“Where do we meet?”
“Just get to the river and follow it upstream. I’ll find you.”
Beverly pulled the hood of her poncho over her head, stepped down out of the mausoleum, and sprinted off into the night, Ethan listening as the sound of her footsteps dwindled away and were soon lost to the steady rain.
He lingered in the threshold, alternating his attention between the approaching lights and the pitch darkness of the crypt, wondering if he had two minutes to spend getting dressed and gathering supplies or if he just needed to go.
The beams of light drew closer, all four of them moving in the general direction of the mausoleum and bringing voices along with them.
Decide, dammit.
He was wasting precious seconds.
If they reach you while you’re in the crypt, you’re dead. There is no escape, and they could be here in less time than it will take you to dress.
He ran.
Wearing nothing but a hospital gown, shoeless, his bare feet swishing through grass and squishing through patches of cold mud.
Rain pelting him.
Achy.
Wracked with chills.
His left hamstring screaming with every flexion.
He shut it all away—the fear, the agony, the cold—and tore through the pines, dodging gravestones.
The four points of light behind him didn’t appear to have noticed his exit as they were still on an intersecting trajectory with the mausoleum.
In near total darkness, the disorientation was staggering. He had no idea if he was heading north or south, toward town or away, but he kept running until he reached a stone wall that formed the decrepit border of the cemetery.
Climbing over, he straddled it, taking a moment to catch his breath and glance back the way he’d come.
More lights.
At least a half dozen newbies in addition to the original four, and there were more appearing every second behind those, a veritable army of fireflies emerging in the dark and all moving toward him with a kind of bobbling motion that made him fear the people holding them were running.
Ethan dropped the microchip on the stone wall.
Then he swung his legs over and hopped down on the other side, wincing at the biting pain in his left hamstring. But he ignored it and pushed on into a field of cut grass.
On the far side, playground equipment gleamed and he could see the rain pouring through the illumination of an overhanging streetlamp.
Beyond, in a stand of dark pines—more flashlights, more voices.
Someone shouted back in the cemetery, and though he couldn’t tell if this was directed at him, it had the effect of accelerating his pace.
Approaching the swing set and sliding board, it occurred to him where he was, and the burbling of running water above the rainfall and the pounding of his heart confirmed it.
Though he couldn’t see it in the dark, on his left lay that grassy riverbank where he’d first come to consciousness in Wayward Pines five days ago.
And the river.
He almost course-corrected to move toward it, but then a light winked on down where he imagined the shore should be.
Ethan streaked past the sliding board, shouldered through a hedge of dripping bushes that nearly ripped the flimsy hospital gown off him, and stumbled out into the street.
The gown hung in tatters around his neck like a shredded cape.
He tore it off, desperately needing oxygen—a full minute of deep inhalations wouldn’t be enough—but there was no time to stop and replenish his lungs.
Lights from the cemetery, the river, and the pines on the north end of the park had converged in that open field in a luminescent swarm that moved toward him now as a single entity, accompanied by a jumble of voices drunk with the giddy exuberance of a chase.
A fresh shot of adrenaline spiked Ethan’s blood.
His muddy feet hammered the wet pavement as he sprinted naked up the middle of the street, rain sheeting down his face.
Realized that his objective had moved.
Forget reaching the river, he needed to find some place to hide and ride this madness out. Didn’t know how many people were chasing him, how many had already seen him, but streaking naked through town was going to get him killed in a hurry.#p#分页标题#e#
A deep voice shouted, “There!”
Ethan glanced back, saw three shadows dart out of a large Victorian house, the man in front tearing down the steps, through the front yard, and leaping over the white picket fence with considerable grace while his companions bunched up at the gate, fumbling with the latch.
The hurdler hit the sidewalk midstride and accelerated, dressed all in black, boots pounding the street. He carried a machete whose wet blade glimmered under the glancing beam of his headlamp, running hard, breathing hard, and a voice in Ethan’s head said flatly with the dead calm of a filibustering senator reading a phone book at three in the morning—That man is fifty yards away, he’s armed, and he’s going to catch you.