Phantoms of the North: An Alice in Deadland Adventure (Alice, No. 6) (3 page)

Arjun stayed silent. He had known
Alice for years, since he and his group had joined forces with her in their
struggle against Zeus and the Red Guards. She had gone from being a young,
impetuous girl to the half-Biter leader of thousands of humans and Biters
alike, and he knew that she often perceived things well beyond what would be expected
of someone her age. In his heart, he knew Alice was right, but after all the
sacrifices they had made to create and defend Wonderland; he didn’t want to
bring more danger upon it.

Danish interrupted their debate.

‘Alice, Konrath wants to talk to
you.’

The screen in front of Danish
flickered to life and the image of President Konrath appeared over the video
link. Konrath’s journey had been no less eventful than Alice’s, from a novelist
before The Rising to a guerrilla leader fighting Zeus, and now the President of
a nation that was trying to regain its identity after overthrowing the
Executive Committee—the first President of the United States since The Rising.

Alice had been pleasantly
surprised by how things had turned out in the Homeland after she had left to
hunt down and destroy the Snark missiles. Konrath had kept some of the missiles
and appointed himself President, and Alice knew from how things had turned out
with the Central Committee in the Mainland and its masters in the Executive
Committee that men with too much power almost always led to tyranny. Not so in
Konrath’s case. He had rallied much of the population in the Homeland around
him, slowly but surely bringing safety to them by crushing the few remaining
pockets of diehard Zeus troopers and the bandits who infested many parts of the
Homeland. However, there was one problem he did not have a solution for, and
that was what this video call was about.

‘Hi, Alice. Hope everyone in
Wonderland is well. I hope Edwards has been able to make his mobile vaccine lab
work.’

‘General, I mean President, we’re
all well.’

Konrath chuckled. ‘Please just
call me Jake. We’re well beyond those formalities.’

Edwards peeked over Alice’s
shoulder. ‘Yes, the mobile lab is up and running and everyone in Wonderland is
now vaccinated. How’re things stateside?’

A crease appeared on Konrath’s
brow.

‘The fighting is still on in some
pockets, but it’s a matter of time before the last Zeus troopers surrender or
die. The bandits know their time is up and many are turning themselves in. So,
on the positive side, we have lots of people who are seeing freedom and the
hope of a united nation after ages, but you all know the big downside, don’t
you? What do I feed them?’

This was the problem Konrath had
been grappling with. When he took over the reins, Konrath had realized just how
bad things were in the Homeland—much of the US heartland had been devastated in
the nuclear and biological strikes by the Chinese during The Rising, and to
make things worse, in the final stages of the fighting against the Executive
Committee, it had adopted a scorched-earth tactic, using napalm and fuel air
explosives on areas it wanted to deny the resistance. As a result, the US, once
the biggest food producer in the world, had very little arable area. It was now
apparent why the Executive Committee and its minions in the Central Committee
had gone to such lengths to take over the remaining fertile areas in what had
been India and China and get slave labor to work those farms from the Deadland.

Alice had the reverse dilemma. The
areas in the Deadland that had been North India still had huge swathes of
fertile land, and with the growing population of Wonderland, she also had many
more mouths to feed. However, she didn’t have the means to farm all the land.
Manual labor would never get the kind of yields they needed to feed such an
expanding population. In contrast, the US, a much more industrialized nation
before The Rising, had huge stocks of agricultural machinery, but fewer arable
areas. The deal was simple—machines and experts to use them would fly in from
the Homeland and start working farms near Wonderland, with the produce shared
between Wonderland and the Homeland.

‘Jake, I think our plan seems like
the only solution to both our problems. Please send your people over and we can
get started.’

As they disconnected, Alice
wondered just how far their plans would go before they began to unravel in the
light of the day’s events. The experts and settlers from the Homeland would
start working large farmlands in what had once been Punjab, not more than a
couple of hours away from the evil that Alice now knew lurked in the deserts
beyond.

***

TWO

The convoy drove through the night
without any headlights on. Alice was in the Jeep up front, together with Salil
and three more men. She turned to one of them.

‘Norbert, you okay back there?’

Norbert Szucs tried to put on a
brave face and nodded. He was a doctor, one of Edwards’ team who had come down
from the Homeland, and had played a major role in the refinement of the
vaccine. Alice had had him come along in case they found others like Sayoni who
needed medical assistance. Like the others, he was carrying a rifle, though he
hoped he wouldn’t have to use it. He was much better at saving lives than he
was at taking them.

Salil stopped the Jeep and the
truck behind them also came to a halt by the side of the road. As they
dismounted, a man got out of the truck and opened the back. Bunny Ears and a
dozen Biters came out and stood, waiting for Alice.

Alice had made a deal with Arjun.
Whether or not they went after the slave traders, they would have to ensure the
farmlands they had chosen were free of hostile Biters. If they happened to come
across any bandit gangs then they would deal with them. Arjun knew of course
that Alice would do more than just wait around to stumble upon gangs of slave
traders. He had seen the fury in her eyes when she had talked about the
condition they had found Sayoni in. They had spent a week formulating their
plan, while a few recon teams went out to gather intelligence about the area
Alice had in mind for the farmland.

Alice walked up to Bunny Ears and
the other Biters. Even after all this time, some humans might have found it
strange for her to talk to Biters. After all, Biters had been presumed to be
nothing more than mindless monsters. Alice, of course, knew better. ‘There may
be other Biters out here. I don’t want to hurt any of them, so if you come
across them, bring them to me and we can make peace with them. If you come
across any gangs, wait for me. I don’t want you to go up against men with guns
by yourselves.’

