“We’re all going to be starving to death in a matter of years. Do you really think you’re up to solving that problem, Ethan? Ready for that weight on your shoulders? What are you going to do? Put it to a vote? Look, I messed up. I realize that. But you need me. You all need me.”

Ethan struggled onto his feet, started for the door.

“Okay, okay. At first, it was just a standard bribe,” Pilcher said.

“What’s a standard bribe?”

“Money. To buy Adam’s silence for you, Kate Hewson, and Bill Evans. To shut down the investigation into your disappearances. But then something changed. He decided he wanted to come along with me and my crew. Be a part of our journey.”

Ethan cocked his right arm back and punched the door.

Blood from his busted knuckles smeared across the steel.

He hit the door again.

“Between you and me,” Pilcher said, “I always thought Hassler was an arrogant prick. I let him have one good year in Wayward Pines, and then I sent him out on a suicide mission beyond the fence. He never returned.”

Ethan shouted for the guard.

“You need me,” Pilcher said. “You know you need me. If something isn’t done, we’ll die out in a matter of—”

“It’s not your concern anymore.”

“Excuse me?”

The guard opened the door.

“How did you like your supper?” Ethan asked.

“What?”

“Your supper. How was it?”

“Terrible.”

“Sorry about that, especially considering it was your last.”

“What does that mean?”

“Remember when you asked me what was going to happen to you, and I said that’s for the people to decide? Well. They decided. We took a vote a few hours ago, right after we finished burying all the people you murdered. And it’s happening tonight.”

Ethan walked out into the corridor as Pilcher screamed his name.

Late afternoon.

The sun already behind the cliffs.

The sky sheeted over with a uniform deck of clouds that seemed to threaten snow.

The power in town had yet to be restored, but still a handful of people had returned to their homes to begin the process of cleaning up, of trying to reassemble the pieces of a life that could never be made right again.

In the distance, the pile of abbies still burned.

Ethan wasn’t sure what it was—maybe the lateness of the day, the darkening clouds, the cold, gray indifference of the towering cliffs—but Wayward Pines felt, possibly for the first time since he’d come here, like exactly what it was: the last town on earth.

He parked on the curb in front of his Victorian house on Sixth Street.

The vibrant yellow and the white trim struck him as off-key in light of the past few days.