by Blake Crouch
“It’s too late.”
“Not while people are alive, it isn’t. We can put them all back into suspension. They won’t remember—”
“What’s done is done. In a day or so, the rebellion in the valley will be finished, but I’m afraid one may be coming to this mountain.”
“What are you talking about?”
Pilcher sipped his drink. “You think the sheriff did this all on his own?”
Ted squeezed his hands into fists to stop the tremor that was coming.
“Burke had help from the inside, from one of my people,” Pilcher said.
“How do you know?”
“Because Burke has information he couldn’t possibly have gotten without the help of someone in surveillance. Someone in your group, Ted.”
Pilcher let the accusation sit.
Ice cracked in his glass.
“What information are you talking about?” Ted asked.
Pilcher ignored the question, held Ted’s eyes with his own. “Your group consists of you and four surveillance techs. I know your loyalty is steadfast, but what about your subordinates? Burke had the help of one of them. Any ideas who it might be?”
“Where is this coming from?”
“Ted. That is just the wrong answer.”
Ted stared down into his lap at his drink. He looked up again.
He said, “I don’t know who on my team would do such a thing. This is why you shut down surveillance?”
“You run the most sensitive group in the superstructure, and it’s been compromised.”
“What about Pam?”
“Pam?”
“It’s possible the sheriff got to her.”
Pilcher laughed, derisive. “Pam would set herself on fire if I asked her to. She’s missing by the way. Her microchip indicates she’s in town, but I haven’t heard from her in hours. I will ask you one last time—which of your men?”
“Give me the night.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Give me the night to find out who did this.”
Pilcher leaned back and regarded him with an unreadable intensity, and said, “You want to handle this yourself, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“A matter of honor?”
“Something like that.”
“Fair enough.”
Ted stood.
Pilcher pointed at the monitors. “Only you and I know what’s happening down in the valley. For now, it stays that way.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s a hard night for me, Ted. I’m grateful to have a friend like you to lean on.”
Ted tried to smile, but he couldn’t manage it. Just said, “I’ll see you in the morning.” He set his scotch glass down on a table and headed for the door.
ETHAN
Everyone went silent.
So quiet Ethan could hear the fire burning in the hearth at the back of the room.
The scratching stopped.
He heard the click-click-click of those talons again.
Retreating.
It made sense. Why would the abbies believe their prey had gone behind this door? They didn’t even know what a door was. That it was something that opened into another place. Most of them were probably still out on—
Something struck the door.
The room took in a collective gasp.
The bolt rattled in its housing.
Ethan straightened.
The door took another blow—twice as hard—as if two abbies had crashed into it at the same time.
He thumbed off the safety and glanced at Hecter, Kate, and the others.
“How many are out there?” Kate asked.
“No idea,” Ethan whispered. “Could be thirty. Could be a hundred.”
In the darkness behind them, children were beginning to cry.
Parents trying to hush them.
And the blows to the door kept coming.
Ethan walked over to the left side where the hinges attached the door to the frame. One of the rusted brass plates popped a screw.
Kate said, “Will it hold?”
“I don’t know.”
The next blow came—the hardest yet.
The entire top plate detached from the frame.
Still four more below it.
Ethan called Maggie over, and in the torchlight, they watched the housing for the bolt.
With the next collision, it shook but held.
Ethan went back to Kate and asked, “Is there another way out of this room?”
“No.”
The barrage continued, and the more the abbies hurled themselves against the logs, the angrier they seemed to get, now shrieking and screaming after every failed attempt.
Another plate broke loose.
Then another.
The end was coming. The thought actually crossed Ethan’s mind that he should go find his family now. Give them both a quick, merciful death, because once the abbies got in, their last moments of sentience would be owned by horror.
The passage outside the door went quiet.
No scraping.
No footsteps.
The cavern held its breath.
After a long moment, Ethan approached the door and put his ear to the wood.
Nothing.
He reached for the bolt.
Kate whispered, “No!”
But he slid it back as quietly as he could manage and grasped the handle.
“Maggie, bring the light.”
When she was standing behind him, Ethan pulled.
The two remaining hinges creaked loudly as they bore the full weight of the door.
The firelight brightened the passage.
It still smelled of the abbies—rot and death—but it was empty.
There were people who just sat against the rock wall and wept.
There were those who trembled silently at the horror they had seen.
Those who sat expressionless, still as stone, gazing into some private abyss.
Others plugged in.
Helped tend the fire.
Repair the door.
Organize the weaponry.
Bring food and water out of storage.
Comfort the grieving.
