HL 04-The Final Hour (10 page)

Now I understood. He was afraid I’d come here to talk, to inform on him, to tell someone how he’d roughed me up.

“Get your hands off me,” I said, grabbing at his wrist.

“Or you’ll do what?” asked Dunbar—but all the same, he threw me roughly back down onto the cot.

I rubbed my hand over my face, trying to get my bearings, trying to defog my mind. My thoughts still seemed to be drifting in some weird netherworld between the present and the past.

“Come on,” Dunbar said. “What did you tell them?”

“Listen . . . ,” I began.

He hit me in the side of the head with his open hand.

“Don’t waste my time, West. Let’s go! What did you tell them?”

I looked up at that nasty, knuckly face. I didn’t like getting hit. I didn’t like that he could just whack me like that and get away with it. He was a bully, that’s all. A bully who knew he had all the power as long as we were here, as long as we were stuck together in the hell of Abingdon.

I couldn’t keep the scorn out of my voice. “I didn’t come here to turn you in, Dunbar.” Slowly, painfully, I sat up on the bed. “You don’t have to be such a coward . . .”

That got to him. The truth always gets to guys like him. He grabbed me again, twisting the front of my shirt in his fingers as he hauled me to my feet, held me close to his angry eyes. “You listen to me, West. You open your mouth one time—one time—and so help me, they will find your broken body . . .”

“I said, get off me!”

I was too angry to stop myself. I knocked his hand away again. I staggered backward as he let me go.

Dunbar looked surprised—surprised I dared to stand up to him, surprised that any prisoner would dare. But he smiled as I glared at him.

“Careful, West,” he said, very softly, very dangerously.

“Listen,” I told him. “The next time you have me in your lousy Outbuilding, with your guards waiting out in the yard to help you so I can’t fight back—then you can beat on me all you want. But you lay your hand on me in here again and so help me, you’ll be in the infirmary with me.”

The bully’s eyes widened in shock, then narrowed in rage. I was pretty sure no prisoner had ever talked to him like that before.

“Oh, you’re gonna be sorry you mouthed off to me, garbage,” he said. “Remember I told you I’m gonna make teaching you a lesson my hobby?”

“I remember.”

“Well, forget that. I’m gonna make it my profession. You think you have some kind of protection against me. You got no protection against me. When I decide to come for you, no one’ll see, no one’ll know, no one’ll say a word. You’ll just be gone.”

With that, he grinned—and turned to walk away.

I was glad to see him go. But before he reached the door, something happened.

It was like another memory attack—that harsh, that sudden, that real—but it only lasted a single second. One flash. One memory. That moment, out in the darkness, out in the shadows of the Homelander compound as I listened to the voices inside the building. I remembered Prince’s voice . . .

The Great Death!

“Dunbar!” I called out. The word sprang from my mouth before I even had time to think about it.

The Yard King stopped about two steps away from the infirmary door. Slowly, he turned back to face me.

“You say something, garbage?”

I was about to answer when there it was again. The flash of memory. The night. The compound. The voices inside. The images and words rushed in on me too quickly for me to understand them all. But one thought stood out from all the others like phrases written in fire in a paragraph of faded print.

The Great Death will not be stopped . . . It will ring in
the devil’s New Year
.

“I have to see the warden,” I said softly, more to myself than to Dunbar. “I have to talk to the warden right away, right now.”

Dunbar narrowed his eyes. He pointed a finger at me. “Just how short a life are you looking to have, you dumb—”

“No,” I said, “no, it’s not about you. It has nothing to do with you. Listen to me, Dunbar. Something terrible is going to happen.”

I stood and stared down at the floor as the thoughts, the images, the memories kept flashing around me, engulfing me.

The Great Death will not be stopped . . . Even if I have
to do it on my own, the Great Death will not be stopped
.

It was hard to think straight, but I knew I had to. I had to put the pieces together. Prince had escaped. Rose had told me that. Most of the Homelanders had been rounded up, but Prince and some of his accomplices were still at large.

Even if I have to do it on my own .
. .

Rose’s bosses in Washington were wrong. Prince hadn’t left the country. The threat of the Homelanders wasn’t over. As long as Prince was alive, as long as he was free . . .

The Great Death will not be stopped
.

He would somehow make sure the Great Death would happen. Whatever the Great Death was, Prince would see it through, even if he had to do it alone.

I had to tell someone, warn someone. But who could I tell? Who could I warn? How could I get the word out? In here. Stuck in here. Rose was gone. He said I wouldn’t be able to get in touch with him anymore. Who else would believe me? My parents—my friends—maybe even my lawyers—sure. But none of them had the power to stand in the way of the Homelanders’ plan.

The Great Death . . . will ring in the devil’s New Year
.

New Year’s. It was right around the corner, a little more than a week away. Whatever Prince was planning, there wasn’t a lot of time to stop him. I had to think of something.

I raised my head slowly. I looked up at Dunbar. “I need to talk to the warden,” I said again. “You gotta tell him, Dunbar. You gotta let him know. There’s going to be a terrorist attack.”

“What?” said the Yard King, his rattling voice cracking with disbelief.

I stared up at him, hoping he could read the seriousness in my eyes, praying he’d believe me. “People are going to die, Dunbar. A lot of people. You have to get me to the warden. I have to tell him. I have to tell someone.”

