Pines (27 page)

Shivering.

Insanely thirsty.

Maddeningly hungry and unable to reach the food in his pocket.

He could hear his heart heaving in his chest against the metal and nothing else.

* * *

He slept.

Or lost consciousness.

Or died for a minute.

When he woke again, he thrashed violently against the sides of the duct, no idea where he was or even when he was, his eyes open to sheer darkness.

For a terrifying moment, he thought he’d been buried alive, the sound of his own hyperventilation like someone screaming in his ear.

* * *

Crawled for what seemed like days.

His eyes conjuring strange displays of light that appeared with greater frequency the longer he stayed in darkness.

Vivid bursts of color.

Imaginary auroras.

Haunting radiance in the black.

And the longer he crawled in that confined darkness, the more aggressively one thought kept eating at him—none of this is real.

Not Wayward Pines, or the canyon, or those creatures, or even you.

So what is this? Where am I?

In a long, dark tunnel. But where do you think you’re going?

I don’t know.

Who are you?

Ethan Burke.

No,
who
are you?

The father of Ben. Husband of Theresa. I live in a neighborhood in Seattle called Queen Anne. I was a Black Hawk helicopter pilot in the second Gulf War. After that, a Secret Service agent. Seven days ago, I came to Wayward Pines—

Those are just facts. They say nothing about your identity, your nature.

I love my wife, but I was unfaithful to her.

That’s good.

I love my son, but I was rarely around. Just a distant star in his sky.

Even better.

I have good intentions, but...

But what?

But all the time I fail. I hurt the ones I love.

Why?

I don’t know.

Are you losing your mind?

I sometimes think I’m still in that torture room. I never left.

Are you losing your mind?

You tell me.

I can’t.

Why?

Because I am you.

* * *

At first, he thought it was just another phantom light show, but there were no erratic blooms of color. No optic fireworks.

Just a sustained speck of blue somewhere far ahead, as faint as a dying star.

When he closed his eyes, it disappeared.

When he opened them, it came back again, like the only vestige of sanity left in his claustrophobic world. It was just a point of light, but he could make it vanish and reappear, and even this scintilla of control was something to cling to.

An anchor. A port of call.

Ethan thinking,
Please. Be real
.

* * *

The dim blue star grew larger, and with its expansion came a quiet hum.

Ethan stopped to rest, a soft vibration now moving through the ductwork, moving through him.

After hours in the dark, this new sensation felt as comforting as a mother’s heartbeat.

* * *

Sometime later, the blue star changed shape into a tiny square.

It grew until it dominated Ethan’s field of vision, anticipation roiling in his gut.

Then it was ten feet ahead of him.

Then five.

Then he was stretching his arms out of the opening of the duct, his shoulders crackling, the new freedom of movement as sweet as he imagined water might have been.

Hanging out of the end of the duct, he stared down into one twice as wide and intersected by other shafts.

A soft blue light filled the main airshaft—emanating from a bulb far below.

Down at the bottom, he glimpsed an air intake.

Must have been a hundred-foot drop down to those blades.

Like staring down a well.

At intervals of ten feet, more shafts fed into the main, some of them considerably larger.

Ethan glanced up. The ceiling was two feet above his head.

Shit.

He knew what his next move was, what it had to be, and he didn’t like it.

* * *

Ethan climbed out into the airshaft with the same technique he’d used to ascend the chute—a pressure stance, each foot pushing into the opposite wall.

His bare feet achieved decent purchase on the metal, and despite the looming fall into spinning blades that awaited even the smallest mistake, he felt almost giddy to be free of that tiny shaft.

* * *

He descended in painstakingly slow increments, one step at a time, keeping pressure against the walls with his arms while he lowered his legs, then shifting the pressure back onto the balls of his feet.

Forty feet down, he rested at the opening to the first large horizontal shaft he’d encountered, sitting on the edge and staring down at the whirring blades as he ate the last of the carrots and bread.

He’d been so focused on surviving that it only now occurred to him to wonder what purpose all this infrastructure served.

Instead of continuing down, he glanced back into the shaft, noticing the darkness was interspersed with panels of light positioned at regular intervals. They extended on as far as he could see.

Ethan turned over onto his hands and knees and crawled across the metal for twenty feet until he reached the first one.

Stopped at the edge, a jolt of fear-tinged excitement coursing through him.

It wasn’t a panel of light.

It was a vent.

He stared through it, down onto a flooring of checkered tile.

The air blowing through the ductwork had taken on a lovely warmth, like an ocean breeze in the dead of July.

For a long time, he waited.

Watching.

Nothing happened.

There was the sound of moving air, of his respirations, of the metal expanding and contracting, and nothing else.

Ethan took hold of the vent by its grating.

It lifted easily away, no screws, no nails, no welding holding it in place.

Setting the grate aside, he grabbed hold of the edge and tried to build the nerve to climb down.

Ethan lowered himself out of the duct until his bare feet touched the black-and-white checkered tile. He stood in the middle of a long, empty corridor. There was the hum of the fluorescent lights and the soft
whoosh
of air moving through the ductwork above him, but no other sound.

His feet made a quiet slap against the tile as he began to walk.

There were doors spaced out every twenty feet with numbers on them, and the one up ahead on his right was barely cracked and spilling a bit of light out onto the floor.

He reached it—number 37—and put his hand on the doorknob.

Listened.

No voices. No movement. Nothing to turn him away.

He pushed the door open another inch and looked inside.

There was a single bed on a metal frame against the far wall, perfectly made. A desk decorated with framed photographs and some tulips in a vase. His eyes passed over a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, a Matisse print, an easel. Beside the door, a terrycloth robe hung from a hook in the wall, a pair of pink bunny slippers beneath it.

