Pines

double-aught buckshot to the chest—she has seen him for the last time, because she will not go to the house on First Avenue to witness what’s left of him, to see the damage inflicted upon her husband, the father of her son.
    More people flood up the street en masse, everyone racing toward Main.
    Despite the dreary weather, it’s a carnival atmosphere, and more and more, she sees costumes, many no doubt prepared in advance.
    Though no one ever speaks of the
fête
, she knows there are people who long for the telephones to ring.
    For the chance to run amok in the wee hours of the night.
    To draw blood.
    She and Ben joined the mob last time—as if they’d had a choice—and while they hadn’t found their way into the eye of the storm that had actually beaten Bill Evans to death, they’d been caught up on the periphery.
    Heard his screams and pleas against the laughter and maniacal taunting of the crowd.
    Afterward, the entire town had reveled on Main Street until dawn—liquor flowing, fireworks exploding, dancing, singing, feasting—and while she couldn’t help but feel sickened by it all, an undeniable oneness buzzed through the crowd like the air itself had been electrified.
    Everyone embracing.
    Effervescent.
    A night for humanity in all its evil, joy, and madness.
    A celebration in hell.
    Her five years in Wayward Pines, there’d been only four
fêtes
.
    Tonight makes five.
    Theresa wipes her face and turns away from the window.
    Moves quietly through the empty attic, mindful to keep her footsteps gentle on the creaky hardwood. If she wakes Ben and he sees a
fête
in progress, he’ll want to go outside, be a part of it.
    She descends the drop-down ladder, folds it up, raises the attic door back into the ceiling.
    So strange to be standing on the second floor of this silent house, considering what’s happening outside.
    She walks down the hallway and stops in the open doorway of Benjamin’s room.
    He sleeps.
    Twelve years old and looking more and more like his father every day.
    Watching him, she wonders if, when they finally catch him, Ethan will cry out.
    Will she hear him?
    And if so, will she be able to stand it?
    Sometimes things feel so normal, so
as they always have been
, but then come moments when the buried tension of questions she no longer allows herself to ask threatens to shatter her like ancient crystal.
    Soon, there will be music on Main Street, and chances are, it will wake her son.
    Ben will want to know what’s happening, and there will be no lying to him.
    No sugarcoating.
    He’s too smart for that.
    And she respects him far too much.
    What will she tell him?
    And the harder question...
    A week from now when she wakes in the middle of the night, alone in her dark bedroom, with no possibility of ever seeing her husband again...
    What will she tell herself?

CHAPTER 11
    Ethan rushed through the next intersection, more lights appearing every time he glanced back, but his nearest pursuer—the hurdler—was his immediate concern. The man had broken ahead of his slower compatriots, Ethan thinking he looked familiar—the bald head, the huge, silver-frame glasses—and as the man closed to within thirty feet, Ethan realized who it was: that prick pharmacist he’d tried to buy aspirin from two days prior.
    Main Street loomed one block ahead, a disturbing noise bubbling up over the two- and three-story buildings—the ebullient chatter of a gathering crowd.
    Under no circumstances could he run naked onto Main Street.
    But at his current clip and without altering his trajectory, in another twenty seconds he would do that very thing.
    One street stood between Ethan and Main, and it wasn’t even a street—just a one-lane alley that slashed behind the row of buildings. It gave him one last boost of rage-infused adrenaline to acknowledge that if he rounded the corner into that alley and came upon anybody, anybody at all, he was done.
    Hacked to death by a machete-wielding pharmacist.
    Nice way to go.
    A one-story garage abutted the street, and he figured the corner of the building, when he turned it, would break the pharmacist’s line of sight for about two seconds.
    If there wasn’t a crowd waiting for him in the alley, it might be enough.
    Ethan had been sprinting up the dead center of the street, but now it was time to make his move.
    He veered right, cutting across the rain-slicked pavement.
    Must not fall.
    Crossed a strip of grass, then sidewalk, then grass again, and as he reached