Wayward: Wayward Pines: 2

Yesterday is history.

Tomorrow is a mystery.

Today is a gift.

That’s why it’s called the present.

Work hard, be happy, and enjoy your life in Wayward Pines!

—Notice to all residents of Wayward Pines (required to be posted prominently in every residence and place of business)

I

1

Mustin had been watching the creature through the Schmidt & Bender telescopic sight for the better part of an hour. It had come over the cirque at daybreak, pausing as the first radials of sunlight struck its translucent skin. Its progression down through the boulder field had been slow and careful, stopping occasionally to sniff the remains of others like it. Others Mustin had killed.

The sniper reached up to the scope, adjusted the parallax, and settled back in behind the focus. Conditions were ideal—clear visibility, mild temperature, no wind. With the reticle set at 25x zoom, the creature’s ghostly silhouette popped against the gray of the shattered rock. At a distance of one and a half miles, its head was no larger than a grain of sand.

If he didn’t take the shot now, he’d have to range the target again. And there was a possibility that by the time he was ready to shoot, the creature would have passed out of his sight line. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. There was still a high-voltage security fence a half mile down the canyon. But if it managed to scale the cliffs over the top of the razor wire, there’d be trouble. He’d have to radio in. Call for a team. Extra work. Extra time. Every effort would be made to stop the creature from reaching town. He’d almost certainly catch an ass-chewing from Pilcher.

Mustin drew in a long, deep breath.

Lungs expanding.

He let it out.

Lungs deflating.

Then empty.

His diaphragm relaxed.

He counted to three and squeezed the trigger.

The British-made AWM bucked hard against his shoulder, the report dampened by the suppressor. Recovering from the recoil, he found his target in the sphere of magnification, still crouched on a flat-topped boulder on the floor of the canyon.

Damn.

He’d missed.

It was a longer shot than he normally took, and so many variables in play, even under perfect conditions. Barometric pressure. Humidity. Air density. Barrel temperature. Even Coriolis effect—the rotation of the earth. He thought he’d accounted for everything in calculating his aiming solution, but—

The creature’s head disappeared in a pink mist.

He smiled.

It had taken a little over four seconds for the .338 Lapua Magnum round to reach the target.

Helluva shot.

Mustin sat up, struggled to his feet.

Stretched his arms over his head.

It was midmorning. The sky steel blue and not a cloud in sight. His perch was atop a thirty-foot guard tower that had been built on the rocky pinnacle of a mountain, far above the timberline. From the open platform, he had a panoramic view of the surrounding peaks, the canyon, the forest, and the town of Wayward Pines, which from four thousand feet above, was little more than a grid of intersecting streets, couched in a protected valley.

His radio squeaked.

He answered, Mustin, over.

Just had a fence strike in zone four, over.

Stand by.

Zone 4 encompassed the expanse of pine forest that bordered the southern edge of town. He took up his rifle and glassed the fence under the canopy of trees, tracked it for a quarter mile. He saw the smoke first—coils of it lifting off the animal’s scorched hide.

I have a visual, he said. It’s just a deer, over.

Copy that.

Mustin swung the rifle north into town.

Houses appeared—colorful Victorians fronted with perfect squares of bright grass. White picket fences. He aimed down into the park where a woman pushed two children in swings. A little girl shot down the blinding glimmer of a slide.

He glassed the schoolyard.

The hospital.

The community gardens.

Main Street.

Fighting down that familiar swell of envy.

Townies.

They were oblivious. All of them. So beautifully oblivious.

He didn’t hate them. Didn’t want their life. He had long ago accepted his role as protector. Guardian. Home was a sterile, windowless room inside a mountain, and he had made as much peace with that fact as a man could hope to make. But that didn’t mean that on a lovely morning as he gazed down into what was literally the last vestige of paradise on the face of the earth, there wasn’t a pang of nostalgia. Of homesickness for what had once been.

For what would never be again.

Moving down the street, Mustin fixed his sight on a man walking quickly up the sidewalk. He wore a hunter-green shirt, brown pants, black Stetson cowboy hat.

