Alice in Deadland Trilogy (11 page)

Another trooper, now more confident since the subject had
been broached, spoke up. 'I also heard that it mentioned something about what
all the folks from the Deadland were doing in the colonies being set up for
them. Something about them being little more than slave labor. Sir, they may
all be lies for all I know, but why would someone suddenly make up such lies
and post them on our boards?'

He quickly shut up when a whole squad of Red Guards came
into the cafeteria and sat at an adjoining table, and they continued their meal
in silence, but Dewan, despite the fear he had felt while meeting Chen, was
exulting inside.

His plan was beginning to work. Now it was all up to Alice
and her group to take it forward. With Chen and his Red Guards here in force,
he knew they would hardly have it easy.

***

'Nikhil, hurry up!'

Alice was gnashing her teeth in frustration at the time
Nikhil was taking to upload his latest post. She scarcely understood the
technology involved in it all, but she knew that the Red Guards would know
within minutes where the post had been uploaded from and would be sending
troopers their way. So far, in the last week they had uploaded two posts. In
both cases, they had ventured far from their base, making an overnight journey
through the forests, uploaded the posts and then made their way back. Alice had
no idea if anyone had even read the posts or what impact they were having, but
Nikhil was sure that the Central Committee would be trying its best to delete
or block the posts.

Nikhil was over fifty and quite unlike most of the other men
at the settlement. He was slightly built, and wore broken glasses that were
crudely held together by adhesive tape. Before The Rising, he had claimed to be
a blogger, though many of the older folks said he had been a hacker. Alice
didn't really know what those words meant, but she knew that he was able to use
the tablet Dewan had left behind and was willing to make the dangerous journey
with her through the forest.

To minimize their chances of detection, only the two of them
had ventured out. While that made for better stealth, it also meant that if
they ran into trouble, their chances of survival were low. Alice was armed to
the teeth, with her handgun, knife and an automatic weapon that they had
salvaged from a Zeus trooper. But while Nikhil carried a handgun, she was not
sure he even knew how to use it properly. To make things worse, he had been
sitting hunched over the tablet for the last fifteen minutes, whispering
something about firewalls. The post he was uploading was one that was a
detailed first person account of Appleseed's role in the destruction of their
settlement, based on Alice's story. It was a risk to personally identify her,
but they had reasoned that putting a face to the messages would make it more
believable than them being from anonymous posters. Also, with Alice supposedly
a wanted terrorist, this would help sow doubts in the minds of Zeus troopers
about whom the real bad guys were.

Finally, he got up and looked at Alice with a look of triumph.

'It's done! And this time I waited to see if there were any
responses so I could be sure somebody is reading our posts.'

Alice froze.

'You waited! You know they'll be coming soon. Let's get out
of here.'

Nikhil persisted and handed her the tablet.

'Look at this.'

Knowing that this war was going to be fought and won as much
with words as with bullets, Alice had finally got around to asking her mother
to teach her to read and had been brushing up her reading skills. There was
only one reply to Nikhil's post and it was short enough for it to not tax her
reading skills much. A Zeus trooper had posted, 'So that's why the Red Guards
are all over the place nowadays.'

Alice knew that whoever had replied to the post would likely
get into a lot of trouble, but it was a small yet significant sign: their
messages were getting through to the Zeus troopers and they were beginning to
create some doubts in their minds. As Nikhil turned off the tablet and put it
in his backpack, Alice heard the dull roar of approaching helicopters.

'Nikhil, come on! They'll be here any minute!'

The sun had barely risen and Nikhil had timed his message to
catch the attention of any Zeus trooper who was up but had some time to go
before their morning drills. This was one among many details shared by Dewan
which were helping them time their postings to coincide with downtimes for Zeus
troopers when they were likely to be surfing on their tablets.

