Alice in Deadland Trilogy (22 page)

Something snapped inside Alice, and she took a signal flare
from her backpack and threw it to the ground, blinding the three men. Before
they could gather their wits, Alice was in front of them, her rifle pointed at
them.

‘Where did you get that bag?’

One of them men made the fatal mistake of thinking they were
faced with a mere girl, and he brought up his pistol. Alice snapped off a three
round burst, hitting him in the chest and slamming him against the tree behind
him. The noise had awakened Satish and he whistled to let the men below him
know that he was just above them. The hood had fallen from around Alice’s head
and now the remaining men saw her face in the fading glow of the flare.

‘The Quee—’

A bullet crashed just inches from his foot, cutting his
sentence short.

‘I asked you a simple question. Where did you get that bag?’

The men were now shrinking back in fear. Before The Rising
they had been convicts on death row, and both men were well accustomed to
violence and crime; talents that had served them well in the Deadland. But for
all that, they knew that they were no match for this half-Biter girl who could
not be killed. They had heard tales of her and what she had done to the Red
Guards, and they had given her settlement at Wonderland a wide berth, only now
to be faced with her in the middle of the Deadland.

One of them gathered up the courage to speak. ‘We saw a
group of Biters in the Deadland a day ago. One of them dropped this.’

Alice thought back to the strange Biters she had seen at the
scene of the latest attack.

‘Where were these Biters going? Were they going towards the
Reservation?’

The man who had spoken now looked at her curiously.

‘No, that was the weird thing. We thought all the Biters
around here followed you, but not these. These ones were different.?’

Satish had now climbed down, but he kept his gun pointed at
the two men.

‘Why do you think these Biters were different?’

‘They were picked up by a black helicopter.’

The next morning, Alice and Satish had the two bandits lead them
to the location where they had seen the helicopter take off. Satish took a look
around the area.

‘Alice, if they come back, this is where they will come.
They’ve flattened the ground to create some sort of a landing pad, and they’ve
sandbagged those two hills to create guard towers.’

Satish got on his radio to call his recon teams. They
checked in one by one, but not one of them had seen or heard a helicopter
approach the area. Then again, if a black helicopter had flown in low at night,
following the Red Guards’ guidance on patrol avoidance, it was possible to pull
off such an attack. Why and how someone would bring Biters in to launch such
attacks was, however, beyond Satish.

Alice kicked the dust at her feet, thinking of the dead
children back at Wonderland.

‘Then we will wait here, and when they come back, we will
kill them all.’

***

‘It’s an attack helicopter.’

Alice heard Satish’s warning and looked up to see the black,
predatory shape hover in the distance. They had been waiting for close to a
day, and were about to give up hope and try their luck elsewhere. A makeshift
bunker near the landing zone had been their refuge. They had been expecting a
troop carrier, of the sort the bandit had described, and with the advantage of
surprise, Alice was fairly confident that she and Satish could have handled
whoever was being flown in on these deadly missions into Wonderland. However,
they most certainly did not have the firepower to deal with an attack
helicopter.

‘How far away are your boys?’

Satish grinned. ‘One of them has that chopper in his sights
right now. If we order it, a SAM will be going up that chopper’s tailpipe.
Should we fire?’

Alice shook her head emphatically. ‘No. If we show our hand
now, they will not go through with their landing. Let’s wait.’

But it soon became apparent this helicopter did not mean to
land. It swept over the area several times, and then one of Satish’s teams
radioed in.

‘White Rook, I can see two Red Guard APCs and two jeeps
filled with Red Guards coming. Still four kilometers from your location, but
they are closing in fast. Wait, they just stopped, and it looks like an officer
is scanning the area with binoculars.’

Alice asked, ‘What’s going on?’

Satish responded, ‘They seem to be on a search mission more
than an attack. I have no idea what or who they might be looking for. Coming
this close to Wonderland on land is a big risk for them to take, especially in
broad daylight, so it must be someone important.’

Alice thought back to what she had heard in the Looking
Glass. ‘Could it be those Americans who had supposedly escaped?’

Satish had his own binoculars trained on the horizon and
replied without shifting his gaze. ‘I don’t see how two escaped prisoners would
warrant such a search attempt.’

Then he froze.

‘Alice, look, there! At two o’clock, maybe a kilometer out,
near that large Banyan tree.’

Alice had her rifle up at her shoulder and looked through
the scope. It was a sunny day and there was excellent visibility, but she did
not notice what Satish had seen until he pointed it out again. During her own
training in the Deadland, her instructors had taught her the art of escape and
evasion, but she had never really been trained to look for a concealed enemy,
simply because Biter hordes were not exactly proponents of stealth and
concealment. However, in the house to house fighting against the Red Guards
that had followed, it had become a critical skill, one she had learnt from
Satish and Arjun, and from her own combat experience.

