Pines

by Crouch, Blake

  He reached it—number 37—and put his hand on the doorknob.

  Listened.

  No voices. No movement. Nothing to turn him away.

  He pushed the door open another inch and looked inside.

  There was a single bed on a metal frame against the far wall, perfectly made. A desk decorated with framed photographs and some tulips in a vase. His eyes passed over a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, a Matisse print, an easel. Beside the door, a terrycloth robe hung from a hook in the wall, a pair of pink bunny slippers beneath it.

  He went on down the silent corridor.

  None of the doors were locked, and each one he took the risk of opening revealed a similar minimalist living space, brightened with a few flourishing touches of individuality.

  After an impressive distance, the corridor terminated in a stairwell, Ethan standing at the top and staring down, counting four flights to the bottom.

  A placard on the wall read Level 4.

  He crept down to the next landing, which delivered him onto another corridor that looked identical to the one above.

  Hard, sudden laughter resonated through the hall.

  It drove Ethan back into the stairwell and primed him to flee. He was already figuring he could return to Level 4, use a chair from one of those apartments to climb back up into the airshaft. But the laughter died down, and after he’d waited a full minute, the corridor remained empty.

  He padded thirty feet in, finally stopping in front of a pair of swinging doors, each inset with a small window.

  A group of three men and two women occupied one of a dozen tables in a modest cafeteria, the smell of hot food making Ethan’s stomach rumble.

  One of the women said, “You know that’s not true, Clay,” pointing a fork at him that had speared a glob of what looked like mashed potatoes.

  Ethan moved on down the corridor.

  He passed a laundry.

  A rec room.

  A library.

  An empty gymnasium.

  Men’s and women’s locker rooms.

  An exercise room where two women jogged side by side on treadmills and a man lifted free weights.

  Ethan came to the stairwell at the far end and descended a flight of stairs that led out into the Level 2 corridor.

  At the first door he came to, he stopped and peered inside through its circular window.

  There was a gurney in the center, surrounded by lights, carts loaded with surgical instruments, heart monitors, IV stands, cautery and suction units, a fluoroscopy table, all immaculately clean and glimmering under the lowlight.

  The next three doors were windowless and identified only by nameplates: Lab A, Lab B, Lab C.

  Down toward the end of the corridor, one window glowed, and Ethan sidled up beside it.

  On the other side of the glass—tapping and the murmur of soft, low voices.

  He peered through the window.

  The room was mostly dark, its glow coming from numerous monitors—twenty-five of them in five stacks of five mounted to the wall and perched above a large console that looked serious enough to launch a rocket.

  Ten feet from where Ethan stood, a man sat staring up at them, his fingers moving at light speed across a keyboard as the images on the screens constantly changed. He wore a headset, and Ethan could just hear his voice coming through, though the words were lost.

  On one of the screens, Ethan studied the slideshow of images...

  The façade of a Victorian house.

  The porch of a different house.

  An alleyway.

  A bedroom.

  An empty bathtub.

  A bathroom with a woman standing in front of a mirror, brushing her hair.

  A man seated at a kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal.

  A child sitting on a toilet reading a book.

  A view of Main Street in Wayward Pines.

  The playground at the park.

  The cemetery.

  The river.

  The interior of the coffee shop.

  The hospital lobby.

  Sheriff Pope sitting behind his desk with his feet kicked up, talking on the telephone.

  Ethan’s line of sight was limited through the window, but he could just make out the left edge of another block of monitors and the sound of other people typing.

  A pool of hot rage went supernova somewhere deep inside him.

  He put his hand on the doorknob, started to turn it. Would have loved nothing more than to creep up behind that man as he watched people going about their private lives and snap his neck.

  But he stopped himself.

  Not yet.

  Ethan backed away from the surveillance center and headed down the stairwell, emerging into the bottom corridor—Level 1.

  Though difficult to tell from this distance, at the far end it appeared to extend beyond the stairwell into another section of the complex.

  Ethan picked up his pace.

  Every ten feet, he moved past a door with no handle, no apparent method of entry beyond a keycard slot.

  Third one down on his left, he stopped.

  Glanced through the small window into darkness—just an empty room.

  He did the same at the tenth door down, stopping and cupping his hands over his eyes so he could draw more detail out of the shadows.

  The face of one of those creatures from the canyon crashed into the glass on the other side, its teeth bared and hissing.

  Ethan stumbled back into the opposite wall, his system buzzing from the scare as the thing screeched behind the glass—thick enough to dampen most of the sound.

  Footfalls echoed in the stairwell he’d just been in.

  Ethan hurried down the corridor, moving as fast as he could, the fluorescent fixtures scrolling past in a stream of artificial light.

  He glanced once over his shoulder as he reached the stairwell, saw two figures in black moving into the far end of the corridor a hundred yards back. One of them pointed and shouted something, and then they rushed toward him.

  Ethan hustled through the stairwell.

  A pair of automatic glass doors were sliding together straight ahead of him.

  He turned sideways, barely managing to squeeze through as they closed after him.

  It was the epic proportions of the next room that took him aback, the mad scope of this place bringing him to a full stop.

