Kumbhpur Rising

by Mayur Didolkar

  “What happened?” he asked, still a little confused about where he was.

  “Come with me and call Neeraj. I think there is a problem,” Rakesh said and walked out without his shirt or shoes, but with the .303 rifle. Rajat stood up on unsteady legs and hobbled after Rakesh. On instinct he too picked up the shotgun, hoping to remember how to use it, if it came to that. He caught up with Rakesh on the stairs down and they walked in the wide forecourt of the temple together. The forecourt was built deep in the ground, you had to descend about forty steps to reach there.From there the main temple was built again on elevated ground, so that while standing at the main gate of the temple the building having the deity was at eye level. Now as both of them stared in the moonless night, they recognized a woman’s shape climbing the stairs to go out of the temple.

  “Rani stop,” Rajat’s instincts were triggered a moment too late. Rakesh did not waste his energy on calling her. He simply began running, taking the wide steps two at a time to catch up with Rani. But Rajat’s scream woke everyone in the still night and in a moment he was overtaken by Alok running like a deranged athlete, almost knocking Rakesh out of his way.

  Rani walked out of the temple and called out “Sonia, where are you dear? I brought you your water” she said and then saw a dim shape sitting beneath a peepal tree directly opposite the temple. It was a woman’s shape, her hair covering most of her face and the curves of her shapely body unmistakably feminine. Rani called her again, and heard her name being called by one of her friends. She paid no heed and began walking towards her dead sister.

  Rakesh, still in better shape despite his heavy drinking, reached the giant arch of the temple first. He saw Rani walking as if hypnotized towards a tree. She had a water bottle in her hand. He debated calling her, but then decided against it. After making sure that his rifle was cocked and ready, he held it at waist level and charged for Rani.

  He was ten feet from her, when one of the undead jumped from the tree he was passing. Rakesh’s rifle got knocked out of his hand as he and his attacker hit the ground together and started mud wrestling. Rakesh saw it was a man, in some distant corner of his mind he was relieved it was not a woman he had to kill again and pushed him as hard as he could. But the man pinned him and was now he bent down to sink his teeth into Rakesh’s exposed neck.

  Rakesh realized what was about to happen and recoiled in horror. He did not want to become one of them. It was that recoil more than anything that saved his neck from getting punctured by the man’s sharp teeth. Up close, they resembled a hound’s teeth rather than a human’s, and Rakesh knowing he would not be able to throw his attacker off, went for his eyes instead. His finger sank in something soft as he punctured the left eye ball, and pulled his finger out quickly. Repulsed, he saw that the man’s eye ball had popped out, and was lying next to them still pulsing faintly.

  “Ahhhh… arghhhh” the thing on top of him let out a howl and started to bang Rakesh’s head on the soft mud. Rakesh saw stars each time it happened and realized that his strength was ebbing. Soon the thing would stop banging his head, and then bend to bite him, or do something equally repulsive, and then Rakesh would complete his life’s failures by failing to die normally.

  The thing banged his head again and howled.

  Alok and Rajat reached the temple arch together, and saw the spectacle. One of the undead was methodically beating Rakesh’s head in the mud while howling like a maniac, as Rani walked towards a tree all alone. They were joined by Neeraj dressed in his undershirt and trousers, an AK 47 in his hands.

  “Do something you dimwits” he screamed loudly, and ran towards Rakesh. He was five feet from the mud wrestling duo when he cocked his assault rifle and simply blew the thing on top of Rakesh away. One moment it was banging Rakesh and howling, in another it stopped being, cut in two by the deadly shells of the AK 47. Rakesh got hit by plenty of flesh and gore and water… it was like Neeraj had shot not a man but a water tank, Rakesh was drenched in the water that tasted moldy, like it came from a dank, dark well not used for centuries. At the same time it also held its faint salty taste that belonged to sea water. Rakesh pushed whatever had remained of that thing, and grabbed his rifle. He sat up and a bolt of pain shot through his neck, his head and his chest. He touched the back of his head and it came away wet and sticky. But he did not know whether it was mud, the remains of his attacker or his own blood.

