The next morning came and so did the next morning and so did the next week and by that time, Dale was not only known in Dexter Islands but in the world.
‘When we thought we had seen it all from the assassination of their resigned president, Philip Hundred right in his presidential quarters, to the assassination of the present governors of the eight states of the country and some days later, the maximum prison being broken into…’, started the BBC presenter. Right behind him was the display of a rather ordinary-looking innocent kid who would be reckoned to be nothing more than a teenager, speaking vehemently in a press hall and it was those words that would bring Dexter into a different light. ‘The very individual who had led the breakout, Dale Eagan whose real name is Reece Bailey, arrived at a media house and exposed everything about the previously anonymous terrorist sect that had been troubling the nation’
‘And now we know that the Boorbunk Prison is in fact, a large oubliette where people are brought in to play a deathly game, which is like the real-life Hunger Games known as The Death Toast’, he said and gasped out a laugh. ‘Now, as funny as this may sound, it has been found out that none of these prisoners were actually guilty of the elevated crimes they were held for and that the whole thing was just a branch of the terrorist’s group. Now the story of the terrorist group is a whole new story…’
If a bird was streaming past every house in USA, it would see their TV on with the news showing on it and with everyone watching ardently. It was like a myth been demystified and this one was a real-life myth. Perching its beak against one of the windows and the exclaims of shock would be heard as the TV showed the picture of General Owen Sawer, ‘…whom Dale Eagan had revealed to be the initiator of the most powerful terrorist group the world has ever faced, bent on turning Dexter into a wasteland and leading its population of thirty million to obsolescence…’
It would fly up in the sky and then later stop on the roof of another house watching an outdoor ceremony taken place. There was a radio somewhere on the ground, listening to the same news. It was a birthday celebration only that the celebrant had asked his family to stop singing the birthday song. Astor moved closer to the radio with his mouth agape.
‘Dale Eagan’, he uttered, he had not come to the realisation that the person talked about everywhere might be his Dale Eagan until he heard that unmistakable voice of his.
‘You know him?’, his mother asked.
Astor nodded with a smile on his face. I know him very well.
The bird flew away and stopped at the windowsill of another family house. There was a TV and the clips of Dale’s three-hour speech was shown. It wondered if any of the people were breathing as they glued their eyes to their television with the only sound in the room the voice of the utterly radical Reece Bailey, son of soldier Andre Bailey.
It took off again, spreading its wings and gliding in air through miles until it reached a set of shops and stopped at one with glass walls since that was the only one it could see through. There were only two people in the room: a craggy-faced aged man with a device in his hand, pulling hair off the head of the other man who was sitting. Still, both of them had their eyes lifted up to the little TV in the room, listening to the very same thing that its tiny birdie brain had guessed to be on it.
‘…Dexter is a nation too with people of whom I am part. We are not some sets of ducks whose getting extinct is something of an animal epic drama’, the bird’s ears could hear clearly what the television was saying, even through the glass. One of its eyes saw the speaker still sitting calmly but with his voice, powerful with indignation and dynamism. ‘No more pickets outside government houses, no more helplessness. To all the awesome people of Dexterrans, I want you to clear off those tears and hold your family and friends closer to yourself. There will always be hope in this darkness and fear, it only takes courage to pronounce it. Do not cower because the storm would soon be over…’
Mark’s eyes widened a little and uttered ‘Dale?’. The lark squeaked off as if trying to inform the man that he was about to drive the clipper into the man’s forehead which will make him lose the only customer he’d had throughout the week.
‘In a country where free speech is more like a death sentence, he has not only performed one of the bravest acts in modern history but has also called the attention of the rest of the world’, the bird heard from a radio in a nearby casino shop. ‘Protests have been held in seventeen countries including Japan, France, Nigeria, England, Belgium and the United States of America’
Off to the next shop with a TV, it could see thousands of people clamouring with placards that has scribbled words on them. ‘Let’s set Dexter free’, ‘#Operation Dale Eagan’, while some wrote ‘#Operation Reece Bailey’ and so many. They were huge graffiti on a wall, the artist had drawn a magnificent image of Dale. Then, some other people came along speaking an Asian language and also lifting placards.
‘And because of this, the leaders of the G8 nations met yesterday in Berlin, Germany on the case of Dexter and they announced their unanimous intention to join forced and face the terrorist group known as The Order of The Quppis’, the broadcaster said and the image of English Prime Minister, Tyron Jefferson was shown. ‘We are going to do this for the collective benefit of humanity and it’s to no one’s gain that we have a group of people perished and so we have to make this giant step…’
The bird flew up in the sky, tired of all the news and just tried to find its way to back to its nest.
