Pines

by Crouch, Blake

  Ethan was almost grateful he’d lost the machete, because he would’ve hacked these little shits into pieces.

  There was an opening off to Ethan’s left—a weak link in the circle he might have charged through over two children who stood no taller than his waist.

  But then what?

  They’d give chase, run him to death in these woods like an injured deer.

  Turning slowly, he locked eyes with the most intimidating of the bunch, a post-pubescent, blond-haired boy armed with a tube sock stretched to the max, its pocket weighted with an ominous-looking sphere—perhaps a baseball or a globe of solid glass. The teen wore a suit that must have belonged to his father—several sizes too large, the sleeves hanging down to his fingertips.

  Ethan roared, approaching the boy with his right arm cocked back, and he would’ve hit him but the kid backpedaled, tripped, fell, and then ran off into the woods the moment he regained his feet, shouting in full voice that they’d found him.

  Half the children, upon seeing their leader turn tail and flee, followed suit.

  Those who didn’t, Ethan charged, feeling a bit like an elk trying to scatter a pack of predatory coyotes, but eventually he chased off all but one, the children screaming as they vanished into the pines as if the devil was after them.

  The boy who stayed behind watched Ethan through the rain.

  He might have been the youngest of the bunch—seven, eight at most.

  He’d dressed up like a cowboy—red-and-white hat, boots, string tie, and a Western-style button-down.

  He held a flashlight and a rock and stood there with no expression at all.

  “Aren’t you afraid of me?” Ethan asked.

  The boy shook his head, water dripping off the brim of his hat. He looked up at Ethan, and as the flashlight beam illuminated the freckles on his face, Ethan could see that he’d lied. He was afraid, his bottom lip trembling uncontrollably. It was the bravest face the boy could muster, and Ethan couldn’t help but admire him, wondering what had prompted him to make this stand.

  “You should quit running, Mr. Burke.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “You could have a beautiful life here, and you don’t even see it.”

  “What is this place?”

  “Just a town,” the boy said.

  Adult voices rang out, a new squadron of flashlights twinkling in the pines like emerging stars.

  “Where’s your home?” Ethan asked.

  The boy tilted his head, puzzled at the question.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where’d you live before Wayward Pines?”

  “I’ve always lived here.”

  “You’ve never left this town?” Ethan asked.

  “You can’t leave,” the boy said.

  “Why?”

  “You just can’t.”

  “I don’t accept that.”

  “That’s why you’re going to die.” The boy suddenly screamed, “He’s over here! Hurry!”

  Lights broke out of the pines into the meadow.

  Ethan ran, crashing into the forest on the other side, not even bothering to shield his face or glance back at his pursuers, thrashing through the darkness, losing all sense of time and direction, struggling to keep his head against the chord of absolute panic that threatened to drop him to his knees, curl him up in the fetal position, and finally break his mind.

  Because of the fear.

  Because of the pain.

  Because none of this made a goddamned inkling of sense.

  It wasn’t the sound of the river that stopped him but the smell.

  A sudden sweetness in the air.

  The terrain dropped away and he scrambled down a muddy bank into frigid, raging water, the river pouring into his boots like liquid steel.

  Despite the freezing shock of it, he refused to falter, just kept staggering in, away from the bank, deeper and deeper into the current.

  The water reached his waist, Ethan gasping as it chilled him to the core, the current fierce, desperate to drag him downstream.

  He took slow, careful steps, the stones on the bed shifting under his weight and tumbling slowly downriver.

  Between each step, he braced himself, leaning into the force of the water.

  Midway across, it rose to his chest.

  The current swept him off his feet.

  Driving Ethan downstream.

  In the near darkness, he had no idea what boulders jutted out of the channel, just knew that slamming into one could kill him.

  He struggled across the current using a hard, deliberate sidestroke.

  His arms worked fine, but with his waterlogged boots he couldn’t kick with any efficiency or power.

  Their weight pulled him under more than they propelled him.

  After a frenzied minute, his muscles on the brink of mutiny, he felt the soles of his boots graze the bottom.

  Standing, he leaned into the current, the water level dropping back to his waist.

  A dozen more steps brought it down to his knees, and then he jogged the rest of the way out of the river, collapsing on the bank.

  Rolled onto his side, breathless, spent, shivering.

  He stared back across the channel.

  Everywhere, new beams of light appeared.

  He could hear people shouting, thought it was possible they were calling his name, but from this distance, the crushing noise of the whitewater destroyed any chance of hearing them distinctly.

  Ethan wanted to move, knew he had to, but he couldn’t make himself scramble back onto his feet. Just needed another minute to lie there and breathe.

  There were more lights on the opposite shore now than he could count, the highest concentration thirty yards upriver at his point of entry, but more and more, people seemed to be venturing north and south of where he’d gone in, light beams sweeping out over the current in a dozen places.

  He rolled over onto his knees.

  Hands shaking with cold like he’d been afflicted with palsy.

  He began to crawl, fingers groping through wet sand.

  Just that minute of lying motionless had stiffened his joints.

