The Last Town

by Blake Crouch

  Disbelief spread quickly across the faces.

  Someone yelled, “Liar!”

  “I understand that at some point in your lives before, each of you bought in hard to what David Pilcher was selling. And to be honest, he’s a brilliant man. No one can deny that. No one can say he isn’t a man of vision, and possibly the most ambitious person who ever lived. I understand what attracted you to him. It’s a rush to keep company with someone who wields such power. Makes you feel better about yourself.

  “From what I gather, a lot of you were at low points when David Pilcher came into your lives. He gave you purpose and meaning, and I totally get that. But he’s as much of a monster as the abbies who lived beyond the fence. Maybe even more. The idea of Wayward Pines was always more important to him than the people who called that town home, and I’m sorry to say, it was more important than any of you.

  “You all knew Alyssa. Everything I’ve heard confirms that she was universally loved inside this mountain. She didn’t see eye to eye with her father. She believed the people of Wayward Pines deserved better than 24-7 surveillance, than being forced to murder one another, than never knowing the truth. What I’m about to show you is upsetting, and I apologize for that, but you need to know what kind of a man you served so you can begin to move past it.”

  Ethan pointed behind the crowd at a hundred-inch monitor mounted to the rock beside the glass doors.

  Most days, it displayed work schedules. Who was on shift in surveillance, security, and suspension. Arrival and departure times for transportation going back and forth to Wayward Pines. An in-mountain message system for Pilcher’s inner circle.

  Tonight, it would show David Pilcher, the creator of Wayward Pines, murdering his only daughter.

  Ethan shouted to one of Ted’s surveillance techs standing beneath the screen, “Play it!”

  THERESA

  The smoke trailed up and vented outside through the barred window near the ceiling. Flames ate away at the legs of Belinda’s desk chair, fueled by a ream of printer paper. Ben sprawled on the single mattress, which Theresa had pulled off the metal frame and set next to the fire. She sat across from Hassler, holding her hands close to the heat.

  On the other side of the bars, Pam’s body lay slumped across the concrete, the pool of blood still expanding around her head.

  “I saw the fence was down,” Hassler said. “I came racing into town. I went to our house, but you weren’t there. I looked everywhere. I thought you and Ben were dead. As I was looking for ammo in the sheriff’s station, I heard your voice, begging Pam to spare you. Isn’t exactly the homecoming I imagined.”

  “I didn’t imagine one at all,” Theresa said. “I was told you weren’t coming back.”

  “What happened here?”

  “The town knows the truth now.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything. We lost a lot of people. I guess the man who built all of this decided to trash his play set and go home.”

  “Who told everyone the truth?”

  “There was a fête called for Kate and Harold Ballinger, but instead of executing them, the sheriff used the opportunity to lift the curtain.”

  “Pope?”

  “Pope’s dead, Adam.” Theresa hesitated. “A lot has happened since you’ve been gone. Ethan is the sheriff now.”

  “Ethan’s here?”

  “He was introduced into the town a month or so ago. He turned this place upside down. Nothing’s been the same since.”

  Hassler stared into the flames. “I didn’t know he was here,” he said.

  “Why would you?”

  “No, I just . . . Does Ethan know?”

  “About us?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I haven’t told him. I mean, I was going to eventually, but Ben and I talked about it, decided there was no rush. We didn’t think we’d ever see you again.”

  Tears dropped out of the corners of Hassler’s eyes, carving clean trails through the grime embedded in his face.

  Ben watched him from the mattress.

  “It’s like a nightmare,” Hassler said.

  “What?”

  “Coming home to this. Every day I was out beyond the fence, facing death and hunger and thirst, it was you, only you, that kept me going. The thought of how our life would be when I got back.”

  “Adam.”

  “That year we lived together—”

  “Please.”

  “Was the happiest I’d ever been. I love you. I never stopped.” Hassler crawled around the bed of coals and put his arm around her. He looked at Ben. “I was a father to you, wasn’t I?” He looked at Theresa. “And I was your man. Your protector.”

  “I wouldn’t have survived Wayward Pines without you, Adam, but I thought you were never coming back. And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, my husband is here.”

  Somewhere outside, an abby howled.

  Hassler pulled his backpack over, opened it, dug around inside until he emerged with a leather-bound journal. Tearing off the plastic, he opened the weathered book to the first page. In the firelight, he pointed to the inscription: When you come back—and you will come back—I’m gonna fuck you, solider, like you just came home from war.

  It broke her to see those words.

  Knocked her flat.

  She’d written them just before Hassler had left.

  “I read it every day,” he said. “You have no idea the hard times it got me through.”

  She couldn’t see anything now, the tears flowing, the emotion unfurling inside of her like a hemorrhage—too fast to staunch.

  “I’m not asking you to predict the future,” he said. “I’m talking about right now. This moment. Do you still love me, Theresa?”

