‘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 an onion-shaped building and about of a thousand of those giant buildings.
Dale was so mesmerised with the heavenly figures he was seeing, that he couldn’t hear the calls and anxious inquiries from Tristan and the rest of them and didn’t even realise the gravity of what was going on there.
‘Bloody huh?’
Dale staggered as he turned to his side to find Mark looking into the Quppis ground. Many other men had climbed up to the mountain’s peak sure of no threats and they could see clearly since they were not staying in the way of the sun’s light.
‘Bloody’, Dale replied as he was brought back to his senses and saw Humvees cruising around the land with machine guns blowing explosive shells in every direction. Soldiers had invaded the Lair but as Dale could see, he judged that the Quppis men were winning the war.
‘How do they do that?’, Dale asked Mark with utter bewilderment when he saw one of the masked men in black catch a bullet.
‘You don’t see the logo on his shirt? That’s a beta man. That’s the second strongest group. Like the alphas, I have never seen their faces and I doubt if they are killable. To your question, I really do not know how they do that’
Dale shook his head in distaste as he watched one of the militants stab a knife into the eye of one of the soldiers.
‘You have ever noticed the Kappa sign on the armours of those executioners at Boorbunk?’, Mark asked.
‘Yes, I do’, Dale replied immediately.
‘That’s what the Kappa specialise in. Shooting’, he said as he pointed his finger at the fourth dome to the left. Only a confirmation that Boorbunk and the whole Death Toast was an operation of The Quppis.
Everyone at the peak followed his finger to see yet another really crazy point on the Quppis ground. The dome had tiny, imperceptible holes at different spots that bullets were flying from and the only reason they could see it was because they were on top of the mountain. No one who was on that battle ground would ever find out. Soldiers would suddenly just fall off and wouldn’t know where the bullets were coming from. At that point, Dale had a thought that Quppis might never be completely invaded.
‘You will never find any of the Kappa men outside and yet they are the deadliest. It would be hard to attack what you can’t see’, Mark said. Dale turned his binoculars from the dome back to the battle ground and fixed it at a gory scene. One of the Beta men (the beta logo was shining on his armour) knelt beside a half-dead soldier and was carefully pinning knives at all the points of his neck until his head went off.
‘When you were redeemed from Boorbunk, did someone trail you to kill you with a sniper?’, Dale asked Mark who looked puzzled. ‘I mean…it happened to me’, Dale said but Mark didn’t say a word still.
‘You know I wasn’t really redeemed’, Mark revealed and Dale dropped the binoculars to face him. ‘I was actually picked during one of the Death Toasts but when I was taken into the execution room. It happened that all those Kappa men stationed at Boorbunk knew me. They pulled off their masks and told me to play along. They shot the wall behind me numerous times so that everyone in The Death Toast room could hear and shot me once in the leg so I could scream and they would take that as my cry of death. The blood dripping from my leg was rubbed all over my body. I played dead and I was taken out, I escaped in the midnight’, he said. ‘They all knew me. They were all my friends. We had all planned to escape from our dome together but they were too scared. So, only I and Barry went. And we survived only to go back to Boorbunk and I was lucky to know them. It is still funny how our fates could have switched if they had left this hell of a place and I didn’t. You know, end up being a bloody merciless assassin’
For a moment, a bitter thought ran across Dale’s mind. He recounted the number of guards he had shot or had ended up dying during the Boorbunk raid. At the core of it all, they were Dexterrans too, who in order to help their families were lured into a kingdom of no exit. No one was born a murderer, none of them was born a monster, none of them was meant to die.
‘How come you never told me?’, Dale asked soberly.
‘There was no need to. It was just like redemption too. They dressed me in black clothes just like the redeemed people. It was complicated’, Mark replied. ‘I went to the US and a family took me in and I became part of them’
All those long discussions and they were still hanging at the top of a mountain watching the proceedings of a war they would soon take part in. Nine thousand and a half men who were going to be reduced by half.
‘Steady, steady sir’, Barma said to Dale again as he tried to steady himself after another acrophobic wave of vertigo filled his face. For the umpteenth time, all the men watching would shout Jesus Christ! as they watched another β-man battling about four soldiers with a small penknife. It looked like a masochistic observation of gladiatorial acts in a Roman amphitheatre but then it wasn’t.
‘How come there are no Gamma-men up there?’, Tristan asked Mark.
‘It’s because Gamma men don’t fight, they…’, Mark wouldn’t be able to finish his statement.
‘No’, Barma yelled and targeted his gun to the Beta man who was presently about to slice the last man up.
‘Hey, Barma’, Dale tried to caution but he had already pulled the trigger twice.
Instead of the bullets to blow up the militant’s head, he instantaneously turned the soldier he was about to kill and used him as a cushion for the bullets.
