Philip Hundred straightened up his blazers and placed his forehead on the wall staining it with his sweat. He had always been a coward, that kind of man who wore his emotions on his capes and didn’t exactly know how to say no. Him not saying no to Sawer seven years ago was one mistake that he knew that he was never going to forgive himself of and even bigger, a mistake Dexter would not forget.
People had turned out at his campaigns, ecstatic and trusting him to the point of holding on to his every word and he let everything go down the drain when someone finally came and offered him a juicy offer, too juicy he forgot it was a poison. He who had thought himself a great strong pillar of society was now sitting one of the chairs, having a conclave with the other members of The Blazing empire. He groaned and hit his forehead against the wall numerous times, it was unreal and now it was a nightmare for him.
In the next ten hours, he would be leaving the presidential home, having resigned a week before, following the orders from a brief telephone call with Sawer. Now, he felt useless and ugly. He couldn’t bear returning to his hometown as he had envisioned it to be and keep running foundations. He was going to stay somewhere in Reckdette, somewhere silent with the belief that he would be completely forgotten as the worst president the world has ever seen. He wasn’t certain of how long he was going to feel like this but he feared that it would linger in him for the rest of his lifetime.
Sawer told him on the call that he was no longer needed in the Order of The Quppis and his resignation was his last assignment and indirectly, hand Dexter to him. Sawer had successfully handled him, controlled him and dumped him.
Dumped.
Philip Hundred walked slowly to his jiggling telephone and jammed it against his ear.
‘Mr. President?’, the secretary called.
‘Yes’
‘Some individuals dressed in black uniforms mentioned that Retired General Owen Sawer sent a message to you’
‘Let them in. Let them in’, he snappily answered. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear anything from anyone at all so much so, that he didn’t suspect the arrival of men in black uniforms – which he knew clearly was what men of the Order of The Quppis put on – after he had parted ways with them.
It was until they marched in that he knew what was awaiting him. He raised his head and stared suggestively at their rather frightening appearances. ‘What did Sawer want to tell me?’, he asked.
The men remained silent, and in that instant, four of the five men moved their hands into their left back pockets, pulled out their guns and extended their hands concurrently. Right there was Philip Hundred face to face with four loaded pistols raised to his head-level, his face was creased in fear and he started to mutter: ‘Please do not kill me, I will do what you want’. He was vibrating at such a frequency that he wasn’t sure if he would not have died before they pulled the trigger.
The fifth man pressed the earpiece in his ear and spoke: ‘We are presently in the presidential villa and we have the president with us’. He spoke calmly like he was reading a commentary, no one would know that they were about to carry out an assassination.
‘Kill him’, the earpiece echoed in response.
Philip Hundred fell on his knees with tears in his eyes. ‘Please don’t do it. I will do what you want’, as if they wanted anything. His voice was murky and muddled with cries and he didn’t stop pleading. What an image it would be to post the picture of the ex-president, few weeks after his resignation, crying like a little girl.
On the other hand, the men didn’t shoot, they kept their eyes fixed on him with their guns still outstretched to his face. Hundred didn’t see anything in their eyes, no flinch or blink, they weren’t full humans anymore – they were all alpha-men anyways – he suddenly had that firm conviction that this was the end of the road and he decided that this was what served him right.
As he saw the men lower their guns to his chest, he closed his eyes and stopped crying. Nonetheless, the six hot bullets that tore through his abdomen made him yell one last time. It would be the first time that blood would flow around the grounds of the president’s office.
Dumped and disposed.
‘Cleared’, the head-man uttered the single word into the headphone as they all marched out of the president’s office and the secretary also had one bullet to his head.
Sawer added one more ice to his beer and raised it in the air before bringing it down to his lipless mouth. Yet another man down, yet another achievement.
Somewhere else in The Dinosaur Nation were some fifteen hundred people, cramped up in one of the two giant churches that existed in Hustarbull on a Sunday morning.