Satish gave an appreciative whistle. ‘That man sure has
guts, that much is for sure. He’s got an attack helicopter on top of him and
perhaps fifty Red Guards on land, and he hasn’t lost his nerve and made a run
for it.’

Now that Alice had spotted him, she saw that there was a bit
of an arm visible beneath the undergrowth. It was not going to be visible from
the air, but once the Red Guard vehicles got there, it was only a matter of
time before they discovered the fugitives.

Alice put her rifle aside.

‘Satish, how many men do you have covering the chopper?’

‘Just a two-man SAM crew and two riflemen. With the element
of surprise, I have no doubt they could take the chopper down, but they cannot
hold off all those Red Guards. I have two more teams with RPGs headed here, but
they won’t make it for the next thirty minutes.’

The buzzing sound of a large caliber automatic gun firing
made Alice swivel her head around. The attack helicopter had seen something and
was firing from its chin mounted turret, the rounds kicking up dust and rocks
on the ground below. Alice looked through her scope and saw a frail old man
stumbling along the ground. Another man was trying to pull him back under
cover, but the older man had clearly lost his nerve. It was hard to be sure
from this distance, but their complexion and features suggested that these were
indeed the two Americans who had escaped.

She turned to look at Satish, and he just looked back, an
eyebrow raised, silently asking her the question.

‘Bring it down!’

As Satish relayed the order to his men, a trail of white
smoke rose from the ground to Alice’s left and snaked up towards the
helicopter. The pilot had been so busy in trying to target the fleeing
fugitives that he never had a chance to react. The missile slammed into the
mid-section of the helicopter, consuming it in a giant fireball.

Alice could now see the Red Guard vehicles fast approaching
the two men. She mounted the bike, with Satish behind her, and they sped
towards the scene.

Alice was more than five hundred meters away when the lead
Red Guard APC opened fire with its machine gun. Alice swerved her bike to the
right and dove off the seat, rolling and coming up behind the cover of a large
tree. Satish was concealed behind another tree. Satish’s men were about a
hundred meters to their left, but they too were holding their fire. Assault
rifles would do little damage to the APCs.

‘Over here!’

The two men heard Alice’s shout and scrambled to her. Alice
did not have much time to register their appearances, but they were clearly
white, one a reed-thin old man whose ribs peered showed prominently through a
dirty vest, and the other a younger man, perhaps the same age as Arjun, wearing
a tattered leather jacket. The younger man’s eyes widened a bit as he saw Alice,
and he started to back up, when Alice pushed him down.

‘Stay here and you may just live.’

The Red Guard APCs were now advancing steadily, and they had
guessed correctly that the absence of any resistance must have meant that they
were not up against enemies with heavy missiles or firepower that could
threaten their vehicles. The two jeeps stayed behind, and as Alice looked, an
officer was standing up in the back of one of the jeeps, speaking on a radio.

‘Satish, those APCs will be on us in a couple of minutes. I
have a plan.’

Before Satish could say anything, Alice had reached into her
backpack and taken out two fragmentation grenades and raced to her bike.

‘Distract one of them!’

Satish peered out from behind cover and started firing at
one of the APCs, and his men started unloading their weapons on it from the
other direction. Caught in the crossfire, the commander manning the heavy
machine gun on the turret was forced inside, as the other APC came towards it
to deal with the sudden threat. Just then Alice’s bike roared to life and she
sped towards the second APC, the grenades in her hands. Distracted by Satish’s
men, the commander in the APC’s turret did not see Alice until it was too late.

Alice pulled the pin from one grenade and threw it, jumping off
her bike as it went careening into the APC. The grenade bounced off the APC and
exploded, shredding several of its tires. Now the vehicle was effectively
stranded, and Alice clambered onto its back, a handgun in one hand and a
grenade in the other. The commander was struggling to take out his own pistol
from its holster when Alice fired at him, sending him slumping back inside the
vehicle crashing back. Then she pulled the pin off the second grenade and
dropped it into the open hatch, jumping off as it exploded.

The Red Guards in the jeeps had now disembarked, and were
firing at Alice. She felt a round hit her thigh as she sought cover behind the
burning APC. The second APC was now approaching and she was effectively trapped
between the dozen or more Red Guards approaching her from the right and the
armored vehicle bearing down upon her from the left.

