by Blake Crouch
Leven glared him down through a thick pair of glasses.
Stubborn. Resisting.
Ethan said, “I’m not leaving.”
“I monitor the systems that keep the superstructure and Wayward Pines functioning. We call it mission control.”
“Which systems?”
“All of them. Electrical. Hull. Filtration. Surveillance. Suspension. Ventilation. The reactor underneath us that powers everything.”
Ethan moved deeper into the nerve center.
“And it’s just you responsible for all of this?”
Leven let slip a smirk. “I have minions. You know, in the event I’m hit by the proverbial bus.”
Ethan smiled, detecting the first inkling of a wicked sense of humor.
“I hear you keep to yourself,” Ethan said.
“I’m in charge of the engine that makes our existence possible. I work eighteen hours a day, every day. Before the burial this morning, I hadn’t seen the sky in three years.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a life.”
“Well, it’s the one I have. I happen to love it.”
Ethan approached a set of monitors in a dark alcove that streamed lines of code at the speed of a stock-market ticker.
“What’s this?” Ethan asked.
“Beautiful, isn’t it? I’m running some projections.”
“Projections on . . . ?”
Leven came and stood beside him. They watched the lines of code spilling down the screens like a waterfall.
Leven said, finally, “The viability of what remains of our species. See, things were dire long before David had his little temper tantrum and threw his people to the wolves.”
“Dire how?”
“Follow.”
Leven showed Ethan over to the main console, where they sat down in oversize leather chairs facing an expansive array of screens.
“Before the massacre in the valley, there were a hundred sixty souls living in the mountain,” Leven said. “Four hundred sixty-one living in Wayward Pines. Our data only goes back fourteen years, but the first killing freeze typically comes in late August. You haven’t been here for a winter yet, but they’re long and brutal. The snow can get ten, fifteen feet deep in the valley. There’s no garden to harvest from. No fruit, no vegetables. We subsist solely on our reserve of freeze-dried meals, supplements, and meat rations. You want to hear a dirty little secret? Now that this is all on you? David Pilcher never intended for us to stay in this valley indefinitely.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He miscalculated how uninhabitable and hostile this world would become.”
Ethan felt something go dark inside of him.
“I’m rerunning my calculations,” Leven said, “but it’s looking like our winter rations will run out in four point two years. Now, there are things we can do to delay the inevitable, like enforcing reduced rations. But that only buys us, at most, another year or two.”
“Not to be callous, but don’t we have less mouths to feed now?”
“Yes, but the abbies wiped out our cattle, our dairy. There will be no milk, no meat. It would take years to reboot the herd.”
“Then we have to find a way to store what we grow for the winter.”
“Our current setup in town doesn’t produce enough food to feed us and save for the future.”
“You mean we eat what we grow?”
“Exactly. And pretty much right away. We’re just too far north. Two thousand years ago, we might have been able to make this growing season work, but it’s gotten shorter and harsher. And these last few years have been the coldest yet. Here’s what I wanted to show you.”
Leven input some new code via the touch screen.
A list began to scroll.
Ethan examined the monitor above him.
Rice: 17%
Flour: 6%
Sugar: 11%
Grain: 3%
Iodized Salt: 32%
Corn: 0%
Vitamin C: 55%
Soybeans: 0%
Powdered Milk: 0%
Malt: 4%
Barley: 3%
Yeast: 1%
The list continued on.
Ethan said, “These are the reserve staple levels?”
“Yes. And as you can see, it’s critical.”
“What was Pilcher planning to do?”
“With our full in-town population, we might have had the manpower to expand our gardens fast enough to meet demand. We were also looking into building a network of greenhouses, but see the problem comes with snow loads in the winter. If enough weight were to build up on the glass roofs, they’d collapse. Again, we’re just too far north.”
“Do the people in the mountain understand what’s coming?”
“No. David didn’t want to spook anyone until we had come up with a solution.”
“And you haven’t.”
“There isn’t one,” Leven said. “Five-year models confirm this valley will become uninhabitable. If we catch a really bad winter, possibly sooner. We’re all from the modern age. If push came to shove, we might have been able to adopt an agrarian lifestyle in a more temperate climate. But with weather like this? The only lifestyle that might support us is the nomadic hunter-gatherer.”
“Except we’re trapped in this valley.”
“Precisely.”
“What about the abbies?” Ethan asked.
“As a food source?”
“Yeah.”
“First off, gross. Secondly, we’ve run models, and there’s too much inherent danger in venturing out beyond the fence to kill them. If we did that on a regular basis, we’d lose too many of our own. Look, I get that you’re just finding this out now, but trust me, I’ve been grappling with this problem for three years. There was no solution before. There’s even less of one now.”
“Did you know what David was planning?”
“You mean with killing the power to the fence?”
“Yeah.”
“No. I was sitting right here the night the fence went down. I called him. He wouldn’t answer. He did it from his office and he locked me out of the system.”
