Wayward Pines: The Widow Lindley (Kindle Worlds Novella) (4 page)

He knew its secrets: That its entire population had been
placed in suspended animation for eighteen hundred years. That the human genome
had decayed to the point where the
Homo sapiens
of his time had become
the vicious degenerate creatures who had stolen and eaten Joanna Lindley this
morning. Creatures Pilcher and his people inside the mountain called
aberrations—abbies for short. That during the eighteen hundred years the humans
had been suspended the imperturbable planet Earth had absorbed and recycled all
the toxins they’d left behind and reclaimed all the cities.

The past hadn’t simply passed—it had been obliterated. And
the future? For the individuals of Wayward Pines, the future was simply another
day like today. So all anyone here had was the present. The moment.

Thus the Pines mantra that everyone knew by heart:

Yesterday is history.
Tomorrow is a mystery.
Today is a gift.
That’s why it’s called the present.
Work hard, be happy, and enjoy your life in Wayward Pines!

But without a decent birth rate, the future would stop being
a mystery and there’d be no more “gifts” of today.

That was the long-term problem. He shook it off and returned
to the here and now.

“What are you doing about those two abbies? And let’s hope
there are only two.”

“I’ve got a couple of teams out hunting them,” Pilcher
explained.

“
Now
you send them.”
You cold son of a bitch.

“And what do we say about Joanna?”

“A bear got her.”

“Karla saw the baby aberration.”

Pilcher raised an eyebrow. “She didn’t see living, breathing
abbies. She found her daughter’s bloody dress and imagined something in it. The
Lindleys had virtually no friends while Jonathan was alive and she’s made no
new ones since his death. So whom is she going to tell? And if she does go
rambling on about it, the explanation will be that her PTSD has made her
delusional. The unspeakable tragedy of finding her daughter’s head has unhinged
her. Pam will see to it that she comes around eventually.”

“Pam’s preferred solution to any problem person seems to be
torture and death.”

“Karla Lindley has been docile and compliant all along,”
Pilcher explained. “There’s no reason to believe she will change.”

“But if she does?”

Pilcher’s expression was grim. “She won’t.”

Karla feigned unconsciousness while the nurse adjusted her
sheets and blanket. As soon as she was gone, leaving a nightlight glowing by
the door, Karla sat up. The first thing she did was find the wall clock which
read
4:32
.

Where had the time gone? The last thing she remembered was—

No…no…you can’t go there. Not now. Not yet…

She’d been awake just
long enough to realize she was in a hospital room, in a patient bed, when the
nurse had come in. She hadn’t wanted to speak to anyone so she’d played possum.

She examined her body. An IV ran into her left arm. She
could find no cardiac monitor leads attached to her chest. Good. She pulled the
IV out of her vein and slapped the tape back over it, then tied the tubing in a
knot.

She was dressed in an open-back hospital gown and nothing
else, so she padded to the closet to see if her clothes were there. She found
her jacket on a hanger and her sneakers on the floor. Next to them sat a white
plastic bag with a red drawstring. She pulled out her underwear, jeans, shirt,
socks, and sweatshirt. Stuffing her underwear back in the bag, she pulled on
the rest.

She started for the door but stopped as she recalled that
all hospitals had cameras in the halls. She went instead to the window. A
near-full moon was slipping behind the peaks to the west. She was on the second
floor and she saw the fans of the HVAC complex whirling on the roof one level
below. She raised the sash, kicked out the screen, and slid through legs first
on her belly. She hung by her fingertips, then let go, landing on her feet in a
crouch on the roof below.

She lowered herself from the HVAC roof the same way. And
then she was running for the center of town. She had things to do and not a lot
of time to do them.

“What couldn’t you tell me over the phone?” Ethan said as he
stormed into Pilcher’s office, his second time here in six hours.

The call had come at five-thirty a.m. Pam, dressed in
running tights and a parka, had been waiting outside in a Jeep. She took him
straight into the mountain where she led him to Pilcher’s apartment.

From behind his desk Pilcher pointed to the bank of two hundred
plus monitors on the wall. “Because you need to see this firsthand.”

“A runner?”

“Karla Lindley.”

He hadn’t expected that.

“But she’s in the hospital.”

“That’s what we thought.”

Pam said. “She was a basket case when I last saw her. Totally
unresponsive.”

Pilcher gave her an annoyed look. “And that’s why we didn’t
have anyone on duty outside her room all night.”

“She was practically catatonic.”

Ethan couldn’t help enjoying Pam’s defensiveness. She was
very possibly the most perfectly sociopathic personality he’d ever met.

Pilcher pointed a remote. “We’ll start with the hospital
room.”

A screen in the lower-left corner of the bank flickered to
the interior of a semi-dark room. The images fast forwarded double-time through
Karla pulling her clothes from the closet, stripping off the hospital gown, and
getting dressed.

Pam smirked as Karla stuffed her underwear back in the bag. “She’s
going commando. Not a bad bod for someone who doesn’t exercise.”

Ethan agreed but said nothing. He knew that if Pam followed
any religion, it was the god and goddess of aerobics and weight training.

They watched her climb out the window. The angle shifted to
the outside where they observed her dropping from the window to make a soft,
graceful, double-foot landing on the roof below. Another angle showed her
repeating the process to the ground.

“She moves like a gymnast,” Ethan said, unable to keep the
admiration from his tone.

