A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  After hurrying the two hundred yards from the highway, Ethan waited for the faux rock face to lift. He ducked in as soon as he could fit. Marcus, his usual escort, waited for him in the topless Wrangler. Ethan swung into the passenger seat and they began the winding trip along fluorescent-lit tunnels bored through the heart of the mountain. Through a million-square-foot cavern. Past the suspension units to stop at the elevators. Using his swipe card, Marcus took him up. After an ear-popping ride, the doors opened onto the spacious, sumptuous quarters of the billionaire-genius master of Wayward Pines, David Pilcher. Marcus escorted him to a huge office lined with books and some two hundred TV screens that monitored the doings of the entire town.

  After only a week as sheriff, Ethan didn’t expect his own swipe card yet, but he found being escorted every step of the way galling. And then he experienced his usual mix of admiration and revulsion as he saw the man himself.

  Short and bald, with small dark eyes, David Pilcher didn’t look like a god, but he functioned as one. He wielded the power of life and death over the inhabitants of Pines. To his credit, he preferred life—most of the time. After all, with less than a thousand human beings left in the world, he didn’t have many to spare.

  “What the hell’s going on, Pilcher?” Ethan said, tossing his Stetson on a chair. “How did a pair of abbies get past the defenses—a mating pair with a cub, no less?”

  “We’re looking into it.” His usual smug tone was missing.

  “Looking into it? You should have spotted them and taken them out before they reached town.”

  “Only one of them reached town—and the Lindley house is on the outskirts.”

  “You’re going to split hairs with me? Have you taken them out yet?”

  Pilcher sighed. “We can’t find them.”

  “What? First they somehow get past a zillion volts of electricity and the snipers, and now you can’t find them?”

  “They’re not dumb animals—your run-in with them not too long ago should have impressed that on you. How’s the Lindley woman doing, by the way?”

  “In the hospital under observation. Completely out of it.”

  “Pam stopped in on her. Says it’s extreme post-traumatic stress.”

  Pam . . . what irony that Pilcher’s pet psychopath posed as one of the town’s guardians of mental health.

  “Extreme barely touches it. Those abbies ate her little girl.”

  Ethan tried to imagine his own mental state if his son Ben were snatched away and he’d given chase only to discover that the boy been devoured and all that was left was his head.

  “A shame.”

  “Your fault, Pilcher.”

  He looked shocked. “Mine?”

  When Belinda told him about the call, the first thing Ethan had suspected was an abby. He’d phoned Pilcher and requested a team be sent out to intercept it.

  “You refused to send a team.”

  “Too risky. They might be seen. We both thought it was a single abby, and I figured the child was already dead. Admit it—you did too.”

  Well, yes, he had, but that didn’t change things.

  “All you had to do was trace her chip—”

  She doesn’t have one.”

  “You told me everybody in Pines had one.”

  “Every adult. Before age four or five there’s not enough soft tissue in the thigh to hide a tracking chip. As soon as she would have started school, she’d have been implanted.”

  “All right, even without the chip we could have given her the benefit of the doubt. If we had, she might still be alive.”

  Pilcher gave a dismissive wave. “Wishful thinking. Don’t torture yourself with what-ifs.” He flashed a sardonic smile. “Look on the bright side: You’re set to be quite the hero.”

  “Am I now?”

  “The new sheriff carries that poor unconscious woman all the way back to town. My, my, my. The Pines proletariat will eat that up.”

  “At least it was downhill. That helped a lot.”

  Ethan rubbed his biceps—they were killing him.

  “Not to mention bringing along her daughter’s head wrapped in your sheriff’s jacket. Not to worry about that—we’ll get you a new one ASAP.”

  Ethan gave him a hard stare. “Are you finding something amusing about this?”

  “Not at all,” he said, the smile fading. “The loss of a child is always tragic—especially a female.”

  Ethan shook his head. “Is that what you’re thinking about—all Joanna’s lost breeding years? That’s what everything boils down to for you, isn’t it: Be fruitful and multiply.”

