“Why?”
“Before Wayward Pines, Hassler and I used to work together. He was my supervisor in the Secret Service and the one who sent me here. I had no idea he was here until I saw him on the street a couple days ago. Come to find out, before Pilcher brought me out of suspension, Hassler was living here, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Something doesn’t feel right.”
Leven scooted back to the console array and went to work on the touch screens.
“And what is it exactly you’d like to know?” he asked.
Hassler’s face appeared on the monitor, his eyes closed, skin pale—a post-suspension photo.
“How he came to be here.”
“Oh.” Leven quit typing, spun around in his chair. “I don’t think I’m going to have that level of detail. You’ll have to ask Pilcher himself.”
Ethan stepped inside the cage, found David Pilcher eating his supper—some freeze-dried abomination from the winter reserves. The old man looked even older with the beginnings of a white beard fading in across his face, and as Ethan sat down across from him in the cramped cell, he wondered just how much rage simmered underneath the surface. Ethan had plenty of his own. He couldn’t drive the image of those grieving families out of his mind, the sound of those shovels spearing into dirt. All that pain this one man’s doing.
“That does not smell like Tim’s cooking,” Ethan said.
Pilcher glanced up.
Hard. Indignant. Defiant.
“It’s like Satan shit on a plate. Must give you great pleasure.”
“What?”
“Seeing me like this. Relegated to a cage that was built to hold a monster.”
“I’d say it’s serving its purpose perfectly.”
“Thought you’d forgotten about me down here, Ethan.”
“No, just been busy cleaning up the mess you made.”
“The mess I made?” Pilcher laughed.
“Adam Hassler.”
“What about him?”
“I hear that before I was brought out of suspension, Adam lived with my wife and son.”
“As I recall, they were quite happy too.”
“How did Adam Hassler come to be a resident of Wayward Pines?”
A touch of life crinkled in the corners of Pilcher’s eyes.
“What does it matter now?” he asked.
“You do not want to f**k with me.”
Pilcher set his plate aside.
Ethan said, “I’m told that he came here looking for me after my disappearance. And that you abducted him. That he woke up here just like I did. Like everyone in town did.”
“Hmm. Interesting. Out of curiosity, who told you to come see me about this? Was it Francis Leven?”
“That’s right.”
“Is it possible that Francis also shared with you a piece of shocking news about our prospects going forward? And when I say ‘our’ I of course mean the human race.”
“Tell me about Hassler.”
“We’re all going to be starving to death in a matter of years. Do you really think you’re up to solving that problem, Ethan? Ready for that weight on your shoulders? What are you going to do? Put it to a vote? Look, I messed up. I realize that. But you need me. You all need me.”
Ethan struggled onto his feet, started for the door.
“Okay, okay. At first, it was just a standard bribe,” Pilcher said.
“What’s a standard bribe?”
“Money. To buy Adam’s silence for you, Kate Hewson, and Bill Evans. To shut down the investigation into your disappearances. But then something changed. He decided he wanted to come along with me and my crew. Be a part of our journey.”
Ethan cocked his right arm back and punched the door.
Blood from his busted knuckles smeared across the steel.
He hit the door again.
“Between you and me,” Pilcher said, “I always thought Hassler was an arrogant prick. I let him have one good year in Wayward Pines, and then I sent him out on a suicide mission beyond the fence. He never returned.”
Ethan shouted for the guard.
“You need me,” Pilcher said. “You know you need me. If something isn’t done, we’ll die out in a matter of—”
“It’s not your concern anymore.”
“Excuse me?”
The guard opened the door.
“How did you like your supper?” Ethan asked.
“What?”
“Your supper. How was it?”
“Terrible.”
“Sorry about that, especially considering it was your last.”
“What does that mean?”
“Remember when you asked me what was going to happen to you, and I said that’s for the people to decide? Well. They decided. We took a vote a few hours ago, right after we finished burying all the people you murdered. And it’s happening tonight.”
Ethan walked out into the corridor as Pilcher screamed his name.
Late afternoon.
The sun already behind the cliffs.
The sky sheeted over with a uniform deck of clouds that seemed to threaten snow.
The power in town had yet to be restored, but still a handful of people had returned to their homes to begin the process of cleaning up, of trying to reassemble the pieces of a life that could never be made right again.
In the distance, the pile of abbies still burned.
Ethan wasn’t sure what it was—maybe the lateness of the day, the darkening clouds, the cold, gray indifference of the towering cliffs—but Wayward Pines felt, possibly for the first time since he’d come here, like exactly what it was: the last town on earth.
He parked on the curb in front of his Victorian house on Sixth Street.
The vibrant yellow and the white trim struck him as off-key in light of the past few days.
They didn’t live anymore in a world where life was to be colorful and celebrated. Life had become something you clung to, that you bit down hard on against the pain, like the rubber block in a session of electroshock therapy.
Ethan jarred open the Jeep’s door with his shoulder and stepped down onto the street.
The neighborhood stood silent.
Joyless.
Tense.
There were no bodies visible, but a large bloodstain still marred the pavement nearby. It would take a day of solid rain to wash it away.
He stepped over the curb.
From the front yard at least, his house looked intact.