‘Is having eyes behind their heads taught in training too?’, Barma protested but Dale won’t be able to reply. He knew there was heavy danger on their heads.
The Beta-man had, in superhuman fashion, sensed where the bullet had come from and now had his finger pressed to his ear, alerting the presence of their almighty arch-enemy, Dale Eagan also known as Reece Bailey.
‘Congratulations, Barma, you just killed us’, Mark announced casually.
‘What do we do?’, Barry asked Dale.
‘We all have to go in at once’, he replied, not sure if that was the best idea but that was what his mind told him, that what was his father told him.
Surprisingly, no man appeared reluctant. They were all sliding off the long hill and making it onto the Quppis’ ground. It was way easier to descend than to ascend a mountain. As they got in like a swarm of black termites clinging on a fallen log, a sharp red light from the top of one of the domes was alerted with a loud wailing siren following.
‘Oh God. That’s the alpha dome. Everybody run’, Mark yelled amidst the noise. Dale ran too. If a Beta-man could kill four US trained military men with a single knife, how much more alpha men.
Dale took one single glimpse at the persons now emerging from the dome’s entrance. The alpha-men weren’t even running, they marched out in a single file with rifles slung around their shoulders. When they got to a point, they moved in different directions. He turned his face away and kept running, he didn’t really want to see the manner in which they fought.
He, Mark, Humphrey, Barma and two other men managed to hide behind a desolate wall somewhere at the corner of the field. They kept breathing heavily with their backs pressed against the wall.
‘Dale!’, Mark called. ‘You know the meaning of Quppis in ancient Doxty Language?’
‘No’
‘It means a fiery end’, he said.
Dale wondered why Mark just brought in unrelated details about The Blazing Empire when there was really no time for that. He could have just told him everything when they were still back at the barber shop where there were no explosions or vibrating ground or bedlam, not even a customer. Because Dale had come to realise that if Mark was right about something, it was that going to Singalort was a death sentence. Now, he had moved ten thousand men from Boorbunk and cajoled them to come here. A lot of them were dead now; from one death sentence to another.
‘Okay?’
‘That is how Sawer wants to end this country. The killings and kidnappings are simply preambles’, he said and the ground under them quaked vigorously as an explosive blew up some metres away. They all fell to the ground, hiding their faces with their arms as they managed to get themselves to their feet. ‘If that is what you have come here to prevent, then that’s the place you need to go to’
‘What are you talking about?’, Dale shouted as audibly as he could, hoping that Mark would be able to hear him through the heavy winds and the trembling ground consistently knocking them off their balance.
‘What I am saying Mr. Reece Bailey is that, Gamma men are building an atomic bomb in there that would blow up in twenty-six hours from now’, Mark said as he staggered to his feet, holding on to the wall.
Dale remained on his feet and he wasn’t even interested on taking covers anymore. Yet again, the entire menace gets more lethal than he thought it was. ‘How did you know?’
‘You really want to me to tell you that? I was worked…’
Dale screamed out in rage. ‘How did you know it would blow up by tomorrow?’
Mark got up and faced Dale. With a stormy, frustrated voice, he said: ‘It’s because I left Singalort two thousand days and the bomb is scheduled to blow up in three thousand days from that time. It’s been eight years that I left. Do the maths, boy’
‘You were counting the days?’, Barma asked.
‘You think my mind ever left Dexter Islands. You think I didn’t want to save Dexter too? This is the grave danger that we are in. These hours are our last chances to remain a country’, Mark replied.
Dale had no words to stay. He was completely in shock and in overwhelmed fright about what was to come. He wasn’t sure he was prepared. He wasn’t sure he would have returned to Dexter if he knew all these.
‘Dale, we have to go’, Humphrey said.
‘You think if such a high-profile project that has been ongoing for years would be launched soon and Singalort is in the middle of an invasion, it wouldn’t be guarded by the most ironclad men in the world?’
At the sound of that, Humphrey stepped back. ‘What are we going to do?’, he asked but Dale couldn’t speak. He, honestly needed a table to sit and a pencil to draft out what to do because his brain were just throwing boxes at him. Boxes that were meant to be filled with ideas on what to do next but were obscurely empty.
Heroism isn’t everything, he thought.
‘Are you okay, Sir?’, one of the two other men who were twin brothers and whose name were Pete and Jake asked. There were young men, probably the youngest men who have ever gotten into Boorbunk. In a tie with Carreras. Maybe.
Some metres away from where Dale stood. Another missile blew up, hurling all of them off the ground violently. Dale hit the ground with his face crushed heavily into the soil. He raised his face painfully with a moan; there was nothing in sight just stodgy brown smoke everywhere. He closed his eyes when the atmospheric dust stung them. He could hear the persistent coughs of Mark and Humphrey in the distance.
‘Are you okay, Humphrey?’, Dale shouted.
