Pines

by Crouch, Blake

  He knocked harder the second time.

  Footsteps approached. He heard a lock turn. The wood door swung open.

  That broad-shouldered man looked at him through the glass.

  “Can I help you?”

  Ethan just needed to see her up close, under the porch light. Confirm it wasn’t her, that he wasn’t going mad. Move on with his myriad other problems in this town.

  “I’m looking for Kate.”

  For a moment, the man just stared at him.

  Finally, he pushed open the glass door.

  “Who are you?”

  “Ethan.”

  “Who are you?”

  “An old friend.”

  The man stepped back into the house, turned his head, said, “Honey, could you come to the door for a minute?”

  She responded with something Ethan couldn’t make out, and the man said, “I have no idea.”

  Then she appeared—a shadow at the end of a hallway leading into the kitchen. Passed briefly through the illumination of an overhead light, and padded in bare feet through the living room up to the door.

  The man stepped aside and she took his place.

  Ethan stared at her through the glass door.

  He shut his eyes and opened them again. He was still standing on this porch and she was still, impossibly, behind the glass.

  She said, “Yes?”

  Those eyes.

  Unmistakable.

  “Kate?”

  “Yes?”

  “Hewson?”

  “That was my maiden name.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I’m sorry...do I know you?”

  Ethan couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  “It’s me,” he said. “Ethan. I came here to find you, Kate.”

  “I think you’re confusing me with someone else.”

  “I’d know you anywhere. At any age.”

  She glanced over her shoulder, said, “It’s fine, Harold. I’ll be in in a moment.”

  Kate opened the door, stepped down onto the welcome mat. She wore cream-colored pants and a faded blue tank top.

  A wedding ring.

  She smelled like Kate.

  But she was old.

  “What’s happening?” Ethan asked.

  She took him by the hand and led him over to the swing at the end of the porch.

  They sat.

  Her house stood on a small rise with a view of the valley, the town. House lights were everywhere now and three stars had popped.

  A cricket, or a recording of a cricket, chirped in one of the bushes.

  “Kate...”

  She put her hand on his leg and squeezed, leaned in close.

  “They’re watching us.”

  “Who?”

  “Shhh.” She motioned toward the ceiling, a slight upward gesture with her finger, whispered, “And listening.”

  “What’s happened to you?” Ethan asked.

  “Don’t you think I’m still pretty?” That snarky, biting tone was pure Kate. She stared down into her lap for a minute, and when she looked up again, her eyes glistened. “When I stand in front of the mirror and brush my hair at night, I still think about your hands on my body. It’s not what it used to be.”

  “How old are you, Kate?”

  “I don’t know anymore. It’s hard to keep track.”

  “I came here looking for you four days ago. They lost contact with you and Evans and sent me here to find you. Evans is dead.” The statement appeared to have little impact. “What were you and Bill doing here?”

  She just shook her head.

  “What’s going on here, Kate?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you live here.”

  “Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “Years.”

  “That’s impossible.” Ethan stood, his thoughts swarming.

  “I don’t have answers for you, Ethan.”

  “I need a phone, a car, a gun if you have—”

  “I can’t, Ethan.” She stood. “You should go.”

  “Kate—”

  “Right now.”

  He held her hands. “That was you when I lost consciousness on the street last night.” He stared down into her face—laugh lines, crow’s-feet, and still so beautiful. “Do you know what’s happening to me?”

  “Stop.” She tried to pull away.

  “I’m in trouble,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Tell me what—”

  “Ethan, now you’re putting my life at risk. And Harold’s.”

  “From who?”

  She tore away from him, started toward the door. When she reached it, she looked back, and for a moment, standing out of the light, she could have been thirty-six years old again.

  “You could be happy, Ethan.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You could have an amazing life here.”

  “Kate.”

  She pushed open the door, stepped inside.

  “Kate.”

  “What?”

  “Am I crazy?”

  “No,” she said. “Not at all.”

  The door closed after her, and then he heard the dead bolt turn. He walked to the door and stared at his reflection in the glass, half-expecting to see a sixty-year-old man, but he was unchanged.

  He wasn’t hungry anymore.

  He wasn’t tired.

  Moving down the steps, down the stone path, and onto the sidewalk, he only felt this tightness in the center of his chest, a familiar sensation that used to hit him just before a mission—walking out to the chopper as the ground crew loaded the fifty-cal Gatling gun and the Hellfires.

  Fear.

  * * *

  Ethan didn’t see a car until the next block—a mid-1980s Buick LeSabre, its windshield plastered with dried pine needles and sitting on four tires that could have used some air.

  The doors were locked.

  Ethan crept up onto the porch of the closest house and lifted a stone cherub from its perch under a window. Through the thin curtains, he saw a young boy inside, seated at an upright piano, playing some gorgeous piece of music, the notes drifting out onto the porch through a four-inch crack where the window had been raised off the sill.

  A woman sat beside him, turning pages of sheet music.

  Though only a foot tall, the cherub was solid concrete and weighed in excess of thirty pounds.

