The Death Toast

Welcome to Boorbunk: The Arena

Welcome to Boorbunk: The Arena

The prison guard was present now, loitering around the hallway with his lead block dragging on the ground behind him, staring grisly at the inmates locked up in their different tiny cell rooms. Just like the rest of the prison guards, they have overtime developed pleasure in watching fear written on the faces of the prisoners; a masochistic affair. He glanced over to the cell numbered ninety that housed one of the men who had recently been held there for the death of the country’s minister of defence. The next four cells in a row contained the rest of the four killers, all looking scared and seemed to be losing their minds, just as he liked it. They had only been here for one week and were not yet adapted to the horror that the crazy hellish place had in store for them. They had only experienced the miserable game of The Death Toast once and were still coping with the shock, looking forward to what evil this place held beyond the iron bars.

It was block fifteen and it was two days after the house had lost one of their people, one of their prisoners just as had always been the custom every four weeks. Only that this time, the lot cast had unluckily captured one of the main men in the prison. The Crusher, during his lifetime, had been the leader of a prison gang – The Crossbones Brotherhood; they were vicious and highly feared. Despite the tough security and orders of the prison, he was the only one brave enough to lead such a team to break the rules and hold conventions, intimidating the wardens and bullying other prisoners. He was tall and hefty, always boastful and never quivered, not even when the guards had threatened him with guns right in his face. He spent most of his time in a different lodge, in a more solitary confinement, tortured severally but he would return, vetting out his anger and rearranging the face of the other inmates in the prison, the fifteenth cellhouse, the last cellhouse.

Then, bloody Thursday had arrived and this week it was turn for the fifteenth block to play the deadly game of The Death Toast that was enjoyed only by the prison guards and the other non-prisoners, including some powerful men: politicians and wealthy people who would come under cover to the prison bay sticking narrowly out of the boundary of the Dexter Island to watch a display of fate and the overall doom of the chosen unlucky prisoner.

THE DEATH TOAST was a game that involved a shuffle of the names of all the prisoners in one ward and randomly picking out one of them. Then, the lead prison guard would announce the one who had been chosen. Whoever whose name had been announced was captured immediately, taking to the room where they would never come out of alive, shot numerous times in the stomach and chest and face until they dropped dead.

All the time such thing happened, what followed was a wild uproar from the rest of the prisoners; protesting angrily or mourning loudly the death of their beloved friend and in some cases, celebrating the embarrassing death of the man, mocking him and other times the combination of everything. The latter was exactly what had happened after Gunther Djovaag had been taking into the room where the mortality of every man was implacably proven, alongside the firing squad. Everyone was outside having shivers as they heard the wails of the man who had proved courage like no other as bullets were sprayed from several guns, settling uneasily in his body. It took twenty-nine bullets to kill The Crusher. By the time his body was brought out, it was full of blood with his eyes closed never to be reopened again.

Then the uproar broke out again, this time in way of violence between the other members of his cult and the prison guards. This had led to the call of a prison lockdown along the fifteenth block for three days. That included the locking of the ninety inmates in utter darkness and without sight of the outside world for seventy-two hours.

The prison guard now loitering around the hallway with a goad in hand was the first person they were seeing in a very long time, two or three days. It was hard to know, there was no clock in there, no light entrance through any opening, utter darkness, hard to distinguish when it was day or night. The only thing that could define their time was the whistle that would echo through the area when the officers wanted them to do something.

The man kept the rod dragging all over the floor as he inspected each of the cell rooms. They all sat completely mute on their steel stools as if they had been evoked with a curse, and yes, they have been; the complete darkness and complete detachment inflicted on them was unlike any other form of torture mentally tormenting them, keeping them in utter gloom. They all stared curiously at the jailer as he peeped into the different cells but never kept an eye contact with him. He had been sent to monitor and to ensure that none of the prisoners had tried to plot a prison break, as impossible as that sounded. After wordlessly taking a count of the men and confirming the number as ninety. As he left, he took one last devilish glare at the five newest entrees who had been found guilty of killing Chuck Hawthorne, despite pleading not guilty and as expected, they were sent to serve a lifetime imprisonment in the most hellish place in the Islands and probably the whole world. If only the rest of the country knew that it was not an imprisonment in anyway, it was a death penalty; their lives were fixed to a game where there was no probability, no certainty that you would not be picked. It wasn’t based on you, it was based in the hands of a set of jailers who were simply having fun picking a random name who would inadvertently mark his last day on Earth.

Nevertheless, there was a really unusual other side of the coin. While four people were killed every month-one every week- there was another game that set one man free every month. This time, it was a general thing. All the two thousand inmates at the prison were taken into a hall and just like The Dark Toast was conducted, a man would come forward and out of the box would pick a random name wrapped within a paper ball. Whoever bared the name was set free and extradited from The Dexter Island to the nearby country of United States of America. It was always a time of celebration and miracle as the occurrence whose possibility of happening was one in a two thousand had befell them. It was main luck and nothing more, the others would just look on, feeling miserable and downcast again.

The Boorbunk Bay on which the prison had been constructed at the exit of the country was a place where death was as close to you as it could be and nothing you did could stop it. If an inmate was lucky enough to stay alive after the execution of one of his fellow inmates, he could heave a sigh and learn to breathe and live for the next four weeks, when he still could.