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eBook Category: Dark Fantasy
eBook Description: To escape his incarceration he had to join forces with a man he despised. Once he was free, he planned to leave his vile accomplice far behind.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: New Worlds 7, ed. Hilary Bailey and Charles Platt, 1974
Fictionwise Release Date: July 2002

15 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [38 KB], eReader (PDB) [20 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [6 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [6 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [59 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [76 KB], hiebook (KML) [44 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [33 KB], iSilo (PDB) [5 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [6 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [34 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [12 KB]
Words: 1748
Reading time: 4-6 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

This cell is small for two men. The prison bars are parallel, yet the sun passing through casts closed octagons of light on the worn cement floor. Parquay lies sleeping in a bunk just a few feet away, his face a study in pores and stubble, while in the exercise yard the marching men pack the baked tan earth ever tighter. No insects escape their heavy tread. No shadows survive the unmerciful eye of the sun.

Night clicks down like a shutter when the sun drops below our prison wall. For the next hour the bare electric bulbs in their protective wire mesh cages will be our only illumination then blackness. Parquay is awake, sitting hunched on the edge of his bunk, rubbing his rough strangler's hands against one another to restore their circulation to life, blinking the sleep from his dark vicious eyes with their red-rimmed pouches. He stretches and yawns like a well-muscled tom, and the stretching of his thick torso pulls the shirttails from his pants. Now he will begin his pacing, back and forth unceasingly, shaking his head with its coarsely cropped red mane from side to side and mumbling to himself. He has instinctively measured his stride to cross the length of our narrow cell in exactly four steps, his toes curling up against the wall at one end, edging between the bars on the other, as if he were testing the strength of these boundaries. Some nights I try to read through the noise of his pacing, but tonight, this special night, I do not read. I lie back breathing evenly, my eyes tracing and retracing the widening cracks of the plaster ceiling.

Although we share the same cell this is a different prison for each of us. Tonight, we shall leave it together. Tonight we make the break for freedom and as a team we complement each other well. Parquay needs my mind to remember the corridors we must cross, my skill to have fashioned the key notch by hasty notch in the machine shop, my thin hands and tapering artist's fingers to reach through the bars curving back to insert the key in its slot.

And I need Parquay. I need his strength and spontaneity, his animal cunning and blind bravado.