Free Wayward Pines: The Widow Lindley (Kindle Worlds Novella) by F. Paul Wilson

----
    The morning Karla Lindley’s daughter disappeared started off
pretty much like any other.
    “Look at you,” Karla said as she finished braiding Joanna’s
hair.
    Her little girl wore a light blue, long-sleeved cotton dress
and pink sneakers. Joanna was a real girly girl who insisted on wearing a dress
every day. She hated jeans and shorts. In a way this was good. When she was
misbehaving, which wasn’t often, Karla didn’t have to threaten her with
physical punishment. The threat of—horror!—having to wear pants was enough to
guarantee compliance.
    “Can I go on the swing?” Joanna said in her squeaky voice.
    “It’s awful early, and you just had breakfast.”
    “Please, Mommy, pleeeeease?”
    She never seemed to tire of that swing, though in all
fairness it hadn’t been up that long. Barely two months. Jonathan had assembled
it just before he—
    Don’t go there.
    “Oh, all right. You put on your vest while I put the kettle
on.”
    She hefted the kettle—at least half full and still warm from
her first cup. She set the flame to high and took Joanna’s little hand in hers.
    Trees surrounded the backyard on all three sides, oaks and
maples up front, all in full fall colors, backed by an impenetrable wall of the
town’s ever-present eponymous pines.
    She went to lift Joanna onto the swing seat but the little
girl pushed her hands away.
    “I can do it!”
    Karla smiled. “My, my. Such independence.”
    Truth was, Joanna was right. She’d be turning four next
month and was quite capable of hauling her skinny little butt onto the seat. More
evidence that her baby girl was growing up. Despite the inevitability, Karla
hated to admit that her baby wasn’t a baby anymore and would need her less and
less as the years went on.
    She also hated to admit that she needed to be needed.
    She’d missed the cut-off date for school this year, but next
fall she’d be off to pre-K. That was the rule in Pines: mandatory education
from four to fifteen. God, she was going to miss her.
    She watched her little strawberry-blond darling wiggle onto
one of the pair of flat board seats—she always chose the one closer to the
house—and start leaning backward and forward as she pumped her legs to start
moving. Soon she was giggling as she soared back and forth, up and down. Was
anything better than the sound of a child having fun?
    Where would I be without you, Joanna?
    Karla had a pretty good idea: a lonely basket case.
    Joanna was all she had. Jonathan had insisted on a house at
the edge of town. As a result they had no neighbors and very few friends. No
friends, really. Just their family unit of three.
    Now down to two.
    From inside came the high-pitched whistle of the kettle
starting to boil on the stove.
    “Be right back,” Karla called.
    “Where you going?”
    “Coffee. Back in a flash.”
    Inside, she turned off the heat. While she waited for the
kettle to stop whistling, she spooned coarsely ground coffee into the French
press. When the rolling boil had eased, she poured the steaming water over the
coffee, stirred the mix, then left it to brew for a couple of minutes.
    In the old days—“old” being five years ago before she’d
ended up in Wayward Pines—she’d owned a Keurig machine where all she had to do
was pop in a K-Cup of whatever blend she fancied at the moment and have a
steaming cup in less than a minute. Then she’d carry it to the computer to
check her email.
    She sighed. No Keurig machines or K-Cups in Pines. No
Internet either. Not even television. The soaring mountain peaks cut off the
signals, they said. But how did they block satellites?
    She shrugged. No matter. She liked her coffee
paint-stripping strong, and a French press brewed far more potent joe than any
K-Cup could manage. And they all were probably better off without TV and the
Internet anyway.
    All …that used to mean three, but now it meant
two.
    She shook it off. She wasn’t going to think about Jonathan
now. Not just