Pines (18 page)

Not tonight...that is not going to happen tonight.

Beverly pulled off her poncho and went to him, curled up under the blanket against the wall. When the pattern of his breathing finally slowed into long respirations, she crawled over to the duffel bag and fished the knife out of an exterior pocket.

It was a folder, rusted and dull, but it was all she’d been able to find.

She tugged the blanket away and pulled up Ethan’s hospital gown and ran her hand along his left leg until she felt the bump on the back of his thigh.

Let her hand linger there a shade longer than she should have, hating herself for it, but God it’d been so long since she’d even touched or been touched by a man.

She’d considered telling Ethan ahead of time, but his impaired state had prevented this, and maybe that was for the best. Regardless, he was lucky. She hadn’t had the benefit of anesthesia when she’d done this to herself.

Beverly set the flashlight on the stone floor so it illuminated the backside of his left thigh.

It was covered in scars.

You couldn’t see the bump, only feel it—and just barely—if you knew exactly where to touch.

She pried open the blade, which she’d sterilized two hours ago with cotton balls and alcohol, her stomach lurching at the thought of what she had to do, praying the pain wouldn’t break his sedation.

Ethan dreamed he’d been tied down and that something was eating his leg, taking small, probing bites that occasionally went deep enough for him to cry out in his sleep.

* * *

He slammed awake.

Groaning.

Darkness everywhere, and his left leg, high on the back of his thigh, burning with a pain he knew all too well—someone was cutting him.

For a terrible moment, he was back in that torture room with black-hooded Aashif, hanging from the ceiling by his wrists, his ankles chained to the floor, and his body taut so he couldn’t struggle, so he couldn’t even move, no matter how awful the pain.

Hands shook his shoulders.

A woman’s voice said his name.

“Ethan, you’re all right. It’s over.”

“Please stop, oh God, please stop.”

“You’re safe. I got it out.”

He registered a splash of light, blinked several times until it sharpened into focus.

A flashlight beam shone on the floor.

In the indirect light, he glimpsed stone walls, two crypts, a stained-glass window, and then it all came roaring back.

“You know where you are?” Beverly asked.

His leg hurt so much he thought he was going to throw up.

“My leg...something’s wrong—”

“I know. I had to cut something out of it.”

His head was clearing, the hospital, the sheriff, his attempt to leave town all coming back, the memories trying to reassemble themselves into a sequence that made sense. He thought he’d seen Kate as well, but wasn’t sure. That piece felt too much like a dream, or a nightmare.

With newfound clarity, the pain in his leg was making it difficult to concentrate on anything else.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

Beverly lifted the flashlight and let it shine on her right hand, where between her thumb and first finger, she held something that resembled a microchip, specks of drying blood still caught up in the semiconductor.

“What is that?” he asked.

“How they monitor and track you.”

“That was in my leg?”

“They’re embedded in everyone’s.”

“Give it to me.”

“Why?”

“So I can stomp it into pieces.”

“No, no, no. You don’t want to do that. Then they’ll know you removed it.” She handed it to him. “Just ditch it in the cemetery when we leave.”

“Won’t they find us in here?”

“I’ve hidden here with the chip before. These thick stone walls disrupt the signal. But we can’t stay here long. They can track the chip to within a hundred yards of where the signal drops.”

Ethan struggled to sit up. He folded back the blanket to uncover a small pool of blood glistening on stone under the flashlight beam. More red eddies trickled out of an incision site on the back of his leg. He wondered how deep she’d had to dig. Felt light-headed, his skin achy and clammy with fever.

“You have something in the bag to close this wound?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Just duct tape.”

“Get it. Better than nothing.”

Beverly pulled the duffel bag over and thrust her hand inside.

Ethan said, “Did I dream you told me you came here in 1985, or did that really happen?”

“That happened.” She pulled out a roll of tape. “What do I do?” she asked. “I have no medical training.”

“Just wrap it around my leg several times.”

