The Last Town

by Blake Crouch

  “Not everything is about you. This is about me and this man I fell in love with while you were gone, and who’s now back, and I have no fucking idea how to handle it. Can you put yourself in my shoes for two seconds?”

  Ethan sat up in bed, threw back the covers.

  “Don’t leave,” she said.

  “I just need some air.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “No, you should’ve told me on day one.”

  He climbed out of bed, walked out of their room wearing socks, pajama bottoms, and a wifebeater.

  It was two or three in the morning, and Level 4 stood empty, the fluorescent lights humming quietly overhead.

  Ethan walked down the corridor. Behind every door he passed, residents of Wayward Pines slept safe and sound. There was comfort in knowing that some had been saved.

  The cafeteria was closed, dark.

  Stopping at the doors to the gymnasium, he peered through the glass. In the low light, he saw the raised basketball hoops, the court covered in cots. The people in the mountain had volunteered as a group to give up their rooms on Level 4 to the refugees, a gesture he hoped would be a good omen for the tough transition to come.

  Down on Level 2, he swiped his card and stepped into surveillance.

  Alan sat at the console, watching the screens.

  He looked back as Ethan entered, and said, “You’re up late.”

  Ethan took a seat beside him.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “I disabled the motion sensors that powered up the cameras, so they’re running all the time now. I’m sure the batteries won’t last much longer. I’ve spotted a few dozen abbies back in town. I’ll take a team down in the morning first thing to finish them off.”

  “And the fence?”

  “Full power. All levels in the green. You should really get some sleep.”

  “I don’t see a lot of that in my future.”

  Alan laughed. “Tell me about it.”

  “Thank you, by the way,” Ethan said. “If you hadn’t backed me up yesterday—”

  “You honored my friend.”

  “The people from town—”

  “Don’t let this out, but we call them townies.”

  Ethan said, “They’re going to be looking to me. I have a feeling the people in the mountain will be looking to you.”

  “Looks that way. There are going to be some tough choices to make in our future, and a right way and a wrong way to handle them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Pilcher ran things a certain way.”

  “Yeah. His.”

  “I’m not defending the man, but sometimes situations arise that are so pivotal, so life and death, one or two strong people need to call the shots.”

  “Think Pilcher has any diehards in the mountain?” Ethan asked.

  “What do you mean? True believers?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Everyone in this mountain is a true believer. Don’t you understand what we gave up to be here?”

  “No.”

  “Everything. We believed that man when he said the old world was dying and that we had a chance to be a part of the new world to come. I sold my house, my cars, cashed out my 401(k), left my family. I gave him everything I had.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “You might have missed it with all the other excitement, but we had a nomad return today.”

  “Yeah, Adam Hassler.”

  “So you know him.”

  “Not well. I’m shocked he made it back.”

  “I’d like to know more about him. Was he a townie before he left on his mission?”

  “I couldn’t tell you. You should go talk to Francis Leven.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The steward of the superstructure.”

  “Which means . . .”

  “He tracks supplies, system integrity, the status of people in suspension and out. He’s a wealth of institutional memory. The heads of each group report to him, and he reports, well, reported, to Pilcher.”

  “Never met him.”

  “He’s a recluse. Keeps mostly to himself.”

  “Where would I find him?”

  “His office is tucked way back in the ark.”

  Ethan stood.

  The pain meds were fading.

  The wear and tear of the last forty-eight hours becoming suddenly pronounced.

  As Ethan started toward the door, Alan said, “One last thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We finally found Ted. He was in his room, stuffed in his closet, stabbed to death. Pilcher had cut his microchip out and destroyed it.”

  Ethan would’ve thought that, after a day like this, one more piece of shitty news would crash into his psyche like a wave against a seawall, but it penetrated. Deeply.

  He left Alan and went back out into the corridor, started up the steps toward the Level 4 dormitories, but then stopped.

  Turning back, he descended the last flight of stairs to the first level.

  Margaret, the abby whose intelligence Pilcher had been testing for the last few months, was up, pacing in her cage under the glare of the fluorescents.

  Ethan put his face to the small window and stared through, his breath fogging the glass.

  Last time he’d seen this abby, she’d been sitting peacefully in the corner.

  Docile. Humanlike.

  Now she looked agitated. Not angry, not vicious. Just nervous.

  Because so many of your brothers and sisters have come into our valley? Ethan wondered. Because so many have been killed, even in this complex? Pilcher had told him that the abbies communicated through pheromones. Used them like words, he’d said.

  Margaret saw Ethan.

  She crept on all fours over toward the door and stood on her hind legs.

  Ethan’s eyes and the abby’s eyes were just inches away, separated by the glass.

  Up close, hers were almost pretty.

  Ethan moved deeper into the corridor.

