Dead I Well May Be by Adrian McKinty

Author:Adrian McKinty
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780743253550
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2003-08-31T23:00:00+00:00

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.

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