The Last Town (The Wayward Pines Trilogy 3)

IX





ETHAN

Francis Leven lived in a stand-alone structure in a far corner of the ark, built into an overhang in the rock wall. Ethan’s keycard didn’t work on the reader, so he banged his fist against the steel door instead.

“Mr. Leven!”

After a moment, the lock retracted.

The door cracked open.

The man who answered stood barely five feet tall, and he was dressed in a bathrobe, which filth and time had degraded to something less than white. Forty-five or fifty, Ethan guessed, although Leven’s advanced state of dishevelment made that approximation iffy. His dishwater hair was shoulder-length and shiny with grease, and through large blue eyes, he regarded Ethan with unveiled suspicion that bordered on malice.

“What do you want?” Leven asked.

“I need to talk to you.”

“I’m busy. Another time.”

Leven tried to shut the door, but Ethan shoved it open hard and forced his way inside.

Candy bar wrappers littered the floor and the air carried a moist, moldy scent, like the living space of a sixteen-year-old boy, but spiked with the caustic odor of stale coffee.

The sole illumination came from recessed lighting in the ceiling and the glow of the giant LED displays that covered almost every square foot of wall space. Ethan stared at the one closest to him, which showed a digital pie chart. At a glance, the chart appeared to reflect the atmospheric breakdown of the superstructure’s air content.

He didn’t know what to make of all the screens.

They showed a seemingly incomprehensible array of data.

—Sets of temperature gradients in Kelvin.

—A digital representation of what Ethan assumed were the one thousand suspension chambers.

—Vital stats on the two hundred fifty people still warm and breathing on the planet.

—Drone footage.

—A full biometric readout on the female abby in captivity.

It was like the surveillance center on steroids.

“I would like for you to leave,” Leven said. “No one bothers me here.”

“Pilcher’s finished. In case you didn’t get the memo, you work for me now.”

“That’s debatable.”

“What is this place?”

Leven glared him down through a thick pair of glasses.

Stubborn. Resisting.

Ethan said, “I’m not leaving.”

“I monitor the systems that keep the superstructure and Wayward Pines functioning. We call it mission control.”

“Which systems?”

“All of them. Electrical. Hull. Filtration. Surveillance. Suspension. Ventilation. The reactor underneath us that powers everything.”

Ethan moved deeper into the nerve center.

“And it’s just you responsible for all of this?”

Leven let slip a smirk. “I have minions. You know, in the event I’m hit by the proverbial bus.”

Ethan smiled, detecting the first inkling of a wicked sense of humor.

“I hear you keep to yourself,” Ethan said.

“I’m in charge of the engine that makes our existence possible. I work eighteen hours a day, every day. Before the burial this morning, I hadn’t seen the sky in three years.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a life.”

“Well, it’s the one I have. I happen to love it.”

Ethan approached a set of monitors in a dark alcove that streamed lines of code at the speed of a stock-market ticker.

“What’s this?” Ethan asked.

“Beautiful, isn’t it? I’m running some projections.”

“Projections on . . . ?”

Leven came and stood beside him. They watched the lines of code spilling down the screens like a waterfall.

Leven said, finally, “The viability of what remains of our species. See, things were dire long before David had his little temper tantrum and threw his people to the wolves.”

“Dire how?”

“Follow.”

Leven showed Ethan over to the main console, where they sat down in oversize leather chairs facing an expansive array of screens.

“Before the massacre in the valley, there were a hundred sixty souls living in the mountain,” Leven said. “Four hundred sixty-one living in Wayward Pines. Our data only goes back fourteen years, but the first killing freeze typically comes in late August. You haven’t been here for a winter yet, but they’re long and brutal. The snow can get ten, fifteen feet deep in the valley. There’s no garden to harvest from. No fruit, no vegetables. We subsist solely on our reserve of freeze-dried meals, supplements, and meat rations. You want to hear a dirty little secret? Now that this is all on you? David Pilcher never intended for us to stay in this valley indefinitely.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He miscalculated how uninhabitable and hostile this world would become.”

