Wayward Pines: The Widow Lindley (Kindle Worlds Novella) (3 page)

“Maybe we should’ve gone the other way,” Karla said.

It had been forty-five minutes or more and she hadn’t seen a
sign of anyone or anything, and they’d heard not another peep from Joanna.

“We already went the other way,” Ethan said. “Remember?”

Right. Karla’s mind was a shambles. They’d run a long way to
the…west? East? North? The trees and the clouds hid the sun, and she hadn’t
been paying attention to the moss, so she was completely disoriented. Whichever
way they’d gone, when they’d found nothing they turned and circled back.

“She’s got to be
somewhere!
”

“We’ll find—” His arm shot out to the side as he skidded to
a halt.

She ran into it. “What?”

“Shhh!” He pointed.

Up ahead, a flat outcropping of gray stone jutted from the
hillside like a cantilever roof. Something had churned up the forest floor
before it.

Ethan checked the breech of his shotgun, then whispered, “Stay
here.”

Karla nodded, but as soon as he started forward, she raised
her pistol and followed. As they neared the outcropping, she noticed a carrion stench.
She wanted to say something but kept mum. No telling what was hiding in the
shadows beneath that overhang.

But when she saw a big bone, coated with dried blood and
buzzing with flies, she lost it.

“Oh, God!” she cried. “That can’t be—!”

Ethan jumped but kept the shotgun pointed toward the
shadows. Without turning, he spoke in a low voice.

“Look at the size of that bone. No way it’s human.”

She had to admit he was right. It looked like the thigh bone
of some big animal.

“But what—?”

“The dairy reported a cow or two missing the other day. I’m
betting that’s what’s left of it.”

“God, the stink!”

“Check out the prints,” he said, pointing to the ground.

Oblong depressions pointing every which way in the dirt, all
with sharp talon holes.

“The same as by my house!”

“One set’s about an inch longer than the other. That means
two of them. Shit.” That last word came freighted with a ton of unease.

“Two of what?”

He didn’t answer, just stared ahead.

They’d stopped maybe fifteen feet from the outcrop and Karla
still couldn’t see anything in the shadows beneath it. What sunlight there was
came in at an angle that offered no help.

“Do you think that’s a cave?” she said.

“I hope not. I don’t know of any caves up here, but that
doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”

He pulled a black flashlight from his belt, turned it on,
and held it atop his shotgun. As he aimed it into the shadows, waving the gun
and the beam back and forth, the circle of light picked up two little pink
objects.

Joanna’s sneakers?

“Oh, no! Oh, dear God!”

She rushed forward.

Ethan cried, “No!” but with his hands full of flashlight and
shotgun, he couldn’t stop her.

She dropped to her knees when she reached them. The pistol
slipped from her fingers. Joanna’s little pink sneakers, stained with blood. She
heard Ethan approaching behind her.

“What’ve you got?”

She couldn’t speak. Her throat had locked. All she could do
was hold up the sneakers. And just a foot away, her quilted vest—slashed and
bloody, with the down billowing out.

Ethan kept the shotgun and flashlight moving back and forth
in the shadows. Joanna could see where the ground rose to meet the rock at the
rear. Not a cave, just an overhang. The beam swept past something light blue
deep in the left corner and darted back to it.

Oh, no! Joanna’s dress!

Karla scrabbled on her hands and knees into the shadows
under the outcrop. That was Joanna’s dress and that was her in it, lying on her
side, facing the rocky wall, but she was still, so still.

“Joanna? Jo? Are you all right?”

She saw the massive bloodstains soaked into the blue cotton
as she neared.

“Joanna!”

She reached her, grabbed her, turned her over and—

Screamed.

Not Joanna! Some horrid, hairless little monstrosity, only
half Joanna’s size, with translucent skin and blank milky eyes and a gaping
mouth that showed toothless gums.

She hurled the dead thing away, toward Ethan. It rolled to
his feet.

