Pines

  Higher up, the color of the steel beams showed through—rust so deep it verged on red. Centuries of oxidation. Three oak trees had grown up right through the heart of it, twisting and turning as they climbed, some of the branches even providing support for the girders. Only the framework of the lower six floors still stood—the corroded skeleton of a building. A handful of beams near the top had bent over and curled like ringlets of auburn-colored hair, but most of the steelwork had long ago collapsed into the center to be subsumed by the forest floor.

  The sound of birds coming from the ruin was tremendous. Like an avian high-rise. Nests everywhere Ethan looked.

  “Remember when you told me you wanted to be transferred to a hospital in Boise?” Jenkins asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’ve brought you to Boise. Right into the center of town.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re looking at the U.S. Bank building. Tallest skyscraper in Idaho. That’s where the Secret Service’s Boise field office is located, right? Up on seventeen?”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “I know this looks like a forest floor, but we’re actually standing in the middle of Capitol Boulevard. The state capitol is just a third of a mile through those trees, although to find any trace of it, you’d have to dig.”

  “What is this? Some kind of trick?”

  “I told you.”

  Ethan grabbed the man by his collar and pulled Jenkins in close. “Start making sense.”

  “You were put into suspended animation. You saw the units—”

  “For how long?”

  “Ethan—”

  “How. Long.”

  Jenkins gave a slight pause, Ethan realizing there was something in him that almost didn’t want to hear the answer.

  “One thousand eight hundred fourteen years...”

  Ethan let go of Jenkins’s shirt.

  “...five months...”

  He staggered back.

  “...and eleven days.”

  Looked at the ruin.

  Looked at the sky.

  “You should get off your feet,” Jenkins said. “Let’s sit.” As Ethan eased down into a bed of ferns, Jenkins glanced up at Pope and Pam. “You guys give us a minute, all right? But don’t go far.”

  They walked off.

  Jenkins sat down across from Ethan.

  “Your mind is racing,” he said. “Will you try not to think for a minute and just listen to me?”

  It had rained here recently—Ethan could feel the dampness of the ground through the pair of brown fatigues they’d dressed him in.

  “Let me ask you something,” Jenkins said. “When you think of the greatest breakthrough discovery in history, what comes to mind?”

  Ethan shrugged.

  “Come on, humor me.”

  “Space travel, theory of relativity, I don’t—”

  “No. The greatest discovery in the history of mankind was learning how man would become extinct.”

  “As a species?”

  “Precisely. In 1971, a young geneticist named David Pilcher made a startling discovery. Keep in mind this was before RNA splicing, before DNA polymorphism. He realized the human genome, which is essentially the entirety of our heredity information, which programs cell growth, was changing, becoming corrupted.”

  “By what?”

  “By what?” Jenkins laughed. “By everything. By what we’d already done to the earth, and by all that we would do in the coming centuries. Mammal extinction. Deforestation. Loss of polar sea ice. Ozone. Increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Acid rain. Ocean dead zones. Overfishing. Offshore oil drilling. Wars. The creation of a billion gasoline-burning automobiles. The nuclear disasters—Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. The two-thousand-plus intentional nuclear bomb detonations in the name of weapons testing. Toxic waste dumping. Exxon-Valdez. BP’s Gulf oil spill. All the poisons we put into our food and water every day.

  “Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars. But we aren’t rock stars. In the scheme of evolutionary forces, we are a weak, fragile species. Our genome is corruptible, and we so abused this planet that we ultimately corrupted that precious DNA blueprint that makes us human.

  “But this man, Pilcher—he saw what was coming. Maybe not specifically, but in broad strokes. Saw that, over successive generations, because of the substantial environmental changes we were bringing to bear, there was the potential for tachytelic anagenesis. To put it in terms you might understand—rapid, macroevolutionary change. What am I saying? From human to something other in thirty generations. To put it in Biblical terms, Pilcher believed a flood was coming, so he decided to build an ark. Are you following me?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Pilcher thought if he could preserve a number of pure humans before the corruption reached critical mass, they could, in effect, sit out the evolutionary changes that would lead to the destruction of human civilization and our species. But to achieve this, it would require a robust suspended animation technology.

  “He set up a lab and dropped his billions into R&D. Nailed it by 1979 and started work fabricating a thousand suspension units. Meanwhile, Pilcher had been looking for a small town to house his cargo, and when he stumbled across Wayward Pines, he knew it was perfect. Secluded. Defendable ground. Closed in by those high mountain walls. Tough to access. Tough to leave. He bought up all the residential and commercial property and started construction on a bunker complex deep in the surrounding mountains. It was a massive project. Took twenty-two years to finish.”

  “How did the supplies keep all of this time?” Ethan asked. “Wood and food couldn’t have lasted nearly two thousand years.”

  “Until the crew reanimated, the warehouse cavern, the dormitories and surveillance center—literally every square inch of that complex—existed in a vacuum. It wasn’t perfect, and we did lose some material, but enough survived to rebuild the Wayward Pines infrastructure, which time and the elements had completely erased. But the cave system we utilized contained minimal moisture content in the air, and since we were able to kill off ninety-nine-point-nine percent of all bacteria, it turned out to be almost as efficient as suspension itself.”

