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, things are pretty awry. Despite the total of 200,000 soldiers that have arrived from different parts of the world to support a quite army-less island nation, it’s still difficult to say that there is any positive result so far but only time will tell’
‘Thank you very much, Ava. Many have said that the famous Reece Bailey might have joined the war too, what…?’
‘Well. Although, no trace of Bailey has been found yet. A group of non-combatant men have been spotted on the main Quppis’ ground who must have been Dexterran volunteers among whom Bailey could have been one’, Reporter Ava dictated. On the screen, her face had been replaced by random snapshots of the war so far showing the so-called volunteers including one that showed Dale sliding off the cliff with all the other men onto the area of the eight domes. Since all the picture came in blinks and weren’t every really clear – you can imagine a cameraman running past missiles just to take snap pictures – that capture was the only one that Samantha’s eyes could catch. And in it, she gasped out a little cry because she could swear she saw Tristan too with his hands cushioning the rest of his body to slide down the craggy mountain.
Everyone was done with their jubilation, so odd for people to celebrate without a real victory. But it was the nearest they had ever come to victory before and only the Dexterrans themselves who had stayed home for almost two years with the windows shut and the doors triple-locked, lived in cellars and underground bunkers, being attacked once or twice on an average and wallowing in hopelessness knew they had all the reasons on Earth to rejoice for at least a glint of hope in the grey clouds that was cast over their homeland. Little did they also know that it might just be the end. In each home, the television was turned on and peered at with at least two shaky undizzy eyes. That night, there was no such thing as not cheating nature because now while they watched the war updates, they realised that the next morning could bring news that would make them having night good sleeps and tell fairy tale stories for the rest of their lives. Or send torrents that would put them to an endless, rottening slumber.
‘…Presently, we cannot say for sure if there is any sign of victory (idiom) or not and no sign of Sawer has been found. We don’t even know if Sawer is in Singalort as proposed earlier on but as I said earlier on, only time will tell…’, the TV broadcaster said.
Samantha sighed with a lot of hope still settled in her heart, she clasped her hands tightly and prayed for a second before carrying Andrew and placing him carefully in bed. He gave a little babble as his back touched the foam lightly.
‘Don’t worry. He is coming home soon’, she whispered.
Well, back at the Quppis’ citadel, nothing was a whisper.
Tristan was somewhere around the domes. So far, he had killed more men than he had told jokes. He wondered if any of those masked men even saw him at all; none of the bullets had hit him and he had not combated face-to-face with any of them. He had followed a band of about sixty men into the Kappa dome and he could boast of killing at least ten of those Kappa men but he wouldn’t. It wasn’t even something to boast of. He imagined Andrew knowing that his comedian father had once killed people. Sounded like a really ironic joke.
Now, they had successfully occupied the Kappa dome having killed every one of them. They took over the tiny windows where those shooters executed from and their target were the Beta, Epsilon, Omicron, Sigma and Omega men they could find fighting around.
‘Have you wondered why we don’t see any Gamma or Alpha or Kappa or Psi man left…’, one scabby man among them asked as they shot from the dome.
Barry was so pissed that he hissed and hoped the man would keep silent and just let the rest focus on the shooting even if he wouldn’t shoot. No one responded, either but this man wouldn’t stop talking.
‘You know or Mu, Lambda, Chi…’, Barry had to turn to the man and even more annoyingly, he couldn’t believe the expression on the man’s face. He was looking so wise, thinking he was making sense because maybe he thought he was the only person in the room that knew all the Greek alphabets.
‘Hey, man’, Barry replied to him with a steady, uninfuriated voice. ‘There is no such thing as Psi, Chi or Mu or Lambda. There are only eight forces. You weren’t sleeping when Mark was telling us all at the cavern’
‘Oh yes. True’, the man said, itching the scabs on his face shamefully. ‘But what about the rest…?’,
‘Mr. Darligton! Will you stop disturbing us! We are in the middle of a goddamn war’, Barry shouted now.
