Pines (32 page)

Pope stared through the glass at Pilcher, a beat of confusion flashing through the lawman’s eyes, followed quickly by recognition.

Then fear.

Pope screamed something that never had a chance of being heard.

“Why?” Ethan said.

Pilcher didn’t avert his eyes from Pope. “He wants to rule.”

Pope beat his fists against the window, blood smearing across the glass.

“Not to rush you or anything, Roger, but we’re all going to die if you don’t get us out of here.”

Ethan felt the skids pivot and go airborne.

He said, “You can’t just leave him.”

Ethan watched as the chopper lifted off the ground, the sheriff hooking his left arm around the skid, fighting to hang on.

“It’s done,” Pilcher said, “and you’re my new sheriff. Welcome aboard.”

A mob of abbies swarmed under Pope, jumping, clawing, but he’d established a decent grip on the skid and his feet dangled just out of reach.

Pilcher said, “Roger, take us down a foot or two if you wouldn’t mind.”

The chopper descended awkwardly—Ethan could tell the pilot hadn’t flown in years—lowering Pope back down into the madness on the ground.

When the first abby grabbed hold of Pope’s leg, the tail of the chopper ducked earthward under the weight.

Another one latched onto his other leg, and for a horrifying second, Ethan thought they would drag the chopper to the ground.

Roger overcorrected, climbing fast to a twenty-foot hover above the field.

Ethan stared down into Pope’s wild eyes.

The man’s grip on the skid had deteriorated to a single handhold, his knuckles blanching under the strain, three abbies clinging to his legs.

He met Ethan’s eyes.

Screamed something that was drowned out by the roar of the turbines.

Pope let go, fell for half a second, and then vanished under a feeding frenzy.

Ethan looked away.

Pilcher was staring at him.

Staring through him.

The helicopter banked sharply and screamed north toward the mountains.

* * *

It was a quiet flight, Ethan’s attention divided between staring out his window and glancing back through the curtain at his sleeping family.

The third time he looked in on them, Pilcher said, “They’ll be fine, Ethan. They’ll wake up tonight, safe and warm in bed. That’s what matters, right? Out here, you would all surely die.”

It was getting on toward dusk.

Ethan dead tired, but every time he shut his eyes, his thoughts ran in a hundred different directions and at blinding speeds.

So he tried to just watch the world move by.

His view was west.

The sun was gone, and in the wake of its passing, mountain ranges stood profiled against the evening sky like a misshapen saw blade.

There was nothing to see of the pine forest a thousand feet below.

Not a single speck of light anywhere that existed because of man.

* * *

They flew through gaping darkness.

With the cabin lights dimmed and the glow of the instrument panel in the cockpit hidden behind the curtain, Ethan could just as well have been adrift in a black sea.

Or space.

He had his family behind him, and there was comfort in that fact, but as he leaned against the freezing glass, he couldn’t help but feel a plunging stab of fear.

And despair.

They were alone.

So very much alone.

It hit him center mass.

These last few days, he’d been fighting to get back to his life outside of Wayward Pines, but it was gone.

Gone for nearly two thousand years.

His friends.

His home.

His job.

Almost everything that defined him.

How was a man supposed to come to terms with a thing like that?

How did one carry on in the face of such knowledge?

What got you out of bed and made you want to breathe in and out?

Your family. The two people sleeping behind you.

Ethan opened his eyes.

At first, he didn’t quite believe what he saw.

In the distance below, a wellspring of light shone in the midst of all that darkness.

It was Pines.

The house lights and porch lights.

The streetlights and car lights.

All merging into the soft nighttime glow of a town.

Of civilization.

They were descending now, and he knew that down in that valley, there stood a Victorian house where his wife and his son lived.

Where he could live too.

There was a warm bed to crawl into.

And a kitchen that would smell of the food they cooked.

A porch to sit out on during the long, summer evenings.

A yard where he might play catch with his son.

Maybe it even had a tin roof, and there was nothing he loved more than the sound of rain drumming on tin.
Especially late at night in bed, with your wife in your arms and your son sleeping just down the hall.

The lights of Wayward Pines glowed against the cliffs that boxed it in, and for the first time, those steep mountain walls seemed inviting.

Fortifications against all the horror that lay beyond.

Shelter for the last town on earth.

Would it ever
feel
like home?

Would it be all right if it did?

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. To the earth...a million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We’ve been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we’re gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.
Michael Crichton

From
Jurassic Park
by Michael Crichton, copyright © 1990 by Michael Crichton. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

He sits in the quiet of his office, his boots up on the desk, studying the brass star in his hand and running his fingers over the WP inset in the center, the lettering in some black stone—obsidian perhaps. He wears dark brown canvas pants and a hunter-green long-sleeved button-down, just like his predecessor. The fabric feels new and over starched.

There is an extensive briefing scheduled with Pilcher and his team tomorrow, but today has been uneventful.

And strange.

For eight hours, he sat in the stillness of his office, lost in thought, and the phone interrupted him only once—Belinda, the receptionist, at the noon hour asking if he’d like her to pick up anything for lunch.

He watches the second hand and the minute hand click over to the twelve.

It is five o’clock.

Sliding his boots off the desktop, he rises and puts on his Stetson, slips his brass star into his pocket. Maybe tomorrow he’ll bring himself to finally pin it on.

Or maybe not.

Like the first day of any new thing, it has been a long one, and he’s glad to see it end.

He looks at the three antique gun cabinets—a lustful, fleeting glance—and exits his office, heading down the hallway toward reception.

Belinda’s desk is covered in playing cards.

“I’m taking off,” Ethan says.

The white-haired woman lays down an ace of spades and looks up with a warm smile that does absolutely nothing to
divulge a single telling aspect of who she really is. “How was your first day?”

