HL 04-The Final Hour Read Free

made a mistake? Answer me.”
    I know: I should have answered him. I should have just lied and said no. I should have said, “No, sir. You’re doing a great job.” I should have said, “There was no knife, sir. There couldn’t have been a knife, sir. Because you don’t make mistakes, sir.”
    That’s what I should have said. But somehow . . . as far away from home as I was . . . somehow I just couldn’t forget what my mom and dad and Sensei Mike had taught me. I couldn’t force the lie up out of my throat. It stuck there, sour and disgusting. All I could do was stand and stare into the fistlike face of this cruel, sick little man.
    Dunbar grinned. “What are you waiting for, garbage? You think someone’s gonna help you? No one’s gonna help you. Not in here. In here, you’re all alone.”
    I didn’t mean to talk back to him, so help me. I meant to be smart and stay quiet. But before I could stop myself, the words just sort of came out.
    “I’m not alone,” I told him. “I’m never alone.”
    Dunbar’s face twisted in rage. This time, when he lifted his hand, he was holding a stun gun. I saw it only for an instant, then a teeth-jarring blast of agony went through me. My brain turned to cotton. My muscles turned to rubber.
    I felt myself falling and falling.

CHAPTER THREE
Into the Past
     
    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