Ethan felt something go dark inside of him.

“I’m rerunning my calculations,” Leven said, “but it’s looking like our winter rations will run out in four point two years. Now, there are things we can do to delay the inevitable, like enforcing reduced rations. But that only buys us, at most, another year or two.”

“Not to be callous, but don’t we have less mouths to feed now?”

“Yes, but the abbies wiped out our cattle, our dairy. There will be no milk, no meat. It would take years to reboot the herd.”

“Then we have to find a way to store what we grow for the winter.”

“Our current setup in town doesn’t produce enough food to feed us and save for the future.”

“You mean we eat what we grow?”

“Exactly. And pretty much right away. We’re just too far north. Two thousand years ago, we might have been able to make this growing season work, but it’s gotten shorter and harsher. And these last few years have been the coldest yet. Here’s what I wanted to show you.”

Leven input some new code via the touch screen.

A list began to scroll.

Ethan examined the monitor above him.

Rice: 17%

Flour: 6%

Sugar: 11%

Grain: 3%

Iodized Salt: 32%

Corn: 0%

Vitamin C: 55%

Soybeans: 0%

Powdered Milk: 0%

Malt: 4%

Barley: 3%

Yeast: 1%

The list continued on.

Ethan said, “These are the reserve staple levels?”

“Yes. And as you can see, it’s critical.”

“What was Pilcher planning to do?”

“With our full in-town population, we might have had the manpower to expand our gardens fast enough to meet demand. We were also looking into building a network of greenhouses, but see the problem comes with snow loads in the winter. If enough weight were to build up on the glass roofs, they’d collapse. Again, we’re just too far north.”

“Do the people in the mountain understand what’s coming?”

“No. David didn’t want to spook anyone until we had come up with a solution.”

“And you haven’t.”

“There isn’t one,” Leven said. “Five-year models confirm this valley will become uninhabitable. If we catch a really bad winter, possibly sooner. We’re all from the modern age. If push came to shove, we might have been able to adopt an agrarian lifestyle in a more temperate climate. But with weather like this? The only lifestyle that might support us is the nomadic hunter-gatherer.”

“Except we’re trapped in this valley.”

“Precisely.”

“What about the abbies?” Ethan asked.

“As a food source?”

“Yeah.”

“First off, gross. Secondly, we’ve run models, and there’s too much inherent danger in venturing out beyond the fence to kill them. If we did that on a regular basis, we’d lose too many of our own. Look, I get that you’re just finding this out now, but trust me, I’ve been grappling with this problem for three years. There was no solution before. There’s even less of one now.”

“Did you know what David was planning?”

“You mean with killing the power to the fence?”

“Yeah.”

“No. I was sitting right here the night the fence went down. I called him. He wouldn’t answer. He did it from his office and he locked me out of the system.”

“So he didn’t consult with you beforehand?”

“David and I haven’t been on the greatest of terms these last few years.”

“Why’s that?”

Leven pushed his chair back from the controls and rolled across the floor.

“The David Pilcher you know wasn’t the same man who hired me away from Lockheed Martin. The end of Wayward Pines has been coming for a long time, but David didn’t want to face it. It’s arrogance, I think, a refusal to admit that he missed this potential crisis. That he didn’t foresee it and steer us all out of the way. Recently, he’s become increasingly withdrawn. Erratic. Emotional. He killed his own daughter. That was the first major fracture. Then when you took control of the town and told the residents the truth, I think he just couldn’t deal anymore. Said ‘screw this’ and hit self-destruct.”

“So you’re telling me it’s over. We’re all going to starve to death.”

Leven smiled. “If the abbies don’t get us first.”

Ethan rose to his feet, watched the monitor scroll the list of depleted provisions like the writings of a doomsday prophet. He said, “You’ve got access to every database in the superstructure?”

“That is correct.”

“Did you know a nomad just returned? Adam Hassler?”

“I heard rumblings of it.”

“Do you have access to his file here?”

Leven tilted his head. “I don’t really feel too hot about where this conversation is going.”

“I want you to pull his file.”

“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.”