Andrew Klavan - The Final Hour

I went down on my knees beside him. “It’s all right, Mike. I got you. I’ll bring you topside; we’ll find an ambulance.”

He shook his head. “No way. No time. Gotta keep going. Gotta stop Prince.”

“That’s crazy, Mike.” I took hold of him under the arm. I tried to lift him to his feet. He wouldn’t let me. “Mike, you’re hurt,” I said. “You need help. You’re hurt bad.”

He grabbed the front of my jacket, yanked my face so close to his I could feel his breath on me. “You think I don’t know how bad I’m hurt?”

“Let me go. I’ll get help.”

“No, you won’t. You’ll go after Prince. You’ll stop him before he sets off that gas, before he kills a million people.”

“I’m not gonna just leave you down here.”

“Wrong again, pal. Yes, you are.”

“Mike…”

He shook me-weakly, though-I could feel the strength going out of him. “Listen to me. You said… You told me… You said you would do what you had to do.”

“That’s not what I meant…”

“What did you mean? You meant you’d do what you had to do if it was fun, if it was nice, if you approved?”

“No, I…”

“If it meant killing a bad guy or winning a fight?”

“I just meant…”

“ This is what you have to do, Charlie. You have to leave me here. You have to let me try to save myself while you go after them and try to save everybody else. This is what you have to do.”

I opened my mouth. I tried to talk, but I felt like there was a sneaker stuck in my throat. I swallowed it down. “I can’t, Mike,” I managed to say finally. “I can’t just leave you.”

“Don’t you tell me that.” Mike’s hand sank down. He slumped weakly where he sat. I looked down at his side. The blood was still burbling out of the bullet wound there. “Don’t tell me you can’t,” he murmured. “I taught you. I trained you, Charlie. If you can’t do what you have to do, I’m a failure. I’m dying for nothing here.”

“What do you mean, dying? You can’t die.”

He tried to laugh, but he didn’t have the strength. “Everybody dies, chucklehead. It’s the first rule of the game. Now listen to me: I’m gonna be all right.”

“Mike…”

“I mean it. You and me, chucklehead, we never talk about the faith stuff much. The way I see it, there’s not much to say. But you know where I stand. I did my best to live true, and whatever happens next, I’m gonna be fine. All right? So what I need, the thing I really need, is for you to go hunt those terrorists down and stop them from killing a lot of innocent…” He didn’t finish the sentence. The pain hit him and he cried out. I felt my whole body go rigid as if the pain were my pain instead of his.

When he could talk again, Mike said weakly: “There’s no more time to talk about this. You told me you’d do what you had to do, Charlie. Now do it.”

I had to bite my lip to keep from crying. I wanted to answer him, to protest, to say something, but there was nothing for me to say. I knew he was right. I knew there was no time to both help Mike and stop Prince from doing what he was going to do. We were down below the city and no one knew we were here. If this job was going to get finished, I was the one who was going to have to finish it. Alone.

I stood up. I looked down at where Mike sat on the ground, resting on one hand. He was between two tracks so at least the trains couldn’t get him. The three gunmen he’d taken out lay splayed all around him. Two lay very still. One, unconscious, groaned a little and stirred. But his arm was twisted in a weird position, and I knew he wasn’t going to come around anytime soon.

“Don’t worry,” said Mike. “I still have my weapon.” He tried to lift the gun to show me, but his hand sank back down to the ground. “I got a spare mag too. I can take care of myself.”

“Right,” I managed to answer back, pretending I believed it.

A train rumbled toward us out of the distance one track over. Rats scrambled past us. One of them crawled right over Mike’s extended leg. He didn’t even have the strength to kick it off. Instead, he busied himself with one of the bodies of the Homelanders. He stripped off the guy’s windbreaker. He bunched it up and pressed it to his side, trying to stanch the flow of blood.

“What are you waiting for?” he said to me. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the growing rumble of the approaching train.

“I don’t…,” I started to say. But the train was too loud now. I knew he wouldn’t hear me. I wanted to tell him, I don’t know what to do.

The train roared by, the light from its windows flashing over us. It gave me a good look at Mike’s pain-racked face. Then it was gone, the rattle of it fading.

“You’ll figure it out,” Mike said, as if he had read my mind. “You’re not alone, Charlie. You’re never alone.”

I nodded. “I’ll be back,” I said. “I’ll be back for you. I swear it.”

Mike smiled, a real smile so I could see his teeth beneath his ’stache. “I’ll be here, chucklehead. You can count on it. Now go.”

I wanted to say something else, anything else, anything to hold off the moment when I had to leave him. But how could I ever say what had to be said? How could I thank him? For teaching me. For believing in me. For leading me. Even for this-maybe especially for this. How could I ever thank him for forcing me to go on alone?

“I’ll see you, Mike,” I said finally.

“Yes, you will. Godspeed, chucklehead.”

I nodded.

Then I left him there.

I had never felt so hopeless, so afraid. I’d been tortured, shot at, beaten, locked up. I’d been running for my life so long I’d almost forgotten what it was like to live without being hunted. But all that time, there’d been something in me, something that lifted me over fear, that never let me sink to the final level of despair. The bad guys were after me, okay, but at least I knew where I was going. I just had to get away, stay alive, prove my innocence, take the next step and the next until I found my way home.

But this wasn’t like that. It wasn’t about me. It wasn’t even about Mike, though I could barely stand to think of him alone and bleeding back there in the dark behind me.

This was about all those people up above me, up there in the city, thousands and thousands and thousands of ordinary people, coming together to celebrate the New Year. And all of them in danger, their lives under threat. All their lives depending on me-me alone-and what I did next.

See, all this while, all night long, I’d just been following Mike. Well, sure I was. Mike was my teacher, my sensei. He always knew what to do, where to go. He could handle anything. I was glad to follow him. I’d been his student since I was a little kid.

But now… now he was gone. Now it was just me down here-just me standing between a million people and total, absolute catastrophe. What if I couldn’t stop it? You know? What if I couldn’t even find Prince? I mean, I hadn’t studied the maps like Mike had. What if I took a wrong turn and just got myself lost in the tunnels and wandered around like an idiot while Prince let his poisoned gas loose into the city? I could already see the headlines in my mind:

Guy Acts Stupid While Millions Die.

The rest of my life-that would be all I would think about. How I couldn’t make it without Mike to lead me. How I failed everyone at the most evil hour of the most desperate day.

I hurried through the tunnel, through the shadows, the fear of failure like a sickness in me, making my breath short, my stomach weak. I could feel the sweat pouring off me. I could feel the dampness of my hand against the handle of the gun. It wasn’t just the running and the fighting that made me sweat. This was a cold sweat, an anxiety sweat. It was the sweat of fear.