The first few Red Guards were now no more than a hundred
meters away and Alice could hear their triumphant shouts as they came closer.
Alice leaned out and fired a burst from her assault rifle. One seemed to go
down, but there were just too many of them. And as Satish’s men were pinned
down by the second APC even as it drove towards her, she was on her own.

The ground near one of the Red Guards seemed to explode in a
burst of dust and sand and a dark figure wearing a hat rushed up, grabbing the
Red Guard and pulling him down, breaking his neck in one move. Several more
Biters streamed out of the hole, overwhelming the Red Guards around them.
Hatter picked up another Red Guard, raising him cleanly over his head before
smashing him to the ground. Several of the Red Guards were conscripts who had
never seen combat, let alone seen a Biter up close. They began to panic, and
that was their undoing. They fired blindly at the approaching Biters, and while
many of the scored hits, only a direct shot to the head would be of any use.
Within seconds they all fell to the clawing, biting attackers who had come to
Alice’s rescue.

The APC now drove towards the Biters, cutting several of
them into ribbons them by half with its machine gun. The Biters were still not
finished, but with their bodies mangled and their legs cut off, they were out
of the fight.

Hatter was staring defiantly at the approaching APC,
screaming in rage when the APC lurched to a halt, exploding from a direct hit.
Alice heard Satish behind her.

‘Thank God for RPGs. My boys got here just in time.’

Alice knew that they owed their survival to had more to it
than just a handful of men armed with one rocket launcher. They would not have
survived without the intervention of Hatter and his fellow Biters. Several of
the Biters had fallen in the battle and their bodies lay scattered around the
ground, their heads blown open by direct hits.

Alice made her thanks to the surviving Biters, and then they
ambled back to their hidden tunnel and disappeared. In spite of having spent so
much time with them, and in spite of being like them in some respects, Alice
was yet to fully figure out the Biters. They followed her with a loyalty that
she had never experienced among humans, even humans who owed her their lives.
They would throw away their lives to protect one of their own without a second
thought, and unlike humans they never seemed to expect anything back in return.
Alice was still young, but had seen enough of the world and of humans to know
that those qualities were in incredibly short supply. People fought over power,
over money, over control. Biters just fought to protect their own.

In becoming a Biter, it was strangely as if one became more
human.

Alice's thoughts were interrupted by Satish.

'Let's now find out who our new American friends are, shall
we?'

***

FOUR

'A jeep would be nothing more than a magnet for air strikes.
Why do you think I asked all my men to disperse?'

Satish said the words with a smile, but Alice had known him
long enough to recognize the underlying irritation. The two Americans had
proved to be a study in contrasts. The older man, who walked with a pronounced
limp, was yet to utter a word. He merely kept looking around him with wide
eyes, and Alice found him staring at her way too often for her comfort. Looking
at his disheveled hair, torn vest and vacant expression, she wondered if he had
indeed lost his mind in some Red Guard labor camp. The younger man, conversely,
was all business. He had immediately equipped himself with a bulletproof vest
from one of the fallen Red Guards, and armed himself with an assault rifle. To
Alice’s amusement, he seemed very vocal about his opinions – though Satish
certainly seemed to find nothing funny in his trying to impose his
opinions.felt otherwise.

'How fast can we walk? Let's take one of the jeeps and get
back to this city of yours.'

Satish took a step closer to the American. He was a good six
inches shorter than the blond, lanky man he faced, but Alice's eyes, trained by
years of experience, told her that the American would not stand a chance. He
clearly had little experience of close combat, since he was holding his rifle
in both hands. At such close quarters, he would never even be able to bring the
rifle up before Satish cut his throat. She held out a restraining hand on
Satish's shoulder and addressed the American.

'My name is Alice Gladwell. What's yours?'

'I am Captain Vince Hudson, U.S Marine Corps. I flew with
the White Knights squadron before The Rising.'

He pointed to a patch stuck on his jacket, showing an
armored man on horseback, carrying what appeared to be a spear or lance. Above
the patch were the words 'White Knights' and below it were inscribed the
letters 'HMM-165'.

'Vince, I have lived and fought in the Deadland all my life.
Here are some things you should know. The Reds control the skies. So traveling
in a large group is suicide. Traveling in large vehicles is suicide. And not
listening to someone like Satish is suicide. We risked our lives to save you,
but if you would rather be on your own, go ahead. I do not like to carry excess
baggage.'

With that, Alice shouldered her assault rifle and began walking
off.

'Hey, wait. Sorry if we started on the wrong foot. Being
chased by Red Guards for a week has a way of putting you on edge.'

They took refuge in a nearby clump of trees. Satish had
already radioed his men to give him advance warning of any incoming Red Guards,
on land or by air. For close to an hour they lay flat against the ground,
waiting for the telltale buzzing sound that would announce the arrival of an
attack helicopter.