Pilcher nodded. “So we’ve noticed.”

“But there’s nothing in her file about any involvement in
gymnastics,” Pam said. “Ever.”

“Video-wise, we lose her after that,” Pilcher said, “but we
can track her path.”

Weather had eroded the town’s outdoor video cams over the
years, so visual coverage had become spotty in places. But the indoor cams
remained fully functional, and the tracking chip implanted in every left thigh
allowed Pilcher to know the whereabouts of every single resident at any moment.

The screen lit with an aerial view of Wayward Pines that
showed a red line tracing a winding trail behind the downtown stores.

“There’s no clear path there,” Pam said. “Which means she’s
hopping fences left and right.”

“Are we talking some parkour action here?” Ethan said.

Pam simply shrugged. If she thought so, she wasn’t saying
so.

“Where’s she going?” Ethan asked.

“Here.” Pilcher stabbed his remote toward the bank and
punched a button.

A screen lit with the interior of a store Ethan new well.

“Main Hardware?”

They watched her grab a short-handle shovel, half a dozen
knives, a hatchet, butane lighters, a couple of fistfuls of protein bars, two
six-packs of water, and beef jerky, shoving them all into a duffel bag.

“What the hell?”

Pam’s smile had a nasty twist. “If you like this one, you’ll
love the next.”

The screen shifted to another interior with a view of Karla,
duffel over her shoulder, passing a familiar looking desk.

“Hey, that’s Belinda’s desk!”

Karla was in the sheriff’s office. She looked around and
then walked up to the gun cabinet. A few sharp blows with the hatchet popped
the doors. He watched her search inside and come up with the .357 Smith &
Wesson. After tucking that into her belt, she grabbed a shotgun—the 12-gauge
autoload.

“See that?” Pam said. “She went straight for the Benelli M4.
Didn’t even hesitate.”

“Almost as if she recognized it,” Ethan said, full of
wonder.

“Almost?” Pilcher said. “Watch.”

She pulled a box of double-ought shells from the cabinet,
then a box of one-ounce Brenneke slugs. Looking like she’d done it a thousand
times before, she loaded the Benelli with alternating shells.

“She’s loading a highway-patrol cocktail,” Pam said. “The
double-ought for whoever’s in the car, the hardball for the engine block.” She nodded with unabashed admiration. “The widow Lindley
knows her shit.”

With the Benelli loaded, she added extra boxes of shells to
the duffel, along with a supply of .357 Mags, slung the Benelli over her
shoulder, and headed for the door. The frame froze as she reached it.

Ethan shook his head. “I know you can’t watch every cam feed
all the time, but I can’t believe nobody picked her up at least once in real
time.”

“Oh, we did,” Pilcher said. “We spotted her in your office.”

“And you didn’t stop her?”

He smiled. “First off, she’s loaded for bear—or should I
say, abby?—and appears to know her way around weaponry. For obvious reasons I
want to avoid a firefight in downtown at all costs, and I don’t want to put any
of our people at risk when it’s not necessary.”

“Not necessary? But—”

“She’s not a danger to the public, Ethan.”

“You don’t know that.”

“We know where she’s going, and we know why. So do you.”

Yeah, Ethan guessed he did.

“I assume then that you haven’t tracked down those two
abbies?”

“Two teams couldn’t find a trace of them,” Pilcher said.

“And so you’re going to let her go after them?”

“Those abbies are a smart couple. If they see four humans
approaching, they’ll hide. But a woman alone in the woods…will they be
able to resist?”

“You’re using her as bait,” Ethan said and thought to himself,
Why am I not surprised?

“I think it’s pretty obvious that she’s using herself as
bait. The abbies will come at her expecting to face a lamb. From what I’ve just
seen, I think they’ll find a wolverine.”

“What if they kill her?”

“There’s a decent chance of that, of course, but I doubt
they’ll get away unscathed.”

“And then we’ll have our guys finish them off,” Pam said.

Ethan stared at the blurry face of the woman frozen on the
screen.

“Who
is
she?”

“The million-dollar question,” Pilcher said. “I hope she
survives, because I want to find out.”

“I thought you backgrounded everyone before you put them
into suspension,” said Ethan.

“We did—thoroughly. Everything said she’s the Quaker farmer’s
daughter from Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania. But obviously she’s a lot more.”

Pam was nodding. “Those weren’t farm-girl moves. What we
just saw shows a high level of training. She could have been a field agent in
one of the intelligence agencies, or black ops, or maybe Special Forces.” She
turned to Ethan and gave him a smile as warm as a great white’s. “But I could
take her.”

“Never mind that,” Pilcher said. “She could have been given
a false identity—a damn good one, let me tell you—and hidden away for security
reasons.”

Something about that wasn’t sitting right.

“Could she have had her identity erased?” Ethan asked.

Pilcher frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s all gut feeling…nah. Forget it.”

“No,” Pilcher said. “Go ahead. I appreciate gut feelings. I
had one about you. That’s why you’re sheriff.”

“All right. Here goes: I have this gut feeling that she hasn’t
been hiding this other self; I get a sense she doesn’t even
know
about
her other self—or at least didn’t know until she woke up in the hospital.”

“Some sort of mind wipe?” Pam said. She looked at Pilcher. “Is
that possible?”

He nodded. “Techniques of varying efficacy were in various
stages of development before we all said good-bye.”