by Blake Crouch
The barkeep said, “Sir?”
“Johnnie Walker Blue. Neat.”
“Those bottles are actually more for atmosphere and extra special occasions.”
“All right. Then what do you recommend?”
“I make a mean martini.”
“By all means.”
He watched the barkeep pour from various unmarked bottles into a big martini glass, which he set on Ethan’s napkin and garnished with a wedge of green apple.
The man said, “Cheers. First one’s on me.”
As Ethan raised the glass to his lips, he heard Kate’s voice: “Now try and keep an open mind.”
She claimed the barstool beside him as he sipped.
He said, “Wow. Well at least they got the glassware right. Until now, I’ve never actually wanted to untaste something.”
It was odorless, but on the tongue the overwhelming note was burn, followed by a strong citrus pucker, and a finish that was mercifully short, like the flavor had just fallen off a cliff.
He carefully returned the martini glass to the napkin.
“You aren’t going to tell me this bathtub gin grows on you.”
Kate laughed. “You look good, Agent Burke. I have to say the elegance of the black suit and tie suits you a thousand times better than that woodsy sheriff getup.”
In the reflection of the mirror, people were dancing to a slow jazz tune. He spotted Imming and his goons in tuxedoes, passing a mason jar and watching the band.
Ethan reached for the stem of the martini glass, thought better of it.
“Nice digs,” he said. “How’d you get all of this up here?”
“We’ve been bringing things for years. Glad you could make it.”
“Well, I barely did, and I still don’t understand what it is I made it to. Is this a costume party?”
“Kind of.”
“So what’s everyone pretending to be?”
“See, that’s the thing. Nobody here is pretending, Ethan. This is a place to come and be who you really are.” She turned in her barstool, surveyed the crowd. “We talk about our past here. Our lives before. Who we were. Where we lived. We remember the people we loved, who we’ve been separated from. We talk about Wayward Pines. We talk about whatever we want, and we have no fear of anything inside this room. It isn’t allowed.”
“Do you talk about leaving?”
“No.”
“So you’ve never been to the fence?”
She sipped the foul concoction posing as a martini.
“Once.”
“But you didn’t go to the other side.”
“No, I just wanted to see it. Since we started coming to this cave, we’ve had three people cross to the other side.”
“How?”
She hesitated. “There’s a secret tunnel.”
“And let me guess.”
“What?”
“None of them ever returned.”
“That’s right.” She stepped down off her stool. “Dance with me.”
Ethan took her hand.
They walked across the uneven rock into the throng of slow dancers.
He cupped his hand to her back but kept a respectful distance.
“Harold won’t mind,” Kate said. “He’s not the jealous type.”
Ethan pulled her closer, their bodies almost touching. “How about this?”
“When I said he’s not the jealous type, that wasn’t a dare.”
But she didn’t pull back.
They danced.
He hated how good it felt to touch her again.
“What do all these people think of me being here? They act like they don’t even realize the sheriff is in the house.”
“Oh, they realize. We had discussions about it. I convinced them you could be trusted. That we needed you. I stuck my neck out.”
“You do need me. That’s true.”
“Question is, do we have you?”
“If I say no, will I wind up naked and stabbed to death in the middle of the road?”
He felt Kate’s fingernails dig into his shoulder.
There was fire in her eyes.
“Not me, not any of my people laid a finger on Alyssa. We aren’t revolutionaries, Ethan. We don’t come to this cave to stockpile weapons and plan a coup. We meet here to be in a place where we aren’t watched. To feel like human beings instead of prisoners.”
He guided her away from the music.
“I’ve been wondering something,” he said.
“What?”
“Two things really. First, how did you figure out that you had a microchip in your leg? Second—how did you know that if you removed the microchip, the cameras wouldn’t see you? I don’t know how you could possibly have just guessed that.”
She looked away from him.
Ethan pulled her out of the main cavern and into the colder passageway.
It had been there always—he saw it now. An embedded suspicion. But up until this moment, until he’d actually voiced the question, the simplicity of the truth had eluded him.
He said, “Kate, look at me. Tell me the truth about Alyssa.”
“I did.”
God, he’d forgotten how well he knew this woman, how easily he could see straight through her. He thought of the photograph of Kate and Alyssa behind the bar as he caught something else in her eyes that she could no longer hide—pain, loss.
“She wasn’t only their spy, was she?”
Kate’s eyes filling with tears.
“She was yours too.”
They spilled down her cheeks and she let them go.
She said, “Alyssa reached out to me.”
“When?”
“Years ago.”
“Years? So you know everything. You’ve known all this time.”
“No. She never told us what was beyond the fence. She said it was for our own safety. In fact, she made it clear that leaving would be death, that all of us, her included, were stuck here. I believed her. Most of us did. I never knew where Alyssa came from. Where she lived when she wasn’t in town. How she knew all these things that we didn’t. But she hated how we’re treated. These conditions. She said there were others like her who felt the same way, and she gave her life to help.”
