HL 04-The Final Hour (30 page)

I would get dressed and go down and find my father and
my sister waiting for me at the table. Then, after we ate, it
would be time to head off to school. My friends would be
waiting for me. And Beth .
. .

“West.”

I sat up straight, coming out of my dream. Confused, I looked around me. I was sitting in a plastic chair, one of a row of plastic chairs bolted to the wall of a tiled hallway. A nurse walked by me—then another, this one pushing an old man in a wheelchair.

My back ached. I shifted. I looked at myself. I was wearing a fresh tracksuit. I had a bandage on my arm. I could feel another bandage wrapped around my ribs. I lifted my hand and touched yet another bandage, this one on my forehead.

I remembered: I was in the hall of a hospital in Manhattan. It was New Year’s Day—no, the day after New Year’s, January 2. I’d been in the hospital for two days now. I’d been bandaged and examined by doctors and nurses. I’d been questioned and interrogated by agents and police. I’d been sleeping—in beds, in chairs—anywhere I could find. And I’d been dreaming. The same old dream. About my life, my old life, back home, back in Spring Hill. I was only slowly beginning to accept the fact that, no matter what happened next, that old life was over. It was gone for good.

“West?”

Still dazed with sleep and exhaustion, I lifted my eyes to the voice that had awakened me. Rose. He was standing over me, next to my chair. He was leaning on a crutch. His left leg was in a cast. There was a bandage high on his balding head.

“Rose . . .”

“You all right? You fell asleep again.”

It was all coming back to me. The prison break. The flight to New York. Patel. The plane crash. The chase through the subway and . . .

“Mike,” I said. I stood up, trying to shake my head clear. “How’s Mike?” He had been in surgery all of yesterday. It had been bad, tough. His heart had stopped once on the operating table. But there was life in him still. A lot of life. He’d fought his way back.

Without a word, Rose tilted his head, beckoning me to follow him. He hobbled away from me, down the tiled hall. There were policemen, I saw, stationed along the wall. A lot of them, it seemed like. Every few doors, another patrolman, standing guard. They had been here since I arrived. They’d been watching me every second. I hadn’t been allowed to leave the place. I hadn’t even been allowed to call home. I was still a convicted killer, after all. And even if Rose could clear that up, I was still a fugitive. Were they going to take me back to Abingdon Prison eventually? I didn’t know. I didn’t have any idea what was going to happen next.

But right now, I couldn’t think about that. I wouldn’t think about it. I had to think about Mike, about whether Mike was going to live or die.

Now, as I followed Rose, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask any questions. I was afraid to hear the answers, to be honest. For all I knew, Mike had already passed away while I slept. A sense of dread gnawed at my stomach. I heard Mike’s voice in my mind.

I did my best to live true, and whatever happens next,
I’m gonna be fine
.

I believed that. Yes, I did. But I wasn’t ready for him to go.

Rose hobbled his way to a door. Another patrolman stood outside it. He held the door open for us.

I followed Rose into a small room with a single bed by the window. Winter daylight streamed in through the glass-and-steel towers across the way. The light fell on Mike. He lay on the bed. There were a lot of wires and tubes and stuff around him. A tube running into his arm. A wire attached to his chest. An oxygen mask over his face. It was kind of scary to see such a big tough guy looking so weak and helpless there.

But alive. At least Mike was still alive. He was breathing steadily and the heart-rate gizmo by his bed showed all his vital signs strong and steady.

I glanced at Rose. He lifted his chin, telling me to go closer to the bed. I stepped up close and looked down into Mike’s face. His eyes were closed, but his expression was peaceful.

As I looked down at him, Mike’s eyes came open suddenly. They shifted and he saw me. He smiled behind his oxygen mask. His hand lifted weakly to his face and pulled the mask down from his mouth.

“Chucklehead,” he whispered.

My legs went unsteady. There was a chair nearby. I pulled it to me and sat down. I reached out and took Mike’s hand, careful not to disturb the pulse monitor on his fingertip.

“Hey, Mike,” I managed to say. “Long time no see.”

His eyes fluttered closed and opened again. “That’s twice those Islamist guys have shot me,” he murmured slowly. “Next time, I might get seriously annoyed.”

I started to laugh, then I had to cover my eyes with my hand. Mike pushed the oxygen mask up over his mouth again and closed his eyes and rested.

I sat there with him a long time. After a while, I guess I must’ve slept again. It seemed like the next thing I knew, Rose was waking me up, his hand on my shoulder.

“You’ve got a phone call, West,” he said.

I followed him again. Down the hospital hallways past the watchful patrolmen. To an office in a quiet corner.

It was a small office with just a small window looking out on an air shaft and a dirty brick wall. There was a desk in there with a phone on it. There wasn’t much else.

“Just pick it up and press line one,” said Rose.

He walked out and left me alone.

