Wayward Pines: Exit Vertigo (Part 1, A Kindle Worlds Novella) by Jordan Crouch

Author:Jordan Crouch [Crouch, Jordan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-10-29T05:00:00+00:00

Connor’s lantern played off uneven contours in the stone walls as he made his way down corridor after corridor. Sliding glass doors lined both sides, behind which were dark office spaces filled with lifeless hardware: desks with monitor grids mounted on them, server towers, touch-screen wall panels. Overhead, empty fluorescent light fixtures extended into the darkness ahead of him.

He passed through a small barrack with empty bunks stacked four high and a mess hall filled with long tables and benches that made crazy shadows on the walls as the lantern beam moved over them.

As he walked down one of the countless darkened hallways, he caught brief, repeating reflections of himself in the sliding glass doors. It reminded him of the flip books he used to make as a child.

Connor stopped in front of one.

He looked like a ghost standing there, translucent in the darkness with his blue lantern.

His eyes were sunken and tired, and his usually trimmed beard was longer than it had ever been. The equation was messy, but he figured that he hadn’t shaved in fourteen days.

He ran a few fingers through it.

Sam would have hated it.

Once, after not shaving for two weeks, he had woken up to her standing beside the bed with a breakfast tray in hand. Only it hadn’t been toast and orange juice. It was his straight razor and a bowl of shaving cream neatly laid out beside a vase with a freshly cut flower. She had straddled his chest and shaved his face there in bed.

He smiled at the memory

That was almost 900 years ago.

The immensity of the number hit him like a gut-blow.

Everyone was gone. Everyone he’d ever known or passed on the street. The entire planet’s population dead hundreds of times over. The world, if it even still existed out there, was one that he wouldn’t recognize. It was too big of an idea to think about it. And now James was gone too. He was only one person, but somehow that seemed just as significant as the billions that had passed before him. It made his stomach feel like he was standing at the edge of a cliff staring out into the empty air below him.

He gathered himself and continued on through a series of corridors, until he arrived at a dead end where a thick metal door was built flush into the stone wall.

Connor passed the light over it.

It was featureless except for the lifeless panel of a biometric scanner and a spoked handwheel protruding from the center. The entire facility had been designed with this duality in mind. When the power was on, it was a fully automated nerve center. He could walk from one end of the mountain to the other without touching a single surface, assuming he had the necessary bio-clearance. But here in the dark, it was a heavy, mechanical world that ran on systems of brute leverage and muscle. The only nonmechanical energy source was a small, modular nuclear reactor that powered the fail-safe

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