The Death Toast

The Death of Barry

He was seeing it again and this time with enough clarity which was only a plus to the nightmare. It was as if he was standing in a distance watching his helpless twelve-year old self. The man were circling around him in the centre of the road, with guns in hand, only one had an hammer in hand. Everything had rushed him all at once as he was sleeping now, like a spear in his head.

He was shaking, struggling to come out of it but his eyes were still close. He was vibrating and so was the metal he was lying on with his teeth out, groaning mildly, willing to burst out.

The men circling, the cold touch of the man on his head, the inky-black of the hammer’s head brimming in the moonlight. Everything rushed in at once yet again another really merciless pierce. His hands were clinging hard on his wrapper and he was shaking even more, the ever-increasing sound of the steel bed said it all.

The man had put off his mask… gave him the scariest smile he had ever been hit with in his life…positioned the hammer in his head…let out something like a roar…raised the hammer and was bringing it down to the side of his head.

Dale screamed out and fell off the bed, sweat all over his body still feeling dizzy like he was still in the dream, waiting for the nightmare to come off completely so that he could feel something, his breathing came really hard and he kept gasping for air as he lay on the ground face directly to the floor. His mind couldn’t get clear of it, it kept bringing back the torturous nostalgic past in the most alive way.

It later left him like a ghost and now what he could feel was the cold all around him, on the ground and in the air, keeping him wrapped in an unwelcome and icy plume. He tried to stand up and sit on his bed but he couldn’t. He felt sick, he felt paralysed, the cold was unbearable. He had a terrible sore throat; the type that wasn’t nice enough to make you spit out yellow phlegm, the type that was dry and overbearing, taking over the whole neck and throat region making it difficult to speak and he could tell that for the whole day he wouldn’t be able to eat. All his limbs were taken over by fever and he couldn’t really do anything with them. He wondered how he was going to cope throughout the day, he wasn’t sure if the wardens could give an off-day if the inmates got really sick or if there was an hospital around there. He moaned as he crawled with all his efforts to grab his bed. He stretched his hand to his bed for support but it didn’t reach it, he tried again and when he grasped the excruciatingly cold steel of the bed, he pulled the rest of his body up and sat on the bed, laying his head on the wall. He looked over at the sink at the side of the room and he wondered how he was going to get to bath that day with the usual chilling water that would probably have become ice. He shut his eyes and quickly opened it again when his brain was about to replay the dream he had just seen. He couldn’t sleep, he just sat there lifeless feeling the tremendous stings of the flies biting all over his legs and hands. With all the blisters he had accumulated all over his body since he had come, he seemed used to them, or was he? No one really gets used to pain, it wasn’t like jokes that got stale to people, it was felt afresh with equal intensity each time.

After some hours, the lights came up and then he could hear the rowdy sound waves bursting through his head from the loudspeaker. He didn’t get up, he just lay there, crying silently, hoping something would shield him from the cold, he was starting to think he was going to freeze to death. He had a sore face and he couldn’t move.

The doors opened at once and it was time for the daily count, he tilted his head to the opened bars as he could hear the boots of the officers walking in. He clutched his fists around each other and then got up and walked two steps out of his cell as ordered. He knew for sure that very soon he was most likely to slump and he knew that if he did, he might never stand again. His eyes were half-close as he could see the man walking up to him.

‘Ninety’, he heard the man say but the officer was still staring at him with bloody eyes. Dale heard him say something.

‘Stand right before I break your leg!’, he shouted again and Dale shrugged his back off the wall, trying as hard as he could to make sure that he wasn’t resting against it and then he placed his both hands beside him. He could still feel the man’s eyes on him, he wondered if there was something else he needed to do but he wasn’t even minding that at all. He was already struggling to breathe, to stay normal. He could see the man still saying to him and now more men had come to his presence.

‘Why haven’t you changed to your prison clothes?! Why haven’t you bathed? Are you deaf?’, he could hear echoes all around but he couldn’t even muster anything or tilt his head. He just raised his hands in the air to signify… whatever it could mean.

Before any other thing, he felt the hit of the block on his head. Blood trinkled in large volumes right into his left eye. There were more hits with the clubs on his stomach and groin, he fell.

