by Blake Crouch
“I don’t know that for sure, but regardless, there’s going to be a fête tonight.”
“For who?”
“Kate and Harold.”
“Jesus. And as sheriff, you have to run it.”
“That’s right.”
“Can’t you stop it?”
“I don’t want to stop it.”
“Ethan.” She turned her head and looked up at him. “What’s going on?”
“Better if you don’t know.”
“You mean in case you don’t pull it off?”
“Yeah.”
“How real is that possibility?”
“Very. But we talked about it last night. I promised you I’d fix this, even if it meant we took the risk of losing everything.”
“I know. It’s just…”
“A little different when the rubber actually meets the road. Pam knows about us, by the way. That we went out last night.”
“Has she told anyone?”
“No, and I’m betting that she won’t, at least not before the fête.”
“But what happens if she says something after?”
“After tonight, none of this will matter anymore. But look, I don’t have to do this. We could fall in line. Live out the rest of our days as good little townies. I’d be sheriff. There’d be perks to that. We have no mortgage here. No bills. Everything provided for. I used to work late every night. Now I’m always home for supper. We have more time together as a family.”
Theresa whispered, “There’s a part of me that wonders if I could buy into it, you know? Just settle. But it wouldn’t be a life, Ethan. Not on these terms.” She kissed him, her lips gone soft from the steam and the heat. “So do whatever you have to do, and just know that no matter what happens, I love you, and I’ve felt closer to you in the last twenty-four hours than in the last five years of our marriage in Seattle.”
The snow was gone by midafternoon.
Under a blue winter sky, Ethan stood just beyond the fence that encircled the school.
Children streamed out of the brick building and down the steps. He spotted Ben walking with two friends, backpacks hanging from their shoulders, talking, laughing.
How normal it all seemed.
Kids getting out of school for the day.
Nothing more.
Ben reached the sidewalk. He still hadn’t noticed his father.
Ethan said, “Hey, son.”
Ben stopped and so did his friends.
“Dad. What’re you doing here?”
“Just felt like picking you up from school today. Mind if I walk you home?”
The kid didn’t look like he wanted to be walked home by Dad, but he hid the embarrassment with grace.
Turning to his friends, he said, “I’ll catch up with you guys later this afternoon.”
Ethan put his hand on Ben’s shoulder.
He said, “How about we go to your favorite place in the world?”
They walked four blocks down to Main Street and crossed to a candy store called The Sweet Tooth. Some of the school kids had beaten them there—clusters of boys and girls grazing the hundreds of glass jars filled with gumballs, Spree, Sweet Tarts, Pixy Stix, Cry Baby bubble gum, Jolly Ranchers, Jawbreakers, M&M’S, Starburst, Pez, Skittles, Sour Patch Kids, Nerds, Smarties, Atomic Fireballs—no staple of teeth-rotting goodness absent from the collection. Ethan knew that, like everything else, it had all been stored in suspension. But he couldn’t help thinking that if anything could last unchanged for two thousand years, it had to be a Jawbreaker.
He and Ben ended up at the chocolate counter.
Homemade fudge in all its permutations beckoned from beneath the glass.
Ethan said, “Pick out whatever you want.”
Armed with hot chocolates and a paper bag heavy with an assortment of fudge, Ethan and Ben strolled the sidewalk.
This was the busiest time of day in Wayward Pines, with school having just let out and the streets wonderfully noisy with the laughter of children.
It never felt more real than this.
Ethan said, “Let’s find a place to sit.”
He led his boy across the street to the bench on the corner of Main and Ninth.
They sat drinking their hot chocolates and nibbling at the fudge and watching people walk by.
Ethan said, “I remember when I was your age. You’re a much better kid than I was. Smarter too.”
The boy looked up, fudge crumbs around his mouth.
“Really?”
Between his glasses and the earflaps that hung down from his hunting cap, Ethan thought he bore a strong resemblance to Ralphie from A Christmas Story.
“Oh yeah. I was a little shit. Mouthy. Full-on rebellious streak.”
This seemed to amuse Ben.
He sipped his hot chocolate.
“School used to be just school,” Ethan said. “We had homework. Parent-teacher conferences. Report cards.”
“What’s a report card?”
“A slip that showed what your grades were for a quarter. You probably don’t really remember when you went to school in Seattle. This one’s a little different.”
Now Ben stared down at the pavement under their feet.
“What’s wrong, son?”
“You’re not supposed to talk about that.” He said it in a grave, quiet voice.
“Ben, look at me.”
The boy looked up.
“I’m the sheriff of Wayward Pines. I can talk about whatever the hell I want. You understand, I run this town.”
The boy shook his head. “No you don’t.”
“Excuse me?”
Now Ben’s eyes were filling up with tears.
“We can’t talk about this,” he said.
“I’m your father. There’s nothing you and I can’t talk about.”
“You aren’t my father.”
A shiv straight into Ethan’s gut would’ve felt better.
He lost his breath.
