About a year ago I frequented one of those sites where people would post a variety of funny pictures, videos and all kinds of stupid internet memes. I didn't do much after school besides sitting on my computer wasting time back then. Sometimes I would browse the newest uploads section of the site looking for pictures that might give me quick laugh or smile. My internet connection was slow and laggy so I always skipped over posts of videos, being too impatient to wait for any of them to buffer just to see some thirty second clip of a guy getting hit in the crotch or whatever, but there was this one time I made an exception. I spotted a video titled, “Radio host prank called,” which quickly captured my interest. I figured something like that was worth waiting a minute or so to watch.
The video clip turned out to be audio only with a black screen for the entire duration. I probably should have expected that considering the post title did say it was a “Radio” host.
The man in the video who was being prank called, ran an internet radio show called “The Real Eagle” where he apparently spent a few hours twice a week ranting about how white people were the only “real Americans” and other racist bullshit like that. The guy sounded kind of old, maybe in his forties or fifties, and talked in a low sort of grumbling tone. He also went by the alias “Dusty”. Not surprising that he wouldn't use his real name. But what was mainly important here was that during the last twenty minutes of every show he would do a segment where he started accepting phone calls from the audience.
Needless to say, it was hilarious. Every single call the guy received was a joke and let me tell you, it made the guy pissed. Sure the jokes the callers pulled on him were pretty lame, but it was Dusty's reaction that made it so entertaining. At one point towards the end of the show you could hear him throw something at the wall and curse far away from the mic as if he were about to leave the room in his anger.
After I had seen that video I started visiting Dusty's web page at a radio blogging site to listen to the show live. Even without the barrage of prank calls it was funny enough just to listen to his idiotic rants on their own. He would say crap like, “We need to purge the blacks and Mexicans from our soil!” almost on a daily basis. The site had a chat room box on the side where everyone that visited mocked the hell out of him during every broadcast. Dusty never paid any attention to it though. The site he hosted his show off of had a chat box for every individual broadcast by default, so I guess he either never noticed or just didn't care.
I spent the next few months listening to Dusty whenever he was on. Every Monday and Friday from 8pm to 11pm he was on the air spouting the same nonsense with a little re-wording. Despite all the prank calls he received, he would always still proceed with the phone call segment at the end of every show. You would think by then he would learn his lesson and call it quits, but he never did. Similarly you could say the same thing about me. Nothing really changed over the months that I listened to Dusty, and I wasn't even one of the people that consistently prank called him every show. To me, listening to “The Real Eagle” was just another way to kill my boredom.
Sure the show was funny, but it never really caught on or grossed a huge following. At most There were maybe a hundred and fifty people that had tuned in to the show live at once, and I can almost guarantee that every single one of them were there to mock and laugh at him. For these reasons, what happened during one particular episode took me completely by surprise.
It was the start of the last twenty minutes of the show. Everything up to that point was ordinary. My parents were out, so I had been parked on my living room couch with my laptop and headphones listening to the pathetic rantings of Dusty, now awaiting the almost routine barrage of prank calls from his “fans”.
This is where things had begun to get odd. Rather then starting the last segment like he usually would, Dusty instead had gotten strangely silent, and then got up, leaving the room without a word.
Several minutes had passed without a sound. Everyone in the chat room was going berserk, clearly pissed off that they weren't getting the chance to harass their favourite bigot. Some had even started leaving, most likely thinking that Dusty had simply had enough of their crap and just left them to sit there like idiots for the rest of the show. I was about to give up and leave the live stream myself, until the distinct noise of a door opening sounded through over the broadcast.
Curious to see what Dusty had come back for, I stopped myself from closing the window and listened.
As I heard Dusty reenter the room, there were the muffled sounds of him shouting stuff along the lines of, “Get in there!” in a few different variations followed by the muted sounds of someone sobbing.
I was now even more curious. Dusty had never once brought another person on the show before. Every other broadcast, it had only ever been him alone doing the show. But besides the obvious questions of who this new person was and why were they there, what concerned me more was why they were crying, and why was Dusty shouting at them in such a threatening voice? All of this had caught me off guard, and I was starting to feel a sinking feeling brewing in my gut.
