The complete journey from Boorbunk Prison to somewhere in the middle of Gollogher where a large farm stood took three hours. The trucks pulled up at the side of a rugged road on one side and a farm – that was so well-organised it was hard for an average Dexterran from Tifftam or Yorkyashire to believe such place existed in Dexter – on the other. Clearly not Dale who had come from Baskers where wheat farms were more than houses.
It was deep into the midnight and half of them were asleep. ‘This is where I live’, the farmer said who had driven the first bus said.
‘Who helped you tend your farm when you were away?’, one of them asked.
‘Weeds do not exist on this part of the state if that’s what you’re asking. And I only got arrested last week’, he replied. The lucky farmer, who had lied to his wife that he was going to return home when he was found innocent – as if there was going to be such a time – would be at least make it home and fulfil his promise to his wife. He hadn’t stayed long in Boorbunk and hadn’t even witnessed any Death Toasts and that consecutively, sounded like going to the beach and seeing no sand or sea.
They walked down a complete mile into the farmland to reach a tiny barn overshadowed by the tall crops.
‘This is where I live’, the man announced and there was a wide grin on his face again, excited by the way everyone was watching him, wondering how they were going to fit into the little barn. ‘Not really’, he upturned. ‘This is just the outside, wait till you get to the inside. Follow me, follow me. One after the other’, he moved to the centre of the room and some other men started trooping in. He pulled off a large block from the surface of the ground to expose a foxhole floor. He grabbed a metal ladder and set it from the surface to the underground floor.
‘Sir. I will let you go first’, he said to Dale. Who wouldn’t call their saviour sir?
Dale climbed down into the underground layer to reveal a room in absolute contrast with the one above. It was as expansive as three Redemption Halls combined, it was so well lit that one who had stayed all day in the room wouldn’t guess that it was midnight or that the weather was freezing outside. In fact, it would have been desperately hot if not for the ventilators applied on every wall that blocked the room.
It took quite some time before they all made it into the room, Khelain – the ex-prisoner who owned the farm – coming in last. ‘So now this is where I live’, he pronounced.
Dale chuckled in fascination of how beautifully the place had been constructed. ‘How long did you make this place up?’
‘It took me nine days to build it up. I did it out of necessity. All my children were killed when the enemy came so I had to protect the rest of my family’. Dale wondered if death had gotten so common and ordinary in Dexter that had a father kept a smiling face when talking about his sons’ killings. ‘No, it’s okay. That was four years ago and we have been living here since. No one would find this underground place and we’ll have been killed if we still lived in a normal house. We suffered a close shave two times with them. I was out at my farm, I just dived into some of my crops and I watched them head into the barn. They left when they didn’t see anybody’
‘It’s really great’, Humphrey added.
‘Thank you’, Khelain said and exposed his teeth, making Dale ponder if one of the new developments at Boorbunk included seizing of toothpastes. He headed to a wall and pressed a button on it.
Looking closely, Dale recognised that it wasn’t actually a wall, it was a door. Until the door opened, Dale would not have been sure; the door had the same muddy colour with the rest of the walls and happened to be a compartment.
A woman rushed out and jumped on Khelain squeezing him in her arms. She yelled mirthfully and the emptiness of the room didn’t help matters at all; echoes were ricocheting against every wall. They remained like that for a whole minute. Her eyes were streamed with tears and when she looked at his face, she hugged him again. ‘It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m home now. I told you I will be home’, Khelain said but his wife didn’t stop crying.
‘You know I didn’t believe you. I thought I will never see you again’, the woman replied.
By this time, all the ten thousand prisoners were already seated on the ground; a number of them lay their bodies on the ground completely asleep. Humphrey, although was feeling sleepy too, had his hands on his leg trying to feel how bad the fracture had gone, and as he saw how horrible it looked, he felt unbearable pain surge in him. Barry rested on the ground, still awake though. Dale also could no longer ignore the pains in his trunk. No kind of stress and no midnight hour would make any of The Humour Sect members ever feel drowsy, not after all their late nights at Crawdown. As for Tristan, he couldn’t move his eyes from the couple’s beautiful reunion moment, it made him remember Samantha and get very eager to meet her again. However, he found himself more yearning to see how old Andrew Moses had grown.
‘Hey, it’s okay. My wife will treat you just in time’, Khelain said to Dale in an exigent tone, as if knowing how badly he was silently writhing in pain. ‘She’s a nurse’, he said in a low voice and Dale nodded, feeling relieved. ‘These are the two men who saved us’, Khelain said with his face turned to his wife.
‘Oh, really’, his wife gave a grateful smile. ‘Thank you all very much. Thank you’, her face came down to Humphrey’s knee. ‘Don’t worry. I will be right back’, she commented and went into the built-in wall room.
His wife was beautiful, too beautiful for Khelain if Dale was to speak. She was like a rose, pretty and fragile. He imagined how she would have appeared when she lost her children. She hurried back with a lot of materials in her hands to treat them as well as two stools.