  He stood and followed Neeraj who ran with his head bent and crouching. Rani was walking slowly, as if in a daze, away from them, crossing first the bunch of trees with the stone platforms known as ‘par’ around them and then towards the left where the trees gradually became thicker and thicker till the wide road merged into a narrow stone way, which in turn got lost in the jungle of tamarind and mango trees. Rakesh almost overtook Neeraj when the serial killer shot out a hand and stopped him.

  “What?” Rakesh asked, panting from pain and running.

  Neeraj slowly put a finger to his lip and began retreating back towards the temple. Having seen how decisive and courageous the man was in action, Rakesh thought it wise to follow his example and started to turn back.

  “Don’t turn your back just walk backwards,” Neeraj said in a low yet perfectly clear voice.

  Rakesh walked backwards and was relieved to find Neeraj had stopped to let him catch up with him. When he looked at Neeraj, he motioned with his head to keep looking to left while Neeraj would watch the right. That would leave their behinds as a happy hunting ground should an attacker come from behind.

  Those few minutes were the longest in Rakesh’s life as he slowly backed out towards the temple with the jungle looming on them in its majestic and cruel silence. This was the same jungle where Raja Shivaji’s army must have fought their foreign invaders a long time back. It occurred to Rakesh that even if they were ambushed and slaughtered here the jungle would see nothing that it had not seen. And that was the real charm of nature, Rakesh thought. Its complete indifference towards human misery was almost God like.

  “Turn around and run on the count of three” Neeraj whispered and then counted slowly to three. Rakesh, his legs turning to rubber and his bowels almost diherric with tension, turned and ran. Thankfully he could see the platformed trees near the temple. They broke out of jungle, and made a dash to the temple gate where Happy, Vinit, Rajat and Ragini were waiting for them. They reached the gate when the four of them were in a heated debate.

  “It’s my wife out there, asshole,” Happy was shouting in Rajat’s face with a loaded revolver in his right hand. Rakesh easily walked between them, without trying to push the two men away from each other. Having broken countless barroom brawls, he knew that pushing people away from each other just gave them more space to swing their arms and in this case it could give the clearance required for Rajat and Happy to shoot at each other.

  “I know Happy and I have fought for her as well as you have, I….I risked my life for her back in the police station, don’t forget that. All I am saying is if we have to go, we have to go with a plan.”

  Ragini, with no experience of breaking up barroom brawls, but with plenty of experience of high strung men, stepped squarely between them, and shouted in Happy’s face, “He is right Happy, let’s decide what we are going to do once we are in that jungle among those freaks. There are six of us against God knows how many of them, so please don’t make it difficult by having hysterics, all right?”

  “By the time we have a plan, she would be dead already,” Happy said.

  “Actually she won’t.” Neeraj spoke for the first time and this time he addressed them as a group.

  “What makes you so sure Neeraj?” Happy asked, his face had taken a sickish hue and his eyes radiated with menace. This was the man who wanted to fight.

  “Think about it, if they wanted to kill her, why didn’t they attack and kill her the moment she stepped out of the temple? Note they attacked Rakesh, but nobody raised a finger on your wife. They just kind of put a spell on her and carried h
er in the jungle. This guy, the one masterminding this freakshow, he is pulling strings. He is not interested in killing one person. He wants us all and he wants us to come after him. He is expecting that we would all just attack the jungle blindly, easy pickings! I don’t know what kind of experience of fights you guys have, but in there without a plan we are sitting ducks Happy, so take that in to consideration,”

  Vinit cleared his throat and said, “So what do you suggest?”

  “In principle the same as Happy suggests, go after them. But we need to think this through, we need to be together. That’s our only chance of saving her and saving ourselves,” Neeraj said.

  “Rajat, Vinit you are the local boys what is this jungle like?” Ragini asked.

