by Blake Crouch
Ethan’s knees hit the snow.
He felt the cold bleed through the denim.
Imming said, “I’m taking hold of your boot, putting it on a step. You feel that?” The sole of Ethan’s right boot touched the narrow side of a one-by-four. “Now put your other boot beside it. Good. Boys, hold his arms. Sheriff, go on and take another step down.”
Even though he couldn’t see, Ethan felt as if he were perched over a great height.
He stepped down onto the next rung.
“Boys, put his hands on the top rung.”
“How far of a drop is it?” Ethan asked. “Or do I even want to know?”
“You got about twenty more steps to go.”
Imming’s voice sounded distant, far below him now, and it echoed.
Ethan ran his hands across the rung to gauge its width.
The ladder was rickety.
It shifted and groaned and shuddered with each descending step.
When his boots finally reached the hard, broken surface below, Imming grabbed him by the arm and dragged him several steps away.
Ethan heard the ladder rattling, the other men starting down, and again the grind of that rusty hinge.
Somewhere above, a door banged shut.
Imming moved around behind him and untied the knot.
Off came the hood.
Ethan stood on the most rotten-looking concrete he’d ever laid eyes on. He looked at Imming. The man held a kerosene lantern that muddied his face in a collage of light and shadow.
Ethan said, “What is this place, Bradley?”
“Know my name, do you? How nice. Before we get to what this place is, let’s have us a chat about whether or not you’ll be breathing long enough to find out. Whether you get to come with us, or if we kill you where you stand.”
The sound of shuffling steps spun Ethan around.
He stared into the eyes of two young men in black hoodies, each holding a machete and glaring at him with an intensity that suggested they might actually want to use them.
“You were given a warning,” Brad said.
“No chip or don’t bother coming.”
“That’s right. And now we get to see how well you follow instructions. Strip down.”
“Excuse me?”
“Get naked.”
“I don’t think so.”
“It works like this. They’re going to examine every square inch of your clothes while I examine every square inch of your body. I understand you were chipped when you met with Kate last night. That means we better find a nice, fresh, ugly-as-sin, stitched-up cut on the back of your leg. If we don’t, if I arrive at the conclusion you’re trying to pull one past us, guess what?”
“Brad, I did exactly—”
“Guess. What.”
“What?”
“We’re going to hack you to death with machetes right here. And I know what you’re thinking. ‘That would start a war, Brad.’ That’s what you’re thinking, right? Well guess what again? We don’t give a fuck. We’re ready.”
Ethan unbuckled his belt, shoved his jeans and briefs down his legs, and said, “Knock yourselves out.”
Ethan pulled off his hoodie and handed it to one of the men with a machete. As he came out of his undershirt, Brad knelt down behind him and ran a gloved finger over the incision.
“It’s fresh,” he said. “You do this yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“This morning.”
“Best keep it clean while it heals. Get your boots off.”
“Aren’t you gonna buy me dinner first?”
Tough crowd—not even a snigger.
Soon Ethan was standing naked.
The kerosene lantern didn’t shed much light as the three men crouched around the glow, inspecting Ethan’s clothes and turning them inside out—every sleeve, every pocket.
The walls of the ancient culvert were six feet apart and six feet high. Everywhere he looked, the concrete was crumbling to the point that it barely resembled concrete. This could’ve been the catacombs beneath some European city, although in all likelihood, it was simply one of the last remaining pieces of infrastructure from the original, twenty-first-century Wayward Pines.
The tunnel ran on a slight incline toward what Ethan figured was the east side of town. It made sense. That big wall of mountains probably drained copious amounts of water during thunderstorms. Massive snowmelt when summer roared in. Even now, a trickle of water meandered through the disintegrating concrete under Ethan’s feet.
Brad looked up, tossed his undershirt to him, said, “You can get dressed.”
As they walked up the tunnel, their footsteps splashing in the runoff, a palpable disappointment hung in the cold, dank air—these farm boys had wanted to kill him, had been aching to dismember him. He just hadn’t given them cause.
The ceiling was low enough to force Ethan to walk hunched over.
The tunnel lay in ruin.
Vines trailed down the walls.
Gnarled rebar showed through the concrete.
Roots.
Lines of snowmelt branched down the walls and dripped from the ceiling.
The lantern only showed what lay twenty feet ahead, and the sound of tiny, scurrying footsteps seemed to be perpetually just beyond the light’s reach.
They passed through intersections with other tunnels.
By more ladders that ascended into darkness.
Ethan’s boots crushed all manner of things.
Rocks.
Dirt.
Debris carried down from the mountains in heavy rainstorms.
A rat’s skull.
He didn’t know how long they trudged through that firelit darkness.
It seemed to take both ages and no time at all.
The quality of the air changed.
It had been stagnant and marginally warmer than conditions in town.
Now they were walking into a steady breeze that brought the fresh chill of the world above.