‘I need you to be calm’, she said to Humphrey as she moved her hand towards the glass, still stuck in the side of his head.
‘Okay’, Humphrey replied. I am calm, I am a hero, I don’t feel pain. But he found himself blinking repeatedly and gritting his teeth together before she even applied force on the glass. ‘Aargh!’, he yelled when the glass was out of his head, and it wasn’t as big as Peter exaggerated it to be in the bus. If it was that big, Humphrey wouldn’t have survived that kind of cut. Now, he was bleeding heavily. With her latex gloves on, she quickly placed gauze against the bleeding.
‘That’s good’, she said after some minutes when the bleeding had subsided substantially. She got some bandage and wrapped it around his head. ‘Here you go. I think you will need to lie down’
Humphrey groaned as he lay his back on the ground, he was still pressing the gauze against the wound. She cleared all the blood from Humphrey’s drenched knee with a white cloth. She used some folded cardboard to serve as splints. ‘Sorry’, she said when Humphrey gave a light groan. She also applied bandages.
She moved over to Dale and the bullet holes on his bare chest were obvious. She was astonished that he had carried bullets in him for such a long time and asked him if he felt pain, because if he wasn’t feeling pain with the metals in his chest, he was definitely going to feel a whole lot of it when she gets it out. She got a bowl with water and wore gloves on both of her hands. She was proud to be, at least working as a nurse. Ever since they had relocated to live under the ground of a farm. All she ever had to do was cook food for herself, Khelain and their new two-year-old son Bruce, sleep, listen to stereo, speak with Khelian all day long when he was not in the farm and daydream. Daydreaming was the activity she resorted to most of the time, when Bruce was fast asleep and not tugging at her nipple for breastmilk and Khelain was doing some work, she’d just lay on the bare ground the way Barry was laying and close her eyes, thinking about good things, thinking about the future; that great future when they won’t be dead or be scared of dying so much that they will live underground. A future where they would live in a normal house and Bruce would learn that houses didn’t have to be holes in the floor – it could be a bungalow painted in blue with a nasturtium garden surrounding it and yellow butterflies perching on them. And she was one of the very few people who had suffered grief and yet believed that there will be light one day.
She moved her hand carefully to Dale’s chest, hoping that he would not look at it and would not shout too loudly when she took it out. ‘You look really young’, she mentioned to turn Dale’s mind away from what she was doing.
Dale, however, was ready for it. He simply gave a smile.
‘How old are you?’, she asked and this time, she had slipped the bullet halfway out of his chest. It came out accompanied by gusts of blood.
‘Twenty-two’, Dale replied and jerked a little backwards when the bullet made it out of his chest. He gritted his teeth hardly to avoid screaming.
‘It’s okay. It’s okay’, she said and smiled, Dale found her teeth’s colour the contrary of her husband’s. ‘Oh! So you’re twenty-two. My first son was about that age when he…’, her face turned morose. ‘left’
Dale reached out and touched her shoulder mildly. ‘I understand. We’ve all lost people’, he gently remarked.
She nodded, dismissing her sorrow and dipped the second bullet into the bowl as well. She applied petroleum jelly on the wound and cleaned it up. ‘You’ll need to wash this twice a day with clean water, Mr…’
‘Dale. Just Dale’. No Mister, he implied.
‘Wow. Dale. Mr. Dale’, she defied.
In that time, Khelain walked in from the room with two trays of steaming boiled corn forming a mountain. ‘So, this is what we have. Let’s eat. Come, pick as many as you want. We have lots of corn. We don’t have nothing to do with it’, and he didn’t have to cajole them to come, they were all hungry men who had just battled like they had never battled before. They trooped and pick the corns in their palms, moving from hand to hand trying to cool its hotness, and yet eating at the same time. Khelain brought more trays and so did his wife bring more.
She also brought out a little radio and dropped on a side wall. She waited there for some time, trying to make the old, weakened-battery stereo come on and find signal which was going to be very difficult, credit to how many metres they were from ground level. It did start playing some time later and the music from it rented the empty space. At least it made the whole thing appear merrier.
Khelain had also cooked up potatoes and that was what Dale decided to eat. He hadn’t tasted anything since he set out looking for the Platini bus carrying Humphrey. Following that, the woman brought two large heavy crates of Tall Elf drink. Dale found it to be the Dexterran equivalent of Sprite back in the pub in America but sweeter, of course. In truth, Dale found the items of Dexter classier than the USA. The roads exclusive, by the way.
Some loud country music was playing from the radio, typical Dean Greene – one of Barry’s favourite artists. As he lay on the ground and hummed to the sweet song, his mind rewind to a sweet night at Crawdown with he and Michael with mics, singing to the very same song by Dean Greene. Some people would stand with their drinks in their hands, dancing to the music while others wriggled their bodies as they sat. Michael had the high tenor voice and he had the bass; and no combination worked better for a country song.
