Alice in Deadland Trilogy (43 page)

As Appleseed slammed the door on
the way out, Gladwell sat down, trying to calm down. Appleseed had struck a
nerve, one Gladwell had tried to keep buried. As a young officer straight out
of training, he had been on a peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, with orders not
to intervene unless his men were fired on. They had stumbled upon a group of
masked gunmen who had lined up several dozen young men and boys and had begun
to execute them. After repeated pleas over the radio to get permission to
intervene, he had acted on his conscience and ordered his men to open fire.
Eight of the gunmen were killed but instead of being rewarded for saving dozens
of civilians, Gladwell found his military career in tatters, especially when it
was revealed that the gunmen were on the payroll of a US Private Military
Contractor with links to powerful senators. The case was buried and Gladwell
was given an honorable discharge. A change in administration gave him the
opportunity to rejoin the government but this time as a diplomat, determined to
not let such perversities of foreign policy happen again. With people like
Appleseed on the loose, and what his friend had mentioned about Zeus
operatives, he was not so sure that he or anyone else could come in the way of
the sort of evil that Appleseed and his masters represented.

As he headed home, he wondered who
Appleseed had been so interested in. He hadn’t even bothered to ask his staff,
but then it was the principle that mattered. Gladwell closed his eyes and tried
to wish away the throbbing headache.

***

‘Honey, I’m sorry, but you need to
listen to me when I tell you something. You are not going out today. Am I
clear?’

Gladwell had shouted much louder
than he had intended to, but the accumulated stress of the last two days was
beginning to tell on him. Jane sulked and ran sobbing to her room. ‘You made me
miss my ballet performance in school. You know how much I’ve prepared for
that.’

Gladwell winced as she slammed the
door to her room, but he had already vented enough at her to take her to task
for this display of defiance. He felt a hand on his shoulder.

‘You’re beginning to scare me.
First you tell me not to step outside of the home, now Jane, and why on Earth
do you have a gun in our house? Will you please tell me what’s going on?’

Gladwell took his wife’s hand in
his and slumped against her, finally feeling himself unable to bear all the
pressure and tension he had been under for the last two days. He asked Jo to
sit down, and she sat down on his lap, trying to calm him down.

‘Do you know all the stuff that’s
on TV about the virus in China and reports about something like it in the US?’

When Jo nodded, he continued,
finding that sharing what was plaguing him made it a bit easier to bear, though
he was now passing on a terrible burden onto Jo. But if things were going to
unravel as fast as he feared, she needed to be prepared.

‘The news channels are downplaying
it, making it seem like something like bird flu or swine flu. But it’s not,
it’s much, much worse.’

‘Do you mean worse in terms of
people dying from it?’

Gladwell fumbled for a while,
trying to put into words what little he had learned. ‘This virus does something
to people. It doesn’t kill them, but it changes them. They start attacking
others. I don’t know much more, but I do know they are about to declare martial
law in some parts of the US.’

He could tell by the expression on
Jo’s face just how difficult she found it to believe this. ‘I’m sure they’ll
cure it. It’s just a virus…’

Gladwell cut her off. ‘Jo, I don’t
know a lot, but I’ve read some cables that show it’s spreading faster than
anyone thought and its effects are like nothing anyone’s seen. Then you have
half the planet going to war at the same time, and nobody has a handle on
things any more. I heard the first cases in India are being reported so I want
you guys to stay home.’

‘What happens now?’

Gladwell stood up, gathering his
coat. He was now on more familiar ground. While the danger was very real and
imminent, he knew the emergency evacuation procedures were in place and his
government would not let him and the other Embassy staffers down.

‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. If the
shit does hit the fan, they’ll get us out.’

***

‘I’m sorry to disturb you
personally, Madam Vice President, but nobody seems to be seeing the gravity of
the situation. There are cases in India now and the media is still largely
ignoring the spread. All I’m asking is that we authorize an emergency
evacuation of the families of Embassy staff here. I and a skeleton staff will
stay behind.’

Gladwell had sent many cables to
Washington making the same request, and many of his colleagues around the world
were making similar pleas. What was puzzling was that nobody in Washington
seemed to care. It was as if they thought they could wish away the crisis by
denying it existed. So Gladwell had taken the risky gambit of going all the way
to the top. One of his mentors had been a White House staffer, and while he was
unable to help directly, he was able to at least set up this call.

Deborah Henfield’s voice boomed
over the speakerphone.

‘I am Deb Henfield, the Vice
President of the United States and I say that there is no imminent crisis based
on all the information I have.’

With that, all of Gladwell’s
worries were dismissed out of hand.

In just one day, things had
spiraled horribly out of control. Many large cities in the US were now affected
by the virus, and the government had reacted with a media blackout. Bizarrely,
the Armed Forces had not been called out to help deal with the crisis,
supposedly because they were needed to deal with crises overseas, Zeus had been
appointed to deal with containing the unrest and chaos in the US. Regional wars
had broken out all over the place and it looked as if the whole world had lost
its sanity at the same time.

Gladwell’s phone rang. It was Brigadier
Randhawa, an Indian Army officer whom he had befriended during his stint in
Delhi. The Brigadier was as blunt as ever. ‘Bob, our governments don’t give a
fuck and things will go downhill soon. I have my men ready with our families to
get to our base in Manesar. If you want, we’ll pick you and your people up.’

Gladwell thanked him and hung up.
Randhawa was a highly decorated soldier and was part of the National Security
Guard, India’s elite commando force, and if there was one place where safety
could be found, it was with him and his men.