“So he didn’t consult with you beforehand?”
“David and I haven’t been on the greatest of terms these last few years.”
“Why’s that?”
Leven pushed his chair back from the controls and rolled across the floor.
“The David Pilcher you know wasn’t the same man who hired me away from Lockheed Martin. The end of Wayward Pines has been coming for a long time, but David didn’t want to face it. It’s arrogance, I think, a refusal to admit that he missed this potential crisis. That he didn’t foresee it and steer us all out of the way. Recently, he’s become increasingly withdrawn. Erratic. Emotional. He killed his own daughter. That was the first major fracture. Then when you took control of the town and told the residents the truth, I think he just couldn’t deal anymore. Said ‘screw this’ and hit self-destruct.”
“So you’re telling me it’s over. We’re all going to starve to death.”
Leven smiled. “If the abbies don’t get us first.”
Ethan rose to his feet, watched the monitor scroll the list of depleted provisions like the writings of a doomsday prophet. He said, “You’ve got access to every database in the superstructure?”
“That is correct.”
“Did you know a nomad just returned? Adam Hassler?”
“I heard rumblings of it.”
“Do you have access to his file here?”
Leven tilted his head. “I don’t really feel too hot about where this conversation is going.”
“I want you to pull his file.”
“Why?”
“Before Wayward Pines, Hassler and I used to work together.
He was my supervisor in the Secret Service and the one who sent me here. I had no idea he was here until I saw him on the street a couple days ago. Come to find out, before Pilcher brought me out of suspension, Hassler was living here, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Something doesn’t feel right.”
Leven scooted back to the console array and went to work on the touch screens.
“And what is it exactly you’d like to know?” he asked.
Hassler’s face appeared on the monitor, his eyes closed, skin pale—a post-suspension photo.
“How he came to be here.”
“Oh.” Leven quit typing, spun around in his chair. “I don’t think I’m going to have that level of detail. You’ll have to ask Pilcher himself.”
Ethan stepped inside the cage, found David Pilcher eating his supper—some freeze-dried abomination from the winter reserves. The old man looked even older with the beginnings of a white beard fading in across his face, and as Ethan sat down across from him in the cramped cell, he wondered just how much rage simmered underneath the surface. Ethan had plenty of his own. He couldn’t drive the image of those grieving families out of his mind, the sound of those shovels spearing into dirt. All that pain this one man’s doing.
“That does not smell like Tim’s cooking,” Ethan said.
Pilcher glanced up.
Hard. Indignant. Defiant.
“It’s like Satan shit on a plate. Must give you great pleasure.”
“What?”
“Seeing me like this. Relegated to a cage that was built to hold a monster.”
“I’d say it’s serving its purpose perfectly.”
“Thought you’d forgotten about me down here, Ethan.”
“No, just been busy cleaning up the mess you made.”
“The mess I made?” Pilcher laughed.
“Adam Hassler.”
“What about him?”
“I hear that before I was brought out of suspension, Adam lived with my wife and son.”
“As I recall, they were quite happy too.”
“How did Adam Hassler come to be a resident of Wayward Pines?”
A touch of life crinkled in the corners of Pilcher’s eyes.
“What does it matter now?” he asked.
“You do not want to fuck with me.”
Pilcher set his plate aside.
Ethan said, “I’m told that he came here looking for me after my disappearance. And that you abducted him. That he woke up here just like I did. Like everyone in town did.”
“Hmm. Interesting. Out of curiosity, who told you to come see me about this? Was it Francis Leven?”
“That’s right.”
“Is it possible that Francis also shared with you a piece of shocking news about our prospects going forward? And when I say ‘our’ I of course mean the human race.”
“Tell me about Hassler.”
“We’re all going to be starving to death in a matter of years. Do you really think you’re up to solving that problem, Ethan? Ready for that weight on your shoulders? What are you going to do? Put it to a vote? Look, I messed up. I realize that. But you need me. You all need me.”
Ethan struggled onto his feet, started for the door.
“Okay, okay. At first, it was just a standard bribe,” Pilcher said.
“What’s a standard bribe?”
“Money. To buy Adam’s silence for you, Kate Hewson, and Bill Evans. To shut down the investigation into your disappearances. But then something changed. He decided he wanted to come along with me and my crew. Be a part of our journey.”
Ethan cocked his right arm back and punched the door.
Blood from his busted knuckles smeared across the steel.
He hit the door again.
“Between you and me,” Pilcher said, “I always thought Hassler was an arrogant prick. I let him have one good year in Wayward Pines, and then I sent him out on a suicide mission beyond the fence. He never returned.”
Ethan shouted for the guard.
“You need me,” Pilcher said. “You know you need me. If something isn’t done, we’ll die out in a matter of—”
“It’s not your concern anymore.”
“Excuse me?”
