Three Seconds

the last centimetres of fuse disappear and the stuff that is wound and taped round a person’s body explodes.
    My eardrums burst.
    Two walls – the one behind the principal prison officer and the one into the office – collapse.
    The shattered window is blown out and falls down into the prison yard.
    The pressure wave finds me but is dampened by the concrete pillar and the rug over the hostage’s body.
    I am unconscious, but only for a few seconds.
    I am alive.
    He had been lying on the floor with the howling pain in his ears when the heat from the explosion reached the diesel barrel and black smoke assaulted the room.
    He had waited until it had found its way out through the hole that had until recently been a window, creating a greyish-black wall that blanketed and hid much of the workshop building.
    He had taken the pile of uniform clothes that belonged to the older guard and thrown it out through the window, then jumped out himself, onto a roof that was only a few metres below.
    I sit without moving and wait.
    I am holding the clothes in my arms, I see nothing through the thick smoke and with no eardrums I struggle to hear, but I feel the vibrations of people moving around on the roof close by, policemen who are there to put an end to a hostage drama; one of them even runs into me without realising who I am.
    I don’t breathe, I haven’t done since I jumped through the window, I know that breathing in this toxic smoke is the same as death.
    He had moved close to those who heard the steps without realising that they belonged to the man they had just seen die, over the roof towards the shiny sheets of metal that looked like a chimney. He had climbed down into the hole, his arms and legs pressed hard against the walls until the pipe narrowed and it had been difficult to keep his grip, then he had let go, fallen the last bit down to the bottom of the ventilation shaft.
    I crouch down and crawl into the pipe that is sixty centimetres in diameter and leads back into the building.
    With my hands against the metal, I pull myself forwards bit by bit, until I am above a room that is a substation and has a door straight out into the lower prison passage.
    I lie down on my back, the pile of clothes under my head like a pillow. I am going to stay in the ventilation shaft for at least three days. I will piss and shit and wait but I will not dream, I will not feel, there is nothing, not yet.
    He put his ear to the door.
    It was difficult to make out, but there might be someone moving about out there – wardens walking past down the passage, not prisoners at this time of day, it was after lock-up and they would all be in their cells.
    He ran his hand over his face and head, no beard, no hair, down his thighs and calves, no dried urine.
    The new clothes smelt of another person, some deodorant or aftershave that the old warden must have used.
    Movements out there again, more people passing.
    He looked at the watch. Five to eight.
    He would wait a little longer; it was the guards coming off duty and on their way home, he had to avoid them, they had seen his face. He stood waiting for fifteen minutes more, the dark substation and fifty-seven yellow and red and green lights around him.
    Now.
    Several of them, and at this time of day, it could only be the night shift.
    The ones that clocked on after lock-up, who never met the prisoners and therefore didn’t know what they looked like.
    His hearing was dramatically impaired but he was certain that they had passed. He unlocked the door, opened it, went out and closed it again.
    Three wardens with their backs to him about twenty metres down the passage that linked Block G with central security. One was roughly his age, the others much younger and presumably newly qualified, on their way to one of their first workplaces. At the end of May, Aspsås prison was always affected by the large influx of summer temps who, after a mere one-hour introduction and a two-day course, put on their uniforms and started to work.
    They had stopped in front of one of the locked security doors that divided the passage up into smaller sections and he hurried to catch up. The older one was holding a set of keys and had just unlocked the door when he came up behind them.
    ‘Can you wait for me, please?’
    They turned round, looked at him, up and down.
    ‘I’m a bit behind.’
    ‘On your way home?’
    ‘Yes.’
    The guard didn’t sound like he suspected anything when he spoke, it had been a