The Last Town

by Blake Crouch

  From sixty feet away, Hassler watches as the mother stops at his pile of clothes and gear.

  She lowers her nose to his duster.

  The young ones come up alongside her and sniff as well.

  Hassler rises a few millimeters until his nose is just above the surface.

  With a long, penetrating breath, he goes under, blowing enough air out of his lungs so his body will sink.

  Soon, he’s sitting on the rocky floor of the pool.

  Streams of burning water shoot up through tiny fissures under his legs.

  He shuts his eyes, and as the pressure and the ache intensifies in his lungs, the oxygen deprivation manifests as explosions of light.

  He digs his fingernails into his legs.

  The thirst for breath growing exponentially.

  All-consuming.

  When he can’t stand it anymore, he surfaces and drinks in a gulp of air.

  The abbies are gone.

  He turns slowly in the water—inch by inch by—

  Freezes.

  The urge to jerk back, to just run, is almost irresistible.

  Ten feet away at the edge of the pool, one of the young abbies crouches down beside the water.

  Motionless.

  Head cocked slightly to one side.

  Transfixed.

  Studying its reflection?

  Hassler has seen more than his fair share of these monsters, but mainly through his riflescope. At a distance.

  He’s never been this close to one undetected.

  He can’t take his eyes off its heart: the beating of the muscle visible through the translucent skin, the blood pumping through its arteries—purple highways converging center mass. All obscured and blurred as if he watches it behind a sheet of quartz.

  The abby has small eyes that remind him of black diamonds—hard and otherworldly.

  But strangely enough, it isn’t the monster’s horrific qualities that so unnerve him.

  Shining through the five-taloned claws, the rows of razor teeth, and the devastating physical strength is its humanness. These things have so clearly evolved from us, and now the world is theirs. David Pilcher, Hassler’s boss and the creator of Wayward Pines, estimated there were half a billion abbies on this continent alone.

  The steam is thick, but Hassler doesn’t dare to slip back under the surface.

  He doesn’t move.

  And still the abby watches its reflection in the pool.

  It will either see him and he will die, or—

  Off in the distance, the mother shrieks.

  The young abby’s head lifts.

  The mother shrieks again, her voice filling with the intensity of a threat.

  The abby scuttles off.

  Hassler listens as the trio moves away from the pool, and by the time he chances the smallest degree of movement—a quick turn of the head—they have vanished into the snowstorm.

  Hassler waits for a break in the snow, but it never comes. He climbs out of the pool and brushes three inches of powder off his duster and dries off each foot before sliding them into the boots.

  He puts the duster on wet and grabs the rest of his gear and jogs across the clearing toward the stand of pines. Ducks under a canopy of low-hanging limbs that protect the ground as thoroughly as a thatched roof. Already shivering, he drops everything and tears open his pack. The old-man’s beard lies on top, and underneath it a bundle of dry tinder that he collected that morning.

  The lichen takes the third spark.

  As the twigs begin to crackle, Hassler breaks off several larger limbs within reach and snaps them over his knee.

  The fire roars.

  The cold departs.

  He stands naked in the heat of the flames.

  Soon, he is dressed and comfortable, leaning back against the trunk of the tree with his hands held out to the fire.

  Beyond his weather-protected nook, snow pours down into the meadow.

  Night creeps in.

  He is warm.

  Dry.

  And for the moment . . .

  Not dead.

  All things considered, in this shitty new world, that’s about as much as a man can hope for at the end of a long, cold day.

  The next time his eyes open, the sky through the branches is infused with deep blue and the meadow lies buried beneath a foot of sparkling white.

  The fire burned out hours ago.

  The saplings in the meadow bend under the weight of snow like little arches.

  Courtesy of the hot springs, it’s the first time in months that, as Hassler struggles onto his feet, he doesn’t feel as stiff as a rusted hinge.

  He’s thirsty but his water froze overnight.

  He eats just enough jerky to beat back the mad, raving hunger he always wakes to.

  Lifting his rifle, he scopes the clearing for any sign of movement.

  It’s a good twenty or thirty degrees colder than yesterday—barely above zero—and plumes of steam ascend in a perpetual cloud off the hot springs.

  Otherwise, nothing moves in that vast winterscape.

  He digs out his compass and the little patch of map and then heaves his pack onto his shoulders.

  Hassler crawls out from under the overhanging branches and sets out across the meadow.

  It is cold and perfectly still, the sun on the rise.

  In the center of the meadow, he stops and glasses the terrain through the scope of his Winchester.

  For the moment at least, the world is his alone.

  As the sun climbs, the glare off the snowpack becomes painful. He would stop to retrieve his sunglasses, but the welcome darkness of the forest is just within reach.

  It’s all lodgepole pine.

  Two-hundred-foot giants with straight, thin trunks and narrow crowns.

