Phantoms of the North: An Alice in Deadland Adventure (Alice, No. 6) (14 page)

‘Do you think it’s wise for us to
seek them out?’

Alice could sense Danish’s
hesitation. ‘They’ve attacked us and they have got a measure of our defenses.
We now know that they are very well equipped and led by someone who has some
training. We cannot sit back and wait for them to attack us again.’

Arjun came by on a bicycle and
Alice stood up when she saw what was in his hand. A pair of bunny ears.

Less than an hour later, most of
Wonderland had assembled to discuss what to do. Word had spread, and Alice
could see looks of panic as people tried to comprehend the kind of monsters who
had attacked them. Monsters who might have once been men, but had been mutated
by radiation into deformed creatures, and more than their physical deformities,
had become fiends who fed on people.

Alice waited for everyone to
settle down and for the buzz of conversation to die down a bit before she
spoke.

‘We were taken by surprise and I
apologize for that, because we may have underestimated this adversary. I have
no doubt they will be back and we must seek them out and destroy them before
they can threaten us again.’

Someone in the crowd spoke up.

‘Why pick a fight? Let’s get our
defences stronger. We have Jeeps with rocket launchers and Gatling guns we
captured from Zeus. We can get all of those out of storage and be ready for
them. Why go and fight on their territory?’

‘Because they have one of ours. We
can’t abandon him.’

For Alice, it was a true measure
of just how much things had changed over the last few years that nobody
objected to that point, and she saw several heads nodding. It did not matter
that the one who had been abducted was Bunny Ears, a Biter. At that point,
Alice realized that Wonderland had finally become a place where humans and
Biters could truly coexist. Everybody had realized that the force which broke
off the raid on Wonderland had been one of Biters, and without their
intervention, the loss of life would likely have been much higher. If anyone
had any doubts, Danish had an added piece of information that sealed the decision
for them.

‘Folks, these guys were not just
vandals burning down the Looking Glass. They left one terminal intact, and
someone saved a message on it.’

Danish had copied it down and read
it out in a trembling voice.

‘Alice of Wonderland, we can burn
your lands and cut down your people at will. But we are willing to settle for
an arrangement: a simple arrangement where you supply us with two healthy
humans every day.’

Word of the autopsy findings had
also spread, and as Alice looked around, several people looked visibly sick.
There was now no real choice but to fight.

Arjun had been thinking logistics
through and said, ‘We’ll need some time to organize a force.’

Alice had other ideas.

‘Just get me a Jeep to drop me
near the old border, beyond which their home lies. I’ve already had the boys
get a couple of bandits who helped them plan their raid. They’ll tell us where
we need to go if they want to live.’

‘Alice, we don’t know how many of
them there are.’

‘Yes, but we don’t have much time.
I don’t need to eat, I don’t need water and I don’t need to sleep. I can keep
going without planning for any of that, which you’ll need to organize if you
want a larger force ready. Let me go ahead and scout and try and save Bunny
Ears, you come as soon as you can with reinforcements.’

There was sound logic in what
Alice suggested, though it was difficult for them to let her go into such
danger on her own. Sayoni came by, her eyes full of tears.

‘I still haven’t seen any sign of
Aalok. He was last seen with Bunny Ears. Oh God, those monsters have got him as
well.’

***

The Khan sat down in his tent and
almost immediately suffered another coughing fit. By now, he had come to take
the blood that he would cough up for granted.

His men were celebrating, smoking
Dreamweed around their camp, telling tales of their raid to their companions
who had been left behind. By their accounts, every single one of them had
personally beheaded a dozen enemies and that the defenders of Wonderland had
cowered in terror. Some of them talked about how they had cut through defenders
to get to Alice and then Rashid had charged, till they were held back by
overwhelming forces from helping him and he had been cut down by deceit by the
blonde witch.

The Khan smiled to himself as he
wiped blood off his lips. He would let them brag and exaggerate—it made Rashid’s
death even more glorious and took away any possibility of anyone thinking there
was anything amiss, and it also charged up the men who had not gone on the
first raid. The Khan would rest, because after their feast, he would lead out
some of the men who had not gone on the first raid out again. He would not give
Wonderland a chance to rest or organize, but subject them to a blitzkrieg of
raids. And on this raid, he would take with him an even more unpleasant
surprise. He would keep increasing the level of terror, making Alice and her
people wonder what was coming next, paralyzing them with fear and at the same
time emboldening the bandits to join his cause.

He called out to a man below.

‘Stop smoking for a minute and
fetch the two canisters I asked to be kept ready.’

The man called another comrade and
they disappeared into the cave that acted as their armory, emerging five
minutes later with a heavy metal box. One of them was about to open the lid when
The Khan stopped him.

‘Get back, you fool. We’ll open it
when we’re ready to deploy the mortars and they’ll be handled only by the men
trained to use them with the mortars.’

The box contained two Sarin gas
shells brought in by smugglers from Syria just before The Rising. The local
Taliban had been planning to use them against an American base, and The Khan
had located their cell as part of his work with the CIA. Ironically, on the run
and abandoned by his own people, he had later led his men to pick up the shells
to add to his armory. He had had no opportunity to use them, till today. They
would kill perhaps only a few dozen, since they would likely not have retained
their full effectiveness after so many years, as careful and diligent as The
Khan had been in maintaining them. However, they would sow panic, and panic and
terror were to be his biggest weapons in engineering the downfall of
Wonderland.

