With a cigarette lighter for a lantern, we worked to cut our way through the double-thickness of hardwood that separated us from the tin on the outside of the roof. A long screwdriver, a chisel, and a pair of tin snips were our only tools. After fifteen minutes of hacking, scraping, and stabbing at the wood, we'd cleared a little space about the size of a man's eye. Waving the flame of the hot cigarette lighter back and forth, we could see the glint of the metal roof beyond the small hole. But the wood was too hard and too thick. With the tools we had, it would take us hours to make a man-sized hole.
We didn't have hours. We had thirty minutes, we guessed, or maybe a little more, before the guards did a routine check of the area.
In that time we had to get through the wood, cut a hole in the tin, climb out on the roof, use our power extension cord as a rope, and climb down to freedom. The clock was ticking on us. We were trapped in the roof of the security building. And any minute, we knew, the guards might notice the cut fence, see the broken door, and find the smashed manhole. Any minute they could come up through the manhole into that black, sweating cave, and find us.
"We've gotta go back," my friend whispered. "We'll never get through the wood. We've gotta go back, and pretend it never happened."
"We can't go back," I said flatly, although the thought had screamed through my mind as well. "They'll find all the broken stuff, the fence we cut, and they'll know it was us. We're the only ones allowed in the area. If we go back, we're in the Slot for a year."
The Slot was prison slang for the punishment unit. In those years, that unit, in that prison, was one of the most inhumane in the country. It was a place of random, brutal beatings. A failed attempt to escape through the roof of the security-force building - their building, the head office for the punishment unit guards - would ensure that the beatings were less random and more brutal.
"Well what the fuck are we gonna do?" my friend demanded, shouting with everything but his voice. Sweat dripped from his face, and his hands were so wet with fear that he couldn't hold the cigarette lighter.
"I think there's two possibilities," I declared.
"What are they?"
"First, we could use that ladder-the one that's chained to the wall downstairs. We could go down again, break the chain off the ladder, tie the extension cord to the top of it, slam it up against the wall, climb up, and throw down the cord on the other side. Then we can slide down to the street."
"That's it?"
"That's the first plan."
"But... they'll see us," my friend protested.
"Yeah."
"And they'll start shooting at us."
"Yeah."
"They'll shoot us."
"You said that."
"Well, fuck me," he hissed. "I think it bears repeating. It's a fuckin' salient point, don't you think?"
"I figure that one of us will get through, maybe, and one of us will get shot. It's fifty-fifty."
We considered the odds in silence for a while.
"I hate that plan," my friend shuddered.
"So do I."
"What's the second plan?"
"Did you notice that buzz saw, on the ground floor, as we came up here?"
"Yeah..." "If we bring it up here, we could use the buzz saw to cut through the wood. Then we can use the tin snips to cut through the tin.
After that, it's back to the original plan."
"But they'll hear the thing," my friend whispered fiercely. "I can hear them talking on the fuckin' telephone. We're that close.
If we drag the saw up here, and fire it up, it'll sound like a fuckin' helicopter."
"I know. But I think they'll just figure it's the workers, doing more work."
"But the workers aren't here."
"No, but the shift at the gate is changing. There's new guards coming on duty. It's a big chance to take, but I think if we do it they'll just hear the noise, as usual, and think it's the workers. They've been listening to drills and hammers and buzz saws for weeks. And there's no way they could imagine that it's us doing it. They'd never figure that crims would be crazy enough to use a power saw, right next to the main gate. I think it's our best shot."
"I hate to be Mister-fuckin'-Negative here," he objected, "but there's no electricity in this building. They shut it off for the renovating. The only power point is outside. The extension cord is long enough to reach down there, I think, but the power is outside the building."
"I know, I know. One of us will have to go down, creep out the door we busted open, and plug the extension cord into the outside power outlet. It's the only way."
"Who goes down there?"
"I'll do it," I said. I tried to sound confident and strong, but there are some lies that the body just won't believe, and the words came out as a squeak.
I scrambled over to the manhole. My legs were stiff with dread and tension-cramp. I slid down the extension cord and crept down the stairway to the ground floor, playing the cord out all the way. It reached to the door, with plenty to spare. The buzz saw was resting near the door. I tied the extension cord around the handle of the saw, and ran back up the stairs. My friend pulled the saw up into the manhole and then passed the cord back to me.
Once more I crept down to the door. With my body pressed flat against a wall, I breathed hard, and tried to find the courage to open the door. At last, with a heart-wrenching rush of adrenaline, I pushed the door aside and stepped out into the open to plug the cord into the socket. The guards, armed with pistols, were talking among themselves, not twenty metres from the door. If one of them had been facing my way, it wouldVe been over. I glanced up to see that they were looking in every direction but mine. They were talking and walking about in the gate area, and laughing at a joke someone had just cracked. No-one saw me. I slipped back inside the building, crawled like a wolf on all fours up the stairs, and dragged myself up the cord to the manhole.
In the dark corner near the trough in the zigzag roof space, my friend lit the cigarette lighter. I saw that he'd connected the power saw to the cord. He was ready to make the cut. I took the lighter, and held it for him. Without a second of hesitation, he hoisted the heavy saw and clicked it to life. The machine screamed like the whine of a jet engine on a runway. My friend looked at me, and a huge grin tore his mouth open. His teeth were clenched in the smile, and his eyes were glittering with the reflected fire. Then he drove the saw into the thick wood. With four swift, ear-splitting cuts, he made a perfect hole that revealed a square of gleaming tin.
We waited in the silence that followed, our ears ringing with diminishing echoes, and our hearts thumping at our chests. After a moment we heard a telephone ring close by, at the main gate, and we thought we were finished. Then someone answered the phone.
It was one of the gate guards. We heard him laugh and talk on in a relaxed, conversational tone. It was okay. We were safe. They'd heard the power saw, of course; but, just as I'd hoped, they'd dismissed it as noise made by the workmen.
Heartened, I punched a hole in the tin with the screwdriver.
Sunlight from the free sky above shot in on us. I widened the hole, and then used the tin snips to cut a panel of tin around three sides. Pushing with two sets of hands, we shoved the flap of tin outwards, and I poked my head through the hole. I saw that we had indeed cut our way into one of the troughs of the roof.
The deepest part of that V-shaped trench was a blind spot. If we lay down in that narrow defile we couldn't see the tower guards, and they couldn't see us.
We had one job left to do. The power cord was still plugged into the outlet, downstairs and outside the building. We needed the cord. It was our rope. We needed it to climb down the outside of the prison wall to the street. One of us had to go down the stairs, push out through the door in full view of the guards in the adjacent gate area, unplug the power cord, and then climb back up into the roof again. I looked at my friend, his sweating face clear in the bright light bathing us from the hole we'd cut in the roof, and I knew it had to be me.