‘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.
‘Yes, we know Reece’, Khelain said.
‘I think they are asking where he is?’, Barry asked.
‘I think they went over there with Mark and Humphrey and those twins’, Tristan said with his finger pointed to The Partition far away.
‘You sure?’, Barry asked to which Tristan nodded.
‘Do you have a transport system?’, Tristan asked the Japs as if they understood English.
Sawer had returned to his tower with a new crew of twenty beta men as guards. His tower was secure, the nuclear bomb was ready to be launched, the little brat who caused it all would die soon and his final mission would soon be accomplished, so for him there was very little to worry about. So just for the sake of checking up on things, he picked up his telephone and punched in Zero-Zero-Zero-Zero-Zero-One. ‘Is he still breathing or he is holding up well like his brother did?’, Sawer said but there was silence on the other end. ‘Hello’
‘We are moving on’, Vince replied.
‘He’s not dead?’, Sawer asked again but this time there was no silence on the other end, there were no words either. He could clearly hear the laughing and talking of many men together in the background. One of them was distinct – the one which had told him that he would lose his life that night.
‘That’s what I meant by we are moving on, General Owen Fibrey Sawer!’, Vince bellowed to Sawer over the telephone. He shuddered in disbelief and the telephone slipped from his palm.
‘NO!!!’, he screamed. ‘You, show me all the footages of all the rooms in The Colour Room… in The Circus’, he ordered.
The closest Beta man rushed to activate the cameras all around The Circuses. It was already morning and things were clearer to see. ‘Down there’, Sawer ordered and the operator clicked on one of the little squares to enlarge it and show it better.
It showed Dale and 000001 who – unmasked – was Vince Bailey and the horde of other men that had been held in The Black Room. ‘No’, he muttered forlornly as he realised the remembrance; it turns out that behind the mask of the man whom he had entrusted ninety-nine percent of the whole Quppis’ deal with, whom he had trusted to be his right-hand man above the other pawns of governors and politicians – somewhere behind that mask – there was another Bailey.
‘Sir, you might want to check this out’, the Beta man said as he showed another footage. This time it showed the display of the camera at The Partition. There were two Humvees zooming into The Circus as well as two helicopters flying overhead.

‘Is it true that there is a nuclear bomb that is about to be launched in the next few hours?’, Dale asked his brother.
‘Nine hours’, Vince replied. ‘It’s in the next building’
The earlier it is detonated, the better, Dale thought.
‘But we can’t go there now’, Vince added and that made Dale suddenly remember that Vince used to be the master of mind-reading when they practised magic together at home. It was painful that his memory loss wouldn’t let him remember a lot of clear moments that they’d shared together as kids. ‘They’ve got thousands of mini-missiles and weapons that would be launched if any unwanted person comes in a 100-metre radius of the building. So, we can’t all try to invade there at once. We’ve got to be patient’, he explained.
‘Wait a second, everyone. What was Sawer thinking when he was going to blow up the nation? He lives in the nation too for God’s sake!’, Humphrey protested. He and Barma were still helping Mark to stand upright. The old man was silent with pain in his limbs.
‘Singalort. The plan was to blow up everyone in the whole country and then leave the area of Singalort untargeted. So that the clan of Quppis could be forever on and own the country alone, to be considered victorious. Now, only two things can happen: It’s either Singalort gets saved from the inferno or…only Singalort gets bombed and the rest of Dexter gets saved’, Vince explained.
‘Now that doesn’t look like a good deal´, Humphrey commented.
They reached the exit of The Colour Room and as they got out, they could see more Humvees approaching them.
Dale took a long look at his brother. ‘You are hurt’, he said referring to the multiple stabs that he had been dealt with.
‘No, I am not. At least not much’, he said.
‘But how? That guy raised the knife so high and drove into your skin. How?’, Barma asked.
‘I wear three Kevlars under my armour. Nothing can really get in. All other alphas and Betas wear just two. The others are privileged to have just one’, Vince said and that was all they could say before the vehicles stopped and some two helicopters wheezed down from the clouds. Some Japanese soldiers rushed out as well as Tristan, Barry, Khelain, Peter and a whole lot of other men.
