by Blake Crouch
“How you doing, Sheriff?”
Pilcher’s voice sounded whiskey-thickened and uncharacteristically happy.
“We should meet tomorrow,” Ethan said.
“Would you like to know what you’ve done?”
“I’m sorry?”
Pilcher spoke more slowly, deliberately. “Would you like to know what you’ve done?”
“I think I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
“Do you now? Well, I’ll tell you anyway. You just bought yourself a town.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what that means.”
People were coming out of the theater and gathering around the ticket window.
“You don’t know what that means? Means they’re yours now. Each and every one of them. Congratulations.”
“I know what you did to your daughter.”
On the other end of the line—silence.
Ethan said, “What kind of a monster—”
“She betrayed me. Me and everyone in this mountain. She put the residents of Wayward Pines in danger. She didn’t just tell people about the blind spots in town. She created them. Sabotaged everything I—”
“Your daughter, David.”
“I gave her every opportunity to—”
“Your daughter.”
“It had to be done. Maybe not the way it was done, but… I lost my head.”
“I’ve been wondering—why have me investigate her murder? Find her body in the road? I assume you orchestrated that. What did you possibly hope to gain?”
“Alyssa never gave up Ballinger’s group. I didn’t think you’d really investigate your former partner unless you thought she’d actually killed someone. And you should’ve come to the conclusion it was Kate. You would’ve if you’d searched her house. I had Alyssa’s murder weapon stowed in a toolbox in Kate and Harold’s shed. You were supposed to find it, but you never even searched, because I guess you never really thought she did it. Well, doesn’t matter now.”
“How do you sleep at night, David?”
“Because I know that no matter what I’ve done, it’s all been in the service of creating Wayward Pines. Of protecting Wayward Pines. And there’s nothing more important. So I sleep just fine. I have a new nickname for you, by the way.”
“We need to meet,” Ethan said. “We need to talk about what comes next.”
“Light-bringer. That’s my new nickname for you. Translated from the Latin, Lucifer. Do you know the mythology of Lucifer? It’s quite apt. He was an angel of the Lord. The most beautiful creature of them all. But his beauty? It deluded him. He started to believe that he was as lovely as his maker. That perhaps he should be God.”
“Pilcher—”
“Lucifer led a band of angels in revolt against the Almighty, and I want to ask you a question now… how’d that turn out for them?”
“You’re a sick man. These people deserved their freedom.”
“I will share with you that it did not turn out well at all. Do you know what God did to them? He cast them out. He created a place called hell for Lucifer and all his fallen angels.”
Ethan said, “And who am I in this fairy tale? Lucifer? And I suppose that makes you God?”
“Very good, Sheriff.” He could hear Pilcher smiling through the telephone. “And if you’re wondering where to go to find this place of everlasting torment that I’m about to create for you, I would say look no further.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Hell is coming to you.”
A dial tone blared for two seconds in Ethan’s ear.
Then all the lights winked out.
25
1040 Sixth Street
Wayward Pines
Three Years, Seven Months Ago
On their last day together, she prepared his favorite meal.
All afternoon in the kitchen—slicing, stirring, mixing.
The simple act of keeping her hands busy somehow carrying her from one moment to the next.
But she had to focus, because the second she dropped her guard, it all came crashing down on her.
Three times, she’d lost it.
Crumbling to her knees.
Her sobs filling the empty house.
It had been so hard here.
Scary and lonely, and ultimately, hopeless.
But then he’d arrived. Like a dream.
They’d found comfort in each other, and for a time, everything had been better. She’d actually been happy in this strange little town.
The front door opened, closed.
She set the knife down on the cutting board.
Dried her eyes on a dish towel.
Turned to face him.
He stood across from her at the kitchen island.
Said, “You’ve been crying.”
“Just a little.”
“Come here.”
She went to him, wrapped her arms around him and cried into his chest as he ran his fingers through her hair.
“Did you talk to them?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“No change.”
“It’s not fair.”
“I know.”
“What if you just said—”
“I don’t have a choice in the matter.”
“Can’t you—”
“Don’t ask me. Please.” He lowered his voice and whispered into her ear. “You know I can’t talk about it. You know there are consequences.”
“It kills me not to understand.”
“Look at me.” He held her face in his hands and stared down into her eyes. No one had ever loved her like this man. “We’ll get through this.”
She nodded.
“How long?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Yes.”
“Are you coming back?”
“Of course I am. Is he upstairs?”
“He’s not home from school yet.”
“I tried to talk to him about it, but—”
“He’s gonna have a real hard time.”
He put his hands on her waist.
