The Last Town (The Wayward Pines Trilogy 3) (14 page)

THERESA

“You’re almost there!” Theresa whispered.

Ben lowered his shoe toward the next foothold.

The cries and the screams from the Wanderers’ cavern were still audible. That narrow ledge had just run out, and now they were down-climbing a fifty-degree stretch of cliff. So far, the abundance of handholds and footholds in the good, hard granite had saved their lives, but Theresa couldn’t ignore the two-hundred-foot fall that awaited the slightest misstep. The reality that her son was on this rock wall with her was almost too much to bear.

If Ben fell, she’d jump right after him.

But so far, he was listening, following her instructions, and doing a damn fine job of holding his twelve-year-old shit together.

Ben stepped down onto the ledge where Theresa had been perched for the last few minutes. It didn’t lead anywhere, but at least there was enough of a surface so they didn’t have to cling desperately to a handhold.

They still had a long way to go, but progress had been made, and the tops of the pine trees were only twenty feet below them.

Another scream broke out of the tunnel far above.

“Don’t think about it,” Theresa said. “Don’t imagine what they’re going through. Just focus on where you are, Ben. On making smart, safe moves.”

“Everyone in that cave is going to die,” he said.

“Ben—”

“If we hadn’t found the ledge—”

“But we did. And soon we’re going to get off this cliff and find your father.”

“Are you scared?” he asked.

“Of course I am.”

“Me too.”

Theresa reached over and touched her son’s face. It was slick and cool with sweat and rosy with exertion and the beginnings of a sunburn.

“Do you think Dad’s okay?” Ben asked.

“I think he is,” she said, but her eyes filled with tears at the thought of Ethan. “Your old man’s one tough hombre. I hope you know that.”

Ben nodded, glanced down the face of the cliff into the welcoming darkness of the dense pine forest.

“I don’t want to get eaten,” he said.

“We’re not. We’re tough hombres too. We’re a family of tough hombres.”

“You’re not a tough hombre,” Ben said.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re a tough
hombra
.”

Theresa rolled her eyes and said, “Come on, brat. We better keep moving.”

It was late afternoon when they stepped from the rock onto the soft floor of the forest.

They had been on the cliff for hours, under the burn of direct sunlight. They dripped sweat as their eyes readjusted in the cool shadow of the trees.

“What now?” Ben asked.

Theresa wasn’t sure exactly. By her estimate, they were approximately a mile from the edge of town, but she wasn’t confident that heading for Wayward Pines was the safest play. The abbies wanted to feed. They would stay where the people were, or at least where they’d been. Then again, if she and Ben made it into town, they could hole up inside a house. Lock themselves into a basement. If the abbies found them in the forest, there’d be nowhere to hide. It was already getting late, and she didn’t relish the thought of sleeping out here in the woods, in the dark.

Theresa said, “I think we go back into town.”

“But that’s where the abbies are.”

“I know of a place where we can hide. Wait this out until your dad fixes it.”

Theresa started off into the trees, Ben following close on her heels.

“Why are you going so slowly?” he asked.

“Because we don’t want to step on any branches. We don’t want to make a sound. If something comes our way, we need to be able to hear it early enough to hide.”

They went on, winding their way down through the trees.

They heard no more screams, human or abby.

Nothing but their own footsteps in the pine needles, their heavy exhalations, and the whoosh of wind pushing through the tops of the trees.

ETHAN

He followed Alan through the glass doors. They took the stairwell up to the second floor, came off the landing, and headed down the corridor into Level 2.

As they approached surveillance, Alan pulled a keycard out of his pocket.

When he swiped it at the door, a red dot lit up above the reader.

Alan tried again, same result.

He banged on the door.

“It’s Alan Spear. Open up.”

No answer.

Alan stepped back, fired four rounds into the card reader, and then put a size thirteen boot into the center of the door.

It burst open.

Ethan let Alan move in first.

The room was dark, illuminated only by the glow from the wall of monitors.

No one at the console.

Ethan waited in the threshold as Alan approached the inner door.

He tried his keycard again: green light.

Dead bolt retracting.

Alan pointed his AR-15 into the side room.

“Clear!” he said.

Ethan walked in, and asked, “Can you operate this system?”

“I can figure out how to play that memory shard. Give it here.”

They sat at the console.

As Alan slipped the shard into a port, Ethan looked up at the screens.

All were dark but one.

A camera feed showed the school basement—a large crowd packed into a classroom. In the center of the room, the injured lay on makeshift cots while neighbors tended to them and nursed their wounds. He searched for Kate but couldn’t pick her out.

An image appeared on another screen.

It was a long camera view across a field—the riverside park. It showed a man limping beside the river.

Ethan said, “Look, Alan.”

Alan looked up.

The man on the screen began to run—the awkward, stumbling gait of someone who’d been wounded.

