The Final Hour

CHAPTER THREE

I don’t know how long it was before the guards hurled me onto the floor of my cell. It might have been a long time. It might have just felt like a long time.

When the cell door clanged shut behind me, I lay where I was, bruised and battered and bleeding.

Dunbar had taken me into the Outbuilding. He had beaten me, hard. Punched me, kicked me, slammed my face into the cement floor. He enjoyed it. You could tell by the gleam in his colorless eyes.

When he was finished with me, he called out the door to his guards. A couple of them came in and grabbed me under the arms. They dragged me out of the Outbuilding, my head hanging down, my toes scraping against the concrete floor. They dragged me into the prison, cursing my dead weight the whole way.

They dragged me up a flight of rattling metal stairs then down the second-tier gallery. The prisoners watched me from inside their cells, watched dead-eyed and silent as I was dragged past.

When we reached my cell, the barred door slid open. The guards tossed me inside the way you’d toss an old mattress onto a junk heap. I grunted as I landed on the floor. I heard the door slide shut behind me. I lay there and bled.

Images drifted through my mind. Memories. Faces. My mom and dad. My sister. My friends, Josh the goofy nerd and big Rick the gentle giant and Miler Miles, the runner who would be a CEO someday.

And Beth. Beth, with her honey hair and her blue eyes and her soft lips that I could almost feel on mine. Beth and me walking together on the path by the river. Not me as I was now, beaten and frightened and wallowing in hopelessness, but the guy I used to be, walking with her hand in hand…

I remembered the night before my blackout, the night I remembered going to sleep in my own bed. I was excited because earlier that day I had worked up the courage to talk to Beth for the first time and she’d written her phone number on my arm. I remembered how I looked around my room once before I turned the lights off, my eyes passing over the karate trophies on the shelves and the poster from the movie The Lord of the Rings on the wall. I remembered closing my eyes with the soft bed under me and the warm blankets around me. Home. Safe at home.

When I opened my eyes again, everything I knew and loved had disappeared. The Homelanders were trying to kill me. The police wanted to arrest me for murder. A year of my life seemed to have vanished into thin air. It wasn’t until later that I found out I had taken a drug to wipe out my memory so that the Homelanders couldn’t get the secrets of Waterman’s team out of me.

Before he died-before the Homelanders killed him-Waterman had given me an antidote to the amnesia drug, another drug to make those memories return. They returned, all right, in sudden attacks, that were sometimes accompanied by spasms of terrible, gripping pain. Those “memory attacks” still overwhelmed me sometimes and I dreaded them. But bit by bit, they were giving me back the life I had lost, the truth about myself. I was grateful for that.

The memories I was having now, though-now as I lay on the cell floor-these were different. I felt no pain as I saw the faces of the people I loved-or, that is, the only pain I felt was the pain of being unable to reach out and touch them, to hear their voices, to be with them. Because I had been processed back into prison as a fugitive, I had hardly gotten to see anyone before I was locked away. I was in court just long enough to see Beth and my mother crying as they sat on one of the courtroom benches, to see my father just barely holding himself together beside them, my friends raising fists of encouragement while their eyes registered despair.

Then I was brought here to Abingdon. I was allowed to call my lawyer, but that was it: You had to earn other phone privileges through good behavior. I hadn’t even gotten a visiting day yet so I hadn’t seen any of the people I loved, not really. I felt as if they might as well be on the far side of the moon.

Remembering, I continued to lie where I was. The blood ran out of my nose and out of a cut on my forehead. It pooled, damp and thick and sticky, around my face. I wanted to get up. I wanted to clean myself off. But I couldn’t muster the strength to move. I just lay there and let the images pass.

Finally, after a while, I managed to pray a little, in a confused, sort of dreamy way. I didn’t ask God to send angels down from the sky to lift me out of there or anything like that. I knew the world didn’t work that way. I knew God made people free and gave them choices, and I knew that meant they could do bad stuff to one another if they wanted to. Maybe life would be easier if we were all just God-zombies doing what was right automatically. But no one ever said freedom was easy.

So I just prayed God would keep his hand in my hand. I knew he knew what it was like to have people do unfair things to you and to hurt you for their own reasons. I just prayed he would stand next to my mom and dad and next to Beth and my friends and whisper to them that he remembered what it felt like, that he knew.

Things come into your head when you pray, I’ve noticed. Helpful things, almost like messages. Right now, for instance, I remembered the Churchill card, the index card Sensei Mike had given me. He’d written some words on the card, words once spoken by the British prime minister Winston Churchill, a speech he’d given during World War II when it seemed the Nazis might destroy his country: “Never give in; never give in-never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force: Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

Somehow the words made me feel a little better. They made me feel good about not giving Dunbar the lie he wanted to hear. He had the “overwhelming might of the enemy,” that was for sure. He could beat me up as much as he wanted and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop him. But the truth-the truth belonged to me. It was mine, and I hadn’t let him take it from me.

Lying on the floor in my own blood, I closed my hand. It was funny: I would almost swear I felt another hand in mine.

I’m not alone, Dunbar, I thought. I’m never alone.

I found the strength to rise.

Groaning, I got to my knees. I took hold of the edge of my cot. I pulled myself up and climbed slowly to my feet. I hobbled slowly to the steel sink in the corner and washed my face, watching the blood swirl down the drain. When I raised my eyes to the small square of mirror on the wall, the sight wasn’t pretty. My face was purple and swollen and cut, but at least the bleeding had stopped.

I went back to my cot and dropped down onto the thin mattress. I stretched out on my back and lay staring up at the white concrete ceiling. The faces of the people I loved and missed rose up before me again and then…

Then, with a sort of flash, there was something else.

A dark night. A torrential rain. A flash of lightning.

I blinked, shaking my head. This was more like a vision than a memory. For one flashing second, that rainy night had seemed real; it had seemed to surround me.

I breathed deeply, slowly, hoping that would be all there was. I didn’t think I was strong enough to go through a memory attack right now. But then…

Then there it was again. Another flash. The dark night on every side of me. The rain lanced down at the windows. They were the grated windows of a bus. A prison bus. It was rumbling and shuddering around me.

I understood what this was. Of course. I had been in prison once before. I had been convicted of murdering my friend Alex Hauser. I’d been convicted of plunging a knife into his chest after we had an argument over Beth. It was a frame-up, a false accusation, all part of Waterman’s plan to get me into the Homelanders, to convince them that I was ready to join their terrorist crew. After my arrest…

I remembered now. I had been in a local jail for about a week. Then they’d put me on a bus to transfer me somewhere else. Here. They were going to send me here, to Abingdon.

Reality seemed to flicker on and off. The past-that rainy night, the shuddering bus-seemed to flicker in and out of being around me.

“Yes,” I whispered to myself. “Yes, I remember now…”

I started to sit up on the cot.

But then I doubled over in pain as the full memory attack struck me.