by Blake Crouch
Pilcher was standing by the window in the rock behind his desk, staring down through the glass.
“Come here, Ethan. I want to show you something. Hurry or you’ll miss it.”
Ethan moved past the wall of flatscreens and around Pilcher’s desk.
Pilcher pointed through the glass as Pam arrived on the other side of him, said, “Now just watch.”
From this vantage point, the valley of Wayward Pines stood in shadow.
“Here it comes.”
The sun broke over the eastern wall.
Sunbeams slanting down into the center of town in a blaze of early light.
“My town,” Pilcher whispered. “I try to catch the first light that reaches it every day.”
He motioned for Ethan and Pam to take a seat.
“What do you have for me, Ethan?”
“I saw Kate last night.”
“Good. What was your play?”
“Total honesty.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I told her everything.”
“What am I missing?”
“Kate isn’t an idiot.”
“You told her you were investigating her?” There was heat in Pilcher’s words.
“You think she wouldn’t have immediately assumed that?”
“We’ll never know now, will we?”
“David—”
“Will we?”
“I know her. You don’t.”
Pam said, “So you told her we were onto her, and she said, ‘Great, here’s what’s going on.’ ”
“I told her that she was under suspicion, and that I could protect her.”
“Played up those old feelings, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“Okay, might not be the worst approach. So what’d you learn?”
“She says the last time she saw Alyssa was on Main Street the night she died. They parted ways. Alyssa was still alive.”
“What else?”
“She has no idea what’s beyond the fence. Asked me repeatedly.”
“Then why is she running around in the middle of the night?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me. But I have a chance to find out.”
“When?”
“Tonight. But I need my chip taken out.”
Pilcher looked at Pam, back to Ethan.
“Not possible.”
“Her note explicitly said, ‘No chip or don’t bother coming.’ ”
“So just tell her you took it out.”
“You think they won’t check?”
“We can make an incision in the back of your leg. They’ll never know the difference.”
“What if they have some other way of finding out?”
“Like what?”
“Fuck if I know, but if there’s a microchip in my leg tonight, I’m staying home.”
“I made that mistake with Alyssa. Let her go dark. If she’d been chipped, we’d already know where she went. Where she was killed. I won’t make that mistake again.”
“I can handle myself,” Ethan said. “You’ve both seen that. Firsthand.”
“Maybe we aren’t as concerned,” Pam said, “with your safety as we are with your loyalty.”
Ethan turned in his chair.
He’d fought this woman once in the basement of the hospital. She’d come at him with a syringe, and he’d crashed into her at full speed, driven her face into a concrete wall. He relived that moment now like the memory of a good meal, wishing he could experience it again.
“She raises a point, Ethan,” Pilcher said.
“And what point is that? You don’t trust me?”
“You’re doing great, but it’s still early times. Lots to prove.”
“I want the chip out, or I don’t go. It’s that simple.”
Pilcher’s voice assumed a harder edge.
“You will be in my office crack of dawn tomorrow with a full report. Is that understood?”
“Yes.”
“And now I have to threaten you.”
“With what will happen to my family if I should decide to run or otherwise misbehave? Can’t I just imagine the worst and assume you’ll deliver? What I really need is to have a word with you in private.” Ethan glanced at Pam. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“Of course I don’t mind.”
When the door had closed behind her, Ethan said, “I’d like to get a better picture of who your daughter was.”
“Why?”
“The more I know her, the better chance I’ll have of finding out what happened to her.”
“I think we know what happened to her, Ethan.”
“I was down in her quarters yesterday. There were flowers and cards all around her door. A real outpouring. But I was wondering—did she have any enemies in the mountain? I mean, she was the boss’s daughter.”
Ethan thought Pilcher might erupt at this intrusion into his privacy and grief.
But instead, Pilcher leaned back in his chair and said, almost wistfully, “Alyssa was the last person to trade on her status. She could’ve lived in this suite with me in luxury, done whatever she wanted. But she insisted on keeping spartan living quarters and she took assignments just like everyone else. Never once sought out preferential treatment because of who she was. And everyone knew. And it made everyone love her even more.”
“Did you two get along?”
“Yes.”
“What did Alyssa think about all this?”
“All what?”
“The town. The surveillance. Everything.”
“Early on, after we all came out of suspension, she had her idealistic moments.”
“You mean she didn’t agree with how you ran Wayward Pines?”
“Right. But by the time she hit twenty, she’d begun to really mature. She understood the reasons behind the cameras and the fêtes. The fence and the secrets.”
“How did she become a spy?”
“Her request. The assignment came up. There were a lot of volunteers. We had a big fight about it. I didn’t want her to do it. She was just twenty-four. So bright. So many other things she could’ve contributed to that wouldn’t have put her in danger. But she stood here and said to me several months ago, ‘I’m the best candidate for this mission, Daddy. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it.’ ”
“So you let her go.”
