He looked at Ethan.

“I don’t understand.”

“Start walking.”

“Ethan—”

Someone shoved him from behind, and when Pilcher regained his balance, he turned to see Alan glaring at him with a lethal intensity.

“Sheriff said to go,” Alan said. “Now I’m telling you, and if you can’t make your legs work, we’ll be happy to drag you by your arms.”

Pilcher started walking south down Main Street, between the dark buildings, Ethan on one side, Alan on the other.

The crowd followed the three men like a vigil, and an uneasy silence descended. No one spoke. There was no sound but footsteps scraping the pavement and the occasional muffled sob.

He tried to hold it together, but his mind was frantic.

Where are they taking me?

Back to the superstructure?

To a place of execution?

They passed the Aspen House and then the hospital.

As everyone moved down the road into the forest south of town, Pilcher realized what was going to happen.

He looked over at Ethan.

The fear sweeping through him like a shot of liquid nitrogen.

Somehow, he kept walking.

At the curve in the road, everyone stepped off the pavement and headed into the woods, Pilcher thinking, I never even looked back, never got one last glimpse of Wayward Pines.

A shallow layer of mist had pooled in the forest and the torchlights looked otherworldly cutting through it.

Like disembodied points of fire.

Pilcher was growing colder by the minute.

He heard the buzzing of the fence.

They were walking beside it.

Then they were standing at the gate. It had all happened so fast, as if no time had passed since they’d removed his hood in the middle of Main Street.

Ethan offered a small backpack to Pilcher.

“There’s some food and water inside. Enough for several days if you last that long.”

Pilcher just stared at the pack.

“You all didn’t have the guts to actually kill me yourselves?” he asked.

“No,” Ethan said. “Just the opposite actually. We all wanted it too much. We wanted to torture you. To let each person left standing take their pound of flesh out of you. Do you not want the pack?”

Pilcher grabbed it, slung the strap over his shoulder.

Ethan went to the control panel and punched in the manual power override.

The humming stopped.

The woods became quiet.

Pilcher looked at all his people. Those from town. Those from the mountain. The last human faces he would ever lay eyes upon.

“You ungrateful f**ks! You’d all have died two thousand years ago if it wasn’t for me. I created a paradise for you. Heaven on earth. I’m your God! And you have the audacity to kick God out of heaven!”

“I think you got your scripture wrong,” Ethan said. “God didn’t get exiled. It was the other guy.”

Ethan opened the gate.

Pilcher looked at Ethan, long and hard, and then glared out at the crowd.

He crossed out of safety to the other side of the fence.

Ethan shut the gate.

Soon, the lines resumed their protective hum.

Pilcher watched as the crowd turned away from him, the flashlights and torchlights receding into the mist.

Then he was standing alone in the cold, dark forest.

He headed south until the hum of the fence became inaudible.

The starlight coming though the tops of the pines was insufficient to light his way.

When his legs became tired, he sat down against the trunk of a pine tree.

Far off, a mile or so away, an abby screamed.

Another one answered. Much, much closer.

And then another.

Pilcher heard the sound of footsteps.

Out there in the dark, something was running.

Running toward him.

ETHAN

At first light, Ethan drove out of the superstructure in one of the security team’s Dodge Rams, his son riding beside him in the passenger seat.

Through the trees.

The boulders.

Then Ethan pulled onto the main road, heading south out of town.

At the hairpin curve, he turned off into the woods and steered down the embankment, weaving carefully between the trees.

When they reached the fence, Ethan turned parallel to it and drove until they arrived back at the gate.

He killed the engine.

The hum of the current moving through the barbed steel lines could be heard even from inside the truck.

“Do you think Mr. Pilcher is dead yet?” Ben asked.

“I have no idea.”

“But the abbies will eventually get him, right?”

“That’s a certainty.”

Ben glanced back through the rear window into the bed of the truck. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why are we doing this, Dad?”

“Because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that thing back there.”

Now Ethan looked into the truck bed.

The female abby from the superstructure sat motionless in a plexiglass cage, staring out into the woods.

“It’s strange,” Ethan said. “The world belongs to them now, but we still possess something they don’t have.”

“What?”

“Kindness. Decency. That’s what it is to be human. At our best at least.”

Ben looked confused.

“I think this abby is different,” Ethan said.

“What do you mean?”

“She has an intelligence, a gentleness I haven’t seen in any of the others. Maybe she has a family she wants to see again.”

“We should shoot her and burn her with all the rest.”

“And what would that accomplish? Feed our anger for a few minutes? What if we did the opposite? What if we sent her out into her world with a message about the species that once lived in this valley? I know it’s crazy, but I’m holding tight to the idea that a small act of kindness can have real resonance.”

Ethan opened his door, stepped out into the forest.

“What do you mean?” Ben asked. “Like it might change the abbies? Maybe more would become like her?”

Ethan walked around to the back of the truck, lowered the tailgate.

He said, “Species evolve. In the beginning, man was a hunter-gatherer. Communicated through grunts and gestures. Then we invented agriculture and language. We became capable of kindness.”

“But that took thousands of years. We’ll all be dead before that ever happens.”