A single hall room could no longer conveniently contain all of them because they were no longer one thousand people. The room was filled with ten thousand people in orange uniforms, choked up together. The prison was Boorbunk and it had been one month since Dale left.
Each of the fifteen wards now had about four times the number of inmates they used to have. Since the terrorism attacks had increased, it only made sense that more arrests had been made and more people had been locked up.
Definitely, brutality had increased. The wardens wouldn’t fail to make them feel the heat of what was cooking outside the prison and to reassure them that real fire hadn’t started burning yet. In the Death Toast rooms, there were three skulls hanging on the walls waiting to be replaced weekly. Weekly! The wardens were no longer patient with people like Dale who spoke back at them or refused to do their bidding. They no longer moved around with clubs or batons and no longer repeated orders, they moved around with shotguns in their belts and tested it on any man who didn’t comply, at once, to the orders rang out from the speakers. And it was sure that no day passed, in one ward or next, without someone’s brain blown out with a bullet or someone’s body carried over to the incinerator or someone’s orange uniform get recoloured into red.
The prisoners, on the other hand, didn’t grow any docile or pacified. They formed groups, like uncivilised Neanderthal tribes, with their fists as their spears and their legs as their stones, beating up people they esteemed as weaklings usually to the point of death, while the prison officers watched on.
More senators and governors and big guns and General Sawer in his full sinister glory, had come to view The Death Toast. It was more frequent and it now involved the picking of three names, one after the other but all those killings weren’t balanced with an equal proportion of redemptions. It was still the usual, one man every month with the probability slimmer than ever.
Here in this large hall was the conducting of The Redemption and there was Sawer at the front, smoking a fat cigar and watching the prisoners roam around with his eyes half-closed. The space was not free enough to allow for orderly queues. Tristan and Pierson stayed somewhere in the middle of the room, trying to remain unnoticed and hoping that none of the bullies who were mostly from Ward 1 or Ward 2, roaming around the crowd would see them to prey on.
‘Hey, you should get out of my way, wall-man!’, one of the Ward-1 prisoners who had a wrinkled nose, yelled to the executioners who were always leaning against the wall, even though The Redemption wouldn’t require their guns.
The main officer raised his gun in the air and shot five times. ‘Today, another man would be set free, out of the goodwill of our hearts and not by any doing of yours. Because you have not by any means proven to be benevolent enough to live, not to speak of being released into the saner world!’, he said. ‘And that is why it is going to be based on your luck’, he said and marched over to the planks.
He wasted no time in picking one of the planks and turning it over. Since it wasn’t as pleasurable as The Death Toast, the warders always made it short and quick. ‘From the thirteenth ward, Crane Bunker’, he said and the crowd went into a state of frenzy. Everyone was protesting and lamenting and despite gun shots that rented the area, the shouts got louder. Then, from behind Tristan, a voice emanated which was louder than the rest and made everyone turn to him, to see whatever the maniac was saying.
‘General! General!’, the man shouted. ‘Please, I know you are a very noble man and you have shown that every time you stopped for the country in wars. I want you to help us. Tell the warders to release more people. I know you can help us. Please. I am not supposed to be here. I have never committed any crime in my life. I don’t want to die’, he begged with a distressed voice. The man that spoke was old man, and old in Boorbunk could mean anything from early forties. The happenings of the place increased the aging process.
Everyone joined the man in his protest, pleading for freedom, thinking naively that somehow their spirit of solidarity would move their much noble General Sawer.
Noble? The man called me noble, General Sawer puffed out of smoke from his nose and from his mouth like a steam engine. He had his back rested against his chair, and his eyes still half-shut. He watched as the prisoners kept calling his name, raising their hands clamouring for their innocence and for their freedom, denoting his silence to mean considering their request. The officers were looking at him, waiting for him to speak or give an order, not quite guessing what the somewhat jaded look on his face could mean. Today won’t be for redemption alone, after all, Sawer thought and placed the fat cigar in the corner of his mouth.
‘That man?’, he asked Officer Eel.
‘Who among them?’
‘The one who first spoke’
‘I… I don’t even know the one who spoke first. It was hard to see. It was like they spoke at the same time’, Officer Eel kept his eyes fixed on Sawer hoping that he didn’t get impatient or turn his rage on him. He was the only man he feared.
‘The elderly man in his sixties’, Sawer said and inhaled.
‘Oh yes, that’s Filman Meynard’
‘Which ward is he from?’
‘He is No.33 in the first ward. He is actually forty-one’
Sawer paused for a minute and removed the cigar from his mouth, watching the protest get wilder and the voices of the people persistent. Hmm…they really want to be free.
‘I want you to get all the men of first ward in front here’, Sawer said.
‘Silence!!’, the officer shouted and for the first time, there was complete calm without using a gun. ‘Let all the men of the first ward march out now and the rest of you step back!’
Then, yet again, there were shouts everywhere. Shouts and screams of jubilation from the members of the first ward and the rest of them bellowing: ‘We are like them too, we are all going free together. Be fair’
The men of the first ward marched outside to the front with smiles of their faces, they couldn’t believe that it was their lucky day. Filman was feeling like a hero, he was eager to go back home and tell his family of how he had set himself free, as well as some other nine hundred men in his ward. Other men tried to rush to the front and mingle with them but the guards pushed them back and set a clear barrier.
‘See y’all in hell!’, one of the bullies shouted out to the rest of the prisoners with the other Ward-1 captives joining the mockery.
‘Thank you, man. I always knew you weren’t totally useless’, someone told Filman. They all remained there, waiting with rushing anxiety for their liberty to be announced.