Finally Satish whispered, 'Looks like they've bled enough
for a day. Alice, it'll be dark soon; let's get into the woods and hear what
Vince and his friend have to say.'

When they were in the forest, Satish passed around a meager
meal of biscuits, which the two Americans wolfed down hungrily.

Alice found the old man staring at her, and finally she
turned to look at him. That was when he spoke his first words.

'You are for real. So there is hope after all.'

'Excuse me?'

The old man smiled, revealing several missing teeth.

'My name is Doctor Steven Edwards, young lady. I have a story
that may interest you.'

Doctor Edwards sat back, munching on his biscuit.

'I was a virologist working for the US Department of Defense
before The Rising. In the days that followed, I did what many did. I hid and
survived the best I could, and one day I was picked up to go and work in some
labor camp in the Mainland.'

'How long were you in the camps?' Satish asked.

'I spent eight years cleaning barracks and tilling fields.
At first I tried to fight back, but when I realized there was nowhere to go to
and no hope for escape, I gave in. The beatings and broken teeth helped.'

Doctor Edwards’ response chilled Alice. She had heard of the
camps and had talked to people who had lost relatives to them, but she had
never met anyone who had survived one. She now saw the scars crisscrossing the
old man's body and wondered what horrors he had endured. Having grown up to
think of Biters as the ultimate horror, Alice now realized that her father had
indeed been right: the worst cruelty was what man could inflict on a fellow
man.

Doctor Edwards continued, 'I had resigned to slaving away in
the camp until a year ago, when some folks in the Central Committee had me
brought to Shanghai. They told me that they thought they could create a vaccine
against the virus that turned people into Biters. Based on my background, they
thought I could help.'

'Why would they single you out?'

'Because, my dear girl, I had worked on the viruses that
perhaps led to this monstrosity in the first place.'

Alice thought back to the Queen of the Biters and the story
she had told Alice.

'Did you know Dr. Protima?'

The old man looked down. 'I did not know her personally but
I knew she was one of the researchers. Unfortunately when I did meet her, it
was to harvest her dead body.'

Alice recalled how Dr. Protima had sacrificed herself in the
attack to rescue Alice from the Red Guard base where she was being held. In the
chaos that had followed the battle, and in wanting to escape impending Red
Guard reinforcements and air strikes, Satish and his men had whisked Alice away
from the base, but Dr. Protima's body had been left behind.

'I took her blood samples and got to work, thinking they
were interested in only a vaccine.'

Alice explained about the vaccine Dr. Protima had given her,
and Edwards looked away sadly.

'That vaccine was unstable. It saved you from becoming a
Biter, but not entirely. With the labs the Reds gave me access to and blood
samples from Protima, I was able to refine it.'

Satish leaned over. 'Is there a vaccine?'

'I couldn't get an actual sample out, but if I can get to a
lab, I do have the details in a print-out with me. The reason we were trying so
hard to get to you was that I wanted to find out if Alice was real or just a
story created by people. With her blood sample and a lab I could make a vaccine
that works.'

'Doctor, how did you escape?'

Vince had been silent so far, but now he chipped in. 'Not
all of the Chinese are bad. As word got out about what was happening here, many
of our guards were talking about whether the Biters were what they had been
told. Several of them were letting prisoners escape, even against threat of
execution. A young man who had lost his brother in the Deadland helped me and a
few others get a spot hidden on a transport plane to Ladakh. When the doc told
me what was going on, I got him along.'

'What happened to the others who escaped with you?'

The soldier's eyes hardened. 'They all died. Every single
one of them. There were twenty of us, hidden among boxes of food and
ammunition. We didn't have a much of a plan, but this was our best chance. When
the plane landed, we tried to fight our way out. We had surprise on our side,
but not much more. There were only a couple of us who knew how to use weapons,
and I managed to get Doc out, but nobody else made it. We got a jeep and drove
some of the way, but since then we’ve been walking and jacking abandoned
vehicles, trying to stay alive long enough to find you.'

Something did not yet make sense to Alice.

'Doctor, why did you suddenly want to escape?'

She saw the fear in Edwards' eyes as he answered.

'They wanted a vaccine all right, but they were also doing
other things. Terrible things.'

***

Chen saw the man in front of him pace his office, his face
contorted in barely controlled anger. The Commissar had flown in from Shanghai
that morning, and the last time Chen had seen him was when the Central
Committee was sentencing him to a labor camp. Then Chen had literally trembled
in fear – but not today. The Commissar was one of the most powerful men in the
Central Committee, second only to the Supreme Commander, who had not been seen
in public for years. Chen had seen the worst they could do to him, and he was
no longer afraid for himself, but he still had his wife to think of, so he made
an attempt to placate the Commissar.