‘Here they are’, Tristan said as he hugged Dale. ‘We meet again finally’
‘What do we do now?’, Peter asked Dale.
‘We have…’, Dale was about to explain a whole lot of things when he noticed that the military men were pointing their rifle at Vince, obviously because of his Alpha man attire. ‘He is one of us’, he said to them and they seemed to understand since they depressed their guns at once, and even gave a brief bow to Dale. Dale couldn’t help being inundated by the honour bestowed to him. First, it was people from the streets and then it was the ex-Boorbunk prisoners who had followed him there and now Asian fighters somehow someway, knew him and respected him so much as to bow their heads to him. Despite the impressive feats he had achieved as a magician, he had never felt more like royalty. ‘Thank you’, he uttered.
‘There are other people in that place. We need to rescue them’, Vince said to the Japs and they nodded. They rushed down into the building.
‘How do they suddenly understand English?’, Khelain asked.
‘They probably always understood it. Why don’t you let us go?’, Tristan said. ‘Wait a second, who among you can drive a Humvee?’
‘Get into the car. I can drive anything’, Humphrey replied and winked at Dale.
Dale and Vince hopped in on one of the many seats of the military car. ‘Where is that place that we were?’, Barma asked. Since Mark was paralysed, Vince appeared to be the new tour guide.
‘That’s the colour room. It is where they torture people. It is where they killed our brother’, he replied and Dale looked away for a moment.
‘Sawer told us’, Dale said. ‘Where’d you go?’
‘When?’
‘When father and mother were killed’
Vince sighed deeply and wiped his face with his palms. ‘I and Taylor, we had actually come here together. Yeah’, he said and nodded with wrinkles formed across his forehead. ‘We both came to find you’, his voice weakened. ‘Taylor was shot at the mouth of the van as we all knew and… I was just right behind him, chasing the van as well that we knew had you in it. I helped Taylor up and despite the fact that he had an injured arm and I told him to let us go back. He insisted that we…we find you. That we never let you go’
Dale turned to him for a second but it only made the emotions more sullen within him.
‘Somehow, we reached the forest after four weeks of walking and sleeping on the street. We both got into the jungle and since then, we’ve both not made it out’ Vince continued. ‘Taylor found the tower and went all out immediately. He killed a guard and missed by a single inch to have killed Sawer by the throat. I wasn’t as brave as him. I wish I was. I still wish I am’, he said.
‘Get ready for a jolly ride!’, Humphrey shouted as everyone got into the vehicle and he turned on the engine. They were heading back to The Dome area where the Quppis’ surrendered fighters were been handcuffed and lain on the ground.
‘So, what did you do?’, Dale asked.
‘I sneaked through the forest for a number of days. I sneaked into the colour room through the drains where blood passed through and looked for you everywhere but there was no trace of you. Then, there were no cameras in the woods and so I stayed there for few days, surviving until some day, I was captured by the rangers and made a Sigma man. It’s… I was fifteen then’
‘Oh. No wonder you’re so good in fighting’, Barma added.
‘So how did you become this?’, Dale pointed to the golden logo on Vince’s vest.
Vince sighed again and faced down. ‘When I was twenty, I made it to the alpha crew and then…I was one of the best. One of the most brutal’
‘How many men did you kill?’, Dale asked.
‘I don’t know but I can tell you how many I did kill to get this badge. I and nine other best alpha-men were selected for The Big Slaughter’
‘Oh My God! You were one of those assholes involved in The Big Slaughter’, Barma exclaimed.
‘We killed every soldier in the barracks. We emptied it all. I was the only man who came back alive among the ten of us. I had killed nine thousand men that night. I became the unanimous best’, Vince said.
Dale looked severely hurt by knowing that. ‘What did Sawer do to you? What did he do to make you beasts?’, he asked but Vince kept silent. He really didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know where he would start from. There was probably no starting point. ‘What do you stand to gain when you become alphas. What is the incentive you have for reaching such rank?’
