The Last Town (The Wayward Pines Trilogy 3) (20 page)

Ethan shouted for the guard.

“You need me,” Pilcher said. “You know you need me. If something isn’t done, we’ll die out in a matter of—”

“It’s not your concern anymore.”

“Excuse me?”

The guard opened the door.

“How did you like your supper?” Ethan asked.

“What?”

“Your supper. How was it?”

“Terrible.”

“Sorry about that, especially considering it was your last.”

“What does that mean?”

“Remember when you asked me what was going to happen to you, and I said that’s for the people to decide? Well. They decided. We took a vote a few hours ago, right after we finished burying all the people you murdered. And it’s happening tonight.”

Ethan walked out into the corridor as Pilcher screamed his name.

Late afternoon.

The sun already behind the cliffs.

The sky sheeted over with a uniform deck of clouds that seemed to threaten snow.

The power in town had yet to be restored, but still a handful of people had returned to their homes to begin the process of cleaning up, of trying to reassemble the pieces of a life that could never be made right again.

In the distance, the pile of abbies still burned.

Ethan wasn’t sure what it was—maybe the lateness of the day, the darkening clouds, the cold, gray indifference of the towering cliffs—but Wayward Pines felt, possibly for the first time since he’d come here, like exactly what it was: the last town on earth.

He parked on the curb in front of his Victorian house on Sixth Street.

The vibrant yellow and the white trim struck him as off-key in light of the past few days.

They didn’t live anymore in a world where life was to be colorful and celebrated. Life had become something you clung to, that you bit down hard on against the pain, like the rubber block in a session of electroshock therapy.

Ethan jarred open the Jeep’s door with his shoulder and stepped down onto the street.

The neighborhood stood silent.

Joyless.

Tense.

There were no bodies visible, but a large bloodstain still marred the pavement nearby. It would take a day of solid rain to wash it away.

He stepped over the curb.

From the front yard at least, his house looked intact.

No windows broken.

No door smashed down.

He walked the flagstone path and stepped up onto the porch. The floorboards creaked.

He pulled open the screen door, pushed open the solid wood door.

It was dark and cold inside, and Adam Hassler sat in the rocking chair beside the dormant woodstove, looking like a wasted version of the man Ethan remembered.

“What the hell are you doing in my house?” Ethan’s voice came out like a low growl.

Hassler looked over, his cheekbones and orbital rims pronounced from starvation.

He answered, “Believe me, I was just as surprised to see you.”

Suddenly, they were on the floor, Ethan struggling to get his hands around Hassler’s neck so he could squeeze the fucking life right out of him. He’d assumed that Hassler’s emaciated state would make overpowering him simple, but the man’s wiry strength was resilient.

Hassler torqued his hips and flipped Ethan onto his back.

Ethan swung, his fist glancing off Hassler’s shoulder.

Hassler returned with a hard, stunning blow.

Ethan’s world went pyrotechnic.

He tasted blood, felt it sliding down his face as his nose burned.

Hassler said, “You never knew what you had.”

He threw another punch, but Ethan caught his arm at the elbow and jerked it the wrong way.

Hassler cried out as the ligaments stretched.

Ethan shoved him into the toppled rocking chair and scrambled up, looking for a weapon, something hard and heavy.

Hassler regained his feet, advanced in a boxer’s stance.

Too dark in the living room for Ethan to see the punches coming.

Hassler connected a jab, then a hard right hook that might have turned Ethan’s lights out if Hassler wasn’t in such a weakened state.

Still, it snapped Ethan’s neck and spun him ninety degrees as Hassler delivered a devastating kidney shot.

Ethan screamed out, stumbling back into the foyer as Hassler kept coming, calm and controlled.

“It’s a mismatch,” Hassler said. “I’m just better than you. Always was.”

Ethan’s fingers wrapped around the iron coatrack.

“I even loved your wife better than you could,” Hassler said.

Ethan sent the hard, metal base arcing through the air.

Hassler ducked.

It punched a hole through the drywall.

Hassler charged, but Ethan caught him with an elbow to the jaw and the man’s knees buckled. Ethan landed his first direct hit to Hassler’s face, his cheekbone crunching under the blow, and it felt so goddamned good that Ethan hit him again. And again. And again. Hassler growing weaker, Ethan stronger, and with each punch the need to do more damage grew exponentially. The fear inside of him breaking out in a whirlwind of violence.

Fear of what this man could do.

Fear of what Hassler could take away from him.

Fear of losing Theresa.

Ethan let go of Hassler’s neck and the man moaned on the floor.

Ripping the coatrack out of the wall, he clutched the metal in his hands and raised the heavy base over Hassler’s head.

I’m gonna kill him.

Hassler looked up at him, his face a bloody mess, one eye already swollen shut and the other filling with the realization of what was coming.

