Pines

The duct is small, but Ethan wiggles into it. He can’t go backward. As he crawls through the dark, he questions his reality again, wondering if he ever really left his imprisonment during the war.

Light appears ahead, and then a quiet hum tingles through the duct. At the source of the light, Ethan sees another duct, a series of them, connected to an air intake below, its fan spinning. He climbs down toward it, then turns into one of the shafts. He crawls until reaching a vent cover, opens it, and climbs down.

Ethan lowers himself into a corridor lined with doors. Each door opens into a small, anonymous bedroom. On the floor, he finds a cafeteria, laundry, locker rooms, even an operating theater and laboratories. In one room, a man wearing a headset watches screens that show footage of Wayward Pines.

Ethan continues down until he reaches the first level. Slipping through a set of doors, he finds an immense warehouse lined with aisles of lumber, food, and supplies. Hearing the crackle of walkie-talkies, he keeps moving until he finds a parking lot full of cars.

Ethan crawls along the edge of the parking lot until he gets to a tunnel with a two-lane road going through it. The sign next to the tunnel, however, says Wayward Pines 3.5. Ethan moves along the wall until finding glass doors with a sign that reads “Suspension.” The nearly freezing room is filled with small units. A plate next to each one gives the occupant’s name, origin, suspension date, and length of residency. The dates begin in the 1980s. As Ethan continues, he finds Beverly’s unit, which is labelled, “Terminated.” He can hear people searching for him, but he continues until finding his own name, and underneath, “Termination in Progress.”

A voice calls out. It’s Jenkins, but Ethan ignores him, continuing down the line to the last machine, which is dated 2032. Jenkins and his men catch up to Ethan, and Jenkins explains that Ethan was “chemically suspended.” Once close enough, Jenkins injects Ethan with something, and Ethan loses consciousness.

Ethan is back in the Gulf War, and his captor, Aashif, enters the room to see what Ethan has written. The paper is blank. Ethan has instead carved a crude American saying into his hand with the pen. Ethan tells Aashif to keep it in mind as he is torturing him. Aashif gets angry, and Ethan feels satisfaction at cracking the man’s calm.

Ethan drifts in and out of consciousness as Aashif cuts his body with small slashes. All night, Ethan thinks of the family he will never see again. The next morning, as Ethan waits for Aashif to return, a Navy Seal arrives and carries Ethan upstairs to where the soldiers surround a wounded Aashif. One of the soldiers gives Ethan his gun. Although Ethan wishes he were a different kind of man, he doesn’t hesitate to kill Aashif. The next time Ethan is conscious, he’s on a plane home and is told that Theresa gave birth to a baby boy.

Ethan wakes knowing he is flying—he recognizes the speed and sound of a Black Hawk helicopter. His hands are cuffed, and Jenkins and Pope sit across from him. Jenkins says he is fulfilling his promise to tell Ethan the truth. Below, a thick pine forest gives way to foothills, and they begin their descent.

Pam uncuffs Ethan, and Pope hands Jenkins a gun. The four of them move across a field, and Ethan asks why they are in a wilderness. Jenkins tells him to look up. Rusted beams rise above the treetops, blending in. They are in downtown Boise, Jenkins says; Ethan was in suspended animation for over 1,814 years. Staggered by this information, Ethan sits with Jenkins while Pope and Pam patrol the perimeter.

Jenkins tells him that, in 1971, a geneticist named David Pilcher realized that human genes were evolving in response to our destruction of the planet. Pilcher decided to preserve humans whose DNA hadn’t been affected. To that purpose, Pilcher founded Wayward Pines. He built the equivalent of a bunker inside the nearby mountains, and the residents, crew, and Pilcher were put in suspended animation.

Jenkins admits that he is David Pilcher, and the other agents were looking for him when they came to town. He also admits that most of the residents were kidnapped, but he considers his actions as done in service of the continuation of the human species. Although over the years he has sent out teams, the ones who returned found no sign of other humans. He theorizes that humans mutated to survive their new environment, resulting in the creatures that they call Aberrations, or abbies. Travel is difficult, so they don’t know how many there are, but there may be hundreds of millions around the world. Abbies are superior predators, which is why security is so tight around Wayward Pines.

When Ethan asks why they can’t tell residents the truth, Pilcher says they tried with the first group, but 93 people died as a result, and humanity couldn’t survive such losses. The system they currently use is the best one they’ve found. Ethan questions the ethics of Pilcher’s actions, but Pilcher argues that individual freedom isn’t as important as the survival of the species. Just as Ethan asks why Pilcher didn’t kill him, rustling in the woods prompts them to return to the helicopter.

Informing Ethan that he is their most problematic citizen, Pilcher tells him to look in the cargo hold. Theresa and Ben are there, both unconscious. Pilcher brought them to Wayward Pines five years ago and has been integrating them. When Ethan asks why he waited so long to tell him, Pilcher reveals that this is their third attempt to integrate Ethan.

Each time a person is reanimated, they lose their memory to the point before suspension—in Ethan’s case, the car wreck. The first time Ethan tried to escape, they rescued him from the abbies. The second time, they brought Theresa and Ben into the picture, only for Ethan to try escaping with them, nearly getting them all killed. This time, they took a psychological approach, inducing psychosis and even using Ethan’s history as a torture survivor against him.

However, when Ethan got all the way into the bunker, Pilcher realized that his perseverance could be an asset. He offers Ethan a choice: come to Wayward Pines on Pilcher’s terms or leave with Theresa and Ben right now. Their conversation is interrupted by gunfire. Over the radio, Pam tells them the abbies are coming. While they wait for Pam and Pope to reach the helicopter, Pilcher tells Ethan he wants his help running Wayward Pines. Ethan sees abbies chasing Pam and Pope and asks for Pilcher’s gun; before Pilcher will hand it over, he demands Ethan’s decision.

Ethan nods and Pilcher throws him the gun. Ethan jumps out and kills the five abbies nearing the helicopter just as fifty more descend on the field. When Ethan boards the helicopter again, Pilcher shuts the door, abandoning Pope. They lift off, and when Ethan asks why, Pilcher tells him Pope wanted to take over, but now Ethan is the new sheriff.

On the flight back to Wayward Pines, Ethan looks in on Theresa and Ben. It finally hits him that everything he knew has been gone for 2,000 years. He decides that focusing on his family will help him “carry on.” As the lights of Wayward Pines appear in the distance, he wonders whether to simply settle into life in town.

Ethan is at his desk in the sheriff’s office. When the clock strikes five, he puts the sheriff star back in his pocket. Maybe he will wear it tomorrow. He is done with his first uneventful day as sheriff and, as he walks out, Belinda, playing solitaire, smiles and asks about his day.

He walks home through the postcard town and, at the address Pilcher gave him, he sees Theresa through the window. When Theresa answers the door, she begins to cry. He’s afraid she’ll ask how he is still alive, but she doesn’t. Instead, Ethan sees that she still loves him, and they step inside. Ben is crying, as is Ethan, as they all hug. Outside, a cricket chirps in the bushes.

The novel closes with a quote from Michael Crichton’s novel, Jurassic Park, which discusses the Earth’s capacity to survive human interference. This final quote places humanity in perspective, noting how, on the larger scale of Earth’s millennia-long lifetime, humans are but “the blink of an eye” (287).