  “So the town is completely self-sufficient?”

  “Yes, it functions like an Amish village or a preindustrial society. And as you saw, we have vast stores of staples that we do package and truck into town.”

  “I saw cows. Did you create suspension chambers for livestock as well?”

  “No, we just put some embryos in stasis. Then used artificial wombs.”

  “There was no such thing in 2012.”

  “But there was in 2030.”

  “Where’s Pilcher now?”

  Jenkins grinned.

  Ethan said, “You?”

  “Your colleagues, Kate Hewson and Bill Evans—when they disappeared in Wayward Pines, they were trying to find me. Some of my business dealings had fallen onto the Secret Service radar. That’s why you’re sitting here right now.”

  “You kidnapped federal agents? Locked them away?”

  “Yes.”

  “And many others...”

  “Aside from my handpicked and extravagantly compensated crew, I didn’t think I’d get much in the way of volunteers for an endeavor of this nature.”

  “So you abducted people who came to Wayward Pines.”

  “Some came to town and I took them there. Others, I sought out.”

  “How many?”

  “Six hundred and fifty were conscripted over the course of fifty years.”

  “You’re a psychopath.”

  Pilcher seemed to consider the accusation, his cool, dark eyes intense and thoughtful. It was the first time Ethan had really looked into the man’s face, and he realized the shaved head and good skin belied Pilcher’s age. The man must have been in his early sixties. Possibly older. Ethan had up until this mom
ent written off his utterly precise, controlled manner of speaking as a gimmick, a shrink’s ruse, but now he saw it for what it was—clear evidence of an immense intellect. It struck him that he was sitting out here under a canopy of oak trees with the sharpest mind he’d ever encountered. Something both thrilling and terrifying in that.

  Pilcher finally said, “I don’t see it quite that way.”

  “No? How then?”

  “More like...the savior of our species.”

  “You stole people from their families.”

  “You still don’t get it, do you?”

  “Get what?”

  “What Wayward Pines is. Ethan...it’s the last town on earth. A living time capsule for our way of life. For the American Dream. The residents, the crew, me, you...we’re all that’s left of the species Homo sapiens.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “I’ve sent out a handful of reconnaissance teams over the years. Those who made it back reported the most hostile conditions imaginable. Without the protection and infrastructure of a place like Wayward Pines, no one could survive. Since my crew came out of suspension fourteen years ago, we’ve had a radio beacon continuously transmitting a distress call on every known emergency frequency. I even made the decision to broadcast the coordinates of Pines on the remote chance there were other humans out there. No one’s shown up on our doorstep. No one’s ever made contact. I said this is Boise, but it’s not. There is no Boise, no Idaho, no America. Names no longer mean a thing.”

  “How did it all end?”

  “We’ll never know, will we? I went to sleep shortly after you so I could still have twenty-five years in Wayward Pines postsuspension. And after 2032, we were all sleeping in the mountain. But if I had to guess? By 2300, I estimated we’d see major abnormalities cropping up. And with diversity being the raw material of evolution, by 2500, we could’ve been classified as a completely different species. Each generation getting closer and closer to something that could thrive in this toxic world. Something less and less human.

  “You can imagine the social and economic ramifications. An entire civilization built for humanity crumbling. I’m guessing there were genocides. Maybe the end came over forty terrible years. Maybe it took a thousand. Maybe a full-scale nuclear war wiped out billions in the span of a month. I’m sure many thought it was end times. But we’ll never have that piece of knowledge. All we know is what’s out there now.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Aberrations. We call them abbies. Those translucent-skinned creatures that nearly killed you in the canyon. Since coming out of suspension, I’ve traveled only three times by helicopter, including today. It’s quite risky. Farthest we got was Seattle. Or where Seattle used to be. We had to haul fuel. Barely made it back. Extrapolating from what I saw, there must be hundreds of millions of those creatures just on this continent alone. They’re predators, of course, and if their population is as healthy as I’m projecting, this would point to a burgeoning deer or other ruminant population. It’s even possible that some descendant of the bison is once again roaming the plains in large numbers.

  “Because we can’t leave the valley to conduct research, we have only a small sample from which to gauge which species survived the last two thousand years unscathed. Birds seem to have come through unaffected. Some insects. But then you’ll realize something’s missing. For instance, there are no crickets. No lightning bugs. And in fourteen years, I haven’t seen a single bee.”

  “What are these abbies?”

  “It’s easy to think of them as mutants or aberrations, but our name for them truly is a misnomer. Nature doesn’t see things through the prism of good or bad. It rewards efficiency. That’s the beautiful simplicity of evolution. It matches design to environment. In trashing our world, we forced our own transformation into a descendant species from Homo sapiens that adapted, through natural selection, to survive the destruction of human civilization. Line our DNA sequences up side by side, and only seven million letters are different—that’s about half of a percent.”

  “Jesus.”