‘Andre is the best thing to come out of Baskers’, Darius said to Dale. ‘We all end up to be one thing. We all became farmers. All simps and…’, he rubbed his forefinger lightly over his lower lip. ‘Your father came along. He went for army and made us proud. Men of Baskers never made it on TV. You couldn’t guess the amount of joy that we felt when we saw him winning an award from the former president in his elegant army uniforms with the rest of the soldiers for some war’
It had been seven days that Dale had arrived in Baskers, seven days since he had gone to Dexter Call, seven days since the world has been chanting his name everywhere. He was sitting with Darius and Lampard, all sipping wheat beer in the hot afternoon. Today, the windows were open just like it had been since Dale’s speech. All the houses in Baskers had their windows open again; Dale’s words had almost completely wiped out their fears. They were almost sure that nothing would harm them.
‘Then we lost him. We lost a gem or so we thought. It would be hard to lose such a gem. You were the rebirth of that very gem’, he said with his hand placed firmly on the shoulder of Dale. ‘I want you to do whatever you wish to do. As it stands, the world is watching you and the future of Dexter Islands can only be made bright’…’by you’
Dale nodded firmly and beamed back at Lampard. ‘Who lives there now?’, he asked.
‘Father and mother were buried there. No one else does. The town left that house alone as a tribute to him’, Lampard replied.
Dale sighed and got to his feet, moving one foot after the other, half-ready to face the nostalgia that would flood at him as he steps into his one-time family house. He went out the front door and went along the street, past Darius’ farm that was the only barrier separating his house from the family house. Even then, he still paused to look at the blue flower growing over the farm’s fence. It was scorpion grass in its most beautiful form. Forget-me-nots. Forget-me-nots.
The door of the home that had been Andre’s was brass and its red colour had almost completely faded. He pushed it open and stuck his head in to see what was left in it. It had been arranged formerly as beautifully as it could be done, a part of the tribute to the people whose blood had flown in there. Dale didn’t know why but he felt like someone had been in there recently.
The walls had large cracks and heavy cobwebs woven at the wall’s angles, he could even see the brown crest of a termite mound built tall behind the centre sofa. The pictures of the family were still left up on the walls, hanging from nails that were going to tarnish off pretty soon. Dale picked one of the pictures and dusted off sandy filth from its surface. When it was clear enough for him to make sense of the picture, he saw someone that must have been him or one of his siblings. The kid in the frame had a jolly smile on his face, he had one of his hands outstretched as if trying to block his face from the camera and his other hand raised to his head clasping his knitted orange-and-white cap with his fingers. Dale gasped impulsively when he saw the caption on the kid’s shirt: MY NAME IS REECE. He remained like that, looking at the little boy in the picture that he had once been. Meek, happy, innocent.
There was another picture that showed four young boys standing in respect of their heights, from tallest to shortest. The first one was more light-complexioned than the rest of the boys. He was wearing a white shirt, like the other boys, that was reaching his knees and khaki jeans. Lampard must have been fifteen at the time. Vince had black hair and his own shirt was mudded up with the sand of the beach that they were on. The next guy was Taylor, he had blue hair and he was bending forward a little, laughing with his milk teeth out. Reece must have said the joke because he was laughing too. He still had that oversized knitted cap on his head. The picture was very timely because his eyes were half-shut in desperate giggling and since he wasn’t holding on to the cap, the camera must have snapped before the cap flew away.
He returned it and picked another picture at the other end of the room. It showed his father and his mother, Ginny on their wedding day. They had leaned towards each other to make their first matrimonial kiss. Dale tried to smile but he couldn’t, he dropped the picture back and looked around at the room again. The picture seemed to get clearer with every passing second he spent in the living room, staring around and with every thud his sole made on the marble floor.
He remembered his parents dancing in the front of the room very frequently, almost every Saturday night when soldier wasn’t in the barracks or at a war zone. In fact, they had been dancing on the last Saturday night that there would share together, when the enemy had invaded. Andre danced with Ginny when it was only two of them left in the room, mostly when the children had gone over to Darius’ farm. However, Dale had seen them a lot of times; he would be in a partitioned-room near the living room practicing the magic trick that his father had taught him.
There will be Dean Greene music playing loudly from the video player. They would both hum to the songs as they moved slowly from side to side, turning and turning, holding hands and chuckling lowly. His mum had her back rested against Andre, and he would hold her by the waist with his fingers sloped down to her butts. Like that, they would remain until the boys returned.
