The Final Hour

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The entrance to the tunnel seemed to have appeared silently. At first, it was just a small break in the base of the cinder blocks. I could see the edge of a pickax working at it, prying off chunks of dirt, making the hole larger. How they had broken through so quietly, I don’t know, but I guess at least some of the noise had been covered up by the roar of the heating system. In any case, now I could see a pair of bright eyes peering up at me from the darkness beneath.

What happened next happened quickly but in the same weird dreamlike quiet. With any noise covered by the blasting air, it seemed like a silent movie. Blade and three of his fellow musclemen suddenly stepped through the Outbuilding door.

I was stunned by how easy it was. “Where are the guards outside?”

“Some of our boys have them distracted,” Blade said. “Come on.”

Then I was moving with them, surrounded by them. We were at the wall, at the break in the floor. Quickly, one by one, we were kneeling down. I watched two men wriggle through the break and disappear into the darkness.

I saw Blade cast a look across the long room at Dunbar. I followed his gaze. The Yard King was lying sprawled in the shadows at the far end of the room. You could just make out the dark stain of blood-my blood-on his throat and on the front of his shirt. I had been right. Moving as quickly as we were, he looked plenty dead enough to pass.

Blade nodded at me. “Good work,” he said. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Then he went down to the ground and lowered himself through the hole.

I watched the top of his head sink down into nothingness. Then I lowered myself after him.

The moment I went over the side, I felt the ground open beneath my feet. My fingers touched a rope. I took hold of it, my hand sticky with drying blood. Wrapping my feet around it, I started sliding down. Blade was directly under my feet. Another man-the last man- was sliding down directly above my head.

Then we were on the ground somewhere below the earth. We were moving quickly in a tightly packed group through the darkness. There were flashlight beams lancing the black air, but they didn’t illuminate much. A wall. The shoulder of a gray uniform. A face, taut and eager, moving forward. All of us moving fast.

There were noises. Rapid breaths. Grunts of effort. Curses. Quick, padding footsteps. Now and then, a voice:

“This way.”

“Quick.”

“Out of my way.”

“Come on.”

I kept stumbling forward through the blackness.

After a while, I had the sense I was descending. It was hard to tell in the dark. I heard a splash up ahead. Then the smell-what a stink!-washed up over me. Seconds later, I splashed into it too. The smell rose around me like smoke, wrapped itself around me, choking me, like smoky fingers on my throat.

I understood we were moving through the sewers now.

After that, there were turns and drops and climbs. Dancing flashlight beams. Glimpses of faces. A confusion of motion. There were moments when we were on some dry surface and moments when we were plunged thigh-deep in awful stinking mess. Soon, it all seemed to run together, a long, dark nightmare of panting motion through a nauseating stench. On and on we went, traveling through the connecting tunnels and tubes.

I don’t know how long we ran. Sometimes we slowed to a kind of jog, but there was no stopping. I was afraid my strength would give out, but no. I could practically feel the adrenaline pumping through me, the energy surging in my limbs, unbelievably steady and unstoppable. My whole inner world was filled with the rhythm of my heart hammering and my lungs working. The pain- the pain I knew was pulsing in every part of me-the pain I knew was still there, always there-seemed somehow far away for the moment, buried beneath the electric surface of that pumped-up adrenaline high. The punches from Blade, the beating from the guards, the cut I’d dug into my own flesh with the knife: Yeah, they throbbed and ached and stung as I pushed myself to keep moving, but the ache seemed almost to belong to someone else, not me.

I ran and ran, breathless. I tried to get my brain working as we went down another corridor of stink and mess. One thing was on my mind and one thing only: We were rushing into a trap.

I had tipped Dunbar off. I had told him we were heading for the mall. I didn’t know how long it would take him to sound the alarm or how fast the police would respond or how far they had to travel. But if the cops weren’t waiting for us at the mall when we got there, they would get there soon enough. That would make it tough for me to get away. I would have to make my escape not just from Blade but from the cops as well. I wished I hadn’t had to do it, to tell Dunbar the plan. But I couldn’t just let this killer Blade and his pals escape. I had to make sure they were captured again. I just didn’t see any other choice.

All this raced through my mind as I raced through the darkness. Stumbling along in the stench and wet. Crushed in with these thugs as they rushed desperately toward what they thought was freedom-a freedom I knew they would never have.

At last, panting, flagging, stumbling, we came around a bend in the dark corridor and I heard several voices at once.