“It was fine.”

“You have a good night, Sheriff. We’ll see you in the morning.”

* * *

It is a cool, clear evening.

Already the sun has slipped behind the mountain walls, and there is a crisp chill settling in that may herald the first frost of the season.

Ethan heads down the sidewalk of a quiet neighborhood.

An old man sitting in a rocking chair on a covered porch calls out, “Evening, Sheriff!”

Ethan tips his hat.

The man raises a steaming mug.

Raises it like a toast.

Somewhere in the near distance, a woman calls out, “Matthew! Time for dinner!”

“Come on, Mom! Just five more minutes!”

“No, right now!”

Their voices echo and fade across the valley.

On the next street down, he walks alongside an entire block devoted to a community garden, several dozen people hard at work, filling large baskets with fruit and vegetables.

The scent of overripe apples skirts along on the breeze.

Everywhere Ethan looks, lights are coming on inside houses, the air becoming fragrant with the smell of suppers cooking.

Through cracked windows, he hears clanging dishes, indistinct conversations, ovens opening, closing.

Everyone he passes smiles and says hello.

Like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life.

* * *

He crosses Main and follows Sixth Street for several blocks until he arrives at the address Pilcher gave him.

It is a three-story Victorian, canary yellow with white trim, its most prominent feature a window shaped like a teardrop centered just below the pitch of the tin roof.

Through a large window on the first floor, he sees a woman standing at a kitchen sink, dumping a pot of boiling pasta into a colander, bellows of steam rising into her face.

As he watches her, he feels an anxious thumping in his chest.

It is his wife.

Up the stone path through the front yard, up three brick steps, and then he is standing on the porch.

He knocks on the screen door.

After a moment, the light winks on.

She opens the door crying and staring at him through the screen while footsteps clomp down a staircase.

Ethan’s son walks up behind her, puts his hands on his mother’s shoulders.

“Hi, Dad.”

Not the voice of a little boy.

“Jesus, you’re taller than your mother.”

There is still the screen between them and through the wire mesh, Theresa looks much the same, although her blonde hair is as long as she’s ever worn it.

“I heard they made you sheriff,” Ben says.

“That’s right.” A long, emotion-packed moment crawls by. “Theresa.”

She wipes her eyes with both hands.

“It smells wonderful,” Ethan says.

“I’m cooking spaghetti.”

“I love your spaghetti.”

“I know.” Her voice breaking.

“They told you I was coming?”

She nods. “You’re really here, Ethan?”

“Yes.”

“To stay this time?”

“I will never leave you again.”

“We’ve waited so long.” She has to keep wiping her face. “Ben, go stir the sauce, please.”

The boy hurries off to the kitchen.

“Would it be all right if I came inside?” Ethan asks.

“We lost you in Seattle. Then we lost you here. I can’t take it. He can’t take it.”

“Theresa, look at me.” She looks at him. “I will never leave you again.”

He worries she’s going to ask what happened. Why he isn’t dead. It’s a question he’s been dreading and preparing for all day.

But it doesn’t come.

Instead, she pushes open the door.

He has feared seeing a hardness in her face, feared it more than anything, but under the glow of the porch light, there is no bitterness here. Some brokenness. The beginnings of wrinkles around her mouth that weren’t there before. Around those bright green eyes that slayed him all those years ago. A lot of tears. But also love.

Mainly love.

She pulls him across the threshold into their home.

The screen door slams shut.

Inside the house, a boy is crying.

A man failing to hold back tears of his own.

Three people entangled in a fierce embrace with no letting go in sight.

And outside, at the exact moment the streetlamps cut on, a noise begins somewhere in the hedges that grow along the porch, repeating at perfect intervals, as steady as a metronome.

It is the sound of a cricket chirping.

by Blake Crouch

On April 8, 1990, the pilot episode of Mark Frost and David Lynch’s iconic television series
Twin Peaks
aired on ABC, and for a moment, the mystery of
Who Killed Laura Palmer?
held America transfixed. I was twelve at the time, and I will never forget the feeling that took hold of me as I watched this quirky show about a creepy town with damn fine coffee and brilliant cherry pie, where nothing was as it seemed.

Twin Peaks
was ultimately canceled, the brilliant director and actors went on to do other things, but the undeniable magic present in those early episodes still haunts me two decades later. Shows like
Northern Exposure
,
Picket Fences, The X-Files,
and
Lost
occasionally veered into that eerily beautiful creepiness that defined
Twin Peaks
, but for the most part, for this fan at least, nothing else has ever come close.

They say all art—whether books, music, or visual—is a reaction to other art, and I believe that to be true. As good as
Twin Peaks
was, the nature of the show, in particular how abruptly and prematurely it ended, left me massively unsatisfied. Shortly after the show was cancelled, I was so heartbroken I even tried to write its mythical third season, not for anyone but myself, just so I could continue the experience.

That effort failed, as did numerous other attempts as I matured, both as a person and a writer, to recapture the feeling my twelve-year-old self had experienced back in 1990.

Pines
is the culmination of my efforts, now spanning twenty years, to create something that makes me feel the
way
Twin Peaks
did. In no way am I suggesting that
Pines
is as good as Lynch’s masterpiece, or even something that is likely to take
you
back to the feeling of that series. The show was so utterly its own thing that any attempt to recreate its aura would be inherently doomed to fail. But I feel the need to express how much
Pines
is inspired by Lynch’s creation of a small town in the middle of nowhere—beautiful on the outside, but with a pitch-black underbelly.

Pines
would never have come about, and I may never have become a writer, if my parents hadn’t let me stay up late on Thursday nights, that spring of 1990, to watch a show the likes of which we will never see again.