As Night Falls (2 page)

I
t was so quiet outside you could hear the rasp of leaves, but as soon as the prison door clanged shut behind him, Nick might as well have been stepping outside into a carnival. Sunlight flaring, colors barking, air so clear it felt like glass upon his skin. He had to blink and shade his eyes as the scene before him resolved. There was asphalt and drab cement, a faraway circle of trees, already winter-brown, and one lone decommissioned school bus, painted white.

They were headed toward the bus, Nick last man out, his preferred position now. On line for chow or the shower or the yard—last was just fine by him. You saw more that way.

He took a look around.

After three o'clock, and a hard frost still lingered on the ground, feathering the pavement. They had been issued jackets—thick, ugly brown things to wear over their greens—and the feel was foreign, as if Nick had been transformed into some bulky alien life-form.

So many things to observe out here, and so many that weren't demanding the usual attention. Barely buried tempers, cattle calls from the guards that signaled chow, change of shift, med dispersal, quiet time. But you never got silence, not really. There was the continual spatter of piss from four men sharing a john. The sound the clicker made during counts and recounts, each man accounted for like a box on a pallet. And talking, of course. Constant mutters, chatter, screams. Cries for Mama, even in the middle of the night.

The prison sat on a carved-up plot of land. Trees had been hulled out and the ground shorn of grasses, paved over for visitor parking, and so the guards could have a clear line of sight. They were far enough away from the nearest town that there was no place to run, and the only cars that drove by went at a pretty good clip, warned by road signs not to stop. There hadn't been a successful prison break since 1961, although a story was habitually trundled out about a more recent attempt, with the inmate rounded up in the adjacent woods hours later, never having even made it off the grounds. There'd been no escape attempt during Nick's twenty-four years of incarceration as far as he knew. That tale was a composite, a patchwork stitching of every desperate man who had the thought to leave, meant to serve as a deterrent for anybody foolish enough to harbor such hope still.

But today it didn't matter how isolated they were or how unlikely was escape.

Nick had a plan.

Harlan took up most of a seat at the back of the bus, and Nick positioned himself across the aisle from him. Two other inmates sat just ahead, with the guard up front.

Rear position. Nick was pleased. He wondered if Harlan sensed his preference, and had deliberately set up the seating. Probably it'd just been luck. Harlan wasn't much for organization.

They'd been cellies since a few years after Nick had gone in, which meant that by now Harlan was completely exposed to him. Nick knew the mutters Harlan made while sleeping, how he shuddered after taking a piss, that Harlan had been paid only one visit his entire time inside. But by the same token, Nick didn't know Harlan at all, not his age, or why he'd gotten life when he hadn't laid a hand on anybody, or even who'd come to see him that time.

Nick slid his palm across the green vinyl seat. He hadn't felt this pebbly texture in years.

“Listen up,” the guard said. He touched the rifle slung low by his side.

This guard was in his forties or fifties, a long time on the job. But today his voice held a note that was different from its usual ring of command.

On the other side of the bus, Harlan's face appeared bland and unchanging, his features lumpy. Harlan hadn't heard the same thing Nick had, but that didn't mean much. Harlan was loyal, better than any man inside, but still, his brains were made of paste, and no amount of heart could change that.

The guard sounded off-kilter. Outside on his own with four men was a change from the usual day-to-day. Nick felt a small sizzle of satisfaction.

“We got blacktopping on a bridge,” the guard said. “You'll work in teams of two.”

Information inside was strictly on a need-to-know. You had to qualify to earn a stint on the outs—even just for a two- or three-hour job—and that had taken Nick a while. The first job he could've worked had been scheduled in August, and that timing would've been a whole lot better considering what he had planned. But the job kept getting postponed—cutbacks probably—until a day sheet stuck between the bars told Nick he'd be riding out today. Nick didn't tend to be a take-what-he-could-get kind of guy, but he had learned a thing or two since going inside. A better chance might not come along.

