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The Death Toast Fate
The Humour Sect had been formed seven years earlier, when they were all still younger. Dale was still fifteen, Pierson was eighteen, Tristan was twenty, Michael was twenty-two and Barry was twenty-three and the tale of them meeting could only be a matter of destiny. Fate.Michael had started the performances in a tavern along Crawdown during the nights, singing the most popular rock songs in a different, more eccentric way that entertained the customers. He was only seventeen and he had just left high school. It was his first job and he had dabbled into it not as a hobby but as a result of necessity, for survival, to be able to breathe above the murky waters of poverty that his family suffered from. He earned twenty-five Dexter groats per night and some other nights when there were more people, they dropped more money and he earned a peak of fifty Dexter dollars. His childhood friend, Barry who was working menially at a soap factory left and soon joined Michael in the business.Barry
The Death Toast Death lives right here
His hair was wet, just like the rest of his shivering, sweltering body even in the coldest of weathers. He didn’t know what else to do, he was running mad. He shouted loud again and hit the bars hard.‘Prisoner Number 32. If you make any noise again! you will be taken to the hole!’, the man from the loudspeaker shouted but Barry wasn’t going to listen. Michael! Michael! He wailed in sorrow.Barry didn’t want to imagine that it was real. It mustn’t be, it mustn’t be, his mind roared. This guy whom he had laughed with, ran to school with, shared shoes with, shared clothes with, shared a room with, suffered with. He screamed again, thunderously and he kept hitting the metal bars until his knuckles started to bleed.His eyes had turned to a sponge dispensing water all over his face. He wasn’t sure he was going to make it out of this, ever. No! No! Not Michael! And then he yelled again, tears blowing out of his eyes, he wasn’t going to stop.Michael had done nothing wrong his whole life! T
The Death Toast No light, only darkness
ALL THE TOP GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS HAVE DECIDED TO GO UNDERGROUND TO DISCUSS THE INSECURITY THAT IS GETTING MORE PREVALENT THROUGHOUT DEXTER ISLANDS, Barry read on the front page of the newspaper. He shook his head sadly and dropped the newspaper. Just beneath the headline, there was a picture of the president and the governors of the different states, including Gollogher’s governor looking all original and sober about the problem of the nation.Most of the other inmates had a copy of the newspaper too. ‘You can’t tell the minds of people’, Dale said, shaking his head as he read the headline.‘There are somethings you only get to find out when you get in here. There are secrets that only people who’re here can get to know, the most guarded secrets of Dexter Island is here lying with us. All our leaders who appear all empathic with us and appear to want the best of us are the leaders of the terrorists. It’s only when we get here that we see everyone who have giving those heroic speeches
The Death Toast Let the drums of Holocaust roll
The Quppis’ ground was a whole kingdom of its own, spanning a hundred kilometres in the centre of cliffs and tall, impassable mountain and dense, endless plantations making it well safeguarded. Out in the Meadow Hills – the exterior surroundings of their barracks – were thousands of rangers moving around, so that no one would come close to discovering where the Quppis’ domain was.The whole land area included two parts: The Spheres and The Circus divided completely by a tall, great wall known as the Partition. The Spheres contained eight giant spherical geodesic domes that housed different phalanxes of their army. Behind them was a glassy dark tower with a pointed peak, no one lived there but Sawer himself. About thirty kilometres from there was The Partition and after that was The Circus was a concoction of funny-looking buildings, countless numbers of them in different shapes and heights. There was an onion-shaped building, a pyramidal-shaped monument, a plank house with a doll as i
The Death Toast An Alliteration
Night descended as it always did on Dexter, retiring people to their beds after the labour of the day and down in Boorbunk what signified the coming of the night was the utter darkness that they were hit with as the inmates lay now on their creaky metal beds that was not entirely their size. Snores could be heard everywhere but even if everyone was going to sleep not Pierson, not Tristan, not Dale.Pierson was sitting on his bed with a locket in his hand, attached to a chain. He had that locket in his possession since…a long time ago. He didn’t know how long he had worn that necklace as a bracelet on his wrist. It was since his life had started, since light had come to it, about fifteen years ago. He opened the locket and brought out the pictures it contained. Through the dark, he managed to see the faces of the people on it. There was Michael’s face on the first picture, Barry was next and then the rest of them had followed, in the order in which they had met.All through his life, h
The Death Toast A New Dale
The next morning set them up to another horrible day ahead, horrible by default. The men called all of them out and counted them, looking pleased and satisfied with the grave looks on the faces of the prisoners. The daily count put them at eighty-four, thanks to the elimination. The new internees seemed to be getting on well.‘Tristan Klyce?’, one of the wardens called with a diffident face. ‘Follow me’Tristan sighed, ready to cope with another morose face of Samantha and have to repeat the words he had said the last time in a more explicit way.He reached the calling room and there were other prisoners in there, resting their head against the soundproof walls listening to the wobbly, comely voices of their loved ones through the telephones. He was led to Samantha in the last booth line where she always was. Only that this time, he wasn’t going to cope with only the face of Samantha, there was another face, another severely cute face, a smaller face.‘Oh My God!’, Tristan’s mouth ope
The Death Toast Fight, Dale!
