by J. Thorn
We had the car we had appropriated from the Taj Mahal Inn, and while it had less than quarter of a tank of gas, I didn’t think we’d need much more. So far, we had been lucky that the Moreko had not trashed it.
We set out deeper into the city. Gangtok had been a small city by most standards, and that had given it a lot of its charm, but the outside world had well and truly intruded in some respects, and the large supermarket called The Loot was an example. We had never tried getting to it, though I suspected it would have a lot of supplies, simply because it was too far inside the city to risk it. But today, I wanted to go deeper in, and not just to get razors and cosmetics.
Our journey to The Loot was uneventful, and I saw that it had already been looted (no pun intended) in the early days of the outbreak. Much of the food was gone but still we got a lot of stuff that we packed into the boot and the back seats. It was when we got closer to the smoke we had seen that I saw something that really freaked me out, and we drove back as fast as we could
Our visitors are now up, and after they are plied with some more tea and food, I look forward to learning more about what they have been through. Everyone is in a great mood, much of their early sense of dread having dissipated. A lot of it came down to the fact that the men were freshly shaved, and the women had all shampooed their hair. Everyone had taken a bath using not just water as we had been but with soap, and everyone was wearing fresh, clean clothes – all courtesy of our little shopping trip.
Negi caught me looking warily at the city and he asked me why I was worried. I told him that I had seen a large number of Moreko running through the town, only they were not coming to attack us. It looked like they were trying to escape something or someone.
Something out there terrifies the Moreko, and it is coming towards us.
Day 172. The Mahdi.
I’m not going to waste too much time writing today, because we need to get ready for the storm that is coming towards us. If I get more time after preparing the guys, I’ll come back to finish the day’s entry.
Here’s the deal. The leader of the army claims to be the Mahdi, some sort of returning messiah – or is it God himself? He says he is out to reclaim the world from evil. Good intentions, but seriously fucked-up means. He seeks out human survivors, and they have to agree to worship him. Refusal means death. The refugees say he is a giant, and a cannibal. I doubt he’s as bad as they say he is, but it’s got everyone here seriously mind-fucked. He sets every village or town on fire as he approaches. That explains the smoke. He drives the Moreko out and exterminates them, and then either takes over or wipes out any human survivors.
All of it sounds ominous enough, but I’m not worried about the tales of his superhuman strength and cannibalism. He’s a man, and any man can be put down with a well-aimed bullet. Nor does his so-called army bother me. He’s supposed to have five hundred fighters, but we are in a good defensive position and I could see us taking them on if we had to. What scares me is that he has tanks.
Fucking tanks.
Day 173. Tanks on my mind.
I woke up at 4AM this morning. Well, saying I woke up would actually be a misrepresentation, since I barely got any sleep. So far we had dealt with Bharti’s half-trained troopers and Moreko who had trouble climbing up the hill. Taking on a force, no matter how poorly trained, in tanks was a totally different ball game. We had absolutely nothing by way of weapons that would do more than scratch the paint off a tank, and I took the old man leading the refugees aside to make sure that they were not just exaggerating. Maybe they had mistaken an armored bulldozer for a tank.
A short talk later, I realized we were indeed in deep shit. These guys had at least one real tank and men who knew how to operate it. The old man didn’t know who the Mahdi was and hadn’t seen him, but he told me that people said that the Mahdi and his core group of followers had escaped from some prison and that most of them seemed to be high on drugs. If some of them knew how to operate a tank, then it was a fair guess that they were Army guys. Between hardened convicts high on drugs and guys with Army experience, our prospects were not looking too bright, even without putting the tank in the equation.
When the Mahdi’s men had come to the refugees’ village, they had lined up all the old people and shot them, then raped the women. They had then forced the children to join the Mahdi’s army, after pumping them with drugs and forcing them to kill a family member as an initiation rite. Good God, I had heard stories like this out of Africa. Hard to believe shit like this really happened.
With even one tank, they could park below the hill and blow our bungalow to bits at leisure, and then mop up what remained of us. To be honest, while I spent much of yesterday supposedly co-ordinating our defenses, I am totally out of my depth here. These people are looking to me to somehow keep us safe, but I know nothing of how to deal with tanks.
To share my misery, I woke up Negi and told him that we were basically screwed. He seemed strangely unperturbed. When I asked him if he wasn’t worried, he told me that nobody would have bet on us staying alive so far. The fact that we had survived so long meant one of three things – we were lucky, someone up there was looking out for us, or we were better at surviving than we gave ourselves credit for. He said that he’d rather think one of those was true than worry about this Mahdi and his tanks.
He’s got a point, and this kid is going to be a great leader some time, if we live long enough. I am a grunt at heart, and if he had joined the Army, I can easily see him being one of those staff officers I would have to salute. But that still doesn’t solve the problem of what to do about the fucking tank.
Day 173. Home is where you can stay in one piece.