  “From a logistical standpoint, abbies are hugely problematic. They’re far more intelligent than the great apes and exponentially more aggressive. We’ve captured a handful over the years. Studied them. Tried to establish communication, but it’s all failed. Their speed and strength is more in line with your average Neanderthal man. At sixty pounds, they’re lethal, and some of them grow to two hundred. You were lucky to survive.”

  “That’s why you’ve built fences around Wayward Pines.”

  “It’s sobering when you realize we aren’t at the top of the food chain anymore. Occasionally, an abby will get through, but we keep the outskirts of town on motion sensors and the entire valley under sniper surveillance, day and night.”

  “Then why didn’t you just—”

  “Take you out?” Jenkins smiled. “At first, I wanted the people to do it. Once you reached the canyon, we knew a pack of abbies was in the area. You were unarmed. Why waste ammo?”

  “But the residents...they don’t know about any of this?”

  “No.”

  “What do they think?”

  “They woke up here after an accident just like you did—reinjured, of course, in the appropriate places. Through our integration program, they come to understand there’s no leaving. And we have rules and consequences to minimize the complications that arise when someone from 1984 lives next door to someone from 2015. For the residents to thrive, to reproduce, they can’t know they’re all that’s left. They have to live like the world is still out there.”

  “But it’s not. So what’s the point of the lie? When you bring them out of suspension, why not just tell them, ‘Congratulations! You’re the sole survivors!’”

  “We did that very thing with the first group. We’d just finished rebuilding the town, and we brought everyone down to the church and said, ‘Look, here’s the deal.’ Told them everything.”

  “And?”

  “Within two years, thirty-five percent had committed suicide. Another twenty percent left town and were slaughtered. Nobody married. No one got pregnant. I lost ninety-three people, Ethan. I cannot—no—humanity cannot afford losses on that scale. Not when our species is this endangered, down to our last eight hundred and eleven souls. I’m not saying our method is perfect, but in all these years, and after trying almost everything, it’s proven the most effective system for growing our population that we’ve landed on.”

  “But they always wonder, right? About what’s out there? About where they really are?”

  “Some do, but we’re an adaptable species. Through conditioning, like good humans, most come to accept their environment, as long as it isn’t completely devoid of hope.”

  “I don’t believe they accept that the world is still out there, when you won’t let them see it.”

  “You believe in God, Ethan?”

  “No.”

  “Many did. Adopted moral codes. Created religions. Murdered in the names of gods they’d never seen or heard. You believe in the universe?”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, so you’ve been to space. Seen those distant galaxies firsthand?”

  “Point taken.”

  “Wayward Pines is just a shrunken world. A small town never left. Fear and faith in the unknown still apply, just on a smaller scale. The boundaries of the world you came from were space and God. In Pines, the boundaries are the cliff walls that protect the town, and the mysterious presence in the mountains, aka me.”

  “You’re not a real psychiatrist.”

  “No formal training, but I play one back in town. I find it helpful to gain the trust of the residents. Stay in touch with the mood of the town. Encourage people in their struggles, their doubts.”

  “You had the people murder Beverly.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Agent Evans.”

  “He forced my hand.”

  “You’d have had them murder me.” br />
  “But you escaped. Proved yourself even more adept than I first thought.”

  “You’ve created a culture of violence.”

  “That’s nothing new. Look, when violence becomes the norm, people adapt to the norm. No different than the gladiator games or throwing Christians to the lions or public hangings in the old West. An atmosphere of self-policing isn’t a bad thing.”

  “But these people aren’t really free.”

  “Freedom is such a twenty-first-century construct. You’re going to sit here and tell me that individual freedom is more vital than the survival of our species?”

  “They could decide that for themselves. There’d be dignity in it at least. Isn’t that what makes us human?”

  “It’s not their decision to make.”

  “Oh, it’s yours?”

  “Dignity is a beautiful concept, but what if they made the wrong choice? Like that first group. If there’s no species left to even perpetuate such an ideal, what’s the point?”

  “Why haven’t you killed me?”

  Pilcher smiled, as if glad that Ethan had finally broached the subject. He cocked his head. “You hear that?”

  “What?”

  “Silence.”

  The birds had gone quiet.

  Pilcher pushed against his legs and struggled onto his feet.

  Ethan stood too.

  The woods had become suddenly still.

  Pilcher pulled the gun out of his waistband.

  He unclipped his walkie-talkie, brought it to his mouth.

  “Pope, come back, over.”

  “Yep, over.”

  “Where are you, over?”

  “Two hundred meters north. Everything all right, over?”

  “I’m getting the feeling it’s time we ran for the hills, over.”

  “Copy that. On our way. Over and out.”

  Pilcher started toward the clearing.

  In the distance behind them, Ethan could hear the ruckus of branches snapping and dead leaves crunching as Pope and Pam headed back their way.

  “It was a big deal, Ethan, for me to fly you a hundred and thirty miles down here to the Boise ruins. I hope you appreciate the gesture. We’ve had our handful of problem residents over the years, but no one like you. What do you think I value most?”