He drove south up Main, wind streaming through the open window frame and his eyes watering against it.

When he reached the curve, he veered off the road and followed the tire tracks from his last foray into the forest, high beams shooting through the trees.

He found his way back to the dead pine stump and turned off the engine.

Stepped out into the dark forest.

Something was wrong, and as he approached the fence, he realized it was the silence that unnerved him.

It shouldn’t be this quiet.

Those conductors and studded cables should be humming.

He walked west beside the dead fence.

Began to jog.

Then run.

After a hundred yards, he came to the gate—a thirty-foot, hinged section that provided egress from the valley. It was how nomads left, and—rarely—returned. Pilcher sometimes sent trucks through it into the wild to harvest firewood or obtain short-range reconnaissance.

Until this moment, Ethan had never actually experienced the terror of seeing it locked wide open.

As he stood staring through the gate into the unimaginably hostile country beyond, he was gripped with the cold, sinking conclusion that he had misread Pilcher completely.

A scream rose up out of the woods.

No more than a mile away.

Another scream answered.

Then another.

And another.

The noise expanding and growing until the ground seemed to tremble with it, as if all of hell was running through the forest.

Toward the dead fence.

The open gate.

Toward Wayward Pines.

For two seconds, Ethan stood frozen, a single question looping through his head as the panic and the fear and the terror swelled inside of him.

What. Have. You. Done?

And he began to run.

WAYWARD PINES

AND NOW A SNEAK PEEK FROM THE THIRD BOOK IN THE WAYWARD PINES SERIES, COMING IN 2014 FROM THOMAS & MERCER

Ethan sprinted back to the Bronco, the panic growing with every stride, every desperate breath, already trying to see a way out, a way to fix this.

But that quiet fence.

The open gate.

It was pure and simple death.

He drove too fast through the trees, pushing the suspension package to the limit, jarring the last few jags of glass out of the windshield.

Up the embankment, onto the road.

He pinned the gas pedal to the floorboard.

The entire town was waiting for him out in front of the theater.

Four hundred and something people standing around in the dark like they’d been kicked out of a costume ball en masse.

Ethan thinking, We don’t have a prayer.

The noise of the crowd was overwhelming.

People emerging from their disbelief and shock, beginning to talk to one another, in some ways, for the first time.

Kate came over. She’d procured real clothes and someone had done a fast stitch job on the gash above her left eye.

Ethan took her over to the car, out of earshot.

He said, “Pilcher killed the power.”

“Yeah, I figured.”

“No, I mean he killed the power to the fence. He also opened the gate.”

She stepped back, studied him.

As if trying to process exactly how bad a piece of news she’d just received.

“So those things,” she said. “The aberrations…”

“They can walk right in now. And they’re coming.”

“How many do you think?”

“No telling. But even a small group would be devastating.”

Kate glanced back at the crowd.

The conversations were dying out, people edging closer to hear the news.

“Some of us have weapons,” she said. “A few have machetes. We’ll defend ourselves.”

“You don’t understand these things.”

“And you’re looking at me like you don’t know what to do.”

“Any ideas, partner?”

“Can’t you reason with Pilcher? Call him up? Change his mind?”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Then we should get everyone back inside. There are no windows. Just one exit on either side of the stage. Double doors leading in. We’ll barricade ourselves in the theater.”

“And then what? What if we’re under siege for days? No food. No heat. No water. And there’s no amount of barricading that would keep the abbies out indefinitely. You understand what would happen if just one of those things got in?”

“Then what, Ethan? What do you propose?”

“I don’t know, but they’re coming, and we can’t just send people back to their homes.”

“Some have already gone.”

“I told you to keep everyone here.”

“I tried.”

“How many?”

“Fifty, sixty.”

“Jesus.”

“Ethan, we’ll get through this.”

“You don’t understand what’s coming. When I escaped several weeks ago, I was attacked by one of them. A small one. I came this close to getting ripped apart.”

“So what are you saying? This is a death sentence? We’re all going to die and that’s just how it goes?”

Ethan saw Theresa and Ben moving toward him.

He said, “If I can get into the superstructure, if I can show the people inside who the man they serve really is, then we might have a chance.”

“So go. Go right now.”

“I’m not leaving my family. Not like this. Not without a real plan.”

Theresa reached him.

They embraced.

She kissed him in front of Kate.

Kissed him showily, he thought.

“What did you find?” Theresa asked.

“Nothing good.”

“Wait,” Kate said.

“What?”

“We need to be somewhere safe while you break into the superstructure.”

“Right.”

“Somewhere protected. Defendable. And already stockpiled with provisions.”

“Exactly.”

She smiled. “I might actually know of a place like that.”

Ethan stood on the Bronco’s roof, bullhorn in hand.

“We’re splitting into four groups of around a hundred each. Harold Ballinger will lead the first. Kate Ballinger, the second. Dave and Anne Engler the third and fourth. There isn’t time to explain everything, but please believe me when I say we are all in imminent danger.”

Someone shouted, “I have a question!”

They were answered with a single, distant scream.

The crowd had been murmuring.

Everyone went suddenly silent.

The sound had come from south of town—a fragile, malignant wail.

Nothing that could be explained or described, because you didn’t just hear it.

You felt its meaning.

And its meaning was this: death is coming.

Brad Fisher sat awkwardly in the destroyed front passenger seat of Ethan’s Bronco, clutching the handle on the door as Ethan sped through town.

Brad said, “We were in the theater. You were talking. Then I looked over and she was gone.”

Ethan was trying to get ahead of his own thoughts, his own fear, fighting to see an endgame that didn’t involve mass casualties.

But the man was crying.

Ethan said, “She probably feared for her life, considering what she was doing with the children. Figured people would see her as a traitor.” He looked over at Brad. “How do you feel about Megan?”

This seemed to throw the man, to catch him off guard.

“I don’t know. I never really felt like I knew her or that she knew me. But we lived together. We slept in the same bed. Sometimes we slept together.”

“Sounds like a lot of real marriages. Did you love her?”

Brad sighed. “It’s complicated.”

The high beams fired across the dark sheriff’s station.

Ethan steered over the curb and took the Bronco right up the sidewalk, tires straddling the pavement. He brought it to a stop a few feet from the entrance. Climbed out, clicked on a flashlight as he and Brad reached the double doors.