The brass star pinned to his lapel refracted a glint of sunlight.

The man turned a corner, the crosshairs of the reticle zeroing in on his back.

Morning, Sheriff Burke, Mustin said. Feel an itch between your shoulder blades?

2

There were still moments, like this one, when Wayward Pines felt like a real place.

Sunlight pouring down into the valley.

The morning still pleasantly cool.

Pansies gemmed a planter under an open window that let the smell of a cooking breakfast waft outside.

People out for morning walks. Watering lawns.

Collecting the local paper.

Beads of dew steaming off the top of a black mailbox.

Ethan Burke found it tempting to linger in the moment, to pretend that everything was just as it appeared. That he lived with his wife and son in a perfect little town, where he was a well-liked sheriff. Where they had friends. A comfortable home. All needs provided for. And it was in the pretending that he’d come to fully understand how well the illusion worked. How people could let themselves succumb, let themselves disappear into the pretty lie that surrounded them.

Bells jingled over the door as Ethan entered the Steaming Bean. He stepped up to the counter and smiled at the barista, a hippie chick with blond dreads and soulful eyes.

Morning, Miranda.

Hi, Ethan. Usual?

Please.

While she started the espresso shots for his cappuccino, Ethan surveyed the shop. The regulars were all here, including two old-timers—Phillip and Clay—hunched over a chessboard. Ethan walked over, studied the game. By the looks of it, they’d been at it for a while now, each man down to a king, queen, and several pawns.

Looks like you’re heading toward a stalemate, Ethan said.

Not so fast, Phillip said. I still got something up my sleeve.

His opponent, a gray grizzly of a man, grinned through his wild beard across the chessboard and said, "By something, Phil means he’s going to take so damn long to move that I die and he wins by forfeit."

Oh, shut up, Clay.

Ethan moved on past a ratty sofa to a bookshelf. He ran his finger across the spines. Classics. Faulkner. Dickens. Tolkien. Hugo. Joyce. Bradbury. Melville. Hawthorne. Poe. Austen. Fitzgerald. Shakespeare. At a glance, it was just a ragtag assembly of cheap paperbacks. He pulled a slim volume off the shelf. The Sun Also Rises. The cover was an impressionistic bullfighting scene. Ethan swallowed against the lump that formed in his throat. The brittle-paged, mass-market edition of Hemingway’s first novel was probably the sole remaining copy in existence. It gave him goosebumps—awesome and tragic to hold it in his hands.

Ethan, you’re all set!

He grabbed one more book for his son and went to the counter to collect his cappuccino.

Thanks, Miranda. I’m going to borrow these books, if that’s okay.

Of course. She smiled. Keep ’em straight out there, Sheriff.

Do my best.

Ethan tipped the brim of his hat and headed for the door.

Ten minutes later, he pushed through the glass double doors under a sign that read:

OFFICE OF THE SHERIFF OF WAYWARD PINES

Reception stood empty. Nothing new there.

His secretary sat at her desk looking as bored as ever. She was playing Solitaire, laying cards down at a steady, mechanical pace.

Morning, Belinda.

Morning, Sheriff.

She didn’t look up.

Any calls?

No, sir.

Anyone been by?

No, sir.

How was your evening?

She glanced up, caught off guard, an ace of spades clutched in her right hand.

What?

It was the first time since becoming sheriff that Ethan had pushed his interaction with Belinda beyond perfunctory greetings, goodbyes, and administrative chitchat. She’d been a pediatric nurse in her past life. He wondered if she knew that he knew that.

I was just asking how your evening was. Last night.

Oh. She pulled her fingers through a long, silver ponytail. Fine.

Do anything fun?

No. Not really.

He thought she might return the question, inquire after his evening, but five seconds of uncomfortable silence and eye contact elapsed and still she didn’t speak.

Ethan finally rapped his knuckles on her desk. I’ll be in my office.

He propped his boots up on the massive desk and kicked back in the leather chair with his steaming coffee. The head of a giant elk stared down at him from its mount across the room. Between it and the three antique gun cases behind the desk, Ethan felt he had the trappings of a country sheriff down cold.