‘Everything. He gives us everything when we become alphas. We get free from some of the rules. We have power over juniors, we are given lots and lots of wealth. He makes us rich. Our families are completely saved and get to live in the golden houses of the exclusive Rainbow City in Reckdette. And a price money of one billion Dexterran dollars’
‘I want to join Quppis’, Dale heard Barma humorously comment.
‘What about you? Which benefit did you get? You didn’t tell them about your family’, Dale asked.
‘Yes. I told Sawer I had no family and then, I thought I really didn’t have. I thought you were dead somewhere, I saw Taylor get killed, I saw mom and dad getting killed. I thought it was over. I refused to get any rewards from this terrible place. From the blood-stained hands of Sawer. I had enough guilt already’
‘The devil’s place is a place of gold’, Dale and Vince said at the same instance. And that made him crack up, giving his elder brother a How-Did-You-Know-I-Was-Going-To-Say-That look.
Vince laughed too. ‘You know dad used to say that’, he said.
‘He did?’
‘Yes, and he also used to say’, Vince stopped and cleared his throat. ‘Don’t blink, you will miss it’, he said mimicking his father’s voice and burst out into laughter which he expected Dale to burst into too. ‘Common, you know what I’m talking about’
Dale chuckled dryly, trying to remember their father’s voice actually saying that.
‘You don’t remember that also, do you?’, Vince asked and Dale shook his head. ‘You seem to have forgotten a lot of things, Reece’, he added and the moroseness of the discussion was back.
‘Yeah, I returned home two weeks ago’, Dale said. ‘I went our house, to where we used to live. To the farm where we used to play’
‘I go there too’, Vince revealed. ‘I go every month. I sleep there some nights because after everything, it is the only place where I still feel human and like a child. Where the air is cool, where I can stay unmasked and stay a whole day without doing anything wrong to anyone. I go down to the cellar. I go to the swing at the back of the house’, he said and laughed.
Vince had been the one who was at the house, Dale realised.
‘He still speaks to me’, Dale said.
‘Me too’, Vince replied.
‘It makes me greatly wish nothing changed. The swings were already rotting and so are the chains but I had sit there anyway on the third swing where I sat when four of us were there in the evenings. But I’d be alone and…let breeze swirl past me as I swung. I try to remember all of us still on those seats, still kids but it never feels the same. Because as I swing with my eyes open, all I see is the burial place of my parents’, Vince said and shook his head.
The Humvee had reached The Dome area and they all got down. The other expatriate soldiers were there and one of them walked up to Dale with a bow on reaching him. ‘They wouldn’t tell us where Sawer is’, the US soldier said.
Immediately, Dale looked at his brother who immediately answered by pointing to the velvety tower in the exact middle of the domes.
‘What do we do?’, another soldier asked Dale and he turned to Vince again.
‘Sawer is guarded by only twenty beta men that he replaced with me. He’s got cameras and he is watching all of us right now. The whole tower is bullet and even bomb-proof which is going to make it impossible to make it explode from the outside. There are hundreds of deadly traps in there that he would have activated now. Including grenade launchers’, Vince emitted. ‘So, the only way we can go is by sending three batches of decoys in there. You go in with your own team as the fourth batch’, he said to Dale and he nodded.
The soldiers gathered themselves for the attack. Dale was about to join them when he stopped to turn to his brother. ‘What about you?’
‘Time is running out, someone’s got to stop the bomb. I will be the one’, Vince said and held his brother’s mutilated palm. ‘Stay safe’
Dale smiled and hugged his brother. ‘Go on’, he whispered in his ear.
‘Use this for your hand’, Vince said and pulled out a white tape from his armour’s pocket before hopping back into the Humvee to the Balloon House where Gamma engineers were working more than they had ever worked to make their decade-long, billion-dollar project finally happened.
‘Launch it’, Sawer said.
‘Sir but there are still eight hours to go’, the Gamma man responded.