  “If the species known as Homo sapiens is to avoid extinction, yes. We had better be goddamn fruitful as all hell and multiply like rabbits!”

  Ethan couldn’t argue the extinction part. With fewer than a thousand real people left and hundreds of millions of hungry predators wandering around beyond the fence, the odds against surviving as a species were huge. So while he agreed with Pilcher’s end, he still had big issues with his means.

  But all that aside, couldn’t Pilcher also view Joanna’s death as a personal tragedy—a mother losing her child, a child losing her future?

  Time to shift the subject.

  “Karla had a gun, you know.”

  Firearms weren’t allowed in Wayward Pines. If someone was going to kill somebody else, they had to do it with kitchen knives or garden tools.

  “I know.”

  “You do? How?”

  “I watched you stow it in the gun cabinet in your office.”

  Shit. He doubted he’d ever get used to Pilcher’s ubiquitous spy cams.

  The boss man added, “I didn’t get a good look at it, though.”

  “An eight-shot Smith and Wesson three-fifty-seven Mag. Her husband’s.”

  “How do you know it was his?”

  “She told me.”

  “And you believe her?”

  Typical David Pilcher attitude: Always assume the worst.

  “I’ve no reason to doubt her.” He remembered something. “Then again . . .”

  “What?”

  “She said she didn’t know anything about guns but recognized my shotgun as a Winchester ninety-seven. But . . .” He shook his head. “She seemed too upset about her little girl to lie.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that. Lie enough about something and it becomes the truth.”

  “You should know.”

  Pilcher didn’t acknowledge the remark, which was okay with Ethan. It had been a cheap shot.

  “No matter whose it was, where’d either of them get a gun?”

  “Good question. Damn good question. We’re looking into it.”

  “I read their files before coming up here.” Pilcher had a file on everyone in Pines. “She’s a Quaker farm girl from Pennsy, born Karla Williamson, with no opportunities to learn about guns. But Jonathan Lindley did a stint in the Iowa National Guard.”

  “I like him as the gun owner.”

  “Any new info on why he hung himself?”

  Pilcher shrugged. “One of the malcontents who couldn’t adapt. We’ve had our share, as you’re well aware. Some kill themselves, some try to run . . .” He smiled. “Some become sheriff.”

  If it weren’t for Ben and Theresa, Ethan could see himself blowing his brainstem out the back of his skull—or at least giving it serious consideration. But his wife and son were more important that the miasma of existential despair that hung over Wayward Pines.

  He knew its secrets: That its entire population had been placed in suspended animation for eighteen hundred years. That the human genome had decayed to the point where the Homo sapiens of his time had become the vicious degenerate creatures who had stolen and eaten Joanna Lindley this morning. Creatures Pilcher and his people inside the mountain called aberrations—abbies for short. That during the eighteen hundred years the humans had been suspended the imperturbable planet Earth had absorbed and recycled all the toxins they’d left behind and reclaimed all th
e cities.

  The past hadn’t simply passed—it had been obliterated. And the future? For the individuals of Wayward Pines, the future was simply another day like today. So all anyone here had was the present. The moment.

  Thus the Pines mantra that everyone knew by heart:

  Yesterday is history.

  Tomorrow is a mystery.

  Today is a gift.

  That’s why it’s called the present.

  Work hard, be happy, and enjoy your life in Wayward Pines!

  But without a decent birth rate, the future would stop being a mystery and there’d be no more “gifts” of today.

  That was the long-term problem. He shook it off and returned to the here and now.

  “What are you doing about those two abbies? And let’s hope there are only two.”

  “I’ve got a couple of teams out hunting them,” Pilcher explained.

  “Now you send them.” You cold son of a bitch.

  “And what do we say about Joanna?”

  “A bear got her.”

  “Karla saw the baby aberration.”

