Pines

scream at this proximity louder than the turbines.
    The bullet went through its teeth and tore out of the back of its skull in a spray of bone and brain as it crashed into Ethan.
    He didn’t move.
    Stunned.
    His head jogged so hard that flashes of light were detonating everywhere he looked, and his hearing was jumbled—muffled and slowed down so that he could pick out all the individual pieces of sound that built the symphony of chaos around him.
    Shotgun blasts.
    The AK.
    The spinning rotors.
    The screams of the abbies.
    Telling himself,
Get up, get up, get up
.
    Ethan heaved the dead weight of the abby off his chest and sat up. Tried to look across the field, but his vision was stuck on blurry. He blinked hard several times and shook his head, the world slowly crystallizing like someone turning the focus knobs on a pair of binoculars.
    Dear God.
    There must have been fifty of them already in the clearing.
    Dozens more breaking out of the trees with every passing second.
    All moving toward the helicopter in the center of the field.
    Ethan struggled up onto his feet, listing left in the wake of the hit, his center of balance annihilated.
    He stumbled toward the helicopter.
    Pam was already inside.
    Pope standing several feet out from the skid, trying to hold the abbies off. He had shouldered the rifle and was taking precision shots now, Ethan figuring he must be down to the final rounds of his magazine.
    Ethan patted him on the shoulder as he stepped onto the skid, screamed in his ear, “Let’s go!”
    Pilcher opened the door and Ethan scrambled up into the cabin.
    He buckled himself in, glanced out the window.
    An army of abbies flooded across the field.
    Hundreds of them.
    Ten seconds from the chopper and closing in like a mongrel horde.
    As he put on his headset, Pilcher pulled the cabin door closed, locked it, said, “Let’s go, Roger.”
    “What about the sheriff?”
    “Pope’s staying.”
    Through his window, Ethan saw Arnold throw down his AK and try to open the door, struggling with the handle but it wouldn’t turn.
    Pope stared through the glass at Pilcher, a beat of confusion flashing through the lawman’s eyes, followed quickly by recognition.
    Then fear.
    Pope screamed something that never had a chance of being heard.
    “Why?” Ethan said.
    Pilcher didn’t avert his eyes from Pope. “He wants to rule.”
    Pope beat his fists against the window, blood smearing across the glass.
    “Not to rush you or anything, Roger, but we’re all going to die if you don’t get us out of here.”
    Ethan felt the skids pivot and go airborne.
    He said, “You can’t just leave him.”
    Ethan watched as the chopper lifted off the ground, the sheriff hooking his left arm around the skid, fighting to hang on.
    “It’s done,” Pilcher said, “and you’re my new sheriff. Welcome aboard.”
    A mob of abbies swarmed under Pope, jumping, clawing, but he’d established a decent grip on the skid and his feet dangled just out of reach.
    Pilcher said, “Roger, take us down a foot or two if you wouldn’t mind.”
    The chopper descended awkwardly—Ethan could tell the pilot hadn’t flown in years—lowering Pope back down into the madness on the ground.
    When the first abby grabbed hold of Pope’s leg, the tail of the chopper ducked earthward under the weight.
    Another one latched onto his other leg, and for a horrifying second, Ethan thought they would drag the chopper to the ground.
    Roger overcorrected, climbing fast to a twenty-foot hover above the field.
    Ethan stared down into Pope’s wild eyes.
    The man’s grip on the skid had deteriorated to a single handhold, his knuckles blanching under the strain, three abbies clinging to his legs.
    He met Ethan’s eyes.
    Screamed something that was drowned out by the roar of the turbines.
    Pope let go, fell for half a second, and then vanished under a feeding frenzy.
    Ethan looked away.
    Pilcher was staring at him.
    Staring through him.
    The helicopter banked sharply and screamed north toward the mountains.
    * * *
    It was a quiet flight, Ethan’s attention divided between staring out his window and glancing back through the curtain at his sleeping family.
    The third time he looked in on them, Pilcher said, “They’ll be fine, Ethan. They’ll wake up tonight, safe and warm in bed. That’s what matters, right? Out here, you would all surely die.”
    It was getting on toward dusk.
    Ethan dead tired, but every time he shut his eyes, his thoughts ran in a