Pines

immaculately clean and glimmering under the lowlight.
    The next three doors were windowless and identified only by nameplates:
Lab A, Lab B, Lab C
.
    Down toward the end of the corridor, one window glowed, and Ethan sidled up beside it.
    On the other side of the glass—tapping and the murmur of soft, low voices.
    He peered through the window.
    The room was mostly dark, its glow coming from numerous monitors—twenty-five of them in five stacks of five mounted to the wall and perched above a large console that looked serious enough to launch a rocket.
    Ten feet from where Ethan stood, a man sat staring up at them, his fingers moving at light speed across a keyboard as the images on the screens constantly changed. He wore a headset, and Ethan could just hear his voice coming through, though the words were lost.
    On one of the screens, Ethan studied the slideshow of images...
    The façade of a Victorian house.
    The porch of a different house.
    An alleyway.
    A bedroom.
    An empty bathtub.
    A bathroom with a woman standing in front of a mirror, brushing her hair.
    A man seated at a kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal.
    A child sitting on a toilet reading a book.
    A view of Main Street in Wayward Pines.
    The playground at the park.
    The cemetery.
    The river.
    The interior of the coffee shop.
    The hospital lobby.
    Sheriff Pope sitting behind his desk with his feet kicked up, talking on the telephone.
    Ethan’s line of sight was limited through the window, but he could just make out the left edge of another block of monitors and the sound of other people typing.
    A pool of hot rage went supernova somewhere deep inside him.
    He put his hand on the doorknob, started to turn it. Would have loved nothing more than to creep up behind that man as he watched people going about their private lives and snap his neck.
    But he stopped himself.
    Not yet.
    Ethan backed away from the surveillance center and headed down the stairwell, emerging into the bottom corridor—Level 1.
    Though difficult to tell from this distance, at the far end it appeared to extend beyond the stairwell into another section of the complex.
    Ethan picked up his pace.
    Every ten feet, he moved past a door with no handle, no apparent method of entry beyond a keycard slot.
    Third one down on his left, he stopped.
    Glanced through the small window into darkness—just an empty room.
    He did the same at the tenth door down, stopping and cupping his hands over his eyes so he could draw more detail out of the shadows.
    The face of one of those creatures from the canyon crashed into the glass on the other side, its teeth bared and hissing.
    Ethan stumbled back into the opposite wall, his system buzzing from the scare as the thing screeched behind the glass—thick enough to dampen most of the sound.
    Footfalls echoed in the stairwell he’d just been in.
    Ethan hurried down the corridor, moving as fast as he could, the fluorescent fixtures scrolling past in a stream of artificial light.
    He glanced once over his shoulder as he reached the stairwell, saw two figures in black moving into the far end of the corridor a hundred yards back. One of them pointed and shouted something, and then they rushed toward him.
    Ethan hustled through the stairwell.
    A pair of automatic glass doors were sliding together straight ahead of him.
    He turned sideways, barely managing to squeeze through as they closed after him.
    It was the epic proportions of the next room that took him aback, the mad scope of this place bringing him to a full stop.
    He no longer stood on tile but on cold rock and at the edge of a cavern the size of ten warehouses—a million square feet at least if he had to guess, and the distance from floor to ceiling sixty feet in places. In all his life, he’d seen only one space more impressive—the Boeing Plant in Everett, Washington.
    Giant globes of light hung down from the rocky ceiling, each one illuminating a thousand-square-foot section of floor space.
    There were hundreds of them.
    The glass doors had begun to spread open behind him, and he could hear the footsteps of those black-garbed men—they’d already covered half the distance of the corridor.
    Ethan ran into the cavern and shot down a passageway between shelves laden with lumber of every dimension. The shelves were forty feet tall, three deep on either side, and extended the length of a football field, Ethan figuring they contained enough linear board feet to rebuild Wayward Pines five times