HL 04-The Final Hour by Andrew Klavan Page A

changed everything.

CHAPTER EIGHT
The Great Death
     
    In an instant, the cafeteria was gone. The prison was gone. The present was gone and I was in the past again.
    I was in the woods. I was running. Trees rushed by me on every side. It was night. It was pitch-black, but somehow I could see. The trees and vines and bushes— all the tangled shapes of the forest—appeared a ghostly green against the darkness. I understood: I was wearing military-style night-vision goggles.
    I looked down for a second as I ran. I saw I was holding a machine gun. An AK-47, compact and deadly. I kept running. I knew I had to run even though I didn’t know why. What was I running away from? What was I running toward? I didn’t know.
    Slowly I began to comprehend. The idea just seemed to form in my mind. I was outside the secret Homelander compound in the woods. I was being hunted, hunted like a deer by Orton and some of the others. I had that double sense again of being in two times at once: I felt as if I knew what was going to happen next. I couldn’t know because it hadn’t happened yet, and yet I did.
    What I knew was this: Someone was about to shoot me.
    Almost the same second the knowledge came to me, it happened.
    As if out of nowhere, Orton stepped from the trees. He lifted his AK, pointed it straight at my chest. For a second, I saw his face through the night-vision goggles, bizarre and green. I saw his goggles bugging out of his face like an insect’s eyes. I saw his mouth gaping in a savage smile of pleasure and triumph.
    Questions flashed through my mind: How had he gotten around in front of me? Why was he trying to kill me? Weren’t we on the same side?
    There was no time to figure out the answers. I had to move. Now.
    Just as Orton stepped into view, I came down on my right foot. I pushed off hard to the side at the same moment he opened fire.
    I heard the cough of the AK. I felt the bullets pepper my side. The impact spun me around in midair. I tumbled downward and smacked into the earth with a bone-jarring thud. As I landed on my shoulder, I somehow managed to keep rolling, twisting—somersaulting, finally, off the forest path and into the low bushes. I heard the AK rattle death yet again. I felt the bullets whistling above my head off to the right.
    Then, before Orton could pull the trigger one more time, I sprang up fast onto my knees and fired back.
    He wasn’t ready for me. He’d obviously lost me in the low brush when I fell and rolled. His second round of gunfire had been aimed in the wrong direction and now he was turned to face the empty woods to my right.
    But I knew where he was. I’d heard his gun. I popped up out of my cover with my gun leveled at his center. I didn’t hesitate. I opened fire.
    Even in the strange green light of the goggles, I saw the dark stain spread over the front of his fatigues. The smile vanished from his face in a look of shock. He staggered backward, his arms flailing. He sat down on the hard dirt of the forest path.
    At that, a whistle blew.
    A man stepped out of the surrounding forest, stripping his goggles off his face as he came. I knew him. Waylon. One of the cruelest and most murderous of the Home–landers band. One day soon, Detective Rose was going to shoot him dead. But now here he was, large and very much alive.
    I stood up slowly. I stretched, trying to ease the pain in my side where the bullets had smacked into me. I stripped off my goggles, too, as I came forward. I glanced down and there was enough moonlight for me to see the dark red-brown stain that had spread from beneath my arm all the way down to my beltline. It was blood-colored paint, of course. This was a training exercise. The bullets were paint pellets that exploded on impact. They hurt something wicked when they hit you, and I knew I’d be bruised all over tomorrow. But they didn’t break the skin. There were no wounds, no blood.
    Waylon reached out and pushed my arm away so he could get a good look at