Adrian McKinty - Dead I Well May Be

We dandered round the courtyard and the whistle went, and Scotchy and I broke formation with everyone else, heading quickly back towards our cells. (Sometimes they thumped people who were slow off the courtyard.) We assumed Fergal was behind us, but when we turned to check he wasn’t there.

Ach, Jesus, I said, and looked for him in all the melee of people and dust. I thought he’d fallen over. I didn’t think it was anything serious, because, like I said, once they had our shoes (or maybe once they knew that Andy had died) the other prisoners weren’t interested in intimidating us or giving us a hard time.

Eejit’s tripped himself up, I said to Scotchy. But when we looked through the dust we saw that, sure enough, the dumb-ass wanker had gone over to the wee Indian fella and was asking him something.

Trouble, Scotchy predicted in a whisper.

Fergal’s voice was ridiculously loud and oddly alien:

Excuse me, mate, I was wondering if you could do me a wee solid and-but before he could continue, the man had turned and started yelling at him, harsh and guttural. He was pushing Fergal, screaming in his face. He was frightened of gawky, harmless Fergal. Any fool, including Fergal, should have seen that.

Fergal grabbed the man by the shoulders.

Calm down, mate, making a whole fuss. We don’t want everybody over, Fergal said.

The man shoved Fergal’s arms off him and caught Fergal a glancing blow on the face.

That’s it, come on, I said to Scotchy, but before we could make it over, Fergal had punched the little man on the jaw. He went down like a collapsing stack of cards, crumpling there in the dust. Fergal backed off and looked about him, but it was too late. Another man had been running over, all the time, from the lower end of the cell block. Our age. He had something in his hand. It was glinting.

He’s got a fucking knife, I yelled, and we both ran.

Fergal heard me and turned his head, but the man had jumped him from behind. There was a yell and a lot of dust and when we got over, Fergal was lying on his back with a piece of glass embedded in his chest. In his heart. Scotchy and I both wailed for the guards. The whistle blew again and they fired a shotgun in the air. They yelled at us to move. We sat there.

Everywhere dust, in vortices, ascending like prayers.

I tried doing mouth to mouth, but there was no breath in him. Guards came and beat us away and dragged us back to our cells. They locked us in the leg irons and howled at us and shook their heads in amazement and disgust. They spat and left, banging the door behind them.

Scotchy crawled over to me.

Do you think he’ll make it? he asked.

I shook my head.

No chance.

Scotchy scrambled back to his side of the cell and we sat there saying nothing, staring wide-eyed at one another.

Our condition worsened. Scotchy began to get his cough again, and both of us were weak as kittens. We hardly had the energy to catch the crickets anymore, and Scotchy concealed from me the fact that his hair was falling out in clumps.

Our luckiest break was that Fergal had left the pick in the cell near a wall. I’d found it after a panicky half-day search. I suppose he’d had the gumption to realize that he could have lost the pick out in the yard, could have dropped it. He had that much bloody sense, at least. I thought about him. Fergal was an only child. His folks were still alive. They’d take it hard. What a complete fucking eejit.

It took Scotchy about a week to figure out the way to pick the locks on our wrist and ankle chains. He’d done a wee bit of that line of work before with cars and bike locks, but Fergal had really made it seem simple.

Scotchy didn’t care anything about the moon now, he just wanted us out of here. It was getting colder at nights and the cell was damp. We were exponentially weaker every day and we could both see that we couldn’t wait much longer.

He got himself out in five days and in the early morning, a day later, he got me out. It wasn’t a third day, so we wouldn’t have to go into the yard, thank God. Indeed, the very minute he got both of us out of the leg irons, we were ready to go. He spent the rest of the day working on the locks on our wrist manacles, but these weren’t so important. We both thought that somehow we’d bloody manage it even if our wrists were chained. Which, as it turned out, would have been disastrously wrong.

It was academic, anyway, for Scotchy got himself out of his wrist manacle at noon and he literally had just gotten me out of mine a few hours later when the door opened and the guard came in with food.

I’d been leaning over next to Scotchy and I leaned back and tried my best to rearrange the chains. He started to fake-cough to give the guard something to look at. The guard was Squinty, who had a bad eye and a jowly face. He was the nicest of the bunch, though, and sometimes, rarely, made a remark.

Today of all days he decided to stop and speak to us while we finished our food.

Scotchy was tense. Our legs and wrists were obviously unlocked. I knew he would be formulating a plan which would be a suicide mission. Squinty would notice that we weren’t locked in our irons and Scotchy would leap up and kill him immediately with his manacle. The only thing then would be to make a break for it across the yard, somehow overpower another guard, get a gun, get over the gate, get a car… Certain death.

Squinty was practicing his terrible English:

Is baseball is no good, fútbol, sí, fútbol , everyone play fútbol , he said.

Normally I liked to encourage Squinty, to get more rice out of him. Today, though, I just wanted to get him the fuck out before Scotchy did something stupid. But even so, I didn’t want to act out of the ordinary, either.

In Ireland, where we’re from, remember, we play football, we don’t play baseball, we’re Irish, not Americans, Irish, we play football, I said slowly.

Squinty grinned and looked up at the ceiling.

He pointed. Of course, he doesn’t notice our leg irons, but today he sees the big hole in the concrete roof.

Oh, Jesus fuck, I whispered.

Scotchy began to get up.

Squinty lowered his arm and made a mock shiver.

Huracán , hurricane, big wind, he said.

There’s a hurricane coming? I asked, and made eye contact with Scotchy, pleading with him to sit the fuck down.

Big wind, he said, grinning.

Maybe big wind blows away prison and we all go free, I said, and forced a laugh.

Squinty didn’t understand but laughed anyway, took away our plates, and locked the door.

Scotchy came over and patted me on the shoulder.

Did well, Bruce, he said.

For the rest of the day I tried to keep my food down, and I mostly succeeded.

We waited until nightfall. As soon as it was good dark, we were leaving.

Getting up through the high ceiling with three people would have been relatively easy-with two it was going to be difficult. But we had a plan.

You all set? I asked him.

He nodded.

I hoisted him up onto my shoulders and he scraped away at the bitumen until there was a hole in the roof that let in the stars. Yeah, with two of us it would be harder to get out but what we were going to do would probably work. Instead of Scotchy going first, Scotchy jumped down and I got on his shoulders. He was pretty unsteady, so as soon I was up there I started pulling myself up through the hole. The light was incredible, there was a huge sky filled with stars. The spotlights on the three occupied towers were playing randomly over the yard and the roof and the fence. I pulled myself up, and when I had my elbows over the edge of the hole, Scotchy jumped from the cell below and grabbed onto my ankles. He was heavier than I’d thought and it took a painful effort not to fall back down into the cell again.