Pines (6 page)

Ethan took a hard look into her face, searching for something—softness, cracks in her resolve—but he didn’t find a shred of compassion.

“Just let me get dressed.” He started to close the door, but she put her foot across the threshold.

“Oh, you wanna watch me? Really?” He backed away into the room. “Fine. Enjoy the show.”

And she did. Stood in the doorway watching him lace up the shoes over his bare feet, button his stained, white oxford, and struggle for two agonizing minutes to knot his tie.

When he’d finally slid his arms into his black jacket, he grabbed the room key off his bedside table and dropped it into her open palm on the way out.

Said, “You’re gonna feel terrible about this in two hours,” as he walked down the corridor toward the stairs.

* * *

At the drugstore on the corner of Main and Sixth, Ethan grabbed a bottle of aspirin off the shelf and carried it up to the register.

“I can’t pay for this,” he said as he set it down on the counter. “But I promise I will be right back here with my wallet in thirty minutes. It’s a long story, but I have a headache from hell, and I’ve got to take something right now.”

The white-jacketed pharmacist had been in the midst of filling a prescription—counting out pills on a plastic tray. He lowered his chin and looked at Ethan over the top of his square, silver-frame glasses.

“What exactly is it that you’re asking me?”

The pharmacist was a balding man on the depressing side of forty. Pale. Thin. With large, brown eyes that looked even larger through his thick-as-plate-glass lenses.

“To help me out. I am...really hurting here.”

“So go to the hospital. I run a pharmacy, not a credit and loan.”

A flash of double vision jarred Ethan for a split second, and he could feel that terrible throbbing beginning to crank up again at the base of his neck, each pulse sending a wave of stunning pain down his spine.

He didn’t remember leaving the pharmacy.

Next thing he knew, he was stumbling down the sidewalk of Main.

Feeling worse by the minute, wondering if he should go back to the hospital, but that was the last thing he wanted. He just needed some goddamned Advil, something to take the edge off the pain so he could function.

Ethan stopped at the next crosswalk. Tried to reorient himself to the direction he needed to go to reach the sheriff’s office when he remembered. Sliding his hand into the inner pocket of his jacket, he pulled out the slip of paper and unfolded it.

604 1ST AVE

He was dubious. Knock on this perfect stranger’s door and ask for medicine? On the other hand, he didn’t want to go to the hospital, and he couldn’t show up at the sheriff’s office in the throes of this mind-crippling headache. He was planning to chew some ass, and that usually went better when you weren’t overcome by the desire to crawl up into a fetal position in a dark room.

What was her name?

That’s right—Beverly.

She’d probably closed last night, which meant there was a good chance she was home now. Hell, she’d offered. He could swing by, borrow a few pills, get this headache under control before heading over to the sheriff’s.

He crossed the street, stayed on Main until he’d reached Ninth, and then took a turn around the block and headed east.

Streets intersected Main.

Avenues ran parallel.

Figured he had about seven blocks to walk.

After the third, he could feel his feet rubbing raw, but he didn’t stop. It was pain, but a welcome distraction from the pounding in his head.

The school occupied an entire city block between Fifth and Fourth Avenues, and he limped alongside a chain-link fence that enclosed a playing field.

It was recess hour for a class of eight- or nine-year-olds, and they were engaged in an elaborate game of freeze tag, a girl with blonde pigtails chasing everyone in sight as a choir of screams echoed between the brick buildings.

Ethan watched their game, trying not to think about the blood that had begun to collect in his shoes—cold between his toes.

Blonde pigtails suddenly stopped in the middle of a group of kids and stared at Ethan.

For a moment, the other kids continued running and screaming, but gradually, they also stopped, taking notice, first, that their pursuer was no longer chasing them, and then, of what had stolen her attention.

One by one, each child turned and stared at Ethan—blank expressions that he could have sworn contained some element of thinly veiled hostility.

He smiled through the pain, gave a little wave.

“Hey, kids.”