‘Mr. Darligton. I need you to be very intelligent’, Tristan said. ‘We just killed all the Kappa men that’s why we are in their dome presently. Alpha men are probably fighting somewhere else, protecting Sawer or something? Gamma men, well I don’t know. Maybe they are protecting Sawer too or staying in their own dome’
‘Do we even know where Sawer stays?’, Darligton asked.
‘Only that old man would know’, Tristan replied.
‘Where is the old man?’, Darligton asked.
‘Where is Dale?’, Barry asked and everyone suddenly fell silent. This time, the silence was fuelled with worry and a little fright.
The next time they spoke was when an entire phalanx of helicopters circled into the arena, covering the light. ‘Woof. What are those?’
‘Fighter jets. Those soldiers look Caucasian. They are on our side’, Barry replied to whoever the asker was and gave an optimistic grin.
At this time, there were already thousands of bodies on the ground with different uniforms – green khaki uniforms, grey uniforms, people in usual clothes and masked men in dark armour with bullet holes.
The next time Dale opened his eyes. He was no longer in the grips of two alpha men but that didn’t mean he could tilt any part of his body still. After three blinks, the dizziness cleared completely from his eyes to the full realisation of where they were staying. He had been bound by stiff wires so tightly that he looked like an embalmed mummy. The first pain he felt was from the blood stopped in all his veins and joints and in spite of the killing sensation in his body, it was only the first pain in the long line of devilish things that were going to happen to him in that room.
He was laying on a slender Murphy bed to which he was bound to. The room was so quiet that Dale could be tempted to think that the entire Quppis war was only a dream but the presence of alpha-men in the room reminded of the gory event they were in the middle of. The room they stayed in was tall and the ceiling was very far away from the ground. All the walls were painted in full black, adding to the relative gloominess of the room. The only light in the room was from a bright bulb hanging from the centre of the ceiling. Dale couldn’t completely turn his head three-hundred-and-sixty degrees to see the full image but he ached to know or have a clue of what the place could be about. He groaned as he twisted his held-down, nearly choked neck to catch something, anything and he did have a second-glimpse at something utterly ghostly.
After succeeding to move his head past the alpha-men wandering around the room without point as if waiting for someone, and raising his eyes until they had climbed up the walls and could see above, he found a horizontal transparent-windowed cupboard – something like a boutique show mirror. What was behind that mirror looked like mannequins or did they? Dale couldn’t get it out but his brain told him mannequin because well, that’s what was found behind see-through glasses in boutiques except that these ones weren’t wearing clothes. No, it couldn’t be mannequins, he disagreed and stretched hard but the wires were just too rigid. He had to use his eye power instead. He squinted hard and then the mannequins came to his line of vision. Mannequins.
The show-glass was in sections with different items laying in each slide. And in each slide, Dale found embalmed flesh of what used to be a human. Dale convulsed like electric shock had just been passed through him and looked away immediately and now, his heart was racing. He felt more scared than he had ever felt since he had gotten into Quppis. He just saw a human being with all his parts cut out and preserved in slides.
‘Aargh!’, Dale heard someone exclaim softly. He turned his head gently and he saw Mark laying just beside him. For the first time, he realised that there were about hundred of such Murphy beds in the room with other people tied to them with wires as well. He had happened to be the first to wake up.
‘Hey’, Dale whispered but Mark wasn’t even looking. Mark writhed his body in pain; he could still feel the slight stab of the needle into his fragile arm and his injured leg hadn’t gotten any better. ‘Hey’, Dale called, this time a little louder. The alpha man started in between their beds didn’t seem a lot concerned about whether they talked or not.
This time Mark looked at Dale. ‘Reece?’, he was also a little astonished to discover other people in the room.
‘Do you know where we are?’, Dale mouthed.
Mark remained silent and stopped to survey the room which was a little easier for him since his shrivelled neck had not been tightly strung up against the bed. They didn’t want the old man to die by choking, not after finding out that he was an ex-terrorist who escaped Singalort and Boorbunk. There were more creative ways to end lives, Sawer would say.
