Alice in Deadland (3 page)

It showed a blonde girl jumping down a hole. In front of her was a creature that was wearing some sort of coat but had the unmistakable ears and whiskers of a rabbit. Just above the drawing was etched in a childish scrawl.

'Alice.'

Alice's reading skills may not have been great but one thing she did know well was how her own name was spelt. She sat down on the ground, oblivious to the bloodthirsty Biters just feet away from her.

What was going on?

She felt strong hands grab her by her shoulders and pull her upright. The Biters were now in a state of considerable agitation and between grunts and screeches, Bunny Ears was trying to tell them something. Whatever it was, they seemed to agree on it soon enough, and Alice was pushed out of the room and into another tunnel.

She was too shell-shocked to resist or even ask where they were taking her. And so Alice was bundled off even deeper into the Biter base.

***

They continued in darkness and total silence for many minutes, and the only consolation Alice had was that if the Biters had wanted to kill her they would have done so long ago. They clearly wanted her alive, but to what end she had no idea. They soon began a steep climb and while the Biters seemed accustomed to both the darkness and the area they were going through, Alice found herself stumbling and falling more than once. Finally they rounded a turn and she felt hands holding her back as if asking her to wait. She saw a sliver of light open up ahead, gradually growing as the door out of the tunnel was pushed open. As she came closer, she saw that it was not much of a door but branches and twigs gathered together, which were now being pushed back into place as their group came out of the tunnel.

The bright sunlight hurt her eyes after having been in the dark for so long and as Alice squinted and looked around, she saw that they were now very much in the heart of what had once been the bustling city of New Delhi. Now all that remained was rubble, but she recognized the broken edifice of what had once been some monument called India Gate. She had only heard about it from the adults, since this was an area that was firmly under the control of the Biters, and was avoided by humans. All around her, she saw evidence of that. There were small groups of Biters lumbering around, and when one or two of them saw her, they snarled and were about to launch themselves at her. Bunny Ears swatted one of them away, and growled a warning to the others. Whatever he said, she realized that her name had been mentioned more than once, and the effect on the Biters was immediate. They all backed away, as if fearful of her, and she continued with the group that was now herding her along to their unknown destination.

Alice subconsciously tried not to breathe too deeply. While the Great Fires had taken place years ago, nobody really knew how much radiation still lingered. When Alice had first heard of the Great Fires and the terrible weapons that had been unleashed, she had wondered aloud how much of the Biters' hideous nature was the result of the radioactive fallout and how much was due to whatever had caused The Rising in the first place. Nobody seemed to have much by way of answers. Most of the nuclear blasts had supposedly been air-bursts designed to incinerate the Biters but keep the ground as free from radiation as possible, but nobody could really be sure what their legacy had been. Her father had by all accounts been someone senior in the Embassy, but things had moved so fast that even he had no real idea of what had been the exact chain of events during the last days.

Alice saw that they were headed towards what seemed to be an opening in the ground. Clearly the rumors about the underground bases had been an understatement. Far from being an isolated base that she had stumbled upon, it seemed like the Biters had a fairly sophisticated network of underground tunnels and bases. She filed away all the details she could spot so that she might be able to help others when she got back. That kept her thinking positively that she would indeed somehow make it back and also took her mind off the growing fear about just where she was being taken.

She heard a dull whirring sound coming from the sky above and she froze. She had heard similar sounds before, and in the past they had always been an unwelcome omen. Today, they signaled hope for her liberation. Bunny Ears pushed her behind the walls of some ruins and they hid as the three black helicopters came into view. As they came closer to the ground, Alice could see that most of the Biters had taken cover. Most, but not all. Two Biters were running around frantically, as if in a state of panic, trying to find safety. A door slid open in one of the helicopters and two men leaned out with sniper rifles at their shoulders. Two shots rang out and both Biters went down, their heads split open by high velocity rounds.

Alice looked around her at the Biters cowering behind the ruins and she saw them in a totally new light. She had grown up thinking of them as rabid, vicious creatures who had to be destroyed because their only reason for being was to destroy humans. Now as she looked at Bunny Ears and the others, she realized that they were absolutely terrified. They certainly did not display much by way of evolved intelligence, but they seemed more like a pack of terrified animals being hunted by humans than a band of evil, ferocious killers. She saw several of them shake in terror as the helicopters came closer to the ground.

She saw the golden trident and lightning bolt drawn on their side, and did not need to read the letters to know which group these represented. Zeus.

She had sometimes overheard her father talk about Private Military Contractors, and how much power they had begun to wield in the chaotic times before The Rising. She did not understand much of what had been talked among the adults, but knew that Zeus was the most powerful of those armies, and it's power had only increased after The Rising and human governments had ceased to function. Nobody knew who really controlled them, but they were the only visibly organized, and certainly best armed, human army around. Every few months, they would visit the independent settlements like the one where Alice lived and try and ask for volunteers to join them, or try and coerce the settlements to accept the rule of the Central Committee. It was unknown who made up this Central Committee, but this group controlled Zeus and it was common knowledge in the Deadland, as the area where Alice lived had come to be known, that once you accepted their rule, you signed away your freedom.

Alice had been lucky to be born in a settlement that had been begun by her father and the remaining contingent of US Marines guarding the US Embassy in New Delhi. They had then linked up with a group of Indian Army officers and their families. So, unlike most other settlements in the Deadland that had proved easy prey both for human looters and Biters in the chaos that prevailed in the early days, their settlement had been able to repel the assaults, and quickly established a reputation of being a group not to be messed with easily. Even then, whenever the Zeus soldiers had come to visit, Alice had felt a stab of fear at their sight. The men she had grown up with were mostly professional soldiers, or men like her father, fighting to save their families. The Zeus troopers in contrast, were guns for hire, and displayed little compassion or sympathy for those in the Deadland. If you didn't join them, they would turn their back even when you were under assault by Biters.

