Alice in Deadland (22 page)

More than five hundred people were gathered among the ruins of buildings that had once been a posh apartment complex. It was almost Sunset so a few torches had been lit. She was about to ask Arjun whether it was smart for so many of them to be in the open when a huge roar welcomed her. A man walked up to her.

'My name is Swapnil and I led our settlement near Mehrauli. Thank you for rescuing us. Some of us would want to go back to our families but I and many others will fight for you in your army. Just tell us what you need.'

As Alice looked around her, she considered what the man had said. Did she indeed now have an army? To think that so many people depended on her, and looked to her for direction was a scary thought but at the same time, she felt an intense surge of pride. If only her father could have seen her now. He had lived and died so that his people could continue to live free, and now she was finally in a position to not just avenge his death but to try and fight for what he had believed in. The celebrations were short-lived because having so many people in the open was an invitation for an air strike. Alice was sure that the Red Guards would be furious at the loss of three helicopters in just a few days and a threat to what they had taken to be an assured source of supply for their labor camps would cause them to lash out. Add to that the fact that the son of a senior Central Committee official was a prisoner in the Ruins, and she was sure that they would take some action, and soon.

She did not have to wait long. She was in a second floor room in what had once been an apartment when she heard the dull roar of approaching helicopters. She had lookouts on the nearby rooftops and soon enough she saw RPGs reach out towards the helicopters. In the darkness it was hard to see how close they came but without any signs of explosions, they seemed to have missed. Explosions rocked one of the rooftops as missiles fired in retaliation found their mark, and Alice wondered which of her comrades she had just lost.

'King of Hearts, Knave of Hearts. Time to go down the Rabbit Hole.'

Their plan was simple. It would be suicide to engage helicopter gunships with just RPGs and small arms. So, with the initial volley of RPGs they had got the Red Guards interested, but now they would hunker down and wait for the Red Guards to make the next move. The whole plan was to get them on the ground where they could be fought on more even terms. Alice watched at least a half dozen helicopters hover near the ground as black figures slithered down ropes. Part of her pitied the Red Guards, who were probably ordinary soldiers being forced into an impossible mission because the son of an important man was at stake. But she reasoned that they were doing their job, and she would do hers. Through the night vision scope on her rifle she watched the Red Guards sweep from one building to another. Commander Li was in the same building as her, sitting in the basement parking lot with four men guarding him. He did not have much more by way of intelligence to offer up, but he was a valuable bargaining chip and their best bet that the Red Guards would not just level the entire neighborhood with air strikes.

She watched a four man team of the Red Guards approach the building in front of her, across a small park where perhaps years ago, children would have played. Even today, a slide remained as a memorial to those simpler, happier days. Under that slide was what appeared to be a garbage bin. Inside it was an IED that Alice had rigged. As the Red Guards passed by the slide, she connected the two wires in front of her. The IED went off with a huge explosion that was deafening in the quiet of the night. When she put her scope back to her eyes, she saw all four Red Guards down. The others were now scrambling for cover, and one or two had fired, likely panicking and firing at shadows. Their muzzle flashes gave them away and they were met with a withering volley of rifle and RPG fire from men and women hidden in the Ruins around them. Alice saw a Red Guard run across the park, perhaps separated from his squad in the chaos. She took careful aim and fired a single round, bringing him down with a shot to the leg. As he scrambled on all fours, two shadows emerged from the darkness and took him away. The helicopters were buzzing overhead like angry hornets, but with the Red Guards mixed up in close combat, there was little they could do. One of them tried to come lower, but a near miss from an RPG sent it back up.

The firing went on for about twenty minutes and then there was silence. As per her plan, nobody cheered, and nobody went out to celebrate. In stark contrast to the deafening crescendo of gunfire and explosions that had rocked the complex just minutes ago, there was now no sound to be heard other than the helicopters overhead. Alice wondered if they would have called for reinforcements, but when and if they arrived they would find an abandoned apartment complex with nothing there but the bodies of a dozen or so Red Guards and multiple booby traps to make life interesting for any Red Guard who landed.

Alice and everyone with her, including eight Red Guards who had been captured alive, were already on their way through the Ruins and it's underground tunnels to another hideout.

The deadly game of cat and mouse that was to be played in the Ruins had begun in earnest.

***

THIRTEEN

Two more weeks passed, where not a single day went by without a raid by Red Guards. After their initial heavy losses in the house to house fighting in the Ruins, the Red Guards were increasingly using drones and air strikes. While that meant fewer Red Guard losses, it also meant that casualties on the side of Alice and her teams were also lower, because it was easy to hide in the Ruins or in the warren of underground tunnels and sewers. Alice realized early that they did not have the numbers or firepower to engage the Red Guards in open combat, so they would hide in the Ruins and use IEDs and ambushes to extract as heavy a toll as possible. Alice's army had also been bolstered by increasing defections among Zeus troopers, and while in absolute the numbers may have been low, the experience some of the recent defectors brought with them helped increase their capabilities and knowledge exponentially. Some of them were senior officers who had been Lieutenants or Majors in the Indian Army before The Rising, and they began a series of classroom trainings. Alice was fascinated by what she learnt. Her knowledge of combat had been forged in the Deadland, where the best schooling was learning to survive every day. But now she learnt of past battles in the Old World, of how insurgents in countries held off mighty armies with air power using low-tech IEDs and ambushes. She learnt of counter-insurgency and quickly grasped how much the Red Guards had bungled in alienating the local people. That was something she immediately set about capitalizing on.