Bunny Ears grunted and led the
other Biters off into the darkness.

‘Salil, get the boys ready. We
need to clean up our neighborhood.’

***

‘Pass me one of those. I need some
Dreamweed too.’

The bandit lazily passed one of
the cigarettes back to his friend, who was sprawled nearby. As he took a drag
and inhaled, he sighed and rested his head against the rock. He had been taking
drugs since well before The Rising, and the lack of a fix was as bad as any of
the other terrors he had had to endure since the day all the guards at his
prison had abandoned their posts, and he had stepped out, not into the freedom
he had at first anticipated, but into a terrifying new world where the undead
and the living alike preyed on the weak.

‘We need to get into a new line of
business. Hardly any people to grab around here, and with what happened to
Bilal and our boys, that yellow-haired witch seems to be coming into our area.’

Another man, sitting behind a
tree, spat on the ground.

‘She got lucky, that’s all. This
is our land, and we’ve done as we’ve pleased here for years. If she comes by
again, I swear I’ll cut off her head.’

He shifted painfully, his leg
still stiff from the bullet wound Alice had inflicted on him in the attack on
his camp. She had left him alive, and that was a mistake he was sure he would
make her pay dearly for.

‘Bilal, what of the folks across
the border? If we don’t get more people to them, they told me they would stop giving
us Dreamweed.’

Bilal sat there, thinking in
silence. The absence of the drug he and his mates were so hooked on would be
troublesome, but he was far more worried about crossing the monsters they
supplied people to. He shivered at the thought of his last meeting. Despite
still bleeding from his wounds, he had been driven down to the old border,
through a bone-jarring journey over a mountain pass where he had met two of the
cloaked and masked monsters on horseback. They had been clear. If Bilal and his
men did not send fresh supplies, they would come for them. But they had also
offered a deal, one that Bilal was going to take them up on. It was his only
way of escaping their wrath.

‘The Phantoms gave me an option.
We give them Biters instead of humans, and they’ll still pay us, though we’ll
get only half a packet of Dreamweed per Biter.’

‘I always thought they wanted
people as slaves. What the hell do they want with Biters?’

Bilal shrugged.

‘I have no clue, and I’m not about
to ask them. All I know is that hunting humans has got more dangerous, but
there’s no shortage of Biters in these parts. Let’s give the Phantoms what they
want and get our Dreamweed. They also told me that they’d give us some AKs if
we got them a couple of healthy humans.’

The man he was talking to smiled
at that prospect. They had all been convicted killers, serving life sentences
before The Rising, Bilal having been a professional contract killer for the
land mafia in North India. So killing and surviving had come naturally to them.
They had looted police stations of their handguns and old bolt-action rifles,
which had been more than enough to terrorize settlements out in the Deadland,
but they were no match for the kind of firepower Alice and her people seemed to
have. Getting a few assault rifles would help even that balance, and then maybe
that yellow-haired Biter witch would think twice about stepping into their
territory.

***

Alice heard the low growls and
knew that Bunny Ears had not failed her. He emerged out of the undergrowth,
followed by at least three dozen new Biters. The moment the Biters saw Salil
and the other humans, a couple of them bared their teeth and began to charge
them. Bunny Ears swatted one of them down to the ground and pushed another
away, growling to let them know who was in charge. Then Alice stepped forward.
The Biters stopped on seeing her, unsure as to what she was—human or Biter? A
couple of them came closer and sniffed the air, going back to their comrades
with a whine, wondering what this was.

Alice strode into their midst,
taking out the old book from the bag at her side. She had done this many times
now, but every single time she was reminded of how she had followed Bunny Ears
down a hole in the ground and come face to face with Doctor Protima, the Queen
of the Biters, and had come to know about this book, the last remaining book in
the Deadland. A book which supposedly foretold Alice’s role in fulfilling the
prophecy of humans and Biters uniting to overthrow the tyrants who had brought
about The Rising in their quest for absolute power.

She no longer cared whether the
prophecy was true or not. Doing what was right did not require a prophecy or a
special book. It required the courage to go with one’s convictions and to be
willing to make the sacrifices needed. She had learned more about that from her
father and others she had met over the years, people like Satish, Vince and
others who had given their lives so that their hard-fought freedom might be
secured, than from any book.

Still, she knew the importance of
symbols for humans and Biters alike, and the book in her hand had become such a
symbol for Biters. She held aloft the book and spoke to the Biters as Salil and
the others watched on.

As the new Biters knelt before
her, Alice spoke to them in a soothing voice.

‘Not all humans are bad, and not
all of them will hurt you. It is possible for us to live together, and if you
help us get rid of the evil men in these wastelands, you can see how we are
creating a new world, one where we all live in peace.’

Then she got up, and turned to
look at Salil.

‘Now, let’s go tell these slave
traders that their days of doing business in these wastelands are over.’

***

Most of the eight men in front of
Bilal were already too stoned to focus. This was the part of his job that he
despised more than anything else—having to lead dimwits like the men in front
of him.

Before The Rising, he had thought
of himself as a predator, a natural hunter of men, and that skill had made him
a very rich man with the thirty hits he had carried out on behalf of his
clients. When he had been betrayed by a jealous associate and jailed, nothing
much changed. Two men who challenged him in prison were found dead, their necks
broken. He was the alpha male there, the one other inmates served, and the one
even the cops didn’t get too rough with. He had counted on not staying in
prison for more than a few months, since many of his clients were very well
connected politically and his skills were much in demand. Then everything had
gone to hell, and once he had recovered from the shock of what he had witnessed
during The Rising, Bilal realized that the new world he lived in threw up a lot
of opportunities for someone of his talents.