  When he came to the next large rock, he reached up, got a handhold, and pulled himself onto his feet.

  His boots sloshed with water.

  There must have been a hundred people across the river, and still more lights appearing on the bank every second. Most beams reached only the midpoint, but a handful carried the potency to shoot all the way across to Ethan’s side, their compact tubes of light clearly visible with the rain falling through them.

  Ethan scrambled away from the water, hoping to put more distance between himself and the lights, but after ten feet, he reached a sheer wall of rock.

  He moved alongside it as the voices of several hundred people overpowered the crush of whitewater.

  A light struck the cliff ten feet ahead.

  Ethan ducked behind a boulder and peeked around the side as the beam traversed the cliff behind him.

  A waterfall of light poured down from the shore into the current. From where Ethan crouched, he saw a few people wading knee-deep in the river, searching, but no one was attempting to swim across.

  He’d started to step out from behind the boulder when a voice, amplified through a megaphone, blared across the river.

  “Ethan, come back to us, and all will be forgiven.”

  He’d have known it anywhere—the deep, guttural boom of Sheriff Pope’s voice, ricocheting off the cliffs, back into the pine forest behind the crowd.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  Actually, I know exactly what I’m doing.

  With no lights striking the rock anywhere in his general vicinity, Ethan struggled back onto his feet, stumbling south beside the cliff.

  “If you come back, we won’t hurt you.”

  Yeah. Be right over.

  “You have my word on that.”

  Ethan wished he had a bullhorn of his own.


  Other voices were shouting his name across the river.

  “Ethan, please!”

  “You don’t understand what you’re doing!”

  “Come back!”

  Pope continued to call out to him as well, but Ethan pushed on into pitch-black rain.

  The farther he moved away from the crowd, the more impossible it became to see.

  Ethan limping now in slow, shuffling steps, his only directional anchor the noise of the river on his left.

  Behind—fading voices, shrinking points of light.

  His body had cranked out the last available adrenaline, and he could feel a world-class crash coming on.

  Total system shutdown.

  But he couldn’t stop. Not yet.

  The urge to curl up in the sand beside the river and sleep was almost overpowering, but those people might decide to cross.

  They had lights and weapons and numbers.

  He had nothing.

  Too great a risk.

  And so, with what little gas he had remaining in his reserve tank, he went on.

  CHAPTER 12

  Ethan had no way of knowing how long he’d been walking alone in darkness.

  An hour.

  Maybe two.

  Maybe less.

  His pace was such that he couldn’t have covered more than a mile. If nothing else, he felt certain of this. Every few minutes, he made himself stop and glance downstream, searching for oncoming lights, listening for footsteps crackling over rocks.

  But each time he looked back, it was always the same—complete darkness—and if someone was following him, the roar of the river effectively masked all other sounds.

  * * *

  The rain slowed to a drizzle and then an intermittent sprinkle and then it stopped altogether.

  Ethan still trudged along, traveling solely by feel, his hands grasping invisible boulders, his feet taking the smallest possible steps so that when they inevitably collided with an impediment, Ethan’s forward momentum didn’t throw him to the ground.

  * * *

  And then he could see.

  One moment, darkness.

  The next—a bulging, gibbous moon, its light shining down through a break in the clouds, the surfaces of every wet rock gleaming like they had been lacquered.

  Ethan sat down on a flat-topped boulder, his legs trembling, at the end of endurance.

  The width of the river had narrowed by almost half, but the current was rougher, blasting down through a rock garden in a furious spray of whitewater.

  Great pines—seventy or eighty feet tall—towered over the riverbank on the other side.

  He suddenly realized how thirsty he was.

  Falling to his knees, he crawled to the edge of the river and dipped his face into a small pool.

  The water tasted deliciously pure and sweet, but bitterly cold.

  Between sips, he glanced downstream.

  Aside from the madness of the water, nothing moved on either shore.

  Ethan wanted to sleep, could’ve lain here on the rocks and drifted off in seconds, but he knew that would be foolish.

  Must find shelter before I lose the light of the moon.

  Before I lose the ability to walk.

  Already, clouds had begun to roll back in front of the moon.

  He forced himself to stand.

  A river crossing here, particularly in his weakened state, would be fatal. He’d have to seek out shelter on this side of the river, but that was going to be a challenge. On the other side, an old pine forest swept up a mountainside for several thousand feet into roiling clouds. In such a forest, he felt confident he’d have been able to find someplace to hole up for the night, even if nothing more than covering himself under a latticework of downed limbs. You lay enough of them on top of you and they’d provide a shelter from the rain, maybe even trap enough body heat to create an oasis of warmth.

  But that wasn’t going to happen.

  On Ethan’s side of the river, the bank climbed steeply for forty feet to the base of that same red-rock cliff that encircled Wayward Pines.

  And above that—ledges upon ledges ascending into darkness.

  He was in no condition for a climb.

  Ethan staggered on.

  Water sloshing in his stomach.