  Ethan hauled it back out into the street.

  There was simply no way to do this quietly.

  He heaved it at the window behind the driver seat, the angel punching easily through. He unlocked the door, pulled it open, climbed inside over the shattered glass, over the seats, and behind the wheel. The impact had decapitated the angel, and Ethan grabbed its head out of the backseat.

  Two blows were sufficient to crack open the plastic sheathing under the steering column and expose the ignition cylinder.

  The light inside the car was bad.

  He worked solely through feel, fingers tugging out the power and starter wires.

  The piano playing inside the house had stopped. He glanced toward the porch, saw two silhouettes now standing behind the curtain.

  Ethan fished the pocketknife out of his jacket, opened the largest blade, and cut the pair of white wires he was betting fed power to the car. Then he shaved the plastic sheathing off the ends and twisted them together.

  The dashboard lit up.

  The front door to the house swung open as he found the darker-colored starter wire.

  A boy’s voice: “Look at the car window.”

  Ethan shaved some plastic off the end of the starter wire, exposing the threads of copper.

  The woman said, “Wait here, Elliot.”

  Please, please, please.

  Ethan touched the starter wire to the power wire, a blue spark crackling in the darkness.

  The engine coughed.

  The woman was moving toward him through the yard.
<
br />   “Come on,” Ethan said.

  He touched the wires together again, and the engine turned over.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Three times.

  On the fourth, it caught and sputtered to life.

  He revved the RPMs, shifted into drive, and punched on the headlights as the woman reached the passenger-side door, yelling through the glass.

  Ethan sped off down the street.

  At the first intersection, he turned left and backed off the gas pedal, reducing his speed into the realm of reason—a pace that wouldn’t draw attention, somebody out for a nice evening drive.

  The gas gauge showed a quarter of a tank remaining. Reserve light not yet on. Not a problem. There was enough fuel to blow out of Wayward Pines. Once he got over the pass, there was a one-stoplight town about forty miles south. Lowman, Idaho. Right on the highway. They’d stopped there for gas on the way out. He could still picture Stallings by the pump in his black suit, filling the tank. Ethan had walked out to the edge of the empty highway, stared at the abandoned buildings across the road—a shuttered roadhouse and general store, and one diner, still alive but barely kicking, the smell of grease in the smoke that trickled out of a vent on the roof.

  He’d called Theresa from that spot with just a single bar of connectivity.

  Barely remembered their conversation. His mind had been elsewhere.

  Last time he’d spoken to his wife.

  He hoped he’d told her he loved her.

  The brakes squealed as he brought the Buick to a full stop, left turn signal clicking. Aside from a handful of people on the sidewalks, the downtown was dead and Main Street empty as far as he could see.

  Ethan eased out into the road through a gentle left turn and accelerated slowly, heading south.

  He passed the pub, the hotel, the coffee shop.

  After seven blocks, the hospital.

  There were no outskirts.

  The buildings simply ended.

  He accelerated.

  God, it felt good to be going, finally getting out, a palpable weight lifting off his shoulders with every revolution of the crankshaft. He should’ve done this two days ago.

  There were no signs of habitation here, the road on a straight trajectory through a forest of pines so giant they could’ve been first-growth.

  The air rushing into the car was cold, fragrant.

  Mist hovered between the trees, and in places, across the road.

  The headlights blazed through it, visibility dropping.

  The reserve light came on.

  Shit.

  The road south out of town was on a steep and winding grade for several thousand feet up to the pass, and any minute now, the climb would begin. It was going to burn through what little gas remained. He should turn around now, head back into town, siphon enough to ensure he reached Lowman.

  Ethan hit the brake for a long, sharp curve.

  The mist was soup through the heart of the turn, the fog blinding white in the high beams, Ethan slowing down to a crawl with nothing to guide him but the faded double yellow.

  The road straightened, shot out of the mist, out of the trees.

  In the distance: a billboard.

  Still an eighth of a mile back, all he could make out were four painted figures standing arm in arm.

  Big, white-teeth smiles.

  A boy in shorts and a striped shirt.

  Mother and daughter in dresses.

  The father suited, wearing a fedora, waving.

  In block letters, under the perfect smiling family:

  WELCOME TO WAYWARD PINES

  WHERE PARADISE IS HOME

  Ethan accelerated past the sign, the road moving parallel to a split-rail fence, the headlights grazing over a pasture and a herd of cattle.

  Lights in the distance.

  The pasture fell away behind him.

  Soon, he was passing houses again.

  The road widened, lost the double yellow divider.

  It had turned into First Avenue.

  He was back in town.

  Ethan pulled over to the curb, stared through the windshield, trying to keep the panic in check. There was a simple explanation: he’d missed the turnoff to the pass. Had shot right past it in that patch of dense fog.

  He whipped the car around and burned back up the road, hitting sixty by the time he reached the pasture.

  Back in the mist and the towering pines, he searched for a sign, for some indication of where the road veered off toward the pass, but there was nothing.

  In the sharpest section of the curve, he pulled off to the side of the road and shifted into park.