  Pilcher raised an eyebrow. “She didn’t see living, breathing abbies. She found her daughter’s bloody dress and imagined something in it. The Lindleys had virtually no friends while Jonathan was alive and she’s made no new ones since his death. So whom is she going to tell? And if she does go rambling on about it, the explanation will be that her PTSD has made her delusional. The unspeakable tragedy of finding her daughter’s head has unhinged her. Pam will see to it that she comes around eventually.”

  “Pam’s preferred solution to any problem person seems to be torture and death.”

  “Karla Lindley has been docile and compliant all along,” Pilcher explained. “There’s no reason to believe she will change.”

  “But if she does?”

  Pilcher’s expression was grim. “She won’t.”

  Karla feigned unconsciousness while the nurse adjusted her sheets and blanket. As soon as she was gone, leaving a nightlight glowing by the door, Karla sat up. The first thing she did was find the wall clock which read 4:32.

  Where had the time gone? The last thing she remembered was—

  No . . . no . . . you can’t go there. Not now. Not yet . . .

  She’d been awake just long enough to realize she was in a hospital room, in a patient bed, when the nurse had come in. She hadn’t wanted to speak to anyone so she’d played possum.

  She examined her body. An IV ran into her left arm. She could find no cardiac monitor leads attached to her chest. Good. She pulled the IV out of her vein and slapped the tape back over it, then tied the tubing in a knot.

  She was dressed in an open-back hospital gown and nothing else, so she padded to the closet to see if her clothes were there. She found her jacket on a hanger and her sneakers on the floor. Next to them sat a white plastic bag with a red drawstring. She pulled out her underwear, jeans, shirt, socks, and sweatshirt. Stuffing her underwear back in the bag, she pulled on the rest.

  She started for the door but stopped as she recalled that all hospitals had cameras in the halls. She went instead to the window. A near-full moon was slipping behind the peaks to the west. She was on the second floor and she saw the fans of the HVAC complex whirling on the roof one level below. She raised the sash, kicked out the screen, and slid through legs first on her belly. She hung by her fingertips, then let go, landing on her feet in a crouch on the roof below.

  She lowered herself from the HVAC roof the same way. And then she was running for the center of town. She had things to do and not a lot of time to do them.

  “What couldn’t you tell me over the phone?” Ethan said as he stormed into Pilcher’s office, his second time here in six hours.

  The call had come at five-thirty a.m. Pam, dressed in running tights and a parka, had been waiting outside in a Jeep. She took him straight into the mountain where she led him to Pilcher’s apartment.

  From behind his desk Pilcher pointed to the bank of two hundred plus monitors on the wall. “Because you need to see this firsthand.”

  “A runner?”

  “Karla Lindley.”

  He hadn’t expected that.

  “But she’s in the hospital.”

  “That’s what we thought.”

  Pam said. “She was a basket case when I last saw her. Totally unresponsive.”

  Pilcher gave her an annoyed look. “And that’s why we didn’t have anyone on duty outside her room all night.”

  “She was practically catatonic.”

  Ethan couldn’t help enjoying Pam’s defensiveness. She was very possibly the most perfectly sociopathic personality he’d ever met.

  Pilcher pointed a remote. “We’ll start with the hospital room.”

  A screen in the lower-left corner of the bank flickered to the interior of a semi-dark room. The images fast forwarded double-time through Karla pulling her clothes from the closet, stripping off the hospital gown, and getting dressed.

  Pam smirked as Karla stuffed her underwear back in the bag. “She’s going commando. Not a bad bod for someone who doesn’t exercise.”

  Ethan agreed but said nothing. He knew that if Pam followed any religion, it was the god and goddess of aerobics and weight training.

  They watched her climb out the window. The angle shifted to the outside where they observed her dropping from the window to make a soft, graceful, double-foot landing on the roof below. Another angle showed her repeating the process to the ground.

  “She moves like a gymnast,” Ethan said, unable to keep the admiration from his tone.

  Pilcher nodded. “So we’ve noticed.”

  “But there’s nothing in her file about any involvement in gymnastics,” Pam said. “Ever.”