BLACK OUT!

What awoke Dale later on was a splitting headache, so hurtful that he thought some of his head was already crushed out. He raised his hand slowly to his head to his forehead and he could still feel dried blood on his face. He was in his prison cell, put on his steel bed.

‘Aah’, he cried and turned his head away, it was like the hammer he had been hit with eight years ago was struck on his head again.

‘Dale’, he heard the whisper of someone from outside his cell. He recognised the voice but he couldn’t turn his head or say anything. ‘Common, bud. Can you hear us?’

They were all there, the four of them but he couldn’t do anything. He just raised his left hand up to signify he could hear them.

‘Oh! I know you feel really hurt but I hope you get well soon’. ‘Please, get well soon Dale’, another one of them said.

Dale shut his eyes again and slept off or maybe fainted, the next time he opened his eyes it was probably midnight again. He seemed to have gotten better, the pain in his body had decreased considerably except in his throat. It felt so heavy as if there was a cavity in it or as if there was a goitre developed over his throat. He couldn’t speak, he just raised his hand and touched his neck that had a hyper-increased temperature as if it was boiling.

‘God, I WANT TO GO HOME’, he cried again and placed both of his palms on his face, feeling miserable. There was still the problem of the headache thumping in his head from the club his head had been it with.

It was the next day and the lights had come on. Dale forced himself to walk out.

‘Eighty-eight, eighty-nine…’, the man walked towards him. ‘Ninety’, he said and it was clear that he was as sick as a dog. The man then walked away from him.

They all marched to the diner and the hunger in Dale’s stomach seemed to be more than the sore ruling in his throat. He was going to force himself to swallow. Tristan and the rest of them hugged him and they looked at him, looking scared for him. The terrified look they gave him made him feel as if he appeared worse than he thought. Tristan wiped his head with his hand and when it withdrew it from him, his palm was painted in red. There was still blood on his head, he hadn’t bathed for the past two days, he couldn’t.

As Dale looked at them, they didn’t look okay too. They also looked extremely thrown off balance with the harsh weather that Boorbunk Bay punished the prisoners with but they were strong, stronger than him. Not really. They were only strong enough to help him. It was always like that, all those times when he had this devastating nightmare that got him sick, they were always there, not as if they all didn’t have shadows they battled with but because they cared, they loved him enough to carry his burden with him.

They helped him to the diner and Michael tried to feed him. ‘Common, eat’. Dale nodded and collected the fork from him and then ate its content. He knew swallowing was going to be a really big deal, probably the hardest activity he was going to take part in that day. He chewed it for a lot of minutes and then with a lot of saliva, he launched it up into his throat, hoping it didn’t get stuck. It went down and Dale coughed.

‘Take’, Barry passed a cup of water to his side. Dale drunk the water until it was half-empty. He took more rounds of the food, following the same procedure; chewing, chewing, chewing, closing his eyes to swallow, hoping it went through, opening his eyes and coughing, then drinking water.

The officer arrived again and he looked around them. ‘Tristan Klyce!’, he shouted and Tristan stood up. The officer left the room without saying any other word and Tristan followed him quickly. Tristan didn’t return until the end of the breakfast time.

‘Time’s up’, the officer shouted and then walked in. ‘In a straight file, walk out one step at a time’

‘Common, Dale. You’ve got to get up’.

The officer suddenly sighted the five of them and they could all see fierceness build up in his veins and body. ‘Hey, are you deaf?’, he ran towards them, scattering through the tables, handling the blackjack well in his hand. The rest of them had fled away leaving Dale on his seat. The metal came crashing down on his head numerous times and the whole place was rented with wails from Dale.

‘Come here’, he said as he dragged him with his cloth with force. Dale could see his blood drool from his scalp to cover his face. He fell and stood up again many times, the man kept pushing him around rigorously. He was dragged down the stairs and taken to the dumpsite. ‘You are going to work here for the next one week. You’d better clean that blood away from your face and start work or else you will be taken down to the hole!’, the man said and left. Dale remained on the spot, dizzy, breathing hard, hoping not to faint, using his palm to mop the viscous crimson liquid away from his face. Moving his hand through his hair made him feel like his hand was in a bowl full of blood.

