Heroics And Cruelties - Chris Roy

Heroics And Cruelties by Chris Roy

Book excerpt

His fingers burned as he held the hacksaw blade tighter and sawed through the forged steel lock.

The dank in the plumbing closet was thick in his nose and his shoulder was pressed against the door to keep it from rattling and alerting the convicts sleeping on the tier above. The shouting and dayroom televisions playing at full volume and the beating on cell bars was enough ruckus to cover the zipping of the fine toothed Craftsman tool through the barrier to his freedom. A door booming in its jam would add an unfamiliar tempo to the atmosphere, tweaker prompts that would draw the eyes, ears and schizophrenic thoughts of the men on the zone with methamphetamine in their veins. Sweat was drooling from his forehead and slinging off his finger tips, rivulets stretching over the length of his arms slick over precise movements. The teeth of the dulling blade locked deep in the scalding cut and his finger slipped just some and the carbide blade cut him as the lock bolt split and his knuckles caught his weight on the doorframe. He looked behind him at the hole in the sheet metal wall he had cut the previous day, the pipes connected to his toilet and sink inside his cell, and grabbed the towel he had stuck through the hole to keep the jagged steel from biting him.

Toweling off his hands, he wiped the grit from the blade and examined the teeth, wondering if they would have lasted longer if the blade was mounted on a saw frame and handle. Where the fuck would I hide an entire hacksaw? he thought. Hard enough getting just the blades in and hiding them. A smile slipped across his chin beard and he pulled it down with his hand to smooth the sweat away from his lips. All those years of living on edge, senses honed with slow fear, will they shake me down today? Did the tower officer see my cellphone light up the cell? Will my hiding spot pass? Will that psych patient throw shit on me if I walk past his cell? It was at an end. The overconnected, drenching of nerves, the imminent heart attack tremors that became the platform for his awareness, was swept into calm with the cool air that hit his eyes. He pushed open the door and took in the concrete slab and grass toned orange by the lights towering around the compound, sparkling white on the razor wire marking the perimeter fences.

The fence didn’t look so intimidating from where he crouched but he knew once he was standing next to it the difficulty breaking its security would make his chest pound. A strip of darkness painted the middle of the inside perimeter fence, and he couldn’t see the sensor wire running horizontally around it. But he knew it was there. Knew it encircled the thousand man unit. Knew if he bumped it while climbing over the alarm would go off.

The officer patrolling the perimeter would be alerted on the radio, and they would drive around and do a security check. They'll take their time getting off their ass to do it, he knew, earning as much state money for as little work as possible. He was confident he could get over both fences and into the field and hide before the van rolled around the perimeter, exhaust popping with raw fuel and failing gaskets. He had a little more than five minutes to get it done.

The muscles in his back shifted and he relaxed into his boxing stance, one foot inside the plumbing closet, the other on the slab in the cone of light, and he took his earbuds from his back pocket and put them in and made sure the clips were secure on his ears, plugged them into his phone, thinking that he wasn’t worried about the lazy officer with the rifle inside the van.

But the woman on the phone was.

The explosion was a spike of lightning shooting up from behind the tower and spreading into a concussion that chased through the stalks of corn and yawned into the humid night with patches of purple that he blinked away and ran towards, stuffing the phone in a pocket made inside his uniform pants.

He believed her when she said it. But that was on Messenger, his chat room escape from the reality of living in maximum security since he was a teenager. Like a gamer that rises early to immerse his mind in the addictive rewards of virtual reality, the online world he built with contraband phones over the past five years was his Matrix. And in that world she was his best friend. His business partner. The person he could tell anything to.

“It started innocently enough,” he said and leapt at the fence. It swayed some, links rattling from his shoes catching in the holes between links. He looked up at the razor wire looping out from the top of the fence and breathed on the earbuds wire, “We thought you might be interested in reviewing this book.”

“ ‘If you’re interested we’re happy to send you a digital copy’,” she said laughing.

“From book reviews to prison escape. Where did we go wrong? You cook a mean pot of chili, ma’am.”

She sighed. “You don’t cook chili in a pressure cooker. Just the beans, if they are dry. Use a saucepan for all of it.” Then, “The second one is set to go off in five seconds.”

The fence bit deeper into his left hand as he let go with his right and took the homemade rope from over his head and set it in his lap and got a good grip on the hook. The rod from his sink had come out of the busted tap with minor intimidation and a smashed fingernail. Bending one end of it into the hook he clipped onto the razor wire was a chore after that, and the all-night sawing turned into a real ass whipping.

He smiled at his frayed fingers and eased his weight onto the braided sheet and dropped back to the ground and a huge stretch of the deadly coils drooped and sandwiched out thin and froze in tension when he cinched the end of the rope low on the fence. Face just above his knees, he jumped from the squatted position and grabbed and his shoes scrambled fast over the sensor cable as the second pressure cooker set a bang against another tower, this one on the other side of the compound. The sparrows that had re-settled on the fences for their nightly roost took off again.