The Last Town

by Blake Crouch

  Everyone weak.

  Everyone cold.

  The snow picks up again, a shroud of white falling against the backdrop of cliffs and evergreens.

  “Doesn’t particularly feel like anyone’s home,” Leven says.

  “One of the first things we’ll do,” Pilcher says, “is send out the drones. We’ll fly them to Boise, Missoula, even Seattle. We’ll know if there’s anything left.”

  They follow their own tracks back into the woods. As a silence descends on the group, a scream rises up in the valley behind them—frail and haunting, echoing off the snow-hidden peaks.

  Everyone stops.

  Another scream answers—lower in pitch, but containing that same mix of sadness and aggression.

  Pope opens his mouth to speak when a veritable nation of screams rises up out of the woods all around them.

  They hurry through the snow, jogging at first, but as the screams close in, everyone accelerates to a full-on sprint.

  A hundred yards out from the tunnel, Pilcher’s legs are finished and sweat pours down his face. The others have reached the portal. They’re climbing through, shouting at him to run faster, their voices commingling with the shrieks behind him.

  His vision blurs.

  He glances back.

  Glimpses movement in the pines—pale forms pursuing him on all fours through the trees.

  He’s gasping for air, thinking, I’m going to die my first day out of suspension.

  The world goes black, and his face is suddenly freezing.

  He hasn’t lost consciousness.

  He’s just facedown in the snow, unable to move.

  As the approaching screams grow louder, he’s suddenly hoisted out of the powder. From his new vantage point, draped over Arnold Pope’s shoulder, he sees the woods joggling behind him and humanoid creatures bearing down, the closest within fifty feet.

  Pope shoves him through the titanium door, and as Pilcher crashes to the floor, Pope scrambles inside.

  Pilcher’s face presses against the cold concrete.

  Pope shouts, “Get back! It’s gonna be close!”

  The portal slams home.

  On the other side, a series of dull thuds crashes into the metal.

  Safe now, Pilcher’s consciousness is ebbing.

  The last thing he hears before slipping under is Pam’s voice cutting through the hysteria, shouting, “What the fuck are those things?”

  I

  TWO HOURS AFTER ETHAN BURKE’S REVELATION

  JENNIFER ROCHESTER

  The house was so damn dark.

  Jennifer tried the kitchen light out of instinct, but nothing happened.

  She felt her way around the fridge to the cabinet over the stove, opened it, and grabbed the crystal candlestick holder, a candle, and the box of matches. She turned on the gas and struck a match to the back burner and set the teakettle over the hissing blue flame.

  Lighting what was left of the candle, she sat down at the breakfast table.

  In her life before, she’d been a pack-a-day smoker, and God could she use a cigarette right now—something to steady her nerves and her hands, which wouldn’t stop trembling.

  As her eyes filled with tears, the candlelight fractured.

  All she could think of was her husband, Teddy, and how far apart she felt from him.

  Two thousand years apart to be exact.

  She’d always harbored hope that the world was still out there. Beyond the fence. Beyond this nightmare. That her husband was still out there. Her home. Her job at the university. On some level, it was that hope that had gotten her by all these years. Hope that one day she might wake up back in Spokane. Teddy would be lying beside her, still sleeping, and this place—Wayward Pines—would all have been a dream. She would slip quietly out of bed and go into the kitchen and cook him eggs. Brew a pot of strong coffee. She would be waiting for him at the breakfast table when he stumbled out of bed in that disgusting robe, disheveled and sleepy and everything she loved. She’d say, “I had the strangest dream last night,” but as she’d try to explain it, all that she’d experienced in Wayward Pines would slip back into the fog of forgotten dreams.

  She’d just smile across the table at her husband and say, “I lost it.”

  Now, her hope was gone.

  The loneliness was staggering.

  But underneath it simmered anger.

  Anger that this had been done to her.

  Rage at all the loss.

  The teakettle began to whistle.

  She struggled to her feet, her mind racing.

  Lifting the kettle off the flame, the whistling died away, and she poured the boiling water into her favorite ceramic mug in which she kept a tea infuser perpetually filled with chamomile leaves. Tea in one hand, candle in the other, she moved out of the dark kitchen and into the hallway.

  Most of the town was still down at the theater, reeling from the sheriff’s revelation, and maybe she should’ve stayed with everyone else; but the truth of it was that she wanted to be alone. Tonight, she just needed to cry in bed. If sleep came, great, but she wasn’t exactly expecting it.

  She turned the corner at the bannister and started up the creaking stairs, candlelight flickering across the walls. The power had gone out several times before, but she couldn’t escape the feeling that tonight of all nights meant something.

  The fact that she’d locked every door and every window gave her some small—very small—peace of mind.

  SHERIFF ETHAN BURKE

  Ethan stared up at twenty-five feet of steel pylons and spiked conductors wrapped in coils of razor wire. The fence usually hummed with enough current to electrocute a person one thousand times over. So loud you could hear it a hundred yards away and feel it in your fillings at close proximity.

