The long way home

CHAPTER THREE

All I Know My name is Charlie West. Until a year ago, I was a pretty ordinary kid. I was seventeen. I lived in a house in Spring Hill with my mom and dad and my annoying older sister, Amy. I went to high school during the week. I went to church on Sunday. My secret ambition was to join the air force and become a fighter pilot, which I thought would be a cool way to serve my country.

I wasn't the most popular kid in school, but I wasn't an untouchable or anything either. I had some good friends: Josh Lerner, who was kind of a geek, and Rick Donnelly and Kevin "Miler" Miles, who were both athletes. I was a pretty decent athlete myself. My sport was karate. I was good at it. I had earned my black belt.

What else do you need to know? There was a girl. Beth Summers. I liked her. A lot. A guy I knew named Alex Hauser liked her too. He used to be my best friend, but he'd gotten into some bad stuff after his parents got divorced. We'd kind of grown apart and I guess you could say we'd become rivals for Beth's affection.

Anyway, that was my life, my ordinary Spring Hill kid life.

Then one day I went to bed and when I woke up, that life was gone. Suddenly, somehow, it was a year later-a whole year had disappeared just like that and I couldn't remember any of it. Suddenly, somehow, I was in the clutches of a group of madmen who called themselves the Homelanders. They were terrorists, foreign Islamists, out to destroy America, recruiting Americans to help them, people who could move around the country more easily than they could without arousing suspicion.

They told me I was one of them, a terrorist myself. But I didn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. I mean, I love this country. You're free here to do and think what you want, to be whatever you can be. I'd never do anything to hurt America.

I guess the Homelanders must've figured that out because they tried to kill me. I escaped and called the police. Which you'd think was a good idea, right? As it turned out: no. As it turned out, the police were after me too. Somehow, during this year-this year I couldn't remember-I had become a wanted man. I'd been put on trial and convicted of murdering Alex Hauser, my former best friend.

So now, not only were the Homelanders trying to kill me, but the police, led by this very angry detective named Rose, were trying to catch me and throw me into prison.

There was no one I could turn to. My parents had moved away and I didn't know where to find them. Nobody believed me about the Homelanders-or if they did, they thought I was one of them. And how could I prove I wasn't, when I didn't remember anything?

Sometimes, to be honest, I wasn't even sure myself.

And that's where things stood. The situation was bad-crazy bad. Some days, it almost seemed impossible. But I'd promised God and I'd promised myself that, no matter what, I would never give in.