by Blake Crouch
He stared at her.
Wanting to tell her.
Wanting to warn her.
He said, “You’re just going to have to trust me.”
Ethan parked his Bronco out of sight in the alley behind the hospital.
Slipped in through a service door.
The ground floor stood absolutely silent.
He took the stairs down to the basement and stepped out into the intersection of four vacant corridors, headed toward the windowless double doors at the terminus of the east wing.
The last few fluorescent light panels near the morgue had gone out.
He reached the doors in semi-darkness.
Pushed through.
Ted stood at the autopsy table at an open laptop.
Ethan walked over as the doors swung closed behind him.
Said quietly, “We safe to talk here?”
“I killed the surveillance cams to the hospital’s sublevel.” He glanced at his watch. “But they’ll only stay in sleep mode another ten minutes.”
“Where’s Pam?”
“Upstairs in a therapy session.”
Ethan moved around the gleaming table, stood beside Ted.
He glanced at the cold chambers, the sink, the organ scale. Ted had angled the examination lamp away from the table, so it fired one corner with an obscene radiance and left the rest of the morgue to shadows.
The laptop finished powering up.
Ted typed in his username and password.
“Why here?” Ethan asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Why did you want to meet here?”
Ted pointed at the screen.
The footage rolled.
HD quality.
From a corner in the ceiling, a camera aimed down at Alyssa.
Ethan said, “Fuck.”
Strapped with thick, leather restraints to an autopsy table.
To this autopsy table.
“No audio?” Ethan asked.
“Didn’t have time to find it. Trust me, you’ll be glad of that.”
Alyssa was screaming something.
Her head lifting off the table.
Every muscle straining.
Pam appeared.
She took a handful of Alyssa’s hair and jerked her head down hard against the metal table.
David Pilcher moved into the frame.
He set a small knife on the metal and climbed up onto the table.
Sat astride his daughter’s legs.
He lifted the knife.
His lips moved.
Alyssa screamed something back as Pam held her head in place.
Pilcher’s lips pursed.
His head cocked to one side.
He didn’t look angry.
Wore no expression at all as he stabbed his daughter in the stomach.
Ethan recoiled.
Pilcher pulled out the blade as Alyssa writhed against the restraints.
Black blood began to pool on the autopsy table.
Pilcher’s lips moved again as Alyssa’s face disintegrated into agony, and when he raised the knife for another strike, Ethan turned away.
He felt sick, swallowed against the taste of iron in the back of his throat.
“I think I get the idea.”
Ted leaned down and typed on the laptop.
The screen went mercifully black.
“And it goes on like that,” Ted said. “On and on and on.”
Ethan felt shaken for having seen it.
Thought of all those black holes in Alyssa’s body he’d seen that first day in the morgue.
He said, “So that night, after Alyssa and Kate parted ways, Pam followed Alyssa, somehow got her down here in the basement. Maybe Pilcher was already waiting for them, maybe he came after. When I inspected her body several days ago in this morgue, I wondered how and why she had been drained of blood. Where she had been killed…”
“And you were standing at the scene of the crime.”
Ethan stared down at the drain beneath his boots.
“You have a copy of this footage, Ted?”
“I made several.” Ted reached into his pocket and took out a fingernail-sized memory shard. “This one’s for you. It won’t play on any device in town, but in case something happens to me and the other copies of this footage, keep it in a safe place.”
Ethan slid the shard into his pocket.
Ted looked at his watch. “A few more minutes and we better be gone. What now? I considered just airing this footage on every screen in the mountain.”
“No, don’t do that. Go back to work. Carry on like nothing has changed.”
“I’m hearing there’s going to be a fête tonight for the Ballingers. Word’s already spreading in the mountain they’re responsible for Alyssa’s death. What are you going to do?”
“I have something in mind, but I haven’t told anyone.”
“So just stand by?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” Ted took one last glance at his watch. “We better get moving. The cameras wake up in sixty seconds.”
It was four in the afternoon when Ethan reached the curve in the road at the end of town. He kicked the Bronco into four-wheel low, drove down the embankment and into the forest.
The ground was soft and patches of snow lingered in the shade between the pines.
It was slow going.
A half mile seemed to take forever.
He spotted the first pylon through the windshield, and as he approached, the cables materialized, and then the coils of razor wire along the top.
He stopped the Bronco thirty yards back.
Dark enough to warrant headlights, but he didn’t want to risk turning them on.
Sitting behind the wheel as the engine idled, he couldn’t escape what a fear-inspiring thing it was to behold.
Just some steel and current.
And considering all that it was expected to keep out of Wayward Pines, and what it was intended to keep safe, it seemed so very fragile.
Hardly like all that was standing between humanity and extinction.
Kate had been right.
The stump was unmissable.