The soft crying noises grew louder as Dusty and the second person approached the still turned on microphone. Now closer, the crying from the other person was clearer now. The sound quality of the microphone Dusty used for his show was far from great, and you could only hear him clearly when he talked directly into the microphone, but I could still tell that this person was a woman.
Between her cries I could hear her softly pleading.
“Please...” She begged. “Stop it...”
I wasn't sure at first, due to the scratchy audio, but it had sounded like the woman had an accent of some kind. I couldn't tell you which, but I think you can understand why that would be relevant to mention.
Before my head could fill itself with any more questions Dusty himself began speaking into the mic with the same threatening authoritative tone he had just ordered the woman in.
“In this beautiful land we live in, filthy bastards like these wander in and taint the progress of the true Americans!”
His words were nothing different from anything else I've heard him say in previous shows. But hearing him say them in the current circumstances, carried a sense of dread with it. I was more then a little unsettled at this point, and I was greatly reconsidering the option of leaving the broadcast.
The chat box, which was usually flooding with heckling at the shows host had noticeably decreased in activity. I imagined that everyone was most likely focusing directly on what was happening on the show right now.
Dusty continued on. Speaking more nonsense about a “Pure Race” and how he would cleanse the US of all who dared to taint it. I can't fully recall everything he had said at that point, as I was more focused on the sounds of the woman's crying. This went on for a few moments with me listening attentively, hoping that everything was going to be okay, and that this woman was not actually in any kind of danger.
Suddenly, Dusty's rant came to an abrupt stop and was immediately followed by a loud clicking noise. The Woman began screaming in reaction, her yells gaining an echo as she ran away from wherever the microphone was placed. Her pleading words from earlier were now intensified and desperate, now loud enough to be picked up by the mic at a distance.
“Please don't do this!!! Just stop!!!”
That was when it hit me. I couldn't tell at first due to the previously mentioned audio quality issues, but that clicking noise must have been the cocking of a gun! Dusty was going to shoot this woman!
My mind did not want to fully accept the belief that this woman was in serious danger. But there was no way to deny it now. This couldn't have been a prank, the woman’s cries for help sounded too real. I was now convinced that Dusty had forced this woman in to the location of wherever it was that he hosted the show from, and planned to shoot her.
I had completely frozen up. What the hell was I supposed to do? It wasn't as if I could just pick up the phone and call the cops. This was a radio show on the internet. There was no way they'd be able to do anything, at least not immediately anyway. Panic began to overwhelm me as I struggled to think of something, anything I could do.
The woman's begging had suddenly grown louder. It was hard to hear over her shouting, but Dusty also began to say something. The way his voice was muffled indicated that he had his back to the mic.
“You've ruined our land! You are the disease and I am the cure!”
Unable to do anything else, the woman once again pleaded with her attacker.
“You don't have to do this!” The woman shouted. “I won't tell anyone! Please! Just let me-”
Bang
Silence.
All of the noise ceased, and the only sound I could hear was the rapid beating of my heart. The loud bang had sent a jolt through my body. Once again I was frozen in place, not knowing what to do. And then my brain finally finished processing everything I had just heard.
Dusty had just killed that woman.
Upon this realization, my mind began to panic, and I started to try and convince myself that this was all just a dream or elaborate hoax. All the while, hearing nothing but the static buzzing of the broadcast through my headphones, with no sound coming from the gunman. I shook my head, desperately trying to remove the gruesome image of the woman's dead body from mind.
Several more minutes of silence passed. I don't know why I didn't just close the browser. I just sat there listening, unable to do anything else. I don't know how long this continued for, but eventually some of my sense began to return to me and I moved my mouse towards the red X in the top right corner of the screen. But then something stopped me.
In a tone that sounded as if he were grinning, Dusty spoke into the microphone one last time.
“They snuck into our country by the waves of the ocean. I'll make sure they go back the same way. One piece at a time.”
I clicked and closed the browser.