They were all out now among the multitudes of guards who were not with rods or with blackjacks but with real guns because today someone among them who had his wrists bound in those chains was going to get battered to nihility with its contents. Dale stood there staring at the governor and then the revulsion he had felt returned to his stomach in a sickening way, wrapping around his gut and he suddenly knew that he was going to spill it out from his mouth, in his words!All the men had taken position with their rifles and the officers had gathered themselves around, waiting patiently for the governor to perform his blind vote.‘Before anything is done, I will like to have a word with these things’, he said as he waved his hand over all the prisoners and then he stood up from his sofa which surely had the skull of Pierson Plummer hanging there rigidly and then walked to the edge of the podium, where Carreras had dived to him on his death day. ‘Killing, savagery, evil, mischief’, he star
The Death Toast Michael Bergmann's Old Man
The sound from the TV shrieked in the ears of the old man, the smoke from the fireplace which he was sitting along stinging his eyes, trying as much as possible to focus on the special weekly report that the Gollogher Press was about to give. He hoped that… really, what he hoped for wasn’t important, the fact that he hoped was ridiculous, in it of itself. In anyways, he really believed that the new special weekly report was going to be better than the one of the previous weeks but the first words proved him wrong.‘Dexter Islands IS ON FIRE!’, Reporter Shelley started and his face displayed the exact terror of those first words. ‘And the terrorists who have been speculated by a Dexter Call journalist to have a new name of The Blazing Empire are having an unbroken run throughout the nation’‘On Sunday, the twenty-second of April, the nation recorded a death toll of hundred thousand people which was the highest mortality rate that Dexter have witnessed in its history but as the week got
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- The Death Toast
A bright horizon
'Our brachiosaur nation of Dexter Islands would not be going extinct’, the soothing voice of the local station’s broadcaster, Taila Jenkins said the very next day after the big war. ‘No pun intended’, she added and it would pass for a really good joke by then.Life was back to normal for everyone. Khelain had returned home and got out from the underground, Tristan gave Samantha a long kiss and proposed to her immediately he returned home making her mother get so joyous that she cried. The same couldn’t be said for Dale.He had received treatment for his damaged left palm that only three full fingers left on it and had to cope with camera lenses that popped up everywhere he went to. On the third day after the end of Quppis, Dale joined a group of one hundred thousand citizens, dressed in gloomy clothes, at the Gollogher main cemetery – which was all the ground where all the military men of Dexter who had died in The Big Slaughter were laid – for a last-respect honour for all the fallen
- The Death Toast
The orange blaze marks the end
Back at Sawer’s tower, there was a whole different case. By then, all the floors of the tower were covered with fire but there was Dale at the top floor, alone with Sawer. Sawer’s knee was dripping in blood and he was struggling to get to his feet and escape from Dale. He knew that verily, verily, it was over.Dale lunged forward and kicked Sawer again in his mouth making him groan and fall back to the ground, this time he made no effort to stand.‘How do you feel now?’, Dale asked.Sawer laughed, puffing out blood from his torn tongue and lips – a tooth fell out along it. ‘I think I should be the one asking you that question. You are done for, Dale. At the end of the day, Singalort would be the only liveable place in this country. Every other place will have been poisoned. I would be victorious and you…’, he laughed again. ‘Mr. Magnanimous, brave, courageous and yet did nothing great’‘The nuclear bomb, huh? Your 000001, don’t you think he would have told me?’‘He would not have betr
- The Death Toast
The nuclear Holocaust
'Let’s go find Dale’, Barry said to the other men. It had been two hours since they had been shooting from the top of the Kappa dome. Currently as they viewed the ground, all they could see were more and more bodies but most of them were now Quppis’ men. Those of them who weren’t lying down were standing with their hands raised in the air and their weapons lowered to the ground. They were in the middle of a spacious circle of ten thousand soldiers in Japanese army uniform, pointing their guns to all the surrendered enemy combatants.‘Yes, let’s go’, Tristan said as they all jogged out of the dome.‘We’re good people. Friends of Dale’, Khelain said when they reached outside and some of the Japanese soldiers turned their guns to them. ‘G O O D. We…save…the…country. We’re not shooting you. Friends…We are…friends’, Khelain tried to demonstrate to the foreign-speaking military men. The men spoke to themselves without dropping their guns at them.‘Reece. Reece?’, one of the soldiers echoed.
