Phantoms of the North: An Alice in Deadland Adventure (Alice, No. 6) (2 page)

Alice wanted to say that her
concern was Wonderland and its people, and that she didn’t want to bring any
new danger upon them. However, she also knew from her own experience that
tyranny and injustice could not be avoided by turning your back to them—they
had to be confronted before they came knocking on your door. She looked up to
see both Arjun and Danish nodding. They too knew from personal experience what
it was like to live under tyranny and how precious freedom was.

‘Aalok, get ready. We have a trip
tomorrow.’

***

The Jeep sped through the deserted
countryside, its roaring engine the only sound to be heard for miles around.
They were now three hours into their journey and Alice began to see a clear
difference in the landscape compared to where she had grown up. The Deadland
around Delhi had been pockmarked with villages and towns before The Rising, and
there were a lot of places for human survivors to take shelter. In contrast,
the area they were now in was full of vast fields, sometimes with no sign of a
single building for miles. Aalok was talking nonstop, perhaps excited that Alice
had agreed to follow up on his tale, and also perhaps scared at going back
closer to the horrors he had escaped.

‘When The Rising took place, the
rural areas were wiped out totally. Many people came back from cities where
they were working to be with their families, and once the infection spread,
there was no escaping it. There was no police, no army like in the big cities
like Delhi.’

Bunny Ears, sitting next to Alice
in the back seat of the open Jeep, growled. Alice too had caught the scent, and
Aalok continued.

‘You thought where you grew up was
the Deadland, but there were at least humans there—here all you’ll find are
Biters.’

‘How did you survive your escape?’

Aalok’s mouth tightened as he
replied, remembering the horrors he had endured.

‘It took me over a month or
perhaps more. I really lost track of time. I’d walk when I could, and hide the
rest of the time. I escaped with a knife I took from a guard, and I…’

He looked at Bunny Ears and didn’t
complete his sentence, not sure if he should speak of killing Biters.

‘Alice, what is that mess?’

‘Salil, stop the Jeep.’

The young man who had accompanied
them, chosen by Arjun for his proven skills in tracking and combat, brought the
Jeep to a halt. In front of them was a vast, mangled heap of steel and concrete.
All around it, the ground was barren and blackened. Aalok spoke in a whisper.

‘This is getting closer to the old
border with Pakistan. Many areas were nuked in the fighting. This seems to have
been some sort of forward deployment of the army that was hit by a nuke.’

Alice had seen what such weapons
did to people when she witnessed the devastation of Shanghai, and they
proceeded in silence, nothing but the blackened, charred remains of the war
machines of the old days around them. A couple of hours more and they began to
see snow-covered mountains in the distance.

‘Ladakh.’

Aalok held up a hand and Salil
stopped the Jeep.

‘We’re here.’

Alice followed Aalok’s
outstretched hand to see a pink cloth tied around a branch in the distance.

‘Sayoni tied it there. Told me it
would help me find her again.’

‘Who’s Sayoni?’

Aalok looked at Salil.

‘I met her at the camp, and we
became friends, well, more than just friends, I guess. We tried to escape
together but she was shot in the leg and couldn’t continue beyond this point
and she asked me to go on and come back for her one day.’

They dismounted, and Salil and
Alice both began looking for tracks. It was easy enough to find several fresh
tracks.

‘How many are there, Aalok?’

‘No more than ten, I’d say. They
used to come into the Deadland and catch people from the settlements on the
fringes. They got me about a year ago when I had come out to fetch water.’

Alice had heard occasional tales
of people disappearing in the far settlements, but had assumed bandits got
them. Now it seemed that there was something much more sinister and organized
at play.

‘Why did they keep you so long?’

Aalok looked at Salil with a
smile.

‘I made myself useful. I rigged up
electricity for them, got them a functioning water heater and so on. The
others…’

He composed himself before
continuing.

‘Once they had four or five
captives, which sometimes took them a month or more, they’d send them west,
across the mountains of the old border. I used to hear them complaining that
with Wonderland and you in charge, more and more settlements were joining you
in the old city, so they had slim pickings.’

Alice looked up from the tracks. ‘They
may not be far away, but you do realize that Sayoni may not be here or even be
alive.’

‘I know that, Alice, and this isn’t
just about Sayoni. There were three others there, and after having seen the
life you’re creating at Wonderland, we can’t leave people out here to be
treated like animals.’

Alice wanted to have a look for
herself before she got any more people involved. She followed the tracks,
walking for close to an hour before they reached the crest of a small hill.
There were largely barren fields with a few trees to their right. In the dust,
she could see a small group. A fire had been lit in the middle of the makeshift
camp, and there were four armed men sitting around it. In a corner, a single
figure lay prone, a bloodied bandage around her leg. Alice brought her rifle up
to her shoulder and took a closer look through the scope. The men were carrying
ancient single-shot rifles, perhaps looted from some old police station. She
and Salil had the latest-issue automatic rifles captured from Zeus troopers.
Even with the numbers stacked against them, with their superior firepower and
element of surprise, this would be no contest. She handed Aalok a pair of
binoculars. As he took a look, he gasped.

‘Sayoni.’

Alice counted the men again. ‘There
are only four of them. Where are the rest?’

‘I don’t know, but there aren’t
any other captives, either. Maybe the rest of the gang took them across the
mountains.’

Alice heard a grunt and turned to
see Bunny Ears looking at something. There was a fifth man, a sentry, who was
sitting against a rock, drinking from a bottle.

‘Good job, Bunny Ears. Salil, I
don’t want to risk shooting from here in case we don’t get them fast enough and
they shoot the woman. We’ll go in closer. Bunny Ears, you distract the guard.’