It had cost him two packs and four shots to get details on the job. He tended to be well supplied, but that trade had wiped him out. If he went back in, he'd be jittery as hell, with a mean clamp of a headache, out of smokes and juice for a week.

He wasn't going back in.

“All you got to do is set down cones,” the guard continued. He reached up to scrub the gray spikes of his crew cut. “Simple as that. Start a quarter mile before the bridge, go a quarter mile after it lets out. Make a nice, generous curve to guide 'em along. We don't want anybody not knowing they don't got two lanes.”

Nick saw Harlan's brow furrowing; he wasn't great with anything beyond simple instructions. And he didn't like guards, especially the older, more experienced ones. Harlan's fists would roll into masses the size of wasp nests, his blank eyes would smolder, whenever he was confronted by a guard.

Before coming up with this idea, Nick had considered simply ordering Harlan to take out the guards who stood in their way; escaping by brute force. But, in addition to the relatively slim chance of that working, it wouldn't have got them where they needed to be.

The driver lurched the bus into gear, rolled out of the lot, and through the gates. Then they were on the road—a real road again, smooth as a woman's ass—and headed north.

They reached old Route 9. Setup looked just about like he'd pictured it. Nick blew out a breath of relief. The intel he'd stripped his stash for had been right.

The bus lumbered over to the side of the road. Cresting it was a hump of hill that let out onto a bridge, only one lane of which was open. The other was newly paved, shiny as sealskin.

A temporary stoplight flared red in the low afternoon light, making sure that cars didn't meet coming over the single lane of the impaired bridge. Visible through the bus window was a pickup parked at a sharp angle. The truck's bed held nested stacks of orange cones.

Harlan began straining to get a look, misting Nick's face with his breath.

“Cut it out,” Nick said, and Harlan lowered his big body back down, biting his lip with piano key teeth.

“Ready?” the guard asked, unease still alive in his tone. “Out of your seats.”

The convict in front of Nick stood up. Small—by prison measures anyway—and dark-skinned, with wiry white coils of hair receding on his scalp.

He took a look through the window at the road.

This particular inmate was of the old school variety, locked up before Nick was even born. Old-School was a rampart, a foundation of the prison who helped keep eight hundred men from battering it apart. Prison lore had it that he was the one who'd helped with the escape more than fifty years ago, but Nick had never been able to buy that. The story had the feel of a tall tale. Why wouldn't Old-School have gotten out himself?

The newer guys used the fathomless measures of time inside to beef up, Nick included, but Old-School had long since passed that mark, allowing himself to shrink and shrivel over the years. Still, he had a commanding dignity about him. The twitchy alertness new guys wore, always on the watch, looking out, had been worn away, smudged like the charcoal of Old-School's skin. He still took everything in—you didn't survive inside if you stopped paying attention—but Old-School did it with a studied breed of acceptance. Even this has its limits, he said with every slow blink of his eyes. Everything does.

“We going to have trouble with that light?” Old-School asked, his eyes still on the road. “Cars barreling through, hitting our cones?”

“We're not going to have trouble so long as you don't make any,” the guard said.

Nick watched the square off, monitoring it for signs of combustion. He'd been planning for too long to let anything go wrong now. Figuring out what was likely to bring them down, coming up with work-arounds. Learning how the world had changed since he'd gone in. And, of course, securing this stint on the outs. That had been the toughest part. To everyone else, Nick probably seemed like just another jailhouse convert, finally come to see the light and the error of his ways. In fact, the good behavior had nearly killed him—holding himself in check whenever anybody crossed him or tried to piss him off. For Harlan, good behavior came easy; he was slow to act on his own volition. But Nick had earned every oxygen-rich breath he took out here, and no wizened old con was going to mess with the scenario he was banking on.

A blink. “You don't got to worry about me,” Old-School said.

Nick took another deep, heady breath.

The guard handed out jerseys, slick with orange reflective tape. “Then get off the bus.”