- The Death Toast
'IT'S ME'
Blood flowed out of his neck like a waterfall and he fell to the ground, still with no groans of pain or death. It was at this that Dale involuntarily pulled off the mask from his face. 000001 had gotten on his feet watching Dale stare at the real face of the alpha-man he just killed.The face of the alpha-man looked normal; like his own, like a regular young Dexterran kicking a pebble down the Crawdown Street. He had his mouth wide open in agony, trying to gain in breath. He raised his hand up to his heavily-bloodied neck, trying to resist the final chokes of death sourced from his neck. It was then that Dale noticed the most disturbing part; the reason he couldn’t speak. It was because he was dumb, he was one of the men whose vocal cords had been cut off. It was why his throaty shrieks looked like a video played on mute. As Dale watched the dying man, he couldn’t help tears rushing to his eyes.Dale wished he could save him but death already loomed around his eyeballs like murky wat
- The Death Toast
Alpha Man 000001
Baby Andrew’s head lay gently against the lap of his mother. It was half past four and unlike her little son, and her mother whose snores could be heard loudly from the other room, she hadn’t even fallen dizzy since the time that Tristan had walked out of the front door. Now, on all the three television channels that Dexter had, reporters could be seen standing in front of a camera summarising what was going on in the present most popular avenue in the world – The Singalort battlefront. Right behind them was smoke and mist and echoing of missiles everywhere.‘Presently as I speak, the last batch of expatriate troops have arrived from Asia at a number of eleven thousand and things are getting really awry here with…’, a bomb blast thundered nearby, sending the reporter crashing to the ground.‘Are you okay there? Reporter Ava?’, the main news broadcaster called.‘Yes. Emm’, the reporter replied, sighing heavily as she once again faced the camera and picked up the microphone. ‘Presently,
- The Death Toast
The eight dones
'What do you see there, Dale?’, Tristan asked. ‘They’re all dead?’, Dale heard another person ask and then on and on and on. The noise reminded him of men at the Tower of Babel. ‘Sir, please will you let us see what’s there?’Dale, still silent, placed the binocular to his eyes to be sure what he had seen were actually there. Through the lenses stood the most magnificent structures he had ever seen. The Quppis’ ground was covered with macadam and there was no grass on the land. On it stood eight grey domes, what Mark must have called hemispherical structures, each of them were as large as a maximum football field closed up. From the height Dale looked at them, they looked like little balls lined out on a very straight line. Right behind them, there was a tall thin tower, something like a tiny slice of a skyscraper. It was also grey and didn’t look like they were built with the same materials that other buildings he had seen were built with. At the side of those structures, there was a
- The Death Toast
'The devil's place is a place of gold'
'Mr. Mark’, Dale called and he find himself bumping into the old man’s arms with excitement. ‘How did you make it here?’The man chuckled and the smell that exuded from his mouth showed that he had smoked very recently. ‘That’s a whole long story now, bod. You will need to tell me how you managed to make it past that hell of a minefield without all dying’‘We lost some men’, Dale said, evasively. ‘We moved through one line’‘You would have gotten killed still in this forest. God helped you. You passed the right path. There are some sides in there that are mini-minefields.’‘And here we are now’, Dale said, looking distressed.‘Yes, Singalort is a death trap like I told you. You don’t make it through the minefield, end of journey. If you do, you get into the forest, pass the wrong paths and you are dead. If you’re fortunate enough to make it here, then that is your best bet of fortune because you are so trapped’, he said and for the first time, he raised his head up from Dale to look a
- The Death Toast
The jungle
Singalort was so massive and dense that people that got in might just ramble around without reaching or finding out a fort with hundreds of thousands of men with black armours and automatic rifles, looking fierce with masks over their head, silent and rather dumb. The Quppis’ ground was well over-shadowed by powerfully tall redwood trees and as the ex-Boorbunk detainees swarmed into the forest, crouched with their guns pointed forward, wholly alert with the only sound they could hear the sound of their boots crunching the dried leaves; they wouldn’t know that on top of those trees were cameras connected to the Quppis’ power house.‘Hey, you all should stop there!’, someone barked nearby and bullets flew around madly in their direction.‘Everyone, take cover’, Dale commanded and everyone bent with their backs to trees.‘Drop your guns now or else you’ll be doomed’, the Quppis man shouted again. It wasn’t just one man that was walking towards them but a whole centurion.Dale peeped slig
- The Death Toast
The last homage to pay
Protests were going on in Tifftam and the whole of Dairione. People were out again with loud voices, confident than ever, sure of a forthcoming peace, sure that it would be sooner than later, sure that they would all witness it. Schools had opened again in some states and churches had opened again, even in Hustarbull where their main bishop had been killed and sorrow had come upon the city. It already marked a whole month since they had stayed with no president for the country and no governor for their states. Since they were all part of the terrorist organisation, Sawer had cleared them all because he was nearing the final stage of the apocalypse.As the whole country was agog with optimism and wild jamboree of a new dawn at hand, the enemy party who had pitched their tents right in the centre of Singalort watched with agony and confusion. The most menacing news for Owen Sawer was the revelation of Dale Eagan’s real name to actually be Reece Bailey which meant he was the son of Andre
