The Last Town

by Blake Crouch

“Because I can’t be with her. Look, I’m not going to stop loving her just because her husband’s around. That’s not the way the human heart works. I can’t just amputate what I feel. It’s not like we live in a big, wide world anymore where I can just move to another city, another state. There’s no alternate life waiting out there for me to get on with. This is it. We’re down to what? Two hundred fifty people? I can’t avoid her, and what I feel for her has defined me for so long now, I don’t know the person I’d be if I tried to walk away from it.”

  “I hear that.”

  “And the funny thing is, as bad as I am, I don’t have it in me to murder her husband. Is there a fate worse than being halfway evil?”

  For a moment, the only sound was the lonely whisper of wind blowing across the rock.

  The woman finally said, “I know you, Adam Hassler.”

  “How?”

  “I used to work for you.”

  “Kate?”

  “Is life weird, or what?”

  “I can leave you alone now if—”

  “I’m not judging you, Adam.”

  He heard her get up, move toward him.

  In a minute, she emerged out of the darkness, still just a shadow, and sat down beside him, their feet hanging off the edge together.

  “Are your pants frozen too?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m freezing my ass off. Do you think it means something that you and I both climbed up here to jump on the same night?”

  “What do you mean? Like, is the universe saying ‘don’t’? Can’t we agree that the universe doesn’t give a shit anymore, and probably never did?”

  Kate looked over at him. “I don’t care if we jump together or climb down together. But whichever it is, let’s just not do it alone.”

  PILCHER

  Someone grabbed his arm and pulled him down out of the truck. It was the first time he’d been outside in days, but he couldn’t see anything through the black hood over his head.

  “What’s happening?” Pilcher asked.

  The hood was ripped off.

  He saw lights—fifty, sixty, maybe a hundred of them. Flashlights, torches, held by the residents of Wayward Pines, and by his own people from the mountain, all of whom surrounded him in a tight circle of bodies. As his eyes adjusted, he saw the buildings of Main Street looming above him, their facades and storefronts awash in firelight.

  Two men stood with him in the circle—Ethan Burke and Alan Spear, his head of security.

  Ethan approached.

  “What is this?” Pilcher asked. “You throwing a fête for me?”

  He looked around at all the faces, hidden in shadow, distorted by firelight. Angry and intense.

  “We took a vote,” Ethan said.

  “Who voted?”

  “Everyone except you. A fête was on the table, but in the end it didn’t feel right, putting you to death using the same self-policing approach you forced upon the citizens of Wayward Pines.” Ethan took a step closer, his breath clouding in the cold. “Look at these people, David. Everyone here lost family, lost friends. Because of you.”

  Pilcher smiled against the rage.

  The murderous, soul-melting rage.

  “Because of me?” he asked. “That’s hysterical.” He stepped away from Ethan, moving out into the middle of the circle. “What else could I have possibly done for you people? I gave you food. I gave you shelter. I gave you purpose. I protected you from the knowledge you couldn’t handle. From the harsh truth of the world that exists beyond the fence. And each of you had to do one thing. One! Goddamn! Thing!” He shrieked the words. “Obey me.”

  He caught the stare of a woman standing several feet away, the tears glistening as they ran down her cheeks.

  So many tears in this crowd.

  So much pain.

  And once upon a time, he might have given a shit, but tonight he only saw ingratitude. Entitlement. Rebelliousness.

  He screamed, “What more could I have fucking done for you?”

  “They’re not going to answer you,” Ethan said.

  “Then what is this?”

  “They’re here to walk with you.”

  “Walk where?”

  Ethan turned to the nearest section of the crowd. “Would you all make way please?” As they parted, Ethan said, “After you, David.”

  Pilcher stared down the dark street.

  He looked at Ethan.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Start walking.”

  “Ethan—”

  Someone shoved him from behind, and when Pilcher regained his balance, he turned to see Alan glaring at him with a lethal intensity.

  “Sheriff said to go,” Alan said. “Now I’m telling you, and if you can’t make your legs work, we’ll be happy to drag you by your arms.”

  Pilcher started walking south down Main Street, between the dark buildings, Ethan on one side, Alan on the other.

  The crowd followed the three men like a vigil, and an uneasy silence descended. No one spoke. There was no sound but footsteps scraping the pavement and the occasional muffled sob.

  He tried to hold it together, but his mind was frantic.

  Where are they taking me?

  Back to the superstructure?

  To a place of execution?

  They passed the Aspen House and then the hospital.

  As everyone moved down the road into the forest south of town, Pilcher realized what was going to happen.

  He looked over at Ethan.

  The fear sweeping through him like a shot of liquid nitrogen.

  Somehow, he kept walking.

  At the curve in the road, everyone stepped off the pavement and headed into the woods, Pilcher thinking, I never even looked back, never got one last glimpse of Wayward Pines.

