The two occasions that made Boorbunk different from every other prison were The Death Toast and The Redemption. And with thirteen of such ceremonies witnessed, The Redemption was the most likely for Dale and his friends to get adapted to, the fuss and hope was gone since it was only one person that was going to finally get lucky, after all.They all stood in line for the sixteenth edition of The Redemption. Dale was standing beside two huge men with so much hair on their faces, head and all over the other parts of their body that their tight prison uniforms could not cover; each prisoner was given the same medium-sized uniform, good for slim prisoners and unlucky for larger-sized inmates. With all the hair on their bodies, Dale predicted that they had been in Boorbunk for ages. Their most useful years wasted here and probably, just in the next Death Toast edition of their wards, their lives might be qualified with that word too.Each man had taken their place and then, Officer Eel cli
Turning and turning finally surmised into giving up and finding a place on the side of the road to just rest for a while and that had led to a long slumber. Dale remained on the sidewalk, with his head placed in the middle of his laps and his eyes shut for hours despite the loud zooming of cars past him every passing minute. It was until the sun had gone down and dusk had arrived completely that he had raised his head up again, in total surprise that he had actually been sleeping on the road. The road was still busy but the night’s darkness was prominent everywhere. He had the assurance in his mind that he was going to stay shelterless for the night-time and possibly for the first few days before he got his bearing and could get his foot in this new place.Dale stood up and gave a loud yawn. No matter what the case was, no situation could beat staying in a little room, ordered around by whistles. Even though it meant sleeping on the street or wandering throughout the night or staying
The emperor of The Blazing Empire, the governor of the Order of the Quppis; General Owen Sawer in all his actions thrived to make something crystal clear to all the citizens of Dexter: that there was no soft side to the present situation and that no one was spared and that the fact that they were Dexterrans was a huge grievance that they were going to pay for brutally and painfully. He reminded himself every day of what he should be: a pernicious, ferocious beast who was completely devoid of emotions and whose place in the ecosystem was to tear people apart. Every day, he got closer to becoming that person and farther from the person he used to be: a soldier, still fierce and deadly but willing to sacrifice himself for his nation. And he was on the brink of doing that in the Pelican war.He had two bullets in his chest but he kept shooting because he knew that if he stopped, Dexter would officially be defeated and handed over to their neighbours, the Norton Islands (The Pelicans). Onl
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 ar
'Del, set the lines straight’, Astor yelled from the other side of the rail. Dale had spent little to no time in understanding how to be a railway construction worker as specialised as that sounds, or at least be useful with some of the work that required less skill. Just as he had spent little time getting his feet back on ground and learning to survive again in the new town of Santa Fe, New Mexico. He had dumped the gloomy extradition clothes into a refuse bin and the only clothes he had were the two dirty, always-unwashed work clothes. He lived in a tavern; a tiny room that was only a bit larger than the prison he had once stayed, it had a stacked bed that he shared with one of the workmen, his two work clothes hanging from the wall facing the bed and his only footwear - brown muddy work boots – laying beneath the bed. There was little or no space to walk around in the room. For Dale, ahead of the claustrophobic restraints of the room, there was the bigger problem of nostalgia that
Dale carefully carried his food tray to avoid hitting the obese sole waitress in the pub, that he figured out to the pub owner’s wife, as he walked to his seat. He found an empty table at the corner of the local restaurant where he hoped people wouldn’t find him, and where he could have a good view of the television. He took one peer at the TV, relieved not to see or hear anything that would make him lose his appetite, the way he had done yesterday and refused to eat ever since.He opened the free Guilder that he had refused to collect yesterday and took two full gulps, rendering the bottle half-empty. It made him remember the days of The Humour Sect back at Crawdown, they had spent the midnight together at a table, very much unawake. Their table would be filled with tens of alcoholic bottles; a benefit that they enjoyed from the sellers for free. Dale had learnt to drink including how to finish a Green Bear bottle in just four gulps. They took approximately ten bottles every night bu
Philip Hundred straightened up his blazers and placed his forehead on the wall staining it with his sweat. He had always been a coward, that kind of man who wore his emotions on his capes and didn’t exactly know how to say no. Him not saying no to Sawer seven years ago was one mistake that he knew that he was never going to forgive himself of and even bigger, a mistake Dexter would not forget.People had turned out at his campaigns, ecstatic and trusting him to the point of holding on to his every word and he let everything go down the drain when someone finally came and offered him a juicy offer, too juicy he forgot it was a poison. He who had thought himself a great strong pillar of society was now sitting one of the chairs, having a conclave with the other members of The Blazing empire. He groaned and hit his forehead against the wall numerous times, it was unreal and now it was a nightmare for him.In the next ten hours, he would be leaving the presidential home, having resigned a
Dale wasn’t sure the exact time that the bus was going to arrive but he was certain that it was going to come that day. It was exactly three months since he was carted away from Dexter and brought to this road with the Welcome to New Mexico signboard. Since The Redemption happened every month, he was expecting to see the Platini truck drop another ex-prisoner today – who would think he was free, until he sees a sniper chasing him around town.Vehicles from Dexter were not difficult to spot. Platini was the only truck manufacturing company in the whole of the Island and its trucks came in only one colour: avocado-green. Although Dexterrans didn’t really like the brand colour of creamy green, The Platini industry would not change it for any reason and everyone was too poor to start their car factories and reject the unfair monopoly of Lloyd Platini, the Reckdettean billionaire. The masses of Dexter just never had it their way. Everything was too tough, they would say and Dale was not ha