‘I said launch it now. We don’t have any time’, Sawer said and returned the telephone. This time, he was no longer in his royal blue dresses. He was in his soldier uniforms, a grey Quppis armour with a golden Q sign across its vest. The fact that he was a septuagenarian didn’t mean he was out of shape or his muscles had gone flabby. He was still the fighter who had won wars for the nation. He was going to win another war but this time, it was the other way round.
‘General Owen Sawer’, a soldier called from outside the tower with a loudspeaker in his mouth. ‘I know you can hear me loud and clear. You are under arrest. Come out of the tower with your two hands in the air. All your men have surrendered, you have no choice now. General Owen Sawer, I know you can hear me. Come out with your hands in the air’, the soldier repeated.
Sawer looked at the camera to see a myriad of troopers: Some in blue, some in green, some in grey military uniforms all with their rifles at hand. Others were just regular individuals, among which he saw Reece Bailey in front. They had surrounded the tower and were ready to attack.
‘You’ve got ten seconds to come out’
Sawer moved his arms over his desk and pulled out something like a guitar box, only that what was within was heavier than normal. He zipped open the bag and pulled out the most powerful gun in Dexter Islands – a 959 JDJ rifle – and held it up.
‘Ten’
He chuckled lightly and moved his fingers through the features of the black gun. It had been a long time since he had held a gun knowing he was going in a battle.
‘Eight’
He dropped the gun and stopped to pace around his chamber. Now, there was only him left in the room. Since the tower had ten floors before reaching Sawer’s office, two Beta men occupied each floor.
‘Six…Four’
He walked back to his telephone and called one of the engineers at the nuke plant. ‘Have you launched it?’
‘Yes, I have. It is going up in thirty minutes’, the Gamma man responded.
‘Good’, he said.
‘Two!’
‘He went to the wall of his chamber and he looked up at the images of himself as a soldier in the Dexterran army uniform as a regular corporal and then, as the commander. The next frame showed the contrast as he was now the head of the world’s most famous gang, one of the most influential people in the world and very soon, his name would be etched in history. The picture showed him standing in front of all the legions of the Quppis on one of their anniversary days.
‘One!’
This is power! Of course, this is power! He convinced himself and laughed heartily at the big accomplishment he was able to achieve. But deep down, he didn’t feel so satisfied. It was like a celebrity who had all the money and fame and was still depressed. For a second, an eerie question was posed at him: ‘What’s the point of all this? What have you gained?’. Questions he hadn’t taken time to ask himself before he started the whole dastardly thing.
He sighed and walked back to his chair, discarding the question and pretending to feel satisfied.
‘Go, go, go’, the head soldier said to the first decoy batch. It was a brew of the military men and the volunteers. Once they had all made it into the first tower, the first bomb went off in the first floor of the tower.
The vehicle kept cruising along with Humphrey in the driver seat humming and enjoying the ride in one of Dexter’s only smoothly tarred roads and Vince at the back ruminating on how best to get his hands on the nuclear bomb.
‘I heard you are Dale’s brother, huh?’, Humphrey asked, facing the back mirror.
‘Dale?’, Vince blurted and laughed. ‘That’s what they call him over the news. He didn’t tell you his real name?’
‘Yeah, he did. Later on. But you would agree with me that Dale is a lot cooler than Reece. And that’s what we’ve always called him since the Boorbunk days. So, it stuck’
‘Hmm’, Vince said and the silence went on.
‘Your brother is brave’, Humphrey said.
‘Yeah, I know’
‘I wouldn’t think I would have met anyone braver until today. You’, he said.
‘No, not at all. I am not brave at all’,
‘Of course you are. You are so fantastic, the way you saved us, you know. I would have looked like barbecue by now’
‘I’m a coward. That’s what I am. If I wasn’t, Sawer would have been dead a long time ago. I wasn’t bold enough to stop everything and Dale did’
‘But you can now’, Humphrey consoled. ‘You are the only one who can save Dexter now, you know’
‘Stop here’, Vince said to Humphrey when they reached the partition wall and he put on his alpha mask. He got off the vehicle. ‘Wait here. When you start hearing gunshots from there or see smoke in the air. Alert some soldiers’
‘Understood’, Humphrey said, enjoying his part in the whole cycle. For one thing, he was one of the people who had little to no tension about whether he was going to survive or not, or whether the nation was going to be saved or not. There were too many badass people fighting with their lives to protect the nation.