Said, “Look, it’s done, and there’s nothing we can do about it, so let’s enjoy the time we do have. All right?”
“Okay.”
“Should we go upstairs for a little while? I’d like a little something to remember you by.”
“I don’t want to burn dinner.”
“Fuck dinner.”
She lay in bed, in his arms, watching the sky darken through the windows.
“I can’t even imagine what it’ll be like,” she said.
“You’re strong. Stronger than you give yourself credit for.”
“What if you don’t come back to me?”
“Then know this. The time I’ve spent with you here in this valley, in this house, has been the best of my life. Better than all my time in the world before. I love you, Theresa. Madly and forever and—”
She kissed him and pulled him on top of her.
Into her.
She was crying again.
“Just be right here,” she said. “I love you. God, I love you so much, Adam, don’t leave me, please, don’t leave me…”
V
26
In the last shreds of daylight, Tobias opened his leather-bound journal and read the first page inscription for possibly the thousandth time.
When you come back—and you will come back—I’m gonna fuck you, soldier, like you just came home from war.
He flipped the pages three-quarters of the way through the volume to where he’d last left off.
The pencil was down to its last inch.
The pipe was getting low.
He crushed down the ashes and took a deep draw, collecting his thoughts as the river murmured past.
From where he sat, the sun had left the building, although it still struck the summit of the mountain across the river, a half mile above him.
That swarm of abbies a
ppeared to be on the move.
He could hear them screeching and screaming as they pushed on up the valley, leaving him a clear path to home.
Tobias wrote:
Day 1,308
I’ll keep this short and sweet. My last night in the wild and so many emotions. I can see the mountains that surround Wayward Pines from my camp, and with any luck, I’ll come out of the cold tomorrow afternoon. There are so many things I’m looking forward to. A warm bed. A warm meal. To speak to another human being again. To sit down with a glass of whiskey and tell people everything I’ve seen.
I alone have the key to what will save us all. I’m literally the one man in the world who can save the world. I carry that knowledge on my shoulders, but none of it really matters.
Because the closer I get to Wayward Pines, all I can think about is you.
Not a single day has passed when I haven’t thought about you. About our time together. About how it felt to hold you that last night.
And now, tomorrow, I’ll see you again.
My sweet, dear angel.
Can you feel that I’m close? Don’t you know it in your bones somehow, that in a matter of hours, we’ll be together again?
I love you, Theresa Burke.
Always.
Never thought I’d get to write these words but…
This is Adam Tobias Hassler…
Signing off.
27
The torched car was still smoking. The traffic light was dark and the streetlamps had gone out. Absent a single light in operation in the entire valley, the stars burned down with a vivid, icy intensity.
Ethan walked out into the middle of the street, Theresa clinging to one arm, Kate on the other side of him. If it irked Theresa for the three of them to be so close, she didn’t show it. Truth be told, Ethan wasn’t sure how he felt walking between them.
So much love and passion and pain.
Like he was caught between repelling forces.
The same poles of two magnets in dangerous proximity.
People were beginning to filter out of the theater.
Ethan handed Kate the bullhorn, said, “Do me a favor. Keep everybody here. I need to go check on something.”
“What’s happening?” Theresa asked.
“I’m not entirely sure.”
He pulled away from her and headed toward the Bronco.
The abby had wrecked it. There was a large hole in the center of the windshield and the front seats were covered in glass and eviscerated, foam padding spilling out. He couldn’t even see through the windshield, so he climbed up on the hood and stomped out the rest of the glass.
He drove south up Main, wind streaming through the open window frame and his eyes watering against it.
When he reached the curve, he veered off the road and followed the tire tracks from his last foray into the forest, high beams shooting through the trees.
He found his way back to the dead pine stump and turned off the engine.
Stepped out into the dark forest.
Something was wrong, and as he approached the fence, he realized it was the silence that unnerved him.
It shouldn’t be this quiet.
Those conductors and studded cables should be humming.
He walked west beside the dead fence.
Began to jog.
Then run.
After a hundred yards, he came to the gate—a thirty-foot, hinged section that provided egress from the valley. It was how nomads left, and—rarely—returned. Pilcher sometimes sent trucks through it into the wild to harvest firewood or obtain short-range reconnaissance.
Until this moment, Ethan had never actually experienced the terror of seeing it locked wide open.
As he stood staring through the gate into the unimaginably hostile country beyond, he was gripped with the cold, sinking conclusion that he had misread Pilcher completely.
A scream rose up out of the woods.
No more than a mile away.
Another scream answered.
Then another.
And another.
The noise expanding and growing until the ground seemed to tremble with it, as if all of hell was running through the forest.
Toward the dead fence.