  Vinit answered, “Not a very big one, may be eight kilometers from here till we come out near your farmhouse, twelve kilometers from the rough centre to the beach, I think if these guys are camping, they must be somewhere close to the centre. I have heard there is a small clearing in the middle of this. Some patch where trees just did not grow. It would be ideal for a guerilla base,”

  “That’s a guess and remember even if it is small; it is still a hundread square kilometer area. May take a full search party two or three days to comb through it,” Rajat reminded them.

  “No, it won’t because I know where exactly they are,” Neeraj said. Everyone turned to him.

  “You do?” Rakesh asked, his admiration for this guy was almost on the verge of hero worship now.

  “Yes it is in the heart attack county and our biggest problem is not how to overpower those freaks when we reach there, our problem is reaching there,” and so, he told them all he knew about the heart attack county. A night that seemed like a faraway memory to everyone, but him.

  “So you are saying maybe we will drop dead of heart attacks when we approach it?” Ragini asked disbelievingly.

  “Not may be. We will dear, guaranteed!” Neeraj replied.

  “So what do we do now,” Rajat asked, but Neeraj was not listening to anyone of them. Suddenly he dropped his weapon and he clutched his forehead, trying hard to crystallize what had occurred to him a moment back in the jungle.

  Neeraj had smelled the strange smell he had experienced the night before, and that was the signal for him to retreat. That awful smell, slightly salty but not pleasant like sea air smell, but more like marinated fish had reminded him of an abandoned tanker he had seen near the petrol pump while coming to the temple a few hours back.

  Neeraj sat down, and waved everyone away, trying hard to remember what had seemed so perfectly clear to him back in the jungle. Now it was all jumbled up, no coherent thought getting formed, but images and the word downwind….. Downwind…..

  “It is all downwind from here” he whispered. Suddenly everyone was watching him. Rakesh was about to ask him something profoundly stupid, when Ragini shushed him with a hand on his arm. Neeraj slowly walked out, again Rakesh tried to stop him, again Ragini stopped Rakesh.

  Neeraj fumbled in his trousers pocket for a cigarette and found a crumpled pack with two smokes left. He lit it with his zippo and walked slowly towards the platformed tree. It was all downwind from here and Rani had said “this trip and enjoyment are like oil and water… oil and water…” these two things played over and over in his mind like a stuck record. It was all downwind, and oil and water….

  Neeraj sat on the stone platform, the wet stone instantly made his trouser seat wet and cold, but he did not mind. Resting his back against the tree trunk, he inhaled and let out a long burst of smoke, trying desperately to remember, what it was about being downwind and oil and water and that abandoned oil tanker he had seen.

  He took a look around himself and for a moment the utter calm of the night took his breath away. It was such a still cold night. No rain, no wind, no moonlight, nothing. As if the whole town was plunged into some kind of abyss, where the only reality was the silence and the darkness.

  “It’s mostly downwind from here and things go like oil and water” he murmured and lit his last cigarette.

  By the time Rani woke up from the dream like trance her dead sister’s voice had induced, she was in the very bowels of the jungle surrounded by a bunch of hungry very machinelike people. The water people, Rajat had called them.

  It was then that she realized that she was tricked. She was in the jungle with no arms on her, her friends far away from her, surrounded by ….. Well surrounded by zombies. Yes, let’s face the truth; people who were dead and still walking were called zombies, so she was surrounded by zombies.

  Then suddenly the crowd parted, and a very old man and a young man walked in front of her. The old man was wearing only a dhoti and had an impossibly long, impossibly white beard. He had a small brass vessel in his hands called kamandalu in Marathi. The younger man wore army fatigues and had an AK 47 assault rifle on his shoulder. He looked shaken and scared of the old man with him.

  “Goooood evening madam…” the old man said in perfect English and bowed to her as if they were meeting in some old school university party rather than in a dark eerie jungle surrounded by the undead.