  A shallow layer of mist had pooled in the forest and the torchlights looked otherworldly cutting through it.

  Like disembodied points of fire.

  Pilcher was growing colder by the minute.

  He heard the buzzing of the fence.

  They were walking beside it.

  Then they were standing at the gate. It had all happened so fast, as if no time had passed since they’d removed his hood in the middle of Main Street.

  Ethan offered a small backpack to Pilcher.

  “There’s some food and water inside. Enough for several days if you last that long.”

  Pilcher just stared at the pack.

  “You all didn’t have the guts to actually kill me yourselves?” he asked.

  “No,” Ethan said. “Just the opposite actually. We all wanted it too much. We wanted to torture you. To let each person left standing take their pound of flesh out of you. Do you not want the pack?”

  Pilcher grabbed it, slung the strap over his shoulder.

  Ethan went to the control panel and punched in the manual power override.

  The humming stopped.

  The woods became quiet.

  Pilcher looked at all his people. Those from town. Those from the mountain. The last human faces he would ever lay eyes upon.

  “You ungrateful fucks! You’d all have died two thousand years ago if it wasn’t for me. I created a paradise for you. Heaven on earth. I’m your God! And you have the audacity to kick God out of heaven!”

  “I think you got your scripture wrong,” Ethan said. “God didn’t get exiled. It was the other guy.”

  Ethan opened the gate.

  Pilcher looked at Ethan, long and hard, and then glared out at the crowd.

  He crossed out of safety to the other side of the fence.

  Ethan shut the gate.

  Soon, the lines resumed their protective hum.

  Pilcher watched as the crowd turned away from him, the flashlights and torchlights receding
into the mist.

  Then he was standing alone in the cold, dark forest.

  He headed south until the hum of the fence became inaudible.

  The starlight coming though the tops of the pines was insufficient to light his way.

  When his legs became tired, he sat down against the trunk of a pine tree.

  Far off, a mile or so away, an abby screamed.

  Another one answered. Much, much closer.

  And then another.

  Pilcher heard the sound of footsteps.

  Out there in the dark, something was running.

  Running toward him.

  ETHAN

  At first light, Ethan drove out of the superstructure in one of the security team’s Dodge Rams, his son riding beside him in the passenger seat.

  Through the trees.

  The boulders.

  Then Ethan pulled onto the main road, heading south out of town.

  At the hairpin curve, he turned off into the woods and steered down the embankment, weaving carefully between the trees.

  When they reached the fence, Ethan turned parallel to it and drove until they arrived back at the gate.

  He killed the engine.

  The hum of the current moving through the barbed steel lines could be heard even from inside the truck.

  “Do you think Mr. Pilcher is dead yet?” Ben asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “But the abbies will eventually get him, right?”

  “That’s a certainty.”

  Ben glanced back through the rear window into the bed of the truck. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why are we doing this, Dad?”

  “Because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that thing back there.”

  Now Ethan looked into the truck bed.

  The female abby from the superstructure sat motionless in a plexiglass cage, staring out into the woods.

  “It’s strange,” Ethan said. “The world belongs to them now, but we still possess something they don’t have.”

  “What?”

  “Kindness. Decency. That’s what it is to be human. At our best at least.”

  Ben looked confused.

  “I think this abby is different,” Ethan said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She has an intelligence, a gentleness I haven’t seen in any of the others. Maybe she has a family she wants to see again.”

  “We should shoot her and burn her with all the rest.”

  “And what would that accomplish? Feed our anger for a few minutes? What if we did the opposite? What if we sent her out into her world with a message about the species that once lived in this valley? I know it’s crazy, but I’m holding tight to the idea that a small act of kindness can have real resonance.”

  Ethan opened his door, stepped out into the forest.

  “What do you mean?” Ben asked. “Like it might change the abbies? Maybe more would become like her?”

  Ethan walked around to the back of the truck, lowered the tailgate.

  He said, “Species evolve. In the beginning, man was a hunter-gatherer. Communicated through grunts and gestures. Then we invented agriculture and language. We became capable of kindness.”

  “But that took thousands of years. We’ll all be dead before that ever happens.”

  Ethan smiled. “You’re right, son. It would take a long, long, long, long time.”

  He turned to face the abby. She sat peacefully in her cage, eyes still heavy from the sedative Ethan had ordered the scientists to administer.

  Pulling his Desert Eagle from the holster, he climbed up into the bed, threw the locks on the cage, and eased the door open several inches.

  Something between a purr and a growl rumbled in the abby’s throat.

  Ethan said, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  He backed slowly away, climbed down out of the truck bed.

  The abby watched him.

  After a moment, she pushed the cage door open with her long left arm and crept out.