The open gate.
Toward Wayward Pines.
For two seconds, Ethan stood frozen, a single question looping through his head as the panic and the fear and the terror swelled inside of him.
What. Have. You. Done?
And he began to run.
WAYWARD PINES
AND NOW A SNEAK PEEK FROM THE LAST TOWN, THE THIRD BOOK IN THE WAYWARD PINES SERIES, COMING IN 2014 FROM THOMAS & MERCER
Ethan sprinted back to the Bronco, the panic growing with every stride, every desperate breath, already trying to see a way out, a way to fix this.
But that quiet fence.
The open gate.
It was pure and simple death.
He drove too fast through the trees, pushing the suspension package to the limit, jarring the last few jags of glass out of the windshield.
Up the embankment, onto the road.
He pinned the gas pedal to the floorboard.
The entire town was waiting for him out in front of the theater.
Four hundred and something people standing around in the dark like they’d been kicked out of a costume ball en masse.
Ethan thinking, We don’t have a prayer.
The noise of the crowd was overwhelming.
People emerging from their disbelief and shock, beginning to talk to one another, in some ways, for the first time.
Kate came over. She’d procured real clothes and someone had done a fast stitch job on the gash above her left eye.
Ethan took her over to the car, out of earshot.
He said, “Pilcher killed the power.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
“No, I mean he killed the power to the fence. He also opened the gate.”
She stepped back, studied him.
As if trying to process exactly how bad a piece of news she’d just received.
“So those things,” she said. “The aberrations…”
“They can walk right in now. And they’re coming.”
“How many do you think?”
“No telling. But even a small group would be devastating.”
Kate glanced back at the crowd.
The conversations were dying out, people edging closer to hear the news.
“Some of us have weapons,” she said. “A few have machetes. We’ll defend ourselves.”
“You don’t understand these things.”
“And you’re looking at me like you don’t know what to do.”
“Any ideas, partner?”
“Can’t you reason with Pilcher? Call him up? Change his mind?”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Then we should get everyone back inside. There are no windows. Just one exit on either side of the stage. Double doors leading in. We’ll barricade ourselves in the theater.”
“And then what? What if we’re under siege for days? No food. No heat. No water. And there’s no amount of barricading that would keep the abbies out indefinitely. You understand what would happen if just one of those things got in?”
“Then what, Ethan? What do you propose?”
“I don’t know, but they’re coming, and we can’t just send people back to their homes.”
“Some have already gone.”
“I told you to keep everyone here.”
“I tried.”
“How many?”
“Fifty, sixty.”
“Jesus.”
“Ethan, we’ll get through this.”
“You don’t understand what’s coming. When I escaped several weeks ago, I was attacked by one of them. A small one. I came this close to getting ripped apart.”
“So what are you saying? This is a death sentence? We’re all going to die and that’s just how it goes?”
He said, “If I can get into the superstructure, if I can show the people inside who the man they serve really is, then we might have a chance.”
“So go. Go right now.”
“I’m not leaving my family. Not like this. Not without a real plan.”
Theresa reached him.
They embraced.
She kissed him in front of Kate.
Kissed him showily, he thought.
“What did you find?” Theresa asked.
“Nothing good.”
“Wait,” Kate said.
“What?”
“We need to be somewhere safe while you break into the superstructure.”
“Right.”
“Somewhere protected. Defendable. And already stockpiled with provisions.”
“Exactly.”
She smiled. “I might actually know of a place like that.”
Ethan stood on the Bronco’s roof, bullhorn in hand.
“We’re splitting into four groups of around a hundred each. Harold Ballinger will lead the first. Kate Ballinger, the second. Dave and Anne Engler the third and fourth. There isn’t time to explain everything, but please believe me when I say we are all in imminent danger.”
Someone shouted, “I have a question!”
They were answered with a single, distant scream.
The crowd had been murmuring.
Everyone went suddenly silent.
The sound had come from south of town—a fragile, malignant wail.
Nothing that could be explained or described, because you didn’t just hear it.
You felt its meaning.
And its meaning was this: death is coming.
Brad Fisher sat awkwardly in the destroyed front passenger seat of Ethan’s Bronco, clutching the handle on the door as Ethan sped through town.
Brad said, “We were in the theater. You were talking. Then I looked over and she was gone.”
Ethan was trying to get ahead of his own thoughts, his own fear, fighting to see an endgame that didn’t involve mass casualties.
But the man was crying.
Ethan said, “She probably feared for her life, considering what she was doing with the children. Figured people would see her as a traitor.” He looked over at Brad. “How do you feel about Megan?”
This seemed to throw the man, to catch him off guard.