From a distance, it looked like a great silver bear, standing on its hind legs, the dead, gnarled branches near the top raised high like threatening claws. The kind of ominous shape which, at dusk, might give someone a start.
Ethan parked beside it.
He grabbed the rifle.
Stepped down onto the forest floor.
It was getting dark too fast.
The door slam echoed through the woods.
Then silence rushed in.
He circled the stump.
There was no snow here, just a bed of compressed pine needles, and nothing that would indicate a door.
He opened the back window of the Bronco and lowered the tailgate.
Grabbed the shovel and the backpack.
A half hour into digging, the head of the shovel struck something hard. Throwing it aside, he fell to his knees, used his hands to tear out the rest of the pine needles—two, maybe three years’ worth of accumulation.
The door was made of steel.
Three feet wide, four feet tall, flush against the ground.
The handle was locked down to an eyebolt with a padlock, which years of rain and snow had rusted into oblivion.
One hard blow from the shovel broke off the lock.
He shouldered the backpack.
Loaded the rifle.
Slung it over his right arm.
He drew the big pistol and jacked a .50-caliber hollow-point cartridge into the chamber.
The hinges on the door creaked like fingernails down a blackboard.
Pitch black inside.
The damp-earth smell of a crawlspace.
Ethan tugged the Maglite off his belt, clicked it on, paired it with the Desert Eagle.
Steps had been cut into the earth.
Ethan carefully descended.
After nine, he ha
d reached the bottom.
The beam of light showed a passageway framed up and supported by four-by-fours.
The construction looked makeshift and hurried, confidence not inspired.
Ethan walked under tree roots and rocks lodged in the dirt.
The walls seemed to narrow in the middle, his shoulders brushing against them, and he had to move like a hunchback so his head didn’t scrape the ceiling.
Midway through, he thought he heard the fence humming through the ground, thought he felt a tingling in the roots of his hair from his proximity to that astronomical voltage straight above his head.
There was a tightness in his chest, like his lungs were constricting, but he knew that was a purely psychosomatic response to moving through this subterranean space.
Then he was standing at the foot of another set of earthen steps, his light shining skyward onto another steel door.
He could go back, get the shovel, take an awkward whack at it.
Instead, he pulled his pistol, drew a bead on the rusted padlock.
Took a breath.
Fired.
An hour later, Ethan closed the tailgate and the back hatch.
He returned the rifle to the gun rack.
He draped himself across the hood, saltwater burning his eyes.
The light down here in the gloom of the forest was nearly gone.
It was so quiet he could hear his heart pounding against the metal.
When he could breathe normally again, he stood.
He’d been hot, but now the sweat felt clammy and chilled his skin.
“What the hell are you into?”
Ethan spun.
Pam stood peering through the tinted glass into the back of the Bronco, as if she’d materialized out of nothing.
Wore tight-fitting blue jeans that showed her figure and a red tank top, her hair pulled back into a ponytail.
Ethan studied her trim waistline.
She wasn’t armed as far as he could see unless she was packing something compact in the small of her back.
“You checking me out, Sheriff?”
“Do you have a weapon?”
“Oh, right, that’s the only reason you’re ogling me.”
Pam lifted her arms over her head like a ballerina, went up on point in her tennis shoes, did a little twirl.
She didn’t have a weapon.
“See?” she said. “Nothing in these jeans but little old me.”
Ethan pulled the pistol out of his holster, held it at his side.
Alas, empty.
“That’s a big gun, Sheriff. You know what they say about guys with big guns.”
“It’s a Desert Eagle.”
“Fifty caliber?”
“That’s right.”
“You could kill a grizzly bear with that beast.”
“I know what you did to Alyssa,” Ethan said. “I know it was you and Pilcher. Why?”
Pam ventured a step toward him.
Eight feet away.
She said, “Interesting.”
“What?”
“I’ve now closed the distance between us. Two steps—two big steps—and I could be all up in your personal space, and yet you haven’t even threatened me.”
“Maybe I want you in my personal space.”
“I made myself available to you and you would rather fuck your wife. What’s bothering me, the rub if you will, is that you’re a pragmatist.”
“I’m not following.” But he was.
“A man of few words and less bullshit. One of the things about you that make me want you. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if there were any bullets in that gun, you’d have drawn down on me at first sight and wasted my ass. I mean, that’s really your only move at this point, right? Am I onto something?”
She took another step toward him.
Ethan said, “There’s something else you haven’t considered.”
“Oh?”
“Maybe I want you in my personal space for another reason.”
“And what might that be?”
Another step.
He could smell her now. The shampoo she’d used this morning.
Her minty breath.
“Shooting is so impersonal,” Ethan said. “Maybe instead of that, I want to pin you down and beat you to death with my bare hands.”