Three abbies sprinted into view on the left side of the screen as the man disappeared out of the right.

A new monitor flashed to life—a feed looking down Sixth Street, Ethan’s street. The man ran out of the field and into the road, the abbies in pursuit, upright, all four of them moving closer and closer to the camera.

They ran him down in front of Ethan’s house and killed him in the street.

Ethan felt a surge of nausea. Rage.

“I wondered this morning if something was up,” Alan said.

“Why’s that?”

“Mustin, that guard back there? He’s a sniper. All day every day, he sits on top of a mountain overlooking the town and the canyon and shoots any abbies that try to come in. I saw him in the chow hall this morning when he should’ve been at his post. He said Pilcher had pulled him off the peak for today. No reason given. It was a clear day too.”

“So Mustin wouldn’t see what his boss had done to all those innocent people.”

“When did they breach the fence?” Alan asked.

“Last night. You weren’t told?”

“Not a word.”

A new screen flared to life.

“That’s the memory shard file?” Ethan asked.

“Yep. Have you seen this?”

“I have.”

“And?”

“You can’t unwatch it.”

Alan played the file.

From high in the corner of a ceiling, a camera looked down on the morgue. There was Pilcher. Pam. And Alyssa. The young woman had been strapped with thick, leather restraints to the autopsy table.

“No audio?” Alan asked.

“It’s a good thing.”

Alyssa was screaming, her head lifting off the table, every muscle straining.

Pam appeared, took a handful of Alyssa’s hair, and jerked her head down against the metal table.

When David Pilcher moved into frame, set a small knife on the metal table, and climbed on top of Alyssa, Ethan looked away.

He’d seen this once before, didn’t need the images reinforced inside his brain.

Alan said, “Jesus God.”

He stopped the video, pushed his chair back from the console, and stood.

“Where are you going?” Ethan asked.

“Where do you think?” He moved toward the door.

“Wait.”

“What?” Alan glanced back. You wouldn’t have known what he’d just seen to look at his face. That Nordic iciness as blank as a winter sky.

“The people in town need you right now,” Ethan said.

“I’m going to go kill him first if that’s okay with you.”

“You’re not thinking.”

“His own
daughter
!”

“He’s done,” Ethan said. “Finished. But he has information we’re going to need. Go mobilize your men. Send a team to shut the gate and restore power to the fence. I’ll go to Pilcher.”

“
You
will.”

Ethan stood. “That’s right.”

Alan dug his keycard out of his pocket, dropped it on the floor, and said, “You’ll need this.”

A key fell beside the card.

“That too. It’s for the elevator. And while we’re at it
. . .
” He pulled a subcompact Glock out of a shoulder holster, held it by the barrel, and offered Ethan the gun. As Ethan took it, Alan said, “If the next time I see you, you confess that, in the heat of the moment, you put a round into that piece of shit’s gut and watched as he bled out slowly, I will totally understand.”

“I’m sorry about Alyssa.”

Alan left the room.

Ethan bent down, lifted the key and the plastic card off the floor.

The corridor was empty.

Halfway down the stairwell, he heard it.

A noise he knew all too well from his time at war.

They were firing the chain gun, and it sounded like death on the drums.

By the time he reached Level 1, the noise was unreal. People would be leaving their workstations, leaving their residences.

At the pair of unmarked doors, he swiped the card through the reader.

The doors opened.

He stepped into the small elevator car, pushed the key into the lock on the control panel, and turned it.

The single button started blinking.

He pressed it, the doors closed, and the racket of the chain gun began to gradually fade away.

He took a deep breath and thought of his family, his fear for them blooming in his stomach like a flower of broken glass.

The doors opened.

He stepped off into Pilcher’s suite.

Passing the kitchen, he heard the sizzle of meat cooking. Garlic, onions, olive oil perfuming the air, Chef Tim obliviously at work while the abbies invaded, intently plating Pilcher’s breakfast, adding intricate dots of a bright red sauce from a pastry bag onto a piece of china.

As Ethan moved down the hall toward Pilcher’s office, he checked the load on Alan’s Glock, happy to see a round already in the tube.

He opened the doors to Pilcher’s office without bothering to knock, and strode inside.

Pilcher sat on one of the leather sofas that faced the wall of monitors, feet propped up on an acacia wood coffee table, a remote control in one hand, a bottle of something old and brown in the other.

The left side of the wall showed feeds from Wayward Pines.

The right—surveillance from inside the superstructure.

Ethan walked over to the sofa, took a seat beside him. He could break Pilcher’s neck. Beat him to death. Suffocate him. The only thing stopping him really was the sense that this man’s death belonged mostly to the people of Wayward Pines. He couldn’t steal that away from them. Not after everything Pilcher had put them through.

Pilcher looked over, his faced streaked with deep scratch marks that still oozed blood.

“Who’d you tangle with?” Ethan asked.