  He no longer stood on tile but on cold rock and at the edge of a cavern the size of ten warehouses—a million square feet at least if he had to guess, and the distance from floor to ceiling sixty feet in places. In all his life, he’d seen only one space more impressive—the Boeing Plant in Everett, Washington.

  Giant globes of light hung down from the rocky ceiling, each one illuminating a thousand-square-foot section of floor space.

  There were hundreds of them.

  The glass doors had begun to spread open behind him, and he could hear the footsteps of those black-garbed men—they’d already covered half the distance of the corridor.

  Ethan ran into the cavern and shot down a passageway between shelves laden with lumber of every dimension. The shelves were forty feet tall, three deep on either side, and extended the length of a football field, Ethan figuring they contained enough linear board feet to rebuild Wayward Pines five times over.

  Numerous voices echoed through the cavern.

  Ethan glanced over his shoulder, saw someone a couple of hundred feet back sprinting toward him.

  He broke out of the narrow canyon between the shelves.

  Straight ahead, the floor space was overrun by hundreds of cylindrical reservoirs thirty feet tall and just as wide, each capable of holding tens of thousands of cubic feet, each labeled in huge, block letters as tall as Ethan.

  Rice.

  Flour.

  Sugar.

  Grain.

  Iodized Salt.

  Corn.

  Vitamin C.

  Soybeans.

  Powdered Milk.

  Malt.
r />   Barley.

  Yeast.

  Ethan ran into the labyrinth of containers. He could hear footfalls—very close—but with all the spatial interference, it was impossible to pinpoint their location.

  He stopped and leaned against a reservoir, breathing into his shirt in the crook of his arm, fighting to mask the noise of his panting.

  A man in black fatigues bolted past, holding a walkie-talkie in one hand and something that resembled a cattle prod in the other.

  Ethan waited ten seconds and then changed course, threading his way through the containers for another hundred yards until he emerged into a parking lot of cars.

  The vehicles ranged in type from early eighties to present to models he’d never seen before—curvaceous, compact designs that looked more like radical concept cars than anything that belonged on a public street.

  Every vehicle, without exception, sported gleaming chrome and unblemished paint jobs under the hanging globe lights, all looking as new and shiny as if they’d just rolled off the assembly line thirty seconds prior.

  A group of men jogged into view on the far side of the parking lot.

  Ethan ducked between a couple of red Jeep Cherokees, didn’t know if he’d been seen, but he felt confident he’d spotted automatic weapons.

  He crawled for several car lengths and then rose up slowly beside a driver’s door until he was peering through the windshield of an early-eighties model Impala.

  They were closer than he’d realized, just thirty feet away now and all armed with submachine guns. Two of them shined flashlights into the interior of every vehicle they passed while the third crawled behind on hands and knees, putting a light under each car.

  Ethan headed in the opposite direction, not bothering to crawl, just running hunched over on the uneven rock and trying to make sure his head wasn’t visible through any glass.

  Near the edge of the parking lot, he stumbled past a Crown Vic with tinted windows in the rear passenger doors. He stopped, and with absolute precision, pulled on the handle and tugged the door open without a sound.

  The dome light blazed down, and Ethan scrambled inside, jerking the door shut after him with just a touch too much force.

  Even from inside the car, he could hear the echo of the slammed door riding through the cavern.

  Crouching down in the shadows behind the driver seat, Ethan glanced over the headrest and through the windshield.

  The trio of men were all standing now, each slowly turning, trying to ascertain where the noise had originated.

  They finally split up, two moving away from Ethan, but one heading straight toward his car.

  As the man approached, Ethan got down behind the seat and curled up into as small and compact a ball as he could make himself.

  The footsteps drew near.

  He had his head tucked between his knees.

  Couldn’t see a thing.

  Then the footsteps were right at his head, inches away on the other side of the door.

  They didn’t trail away.

  They had stopped.

  The urge to lift his head to see what was happening so strong it nearly overcame him.

  He wondered if the man was spotlighting the interior of the Crown Vic.

  Wondered how well the light would pass through the rear tinted windows.

  If he couldn’t get a decent glimpse inside, would he just open the door?

  The footsteps went on, but Ethan didn’t move—waited another five minutes until he could no longer hear them.

  Finally, he sat up and stared through the windshield.

  The men were gone.

  He didn’t see anyone.

  Ethan eased the door open and crawled down onto the rock. If he strained to listen, he could hear voices, but they were much farther off, in some distant region of the cavern.

  A hundred feet of crawling brought Ethan to the edge of the parking lot.

  Straight ahead stood the cavern wall and the opening to a tunnel broad enough for two cars to travel abreast.

  Ethan rose up onto his feet and crossed to the tunnel.

  It was empty and well lighted and fell away from where he stood in a straight shot that descended at a ten or twelve percent grade over pristine pavement.

  A sign had been affixed to the rock above the arched opening—white lettering on green background, just like the signage of the American interstate highway system.

  But it listed only one destination...

  WAYWARD PINES 3.5

  Ethan glanced back at all the cars, thinking maybe he could borrow one of the older models, which were much easier to hotwire.

