Singalort was so massive and dense that people that got in might just ramble around without reaching or finding out a fort with hundreds of thousands of men with black armours and automatic rifles, looking fierce with masks over their head, silent and rather dumb. The Quppis’ ground was well over-shadowed by powerfully tall redwood trees and as the ex-Boorbunk detainees swarmed into the forest, crouched with their guns pointed forward, wholly alert with the only sound they could hear the sound of their boots crunching the dried leaves; they wouldn’t know that on top of those trees were cameras connected to the Quppis’ power house.
‘Hey, you all should stop there!’, someone barked nearby and bullets flew around madly in their direction.
‘Everyone, take cover’, Dale commanded and everyone bent with their backs to trees.
‘Drop your guns now or else you’ll be doomed’, the Quppis man shouted again. It wasn’t just one man that was walking towards them but a whole centurion.
Dale peeped slightly past the tree he was laying behind and he could see a phalanx of militants in dark marching towards them. He knew what that meant. He looked towards the next trees where other men were sticking behind.
‘On three’, Dale mouthed to Humphrey who was the nearest man to him with three of his fingers raised. The message went around and they held tightly to their guns.
‘Three…two…one’, they turned away from their trees and shot in the direction of the Quppis soldiers.
‘Now’, Dale reordered. They all recoiled to the backs of their trees and tried to hold their breath.
The masked men had reduced by half but those who were still standing didn’t budge one bit. They were even moving a little faster and now, they appeared more fearful because they weren’t even making a sound, their boots appeared to have disappeared since all the crunching sounds had stopped. Humphrey, who was convinced that they were all dead or had backed off, stretched his neck to look behind. One of the Quppis men who had sighted shot immediately and Humphrey jolted backwards one split second before the bullet stroke him. The bullet pierced into the tree making him gasp loudly.
Dale placed his hand over his lips, signalling Humphrey to keep shot. They remained like that for a whole minute. Each man’s body streamlined against the trees, dared to move one inch or make a sound.
At once, Peter roared and turned back, supporting his gun with his bicep as he watched bullets fly out of his gun. The rest of them joined in, shooting spontaneously until all the men had slumped down to their feet after proclaiming their final deathly shriek.
‘Wo’, they exclaimed.
‘No man has to die after all’, one of them named James commented as they moved on down the forest.
The men they had just killed were the rangers whom Sawer had sent to secure the land against perpetrators like them, not like the cameras have been alerted yet.
They soon migrated from the tree-populated area to a completely new ground with no trees or tall plants, just fell redwood trucks lying horizontally over the ground, half-decayed with moss all over them. They stopped when they reached a marked-out line. From that point onwards, there was nothing on the ground at all. Just plain ground with no grass or fallen trees.
Dale held up his hand to command a halt. ‘What’s wrong?’, Tristan asked from behind him and almost the rest of them joined in the protest.
‘Don’t you think there is something about this line here?’, Dale asked, staring over the plain ground ahead as if trying to perceive why there was suddenly a tonsured land with a ridged strip laying it out.
‘Like more people hiding somewhere down that ground’, Ray replied. ‘I feel the same way but…’
‘No, that’s not what I mean’, Dale said. He didn’t know what he meant and just kept his gaze on the ground trying to pick out what his mind was cautioning him about.
‘Common, we need to go Dale. Now. Before another set attacks us’, someone mentioned. ‘What are we waiting for?’
‘Okay, let’s go then’, he said as he stepped into the ground, jogging along as the rest followed. Dale who knew his instinct never deceived him realised what was wrong. As the men rushed onto the land, they exploded into a million pieces of burnt flesh. They were on a minefield!
‘Everybody stop. Oh my goodness. Stop now’, Dale yelled. Many of them had died. He wondered how he had gotten so far without getting exploded. He was the man in the lead. He looked behind and he could see the men left alive swearing aloud. There was nothing to be seen of the men that were dead. It was like a suicide bomber with the bomb attached to him gone off. He would blow along with the missile. They had dropped their legs on the spots where the explosives had been detonated and at that very second, the rest would be history.
Men had to die after all.
He could see Tristan, Barry and Peter hanging on their feet, shuddering like a tuning fork, trying very hard not to move an inch because only God knew what the next spot they were going to land on had in store for them.
