The Last Town

by Blake Crouch

  Six inches wide, it traversed the face of the cliff.

  Hecter was already halfway across.

  Ethan followed.

  The forest was now three hundred feet below.

  Wayward Pines was somewhere out there, the town still dark but filled with distant screams.

  On the rock below, Ethan spotted movement.

  White forms climbing toward him.

  He shouted to Hecter, “They’re on the cliff!”

  Hecter looked down.

  The abbies climbed fast, fearlessly, like the possibility of falling did not exist.

  Ethan stopped, holding the cable with one hand while he tried to get a decent grip on the Mossberg.

  No use.

  He called out to Hecter, “Come here!”

  Hecter turned awkwardly on the narrow planks and headed back toward Ethan.

  “I need you to hold my belt,” Ethan said.

  “Why?”

  “There’s not enough room up here for me to stand and aim.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Hold the cable with one hand, grab my belt with the other. I’m going to lean out over the edge and take a clean shot.”

  Hecter sidestepped the last few feet to Ethan and grabbed hold of his belt.

  “I assume it’s buckled?” he asked.

  “Good one. You got me?”

  “I got you.”

  And still it took three seconds for Ethan to steel his nerve.

  He let go of the cable and slid the strap of the shotgun off his shoulder, aimed the luminous sight down the face of the cliff.

  Ten abbies were making an ascent in a tight cluster. He tried to focus, to put the fear out of his mind, but he kept seeing that man falling toward him, his head cracking open on the rock.

  The scream.

  The silence.

  The scream.

  The silence.

  Ethan’s stomach turned. The world seemed to rush up at him and fall away at the same time.

  Get it together.

  Ethan drew a bead on the leader.

  The shotgun bucked him back against the cliff and the report raced across the valley, bounced off the western wall of rock, and returned.

  The slug hit the lead abby.

  It peeled off with a shrill screech and tumbled down the rock, crashing into four more and knocking them over like bowling pins.

  The others held fast.

  They had climbed to within sixty feet of the plank.

  Once again Ethan leaned out over the ledge, heard Hecter groaning, and imagined the cable biting into Hecter’s fingers.

  The remaining abbies had taken the hint and spread out.

  He took his time shooting them down from left to right.

  No misses.

  Watched them plunge into the darkness, taking out a handful of others who had just begun to climb.

  He was out of ammo.

  “All right,” Ethan said.

  Hecter pulled him back onto the plank and they hurried on, crossing the rock face until they rounded the corner at the end.

  They rushed up the widening ledge into the mountain.

  Ethan could hardly see a thing in the passage, and up ahead, the door to the cavern was shut.

  He pounded the wood.

  “Two more out here! Open up!”

  The bolt slid back on the other side, hinges creaking as it opened.

  Ethan hadn’t noticed the door his first time here, but now he made a careful study. It had been constructed of pine logs stacked horizontally and cemented together with an earth-based mortar.

  He followed Hecter inside.

  Kate shut the door after him and shot a heavy steel rod back into its housing.

  Ethan said, “My family—”

  “They’re here. They’re safe.”

  He spotted them over by the stage, flashed an I-love-you sign.

  Ethan surveyed the cavern—several thousand square feet with kerosene lamps hanging from wires in the low rock ceiling.

  A scattering of furniture.

  Bar on the left.

  Stage on the right.

  Both rickety-looking, as if they’d been assembled out of scrap wood. At the large fireplace toward the back, someone was already building a fire.

  Looked to Ethan like only a hundred people or so, everyone huddled around torches, eyes twinkling in the firelight.

  He said, “Where are the other groups?”

  Kate shook her head.

  “It’s only us?”

  As her eyes welled up, he held her. “We’ll find Harold,” Ethan said. “I promise you that.”

  The abby screams reverberated through the passage beyond the door.

  “Where’s our army?” Ethan asked.

  “Right here.”

  He looked at a half-dozen scared-shitless people who had no business even holding weapons.

  The definition of ragtag.

  Ethan examined the door again. The bolt was a long piece of solid metal, half an inch thick. It spanned the five-foot wide door, which had been expertly cut to fit snugly into the arch. The housing looked durable.

  Kate said, “We could all stand right outside the door. Shoot anything that tried to come down the passage.”

  “I don’t like it. No telling how many of those things are coming, and no offense”—Ethan glanced at the terrified faces surrounding him—“but how many of you can shoot accurately in a pressure situation? These things don’t go down easy. Those of you with .357s? You’d better score head shots every time. No, I think we stay in here. Pray the door holds.”

  Ethan turned and addressed the rest of the group. “I need everybody to move back to the far wall. We’re not out of the woods yet. Keep quiet.”

  Everyone began to migrate away from the stage and the bar, grouping near the sofas against the rear wall of the cavern.

  Ethan said to Kate, “We’re going to stay right here, in front of this door. Anything that gets through dies. Where’s the bag of ammo?”

  A young man who worked at the dairy said, “I’ve got it right here.”