‘Ha ah!’, Mark burst into loud laughter. ‘So ironic’
‘What? Where are we?’
‘I didn’t know I would die here’, Mark said and that comment didn’t help Dale’s racing heart in any way.
‘What are you talking about?’
Mark didn’t respond. Instead, he laughed out again and kept on staring at the ceiling. By this time in the auditorium, everyone was soon awake frightened and not knowing what was to come.
About an hour later when Dale couldn’t feel any part of his body anymore – near rigor mortis – all the alpha men marched to the entrance of the room and formed something like an aisle. Everyone was peering their eyes from the side of their beds to see who this grand entry welcome was for. Who else?
At that juncture, the door drew open silently by a gloved hand that turned out to be another masked man that turned out to be another alpha man – only that this alpha man had a glint of gold on the alpha logo of his vest that made it sparkle more than those of other alpha men.
An alpha man is an alpha man. Fear all of them, Dale disciplined himself as he kept his eyes wide and unblinking because right behind the sparkling alpha was the main attraction. In all his power and dark glory stood Owen Sawer, The Emperor of The Blazing Empire.
Dale had seen him before on the TV of Crawhaven Pub one night when they were performing. It had just been after the Invardi War, they were speaking about the great feats that he had done for the nation and now, he could recall that day’s broadcaster saying: ‘I think presently above anything else, General Sawer didn’t just fight because he was a soldier, he didn’t fight like he cared about his own life, I think it would be just right to say that every Dexterran alive and witnessing our victory over Invardi owes their life to this hero…’. Indeed, we do and now we are paying.
Sawer was tall and had brown skin, the exact shade of Dale’s skin. Despite the fact that he was well past seventy, he still looked fierce and embodied the full-on soldier physique. Surprisingly and even more frighteningly, he appeared in a light mood.
‘Well, well, well. It’s good to see all of you’, Sawer stated and as he walked through the beds, the sparkling-logo man followed right behind him. ‘Oh’, he gasped in awe and Dale had a very strange guess that Sawer was coming towards him.
No! no! No!, Dale yelled in his head but Sawer was already right in front of him and he laid his hand on Dale’s forehead. Dale felt so revulsed that he cried out, finding it hard to drive off the man’s cold palm from his head. ‘Mr. Reece Bailey’, Sawer called out and he himself had revulsion in his voice. ‘Look at you’, he said and gave a worrying sigh. ‘You shouldn’t have done this. You should have brought all this to yourself. You could have stayed in the US. Now, here you are’
‘Sawer! You die tonight!’, Dale shouted.
Sawer laughed in reply and turned away from Dale. ‘You know something, Reece?’, Sawer said and itched his white hair. ‘Only two people have looked me in the eye and told me something related to that. One of them was a fellow soldier and the other a little teenage boy and now, you. But you know something y’all share in common?’, Sawer asked and stared at Dale’s eyes. ‘Okay, you’re not that smart. But I think those three people share quite a whole lot in common. They are all Baileys’. At that, Dale jerked his head up as if to sit up and stare directly at him. He saw Sawer’s special bodyguard suddenly close his fists hardly in the glove and look at Sawer as if he were annoyed too.
‘Oh yes’, Sawer said and removed his hand from Dale’s hair. ‘Just like you and as you know or you don’t know, the rest was history. The first was my good friend, Andre Bailey. We were good partners. He was a great officer. We could have ruled this place but now, he is somewhere where I am sure he isn’t ruling’, he said and chuckled gleefully. ‘And the other now was a little boy. I think Baileys have a knack of knowing just the best way to die. You know…His name was Taylor Bailey’. At the call of the name, Dale shivered and sort of barked out like a dog. Yet again, Dale thought he saw the special-alpha man have the same reaction to that name being mentioned.
‘You die tonight, Sawer!’, Dale cried out and now tears streamed down the sounds of his eyes to his ears. No, Taylor died in Baskers, he was shot twice in the head, wasn’t it? Dale screamed in his head.