“What
is
that thing?” she screamed. “And what’s it
doing in Joanna’s dress?”

Ethan said nothing. He showed only mild shock as he glanced
at the dead creature, then returned his wary attention to their surroundings.

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

“
What?
” She couldn’t believe her ears. “What about
Joanna?”

“We’re not going to find her.”

“We
are!
”

“Look at that dress,
Karla. It’s shredded. And the blood…”

“No, please.” She was shaking her head. “Please…”

“And worse, there’s two of them.”

“You keep saying that, but two of
what?
”

He rose on tiptoe. “Hold on a minute.”

As he hurried off to the left and out of sight, Karla
scrambled from under the overhang.

“Where are you?” she called, then spotted him above her,
standing on the outcrop. “What are you—?”

She saw his sick, horrified expression.

“Aw, Christ,” he said in a strangled voice. “Aw—”

He turned and vomited.

Karla stood frozen for an instant, then she was on the move,
adrenaline-fueled panic driving her around and up and onto the outcrop. Its
upper surface was abuzz with flies and littered with bones of all sizes. She
saw a cow’s head, and another, and something else…something the size of a
soccer ball, decorated with strawberry blond pigtails.

She took a step forward but her knees wouldn’t support her. The
world went blank.…

After hurrying the two hundred yards from the highway, Ethan
waited for the faux rock face to lift. He ducked in as soon as he could fit. Marcus,
his usual escort, waited for him in the topless Wrangler. Ethan swung into the
passenger seat and they began the winding trip along fluorescent-lit tunnels
bored through the heart of the mountain. Through a million-square-foot cavern. Past
the suspension units to stop at the elevators. Using his swipe card, Marcus
took him up. After an ear-popping ride, the doors opened onto the spacious,
sumptuous quarters of the billionaire-genius master of Wayward Pines, David
Pilcher. Marcus escorted him to a huge office lined with books and some two
hundred TV screens that monitored the doings of the entire town.

After only a week as sheriff, Ethan didn’t expect his own
swipe card yet, but he found being escorted every step of the way galling. And
then he experienced his usual mix of admiration and revulsion as he saw the man
himself.

Short and bald, with small dark eyes, David Pilcher didn’t
look like a god, but he functioned as one. He wielded the power of life and
death over the inhabitants of Pines. To his credit, he preferred life—most of
the time. After all, with less than a thousand human beings left in the world,
he didn’t have many to spare.

“What the hell’s going on, Pilcher?” Ethan said, tossing his
Stetson on a chair. “How did a pair of abbies get past the defenses—a mating
pair with a cub, no less?”

“We’re looking into it.” His usual smug tone was missing.

“Looking into it? You should have spotted them and taken
them out before they reached town.”

“Only one of them reached town—and the Lindley house is on
the outskirts.”

“You’re going to split hairs with me? Have you taken them
out yet?”

Pilcher sighed. “We can’t find them.”

“What? First they somehow get past a zillion volts of
electricity and the snipers, and now you can’t find them?”

“They’re not dumb animals—your run-in with them not too long
ago should have impressed that on you. How’s the Lindley woman doing, by the
way?”

“In the hospital under observation. Completely out of it.”

“Pam stopped in on her. Says it’s extreme post-traumatic
stress.”

Pam…what irony that Pilcher’s pet psychopath posed as
one of the town’s guardians of mental health.

“Extreme barely touches it. Those abbies ate her little
girl.”

Ethan tried to imagine his own mental state if his son Ben
were snatched away and he’d given chase only to discover that the boy been
devoured and all that was left was his head.

“A shame.”

“Your fault, Pilcher.”

He looked shocked. “Mine?”

When Belinda told him about the call, the first thing Ethan
had suspected was an abby. He’d phoned Pilcher and requested a team be sent out
to intercept it.

“You refused to send a team.”