  Forest travel is considerably more dangerous, and at the edge of the trees Hassler pulls the .357 out of an inner pocket of his duster and checks the load.

  The forest climbs.

  The sun pushes through the pines in splashes of light.

  Hassler crests a ridge.

  A lake comes into view that shines like a jewel. Close to shore, the water has frozen, but it’s still liquid out in the center. He sits on a bleached tree stump and raises the butt of the rifle to his shoulder.

  The lake is immense. He scopes the shoreline. There’s nothing in the direction he intends to travel but unblemished, glittering white.

  On the opposite side—a couple miles away—he spots a bull in a bloody patch of snow pulling long ropes of intestines out of a massive grizzly bear whose throat the abby has torn out.

  Hassler starts down the gentle slope.

  At the lakeshore, he studies the map again.

  The forest comes close to the water, and keeping between the shore and the trees, he makes his way around to the western side of the lake.

  The trek through the snow has worn him out.

  Hassler unslings his rifle from his shoulder and collapses near the water’s edge. In proximity, he sees that the ice isn’t thick. Just a fragile crust from the hard overnight freeze. This snow has come early. Way early. By his reckoning, it’s only July.

  He scopes the shoreline again.

  The woods at his back.

  Nothing moves but that abby across the lake, its entire head now buried inside the grizzly’s belly—gorging itself.

  Hassler leans back against his pack and takes out the map.

  There is no wind, and with the sun directly above him, he feels warm down to his bones.

  He loves mornings—without a doubt, his favorite time of day. There is something hopeful about waking in the early light and not yet knowing what the day has in store. Emotionally speaking, late afternoons are the hardest, with the light beginning to fa
il and the knowledge setting in that he’ll be spending another night outside, alone in the dark, the threat of an awful death forever in the wings.

  But in this moment at least, the coming night feels very far away.

  Once again his thoughts turn north.

  To Wayward Pines.

  To the day he’ll reach its fence and return to safety.

  To that little Victorian house on Sixth Street.

  And to the woman he loves with a ferocity he will never fully grasp. It was for her alone that he willingly abandoned his life in 2013, volunteering to be put into suspended animation for two thousand years, with no idea of what kind of a world he’d be waking to. But just knowing it would be one with Theresa Burke alive in it, and her husband, Ethan, long since dead, was more than enough for him to risk everything.

  He pairs the map with the compass.

  The most prominent feature in the region is a ten-thousand-foot peak that was once called Mount Sheridan. The top thousand feet of the peak stand above the timberline—blown stark white against the purple sky. It’s windy at the summit, with streamers of snow spraying off the top.

  An hour’s walk in prime conditions.

  Two or three in a foot of newly fallen snow.

  For now, it simply represents his north.

  The direction of home.

  THE RICHARDSONS

  Bob climbed out of the car and closed the door gently after him.

  The woods were quiet, the screams in town distant.

  He walked a little ways out from the hood and tried to think.

  Leaving town had been the right choice. They were still alive.

  The dome light in the car kicked off.

  Darkness closed in.

  He eased down onto the pavement and put his face between his knees. Wept softly. After a minute, the car door opened behind him and the interior lights threw color on the road.

  His Wayward Pines wife walked over.

  “I said I needed a minute,” Bob said.

  “Are you crying?”

  “No.” He wiped his eyes.

  “Oh my God, you are.”

  “Leave me alone please.”

  “Why are you crying?”

  He gestured toward town. “This isn’t enough?”

  She sat down beside him.

  “You had someone, didn’t you?” she said. “Before Wayward Pines, I mean.”

  He made no response.

  “Your wife?”

  “His name—”

  “His?”

  “Was Paul.”

  They just sat there in the road.

  Breathing.

  Barbara finally said, “This must have been awful for you.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t any picnic on your end.”

  “You never seemed like you were really—”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  “How is this remotely your fault? None of this was our choice, Barbara. You were never married before, were you?”

  “You were my first. In more ways than one.”

  “God, I’m so sorry.”

  “How is this remotely your fault?” Barbara laughed. “The fifty-year-old virgin—”

  “And the queen.”

  “Sounds like a bad movie.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “How long were you and Paul . . . ?”

  “Sixteen years. I just can’t believe he’s dead, you know? That he’s been dead for two thousand years. I always thought I would be with him again.”

  “Maybe you still will.”

  “That’s nice of you to say.”

  She reached over, took hold of his hand, and said, “These last five years, you’re all I’ve had, Bob. You always treated me with care. With respect.”

  “I think we made it work about as well as it possibly could.”

  “And we did make damn good muffins.”

  Somewhere out there, gunshots echoed across the valley.

  “I don’t want to die tonight, honey,” she said.

  He squeezed her hand. “I’m not going to let that happen.”