  “What if it does something?” Ben asked. “What if it attacks—”

  “She’s not going to hurt us. She knows my meaning.” Ethan caught her eyes. “Don’t you?”

  He started toward the fence, the abby following sluggishly, several paces behind.

  At the gate, he typed in the code for the manual power override, and waited as the bolts unlatched.

  The fence went silent.

  He shoved the gate open with his boot.

  “Go on,” Ethan said. “You’re free now.”

  The abby watched him warily as she slunk past, squeezing herself through the opening, out into her world.

  “Dad, you think we’ll ever be able to live side by side with them?”

  Ten feet out, the abby shot a glance back at Ethan.

  Her head tilted.

  She watched him for a beat, and he could have sworn she had something to say, her eyes brimming with intelligence and understanding.

  There were no words.

  But Ethan understood.

  And all at once, it came to him.

  “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

  He blinked—

  And she was gone.

  Ethan sat with Theresa on one of the park benches, watching Ben, who stood in the middle of the field, staring up at the sky. A couple hundred feet above, a kite skirted along on the breeze. It had taken the boy several tries to get the kite up and out of the still air near the surface, but the patch of red was now a fixture against the perfect blue, twirling around on the currents.

  It was a nice thing to sit and watch a child with a kite, and it was the first morning in days, maybe weeks, that didn’t feel like winter.

  “Ethan, that’s insane.”

  “If we stay in this valley,” he said, “we all die in a matter of years. There’s not even a question. So why put it to a vote?”

  “You let the people decide.”

  “What if—”

  “You let the people decide.”

  “People get it wrong.”

  “That’s true, but you have to figure out what kind of a leader you’re going to be.”

  “I know what the right decision is, Theresa.”

  “So sell your idea to them.”

  “It’s a hard sell. It’s risky. And what happens if they make the wrong choice? Even you’re on the fence.”

  “It’s our wrong choice to make, honey. If you’re willing to force this on people, then what was the point of ever telling them the truth about Wayward Pines?”

  “I caused all of this,” Ethan said. “All the death. The suffering and loss. I turned our lives inside out. Now I just want to fix it.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m terrified.” She took his hand into hers. “You’re not just asking me to trust the people with their fate. You’re asking me to trust them with yours. With Ben’s.” Their son sprinted across the field, dragging the kite behind him, laughing. “The day I broke into the superstructure, Pilcher told me that I would come to understand the things he did. The choices he made.”

  “And do you now?”

  “I’m starting to feel the weight that was on his shoulders.”

  “He didn’t trust his people to make the right choices,” Theresa said, “because he was afraid. But you don’t have to be, Ethan. If you do what you know in your heart is right, if you give people the freedom to choose their own fate, their own destiny—”

  “We could starve to death in this valley.”

  “That’s true. But you won’t have compromised your integrity. That’s the only thing you really have to fear.”

  That night, Ethan stood where it had all begun, on the bare stage in the opera house, under the burn of the lights, with the last
two hundred fifty people on the planet looking on.

  “Here we are,” he said to the crowd, “humanity at the end of the world. We’re here right now because of the choice I made to tell everyone the truth about Wayward Pines. Don’t think I’ve missed that. Many of you lost loved ones. We’ve all suffered. I’ll live with my decision and what it cost for the rest of my life, but right now, it’s time to consider the future. In fact, it’s all I’ve been thinking about this past week.”

  The core group of Pilcher’s inner circle sat together off stage left—Francis Leven, Alan, Marcus, Mustin—all watching him.

  The quiet in the theater was absolute.

  A coiled silence.

  “I know we’re all trying to figure out where we go from here,” he said. “What happens next. What our lives might look like. We have some hard truths to face, and we need to face them together. Right now. Here’s the first one. Our food is running out.”

  Gasps and whispers trickled through the crowd.

  Someone shouted, “How long?”

  “About four years,” Ethan said. “Which brings us to the second hard truth. We can’t stay in this valley. I mean, we could. Until the next fence failure. Until a winter comes like we’ve never imagined. Until the food supply is exhausted.

  “Francis Leven is here from the superstructure and he can walk you all through the particulars, explain exactly why our lives are no longer sustainable in Wayward Pines.

  “But I didn’t drag you down here just to be the bearer of bad news. I also have a proposal for a new course of action. Something radical and dangerous and daring. A leap in the dark.”

  Ethan found Theresa in the crowd.

  “To be honest, I debated even proposing this as a choice. A friend of mine recently said to me that sometimes we find ourselves in situations that are so life and death, one or two strong leaders need to call the shots. But I think we’re all finished with having our lives controlled. I don’t know how, but we’re going to find our way through this. What it comes down to for me is that I’d rather us make bad decisions as a group, than to live in the absence of freedom. That was the old way. That was Pilcher’s way.

  “So all I ask is that you hear me out, and then we’ll decide what to do. Together. Like free human beings.”