His wife would be arriving at work right about now. In her past life, Theresa had been a paralegal. In Wayward Pines, she was the town’s sole realtor, which meant she spent her days sitting behind a desk in an office on Main Street that people rarely entered. Her job, like the vast majority of those assigned to the residents, was mainly cosmetic. Window dressing for a pretend town. Only four or five times a year would she actually assist someone with a new home purchase. Model residents were rewarded with the option to upgrade their home every few years. Those residents who had been here the longest and never violated the rules lived in the biggest, nicest Victorians. And those couples that became pregnant were all but guaranteed a new, more spacious home.

Ethan had nothing to do and nowhere to be for the next four hours.

He opened the book from the coffeehouse.

The prose was terse and brilliant.

He choked up at the descriptions of Paris at night.

The restaurants, the bars, the music, the smoke.

The lights of a real, living city.

The sense of a wide world brimming with diverse and fascinating people.

The freedom to explore it.

Forty pages in, he closed the book. He couldn’t take it. Hemingway wasn’t distracting him. Wasn’t sweeping him away from the reality of Wayward Pines. Hemingway was rubbing his face in it. Pouring salt into a wound that would never heal.

At a quarter to two, Ethan left the office on foot.

He strolled through quiet neighborhoods.

Everyone he passed smiled and waved, greeting him with what felt like genuine enthusiasm, as if he’d lived here for years. If they secretly feared and hated him, they hid it well. And why shouldn’t they? As far as he knew, he was the sole resident of Wayward Pines who knew the truth, and it was his job to make certain it stayed that way. To keep the peace. The lie. Even from his wife and son. In his first two weeks as sheriff, he’d spent most of his time studying dossiers on each resident, learning the particulars of their lives before. The details of their integrations. Surveillance-based reports of their lives after. He knew the personal histories of half of the town now. Their secrets and fears. Those who could be trusted to maintain this fragile illusion. Those with hairline cracks in their veneer.

He was becoming a one-man gestapo.

Necessary—he got that.

But he still despised it.

Ethan hit Main Street and headed south until the sidewalk and the buildings ended. The road went on, and he walked its shoulder into a forest of towering pines. The murmur of town life dropped away.

Fifty feet past the road sign that warned of a sharp curve ahead, Ethan stopped. He glanced back toward Wayward Pines. No cars coming. Everything still. No sound but a single bird cheeping in a tree high overhead.

He stepped down from the shoulder and set off into the woods.

The air smelled of pine needles warming in the sun.

Ethan moved across the cushiony floor of the forest through spaces of light and shadow.

He walked quickly enough to sweat through the back of his shirt, his skin cool where the fabric clung.

It was a nice hike. No surveillance, no people. Just a man on a walk by himself in the woods, briefly alone with his thoughts.

Two hundred yards from the road, he reached the boulders, a collection of granite blocks scattered between the pines. At the point where the forest swept up the mountainside, a rock outcropping loomed, half-buried in the earth.

Ethan approached.

From ten feet away, the smooth, vertical rock face looked real. Right down to the quartz vein and the bright smatterings of moss and lichen.

At close range, the illusion was less convincing, the dimensions of the face just a touch too square.

Ethan stood several feet back and waited.

Soon, he heard the muffled mechanical hum of the gears beginning to turn. The entire rock face lifted like a giant garage door—wide and tall enough to accommodate a tractor trailer.

Ethan ducked under the rising door into the dank, subterranean chill.

Hello, Mr. Burke.

Marcus.

Same escort as before—a twentysomething kid with the buzzed hair and sharp jawline of a grunt or a cop. He wore a yellow windbreaker, and it dawned on Ethan that he’d forgotten to bring his jacket again. He was in for another freezing ride.

Marcus had left the doorless, topless Wrangler idling and facing back the way it had come.

Ethan climbed into the front passenger seat.

The entrance door thudded closed behind them.

Marcus pulled the emergency brake and shifted into gear as he spoke into a headset, I’ve got Mr. Burke. We’re en route.