“As you’ll find with your son soon enough, letting go is the hardest, greatest thing we can do for them.”
“Thank you,” Ethan said. “I feel like I know her a little bit now.”
“I wish you’d really gotten the chance. She was something else.”
Halfway to the doors, Ethan stopped, glanced back at Pilcher.
“Mind if I ask one more prying question?”
Pilcher smiled sadly. “Sure. Why stop now?”
“Alyssa’s mother. Where is she?”
It was like something broke inside the man’s face. He looked suddenly old, as if the underpinnings had been washed away.
Ethan instantly regretted asking.
The air was sucked out of the room.
Pilcher said, “Out of everyone who went into suspension, nine people never woke up on the other side. Elisabeth was one of those nine. Now I’ve lost my daughter too. Hug your family tonight, Ethan. Hold them tight.”
The OR was down on Level 2, and the surgeon was waiting for them.
He was a roundish man with a bowed back and awkwardness of movement, as if his bones had atrophied after years of living in this mountain, and too little exposure to sunlight. His white coat dropped to his wing tips and he was already wearing a surgical mask.
As Ethan and Pam entered, the doctor looked up from a sink that ran steaming tap water.
He washed his hands furiously.
Didn’t introduce himself.
Just said, “Take off your pants and lie on your stomach on the table.”
Ethan looked at Pam. “You’re staying for this?”
“You honestly think I’d pass up a chance to watch you get cut?”
Ethan sat down on a stool and began to pull off his boots.
Everything had been prepped.
Spread out on blue surgical cloth on a tray beside the operating table: a scalpel, tweezers, forceps, sutures, needle, scissors, needle holder, gauze, iodine, and a small, unlabeled bottle.
Ethan tugged his boots off, unbuckled his belt, and dropped his khaki pants.
The floor was cold through his socks.
With his elbow, the surgeon shut off the tap.
Ethan climbed onto the table and lay on his stomach on the cloth.
There was a mirror on the wall across the room beyond the heart monitors and IV stands. He watched the doctor finish pulling on his surgical gloves and wander over.
“How deep is the microchip?” Ethan asked.
“Not terribly,” the doctor said.
He opened the bottle of iodine.
Poured some onto a cloth.
Scrubbed the back of Ethan’s left leg.
“We affix them to the biceps femoris.” The doctor jabbed the syringe into the smallest bottle. “Few little pinches coming,” he said.
“What’s in that?”
“Just a local anesthetic.”
Once the back of his leg was numb, it went fast.
Ethan couldn’t feel a thing, but in the reflection of the mirror, he watched the doctor lift the scalpel.
He felt some pressure.
Soon there were smears of blood on the doctor’s latex gloves.
A minute later, he traded the scalpel for the tweezers.
Twenty seconds later, the microchip plunked into the metal tray beside Ethan’s head.
It looked like a flake of mica.
“Do me a favor,” Ethan said as the doctor pushed a piece of gauze into the wound.
“What’s that?”
“Do a sloppy job on the sutures.”
“Smart,” Pam said. “It’ll buy you some Kate cred if she thinks you cut it out yourself. Like maybe you’re going rogue.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
The doctor lifted the needle holder, a length of dark thread dangling.
The pain from the incision was beginning to warm in the back of Ethan’s leg as he and Pam moved down the Level 1 corridor toward the cavern.
Ethan stopped at the door to Margaret’s cell, leaned in toward the glass window, and cupped his hands around his eyes.
“What are you doing?” Pam asked.
“I want to see her again.”
“You can’t.”
He squinted through the glass into darkness.
Couldn’t see a thing.
“Have you worked with her?” Ethan asked.
“I have.”
“What do you think of her?”
“She should be put in the incinerator with all of our specimens. Come on.”
Ethan looked at Pam. “You see no benefit to learning from the abbies? They do outnumber us by a few hundred million.”
“Oh, you mean so we can coexist? What kind of let’s-hold-hands hippie shit are you suggesting?”
“Survival,” Ethan said. “What if they aren’t all mindlessly violent? If they actually possess a real intelligence, then communication is possible.”
“We have everything we need in Wayward Pines.”
“We can’t live in this valley forever.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I don’t consider the conditions in town ‘living.’ ”
“What would you call it?”
“Imprisonment.”
He turned back to the cage.
Margaret’s head filled the circular window, inches away.
She stared into Ethan’s eyes.
Lucid.
Utterly calm.
“A penny for your thoughts,” he said.
Her black talons began to tap against the glass.
16
It was a two-bedroom Victorian on the northeast side of town, freshly painted, with two pine trees in the front yard and Wayne Johnson’s last name already stenciled on the black mailbox.
Ethan stepped up onto the front porch and rapped the brass knocker.
After a moment, the door opened.
