Pines

Still reeling, Ethan¹ wanders into a neighborhood cookout and spots a silver-haired woman whose laugh he recognizes. It is Kate Hewson,⁷ his former partner and lover, but she looks at least sixty. She pulls him aside and, in a tense whisper, tells him they are being watched and listened to.

She cannot explain what is happening, only that he should get out. Back on the street, Ethan¹ hot-wires a car and races south. The road curves through fog, then inexplicably delivers him back into town. A sign reads 'Welcome to Wayward Pines: Where Paradise is Home.' Waiting in the mist is Pope,⁴ who cracks Ethan¹'s skull with a shotgun stock.

Fifteen months after Ethan¹ vanished, his wife Theresa³ holds a memorial service on the mountain where he proposed. Later that night, as rain slashes the windows, a bald man in a black suit knocks on her door. He introduces himself as David Pilcher² and shows her a Polaroid of Ethan¹ lying bruised on an operating table.

Pilcher² offers her and her son Ben⁸ a chance to see Ethan¹ again, but the price is leaving their lives behind forever. He sets two glass vials of sedative on the coffee table. Theresa,³ drunk and heartsick, starts to agree, then balks. Pilcher² calmly produces an aerosol canister, gasses her and Ben⁸ into unconsciousness, and summons his accomplices to take them.

Dr. Jenkins,² the hospital psychiatrist, informs Ethan¹ that he is suffering from psychosis triggered by a brain bleed. He will require immediate surgery. When Ethan¹ refuses, Nurse Pam⁶ straps him down and, with a terrifying grin, threatens to paralyze him and leave him fully conscious during the operation so he can feel every cut and drill.

Inside the operating room, a surgeon tests a bone drill. As Pam⁶ wheels him toward that room, the elevator doors open and Beverly⁵ emerges. She knocks Pam⁶ unconscious with a chair, uncuffs Ethan,¹ and guides him through the hospital's basement corridors into the rain-soaked cemetery, eventually hiding him inside a stone mausoleum.

Inside the crypt, Beverly,⁵ a former IBM sales rep who arrived in 1985, reveals how she learned the town's secret. After a car accident identical to Ethan¹ 's, she woke with amnesia and was assigned a job and a home. She discovered a microchip embedded in her thigh, placed in everyone to track their location.

With Ethan¹'s consent, she slices it out of his leg. She also tells him about Bill Evans,⁹ the Secret Service agent she befriended, and how, when they tried to escape together, the town's telephones all rang at once, summoning the populace to hunt them. Evans⁹ was beaten to death by the mob. As she finishes, the telephones begin to ring again.

Ethan¹ flees the mausoleum as hundreds of townspeople, dressed in bizarre costumes and carrying makeshift weapons, pour into the streets. He sprints naked through alleys, killing a machete-wielding pharmacist and another pursuer, then hides in an apartment. From a third-story window, he watches the carnivalesque assembly on Main Street, where a bonfire rages.

Two men drag Beverly⁵ into the circle. A man in a Santa hat swings a baseball bat into her skull, then a woman in angel wings shatters her spine. The mob descends, tearing her apart. Ethan¹ erupts in grief and fury, but can only flee into the woods, eventually crossing a freezing river to an alcove on the opposite cliff.

Following the canyon upstream, Ethan¹ reaches a twenty-foot fence topped with razor wire and crackling with voltage. 'Beyond This Point You Will Die.' He free-climbs the canyon wall to bypass it. On the other side, a pack of hairless, translucent-skinned creatures — something between human and animal — attacks Ethan.¹

Ethan¹ crushes one's skull with a rock, then is pursued by five more as he scales a sheer rock face toward a metal ventilation grate. The largest abby climbs terrifyingly fast, forcing Ethan¹ to retreat into a narrow airshaft after battering the grate open with a slab of granite. He crawls into total darkness, uncertain if he is crawling toward safety or his tomb.

After an interminable crawl through the ventilation system, Ethan¹ drops into a sprawling underground complex. He passes dormitories and a cafeteria before finding a control room where operators monitor every street, house, and resident of Wayward Pines via countless screens.

Further on, a colossal cavern houses mountains of lumber, grain silos, and a fleet of pristine cars from various decades. The final chamber is frigid and blue-lit, filled with hundreds of coffin-sized units. Each contains a human body packed in black sand, suspended in stasis.

He reads the nameplates: Janet Palmer, 1982. Brian Rogers, 1984. Beverly⁵ Short, 1985 — terminated. And then his own: John Ethan¹ Burke, suspended 9.24.12. Integration attempts: 3. Termination in progress. Beside his unit, he finds Theresa³ and Ben.⁸

Surrounded by guards, Ethan¹ faces David Pilcher,² the man he knew as Dr. Jenkins. Pilcher² explains that the year is roughly 4012. Human civilization collapsed centuries ago due to environmental ruin, and the abbies are what Homo sapiens evolved into. Pilcher,² a genetics billionaire, foresaw the extinction and spent his fortune creating Wayward Pines, suspending hand-picked survivors.

Ethan¹'s family has been living in town for five years, but Ethan¹ himself has been awakened and failed twice before; each time his memory was reset. Pilcher² now wants Ethan¹ to replace Pope,⁴ to serve as sheriff and maintain order by any means necessary. The revelation reframes every event as a programmed loop designed to break him into submission.

Pilcher² flies Ethan,¹ Pope,⁴ and Pam⁶ by helicopter to a forest that, Pilcher² claims, is the heart of what was once Boise, Idaho. They land in a clearing and hike to the skeletal remains of the U.S. Bank building, its steel girders rusted and entwined with massive oaks. Ethan¹ stares at the ruins of the city he knew, the last doubt dissolving.

As they return, a horde of abbies swarms from the trees. Pilcher² orders the pilot to take off while Pope⁴ is still outside, clinging to the skid. Ethan¹ watches from the window as the abbies pull Pope⁴ down and tear him apart. Pilcher² hands Ethan¹ the sheriff's badge, saying Pope⁴ wanted to rule; now Ethan¹ will.