The Last Town (The Wayward Pines Trilogy 3)

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.”

“It’s too late.”

“Not while people are alive, it isn’t. We can put them all back into suspension. They won’t remember—”

“What’s done is done. In a day or so, the rebellion in the valley will be finished, but I’m afraid one may be coming to this mountain.”

“What are you talking about?”

Pilcher sipped his drink. “You think the sheriff did this all on his own?”

Ted squeezed his hands into fists to stop the tremor that was coming.

“Burke had help from the inside, from one of my people,” Pilcher said.

“How do you know?”

“Because Burke has information he couldn’t possibly have gotten without the help of someone in surveillance. Someone in your group, Ted.”

Pilcher let the accusation sit.

Ice cracked in his glass.

“What information are you talking about?” Ted asked.

Pilcher ignored the question, held Ted’s eyes with his own. “Your group consists of you and four surveillance techs. I know your loyalty is steadfast, but what about your subordinates? Burke had the help of one of them. Any ideas who it might be?”

“Where is this coming from?”

“Ted. That is just the wrong answer.”

Ted stared down into his lap at his drink. He looked up again.

He said, “I don’t know who on my team would do such a thing. This is why you shut down surveillance?”

“You run the most sensitive group in the superstructure, and it’s been compromised.”

“What about Pam?”

“Pam?”

“It’s possible the sheriff got to her.”

Pilcher laughed, derisive. “Pam would set herself on fire if I asked her to. She’s missing by the way. Her microchip indicates she’s in town, but I haven’t heard from her in hours. I will ask you one last time—which of your men?”

“Give me the night.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Give me the night to find out who did this.”

Pilcher leaned back and regarded him with an unreadable intensity, and said, “You want to handle this yourself, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“A matter of honor?”

“Something like that.”

“Fair enough.”

Ted stood.

Pilcher pointed at the monitors. “Only you and I know what’s happening down in the valley. For now, it stays that way.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s a hard night for me, Ted. I’m grateful to have a friend like you to lean on.”

Ted tried to smile, but he couldn’t manage it. Just said, “I’ll see you in the morning.” He set his scotch glass down on a table and headed for the door.