The Last Town (The Wayward Pines Trilogy 3) (19 page)

If he’d had a keycard to this cell, Ethan would’ve rushed inside and beat the man to death.

Everyone—townies and mountain people—came down for the burials.

The cemetery was too full to accommodate all the bodies so an open field on the southern border of the graveyard was annexed.

Ethan helped Kate with Harold.

The sky was gray.

No one spoke.

Tiny flakes of snow swirled through the crowd.

There was just the constant sound of shovels stabbing into the cold, hard ground.

As the digging finished, people crumpled down in the snow-frosted grass beside loved ones, or what was left of them, the dead wrapped tightly in once-white sheets. The digging had given them something to do, but as they sat motionless and cold beside lost fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, friends, and children, muffled sobs began to rise up from the crowd.

Ethan walked out into the middle of the field.

From where he stood, it was a crushing collection of sights and sounds: all those little mounds of dirt, the dead waiting to be lowered into their final resting places, the grieving of those who had lost everything, the mountain people standing behind the townies looking solemnly on, and the column of smoke at the north end of town coughing spirals of sweet-smelling black into the sky as six hundred abby corpses smoldered into nothing.

Except for David Pilcher, the man responsible for all this pain, every human being left on earth was in this field.

Even Adam Hassler, standing on the outskirts with Theresa and Ben.

Ethan was struck with a single, terrifying thought:
I’m losing my wife
.

He made a slow turn, studying all the faces. The grief was overpowering. A living thing.

“I don’t know what to say. Words can’t make any of this feel better. We lost three-quarters of our people, and it’s going to be hard for a long, long time. Let’s do what we can to help one another, because it’s just us out here alone in the world.”

As everyone began to lift the bodies gently down into their graves, Ethan headed back across the field, through the falling snow toward Kate.

He helped her lower Harold into his grave.

Then they took up their shovels, and, along with everyone else, began to fill in the dirt.

THERESA

She walked with Hassler through the forest south of town, snowflakes drifting down between the pines. Adam had shaved his beard and cut his hair, but the smooth skin only underscored the gaunt, drawn quality of his face. He looked emaciated. Like a refugee of a starving world. She couldn’t get past how surreal it felt to be physically close to him again. Before she’d given him up for dead, she’d made it a habit of imagining their reunion. None of those fantasies had been anything like the real thing.

“Are you sleeping all right?” Theresa asked.

“It’s funny. You don’t know how many nights out in the wild I dreamed of sleeping in a bed again. All the pillows, the covers, the warmth, the safety. Being able to reach out in the dark to a bedside table and wrap my hand around a cool glass of water. But since I’ve been back, I’ve barely slept. Guess I got used to sleeping in a bivy sack, tied into a tree thirty feet off the ground. How about you?”

“It’s difficult,” she said.

“Nightmares?”

“I keep dreaming that things went another way. That those abbies got into the jail cell.”

“How’s Ben?”

“He’s okay. I can tell he’s trying to wrap his head around what happened. A lot of his classmates didn’t make it.”

“He saw things no kid should ever have to see.”

“He’s twelve now. Can you believe it?”

“He looks so much like you, Theresa. I’ve wanted to see more of him, to just talk to him, but it didn’t feel right. Not yet.”

“That’s probably best,” she said.

“Where’s Ethan?”

“He was going to stay with Kate for a while after the burial.”

“Some things never change, huh?”

“She lost her husband. She doesn’t really have anyone else.” Theresa sighed. “I told Ethan.”

“Told him
. . .
”

“About us.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t just go on keeping it from him.”

“How’d he take it?”

“You know Ethan. How do you think?”

“But he understands what the situation was, right? That you and I were trapped here. That we thought he was dead.”

“I explained everything.”

“So does he not believe you?”

“I don’t know if it’s that so much as he’s just trying to come to terms with the idea that, well, you know.”

“That I was fucking his wife.”

Theresa stopped.

So quiet in the woods.

“It was good, right?” Hassler asked. “When it was just you, me, and Ben. I made you happy, didn’t I?”

“Very.”

“You have no idea what I’d do for you, Theresa.”

She looked up into his eyes.

He stared at her with such love.

An energy in the air, Theresa could sense that this moment carried more heft than she realized. Her heart had once been wide open to this man, and if she let him keep looking at her like this, like she was the only thing that existed in his world—

He moved in.

Kissed her.

At first, she drew back.

Then she let him.

Then she kissed back.

He walked her slowly back against a pine tree, and as he pressed into her she ran her fingers through his hair.

