The Final Hour

CHAPTER TWELVE

I stepped out into the yard. The sky hung low, dark gray and heavy. It seemed to press down on me. The cold air felt full of a coming storm.

I felt the danger on every side. Wherever I turned, someone was watching me, waiting for his chance.

Out by the basketball court, it was the Islamist crew. They were gathered at the edge of the black asphalt. They were stealing glances at me with deep, angry eyes, then turning away to murmur to one another.

Over by the Outbuilding, it was the guards. They were standing with Dunbar at the Outbuilding door. Dunbar lifted his chin in my direction, his face like stone. It was his way of saying: I’m waiting for you, punk. I’m waiting for my moment.

Then there were the musclemen over by the weights, the guys with the swastika tattoos. Blade was at the center of them, lying on a bench pressing about a gazillion pounds of weights on a bar. One of his buds noticed me and said a word to him. Blade let the weights settle into the holder. Then he sat up on the bench and looked at me. Not an angry look, but not a friendly one either. Kind of suspicious, I guess you’d call it. Like he was trying to take my measure, trying to figure out exactly who I was and what I was up to.

I started moving toward him.

It felt like a long way across the yard. The whole time I was walking, I felt all those eyes on me. The guards’ eyes and the Islamists’ eyes and the Nazis’ eyes too. As I came near the weight area, Blade stood up from the bench. He made a sort of ironic gesture, a sort of “right-this-way” wave of his hand, letting me have a chance at that bar with its gazillion pounds of weights on either end.

I figured this was some kind of challenge, some kind of way for me to prove myself to these thugs. So I didn’t hesitate. I lay down on the bench. I placed my hands on the bar. I took a breath and went for it. I strained as hard as I could, the breath coming between my tight lips in puffing grunts. I pushed and pushed against the bar, trying to lift it even an inch off its resting place.

No way. I might as well have tried to shift the moon.

I gave a gasp and my arms fell back.

Blade bent down and leaned his scarred-up, goateed face in close to mine, giving me a full look at his dreamy and murderous eyes.

“What’s the matter, brother? Ain’t you got what it takes?”

I didn’t flinch. Still lying there, panting, on the bench, I looked straight up at him. “I want in,” I said.

He blinked. He straightened. He looked down at me, surprised.

I sat up, swinging my feet to the ground. “You said you could use me, right?”

He took a long, slow look around the yard to make sure no one was listening. Then he murmured softly, “That’s right. If you got what it takes.”

I stood. Instinctively, the other swastika boys circled around me, ready to attack if Blade gave the word.

“I’ve got what it takes,” I said. “I want in. What do you say?”

Blade studied me a long minute. I’ll tell you something: I’d already seen some truly evil humanoids in my life. Prince. Waylon. Orton. Not just guys who’d lost their way, you know, who’d made mistakes and did something wrong. I’m talking about the real evildoing deal, the ones who knew they had a choice and chose to do damage to the rest of the world, who chose to cause suffering and wreak havoc. It’s a special breed of truly wicked individual and I’d learned to know them when I saw them. And I knew Blade. Blade was right in there with the worst of them.

When he smiled, I felt a finger of ice draw itself slowly up my spine.

“Here’s the deal,” he said in that grating purr. “There’s a reason we came to you, a reason we want you in.”

I nodded. “I figured it wasn’t my good looks. What is it?”

Blade looked around again, and all the other thugs looked around too. There was no one near us, no one who could hear.

Blade’s low, rumbling growl went on. “What I say next-there’s no going back, you feel me? Once I let you in, you’re in. You can’t un-know what you know.”

I took a deep breath. If I could’ve thought of any other way to get out of here, to have some chance, some shot of finding out what the Great Death was, where it was going to take place, of stopping Prince before he could carry out his plan, believe me, I would’ve done it. But this was all I had.

I nodded. “Keep talking.”

“Understand me, kid,” Blade went on. “You play me for a fool, you play a double game with me, and you will die. Not maybe. Not probably. You will. No matter what happens to me. I got friends all over, friends everywhere. Once I tell you what we’re planning, we are blood brothers, my young disciple, and if you betray me, the gates of hell themselves will not keep me from having my revenge.”

All the time he was spouting this stuff, his eyes were glazed and dreamy. It was as if he was imagining his revenge as he spoke about it, imagining how sweet it would be. An evil dude, I’m telling you.

For my part, I knew I had to show Blade I wasn’t intimidated. I was way, way intimidated, believe me. I’d’ve been crazy not to be intimidated. The guy was a stone killer. But all the same, I knew I had to show him I was cool.

So I put on my hardest voice. I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, Blade, I get it already. You’re a tough guy and if I mess with you I’m a dead man. So you gonna tell me what I have to do or not?”