‘I’m’, he coughed out again. His nose was severely broken and he had a heavy wound at the base of his skull. He groaned out. ‘Where are you, Dale?’
‘I’m right here. Where are y’all?’, Dale managed to speak.
‘I can’t see anything. Don’t worry I am coming to you sir’, Pete who was the least hurt said and got to his feet. As he dusted grime off his eyes, he could see a figure in the middle of the smoke. ‘Jake’, he called, unsure of what it could be. Who he could be. The man was standing still and that was all that he could see, the film of the explosion blocking everything else.
‘What?’, Jake said as he got to his feet. Humphrey looked up too, staring at this effigy in the middle of the smoke.
‘Dale, is that you?’, shouted Humphrey as he coughed out dust again.
‘What’s going on?! Do you…’, Dale stopped for a second because from where he lay, he could see the back view of the still man and he knew what it was already. Shit.
The smoke slowly cleared away and Humphrey got to his feet with wide-opened eyes as they discovered the very unfortunate way their lives were going to end. Standing right before them was a masked rifle-man (needless to say, in all black) but more significantly with a giant α symbol inscribed on it. Now, he was marching towards them.
Although he was walking, he was thrice as swift as an average man jogging. Jake’s lips went sagged immediately and so did the rest of his body. He couldn’t even move one inch before the alpha-man clasped Jake’s collarbones in both of his gloves and just in the casual manner in which someone would pull open a car door, Jake’s clavicles were out of his body and were held in the hands of the killer. A second later, Jake wouldn’t be able to scream of pain because the pointed edges of collarbones were pinned through his mouth down to his throat, making blood spill out of his mouth like a gargoyle spills out water.
With fury, Dale snubbed his injuries and got to his feet. He cocked his gun and shot endlessly at the beast of a man. Then another terrifying thing happened. As the bullets rushed into the back of the alpha-man, he didn’t jerk or groan in pain or fall, he remained calm and mute. He turned to face Dale and started walking towards him. He was walking faster and with his arms swinging wildly as he neared Dale.
Dale shrieked in frustration as the alpha-man refused to die. He had wasted more than one hundred bullets in his face, chest and back. And now, the only way Dale was going to be completely convinced that those guys were real mortals and not built-up robots was by pulling off that eerie black mask he wore over his/its head and see a human face.
Pete bent over his brother to see blood leaking from his shoulders where his bones had dragged out and his mouth. ‘Jake’, he called softly as if he was just asleep. At that instant when he knew his brother had been successfully, wholly being slaughtered, his face turned blank in euphoric grief. He wailed out Jake’s name repeatedly. ‘We promised father that we were going to return home together. Wake up please’, as he spoke his body was gummed against his brother’s lifeless self, staining his whole body with dark red blood.
On the other end, few metres away, Dale was shooting at the strange immortal psychopath who wouldn’t budge or die or speak. The last being the most eerie.
‘Dale, don’t shoot. Run. Run, Dale’, Mark shouted and Dale wondered why he hadn’t thought of such an idea and wasted his bullets to someone who was dusting them off him like plastics. Dale turned his back and ran as fast as he could. The alpha-man did not bother to chase him, he remained on the same spot with his helmet faced directly at where Dale was heading to. Then, he turned back walking towards where Mark, Barma and Pete were.
‘Hey, we have to go. He’s coming. He’s coming’, Barma screamed and helped Mark to his feet. ‘Pete, stand up. Save your life’
‘No, no, no’, Pete cried on holding onto his dead twin. Mark and Barma ran off just before the alpha-man arrived. He shot at them twice before they went out of his sight. One went into the air and one spiked into Mark’s knee. He groaned as he fell but scrambled to a stand with Barma’s help and fled.
The alpha man, then walked towards crying Pete and waited for few minutes before pulling out a pistol and killing him. He placed his hand in his left ear, putting on his earpiece. ‘Sir, we have found Reece Bailey’
‘Where did you meet him?’, Sawer said, jumping out of his seat.
‘Past The Spheres, he was past The Partition, he is definitely somewhere in The Circus’, the man commented.
‘Fuck. That’s close to the nuclear plant’, he said and ended the call quickly.
The only reason the alpha-man wasn’t able to perform a whole brutal killing process on Pete the way he had done for his brother was because his energy was completely drained out. There was blood all over his body because he was human, of course. He staggered about for a minute and then fell like a pack of cards, dead. It would be the beginning of the ends of many alpha-men.
‘I am not going to let Reece Bailey live for more than today’. At that, Vince’s knuckles crackled. ‘Never, will I let such happen’, he punched some digits on the telephone and placed it against his ear. ‘I want you to gather thirty men to the outskirts of The Circus, find Reece Bailey and kill him on the spot’
‘Sir, I volunteer to lead the team’, Vince called.
