The Last Town
Page 22
Crater Lake—empty.
Mount Shasta—decapitated.
Standing on the ruins of Fort Point and staring across the bay at all that was left of the Golden Gate Bridge—the top hundred feet of the south tower poking out of the water like the mast of a sunken ship.
All those nights he’d spent wet and cold.
Hungry and lonely.
The gray mornings he hadn’t had the will to rise out of his sleeping bag and walk on.
The nights he’d sat contentedly before a fire, smoking his pipe.
What a strange, amazing life.
And now, after all of that, he was going home.
Hassler cinched down his pack and clipped in the straps and hoisted it onto his shoulders. He’d pushed himself harder than usual these last few days, and he could feel the strain in his legs and his hips, a slowly building ache that would take several days of rest to relieve. But what did it matter now? Soon, he’d be clean and in a warm, soft bed with a full stomach. No harm in toughing it out on the homestretch.
He followed the path of a stream until it branched west.
The white noise of the water dwindled away.
The woods became dark and silent.
Every step held meaning, and each one more than the last.
A few minutes shy of dawn, he stopped.
Straight ahead stood the fence.
Something was wrong. It should’ve been humming with its lethal voltage, but it didn’t make a sound.
A single thought screamed through his mind—Theresa.
Hassler started running for the gate.
V
TED
Ted’s residence on Level 4 was twice the size of the others, a perk of being one of the first to join David Pilcher’s inner circle. For fourteen years he’d lived in this tiny space, and it exuded the messy comfort of home, with everything (sort of) in its place.
Life in the superstructure shook out in a strange rhythm of work and leisure, and it generally took people years to find the balance. Regardless of department, work shifts were onerous. Ten-hour days, six days a week. And still, things just barely got done For Ted, as head of surveillance, there wasn’t a week in recent memory when he had worked fewer than seventy hours. The challenge had come with finding what to do, beyond sleeping, with the other seventy hours of free time in the week. He wasn’t an extrovert, and even though they existed for him only on surveillance monitors, Ted felt he spent every working second with the residents of Wayward Pines. So in his time off, he wanted nothing more than to be alone.
He’d tried painting.
Photography.
A bad spell of knitting.
Excessive exercise.
Until one day, eight years ago, he’d found an antique typewriter in the ark, an Underwood Touchmaster Five. He’d carried it back to his residence, along with several boxes of paper, and set up a little writer’s desk in the corner of his room.
All his life, he’d felt like he harbored within him the Great American Novel.
But now that there was no America, no anything really, what would he write?
Was there even a point to the creation of books and art when humanity lived on the precipice of extinction?
He didn’t know, but as he began to punch the old keys, worn so smooth the letters were barely visible, he knew he liked writing and that he loved the feel of the Underwood under his fingers.
There was no screen.
Just the lovely, tactile click-click-click of the keys, the faint smell of ink as the paper scrolled slowly out, and him alone with his thoughts.
At first, he’d toyed with a detective novel.
That had petered out.
Then his own life story, which he quickly tired of recounting.
A couple weeks in, it hit him. All day long, he stared at surveillance monitors broadcasting hundreds of private lives in all stages of desperation. He would make the residents of Wayward Pines his subjects. Chronicle their lives before, their integrations into the town, imagine their interior thoughts and fears.
He’d started writing, and he couldn’t stop.
The stories had poured out of him and the paper had accumulated beside his desk like snowfall until he had thousands upon thousands of pages detailing the lives (as he envisioned them) of the people of Wayward Pines.
He didn’t know what he would do with all these stories.
Couldn’t fathom that anyone would ever want to read them.
His working title was The Secret Lives of Wayward Pines, and he imagined the cover as a collection of all the faces of all the people who lived down in that valley. He’d have to finish the book first, and therein lay the other problem. There was no end to the book in sight. The lives carried on. New things happened. People died. New people were introduced into town. How would one publish a living book, whose stories never ended?
The answer had come, tragically, last night as Ted sat in Pilcher’s office, watching on his monitors as a swarm of abbies swept through town.
The end would come all at once as the “god” of the town brought a swift and sudden conclusion.
The knock came early to Ted’s door.
He was lying in bed, where he’d been all night, paralyzed with fear. With indecision.
He said, “Come in.”
His oldest friend, David Pilcher, walked inside.
Ted hadn’t slept, and by the looks of it, neither had Pilcher.
The old man looked tired. Ted could see the immense hangover he carried in the squint of his eyes, and he still stunk of good scotch. A five o’clock shadow was fading in on Pilcher’s face, as well as sprouting up across his shaven head in fine speckles of gray.
Pilcher pulled the chair away from Ted’s writing desk, dragged it in front of the bed, and took a seat.
He looked at Ted.
He said, “What do you have for me?”
“What do I have?”
“Your team. You told me you would handle it. You would find out which of them helped Sheriff Burke orchestrate this rebellion.”
Ted sighed. He sat up, grabbed his thick glasses off the bedside table, and put them on. He was still wearing his stained, short-sleeved button-down and clip-on tie. Same pants. He hadn’t even bothered to take off his shoes.
Last night, in Pilcher’s office, Ted had been afraid.
Now, he just felt tired and angry.
So very angry.
He said, “When you said the sheriff had information he couldn’t have had otherwise, did you want to tell me what you meant by that?”
Pilcher leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs.
“No, not really. I just want you, as head of the surveillance unit, to do your job.”