“There.”

“Oh man!”

“I see it, I see it!”

I saw it too: light. A dim gray glow that seemed to pour down into the darkness like water. It was the way out, the way back to the upper world.

I could feel the others around me tense with hope and expectation. I could hear the beat of their breathing change. As the flashlight beams crisscrossed this way and that around us, I could see their faces, their bright, desperate faces, suddenly full of hope; their gazes yearning for that light up ahead, yearning for freedom.

More whispers:

“Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“Baby, there we go.”

“We are going home.”

We all want the same thing, I guess. Killers or no, good or bad. We all want to be free. We all want to go home.

I looked ahead, down the tunnel, at the cascade of faint gray light growing brighter as we grew near. I was thinking: What now? What do I do when the police surround us? How do I break away?

I didn’t know the answer and not knowing made me afraid. What if I made a run for it and the cops opened fire and shot me down? What if the cops showed up and Blade guessed I had tipped them off and he killed me?

What if-here was the really bad one-what if I tried to run and got captured again? My lawyer’s appeal would be ruined. Even with all the help Rose had given me, no one would believe I was innocent now.

That thought made my inner world darken even as we moved to the light ahead. It was one thing to think about getting shot to death, it was something else- something much worse-to think about getting stuck in Abingdon for the rest of my life.

As we covered the last few yards to that gray glow, I tried to remind myself why I had done this. The Great Death. I had to stop it. I had to try, no matter what. No matter what.

I fought off my fears and pushed on.

The pavement beneath us was climbing now. Barely running, barely jogging, we just stumbled upward, exhausted, step by wobbly step. As we came near the light, I could make out the faces and forms of the men with me. They were all so exhausted that even the cruelty seemed to be gone from their eyes. There was just the desperation and yearning. To be free. To go home.

Blade was the lead man. He took a last step into the falling light. He stopped. He looked up. Captured in the gray glow, his scarred face with its devilish pointed beard seemed washed clean by light. He looked young and fresh and almost innocent, the meanness gone. I guess he’d really been that way once, when he was a kid maybe, before he did the things he’d done. For a second, in that light, you could see how he used to be.

“Let’s go,” he whispered up into the glow.

The next moment, a rope dropped down. Blade grabbed it, wrapped his legs around it, and started climbing up into the light.

As soon as there was room beneath his feet, another muscleman grabbed hold and started climbing. I was third in line. I went up the rope quickly, following the soles of the feet above me.

As I reached the top, a hand grabbed my arm, helping me up. I crawled out through a jagged hole. The smell and filth and weariness still clung to me. Blinking and squinting, I looked around at a world that seemed to have been drained of all color, that seemed only black-and-white, like an old movie.

I was in an empty structure, a half-finished building. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all white cement and plaster. At the windows-or the spaces where windows were supposed to be, empty rectangles with no glass in them-there was a weird gray-blackness that I couldn’t identify for a second. Then I could: It was the sky. It was covered to the horizon with thick big-bellied clouds. A thunderstorm was gathering-gathering fast. I could feel the cold wet wind blowing in on me through the window holes.

There were two men in overalls who had been waiting for us here. There were two others who had come into the prison to get us. Then there was Blade and his three companions, the final two of them still coming up the ropes.

Moving to one of the windows, I looked out. It was a strange sight: a ghost mall. Empty white structures everywhere like some desert city dug up by archaeologists or something. Window holes and sidewalks, some of them completed, others full of gaps and broken bits, all of it making for a geometric pattern of white cubes with dark rectangles in them. The whiteness of the mall buildings was set against the growing darkness of the clouds around. The clouds seemed to go on and on forever over empty territory. Beyond the mall, as far as I could see, there was nothing but dead fields full of dirt and boulders and sudden slopes that fell away out of sight.

I peered out and scanned the area. I was trying to pick out my best escape route. Behind me, I heard the last of the thugs grunting and cursing, climbing up through the broken hole in the building’s floor. I wondered: Could I just throw myself out the broken window and run for it?

A movement at the corner of my eye caught my attention. I turned to it. My breath stopped.

A long line of white cars was moving toward the mall under the black clouds.

The police. Moving without sirens or lights over the long road through the empty country.

Coming. Coming here. Coming for us.

If I was going to run for it, I had to start running now.

There was a deep throaty roll of thunder.

I glanced back at the others to see if anyone was watching me.

Someone was. Blade. Not just watching me. He was pointing a gun at my head.