Aalok looked around as if seeing
how he could make himself useful, but Alice had it under control, and there was
nothing really for him to do but to wait and pray.

Alice and Salil crept down the
hill, moving in silence from cover to cover, rock to tree. They were halfway
down, almost parallel to the sentry when Alice held up a fist to signal Salil
to stop. Bunny Ears appeared over the hill and began walking towards the guard.
The man must have smelled him before he saw him as his head snapped up and he
grabbed the rifle next to him and chambered a round. Bunny Ears hissed at him
and began walking back up the hill with the man in hot pursuit. Alice nodded at
Salil and they began running down the rest of the way. The four men in the camp
still hadn’t seen them and when she was about twenty feet away from them, Alice
knelt and fired her first burst. The bullets caught one of the men in the neck
and he went down in a spray of blood.

‘Cover me!’

With those words, Alice dropped
her rifle and raced at the men, handgun in right hand and knife in her left,
just as she had gone into battle countless times before. The men were getting
up, trying to come to grips with this unexpected threat. One went down as Salil’s
bullets raked his chest. Another had his rifle up, trying to work the ancient
bolt action to chamber a round but fumbling in his panic, when Alice raised her
handgun from less than ten feet away and shot him in the face. The last man got
a shot off but missed as Alice rolled, coming up in a crouch and shooting him
in the right thigh. As he grabbed his leg, Alice came up to him, striking him
with the reversed hilt of her knife on the face, knocking him out cold.

Salil had reached the camp, and
Aalok was also now coming down the hill. Alice reached the woman. She was
burning with fever and unconscious.

‘Get her to the Jeep. We need to
get her back to Wonderland.’

Salil had been rummaging through
the camp, and there was very little of use, but one thing struck him as
odd—packets of brownish herbs or grass in one of the tents.

‘What’s this?’

Aalok had reached the camp and he
recognized the packets.

‘They call it Dreamweed. In the
old days, we called it poppy or marijuana, and maybe it’s mixed with some other
drugs. It’s what they’re paid with from across the border to send people over.
These guys were all addicted to it.’

Alice looked at the stash,
wondering what power it held over men to make them commit such evil. She would
never let it near Wonderland.

‘Leave it there. I’ll burn it all.’

On the way up, they met Bunny
Ears, standing over the body of the guard, whose neck he had snapped. As they
sat in the Jeep for their journey back, Sayoni lay in the back seat, her head
on Aalok’s lap. She was muttering something. As Alice leaned closer, Sayoni
said, ‘They took them to hell. They took them to hell.’

***

Back in Wonderland, Alice, Arjun,
Doctor Edwards and Danish spent much of the evening closeted at the Looking
Glass. Aalok was still by Sayoni’s side as she lay in the medical center.

‘Doctor, how’s Sayoni?’

Edwards looked up at Alice;
smiling because this was perhaps the tenth time she had asked the question. ‘She’s
badly dehydrated, has some sort of bacterial infection that’s causing the fever
and has a broken leg. She will be out for some time, and Alice, you need to
relax. Nothing’s changed in her situation since you last asked.’

‘I can’t relax. I have a very bad
feeling about all this. The men we killed were not just bandits. They are
sending people over the mountains to someone. Who could they be? What are these
drugs that give them such a hold over the slave traders?’

Danish had been on his radio,
chatting with his counterparts in the Homeland, trying to get any more
information. ‘I asked Konrath’s people, and they’ve gone and checked the
records the Executive Committee kept and also any papers kept by the old US
Government as the Rising broke. Much of Pakistan and Afghanistan was wiped out
in The Rising. Pakistan was hit by nuclear weapons several times and their own
terrorists imploded dirty bombs when the outbreak was spiraling out of control.
After that, nobody heard much from them. The Central Committee had a few
flights sent over, but they reported the cities to be in ruins, with no signs
of any settlements. They then basically just ignored the area.’

‘Someone out there is organized
enough to do this, and what worries me is that they’re not all that far from
us.’

Arjun had been listening quietly,
but now he spoke, with an urgency in his voice that got everybody’s attention.

‘Whoever they are, they’re up to
no good. They’re trading drugs for people, to be kept as slaves or for whatever
purpose they have in mind. So far they’ve just operated on the fringes of the
Deadland, which is why we never crossed paths with them, but with more and more
of the settlements moving in and joining Wonderland, I suppose their pickings
are getting slimmer. Add to the fact that you just took out one of the gangs
they use, and I worry they’ll be tempted to come closer to Wonderland.’

Alice was beginning to understand
that their few months of peace were now coming to an end. There was a new
threat on the horizon, and she would have to nip it in the bud before her
people were threatened again. ‘We can’t wait for them to come looking for us. I
saw what those men did to Sayoni, and we can’t let other gangs roam free out
there, doing this to other people. Once they realize that these lands are off
bounds, they may just go elsewhere.’

Arjun smiled as he realized that
the line of thinking Alice had started was one that might have far-reaching
consequences.

‘Alice, you do realize what a big
country India was, don’t you? We’ve lived and fought in one very small corner
of it, and we don’t have the numbers or the means to go to every single nook
and cranny of it to help people. We simply cannot do that. God alone knows what
else is festering in the jungles, deserts and cities of the old country—there
could be gangs, warlords or slave traders all over the place. Or there could be
nothing but radioactive ruins.’

Alice didn’t want to argue with
her old companion, but she didn’t at all agree with him.

‘You’re right, I don’t know what
else is out there, but I do know what is happening in the deserts outside the
Deadland. Ignoring the presence of evil in the hope it doesn’t touch you is
usually the easiest way of ensuring it turns on you.’