As he kissed her neck, she tilted her head back and looked up into snowflakes that fell and melted on her face, and then he was unzipping her jacket, his fingers making quick work of the buttons on her shirt underneath, and she found herself reaching for his.

She stopped.

“What?” he asked, breathless. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m still married.”

“That didn’t stop him.” There was a part of her that wanted him to talk her into it. To keep pushing. To
not
stop. “Remember how he made you feel? What was it you said to me, Theresa? Your love for him always burned at a hotter temperature.”

“I’ve seen him change in the last month. I’ve seen glimmers of—”

“Glimmers? Is that all you felt from me? Glimmers?”

She shook her head.

“I love you with everything I have. Nothing held back. No bets hedged. All in. Every second of every day.”

Off in the distance, a scream ripped through the forest.

An abby.

High-pitched. Delicate. Bloodcurdling.

Hassler staggered back from her, and she could see the intensity hardening across his brow.

“Is it—”

“I don’t think it’s inside the fence,” he said.

“Let’s get out of here anyway,” she said.

She buttoned up, zipped up.

They started back toward town.

Her body was humming and her head was spinning.

They reached the road and walked down the double yellow line.

Buildings appeared in the distance.

In silence, they headed into Wayward Pines.

She felt reckless but she went on with him.

At the intersection of Sixth and Main, Hassler said, “Can we go see it together?”

“Sure.”

They walked down the sidewalk of their neighborhood.

No one out.

The houses empty and dark.

Everything looked cold and gray and void of life.

“Doesn’t smell like us in here anymore,” he said as they stood at the foot of the stairs in what had once been their yellow Victorian.

He moved into the kitchen, through the dining room, and back out into the hallway.

“I can’t imagine how difficult this is for you, Theresa.”

“You have no idea.”

Hassler emerged out of the shadow of the hall, and when he reached her he went down on one knee.

“I think this is how it’s done, right?” he asked.

“What are you doing, Adam?”

He took her hand.

His were rough, not the hands she remembered. They’d become wiry and hard as steel, and there was dirt from beyond the fence embedded so deep underneath his fingernails she couldn’t imagine it ever washing away.

“Be with me, Theresa, whatever that means in this new world we’re living in.”

Tears dripped off her chin onto the floor.

Her voice trembled.

She said, “I’m already—”

“I know you’re married, I know Ethan’s here, but I don’t give a shit and you shouldn’t either. Life is too hard and too short not to be with the one you love. So choose me.”

IX

ETHAN

Francis Leven lived in a stand-alone structure in a far corner of the ark, built into an overhang in the rock wall. Ethan’s keycard didn’t work on the reader, so he banged his fist against the steel door instead.

“Mr. Leven!”

After a moment, the lock retracted.

The door cracked open.

The man who answered stood barely five feet tall, and he was dressed in a bathrobe, which filth and time had degraded to something less than white. Forty-five or fifty, Ethan guessed, although Leven’s advanced state of dishevelment made that approximation iffy. His dishwater hair was shoulder-length and shiny with grease, and through large blue eyes, he regarded Ethan with unveiled suspicion that bordered on malice.

“What do you want?” Leven asked.

“I need to talk to you.”

“I’m busy. Another time.”

Leven tried to shut the door, but Ethan shoved it open hard and forced his way inside.

Candy bar wrappers littered the floor and the air carried a moist, moldy scent, like the living space of a sixteen-year-old boy, but spiked with the caustic odor of stale coffee.

The sole illumination came from recessed lighting in the ceiling and the glow of the giant LED displays that covered almost every square foot of wall space. Ethan stared at the one closest to him, which showed a digital pie chart. At a glance, the chart appeared to reflect the atmospheric breakdown of the superstructure’s air content.

He didn’t know what to make of all the screens.

They showed a seemingly incomprehensible array of data.

—Sets of temperature gradients in Kelvin.

—A digital representation of what Ethan assumed were the one thousand suspension chambers.

—Vital stats on the two hundred fifty people still warm and breathing on the planet.

—Drone footage.

—A full biometric readout on the female abby in captivity.

It was like the surveillance center on steroids.

“I would like for you to leave,” Leven said. “No one bothers me here.”

“Pilcher’s finished. In case you didn’t get the memo, you work for me now.”

“That’s debatable.”

“What is this place?”

Leven glared him down through a thick pair of glasses.

Stubborn. Resisting.

Ethan said, “I’m not leaving.”

“I monitor the systems that keep the superstructure and Wayward Pines functioning. We call it mission control.”

“Which systems?”

“All of them. Electrical. Hull. Filtration. Surveillance. Suspension. Ventilation. The reactor underneath us that powers everything.”