Harlan's girth caused each step to heave as Nick followed him down. A chill sun shone through the naked spires of trees. In concert he and Harlan approached the pickup, so in sync they glided. Harlan hoisted up a batch of cones, taking the bulky rubber tower into his arms as if it were a toddler. Old-School and the other inmate wrestled their own stack down.

A sick, eerie light descended, and Nick looked up to see the temporary stoplight turn green. A late model sedan shot across the bridge, its driver clearly pissed off by the delay.

Timing was going to be key.

Old-School and the other inmate made it to the far end of the bridge, probably thinking that haste had bought them the choice position, farthest away from the guard and the bus. But Nick was glad again to be last. He watched both men walk on—a quarter mile looked about right—before Old-School took the first cone out of the other inmate's arms and set it down, his placement as precise as if decided by instrument.

The guard jerked his chin toward Nick and Harlan, indicating that they should get a move on. The guard's gaze was targeted and direct, switching back and forth between the woods, the adjacent fields, the thin skin of the river itself. Only last did he scan the long, empty road, where a body would be seen instantly, a fool's choice of escape.

Nick led Harlan along the asphalt, gauging the distance till they'd gone about fifteen hundred feet, just like the guard had specified. Then Nick held up a barricading hand, stopping Harlan, and reached for a cone. Harlan had to stoop way down for Nick to take it.

Nick placed the orange dunce cap on the road, then took a few steps in the direction of the bridge. Harlan trod after him, and they repeated the sequence.

Nick touched a spot on his leg before tackling the next cone. Weather coming in. He could feel it, even if the sky was still clear, and for a second the privilege he'd fought so hard to win turned nasty, useless, something to stomp into the ground. Bring inmates in at the tail end of the day so the fewest number of cars would be coming over that bridge. It wasn't like there was rush hour out here. Schedule the job in November instead of the summer due to someone's budgetary screwup. Nick felt a dagger of resentment toward the powers that be, not to mention the citizens who were able not only to drive around freely, but be protected as they did it.

Harlan began shifting his burden of cones from one arm to the other while Nick tried to wrestle his anger down. It was a trick he'd learned in mandated counseling, to picture a mental scabbard and thrust his fury into it. Nick had dutifully attended one idiotic session each week all year. Now he breathed in air so fresh it tasted like menthol. Never again was he going to take a whiff of the stale, recirculated air inside. The sensation in his leg was sometimes misleading, and in this case, it'd better be.

A car streaked by, its cloud of exhaust smelling like freedom. The light changed to red, and Nick stilled with a cone in his arms.

He began to count.

The car cooled its wheels, forced to wait at the bridge. It occurred to Nick that these drivers weren't so free themselves, and he felt a swell of satisfaction build.

He swiveled to share it with Harlan, then scowled. Nick had been keeping track of how long the light stayed red, maintaining a beat in his head. But he could see Harlan's lips visibly moving, expelling white puffs into the frigid air. If the guard were any closer—and could lip-read—he might've seen that Harlan was counting.

“Quit it!” Nick ordered, low.

The stack of cones Harlan was hugging to his chest pitched sideways, off balance.

Nick reached over to steady them, cuffing Harlan on his coat sleeve as he did.

It was like hitting a girder.

The light changed and the car moved on across the bridge. The driver gave Old-School and the other inmate a wide berth on the opposite side.

Harlan's mouth stilled and so did the count in Nick's head.

He'd gotten to ninety. A minute and a half.

They would enter at the seventy-five-second mark. That would give them fifteen seconds more for maneuvering, the inevitable balking and surprise.

The road behind them was empty now, a faded gray strand in contrast to the new lane they were approaching on the bridge. Nick didn't want to risk looking too long in this direction—the guard was headed back their way—but he would've felt a whole lot better if he could've seen another car. This road was supposed to be decently trafficked for these parts, but here was that end-of-the-day thing again, poking up its ugly snout.

The light went through another cycle with no car appearing. Harlan struggled with his armful of cones, and Nick reached for a few more, lightening Harlan's load. They were getting close to the bridge.