Wayward (Wayward Pines, #2)

by Blake Crouch

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. —JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST

I should read Paradise Lost someday.

YESTERDAY IS HISTORY. TOMORROW IS A MYSTERY. TODAY IS A GIFT. THAT’S WHY IT’S CALLED THE PRESENT.

He ran his finger across the spines. Classics. Faulkner. Dickens. Tolkien. Hugo. Joyce. Bradbury. Melville. Hawthorne. Poe. Austen. Fitzgerald. Shakespeare.

He opened the book from the coffeehouse. The prose was terse and brilliant. He choked up at the descriptions of Paris at night. The restaurants, the bars, the music, the smoke. The lights of a real, living city. The sense of a wide world brimming with diverse and fascinating people. The freedom to explore it. Forty pages in, he closed the book. He couldn’t take it. Hemingway wasn’t distracting him. Wasn’t sweeping him away from the reality of Wayward Pines. Hemingway was rubbing his face in it. Pouring salt into a wound that would never heal.

In his first two weeks as sheriff, he’d spent most of his time studying dossiers on each resident, learning the particulars of their lives before. The details of their integrations. Surveillance-based reports of their lives after. He knew the personal histories of half of the town now. Their secrets and fears. Those who could be trusted to maintain this fragile illusion. Those with hairline cracks in their veneer. He was becoming a one-man gestapo. Necessary—he got that. But he still despised it.

It might’ve been a perfect moment but the knowledge of everything elbowed in. Would he reach the point one day when he could shut that off? Just take these unexpected respites of peace for their surface beauty and forget the underlying horror? Was that how people managed to live here for years without losing their minds?

Ethan didn’t miss those things. Didn’t wish that his son was growing up in a world where people stared at screens all day. Where communication had devolved into the tapping of tiny letters and humanity lived by and large for the endorphin kick from the ping of a received text or a new e-mail.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.

Pam just smiled. It was a facade, no comfort in it. Pure mask. The thought crossed Theresa’s mind, and not for the first time—who is this woman I’m spilling all my secrets to? To some extent, the exposure was terrifying. But the compulsion to actually connect with another human being tipped the scales.

“Never assume you know where someone else is coming from.”

“Some of the residents, like Kate and Harold Ballinger, knew in their hearts that something was very wrong. That none of this was real. Others chose to believe the lie. Like good humans, they adapted. Made the best of a fucked-up situation, and tried to just live their lives. But it wasn’t a life. It was nothing more than a beautiful prison, run by a psychopath.”