Everyone’s been on edge all day, and this afternoon one of the guys on guard duty started shooting. Everyone rushed out, ready to face an attack, and he claimed to have seen Moreko moving among the buildings below. When we took a look, we didn’t see any. The smoke now seems closer and there are many more pillars of smoke rising above the city. Why the fuck does this Mahdi burn the bloody city down? Maybe somewhere in his twisted, drug-addled mind it makes sense. Anyways, Negi had a good idea – to gather everyone together and talk to them. Talking was fine, but he wanted me to reassure them. I had no idea what I could offer by way of reassurance but either someone had to try to hold things together or we would give into panic.
We met just before sunset, and with everybody crowding into the living and dining rooms, it was a tight fit. I’m not one for speeches, so I kept it simple. For better or for worse, this is our only home, and we are the only friends and family any of us has left in this world. We had been through all kinds of shit and survived, because we had stuck together. We had survived Moreko, we had survived Bharti’s camp, and we had survived nights in the forest. That was not because we were smarter or stronger than others, but because people, ordinary people like Sen, had thought of others before they thought of themselves.
It was no different from being in the Army – you threw total strangers together and soon, they would be willing to die for each other. That came from shared values, traditions and a feeling of camaraderie. We needed to be like that, only we were not fighting for political objectives or conquest, we were fighting for our survival. I looked at some of the moms and told them how I had seen them fight in the hotel, and how when one’s family is threatened, one can do more than one ever thought possible. I had not told any of them much about myself, so now I told them about my fucked-up career and my failed marriage. I had no family and not much to my name, but this was now my home and these people were my family. If anyone tried to get into my home and harm my family, no matter how big or bad they were, no matter what delusions of divinity they had, and no matter if they had a tank, I would fight.
I made the old man tell everyone about what the Mahdi’s men did to any village or town they overran, and I could see some eyes widen in fear, yet others hardened in resolve. That was a good sign. It was okay to be scared – hell, I was shit scared –
but as long as you channel that fear into deliberate action, you have a chance of staying alive.
I have no idea if the speech made any difference, but we’ll find out soon enough. I can hear the Moreko growling below, and it sounds like there’s shitloads of them. It’s going to be a long night.
Day 174. The morning after.
It’s noon and most people are still asleep. I can’t blame them. After it was all over, people just dropped where they were standing.
The Moreko started coming at night, thousands of them. We had all our lights off and no torches were lit on the hill. The last thing we wanted to do was to attract attention to ourselves. Instead, I had played pyromaniac again and gone down just before the Moreko got there and set a few more of the adjoining buildings on fire. That meant we got a pretty good view of the Moreko headed our way. In spite of the cold, everyone other than the youngest kids was outside, and everyone was carrying a weapon of some sort.
As we saw the Moreko start to appear, I could hear a couple of safeties being switched off, and I told everyone not to fire till I said so. At that point, it looked like the Moreko were not paying us any attention but were trying to get away from something. As we looked closer, sure enough, they seemed to be going especially apeshit when they came close to one of the burning buildings. I had suspected that the Moreko were afraid of fire after I had gone down with my Molotovs, and it seems that the Mahdi has figured it out as well. That would explain the smoke and his scorched earth tactics.
He was clearing the Moreko out before he came in with his men. Till then, the Moreko had been ignoring us, but with so many of them streaming in, it was inevitable that a few of them would come up the hill. We spotted at least four of them coming up and then we were faced with a tough choice. If we opened fire, we would attract all the other Moreko, and if we didn’t, we obviously risked the Moreko coming too close for comfort. I told Ashok to go with some of the guys and fetch a couple of cans of fuel while I went down the hill to the halfway point bunker where we had three guys on guard duty. By the time I got there, there were four Moreko less than ten meters away, and we huddled in the bunker, watching the Moreko silhouetted in the fires below. Ashok was there a minute later, carrying three Molotov cocktails. As word spread of how the Moreko seemed to fear fire, I had asked people to start making Molotov cocktails. We had dozens of bottles around and a fair bit of fuel.
We just lay there in the darkness, hoping the Moreko would turn back, but of course, we had no such luck. I shot the first Moreko when he was just five feet away, and then the other guys unloaded on the remaining Moreko. Shooting the first four was easy, it was dealing with the thousand below that was the tough part. Attracted by the shots, or who knows, the blood, other Moreko began streaming up the hill. Ashok and I threw one Molotov cocktail each down the path, not really aiming to hit anyone, but to illuminate the path and hopefully dissuade the Moreko from coming closer. For a while it seemed to work – these fuckers are indeed terrified of fire, and they stayed back from the flames. We took that opportunity to further thin their numbers by shooting a few of them. I had radioed Negi to tell the folks up on the hill to still hold their fire in case the Moreko did turn back.
However, once the flames began to die down, which was an inevitability given the strong winds blowing around us, the Moreko began coming up. We shot a couple more and threw our two remaining Molotov cocktails. This time we hit the jackpot – two Moreko were engulfed in flames, and as they screamed and ran about, they set at least three or four more on fire, and they fell off the cliff, screaming and growling. We were shooting all the while, and at least a half dozen more Moreko fell before we had to retreat.