She started a piece of tape and then moved in, winding it carefully around Ethan’s thigh.

“Is that too tight?”

“No, it’s good. You need to stop the bleeding.”

She made five revolutions and then ripped the tape and smoothed it down.

“I’m going to tell you something,” Ethan said. “Something that you won’t believe.”

“Try me.”

“I came here five days ago...”

“You already told me that.”

“The date was September twenty-fourth, 2012.”

For a moment, she just stared at him.

“Ever heard of an iPhone?” Ethan asked.

She shook her head...

“The Internet? Facebook? Twitter?”

...and kept shaking it.

Ethan said, “Your president is...”

“Ronald Reagan.”

“In 2008, America elected its first black president, Barack Obama. You’ve never heard of the
Challenger
disaster?”

He noticed the flashlight beginning to tremble in her hand.

“No.”

“The fall of the Berlin Wall?”

“No, none of it.”

“The two Gulf Wars? September eleventh?”

“Are you playing some mind game with me?” Her eyes narrowed—one measure of anger, two of fear. “Oh God. You’re with them, aren’t you?”

“Of course not. How old are you?”

“Thirty-four.”

“And your birthday is...”

“November first.”

“What year?”

“Nineteen fifty.”

“You should be sixty-one years old, Beverly.”

“I don’t understand what this means,” she said.

“Makes two of us.”

“The people here...they don’t talk to each other about anything outside of Wayward Pines,” she said. “It’s one of the rules.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They call it ‘live in the moment.’ No talk of politics is allowed. No talk of your life before. No discussions of pop culture—movies, books, music. At least nothing that isn’t available here in town. Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are hardly any brand names. Even the money is weird. I didn’t realize it until recently, but all the currency is from the fifties and sixties. Nothing later. And there are no calendars, no newspapers. Only way I know how long I’ve been here is because I keep a journal.”

“Why is it like this?”

“I don’t know, but the punishment for slipping up is severe.”

Ethan’s leg throbbed from the constriction of the duct tape, but at least the bleeding had subsided. He let it ride for now, but he’d have to loosen it soon.

Beverly said, “If I find out you’re with them—”

“I am not with them, whoever
they
are.”

There were tears building in her eyes. She blinked them away and wiped the glistening trails off the sides of her face.

Ethan leaned back against the wall.

The chills and the aches getting worse.

He could still hear the rain beating down above them, and it was still night beyond that stained-glass window.

Beverly lifted the blanket off the floor and draped it over Ethan’s shoulders.

“You’re burning up,” she said.

“I asked you what this place was, but you never really answered me.”

“Because I don’t know.”

“You know more than me.”

“The more you know, the stranger it becomes. The less you know.”

“You’ve been here a year. How have you survived?”

She laughed—sad and resigned. “By doing what everyone else does...buying into the lie.”

“What lie?”

“That everything’s fine. That we all live in a perfect little town.”

“Where paradise is home.”

“What?”

“Where paradise is home. It’s something I saw on a sign on the outskirts of town when I was trying to drive out of here last night.”

“When I first woke up here, I was so disoriented and in so much pain from the car accident, I believed them when they told me I lived here. After wandering around in a fog all day, Sheriff Pope found me. He escorted me to the Biergarten, that pub where you and I first met. Told me I was a bartender there, even though I’d never tended bar in
my life. Then he took me to a little Victorian house I’d never seen before, told me it was home.”

“And you just believed him?”

“I had no competing memories, Ethan. I only knew my name at that point.”

“But the memories came back.”

“Yes. And I knew something was very wrong. I couldn’t make contact with the outside world. I knew this wasn’t my life. But there was something, I don’t know—sinister—about Pope. On some instinctive level, I knew better than to question him about anything.

“I didn’t have a car, so I started taking long walks toward the outskirts of town. But a strange thing happened. Every time I’d get near to where the road looped back, guess who showed up? It dawned on me that Pope wasn’t really a sheriff. He was a warden. For everyone who lived here. I realized he must be tracking me somehow, so for two months I kept my head down, went to work, went home, made a few friends—”

“And they’d bought into all this as well?”

