The Final Hour

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

They wanted to strap me down, but I wouldn’t let them. I was tired of feeling trapped and helpless. Tired of being pushed around and told what to do. This was my choice, my decision. I didn’t need any straps.

I rolled up my sleeve and held it out to Dr. Farber. “Just do it,” I told her.

I was sitting in the big chair behind the desk. Milton One and Dodger Jim were standing near me. Mike was leaning against the desk, his arms crossed on his chest, watching me. Rose was standing at the window, staring out at the night.

Dr. Farber lifted the hypodermic. She took a breath.

“Isn’t this where you’re supposed to say it won’t hurt a bit?” I asked her.

She tried to smile but didn’t do a very good job. She leaned forward and pressed the hypodermic needle against my arm.

I didn’t want to watch. I looked at Mike. He winked at me. I winked back.

The needle went into me.

I thought I was ready for the pain. I wasn’t. With all the memory attacks I’d experienced, I thought I’d been through it before and could take it. But this was worse-much worse-than it had ever been. For what must have been a minute but seemed like days, I lay in thrashing contortions on the floor. I heard myself screaming in mindless agony.

Then-thank God-I felt as if I were plunging out of my own agonized body, plunging into a darkening whirlpool of time, and my own screams slowly faded away into ever-receding echoes.

Now, at last, the echoes faded too. I fell from the whirlpool into empty space. That’s what it seemed like, anyway. It seemed like I was dropping down and down and down through a vast empty space whose only limit was the past spread out beneath me. Moments of the past played themselves out far below as I tumbled toward them, watching. I caught glimpses of my whole life as it seemed to replay itself all in a single moment. There was me and Alex Hauser as little kids on a baseball field… Me as a miniature yellow belt in Sensei Mike’s karate class for children… Me at the dinner table with my mom and dad and my sister, Amy, rolling her eyes at some new horror-of-horrors that she’d experienced that day in school… Me and my friends clowning around at our lunch table in the cafeteria… Me with Beth

… Me slipping into the car next to Waterman to hear what he wanted me to do… Me with Alex again, teenagers now, arguing in my mom’s car before he stormed off into the park where Mr. Sherman stabbed him to death… My trial for his murder… The Homelander compound. ..

There was so much time flashing before my eyes as I spun and tumbled down. At first, I couldn’t think. My mind was clouded with confusion. Where was I? Where was I going? What was happening to my body? Was that me I could still hear screaming in the far distance? Was I dying? Was this what the end looked like?

But then, I remembered… not the past… the present… the Great Death… New Year’s Eve… no time for fear and confusion. No time. No time.

I fought down my rising panic. I forced myself to focus. I had done this a million times before. In sparring matches. In belt tests. In fights with killers. I knew how to focus when I had to, and I had to now.

One memory. That’s what I needed. I needed to find one memory and fall into it. I focused my mind with all the energy I had…

There it was. I saw it below me. The compound. The barracks. The unconscious guard on the ground…

I guided my fall toward it.

If you’ve ever jumped off a really high diving board, you will know what it felt like then. That plunge where you think that any second you should hit the water, but the second passes and you’re still going down and down, and your stomach starts to rise inside you and then…

Then I was there. I had done it. I was in the compound. I was underneath the barracks window. The guard was unconscious beside me. Waylon was standing at the window above me. Prince’s voice was drifting out to me.

They are weary of war, but war is what we live for. They are afraid of death, but death is what we love.

The guard stirred on the ground, waking.

Then Waylon moved away from the window. And I leapt up. I grabbed hold of the sill. I lifted myself. I looked in.

It was one of those weird double moments. I was in the past, but I was in the present too. I knew I was lying on the floor in the weird mansion screaming in agony. And I knew I was in the Homelander compound. I knew the guard was about to cry for help. I was about to be caught. But now-right now-there was this one moment-looking in the window…

Look! I thought desperately. Look!

I looked.

There was Sherman. Prince. Waylon. The table. The laptop.

The laptop.

Look, Charlie! What’s on the laptop?

“ I see it! ” I shouted. “ I see it, I see it! ”

Then, like an enormous, monstrous paw made of fire rising up from the bottom of the earth, breaking through the earth’s surface to grab me, pain-pain like nothing I had ever known before-wrapped itself around me, closed its flaming fingers tight.

“No!” I shouted.

I tried to fight it off, but it was no use. It was irresistible. It dragged me off the windowsill. It dragged me down and down, out of the compound, out of time, out of memory, down into an all-consuming agony like nothing else.

I have to tell them! I thought. Don’t let me die. Please. Not yet. Mike. Rose. I have to tell them what I saw!

It was the last sensible thought I had. After that, there was nothing-nothing at all-but falling and pain and blackness.