'Comrade Commissar, we lost more than two dozen Red Guards
in pursuing the fugitives. It was my decision to stop the pursuit because we
accounted for most of them at the airfield, but two men were not worth losing
more men over.'

The Commissar turned on him, fury showing in his eyes.

'Comrade General, what were you doing before The Rising?'

The sudden question took Chen by surprise.

'I was commanding an infantry regiment.'

The Commissar stared at Chen, his eyes boring into him.

'Comrade General, I was in charge of all our strategic
missile groups. You do know the decisions I had to make.'

Chen remembered the nuclear devastation that had followed
The Rising and realized where Hu was going.

'So, Comrade General, difficult times call for difficult
choices and sacrifice. We have sacrificed much to preserve our people and
provide stability in these trying times. China is the only nation still
standing from all the nations of old. More than two hundred million people
still depend on the Central Committee to keep them safe. So when two fugitives
escape, it is not about two people getting away; it is about people seeing that
we are no longer in control.'

Hu saw a chessboard on Chen's table and walked to it,
picking up a pawn.

'I realize you have been through difficult times, but we
need men of your talent and experience in the coming struggle.'

Chen hesitated. 'Comrade Commissar, the war in the Deadland
here has been fought to a standstill. For months, we have not aggressively
pursued the terrorists, following the orders of the Central Committee.'

Hu continued to twirl the pawn in his hands.

'Comrade, any war is like a game of chess. You need to make
your moves carefully, and sometimes there may be a long wait between moves. We
have been patient, and we have been waiting for the right opportunity to make
our move. Do you play chess, Comrade?'

Chen was getting more and more confused as to where this
conversation was going.

'Comrade General, we were quiet in the Indian Deadland
because we were hurting ourselves by trying to fight this Yellow Witch with
conventional tactics. If anything, our men who fought in the Deadland came back
with their minds filled with stories about the Biters and how the people of the
Deadland had found a way of living with them. Then we had to spend time, effort
and lives to re-educate them and re-instill the right revolutionary fervor.
What a waste.'

Chen felt his throat tighten. He knew he was one of those
who had been punished for going back to the Mainland with dangerous new
questions about the war.

'Comrade General Chen, dangerous ideas like those make
people question the reality that they have come to accept. The idea that they
can gain so-called freedom can be a very dangerous one, for it makes people
forget that in that freedom lies the loss of all the security and prosperity
that we can provide.'

'With all due respect, there are enough veterans back in the
Mainland who have passed on stories about the Biters and their Queen.'

Chen saw Hu smile, but there was little humor in his
expression; just the look of a man who finally seemed to have things under
control. He said, 'It is time we put an end to this. Time that we brought back
the savages of the Deadland under our control. That is the key to stop the
brimming unrest among the people of the Mainland. Once food flows onto their
dinner tables and they no longer have to work on the farms, our people will
stop thinking of freedom.'

'Comrade Commissar, we have tried. We brought to bear all
our firepower, but you know as well as I do that in a guerilla campaign on
their home ground, at best we will fight a long, hard war of attrition.'

Now Hu replaced the pawn, taking up another piece: the
Queen.

'Comrade General, I flew down because I need you to know
what is going on, so that you can use your experience in the Deadland and the
trust your men have in you. We are about to enter a decisive phase in this
battle, one that will change the game in our favor. A phase that has already begun
with a few select operations behind enemy lines.'

Seeing Chen's puzzled expression, Hu pointed to the black
helicopter at the far end of the base.

'Comrade General, it is time we stopped trying to win this
war with pawns. The enemy has that half-Biter witch they call their Queen who
they follow into battle. It's time that you met the Red Queen.'

***

Despite all that she had seen and experienced, Alice found
it hard to believe that what Edwards had shared could have happened:
experiments conducted on labor camp inmates to try and create hybrid
human-Biters who could wage war in the Deadland, in an attempt to create an
army that would not require food, water, and be immune to pain and injury. More
importantly, it would not be an army of impressionable young conscripts who
would go back to the Mainland with uncomfortable questions for their masters in
the Central Committee about the true nature of the war they were fighting.

Hundreds of young men and women had died in the experiments,
which was when Edwards refused to co-operate any further, despite all the
torture he was subjected to. When he was shipped back to the labor camp, he
knew that a vaccine could be created but also knew that the Chinese researchers
were getting closer and closer to their dream of creating an army of hybrids.