Alice and Nikhil were running into the trees when the first
helicopter appeared over the horizon. Alice turned around and saw that there
were two sleek gunships and a larger troop carrier. By the time the first Red
Guards were on the ground, Alice and Nikhil were already more than a kilometer
away, tearing through the forest as fast as they could run. From her previous
run-in with the Red Guards, Alice knew that they would likely be trying to
flank them and drive them into a trap, so instead of taking the path that led
to the road which they needed to follow back to their base, they turned right,
running through the forest till they came to a clearing. She could see the
broken shells of old buildings. Nikhil had told her that once upon a time this
had been a posh suburb and that some of the wooded areas they had run through
had once been part of farmlands of the elite. That was a world that sounded
totally alien to her, but she was happy for the cover the buildings would
provide them. They ran into an old apartment building and rushed up the stairs.
On the second floor, they stopped to see where their pursuers were, but saw no
sign of them.

Alice relaxed a bit and took a look around her. For someone
who had lived in the open for much of her life, it was hard to imagine living
in these concrete shells
–
but then, their occupants never had making an instant getaway as a priority.
Perhaps if they had, they would have lived longer than they did during The
Rising. The apartment was obviously abandoned and as they walked from one flat
to another, they found little of use or interest, since they had been picked clean
over the years.

As Alice entered one flat, she saw something small lying in
a corner. It was a small female figure with half burnt blonde hair.

'Nikhil, what is this?'

'Alice, that was a Barbie doll that girls used to play
with.'

Alice flung the doll to one side, wondering how girls ever
had enough spare time to sit and play with silly little figurines. She looked
out the window and froze. There were a dozen or more Red Guards outside, their
rifles at the ready, walking past the apartment. She motioned for Nikhil to get
down as she continued watching the men outside. One of them was speaking into a
handheld radio and as Alice looked up in the sky, she saw the faint outline of
something black hovering above them. That must have been one of the drones Appleseed
had mentioned, thought Alice, wondering if they had been spotted on their way
into the apartment. Most of the Guards walked past and Alice was beginning to
relax when one of them suddenly stopped and looked back at the apartment. Alice
ducked down as he brought his rifle up to his shoulder, looked through the
scope and casually fired a single round.

The bullet hit the wall just outside the window where Alice
and Nikhil were sheltering, and they waited for a minute or more, hoping the
Guard had moved on. Nikhil, tired of sitting on his haunches, started to get up
to stretch when another bullet shattered the glass on the window. Nikhil dove
to his right, and even without hearing the Red Guard's bellowed command to his
men, Alice knew that the sudden movement had given them away. Alice was at the
window in a split second, her rifle at the ready, and she fired at the first
Red Guards approaching the apartment. Her bullets kicked up the dirt around
them and she saw one of them fall before he was pulled behind cover by a
comrade. Before she could find new targets, the other Guards opened fire on
full automatic, shredding the window and showering her with glass. With the
numbers so stacked against her, standing her ground and hoping to win the
firefight was a losing cause.

She saw that Nikhil was crouched against the wall, and while
his hands were gripping his gun, they were shaking uncontrollably. An idea came
to her as she considered the odds against them.

'Nikhil, just point your gun out the window and fire down at
them. You don't even have to aim; just stick it out and shoot once every few
seconds and please don't get yourself killed.'

He offered her a wan smile, as she took her rifle and ran
out of the flat and down the stairs. She could hear the pop of Nikhil
’
s gun, immediately
answered by an overwhelming volley of automatic weapon fire from the Red
Guards. She rounded the corner on the corridor and climbed out an open window
that had once served as a fire exit. She crouched on the narrow stairwell
outside and saw the Guards, four of whom were now advancing from cover to cover
while their comrades kept up a withering rate of fire at the window where
Nikhil was hiding. She was almost behind the Red Guards and they had not yet
spotted her. She selected single shot mode, not wanting to waste bullets, and
aimed carefully at the Guards advancing on the apartment. Her first shot took a
Guard in the neck, killing him instantly. Before the others had realized what
had happened, another was down. By the time the Guards spotted her and their
officer, a tall and thin man, screamed orders to his men, a third Guard was
down.

As Alice dove back into the corridor, bullets slammed into
the stairwell where she had been seconds ago. There were still nine Guards left
and while she had managed to give them a nasty surprise, the odds were still
very much against them. She retreated back up the stairs and found Nikhil
grinning.

