Alice in Deadland (18 page)

'Alice, stop!'

Alice slowed down and saw Nikhil bent over, holding his knees, trying to catch his breath.

'Nikhil, the Red Guards will be at the site of our last transmission any time. We need to get underground as soon as we can.'

Nikhil closed his palms together, in a theatrical show of begging for mercy. Alice laughed out loud. Nikhil was not much of a fighter, but he was fun to have around, and he was the only one who knew how to use the tablet and that made him invaluable.

'Ok, get a drink of water and we'll be on our way.'

Nikhil took out a bottle from his backpack and drank and when he was about to put it back, took out his tablet for one last look.

'Let me see if they've already taken down my message.'

Alice watched his expression and knew that something was very wrong.

'Nikhil, what happened?'

He called her closer and showed her the screen. There was a single message.

'To all friends in the Deadland- keep you heads down. Heavy downpour expected soon.'

The message had been uploaded from Dewan's account. Alice ground her teeth in anger and frustration.

'Why the Hell would he expose himself by posting like that? Appleseed and the others will be sure to question him.'

Nikhil turned the tablet off.

'Alice, he was trying to be as cryptic as he could, and I guess he could claim it was aimed at his men and comrades on mission in the Deadland, but he would take such a risk only if he desperately needed to get a message through to us.'

'What...'

Alice never got a chance to finish her sentence as her voice was drowned out by the drone of multiple jet engines overhead. Alice looked up see dozens of jets approaching from over the horizon. She had seen the occasional Zeus attack helicopter, but she had never seen aircraft such as this- large bombers with swept wings, flying in formation, darkening the sky like a swarm of locusts.

'Nikhil! Are they coming to bomb where we last transmitted from?'

She saw that Nikhil was staring at the approaching armada, his face frozen in fear.

'Alice, they don't need so many heavy bombers to target one location. That fleet could flatten many, many miles of land.'

'Could they get through to our underground shelters?'

Nikhil never took his eyes off the approaching aircraft as he replied.

'I don't know. Some of them seem to be hardened bomb shelters that were built before The Rising, but the rest are no more than old sewers, maintenance tunnels and underground parking lots. Those wouldn't survive a direct hit. And nobody in the open would have a chance.'

Alice thought of the hundreds of people including her mother and sister in one of those shelters and of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of human settlements overground in the Deadland.'

'Nikhil, we've got to...'

Alice stopped in mid-sentence. She really didn't know what she could say that would be even remotely adequate. They couldn't really warn anyone, and there was no question of saving anyone else's lives. They were still more than a kilometer away from the underground entrance that would lead them to where the rest of their group was hidden. She stood quietly for a minute, looking back at the direction they had come from, and she could see several pillars of smoke rising in the horizon. Fires at the human settlements, where people were seeking warmth or perhaps cooking their frugal meals, and perhaps like Alice and Nikhil, watching the approaching fleet, not knowing what was coming their way.

Alice felt Nikhil pull hard at her arm.

'Alice, they aren't that far away. All we can do is run and try and find some cover.'

Alice ran like she had never run before and soon they could see the three large yellow leaves laid across a branch that signaled the entrance to their underground passage. Alice turned to say something to Nikhil, and saw that he was struggling to keep up. She screamed something to him, but her voice was now drowned out by the roar of the dozens of engines overhead. Alice dove through the branches and clambered on all fours through the narrow passageway, hoping that Nikhil was following. She knew that there was little cover overhead other than tree trunks and kept going faster, her palms and knees cut and scratched in a dozen places as she reached the near vertical drop that led to the hardened bomb shelter below. She dove in as the first bombs hit and she fell to the concrete floor. As she managed to sit up and get her bearings she felt the ground shake all around her and bits and pieces of the concrete roof chip off and fall as the bombs continued to rain down. There was no sign of Nikhil. She screamed out for him several times but heard no response. In the darkness, she felt along the walls for the unlit torch she knew would be there, and from her backpack took out the small can of fuel and flint she needed to light it. When it was lit, she saw that larger pieces of the ceiling were now falling down towards her and when one particularly large piece missed her head by inches, she hung the torch on the wall and lay down in a fetal position, with her head covered in her hands. The rumbling continued and she thought she heard a voice and she looked up to see Nikhil at the edge of the drop. He threw his backpack down and was about to jump down when there was a huge crash that lifted Alice cleanly off the ground and threw her across the corridor.

Then she saw no more.

***

Dewan studied the pistol in his hands, wondering just how much easier it was to take another life than to contemplate taking one's own. He had no family and not much that he could say he had to live for, yet it seemed awfully hard to put the gun to his head and pull the trigger. He had shot others, men and Biters, dozens of times without conscious thought in the years of fighting that had dominated his life, but now he could not bring himself to do the same to himself. It wasn't just fear that held him back, though that was certainly there, but a feeling of infinite sadness that came from realizing that his life had not really amounted to much after all. He had spent most of his life serving a cause that had been a lie, and when he thought he had a chance to make amends, it was all too little, too late. He had seen the heavy bombers fly in from Tibet and knew that Chen's orders were as simple as they were brutal. He had ordered a saturation fire-bombing of the Deadland near Delhi, with wave upon wave of flights till nothing remained. Dewan had been unable to face his own troops in the cafeteria, local boys who had looked at him with horrified eyes. He had no answers for the questions behind those eyes. No answers as to why their friends and families had just been sentenced to a horrific death by the same Central Committee they were serving to supposedly help human survivors.