‘Okay, that’s enough’, Sawer said, displeased and signalled to one of the alpha men in the room.
‘What are you going to let them do to me?’
‘The reason we are all in this room’, Sawer responded.
The alpha man had a rotor blade in his hand and marched to Dale’s bed.
‘No. No’, Dale screamed but everything happened quickly. Dale’s fingers were pulled out of the wire and with the blade of the machine rolling, three of his fingers were chopped off from the root.
‘Cut ‘em all’, Sawer said and grinned as he watched blood pour to the ground along with Dale’s fingers.
‘Sir. Let us begin the ritual properly’, The special alpha said.
‘Okay, stop’, Sawer said to the other man.
Dale turned his head to the special alpha with a face full of gratitude as if the special alpha had said it to assist him. The goal was to make the torture exquisite.
‘This room is The Black Room and no one has ever died here before. Except one. His name was Taylor Bailey’
‘That’s not true. You are a liar’, Dale shouted.
‘Reece, shut up. You will get yourself killed’, Mark shouted from the other slender bed.
‘We are all going to die anyway’
‘Oh Yes. You think that your brother was killed on the road. My men shot him from the van. Bla…bla…bla. But that’s what we all thought too. Turns out the boy is invincible to bullets. Until the little boy appeared here’, Sawer said and pulled up his sleeve. ‘He arrived in my room and shot me here. I mean, Baileys are very brave people’, he said, laughing and facing his bodyguard. ‘I think 000001 would agree with me’, and the bodyguard nodded. ‘I don’t know how he got in here. He just appeared with a two-bullet pistol. He killed one of my men with one and hit me in the arm with the other’
‘I will finish what he started. I swear I will…’, Dale yelled.
‘Why don’t you wait for me to complete my story?’, Sawer said. He signalled to some guards with a move of his fingers and immediately, they picked up two tall ladders and rested them against the western wall. ‘So I brought him here and told him that what he did was wrong. He begged me not to kill him and I didn’t’, Sawer said and now, Dale could hear the climbing sounds of the guards as they marched up the tall wooden ladder. ‘This is what I did instead’, Sawer said and pointed his arm to the two guards who were now climbing down. They had detached the entire glass cupboard from the upper wall and brought them towards Sawer, hence towards Dale. Dale’s eyes widened excessively as he realised the full terror of the contents of the cupboard. The body parts in it were well laid-out and clean, no blood at all. They were complete body parts. The ten fingers lain out, a sure human torso that looked like that of a 14-year-old, human feet, he saw blue strands of hair well-hung within the mirror. Dale’s face kept moving through the contents of the showglass. The more they tormented him, the more he stared. He jerked in horror the most when he saw a tiny penis hanging too…and then at the end of the cupboard, Dale found a hair-free face of a kid. A face that Dale knew at once to be that of his brother, Taylor.
‘So, there you have it’, Sawer said impressed with his neat butchering result.
‘You really did this? You did all of these to a 13-year-old boy?’, Dale was crying even more and the pain of his mutilated hand had gone completely dead in the presence of the new pain that he was feeling. ‘You killed my brother because…’
‘No. No. I didn’t kill him. God is my witness’, Sawer said. ‘I cut him up and left his head with his torso and left him in the room for quite some time. And I tell you, your brother is very, very strong. He refused to die the whole time despite the fact that this room was shredded in his blood. So, I left him here, limbless and castrated for the next’, Sawer paused, calculating the time. ‘Twenty-two days. It was then that I came back. Chopping off his head and then scraping his head from the hair. I think I did a really great job. I mean…so great for someone who even has never gone to anatomy class. So, I did all that and preserved his body here’, Sawer said and turned his hands to his end result.
Now, Dale couldn’t even speak. He turned his head away from Sawer and the showglass, and let the tears keep rolling.
‘So, I am leaving you, Reece Bailey to the hands of the number 000001’,Sawer said and tapped on the golden alpha logo of his bodyguard who nodded.