Barry kept his face unblinking at the ceiling with a drab face on. All he could see now was Michael. His one brother, connected only not by blood. Things would never be the same again, he realised. He would always need that louder voice with him that subconsciously lifted his spirits and made him far more confident than he thought he would ever be.
‘Barry! Barry! Are you okay?’, Tristan asked after numerous calls. ‘Come check out these fried potatoes. I have not tasted anything sweeter in a very long time’, he said and handed over some sweetly peppered spud to him.
‘Wow’, Barry exclaimed when the potato filled his mouth and turned out to be worth the hype – good enough to make him forget any worries. For now, at least.
He picked up more of the potatoes and ate and ate. ‘Drinks are down here. Let’s have a good time’, Khelain announced.
Everyone was awake, the spirit of sleep very far away. The Dean Greene song faded to rumbling sounds and everything went silent, turning everybody’s attention to the wireless. The next time the radio was going to speak, it was broadcasting news, and what other news were expected to fill the nation if not the unexpected prison break.
‘…although 70 of the prisoners were killed during the getaway, none of the other prisoners were retained. The almighty fortification of the standard prison that held the most notorious criminals in the country was rendered vain by the ten thousand, one hundred and twenty-one detainees that escaped without any trace…’, the reporter dictated but Khelain turned the radio to another station where music was playing again.
‘Good, let’s continue the merry’, he said and instantaneously everyone was back, happier than they had been in months or for people like Peter, years. Humphrey remained on the ground, his left leg was not rigid enough to support him.
‘Let us welcome our hero who set us free! Dale’, Khelain was the announcer, again.
Dale smiled and walked forward, he had something important to say. ‘It’s with a lot of happiness in my heart that I see you all free because we were not meant to be bonded in the first place’, he said and they cheered. ‘First things first, we are all survivors, we were lucky. We are still lucky to be here today. Some of us were not as fortunate, our brothers, our friends, other innocent men’s skull have hung on the walls with their mouths not privileged to proclaim any word or celebrate even with us today. Their families would not be able to see their faces anymore. Let’s hold one singular moment of silence for all of our fellow men’
The room went silent at that time; they all had their eyes shut and one of their knees dropped on the ground, taking the moment with utter importance because they witnessed it and they knew how close they’d come every three weeks to joining the list.
‘May their souls rest in absolute repose’, Dale’s whispered words broke the silence. ‘But I want to congratulate the rest of you on this glorious morning. The chains have broken forever!’, he said and the noise from everyone filled the place. ‘But we have one more task to do’
There was suspense in the air. ‘Just as we have broken the chains of Boorbunk off our hands. We all know that we are not completely free. Our lives are not completely ours. So, we’ve got one giant task. To set the nation free’, Dale revealed and cynical murmurings filled every one’s mouths. He had asked for too much from them.
‘What do you mean by that?’, someone asked and some other people echoed. Even Tristan had a disapproving look on his face.
‘The terrorists. We can face them. We can protect the people. We have to. No one is going to do it if we don’t’
‘Face the terrorists? Do you know what you’re saying? We are going to get ourselves killed’, another man protested.
‘You don’t know what you’re saying, lad’
‘There is no way we do anything’
‘We’re not the military’
‘We have faced enough already’
‘We have a better chance living if we simply stay out of more trouble!’
‘I went to a place where there is 911!’, Dale firmly said and thankfully the protests stopped. ‘But here look around, we don’t have anything. We don’t even have security. Everything is depleted. We are alone open to the attack of the enemy!’, Dale shouted. ‘If you get a knock on your door tomorrow and you open to find a gun on your head. What are you going to do?’, he paused for a minute. ‘We have to save ourselves, people and we can go there with the resilience that we hold. Our security is in our goddamn hands. We are going to be our own military’, Dale said and looked around at all facing him with dissenting eyes.
‘Dale. We will get killed and you need to understand that, first’
‘That’s what someone told me when I was attempting to save y’all lives. You think I will be here talking to you if I listened to them. Y’all will still be back there, fearing what will happen next minute’, Dale said. He raised his voice now with unexpected vehemence. ‘And there is a little girl out there! Who doesn’t know what’s next for her. Her parents are dead and she’s displaced. She is helpless and she can’t guess what her future is going to be. This is not what we see Dexter as! We could all be heroes if we take the giant step. The enemies are people and bullets can penetrate them too. God is going to be with us. On the journey to our promised land, to our bright horizon, we have to go and forget any fears. But surely, it will be tough and many of us will lose our lives’, he said frankly. ‘But, someone has to make the sacrifice and I am going to be the first to drop my concern about my survival and fight with all I’ve got’
Khelain walked forward to Dale and tapped his shoulder. ‘I will join you’, he said.
Many hands went up in the crowd and more people joined, although frightened by the gravity of the decision they had just made.
‘Dale, we are going to do this. Together’, Tristan said and he raised his hand too.
Dale smiled. ‘But first, let’s return home’, he replied.