'Did I hit anyone?'

Despite all the stress, she smiled.

'Nikhil, you should stick to that tablet thing of yours.'

As she peered out another window, she saw that the Guards
were again advancing on the apartment, and she brought her rifle up, determined
not to go down without a fight. Just then, a dark figure wearing a hat rushed
out from the forest and picked up the nearest Red Guard, snapping his neck and
tossing his body away. Several more Biters jumped out of the bushes, and Alice
saw the Red Guard officer shoot one in the head before beginning to run towards
the apartment. Taken by surprise and outnumbered, the Red Guards never stood
much of a chance, and two or three more were killed before Alice saw Hatter
stand up to his full height and scream. The other Biters took his cue and the remaining
Red Guards were not killed but bitten. The Officer who had been running towards
the apartment raised his rifle, aiming straight at Hatter, who was now lunging
towards him. The Red Guard Officer was about to pull the trigger when a single
bullet from Alice hit him in the neck and he went down. Hatter looked up with
his expressionless, red eyes and saw Alice at the window.

Alice had never been so happy to see Biters before, and as
she and Nikhil came down, they saw that the four Guards who had been bitten
were now twitching on the ground, as if suffering a violent fit, and then they
sat up, all trace of humanity gone in their lifeless eyes, blood from the bites
they had suffered streaming down their bodies. They looked at Alice and Nikhil
and one of them hissed and started to move towards them, when Hatter hit him
hard and then barked something to them. Alice didn't understand what he said,
but it was clear that they knew who was in charge because as they ran into the
forest to get back to their base, the newly converted Biters made no move to
attack them. Alice turned back after a few minutes of running to see Hatter and
the other Biters following them. Some distance behind them were the new
converts.

Alice smiled and Nikhil asked her what she found so funny
about their near brush with death.

'When the colonel talked about us turning Zeus troopers to
our side, I'm guessing he didn't have this in mind.'

***

TEN

'Three hundred?'

Appleseed withered in the face of Chen's rhetorical
questions. The one thing that Appleseed had learnt about his Chinese boss was
that when he asked a question, he rarely wanted an answer. Instead, he was
usually passing judgment, and in this case, Appleseed knew that the judgment
being passed could be deadly for him. Appleseed had been a career military
officer in the old US Army, when as a colonel based in Afghanistan he had been
approached by some old mentors who had mentioned certain special projects they
wanted him to help with. At the time, a million dollars in cash seemed to be
worth the secrecy and subterfuge he had dealt with, and when The Rising had
taken place, he actually thought that he had been chosen to be one of the
elites to fight this scourge. Fifteen years later, he was not so sure anymore
about who or what cause he really served. The money was no longer worth much,
but he did have a wife and three kids, and he knew that if Chen ordered it, in
an instant he could be reduced to being no more than yet another of the
millions of slave laborers who lived and died without much fanfare in the many
camps that sustained the utopian new world that the Central Committee promised
to usher in. The only currency he knew and recognized that still mattered in
this new world was power, and he was determined to cling on to that.

He straightened his back and faced Chen, whom he towered
over.

'Yes, sir. Over the past one week, we have had more than
three hundred desertions in the force.'

Appleseed saw Chen's pale face darken and his fists turn red
as he clenched the chair in front on him.

'That, General, is the problem of using the occupied to
manage their own territories.'