Not a single one of them waved back or otherwise responded. They just stood frozen in place like a collection of figurines, only their heads turning as they watched him pass out of sight around the corner of the gymnasium.

“Weird little shits,” Ethan muttered under his breath as their laughter and screams started up again, the game resuming.

On the other side of Fourth Avenue, he picked up the pace, the pain in his feet getting more intense, but he pushed through it, thinking,
Just get there. Grin and bear it and get there.

Beyond Third Avenue now, and he was jogging, his ribs beginning to ache again. He passed a series of houses that looked more run-down. The seedy side of Wayward Pines? he wondered. Could such a town have a bad side?

At First Avenue, he stopped.

The road had gone to dirt—the gravel long since worn away and the lumpy grade of it heavily washboarded. There was no sidewalk and there was no road beyond this one. He’d come to the eastern edge of Wayward Pines and behind the houses that lined this street, civilization came to an abrupt end. A steep hillside, wooded with pines, ran up several hundred feet to the base of that cirque that enclosed the town.

Ethan limped down the middle of the empty dirt road.

He could hear birds chirping in the nearby woods, and nothing else. Completely isolated from what little bustle downtown Wayward Pines could muster.

He was passing mailboxes that were already in the five hundreds, feeling the first glimmer of relief, knowing Beverly’s place would be on the next block.

The light-headedness was threatening again, waves of it—gentle so far—washing over him.

The next intersection stood completely empty.

Not a soul out.

A warm wind sliding down off the mountain sent little whirlwinds of dust across the street.

There it was—604, the second house on the right. He could tell this from the tiny steel plate that had been screwed into what was left of the mailbox, which was completely covered in rust except for the gaping, jagged holes. A quiet tweeping emitted from within, and for a moment, he thought it might be another speaker, but then he glimpsed the wing of the bird that was nesting inside.

He looked up at the house itself.

It had probably been a lovely two-story Victorian once, with a steeply pitched roof and a porch with a swing and a stone path leading through the front yard to the entrance.

The paint had long ago chipped away. Even standing in the street, Ethan could see that not even a fleck of it lingered. The boards still attached to the listing frame had been bleached almost white by the sun, most in the final stages of disintegration from rot. Not a jag of window glass remained.

He pulled the ticket from last night’s dinner out of his pocket and rechecked the address. The handwriting was clear—
604 1st Ave
—but maybe Beverly had transposed the numbers, or written “Ave” when she meant “St.”

Ethan pushed his way into the waist-high weeds that had overtaken the front yard, only flashes of the stone pathway visible through the undergrowth.

The two steps leading to the covered porch looked like they’d been run through a wood chipper. He stepped up and over them onto a floorboard, his weight upon it producing a deafening creak.

“Beverly?”

The house seemed to swallow his voice.

He carefully crossed the porch, stepped through the doorless doorway, and called her name again. He could
hear the wind pushing against the house, its timber frame groaning. Three steps into the living room, he stopped. Springs lay rusting on the floor amid the crumbling frame of an ancient sofa. A coffee table stood covered in cobwebs, and underneath them, the pages of some magazine, sodden and rotted beyond recognition.

Beverly couldn’t have wanted him to come here—not even as a joke. She must have accidentally written down the wrong—

The smell brought his chin up. He took a tentative step forward, dodging a trio of nails sticking up through a floorboard.

Sniffed the air again.

Another blast of it swept by as a gust of wind shook the house, and he instantly buried his nose in the crook of his arm. He moved forward, past half a staircase, into a narrow hallway that ran between the kitchen and the dining room, where a cascade of light streamed down onto the splintered remains of where the ceiling had crushed the dinner table.

He went on, picking his way through a minefield of bad boards and outright holes that gaped into the crawlspace under the house.

The refrigerator, the sink, the stove—rust covered every metal surface like a fungus, this place reminding him of the old homesteads he and his friends would stumble across on summer explorations into the woods behind their farms. Abandoned barns and cabins, the roofs perforated with holes that the sun blazed through in tubes of light. He’d once found a fifty-year-old newspaper inside an old desk announcing the election of a new president, had wanted to take it home and show his parents, but the thing was so brittle it had flaked apart in his hands.