Dale bent down and placed his hands on his knees, he shut his eyes and couldn’t help crying. He grabbed his spade and got to work.

He was sitting here now at lunch, watching snow fall outside the glass walls at one side of the diner. It was December and if it was the second day of the month, it meant he was clocking twenty-one on that day. He managed to smile and with the drying blood, he scribbled a giant 21 on the table. Of all the things he enjoyed in his life, it had to do with birthdays. Birthday cakes, birthday presents, birthday parties. He especially loved birthday surprises more than any other thing. He kept staring down at the two figures right in front of him beside his food. It still seemed so astounding and not quite in a very good way that he was actually was getting older. He still felt like he was still sixteen, he really didn’t wish he ever grew older in his life. He wanted to preserve his young look for as long as he could. No wonder Groundhog Day was his favourite story but he was twenty-one, anyways and as far as it was his birthday, he was happy. It didn’t matter if he was feeling weak or if cold blood was still plastered all over his face and on his chest or even if the cold he was feeling was choking him.

The loudspeaker struck him out of his sweet daydream, reminding him of where he was, reminding him that birthdays weren’t celebrated in there.

The same orders and they were at work again but he was in the dumpsite in the cold with more work to do. Snow adding to the refuse filled over everywhere, more landfill to clear. He looked over at Carreras at his side and it was then he discovered that he was not the only one suffering in here. He could sight him with his one good hand trying to move the refuse with all his strength. He was sweating really hard and he didn’t look comfortable in anyway. The flesh in the second arm kept jingling about of its own course, as if trying to reach out. He could see Carreras curse under his breath as he dropped his spade and cleaned his face from the sweat about to drip from his eyelid into his eye.

‘Carreras? Are you alright there?’

‘Not really’, he replied.

‘It’s okay’

‘What about you? Are you okay now? I saw you yesterday, I was so scared, you looked so down. I thought.. I thought you were going to die’

‘Yeah, I am better now, thanks. We’ll be fine’

‘Yeah, we will’

Dale held the handle of the spade and helped Carreras with his part.

The Death Toast was in two days’ time and it was no longer news anymore, it was written on everyone’s faces that something really bad was about to happen. Something that was going to take away one of them, any of them.

‘Hey, don’t dwell on it. It’s a one-in-a-ninety probability, we will make it through. All five of us’, Tristan said while they were in the relaxing room. Michael looked the most scared of them and of course as expected, Tristan looked the most relaxed. He seemed so cool with everything, even with the news of a likely death.

As for Dale, he wasn’t scared for himself, he was scared for his friends. Dangerous fear, Uneasy fear, fear as cold as ice, fear as hot as fire, burning really wild in his heart. ‘Hey, Dale’, Michael said and put his palm in his. ‘I want you to keep calm. Know that anything that happens here is fate’, he said with his eyes staring right into his. Dale nodded and tried as much as possible to make those words make an effect. KEEP CALM! KEEP CALM! Dale could remember hearing someone else saying those words to him. He could hear the words again but louder in his head, making more meaning, feeling more alive. It went away again and he focused on Michael’s words. KEEP CALM! KEEP CALM! The second sentence, however wasn’t helping matters, it aroused worry.

Fate, in this case wasn’t a comforting word in anyway. He wasn’t seeing it as a more escapable one-in-a-ninety case, he saw it as a five-in-ninety chance, a one-in-sixteen chance. Dear Lord! Death didn’t seem as far away as Tristan had explained it.

‘Let’s go’, Pierson alerted as they could hear the rattling of the whistle piercing through the atmosphere. Dale went into his cell and sat on his bed, with his mind in retrospection of what they had been talking about earlier. The lights went out quickly.

Dale walked over to the sink and watched his face with the chilling water, watching the now blooded water run into the drain. He removed his blood-filled shirt and moved his fingers around the wound that had been inflicted on his chest with the club. His teeth were chattering together in discomfort as he could feel the outside cold striking through his body and particularly smiting through his wound.

Another twenty-four hours passed and then…

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.