Pines

Jenkins looked dubious.

“I’ve seen you shoot,” Pope said. “You’ll be fine. Anywhere near the heart, or better yet a head shot, and you’re golden.”

Pope reached back behind his seat and came up with an AK-47 outfitted with a hundred-round drum. Ethan watched him switch the mode from safety to three-round burst.

Jenkins pulled off his headset. Then he swept aside the curtain between the passenger cabin and the cockpit, said to the pilot, “We’ll be on cha

“I’ll keep my finger on the engine start.”

“You radio at the first sign of trouble.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Arnie left you a gun?”

“Two, in fact.”

“We won’t be long.”

Jenkins opened the cabin door and climbed out.

After Pope and Pam, Ethan followed, stepping down onto the skid and then into the soft, waist-high grass. He caught up with Jenkins, and the four of them moved quickly across the field, Pope out in front with the assault rifle, Pam bringing up the rear.

It was late in the day—a crisp, golden afternoon.

Everyone seemed twitchy and nervous, like they were out on a patrol.

Ethan said, “Ever since I came to Wayward Pines, you’ve done nothing but fuck with me. What are we doing out here in the goddamned wilderness? I want to know right now.”

They entered the woods, slogging their way through a riot of underbrush.

The noise of birds getting louder.

“But Ethan, this isn’t the wilderness.”

Ethan glimpsed something barely visible through the trees, realized he’d initially missed it because of all the vegetation. He quickened his pace, now clawing his way through the bushes and saplings that comprised the forest understory, Jenkins following closely behind.

When Ethan arrived at the base of it, he stopped and looked up.

For a moment, he didn’t understand exactly what he was staring at. Down low, the beams were wrapped in several feet of dead and living vines, the brown and the green camouflaging the shape of the structure, blending it so seamlessly into the color of the forest that if you looked at it askance, it disappeared.

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.”