Ethan hadn’t ventured a breath through his nose in over a minute, and still he could tell the stench was getting
stronger. Swore he could taste it in the corners of his mouth and the sheer intensity of it—worse than ammonia—was drawing tears from his eyes.

The far end of the hallway grew dark—still protected under a ceiling that dripped from the last good rain, whenever that had been.

The door at the end of the hall was closed.

Ethan blinked the tears out of his eyes and reached down for the doorknob, but there wasn’t one.

He nudged the door open with his shoe.

Hinges grinding.

The door banged into the wall and Ethan took a step forward across the threshold.

Just like his memory of those old homesteads, bullets of light shot through holes in the far wall, glinting off the labyrinth of cobwebs, before striking the only piece of furniture in the room.

The metal frame was still standing, and through the soupy ruin of the mattress, he could see the bedsprings like coiled copperheads.

He hadn’t heard the flies until now, because they had congregated inside the man’s mouth—a metropolis of them, the sound of their collective buzzing like a small outboard motor.

He’d seen worse—in combat—but he’d never smelled worse.

White showed through everywhere—the wrist and ankle bones, which had been handcuffed to the headboard and the iron railing at the base of the bed. Where his right leg was exposed, the flesh looked almost shredded. The internal architecture on the left side of the man’s face was exposed, right down to the roots of his teeth. His stomach had bloated too—Ethan could see the swell of it underneath the tattered suit, which was black and single-breasted.

Just like his.

Though the face was a wreck, the hair length and color were right.

The height was a match too.

Ethan staggered back and leaned against the doorframe.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

This was Agent Evans.

* * *

Back outside on the front porch of the abandoned house, Ethan bent over, his hands braced against his knees, and took deep, penetrating breaths through his nose to purge the smell. But it wouldn’t leave. That death-stink had embedded in his sinus cavity, and as a bitter, putrid bite in the back of his throat.

He took off his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt, fought his way out of the sleeves. The stench was in the fibers of his clothing now.

Shirtless, he moved through the riot of undergrowth that had once been a front yard and finally reached the dirt road.

He could feel the coldness of raw skin on the backs of his feet and the bass throb in his skull, but the pain had lost its edge to pure adrenaline.

He set off at a strong pace down the middle of the street, his mind racing. He’d been tempted to search the pockets of the dead man’s coat and pants, see if he could score a wallet, some ID, but the smart play had been to hold off. To not touch anything. Let people with latex gloves and face masks and every conceivable state-of-the-art forensic tool descend on that room.

He still couldn’t wrap his head around it.

A federal agent had been murdered in this little slice of heaven.

He was no coroner, but he felt certain Evans’s face wasn’t just rotting away. Part of his skull had been caved in. Teeth broken out. One of his eyes MIA.

He’d been tortured too.

The six blocks seemed to fly by, and then he was jogging up the sidewalk to the entrance of the sheriff’s office.

He left his jacket and shirt outside on a bench and pulled open one of the double doors.

The reception area was a wood-paneled room with brown carpeting and taxidermied animal heads mounted on every available piece of vertical real estate.

At the front desk, a sixty-something woman with long, silver hair was playing solitaire with a physical deck of cards. The freestanding nameplate on her desk read “Belinda Moran.”

Ethan arrived at the edge of her desk and watched her lay down four more cards before finally tearing herself away from the game.

“May I help—” Her eyes went wide. She looked him up and down, wrinkling her nose at what he supposed was the god-awful stench of human decay that must be wafting off him. “You’re not wearing a shirt,” she said.

“United States Secret Service Special Agent Ethan Burke here to see the sheriff. What’s his name?”

“Who?”

“The sheriff.”

“Oh. Pope. Sheriff Arnold Pope.”

“Is he in, Belinda?”

Instead of answering his question, she lifted her rotary phone and dialed a three-digit extension. “Hi, Arnie, there’s a man here to see you. Says he’s a secret agent or something.”