Appleseed bit his tongue. He knew how badly the Chinese Red
Army had been hit by retaliatory strikes by US nuclear forces in the days
following The Rising, and while the erstwhile United States was little better
than the Asian Deadland Appleseed oversaw, there was continued fierce
resistance from bands of American guerillas that was bleeding the Red Guards
dry. He knew that Chen and his Chinese masters badly wanted to nip in the bud
any possible insurrection in Asia and that they were counting on him to do it.
That was the single most important source of Appleseed's power. For the past
fifteen years, he had managed the Asian Deadland with an iron fist, born out of
extensive experience in Afghanistan before The Rising, a fiery grounding in
counter-insurgency that had helped him decimate the Biters and bring into the
Central Committee's fold most of the remaining human settlements. That was, of
course, till that silly girl called Alice surfaced and the whole matter
threatened to spiral out of control. He felt a familiar stirring as he recalled
being alone with her. In his mind, he was a soldier who was doing his duty, but
there were dark moments and dark deeds that he tried hard to not consciously
face, for in his hearts of hearts he enjoyed the power he held over others, the
power to make them submit to his will, the power to make them beg him. He
recalled all the grief this Alice had caused him and promised himself that the
next time she was alone with him, she would be begging him for mercy.

Over the past two weeks, her cohorts had been bombarding the
Zeus Intranet with messages, averaging more than three a day, and while Chen
had flown in Information Technology specialists from Shanghai who would delete
every posting within minutes, the seditious messages were slowly but surely
having an impact. The hardest hit were recruits from the human settlements in
the Deadland of what had once been India, and desertions had been on the rise.
All attempts to track down the posters had proven to be in vain and the efforts
at striking back against them had produced little by way of tangible results
other than many scores of casualties.

'Eighty-five Red Guards have died in one week. Does that
sound like something the Central Committee will tolerate?'

Appleseed had posed a rhetorical question to Dewan not
unlike the ones being posed to him by Chen, and he was infuriated to see Dewan
standing impassively in front of him.

'Goddamit, Colonel! You've been patrolling these areas for
years. Don't tell me you don't know where these people can be.'

Dewan looked Appleseed straight in the eye, and waited for a
few seconds before replying, as if weighing how best to phrase his reply.

'Sir, General Chen insists on flying in Red Guards straight
from Tibet or mainland China who know nothing of the local people or terrain.
That's why they walk into one ambush after another. If they let me and my boys
get a free reign, we may actually produce better results.'

Appleseed turned on Dewan with a fury. 'Colonel, the reason
he does that is because he is not sure whether any of the local troops can be
trusted. I hope I don't have to remind you of the number of desertions we've
seen over the past couple of weeks.'

Dewan thought of how to reply to that, and when he did,
Appleseed noticed that the colonel was not looking him in the eye.

'General, the boys are no longer sure of what the truth is. These
posters from the Deadland are sending out messages that challenge the very
reason we are doing what we are. I haven't really seen the Central Committee
counter those with any compelling arguments other than to censor the posts and
send out Red Guards against locations where the posts were supposedly
uploaded.'

'Colonel, I hope you realize that such statements about the
Central Committee border on treason!'

Appleseed noticed that Dewan did not flinch under the
implicit threat, and an idea came to him.

'Colonel, would you say that anyone not in approved
settlements can be considered at the very least a sympathizer, if not an active
collaborator with the counter-revolutionaries among the humans and no more
deserving of mercy than the damned Biters?'

Dewan was taken aback by Appleseed lapsing into the lingo
used by Chen and his Chinese masters, and his hesitation led Appleseed to press
ahead.

'I take it that this Alice and her cohorts could not move so
freely in the Deadland if the remaining human settlements there did not at
least implicitly support her?'

Dewan did not know where this was going and he knew that
anything he said would not help his cause, so he just stayed silent as
Appleseed continued.

'So, Colonel Dewan, from your response, I take it that anyone
still in the Deadland in unauthorized settlements is probably a human
sympathizer of this Alice or have been subverted by the Biters and their
supposed Queen. For years we have resisted taking active measures against the
Biters in the Deadland because we wanted to minimize collateral damage among
the human settlements there. Perhaps that equation has now changed.'

Dewan felt a chill go up his spine as he realized where this
was going. Appleseed picked up his radio to call Chen.

'General Chen, I have a plan that may help us eradicate the
threat we face once and for all.’

As Dewan heard Appleseed outline his plan, he was seized
with panic. He had to do something to warn Alice and the others, but there was
no way he could do that without compromising himself.

***

'It's her!'