  She looked up at the matted beard, the scarred face, his hollowed-out eyes.

  God, but she did.

  “I never stopped,” she whispered.

  The relief in his eyes was like a stay of execution.

  “I need to know something,” she said. “When we were living together, did you know?”

  “Did I know what?”

  “About this town. What it was. All the secrets that were kept.”

  He stared into her eyes and said, “Until the day David Pilcher came to me and said I’d been chosen for a nomad mission beyond the fence, I only knew what you knew.”

  “Why did he send you out there?”

  “To explore. To search for signs of human life outside our valley.”

  “Did you find any?”

  “My last entry out there . . .” Hassler flipped to the end of his journal. “I wrote, ‘I alone have the key to what will save us all. I’m literally the one man in the world who can save the world.’”

  “So what is it?” Theresa asked. “What’s the key?”

  “To make our peace.”

  “With what?”

  “With the fact that this is truly the end. The world belongs to the abbies now.”

  Even through her grief and shock, this statement registered.

  Theresa felt suddenly, completely, alone.

  “There isn’t going to be some discovery that saves us,” Hassler said. “That puts us back on the top of the food chain. This valley is the only place where we can survive. We’re going to become extinct. That’s simply a fact. Might as well do it with grace. Savor each day, each moment.”

  MUSTIN

  Mustin brushed the snow off the rocks and settled down into his perch. Due to the sheer quantity of ammo he’d brought along this time, it had taken him an extra hour to reach the peak.

  He’d scoped the town before, but of course he’d never had a target in the valley.

  He zeroed out the scope on what was left of Sheriff Burke’s Bronco.

  It took him three shots, followed by three minor adjust
ments to the parallax, before he put a round exactly where he wanted it—through the front tire on the driver side.

  The town had been laid out in regular blocks, three hundred feet long on each side, which meant that further adjustments would be simple now that he had his point of reference.

  He cracked his neck.

  Grabbing the bolt, he opened the breach and jacked the first round out of the five-capacity magazine.

  Settling in behind the focus, he enabled his headset as he glassed Main Street.

  “Mustin here, in position. Over.”

  Ethan Burke responded, “We’re at the tunnel door. Over.”

  “Copy that. Beginning my first pass now. Stand by. Out.”

  There were bodies scattered up and down Main.

  Five abbies feeding in the middle of the street in front of the Steaming Bean.

  For now, he ignored the forest and the cliffs surrounding the town and took his time studying the east-west-running avenues, the north-south-running streets.

  He scribbled a notation on his pad after every sighting.

  Eleven minutes later, he tapped the TALK button on his headset.

  “Mustin back. Over.”

  “Go ahead,” Ethan said.

  “I’ve got a visual on a hundred and five aberrations. About half of them are moving in groups of between fifteen and twenty. The others are ranging solo through town. No sign of survivors yet.”

  Ethan said, “You’ve got twenty minutes and then we’re rolling in. Over.”

  Mustin smiled. A deadline. He liked that.

  He asked, “We taking bets? Over.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Number of kills. Over.”

  “Just get to it.”

  Mustin started on the south end of Main and worked slowly north.

  Fifteen hits.

  Five misses.

  Twelve kills.

  Three left to wish they were dead, dragging themselves across the pavement.

  He moved up to Seventh Street, made his adjustments, and went to work. Near the school, he sighted down a group of eighteen abbies sleeping in the street. He shot four of them before the others woke up and realized they were under attack. Brought down five more as they scattered.

  It went on like this, and he had to admit it was the most fun he’d ever had with his AWM sniper rifle.

  With five minutes remaining, he shot three abbies on the road south of town, killed two more in the vicinity of the gardens. As the sheriff’s voice came back over the headset, he put a round through the head of an abby running at full speed past the hospital.

  “Time’s up,” Ethan said. “Over.”

  “Forty-four,” Mustin said. “Over.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “There are forty-four less abbies to contend with. Over.”

  “Impressive. Is the fence holding?”

  Mustin swung the rifle south, glassing the forest in the vicinity of the fence.

  He reported, “The gate’s still closed. Now I can give you some cover once you get into town, but shooting down into the forest is iffy at best. Over.”

  “Understood. You’ll be our eyes. Kill what you can. Tell us what’s coming. Over.”

  Mustin reloaded the magazine and chambered the next round.

  He glassed what he could see of the woods and the boulders that surrounded the entrance to the superstructure.

  “You’re clear to roll out,” he said.

  ETHAN

  He rode in the front passenger seat of an armored Humvee, with Alan behind the wheel.

  In his side mirror, he could see the metalworkers welding shut the entrance to the superstructure.

  Up on the roof of the Humvee, one of the guards manned a .50 cal machine gun.

