The man pulled the trigger. I heard the gun whisper, saw the smoke, felt the impact in the center of my chest.
And then I was falling and falling into utter blackness.
CHAPTER TWO
Dreams and Whispers I was home again, a soft pillow under my head, warm and secure with the covers pulled up around my ears. I could hear my mother calling me from the foot of the stairs, telling me it was time for school…
But I didn’t go to school. I was suddenly walking along Spring River in my hometown of Spring Hill. I was holding Beth’s hand. The leaves on the birch trees around us were orange and yellow against the white bark and the wind was stirring in them. Beth’s blue eyes were turned up to me. Her curling honey-brown hair moved at the edges of her smooth features as the wind blew. I looked at her and hurt with yearning. We had fallen in love during my trial for Alex’s murder. We had fallen in love… but I couldn’t remember it. I wanted desperately to remember. But it was part of that missing year.
I felt a jolt and suddenly Beth was gone. The river was gone and so were the birch trees. Suddenly I was moving quickly and another guy’s face was moving quickly in front of me. Mike-Sensei Mike-my karate teacher. He was throwing blows at me, quick chops and punches, too fast to block. They hit me in the chest and the shoulder, jolting me again and again. Mike’s face was as it always was, long and lean with chiseled features under that neatly combed black hair he was so proud of and the big black mustache. But then he opened his mouth to speak-and the voice that came out wasn’t his. It was deep and rumbling with a British accent. Somehow I knew it was Winston Churchill’s voice, the voice of the man who was British prime minister during World War II. He spoke the words that Mike had taught me, the philosophy he’d taught me: “Never give in; never give in-never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force: never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
I didn’t want to give in, but they were after me. I was in the woods. It was dark. It was pitch-black night. All around me, dogs were howling, sirens were sounding, footsteps were drawing near. It was the Homelanders. The Homelanders were coming for me. The Homelanders was a group run by Islamo-fascist terrorists from the Middle East. They hated… Well, they hated a lot of things. They hated our country. They hated the idea that people should be free to choose how they live, to choose what they believe. There were Americans among them too, homegrown traitors they’d recruited because it was easier for them to move around the country, to get at their targets. The Homelanders thought I was one of them, one of their American traitors. Only they thought I had betrayed them as well. So they were chasing me, closing in on me, and then…
Then suddenly, bright lights blinded me. The night whirled red and blue. I wasn’t in the woods anymore. I was on a city street. The police were coming for me. Their cars were racing at me from every street, from every side. They thought I’d killed my best friend, Alex Hauser. I’d been put on trial for it, convicted of it. I’d been put in prison. I’d escaped.
But I couldn’t remember any of that. It was like falling in love with Beth. Like falling into league with the Homelanders. It was all part of that missing year, that chunk of memory that had somehow disappeared.
I felt another jolt-and now suddenly they had me. The police. I was captured. Under arrest. In handcuffs. Detective Rose-the man who’d arrested me for Alex’s murder, the man who was relentlessly hunting me still- was leading me to a patrol car that would take me back to prison. I was surrounded by state troopers. They were crowded around me, pressing in on every side. The open door of the patrol car was getting closer and closer. They were going to put me in the car and take me back to prison. But now a voice was whispering in my ear:
You’re a better man than you know. Find Waterman.
Find Waterman…
Suddenly, with another jolt, my eyes came open. I was awake. My heart was pounding-and it pounded faster as I realized I was still in utter blackness.
Am I dead?
That was the first thought that went through my mind. But then there was another jolt. I bounced heavily and felt a throbbing ache in my head. Oh man, it hurt-it hurt like crazy. Well, at least I wasn’t dead anyway. Not with a headache like that!
But then, where was I?
I reached out and felt the space around me. Metal. Plastic. Some kind of padding material. Some kind of heavy insulated wires.
I listened. An engine. Rushing wind. Highway noises…
With a spurt of claustrophobic panic, it came to me: I was locked in the trunk of a moving car.
My first instinct was to start pounding on the trunk lid, to start shouting, “Help! Let me out! Let me out!” Which would’ve been pretty dumb, I know. I mean, whoever put me in the trunk of a car probably hadn’t done it by accident. They probably weren’t walking around, thinking, Hey, what happened to Charlie? Gee, I hope we didn’t leave him in the trunk of the car! Obviously, they’d dumped me in here on purpose, and so if I started shouting, “Help! Help! Let me out!” they probably wouldn’t say, Oh, okay, sorry, we thought you liked it in there. All it would do was alert them that I was awake. So, like I say, screaming for help: dumb idea. And I knew it was a dumb idea. But still, let me tell you, in my fear and claustrophobia, the urge to start screaming anyway was almost overwhelming. I had to work hard to fight it down. I had to force myself to breathe slowly, deeply. I had to force myself to think. I thought: Okay, what’s my situation? How did I get here? What happened to me?
Then I remembered: Waterman.
I felt another jolt as the car went over a bump. I flinched as the pain lanced through my head like a jagged bolt of lightning. I winced. I thought: Ow! Then I thought: Waterman. Right. Waterman in the alley. And the man in the Dodgers cap. And the gun…
The gun. The man in the Dodgers cap had shot me. Quickly, my hand went to my chest. I felt the bruise, the stinging pain under my fleece where the gunshot had hit me.
But that’s all I felt. No dampness. No blood. Plus I was alive. Which meant I hadn’t been shot with a bullet. A bullet to that spot would’ve almost surely hit my heart, almost surely killed me, with plenty of blood to go around. Flinching at the pain in my head again, I realized: it wasn’t a bullet. It was a dart, a drug of some kind. The man in the Dodgers cap had fired a tranquilizer weapon at me. I’d been knocked out, but I was unhurt. I was alive.
Okay. So that was my situation. On the plus side, I was alive. That definitely had to be counted as a positive. In terms of negatives: well, the whole locked-in-the-trunk-of-the-car thing. It was hard to find anything good to say about that.
In fact, as I thought about it, I felt the panic and claustrophobia start to rise up in me again.
Again, I forced myself to breathe deeply. Never give in, I told myself. Never, never, never, never.
Feeling stiff and uncomfortable, I shifted in the small space. I discovered I had a little room to move. My eyes were adjusting to the darkness now too. I could see that I was facing the rear of the car. I struggled to turn around, to face the front, to see what else I could see. Moving like that redoubled my sense of claustrophobia. Made me feel like I was in a coffin, buried underground, left for dead. Not a pleasant feeling.
All the same, I did manage to make the turn onto my back then onto my other side. When I finished, I could see the barrier between the trunk and the backseat. That gave me an idea. I struggled to get closer to the barrier. I managed to press my ear against it. I listened.
Sure enough, I could hear what was going on inside the car. I could hear voices in there. At first, it was hard to make out the words through the barrier. The rumble of the car’s motion kept drowning them out too. But if I lay very still and kept my breathing shallow, I could hear some of what was being said.