  Tonight, Ethan heard nothing.

  Worse still, the thirty-foot gate stood wide open.

  Locked open.

  Shreds of mist skirted past like the front edge of an approaching storm, and Ethan gazed out into the black woods beyond the fence. Over the pounding of his heart, he heard shrieks beginning to echo in the forest.

  The abbies were on their way.

  David Pilcher’s final words to him were set on repeat.

  Hell is coming to you.

  This was Ethan’s fault.

  Hell is coming to you.

  He’d made the mistake of calling that psychofuck’s bluff.

  Hell is coming to you.

  And telling people the truth.

  And now everyone in town, his wife and son included, was going to die.

  Ethan sprinted back through the forest, the panic growing with every stride, every desperate breath. He weaved between the pines, now running alongside the quiet fence.

  His Bronco lay just ahead and already the screams were louder, closer.

  Jumping in behind the wheel, he cranked the engine and sped off into the trees, pushing the suspension package to the limit and jarring the last few jags of glass out of what was left of the windshield.

  He reached the road that looped back into town and roared up the embankment, back onto pavement.

  Pinned the gas pedal to the floorboard.

  The engine wailed.

  He shot out of the trees and raced beside a pasture.

  High beams blazed across the billboard at the edge of town, showing a family of four waving, smiling those carefree 1950s shit-eating grins over the slogan:

  WELCOME TO WAYWARD PINES

  WHERE PARADISE IS HOME

  Not anymore, Ethan thought.

  If they were lucky, the abbies would reach the dairy first, slaughtering their way through the cattle before tearing into town.

  There it was.

  Straight ahead.

  The outskirts of Waywar
d Pines.

  On a clear day, the town defined perfection. Neat blocks of brightly colored Victorian houses. White picket fences. Lush, green grass. Main Street looked like something built for tourists to wander down and dream of retiring here to live the good life. The quaint life. The mountain walls that surrounded the town promised shelter and security. At first blush, nothing about it felt like a place you couldn’t leave—a place where you’d be killed for even trying.

  Except tonight.

  Tonight, the houses and buildings stood ominously dark.

  Ethan turned onto Tenth Avenue and screamed through seven blocks before ripping out onto Main so hard the right-side wheels lifted off the ground.

  Up ahead, at the intersection of Main and Eighth, the entire town stood where he’d left them—out in front of the opera house. Four hundred and something souls waiting around in the dark like they’d been kicked out of a ball en masse, still dressed in their ridiculous costumes from the fête.

  Ethan shut off the car and climbed out.

  It was eerie to see Main Street in the dark, all that storefront glass lit only by torchlight.

  There was the Steaming Bean.

  Wooden Treasures—Kate and Harold Ballingers’ toy store.

  The Wayward Pines Hotel.

  Richardson’s Bakery.

  The Biergarten.

  The Sweet Tooth.

  Wayward Pines Realty Associates, where Ethan’s wife, Theresa, worked.

  The noise of the crowd was overwhelming.

  People were emerging from their disbelief and shock in the wake of Ethan’s decision to tell them all the truth about Wayward Pines. Beginning to talk to one another, in some ways, for the first time.

  Kate Ballinger hurried over. It was Kate and her husband, Harold, who’d been on the execution block for tonight’s fête, whose lives Ethan’s revelation had momentarily saved. Somebody had done a fast-stitch job on the gash above her left eye, but her face was still streaked with blood, which had also matted her prematurely white hair. Kate’s disappearance in Wayward Pines had brought Ethan to this town two thousand years ago. In another lifetime, they had worked together in the Secret Service. They’d been partners. For a brief, scorching window, they’d been more than partners.

  Ethan took Kate by the arm and hustled her around to the back of the Bronco, out of earshot from the crowd. She’d almost died tonight, and as Ethan stared down at her, he could see in her eyes that she was holding everything together by a fraying thread.

  He said, “Pilcher killed the power.”

  “I know.”

  “No, I mean he killed the power to the fence as well. He opened the gate.”

  She studied Ethan, as if trying to process exactly how bad a piece of news she’d just received.

  “So those things . . .” she said. “The aberrations . . .”

  “They can walk right into town now. And they’re coming. I heard them at the fence.”

  “How many?”

  “I don’t know. Even a small group would be catastrophic.”

  Kate glanced back at the crowd.

  The conversations were dying out, people edging closer to hear the news.

  “Some of us have weapons,” she said. “A few have machetes.”

  “That’s not going to cut it.”

  “Can’t you reason with Pilcher? Call him back? Change his mind?”

  “We’re past that point.”

  “Then we get everyone back inside the opera house,” she said. “There are no windows. Just one exit on either side of the stage. Double doors leading in. We’ll barricade ourselves inside.”

  “What if we’re under siege for days? No food. No heat. No water. And there’s no amount of barricading that will keep the abbies out indefinitely.”

  “Then what, Ethan?”

  “I don’t know, but we can’t just send people back to their homes.”

  “Some have already gone.”

  “I told you to keep everyone here.”