As snipers on the helicopters provided cover, men dressed all in black rappelled down from the helicopters and began fanning out. Alice was only too conscious of the reputation Zeus had, but right now between being herded to an unknown fate as a prisoner of the Biters, and getting a chance of going back home, even if it meant trusting the Zeus troopers, she would choose the latter in a heartbeat. She waited for the Zeus troopers to come closer, since she knew that if she tried to attract their attention too early, Bunny Ears and his friends would surely kill her. She kept waiting for the right moment, but then without her having to do anything, a distraction presented itself.

A female Biter near Alice lost her nerve and ran into the open, screeching wildly. Two Zeus troopers knelt and fired their weapons on full automatic at her, the criss-crossing lines of fire turning the Biter around like a puppet on a string, before she was thrown to the ground. When she tried to get up, a sniper on a helicopter shot her head off with a single bullet. Another Biter ran towards one of the doors leading to an underground base when several shots sent him down, and once again a sniper delivered the coup de grace.

Alice watched, realizing that this was no battle. This was a massacre. She saw Bunny Ears and the others with her huddling, as if deciding what to do, when she decided to make her move. She stepped out from behind cover, hoping that the Zeus troopers would not shoot her, and screamed at the top of her voice.

'Help me! I'm human!'

***

Alice's eyes widened in fear when instead of coming to her assistance one of the Zeus troopers knelt down and aimed his rifle at her. She was pushed to one side as the bullets tore through the air where she had stood scant seconds before. She looked up to see Bunny Ears glaring at her before he grabbed her by her arm and dragged her behind cover.

The Zeus troopers seemed to comprehend what was going on, and the fact that a young human girl seemed to be help captive by this horde of Biters galvanized them into action. More troopers rappelled out of the helicopters and they began advancing towards the wall behind which Alice was now hidden.

Bunny Ears whistled, an ear piercing sound that made Alice involuntarily cover her ears. When she peeked out the side of the wall, she saw what his signal had meant. All around the Zeus troopers, Biters gathered among the ruins and advanced upon them. The troopers opened fire and Alice saw several of the Biters fall, but the others were now advancing at speed. The snipers on the helicopters took out a few more Biters with carefully aimed head shots.

Alice looked on in fascination. She had directly participated in more than a dozen skirmishes with the Biters and witnessed a dozen or more as a spotter or during her training. At that time, it had been but natural to think of the Biters as the ferocious, formidable adversaries everyone said they were, and she had not even thought twice before emptying her clip into the undead Santa's head when he had blundered into their path during a patrol.

Now, sitting among the Biters and getting a glimpse of what battle against humans looked like from their perspective, she began to see things a bit differently. Sure, up close they were formidable, with their strength, seeming immunity to pain, and their single-minded dedication to biting human flesh. But in the open like this, against trained soldiers, they were cannon fodder. They could not use any weapons, moved slower than humans, and did not seem to have enough intelligence for anything more than the most rudimentary tactics.

The dozen or so Zeus soldiers were now tightly packed with their backs to each other, like a phalanx, and were moving steadily towards her position. They were still picking off targets at will, and dozens of Biters littered the ground around them. But the Biters kept coming, and Alice saw that at least two holes had opened up in the ground, and Biters were pouring through them, trying to get close enough to the soldiers to bring their teeth and nails to bear. It was a massacre, and Alice wondered what the Biters were trying to achieve by walking straight into certain annihilation, or were they just such mindless drones that they kept going, driven by instinct or bloodlust, regardless of the odds that faced them?

She felt a tug at her arm, and Bunny Ears pulled her up and dragged her along. She tried to resist, but his grip on her arm was so tight that she could not shake him off. When she kicked out at him, sending him staggering back, he nonchalantly slapped her across the face. The blow was so hard it knocked her down and she felt the ground spinning around her as Bunny Ears picked her up and slung her across his shoulders. He screeched loudly, and in apparent response, a dozen or more Biters stepped between them and the advancing Zeus troopers.

It became instantly clear to Alice that there was a method to what the Biters were doing. They were buying Bunny Ears some time so he could get her away. Why they wanted her so badly, and what the drawing on the wall had meant were beyond her, but what was certain was that her hopes of a rescue were being dashed. She could now see the Zeus troopers falter and start to withdraw in face of the sheer strength of numbers of the Biters. Before Bunny Ears ducked into some ruins, she saw the first Zeus trooper fall under a group of clawing and slashing Biters.

They were someplace dark, and Bunny Ears was running through what appeared to be long corridors of some official building. There were doors lining the corridor, and Alice saw Biters hiding behind more than one of them. Even if any of the Zeus troopers got this far, in the confined and dark environment, they would be easy pickings for the hidden Biters. She began to reassess the Biters based on what she had just seen. Yes, they were clearly not as intelligent as humans, but they were displaying some sort of planning and forethought. But the big question still remained- what the hell did they want with her?

Bunny Ears ducked low under a collapsed beam and finally stopped, unceremoniously dumping Alice on the ground. She swore with the choicest of obscenities she had learnt from years spent in the company of soldiers and glared at him, but he just looked at her with no expression in his yellowing, vacant eyes. He pointed to a hole in the wall that he motioned for her to walk through. When she hesitated, he slapped her, sending her crashing to the ground again.

'What the hell is it with you? Stop hitting me and I may listen!'