by Mainak Dhar
When Dewan replied truthfully that he had not seen the post, Chen smiled.
'Of course you did not. It was up for only five minutes before we removed it and locked your account, from which it was posted. That won't stop whoever did it from creating new accounts and posting again, but it does make you wonder. Biters cannot use tablets, but their terrorist human collaborators can. Counter-revolutionaries like this Alice of yours.'
The last two words caught Dewan totally off guard, and he realized he was walking a razor's edge and that anything he said could land him in serious danger.
'Sir, I have devoted the last fourteen years to serving the cause we all fight for, and I want to help in any way I can.'
Chen dismissed him and told him that he could go and rejoin his unit.
'Colonel, I may take you up on that offer someday.'
Dewan reached his desk, his heart pounding. He knew his story was wafer thin, and the fact that Chen was here showed just how a serious a threat the Central Committee saw the situation as. Media and what had been recreated of the Internet was strictly regulated, and nobody had really complained, once again trading off democracy for security. But for the first time ever, that tightly controlled information flow had been breached.
A few minutes later, he went to the cafeteria to have dinner and saw several troopers there. He sat down next to a few young recruits and while they quickly shut up when he sat, he could see that they had been in the middle of an animated conversation.
'So, guys, what were you talking about?'
One of the troopers looked around, as if seeking support from his comrades, and then looked at Dewan. 'Sir, it's nothing; just some stupid rumors some of the guys had seen.'
Dewan had always been well liked by his men, not least because he was always accessible and was someone they could count on to help. Many of his men had been mere boys who had been picked up from the Deadland, and Dewan had trained them and, in many cases, saved their lives in combat.
He looked at a young trooper he knew well. 'Satish, what are these rumors?'
The young trooper seemed to be struggling with how to say what was on his mind.
'Sir, it seems someone hacked into your account and posted some stuff about The Rising last night. A few of the guys happened to read it, and have been telling all sorts of wild stories.'
Dewan had to stop himself from smiling.
'I heard some bastards hacked my account. What did they post?'
Another trooper spoke, seemingly hesitant to even say the words out loud. 'Something about The Rising having been caused by human governments and about how China was behind so much of it.'
Another trooper, now more confident since the subject had been broached, spoke up. 'I also heard that it mentioned something about what all the folks from the Deadland were doing in the colonies being set up for them. Something about them being little more than slave labor. Sir, they may all be lies for all I know, but why would someone suddenly make up such lies and post them on our boards?'
He quickly shut up when a whole squad of Red Guards came into the cafeteria and sat at an adjoining table, and they continued their meal in silence, but Dewan, despite the fear he had felt while meeting Chen, was exulting inside.
His plan was beginning to work. Now it was all up to Alice and her group to take it forward. With Chen and his Red Guards here in force, he knew they would hardly have it easy.
***
'Nikhil, hurry up!'
Alice was gnashing her teeth in frustration at the time Nikhil was taking to upload his latest post. She scarcely understood the technology involved in it all, but she knew that the Red Guards would know within minutes where the post had been uploaded from and would be sending troopers their way. So far, in the last week they had uploaded two posts. In both cases, they had ventured far from their base, making an overnight journey through the forests, uploaded the posts and then made their way back. Alice had no idea if anyone had even read the posts or what impact they were having, but Nikhil was sure that the Central Committee would be trying its best to delete or block the posts.
Nikhil was over fifty and quite unlike most of the other men at the settlement. He was slightly built, and wore broken glasses that were crudely held together by adhesive tape. Before The Rising, he had claimed to be a blogger, though many of the older folks said he had been a hacker. Alice didn't really know what those words meant, but she knew that he was able to use the tablet Dewan had left behind and was willing to make the dangerous journey with her through the forest.
To minimize their chances of detection, only the two of them had ventured out. While that made for better stealth, it also meant that if they ran into trouble, their chances of survival were low. Alice was armed to the teeth, with her handgun, knife and an automatic weapon that they had salvaged from a Zeus trooper. But while Nikhil carried a handgun, she was not sure he even knew how to use it properly. To make things worse, he had been sitting hunched over the tablet for the last fifteen minutes, whispering something about firewalls. The post he was uploading was one that was a detailed first person account of Appleseed's role in the destruction of their settlement, based on Alice's story. It was a risk to personally identify her, but they had reasoned that putting a face to the messages would make it more believable than them being from anonymous posters. Also, with Alice supposedly a wanted terrorist, this would help sow doubts in the minds of Zeus troopers about whom the real bad guys were.