Over the last couple of weeks, Alice had slowly got used to
this kind of reception whenever she walked into a human settlement in the
Deadland. While Nikhil had kept up a relentless barrage of messages aimed at
the Zeus troops, Alice had never really accounted for how fast the news would
spread among the settlements. Most of the deserters found their way back to
their settlements, and there they shared tales of the lies they had been told,
of how the Central Committee, far from being a benevolent power, represented
forces that had perhaps brought upon the catastrophe of The Rising in the first
place to serve their pursuit of power. Most people found it hard to think of
the Biters as anything other than the monsters they had always taken them for,
but once doubts were sowed about the true nature of the Central Committee, they
proved hard to undo. Add to that the heavy-handed tactics of the Red Guards and
Chen, and one settlement after another had started to side with Alice.

Alice found herself facing more than three hundred people in
the settlement, located just west of what had once been the suburb of Noida.
Their leader, a grizzled old man, walked up to her and looked at her as if
sizing her up.

'You are but a young girl, little more than child, and a
foreigner at that. What makes you expect that we would side with you and risk
facing the Red Guards?'

Alice looked the old man in the eye. 'I don't expect you or
your people to do anything other than to hear me out. After that, you can still
choose to send your young ones to serve Zeus and to slave in the Central
Committee's labor camps. Or you can choose to fight.'

The old man snorted derisively. 'Fight for what? You speak
very fancy words for someone so young. Do you even know what those words mean?'

Alice did not even flinch as she replied, 'I fight for the
freedom that we all have as human beings. The freedom to live the way we want,
the freedom to choose our leaders, the freedom my father and hundreds of others
have died to protect.'

The man averted his eyes and turned to the assembled crowd.

'Let us hear her out.'

When Alice finished, twenty more young men and women had
joined her ranks. She never quite realized when her struggle to ensure safety
and survival for her settlement had become something more. Perhaps it was when
she watched her father and his friends be killed by the Red Guards; perhaps it
was when she realized the full extent of the conspiracy behind it all – but
what mattered now was that whether she liked it or not, she was effectively
leading an ever growing army that fought back against the Red Guards. The
Biters still would not really take orders from her, but she noticed that they
were always lurking in the background on the Queen's orders, waiting to wade
into the battle to support her.

Alice waited on the small hill outside the settlement as
Nikhil uploaded his latest message, about how more and more desertions were
taking place. They had actually met a dozen deserters who had returned to their
settlements, and Nikhil had used the tablet’s camera to record a few of their
testimonies that he was also uploading. When he finished, he looked at Alice.

‘I’m almost out of juice. We need to be heading back.’

Alice realized that the small tablet in Nikhil’s hand had
proved to be a more devastating weapon in their struggle than any amount of
firepower, and she also understood that it needed recharging. Dewan had left a
charger behind, but only one of the underground shelters had an old generator
which was being carefully husbanded to provide limited electricity and now also
to power up the tablet. Alice and Nikhil set off at a brisk pace, jogging more
than walking through the forest. Along the way, Alice spotted three men with
rifles who waved to her. Even if people had not met her, almost everyone seemed
to know about the blond haired girl who was fighting back.

As Alice ran faster and faster, she felt Nikhil fall behind,
but she wasn’t worried. There was no sign of Red Guards nearby and they had only
about five kilometers to go before they could disappear underground. Running
always helped clear her mind, and Alice realized just what a motley crew she
was leading. There were, of course, the people from her own settlement, who she
knew would follow her to the end; then there were some from other settlements
in the Deadland who had supported her but would not trust the Biters and so
chose to stay in their own settlements while helping her with scouting; and
finally there were those who said they wanted to help but would not bring
themselves to follow a young girl, and remained uneasy allies at best. Even
among the Biters, Alice had realized that while the Queen commanded the loyalty
of many of them, there were small bands in the Deadland who had gone almost
rabid, crazed with fear and hate, and would attack any human on sight. That
made it tougher for her to sell her story of how the Biters could be worked
with. It was all such a complicated mess that it made her head hurt and made
her wish that she did not have to be the one to deal with it all.

‘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.’