‘Oh God. Taylor’, Dale whispered as he turned back to the ceiling. His brain was filled the haunting images of his young brother getting cut while still alive, castrated with a knife. His limbs sliced with a knife and his legs severed at the hips. All while he was still awake. He had watched his bones crush off and his limbs separate from his body.
‘I leave the rest of you to the talented hands of my other men. Have a happy cutting (cotton) period’
He turned to see Sawer leave the room and despite the fact that he knew that very soon, the same thing was going to be performed on him. All he could think about was Taylor and now, Vince. Where could Vince be? As long as his unreliable brain could make him remember, Taylor had been his nicest brother and Vince the second nicest. Where could Vince be?!! Turns out there was a reason why the question kept ringing wildly in his brain at that time.
The special bodyguard slammed the door shut behind Sawer and now there were yells everywhere from Humphrey and Barma and the other men including foreign soldiers who had been captured in the room.
‘Shh’, Dale thought he heard the special bodyguard say. He did say it, Dale realised because every other person was silent and the guard had his hand on his lips.
‘What are you doing?’, another alpha-man asked the 000001.
He didn’t respond. Instead, he pulled out something from his pocket. It was a pen-knife. He walked to Dale and instead of cutting another finger with it, he handed it to his other hand.
‘What are you doing?’, the alpha-man called again and now they were all walking onto him.
‘Save yourself now’, the 000001 said silently from under the mask.
‘Who are you?’, Dale asked, astonished beyond limits but the special alpha wouldn’t answer because now all the other alpha men were turned against him. They were all holding long knives from somewhere in their armour.
‘You raise swords at me? It seems you don’t know why they call me what they call me. It’s the end of the road, brothers. Let us stop all these. We are not killing any of them today’
‘Who is your brother? No one is your brother. You are a traitor and traitors die’, one of them said and now, they rushed madly at him like a swarm of bees. Everyone roared as they watched the group of hundred alpha men descend on this different alpha.
000001 ran up the tall wall quicker and more fantastic than anything or anyone Mark had ever seen in in all his 70 years of existence, and somersaulted as he came back down, precisely slicing the necks of two alpha men as he reached down. He raced down the room amid the Murphy beds where people were tied down and stabbed them as he went on. He grabbed another one of them, sent the knife through his mask until it came out of the other side like a needle sewing a torn cloth. Yet, as everything was going on, there were no shrieks or gripes of pain from any of the alpha men. The only sound that could be heard was that of knives stabbing flesh ruthlessly, bones crushing, blood splattering, the heavy thuds of the men as they fell to the ground, slain and ended. Alpha had levels after all.
Dale tried to focus on himself as he rubbed the sharp side of the knife with as much impact as he could assume while tied up, against the powerful wires that wouldn’t get detached.
Now, this special good-guy alpha man was busy throwing off the others, crashing them against the wall with torrential force, despite their height or their weight. He was only a bit taller than Dale and had almost the same frame if the armour was not misleading but he was flinging other heavy men off left and right with slingshot arms that gripped like clamps. Just then, one of them flew at him, making two of them crash against a wall. Since he was now on the ground, two men rushed at him holding him down while the one who had dived at him like a bolt, drew out a knife and stabbed him somewhere in the abdomen more times than Dale could count. Still, no sound from this special alpha-man. He wasn’t even struggling as they held him down and digging the knife in him.
The stabbing wasn’t the rhythmic dramatic way assassins did it in action movies, it was as fast and endless as a woodpecker poking a tree’s bark. Although Dale couldn’t see any blood, the yanking of the killer’s dagger as it sunk repeatedly with vigour into their traitor was so gruesome that he turned his face away and focused on getting the wires cut.
It didn’t take long before tables turned. The next time Dale turned to the fight scene; 000001 was on top and had killed the men holding him. He pulled out two knives and launched it down into the other alpha’s throat at both sides so deeply that Dale could imagine the mouth of the two knives forming a confluence in the centre of the victim’s throat. By then, the wires were loose.