The Last Town

Hassler waits for a break in the snow, but it never comes. He climbs out of the pool and brushes three inches of powder off his duster and dries off each foot before sliding them into the boots.

He puts the duster on wet and grabs the rest of his gear and jogs across the clearing toward the stand of pines. Ducks under a canopy of low-hanging limbs that protect the ground as thoroughly as a thatched roof. Already shivering, he drops everything and tears open his pack. The old-man’s beard lies on top, and underneath it a bundle of dry tinder that he collected that morning.

The lichen takes the third spark.

As the twigs begin to crackle, Hassler breaks off several larger limbs within reach and snaps them over his knee.

The fire roars.

The cold departs.

He stands naked in the heat of the flames.

Soon, he is dressed and comfortable, leaning back against the trunk of the tree with his hands held out to the fire.

Beyond his weather-protected nook, snow pours down into the meadow.

Night creeps in.

He is warm.

Dry.

And for the moment . . .

Not dead.

All things considered, in this shitty new world, that’s about as much as a man can hope for at the end of a long, cold day.

The next time his eyes open, the sky through the branches is infused with deep blue and the meadow lies buried beneath a foot of sparkling white.

The fire burned out hours ago.

The saplings in the meadow bend under the weight of snow like little arches.

Courtesy of the hot springs, it’s the first time in months that, as Hassler struggles onto his feet, he doesn’t feel as stiff as a rusted hinge.

He’s thirsty but his water froze overnight.

He eats just enough jerky to beat back the mad, raving hunger he always wakes to.

Lifting his rifle, he scopes the clearing for any sign of movement.

It’s a good twenty or thirty degrees colder than yesterday—barely above zero—and plumes of steam ascend in a perpetual cloud off the hot springs.

Otherwise, nothing moves in that vast winterscape.

He digs out his compass and the little patch of map and then heaves his pack onto his shoulders.

Hassler crawls out from under the overhanging branches and sets out across the meadow.

It is cold and perfectly still, the sun on the rise.

In the center of the meadow, he stops and glasses the terrain through the scope of his Winchester.

For the moment at least, the world is his alone.

As the sun climbs, the glare off the snowpack becomes painful. He would stop to retrieve his sunglasses, but the welcome darkness of the forest is just within reach.

It’s all lodgepole pine.

Two-hundred-foot giants with straight, thin trunks and narrow crowns.

Forest travel is considerably more dangerous, and at the edge of the trees Hassler pulls the .357 out of an inner pocket of his duster and checks the load.

The forest climbs.

The sun pushes through the pines in splashes of light.

Hassler crests a ridge.

A lake comes into view that shines like a jewel. Close to shore, the water has frozen, but it’s still liquid out in the center. He sits on a bleached tree stump and raises the butt of the rifle to his shoulder.

The lake is immense. He scopes the shoreline. There’s nothing in the direction he intends to travel but unblemished, glittering white.

On the opposite side—a couple miles away—he spots a bull in a bloody patch of snow pulling long ropes of intestines out of a massive grizzly bear whose throat the abby has torn out.

Hassler starts down the gentle slope.

At the lakeshore, he studies the map again.

The forest comes close to the water, and keeping between the shore and the trees, he makes his way around to the western side of the lake.

The trek through the snow has worn him out.

Hassler unslings his rifle from his shoulder and collapses near the water’s edge. In proximity, he sees that the ice isn’t thick. Just a fragile crust from the hard overnight freeze. This snow has come early. Way early. By his reckoning, it’s only July.

He scopes the shoreline again.

The woods at his back.

Nothing moves but that abby across the lake, its entire head now buried inside the grizzly’s belly—gorging itself.

Hassler leans back against his pack and takes out the map.

There is no wind, and with the sun directly above him, he feels warm down to his bones.

He loves mornings—without a doubt, his favorite time of day. There is something hopeful about waking in the early light and not yet knowing what the day has in store. Emotionally speaking, late afternoons are the hardest, with the light beginning to fail and the knowledge setting in that he’ll be spending another night outside, alone in the dark, the threat of an awful death forever in the wings.

But in this moment at least, the coming night feels very far away.

Once again his thoughts turn north.

To Wayward Pines.

To the day he’ll reach its fence and return to safety.

To that little Victorian house on Sixth Street.

And to the woman he loves with a ferocity he will never fully grasp. It was for her alone that he willingly abandoned his life in 2013, volunteering to be put into suspended animation for two thousand years, with no idea of what kind of a world he’d be waking to. But just knowing it would be one with Theresa Burke alive in it, and her husband, Ethan, long since dead, was more than enough for him to risk everything.

He pairs the map with the compass.

The most prominent feature in the region is a ten-thousand-foot peak that was once called Mount Sheridan. The top thousand feet of the peak stand above the timberline—blown stark white against the purple sky. It’s windy at the summit, with streamers of snow spraying off the top.

An hour’s walk in prime conditions.

Two or three in a foot of newly fallen snow.

For now, it simply represents his north.

The direction of home.

THE RICHARDSONS

Bob climbed out of the car and closed the door gently after him.

The woods were quiet, the screams in town distant.

He walked a little ways out from the hood and tried to think.

Leaving town had been the right choice. They were still alive.

The dome light in the car kicked off.

Darkness closed in.

He eased down onto the pavement and put his face between his knees. Wept softly. After a minute, the car door opened behind him and the interior lights threw color on the road.

His Wayward Pines wife walked over.