HL 04-The Final Hour (8 page)

A buzzer sounded. Dinnertime was over.

I got up off my bench. My head was throbbing like my brain was overloaded. I moved to the garbage cans, emptied my tray, and set it on the stack.

I looked around. I saw the swastika boys gathered in one corner of the room, murmuring to one another, eyeing me with suspicion. I saw some of the Islamist gang looking at me from another corner, waiting for their chance.

I couldn’t join one and I couldn’t hide from the other. It was as if the stone walls of this prison were closing in on me from every side.

I took a step toward the cafeteria door . . . and suddenly, the room went white. A terrible pain shot through me.

The next few minutes changed everything.

CHAPTER EIGHT
The Great Death

In an instant, the cafeteria was gone. The prison was gone. The present was gone and I was in the past again.

I was in the woods. I was running. Trees rushed by me on every side. It was night. It was pitch-black, but somehow I could see. The trees and vines and bushes— all the tangled shapes of the forest—appeared a ghostly green against the darkness. I understood: I was wearing military-style night-vision goggles.

I looked down for a second as I ran. I saw I was holding a machine gun. An AK-47, compact and deadly. I kept running. I knew I had to run even though I didn’t know why. What was I running away from? What was I running toward? I didn’t know.

Slowly I began to comprehend. The idea just seemed to form in my mind. I was outside the secret Homelander compound in the woods. I was being hunted, hunted like a deer by Orton and some of the others. I had that double sense again of being in two times at once: I felt as if I knew what was going to happen next. I couldn’t know because it hadn’t happened yet, and yet I did.

What I knew was this: Someone was about to shoot me.

Almost the same second the knowledge came to me, it happened.

As if out of nowhere, Orton stepped from the trees. He lifted his AK, pointed it straight at my chest. For a second, I saw his face through the night-vision goggles, bizarre and green. I saw
his
goggles bugging out of his face like an insect’s eyes. I saw his mouth gaping in a savage smile of pleasure and triumph.

Questions flashed through my mind: How had he gotten around in front of me? Why was he trying to kill me? Weren’t we on the same side?

There was no time to figure out the answers. I had to move. Now.

Just as Orton stepped into view, I came down on my right foot. I pushed off hard to the side at the same moment he opened fire.

I heard the cough of the AK. I felt the bullets pepper my side. The impact spun me around in midair. I tumbled downward and smacked into the earth with a bone-jarring thud. As I landed on my shoulder, I somehow managed to keep rolling, twisting—somersaulting, finally, off the forest path and into the low bushes. I heard the AK rattle death yet again. I felt the bullets whistling above my head off to the right.

Then, before Orton could pull the trigger one more time, I sprang up fast onto my knees and fired back.

He wasn’t ready for me. He’d obviously lost me in the low brush when I fell and rolled. His second round of gunfire had been aimed in the wrong direction and now he was turned to face the empty woods to my right.

But I knew where he was. I’d heard his gun. I popped up out of my cover with my gun leveled at his center. I didn’t hesitate. I opened fire.

Even in the strange green light of the goggles, I saw the dark stain spread over the front of his fatigues. The smile vanished from his face in a look of shock. He staggered backward, his arms flailing. He sat down on the hard dirt of the forest path.

At that, a whistle blew.

A man stepped out of the surrounding forest, stripping his goggles off his face as he came. I knew him. Waylon. One of the cruelest and most murderous of the Home–landers band. One day soon, Detective Rose was going to shoot him dead. But now here he was, large and very much alive.

I stood up slowly. I stretched, trying to ease the pain in my side where the bullets had smacked into me. I stripped off my goggles, too, as I came forward. I glanced down and there was enough moonlight for me to see the dark red-brown stain that had spread from beneath my arm all the way down to my beltline. It was blood-colored paint, of course. This was a training exercise. The bullets were paint pellets that exploded on impact. They hurt something wicked when they hit you, and I knew I’d be bruised all over tomorrow. But they didn’t break the skin. There were no wounds, no blood.

Waylon reached out and pushed my arm away so he could get a good look at where the pellets had landed. I flinched at the pain.

“Not so bad. Not fatal,” he said gruffly. He had a deep voice with a heavy Middle Eastern accent. He was big and thickly built. He had a large face with sagging folds behind his scruffy black beard. “You live to fight another day,” he said. Then he turned to Orton. “But you,” he said roughly. “You are dead.”

Orton was slowly getting to his feet. I could see his face contorted in pain. He looked down at the stains covering the front of his shirt. The grimace of pain became a grimace of anger.

