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The hospital

The coardens

Main Street

Fighting down that familiar swell of envy

Townies

They were oblivious All of them So beautifully oblivious

He didn’t hate theo accepted his role as protector Guardian Home was a sterile, less room inside a mountain, and he had made as much peace with that fact as a man could hope to azed down into as literally the last vestige of paradise on the face of the earth, there wasn’t a pang of nostalgia Of homesickness for what had once been

For ould never be again

Moving down the street, Mustin fixed his sight on a reen shirt, brown pants, black Stetson cowboy hat

The brass star pinned to his lapel refracted a glint of sunlight

Thein on his back

“Morning, Sheriff Burke,” Mustin said “Feel an itch between your shoulder blades?”

2

There were still moments, like this one, when Wayward Pines felt like a real place

Sunlight pouring down into the valley

Thestill pleasantly cool

Pansies gemmed a planter under an openthat let the s breakfast waft outside

People out forwalks

Watering lawns

Collecting the local paper

Beads of dew stea off the top of a black mailbox

Ethan Burke found it te was just as it appeared That he lived with his wife and son in a perfect little tohere he was a well-liked sheriff Where they had friends A comfortable ho that he’d come to fully understand hoell the illusion worked How people could let themselves succumb, let themselves disappear into the pretty lie that surrounded them

Bells jingled over the door as Ethan entered the Stea Bean He stepped up to the counter and smiled at the barista, a hippie chick with blond dreads and soulful eyes

“Morning, Miranda”

“Hi, Ethan Usual?”

“Please”

While she started the espresso shots for his cappuccino, Ethan surveyed the shop The regulars were all here, including two old-timers—Phillip and Clay—hunched over a chessboard Ethan walked over, studied the game By the looks of it, they’d been at it for a while now, each , queen, and several pawns

“Looks like you’re heading toward a stalemate,” Ethan said

“Not so fast,” Phillip said “I still got so up my sleeve”

His opponent, a gray grizzly of a h his wild beard across the chessboard and said, “By so to move that I die and he wins by forfeit”

“Oh, shut up, Clay”

Ethan er across the spines Classics Faulkner Dickens Tolkien Hugo Joyce Bradbury Melville Hawthorne Poe Austen Fitzgerald Shakespeare At a glance, it was just a ragtag assembly of cheap paperbacks He pulled a slim volume off the shelf The Sun Also Rises The cover was an iainst the lued, way’s first novel was probably the sole reoose buic to hold it in his hands