Often in the darkness of night, she and a small group would travel into the Deadland and meet with settlements, telling them of the struggle that was being waged and asking them for their support. Alice had thought that telling them about how evil the Red Guards were and the conspiracy behind The Rising would be enough to get the settlements on her side, but it wasn't always so easy. One evening, Arjun sat down next to her.

'Alice, only a few people will fight out of a desire for revenge. Maybe some people like you who have directly lost family and friends to the Red Guards. But others want safety for their families, and they won't be motivated only by wanting to destroy something, but the promise of something that is a better life.'

Alice had never thought of it that way.

'Arjun, how do you know so much about this?'

He smiled.

'Remember, I was a salesman. My job was selling things to people which they often didn't want, and the key is that we need to make them want something they may not even have considered before.'

'What would they want?'

Arjun took out a faded photograph. It showed a city street with cars and people walking around.

'Most of the leaders of the settlements were young men and women before The Rising. They remember how life was before, and if you ask all of them, including me, what they would most want- they would say that they want the safety and stability that they once had. Especially in places like India and the US which were democracies, people would want to be able to choose their future instead of having someone sitting in Shanghai deciding it for them.'

Democracy.

Alice had never seen what the Old World had been like, but her father had often talked about the ideals he had believed in, and things he had tried so hard to bring to life in their own settlement. A system where people did not rule because they were stronger or better armed, but where people chose those who would guide them, and decisions were taken by voting on them. She knew that the heavy-handed tactics of Zeus had rankled among a lot of the settlements but they had been happy to trade freedom for safety. Could she really offer them an alternative? The tactics of the Red Guards and defections among Zeus troopers had certainly made them question what they were actually signing up for when they accepted the supposed safety of operating under the Red Guards umbrella, especially when Commander Li had revealed the inhuman conditions in the labor camps were people from the settlements were taken. But what kind of life could she offer in the desolation of the Deadland or the Ruins?

Arjun must have read her mind.

'Alice, there are now more than five hundred of us. All of us living in the Ruins. Families, people who till a day ago were strangers, all living together. Think about what we've started here.'

The next day saw several Red Guard sorties over the Ruins. Jets and helicopters seemed to be dropping bombs and firing rockets, but they were nowhere near Alice and her troops. Alice thought they must have been acting on faulty intelligence and the misguided air raid of the Red Guards was the subject of many a joke over lunch.

Alice was leading a patrol in the Ruins the next night with two of Satish's men when a threat that she had almost forgotten about presented itself. One of the young Zeus troopers ahead suddenly screamed and Alice was instantly on guard, bringing up her night vision scope to her eyes. She saw three shapes emerge from behind the building in front of her. From the way they moved, there was no doubt that they were Biters. The trooper was lying at their feet, his neck bent at an impossible angle. She heard a sound to her left and turned to see three more Biters emerge. Alice hesitated for only a minute, as she thought of the Queen and the Biters who had helped her before squeezing the trigger on her rifle, sending the first Biter down with a bullet to the head. The others charged at her and she shot another before she ordered the trooper with her to retreat. In such close quarters, and not knowing how many other Biters were around, standing and fighting would be suicidal. She ran through the darkness, more than once swerving away from what she thought was a Biter lurking in the shadows but turned out to be a pipe or a broken piece of furniture.

'Vivek, you with me?'

She got no reply from the trooper and just hoped that he was okay. A Biter suddenly appeared in front of her, and without breaking her stride she hit him on the face with the butt of her rifle and as he went down, fired a round into his head. Knowing that she was probably too far from her base to be able to make it in the darkness while she was surrounded by Biters, she made for the nearest intact building and clambered up the stairs to the second floor. She huddled against the wall, her rifle trained at the stairs. She had two fragmentation grenades with her, so if the Biters did try and attack in force, she would give them a nice surprise. She saw a Biter appear in the doorway and a single round to the head put him down. Two more followed and she fired again, missing twice but then compensating with two more head shots that put them down. She retreated further up the stairs and hoped she had not drawn too much attention to herself.

When no more Biters presented themselves for a few seconds, she breathed a bit easy and looked out the window through her scope. She saw the flag that Arjun had put up, partially hidden behind an old lamppost. She thanked the Red Guards for their high technology scopes since it told her precisely that their base was two thousand meters away. She didn't know if she wanted to risk trying to walk alone in the darkness with an unknown number of Biters around so she took out her tactical radio to call Arjun for assistance. That was when several gunshots shattered the silence of the night. There were a few scattered single shots but then someone began firing on full automatic. The gunshots were coming from the direction of their base, and as Alice looked through her scope, she could see several muzzle flashes. Sweeping her scope around, she saw several dark shadows shuffling towards the base and she knew what the Red Guards had done. They did not have to land and fight house to house after all. They had stirred up the Biters by bombing them, and now the Biters were streaming towards the areas where the humans were based. Alice gripped her rifle and prepared to rush to her friends' aid.

The Red Guards had just opened a new, deadly front in the war in the Ruins.

***

When Alice reached her base, she saw several Biters lying on the ground, their heads shattered by direct hits. However, when she got closer she noted with dismay that many of her team were also dead. The Biters had taken them totally by surprise. Used to days of airborne attacks by the Red Guards, they had never really anticipated a ground attack by Biters. She saw Arjun point his pistol at a writhing man on the ground and shoot him in the head. Better dead than undead was a fine slogan, but from the pain in Arjun's face, she knew how tough it was to have to shoot a friend.