The guard opened the door.
“How did you like your supper?” Ethan asked.
“What?”
“Your supper. How was it?”
“Terrible.”
“Sorry about that, especially considering it was your last.”
“What does that mean?”
“Remember when you asked me what was going to happen to you, and I said that’s for the people to decide? Well. They decided. We took a vote a few hours ago, right after we finished burying all the people you murdered. And it’s happening tonight.”
Ethan walked out into the corridor as Pilcher screamed his name.
Late afternoon.
The sun already behind the cliffs.
The sky sheeted over with a uniform deck of clouds that seemed to threaten snow.
The power in town had yet to be restored, but still a handful of people had returned to their homes to begin the process of cleaning up, of trying to reassemble the pieces of a life that could never be made right again.
In the distance, the pile of abbies still burned.
Ethan wasn’t sure what it was—maybe the lateness of the day, the darkening clouds, the cold, gray indifference of the towering cliffs—but Wayward Pines felt, possibly for the first time since he’d come here, like exactly what it was: the last town on earth.
He parked on the curb in front of his Victorian house on Sixth Street.
The vibrant yellow and the white trim struck him as off-key in light of the past few days.
They didn’t live anymore in a world where life was to be colorful and celebrated. Life had become something you clung to, that you bit down hard on against the pain, like the rubber block in a session of electroshock therapy.
Ethan jarred open the Jeep’s door with his shoulder and stepped down onto the street.
The neighborhood stood silent.
Joyless.
Tense.
There were no bodies visible, but a large bloodstain still marred the pavement nearby. It would take a day of solid rain to wash it away.
He stepped over the curb.
From the front yard at least, his house looked intact.
No windows broken.
No door smashed down.
He walked the flagstone path and stepped up onto the porch. The floorboards creaked.
He pulled open the screen door, pushed open the solid wood door.
It was dark and cold inside, and Adam Hassler sat in the rocking chair beside the dormant woodstove, looking like a wasted version of the man Ethan remembered.
“What the hell are you doing in my house?” Ethan’s voice came out like a low growl.
Hassler looked over, his cheekbones and orbital rims pronounced from starvation.
He answered, “Believe me, I was just as surprised to see you.”
Suddenly, they were on the floor, Ethan struggling to get his hands around Hassler’s neck so he could squeeze the fucking life right out of him. He’d assumed that Hassler’s emaciated state would make overpowering him simple, but the man’s wiry strength was resilient.
Hassler torqued his hips and flipped Ethan onto his back.
Ethan swung, his fist glancing off Hassler’s shoulder.
Hassler returned with a hard, stunning blow.
Ethan’s world went pyrotechnic.
He tasted blood, felt it sliding down his face as his nose burned.
Hassler said, “You never knew what you had.”
He threw another punch, but Ethan caught his arm at the elbow and jerked it the wrong way.
<
br /> Hassler cried out as the ligaments stretched.
Ethan shoved him into the toppled rocking chair and scrambled up, looking for a weapon, something hard and heavy.
Hassler regained his feet, advanced in a boxer’s stance.
Too dark in the living room for Ethan to see the punches coming.
Hassler connected a jab, then a hard right hook that might have turned Ethan’s lights out if Hassler wasn’t in such a weakened state.
Still, it snapped Ethan’s neck and spun him ninety degrees as Hassler delivered a devastating kidney shot.
Ethan screamed out, stumbling back into the foyer as Hassler kept coming, calm and controlled.
“It’s a mismatch,” Hassler said. “I’m just better than you. Always was.”
Ethan’s fingers wrapped around the iron coatrack.
“I even loved your wife better than you could,” Hassler said.
Ethan sent the hard, metal base arcing through the air.
Hassler ducked.
It punched a hole through the drywall.
Hassler charged, but Ethan caught him with an elbow to the jaw and the man’s knees buckled. Ethan landed his first direct hit to Hassler’s face, his cheekbone crunching under the blow, and it felt so goddamned good that Ethan hit him again. And again. And again. Hassler growing weaker, Ethan stronger, and with each punch the need to do more damage grew exponentially. The fear inside of him breaking out in a whirlwind of violence.
Fear of what this man could do.
Fear of what Hassler could take away from him.
Fear of losing Theresa.
Ethan let go of Hassler’s neck and the man moaned on the floor.
Ripping the coatrack out of the wall, he clutched the metal in his hands and raised the heavy base over Hassler’s head.
I’m gonna kill him.
Hassler looked up at him, his face a bloody mess, one eye already swollen shut and the other filling with the realization of what was coming.
He said, “Do it.”
“You sent me here to die,” Ethan said. “Was it for the money? Or so you could have my wife?”
“She deserves so much better than you.”
“Did Theresa know that you orchestrated all of this so you could be with her?”
“I told her I came here looking for you and that I was involved in a car wreck. She was happy with me, Ethan. Truly happy.”