  Ethan took it from him and dropped it on the floor. He knelt over it, and said, “I need some light please.”

  Maggie held the torch over his head.

  He rifled through ammunition, grabbed a box of two-and-three-quarter-inch Winchester slugs for himself, and then handed out backup ammo to everyone else.

  Moving twenty feet back from the pine-log door, Ethan ghost-loaded the Mossberg as an unsettling hush fell upon the cavern.

  Maggie and another man stood behind the shooters with torches.

  Kate stood next to Ethan with a shotgun of her own, and he could hear her struggling not to break down.

  Then suddenly—movement out in the passage.

  Kate drew in a sharp breath, wiped her eyes.

  Ethan could feel a fight coming. He glanced back, tried to find his family amid the crowd, but they had withdrawn into the shadows. He had come to terms with the possibility of his own death. There was no coming to terms with seeing an abby tear into his only son or disembowel his wife. There would be no going forward after that. Whether he lived or not, he would not survive.

  If the abbies got through that door, and there were more than ten of them, everyone in the cavern would die horrible deaths.

  He’d expected a scream but instead came the sound of talons clicking on the stone floor of the passage.

  Something scraped across the logs on the other side of the door, and then it began to scratch around the metal handle.

  IV

  PILCHER

  The town of Wayward Pines lay in ruin—buildings turned upside down, cars scattered, roads cracked in two. Even the hospital was destroyed, the top three fl
oors sheared off. Ethan’s house in particular had seen the worst of it—crushed to pieces, the aspen trees in the backyard snapped in half and shoved through the windows.

  This architectural miniature of Wayward Pines had been commissioned by David Pilcher in 2010, and he’d spared no expense for the elaborate model, whose price tag came in at $35,000. For two thousand years, it had stood under glass as the centerpiece of his office, a tribute not only to the town itself, but his own boundless ambition.

  It had taken him fifteen seconds to destroy it.

  Now he sat on a leather sofa, watching the wall of monitors as the real town came apart at the seams.

  He’d killed power to the entire valley, but the surveillance cameras ran on batteries, and most were night vision–enabled. The screens showed what the cameras saw, and the cameras were in every room of every home. In every business. In bushes. Hidden in streetlamps. They triggered off the microchips embedded in every resident of Wayward Pines, and, my, were they popping tonight.

  Almost every monitor lit up.

  On one screen: an abby chasing a woman up a flight of stairs.

  On another: three abbies ripping a man apart in the middle of a kitchen.

  —A mob of people running for their lives down the middle of Main Street, overtaken by abbies in front of the candy store.

  —An abby devouring Belinda Moran in her recliner.

  —Families sprinting down hallways.

  —Parents trying to shield children against a horror they were incapable of stopping.

  So many frames of suffering, terror, and despair.

  Pilcher took a drink from a bottle of scotch—this one from 1925—and tried to think about how to feel about this. There was precedent of course. When God’s children rebelled, God laid down a righteous beating.

  A soft voice, the one he’d long since learned to ignore, whispered through the gale-force madness in his head, Do you really believe you’re their God?

  Does God provide?

  Check.

  Does God protect?

  Check.

  Does God create?

  Check.

  Conclusion?

  Fucking A.

  The search for meaning was the cornerstone of human disquiet, and Pilcher had removed that impediment. He’d given the four hundred sixty-one souls in that valley an existence beyond their wildest fantasies. Given them life and purpose, shelter and comfort. For no other reason than he had chosen them, they were the most important members of their species since h. sapiens had begun to walk the savannahs of East Africa two hundred thousand years ago.

  They had brought this reckoning to bear. They had demanded full knowledge, knowledge they were ill-equipped to stomach. And when faced with the truth from Ethan Burke, they had revolted against their creator.

  Still, watching their deaths on the monitors wounded him.

  He had treasured their lives. This project meant nothing without people.

  But still—fuck them. Let the abbies have them all.

  He had a couple hundred people still in suspension. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d started over, and his people in the mountain would support him through it all, unquestioningly, and with pure and total devotion. They were his army of angels.

  Pilcher stood, unstable on his feet. He moved over to his desk, weaving. No one else in the superstructure knew what was happening in the valley. He’d instructed Ted Upshaw to close surveillance for the night. The reveal of what he’d done would have to be finessed.

  Pilcher collapsed into his chair, lifted the phone, and dialed up dear old Ted.

  PAM

  She reached the fence in the dead of night. The hole Ethan Burke had dug out of the back of her left thigh radiated pain all through her leg and even up into her torso. The sheriff had cut out her microchip and left her stranded on the wild side of the fence, and up until this moment, she’d been obsessed with questioning why. Now, that curiosity was replaced as she stared up at the fence and wondered, What the hell?

  It was silent.

  No electricity humming through its veins.

  Stupid thing to do, but she couldn’t resist. Reaching out, she grabbed hold of the thick steel cable. Barbs bit into her palm but that was it. No jolt. There was something strangely illicit, erotic even, about touching the wire.