Saw the world suddenly through a blur of tears.
He barely found his voice. “Ben? What are you talking about?”
“Not my real one.”
“I’m not your real father?”
“You don’t understand. You never will. I’m going home.”
Ben started to stand, but Ethan put his arm around him, held him to the bench.
“Let go of me!”
“Who do you think your real father is?” Ethan asked.
“I’m not supposed to talk about—”
“Tell me!”
“The one who protects us!”
“Protects from what?”
The boy glared up at Ethan, all tears and vitriol, and said, “The demons past the fence.”
“You’ve been beyond the fence?” Ethan asked.
The boy nodded.
“Who took you?”
Stonewall.
“Was it a short, older man with a shaved head and black eyes?”
Ben didn’t answer, but it was an answer.
“Look at me, son. Look at me. What do you mean when you say he’s your father?”
“I told you. He protects us. He provides for us. He created all of this, everything we have in Wayward Pines.”
“That man is not God, if that’s what you’ve been—”
“Don’t say that.”
Ethan thinking, If there were no other reason for burning this place to the ground, it’s this. They’re stealing our children away from us.
“Ben, there are things in this world that are true and that are lies. Are you listening to me? Your mother’s and my love for you—there is nothing truer than that. Do you love me?”
“Of course I do.”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yes.”
“That man who took you past the fence is not God. He’s the furthest thing from it. His name is David Pilcher.”
“You know him?”
“I work for him. See him almost every day.”
Suddenly, Meg
an Fisher was standing in front of them.
Ethan hadn’t even heard her footsteps.
She’d come out of nowhere.
Kneeling down carefully in her woolen skirt, she put her hand on Ben’s knee.
“Everything okay, Benjamin?”
Ethan forced a smile. “We’re fine, Megan,” he said. “Rough day at school. I’m sure you know how that goes. But nothing a little trip to The Sweet Tooth can’t fix.”
“What happened, Benjamin?”
The boy was staring down into his lap, literally crying into his hot chocolate.
Ethan said, “It’s kind of a private matter.”
This snapped Megan’s head up.
Gone was the perky, pleasant host who had welcomed him and Theresa into her home several nights ago.
She said, “Private?”
Like she didn’t understand the meaning of the word.
Like Ben was her son and it was Ethan overstepping his bounds.
“At School of the Pines,” she went on, “we believe in a community approach to—”
“Yeah, private. Like mind-your-own-fucking-business private, Mrs. Fisher.”
The look on her face—pure shock and disgust—made Ethan fairly confident she had never been spoken to like that before. Certainly not since she’d woken up in Wayward Pines and attained this position of power.
Megan stood straight up and scowled down at him like only a teacher can.
She said, “They’re our children, Mr. Burke.”
He said, “Like hell.”
As she stormed off down the sidewalk, Ben launched out of his father’s grasp and sprinted away across the street.
“Afternoon, Belinda,” Ethan said as he walked into the sheriff’s office.
“Afternoon, Sheriff.”
She didn’t look up from her cards.
“Any calls?”
“No, sir.”
“Anyone been by?”
“No, sir.”
He rapped his knuckles on her desk as he walked past, said, “Hope you’re in the mood for some big fun tonight.”
He could feel her eyes on him as he moved on down the hallway toward his office, but he didn’t look back.
Inside, he hung his hat on the coatrack.
Went to the closet, unlocked the door.
He’d only opened it up once before, his avoidance purely psychological. The things inside represented what he hated most about this job, this town. What he’d been dreading since day one.
His predecessor’s costume hung from a brass wall hook.
During his own fête, he’d only glimpsed Sheriff Pope from afar, the details of this outfit lost in the midst of Ethan’s fear and panic.
Up close, it looked like the cloak of a demon king.
Fashioned out of a brown bear’s coat, there was extra fur padding under the shoulders and it tied across the collarbone with a link of heavy-gauge chain. The fur itself clumped in places where Ethan suspected blood had spattered, stuck, dried. But no effort had been made to clean the garment, which reeked like the breath of a scavenger—rotted blood and decay. None of it rivaled the adornments. The scalp of every prior guest of honor had been stitched into the fur. Thirty-seven in all. The earliest resembled beef jerky. The most recent were still pale.
On a shelf above the cloak rested the headdress.
The skull of an abby formed the centerpiece. The jaws were wide open, held in place with metal rods, and a rack of antlers had been screwed down into the top of the brainbox.
A sword and a shotgun lay across brackets in the wall, the rhinestones that covered them glittering under the overhanging lightbulb.
Ethan startled when his telephone rang.
Such a rare occurrence.
He walked out into his office, around his desk, and caught it on the fifth ring.
Answered, “Sheriff Burke speaking.”
“Do you know who this is?”
Even though he spoke at barely a whisper, Ethan recognized the voice as Ted’s.
He said, “Yes. How’d you know I was here?”
“How do you think?”
Of course—Ted was watching him from surveillance inside the mountain.