The trickle running down the floor of the tunnel had expanded into a fast-moving stream, and instead of just the noise of their footfalls in the water, a new, more substantial sound had begun to build.
They walked out of the tunnel into a rocky streambed.
Ethan followed the men as they scrambled up the bank.
When they reached level ground and stopped for a breather, he finally identified the noise that was now so overbearing he would’ve had to shout to be heard.
He couldn’t see it in the oppressive, starless dark, but in the near distance, a waterfall was crashing into the ground. He could hear the main cascade pummeling rock with a constant, thudding splat, and his face was damp with mist.
The men were already moving on and he followed the glow of the lamp like a lifeline as they climbed into a dense pine wood.
There was no path that he could see.
The white noise of the falls slowly faded away until he heard nothing but the sound of his own respirations in the increasingly thin air.
He had been cold in the tunnel. Now he sweated.
And still they climbed.
Trees clustered so closely that only the faintest dusting of snow had found its way to the forest floor.
Ethan kept looking back down the hillside, straining to see the lights of Wayward Pines, but it was all as black as pitch.
Suddenly there was no place else for the woods to go.
The trees simply ended at a wall of rock.
The men didn’t stop, didn’t even pause, just walked on, right up the face of it.
Imming shouted back, “It’s steep but there’s a path. Just step exactly where we do, and be glad it’s dark.”
“Why?” Ethan asked.
The men just laughed.
The forest had been steep.
This was insane.
Imming hooked the lantern onto a leather strap and slung it over his shoulder so he could use all four appendages.
Because you
needed them.
The mountain swept up well beyond the shit-yourself side of fifty degrees. A steel cable had been bolted into the rock and there was some semblance of a path running alongside it—small footholds and indentations in the rock that appeared to suggest a trail. Most were natural. Some looked man-made. It all looked suicidal.
Ethan clung to the rusted cable—it was life.
They ascended.
Nothing to see but the meager patch of lantern-lit rock in their immediate vicinity.
At the first switchback, the pitch steepened.
Ethan had no concept of how high they had climbed, but he had a terrifying sense that they were already above the forest.
The wind kicked up.
Without the protection of the trees below, the rock had collected a quarter inch of snow.
Now it was steep and slippery.
Even Imming and his men slowed their manic pace, everyone taking careful steps, making sure each foothold was sound.
Ethan’s hands grew stiff with cold.
At this height, the cable had been lacquered with snow, and each new step required Ethan to brush it off before proceeding.
Past the sixth switchback, the cliff abandoned all reason and went vertical.
Ethan was shivering now.
His legs had turned to jelly.
He couldn’t be sure, but it felt like the strain of climbing had ripped the stitches at his incision site, a trail of blood running down the back of his leg and into his boot.
He stopped to catch his breath and refortify his nerve.
When he looked up again, the lantern had vanished.
There was nothing above him, nothing below.
Just endless, swimming darkness.
“Sheriff!”
Imming’s voice.
Ethan looked up and down again—still nothing.
“Burke! Over here!”
He glanced across the cliff.
There was the light, twenty feet away, but they weren’t climbing anymore. They had somehow moved across the sheer face of the cliff.
“You coming or what?”
Ethan glanced down and saw it: one long step away, a single plank, six inches wide, had been bolted into the rock with a smaller cable running parallel above it.
“Let’s go!” Imming yelled.
Ethan stepped from the foothold, across two feet of emptiness, onto the six-inch plank. It was coated with slush and the back half of his cowboy boots hung off the edge.
He clutched the cable, went to move his right boot, but its smooth sole lost traction on the icy board.
His feet went out from under him.
The scream he heard was his own.
His chest slammed against the rock, one hand barely gripping the cable as his weight tugged him down, the twined metal biting into his fingers.
Imming was shouting at him, but Ethan didn’t comprehend the words.
He was zoned in on the cold, cutting steel as he felt his grip slowly dissolving and his boots beginning to slide off his feet.
He saw himself slipping, imagined the stunning lift in his stomach, his arms and legs flailing. Could there be anything worse than falling in total darkness? At least in the daylight, you’d see the ground rushing up to end you, have a chance, albeit fleeting, to prepare.
He pulled himself up by the cable until his boots touched the plank again.
Leaned into the rock.
Gasping.
Hand bleeding.
Legs shaking.
“Hey, asshole! Try not to die, okay?”
The men laughed and their footsteps trailed away.
No time to regroup.
With meticulous sidesteps, he traversed the rock face.
After five minutes of terror, the lantern disappeared around a corner.
Ethan followed, and to his infinite relief, the trail widened.
No more cable or wooden planks.
Now they walked up a gently sloping ledge.
Maybe it was the exhaustion and the fading overload of adrenaline, but Ethan missed the transition entirely.
From outside to in.
The light of the lantern now shone on rock walls all around him, even overhead, and the air had spiked ten degrees.
Their footfalls made an echo.
They moved through a cavern.
Up ahead—a din of voices.