  BELINDA MORAN

  The old woman sat in her leather recliner, the footrest extended, a dinner tray on her lap. By candlelight, she turned the cards over, halfway through a game of Solitaire.

  Next door, her neighbors were being killed.

  She hummed quietly to herself.

  There was a jack of spades.

  She placed it under the queen of hearts in the middle column.

  Next a six of diamonds.

  It went under the seven of spades.

  Something crashed into her front door.

  She kept turning the cards over.

  Putting them in their right places.

  Two more blows.

  The door burst open.

  She looked up.

  The monster crawled inside, and when it saw her sitting in the chair, it growled.

  “I knew you were coming,” she said. “Didn’t think it’d take you quite so long.”

  Ten of clubs. Hmm. No home for this one yet. Back to the pile.

  The monster moved toward her. She stared into its small, black eyes.

  “Don’t you know it’s not polite to just walk into someone’s house without an invitation?” she asked.

  Her voice stopped it in its tracks. It tilted its head.

  Blood—from one of her neighbor’s no doubt—dripped off its chest onto the floor.

  Belinda put down the next card.

  “I’m afraid this is a one-player game,” she said, “and I don’t have any tea to offer you.”

  The monster opened its mouth and screeched a noise out of its throat like the squawk of a terrible bird.

  “That is not your inside voice,” Belinda snapped.

  The abby shrunk back a few steps.

  Belinda laid down the last card.

  “Ha!” She clapped. “I just won the game.”

  She gathered up the cards into a single deck, split it, then shuffled.

  “I could play Solitaire all day every day,” she said. “I’ve found in my life that sometimes the best company is your own.”

  A growl idled again in the monster’s throat.

  “You cut that right out!” she yelled. “I will not be spoken to that way in my own home.”

  The growl changed into something almost like a purr.

  “That’s better,” Belinda said as she dealt a new game. “I apologize for yelling. My temper sometimes gets the best of me.”

  ETHAN

  The light in the distance was getting closer, but he couldn’t see a thing around him.

  Tripping every few steps, he tore up his hands as he grasped for branches in the dark.

  Wondering, Could the abbies track us? By scent? Sound? Sight? All of the above?

  The torchlights were close.

  He could see his group in the illumination.

  Ethan came out of the trees at the base of the cliff.

  There was already a line of people moving like ants up the rock, the glow of torches high above like a strand of Christmas lights strung across the cliff.

  Ethan had climbed this route only once before while infiltrating the Wanderers, Kate and Harold’s secret group.

  Steel cables had been bolted into the rock in a series of harrowing switchbacks over man-made footholds and handholds.

  A dozen people stood around the base of the cliff, waiting their turn to ascend. He looked for his family, but they weren’t there.

  Hecter walked over. “This is a bad idea,” he said. “Putting children on the cables in the dark.”

  Ethan thought of Ben, drove his son out of his mind.

  “How many
are coming?” Hecter asked.

  “More than we can handle.”

  Down the mountainside, Ethan could hear branches snapping.

  He had a pocketful of twelve-gauge shells and he started feeding them into the magazine while he watched the edge of the forest.

  With the last shell in the tube, he leveled the shotgun on the woods.

  Thinking, Not yet. Just a little bit longer please.

  Hecter tapped Ethan’s shoulder, and said, “It’s time.”

  They went up the rock face, clutching the freezing cable.

  By the time Ethan reached the third switchback, the forest below him was alive with screams and shrieks.

  Wails lifting up through the trees.

  The nearest torch was twenty feet above, but the stars were numerous and bright enough to light the rock.

  Ethan glanced down the cliff as the first abby came out of the trees.

  Another appeared.

  And another.

  Then five more.

  Then ten.

  Soon there were thirty of them gathered at the base.

  He kept climbing, trying to focus on clutching the cables and stepping sure-footedly, but every time he looked down there were more abbies than before.

  The rock went vertical.

  He wondered how Theresa and Ben had fared.

  Were they safe in the Wanderers’ cavern now?

  Above him, a scream that plummeted in his direction.

  Closer, closer, closer, closercloserclosercloser . . .

  Growing exponentially louder until it was right on top of him.

  He looked up as a man rocketed past, arms flailing, eyes gaping wide with horror.

  He missed Ethan by two inches and his head struck a ledge twenty feet below, the blow sending him somersaulting the remaining distance toward the forest floor in dead silence.

  Jesus.

  Ethan’s legs felt like liquid.

  A tremor moved through his left foot.

  He leaned into the rock and clutched a handhold. Shut his eyes. Let the panic course through him and burn itself out.

  The terror passed.

  Ethan went on, pulling himself up foot by foot on the rusted cable as the abbies ripped apart the man who’d lost his footing on the cliff.

  Ethan reached the plank walkway.