He now clambered down, passing the
cage where Bunny Ears and Aalok were kept. He smiled at Aalok, and then took
his mask off. Aalok gasped and moved to the back of the cage, looking on in
horror at the deformed face. His face was pockmarked with warts and tumors like
his men, and he had wiped his mouth after his coughing fit, but his chest was
covered with blood. As The Khan came closer to the cage, Bunny Ears put himself
between Aalok and The Khan, baring his teeth. The Khan smiled, though to Aalok
it looked nothing like a smile, with the swollen lips moving slightly,
revealing yellow, sharp teeth. He spoke to them in English.

‘Enjoy our hospitality a little
bit longer, then you go into our pot. You people and your Alice take so much
pride in humans and Biters living together, well, now you can be cooked
together.’

He laughed and then moved on to
address his men.

‘Feast and rest, my men. Tomorrow,
some of you will ride down again to strike terror into our enemies’ hearts.’

***

EIGHT

The bandit had fallen asleep and
Alice woke him with a slap across the face. The man whimpered in fear as he saw
Alice inches away from his face.

‘We vaccinated you, we treated you
well, and we let you go. In return, you let those monsters into our home. Now
it’s your turn to make amends. You can sleep later, first tell us which turn to
take up ahead.’

Negi, a young scout, was at the
wheels. He had been out on numerous recon patrols, but they had never ventured
so far from Wonderland. Danish had used the one working computer to communicate
with the Homeland, and they had sent him an old satellite map, which was now
displayed on the tablet Negi had with him. Zeus had created a sophisticated
network that pushed information to handheld tablets. After their victory, Alice
and her friends had inherited those tablets and with the help of Konrath’s
forces, once they overran the servers based in the erstwhile United States, the
network as well.

The names on the map no longer
mattered, since those who had given those names were long dead or turned into
Biters, but Negi could see that to his right lay the Ladakh valley. They had
seen a few Biters along the roadside, but other than that the area seemed
totally depopulated. Danish had said that the area was home to several large
army bases which had been hit by tactical nuclear and conventional missile
strikes in the fighting during The Rising.

The bandit moved, trying to ease
the discomfort of having his arms tied behind his back. But if he was looking
for sympathy, he was in the wrong company. Alice glared at him.

‘How well guarded is their
approach?’

‘I’ve never been to their camp,
but we used to hear it’s just a few kilometers from the mountain path they met
us on. It’s a narrow path, and I don’t think they normally have it under guard.
Someone once told me that they have guards further in, closer to their camp.’

Alice kept glaring at him, and he
withered under her gaze and looked down, mumbling, ‘I swear that’s all I know.
I swear.’

‘Where now?’

The bandit was going by memory,
and had never seen the map Negi had, but so far the path he was telling them to
follow led to the foothills of the Kargil area, near the old India Pakistan
border.

‘Keep right.’

The Jeep was now off the paved
road and had headed into a bumpy path littered with rocks and the occasional
shell of a burned-out vehicle, a testament to the battles that had been fought
here. He was forced to slow down in the darkness, but was still pushing ahead
as fast as he could. He knew that Aalok and Bunny Ears might have very little
time. Negi took a drink from his bottle and out of habit offered it to Alice,
who smiled.

‘I don’t get thirsty.’

The bandit would have asked for
water, but he realized that it was best for him to keep his mouth shut and hope
to be released when he took them where they wanted to go. They had been driving
non-stop for the best part of a day, and Danish had sent them a message saying
that a larger force under Arjun had set out four hours after they had left.
Alice did not know exactly what odds she was going up against, but she knew she
would have the advantage of surprise. The Khan, which was what the leader was called
according to the bandit, would likely not expect a retaliatory raid so soon,
especially not by one person.

‘Almost there.’

At Negi’s call, Alice began
checking her kit. She was carrying a sniper rifle, a submachine gun for close
in work and her usual knife and handgun at her belt. Arjun had told her to
scout the area and wait for reinforcements, but Alice was not going to wait
around if it looked like Bunny Ears and Aalok were in imminent danger. So she
had carried along some heavier artillery in the form of two fragmentation and
two flashbang grenades.

She sat in silence as Negi drove
on, thinking of the kind of enemies she was going up against. When she had been
growing up in the Deadland, she had believed that Biters were the worst kind of
monsters humans could face. Now, having seen what humans were capable of doing
to each other, she realized that there was nothing quite as dangerous, or quite
as ugly, as human beings at their worst. And the men, if they could still be
called that, she was about to face were worse than Red Guards or Zeus soldiers.
They fought for their masters, who were driven by the desire to get and keep
power. These Phantoms were little better than crazed, rabid animals who
literally fed on those weaker than themselves.

It was time to show them that they
were not at the top of the food chain.

***

Aalok crawled to Bunny Ears. Their
captors had worked themselves up into a frenzy over the last few hours, and now
in the darkness, wearing their masks in the light of the torches that ringed
the walls of their camp, they looked like someone’s worst nightmare. Aalok had
never considered himself a fighter, but he was a survivor, and he was not going
to go quietly. He remained flat on the ground and spoke in a whisper.

‘Turn a bit. I’ll try and get at
your ropes with my teeth.’

Bunny Ears said nothing, but
turned a bit so that the rope that bound his one good arm to his body was
easily within Aalok’s reach. It was painstaking work. Just getting a good grip
on the rope with his teeth was tricky enough, and then as he worked at
loosening the bond his teeth and mouth hurt, but he knew it was nothing
compared to being cut or flayed alive by these monsters to be their meal. He
kept at it for several minutes and finally lay back flat on the ground, trying
to catch his breath and have another go. He also used that break to take
another look at what the Phantoms were doing.