by Blake Crouch
The boy wrapped his arms around Ethan and squeezed.
“You can cry if you want,” Ethan said. “There’s no shame in it.”
“You’re not.”
“Look again.”
The boy looked up. “Why are you crying, Dad? Is it because you aren’t coming back?”
“No, it’s because I love you. So very much.”
“Are you coming back?”
“I’m going to try my best.”
“What if you don’t?”
“He’s coming back, Ben,” Theresa said.
“No, let’s be straight with him. It’s very dangerous what I have to do, son. It’s possible I won’t make it. If something happens to me, you take care of your mother.”
“I don’t want anything to happen to you.” Ben started to cry again.
“Ben, look at me.”
“What?”
“If something happens to me, you take care of your mother. You’ll be the man of the house.”
“Okay.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
As Ethan kissed the top of the boy’s head, he looked over at Theresa.
She was so strong.
“You’ll come back,” she said, “and when you do, you’ll make everything about this town better.”
HASSLER
The nomad had planned to spend one last night in the wild, but the moment Hassler zipped into his bivy sack at the top of the pine tree, the realization hit: sleep would never find him.
He’d been out in the wild beyond the fence for 1,308 days. He couldn’t be certain, but by his estimate, Wayward Pines was just a few miles to the north, and now that the swarm of abbies had moved out of his path, he was in the clear to go home.
Every harrowing day of his expedition, at some point, his mind had wandered to this moment. Wondering, Would he ever see it again? What would it feel like to walk back into town? Into safety and all the things he loved?
There had been only eight nomads sent out beyond the fence in the history of Wayward Pines. Among Pilcher’s inner circle, it was seen as the ultimate honor and sacrifice. To Hassler’s knowledge, no nomad had ever returned from a long-term mission. Unless one of them had come back while he was away, Hassler would be the first.
He went slowly, methodically, packing his Kelty external frame backpack for the last time—the empty one-liter water bottles, his flint and steel, an empty first-aid kit, the last few scraps of moldy buffalo jerky.
Out of habit, he sealed his leather-bound journal in its plastic bag. Everything he’d experienced and encountered in his three and a half years in the wild was contained in those pages. Days of sadness. Joy. Days he was sure would be his last. All that he’d discovered. Everything seen.
His heart racing as an abby swarm, fifty thousand strong, had sprinted across what had once been called the Bonneville Salt Flats on the Great Salt Lake.
Tears running down his face as he’d watched a life-altering sunset turn the skeletal ruins of the Portland skyline from rust to bronze.
Crater Lake—empty.
Mount Shasta—decapitated.
Standing on the ruins of Fort Point and staring across the bay at all that was left of the Golden Gate Bridge—the top hundred feet of the south tower poking out of the water like the mast of a sunken ship.
All those nights he’d spent wet and cold.
Hungry and lonely.
The gray mornings he hadn’t had the will to rise out of his sleeping bag and walk on.
The nights he’d sat contentedly before a fire, smoking his pipe.
What a strange, amazing life.
And now, after all of that, he was going home.
Hassler cinched down his pack and clipped in the straps and hoisted it onto his shoulders. He’d pushed himself harder than usual these last few days, and he could feel the strain in his legs and his hips, a slowly building ache that would take several days of rest to relieve. But what did it matter now? Soon, he’d be clean and in a warm, soft bed with a full stomach. No harm in toughing it out on the homestretch.
He followed the path of a stream until it branched west.
The white noise of the water dwindled away.
The woods became dark and silent.
Every step held meaning, and each one more than the last.
A few minutes shy of dawn, he stopped.
Straight ahead stood the fence.
Something was wrong. It should’ve been humming with its lethal voltage, but it didn’t make a sound.
A single thought screamed through his mind—Theresa.
Hassler started running for the gate.
V
TED
Ted’s residence on Level 4 was twice the size of the others, a perk of being one of the first to join David Pilcher’s inner circle. For fourteen years he’d lived in this tiny space, and it exuded the messy comfort of home, with everything (sort of) in its place.
Life in the superstructure shook out in a strange rhythm of work and leisure, and it generally took people years to find the balance. Regardless of department, work shifts were onerous. Ten-hour days, six days a week. And still, things just barely got done For Ted, as head of surveillance, there wasn’t a week in recent memory when he had worked fewer than seventy hours. The challenge had come with finding what to do, beyond sleeping, with the other seventy hours of free time in the week. He wasn’t an extrovert, and even though they existed for him only on surveillance monitors, Ted felt he spent every working second with the residents of Wayward Pines. So in his time off, he wanted nothing more than to be alone.
He’d tried painting.
Photography.
A bad spell of knitting.
Excessive exercise.
