by Blake Crouch
“Mr. Pilcher knew you’d come,” Marcus said.
“He told you that, huh?”
“He told me everything you did.”
“Everything I did?”
“And he also told me to shoot you, so—”
“People are dying in Wayward Pines, Marcus. Women. Children.”
Marcus had halved the distance between them and Ethan could read enough rage in his eyes to suggest he might actually pull the trigger.
The glass doors opened. Ethan glanced back, saw a big blond man enter, aiming a pistol at his heart. Ethan remembered him from that day in the morgue. Alyssa’s friend, Alan—Pilcher’s head of security.
Ethan looked at Marcus, the kid now shouldering the machine gun, preparing to shoot.
Ethan said to Alan, “You have orders to shoot me on sight as well?”
“Better believe.”
“Where’s Ted?”
“No idea.”
“You might want to hear me out first,” Ethan said.
Marcus was closing in. As Alan pointed his pistol in Ethan’s face, Marcus reached forward and tugged the Desert Eagle out of Ethan’s waistband, threw it across the stone.
“You have no idea what’s going on out there,” Ethan said. “Either of you. Last night, Pilcher turned off the fence and opened the gate. He let a swarm of abbies into the valley. Most of the town has been massacred.”
“Bullshit,” Alan said.
“He’s lying,” Marcus said. “Why are we even listening—”
Ethan said, “I want to show you something. I’m reaching slowly into my pocket—”
Alan said, “I swear to God that’ll be the last move you ever make.”
“You just took my weapon.”
Marcus said, “Alan, we have orders. I—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Ethan said. “Adults are talking.” He looked back at Alan. “Remember when we met in the morgue? Remember what you asked me to do?”
“Find who killed Alyssa.”
“That’s right.”
Alan fixed his eyes on Ethan.
“I found who killed her,” Ethan said.
Alan’s jaw tensed.
“It was your boss. And Pam.”
Alan said, “You come in here with an accusation like that you better be able to—”
“Prove it?” Ethan pointed at his pocket. “May I?”
“Slowly.”
Ethan reached in, fingers probing until he felt it. Lifting out the memory shard, he held up the square shaving of metal, and said, “Pilcher and Pam killed Alyssa. But first they tortured her. The head of surveillance gave this to me. It shows everything.” Alan kept the gun trained on Ethan, his expression unreadable. “I have a question for you, Alan,” Ethan said. “If what I’m telling you is true, where does your loyalty fall?”
“He’s playing you,” Marcus growled.
“One way to find out,” Ethan said. “What does it cost you to look at this, Alan? Unless avenging Alyssa isn’t something that interests you.”
Behind the glass doors, Ethan saw another armed man sprinting down the corridor.
He was dressed in black, armed with a Taser, pistol, machine gun, and testosterone. As he approached the glass doors, he spotted Ethan and raised his weapon. Alan suddenly wrapped his right arm around Ethan’s neck and held his pistol to Ethan’s temple.
The doors whisked open.
Alan said, “I’ve got him. Stand down.”
“Kill him!” Marcus screamed. “You have orders!”
The new arrival said, “Alan, what the hell are you doing?”
“You do not want to shoot this man, Mustin. Not yet.”
“What I want and don’t want doesn’t have a whole helluva lot to do with it. You know that better than any of us.”
Alan tightened his grip on Ethan.
“Sheriff says the town’s been overrun with aberrations and that the bossman opened up the gate. He also says that Mr. Pilcher and Pam are responsible for Alyssa’s death.”
“One thing to say it,” Mustin said. “Another to prove it.”
Ethan held up the memory shard.
“He claims it has footage of Alyssa’s death.”
“So what?” Marcus said.
Alan leveled a wilting glare at the young man. “What are you saying, son? That on the wild assumption any of this is true, you’d be a-okay with Mr. Pilcher killing one of our own, his own daughter, and trying to hide it? You’d just go along with that?”
“He’s the boss,” Marcus said. “If he did something like that, I bet he had—”
“He’s not God, is he?”
A scream raced up the tunnel and went reverberating through the ark.
Alan released Ethan and said, “What was that?”
“Sounds like some of the abbies found their way into the mountain,” Ethan said. “I drove through the entrance to the tunnel.”
Alan looked at Mustin’s weapon. “What do we have that’s meaner than an AR-15?”
“An M230 chain gun on a rolling mount.”
“Mustin, Marcus, get on that chain gun. Call everybody up. The entire team.”
“What are you going to do with him?” Marcus asked, jutting his chin toward Ethan.
“He and I are heading up to surveillance to take a look at what he’s got.”
“We were told to kill him,” Marcus said, raising his gun.
Alan stepped toward Marcus, the barrel of the AR-15 digging into his sternum.
“Would you mind not pointing your weapon at me, son?”
Marcus lowered his gun.