‘Gaurds!’, Sawer shouted with an eerily reverberant voice. All the executioners marched one after the other circling the precisely, nine hundred and eighty-nine men, who now did not get what was going on.
Why are there guards? Tristan thought as he watched with widened eyes and an open mouth the new cloudy atmosphere that was descending on the avenue. And that was the question hanging from the lips of everyone. Sawer had invoked demons with that single unwarranted word and even more, the fierce purpose with which he had altered it. Whatever it meant, it was left for the men in the circle of the guards to find out and as the masked hatchet men raised their rifles (and they cracked their guns at the same minute) to face the ward-one prisoners, it was clear to Tristan and Barry that lives were on the line.
Many lives. Many, many lives. Just the way Sawer liked it.
The hall was silent and there was not one single murmur in the room; just racing hearts and widened eyes and the reciting of the Lord’s prayer in their heads.
‘Filman Meynard? You did something that seemed brave in your eyes and now, your entire room is going to suffer for it!’, he said and looked at one of the masked men. ‘Kill them!’
…and there would be no single moment of pausing. The guns did their jobs, making blood splatter and making men fall with a final howl leaving their windpipes.
‘Stop!’, Sawer said again. He had forgotten to add some spice to the exercise, and even though half the men were dead already he was going to add it. Definite death was a great prospect but there was no much joy in seeing the prisoners waiting in turn for the bullet to break him down. There should be an option of living. He wanted to see that sheer will to live.
The Ritual of Caprice.
‘You!’, he commanded one of the masked men. ‘Shoot anyone of them you like’
The rifle-man moved over to the prisoner who had a wrinkled nose, who had earlier called him a w-all-man. He, just like the rest of the prisoners who were lucky to not have been shot yet were on their knees, scared to look up hoping that none of the masked men would hate their faces enough to stop at their presence. Only that he, on the other hand, had stepped on the feet of one of them earlier.
‘You remember me, don’t you?’, the man spoke from behind the mask.
‘Please don’t do it. I’m sorry’, the prisoner was shivering with his head bent under the mouth of the man’s gun.
‘What’s your name, bear-face?’
‘My name? Kingsley Benson’, the Ward-1 rogue replied.
‘Kingsley, look up at me’, the rifle-man said in that robotic, emotionless tone.
Slowly and difficultly, he raised up his head to expose an hairy face, wobbly eyes, slack lips and a freshly injured nose. ‘Please’, the gun was on his forehead now. ‘Please?!’
The gunshot thundered throughout the room making the rest of the other Ward-1 men jolt and yell in fear, knowing that this was another face of The Death Toast.
Just two games from the same inventor.
Then Sawer spoke again, ‘Now, you. You pick any feed you want, use the spoon you have in your hand to scoop it’. Another gunshot, another command, another desperate pleadings from the men about to die, the direct and heartless raise of the gun and another blast.
Repeat.
‘There has been a man who has done this kind of thing that Filman did before’, Eel said to Sawer. ‘He had even done worse, calling Governor Dormas an animal’
‘Who?’, he asked, ready to end the ward of that person as well and punish the culprit with some heightened level of pain that only the Order of the Quppis can render.
‘His name is Dale Eagan’, the officer stated.
Dale Eagan, Sawer thought through the name to figure out where he had heard the name recently. Every Dexterran’s name seemed to sound familiar to Sawer because well, he was familiar with all of them. Every day, at his desolate Singalort chamber, he would scroll through the databases of all the citizens that were present in the office’s in-built supercomputer. The satellite that had been said by the new minister of defence, General Dean Kaca – who was also one of the men on the inner circle of The Order of The Quppis – to be built for security purposes was in fact, built for the exact opposite reason.
It tracked the movements and the positions of all the inhabitants in the country, so that as far as one was within the geography of Dexter Islands, he was not hidden from the eye of Sawer and he was not, at any rate, safe. It also contained the profiles of all the men plus their life accounts. Sometimes as he scrolled through the records, he would find an interesting personality and then tell to his bodyguard: ‘Get 20 men from the Omega team. This man, Diego Fine lives with his wife, his twelve young kids, his aunt and his grandmother. Let them go to this man’s house, kill eleven of his children and spare any of them they desire, kill his aunt and bring the grandma here. I will let Diego swim in the blood of his children’, he would say with the satisfaction of a good decision.
In forty minutes, he would get a telephone call from the men he had given an assignment. ‘The eleven kids are cleared! The aunt cleared!’, the Omega-ranked assassin would say and Sawer would give a cold chuckle as he could hear the loud, wild mournings of the bereaved Diego Fine in the background.
‘Where is he now?’, Sawer asked Eel.
‘He got lucky, he got extradited’
‘Hmm’, Sawer sighed as he could now remember where he had heard the name. He always knew he had to trust his instincts and he was glad that he had killed him off. ‘He is in good hands’
Officer Eel who didn’t quite get what that meant just turned his face to the proceedings of the shootings.
There were three hundred rifle-men which meant three hundred deaths, leaving the first ward with about six hundred men only. And among them was Filman Meynard, the main culprit.
‘Let all the men return to their wards’, a voice from the loudspeaker echoed.
Filman got up from his knees and walked ahead taking every step with shivering hands, finding it difficult to grasp that none of the masked men had found him to shoot. He was almost out of the room when another blast echoed through the room. ‘I would not allow anyone to die for you. The best I can do is to get a lot of men to die with you’, Sawer said and returned his pistol into his pocket.
The Redemption had now claimed more lives than The Death Toast and had marked the record number of people to be killed in one day. It was only solid verification to show that the fiery beast had been there.