They were all standing, sweating in their different cells in their special black uniform for this special event, as nervous as getting nervous could get. The troubled silence was violently broken by the arrival of the officers. They had come in full force and this time, they didn’t only look angry, they looked like they were on some really heavy drugs, their pupils seemed to have constricted to half its usual size. They looked like tigers and they weren’t going to hesitate to shoot people. There was no chance for anyone to keep calm, it was not time for decorum, it was not time for silence or patient handling, death after all didn’t attack lightly or patiently.
There were about a hundred officers in the place, they rushed in and pulled out the prisoners into a queue. Some of them arrived with heavy chains and attached all of the prisoners’ hands together in a single plane impossible for them to move out of the row. There was no need to shout orders today, it was the only day when they were given the license to shoot people and they really wanted to do it. They looked like blood-thirsty predators, they were. At once, they marched out of their cell each of them taking one step at the same time, unable to move their hands, it was fixed in the heavy chains. The officers stayed around them on every side with automated guns in their hands. They were taken into a separate room with a very long table as the only structure in the room, it was partly dim with short windows at the top of the tall, dark walls with no paints at all.
They marched in and they all stood in front of the table. On the table, there were glass cups in the front of each of them. They were instructed to sit on the chairs facing the table, facing the sweating cup that definitely contained something really cold.
‘Drink’, the officer said in his monotonous, calm yet disturbing voice. They all managed to raise their hands from its fixed position to the cup.
Dale stared at the contents of the cup through the glass. It was a juice poured into ice, dark red in colour, like… like blood but it wasn’t. Peter had called the ritual drink, a drink that was taken before the real practice.
Dale took it all at once as hard as it seemed, noting his swallowing problem and the unbearable temperature of the drink that made his teeth convulse of its own will. He dropped the glass back and then they were up again. The thirty minutes they had spent seemed like a whole day already.
They all got up and marched again silently out of the room and were taken into another room, dimly lit with the same short windows that was in the past room. The room was large, twice as broad as the last room. More eerie and more important to the event of the day.
It was the room where the sacrificial lamb was going to be picked out, gotten rid of and forgotten about, whether he was innocent or not. They were more people in there, about a thousand guards were in there, standing with their backs to the wall. They were dressed in special armour, special masks with weapons in their hands. They didn’t move at all, they weren’t going to. Until someone was picked.
All of them were stretched out in one single row, one single plane facing the frontier wall. On the wall, there was a huge image of a skull, it looked so real, they could all guess it was likely the skull that was carefully extracted from one of the previously dead prisoners. There had been another one there during the first Death Toast that The Humour Sect had witnessed. This one looked larger and more intact, as Dale stared at it now, he decided that it wasn’t human. It was black in colour, pitch-black.
They remained there, standing in the room sweat all over their body, trying to stay calm. Dale who was standing at the farthest distance (Number Ninety) dared not look to his right, or else he would have to keep an eye contact with one of the ‘robot-looking’ unusual people, they were the ones who carried out the killing. Nevertheless, he peered once at the right. It was the closest he had ever come to one. Dale recognised something on his vest – a Κ sign. Kappa symbol, Dale realised. Kappa? What was Greek alphabet doing on a prison executioner’s vest?.
He looked at his left and he saw Pierson staring down at the ground, mute like the rest of them. Only that he wasn’t breathing hard at all, he looked sparingly calm, no sweat, no glassy eyes, no clenched teeth or fists. Sparingly because no one could really tell what was going on in his mind.
It was about one hour before some men walked into the room through the entrance, facing the prisoners directly. The sound of their loafers broke the silence. No one really wanted to look up or see who the people were but Dale’s curiosity forced him to. Slowly, he raised his head from the dark dry ground up above the podium that the men were standing on, he could see their loafers now. They were wearing real shoes not those heavy soldier boots that all the officers were known to wear. His gaze went up and he could see their trousers. Then at once, the full picture came into sight. They were all in dark suits, all in black shades, only one man in the centre wasn’t wearing black shades, he was wearing glasses, reading glasses with a golden frame.
Dale could remember someone who wore golden frame. No, it wasn’t in here, no one wore glasses for whatever reason in Boorbunk. No, it wasn’t in Crawdown, no one had enough to afford those kinds of glasses that had frames that were shimmering even in the dim-lit room, the glasses were expensive. The image seemed to get clearer, he had seen the person on TV. Yes, he knew the person. It was the governor of Gollogher, Governor Caiman Dormas and he was standing right in front of them.
His mind went back to about two weeks ago when they had read about the arrival of the governor in the prison, Peter had mentioned that it wasn’t just a visit but he hadn’t said what exactly he was here for. He had said: ‘Y’all will find out’.
He was in the room where The Death Toast was supposed to get played. What could he be here for?
Governor Dormas had been brought into power after a violent coup overthrowing the opposition party, the coup had been undertaken by an unknown guerrilla, presumably just a group of angry citizens who were fed up of the bad, loose government that was headed by the then Governor Logan. The citizens who couldn’t imagine a worse administration than that of Logan’s and thereby expected a miracle to take place in the era of the new governor in charge, were made to experience what a worse, more terrible system would look like. Terrorism broke through Gollogher and nothing was done about it.
The governor seemed to be non-existent even when the loudest state-wide protests had been held, beckoning on him to fulfil his promise of complete change to the state and shedding light on the dark spots of the society. He only came out to speak, once in every four months, talking gently explaining that a greater future was coming and it was sooner than expected. They had take his words to heart and have a good night sleep but only for that night. They had wake up the next morning to hear of a bomb explosion in a stadium during a football match that had killed thousands of people by a suicide bomber who had run into the pitch, seconds before the bomb was detonated.