  Left the car running, stepped out into the night.

  He crossed to the other side and started walking along the shoulder.

  After a hundred feet, the fog was thick enough to hide his car completely. He could still hear it idling, but the sound grew softer with each step.

  He walked two hundred yards before stopping.

  He’d come to the other side of the curve, where the road straightened out again and ran back into town.

  The rumble of the car engine had died away completely.

  There was no wind and the woods stood tall and silent.

  Mist drifted by all around him, seemed to carry an electric charge, but he knew that hum was only some microscopic noise within himself, in his head, exposed only in the total absence of sound.

  Impossible.

  The road should not turn here.

  It should barrel on through these pines another half mile and then begin the long series of switchbacks up the side of that mountain to the south.

  He stepped carefully down off the shoulder into the trees.

  The pine needle floor of the forest like walking on cushions.

  The air damp and chill.

  These trees...he’d never seen pines so tall, and with little in the way of undergrowth to contend with, moving between the massive trunks was easy—a forest with breathing room. You could be lost before you knew it.

  He walked out of the mist, and now when he looked up, glimpsed icy points of starlight through the tops of the trees.

  Another fifty yards, and he stopped. He should go back now. There were certainly other roads out of town, and he could already feel the disorientation creeping in. He glanced back over his shoulder, thought he saw the general route he’d taken to arrive at this spot, but you couldn’t be sure. Everything looked the same.

  Out of the woods ahead of him: a scream.

  He became very still.

  There was the thumping of his heart and nothing else.

  The scream could only be compared to human suffering or terror. Like a hyena or a banshee. Coyotes at their maddest. The mythologized Rebel Yell. High and thin. Fragile. Terrible. And on some level, humming under the surface like buried electrical cables, was a dim awareness that this wasn’t the first time he’d heard it.

  Again, the scream.

  Closer.

  An alarm going off between his eyes, in the pit of his stomach: Leave this place now. Don’t think about it. Just. Go.

  Then he was running through the trees, gasping after twenty steps, back into the mist and the cold.

  Up ahead, the ground sloped upward, and he climbed on hands and knees until he’d stumbled back out into the road. Despite the cold, he was sweating, eyes stinging with saltwater. He jogged along the double yellow line, back through the curve, until he saw two cylinders of light in the distance, cutting through the mist.

  Slowed to a walk, and above the noise of his exertion, he heard the idle of the stolen car.

  He reached it, opened the driver’s-side door. Climbed in behind the wheel, put his foot on the brake, and reached for the gearshift, desperate to leave this place.

  He caught movement out of the corner of his left eye—a shadow in the side mirror. His eyes cut to the rearview mirror above the dash, and in the red glow of the brake lights, he saw what he’d missed—the cruiser parked
thirty feet behind his rear bumper, just shy of complete invisibility in the mist.

  When he looked back through the driver’s-side window, a shotgun barrel stared him down, just a few inches away. A flashlight blazed inside, firing the interior of the car with a harsh light that glared off the chrome and glass.

  “You must be out of your goddamned mind.”

  Sheriff Pope.

  The irate gravel in his voice came slightly muffled through the glass.

  Ethan still had his hand on the gearshift, wondering if he jammed it into drive and floored the gas—would Pope fire on him? At this range with a twelve gauge, you were talking decapitation.

  “Very slowly,” Pope said, “put both hands on the wheel, and use your right to turn off the car.”

  Ethan said through the glass, “You know who I am, and you ought to know better than to interfere. I’m leaving this town.”

  “The hell you are.”

  “I’m an agent of the United States government, with the full—”

  “No, you’re a guy with no ID, no badge, who just stole a car, who might have murdered a federal agent.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I won’t tell you again, partner.”

  Something needled Ethan to comply, whispered that pushing this man could be dangerous. Even fatal.

  “All right,” Ethan said. “Just give me a second. The car’s hotwired. I have to separate the wires to turn it off.”

  Ethan flicked on the dome light, got his hands under the steering column, pulled the white wires apart.

  The lights died.

  The engine shut down.

  Nothing but the painful brilliance of Pope’s flashlight.

  “Out!”

  Ethan found the handle, had to dig his shoulder into the door to jar it open. He stepped outside. Mist streamed through the light beam. Pope, an angry shadow behind the flashlight and the shotgun, eyes hidden under the brim of his Stetson.

  Ethan smelled the gun oil, figured Pope for a man dedicated to the tender loving care of his armory.

  “You remember that part where I told you not to leave town?” Pope growled.

  Ethan would have answered, but the light beam struck the ground, Ethan realizing a split second before it hit him that the shadow moving toward his head was the stock of the shotgun.

  * * *

  Ethan’s left eye had been closed by the blow—it felt hot and huge and it throbbed with his pulse. Through his right, he saw the interrogation room. Claustrophobic and sterile. White cinder-block walls. Concrete floor. A bare wood table, on the other side of which sat Pope, sans Stetson and jacket, the sleeves of his hunter-green button-down rolled up to expose his forearms—thick and freckled and knotted with muscle.