“She was your friend?”
“One of my best.”
“So the bell pepper, the secret notes, Alyssa’s investigation…”
“All for show. They made her investigate us. Maybe they were onto her. Suspected what she was doing.”
“Do you know who they are? Did she ever tell you?”
“No.”
In the cavern, the band was playing a new song, something fast.
People were jitterbugging.
Ethan said, “Was Alyssa even here three nights ago?”
“No, there was no meeting. Too risky. But she’d been here plenty of times before. The night she died, I met her in the crypt. We talked about what she was going to do. They were expecting a full report from her. They wanted her to name names, to turn us all in. So examples could be made.”
“What did you and Alyssa decide she should do?”
“Make up an excuse for why she didn’t get to see our group. It was the only option.”
“What time did you and Alyssa part ways? This is very important.”
“As I was walking home, I remember hearing the clock strike two.”
“And where was this exactly?”
“Corner of Eighth and Main.”
“Where’d she go after you left her?”
“I have no idea.”
“No, I mean which direction?”
“Oh. I think she started walking south down the sidewalk.”
“Toward the hospital?”
“Right.”
“And there’s no possible way one of your people killed her? Maybe someone who knew she knew the truth? Who was willing to do anything to get it?”
“Impossible.”
“You’re absolutely certain? Those boy
s who brought me here tonight had more than a few rough edges. And machetes.”
“Well, they don’t trust you. But they loved Alyssa. Everyone did. Besides, it’s no secret among my people that there’s a tunnel under the fence. Alyssa wasn’t stopping anyone from leaving.”
“Then what does stop them?”
“The people who left and never came back.”
He got that Johnnie Walker Blue after all.
Kate went behind the bar, requisitioned the bottle and two rocks glasses, and carried them to a small table out of the main current of the noise and the motion.
They drank and watched the crowd and listened to the music, Ethan studying the faces, becoming increasingly floored, because no one in this room was someone he would’ve expected to be in this room.
In Wayward Pines, this crowd walked the line like perfect little townies.
Followed the rules, caused nary a ripple.
He would’ve pegged most everyone here as full-on converts to everything that life in Wayward Pines entailed, and yet here they were, freed of their microchips, at least for a few hours, drunk and happy and dancing in a cavern.
After the next song, the band quit playing.
The dynamic in the room changed almost instantly.
People found seats at tables, or sat on the floor against the rock wall.
Ethan leaned over to Kate, whispered, “What’s happening?”
“You’ll see.”
Kate’s husband walked over to their table.
Ethan stood.
“Harold Ballinger,” the man said. “I don’t believe we’ve actually met.”
“Ethan Burke.”
They shook hands.
“You worked with my wife many years ago.”
“That’s right.”
“I’d love to hear about it sometime.”
As they sat down, Ethan wondered if Kate had even told her husband about their time together. He wasn’t getting that vibe.
A man was arranging torches in a half circle around the front of the stage.
He stepped down, and a woman in a strapless dress took his place in the firelight.
Only her blond dreads gave her away—it was the barista from the coffee shop.
She was smiling, holding a martini glass in one hand, a hand-rolled cigarette in the other.
There was no microphone.
She said, “It’s getting late. I think we only have time for one share tonight.”
A man stood, asked, “Okay if I go?”
“Sure. Come on up.”
He made his way to the stage in a dark suit that didn’t quite fit him—a little short in the cuffs, a little tight across the chest—and as he stepped into the spotlight and the candles lit his face, Ethan realized it was Brad Fisher. He and Theresa had eaten dinner at the man’s house just two nights ago.
Ethan scanned the crowd, but he didn’t see Mrs. Fisher.
Brad cleared his throat.
Nervousness in his smile.
“My third time here,” he said. “Some of you know me. Most of you don’t. Yet. I’m Brad Fisher.”
The room responded like an AA meeting, “Hello, Brad.”
He said, “First of all, where’s Harold?”
“Back here!” Harold yelled.
Brad turned slightly so he faced Ethan’s table.
“Harold came into my office two months ago, and without going into too much detail, made it possible for me to come here. I don’t know how to thank you, Harold. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to.”
Harold waved him off and yelled, “Pay it forward!”
Laughter shuddered through the room.
Brad went on, “I was born in Sacramento, California, in 1966. It’s funny—the week before I woke up in Wayward Pines, I thought I had finally arrived at the prime of my life. I actually remember thinking those exact words. I had this great new job in Silicon Valley, and I had just married my best friend. Her name was Nancy. We met at Golden Gate Park. Don’t know if any of you know San Fran. There’s this Japanese Tea Garden. We met on the moon bridge. It was…” His face softened at the memory. “So cheesy. One of those high arching bridges. I mean it was something out of a movie. We always laughed about it.