  Suddenly Rani found herself growing calm instead of frightened. She was tricked by this very old man and his followers. These fucks had used her Sonu to lure her here.

  “You the asshole putting this town in some kind of morbid nightmare?” Rani asked, hands on her hips, her voice rose steadily “You used my Sonu to bring me out here fucker…” The men and women surrounding her suddenly went very quiet. Nobody spoke to the Courageous Leader that way.

  Rani pressed on “And these are your trusted followers, oh boy do I ever pity you? All it took was one crazy woman with a gun in each hand and they were scattered like birds. And she followed and shot them you hear me?” she screamed at the crowd. “They ran for their lives, because your leader can not help you with those dark big shiny round things us human call guns… and my husband and his friends have plenty of them. We are going to smoke you and we are going to kill you, you coward bastards. Using my Sonu to bring me out, if you were a man you would have called me out and I would have kicked your ass and sent you back” she was shaking with anger.

  Aleem started to raise his gun but the Courageous Leader shoved him away.

  “Anger, I like that in a lady, but not the language though. You are going to come with us. Should we say as bait for your ignorant friends who had no business poking their noses in this town’s business,” he said and motioned to the crowd.

  One of them moved swiftly to cover her nose with a dirty kerchief and then she was lifted off her feat by a multitude and a woman carrying her said “Whatever you do, don’t try to take this off before we set you down. You do that, you are dead, you city bitch.”

  ***

  Chapter 2

  The small crowd inside the safety of the temple watched Neeraj as he sat quietly on the platform and smoked. Nobody knew what the killer was thinking and nobody, not even Rakesh was foolish enough to join him in his bare loneliness.

  “What is he doing sitting there like that?” Rakesh asked “Stupid bastard will get himself killed, the whole town is full of those weird people and he sits on the tree trunk and smokes.”

  “Whatever Mr. Joshi is, he is not stupid, take it from me Rakesh,” Vinit said.

  “Well that makes Rakesh a minority” Ragini said and cackled, Rajat joined her but Vinit’s sallow face remained expressionless. Happy stared in the space and mutterred to himself.

  Suddenly, Neeraj stood up and raised his hands, his voice was clear enough to carry “You fucking assholes… come and get me, I am right here without a gun and alone. Come on, you want me, you got me…. Come on shitbrains, come on” his voice had a frenzied quality that they had not heard before. He went on and on repeating the same words over and over again, basically challenging the undead for a good old free for all.

  Then as suddenly as he had started, he stopped, and walked to them with a sense of purpose that was unmistakable. When he finall
y reached them Ragini could see that he was a man with the plan.

  “All right listen up everyone, the only way to save Mr. Shah’s wife and save ourselves in the bargain is to burn this jungle down,” he said. Rajat and Rakesh groaned. They were in the mental process of bracketing Neeraj with their ex-boss. A resident of loonsville. Vinit too stared at him gapemouthed. Only Ragini and Happy’s Expression did not change. Rajat saw a bit of sad resignation in Happy’s eyes, but no incredulity and no fear.

  Then Rajat knew they were going to burn the jungle down, or die trying.

  “I sat there for a full twenty minutes, I smoked cigarettes, and I kept my weapon down in full view,” Neeraj explained as they all listened “Nobody came to kill me. I was practically a sitting duck there, none of you could have come and saved me, had one of those freaks chosen to attack me at that moment, but nobody came, why? That’s the big question here,” he said and looked around.

  Happy spoke slowly “because they are all back at the base in the jungle. The town is empty at this moment practically.”

  “Yes, they have all retreated to their final outpost, and they are waiting for us to come to them, only to come to them we need to pass the heart attack county. Their boss is counting on us charging like mad, confident in our ability to blow them away, unaware that if we cross the heart attack county we are dead before we reach their base, and not all the arsenal in the world can save us. Only he didn’t know that we already know about the place called Heart Attack County,” Neeraj said.

  “So how do we cross it?” Rakesh asked.

  “We change the air,” Happy replied once again.