“I don’t know. On a surface level, they never blinked. Never gave any indication that things were out of the ordinary. After a while, I realized it must be fear that was keeping everyone in line, but of what, I didn’t know. And I sure didn’t ask.”

Ethan thought back to the neighborhood party he’d stumbled upon—God, was it just last night?—and how normal it had seemed. How perfectly ordinary. He thought of all the quaint Victorian houses in Wayward Pines and of all the families who lived inside them. How many residents—inmates—kept up a strong, carefree countenance during the day, but then lay awake at night, sleepless, minds racing, terrified and struggling to comprehend why they’d been locked away in this scenic prison? He imagined more than a few. But human beings were, if nothing else, adaptable. He
figured just as many had convinced themselves, convinced their children, that things were exactly as they should be. As they’d always been. How many lived day to day, in the moment, banishing any thought or remembrance of the life they had known before? It was easier to accept what could not be changed than to risk everything and seek out the unknown. What lay beyond. Long-term inmates often committed suicide, or reoffended, when faced with the prospect of life outside the prison walls. Was it so different here?

Beverly continued, “One night at the bar, a few months after my arrival, this guy slipped me a note. It said, ‘the back of your left thigh.’ That night in the shower, I felt it for the first time—a small bump, something under the skin—although I didn’t know what I was supposed to do about it. Next night, he was back at my bar. Scribbled a new message, this time on the ticket—‘cut it out, keep it safe, it’s how they track you.’

“First three times, I chickened out. The fourth, I manned up and did it. By day, I always kept the chip with me. Carried on like everyone else. And the weird thing is that there were moments when it almost felt normal. I’d be at someone’s house having dinner, or a neighborhood block party, and I’d catch this feeling like maybe it had always been this way, and that my prior life was the dream. I started to see how people could grow to accept a life in Wayward Pines.

“At night, after my shift ended at the pub, I’d go home, leave the chip in my bed where I was supposed to be, and head out. Each night, a different direction. I kept running into dead ends. To the north, east, and west were these towering cliff walls, and I could climb them for a hundred feet or so, but the ledges inevitably got thinner, and I would always run out of handholds or come to a point where I didn’t have the guts to keep climbing. I came across more than a few skeletons at
the base of those cliffs—old, broken bones. Human. People who had tried to climb out and taken a fall.

“Fourth time I ventured out, I went south up the main road, the one I’d driven into Wayward Pines. I found what you found—it just looped back into town, back into itself in an endless circle. But I kept heading south into the woods. Must’ve gone a half mile before I finally came to the fence.”

“A fence?”

The throbbing in Ethan’s leg had become unbearable, worse than the pain of Beverly’s incision. He loosened the duct tape.

“It was twenty feet high and it ran through the forest in either direction as far as I could see. There was barbed wire across the top, and it hummed like it was electrified. The same sign was attached to the fencing every fifty feet. It said, ‘Return to Wayward Pines. Beyond This Point You Will Die.’”

Ethan rewrapped his leg.

The throbbing had faded, and there was still pain, but it seemed to have dulled.

“Did you find a way through?”

“No. It was getting near dawn, and I thought I’d better get back to town. But when I turned to go, there was a man standing in front of me. Scared me to death until I realized who it was.”

“Guy who told you about the chip?”

“Exactly. He said he’d been following me. Every night I’d gone out.”

“Who was he?” Ethan asked, and he couldn’t be sure in the low light, but it looked as though a shadow passed across Beverly’s face.

“Bill.”

A prickling sensation, like a low-amp current, ripped through Ethan’s body.

“What was Bill’s last name?” he asked.

“Evans.”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“Evans was the dead man in the house. The one you steered me toward.”

“Right. I wanted you to understand right off how dangerous this place is.”

“Message received. Evans was one of the Secret Service agents I was sent to Wayward Pines to find.”