“This is stupid,” he protested to Waylon. He gestured at me. “Look at him. With those wounds, he would never have been able to jump up that way. I’d have finished him off while he was lying there.”

Waylon took a long stride and stood in front of Orton, looking down at him. “You’re forgetting one thing,” he said. “You cannot possibly say such a thing to me. Do you know why?”

“Why?” said Orton angrily.

“Because you’re dead,” said Waylon.

With that, Waylon hit Orton in the face, shockingly fast, shockingly hard, his open palm smacking loudly against Orton’s cheek . . .

And with that smack, the scene was gone—and the blow seemed to hit me in the face instead of Orton. Confused— and taken completely by surprise—I was sent reeling backward by the impact.

I tried to steady myself, to get my bearings, look around. Everything had suddenly changed. I wasn’t in the woods anymore. I was standing on hard-packed dirt. There were faces on every side of me. Faces twisted, mouths open. People were screaming roughly.

Orton was there. Orton’s furious face was bobbing around in front of me.

We were fighting, he and I. It was another training exercise: self-defense. But it wasn’t like sparring back home in the dojo. In the dojo, Sensei Mike taught his students that even when we sparred against one another, we were teammates. We weren’t trying to hurt one another. We were trying to make each other better. Here, now, in the Homelanders’ training compound, I could tell by the way my face throbbed that Orton was not holding back. He was a trained fighter, just like I was. And he’d hit me full force in the face. He wasn’t trying to make me better at all. He was just trying to bring me down.

The full situation started to come back to me, in that weird double way things did during these memory attacks. Orton hated me. He was used to being the top dog among the Homelander recruits and he was jealous of my success. He meant to punish me for it. He meant to prove he was still the best, even if I got hurt in the process. Even if I got killed in the process.

He closed in on me again. His stare was intense, focused. His features were taut with purpose, his mouth twisted with fury for revenge. I could hear the crowd of men around us cheering for him fiercely. I could see their bared teeth, their gleaming eyes on every side of me.

With no windup, no warning, Orton launched a high crescent kick. The edge of his foot came looping toward the side of my head. I was still dazed from his last punch. I only just managed to duck the blow. His sneaker swung past above me, but he was already using the velocity of the kick to bring himself spinning full around like a top, his hand snapping out in order to send a chop at my neck.

I managed to get an elbow up, fending off the worst of the strike. But I was off-balance. The movement sent me stumbling to the side, tumbling to the ground as the crowd cheered with bloodlust. I rolled onto my back and Orton, still moving, flung himself at me. I lifted my feet and caught him in the belly and somersaulted backward. The throw sent him flying through the air.

I got up as he hit the ground. I saw dust puff up all around him. I heard the breath come out of him with a loud grunt. I rushed to attack him before he could stand, but he was too quick. He rolled to the side and was on his feet before I could reach him.

The crowd moved with us, leaving us just enough space to fight as they pumped their fists at us and cheered.

Orton and I circled each other. He was good, tough, fast. And I could see by that angry gleam in his eye that he didn’t mean to lose to me ever again.

As for me, I was out of breath, dazed from the blow to my face; aching all over. I wasn’t sure I could handle another solid attack.

Fortunately, before Orton could make his next move, Waylon stepped in between us.

He was even more frightening by daylight. Big and ruthless with nothing but meanness in those baggy eyes.

“All right,” he said in his guttural accent. “That’s enough.”

I put my guard down. I breathed a sigh of relief. I was pretty sure I’d gotten out of a very bad situation there. If Orton had attacked again, he probably would’ve finished me off.

Waylon turned to Orton. “Good job,” he said.

Then he kicked me in the chest.

It was a back kick, perfectly planted. It hit me right above the heart. I went flying backward and then dropped down to the ground, coughing.

Waylon turned and stood over me. “You,” he said in his thick accent. “You need to fight like you mean it. You are not in the dojo at the mall now. If you lose here, you die. You need to fight to kill.”

I started to get off the ground, but then . . .

It was as if someone poured a giant glass of Liquid Night down over us. Darkness ran down on top of us and the training ground vanished . . .

I was suddenly in a silent hallway. It was dark, very dark. Even before I fully understood where I was, I knew I was in terrible danger. If anyone found me here, I’d be killed on the spot.

I pressed close to the wall. There was an opening up ahead. A doorway. I could make out the rectangle of moonlit night, lighter than the inner dark. I edged closer to the door. I peeked out.

From here, I could see the buildings of the training compound, hulking barracks and watchtowers surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence and the deep black expanse of the forest beyond. The structures of the compound were sunk in the night shadows—with one exception. One building, just across the way, over by the fence, had a yellow light burning in its window. A jeep was parked outside.