Pines (13 page)

He’d called Theresa from that spot with just a single bar of connectivity.

Barely remembered their conversation. His mind had been elsewhere.

Last time he’d spoken to his wife.

He hoped he’d told her he loved her.

The brakes squealed as he brought the Buick to a full stop, left turn signal clicking. Aside from a handful of people on the sidewalks, the downtown was dead and Main Street empty as far as he could see.

Ethan eased out into the road through a gentle left turn and accelerated slowly, heading south.

He passed the pub, the hotel, the coffee shop.

After seven blocks, the hospital.

There were no outskirts.

The buildings simply ended.

He accelerated.

God, it felt good to be going, finally getting out, a palpable weight lifting off his shoulders with every revolution of the crankshaft. He should’ve done this two days ago.

There were no signs of habitation here, the road on a straight trajectory through a forest of pines so giant they could’ve been first-growth.

The air rushing into the car was cold, fragrant.

Mist hovered between the trees, and in places, across the road.

The headlights blazed through it, visibility dropping.

The reserve light came on.

Shit.

The road south out of town was on a steep and winding grade for several thousand feet up to the pass, and any minute now, the climb would begin. It was going to burn through what little gas remained. He should turn around now, head back into town, siphon enough to ensure he reached Lowman.

Ethan hit the brake for a long, sharp curve.

The mist was soup through the heart of the turn, the fog blinding white in the high beams, Ethan slowing down to a crawl with nothing to guide him but the faded double yellow.

The road straightened, shot out of the mist, out of the trees.

In the distance: a billboard.

Still an eighth of a mile back, all he could make out were four painted figures standing arm in arm.

Big, white-teeth smiles.

A boy in shorts and a striped shirt.

Mother and daughter in dresses.

The father suited, wearing a fedora, waving.

In block letters, under the perfect smiling family:

WELCOME TO WAYWARD PINES
WHERE PARADISE IS HOME

Ethan accelerated past the sign, the road moving parallel to a split-rail fence, the headlights grazing over a pasture and a herd of cattle.

Lights in the distance.

The pasture fell away behind him.

Soon, he was passing houses again.

The road widened, lost the double yellow divider.

It had turned into First Avenue.

He was back in town.

Ethan pulled over to the curb, stared through the windshield, trying to keep the panic in check. There was a simple explanation: he’d missed the turnoff to the pass. Had shot right past it in that patch of dense fog.

He whipped the car around and burned back up the road, hitting sixty by the time he reached the pasture.

Back in the mist and the towering pines, he searched for a sign, for some indication of where the road veered off toward the pass, but there was nothing.

In the sharpest section of the curve, he pulled off to the side of the road and shifted into park.

Left the car running, stepped out into the night.

He crossed to the other side and started walking along the shoulder.

After a hundred feet, the fog was thick enough to hide his car completely. He could still hear it idling, but the sound grew softer with each step.

He walked two hundred yards before stopping.

He’d come to the other side of the curve, where the road straightened out again and ran back into town.

The rumble of the car engine had died away completely.

There was no wind and the woods stood tall and silent.

Mist drifted by all around him, seemed to carry an electric charge, but he knew that hum was only some
microscopic noise within himself, in
his
head, exposed only in the total absence of sound.

Impossible.

The road should not turn here.

It should barrel on through these pines another half mile and then begin the long series of switchbacks up the side of that mountain to the south.

He stepped carefully down off the shoulder into the trees.

The pine needle floor of the forest like walking on cushions.

The air damp and chill.

These trees...he’d never seen pines so tall, and with little in the way of undergrowth to contend with, moving between the massive trunks was easy—a forest with breathing room. You could be lost before you knew it.

He walked out of the mist, and now when he looked up, glimpsed icy points of starlight through the tops of the trees.

Another fifty yards, and he stopped. He should go back now. There were certainly other roads out of town, and he could already feel the disorientation creeping in. He glanced back over his shoulder, thought he saw the general route he’d taken to arrive at this spot, but you couldn’t be sure. Everything looked the same.

