HL 04-The Final Hour (14 page)

“What did you think, garbage boy?” he said. The sound of that voice burned right through me. “When you were talking tough in the infirmary. Huh? What did you think?” He nudged me with his shoe tip. “I’m asking you a question.”

I groaned in answer. It was all I could manage.

“When you put your hands on me like I was just one of your fellow garbage cons,” Dunbar went on. “What exactly were you thinking? Really. I’m curious to know.” He nudged me again. “Did you think you’d never be back here? Did you think I’d never get another chance at you?” He let out a brief laugh. He shook his head. “You cons are so dumb. Don’t you understand? In here, behind these walls, time is always on my side. Always. Eventually, I always get my chance.”

I flinched as he crouched down over me. He grinned at that. He liked to see my fear. He chuckled.

Carefully I slipped the knife out of my sleeve into my palm. I wrapped my fingers around the rope-grip handle.

“Oh, you con, you garbage,” Dunbar said, shaking his head again. “Let me tell you something: This is gonna hurt you way, way more than it hurts me.” He reached down to grab me.

And then I was on him.

I don’t think I’d ever moved so fast in my life. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next—when the escape would begin or how or when—but I knew it was going to be soon, any minute, and there was no time to lose.

Before Dunbar could react, before he could even get that sadistic grin off his face, I sprang off the floor and grabbed him by the hair. At the same time, I threw a body block into him. Crouched down the way he was, he was completely off-balance. I drove him to the floor and got on top of him, my knees pinning his arms, my knife-blade set against the soft flesh under his chin.

I pressed my face close to his. I spoke in a low whisper, the words tumbling out quickly.

“Listen to me, Dunbar. Listen to me good. Any second now, some of Blade’s thug pals are gonna come through that wall. You read me, chucklehead?”

Dunbar couldn’t believe what was happening. He couldn’t understand what I was saying. “What?”

I banged his head against the floor. “Listen! I’m supposed to kill you now, do you understand me?”

“I . . .”

I banged his head again. “Do you?”

He nodded quickly. “Yes! Yes! Don’t kill me! Please!”

“It doesn’t matter whether I do or not. If I don’t kill you, you can bet Blade or one of his crazies will, okay?”

“Please,” he said again, terrified.

“You got one chance, one choice. Which is to do what I tell you to do, you read me?”

“Yes, yes, anything, what?”

“Act dead. Play dead. Understand? Play dead or you will
be
dead. That’s a guarantee.”

Before he could answer, I let him go. His head fell back against the floor. Before he could think, I took the knife away from his throat and held it to my arm. Taking a quick breath against the pain, I cut myself—a nice long slash.

Man, it hurt. It hurt like you wouldn’t believe. A long second of pure, stinging pain. Then the thick blood began to flow. Dunbar tried to lift his head, but I jammed my arm under his throat, knocking him back, making him gag. I rubbed the arm back and forth against him so that my blood was smeared all over him. It wasn’t going to look convincing, but I hoped it would do the trick in the rush and confusion that was sure to come.

I jumped off the Yard King. It wasn’t easy to move, let me tell you. I had to ignore the pain all over my body from all the punishment I’d taken. But I did ignore it. What had to be done had to be done.

I grabbed Dunbar by the shirtfront and hauled him up to his knees. I dragged him to a dark corner of the Outbuilding as he struggled to get his feet under him. All the while I was dragging him, I was talking to him under my breath.

“There’s a mall near here,” I told him. “An unfinished mall about two miles away. You know it?”

“Yeah. Yeah,” Dunbar said weakly.

“That’s where Blade and his boys are headed. Tell the cops. You got it? Tell the cops to cut them off. Stop them. Don’t let these clowns escape. They’re killers, every one of them.”

I threw him against the wall. He sat down hard, his back pressed to the cinder blocks.

“Lie down and play dead, Dunbar,” I said. “They’ll be here any second and if you don’t look dead, you will be.”

I heard a noise behind me. I turned—but there was no one else in the Outbuilding. Not yet anyway.

Suddenly, while I was turned like that, Dunbar grabbed my arm.

I spun around on him, drawing back the knife to threaten him.

But he wasn’t on the attack. He was too stunned and scared for that. He was just gaping up at me, his eyes wide, his mouth open.

“Why . . . ?” he whispered.

“What?”

“Why didn’t you do it?”

I shook my head. I didn’t understand him.

“You were supposed to kill me,” said Dunbar. “Why didn’t you?”

For another second, I still couldn’t figure out what he was saying. But then I got it: He really didn’t know. He really didn’t understand.

“I beat you,” he said. “I’d’ve beat you again, worse this time, much worse. I might have killed you and you know it. Now you had your big chance. Why didn’t you kill me?”

Angrily, I yanked my arm free of his grasp. He fell back against the wall.

“I haven’t got time to explain it to you, Dunbar,” I said. “Try to figure it out for yourself.”

The Yard King seemed about to speak again—but then he tensed, afraid. All at once, he slumped over, lay on the floor, his eyes shut, his mouth open. At first, I thought he’d fainted. But then I realized: He was pretending to be dead.

That’s when I looked over my shoulder and saw the hole in the dirt floor.