The Jeep lurched forward, accelerating on a single, unmarked lane of pristine pavement.

They sped up a fifteen-percent grade.

The walls of the tunnel were exposed bedrock.

In places, rivulets of water came down the rock and spiderwebbed across the road. An occasional droplet starred the windshield.

The fluorescent luminaires blurred past overhead in a river of morbid orange.

It smelled like stone, water, and exhaust.

Between the engine growl and the wind, it was too noisy for conversation. This was fine by Ethan. He leaned back into the gray vinyl seat and fought the urge to rub his arms against the constant blast of cold, wet air.

Pressure built inside his ears, the roar of the engine fading.

He swallowed.

The noise returned.

They kept climbing.

At thirty-five miles per hour, it was only a four-minute trip, but it seemed to take longer. Something disorienting and time-skewing in the face of all the cold and the noise and the wind.

The sense of literally boring up inside a mountain.

The unnerving anticipation of going to see him.

The tunnel emptied into an immense cavern that contained the floor space of ten warehouses. A million square feet or more. A room expansive enough for the assembly of jets or spacecraft. But instead it held provisions. Huge cylindrical reservoirs filled with food staples. Long rows of shelving forty feet high stocked with lumber and supplies. Everything needed to keep the last town on earth running for years to come.

Marcus drove past a door with the word Suspension stenciled across the glass. Misty blue light clouded behind the entrance, and it ran an icy finger down Ethan’s spine to know what stood inside.

Pilcher’s suspension units.

Hundreds of them.

Every resident of Wayward Pines, himself included, had been chemically suspended in that room for eighteen hundred years.

The Jeep jerked to a stop beside a pair of glass doors.

Marcus turned off the car as Ethan climbed out.

The escort typed in a code on the keypad and the doors whisked apart.

They moved past a placard that read Level 1 into a long, empty corridor.

No windows.

Fluorescent lights humming.

The floor was a streak of black-and-white checkered tile. Every ten feet stood a door inset with a small circular window. No handle, no doorknob—they opened only with a keycard.

Most of the windows were dark.

Through one, however, an aberration watched Ethan pass, the pupils of its large, milky eyes dilating, razor cuspids bared, a single black talon clicking on the glass.

They visited him in nightmares. He’d wake dripping with sweat, reliving the attack, Theresa patting his back and whispering that he was safe at home in bed, that everything would be okay.

Halfway down the corridor, they stopped at a pair of unmarked doors.

Marcus swiped his keycard and they opened.

Ethan stepped inside the small car.

His escort inserted a key into a chrome panel, and when the sole button began to blink, pushed it.

The movement was smooth.

Ethan’s ears always popped once during the ride, but he could never tell if they were rising or descending.

It stuck in his craw that even after two weeks on the job he was still escorted around this place like a child or a threat.

Two weeks.

Jesus.

It felt like just yesterday he’d been sitting across the desk from Adam Hassler, Special Agent in Charge of the Seattle field office, receiving the assignment to come to this town and find Ethan’s missing ex-partner, Kate Hewson. But he wasn’t a Secret Service agent anymore. He still hadn’t fully come to terms with that fact.

The only way to know that they had stopped was that the doors opened.

The first thing he saw stepping off was a Picasso, which Ethan suspected was original.

They walked through a posh foyer. No fluorescent lights and checkered linoleum here. It was all marble tile and high-end wall sconces. Crown molding. Even the air tasted better—none of that canned, stale-edged component found in the rest of the complex.

They passed a sunken living room.

A cathedral kitchen.

A library walled with leather-bound volumes that smelled absolutely antique.

Turning a corner, they finally headed down toward the double oak doors at the end of the hall.

Marcus knocked hard twice, and a voice on the other side responded, Come in!

Go ahead, Mr. Burke.

Ethan opened the doors and stepped through into a spectacular office.

The floor was a dark, exotic hardwood with a high-gloss sheen.

The centerpiece was a large table that displayed, under glass, an architectural miniature of Wayward Pines, accurate even to the color of Ethan’s house.