I went to the desk. I picked up the phone. There was a button on it with a light blinking. I pressed the button.

“Hello?” I said. “This is Charlie West.”

A woman on the other line, said, “Hold for President Spender.”

I snorted. I wasn’t sure what the joke was, but it was some kind of joke for certain. President Spender—as in the president of the United States of America—wasn’t calling me. Obviously.

Only he was.

“This is President Spender,” said the next voice on the phone—and it was really him too; I recognized his voice.

My back got very straight, so straight it ached. And I said something like, “Uh . . . hi . . . hello . . . sir . . . Mr. President.”

To be honest, I don’t really remember exactly what the president said after that. I was kind of in a daze the whole time he was talking. He said he was proud of me, I remember. Grateful for what I’d done. He said the American people would be grateful, too, when they found out what had happened.

And, oh yeah, there is one thing I remember pretty clearly. At some point, President Spender said, “I want you to know that, when you’re ready, there’s going to be a place waiting for you in the Air Force Academy. I have some pull with them, being commander in chief and all. But listen, I can only get you in the door. After that, you’re going to have to make the grade yourself.”

After the president said good-bye, I set the phone down and just sort of stood there. I stared at the phone and thought to myself,
That was the president. Of the
United States. Calling me
. Which—come on—was cool.

The door opened. Rose came back in, clumsily maneuvering his cast and crutch into the room.

“That was the president,” I told him. “Of the United States. Calling me.”

Rose nodded. “Cool.”

“He says he’ll get me into the Air Force Academy.”

“Well, he
is
commander in chief,” said Rose. “That’ll probably count for something.”

I blinked, still trying to take it all in. “Does this mean I don’t have to go back to prison?” I asked him.

I think that was the first time I ever saw Rose just crack up, just lose it. He let out a wild, high laugh, looking down at the floor, shaking his head, his shoulders going up and down with his laughter.

“What?” I asked. “What’s so funny? What about all the negotiations and the secrecy and the people who don’t want to believe the Homelanders exist?”

It took him another second or so to get back into Serious Rose mode. When he did, he limped across the room to me. He reached out and put his free hand on my shoulder. He looked at me with his smart, serious eyes.

“You don’t have to worry about that anymore, Charlie,” he said. “Those people’s opinions are what you might call out of fashion at the moment.”

When I still didn’t totally understand, Rose patted my shoulder and said, “It’s over, Charlie. You did it. You stopped them. It’s done.”

Now Rose and I walked together to the elevators. There were other people waiting to ride, but a patrolman asked them to take the next car so we could ride down alone. Rose and I stood together as the elevator sank slowly to the ground floor. I didn’t say anything at first. I was just trying to get my head around it all.

It was over, like Rose said. No more Homelanders trying to kill me. No more police trying to arrest me. No more days and nights on the run, alone, afraid, confused about who I was and what was happening.

“Where are we going now?” I asked Rose.

He glanced over at me. For a second, I thought he might start laughing again. But no chance. “Home, Charlie,” he said. “You, anyway—you’re going home.”

Before I could fully comprehend what Rose had said, the elevator touched down. The doors drew open. And suddenly, lights began flashing in my eyes and people started shouting at me. There was a crowd of reporters gathered in the hospital lobby. Taking pictures and video. Calling out questions. A confusing chaos of light and noise.

“Can you tell us what happened, Charlie?”

“What was it like infiltrating the Homelanders?”

“What happened in the subway New Year’s Eve?”

A couple of patrolmen guided the shouting reporters out of my way. Rose took me by the arm with his free hand. The reporters went on shouting at me as I pushed past them.

They would go on shouting at me for days, in fact. But the stories that were on the news were never the real story, never the whole story. Still, they were enough to clear my name so people understood I hadn’t killed my friend or betrayed my country or any of the other stuff I was accused of. That was enough for me. That was more than enough.

When I got past the reporters, I saw the front doors of the hospital. They were all made of glass and the sun was shining through them. It was like walking into a pool of light. I started toward it.

But before I got there, I saw a long black car pull up in the circular driveway outside. Even before the car came to a full stop, its doors started opening. I stood still and stared as my mom and dad and Beth and my sister, Amy, and my friends Josh and Rick and Miler all poured out of the car and started hurrying to the hospital entrance.

As I went on standing there, amazed, the reporters pushed back toward me. The police made them keep their distance, but they formed a half circle around me. Their cameras flashed again, and their bright lights shone on me, and their shouted questions became one loud rush of voices.

At the same time, my family and my friends came through the front doors and hurried to me. Beth reached me first and I threw my arms around her and held her close and then the others were all around me and then . . .

But you know, really, there’s nothing else I can say. There are things you can describe in life and things you just can’t. There are dangers and adventures, miseries and fears that you can tell about and then . . . well, then there’s home and joy and love—and those are beyond the power of words to describe.

So I guess this story is over.