The Cursed Shell

45

"Shit!" Dhawan cried when Josh's dead hand fell on the button of TeE.

"What did you do?!" Dunkirk snapped at Dhawan. It was Dhawan's fault indeed.

They all rushed towards Josh's bleeding corpse with flesh and a part of brain popped out of his head. Brute and Krystene tried their best not to look at it.

Duke Stain picked Josh's hand and kept it aside.

"Did the button get pressed?" Dunkirk asked.

Duke stood up and rushed towards the semi-domed corner of the room from where Josh had picked the TeE. "Although now-a-days, it is not necessary for a TeE to have joined with a device connected with CoFFe, the early TeE had to be joined in that way to work. Let's just hope that Josh had the same version of TeE."

"How would that help?" Dhawan asked.

"If it is that version of TeE," Duke said, pulling the metal plates covering the plain bottom of the dome, "then if given time, I can probably hack it."

"What if you don't get enough time?" Dhawan asked.

"Just shut up!" Dunkirk shouted. "Let him do what he is doing."

Duke pulled the last metal sheet off from the surface. "Oh, my, my", he said while he looked at the bottom surface of the semi-domed structure.

"What happened?" Dhawan asked.

"Okay, so as we wanted, this is that early version of TeE", said Duke.

"So... that is good, isn't it?" Dhawan asked.

"Yes, it is," Duke said, with no hopeful expression in his face, "but it has a timer."

"It means..."

"It means the messages are still in draft in Josh's TeE", Duke told him.

"That is good," Dhawan smiled, "it means you will get time to hack it."

Duke sighed and took a cuboidal monitor-like device out from the semi-domed structure. There was the timer told by Duke displayed on its screen. It showed - 04:12. The time decreased with each passing second. "This time is not enough to hack a TeE. TeE's construction is one of the most complex mechanical designs in the world."

"But still, can you try?" Dunkirk asked.

"Okay," Duke sighed again, "I will try. Can I get Joshua Lamb's device?"

"Joshua Lamb's device?" Dhawan asked.

"His phone!" Duke said.

"Oh", Dhawan said and pulled an iPhone out of Josh's  pocket and handed it to Duke. 'Could not he just say Josh's phone. I mean - who uses the term device while talking about a phone now-a-days?' Dhawan thought.

"Thank you", Duke said and stood up and walked towards the semi-domed structure. From there he took a wire with two broken ends out and walked back to the monitor-like device. He used the wire as an adaptor to join Josh's phone and TeE.

Everyone watched Duke trying to hack the device.

"I don't understand one thing," Brute asked Dhawan, "why did Josh fit a timer? I mean - sending the message directly to those bad guys at once would have been easier for him."

Dhawan replied after a second. "As Josh had already said, he himself did not want to send these messages. He used the TeE just to threaten us. He even said that once he presses the button, the messages would be sent within five minutes. So I think that Josh just fixed the timer so that he would be able to stop the messages from the drafts to be sent on time if he ever presses the button, because he did not want those messages to be sent."