“While you and Mustin make sure we don’t all get eaten, I’m going to look at what the sheriff says is proof concerning what happened to my friend. And if it’s anything less than advertised, I’ll execute him on the spot. That all right with you?”
THERESA
“You’re almost there!” Theresa whispered.
Ben lowered his shoe toward the next foothold.
The cries and the screams from the Wanderers’ cavern were still audible. That narrow ledge had just run out, and now they were down-climbing a fifty-degree stretch of cliff. So far, the abundance of handholds and footholds in the good, hard granite had saved their lives, but Theresa couldn’t ignore the two-hundred-foot fall that awaited the slightest misstep. The reality that her son was on this rock wall with her was almost too much to bear.
If Ben fell, she’d jump right after him.
But so far, he was listening, following her instructions, and doing a damn fine job of holding his twelve-year-old shit together.
Ben stepped down onto the ledge where Theresa had been perched for the last few minutes. It didn’t lead anywhere, but at least there was enough of a surface so they didn’t have to cling desperately to a handhold.
They still had a long way to go, but progress had been made, and the tops of the pine trees were only twenty feet below them.
Another scream broke out of the tunnel far above.
“Don’t think about it,” Theresa said. “Don’t imagine what they’re going through. Just focus on where you are, Ben. On making smart, safe moves.”
“Everyone in that cave is going to die,” he said.
“Ben—”
“If we hadn’t found the ledge—”
“But we did. And soon we’re going to get off this cliff and find your father.”
“Are you scared?” he asked.
“Of course I am.”
“Me too.”
Theresa reached over and touched her son’s face. It was slick and cool with sweat and rosy with exertion and the beginnings of a sunburn.
“Do you think Dad’s okay?” Ben asked.
“I think he is,” she said, but her eyes filled with tears at the thought of
Ethan. “Your old man’s one tough hombre. I hope you know that.”
Ben nodded, glanced down the face of the cliff into the welcoming darkness of the dense pine forest.
“I don’t want to get eaten,” he said.
“We’re not. We’re tough hombres too. We’re a family of tough hombres.”
“You’re not a tough hombre,” Ben said.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re a tough hombra.”
Theresa rolled her eyes and said, “Come on, brat. We better keep moving.”
It was late afternoon when they stepped from the rock onto the soft floor of the forest.
They had been on the cliff for hours, under the burn of direct sunlight. They dripped sweat as their eyes readjusted in the cool shadow of the trees.
“What now?” Ben asked.
Theresa wasn’t sure exactly. By her estimate, they were approximately a mile from the edge of town, but she wasn’t confident that heading for Wayward Pines was the safest play. The abbies wanted to feed. They would stay where the people were, or at least where they’d been. Then again, if she and Ben made it into town, they could hole up inside a house. Lock themselves into a basement. If the abbies found them in the forest, there’d be nowhere to hide. It was already getting late, and she didn’t relish the thought of sleeping out here in the woods, in the dark.
Theresa said, “I think we go back into town.”
“But that’s where the abbies are.”
“I know of a place where we can hide. Wait this out until your dad fixes it.”
Theresa started off into the trees, Ben following close on her heels.
“Why are you going so slowly?” he asked.
“Because we don’t want to step on any branches. We don’t want to make a sound. If something comes our way, we need to be able to hear it early enough to hide.”
They went on, winding their way down through the trees.
They heard no more screams, human or abby.
Nothing but their own footsteps in the pine needles, their heavy exhalations, and the whoosh of wind pushing through the tops of the trees.
ETHAN
He followed Alan through the glass doors. They took the stairwell up to the second floor, came off the landing, and headed down the corridor into Level 2.
As they approached surveillance, Alan pulled a keycard out of his pocket.
When he swiped it at the door, a red dot lit up above the reader.
Alan tried again, same result.
He banged on the door.
“It’s Alan Spear. Open up.”
No answer.
Alan stepped back, fired four rounds into the card reader, and then put a size thirteen boot into the center of the door.
It burst open.
Ethan let Alan move in first.
The room was dark, illuminated only by the glow from the wall of monitors.
No one at the console.
Ethan waited in the threshold as Alan approached the inner door.
He tried his keycard again: green light.
Dead bolt retracting.
Alan pointed his AR-15 into the side room.
“Clear!” he said.
Ethan walked in, and asked, “Can you operate this system?”
“I can figure out how to play that memory shard. Give it here.”
They sat at the console.
As Alan slipped the shard into a port, Ethan looked up at the screens.
All were dark but one.
A camera feed showed the school basement—a large crowd packed into a classroom. In the center of the room, the injured lay on makeshift cots while neighbors tended to them and nursed their wounds. He searched for Kate but couldn’t pick her out.
An image appeared on another screen.
It was a long camera view across a field—the riverside park. It showed a man limping beside the river.
Ethan said, “Look, Alan.”
Alan looked up.
The man on the screen began to run—the awkward, stumbling gait of someone who’d been wounded.