Ginny was a tall woman with long, dark tresses flowing down her back. She had smooth golden skin that Dale almost remembered it glowing in the sun. She was beautiful, so gorgeous-looking that Dale had vowed to marry someone who looked exactly like her, the kind of beauty that Basker natives would qualify as too much for one man alone. And she didn’t fall into the hands of one man. Andre was a lot more than one man in everything. She had fallen for him not for his looks (he wasn’t convincingly handsome) but who wouldn’t be smitten by the most courageous man in the whole state? For him, she had been his dream girl since he was ten, since he had run errands for his mother and he would sneak around her house and hope to see her face from her bedroom’s window. At the end of the day, he was the lucky man who kissed her red lips at the altar and hours later, held her closer to himself.
As Dale moved through all the rooms still intact, he couldn’t help himself but cough out into tears.
No one should have left, he protested over and over again thinking probably he could have stopped everything from happening back then even though he had only been a tyke.
As if knowing that some people were coming for him soon, Andre had called the four of them few months before he was actually killed and thought them how to handle a gun, throw a grenade and how to dodge a bullet. He took them to the house’s basement where he had arranged a whole arsenal and instructed them to come down here whenever there seems to be danger and arm themselves. It was one of those few times when their father had spoken to them with complete seriousness. He was always joking, always laughing but these times he was in soldier form, giving orders to lay soldiers. And for Dale who had witnessed the assassination first-hand, the instructions had come in handy. The enemy came in, fully-clad like they always were.
Ginny and Andre were having their romantic time in the living room: it wasn’t just side-to-side dance that day. They were facing each other, intertwining their tongues and lips like high school kids. It seemed like Ginny really enjoyed kissing because Dale could hear her chuckle as they went on. Andre, on the other hand, had his hands clutched down at her large butts and hips, roaming his hands all over it and pressing every inch with intense amatory pleasure. Little did they know that that moment was going to be the last romantic moment they would ever share. The exchange of saliva stopped when they heard gunshot outside. Andre instantaneously broke off and told his wife to take cover. He was about to get weapons just before ten men filled the room, all of them had their guns facing him. Dale remained where he was frozen like a statue, his heart jerking spasmodically just like the guns did the very next moment. The next time Dale looked, he saw both of his parents laying dead with the floor tiled in red.
Still silently, his face went red as his eyes hosed out tears. He stood up instantaneously dropping the deck of cards, he ran down to the bedroom and went down to the cellar. From the ammunitions, he pulled out one gun and one knife. He sneaked back to the sitting room where the attackers were still staying, loitering around for any other person that they would kill. At once, Dale leapt towards one of them and holding on to his leg, he prodded the knife into the ankle until it came out of the other side. The attacker roared from under his pain and as they all turned to him, he cocked the gun and shot as many of them as he could.
‘Get him. Get him’, they shouted and chased him down the alleyway as Dale ran back to the basement. The grenades he had set on the ground there earlier detonated immediately they got in, the unharmed ones came rushing at him as he shot on. He wouldn’t have thought that he could handle an AK-47 and now, he had started to feel the weight. He managed to keep shooting as he ran out through the secret exit door of the basement that led outside. Dale’s wobbly legs wouldn’t let him go further as he fell after being tripped from a rock just outside the house. He had expected them to kill him right that moment but they didn’t. They placed their hands to their ear pieces that Dale had realised now to mean that they were receiving messages from Owen Sawer. Without saying any word, two among them had come to him and carried him until they reached their truck. Dale’s wriggling and flailing and screaming wouldn’t loosen their grip by one inch. They tied his hands together and used a duct tape over his mouth when he got into the truck.
Dale felt himself breathing hard as he thought of it, as he thought of that deadly night that had changed everything; when he had lost one family but found another. He went into the bedroom that his parents had once stayed, the one that led to the underground room where all the weapons were. As he got down the ladder and stepped in, he could still find all the ammunitions still hung over all the walls; he wasn’t even sure if any other person knew that something was down there. The rifles were full of dust and probably now useless.
Yet again, Dale had a clearer confirmation that someone might have gotten in there. The dust in the ground had footprints of someone’s boots that had walked in. But he wasn’t concerned about that at all. He just wanted to see all the memorabilia in that house, that would connect him to his past. Because the past made him feel whole.
There was a passageway out of the antic, the one he must have run through when those Quppis’ men were chasing him. The door led to the backyard of the house. There were four swings dangling gently with the breeze. Dale walked towards and rubbed his palm over the rail and the metal swings that his father must have put in place for four of them. Directly opposite the swings were the memorials of his buried parents. He sniffed in as he turned to leave the house.
Slowed down with numbness, his feet moved slowly out through the backyard and out of the home. He cleaned his eyes and took one grave look over the home again. As he returned to Darius’ home, he moved with the final conviction that there was no mistaking a battle at hand. There was no going back. It was time to go into Singalort and stop all the evil that emanated from it.