Andrew Klavan - The truth of the matter

Then an angry shout. For about two seconds, maybe three, the furious voice reached me clearly. It was a deep, hollow voice screaming in a language I didn’t understand. Arabic, it sounded like.

The moment I heard it, the moment I heard that voice, my head snapped back away from the wall. A thrill of fear flared inside me. The voice faded from my hearing as I staggered back a step from the wall. I stared at the space. My mouth had gone dry. My legs felt weak.

I remembered that voice! Somehow, from somewhere. I knew the man who was speaking. I tried to picture his face, tried to call up his name, but I couldn’t. It was just beyond the edge of my memory, a shadowy presence in the deeper darkness of the year I had forgotten.

Still-still-I knew him. I was sure of it. And I knew something else too: I knew he was a killer. Tough, vicious, wicked to the bone.

I could not recall his face or his name, but I knew this for certain: he was one of the Homelanders.

They were here.

Waylon I stood there, frozen. I didn’t even breathe. A thousand thoughts flashed through my head in a second.

Waterman’s words: The Homelanders are close. Very close… It’s only a matter of time before they find this place and strike and try to kill us all.

Had they done it? Had they broken in? Had they gotten Waterman and his friends? Or had he escaped? Where was he?

I knew I had to do something, had to move. It was like forcing myself to break free from a block of ice. But I did it. I made myself step forward, step back to the wall again. I made myself press my ear against the wall.

Once again, I heard that voice-now that I recognized it, I could distinguish it even though I couldn’t hear the words. Again, the face of that vicious killer seemed to rise up out of the darkness of my memory- come close to the surface-then sink back down again into obscurity.

Then-startling-another shout-another voice-this one speaking English: “There’s no one else in here either!”

The killer answered him with a shouted curse.

The other man shouted in English again: “There must be another way out.”

Then a third man shouted: “Waylon! No one here either. Maybe they snuck him out before we showed up.”

The killer-obviously their leader-shouted out another stream of Arabic.

I felt suddenly hollow inside. Hollow and weak and unsteady. I knew it was me they were looking for. And I knew that name too. The killer’s name: Waylon. This was something I did remember clearly, something that had happened when I woke up strapped to that metal chair with the Homelander goons working me over.

There had been voices outside the door. There had been a man with an American name but a thick accent: Waylon. He had been coming from the Homelanders’ leader, a man who called himself Prince. He had given the order to my torturers:

The West boy is useless to us now. Kill him.

I understood why Waterman had put me inside the Panic Room. The Homelanders had been following him. They’d breached some of his files. They might know about this bunker. They might even have the entry codes. But he must’ve felt the Panic Room was still secure. He must’ve felt he could keep me safe here while I was helpless under the influence of the drug.

I listened. Outside in the main bunker, there was a pause, silence. I could feel them out there, on the other side of that wall. I could sense them looking for me, listening for me. I felt that if I made even the slightest noise, they would hear it. They would find me. They would kill me. Waylon would finally kill me, as he’d wanted to do all this time.

Then, Waylon spoke. He was standing right next to me, directly on the other side of the wall. His voice seemed almost at my ear and, even through the thick wall, I heard every word he said with perfect clarity.

“All right. We’ll have a look around for him outside first. Then we blow this place to pieces. If he’s hiding here anywhere, he won’t survive.”

One of the others answered him: “But I thought we were supposed to question him about…”

“I know what we’re supposed to do!” Waylon shouted back. “But if he is here somewhere and we can’t find him-we can’t let him get away. Do what I tell you. Set the explosives! Make sure no one gets out of this hole alive!”

I heard them moving again, heard their wordless voices again, talking to one another, the sounds growing dimmer as they moved out of earshot, as they went to search for me in the ruins of the facility outside.

Then it was quiet.

I stepped back away from the wall again. I looked around. They were going to blow the bunker up. Just in case I was here. If they couldn’t find me, they were going to make sure they killed me.

And now the Panic Room-the place Waterman had intended to be my refuge-had become my trap-and would be my coffin.

Because there was no way out.

The Second Wave I stood where I was, turning this way and that, looking frantically around me as if I might discover some other exit.

But there was none. I knew there was none. The only entrance and exit was that secret door, and I didn’t know the code that opened it. That code-that series of passes Waterman had made with his hand to make the door slide open: I had tried to follow it, to memorize its straight lines and slashes, but it was way too complicated to fix in my mind. I had only the vaguest idea of the pattern.

I stepped up to the wall. I passed my hand over it. It was an act of pure desperation. I tried to imitate the straight lines and diagonals Waterman had made. But of course nothing happened. The door didn’t open. It was hopeless. I was stuck in here. Stuck while the Homelanders prepared to blow the place-and me-into oblivion.

I looked around again, hoping for another idea. I saw the chest. I moved to it quickly. I knelt down beside it. I took the tray off and placed it on the floor. Then I pushed up the lid of the chest. It opened easily.

There was a pile of blankets inside. I pulled them out quickly, tossing them onto the floor. There was nothing underneath. The chest was empty. I felt the bottom, some crazy idea forming in my head that maybe there was a trapdoor, a secret tunnel or something like that. No such luck.

I crouched back on my heels and tried to think. There had to be something I could do. There had to be something I could at least try.

An idea began to form in my mind-and as it did, a slight hope began to rise in me…

And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, the pain struck again-that writhing, fiery snake of pain that I’d felt when the crow-faced woman injected me. I cried out and twisted backward, as if I could escape it. But it gripped me from within, twisted me, made me thrash helplessly on the floor for an endless second, and then another, and then…

It all began again. I felt myself break free of my body, as if my soul were floating away. I could see myself there below, twisting on the floor, gripping my stomach, but I couldn’t feel the pain anymore. My body grew more and more distant. I reached out for it, trying to grab hold of myself, to get back into myself. I couldn’t leave my body now! This was no time to go flying into the past-not with the Homelanders getting ready to dynamite the bunker.

But there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t stop it. I drifted further and further away until even the urgency of my situation seemed part of another world, another life. A moment later, I had forgotten what the urgency was. I was entering an all-surrounding darkness, turning away from my lost body, turning toward a small point of light that I knew contained my memories…

In a flash, I was there, in the past. I was in the long black limousine. I was sitting in the backseat with Waterman. I wasn’t watching the scene this time. I was in it. I was part of it. I was living it again.