Hundreds of Red Guards had flown in the night before and all Zeus units where desertions had taken place had been disarmed and were now effectively under arrest. The Central Committee propaganda machine was in overdrive with reports about how counter-revolutionaries and terrorists had subverted some isolated units in the Deadland in North India and were currently being pacified by the heroic efforts of the Red Guards. Dewan had taken the risk of sending out his warning, but he knew it was likely to be too late. He also knew that it was too late for him. The Red Guards would be coming for him soon. As he put the gun to his head one last time, he heard footsteps outside his door and he paused. No, if he was going to die, he would at least put what remained of his life to some use after all.

He brought up the browser on his tablet and logged in to his official email account. He had already barricaded his door with a bulky bookshelf and he heard banging on the door as he began typing. He wrote at breakneck speed, writing of what he had learnt, of the deception behind The Rising and then of how Chen and his masters in the Central Committee were misleading all Zeus troops. He heard shots as the Red Guards outside shredded the door with automatic weapons and began kicking it open. Dewan finished and pressed `send' as the first Red Guard came in. Dewan flung his tablet at the man and as the Red Guard lost his balance, shot him twice. Two more Red Guards came into the room and Dewan put them down with single shots to the head. Years of hunting Biters had taught him a thing or two that were finally going to be put to some use, he thought as he picked up the first Guard's rifle and rolled behind his study desk. He saw feet gathered outside his door and fired a short burst, hearing screams as the Guards took cover. He heard something hit the floor and looked to see a black cylinder rolling towards him. As the stun grenade went off, he closed his eyes, but he had not been fast enough. When he opened his eyes, he saw little more than flashes of white and black and he stood up unsteadily, trying to gauge from the footsteps where the Guards were and fired his rifle on full automatic, not knowing if he hit anyone. He was trying to blink away the bright lights when the first bullets struck him.

Alice opened her eyes, and the first thing she felt was the wetness on her face. For a moment she wondered where all the water had come from but the rusty smell and the acrid taste told her that it was her own blood. She got up gingerly, and as she looked around she saw that the passageway she was in was bathed in light. She looked up to see a hole in the ground above that had been blasted open by the bombing. Several large pieces of concrete lay around her and as she felt the throbbing lump on her head from which blood still flowed and the countless scrapes and cuts all over her body, she knew that she had been hit by her fair share or more of the debris. Still, she was alive, and that was something to be thankful for. She took a deep breath and felt her ribs hurt, and hoped that she had not broken anything inside. The dust raised by the shattered concrete made her gag with every breath and she found that the passageway leading onto the tunnels she had planned to enter had collapsed. She tried to grab handholds on the walls to climb out of the hole caused by the bombing and then she saw Nikhil. Or rather, she saw his hand, still grabbing his tablet. The rest of him was hidden under a giant slab of concrete. Alice knelt down beside him for a few seconds, feeling his lifeless, cold hands and then she took the tablet from his backpack, putting it into hers.

'Goodbye, Nikhil.'

She climbed out and saw something that looked like the Hell that the old religions had believed in. Some humans still prayed before their idols and crosses and holy books, but Alice had never really been brought up with any particular gods to believe in. Her father had once told her that there must be a power beyond human comprehension, otherwise The Rising could never be explained, yet it was vain and stupid to create our own vision of these gods and fight over whose vision was right. The fear of Biters and human marauders hunting you down had a good way of making people band together, irrespective of the gods they once worshipped. Nevertheless, Alice now knew what the old religions had meant when they spoke of a place called Hell. All around her, the forests were on fire, vast charred swathes of ashes and burning stumps that finally did justice to the name this area had carried for years- the Deadland.

Alice ran as fast as she could, desperate to reach her mother, sister and the others. After a few minutes of running, she came upon the ruins of a small settlement. The dozen or so small tents had been almost vaporized by the bombing, and other than ashes and a few scattered limbs, there was no sign of any people. Alice gagged and threw up on the ground, blinking back tears.

How many thousands had died today? What kind of men could be capable of such evil?

The answer was right there for her to see. The same kind of men who had almost wiped out human civilization so that they could rule over the ashes. The same men who now hid behind the anonymity of the Central Committee and used the Red Guards and Zeus troopers to enforce their will, wiping out any remaining trace of resistance and ruling over their empire while the rest of humanity lived and died like animals.

Alice ran on, her mind plagued with worries for what had happened to the others but through the agony she felt in her mind and body, one thought was crystal clear.

She would make sure Nikhil and the thousands of others who had perished today would not go unavenged.

***

ELEVEN

Alice ran through a charred forest, trying hard to see through the smoke and to breathe despite the suffocating fumes all around her. Much of the ground was still burning as far as she could see. What kind of weapons had the Red Guards unleashed that had caused such damage- turning acres of land into a sea of fire? She raised her hands to her mouth, trying to stifle a gasp of horror as she saw a gaping hole where the entrance to their shelter should have been. She kept hoping that perhaps people would have had a chance to go deeper into the hardened shelters further underground, but as she ran closer she knew she was hoping against hope. People would have stayed in the larger but less secure chambers close to the surface. There was no reason for them to cram into the smaller chambers deeper underground as they had no warning of what was coming. She stopped abruptly as she saw what the hole in the ground revealed, and then she fell to her knees, crying and screaming as she saw dozens of bodies heaped upon each other, many burnt beyond recognition.