Out of the woods ahead of him: a scream.

He became very still.

There was the thumping of his heart and nothing else.

The scream could only be compared to human suffering or terror. Like a hyena or a banshee. Coyotes at their maddest. The mythologized Rebel Yell. High and thin. Fragile. Terrible. And on some level, humming under the surface like buried electrical cables, was a dim awareness that this wasn’t the first time he’d heard it.

Again, the scream.

Closer.

An alarm going off between his eyes, in the pit of his stomach: Leave this place now. Don’t think about it. Just. Go.

Then he was running through the trees, gasping after twenty steps, back into the mist and the cold.

Up ahead, the ground sloped upward, and he climbed on hands and knees until he’d stumbled back out into the road. Despite the cold, he was sweating, eyes stinging with saltwater. He jogged along the double yellow line, back through the curve, until he saw two cylinders of light in the distance, cutting through the mist.

Slowed to a walk, and above the noise of his exertion, he heard the idle of the stolen car.

He reached it, opened the driver’s-side door. Climbed in behind the wheel, put his foot on the brake, and reached for the gearshift, desperate to leave this place.

He caught movement out of the corner of his left eye—a shadow in the side mirror. His eyes cut to the rearview mirror above the dash, and in the red glow of the brake lights, he saw what he’d missed—the cruiser parked thirty feet behind his rear bumper, just shy of complete invisibility in the mist.

When he looked back through the driver’s-side window, a shotgun barrel stared him down, just a few inches away. A flashlight blazed inside, firing the interior of the car with a harsh light that glared off the chrome and glass.

“You must be out of your goddamned mind.”

Sheriff Pope.

The irate gravel in his voice came slightly muffled through the glass.

Ethan still had his hand on the gearshift, wondering if he jammed it into drive and floored the gas—would Pope
fire on him? At this range with a twelve gauge, you were talking decapitation.

“Very slowly,” Pope said, “put both hands on the wheel, and use your right to turn off the car.”

Ethan said through the glass, “You know who I am, and you ought to know better than to interfere. I’m leaving this town.”

“The hell you are.”

“I’m an agent of the United States government, with the full—”

“No, you’re a guy with no ID, no badge, who just stole a car, who might have murdered a federal agent.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I won’t tell you again, partner.”

Something needled Ethan to comply, whispered that pushing this man could be dangerous. Even fatal.

“All right,” Ethan said. “Just give me a second. The car’s hotwired. I have to separate the wires to turn it off.”

Ethan flicked on the dome light, got his hands under the steering column, pulled the white wires apart.

The lights died.

The engine shut down.

Nothing but the painful brilliance of Pope’s flashlight.

“Out!”

Ethan found the handle, had to dig his shoulder into the door to jar it open. He stepped outside. Mist streamed through the light beam. Pope, an angry shadow behind the flashlight and the shotgun, eyes hidden under the brim of his Stetson.

Ethan smelled the gun oil, figured Pope for a man dedicated to the tender loving care of his armory.

“You remember that part where I told you not to leave town?” Pope growled.

Ethan would have answered, but the light beam struck the ground, Ethan realizing a split second before it hit him that the shadow moving toward his head was the stock of the shotgun.

* * *

Ethan’s left eye had been closed by the blow—it felt hot and huge and it throbbed with his pulse. Through his right, he saw the interrogation room. Claustrophobic and sterile. White cinder-block walls. Concrete floor. A bare wood table, on the other side of which sat Pope, sans Stetson and jacket, the sleeves of his hunter-green button-down rolled up to expose his forearms—thick and freckled and knotted with muscle.

Ethan wiped away the fresh line of blood sliding down the side of his face, oozing out of the gash above his left eyebrow.

He stared at the floor. “May I have a towel, please?”

“No. You can sit there and bleed and answer my question.”

“Later, when this is all over, and you’re out of prison, I’m going to invite you over to my house to see your badge. It’ll be behind glass, in a frame, hanging over my mantel.”