Dunbar let out a harsh laugh. “Man, you are one crazy—”

The next moment I was on him. I didn’t think about it, I just leapt off the bed. One hand grabbed Dunbar’s shirt, the other was on his throat, curved into a claw around his Adam’s apple. I knocked him back against the wall and held him there, my eyes inches from his.

“Do it, Dunbar!”

He stared at me, his mouth open. “Are you out of your—”

“Do it,” I said. “Or so help me, I will turn you in for the things you do. Even if you kill me for it, Dunbar, I will turn you in and they will put you away. How do you think that’ll be, huh? How do think you’ll do in prison? How do you think the cons’ll treat you once you’re here on the inside?”

His eyes turned into deep pools of fear.

I clutched his throat tighter until he gagged.

“Get me to the warden!” I said. “Do it!”

CHAPTER TEN
The Warden

The warden’s name was Wilson Tanker. He was a large, square-built man with a shaven head and a sharp silver mustache. He wore a black suit and a black shirt and a string tie with a turquoise clasp. He had such narrow eyes they were almost buried in the windburned ridges and wrinkles of his cheeks. He seemed constantly to be squinting at you, like he was trying to make you out in the dark.

He was sitting in a swivel chair behind a gunmetal-gray desk. It was daylight now—it had taken me more than twelve hours to get in to see him. The window behind him looked out on a section of the prison I’d never seen, a wall of grated windows across a narrow courtyard two stories down. Trucks occasionally rumbled through the court on their way from somewhere to somewhere else—somewhere I couldn’t go.

Two flagpoles stood against the paneled wall, an American flag and a state flag, one on either side of the window, on either side of Tanker as he leaned back and swiveled this way and that.

He had me standing in front of the desk. There was a guard standing beside my left shoulder and another standing beside my right. Chuck Dunbar was standing in back of me. I guess you could say I was well guarded.

For a long time, Warden Tanker just went on swiveling back and forth, back and forth, squinting narrowly up at me.

Then after a while he asked, “And just how would you know there’s going to be a terrorist attack on New Year’s Eve?”

My frustration felt like a creature trapped in my chest trying to get out, a great big gorilla or something pounding on the cage bars of my insides. I let out a slow breath, hoping to calm the gorilla down. It didn’t help much. “I was with them,” I said. “The terrorists. I overheard them talking.”

Warden Tanker looked at the guard to the left of me. Then he looked at the guard to the right of me. Then he looked over my shoulder at Dunbar. “Uh-huh,” he said finally. He had a thin, high reedy voice that came out of him in a slow drawl. “So why did you wait until now to tell me?”

I stammered stupidly as I tried to put the words together. Finally, I managed to say, “I didn’t remember.”

Warden Tanker sort of rolled that around in his mouth for a moment, then drawled it slowly back at me: “You didn’t remember.”

“That’s right!”

“Just kind of slipped your mind, did it?”

“Yes . . . No . . . I had amnesia.”

“Amnesia.”

“Well, not exactly amnesia. I took a drug . . .”

“I’ll just bet you did.”

“No, not that kind of drug. A special drug so I wouldn’t remember. So the terrorists couldn’t get any information out of me.”

Once again, the gorilla of frustration threatened to tear me wide open, as the warden swiveled slowly, moving his eyes from one guard to another as if they were all sharing a private joke.

“And you got this drug exactly where?” Tanker asked. “From the amnesia fairy, I’m guessing.”

The guard at my left shoulder snorted.

“Look,” I said, trying to control my temper. “I know this all sounds hard to believe.”

“Oh, you know that, do you?” asked the warden.

“Yes, but you
have
to believe it. You
have
to.”

Slowly, thoughtfully, Warden Tanker stroked his silver mustache with his hand. The way he did it reminded me of Sensei Mike. Sensei Mike had a big black mustache, and he’d stroke it with his hand sometimes when he was trying to hide the fact that he was laughing. But then Sensei Mike was always laughing because he thought the world was kind of a funny place in a lot of ways. The warden, on the other hand, was laughing at me. “Supposing I do believe you,” he went on slowly, “what do you expect me to do about it?”

The Frustration Creature was going so crazy inside me that for a minute I couldn’t answer—couldn’t answer without trying to throw this guy out the window. But finally, I managed to blurt out, “Tell somebody! Homeland Security. The FBI. Anybody! What’s wrong with you?”

I felt a sharp blow to the back of my head. I stumbled forward a step. Dunbar had hit me.

“Speak to the warden with respect,” he growled.

“You see, son,” the warden said—and I so wanted to punch him. So. “My problem is: A lot of cons come in here with a lot of stories. Hoping to get some new privileges or just start some kind of trouble. You know how I can tell when they’re lying?”

I couldn’t answer. I gestured helplessly.

“I can tell they’re lying because their mouths are moving.” He waved me away like I was a bad smell. “You have something you want to communicate with the outside world, call your lawyer.”

The guards on either side of me took hold of my arms, ready to drag me out of there.

“I
did
call my lawyer,” I said as the Frustration Creature raged and hammered at the bars of his cage inside my chest. “His office is closed for the holidays. Even if they get back to me—and even if they believe me—it could be too late.”

But the warden wasn’t listening. He had already opened a folder on his desk, was already turning to other business. “Well, then I guess you’re out of luck,” he drawled.