Wayward Pines: Alone (Kindle Worlds Novella) by Brett Battles

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

Ted arrived in the surveillance department at ten minutes before seven a.m. His first order of business was a check-in call with Pilcher.

“Nothing to report,” Ted told him. “Town was quiet last night. Everybody’s behaving.”

“All right. See that it stays that way.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We should be back by tomorrow afternoon,” Pilcher said.

“Already? Thought you were going to stay a few more days.”

“We’ll have seen everything we need to by then.”

“So, pretty much what you expected to find?” Ted asked.

“Pretty much.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be. It just means what we’re doing is all the more important.”

“Of course.”

Once he’d finished with Pilcher, Ted took over in the live monitoring room. Several tasks needed completing at the start of every morning shift—camera checks, microphone checks, maintenance requests, personnel checks.

He worked his way through the first three, noting that two more cameras seemed to be malfunctioning, and that one of the microphones that was supposedly fixed the previous week was not working again. He feared that at some point in the next few years, repairs would become a real problem. The extensive monitoring they conducted in Wayward Pines was way above and beyond what they had initially planned back before they’d all gone into the sleep chambers, so their supply of parts for the cameras and microphones was less than it should have been. When they ran out, some areas would just have to go unmonitored.

He moved onto the personnel check. This mainly consisted of pinging all tracking chips and making sure a return signal came back. It was a totally automated system. All Ted had to do was look at the results. The 461 tracking chips that corresponded to the current population of Wayward Pines all checked out. As for Pilcher’s people in the mountain facility, the computer was showing that eleven chips were not responding. That made sense. The eleven belonged to the people who’d accompanied Pilcher on his trip to Seattle.

Ted was about to close the information screen when something struck him. While eleven was the right amount of chipped personnel not on site, that number, when added to the total number of mountain residents whose chips reported back in good condition, was wrong. It was one fewer than yesterday, but the computer didn’t note any missing.

He pulled up the raw number of mountain residents regardless of chip status. There it was again, off by one number.

What the hell?

It wasn’t as if the computer would randomly delete someone from the system. No one was ever deleted from the system. If they weren’t on the resident log, they would be …

He grimaced. Was it possible someone had passed away during the night and he hadn’t been informed? Doubtful in the extreme. With Pilcher’s absence, Ted was basically in charge. So if someone had died—because that would be the only other list this missing person could be on—he would know about it.

He brought up the list anyway, sorting it by most recent entry first, and then stared at the screen in disbelief. According to the computer, AJ Pilcher was dead.

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