Music.
Ethan followed the men to the end of the passage.
The sudden onslaught of light burned his eyes.
His guides walked on, but Ethan stopped at the wide, open door.
Couldn’t quite grasp what he was seeing.
Couldn’t fit it into a previous point of reference.
The room was several thousand square feet—the footprint of a comfortable house. The ceiling dipped low at the corners, vaulted past twenty feet in the center. The rock walls glowed the color of adobe in the abundance of firelight. There were candles everywhere. Torches. Kerosene lamps dangling from wires in the ceiling. It was warm, the heat radiating from a large fireplace in a distant corner—a recess in the room that apparently vented smoke outside. There were people everywhere. Congregating in small groups. Dancing. Sitting in chairs around the fire. Nearby, a trio of musicians played on a makeshift stage—trumpet, stand-up bass, an upright piano that Ethan figured must have been disassembled and hauled up here in pieces. It was Hecter Gaither on the bench, leading the band in some moody jazz thing that would’ve sounded right at home in a club in New York City. Everyone was dressed to the nines in clothes that couldn’t have possibly made the trip Ethan had just endured.
People were smoking.
Talking over the music.
Smiling.
Laughing.
The smell of booze like perfume in the air.
And then Kate was standing in front of him.
She had dyed her hair back to that java brown, and she wore a black, sleeveless number.
Smiling and the glassiness of liquor glistening in her eyes like tears, she said, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world.” She ran her hand down the left sleeve of his hoodie. “Looks like you had a rough hike in. Let’s get you into something dry.”
She led him through the crowd to the far side of the room. They swung around into an alcove where the clothes the people had worn here hung dripping from wooden racks.
“Forty-two long, right?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
She showed him to a black suit hanging from the end of a rack filled with dry, pristine formal wear.
“Looks like your old threads, huh? Shoes and socks right over there. Get dressed and come on out.”
“Kate—”
“We’ll talk in there.”
She left him.
He stripped out of his hoodie, his undershirt, his damp jeans. There was a bench against the wall and he sat down and pulled off his boots and inspected the incision.
A few of the stitches had popped, but he’d brought along extra gauze and tape.
He wrapped his leg tightly enough to stop the bleeding and used his damp undershirt to clean the line of dried blood that trailed all the way down to his foot.
Walking back into the party, Ethan couldn’t deny that he felt like a brand-new man. There’d been a mirror in the changing room, and he’d combed his wet hair over to the side in the style he’d worn back in his g-man days.
Someone had constructed a bar along one side of the cavern.
Ethan threaded his way toward it through the crowd and installed himself on an open stool.
The bartender wandered over.
White oxford, black tie, black vest.
Refreshingly old-school.
He threw a cocktail napkin down on the dark, scuffed wood of the bar.
Ethan recognized him from town. They’d never spoken, but he worked the cash register several days a week at the grocery store.
“What’ll it be?” the man asked, no indication that he knew or cared who
Ethan was.
“What do you have?” Ethan asked, glancing at the bottles lined up on the wall in front of a mirror. He saw bourbon, scotch, vodka. Brand names he recognized, but they were all nearly empty. Unlabeled bottles of clear liquor seemed to be in ample supply.
The mirror had been framed with dozens of Polaroid photos. One toward the center caught his eye. It was a close-up of Kate and Alyssa, both women dressed like flappers—newsboy caps, bobbed hair, gaudy makeup, and pearls. Their cheeks were pressed together. They looked drunk, in the moment, and irredeemably happy.
The barkeep said, “Sir?”
“Johnnie Walker Blue. Neat.”
“Those bottles are actually more for atmosphere and extra special occasions.”
“All right. Then what do you recommend?”
“I make a mean martini.”
“By all means.”
He watched the barkeep pour from various unmarked bottles into a big martini glass, which he set on Ethan’s napkin and garnished with a wedge of green apple.
The man said, “Cheers. First one’s on me.”
As Ethan raised the glass to his lips, he heard Kate’s voice: “Now try and keep an open mind.”
She claimed the barstool beside him as he sipped.
He said, “Wow. Well at least they got the glassware right. Until now, I’ve never actually wanted to untaste something.”
It was odorless, but on the tongue the overwhelming note was burn, followed by a strong citrus pucker, and a finish that was mercifully short, like the flavor had just fallen off a cliff.
He carefully returned the martini glass to the napkin.
“You aren’t going to tell me this bathtub gin grows on you.”
Kate laughed. “You look good, Agent Burke. I have to say the elegance of the black suit and tie suits you a thousand times better than that woodsy sheriff getup.”
In the reflection of the mirror, people were dancing to a slow jazz tune. He spotted Imming and his goons in tuxedoes, passing a mason jar and watching the band.
Ethan reached for the stem of the martini glass, thought better of it.
“Nice digs,” he said. “How’d you get all of this up here?”
“We’ve been bringing things for years. Glad you could make it.”