Pines (28 page)

Rice.

Flour.

Sugar.

Grain.

Iodized Salt.

Corn.

Vitamin C.

Soybeans.

Powdered Milk.

Malt.

Barley.

Yeast.

Ethan ran into the labyrinth of containers. He could hear footfalls—very close—but with all the spatial interference, it was impossible to pinpoint their location.

He stopped and leaned against a reservoir, breathing into his shirt in the crook of his arm, fighting to mask the noise of his panting.

A man in black fatigues bolted past, holding a walkie-talkie in one hand and something that resembled a cattle prod in the other.

Ethan waited ten seconds and then changed course, threading his way through the containers for another hundred yards until he emerged into a parking lot of cars.

The vehicles ranged in type from early eighties to present to models he’d never seen before—curvaceous, compact
designs that looked more like radical concept cars than anything that belonged on a public street.

Every vehicle, without exception, sported gleaming chrome and unblemished paint jobs under the hanging globe lights, all looking as new and shiny as if they’d just rolled off the assembly line thirty seconds prior.

A group of men jogged into view on the far side of the parking lot.

Ethan ducked between a couple of red Jeep Cherokees, didn’t know if he’d been seen, but he felt confident he’d spotted automatic weapons.

He crawled for several car lengths and then rose up slowly beside a driver’s door until he was peering through the windshield of an early-eighties model Impala.

They were closer than he’d realized, just thirty feet away now and all armed with submachine guns. Two of them shined flashlights into the interior of every vehicle they passed while the third crawled behind on hands and knees, putting a light under each car.

Ethan headed in the opposite direction, not bothering to crawl, just running hunched over on the uneven rock and trying to make sure his head wasn’t visible through any glass.

Near the edge of the parking lot, he stumbled past a Crown Vic with tinted windows in the rear passenger doors. He stopped, and with absolute precision, pulled on the handle and tugged the door open without a sound.

The dome light blazed down, and Ethan scrambled inside, jerking the door shut after him with just a touch too much force.

Even from inside the car, he could hear the echo of the slammed door riding through the cavern.

Crouching down in the shadows behind the driver seat, Ethan glanced over the headrest and through the windshield.

The trio of men were all standing now, each slowly turning, trying to ascertain where the noise had originated.

They finally split up, two moving away from Ethan, but one heading straight toward his car.

As the man approached, Ethan got down behind the seat and curled up into as small and compact a ball as he could make himself.

The footsteps drew near.

He had his head tucked between his knees.

Couldn’t see a thing.

Then the footsteps were right at his head, inches away on the other side of the door.

They didn’t trail away.

They had stopped.

The urge to lift his head to see what was happening so strong it nearly overcame him.

He wondered if the man was spotlighting the interior of the Crown Vic.

Wondered how well the light would pass through the rear tinted windows.

If he couldn’t get a decent glimpse inside, would he just open the door?

The footsteps went on, but Ethan didn’t move—waited another five minutes until he could no longer hear them.

Finally, he sat up and stared through the windshield.

The men were gone.

He didn’t see anyone.

Ethan eased the door open and crawled down onto the rock. If he strained to listen, he could hear voices, but they were much farther off, in some distant region of the cavern.

A hundred feet of crawling brought Ethan to the edge of the parking lot.

Straight ahead stood the cavern wall and the opening to a tunnel broad enough for two cars to travel abreast.

Ethan rose up onto his feet and crossed to the tunnel.

It was empty and well lighted and fell away from where he stood in a straight shot that descended at a ten or twelve percent grade over pristine pavement.

A sign had been affixed to the rock above the arched opening—white lettering on green background, just like the signage of the American interstate highway system.

But it listed only one destination...

WAYWARD PINES 3.5

Ethan glanced back at all the cars, thinking maybe he could borrow one of the older models, which were much easier to hotwire.

Something caught his eye—a chill blue light coming from a glass door in the rock fifty yards away.