  “Video-wise, we lose her after that,” Pilcher said, “but we can track her path.”

  Weather had eroded the town’s outdoor video cams over the years, so visual coverage had become spotty in places. But the indoor cams remained fully functional, and the tracking chip implanted in every left thigh allowed Pilcher to know the whereabouts of every single resident at any moment.

  The screen lit with an aerial view of Wayward Pines that showed a red line tracing a winding trail behind the downtown stores.

  “There’s no clear path there,” Pam said. “Which means she’s hopping fences left and right.”

  “Are we talking some parkour action here?” Ethan said.

  Pam simply shrugged. If she thought so, she wasn’t saying so.

  “Where’s she going?” Ethan asked.

  “Here.” Pilcher stabbed his remote toward the bank and punched a button.

  A screen lit with the interior of a store Ethan new well.

  “Main Hardware?”

  They watched her grab a short-handle shovel, half a dozen knives, a hatchet, butane lighters, a couple of fistfuls of protein bars, two six-packs of water, and beef jerky, shoving them all into a duffel bag.

  “What the hell?”

  Pam’s smile had a nasty twist. “If you like this one, you’ll love the next.”

  The screen shifted to another interior with a view of Karla, duffel over her shoulder, passing a familiar looking desk.

  “Hey, that’s Belinda’s desk!”

  Karla was in the sheriff’s office. She looked around and then walked up to the gun cabinet. A few sharp blows with the hatchet popped the doors. He watched her search inside and come up with the .357 Smith & Wesson. After tucking that into her belt, she grabbed a shotgun—the 12-gauge autoload.

  “See that?” Pam said. “She went straight for the Benelli M4. Didn’t even hesitate.”

  “Almost as if she recognized it,” Ethan said, full of wonder.

  “Almost?” Pilcher said. “Watch.”

  She pulled a box of double-ought shells from the cabinet, then a box of one-ounce Brenneke slugs. Looking like she’d done it a thousand times before, she loaded the Benelli with alternating shells.

  “She’s loading a highway
-patrol cocktail,” Pam said. “The double-ought for whoever’s in the car, the hardball for the engine block.” She nodded with unabashed admiration. “The widow Lindley knows her shit.”

  With the Benelli loaded, she added extra boxes of shells to the duffel, along with a supply of .357 Mags, slung the Benelli over her shoulder, and headed for the door. The frame froze as she reached it.

  Ethan shook his head. “I know you can’t watch every cam feed all the time, but I can’t believe nobody picked her up at least once in real time.”

  “Oh, we did,” Pilcher said. “We spotted her in your office.”

  “And you didn’t stop her?”

  He smiled. “First off, she’s loaded for bear—or should I say, abby?—and appears to know her way around weaponry. For obvious reasons I want to avoid a firefight in downtown at all costs, and I don’t want to put any of our people at risk when it’s not necessary.”

  “Not necessary? But—”

  “She’s not a danger to the public, Ethan.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “We know where she’s going, and we know why. So do you.”

  Yeah, Ethan guessed he did.

  “I assume then that you haven’t tracked down those two abbies?”

  “Two teams couldn’t find a trace of them,” Pilcher said.

  “And so you’re going to let her go after them?”

  “Those abbies are a smart couple. If they see four humans approaching, they’ll hide. But a woman alone in the woods . . . will they be able to resist?”

  “You’re using her as bait,” Ethan said and thought to himself, Why am I not surprised?

  “I think it’s pretty obvious that she’s using herself as bait. The abbies will come at her expecting to face a lamb. From what I’ve just seen, I think they’ll find a wolverine.”

  “What if they kill her?”

  “There’s a decent chance of that, of course, but I doubt they’ll get away unscathed.”

  “And then we’ll have our guys finish them off,” Pam said.

  Ethan stared at the blurry face of the woman frozen on the screen.

  “Who is she?”

  “The million-dollar question,” Pilcher said. “I hope she survives, because I want to find out.”