‘Aah. Oh God. Fuck’, one man kept on yelling from behind. He had probably just lost someone dear. That was what Dale thought but when he turned back he saw the screaming man with his left knee split into two. He was holding his bloodied knee as flesh dangled from it. He had slightly touched on one of the mines. Thankfully, only half his left knee would pay for it.
‘Hold him up’, one among them said. The two men nearest to the injured man stretched, careful not to move their legs from their spot and picked him up, lest he should fall and hit another mine.
‘What are we going to do now?’, someone asked Dale.
Dale sighed hesitantly, as unsure as everyone else. ‘This is what we are going to do?’, he stated with a loud voice so that it could reach those who were far behind, lingering on one spot on the minefield. ‘You have to fall in the straight line behind me. That is the only mine-free line’, that was why he had gone far enough. All thanks to his very straight running.
They started hopping, man after man, with their legs together until they had formed a long queue. ‘This is the only line we are going to walk through, make sure your leg doesn’t collide with another person’s. One leg at a time. Is that understood?’, Dale said and the last words he said made him blush at the fact that he was actually instructing people.
Everyone fell in line and started moving, with each man breathing on the next man’s neck shakily. They all just witnessed the explosive ends of their peers and now it was clear that many other men would die during the sojourn.
The entire marked-out field was a whole kilometre and their legs sure ached to be walking steadily for such a long time. The end of the minefield led them into another sparse land of tall dense forests. As they all stepped out on it, back to their crouching positions, desperately alert and their rifles’ triggers laying slightly pressed in their fingers, they wouldn’t know that they had just stepped into the very lair of Quppis.
Alarum had broken out across the premises with the Quppis’ men, of all ranks and levels, heading in one plane, armed to the teeth in their black suits. Each of them had ear pieces in their lugholes, receiving orders from the Public Address system of the ground, as they marched in large strides that would be at the same pace with an average man running.
‘I want you all alpha-men, to go out there and kill all of them. Kill everyone of them…especially…I want you to find the son of a bitch called Dale. Point the gun in his head and blow it out, over and over again until there is no more blood left to pour out of it. Understood?!’, Sawer jabbered, and like a set of androids operating under the same code, the six alpha-men bowed and left with no words coming out of their mouth. For the first time in a very long time, they wouldn’t be standing still like pillars against the walls of Sawer’s room as guards that they were. They would be out in the war ground, showing how ruthless and animalistic they could get, showing to Sawer that they were so much of mindless beasts that he had chosen them to be his personal guards.
However, Vince was the only one who wouldn’t be out there. Sawer retained him in his room as the personal guard because well, he was the best fighter in the force and the only one Sawer adored, the only that Sawer had told to pull off his mask so that he could see his face, the only one Sawer wanted to hear speak and yet, the only one who was still – emotionally – human.
‘You stay here’, he said pointing to Vince who bowed like the men had done before. ‘I can’t trust that son of a bitch, son of a Bailey to find me here alone with no guard’, he mumbled under his breath and collapsed in his seat, watching on his 100-pixelled walled television the entire frenetic activity of his soldiers out in the arena, in different tiny sections that the thousands of cameras around the Quppis’ ground were covering.
‘I think we need to move faster now’, Dale said through the dark woodland. Every man began to jog after one another through the trees and stumps. They kept running even though they were half-blinded with only little light making it past the broad leaves and reflecting to them. They looked around with haste as they proceeded and they had to make a lot of last-minute leaps over tall stumps or thorny offshoots or rocks half-buried in the soil. They finally stopped at a craggy mountain steep that if they had kept on going would easily dump all of them down into a stream seventy-feet away.
This looks like an ingenious trap, Dale thought as he looked down from the feet of the cliff alongside the other men. No one who was running up to that point would have thought that there was such a deep gulf because the space where the stream flowed through could be jumped over to dry land at the other end. If it wasn’t that deep, they would all have leaped over it like they had done to the other obstacles in the forest but as they all stared at the hollow gorge with the knowledge that making a mistake in jumping would lead to instant death, no one dared to jump.
‘Do not tell me that you want to lead them to jump down that way, Reece Bailey?’, someone who was definitely not one of them uttered from behind. They all instantaneously turned their heads, some of them jumping when they saw the man who had spoken. By his appearance, they could all tell he was not related to Quppis. He had the face of a proper Dexterran granny and that was what made Dale recognise him.
Dale walked through the rest of the people with strained eyes, not because he was contemplating who the man was but because the question about to blow out of his tongue was: How on Earth did you make it here?