The sound of footsteps and voices came back into range, still a good distance away, beyond the cars. Ethan thought he saw the beam of a flashlight strike one of the reservoirs, but he couldn’t be sure.

He kept close to the wall of the cavern.

It curved gently as he jogged alongside it toward the glass door.

Five feet away, he stopped.

As the door slid open, he read a single word stenciled on the glass:

SUSPENSION

Ethan stepped inside.

The door zipped closed behind him.

It was much colder, just a few degrees above freezing, and his breath plumed in the chill. The light was frigid blue, like sunshine passing through sea ice, and the air was murky
with a pale gas that hovered ten feet above, thick enough to completely mask the ceiling like a cloud. And yet this room had the clean, rinsed smell of a post-snowstorm night—odorless and pure.

The noise of hissing gas and soft beeps broke the silence.

Approximately the dimensions of a grocery store, the room housed row after row of charcoal-colored units—hundreds and hundreds of them—each the size of a drink machine, each spitting a white stream of gas from its roof like a smoking chimney.

Ethan walked down the first aisle and faced one of the machines.

A two-inch-wide panel of glass ran down the middle, nothing to see behind it.

To the left of the glass, a keypad was framed with several gauges and readouts, all of them zeroed out.

To the right of the glass, he studied a digital nameplate:

JANET CATHERINE PALMER
TOPEKA, KS
SUSPENSION DATE: 2.3.82
RESIDENT: 11 YEARS, 5 MONTHS, 9 DAYS

Ethan heard the door slide open, turned to see who’d entered, but the waves of gas blocked his view. He moved on down the aisle, deeper into the fog, glancing at the nameplate on each machine he passed, the suspension dates progressing steadily through the 1980s.

One stopped him altogether as voices mixed in with the sound of escaping gas and beeps.

Behind the center pane of glass, it looked as if the interior of the machine had been packed with black sand. Just barely poking through, he saw a white finger, motionless, its tip resting against the glass beneath a fingerprint smudge.

The gauges displayed what appeared to be a flat-lined heart monitor and a temperature reading of 21.1111°C.

The nameplate:

BRIAN LANEY ROGERS
MISSOULA, MT
SUSPENSION DATE: 5.5.84
INTEGRATION ATTEMPTS: 2

The next machine down stood empty, but Ethan recognized the first name, wondered if it was her:

BEVERLY LYNN SHORT
BOISE, ID
SUSPENSION DATE: 10.3.85
INTEGRATION ATTEMPTS: 3
TERMINATED

There was someone moving quickly toward him now. He tore himself away from Beverly’s unit, mind reeling as he ran to the end of the aisle and started up the next.

What the hell did this mean?

There must have been a half dozen people in the room now, all chasing him, but he didn’t care.

Just needed to see one more unit.

Had to see it.

And on the fourth row, midway down the aisle, with voices closing in, he stopped.

Stared at the empty machine.

His
empty machine.

JOHN ETHAN BURKE
SEATTLE, WA
SUSPENSION DATE: 9.24.12
INTEGRATION ATTEMPTS: 3
TERMINATION IN PROGRESS

Reading his name didn’t make it any more real.

He stood there not knowing what to do with the information in front of him.

Trying to piece together what it meant.

For the first time in what seemed like forever, he couldn’t care less about running.

“Ethan!”

He knew this voice, although it took him a moment to link it back to the memory.

To the face it belonged to.

“We need to talk, Ethan!”

Yes, we do.

It was Jenkins. The psychiatrist.

Ethan started walking.

He felt like he’d been unraveling for days, but now he was getting down to the end of the string, wondering what exactly was going to happen when it all ran out.

“Ethan, please!”

He wasn’t even looking at names anymore, or to see which machine was occupied, which one empty.

Only one thing mattered, one terrible suspicion gnawing his guts out.

“We don’t want to hurt you! No one touches him!”

It was all he could do to make his legs work as he approached the last machine on the last row in the farthest corner of the room.