Mount Shasta—decapitated.
Standing on the ruins of Fort Point and staring across the bay at all that was left of the Golden Gate Bridge—the top hundred feet of the south tower poking out of the water like the mast of a sunken ship.
All those nights he’d spent wet and cold.
Hungry and lonely.
The gray mornings he hadn’t had the will to rise out of his sleeping bag and walk on.
The nights he’d sat contentedly before a fire, smoking his pipe.
What a strange, amazing life.
And now, after all of that, he was going home.
Hassler cinched down his pack and clipped in the straps and hoisted it onto his shoulders. He’d pushed himself harder than usual these last few days, and he could feel the strain in his legs and his hips, a slowly building ache that would take several days of rest to relieve. But what did it matter now? Soon, he’d be clean and in a warm, soft bed with a full stomach. No harm in toughing it out on the homestretch.
He followed the path of a stream until it branched west.
The white noise of the water dwindled away.
The woods became dark and silent.
Every step held meaning, and each one more than the last.
A few minutes shy of dawn, he stopped.
Straight ahead stood the fence.
Something was wrong. It should’ve been humming with its lethal voltage, but it didn’t make a sound.
A single thought screamed through his mind—Theresa.
Hassler started running for the gate.
V
TED
Ted’s residence on Level 4 was twice the size of the others, a perk of being one of the first to join David Pilcher’s inner circle. For fourteen years he’d lived in this tiny space, and it exuded the messy comfort of home, with everything (sort of) in its place.
Life in the superstructure shook out in a strange rhythm of work and leisure, and it generally took people years to find the balance. Regardless of department, work shifts were onerous. Ten-hour days, six days a week. And still, things just barely got done For Ted, as head of surveillance, there wasn’t a week in recent memory when he had worked fewer than seventy hours. The challenge had come with finding what to do, beyond sleeping, with the other seventy hours of free time in the week. He wasn’t an extrovert, and even though they existed for him only on surveillance monitors, Ted felt he spent every working second with the residents of Wayward Pines. So in his time off, he wanted nothing more than to be alone.
He’d tried painting.
Photography.
A bad spell of knitting.
Excessive exercise.
Until one day, eight years ago, he’d found an antique typewriter in the ark, an Underwood Touchmaster Five. He’d carried it back to his residence, along with several boxes of paper, and set up a little writer’s desk in the corner of his room.
All his life, he’d felt like he harbored within him the Great American Novel.
But now that there was no America, no anything really, what would he write?
Was there even a point to the creation of books and art when humanity lived on the precipice of extinction?
He didn’t know, but as he began to punch the old keys, worn so smooth the letters were barely visible, he knew he liked writing and that he loved the feel of the Underwood under his fingers.
There was no screen.
Just the lovely, tactile click-click-click of the keys, the faint smell of ink as the paper scrolled slowly out, and him alone with his thoughts.
At first, he’d toyed with a detective novel.
That had petered out.
Then his own life story, which he quickly tired of recounting.
A couple weeks in, it hit him. All day long, he stared at surveillance monitors broadcasting hundreds of private lives in all stages of desperation. He would make the residents of Wayward Pines his subjects. Chronicle their lives before, their integrations into the town, imagine their interior thoughts and fears.
He’d started writing, and he couldn’t stop.
The stories had poured out of him and the paper had accumulated beside his desk like snowfall until he had thousands upon thousands of pages detailing the lives (as he envisioned them) of the people of Wayward Pines.
He didn’t know what he would do with all these stories.
Couldn’t fathom that anyone would ever want to read them.
His working title was The Secret Lives of Wayward Pines, and he imagined the cover as a collection of all the faces of all the people who lived down in that valley. He’d have to finish the book first, and therein lay the other problem. There was no end to the book in sight. The lives carried on. New things happened. People died. New people were introduced into town. How would one publish a living book, whose stories never ended?
The answer had come, tragically, last night as Ted sat in Pilcher’s office, watching on his monitors as a swarm of abbies swept through town.
The end would come all at once as the “god” of the town brought a swift and sudden conclusion.
The knock came early to Ted’s door.
He was lying in bed, where he’d been all night, paralyzed with fear. With indecision.
He said, “Come in.”
His oldest friend, David Pilcher, walked inside.
Ted hadn’t slept, and by the looks of it, neither had Pilcher.
The old man looked tired. Ted could see the immense hangover he carried in the squint of his eyes, and he still stunk of good scotch. A five o’clock shadow was fading in on Pilcher’s face, as well as sprouting up across his shaven head in fine speckles of gray.
Pilcher pulled the chair away from Ted’s writing desk, dragged it in front of the bed, and took a seat.
He looked at Ted.
He said, “What do you have for me?”
“What do I have?”
“Your team. You told me you would handle it. You would find out which of them helped Sheriff Burke orchestrate this rebellion.”
Ted sighed. He sat up, grabbed his thick glasses off the bedside table, and put them on. He was still wearing his stained, short-sleeved button-down and clip-on tie. Same pants. He hadn’t even bothered to take off his shoes.
Last night, in Pilcher’s office, Ted had been afraid.
Now, he just felt tired and angry.
So very angry.
He said, “When you said the sheriff had information he couldn’t have had otherwise, did you want to tell me what you meant by that?”
Pilcher leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs.
“No, not really. I just want you, as head of the surveillance unit, to do your job.”