He went on down the silent corridor.

None of the doors were locked, and each one he took the risk of opening revealed a similar minimalist living space, brightened with a few flourishing touches of individuality.

After an impressive distance, the corridor terminated in a stairwell, Ethan standing at the top and staring down, counting four flights to the bottom.

A placard on the wall read
Level 4
.

He crept down to the next landing, which delivered him onto another corridor that looked identical to the one above.

Hard, sudden laughter resonated through the hall.

It drove Ethan back into the stairwell and primed him to flee. He was already figuring he could return to Level 4, use a chair from one of those apartments to climb back up into the airshaft. But the laughter died down, and after he’d waited a full minute, the corridor remained empty.

He padded thirty feet in, finally stopping in front of a pair of swinging doors, each inset with a small window.

A group of three men and two women occupied one of a dozen tables in a modest cafeteria, the smell of hot food making Ethan’s stomach rumble.

One of the women said, “You know that’s not true, Clay,” pointing a fork at him that had speared a glob of what looked like mashed potatoes.

Ethan moved on down the corridor.

He passed a laundry.

A rec room.

A library.

An empty gymnasium.

Men’s and women’s locker rooms.

An exercise room where two women jogged side by side on treadmills and a man lifted free weights.

Ethan came to the stairwell at the far end and descended a flight of stairs that led out into the Level 2 corridor.

At the first door he came to, he stopped and peered inside through its circular window.

There was a gurney in the center, surrounded by lights, carts loaded with surgical instruments, heart monitors, IV stands, cautery and suction units, a fluoroscopy table, all immaculately clean and glimmering under the lowlight.

The next three doors were windowless and identified only by nameplates:
Lab A, Lab B, Lab C
.

Down toward the end of the corridor, one window glowed, and Ethan sidled up beside it.

On the other side of the glass—tapping and the murmur of soft, low voices.

He peered through the window.

The room was mostly dark, its glow coming from numerous monitors—twenty-five of them in five stacks of five mounted to the wall and perched above a large console that looked serious enough to launch a rocket.

Ten feet from where Ethan stood, a man sat staring up at them, his fingers moving at light speed across a keyboard as the images on the screens constantly changed. He wore a headset, and Ethan could just hear his voice coming through, though the words were lost.

On one of the screens, Ethan studied the slideshow of images...

The façade of a Victorian house.

The porch of a different house.

An alleyway.

A bedroom.

An empty bathtub.

A bathroom with a woman standing in front of a mirror, brushing her hair.

A man seated at a kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal.

A child sitting on a toilet reading a book.

A view of Main Street in Wayward Pines.

The playground at the park.

The cemetery.

The river.

The interior of the coffee shop.

The hospital lobby.

Sheriff Pope sitting behind his desk with his feet kicked up, talking on the telephone.

Ethan’s line of sight was limited through the window, but he could just make out the left edge of another block of monitors and the sound of other people typing.

A pool of hot rage went supernova somewhere deep inside him.

He put his hand on the doorknob, started to turn it. Would have loved nothing more than to creep up behind that man as he watched people going about their private lives and snap his neck.

But he stopped himself.

Not yet.

Ethan backed away from the surveillance center and headed down the stairwell, emerging into the bottom corridor—Level 1.

Though difficult to tell from this distance, at the far end it appeared to extend beyond the stairwell into another section of the complex.

Ethan picked up his pace.

Every ten feet, he moved past a door with no handle, no apparent method of entry beyond a keycard slot.

Third one down on his left, he stopped.

Glanced through the small window into darkness—just an empty room.

He did the same at the tenth door down, stopping and cupping his hands over his eyes so he could draw more detail out of the shadows.

The face of one of those creatures from the canyon crashed into the glass on the other side, its teeth bared and hissing.

Ethan stumbled back into the opposite wall, his system buzzing from the scare as the thing screeched behind the glass—thick enough to dampen most of the sound.

Footfalls echoed in the stairwell he’d just been in.

Ethan hurried down the corridor, moving as fast as he could, the fluorescent fixtures scrolling past in a stream of artificial light.

He glanced once over his shoulder as he reached the stairwell, saw two figures in black moving into the far end of the corridor a hundred yards back. One of them pointed and shouted something, and then they rushed toward him.

Ethan hustled through the stairwell.

A pair of automatic glass doors were sliding together straight ahead of him.

He turned sideways, barely managing to squeeze through as they closed after him.

It was the epic proportions of the next room that took him aback, the mad scope of this place bringing him to a full stop.

He no longer stood on tile but on cold rock and at the edge of a cavern the size of ten warehouses—a million square feet at least if he had to guess, and the distance from floor to ceiling sixty feet in places. In all his life, he’d seen only one space more impressive—the Boeing Plant in Everett, Washington.

Giant globes of light hung down from the rocky ceiling, each one illuminating a thousand-square-foot section of floor space.

There were hundreds of them.

The glass doors had begun to spread open behind him, and he could hear the footsteps of those black-garbed men—they’d already covered half the distance of the corridor.

Ethan ran into the cavern and shot down a passageway between shelves laden with lumber of every dimension. The shelves were forty feet tall, three deep on either side, and extended the length of a football field, Ethan figuring they contained enough linear board feet to rebuild Wayward Pines five times over.

Numerous voices echoed through the cavern.

Ethan glanced over his shoulder, saw someone a couple of hundred feet back sprinting toward him.

He broke out of the narrow canyon between the shelves.

Straight ahead, the floor space was overrun by hundreds of cylindrical reservoirs thirty feet tall and just as wide, each capable of holding tens of thousands of cubic feet, each labeled in huge, block letters as tall as Ethan.