Pines

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