Pam smiled. “You had that chance before.”
“I remember.”
“You got the jump on me. Wasn’t a fair fight.”
“For who? I was drugged, for fuck’s sake.”
Ethan raised the pistol and pointed it at her face.
She said, “That’s a big hole at the end of that gun.”
Ethan thumbed back the hammer.
For a beat—hesitation in her eyes.
She blinked.
Ethan said, “Think long and hard. Out of all the moments you’ve experienced, is this the one you want to be your last? Because it’s heading fast in that direction.”
She was wavering.
Not exactly fear in her eyes, but uncertainty.
Disdain for a situation she was not controlling.
Then it passed.
That steel resolve returning.
A smirk curled her lips.
She had balls. No way around that fact. She was about to call his bluff.
When her mouth opened, he squeezed the trigger.
The hammer snapped down into the firing pin.
Pam flinched—a split second of am-I-dead self-doubt.
Ethan spun the pistol in his hand, gripped it by the barrel, and swung with everything he had, four point five pounds of Israeli-made steel on a collision course with her skull, and it would’ve smashed it in, but Pam weaved at the last conceivable second.
As the momentum of Ethan’s swing turned him sideways, she hooked him in the kidney with a blow of such stunning and direct force it brought Ethan to his knees, a bright release of incendiary pain flashing through his lower back, and before he could even fully appreciate that pain, she punched him in the throat.
He was on the ground, face against the forest floor, world askew, and wondering if she’d crushed his trachea because he couldn’t draw breath.
Pam squatted down in front of him.
“Don’t tell me it was that easy,” she said. “I had this all built up in my mind, you know? But two shots and you’re asphyxiating on the ground like a little bitch?”
He was fading, his vision igniting with oxygen-deprived pyrotechnics.
There.
Finally.
Right on the cusp of uncontrolled panic, something gave.
A trickle of precious air slid down his throat.
He tried not to let on.
Made his eyes bug out as he inched his hand into his back pocket.
The Harpy.
“As you lay there suffocating, I want you to know something.”
Ethan worked his thumb into the hole in the blade.
“Whatever you were trying to pull off, you failed, and Theresa and Ben…”
He produced a wet, choking sound that made Pam smile.
“What I do to them will make what we did to Alyssa seem like a day at the spa.”
He flicked the blade open and shoved it straight into Pam’s leg.
It was so sharp, he only knew he’d aimed well when she gasped.
He turned his wrist, turned the blade.
Pam shrieked and jerked back away from him.
Blood darkened her jeans, ran down over her shoe, into the pine needles.
Ethan struggled to sit up.
Came painfully to his feet.
His kidney was throbbing but at least he could breathe again.
Pam was dragging herself away from him with her good leg, seething, “You’re dead! You’re fucking dead!”
He picked up the Desert Eagle and followed her.
As she screamed at him, he bent over and brought the heavy pistol down on the back of her head.
The forest was
quiet again.
The evening gone deep blue.
He was fucked.
Absolutely fucked.
How long could Pam be AWOL before Pilcher sent out a search party? Strike that. There wouldn’t even be a search. He’d just dial in on her chip and come right to the fence.
Unless…
With the Harpy, Ethan cut out a large swath of Pam’s jeans, exposing the back of her left leg.
A shame she couldn’t be conscious for this.
21
Superstructure
Wayward Pines, Idaho
New Year’s Eve, 2013
Pilcher closed the doors to his office behind him.
Giddy.
Practically vibrating with energy.
Moving past the architect’s miniature of the future Wayward Pines, he opened the closet, where a pristine tux hung from the rack.
“David?”
He turned, smiled.
“Sweetheart, I didn’t see you there.”
His wife sat on one of the couches that faced the wall of screens.
He started unbuttoning his shirt as he walked toward her.
Said, “I thought you’d be dressed by now.”
“Come sit with me, Dave.”
Pilcher took a seat beside her on the plush leather.
She put her hand on his knee.
“Big night,” she said.
“Does it get any bigger?”
“I’m really happy for you. You did it.”
“We did it. Without you, I—”
“Just listen.”
“What’s wrong?”
Her eyes welled up. “I’ve decided to stay behind.”
“Stay?”
“I want to see the end of my story in the present. In this world.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Please don’t raise your voice with me.”
“I’m not, I just… tonight, of all nights, you choose to tell me this. How long have you felt this way?”
“A while. I didn’t want to disappoint you. There were so many times I almost said something.”
“Are you scared? Is that it? Look, that’s totally normal.”
“It’s not that.”
Pilcher leaned back into the cushion and stared at the blank screens.
He said, “Our entire life together has been building toward tonight. It’s all been about tonight. And you’re walking away from it?”
“I’m sorry.”
“This means you’re walking away from your daughter.”