‘God is our refuge and strength! A very present help in trouble. Therefore, we would not fear though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea!’, Bishop Guin Mangione read the psalm aloud and the walls of the large auditorium was enough to echo the sound to the farthest seats. His voice was so strong that it was audible without any microphones; and it grew stronger as he read the psalm, it was the one thing that gave him and every other person in the auditorium substantial hope, to keep their eyes open during the storm.
‘Yes!’, the members of the church echoed back as he read on.
‘We are children of God and we shall not fear’, he shouted. Mangione’s voice wasn’t one to have to waver, or to go hoarse after long preaching. He was a powerful preacher and very ruthless at the pulpit, proclaiming God’s promises for the people and restoring the hope of the natives of Hustarbull, even though his first daughter died from a stray bullet at the market last week, even though his wife was battling the worst form of leukemia and his church stipends were not enough for treatment, even though he had almost frozen to death when Hustarbull had experienced its first snow the night before.
‘Amen’, the church members responded, some of them had their eyes shut and some of them had their hands in the air and some of them were kneeling down.
‘And no matter what we face today. No matter what tribulations we might be facing, we are going to be stay unscathed because that’s what the Lord said!’, he roared. ‘The Bible says, The Lord would not leave us or forsake us, he would bring his angels in charge of us to guide us in all our ways. In his hands he would bare us up lest we hit our feet against the stone’
‘We will tread on the lion and the adder and the lion and the adder would trample under foot’, the multitude proclaimed along with him. Everyone had those words coded in their memories, it was their strongest weapons, that gave them confidence amidst all the gloom that they were trying to see through.
‘That’s to tell us that the enemy has got nothing on us’, but those were the last words he said before he collapsed off the tall pulpit in a freefall and the church burst into a flurry of screams. All the men who had burst into a run and tried to rush out of the doors and tall windows were not fast enough to escape before they got shot and fell to the ground, dead.
Everyone kept shrieking and some of them had already fainted as they watched twenty-one masked men in black metal armours and equally dark helmets walk in between the pews with their long rifles pointed forward in their gloved hands.
For the first time in a very long time, Vince was the man leading the pack. The only man with the shining α-logo on his vest, leading twenty sigma men. They took positions around the hall with nine men standing in front of the nine pews of the church. There was one of them facing the shaking ministers as they just witnessed the death of their bishop, dead from only one bullet. Another one had his gun pointed at the choristers squeaking loudly with their melodious voices, they had their hands over their faces not wanting to see a gun pointing to them.
‘Catholic Church, Rockview, Hustarbull. Nine rows of pews for the church members, a section for choristers and a special front row set of chairs for the ministers, and some special chairs for stewards and ushers and other church workers’, Vince told Sawer through his earpiece.
‘Hmm. That’s a dicey one. One, three, six, seven, nine. Yes. Clear them all’, he responded which he knew was a little lenient. ‘Let’s spare the choir and the ministers’
The twenty men who had heard his order from their earpieces marched forward to the first pew to start their work. They raised the guns and then sprayed the bullets like insecticide over weeds. As Vince watched them shoot under his mask, his body quaked vigorously and he gave out a loud gasping sound. He had gone for too many missions like this and shot more people than he could remember but his body could never conform completely to seeing blood splashing around.
The men marched over to the third pew and then blasting sounds rented the church atmosphere-turned-slaughterhouse yet again. The blasting sounds however were not compared to the yells from the rest of the still living members of the congregation, who were not sure if their row was going to be the next that this unnaturally mute masked killing agents were going to turn their guns towards.
They marched over to the sixth row and were about to shoot but they decided to wait a little when they heard one man praying loudly in one of the backbenches. One of the Sigma men went to him and bent his head to face the middle-aged man: ‘Should I wait for you to finish?’, the agent asked but the man did not respond.