  She let go, invigorated and wet.

  Limping alongside the fence, she wondered if Burke had done this. A massive swarm of abbies had raced past her two hours ago. She’d watched them running north toward Wayward Pines from forty feet up a pine tree.

  Hundreds and hundreds of them.

  She quickened her pace, struggling against the burn in the back of her leg.

  Five minutes later, she reached it.

  The gate was open.

  Locked open.

  She looked back in the direction of the dark woods through which she—and that swarm of abbies—had come. She stared at the open gate.

  Was it possible?

  Had the swarm pushed into the valley?

  Pam jogged through the gate. It hurt like hell, but she didn’t slow down, just grunted through the pain.

  Several hundred yards later, she heard the screams. Couldn’t tell if they were human or abby at this distance, only that there were many of them. She stopped running. Her leg was throbbing. She didn’t have a weapon. She was injured. And in all likelihood, a swarm of abbies had somehow entered the valley.

  She was torn. The part of her psyche that whispered self-preservation urged her to make a run for the superstructure. Get somewhere safe. Regroup. Let Dr. Miter patch her up. But the part that ruled every fiber of her being was afraid. Not of the abbies. Not of any horror she might encounter in a town overrun with monsters. She was afraid she would find Ethan Burke already dead, and that was unacceptable. After what he’d done to her, there was nothing in the world she wanted more than to find that man and take him slowly apart.

  Piece by agonizing piece.

  TED UPSHAW

  The smell of booze hit him as he opened the door to the old man’s office.

  Pilcher sat behind his desk, and when he saw Ted, he smiled a little too wide; his face was red, eyes gone glassy.

  “Come in, come in!”

  He struggled onto his feet as Ted closed the door after him.

  Pilcher had wrecked the place. Two of the monitors were smashed, and the architect’s miniature of Wayward Pines had capsized, the glass that had once covered the model town shattered across the floor, houses and buildings crushed amid the shards.

  “I woke you, didn’t I?” Pilcher said.

  He hadn’t actually. Ted couldn’t have slept tonight if someone had injected him full of tranquilizers. But he said, “It’s fine.”

  “Let’s sit together like old friends.”

  There was a thickness, a deliberation, behind Pilcher’s words. Ted wondered how drunk he actually was.

  Pilcher staggered over to the leather couches. As Ted followed him, he saw that the monitors had been turned off in here as well.

  They sat on the cool leather, facing the dark monitors.

  Pilcher poured two healthy glasses of scotch from an expensive-looking bottle with the word Macallan on it and handed Ted the glass.

  They clinked the crystal glasses.

  Drank.

  It was the first alcohol Ted had sipped in more than two thousand years. When he’d been homeless and drinking himself to death in the wake of his wife’s passing, old scotch like this would have been a religious experience. But he’d lost his taste for it.

  “I still remember the day we met,” Pilcher said. “You were standing in the soup line of that shelter. It was your eyes that called out to me. So much grief in them.”

  “You saved my life.”

  The old man looked over at him. “
Do you still trust me, Ted?”

  “Of course,” Ted lied.

  “Of course. You shut down the surveillance hub when I told you to.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You didn’t even ask why.”

  “No.”

  “Because you trust me.”

  Pilcher stared into his glass at the swirling amber liquid.

  “I did something tonight, Ted.”

  Ted looked up at the dark screens. Felt something go ice cold in the pit of his stomach. He looked over at Pilcher as the man raised a control tablet and typed something on the touchpad.

  The screens flashed to life.

  As head of surveillance, Ted had spent a quarter of his life watching these people eat, sleep, laugh, cry, fuck, and sometimes—when a fête was called—die.

  “I didn’t do this lightly,” Pilcher said.

  Ted stared at the screens, his eyes locking on one in particular—a woman crouching in the shower, shoulders heaving with sobs as a fist of talons punched through the bathroom door.

  He felt suddenly ill.

  Pilcher watched him.

  Ted looked over at his boss. Eyes welling up with tears, he said, “You have to stop this.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “How so?”

  “I used our abbies in captivity to draw a swarm to the fence. Then I opened the gate. Over five hundred abbies have entered the town.” Ted wiped his eyes. Five hundred. He could barely comprehend such a number. Just fifty abbies would have been an unqualified disaster.

  Ted fought to keep his tone in check.

  “Think about how hard you worked to gather the people in that valley. Decades. Remember the excitement you felt every time we put a new recruit into suspension. Wayward Pines isn’t the streets or the buildings or the suspension units. It’s nothing that you built. It’s those people and you’re—”

  “They turned their backs on me.”

  “This is about your goddamned vanity?”

  “I have several hundred others in suspension. We’ll start again.”

  “People are dying down there, David. Children.”

  “Sheriff Burke told them everything.”

  “You lost your temper,” Ted said. “That’s understandable. Now send down a team to save whomever they still can.”