Until one day, eight years ago, he’d found an antique typewriter in the ark, an Underwood Touchmaster Five. He’d carried it back to his residence, along with several boxes of paper, and set up a little writer’s desk in the corner of his room.
All his life, he’d felt like he harbored within him the Great American Novel.
But now that there was no America, no anything really, what would he write?
Was there even a point to the creation of books and art when humanity lived on the precipice of extinction?
He didn’t know, but as he began to punch the old keys, worn so smooth the letters were barely visible, he knew he liked writing and that he loved the feel of the Underwood under his fingers.
There was no screen.
Just the lovely, tactile click-click-click of the keys, the faint smell of ink as the paper scrolled slowly out, and him alone with his thoughts.
At first, he’d toyed with a detective novel.
That had petered out.
Then his own life story, which he quickly tired of recounting.
A couple weeks in, it hit him. All day long, he stared at surveillance monitors broadcasting hundreds of private lives in all stages of desperation. He would make the residents of Wayward Pines his subjects. Chronicle their lives before, their integrations into the town, imagine their interior thoughts and fears.
He’d started writing, and he couldn’t stop.
The stories had poured out of him and the paper had accumulated beside his desk like snowfall until he had thousands upon thousands of pages detailing the lives (as he envisioned them) of the people of Wayward Pines.
He didn’t know what he would do with all these stories.
Couldn’t fathom that anyone would ever want to read them.
His working title was The Secret Lives of Wayward Pines, and he imagined the cover as a collection of all the faces of all the people who lived down in that valley. He’d have to finish the book first, and therein lay the other problem. There was no end to the book in sight. The lives carried on. New things happened.
People died. New people were introduced into town. How would one publish a living book, whose stories never ended?
The answer had come, tragically, last night as Ted sat in Pilcher’s office, watching on his monitors as a swarm of abbies swept through town.
The end would come all at once as the “god” of the town brought a swift and sudden conclusion.
The knock came early to Ted’s door.
He was lying in bed, where he’d been all night, paralyzed with fear. With indecision.
He said, “Come in.”
His oldest friend, David Pilcher, walked inside.
Ted hadn’t slept, and by the looks of it, neither had Pilcher.
The old man looked tired. Ted could see the immense hangover he carried in the squint of his eyes, and he still stunk of good scotch. A five o’clock shadow was fading in on Pilcher’s face, as well as sprouting up across his shaven head in fine speckles of gray.
Pilcher pulled the chair away from Ted’s writing desk, dragged it in front of the bed, and took a seat.
He looked at Ted.
He said, “What do you have for me?”
“What do I have?”
“Your team. You told me you would handle it. You would find out which of them helped Sheriff Burke orchestrate this rebellion.”
Ted sighed. He sat up, grabbed his thick glasses off the bedside table, and put them on. He was still wearing his stained, short-sleeved button-down and clip-on tie. Same pants. He hadn’t even bothered to take off his shoes.
Last night, in Pilcher’s office, Ted had been afraid.
Now, he just felt tired and angry.
So very angry.
He said, “When you said the sheriff had information he couldn’t have had otherwise, did you want to tell me what you meant by that?”
Pilcher leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs.
“No, not really. I just want you, as head of the surveillance unit, to do your job.”
Ted nodded.
“I didn’t think you would answer me,” Ted said, “but that’s okay. I know what that information is. I should’ve told you last night, but I was too scared.” Pilcher cocked his head. “I found the footage of what you and Pam did to your daughter.”
For a moment, it was painfully quiet in Ted’s quarters.
“Because Sheriff Burke asked you to help him?” Pilcher said.
“I sat here all night, trying to think what to do.” Ted reached into his pocket, pulled out a piece of hardware that resembled a flake of mica.
“You made a copy of the footage?” Pilcher asked.
“I did.”
Pilcher leveled his gaze on the floor, then back at Ted.
He said, “You know the things I’ve done for our project. For us to be sitting here right now, two thousand years in the future, the last of humanity. I saved—”
“There’s a line, David.”
“You think so?”
“You murdered your own daughter.”
“She was helping an underground—”
“There is no scenario in which killing Alyssa is okay. How do you not know that?”
“I made a choice, Ted, in that previous life, that nothing, nothing, was more important than Wayward Pines.”
“Not even your daughter.”
“Not even my sweet Alyssa. You think”—tears spilled down his face—“I wanted that outcome?”
“I don’t know what you want anymore. You murdered an entire town. Your own daughter. Years ago, your wife. Where does it end? Where’s the line?”
“There is no line.”
Ted ran his fingers over the memory shard in his hand. He said, “You can still come back from this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Call everyone together. Come clean. Tell them what you did to Alyssa. Tell them what you did to the people of Wayward—”
“None of them would understand, Ted. You don’t.”
“This isn’t about them understanding. This is about you doing what’s right.”
