The Truth of the Matter Read Online Free PDF Page B

Waterman was on top of me, his hand clutching my throat, squeezing off the airway. I couldn’t breathe. The world went watery in front of my eyes.
    The next thing I knew, Waterman and Dodger Jim were dragging me to my feet. They hurled me into the chair, hard. Dodger Jim punched me in the jaw. It felt like getting hit by a brick.
    My head flew back, and my mind seemed to fall away from the world like falling down a well.
    “Knock it off,” I heard Waterman say from a distance.
    “I told him what would happen if he tried me again,” said Dodger Jim.
    My head slumped forward. I was only half-conscious as they held my arms against the arms of the metal chair and snapped the handcuffs around my wrists.
    The two men stood back, breathing hard. I looked up at them from the chair, helpless.
    Dodger Jim shook his head angrily, rubbing the spot on his wrist where I’d kicked him. “You’re a tough little monkey, kid,” he said. “I’ll give you that.”
    The door in the wall buzzed and opened. The crow-faced woman came in. My eyes went wide in terror as I saw she was carrying a syringe.
    That woke me up. I jolted back in the chair as if there was some chance of getting away from her. I struggled against the handcuffs, trying uselessly to get free.
    Waterman stood in front of me. “Listen to me, Charlie,” he said. “Listen. You have to listen. We’re not your enemies, so help me.”
    It was a long moment before I could still my panic and stop trying to break through the handcuffs.
    “We have to do this,” Waterman said. “We have no choice. The Homelanders are close. Very close. They’ve hacked some of our files. We don’t know how many. We don’t know how much they know. But they know about me. They’ve been watching me for weeks. It’s only a matter of time before they find this place and strike and try to kill us all. We want to help you, but we have to be sure you’re still on our side and there’s only one way to do that. You’ve been out of touch for too long. You might have gone over. The loss of memory . . . everything . . . it might all be a fake, or there might be permanent damage that makes you a liability. We just can’t trust you until we know for sure.”
    “Who are you?” I said hoarsely. “What are you talking about? Who are you?”
    “We’re the good guys, Charlie. If liberty is better than slavery, like you said—if the people who work for liberty are the good guys—then we’re the good guys, though we can’t always be as good as we might like. The Islamo-fascists don’t believe in freedom at all, Charlie, believe me. They want everyone to think the same thing, to do what they’re told. They hate our country, our liberty, our Constitution. Our whole way of life. And the Americans who’ve joined them, who’ve kidded themselves into thinking they’re no worse than us, that one philosophy is no better than another, are self-hating fools. They’re your enemies, Charlie.”
    “If you’re on my side, why are you doing this to me?” I shouted at him, struggling against the handcuffs again.
    “I’m sorry, but we have to be sure where you stand,” Waterman said. He nodded at the crow-faced woman with the syringe. She stepped toward the chair as I struggled to get away from her.
    “The Homelanders are going to attack this country, Charlie,” Waterman said. “They’re going to hit us soon, hard, and from the inside. The people in this bunker are some of the only people left who can stop them. If they get to us, then we’ve got no chance. We can’t risk the possibility that you’re their agent.”
    The crow-faced woman nodded at Dodger Jim. He came forward and grabbed my left arm, rolling up my sleeve to bare the vein for the needle. He was grinning.
    “You’re not gonna like this, kid,” he said with vengeance gleaming in his eyes. “It hurts like crazy.”
    “Listen to me, Charlie,” said Waterman. “If we haven’t lost you, you’re our best hope. If we have,