Pines

the door.
    His first instinct was to leave without being seen, and this puzzled him. He was a federal agent with the full authority of the United States government. This meant people had to do what he said. Even nurses and doctors. They didn’t want him to leave? Tough shit. And yet, some part of him was resisting the hassle of an incident. It was stupid, he knew, but he didn’t want Nurse Pam catching him.
    He turned the doorknob, opened the door an inch from the jamb.
    What he could see of the corridor beyond was empty.
    He strained to listen.
    No distant chatter of nurses.
    No footsteps.
    Just blaring silence.
    He poked his head out.
    A quick glance left and right confirmed his suspicion. For the moment, the place was empty, even the nurses’ station fifty feet down the corridor.
    He stepped out of his room and onto the checkered linoleum floor and closed the door softly behind him.
    Out here, the only sound came from the fluorescent lights overhead—a soft, steady hum.
    He suddenly realized what he should have done in the first place and bent down through the pain in his ribs to unlace his shoes.
    In bare feet, he moved down the corridor.
    Every door on this wing was shut, and with no light slipping through the cracks beneath the doors, none of the rooms but his appeared to be occupied.
    The nurses’ station stood vacant at the intersection of four corridors, three of which led to additional wings of patient rooms.
    A shorter hallway behind the station ran down to a pair of double doors with the word SURGICAL emblazoned on a nameplate above them.
    Ethan stopped at the elevator right across from the station and punched the down arrow.
    He heard pulleys beginning to turn through the doors.
    “Come on.”
    It took years.
    Realized he should’ve just taken the stairs.
    He kept looking over his shoulder, listening for approaching footsteps, but he couldn’t hear a thing over the noise of the rising elevator car.
    The doors finally separated with a screech that made his teeth ache, and he stepped to the side in the event someone had ridden up.
    No one exited the car.
    He hurried inside and pressed G .
    Studying the illuminated numbers over the doors, he watched as the car began its slow descent from 4, and a full minute had passed—enough time for him to put his shoes back on—before the G illuminated and the doors began to creak open.
    He squeezed through, stepped out into another intersection of hallways.
    Voices murmured, not far away.
    The noise of a stretcher rolling along on a squeaky wheel.
    He went the opposite way, tracking through three long corridors, and had begun to suspect he was lost when he spotted an EXIT sign.
    He hurried down a half flight of stairs, punched through the door at the bottom, and stumbled outside.
    It was early evening, the sky clear and fading, and the mountains taking on the after light of the sun in tones of pink and orange. He stood on a short walkway extending out from the hospital—a four-story, redbrick building that reminded him more of a school, or a mental asylum.
    He took as deep a shot of oxygen as he could without bringing the pain, and it felt amazing to inhale this cool, pine-scented air after breathing the hospital’s antiseptic stench.
    He reached the sidewalk and started down Main Street toward the buildings of downtown.
    There were more people out than in the afternoon.
    He passed a restaurant situated in a small house with a patio off to the side. People dined outside under aspen trees strung with tiny white lights.
    The smell of the food made his stomach growl.
    At the corner of Main and Fifth, he crossed the street and returned to the phone booth where he’d lost consciousness two days before.
    Stepping inside, he thumbed through the directory until he found the street address of the Wayward Pines Sheriff’s Office.
    * * *
    He felt better than he had in days walking toward the east side of town as the light began to fail and the temperature dropped.
    He strolled past a barbecue in progress.
    The smell of charcoal on the breeze.
    The good, sour aroma of beer wafting out of plastic cups.
    The sound of children’s laughter echoing through the valley.
    The cicada-like clicking of a water sprinkler nearby.
    Everywhere he looked, it was a painting.
    Like the Platonic ideal of a town. There couldn’t have been more than four or five hundred people living here, and he found himself wondering what had brought them. How many had discovered Wayward Pines by