The next thing he did was to call
the head of the Marine detachment at the Embassy. With outbreak cases reported
across India, Gladwell had already asked the Marines to be ready for any
eventuality.

The Embassy was already full of
anxious American citizens, many of them now stranded. Several international
flights had already been cancelled as authorities panicked. At first, a few had
been outraged at what was happening back in the United States, especially since
Zeus mercenaries were in charge of law and order in the US. But now everyone
had bigger things to worry about. Rumors that the first cases had been reported
in Delhi had sent everyone into a panic and Gladwell was increasingly torn
between staying at the Embassy to hold things together or getting home to be
with Jo and Jane.

He also saw with increasing
irritation that Appleseed was back at the Embassy. As a serving Army Officer,
he had every right to be there, but what irked Gladwell was the fact that he was
bringing in a gaggle of black-suited men, who were on paper US citizens in
Delhi on business trips. Again, going by the book, there was nothing Gladwell
could do to stop them, but the fact that their employer was Zeus told Gladwell
where Appleseed’s true allegiance lay and also made him even more concerned.

‘Dr. Dasgupta is here to meet
you.’

Gladwell normally would never have
entertained a meeting request at a time like this, but this lady had called
multiple times and had said that it was a life-and-death situation. He had done
background checks on her and he could not figure out what had made her so
anxious to meet him. She had recently resigned from some government-funded lab
to come back to India.

He finished a couple of emails and
then was about to tell his secretary to send his visitor up when his phone
rang. He sat down when he realized the call was from the White House. The
President had been largely invisible in the preceding days and the VP had been
the public face of the government. Remembering his last conversation with her,
Gladwell hoped that she was not too ticked off.

‘I am calling you on an urgent
national security matter that you need to know. We have been tracking a person
of interest called Protima Dasgupta who we believe to have links with terror
groups. Do not meet her or allow her access to the Embassy. We have men on the
ground who will deal with her.’

Then she hung up, leaving Gladwell
flabbergasted. He found it odd that the Vice President would call about a
matter like this, but then he also knew that he was hardly privy to all the
classified operations sometimes going on under his nose. The last thing he
wanted in the middle of all this chaos was a terror suspect loose in his
Embassy. He dialed his secretary.

‘Tell Dr. Dasgupta that I’m busy
and I cannot meet her today.’

When his mobile phone rang, it was
Jo, and she sounded terrified.

‘Bob, they’re calling these things
Biters, and I’ve got calls from friends saying they’re right in the middle of
Delhi.’

***

‘Sir, do we open fire?’

‘No, Jim, just get us home.
Randhawa asked us to link up with his convoy on the way to National Highway 8,
and we don’t have much time.’

The SUV sped through the streets
of Delhi, and not for the first time, the driver ran over a Biter who got in
the way. Under normal circumstances, Gladwell would have been horrified at the
thought of running over people in his rush to get home, but things were
anything but normal.

In the minutes following Jo’s
call, all hell seemed to have broken loose. There were rumors that Biters were
all over central Delhi, and Gladwell tried one last time to get through to his
superiors and ask them to send help, but nobody was picking up the phone. The
news was reporting that the President and Vice President had already been
evacuated and that the US mainland was now teeming with Biters. Then came the
news that tactical nuclear attacks had been launched on Indian Army targets by
Pakistan, and that India was in the process of retaliating.

Gladwell took an hour to ensure
that the staffers got transport home, in many cases relying on the Marines to
stop taxis for them. He wished there was more he could do for the US citizens
at the Embassy, but after talking to Randhawa, he was told that there were only
five trucks, and there was no room for others. Gladwell had agreed on a
rendezvous point with Randhawa and asked all his staffers to get there with
their families. He only hoped most of them would get there safely.

Gladwell had initially been
skeptical about the rumors about the Biters being bloodthirsty monsters who
could not be killed. But in the ten minutes since they had left the Embassy, he
was more scared than he had ever been before. All around him, small groups of
Biters, covered in blood and grotesque wounds, roamed through the city at will,
attacking anyone they saw. He saw a couple of police posts that had been
overrun, and his stomach had churned at the sight of what had remained of the
policemen.

The SUV screeched to a halt
outside Gladwell’s home and the two Marines at the back stepped out, their
assault rifles at the ready. The driver was also armed, but he kept the engine
running as Gladwell sprinted inside and came out a minute later with Jo and
Jane. As he herded them into the vehicle, Jane saw a trio of Biters walk
towards them and she screamed. That got their attention and they increased
their pace.

‘Get inside now!’

Jane was now crying in terror and
had to be bodily lifted inside the vehicle. The driver backed away and began
the journey to the highway where they were to link up with Randhawa. In theory
it was only a twenty-minute drive, but now they were going to drive through a
city teeming with Biters.

***

‘Sir, the road’s too blocked with
cars. There’s no way we can proceed!’

Between the driver’s increasingly
panic-stricken updates, Jane’s continuous sobbing and one of the Marines’ loud
prayers, Gladwell was having trouble concentrating on keeping all of them
alive. This was the third dead end they had hit in the last ten minutes, and he
was beginning to regret having taken the SUV in the first place. True, they
comfortably fit into it, but with the streets littered with abandoned vehicles,
it was that much tougher to find a way through the maze. On the flip side, they
had managed to store some stocks of drinking water and canned food in the
trunk, but Gladwell was pretty sure by now that they were at more imminent risk
of dying at the hands of Biters instead of thirst or hunger.