by Blake Crouch
First contact made at approximately 1125 at the corner of Main and Ninth. Note slipped to Kate Ballinger that read, “Sick of being watched.” Brief eye contact made. No words spoken. No further contact was made on this date.
Day #5311
From: Alyssa Pilcher
To: David Pilcher
Mission #1055
Contact Report #2
Subject: Resident 308, a/k/a Kate Ballinger
Eighteen days post-initial contact, Ballinger approached me at the gardens and gave me a bell pepper. The pepper had been sliced open and there was a note inside that read: “Tracking chip on hamstring in your left leg. Cut it out in a closet, but keep with you until further notice.” Two potential rendezvous times were given for me to confirm I had removed the chip. The first at 1400 on Day 5312. The next at 1500 on Day 5313. If I failed to remove the chip by Day 5313, we would have no further interaction. No further contact was made on this date.
Day #5312
From: Alyssa Pilcher
To: David Pilcher
Mission #1055 Contact Report #3
Subject: Resident 308, a/k/a Kate Ballinger
At 1400, I passed Ballinger walking south on Main Street near the intersection of Sixth. I shook my head. No further contact was made on this date.
Day #5313
From: Alyssa Pilcher
To: David Pilcher
Mission #1055
Contact Report #4
Subject: Resident 308, a/k/a Kate Ballinger
At 1500, I passed Ballinger walking south on the riverside trail. I nodded to her. She smiled. No further contact was made on this date.
Day #5314
From: Alyssa Pilcher
To: David Pilcher
Mission #1055
Contact Report #5
Subject: Resident 308, a/k/a Kate Ballinger
Ballinger returned to my stand at the gardens with a second bell pepper. The note inside read: “Tonight. 1:00 a.m. The cemetery mausoleum. Leave your chip in your bedside table. Wear a jacket with a hood.” Will follow up with a new report tomorrow.
Ethan moved through the Level 3 corridor with his escort in tow.
Halfway down, he stopped at a pair of double doors. Through the glass, he saw a full-court basketball game in progress. Shirts versus skins. The impact of the ball on the hardwood. The squeak of shoes. For a millisecond, he had the mad thought of joining in the game.
They walked on.
“Mind if I ask you something, Marcus?”
“Shoot.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“And how long have you lived here in the superstructure?”
“Mr. Pilcher brought me out of suspension two years ago to replace a guard who was killed on a mission out beyond the fence.”
“Everyone in the mountain knew what they were getting themselves into when they signed on with Pilcher, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“So why’d you do it?”
“Do what?”
Ethan stopped outside the doors to a cafeteria.
He faced Marcus.
“Why’d you throw your old life away for this?”
“I didn’t throw anything away, Mr. Burke. In my life before, you know what I was?”
“What?”
“A tweaker and a drunk.”
“And what? Pilcher found you? Gave you a chance to be all you could be?”
“I met him just out of prison—a three-year stint for vehicular manslaughter. I was high and drunk and killed a family on New Year’s Eve. He saw something in me I never knew was there.”
“Didn’t you have a family? Friends? A life that was at least your own? What made you trust him in the first place?”
“I don’t know, but he was right, wasn’t he? We’re a part of something here, Mr. Burke. Something that matters. All of us.”
“Here’s the thing, Marcus, and I don’t want you to ever forget it. Nobody fucking asked me or anyone in that valley if we wanted to be a part of this.”
Ethan walked on.
At the bottom of the stairwell leading out into Level 1, a noise stopped him.
Marcus was already swiping his card at the glass-door entrance to the cavern.
Ethan started down the corridor.
“Mr. Burke, where are you going?”
The noise was something screaming.
Banshee-like.
Tortured.
Inhuman.
He’d heard it before and it chilled him to his core.
“Mr. Burke!”
Ethan was jogging down the corridor now, the screams getting louder.
“Mr. Burke!”
He stopped at a wide window.
Stared through the plate glass into a laboratory.
There were two men in white coats and David Pilcher.
They surrounded an aberration.
The creature had been strapped to a steel gurney.
Stout leather restraints buckled down across its legs, below its knees and above.
One across its torso.
Another across its shoulders.
A fifth securing its head.
Its thick wrists and ankles had been clamped down to the sides of the gurney with heavy-gauge steel bracelets, and the thing convulsed against the leather straps as if in the throes of electrocution.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Marcus said, sidling up to Ethan.
“What are they doing to it?”
“Come on, let’s go. Mr. Pilcher won’t be happy if he sees—”
Ethan pounded on the glass.
Marcus said, “Oh geez.”
The men turned.
The two scientists scowling.
Pilcher said something to them and then walked over to the lab entrance. When the door opened, the abby’s screams amplified, echoing up and down the corridor like something calling out from hell.
The doors whisked closed.
“Ethan, how can I help you?”
“I was on my way out. I heard screams.”