His eyes were tightly closed and he had sweat all over his body that soaked him so much that his shirt had gummed to his shirt. ‘I lift up my eyes to the hill from whence does my help come. My help comes from the Lord who made Heaven and Earth. He will not let my foot be moved, He who keeps me will not slumber’, he kept repeating with an almost collapsing voice, crying in a way that adults should not be seen crying. His voice was vibrating too hard, now that he knew that a rifle was facing him very closely but he didn’t stop praying because he was certain that God was not going to forsake him, no matter what. He clutched his rosary in his clammy right palm, raising the cross in the air and with his other hand, he held the hand of a little girl who appeared to have fainted or had a heart attack.
‘Oh! Is that your daughter?’, but the praying man didn’t reply. The masked man pulled out his pistol and blew the head off the man’s daughter off. It was the wetness of her blood against her father’s cheek that made his prayers go off into a loud, grave mourn. He dropped his rosary and placed both of his hands on her face. ‘Mariam! Mariam!!’, he shouted out but she was long gone. Instantaneously, he leaped to his feet, grabbed the man who had killed his daughter and raised his hand up to hit him but at that very same time, the Sigma-man retaliated and bent the other man’s wrist, until the bones holding it in place broke and his palm was no longer in place, dangling painfully from the profusely-bleeding stump that was his wrist. He gave him two powerful jabs from his gauntlets that were made of steel.
Half the bones of Mariam’s father’s skull were crushed, leaving his face bizarrely disjointed that the wails from the congregation grew louder. They were seeing so much blood than they had seen in their lifetimes and even scarier was that theirs could join in the ever-flowing red river.
‘Did the Bible teach you to be violent too?!’, he shouted at the half-dead man who was lying on the ground. He pointed his gun and ended the man’s misery.
Vince shut his eyes and swallowed hard, he couldn’t bear the view anymore but that was the best he could do. He was supposed to be the alpha-man, the cruellest and most inhumane in the set but here he was, knowing that he was going to retch all-day long when they returned to Singalort and he was going to have terrible nightmares.
One of the church members was trying to escape out of the church again, he had reached the doorway before he was spotted and Vince jumped at the sound of the gunshot.
It was time for the seventh row and as the men raised their guns, the noise from the crowd was totally ear-splitting. The reason was obvious, the seventh row was the row reserved for only children. Vince could even see one of the women running towards them and begging them to kill her and spare the children. He couldn’t bring himself to watch this.
‘Hey’, he shouted before they shot the guns. ‘Free the seventh pew and move to the ninth’, he ordered.
‘Sir? But that was not what we were instructed to do’, the Sigma-man who had previously broken a man’s wrist replied.
‘Are you trying to disobey me?’
‘No, I am trying to follow the master’s orders’
‘If I see blood in this seventh row, get ready to face my wrath’, Vince threatened and there was nothing scarier than that. The wrath of an alpha-man was Hell’s wrath.
Without saying a word, all of them moved to the ninth row. Everyone on the row were praying loudly, more than they had ever done before, more than they ever needed to do. Their voices were so strong, it was enough to summon The Holy Ghost which was what they were trying to do, expecting a situation-changing miracle to save them, just like they had always believed.
Yet, the bullets shot at them killed them and no invisible breastplate appeared on them, neither did lightning strike their enemy down.
‘Do you still believe in this God?’, the Sigma-man asked the last member of the congregation who was about to be shot. The teenager with a red mane of hair over his head, was crying profusely and begging them, instead of praying. ‘Hasn’t your dear God forsaken you?’
‘Please don’t kill me. Please…’, he cried.
‘Oh, you are begging me now. Where did you put God?’, the gun-man yammered on and laughed loudly. ‘Well, I think it’s over now. You’re seating at the last bench, so I believe that you should have said The Lord’s prayer and every other thing you need to say’, he said and jammed the mouth of his gun directly on his forehead. ‘And if you haven’t, well I doubt if God would forgive your sins’, he said and pressed his fore finger slightly against the trigger. The lad’s blood splattered against the Holy Mary statue behind him.