Pines

by Crouch, Blake

  “And you just believed him?”

  “I had no competing memories, Ethan. I only knew my name at that point.”

  “But the memories came back.”

  “Yes. And I knew something was very wrong. I couldn’t make contact with the outside world. I knew this wasn’t my life. But there was something, I don’t know—sinister—about Pope. On some instinctive level, I knew better than to question him about anything.

  “I didn’t have a car, so I started taking long walks toward the outskirts of town. But a strange thing happened. Every time I’d get near to where the road looped back, guess who showed up? It dawned on me that Pope wasn’t really a sheriff. He was a warden. For everyone who lived here. I realized he must be tracking me somehow, so for two months I kept my head down, went to work, went home, made a few friends—”

  “And they’d bought into all this as well?”

  “I don’t know. On a surface level, they never blinked. Never gave any indication that things were out of the ordinary. After a while, I realized it must be fear that was keeping everyone in line, but of what, I didn’t know. And I sure didn’t ask.”

  Ethan thought back to the neighborhood party he’d stumbled upon—God, was it just last night?—and how normal it had seemed. How perfectly ordinary. He thought of all the quaint Victorian houses in Wayward Pines and of all the families who lived inside them. How many residents—inmates—kept up a strong, carefree countenance during the day, but then lay awake at night, sleepless, minds racing, terrified and struggling to comprehend why they’d been locked away in this scenic prison? He imagined more than a few. But human beings were, if nothing else, adaptable. He figured just as many had convinced themselves, convinced their children, that things were exactly as they should be. As they’d always been. How many lived day to day, in the moment, banishing any thought or remembrance of the life they had known before? It was easier to accept what could not be changed than to risk everything and seek out the unknown. What lay beyond. Long-term inmates often committed suicide, or reoffended, when faced with the prospect of life outside the prison walls. Was it so different here?

  Beverly continued, “One night at the bar, a few months after my arrival, this guy slipped me a note. It said, ‘the back of your left thigh.’ That night in the shower, I felt it for the first time—a small bump, something under the skin—although I didn’t know what I was supposed to do about it. Next night, he was back at my bar. Scribbled a new message, this time on the ticket—‘cut it out, keep it safe, it’s how they track you.’

  “First three times, I chickened out. The fourth, I manned up and did it. By day, I always kept the chip with me. Carried on like everyone else. And the weird thing is that there were moments when it almost felt normal. I’d be at someone’s house having dinner, or a neighborhood block party, and I’d catch this feeling like maybe it had always been this way, and that my prior life was the dream. I started to see how people could grow to accept a life in Wayward Pines.

  “At night, after my shift ended at the pub, I’d go home, leave the chip in my bed where I was supposed to be, and head out. Each night, a different direction. I kept running into dead ends. To the north, east, and west were these towering cliff walls, and I could climb them for a hundred feet or so, but the ledges inevitably got thinner, and I would always run out of handholds or come to a point where I didn’t have the guts to keep climbing. I came across more than a few skeletons at the base of those cliffs—old, broken bones. Human. People who had tried to climb out and taken a fall.

  “Fourth time I ventured out, I went south up the main road, the one I’d driven into Wayward Pines. I found what you found—it just looped back into town, back into itself in an endless circle. But I kept heading south into the woods. Must’ve gone a half mile before I finally came to the fence.”

  “A fence?”

  The throbbing in Ethan’s leg had become unbearable, worse than the pain of Beverly’s incision. He loosened the duct tape.

  “It was twenty feet high and it ran through the forest in either direction as far as I could see. There was barbed wire across the top, and it hummed like it was electrified. The same sign was attached to the fencing every fifty feet. It said, ‘Return to Wayward Pines. Beyond This Point You Will Die.’”

  Ethan rewrapped his leg.

  The throbbing had faded, and there was still pain, but it seemed to have dulled.

  “Did you find a way through?”

  “No. It was getting near dawn, and I thought I’d better get back to town. But when I turned to go, there was a man standing in front of me. Scared me to death until I realized who it was.”

  “Guy who told you about the chip?”

  “Exactly. He said he’d been following me. Every night I’d gone out.”

  “Who was he?” Ethan asked, and he couldn’t be sure in the low light, but it looked as though a shadow passed across Beverly’s face.

  “Bill.”

  A prickling sensation, like a low-amp current, ripped through Ethan’s body.

  “What was Bill’s last name?” he asked.

  “Evans.”

  “Jesus.”

  “What?”

  “Evans was the dead man in the house. The one you steered me toward.”

  “Right. I wanted you to understand right off how dangerous this place is.”

  “Message received. Evans was one of the Secret Service agents I was sent to Wayward Pines to find.”

  “I didn’t know Bill was Secret Service. He wouldn’t tell me anything about what we called ‘our lives before.’”

  “How did he die?”

  Beverly lifted the flashlight off the floor, its bulb beginning to weaken in intensity.

  She switched it off.

  Total darkness.

  The whisper of rain and nothing else.