Pilcher turned toward the plate glass. The abby had calmed down or worn itself out. Only its head swiveled under the strap, its screams reduced to croaks. Ethan could see its massive heart beating furiously through its translucent skin. There was no detail. Only color and form and motion, all obscured as if behind frosted glass.
“Quite a specimen, no?” Pilcher said. “He’s a three-hundred-seventeen-pound bull. One of the largest males we’ve ever seen. You’d think he’d be alpha male of a sizeable swarm, but my sniper spotted him coming down the canyon this morning, all by his lonesome. Took four hundred milligrams of Telazol to bring him down. That’s the full-grown adult male jaguar dosage. And he was still only sluggish by the time we reached him.”
“How long did that keep him sedated?”
“These tranqs only work for about three hours. After that, you better have them locked up, because boy do they come back angry.”
“He’s a big boy.”
“Bigger than the one you tangled with for sure. I think it’s fair to say if you’d met this bull in the canyon, we wouldn’t be speaking right now.”
“What are you doing with it?”
“Getting ready to remove a gland at the base of its neck.”
“Why?”
“Abbies communicate through pheromones. These are airborne signals that give information and trigger responses.”
“Don’t humans do the same thing?”
“Yeah, but it’s at a much more instinctual, broader level for us. Sexual attraction. Mother-infant recognition. Abbies use pheromones like we use words.”
“So why are you effectively cutting out that thing’s tongue?”
“Because the last thing we want is for him to tell all his friends he’s in trouble. Don’t get me wrong. I love the fence. I trust the fence. But several hundred abbies on the other side trying to figure out how to save their brother makes me a little uncomfortable.” Pilche
r glanced down at Ethan’s waist. “You still aren’t wearing your revolver.”
“I’m here. In the mountain. What does it matter?”
“It matters, Ethan, because I asked you to do it. It’s a simple thing, isn’t it? Wear a gun at all times. Look the goddamn part.”
Ethan stared back through the glass.
One of the scientists was leaning over the abby’s face, shining a penlight into its left eye as it hissed.
It looked to be between six and seven feet tall.
Arms and legs like cords of intertwined steel fiber.
Ethan couldn’t take his eyes off the beast.
Its black talons as long as his fingers.
“Are they intelligent?” Ethan asked.
“Oh my, yes.”
“As smart as chimpanzees?”
“Their brains are larger than ours. Because of obvious communication barriers, testing their intelligence—on our terms—becomes problematic. I’ve attempted a battery of social and physical tests, and it’s not that they can’t do them. They just refuse. It would be like me trying to test you and you telling me to stick it up my ass sideways. That sort of a response. We did capture a somewhat compliant specimen several months ago. She’s down in cage nine. Low hostility rating. We call her Margaret.”
“How low?”
“I gave her recall tests sitting across a table from her in her cage. Now I did have two guards behind me pointing shotguns loaded with twelve-gauge slugs at her chest. But still—she displayed no signs of aggression.”
“How’d you test her?”
“With a simple child’s memory game. Walk with me.”
Pilcher knocked on the glass and held up one finger to the scientists.
They moved down the corridor toward the glass doors at the far end, Marcus trailing ten feet behind.
“I use small cardboard tiles. One side is blank. The other has a photograph—a frog, a bicycle, a glass of milk. I arrange them all picture-side up on the table and then let Margaret see them. We start easy. Five tiles. Then ten. She gets two minutes to study them. Then I turn them over so she can’t see the picture. I reach into a bag containing duplicates of the tiles. I show her, for instance, the one with the glass of milk. She touches her talon to the corresponding tile on the table, and I turn it over to see if she got it right.”
“How’d she do?”
“Ethan, we worked our way up to one hundred and twenty tiles, with Margaret only getting thirty seconds to memorize their positions.”
“And she got them all right?”
Pilcher nodded, pride in his voice. “Total recall.” He stopped and pointed at a small window in a door whose only point of access appeared to be a keycard entry. “I keep her in here. Would you like to meet Margaret?”
“Not even a little bit.”
There was a glare off the glass from the overhead fluorescent lights.
Ethan cupped his hands around his face and stared into the cage.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Pilcher said. “But I don’t believe she’s an anomaly. Her intelligence I mean. She’s only different in temperament. Which is not to say that she wouldn’t tear my throat out if she thought she could get away with it.”
The cage was only floor, walls, ceiling, monster.
The thing called “Margaret” sat in the corner with its legs curled into its chest. It watched the window in the door through small, opaque eyes that never blinked.
“I’ve already taught her fifty-two signs. She’s a natural learner. Wants to communicate. Unfortunately, her larynx is structured differently than ours to the point of making speech, at least in the sense which we understand it, impossible.”
The aberration looked almost meditative.
It struck Ethan as infinitely more unsettling to see one sitting still and docile.
Pilcher said, “I don’t know if you saw my report this morning.”
“No, I came straight here.”
“We’re bringing a prospective resident out of suspension. Wayne Johnson. It’s his first day. He’s probably waking up in the hospital as we speak. Pam’s handling orientation. We’ll see how it goes, but you may be called upon to assist in the coming days.”
