Read Online Perilous by E. H. Reinhard - Free Book Online

key clicked in the small food slot, and the door flipped up. Viktor stuck his hands through. The guard clicked the handcuffs around his wrists.
    “Get on the wall,” the guard said.
    Viktor walked to the back of the room and faced the wall.
    The door was unlocked and opened. The guard walked to him and clicked ankle cuffs around his legs. He linked another chain from the ankle cuffs to the handcuffs. “Time for the dog to go outside.”
    Viktor smirked.
    The guard shoved him through the door. He pulled Viktor by the elbow down the hallway of the SHU. Both gray walls had a single red stripe running horizontally. The red was the same color as the metal mesh ceiling. Viktor caught glimpses of the other inmates behind the small windows of their cell doors. The guard pushed Viktor’s shoulder to turn him left, toward the door leading outside. The guard pulled his keys from his waist and unlocked the first metal-grate door. They walked through. With a loud clang, the door slammed and relocked at their back. Twenty feet ahead was the door leading to the yard. The guard swiped his security badge through the slot and pulled the handle. The door opened, and a rush of air passed Viktor’s face. Viktor breathed in deeply. The dank smell of the prison faded as they stepped outside. Warm sunlight hit his face.
    “Walk. You’re going in the first one,” the guard said. He shoved Viktor in the back. He had no intentions of letting Viktor stop to enjoy the day.
    Viktor stumbled forward to the chain-link cage. The guard removed his ankle shackles and unlocked the gate for the fenced-in, twenty-by-forty-foot rectangle.
    Viktor stepped inside. He turned and watched the guard close and lock the gate. Viktor placed his wrists through the small opening before him. The guard unlocked the cuffs around his wrists.
    “Forty-eight minutes,” the guard said.
    Forty-eight minutes was all Viktor had to enjoy the sunlight, to see the sky, and to breathe fresh air. A six-minute walk from his cell to his cage outside, and a six-minute walk from the cage back to his cell took twelve minutes of the one hour he got out of his cell in the SHU. However, that was better than constantly watching over his shoulder for a shiv.
    Viktor took a spot at the back of the fence, leaning and staring at the sky. The sun inched closer to the concrete fence at the end of the yard. It would be down within the hour. Past the chain-link roof on his cage, a couple birds flew in the distance. He looked left to right across what he could see of the horizon beyond the various prison buildings. The sky was clear—not a cloud could be seen. Depending on the rotation, it would be at least two weeks before he would see sunshine again. Every day, his yard time came an hour later. The next day, it would happen between six and seven o’clock, dusk. He had two weeks before him of going out during the nighttime hours—that is, if they let him stay in the SHU. Viktor looked out at the other, four, empty cages. He wondered where the other three inmates were. He’d never been outside when the other cages were empty. He looked around the yard some more. The grounds were empty other than him and the two guards he could see in the tower in the distance.
    While safety was his main concern, he hadn’t taken into consideration just how much solitary confinement would take its toll. Viktor had zero human interaction aside from the sentence or two a day of instructions from the guards since being placed in the SHU.
    Viktor thought about trying to pay off a guard to get him a cell phone.
    The sound of a door opening in the distance caught Viktor’s attention. He had no way of knowing how much time he had already spent outside, but it definitely wasn’t forty-eight minutes. He figured guards were coming out with other inmates. Viktor looked toward where the sound had come from. An uneasy feeling overtook him. Three men walked from the side of the building toward his cage. They weren’t