Now, he was here. What on Earth could he be doing here? Dale begged for an answer as he kept staring across the men, all looking so tranquilised and absent-minded in a way that almost deceived the prisoners that everything was well. Whatever he was here for, it would only take few minutes for him to find out.
The officers soon joined the governor on the stage, one of them had a mallet in his hand. He hit the mallet on a table three times, it was supposed to proclaim the starting of the toast.
‘It has been quite a while since we were in this room, the last time we were here, the cold wasn’t this prominent but fortunately for all of us, it is here now and the cold wine that y’all have taken was rather unnecessary. The weather must have put you all in the right frame of mind. The coldness. The chills. The coldness of death!’
Dale shivered at those words and shut his eyes. He could notice Pierson looking at him. ‘It’s okay’, he whispered. Dale nodded but shut his eyes again, he really wished he could block his ears from the torturous words of the officer.
The drink was the toast, the toast to a chilling end, to a chilling demise.
‘Hey, happy birthday’, Pierson said.
Dale smiled and nodded, he wondered how he had known the exact date even with no calendars but it was Pierson and he never got numbers wrong.
‘Here with us, we have our special dignitary, the governor of Gollogher and he would be launching for us today the ceremony. This room is your death row and today, he will be the lead executioner!’, he announced. Right in the eyeballs of the governor was this imperceptible, almost uncatchable tinge of fierce pleasure as he looked at all the prisoners.
At that point, some men came and removed the chains from their wrists. Two of the men in special outfits and dark masks on their faces brought into the room a table; the table that contained all of their names written on it.
‘And lest I should forget, I will like to show this special souvenir to our dignitary today’, he said and stretched his hand up to the skull on the wall. ‘While you were not around, we were able to pull out the skull of the last prisoner that we killed!’. The response to that was shrieks of shock from everyone. ‘We painted it completely with ink and we replaced it with the last one’
Governor Dormas looked up at it, ogling his eyes over it as if it was some piece of really priceless treasure. Dale watched him staring at it in silence, his expression said it all, he looked impressed but why was he silent? Was he feeling a little guilty of what he was doing? Or he was not bold enough to show the kind of bloody asshole he was.
He positioned the rim of his glasses well on his face and then looked away from the skull that used to be housed in The Crusher’s head. He marched up to the table and without hesitation, he picked one of the planks that had one of the men’s names on the underside of it and handed it over to the officer. He walked magnificently and sat on a sofa that had been prepared for him, it was resting against the wall that Djovaag’s skull hung from.
The main officer turned the plank. He grinned, he seemed pleased with the name of the person there, or maybe it just felt good to know that very soon, one of the men standing in front of him in the black uniform will be there no more. There was a disquietude among them, nervosity had reached its peak. It was going to be a great relief to know that you were going to remain alive for the next four weeks at least but until then, they had to face this despicable moment.
‘It’s a Barry!’, he said at once and while they were sighs of relief among the other men, Dale, Tristan, Michael and Pierson were about to fall apart. It is clearly known to everyone that there was only one Barry in the fifteenth ward. Only the blonde-haired Barry, the guy who they all enjoyed when he sung. Tears had blurred Dale’s eyes already. Barry remained still, he kept staring at the announcer who was staring right back at him with a monstrous smile held within his cheeks.
‘Barry Yates’, he said finally. Everyone kept staring around to know who the second Barry was. All the armoured men suddenly broke out from their still positions, it was time to get to work. About thirteen of them matched down the row and grabbed no one else but the only anonymous man in the ward.
The Voyant. He was Barry YATES.
He didn’t struggle and there was no change in his expression. He looked the same way: morose, terrified, mute. They surrounded him on every side and since he didn’t struggle, there was no need to move him roughly. They led him out of that room and into another, the place where the exercise of the day was going to be finalised.
Dale shut his eyes as he could hear the multiple blasts echoing into his ears. About a hundred bullets had been wasted on the elderly man. As he opened his eyes, tears burst out and he couldn’t hold it. The next time they came here, they weren’t going to find this skull anymore, they were going to find another. Michael rushed up to Dale and hugged him.
‘Happy birthday’, he said smiling.
‘You ain’t no bud no more, so you should stop crying. You are twenty-one today’, Pierson said and hugged him.
Barry was also there too smiling at him. He had just escaped by a hair’s breadth. In this case, it was a matter of surnames. If only the man had mentioned Schlesinger, Dale wouldn’t know what would be happening now.
They were all made to return to their cells and since they were now eighty-nine, the wardens shuffled them across the cells which made Dale move to Cell Number twenty-three and now he was opposite Tristan who was number sixty-six. By the time Dale reached the cell, all the materials that belonged to the late Barry had been packed away and he felt a little sober as he walked into the room. He dropped his own load on the shelves and unfolded the bed to sit on it.
The Voyant had the luxury or perhaps, had been cursed with the power to know beforehand that his death was next. It was more of a luxury, more of a blessing, the rest of them had gone blindly into that room not knowing what to expect, if it was their turn or not. He gripped the steel of the bed and sighed, he arose and walked over to the sink and splashed the algid water all over his face. It was a relief to know that he and his friends were going to live longer and he felt a strong confirmation that one of them, if not him would make it out during the game of The Redemption before the next Toast.
Just then, his eyes sighted a piece of paper. He picked it up and there was something written on it. It had a date that showed that it had been written on The Free Day.
Hello Friend. That was what the letter began with. Dale sat and started to read with keen concentration. Just as he would have been eager to hear words from The Voyant’s mouth, he was to read his words scribbled clearly on the paper.