Three abbies sprinted into view on the left side of the screen as the man disappeared out of the right.
A new monitor flashed to life—a feed looking down Sixth Street, Ethan’s street. The man ran out of the field and into the road, the abbies in pursuit, upright, all four of them moving closer and closer to the camera.
They ran him down in front of Ethan’s house and killed him in the street.
Ethan felt a surge of nausea. Rage.
“I wondered this morning if something was up,” Alan said.
“Why’s that?”
“Mustin, that guard back there? He’s a sniper. All day every day, he sits on top of a mountain overlooking the town and the canyon and shoots any abbies that try to come in. I saw him in the chow hall this morning when he should’ve been at his post. He said Pilcher had pulled him off the peak for today. No reason given. It was a clear day too.”
“So Mustin wouldn’t see what his boss had done to all those innocent people.”
“When did they breach the fence?” Alan asked.
“Last night. You weren’t told?”
“Not a word.”
A new screen flared to life.
“That’s the memory shard file?” Ethan asked.
“Yep. Have you seen this?”
“I have.”
“And?”
“You can’t unwatch it.”
Alan played the file.
From high in the corner of a ceiling, a camera looked down on the morgue. There was Pilcher. Pam. And Alyssa. The young woman had been strapped with thick, leather restraints to the autopsy table.
“No audio?” Alan asked.
“It’s a good thing.”
Alyssa was screaming, her head lifting off the table, every muscle straining.
Pam appeared, took a handful of Alyssa’s hair, and jerked her head down against the metal table.
When David Pilcher moved into frame, set a small knife on the metal table, and climbed on top of Alyssa, Ethan looked away.
He’d seen this once before, didn’t need the images reinforced inside his brain.
Alan said, “Jesus God.”
He stopped the video, pushed his chair back from the console, and stood.
“Where are you going?” Ethan asked.
“Where do you think?” He moved toward the door.
“Wait.”
“What?” Alan glanced back. You wouldn’t have known what he’d just seen to look at his face. That Nordic iciness as blank as a winter sky.
“The people in town need you right now,” Ethan said.
“I’m going to go kill him first if that’s okay with you.”
“You’re not thinking.”
“His own daughter!”
“He’s done,” Ethan said. “Finished. But he has information we’re going to need. Go mobilize your men. Send a team to shut the gate and restore power to the fence. I’ll go to Pilcher.”
“You will.”
Ethan stood. “That’s right.”
Alan dug his keycard out of his pocket, dropped it on the floor, and said, “You’ll need this.”
A key fell beside the card.
“That too. It’s for the elevator. And while we’re at it . . .” He pulled a subcompact Glock out of a shoulder holster, held it by the barrel, and offered Ethan the gun. As Ethan took it, Alan said, “If the next time I see you, you confess that, in the heat of the moment, you put a round into that piece of shit’s gut and watched as he bled out slowly, I will totally understand.”
“I’m sorry about Alyssa.”
Alan left the room.
Ethan bent down, lifted the key and the plastic card off the floor.<
br />
The corridor was empty.
Halfway down the stairwell, he heard it.
A noise he knew all too well from his time at war.
They were firing the chain gun, and it sounded like death on the drums.
By the time he reached Level 1, the noise was unreal. People would be leaving their workstations, leaving their residences.
At the pair of unmarked doors, he swiped the card through the reader.
The doors opened.
He stepped into the small elevator car, pushed the key into the lock on the control panel, and turned it.
The single button started blinking.
He pressed it, the doors closed, and the racket of the chain gun began to gradually fade away.
He took a deep breath and thought of his family, his fear for them blooming in his stomach like a flower of broken glass.
The doors opened.
He stepped off into Pilcher’s suite.
Passing the kitchen, he heard the sizzle of meat cooking. Garlic, onions, olive oil perfuming the air, Chef Tim obliviously at work while the abbies invaded, intently plating Pilcher’s breakfast, adding intricate dots of a bright red sauce from a pastry bag onto a piece of china.
As Ethan moved down the hall toward Pilcher’s office, he checked the load on Alan’s Glock, happy to see a round already in the tube.
He opened the doors to Pilcher’s office without bothering to knock, and strode inside.
Pilcher sat on one of the leather sofas that faced the wall of monitors, feet propped up on an acacia wood coffee table, a remote control in one hand, a bottle of something old and brown in the other.
The left side of the wall showed feeds from Wayward Pines.
The right—surveillance from inside the superstructure.
Ethan walked over to the sofa, took a seat beside him. He could break Pilcher’s neck. Beat him to death. Suffocate him. The only thing stopping him really was the sense that this man’s death belonged mostly to the people of Wayward Pines. He couldn’t steal that away from them. Not after everything Pilcher had put them through.
Pilcher looked over, his faced streaked with deep scratch marks that still oozed blood.
“Who’d you tangle with?” Ethan asked.
“I had to let Ted go this morning.”