  Six doors down, he looked through the window of another cage.

  There was no bed, no chair.

  Just floor and walls and David Pilcher sitting in a corner, his head hung as if he’d fallen asleep sitting up. The lights burned down through the window and lit the left side of the man’s face.

  He hadn’t been allowed to keep any personal effects, including a razor, and white stubble was beginning to overspread his jaw.

  You did this, Ethan thought. You ruined so many lives. My life. My marriage.

  If he’d had a keycard to this cell, Ethan would’ve rushed inside and beat the man to death.

  Everyone—townies and mountain people—came down for the burials.

  The cemetery was too full to accommodate all the bodies so an open field on the southern border of the graveyard was annexed.

  Ethan helped Kate with Harold.

  The sky was gray.

  No one spoke.

  Tiny flakes of snow swirled through the crowd.

  There was just the constant sound of shovels stabbing into the cold, hard ground.

  As the digging finished, people crumpled down in the snow-frosted grass beside loved ones, or what was left of them, the dead wrapped tightly in once-white sheets. The digging had given them something to do, but as they sat motionless and cold beside lost fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, friends, and children, muffled sobs began to rise up from the crowd.

  Ethan walked out into the middle of the field.

  From where he stood, it was a crushing collection of sights and sounds: all those little mounds of dirt, the dead waiting to be lowered into their final resting places, the grieving of those who had lost e
verything, the mountain people standing behind the townies looking solemnly on, and the column of smoke at the north end of town coughing spirals of sweet-smelling black into the sky as six hundred abby corpses smoldered into nothing.

  Except for David Pilcher, the man responsible for all this pain, every human being left on earth was in this field.

  Even Adam Hassler, standing on the outskirts with Theresa and Ben.

  Ethan was struck with a single, terrifying thought: I’m losing my wife.

  He made a slow turn, studying all the faces. The grief was overpowering. A living thing.

  “I don’t know what to say. Words can’t make any of this feel better. We lost three-quarters of our people, and it’s going to be hard for a long, long time. Let’s do what we can to help one another, because it’s just us out here alone in the world.”

  As everyone began to lift the bodies gently down into their graves, Ethan headed back across the field, through the falling snow toward Kate.

  He helped her lower Harold into his grave.

  Then they took up their shovels, and, along with everyone else, began to fill in the dirt.

  THERESA

  She walked with Hassler through the forest south of town, snowflakes drifting down between the pines. Adam had shaved his beard and cut his hair, but the smooth skin only underscored the gaunt, drawn quality of his face. He looked emaciated. Like a refugee of a starving world. She couldn’t get past how surreal it felt to be physically close to him again. Before she’d given him up for dead, she’d made it a habit of imagining their reunion. None of those fantasies had been anything like the real thing.

  “Are you sleeping all right?” Theresa asked.

  “It’s funny. You don’t know how many nights out in the wild I dreamed of sleeping in a bed again. All the pillows, the covers, the warmth, the safety. Being able to reach out in the dark to a bedside table and wrap my hand around a cool glass of water. But since I’ve been back, I’ve barely slept. Guess I got used to sleeping in a bivy sack, tied into a tree thirty feet off the ground. How about you?”

  “It’s difficult,” she said.

  “Nightmares?”

  “I keep dreaming that things went another way. That those abbies got into the jail cell.”

  “How’s Ben?”

  “He’s okay. I can tell he’s trying to wrap his head around what happened. A lot of his classmates didn’t make it.”

  “He saw things no kid should ever have to see.”

  “He’s twelve now. Can you believe it?”

  “He looks so much like you, Theresa. I’ve wanted to see more of him, to just talk to him, but it didn’t feel right. Not yet.”

  “That’s probably best,” she said.

  “Where’s Ethan?”

  “He was going to stay with Kate for a while after the burial.”

  “Some things never change, huh?”

  “She lost her husband. She doesn’t really have anyone else.” Theresa sighed. “I told Ethan.”

  “Told him . . .”

  “About us.”

  “Oh.”

  “I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t just go on keeping it from him.”

  “How’d he take it?”

  “You know Ethan. How do you think?”

  “But he understands what the situation was, right? That you and I were trapped here. That we thought he was dead.”

  “I explained everything.”

  “So does he not believe you?”

  “I don’t know if it’s that so much as he’s just trying to come to terms with the idea that, well, you know.”

  “That I was fucking his wife.”

  Theresa stopped.

  So quiet in the woods.

  “It was good, right?” Hassler asked. “When it was just you, me, and Ben. I made you happy, didn’t I?”

  “Very.”

  “You have no idea what I’d do for you, Theresa.”

  She looked up into his eyes.

  He stared at her with such love.