A rotund, balding, gray-skinned man looked up at Ethan, squinting against the light.
He wore a bathrobe, and what hair he still had looked slept-on and uncombed.
“Mr. Johnson?” Ethan said.
“Yes?”
“Hi, I just wanted to swing by and introduce myself. I’m Ethan Burke, sheriff of Wayward Pines.” It felt strangely dirty claiming that position.
The man stared at him, confused.
“Would it be all right if I came in for a minute?”
“Um, sure.”
The house still smelled unlived-in and sterile.
They sat at a small kitchen table.
Ethan took off his Stetson and unbuttoned his parka.
Casserole dishes and plates wrapped in tinfoil lined the counters.
Neighbors no doubt had been called and urged to bring lunch and dinner to Mr. Johnson during this first difficult week.
The three plates within eyeshot looked untouched.
“Are you eating?” Ethan asked.
“Haven’t really had much of an appetite. People have been bringing food over.”
“Good, so you’re meeting the neighbors.”
Wayne Johnson ignored this.
The Wayward Pines Welcome Manual issued to each resident upon their arrival lay open across the table’s faux-wood veneer. Seventy-five pages of dire threats sugarcoated as “suggestions” for living a happy life in Pines. Ethan’s first week as sheriff had been spent memorizing it cover-to-cover. The book was currently open to the page that explained how food was distributed through the winter months when the gardens were in deep freeze.
“They tell me,” Wayne said, “that I’m going to be working soon.”
“That’s right.”
The man put his hands in his lap and stared at them.
“What will I be doing?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Are you one of the people I can actually talk to?” the man asked.
“Yes,” Ethan said. “Right now, you can ask me whatever you want, Mr. Johnson.”
“Why is this happening to me?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Or you won’t tell me?”
There was a section toward the beginning of the welcome manual entitled “How to Handle Questions, Fears, and Doubts About Where You Are.”
Ethan pulled the manual over and thumbed through to that section.
“This chapter might offer you some guidance,” Ethan said.
He felt like he was reading off a very bad script, which he didn’t believe in.
“Guidance for what? I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what happened to me. And no one will tell me anything. I don’t need guidance, I need fucking answers.”
“I understand your frustration,” Ethan said.
“Why doesn’t the phone work? I’ve tried to call my mother five times. It just rings and rings. That isn’t right. She’s always home, always by the phone.”
Ethan had been in Wayne Johnson’s shoes not long ago.
Frantic.
Terrified.
Coming unhinged as he ran around town trying to make contact with the outside world.
Pilcher and Pam had set out to make Ethan believe he was losing his mind. That had been their integration plan for him from the start. Wayne Johnson’s was different. He was getting what most people got: several weeks to explore town, explore the boundaries, and have several freak-outs before the tough love kicked in.
“I walked the road out of town this morning,” Wayne said. “Guess what? It just looped back around into town. That isn’t right. Something’s off. I just drove here a couple days ago. How is it possible that the road I came in on
is no longer there?”
“Look, I understand you have some questions and—”
“Where am I?”
His voice filled the house.
“What the hell is this place?”
His face was red and he was shaking.
Ethan heard himself say, “It’s just a town, Mr. Johnson.” And the scary thing was he hadn’t even considered his answer. It had just sprung out of him like it had been programmed. He hated himself for it. He’d been told that very thing over and over during his integration.
The man said, “Just a town? Yeah. Just a town where you aren’t allowed to leave or have contact with the world outside.”
“Understand something,” Ethan said. “Every person in Wayward Pines has sat where you sit, including me. It gets better.”
Congratulations. Now you’re out and out lying to the man.
“I’m telling you that I want to leave, Sheriff. That I don’t want to be here any longer. That I want to go home. Back to my life like it was before. What exactly do you say to that?”
“It’s not possible.”
“Not possible for me to leave?”
“That’s right.”
“And what authority do you think you have to hold me here against my will?”
Ethan stood.
He was beginning to feel sick.
“What authority?” the man asked.
“The sooner you make your peace with your new life here, the better things will be for you.”
Ethan put on his hat.
The back of his leg was beginning to hurt.
“I wish you’d just say what you mean,” Mr. Johnson said.
“I’m sorry?”
“If I try to leave, you’ll kill me. That’s the gist of it, right? The hard bit of truth you’ve been dancing around?”
Ethan patted the welcome manual. “Everything’s here,” he said. “All you need to know. Inside the town is life. Outside is death. It’s really that simple.”
As Ethan walked out of the kitchen and back toward the front door, Wayne Johnson called after him, “Am I dead?”
Ethan’s hand was on the doorknob.
“Please, Sheriff, just tell me. I can handle it. Did I die in that accident?”
He didn’t need to look back to know the man was crying.
“Is this hell?”
“It’s just a town, Mr. Johnson.”