“Too risky. They might be seen. We both thought it was a
single abby, and I figured the child was already dead. Admit it—you did too.”

Well, yes, he had, but that didn’t change things.

“All you had to do was trace her chip—”

She doesn’t have one.”

“You told me everybody in Pines had one.”

“Every adult. Before age four or five there’s not enough
soft tissue in the thigh to hide a tracking chip. As soon as she would have
started school, she’d have been implanted.”

“All right, even without the chip we could have given her
the benefit of the doubt. If we had, she might still be alive.”

Pilcher gave a dismissive wave. “Wishful thinking. Don’t
torture yourself with what-ifs.” He flashed a sardonic smile. “Look on the
bright side: You’re set to be quite the hero.”

“Am I now?”

“The new sheriff carries that poor unconscious woman all the
way back to town. My, my, my. The Pines proletariat will eat that up.”

“At least it was downhill. That helped a lot.”

Ethan rubbed his biceps—they were killing him.

“Not to mention bringing along her daughter’s head wrapped
in your sheriff’s jacket. Not to worry about that—we’ll get you a new one ASAP.”

Ethan gave him a hard stare. “Are you finding something
amusing about this?”

“Not at all,” he said, the smile fading. “The loss of a
child is always tragic—especially a female.”

Ethan shook his head. “Is that what you’re thinking
about—all Joanna’s lost breeding years? That’s what everything boils down to
for you, isn’t it: Be fruitful and multiply.”

“If the species known as
Homo sapiens
is to avoid
extinction, yes. We had better be goddamn fruitful as all hell and multiply
like rabbits!”

Ethan couldn’t argue the extinction part. With fewer than a
thousand real people left and hundreds of millions of hungry predators
wandering around beyond the fence, the odds against surviving as a species were
huge. So while he agreed with Pilcher’s end, he still had big issues with his
means.

But all that aside, couldn’t Pilcher also view Joanna’s
death as a personal tragedy—a mother losing her child, a child losing her
future?

Time to shift the subject.

“Karla had a gun, you know.”

Firearms weren’t allowed in Wayward Pines. If someone was
going to kill somebody else, they had to do it with kitchen knives or garden
tools.

“I know.”

“You do? How?”

“I watched you stow it in the gun cabinet in your office.”

Shit. He doubted he’d ever get used to Pilcher’s ubiquitous
spy cams.

The boss man added, “I didn’t get a good look at it, though.”

“An eight-shot Smith and Wesson three-fifty-seven Mag. Her
husband’s.”

“How do you know it was his?”

“She told me.”

“And you believe her?”

Typical David Pilcher attitude: Always assume the worst.

“I’ve no reason to doubt her.” He remembered something. “Then
again…”

“What?”

“She said she didn’t know
anything about guns but recognized my shotgun as a Winchester ninety-seven. But
…” He shook his head. “She seemed too upset about her little girl to lie.”

“Don’t be too sure of that. Lie enough about something and
it becomes the truth.”

“You should know.”

Pilcher didn’t acknowledge the remark, which was okay with
Ethan. It had been a cheap shot.

“No matter whose it was, where’d either of them get a gun?”

“Good question. Damn good question. We’re looking into it.”

“I read their files before coming up here.” Pilcher had a
file on everyone in Pines. “She’s a Quaker farm girl from Pennsy, born Karla
Williamson, with no opportunities to learn about guns. But Jonathan Lindley did
a stint in the Iowa National Guard.”

“I like him as the gun owner.”

“Any new info on why he hung himself?”

Pilcher shrugged. “One of the malcontents who couldn’t
adapt. We’ve had our share, as you’re well aware. Some kill themselves, some
try to run…” He smiled. “Some become sheriff.”

If it weren’t for Ben and Theresa, Ethan could see himself
blowing his brainstem out the back of his skull—or at least giving it serious
consideration. But his wife and son were more important that the miasma of
existential despair that hung over Wayward Pines.