  “I tried.”

  “How many went home?”

  “Fifty, sixty.”

  “Jesus.”

  Ethan spotted Theresa and Ben—his precious family—moving toward him through the crowd.

  He said, “If I can get into the superstructure, if I can show Pilcher’s inner circle who the man they serve really is, then we might have a chance.”

  “So go. Right now.”

  “I’m not leaving my family. Not like this. Not without a real plan.”

  Theresa reached him. She’d pulled her long blonde hair into a ponytail, and both she and Ben were dressed in dark clothing.

  Ethan kissed her, then ruffled Ben’s hair. Ethan could already see the man his twelve-year-old boy might become shining through his eyes. Maturity threatening.

  “What did you find?” Theresa asked him.

  “Nothing good.”

  “I’ve got it,” Kate said. “We need to be somewhere safe while you break into the superstructure.”

  “Right.”

  “Somewhere protected. Defendable. Already stockpiled with provisions.”

  “Exactly.”

  She smiled. “I might actually know of a place like that.”

  Ethan said, “The Wanderers’ cavern.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That might work. I have guns at the sheriff’s station.”

  “Go get them. Take Brad Fisher with you.” She pointed to the sidewalk. “He’s right over there.”

  “How are we going to get this many people up the cliff?”

  “I’ll separate everyone into groups of a hundred,” Kate said, “with each group led by someone who knows the way.”

  “What do we do about the ones who went home?” Theresa asked.

  She was answered with a single, distant scream.

  The crowd had been murmuring.

  Now everyone went silent.

  The sound had come from south of town—a fragile, malignant moan.

  Nothing that could be explained or described, because you didn’t just hear it.

  You felt its meaning.

  And its meaning was this: hell is coming.

  Ethan said, “It’s going to be hard enough to protect the people who stayed.”

  “So they’re just on their own?”

  “We’re all on our own now.”

  He went around to the front passenger seat of the Bronco, reached in, and grabbed the bullhorn. Handing it to Kate, he asked, “You got this?”

  She nodded.

  Ethan looked at Theresa. “I want you and Ben to stay with Kate.”

  “Okay.”

  Ben said, “I’m coming with you, Dad.”

  “I need you with Mom.”

  “But I can help you.”

  “This is how you help me.” Ethan turned to Kate. “I’ll catch up after the sheriff’s office.”

  “Come to the little park at the north end of town.”

  “With the gazebo?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Brad Fisher, Wayward Pines’s only lawyer, sat awkwardly in the destroyed front passenger seat of Ethan’s Bronco, clutching the handle on the door as Ethan hit sixty on First Avenue.

  Ethan glanced over. “Where’s your wife?”

  Brad said, “We were in the theater. You were talking, telling us everything. Then I looked over and Megan was just gone.”

  Ethan said, “Considering what she was teaching the children behind their parents’ backs, she probably figured people would see her as a traitor. Feared for her life. How do you feel about her now?”

  This seemed to catch Brad off guard. Normally, he was spit-shined and clean-shaven, the model of a competent young lawyer. Now, he scratched at the sandpaper on his chin.

  “I d
on’t know. I never really felt like I knew her or that she knew me. We lived together because we were told to. We slept in the same bed. Sometimes we slept together.”

  “Sounds like a lot of real marriages. Did you love her?”

  Brad sighed. “It’s complicated. You did the right thing, by the way. Telling us.”

  “If I’d known he’d kill the power to the fence—”

  “Don’t go there, Ethan. You can’t play that game. You did what you believed was right. You saved Kate and Harold. Showed us all what our lives are really worth.”

  “I wonder,” Ethan said, “how long that sentiment is going to last once people start dying.”

  The high beams fired across the dark sheriff’s station. Ethan steered over the curb and took the Bronco right up the sidewalk. He brought it to a stop a few feet from the entrance and climbed out, clicking on a flashlight as he and Brad reached the double doors. Ethan unlocked them, propped one open.

  “What are we grabbing?” Brad asked as they ran through the lobby and turned down the corridor to Ethan’s office.

  “Anything that shoots.”

  Brad manned the flashlight as Ethan pulled guns out of the cabinet and matched up the ammunition.

  He set a Mossberg 930 on the desk and pushed in eight slugs.

  Fed thirty rounds into the magazine of a Bushmaster AR-15.

  Topped off the mag for his Desert Eagle.

  There were more shotguns.

  Hunting rifles.

  Glocks.

  A sig.

  A .357 Smith & Wesson.

  He got two more handguns loaded, but it was all costing too much time.

  KATE HEWSON BALLINGER

  She grabbed hold of Harold’s arm. Her husband was taking his group to an entrance a few blocks south, and she was leading hers to the north end of town.

  She threw her arms around his neck, kissed him long and deep.

  “I love you,” she said.

  He grinned, his silver hair sweat-plastered to his forehead despite the chill, the bruises on his face beginning to blacken.

  “Katie, if something happens—”

  “Don’t do that,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Just get your ass to the cliff.”