Ethan moved deeper into the nerve center.

“And it’s just you responsible for all of this?”

Leven let slip a smirk. “I have minions. You know, in the event I’m hit by the proverbial bus.”

Ethan smiled, detecting the first inkling of a wicked sense of humor.

“I hear you keep to yourself,” Ethan said.

“I’m in charge of the engine that makes our existence possible. I work eighteen hours a day, every day. Before the burial this morning, I hadn’t seen the sky in three years.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a life.”

“Well, it’s the one I have. I happen to love it.”

Ethan approached a set of monitors in a dark alcove that streamed lines of code at the speed of a stock-market ticker.

“What’s this?” Ethan asked.

“Beautiful, isn’t it? I’m running some projections.”

“Projections on
. . . 
?”

Leven came and stood beside him. They watched the lines of code spilling down the screens like a waterfall.

Leven said, finally, “The viability of what remains of our species. See, things were dire long before David had his little temper tantrum and threw his people to the wolves.”

“Dire how?”

“Follow.”

Leven showed Ethan over to the main console, where they sat down in oversize leather chairs facing an expansive array of screens.

“Before the massacre in the valley, there were a hundred sixty souls living in the mountain,” Leven said. “Four hundred sixty-one living in Wayward Pines. Our data only goes back fourteen years, but the first killing freeze typically comes in late August. You haven’t been here for a winter yet, but they’re long and brutal. The snow can get ten, fifteen feet deep in the valley. There’s no garden to harvest from. No fruit, no vegetables. We subsist solely on our reserve of freeze-dried meals, supplements, and meat rations. You want to hear a dirty little secret? Now that this is all on you? David Pilcher never intended for us to stay in this valley indefinitely.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He miscalculated how uninhabitable and hostile this world would become.”

Ethan felt something go dark inside of him.

“I’m rerunning my calculations,” Leven said, “but it’s looking like our winter rations will run out in four point two years. Now, there are things we can do to delay the inevitable, like enforcing reduced rations. But that only buys us, at most, another year or two.”

“Not to be callous, but don’t we have less mouths to feed now?”

“Yes, but the abbies wiped out our cattle, our dairy. There will be no milk, no meat. It would take years to reboot the herd.”

“Then we have to find a way to store what we grow for the winter.”

“Our current setup in town doesn’t produce enough food to feed us and save for the future.”

“You mean we eat what we grow?”

“Exactly. And pretty much right away. We’re just too far north. Two thousand years ago, we might have been able to make this growing season work, but it’s gotten shorter and harsher. And these last few years have been the coldest yet. Here’s what I wanted to show you.”

Leven input some new code via the touch screen.

A list began to scroll.

Ethan examined the monitor above him.

Rice: 17%

Flour: 6%

Sugar: 11%

Grain: 3%

Iodized Salt: 32%

Corn: 0%

Vitamin C: 55%

Soybeans: 0%

Powdered Milk: 0%

Malt: 4%

Barley: 3%

Yeast: 1%

The list continued on.

Ethan said, “These are the reserve staple levels?”

“Yes. And as you can see, it’s critical.”

“What was Pilcher planning to do?”

“With our full in-town population, we might have had the manpower to expand our gardens fast enough to meet demand. We were also looking into building a network of greenhouses, but see the problem comes with snow loads in the winter. If enough weight were to build up on the glass roofs, they’d collapse. Again, we’re just too far north.”

“Do the people in the mountain understand what’s coming?”

“No. David didn’t want to spook anyone until we had come up with a solution.”

“And you haven’t.”

“There isn’t one,” Leven said. “Five-year models confirm this valley will become uninhabitable. If we catch a really bad winter, possibly sooner. We’re all from the modern age. If push came to shove, we might have been able to adopt an agrarian lifestyle in a more temperate climate. But with weather like this? The only lifestyle that might support us is the nomadic hunter-gatherer.”

“Except we’re trapped in this valley.”

“Precisely.”

“What about the abbies?” Ethan asked.

“As a food source?”

“Yeah.”

“First off, gross. Secondly, we’ve run models, and there’s too much inherent danger in venturing out beyond the fence to kill them. If we did that on a regular basis, we’d lose too many of our own. Look, I get that you’re just finding this out now, but trust me, I’ve been grappling with this problem for three years. There was no solution before. There’s even less of one now.”

“Did you know what David was planning?”

“You mean with killing the power to the fence?”

“Yeah.”

“No. I was sitting right here the night the fence went down. I called him. He wouldn’t answer. He did it from his office and he locked me out of the system.”

