The Final Hour

CHAPTER SEVEN

Dinnertime.

The cafeteria was a big room with green cinder-block walls and a metal ceiling. There were long shiny metal tables with benches bolted to the floor on either side. The prisoners moved in a line past the service counter. A gray line of gray men. Staff servers scooped some kind of meat onto our plates. Some kind of vegetables and potatoes too. Guards stood against the wall and watched us, sharp-eyed.

I thought back to the cafeteria in my high school. I thought about clowning around there with Josh and Miler and Rick. I thought about the first time I talked to Beth, how she wrote her phone number on my arm. It was only a little more than a year ago. It might as well have been a lifetime.

I carried my tray to a spot near the wall and sat down. I had to eat and keep watch at the same time. If someone was going to try to kill me again, this would be a good place to do it, guards or no.

So I ate and I watched. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call a relaxing meal. There were no relaxing meals in Abingdon.

After a couple of minutes had gone by, I noticed something strange. No one else was sitting down at my table. The benches around me were empty, as if the other prisoners were avoiding me. That made my adrenaline start flowing. It wasn’t normal. It meant something was going on. Something was about to happen.

What did happen took me by surprise. My table started to fill up-and all the prisoners who were sitting down around me were guys I had seen out in the exercise yard around the weights. They were the guys with swastika tattoos-the ones who had come to my rescue when I’d been attacked. Suddenly, they were on every side of me. My hand, lifting my spoon from the tray to my mouth, froze and hovered in midair.

“Go on eating,” said the man to my right.

I knew him. Everybody in Abingdon knew him. His name was Joe Chubb. His nickname was Blade. He was the guy who’d knocked out the wolf-faced man when he tried to kill me in the yard. He was the leader of the swastika boys. Not a nice guy. He was in here for murder. He’d beaten a man to death in a bar, just punched him in the head until he stopped breathing. It was easy to picture him doing something like that too. He was a scary-looking dude, no question. Tall and wide with dirt-brown hair and a face that looked like someone had banged it out of a rock with a hammer. His skin was full of ridges and scars. Some of them were acne scars. Some of them were put there with weapons of one kind or another. He wore a close, pointed beard that gave him a devilish appearance. But the scariest thing about him was the look in his eyes. It was kind of a distant, dreamy look but not in a good way. He seemed to be dreaming something violent and evil. It seemed like that was a good dream for him, like he was enjoying it and maybe when he woke up, he’d try to make his dreams come true.

He spoke in a low murmur, a guttural purr. It made me think of a cat torturing a mouse to death and having a fine old time at it.

“Listen,” he said. “We’re on the move. We could use you.”

I just sort of blinked at him. I didn’t understand what he meant.

“We’re getting out of here,” he went on, under his breath.

“Out?” I said.

“Keep your voice down, punk.”

Then I understood. They were planning an escape.

“Are you crazy?” I started to say. And then I dropped my voice to a whisper and said it again: “Are you crazy? That’s impossible. You’ll be killed.”

Blade shook his head. He smiled another dreamy smile. “Nothing’s impossible, punk. It’s all set. Right after Christmas.”

I took a quick glance around to see if the guards were watching us. They stood with their backs against the wall, scanning the room, but none of them seemed to be paying particular attention to me and Blade.

I pretended to go on eating. “What do you want with me?” I asked him out of the side of my mouth.

“We could use you,” he said again.

“Why?”

“I can’t explain that now. This isn’t the time or place. Just tell me: Are you in or out?”

I didn’t know what to say. Why would a guy like Blade come to me? I just sat there, staring stupidly.

“In or out,” Blade said again, more urgently this time. “Which is it, punk?”

Finally, I managed to shake my head. “I’ve got an appeal on. My lawyer says I could be free in a couple of months…”

“Listen, brainless, you don’t have a couple of months,” Blade purred with an ugly-sounding laugh. “Your Islamist buddies haven’t changed their plans. I have that solid. They still mean to put a shiv in you. You stick around and the only way you’ll get out of here is in a box.”

I glanced at him. He wasn’t kidding. I believed him too. Blade was the sort of guy who knew things, heard things. All the information in the prison seemed to make its way to him eventually. If he said the Islamists were going to try to kill me again, it was pretty certain he was right. It made sense. With Prince on the loose, every Islamo-fascist in the prison would be looking to take a shot at me and earn his favor.

“We won’t be around to protect you this time,” Blade told me. “One way or another, we’ll be gone.”

I nodded. I understood. But what difference did it make? Obviously there was no way I was getting myself involved in a prison break-especially not with this gang of Nazi nutbags. I would just have to try to stay alive in here the best I could until Rose got me out.

“Good luck,” I said to Blade.

“Your funeral,” he answered curtly.

Then he and his friends all got up at once. I was alone again at the long table.

I sat there, staring down at my tray. I felt strange and unfocused, as if I were underwater. What was I supposed to do now? I wondered. Now that I knew there was going to be an escape? Should I tell someone? Should I warn the authorities? Or should I just keep my mouth shut?

Man oh man, it can be hard to know what to do sometimes, what’s right, what’s wrong. It can be easy in theory, sitting around thinking about it, but hard in fact, in life. There could be no mistake about one thing: Blade and his guys were killers, every one of them. Those swastikas tattooed on their arms and foreheads: They weren’t some accident or some fashion statement or something. They weren’t like some kid wearing a picture of Che Guevara on his T-shirt because he doesn’t understand Che was a stone Communist killer or some girl wearing a Soviet hammer and sickle for a belt buckle because she doesn’t know the Soviets murdered a hundred million people. That’s just ignorance, just dopiness.

But when these guys put swastikas into their flesh, they meant it. They wanted to express all the hate that symbol holds, all the evil and murderous meanness. If they got out of this place, they’d be doing the same sort of violence and murder that got them in here to begin with.

So I couldn’t let them escape, could I? I had to turn them in. I had to. Didn’t I? I couldn’t just let them break out and get free to hurt people again.

But then…

Well, they had saved my life, hadn’t they? I knew they only did it because they were racist lunatics. Basically, if a black guy wanted to kill me, they were going to protect me on general principles, just to prove they were bosses of the yard. But the fact remained, I’d be dead if it weren’t for them. The idea of ratting them out to the Abingdon guards-who were almost as bad as the prisoners-didn’t feel right. It felt dirty.

And, okay, just being honest, there was something else too. A rat in Abingdon is a dead man. If anyone ever found out I’d gone to the authorities-and they definitely would find out, they definitely would-the word would spread fast. Every single prisoner in this place would want me dead then. Some of them would come after me even after I got out of prison. They’d come after my family, after the people I loved. I’d never be able to rest.

So that was the situation: I had to stop these guys from breaking out, but if I ratted on them, I’d have a target on my back for the rest of my life. That’s the thing, the crazy, brain-rattling thing about a place like Abingdon. When you’re in a world of evil, all your logic gets turned upside down. What’s right feels wrong; what’s wrong feels like your only choice.

I tried to think what Sensei Mike would do, what he’d tell me to do. He was a war hero, after all. He had a piece of titanium in his leg from the time he held off an attack by a hundred Taliban almost single-handedly in Afghanistan. He wouldn’t be afraid of Blade or the guards or anyone who might come for him.

I knew he’d want me to try to stop this escape-but how?

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.