Men followed him now.

He could sense them close behind in the fog.

No chance at escaping now, but then, did it really matter anymore?

He arrived at the last machine and put his hand against the glass to brace himself.

Surrounded by black sand, a man’s face pressed against that narrow window down the front.

Eyes open.

Unblinking.

No breath to fog the inside the glass.

Ethan read the nameplate and the year of suspension—2032. He turned around as Dr. Jenkins emerged out of the fog, the small, unassuming man flanked by five of those black-clad men dressed in something approaching full riot gear.

Jenkins said, “Please don’t make us hurt you.”

Ethan shot a glance up the last aisle—two more figures loomed in the fog.

He was cornered.

Said, “What is this?”

“I understand you want to know.”

“Do you.”

The psychiatrist studied him for a moment. “You look terrible, Ethan.”

“So I was what, frozen?”

“You were chemically suspended.”

“What does that even mean?”

“To oversimplify, we use hydrogen sulfide to induce hypothermia. Once the core temperature is at ambient levels, we pack you in volcanic sand and crank up the sulfur gas to a concentration that kills all aerobic bacteria. Then we attack the anaerobic. Basically anything that supports cell senescence. This puts you in a highly efficient state of suspended animation.”

“So you’re telling me that, at least for a time, I was dead?”

“No. Dead...by definition...is something that can’t be undone. We like to think of it as turning you off in such a way that allows us to turn you on again. To reboot you. Keep in mind, I’m giving you the dummy’s guide to a very delicate and complex process. One that took decades to perfect.”

Jenkins moved forward with the caution he might have used to approach a rabid animal. His thugs kept close, inching forward themselves, but he waved them back, stopping two feet away from Ethan, and reaching out slowly until his hand touched Ethan’s shoulder.

“I understand this is a lot to take in. That fact is not lost on me. You aren’t crazy, Ethan.”

“I know that. I’ve always known that. So what is this all about then? What does it mean?”

“You’d like for me to show you?”

“What do you think?”

“All right, Ethan. All right. But I have to warn you...I’m going to ask for something in return.”

“What?”

Jenkins didn’t answer. Instead, he just smiled and touched something to Ethan’s side.

Ethan heard clicking, realized what was coming a half second before it hit him—like jumping into a freezing lake, every muscle flexing in unison, his knees locking, and a blast-furnace burn at the excruciating point of contact.

Then he was on the ground, his entire body vibrating and Jenkins’s knee digging into the small of his back.

The pinch of a needle sliding into the side of his neck cut through the effects of the electro-muscular disruption, and Jenkins must have hit a vein, because almost immediately, the pain of the Taser hit melted away.

The pain of everything melted away.

The euphoric rush coming fast and hard and Ethan struggling to see through it, to keep a finger on the fear of what was happening.

But the drug was too beautiful.

Too heavy.

It pulled him under into a painless bliss.

Barely two seconds have elapsed since the last grain of black sand emptied from the upper bulb of the hourglass when the door unlocks and swings open.

Aashif stands in the doorway smiling.

It is the first time Ethan has seen him without a hood, and it strikes him that this does not look like a man who is capable of doing the things to Ethan he has promised he will do.

His face is clean-shaven with only the faintest peppering of stubble.

Hair black and midlength and greased back.

“Which of your parents was white?” Ethan asks.

“My mother was British.” Aashif steps into the room. At the desk, he stops and stares down at the sheet of paper. Points to it. “I trust it is not blank on the other side.” He turns it over, studies it for a moment, and shakes his head as his eyes rise to Ethan’s. “You were to write down something that made me happy. Did you not understand my instructions?”

“Your English is fine. I understood.”

“Then maybe you do not believe I will do what I have said.”

“No, I believe you.”

“What then? Why did you not write something?”

“But I did.”

“In invisible ink?”

Now Ethan smiles. It takes everything within his power to stifle the tremor that keeps threatening to move through his hands.