Ethan sat with his family on a broken loveseat at the edge of the fire. The room was warming, and Hecter played something beautiful on the piano that seemed to dial back the edge, to make everyone feel just a touch more human.
In the low light, Ethan counted their number over and over.
Kept arriving at ninety-six.
This morning, there had been four hundred sixty-one souls in Wayward Pines.
He tried to tell himself that it was possible other groups had survived. That they had somehow managed to find refuge. Someplace where the abbies couldn’t get at them. Barricaded themselves in houses or the theater. Fled into the woods. But in his heart, he didn’t believe it. He might have managed to buy in if he hadn’t peeked through that trapdoor and seen Megan Fisher in the street and all those others getting slaughtered.
No.
In the town of Wayward Pines, eighty percent of humanity had been wiped out.
Theresa said, “I keep thinking we’re going to hear someone knocking on the door. Do you think there’s a chance that some of them will make it up here?”
“Always a chance, right?”
Ben’s head lay in Ethan’s lap, the boy asleep.
“You okay?” Theresa asked.
“I suppose, considering I made a decision that sent most of this town to a violent death.”
“You didn’t turn off the fence and open the gate, Ethan.”
“No, I just invited it to happen.”
“Kate and Harold would be dead.
”
“Harold probably is anyway.”
“You can’t look at it that way—”
“I fucked up, baby.”
“You gave these people their freedom.”
“And I’m sure they really had a chance to savor it as the abbies were tearing their throats out.”
“I know you, Ethan. No, look at me.” She turned his chin toward her. “I know you. I know you only did what you believed was right.”
“I wish we lived in a world where actions were measured by the intentions behind them. But the truth is, they’re measured by their consequences.”
“Look, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I just need to tell you, I need you to know, that I feel closer to you right now—on the brink of dying—than I have in years. Maybe ever. I trust you now, Ethan. I know you love me. I’m starting to see it like I haven’t before.”
“I do, Theresa. So much. You are . . . everything.” He kissed her and she leaned into him, resting her head against the side of his shoulder.
He put his arm around her.
Soon, she was asleep.
He looked around.
The collective grief was a tangible thing. It seemed to weigh down the air with a thickness like water or dense smoke.
His hands grew cold. He dug his right one into the pocket of his parka. His fingers touched the memory shard that contained the footage of David Pilcher murdering his own daughter. Grasping it delicately between his thumb and forefinger, an H-bomb of rage blossomed in his gut.
Ted had copies of this footage as well, and Ethan had told him not to do anything with it. To stand by. But that was before the abby invasion. Did Ted know what was happening in Wayward Pines?
Ethan ran another headcount.
Still ninety-six.
Such frailty.
He thought of Pilcher, sitting in the warmth and safety of his office, watching on his two hundred sixteen flatscreens as the people he had kidnapped in another lifetime were massacred.
Voices roused him.
Ethan opened his eyes.
Theresa was stirring beside him.
The quality of the light hadn’t changed, but it felt much later. Like he’d been asleep for days.
Gently lifting Ben’s head off his lap, he stood and rubbed his eyes.
People were up and moving around.
Near the door, voices were raised.
He saw two separate groups, with Kate standing between Hecter and another man.
Both men were yelling.
He walked over, caught Kate’s eye.
She said, “We have some people who want to go outside.”
A man named Ian, who owned a shoe-repair store on Main called The Cobbler’s Shoppe, said, “My wife is out there. We were separated when the four groups were forming.”
“And you want to do what exactly?” Ethan asked.
“I want to help her! What do you think?”
“So go.”
“He also wants a gun,” Kate said.
A woman who worked in the community gardens pushed past several people and glared at Ethan. “My son and my husband are out there.”
Kate said, “You understand my husband is too?”
“So why are we hiding in here instead of rescuing them?”
Hecter said, “You’d be dead within ten minutes of leaving this cavern.”
“That’s my choice, pal,” Ian said.
“You aren’t taking a gun.”
Ethan broke in: “Hold on just a minute. This is a conversation for everyone.”
He walked into the middle of the room, and said loudly enough for everyone to hear, “Circle up! We need to talk!”
The crowd slowly converged, bleary-eyed, bedraggled.
“I know it’s been a hard night,” he said.
Silence.
He sensed anger and blame in the eyes that watched him.
Wondered how much of it was truly there, how much he imagined.
“I know you’re all worried about those who didn’t make it in here. I am too. We barely made it ourselves. And some of you may be wondering why we didn’t stop and help. I can tell you right now that if we had, this would be an empty cavern, and we’d all be dead in that valley. That’s hard to hear. As the man responsible for us being in this situation . . .”
Emotion reared its head.
He let the tears come, let the tremor disrupt his voice.