“I had to let Ted go this morning.”

Ethan bristled.

Pilcher smelled boozy. He wore a black satin robe and looked disheveled as hell as he offered Ethan the bottle.

“No thanks.”

On one of the screens, Ethan saw the brilliant muzzle flash of the chain gun cutting down abbies in the tunnel.

On another—abbies on Main Street, lackadaisically feeding on kills from the night before, their stomachs bulging.

“Quite an end to it all,” Pilcher said.

“Nothing’s ending but you.”

“I don’t blame you,” Pilcher said.

“Blame me? For what?”

“Your envy.”

“What exactly do you think I envy?”

“Me, of course. The way it feels to sit behind that desk. To have
. . .
created all of this.”

“You think that’s all this is about? That I want your job?”

“I know you believe in your heart it’s about giving people truth and freedom, but the truth, Ethan, is there is nothing in this world like power. The power to kill. To spare.” He waved at the screens. “To control lives. To make them better. Or worse. If there ever was a God I think I know how he must have felt. People demanding answers they could never handle. People hating him even as they basked in the safety he provided. I think I finally understand why God went away and left the world to destroy itself.” Pilcher smiled. “And you will too one day, Ethan. After you’ve sat behind that desk for a while. You’ll understand that the people in that valley aren’t like you and me. They can’t handle what you told them last night. You’ll see.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Either way, they deserved to know the truth.”

“I’m not saying it was perfect. Or even fair. But before you came, Ethan, it worked. I protected these people and they lived the closest thing to normal lives that they could ever hope for. I gave them a beautiful town and the opportunity to have faith that all was as it should be.”

Pilcher drank straight from the bottle.

“Your fatal flaw, Ethan, is that you’re under the mistaken impression that people are like you. That they have your courage, your fearlessness, your will. You and I are exceptions, cut from the same cloth. Even my people in the mountain struggle with the fear. But not you and me. We know the truth. We aren’t afraid to look it in the eye. Only difference being, I’m aware of this fact, and it’s something you’re going to learn slowly and painfully and at great cost of human life. But you’ll remember this conversation one day, Ethan. You’ll understand why I did the things I did.”

“I’ll never understand why you turned off the fence. Why you murdered your daughter.”

“Rule long enough, you will.”

“I don’t plan on ruling.”

“No?” Pilcher laughed. “What do you think you’ve got down there? Plymouth Rock? You going to write a constitution? Start a democracy? The world beyond the fence is too cruel, too hostile. That town needs one strong man to lead.”

“Why did you turn off the fence, David?”

The old man sipped his whiskey.

“Without me, this would be a world free of our species. We’re here because of me and me alone. My money. My brilliance. My vision. I gave them
everything
.”

“Why did you do it?”

“You might as well say I created them. And you. And you have the gall to ask—”

“Why?”

Pilcher’s eyes suddenly burned with unchecked rage.

“Where were they when I discovered that the human genome was becoming corrupted? That humanity would become extinct in a matter of generations? When I built a thousand suspended animation units? When I dug a tunnel into the heart of a mountain and stocked a five-million-square-foot ark with enough supplies to rebuild the last town on earth? And while we’re on the topic, Ethan:
Where the fuck were you?
”

Pilcher’s entire body shook with fury.

“Were you there the day I emerged from suspended animation and took my crew outside to find that the abbies had taken over the world? Were you there as I walked down Main Street watching my workers frame each building? Pave each road? On the morning I called the head of suspension into this office and instructed him to wake you up so you could be with your wife and son again? I gave you this life, Ethan. You and everyone in that valley. Everyone in this mountain.”

“
Why
?”

He growled, “Because I could. Because I am their fucking creator, and creations don’t get to question the one who made them. Who gives them breath. And who can, at any second, snatch it all away.”

Ethan looked up at the monitors. They showed chaos in the cavern. The chain gun was empty and the guards were falling back with their AR-15s as the monsters advanced.

“I didn’t have to even let you up here. I could’ve locked the elevator. What are you going to do with me?” Pilcher asked quietly.

“That’s for the people you tried to murder to decide.”

Pilcher’s eyes misted.

As if, for a fleeting moment, he saw himself with clarity.

He looked back at his desk.

At the wall of screens.

His voice became raspy with emotion.

“It got away from me,” he said, and then he blinked, a hardness returning to those small black eyes, like water freezing over.

Pilcher came at Ethan with a short-bladed fighting knife, a sudden, lunging stab aimed straight at Ethan’s gut.

Ethan deflected Pilcher’s wrist, the blade only grazing his side.

Rising to his feet, he rained down a savage left hook that snapped Pilcher’s head around and cracked his cheekbone, the force of the blow driving him off the couch, his head smashing into the edge of the coffee table.

Pilcher shivered out on his back and the knife slipped out of his grasp, clattering to the hardwood floor.