Vince marched through the sand, moving with his alpha-man posture, back to mute set, back to the cold-blooded 000001 who was the brother of no one. In long large strides, he had reached The Colour Room which was the first structure in The Circus and when he was past it, he was standing right in the front of The Balloon, the name of the magnificent onion-shaped building that the nuke had been set. There were two guards in front of the gate and he walked past gallantly into the office. Gamma men were the only rank that didn’t wear masks or armours. They wore lab coats and wore white gloves.
‘Alpha, did master tell you to send a message to us?, one of the scientists said to Vince.
‘Go on with your job’, he responded.
He walked past the labyrinthine cubicles that were offices, lab rooms and reached the open ground which had no ceiling. There it stood; the warhead of the apocalyptic material supposed to end Dexter. There was something like a flat screen attached to a wall that was beeping. It showed that the bomb was going to take off in twenty-one minutes. Right beside it was two buttons: red and green. The red one had been pressed down already which was what caused the countdown, all he needed to do was to press the green button and it would mean that in the next twenty-one minutes, Singalort would be blown up.
Everyone turned to Vince with a little suspicion because other ranks were practically restricted from the launch room even the 000001. ‘What’s the message?’, the head Gamma-man asked.
‘Patrol’, Vince said and he knew that sounded foolish.
‘Patrol?’
The answer to their skepticism came immediately. The ear-pod in the Gamma-man’s ear vibrated to life and there could be no one else on the other side. ‘Kill him immediately. He is not one of us. He wants to stop the bomb. Stop him now!’,
‘Shit’, Vince uttered as he saw all the Gamma men begin to rush to him – the fact that they were mainly specialised scientists with most of them in thick-lensed glasses didn’t mean they couldn’t kill too. They pulled out Glocks from the pocket of their lab coats and wasted no time in making them fire towards Vince and find a way to get through his Kevlar-reinforced armour.
‘You should get more guns, don’t you think?’, he said and ran towards the green button but many of them were already gathered there. Consequently, the building’s alarm had gone off and all the guards surrounding The Balloon were heading towards the Launch room.
The Gammas gathered up on him, rushing him relentlessly with their hands and daggers like a swarm of stinging bees. He was engrossed trying to crush every last one of them that he barely realised that a grenade had been placed just near him.
‘Everybody, move’, someone yelled and they all knew what that meant, moving steps away from Vince and making him wonder what was going on.
The grenade exploded sending Vince flying across the room to the other end.
By then, soldiers were rushing in in helicopters and army vehicles after being alerted by Humphrey.
Vince coughed out in pain. He had landed on his head and half of his face was almost completely crushed. One of the Gamma men rushed to him with a roar and jabbed a dagger into him. This time, the Kevlars weren’t enough because he could feel the sharp slice of the blade in his left chest. He was about to get stabbed again but he rolled away and jumped to his feet.
‘Go, Vince’, he heard his father’s voice say to him.
Standing at the centre of the room, he cocked his rifle and bathed everyone in the room with a shower of bullets until they were clean with blood and little life left in them.
‘Now’, his father’s apparition ordered. Vince turned to the green button and with a loud roar, he jumped towards it almost physically floating through air and used both of his palms – one over the other – to compress the green button.
‘Everyone should put their hands in the air’, the soldier said as a horde of military men rushed into the room. Three of the men rushed to Vince of whom one was Humphrey.
‘Are you okay?’, Humphrey asked redundantly because Vince’s appearance said it all. He looked like the dumb alpha man whom Dale had saved his brother from at The Black Room, who was choking on his blood and gasping for air, gasping for life.
‘We’ve got to go’, and his voice sounded even worse. ‘Dexter is safe’, Vince continued. ‘Singalort is going to go down in…’
‘Eleven minutes’, Humphrey said as he stared in horror at the stop watch.