He said, “Do it.”

“You sent me here to die,” Ethan said. “Was it for the money? Or so you could have my wife?”

“She deserves so much better than you.”

“Did Theresa know that you orchestrated all of this so you could be with her?”

“I told her I came here looking for you and that I was involved in a car wreck. She was happy with me, Ethan. Truly happy.”

For a long moment, Ethan stood over Hassler on the brink of caving in the man’s skull.

Wanting to do it.

Not
wanting to be the man who would.

He threw the coatrack across the living room and collapsed on the hardwood next to Hassler, his kidney throbbing.

“We’re here because of you,” Ethan said. “My wife, my son—”

“We’re here because two thousand years ago you fucked Kate Hewson and destroyed your wife. If Kate had never transferred to Boise, she never would have come to Wayward Pines. Pilcher never would have abducted her and Bill Evans.”

“And you never would have sold me out.”

“Just to be clear, you’d be dead right now if I hadn’t—”

“No, we’d have lived out our lives in Seattle.”

“You call what you and Theresa had a life? She was miserable. You were in love with another woman. You want to sit there and tell me what I did was wrong?”

“You seriously just said that?”

“There’s no right or wrong anymore, Ethan. There’s only survival. I learned that in my three and a half years wandering around that hell beyond the fence. So don’t look at me hoping to catch a glimpse of regret.”

“It’s kill or be killed now? That’s where we’re at?”

“We were always there.”

“So why didn’t you kill me?”

Hassler smiled, blood between his teeth.

“When you walked back to the superstructure from Kate’s house last night? I was there. In the woods. It was dark, and it was just you and me. I had my bowie knife, the same one I killed abbies with in hand-to-talon combat you couldn’t even fathom. You don’t know how close I came.”

Ethan felt something cold inch down his spine.

“What stopped you?” he asked.

Hassler wiped blood out of his eyes.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I think it’s because I’m not as hard as I’d like to be. See, in my head, I know there’s no right or wrong, but my heart hasn’t made that connection. My twenty-first-century hardwiring is too deep. Too institutional. My conscience intrudes.”

Ethan stared at his old boss through the mounting darkness in the living room.

“Where does this leave us?” Ethan asked.

“The best moments of my life I lived right here. With Theresa. With your son.”

Hassler groaned as he hoisted himself up into a sitting position against the wall.

Even in the low light, Ethan could see the man’s jaw beginning to swell, Hassler’s words now coming lopsided, garbled.

“I’ll walk away,” Hassler said. “Forever. One condition.”

“You think you’re entitled to a condition?”

“Theresa never hears about what really happened.”

“You’d just be doing this so she goes on loving you.”

“She chose you, Ethan.”

“What?”

“She chose you.”

Relief swept over him.

His throat ached with emotion.

“Now that it’s over,” Hassler said, “I don’t want her to know. Respect that wish, and I’ll make an impossible situation possible.”

“There is another option,” Ethan said.

“What’s that?”

“I could kill you.”

“Do you have that in you, old friend? Because if so, knock yourself out.”

Ethan looked at the cold woodstove. Into the evening light coming through the windows. Wondered how this house could ever feel like home again.

“I’m not a murderer,” Ethan said.

“See? We’re both too soft for this new world.”

Ethan got up. “You were out there for three and a half years?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

“So you know more about this new world than any of us.”

“Probably so.”

“What if I were to tell you that we couldn’t stay in Wayward Pines any longer? That we needed to leave this valley and go someplace warmer, where crops could be grown? Do you think we’d have a chance?”

“Of surviving as a group on the other side of the fence?”

“Yeah.”

“That sounds like mass suicide. But if we truly have no choice? If it’s stay in this valley and die or take a chance heading south? I guess we’d have to find a way.”

On his way up to the cafeteria, Ethan stopped again at the cage of the female abby. She was sleeping, curled up in a corner against the wall, thinner, frailer even than the last time he’d seen her.

One of the lab techs who worked in the abby holding facility moved past Ethan, heading toward the stairwell.

“Hey,” Ethan called after him. The white-jacketed scientist stopped in the middle of the corridor, turned to face him. “Is she sick or what?” Ethan asked.

The young scientist flashed an ugly smile.

“She’s starving to death.”

“You’re starving her?”

“No,
she
refuses to eat or drink.”

“Why?”

The man shrugged. “No idea. Maybe because we made a bonfire out of all her cousins?”

The scientist chuckled to himself and continued down the corridor.

Ethan found Theresa and Ben at a corner table in the packed cafeteria. When she saw the bruises on his face, her eyes—tear-swollen and red—went wide.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Have you been crying?”

“We’ll talk later.”

Dinner consisted of packages of freeze-dried horror.

Lasagna for Ethan.

Beef Stroganoff for Ben.

Eggplant parm for Theresa.