“For our honeymoon, we opted for a road trip instead of a tropical getaway. We’d only known each other six months, and there was something that sounded right about just being on the road together. Driving across the West. We kept it loose. We didn’t make plans. It was the best time of my life.”
Even from the back of the room, Ethan could see that Brad was steeling himself to go on.
“A week or so into our trip, Nancy and I hit Idaho. Stayed in Boise for the first night, and I still remember that morning over breakfast when Nance picked Wayward Pines off the map. It was in the mountains. She liked the sound of it.
“We checked into the Wayward Pines Hotel. Had dinner at the Aspen House. We ate on the patio, all those white lights strung from the aspen trees twinkling above us. It was one of those nights. You know what I mean, right? You talk about the future over a bottle of wine and everything seems possible and within reach.
“We went back to our room and made love and fell asleep and when we woke up, we were here and nothing has ever been the same. Nance lasted two months and then she took her own life.
“Now I live with a stranger with whom I’ve never shared a single authentic moment. It’s been a lonely couple of years since I woke up in Pines, and that’s why meeting Harold and now all of you—people who I can share real moments with—is the best thing that’s happened to me in a very long time.” He sipped his martini, winced. “It grows on you, right?”
Someone shouted, “Never!”
More laughter.
Brad said, “I know we all have to start the cold walk home pretty soon, but I hope I can get up here and talk more about my wife. My real wife.” Now he raised his glass. “Her name was Nancy, and I love her, I miss her…” Here came the emotion. “And I think about her every single day.”
Everyone in the room stood.
Glasses raised, winking in the firelight.
The room said, “To Nancy.”
They drank and then Brad stepped down off the stage.
Ethan watched him walk out into the passageway where the man slid down onto the floor and wept.
Ethan looked at Kate, wondering what her group thought of the striking incongruence of time. Brad Fisher had said he was born in 1966, but the man couldn’t have been older than twenty-nine or thirty, which meant he had come to Wayward Pines, Idaho, in the mid-1990s, with Bill Clinton president and 9/11 still five or six years away. No doubt others in this room had come to town before him and after him. What did they make of it? Did they compare and contrast their own views of the world before, searching for meaning in their current existence? Did those who had arrived around the same time seek one another out for the comfort of a shared knowledge of history?
“Imagine it,” she said. “First time in two years he’s been able to openly speak about his real wife.”
People were forming a line to the dressing room.
“What about his Wayward Pines wife, Megan?” Ethan asked. “He couldn’t bring her?”
“She’s a teacher.”
“So?”
“They’re true believers. Someone scored him a dose of something that he probably slipped into his wife’s water at dinner. Knocked her out cold for the entire night so he could slip out.”
“So she doesn’t know he’s coming to these.”
“No way. And she can’t ever find out.”
Everyone had left.
Ethan changed out of his black suit and back into the damp jeans and hoodie.
In the main cavern, Kate was blowing out candles and Harold was collecting empty martini glasses and lining them up on the bar.
With the last candle, Kate lit a kerosene lamp for the journey home.
They followed Harold down the passageway.
Outs
ide, the sky had cleared.
Stars blazed down out of the dark and the moon was bright.
Harold took Kate’s lamp and slung it over his shoulder and they all moved down the ledge to where the path swung out across the face of the cliff. All of the homeward-bound foot traffic had polished the wooden planks and the cables clean of snow.
Ethan could see Wayward Pines now.
Snow-mantled and silent in the valley below.
White roofs.
Twinkling lights.
He thought of all the people down there.
Those dreaming of their lives before.
Those still awake in the wee hours in their private prisons, wondering what their lives had become, not knowing if they were alive or dead.
The men and women trudging home from the cavern in wet clothes back to a world they knew was wrong.
His wife.
His son.
Kate said, “Ethan, I have to know.”
“Know what?”
“How bad was it? What they did to Alyssa. Did she suffer?”
Ethan reached for the cable and took that first, stomach-churning step onto the plank. He told himself not to look down, but he couldn’t resist the urge. The forest was three hundred feet below the soles of his boots, the pine trees crowned with snow.
“She died quickly,” he lied.
“Please don’t do that,” Kate said. “I want the truth. How much did they hurt her?”
It had been heady in the cavern, but now the questions came in a rush of mounting heat…
Had Alyssa been tortured by Pilcher’s people to name the members of Kate’s group?
Or killed by Kate’s people to stop her from naming them?
“Ethan?”
Where had it happened?
“Ethan.”
Who had cut her?
Pilcher didn’t murder his daughter.
Was Kate playing him?
“What did they do to my friend?” she asked. “I have to know.”
He glanced back at the woman he had once loved. She and her husband were standing on the edge of the cliff.
He’d assumed he would come out of this night with a better understanding of what had happened to Alyssa, but he only felt more uncertain.
Plagued with more questions.
Pilcher’s words beginning to echo through his head.