This elicited a radiant smile. “Think so, huh?”

“You assaulted a federal agent. That’s a career-ender.”

“Tell me again, Ethan, how exactly you came to know about the body in six-oh-four? And none of this vanishing-bartender bullshit.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The truth.”

“What I told you is the truth.”

“Really? You want to keep heading down that path? Because I went to the pub.” Pope drummed his fingers on
the tabletop. “They don’t even have a female bartender on staff, and nobody saw you there four nights ago.”

“Somebody’s lying.”

“So what I’m wondering is...why’d you
really
come to Wayward Pines?”

“I told you.”

“The”—in air quotes—“investigation?”

Ethan took a deep breath, felt the anger rattling in his chest like sand in a bleached-out skull. His head was killing him again, and he knew it was in part owing to the trauma to his face courtesy of Pope. But it also felt like that old, familiar pounding at the base of his skull that had plagued him ever since he’d woken by the river, not knowing who or where he was. And there was something more—the disconcerting déjà vu surrounding this interrogation.

“There’s something wrong with this place,” Ethan said, the emotion gathering like black clouds in his chest—accumulation of four days’ worth of pain and confusion and isolation. “I saw my old partner this evening.”

“Who?”

“Kate Hewson. I told you about her. Only she was older. At least twenty years older than she should’ve been. How is that possible? Tell me.”

“It ain’t.”

“And how can I not make contact with anyone on the outside? How is there no road out of town? Is this some kind of experiment?”

“Of course there’s a road out of town. You got any idea how goddamned crazy you sound?”

“There’s something wrong with this place.”

“No, there’s something wrong with you. I have an idea.”

“What?”

“How about I give you a sheet of paper. Let you have some time to write down everything you want to tell me. Perhaps I’ll give you one hour to do it.”

The offer chilled Ethan.

Pope continued. “Or maybe you’d answer my questions faster if I were wearing a black hood? Or if I hung you up by your wrists and cut you. Do you like being cut, Ethan?” Pope dug his hand into his pocket, tossed Ethan something across the table.

Ethan said, “You had it?” He lifted the wallet, flipped it open—Secret Service credentials in the clear plastic sleeve, but they weren’t his.

The badge had been issued to William V. Evans.

“Where’s mine?” Ethan asked.

“Yeah. Where. William Evans. Special Agent. Secret Service. Boise field office. How again did you know it was him in the abandoned house?”

“I told you. I was sent here to find him and Kate Hewson.”

“Oh, that’s right. I keep forgetting. I called your Agent Hassler in Seattle, by the way. He’d never heard of you.”

Ethan wiped more blood out of his face and leaned forward in his chair.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do, what game—”

“My theory, Agent Evans had been pursuing you, finally caught up with you here in Wayward Pines. So you kill him and kidnap his partner, Agent Stallings, intending to flee town in their car. Only on the way out, a little piece of bad luck catches up with you, and you get into a car accident. Stallings is killed, you take a hard blow to the head. Maybe it jars a screw loose, and when you wake up, you actually start believing
you’re
this Secret Service agent.”

“I know who I am.”

“Really? You don’t find it odd that no one can locate your identification?”

“Yeah, because it’s deliberately being—”

“Right, we’re all involved in some big conspiracy.” Pope laughed. “You ever consider that maybe no one can locate the badge of Ethan Burke because it doesn’t exist? Because
you
don’t exist?”

“You’re insane.”

“I think you may be projecting, partner. You killed Agent Evans, didn’t you—”

“No.”

“—you sick, psychopathic nut job. Beat him to death with what?”

“Fuck you.”

“Where’s the murder weapon, Ethan?”

“Fuck you.”

Ethan could feel the ire exploding within him. Pure, flammable rage.

“See,” Pope said, “I don’t know whether you’re just a damn good liar, or if you actually believe this elaborate lie you’ve constructed.”

Ethan stood.