  “It happened the night we tried to escape. I still don’t understand exactly how they found out, because we left our microchips in our beds like we’d done so many times before. Bill and I met up at our predetermined spot with supplies and provisions...but we never had a chance.”

  Ethan could hear the grief splitting her voice.

  “We had to go separate ways,” she said. “I made it back to my house, but they caught him. Tore him apart.”

  “Who tore him apart?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Who’s every—”

  “The entire town, Ethan. I could...hear him screaming from my house, but there was nothing I could do. At last, I understood. I realized what it was that kept everyone here.”

  For what seemed a long, long time, neither of them spoke.

  Finally, Ethan said, “I never made it to the fence, but I did wander a ways into the woods beyond the curve in the road at the south end of town. This was just last night. I could swear I heard something.”

  “What?”

  “It was a scream. Or a cry. Maybe something in between. And the weird thing was this feeling like I’d heard it before. In a dream. Or another life. It filled me with terror on such a base level, like the howl of a wolf. Something deeply ingrained. My only response was to run. So now I hear you telling me about this electrified fence, and I’m wondering, why is it there? Is it to keep us in? Or to keep something out?”

  At first, Ethan thought the sound was coming from inside his head—some aftereffects of the drug Nurse Pam had given him, or the trauma of Pope’s beating and everything he’d experienced since.

  But the noise quickly grew.

  Something was ringing.

  No.

  Many things were ringing.

  Hundreds and hundreds of them.

  “What is that?” Ethan asked, struggling onto his feet.

  Beverly was already at the door, fighting to pull it open, the hinges grinding, and then a blast of colder air swept into the crypt and the noise grew suddenly loud.

  Ethan realized what it was.

  The sound of five hundred rotary telephones going off at once, filling th
e valley with a bright, eerie ringing.

  “Oh God,” Beverly said.

  “What’s happening?”

  “This is how it started the night Bill died.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Every telephone in every house in Wayward Pines is ringing right now. People are being told to find and kill you.”

  Ethan braced for the impact of that piece of information, but he was only vaguely aware that he should be scared shitless, something he knew but didn’t feel, his mind already roping itself off, sliding into that numb, adrenalized state of rote survival he’d tasted those few times in his life when he’d had the misfortune to lock eyes with death. No place for extraneous, wasted thought or emotion. All power diverted and channeled so it could heighten the only thing that could keep him alive—sensory perception.

  “I’ll go ditch the chip and hide here,” he said. “Wait them out.”

  “There are just over five hundred people living in Wayward Pines, and every one of them will be looking for you. I’m thinking eventually someone’s going to come through this door, and you don’t want to be here when that happens.”

  Ethan grabbed the flashlight out of her hand and flicked it on, limped over to the duffel bag.

  “What’s in here?” he asked, going down on his knees beside the bag.

  “Clothes for you. Shoes. I had to guess your size.”

  “Weapons?”

  “Sorry. Couldn’t get my hands on any.”

  Ethan started pulling things out—a long-sleeved black T, black jeans, black shoes, two dozen bottles of water—

  “Turn off the light!” Beverly hissed at him.

  Ethan killed it.

  “You have to go right now,” she said. “They’re coming.”

  “Just let me get dressed and—”

  “They’re already in the cemetery. I can see their flashlights.”

  Ethan left everything strewn across the floor and staggered over to the iron door. Out in the darkness, he spotted four points of light weaving through the headstones.

  They appeared to be a few hundred feet away, although judging distance was a challenge in this weather.

  The telephones had gone quiet.

  Beverly whispered in Ethan’s ear, “You need to find the river at the southwest end of town. That’s the route Bill and I had planned to take. It’s the only direction I haven’t thoroughly explored. Bill went up a little ways and thought it looked promising.”

  “Where do we meet?”

  “Just get to the river and follow it upstream. I’ll find you.”

  Beverly pulled the hood of her poncho over her head, stepped down out of the mausoleum, and sprinted off into the night, Ethan listening as the sound of her footsteps dwindled away and were soon lost to the steady rain.

  He lingered in the threshold, alternating his attention between the approaching lights and the pitch darkness of the crypt, wondering if he had two minutes to spend getting dressed and gathering supplies or if he just needed to go.

  The beams of light drew closer, all four of them moving in the general direction of the mausoleum and bringing voices along with them.

  Decide, dammit.

  He was wasting precious seconds.

  If they reach you while you’re in the crypt, you’re dead. There is no escape, and they could be here in less time than it will take you to dress.

  He ran.

  Wearing nothing but a hospital gown, shoeless, his bare feet swishing through grass and squishing through patches of cold mud.

  Rain pelting him.

  Achy.

  Wracked with chills.

  His left hamstring screaming with every flexion.

  He shut it all away—the fear, the agony, the cold—and tore through the pines, dodging gravestones.

  The four points of light behind him didn’t appear to have noticed his exit as they were still on an intersecting trajectory with the mausoleum.