“From my place at the back of the line,” he said, “I saw what was happening to our people above ground. I know what these aberrations are capable of. And I think we all need to start coming to terms with a hard, hard truth. There’s a chance we’re all that’s left of Wayward Pines.”
Someone yelled, “Don’t say that!”
A man stepped into the circle. He was an officer of the fête, still dressed in black, still carrying his machete. Ethan had never exchanged words with him, but he knew where he lived, that he worked at the library. He was slim and fit, with a shaved head and faint stubble across his jawline. He also carried that whiff of unearned arrogance that seems to cling to those who crave authority for the sheer sake of power.
The officer said, “I tell you what you do. You get on your hands and knees and crawl back to Pilcher and beg the man’s forgiveness. Tell him you did this. Tell him you brought this shitstorm down on our heads all on your very own and that we want to go back to the way things were. That none of us signed up for this.”
“It’s too late,” Ethan said. “You all know the truth now. You can’t unknow it. There’s no easy way out of this.”
A short, squat man—the town butcher—pushed his way into the circle.
He said, “You’re telling me my wife and daughters are dead. That at least a dozen dear friends of mine are dead. So what are you saying we do about it? Hide in here like a bunch of cowards and write them off?”
Ethan moved toward him, his jaw tensing. “I am not saying that, Andrew. I am not saying we write anybody off.”
“Then what? What are we supposed to do? You pulled the wool away from our eyes. But for what? To lose most of our people and live like this? I’d rather be enslaved. I’d rather be safe and have my family.”
Ethan stopped a foot away from the man. He scanned all the faces, found Theresa’s. She was crying. She was sending him love. “I may have fired the opening shot,” he said, “but I didn’t turn off the fence, and I didn’t open the gate. The man responsible for the deaths of our families and our friends, for you even being in Wayward Pines in the first place, is alive and well two miles from where we stand. And my question for you is: Are you going to stand for that?”
Andrew said, “He’s backed by his own private army. Those are your words.”
“Yeah.”
“So what do you want us to do?”
“I want you to not lose hope! David Pilcher is a monster, but not everyone in the mountain is. I’m going across the valley.”
“When?”
“Right now. And I’d like Kate Ballinger and two others who can shoot to come with me.”
“We should take a large group,” the officer said.
“Why? So we attract more attention and get more people killed? No, we need to go light and fast. Stay unseen if at all possible. And yes, it’s likely we won’t come back, but the alternative is to sit here in this cave and wait for the inevitable. I say we go out swinging.”
Hecter said, “Even if you make it into the mountain, you actually believe you can stop this man?”
“I do believe that.”
A woman stepped out of the crowd. She still wore her costume from the night before—a ball gown with a tiara she hadn’t thought to take off. Her lipstick, mascara, and eyeliner streaked garishly down her face.
“I want to say something,” she said. “
I know a lot of you are angry at this man. At the sheriff. My husband . . .” She took a moment to collect herself. “Was in another group. We’d been married six years. It was a forced marriage, but I loved him. He was my best friend, even though we barely talked. It’s amazing how well you can come to know a person through eye contact. Through subtle glances.” Murmurs of agreement rippled through the crowd. She stared at Ethan. “I want you to know that I would rather Carl be dead and I would rather die today than live in that sick illusion of a town for one more hour. Like prisoners. Like slaves. I know you did what you thought was right. I don’t blame you for a thing. Maybe not everyone feels this way, but I know I’m not the only one.”
“Thank you,” Ethan said. “Thank you for saying that.”
He made a slow turn, studying the ninety-five faces watching him, feeling the true weight of their lives on his shoulders.
He said, finally, “I’m going out that door in ten minutes. Kate, you in?”
“Hell yes.”
“We need two others. I know more of you may want to come, but there could still be another attack on this cavern. We want to leave you well armed and well guarded. If you think you can shoot, if you’re in exceptional physical condition, and if you can control your fear, then join me over at the door.”
Ethan sat on the stage between Theresa and Ben.
The boy said, “I don’t want you to go back out there, Dad.”
“I know, buddy. Between you and me, I’m not all that wild about it myself.”
“So don’t go.”
“Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re the right things.”
He couldn’t imagine what was going through the boy’s mind. All the lies he’d been taught in school suddenly melting against the blistering heat of the truth. Ethan could remember his dad waking him from nightmares when he was Ben’s age, telling him it was just a bad dream, that there were no such thing as monsters.
But in his son’s world, monsters did exist.
And they were everywhere.
How did you help a boy come to terms with something like that when you could barely face it yourself?
The boy wrapped his arms around Ethan and squeezed.