“Is it safe for us to talk like this?” Ethan asked.
“Not for long.”
“They’ll find out?”
“Eventually. Question is, will it matter when they do?”
“What does that mean exactly?”
“I found it.”
“Found what?”
“That thing we were looking for. It was buried, hidden deep, but nothing can truly be erased.”
“And?”
“Not over the phone. Can you meet me in the morgue in twenty minutes?”
“Sure.”
“Dr. Miter just walked into your station. You better get going.”
Ethan heard voices in the background, the sudden shuffle of Ted hanging up his phone.
The moment Ethan shelved his phone it rang again.
“Hi, Belinda,” he said.
“Sheriff, there’s a Dr. Miter here to see you.”
To reinsert my microchip.
“I’m kind of in the middle of something. Would you mind getting him a cup of coffee and showing him over to the waiting area?”
“Yes, sir.”
Ethan opened the deep left-hand drawer of the desk, lifted out his leather belt and holster, strapped it on.
He turned his attention to the gun cabinets, unlocked the doors and the drawer on the middle one.
From the drawer, he lifted out a Desert Eagle, popped in the magazine, holstered it.
Then he took down the Model 389 Rifle—a camo-stock with a blued assembly and 4x32 scope.
His phone rang again.
He grabbed it.
“Yes, Belinda?”
“Um, Dr. Miter doesn’t really want to wait anymore.”
“A doctor who doesn’t want to wait. Do you see the irony there, Belinda?”
“I’m sorry, sir?”
“I’ll be right out.”
Ethan hung up the phone and moved to the window beside the gun cabinet. It was a slider. He opened the clasps, forced it open, then pushed the screen completely out of the frame.
Climbing awkwardly over the sill, he lowered himself behind the row of bushes that lined the front of the building.
Fought his way through the grabby branches and jogged down toward the street.
He’d driven the Bronco to work this morning and he pulled open the driver-side door and stowed the rifle on the gun rack.
As he cranked the engine, he could hear the phone in his office ringing again through the open window.
Ethan pulled his Bronco into an empty parking space on Main and walked over to the storefront glass of Wooden Treasures.
Kate was sitting behind the cash register, staring with a kind of bored, blank intensity into nothing. To go from that brilliant sliver of freedom last night back to the day-to-day enslavement that defined life in Wayward Pines must be a crushing thing, he thought. Figured the days after their secret parties were filled with hangovers and the hard edge of reality. Of what their lives truly were.
Ethan knocked on the glass.
They sat on the bench on the corner of Main and Ninth.
The downtown had emptied out.
It didn’t look real anymore.
Could’ve been the set of a movie after production had stopped.
Already the light was beginning to fail as the sun slipped behind the western wall of rock.
“We’re safe to talk here,” Ethan said.
“You look terrible,” Kate said. “Have you slept?”
“No.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I need to know how to find the tunnel under the fence.”
“Why?”
“There isn’t time to explain. Have you been to it?”
“Once,” she said. “Years ago.”
“Did you go through to the other side?”
/>
She shook her head.
“Why?”
“Scared.”
“How do I find it, Kate?”
“There’s a big dead pine stump. As tall as you. Bigger around than anything near it. If it’s still standing, you can’t miss it. The door to the tunnel is right beside it, in the forest floor. It’ll be covered over with pine needles. I don’t think anyone’s gone to the other side in a long, long time.”
“Is it locked?”
“I don’t know. Ethan, what’s going on?”
He stared at her.
Wanting to tell her.
Wanting to warn her.
He said, “You’re just going to have to trust me.”
Ethan parked his Bronco out of sight in the alley behind the hospital.
Slipped in through a service door.
The ground floor stood absolutely silent.
He took the stairs down to the basement and stepped out into the intersection of four vacant corridors, headed toward the windowless double doors at the terminus of the east wing.
The last few fluorescent light panels near the morgue had gone out.
He reached the doors in semi-darkness.
Pushed through.
Ted stood at the autopsy table at an open laptop.
Ethan walked over as the doors swung closed behind him.
Said quietly, “We safe to talk here?”
“I killed the surveillance cams to the hospital’s sublevel.” He glanced at his watch. “But they’ll only stay in sleep mode another ten minutes.”
“Where’s Pam?”
“Upstairs in a therapy session.”
Ethan moved around the gleaming table, stood beside Ted.
He glanced at the cold chambers, the sink, the organ scale. Ted had angled the examination lamp away from the table, so it fired one corner with an obscene radiance and left the rest of the morgue to shadows.
The laptop finished powering up.
Ted typed in his username and password.
“Why here?” Ethan asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Why did you want to meet here?”
Ted pointed at the screen.
The footage rolled.
HD quality.
From a corner in the ceiling, a camera aimed down at Alyssa.
Ethan said, “Fuck.”
Strapped with thick, leather restraints to an autopsy table.
To this autopsy table.
“No audio?” Ethan asked.
“Didn’t have time to find it. Trust me, you’ll be glad of that.”