  In near total darkness, the disorientation was staggering. He had no idea if he was heading north or south, toward town or away, but he kept running until he reached a stone wall that formed the decrepit border of the cemetery.

  Climbing over, he straddled it, taking a moment to catch his breath and glance back the way he’d come.

  More lights.

  At least a half dozen newbies in addition to the original four, and there were more appearing every second behind those, a veritable army of fireflies emerging in the dark and all moving toward him with a kind of bobbling motion that made him fear the people holding them were running.

  Ethan dropped the microchip on the stone wall.

  Then he swung his legs over and hopped down on the other side, wincing at the biting pain in his left hamstring. But he ignored it and pushed on into a field of cut grass.

  On the far side, playground equipment gleamed and he could see the rain pouring through the illumination of an overhanging streetlamp.

  Beyond, in a stand of dark pines—more flashlights, more voices.

  Someone shouted back in the cemetery, and though he couldn’t tell if this was directed at him, it had the effect of accelerating his pace.

  Approaching the swing set and sliding board, it occurred to him where he was, and the burbling of running water above the rainfall and the pounding of his heart confirmed it.

  Though he couldn’t see it in the dark, on his left lay that grassy riverbank where he’d first come to consciousness in Wayward Pines five days ago.

  And the river.

  He almost course-corrected to move toward it, but then a light winked on down where he imagined the shore should be.

  Ethan streaked past the sliding board, shouldered through a hedge of dripping bushes that nearly ripped the flimsy hospital gown off him, and stumbled out into the street.

  The gown hung in tatters around his neck like a shredded cape.

  He tore it off, desperately needing oxygen—a full minute of deep inhalations wouldn’t be enough—but there was no time to stop and replenish his lungs.

  Lights from the cemetery, the river, and the pines on the north end of the park had converged in that open field in a luminescent swarm that moved toward him now as a single entity, accompanied by a jumble of voices drunk with the giddy exuberance of a chase.

  A fresh shot of adrenaline spiked Ethan’s blood.

  His muddy feet hammered the wet pavement as he sprinted naked up the middle of the street, rain sheeting down his face.

  Realized that his objective had moved.

  Forget reaching the river, he needed to find some place to hide and ride this madness out. Didn’t know how many people were chasing him, how many had already seen him, but streaking naked through town was going to get him killed in a hurry.

  A deep voice shouted, “There!”

  Ethan glanced back, saw three shadows dart out of a large Victorian house, the man in front tearing down the steps, through the front yard, and leaping over the white picket fence with considerable grace while his companions bunched up at the gate, fumbling with the latch.

  The hurdler hit the sidewalk midstride and accelerated, dressed all in black, boots pounding the street. He carried a machete whose wet blade glimmered under the glancing beam of his headlamp, running hard, breathing hard, and a voice in Ethan’s head said flatly with the dead calm of a filibustering senator reading a phone book at three in the morning—That man is fifty yards away, he’s armed, and he’s going to catch you.

  What are you going to do about it?

  CHAPTER 10

  Accessed from the attic, it is the highest window in the house.

  Teardrop-shaped with an overhanging eave that keeps the glass protected from the rain.

  It is late and dark and the hush of rainfall on the tin roof above her head would be a peaceful sound on any other night.

  A sound to sleep to.

  To dream to.

  Her telephone didn’t ring with all the others, and for this, she is grateful.

  She
’d prayed they wouldn’t expect her to take part in this, and that confirmation is a small comfort in the midst of this nightmare.

  From her vantage point on the third floor, she can see the flashlights appearing across the valley like the lights of a great city coming to life. Hundreds of them. Most distant, nothing more than motes of brilliance in the pouring rain. Others close enough to see individual cones of light sweeping through the mist that is beginning to form in the alleys and depressions.

  When he comes into view, her heart stops.

  Naked.

  Pale.

  Running like a ghost up the middle of the street and pursued by a trio of black-garbed men with machetes.

  She’s known this was coming, thought she’d prepared herself as much as one can for such a thing, but seeing him in the flesh—his fear, his panic, his despair—she has to bite her lip to stop herself from screaming out to him.

  I’m watching his execution.

  Ethan passes out of view, moving toward the buildings that line Main Street, and it hits her like a load of double-aught buckshot to the chest—she has seen him for the last time, because she will not go to the house on First Avenue to witness what’s left of him, to see the damage inflicted upon her husband, the father of her son.

  More people flood up the street en masse, everyone racing toward Main.

  Despite the dreary weather, it’s a carnival atmosphere, and more and more, she sees costumes, many no doubt prepared in advance.

  Though no one ever speaks of the fête, she knows there are people who long for the telephones to ring.

  For the chance to run amok in the wee hours of the night.

  To draw blood.

  She and Ben joined the mob last time—as if they’d had a choice—and while they hadn’t found their way into the eye of the storm that had actually beaten Bill Evans to death, they’d been caught up on the periphery.

  Heard his screams and pleas against the laughter and maniacal taunting of the crowd.