  An energy in the air, Theresa could sense that this moment carried more heft than she realized. Her heart had once been wide open to this man, and if she let him keep looking at her like this, like she was the only thing that existed in his world—

  He moved in.

  Kissed her.

  At first, she drew back.

  Then she let him.

  Then she kissed back.

  He walked her slowly back against a pine tree, and as he pressed into her she ran her fingers through his hair.

  As he kissed her neck, she tilted her head back and looked up into snowflakes that fell and melted on her face, and then he was unzipping her jacket, his fingers making quick work of the buttons on her shirt underneath, and she found herself reaching for his.

  She stopped.

  “What?” he asked, breathless. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m still married.”

  “That didn’t stop him.” There was a part of her that wanted him to talk her into it. To keep pushing. To not stop. “Remember how he made you feel? What was it you said to me, Theresa? Your love for him always burned at a hotter temperature.”

  “I’ve seen him change in the last month. I’ve seen glimmers of—”

  “Glimmers? Is that all you felt from me? Glimmers?”

  She shook her head.

  “I love you with everything I have. Nothing held back. No bets hedged. All in. Every second of every day.”

  Off in the distance, a scream ripped through the forest.

  An abby.

  High-pitched. Delicate. Bloodcurdling.

  Hassler staggered back from her, and she could see the intensity hardening across his brow.

  “Is it—”

  “I don’t think it’s inside the fence,” he said.

  “Let’s get out of here anyway,” she said.

  She buttoned up, zipped up.

  They started back toward town.

  Her body was humming and her head was spinning.

  They reached the road and walked down the double yellow line.

  Buildings appeared in the distance.

  In silence, they headed into Wayward Pines.

  She felt reckless but she went on with him.

  At the intersection of Sixth and Main, Hassler said, “Can we go see it together?”

  “Sure.”

  They walked down the sidewalk of their neighborhood.

  No one out.

  The houses empty and dark.

  Everything looked cold and gray and void of life.

  “Doesn’t smell like us in here anymore,” he said as they stood at the foot of the stairs in what had once been their yellow Victorian.

  He moved into the kitchen, through the dining room, and back out into the hallway.

  “I can’t imagine how difficult this is for you, Theresa.”

  “You have no idea.”

  Hassler emerged out of the shadow of the hall, and when he reached her he went down on one knee.

  “I think this is how it’s done, right?” he asked.

  “What are you doing, Adam?”

  He took her hand.

  His were rough, not the hands she remembered. They’d become wiry and hard as steel, and there was dirt from beyond the fence embedded so deep underneath his fingernails she couldn’t imagine it ever washing away.

  “Be with me, Theresa, whatever that means in this new world we’re living in.”

  Tears dripped off her chin onto the floor.

  Her voice trembled.

  She said, “I’m already—”

  “I know you’re married, I know Ethan’s here, but I don’t give a shit and you shouldn’t either. Life is too hard and too short not to be with the one you love. So
choose me.”

  IX

  ETHAN

  Francis Leven lived in a stand-alone structure in a far corner of the ark, built into an overhang in the rock wall. Ethan’s keycard didn’t work on the reader, so he banged his fist against the steel door instead.

  “Mr. Leven!”

  After a moment, the lock retracted.

  The door cracked open.

  The man who answered stood barely five feet tall, and he was dressed in a bathrobe, which filth and time had degraded to something less than white. Forty-five or fifty, Ethan guessed, although Leven’s advanced state of dishevelment made that approximation iffy. His dishwater hair was shoulder-length and shiny with grease, and through large blue eyes, he regarded Ethan with unveiled suspicion that bordered on malice.

  “What do you want?” Leven asked.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “I’m busy. Another time.”

  Leven tried to shut the door, but Ethan shoved it open hard and forced his way inside.

  Candy bar wrappers littered the floor and the air carried a moist, moldy scent, like the living space of a sixteen-year-old boy, but spiked with the caustic odor of stale coffee.

  The sole illumination came from recessed lighting in the ceiling and the glow of the giant LED displays that covered almost every square foot of wall space. Ethan stared at the one closest to him, which showed a digital pie chart. At a glance, the chart appeared to reflect the atmospheric breakdown of the superstructure’s air content.

  He didn’t know what to make of all the screens.

  They showed a seemingly incomprehensible array of data.

  —Sets of temperature gradients in Kelvin.

  —A digital representation of what Ethan assumed were the one thousand suspension chambers.

  —Vital stats on the two hundred fifty people still warm and breathing on the planet.

  —Drone footage.

  —A full biometric readout on the female abby in captivity.

  It was like the surveillance center on steroids.

  “I would like for you to leave,” Leven said. “No one bothers me here.”

  “Pilcher’s finished. In case you didn’t get the memo, you work for me now.”

  “That’s debatable.”

  “What is this place?”