A deceased Dale
The doors of the cellhouse shrieked open, it was rare to have the wardens come in at such an hour. The lights were out and the sound of boots ensued through the silence. More bizarrely, it was just one man with a little torch with a tiny ray of light that did little justice to the overpowering darkness. It was only a few minutes after they were in the relaxing room and rarely any of them had slept off. They all watched breathlessly straining their eyes to see what the man was up to. The warden walked slowly, taking one step and then stopping in front of each ward. He looked into each of the cells flashing his light at the person occupying them.
They reached the cell number forty-six and flashed its light at Barry. As he pointed it at him, Barry was able to give one glimpse at the warden. He had a balaclava over his face and although he didn’t have any clubs, he didn’t look harmless at all. He wasn’t like the usual prison guard, he was one of the men who lined the walls during The Death Toast. One of those men that wore special armours and sinister masks with ultra-powered rifles slinging at their arms; one of the men that shot countlessly in the other room when a name was picked! He kept walking stride after stride, checking who was in it. Everyone remained alert with their hearts racing faster than the sleight-of-hand of Dale.
Dale. Dale!
The man reached cell number eighty-two and flashed the light at it but this time he didn’t raise the light from it. He left the light on the face of Dale who was fast asleep, his face towards the wall. The man walked to the jail door and used a key to pull it open. At that point, everyone’s breath had seized. He moved into the cell and without a second’s uncertainty, he produced a pistol from his belt and pointed it in the direction that Dale was laying. He fired the gun three times and walked out of the jailhouse. His mission accomplished but he had also managed to set the night in crisis with everyone screaming and hitting the metal bars holding them in, begging to get out and pray that what remained of Dale was not a dead body. The realisation of that kept Barry mad and the restlessness endured till the next morning.
The whistles came again and the doors slid open, Barry and Tristan, accompanied by tens of the Ward-15ers rushed out trying to reach the cell of Dale but they were stopped by the newly arrived guards. No one was allowed to look into the cell of Dale.
‘Hey, you stay there or you will end up like him’, the head officer said to them.
‘You killer!’, Tristan cried.
‘Your friend was a really ill-behaved individual and since his punishment in The Hole couldn’t curb it. What we do here is dump away unrepairable materials’, he replied.
The place suddenly got silent. Everyone had different reactions to the fact that Dale was dead. Most of them had their hands over their mouths, many of them in tears while some just caught unawares. The doses of tragedy they were fed with every now and then kept getting darker and there was nothing for them to do.
Just then, out of the cellroom number eighty-two came the deceased but he wasn’t floating or looking like an ethereal being, he was real. It was Dale. At that point, Barry straightened up and cleaned the tears from his eyes. The silence got more intense and the reactions from everyone watching was more diverse. Barry’s mouth remained agape as he watched Dale walk forward.
Dale walked down the aisle with the other officers moving out of the way and then he stopped in the presence of the head officer who didn’t know what to expect. Everyone behind Dale could see the blood rushing out from the base of his head.
Out of the three bullets that Dale had been attacked with, only one had hit him. The first one had hit the head of the metal bed, the second one had just brushed past his ear and crushed into the wall, the third one had hit him just in the core of his nape. Obviously, un-fatally.
Dale looked around at everyone, trying to send them a calming message and then he turned to the head officer and said with such a serene voice that wasn’t expected from someone who had just been hit with bullet(s) some hours ago: ‘Next time you launch such attack, send someone with a better target, with a gun with stronger missiles and give him a better torch!’, he said and grinned, watching shock on the face of the head officer, irritation meshed with shock in equal extent. He returned to his position and waited for many minutes packed with surprise and shock before the procession of the daily count broke the edgy silence.
‘Dale!’, Barry shouted and hugged him after the guards had left. All the other cellmates came around in a union that seemed to be everything to all of them.
‘It’s okay. It’s okay’, Tristan said before they all walked out to the eating room.
It was all strange the way Dale took everything with such grace and control, even with the back of his uniform soaked.
‘Let’s go’, Dale whispered.
‘I believe the only currency that we should have shouldn’t be unity but the fearlessness and courage that comes with it and since we are together, we must learn to dump fear in the bin. This shouldn’t be a place to fear of anything when you know your fate already! That’s what I stand for and till we all learn to embrace that, we will die at both ends. We would die in vain’, Dale said during the waiting hour in the midnight.