We were out of Molotov cocktails and trying to make a stand there would be suicide. I had asked Negi and the others to cover us, but to fire only on single-shot mode. At this range, few of the shots would count, yet a few more Moreko fell as we clambered up the hill.
As we reached the top, the guys had lit torches on the approach – there was no reason to hide now, and the Moreko kept coming. Three young guys were at the top, and threw Molotov cocktails over our heads. One missed and fell harmlessly over the side of the hill, but the other two struck home. The path behind us was now littered with burning Moreko and as we reached the top, we turned and began firing. I could hear a couple of people gag and throw up behind me. The stench of burning flesh wasn’t exactly pleasant, but we had no time to consider such niceties. The Moreko were still coming up the hill and would overwhelm us unless we had a better idea.
The thing with life, as with combat, is that the best ideas can come from the most unlikely of sources. The key to staying alive is being open to these. In our case, the stroke of genius came from a ten-year-old kid. One moment I was shooting a Moreko in the head, and the next this kid was next to me, telling me he had read a book about castles. I wanted to tell him to shut the fuck up and let me shoot but as he said more, I realized he might just have saved all of us.
The kid had read about how defenders of medieval castles used to pour burning oil onto attackers. It was so simple I wanted to hit myself. We had spent so much time and effort into making Molotovs which had a pretty narrow area of impact. I screamed for Negi and Ashok, and soon we had two drums full of fuel that we were pouring downhill. One of the lead Morekos slipped on the fuel and fell, but making them slip to their deaths wasn’t exactly our plan. I lit a match and threw it on the expanding pool of fuel and it went up like a bloody inferno. It was an awesome sight – it was as if a sea of flame was traveling down the hill, engulfing the Moreko in its path.
Some of our folks kept shooting and I had to stop them, since once the fire took hold, the Moreko were retreating downhill, many of them falling off the edge. We waited for a couple of hours, and even when it didn’t seem like they were coming back, almost all of us stayed up, standing outside with our weapons ready.
If there’s one thing that smells worse than a decaying Moreko, it’s a burnt Moreko. The stench was overpowering in the morning, and as much as we all wanted to rest, a bunch of us grabbed shovels and went about the unpleasant task of piling the Moreko bodies on the path up the hill into small heaps and then setting them on fire. The last thing we need is disease.
Nobody really was in a mood to celebrate our victory. Part of that was the simple fact that people were dead tired, but part of that was a realization that our battle for survival was far from over. The fact that so many Moreko came by means that the Mahdi’s forces are getting closer, and with the fires we lit last night, they will know exactly where we are.
Day 175. I have seen the enemy... and he scares the shit out of me.
We were all on edge last evening, and some of the folks decided to have a party. I was on the verge of saying we had more preparing to do, but Negi told me that people needed to unwind. With the generators being conserved carefully for essential power, we certainly didn’t turn the CD player on, and even if we had, we had only one CD intact that had survived the various gun battles the bungalow had seen. Echoing just what a bizarre fuck my erstwhile boss was, it was a CD of Gregorian chants, hardly the first choice of music for our party. So we made do – people sang, they danced, and tried to forget that a giant cannibal was about to march towards us. I know that when I put it that way, you’ll think I’m being a pessimist and trying to prevent people from having a little harmless fun. Unfortunately, it’s also the truth of what we face.
So while people partied, I went out on a little trip of my own. This time, I didn’t need Ashok to ask to come along – I sought him out and took two more guys with me. Put a few drinks in me and I’ll claim I’m the frigging Terminator, but even I know when I can’t handle something by myself. Negi wanted to come along, but I told him he was needed back in the bungalow. I can understand people trying to destress and at times like that, they need the sanity Negi can bring. The more I think of it, he’s the real head of this household. Me, I’m like the old guard dog, always sniffing out trouble, and always eager t
o get into a scrap.
As we walked down, I could hear the sounds of laughter coming from the bungalow, a sharp contrast to the screams and the gunfire of the previous night. If I’m honest with myself, it was pretty pleasant. People deserve to have some fun and not worry about fighting to survive every night. But then again, nobody deserves to live in a world where the fucking undead roam around trying to rip your throat out, and where a psycho cannibal rides about in a tank. Their laughter was an echo of a world that we might never really know again, but if we were to survive long enough to know whether that was even possible, I needed to get out there and get a better idea of what we were up against.
Going out at night might seem crazy, but I was betting on the fact that after last night’s roasting, the Moreko would not be around in large numbers. Also, the Mahdi’s men might be ex-cons and hard men, but they were not all trained soldiers, and I doubted they would venture far from their positions at night. We went on foot, and I was soon reminded that the guys with me were younger than me, and had both legs, when they started getting ahead of me.
We were about four kilometers out, moving towards the smoke, when I heard a roar. For a moment, I thought it was the Moreko. When you’ve spent way too much time for almost six months watching and hearing the undead fuckers all day, that happens. I should have told the guys to slow down. Maybe it was my ego that stopped me, since I didn’t want them to think I couldn’t keep up. In any case, I almost got them all killed.