Blade’s people had arrived.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Breakout

The entrance to the tunnel seemed to have appeared silently. At first, it was just a small break in the base of the cinder blocks. I could see the edge of a pickax working at it, prying off chunks of dirt, making the hole larger. How they had broken through so quietly, I don’t know, but I guess at least some of the noise had been covered up by the roar of the heating system. In any case, now I could see a pair of bright eyes peering up at me from the darkness beneath.

What happened next happened quickly but in the same weird dreamlike quiet. With any noise covered by the blasting air, it seemed like a silent movie. Blade and three of his fellow musclemen suddenly stepped through the Outbuilding door.

I was stunned by how easy it was. “Where are the guards outside?”

“Some of our boys have them distracted,” Blade said. “Come on.”

Then I was moving with them, surrounded by them. We were at the wall, at the break in the floor. Quickly, one by one, we were kneeling down. I watched two men wriggle through the break and disappear into the darkness.

I saw Blade cast a look across the long room at Dunbar. I followed his gaze. The Yard King was lying sprawled in the shadows at the far end of the room. You could just make out the dark stain of blood—my blood—on his throat and on the front of his shirt. I had been right. Moving as quickly as we were, he looked plenty dead enough to pass.

Blade nodded at me. “Good work,” he said. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Then he went down to the ground and lowered himself through the hole.

I watched the top of his head sink down into nothingness. Then I lowered myself after him.

The moment I went over the side, I felt the ground open beneath my feet. My fingers touched a rope. I took hold of it, my hand sticky with drying blood. Wrapping my feet around it, I started sliding down. Blade was directly under my feet. Another man—the last man— was sliding down directly above my head.

Then we were on the ground somewhere below the earth. We were moving quickly in a tightly packed group through the darkness. There were flashlight beams lancing the black air, but they didn’t illuminate much. A wall. The shoulder of a gray uniform. A face, taut and eager, moving forward. All of us moving fast.

There were noises. Rapid breaths. Grunts of effort. Curses. Quick, padding footsteps. Now and then, a voice:

“This way.”

“Quick.”

“Out of my way.”

“Come on.”

I kept stumbling forward through the blackness.

After a while, I had the sense I was descending. It was hard to tell in the dark. I heard a splash up ahead. Then the smell—what a stink!—washed up over me. Seconds later, I splashed into it too. The smell rose around me like smoke, wrapped itself around me, choking me, like smoky fingers on my throat.

I understood we were moving through the sewers now.

After that, there were turns and drops and climbs. Dancing flashlight beams. Glimpses of faces. A confusion of motion. There were moments when we were on some dry surface and moments when we were plunged thigh-deep in awful stinking mess. Soon, it all seemed to run together, a long, dark nightmare of panting motion through a nauseating stench. On and on we went, traveling through the connecting tunnels and tubes.

I don’t know how long we ran. Sometimes we slowed to a kind of jog, but there was no stopping. I was afraid my strength would give out, but no. I could practically feel the adrenaline pumping through me, the energy surging in my limbs, unbelievably steady and unstoppable. My whole inner world was filled with the rhythm of my heart hammering and my lungs working. The pain— the pain I knew was pulsing in every part of me—the pain I knew was still there, always there—seemed somehow far away for the moment, buried beneath the electric surface of that pumped-up adrenaline high. The punches from Blade, the beating from the guards, the cut I’d dug into my own flesh with the knife: Yeah, they throbbed and ached and stung as I pushed myself to keep moving, but the ache seemed almost to belong to someone else, not me.

I ran and ran, breathless. I tried to get my brain working as we went down another corridor of stink and mess. One thing was on my mind and one thing only: We were rushing into a trap.

I had tipped Dunbar off. I had told him we were heading for the mall. I didn’t know how long it would take him to sound the alarm or how fast the police would respond or how far they had to travel. But if the cops weren’t waiting for us at the mall when we got there, they would get there soon enough. That would make it tough for me to get away. I would have to make my escape not just from Blade but from the cops as well. I wished I hadn’t had to do it, to tell Dunbar the plan. But I couldn’t just let this killer Blade and his pals escape. I had to make sure they were captured again. I just didn’t see any other choice.

All this raced through my mind as I raced through the darkness. Stumbling along in the stench and wet. Crushed in with these thugs as they rushed desperately toward what they thought was freedom—a freedom I knew they would never have.

At last, panting, flagging, stumbling, we came around a bend in the dark corridor and I heard several voices at once.

“There.”

“Oh man!”

“I see it, I see it!”

I saw it too: light. A dim gray glow that seemed to pour down into the darkness like water. It was the way out, the way back to the upper world.

I could feel the others around me tense with hope and expectation. I could hear the beat of their breathing change. As the flashlight beams crisscrossed this way and that around us, I could see their faces, their bright, desperate faces, suddenly full of hope; their gazes yearning for that light up ahead, yearning for freedom.

More whispers:

“Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“Baby, there we go.”

“We are going home.”

We all want the same thing, I guess. Killers or no, good or bad. We all want to be free. We all want to go home.

I looked ahead, down the tunnel, at the cascade of faint gray light growing brighter as we grew near. I was thinking:
What now? What do I do when the police surround
us? How do I break away?

I didn’t know the answer and not knowing made me afraid. What if I made a run for it and the cops opened fire and shot me down? What if the cops showed up and Blade guessed I had tipped them off and
he
killed me?