Pines

“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 gri

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 moment written off his utterly precise, controlled ma

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 reco

“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-ski

“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 ca