‘No. Stay here’, Sawer replied and Vince felt so enraged that his fingers clutched closer to his waist knife.
Dale caught up with Barma in the front and assisted him to carry up Mark whose leg was bleeding heavily. ‘Why do those guys not die?’, Dale asked Mark.
‘They do die. You just won’t see them. You think they are called alpha-men for nothing’, Mark spoke with little audibility because of the excessive noise and hullabaloo everywhere, plus the fact that Mark was in intense pain but Dale kept his ears wide open. ‘Sawer was a soldier for thirty years, the best soldier in the force and had survived the four biggest wars in the country’s wars which no one else has done. His secret? He has a very ingenious way of inhibiting the feel of bullets when they hit him, like suck it all up for a limited period of time. In that same fashion, he has thought the alpha man the sinister art of taking in bullets, taking in stabs without…’, Mark cried out and fell to the floor alongside Dale and Barma. He had been shot directly in the left knee which was the better working leg of his two. The other one was half-paralysed since the tissues in it had died off. ‘Stupid Bastards!’, he yelled mournfully.
‘What are we going to do?’, Humphrey asked and Dale shook his head to show ignorance.
‘Here’, Barma had torn out a sash in the side of his shirt and placed over the face of where the bullet had pierced. Dale didn’t see how that helped because the blood still flowed seamlessly through the light fabric of the cloth but Mark stopped mourning which Dale was really grateful for because he wanted to hear about what Mark knew, then and there to see if it there was still any way through all the thick smoke everywhere and the quaking earth and immortal, brutal, mute combatants to averse the impending end that Dexter might come to in twenty-one hours, or end this entire evil creation of Sawer. Because now Owen Sawer didn’t feel like just a former general who was now a villain and could be conquered by a hero who had packed a whole bunch of amateur fighters who were once ex-detainees, but like a complete demon who had slit for pupils and didn’t acknowledge Dexterrans as living beings despite the fact that he was fought for them.
Mark tried to speak. ‘They’ve been thought to…postpone death and kill their attackers first before giving up the ghost’.
‘He’s losing so much blood. We have to find the others’, Dale called. The four of them were past the area where all the domes were – where the real war was going on – and the wall where they had once leaned against was the demarcation between the domes and the special structures on the other end of the Quppis ground that included The Colour Room and The Nuclear Plant where gamma-men (the specialised members of the empire) had been building and testing the one thing that was going to smoulder Dexter Islands into nothingness.
‘I don’t know. I..’, Barma tried to suggest that he should get more people but he wouldn’t even be able to one inch. Since they were all lying somewhere on plain ground that they could be easily seen, it didn’t take long for the alpha scouts to find them and they did. They were twenty in number and in marching succession, they surrounded Dale and the rest of them.
‘We got them all’, one of them alighted.
‘Oh Great. I think I have another idea’, Sawer said and he jumped to his feet again, pacing around the walls including the one where Vince – who was finding a way to get out of the tower – was. ‘Don’t kill them. Take them to the Black Room’, he ordered.
The alpha men walked towards them and picked them up. Dale tried to remain calm and stay silent. He could hear the overwhelming wraith of his father telling him to do so. Their hands were so firm that Dale could not move one inch as they pushed him towards what Dale would call an onion building that was painted in a thousand shades of different colours. Little did he know that they were heading to the goriest place on the planet. And the goriest room of that goriest place.
‘I will be there’, Sawer added before cutting the telephone call.
Vince knew this was his only chance, he had to persuade Sawer. ‘Sir, I am going with you. I will like to take over from the Gamma men to do the torturing’
Sawer gave a wave of his hand to show disapproval.
‘Sir. But you would agree with me that Reece Bailey is a hell of a nuisance. Don’t you think, sir, that he needs to feel all the weight of everything he has done to us? Let me inflict on him a punishment that only alpha hands like mine possesses’, Vince stated.
Usually, alpha-men and the entire Quppis army didn’t say so many words per day but Vince was the only one given the chance to. The only enemy soldier that the Quppis’ rules didn’t work for, the only one Sawer rusted enough to guard him, the only one who was bent on exercising vengeance and ending The Blazing Empire.
‘Where are you taking us to?’, Dale dared to ask one of the alpha-men grabbing his arm.
Sure enough, no one responded to both of them. Instead, they suddenly paused for a second. Four of the alpha men marched forward towards Dale. One of them came towards Dale, one towards Humphrey, one towards Mark and one towards Barma.
‘What are you going to do to us?’, Dale asked again. The more fear he felt in his heart, the more courage he exuded. Each of those men were holding something in their hands like a long cylindrical pin.
‘Reece’, Dale heard Mark call. ‘You have to…’
That was all Dale heard before the content of the syringe emptied into his arm and automatically went dizzy and fell into an induced sleep.