  He could feel his feet—swollen and throbbing in his boots. Knew he should’ve stopped to empty the water out of them an hour ago, but he’d been concerned that if he sat down, he wouldn’t have the strength to relace them and continue on.

  The going was getting more difficult on this side, with little in the way of level ground, all of it rocky and steeply sloping.

  He passed into a grove of soaring pines.

  The rocky ground gave way to soft, moist earth covered in a cushion of dead pine needles, Ethan thinking, Worse comes to worse, I’ll sleep here. Wasn’t ideal—too close to the river, no branches to cover himself with, and anyone tracking him couldn’t help but find him. But at least he’d have some protection under the canopies of these ancient pines.

  He took one last look around, having already decided that if he saw nothing of interest, this would be home for the night.

  Ethan glanced up the slope that led to the base of the cliff.

  He thought he saw a patch of blackness up there.

  Didn’t think, didn’t debate, just climbed.

  Scrambling on all fours up through the pines and then out of them onto a field of shattered rock.

  Steeper and steeper.

  He was panting again, sweat pouring down his face, his eyes stinging with it.

  Near the cliff, the rock became looser and finer, his feet sliding with every step like he was climbing a sand dune.

  He reached the cliff.

  The darkness setting back in, all but a cuticle of the moon shrouded in clouds, and the air growing heavy with the smell of returning rain.

  There it was—that patch of black he’d spotted from the river was a recess in the cliff. It extended back for five or six feet, the interior smooth and dry, protected from the elements.

  Ethan climbed up onto the ledge and crawled inside.

  The back wall had a natural slope, and he leaned against it, the darkening world framed by the walls of the little alcove. He couldn’t see the river from his vantage point, the sound of it vastly diminished to something like a loud whisper.

  As the moonlight died, the pine forest on the other side of the river dimmed steadily away, leaving Ethan once more in absolute darkness.

  It began to rain.

  He sat up, and with trembling fingers, tried to unlace the boots he’d taken from the man he’d killed in the apartment. Took him several minutes to finally unravel the knot and pull off the boots. Dumped at least a pint of water out of each and then peeled off the layers of socks and wrung them out and laid them on the rock to dry.

  His clothes were sopping wet.

  He took off the hoodie, the T-shirt, the jeans, even his briefs. Spent ten minutes sitting naked in the alcove, twisting water out of the clothes until they were only damp.

  He draped the hoodie over his chest, the long-sleeved T over his legs, and folded the jeans into a pillow. Lying against the back wall of the cave, he turned over onto his side and shut his eyes.

  Never in his life had he been so cold.

  At first, he feared it would keep him from sleep, his body shivering so violently in a failing effort to warm itself that he had to grasp the sleeves of the hoodie so he didn’t shake it off.

  But as cold as he was, he was even more exhausted.

  Within five minutes, sleep won out.

  CHAPTER 13

  Ethan’s right ankle is shackled and chained to an eyebolt in the floor.

  He sits at a ramshackle desk that holds three objects...

  A blank sheet of A4 paper.

  A black ballpoint pen.

  And an hourglass whose black grains of sand are cascading from one bulb into another.

  Aashif has advised Eth
an that when the sand runs out, he will return, and if at that time what Ethan has written on the paper doesn’t delight him, Ethan will die by lingchi.

  But Ethan knows that even if he had specific, high-clearance knowledge of a major upcoming offensive, wrote down dates, locations, targets, details of the anticipated ground strike and air support, it wouldn’t be enough.

  Nothing will ever be enough, because no matter what he writes, he will die and die horribly.

  All he knows of Aashif is his voice and those brown, evil eyes in which he senses not a desire to learn information but to inflict pain.

  The guise of interrogation is merely foreplay.

  Something to get Aashif hard and wet.

  He is a sadist. Probably al-Qaida.

  Somehow, Ethan didn’t allow that full realization to set in as he hung by his wrists in the torture room, but sitting here alone at the desk in the quiet, it hits him full force.

  No matter what he writes, in a little under an hour, his life will become infinitely worse.

  There is a single window in the room, but it has been boarded over with two-by-sixes.

  Through tiny cracks between the panels of wood, brilliant strings of Iraqi sunlight tear through.

  The heat is scalding, sweat streaming out of every pore.

  The hyperrealness of the moment becomes unbearable, Ethan overwhelmed with sensory input.

  —A dog barking outside.

  —The distant laughter of children.

  —Miles away, the eerie, cicada-like clicking of a gunfight.

  —A fly buzzing at his left ear.

  —The scent of Masgouf roasting nearby.

  —Somewhere in the bowels of this compound, a man screaming.

  No one knows I’m here. At least no one who can help me.

  His thoughts veer toward Theresa—pregnant back home—but the onslaught of emotion and homesickness is more than he can bear in light of what lies ahead. The temptation to replay their last conversation—a VoIP call at the MWR—is powerful, but it would break him.

  Cannot go there. Not yet. In my final moments maybe.

  Ethan lifts the pen.

  Just need something to occupy my mind. Cannot sit here and dwell on what’s coming.

  Because that’s what he wants.