Week 4 Story: Emergency Exit

“Hey,” I said, shaking the man’s shoulder. Almost gently at first, then a little rougher when he didn’t respond. “Hey, get up. We don’t have much time.”

He rolled over to face me then, blinking muzzily. “What?”

“Nursing check within twelve minutes,” I said, nodding over at the reinforced door. “Maybe sooner. Don’t you want to get out of here?”

Now he sat up all the way, wincing and clutching at his side. Under the sickly fluorescents, he looked thin and pale, short blond hair slicked with sweat. That was what happened when you paid another inmate to shank you, apparently.

Not for the first time since I’d been dragged in here for suicide watch, I wondered if he really had been trying to get himself killed, or if he’d just wanted to buy himself a better shot at getting out of here.

He looked over at me, thin mouth melting into a scowl. “Who the h—”

“Your roommate for the past day, Chris,” I said impatiently. “Cheaper to use inmates for suicide watch than paying extra nurses. Look, I’ve got us a line out of here, but I need your help. Do you still want out?”

He hesitated for a minute, taking in the plain little room they’d stuck us in—gray walls and floor, a mattress on the floor, and nothing else. Wouldn’t want to give the saps in here anything else to off themselves with.

I’d figured he’d take his time deciding: they were usually a pretty suspicious lot in here, and he didn’t have any reason to trust me. For all he knew, this was some elaborate trap to nail him for attempted escape.

But then he just looked down at his long, thin fingers, cupped gently around his wound.

“Yes,” he breathed.

“Okay, then.” I stood. “Time to leave prison life behind.”

***

I’d already worked out our escape route while Chris was asleep, and now we clambered down a dark, narrow tunnel. Chris kept pausing to check his wound, surprised that it hadn’t started bleeding again. Even though he moved with all the grace of a stoned rhino, he didn’t make any noise. I wondered if he’d noticed that, too.

“Well?” I said eventually. “Why’d you do it?”

“Do what?”

I turned to give him a look. Not a sharp one, exactly—but by this point, we were way past playing games.

After a minute, he mumbled, “You don’t know how bad I wanted out of there. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“Right,” I said. “Because you’re the only one here who’s ever spent any time in prison.”

But he was right. I had no clue what it was like. Any of it.

“Half the time it was okay,” he said slowly. “I was okay. I’d keep my head down, do my time, get out. Maybe even get to see my boy grow up. God, just to see one of his baseball games...”

He was losing me now with the boy and the baseball. But he was losing lots of things, so I didn’t complain. This was his time, not mine.

“But the rest of the time,” he went on. I turned to see him shake his head. “The rest of the time, it was like I’d never get out. Like I was dying a little bit every day. Hell, half the time I wanted to die. Like the only thing that could fix this mess was a visit from Mr. Death himself.”

“Well,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “You don’t have to worry about that anymore, at least.”

We kept going for a while in silence. I tried to prod him along so we’d be gone before the next nurse made her round and saw Chris’s bed was empty. But we hadn’t made it far enough when I heard the nurse’s thin, high voice call the guards.

I glanced over at Chris, and knew he’d heard, too. His hearing was limitless now, after all.

He stopped short, examining the tunnels around us. Probably he was realizing that they were the wrong size and shape to be part of this prison. That it didn’t really make sense for a prison to have tunnels like this at all.

And then his sharp new hearing heard the nurse say, “Chris Wellers—he’s gone,” and he knew.

He twisted around and scrambled down the tunnel, running full-tilt in a space that’d barely supported a crouch moments ago. Perspective really was everything.

A second later, the entire structure shifted, blurring into one of the prison hallways instead. Chris sprinted to the little suicide watch broom closet at the end of it.

When he saw his own body lying on the mattress, pale and still, he actually flinched.

“I don’t...” he whispered, but he didn’t finish.

He didn’t need to. Understand. They always said that, even though most of them really did understand.

“Sure you do,” I said. "You never woke up, Chris."

He turned and looked at me then, stumbling over himself to back away, and I wondered what he saw. Not an inmate decked out in orange anymore, that was for sure—that had probably ended with the tunnel—but still, I was curious. It was a weird thing, never knowing what you actually looked like.

“You,” he whispered. “You’re the one who did this.”

“No,” I said, voice rising a little despite myself, sharper than I’d meant. “You did. I’m just here to clean up your mess.”

“Mr. Death, reporting for duty,” he said bitterly, staring over at his body, even as he clutched the side that would never bleed again. “Lucky me.”

I took a deep breath, but didn’t answer this time. No need. The nurse and guards would come back for his body, and Chris would watch them cart it away, and then the fight would leave him.

He’d face me. Maybe even apologize. And then he’d follow me out quietly.

They always did.

There was only one way out, after all.

Author's Note: Last week when I read the Ramayana, I was struck by an exchange between the death god Yama and a mortal character. Yama had dealt with death plenty of times, obviously, but he was intrigued by this mortal character on his metaphorical deathbed. In that story, Yama was intrigued by the man's strength, but I ended up flipping that in my story without really meaning to, resulting in a story where Death is intrigued by man's weakness instead.

Bibliography: The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic by R. K. Narayan.

Image Credit: Emergency Exit Sign. Source: Max Pixel.