“Okay.”
“I hope Ted in surveillance was helpful.”
“He was.”
“So you’ll be reaching out to your old partner soon?”
“Tonight or tomorrow.”
“Excellent. You have a game plan?”
“Working on it.”
“You will report to me every day on your progress.”
Ethan said, “David, about your phone call last night.”
“Forget it. I just thought you should know.”
“I wanted to tell you again how sorry I am for your loss. If you need anything…”
Pilcher stared at Ethan, his eyes raging but his voice cool. “Find who did this to my little girl. That’s all I need from you. Nothing more.”
10
Pam was sitting on the end of the bed in her classic nurse’s uniform when Wayne Johnson woke up.
For a long time, he lay motionless under the comforter, blinking at the ceiling.
Finally, he sat up and looked at her.
He was shirtless, balding.
Forty-two years old.
Never married.
No children.
Wayne had come to Wayward Pines, Idaho, on August 8, 1992, as a traveling encyclopedia salesman. He’d arrived late and knocked on five doors. In the evening, after one sale, he’d checked into the Wayward Pines Hotel and then walked to a family-style restaurant. En route, he was struck by a motorcycle in the crosswalk, a perfect hit and run—enough head trauma to render him unconscious, but not enough to kill or permanently damage his brain.
In light of the death of Peter McCall two nights ago at the fence, the town was primed for the introduction of a new resident.
Wayne Johnson’s skin still looked gray. He was only ten hours post-suspension blood transfusion, but his color would be back by day’s end.
Pam smiled and said, “Hello there.”
He squinted at her, his vision probably still blurred as his system rebooted.
His eyes darted around the room.
They were on the fourth floor of the hospital. The window was cracked and the white linen curtains pushed in and out as the breeze ebbed and flowed, the rhythm as steady as if the room itself was breathing.
Wayne Johnson said, “Where am I?”
“Wayward Pines.”
He pulled the covers up around his neck, but it wasn’t modesty that drove him.
“I’m… freezing.”
“Totally normal. You’ll feel better by the end of the day, I promise.”
“Something happened,” the man said.
“Yes. Something happened. Do you remember what?”
His eyes narrowed.
“Do you know your name?” Pam asked.
Total amnesia, especially during the first forty-eight hours, occurred thirty-nine percent of the time.
“Wayne Johnson.”
“Very good. Do you remember what brought you here?”
“I came to sell encyclopedias?”
“Yes. Good. Did you make any sales?”
“I don’t re… one. I think. Yes. One sale.”
“And then what happened?”
“I was walking to dinner and…” She could see the memory of the trauma wash over him, the fear and the shadow of the fear passing across his face. “Something hit me. I don’t know what. I don’t remember anything after. Is this a hospital?”
“Yes. And this is your town now.”
“My town?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t live here. I live in Scottsbluff, Nebraska.”
“You did live in Scottsbluff, but now you live here.”
Wayne sat up a little straighter.
This was far and away Pam’s favorite part of integration. Watching a new resident begi
n to comprehend that their life—or whatever this new existence was—had irrevocably changed. Nothing beat the fêtes, but these moments of quiet, devastating revelation were, at least for her, a close second.
“What does that mean exactly?” Wayne Johnson asked.
“It means that you live here now.”
Sometimes they connected the dots on their own.
Sometimes she had to nudge them over the line.
She waited a minute, watching the wheels turn frantically behind Mr. Johnson’s eyes.
He finally said, “In the accident… was I hurt?”
Pam reached across the bed and patted the lump that was his leg under the blankets.
“I’m afraid you were.”
“Hurt bad?”
She nodded.
“Was I…?”
He looked around the hospital room.
He looked at his hands.
She could feel the question coming.
Willed it to come.
He was tiptoeing right up to the edge of it.
“Was I…?”
Pam thinking, Ask it. Just ask it. The data was conclusive—almost every time a resident arrived at the question on their own and found the courage to give voice to it, their integration progressed without incident. Failing to ask the question was a frighteningly accurate predictor for unbelievers, fighters, runners.
Wayne closed his mouth.
Swallowed the question down like a bitter pill.
Pam didn’t push it. No point in that.
It was still early.
Still plenty of time to make Mr. Johnson think that he was dead.
11
Ethan sat at a window table in the Steaming Bean, sipping a cappuccino and watching the toy store across the street. It was called Wooden Treasures, and it adjoined a workshop where a man named Harold Ballinger spent his weekdays building toys. His wife, Kate Ballinger, formerly Kate Hewson, formerly Ethan’s partner in the Secret Service, worked in the toy store.
Ethan had only spoken to her once since coming to Wayward Pines, in the midst of his horrifying integration. But since becoming sheriff, they hadn’t said two words to each other, and he’d managed to avoid her entirely.
Now he studied her through the glass.
She sat at the cash register in the empty toy store, engrossed in a book. It was late afternoon and the light angling through the storefront glass fired her prematurely white hair into a shock of almost blinding brilliance.