“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 grinned.
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 manner of speaking as a gimmick, a shrink’s ruse, but now he saw it for what it was—clear evidence of an immense intellect. It struck him that he was sitting out here under a canopy of oak trees with the sharpest mind he’d ever encountered. Something both thrilling and terrifying in that.
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 reconnaissance teams over the years. Those who made it back reported the most hostile conditions imaginable. Without the protection and infrastructure of a place like Wayward Pines, no one could survive. Since my crew came out of suspension fourteen years ago, we’ve had a radio beacon continuously transmitting a distress call on every known emergency frequency. I even made the decision to broadcast the coordinates of Pines on the remote chance there were other humans out there. No one’s shown up on our doorstep. No one’s ever made contact. I said this is Boise, but it’s not. There is no Boise, no Idaho, no America. Names no longer mean a thing.”
“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.#p#分页标题#e#
“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-skinned creatures that nearly killed you in the canyon. Since coming out of suspension, I’ve traveled only three times by helicopter, including today. It’s quite risky. Farthest we got was Seattle. Or where Seattle used to be. We had to haul fuel. Barely made it back. Extrapolating from what I saw, there must be hundreds of millions of those creatures just on this continent alone. They’re predators, of course, and if their population is as healthy as I’m projecting, this would point to a burgeoning deer or other ruminant population. It’s even possible that some descendant of the bison is once again roaming the plains in large numbers.