“Why would I do that?”
“For your own soul, David.”
“Let me tell you something. It’s the story of my life, people not understanding what I was willing to do to succeed. My wife didn’t get it. Alyssa didn’t get it. And I’m sad, but not shocked, that you don’t either. Look at what I’ve created. Look at what I’ve accomplished. If there were history books still being written, I would be listed as the most important human being who ever lived. That isn’t delusion. That’s just fact. I saved the human race, Ted, because there was nothing I wasn’t willing to do to succeed. No one has ever understood that. Well, two people did. But Arnold Pope is dead, and Pam’s missing. You know what that means?”
“No.”
“It means the dirty work now falls to me.”
And suddenly Pilcher was out of the chair and moving toward the bed, Ted not understanding what was happening until the short blade of the fighting knife in his boss’s hand threw a wink of light.
ETHAN
In the end, Maggie and Hecter were the only volunteers Ethan felt comfortable with. No one else in the group, not even Kate, had faced down the abbies like those two. He figured most courage would wilt in the face of a charging abby. Go with known quantities.
They armed themselves.
Maggie had only shot a .22 rifle once in her life, so Ethan loaded a Mossberg 930 with buckshot for her and filled the pockets of her trench coat with extra shells. He showed her how to hold it. How to reload. Prepped her for the aggressive recoil.
He slug-loaded a Mossberg and then a .357 Smith & Wesson for Hecter.
Kate chose the Bushmaster AR-15 with a .40 caliber Glock for backup.
Standing in the passage, Ethan glanced back at the handful of people he’d armed to guard the cavern door.
“And if you don’t come back?” the officer asked.
“You’ve got provisions here to last a few days,” Kate said.
“Then what?”
“I guess you’ll have to figure that out for yourselves.”
Theresa and Ben stood just inside the cavern.
They’d already said their goodbyes.
Ethan held eye contact with his wife until the heavy log door swung closed and the bolt rattled home.
It was freezing.
In the distance, daylight streamed past the opening.
Ethan said, “Nobody shoots unless we have no choice. Our best-case scenario, we get down into town without firing a shot. Once we broadcast our position, it’s probably all over for us.”
Kate led the way toward the light at the end of the passage.
Ethan replayed his last glimpse of Theresa and Ben as the door had shut between them.
Thinking, Was that the last time I’ll ever see you?
Do you know how much I love you?
They stood at the end of the ledge, looking out across the valley.
It was morning.
Not a sound rising out of the town a thousand feet below.
The sunlight felt good on Ethan’s face.
Maggie whispered, “It just feels like a nice, normal morning, doesn’t it?”
They were too far away to see anything distinct in the streets below. Ethan pictured the pair of binoculars sitting in the bottom drawer of his desk at the station. Would’ve been nice to have.
He stepped to the edge and looked straight down three hundred feet of vertical stone that glistened in the sunlight.
They worked their way across the plank and rested on the other side at the top of the highest switchback.
The stone was warm in the sun.
They down-climbed.
Clutching cables.
Following the steps that had been cut into the rock.
There were no birds out.
Not even a whisper of wind.
Just the four of them, breathing quickly.
Below the tops of the trees, below the reach of the sun, the steel cables were like ice.
Then they were off the rock, standing on the soft floor of the forest.
Ethan said, “You know the way into town, Kate?”
“I think so. It’s weird. I’ve never been here in the daylight.”
She led them into the pines.
There were still patches of snow in places, footprints from the night before. They followed the tracks down the mountainside, Ethan scanning the trees, but nothing moved. The woods felt absolutely dead.
After awhile, he heard the waterfall.
They descended a steep pitch of hillside.
Reached the stream and the opening of the drainage tunnel. The abbies Ethan had shot last night lay dead in the water and on the bank.
There was mist in his face.
He stared up at a single cascade that spilled over a ledge two hundred feet above. The sunlight made a rainbow where it passed through the falling water.
“Take the tunnel into town?” Kate asked.
“No,” Ethan said. “We should leave ourselves plenty of room to run.”
After a quarter of a mile, the terrain leveled out and they emerged from the woods behind an old, decrepit house on the eastern edge of town, the same house, Ethan realized, where he’d found the mutilated corpse of Agent Evans when he’d first arrived in Wayward Pines.
They stopped in the weeds on the side of the house.
Up until this moment, Ethan had found comfort in the silence. Now it was disquieting. Like the world was holding its breath for something.
He said, “I was thinking on the hike down. If we could find a functional car, we could haul ass to the south end of town and not have to worry about an ambush the whole time. Kate, does that old beater in front of your house run?”
“Haven’t cranked it in years. I wouldn’t want to chance it.”
“The car in front of mine does,” Maggie said.
Ethan asked, “When’s the last time you took it for a spin?”