  There were two Dodge Ram pickup trucks behind them, two men standing in the back of the first with pump-action shotguns.

  The second Ram carried the chain gun.

  Two transfer trucks followed the Rams, and a third pickup truck brought up the rear holding six guards in the bed, all armed to the teeth.

  In Ethan’s headset, Mustin said, “I’d advise staying off Main. What’s your route? Over.”

  Alan turned out of the woods and onto the road into town.

  “Thirteenth to Fifth,” Ethan said, “then three blocks to the school. Any company?”

  “See that guy in the distance?”

  Ethan squinted through the windshield.

  A hundred yards up the road, an abby was squatting over the double yellow. The sound of approaching engines caught its attention, and as it stood, a puff of red mist exploded out of the side of its head.

  “You got a few other stragglers in your path,” Mustin said. “I’ll start clearing the way. Over.”

  The sun had yet to rise above the cliffs, and the valley ahead was still draped in the light of early morning.

  “Get any sleep?” Alan asked.

  “What do you think?”

  KATE

  She heard the tat-tat-tat of automatic gunfire.

  Everyone in the classroom did.

  She and Spitz went to work dragging the furniture away from the door and pulling the nails out of the frame.

  They got it open, told everyone to wait.

  Rushed out into the hall.

  Up the stairs.

  The noise of gunfire growing louder, and in the space between shots another sound becoming audible—the rumble of engines.

  At the exit, Kate raised her AR-15 and told Spitz to get the door.

  He pulled it open.

  She took two steps through the threshold.

  There were abbies in the schoolyard running toward a convoy of vehicles in the intersection of Tenth and Fifth—a Humvee, three pickup trucks, and two eighteen-wheelers.

  An abby broke off from the pack and came hurtling toward her.

  Spitz said, “You got him?”

  She let it get closer, within twenty feet.

  “Kate?”

  She squeezed—put three bursts in a nice pattern through its chest and dropped it five feet from the door.

  Now came a noise like thunder, and with it, from the second pickup truck, a bright orange muzzle flash from a gun so big it should’ve been mounted on an attack helicopter.

  It cut an entire row of abbies in half.

  The front passenger door of the Humvee swung open.

  When Ethan stepped out, her heart swelled.

  She watched him come around the front of the vehicle and run toward the fence.

  As he climbed over, four abbies charged him from the playground.

  Kate took aim and ripped through the rest of her magazine, bringing them all down.

  Ethan looked over, eyebrows up in surprise.

  For a moment, the shooting had stopped.

  There were abbies lying everywhere and men climbing down out of the truck beds, beginning to set up a perimeter.

  Kate ran toward him, Ethan limping, carrying a shotgun, his jeans ripped all to hell, his shirt in tatters, face streaked with blood.

  Tears blurred her vision and she wiped them away.

  They reached each other and she threw her arms around him.

  “How are the injured?” he asked.

  “One died. One’s hanging on. Barely.”

  “I brought trucks. We’re taking everyone out of here, into the mountain.”

  “Have you found Harold?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What about Theresa and Ben?”

  He shook his head.

  Tears were running down her face and her eyes were shut tight and Ethan kept saying her name, kept saying that everything would be okay, but she couldn’t stop crying and she wouldn’t let him go.

  ETHA
N

  As he held Kate, he glimpsed a man walking down Tenth Street in a long, black duster that fell to his ankles, his face hidden under a black cowboy hat and a long, unkempt beard.

  Ethan said, “Who the hell is that?”

  Kate turned her head. “I’ve never seen him before.”

  Ethan started across the schoolyard, scaled the fence, and moved out into the middle of the street.

  The man in black carried a Winchester rifle, which rested against his shoulder, and his shuffling gait scraped his boots across the pavement. He stopped several feet away from Ethan—a haggard, vile-smelling specimen. He would’ve looked like a homeless eccentric were it not for his eyes. No insanity there. Just clear, lucid intensity.

  The man said, “Well goddamn, Ethan.”

  “I’m sorry, do we know each other?”

  Ethan just glimpsed the man’s smile through the shambles of his beard.

  “Do we know each other?” the man laughed, his voice scratchy, like his larynx had been wrapped in sandpaper. “I’ll give you a hint. Last time we spoke, I sent you here.”

  Recognition fired in Ethan’s brain.

  Synapses connecting the dots.

  He cocked his head and said, “Adam?”

  “So what I hear, you started this mess.”

  “You’ve been in town all this time?”

  “No, no. I just got back.”

  “Back from where?”

  “Out there. Beyond.”

  “You’re a nomad?”

  “I’ve been gone three and a half years. Came back through the fence yesterday at dawn.”

  “Adam—”

  “I know you have questions, but if you’re looking for your family, I found them last night.”

  “Where?”

  “Theresa had locked herself and Ben into the jail cell in the sheriff’s station.”