It sounded almost convincing, sort of. At least it made Blade smile: a big toothy grin. He looked around at his swastika pals. They toothy-grinned right back at him as if to give me their seal of approval. And it’s funny-if by “funny” you mean kind of miserable and strange: I have been tortured by terrorists; I’ve been shot at by the police; I’ve been taken away from my home, my family, my girl, just about everything I loved. But I don’t think I’d ever felt quite so desperately far away from everything good and bright in the world as I felt just at that moment surrounded by the smiling approval of this gang of racist madmen.

“Okay,” said Blade. “Listen up. About two miles from here as the crow flies, there’s a mall-or part of a mall-a mall they were building. You know, it was supposed to be for the town, Abingdon, where the guards and their families live and so on. Only times got tough, right? The builders ran out of money. The thing was never finished. It’s just sitting out there off the main highway. All empty and abandoned. Except not.”

I narrowed my eyes. I didn’t get it. “Not…?” I said.

“Not really abandoned. Some of our friends have been working out there. Digging, if you see what I mean.”

I started to see, but I shook my head anyway to make sure he’d explain it all.

“See, the mall has a complete sewage system,” said Blade. “And that system links up to the sewage system of the town. And that town system links up to a treatment plant. And that treatment plant also serves this prison.”

My lips parted. “You mean, there’s, like, a link between the prison sewers and the sewers that go out to this abandoned mall?”

“That is what I mean. That’s exactly what I mean.” Blade’s dreaming eyes shifted back and forth as he went on. “Our friends have been working ’round the clock to link the systems underground. Then it’s an easy tunnel from the sewers right up into this yard right here.”

“The yard? What good does that do?” I said. “We’re surrounded by guns. The minute they break through the ground, the guards’ll open fire.”

Blade grinned his toothy grin again and his pals grinned their toothy grins. Blade shook his head. “As it happens, there’s exactly one place in this entire prison where a tunnel could break through without being noticed by anyone.”

I thought about it for a minute, but I still didn’t get it.

“The Outbuilding,” said Blade.

As he said the word, my eyes darted to the cinder-block structure sitting squat in the corner of the yard. A cold wind blew over me. It almost felt like some kind of warning, some kind of omen. It made me shiver, standing there, surrounded by those grinning and evil men.

“The Outbuilding,” I echoed softly.

“It’s the Yard King’s castle, no? He’s in there alone most of the time. He likes it that way. No one sees what he does, no one hears what he says, no one knows what he’s up to. If our friends can tunnel up into the Outbuilding, it’s more than likely there’ll be nobody there but Dunbar.”

I shrugged. “So what? Dunbar doesn’t need any help to set off an alarm. All he has to do is shout…”

“But he’s not gonna shout,” purred Blade. “He’s not gonna do anything.”

“Oh yeah? Why not?”

Once again, the wind rose. Once again, Blade smiled around at his friends and they smiled back.

“The thing about the Yard King,” Blade said, “is that he holds a grudge.”

I gave a snorting, mirthless laugh. “Yeah, I noticed that.”

“I’ll bet you have. See, once he takes a dislike to you, nothing on this earth will keep you safe until he feels sure he’s broken you or killed you. Until he knows you live in fear of him, until he sees you cringe and grovel every time he walks by, he will not let you be. That’s how he is when he gets his grudge on against someone.”

“I know, I know.”

“You do know. Because right now, my young disciple, Yard King Dunbar has his grudge on against you.”

I nodded. “He does. That’s the truth. He’s promised he’ll get me back in that Outbuilding the first chance he gets.”

“Well, we’re going to give him that chance,” Blade murmured. “December 30. Five days after Christmas.”

“The thirtieth… You said ‘right after.’”

“That is right after. That’s when the tunnel will be finished. That’s the earliest we can go.”

I took a breath. December 30. One day before New Year’s Eve. How would I ever find Prince in time? How would I ever stop him?

Blade went on, “Yard time on the thirtieth, you are going to start some trouble in the yard. You are going to get into a fight, with me in fact. It is a sure thing what will follow that.”

I nodded. “Dunbar’ll have his goons drag me into the

Outbuilding so he can beat the daylights out of me.”

Blade gave a laugh and the cold wind blew, and to tell you the truth I wasn’t sure which chilled me more, his laughter or the wind. “That’s right. That’s exactly what he’ll do. And as we learned in our last journey to the Outbuilding, when he takes you inside, the other guards disappear.”

“That’s right. He doesn’t want any witnesses.”

“And because he doesn’t want any witnesses, you will be in there all alone with Yard King Dunbar at the very moment when our friends are ready to break through into the Outbuilding and give us a passage out of here.”

I looked into Blade’s dreamy eyes to see if I could find any humanity in there. I shouldn’t have wasted my time. I said, “That’s your master plan? What do you think? You think Dunbar won’t set off the alarm because he’ll be too busy beating me to a pulp?”

Blade gave that chilling laugh again. “Oh, no, no, no, my young disciple. No, no, no. My master plan is to supply you with a shiv. A knife.” His toothy grin flashed and the toothy grins of the men around him flashed. Blade laid his hand on my shoulder.

“Dunbar is not going to set off the alarm,” he said, “because you’re going to kill him.”