  Something caught his eye—a chill blue light coming from a glass door in the rock fifty yards away.

  The sound of footsteps and voices came back into range, still a good distance away, beyond the cars. Ethan thought he saw the beam of a flashlight strike one of the reservoirs, but he couldn’t be sure.

  He kept close to the wall of the cavern.

  It curved gently as he jogged alongside it toward the glass door.

  Five feet away, he stopped.

  As the door slid open, he read a single word stenciled on the glass:

  SUSPENSION

  Ethan stepped inside.

  The door zipped closed behind him.

  It was much colder, just a few degrees above freezing, and his breath plumed in the chill. The light was frigid blue, like sunshine passing through sea ice, and the air was murky with a pale gas that hovered ten feet above, thick enough to completely mask the ceiling like a cloud. And yet this room had the clean, rinsed smell of a post-snowstorm night—odorless and pure.

  The noise of hissing gas and soft beeps broke the silence.

  Approximately the dimensions of a grocery store, the room housed row after row of charcoal-colored units—hundreds and hundreds of them—each the size of a drink machine, each spitting a white stream of gas from its roof like a smoking chimney.

  Ethan walked down the first aisle and faced one of the machines.

  A two-inch-wide panel of glass ran down the middle, nothing to see behind it.

  To the left of the glass, a keypad was framed with several gauges and readouts, all of them zeroed out.

  To the right of the glass, he studied a digital nameplate:

  JANET CATHERINE PALMER

  TOPEKA, KS

  SUSPENSION DATE: 2.3.82

  RESIDENT: 11 YEARS, 5 MONTHS, 9 DAYS

  Ethan heard the door slide open, turned to see who’d entered, but the waves of gas blocked his view. He moved on down the aisle, deeper into the fog, glancing at the nameplate on each machine he passed, the suspension dates progressing steadily through the 1980s.

  One stopped him altogether as voices mixed in with the sound of escaping gas and beeps.

  Behind the center pane of glass, it looked as if the interior of the machine had been packed with black sand. Just barely poking through, he saw a white finger, motionless, its tip resting against the glass beneath a fingerprint smudge.

  The gauges displayed what appeared to be a flat-lined heart monitor and a temperature reading of 21.1111°C.

  The nameplate:

  BRIAN LANEY ROGERS

  MISSOULA, MT

  SUSPENSION DATE: 5.5.84

  INTEGRATION ATTEMPTS: 2

  The next machine down stood empty, but Ethan recognized the first name, wondered if it was her:

  BEVERLY LYNN SHORT

  BOISE, ID

  SUSPENSION DATE: 10.3.85

  INTEGRATION ATTEMPTS: 3

  TERMINATED

  There was someone moving quickly toward him now. He tore himself away from Beverly’s unit, mind reeling as he ran to the end of the aisle and started up the next.

  What the hell did this mean?

  There must have been a half dozen people in the room now, all chasing him, but he didn’t care.

  Just needed to see one more unit.

  Had to see it.

  And on the fourth row, midway down the aisl
e, with voices closing in, he stopped.

  Stared at the empty machine.

  His empty machine.

  JOHN ETHAN BURKE

  SEATTLE, WA

  SUSPENSION DATE: 9.24.12

  INTEGRATION ATTEMPTS: 3

  TERMINATION IN PROGRESS

  Reading his name didn’t make it any more real.

  He stood there not knowing what to do with the information in front of him.

  Trying to piece together what it meant.

  For the first time in what seemed like forever, he couldn’t care less about running.

  “Ethan!”

  He knew this voice, although it took him a moment to link it back to the memory.

  To the face it belonged to.

  “We need to talk, Ethan!”

  Yes, we do.

  It was Jenkins. The psychiatrist.

  Ethan started walking.

  He felt like he’d been unraveling for days, but now he was getting down to the end of the string, wondering what exactly was going to happen when it all ran out.

  “Ethan, please!”

  He wasn’t even looking at names anymore, or to see which machine was occupied, which one empty.

  Only one thing mattered, one terrible suspicion gnawing his guts out.

  “We don’t want to hurt you! No one touches him!”

  It was all he could do to make his legs work as he approached the last machine on the last row in the farthest corner of the room.

  Men followed him now.

  He could sense them close behind in the fog.

  No chance at escaping now, but then, did it really matter anymore?

  He arrived at the last machine and put his hand against the glass to brace himself.

  Surrounded by black sand, a man’s face pressed against that narrow window down the front.

  Eyes open.

  Unblinking.

  No breath to fog the inside the glass.

  Ethan read the nameplate and the year of suspension—2032. He turned around as Dr. Jenkins emerged out of the fog, the small, unassuming man flanked by five of those black-clad men dressed in something approaching full riot gear.

  Jenkins said, “Please don’t make us hurt you.”

  Ethan shot a glance up the last aisle—two more figures loomed in the fog.

  He was cornered.

  Said, “What is this?”

  “I understand you want to know.”

  “Do you.”

  The psychiatrist studied him for a moment. “You look terrible, Ethan.”