The left-hand wall was adorned with the works of Vincent van Gogh.

The opposite wall consisted of a floor-to-ceiling bank of flat-screened monitors. Nine high, twenty-four across. Leather sofas faced the screens that showed two hundred sixteen simultaneous images of Wayward Pines—streets, bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, backyards.

Every time Ethan saw those screens he had to stifle an irresistible impulse to tear someone’s head off.

He understood the purpose—fully—but still…

That fury, said the man behind the intricately carved mahogany desk. You flash it every time you come to see me.

Ethan shrugged. You’re eavesdropping on private lives. Just a natural reaction.

You believe privacy should exist in our town?

Of course not.

Ethan moved toward the giant desk as the doors behind him swung shut.

He shelved his Stetson under his right arm and eased down into one of the chairs.

Stared at David Pilcher.

He was the billionaire-inventor (when money meant something) behind Wayward Pines, behind this complex inside the mountain. In 1971, Pilcher had discovered that the human genome was degrading, and he’d privately predicted that humanity would cease to exist within thirty to forty generations. So he built this suspension superstructure to preserve a number of pure humans before the genome corruption reached critical mass.

In addition to his inner circle of one hundred sixty true believers, Pilcher was responsible for the abduction of six hundred fifty people, all of whom, himself included, he’d put into suspended animation.

And Pilcher’s prediction came true. At this very moment, beyond the electrified fence that surrounded Wayward Pines, lived hundreds of millions of what humanity had devolved into—aberrations.

And yet, Pilcher didn’t own the face he’d ostensibly earned. He was a physically unthreatening man. Five foot five in boots. Hairless save for the faintest silver stubble—more chrome than winter clouds. He watched Ethan through diminutive eyes that were as black as they were unreadable.

Pilcher pushed a manila folder across the leather-topped desk.

What’s this? Ethan asked.

A surveillance-based report.

Ethan opened the folder.

It contained a black-and-white screenshot of a man he recognized. Peter McCall. The man was editor in chief of the town paper—the Wayward Light. In the photograph, McCall is lying on his side in bed, staring empty-eyed into nothing.

What’d he do? Ethan asked.

Well, nothing. And that’s the problem. Peter hasn’t shown up for work the last two days.

Maybe he’s been sick?

He hasn’t reported feeling ill, and Ted, my head surveillance tech, got a weird vibe.

Like he might be considering running?

Perhaps. Or doing something reckless.

I remember his file, Ethan said. I don’t recall any major integration issues. No subsequent insubordinate behavior. Has he said anything disturbing?

McCall hasn’t spoken a word in forty-eight hours. Not even to his children.

What do you want me to do exactly?

Keep an eye on him. Drop by and say hello. Don’t underestimate the effect your presence can have.

You aren’t considering a fête are you?

No. Fêtes are reserved for those who exhibit true acts of treason and try to bring others along with them. You aren’t wearing your sidearm.

I think it sends the wrong message.

Pilcher smiled a mouthful of tiny white teeth. "I appreciate your taking an interest in the message I want my sole figure of authority in town to espouse. I mean that. What would your message be, Ethan?"

That I’m there to help. To support. To protect.

"But you’re not actually there to do any of those things. I’ve been unclear—this is my fault. Your presence is a reminder of my presence."

Got it.

So the next time I spot you walking down the street on one of my screens, can I expect to see your biggest, baddest gun bulging off your hip?

For sure.

Excellent.

Ethan could feel his heart punching against his ribs with a furious intensity.

Please don’t take this minor rebuke to be my overall impression of your work, Ethan. I think you’re integrating nicely into your new position. Would you agree?

Ethan glanced over Pilcher’s shoulder. The wall behind the desk was solid rock. In the center, a large window had been cut into the stone. The view was of the mountains, the canyon, and Wayward Pines—two thousand feet below.

I think I’m getting more comfortable with the job, Ethan said.

You’ve been rigorously studying the resident files?

I’ve gotten through all of them once.

Your predecessor, Mr. Pope, had them memorized.

I’ll get there.

"Glad to hear it. But you weren’t