“So he didn’t consult with you beforehand?”

“David and I haven’t been on the greatest of terms these last few years.”

“Why’s that?”

Leven pushed his chair back from the controls and rolled across the floor.

“The David Pilcher you know wasn’t the same man who hired me away from Lockheed Martin. The end of Wayward Pines has been coming for a long time, but David didn’t want to face it. It’s arrogance, I think, a refusal to admit that he missed this potential crisis. That he didn’t foresee it and steer us all out of the way. Recently, he’s become increasingly withdrawn. Erratic. Emotional. He killed his own daughter. That was the first major fracture. Then when you took control of the town and told the residents the truth, I think he just couldn’t deal anymore. Said ‘screw this’ and hit self-destruct.”

“So you’re telling me it’s over. We’re all going to starve to death.”

Leven smiled. “If the abbies don’t get us first.”

Ethan rose to his feet, watched the monitor scroll the list of depleted provisions like the writings of a doomsday prophet. He said, “You’ve got access to every database in the superstructure?”

“That is correct.”

“Did you know a nomad just returned? Adam Hassler?”

“I heard rumblings of it.”

“Do you have access to his file here?”

Leven tilted his head. “I don’t really feel too hot about where this conversation is going.”

“I want you to pull his file.”

“Why?”

“Before Wayward Pines, Hassler and I used to work together. He was my supervisor in the Secret Service and the one who sent me here. I had no idea he was here until I saw him on the street a couple days ago. Come to find out, before Pilcher brought me out of suspension, Hassler was living here, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Something doesn’t feel right.”

Leven scooted back to the console array and went to work on the touch screens.

“And what is it exactly you’d like to know?” he asked.

Hassler’s face appeared on the monitor, his eyes closed, skin pale—a post-suspension photo.

“How he came to be here.”

“Oh.” Leven quit typing, spun around in his chair. “I don’t think I’m going to have that level of detail. You’ll have to ask Pilcher himself.”

Ethan stepped inside the cage, found David Pilcher eating his supper—some freeze-dried abomination from the winter reserves. The old man looked even older with the beginnings of a white beard fading in across his face, and as Ethan sat down across from him in the cramped cell, he wondered just how much rage simmered underneath the surface. Ethan had plenty of his own. He couldn’t drive the image of those grieving families out of his mind, the sound of those shovels spearing into dirt. All that pain this one man’s doing.

“That does not smell like Tim’s cooking,” Ethan said.

Pilcher glanced up.

Hard. Indignant. Defiant.

“It’s like Satan shit on a plate. Must give you great pleasure.”

“What?”

“Seeing me like this. Relegated to a cage that was built to hold a monster.”

“I’d say it’s serving its purpose perfectly.”

“Thought you’d forgotten about me down here, Ethan.”

“No, just been busy cleaning up the mess you made.”

“The mess I made?” Pilcher laughed.

“Adam Hassler.”

“What about him?”

“I hear that before I was brought out of suspension, Adam lived with my wife and son.”

“As I recall, they were quite happy too.”

“How did Adam Hassler come to be a resident of Wayward Pines?”

A touch of life crinkled in the corners of Pilcher’s eyes.

“What does it matter now?” he asked.

“You do not want to fuck with me.”

Pilcher set his plate aside.

Ethan said, “I’m told that he came here looking for me after my disappearance. And that you abducted him. That he woke up here just like I did. Like everyone in town did.”

“Hmm. Interesting. Out of curiosity, who told you to come see me about this? Was it Francis Leven?”

“That’s right.”

“Is it possible that Francis also shared with you a piece of shocking news about our prospects going forward? And when I say ‘our’ I of course mean the human race.”

“Tell me about Hassler.”

“We’re all going to be starving to death in a matter of years. Do you really think you’re up to solving that problem, Ethan? Ready for that weight on your shoulders? What are you going to do? Put it to a vote? Look, I messed up. I realize that. But you need me. You all need me.”

Ethan struggled onto his feet, started for the door.

“Okay, okay. At first, it was just a standard bribe,” Pilcher said.

“What’s a standard bribe?”

“Money. To buy Adam’s silence for you, Kate Hewson, and Bill Evans. To shut down the investigation into your disappearances. But then something changed. He decided he wanted to come along with me and my crew. Be a part of our journey.”

Ethan cocked his right arm back and punched the door.

Blood from his busted knuckles smeared across the steel.

He hit the door again.

“Between you and me,” Pilcher said, “I always thought Hassler was an arrogant prick. I let him have one good year in Wayward Pines, and then I sent him out on a suicide mission beyond the fence. He never returned.”