Finally, he got up and looked at Alice with a look of triumph.
'It's done! And this time I waited to see if there were any responses so I could be sure somebody is reading our posts.'
Alice froze.
'You waited! You know they'll be coming soon. Let's get out of here.'
Nikhil persisted and handed her the tablet.
'Look at this.'
Knowing that this war was going to be fought and won as much with words as with bullets, Alice had finally got around to asking her mother to teach her to read and had been brushing up her reading skills. There was only one reply to Nikhil's post and it was short enough for it to not tax her reading skills much. A Zeus trooper had posted, 'So that's why the Red Guards are all over the place nowadays.'
Alice knew that whoever had replied to the post would likely get into a lot of trouble, but it was a small yet significant sign: their messages were getting through to the Zeus troopers and they were beginning to create some doubts in their minds. As Nikhil turned off the tablet and put it in his backpack, Alice heard the dull roar of approaching helicopters.
'Nikhil, come on! They'll be here any minute!'
The sun had barely risen and Nikhil had timed his message to catch the attention of any Zeus trooper who was up but had some time to go before their morning drills. This was one among many details shared by Dewan which were helping them time their postings to coincide with downtimes for Zeus troopers when they were likely to be surfing on their tablets.
Alice and Nikhil were running into the trees when the first helicopter appeared over the horizon. Alice turned around and saw that there were two sleek gunships and a larger troop carrier. By the time the first Red Guards were on the ground, Alice and Nikhil were already more than a kilometer away, tearing through the forest as fast as they could run. From her previous run-in with the Red Guards, Alice knew that they would likely be trying to flank them and drive them into a trap, so instead of taking the path that led to the road which they needed to follow back to their base, they turned right, running through the forest till they came to a clearing. She could see the broken shells of old buildings. Nikhil had told her that once upon a time this had been a posh suburb and that some of the wooded areas they had run through had once been part of farmlands of the elite. That was a world that sounded totally alien to her, but she was happy for the cover the buildings would provide them. They ran into an old apartment building and rushed up the stairs. On the second floor, they stopped to see where their pursuers were, but saw no sign of t
hem.
Alice relaxed a bit and took a look around her. For someone who had lived in the open for much of her life, it was hard to imagine living in these concrete shells – but then, their occupants never had making an instant getaway as a priority. Perhaps if they had, they would have lived longer than they did during The Rising. The apartment was obviously abandoned and as they walked from one flat to another, they found little of use or interest, since they had been picked clean over the years.
As Alice entered one flat, she saw something small lying in a corner. It was a small female figure with half burnt blonde hair.
'Nikhil, what is this?'
'Alice, that was a Barbie doll that girls used to play with.'
Alice flung the doll to one side, wondering how girls ever had enough spare time to sit and play with silly little figurines. She looked out the window and froze. There were a dozen or more Red Guards outside, their rifles at the ready, walking past the apartment. She motioned for Nikhil to get down as she continued watching the men outside. One of them was speaking into a handheld radio and as Alice looked up in the sky, she saw the faint outline of something black hovering above them. That must have been one of the drones Appleseed had mentioned, thought Alice, wondering if they had been spotted on their way into the apartment. Most of the Guards walked past and Alice was beginning to relax when one of them suddenly stopped and looked back at the apartment. Alice ducked down as he brought his rifle up to his shoulder, looked through the scope and casually fired a single round.
The bullet hit the wall just outside the window where Alice and Nikhil were sheltering, and they waited for a minute or more, hoping the Guard had moved on. Nikhil, tired of sitting on his haunches, started to get up to stretch when another bullet shattered the glass on the window. Nikhil dove to his right, and even without hearing the Red Guard's bellowed command to his men, Alice knew that the sudden movement had given them away. Alice was at the window in a split second, her rifle at the ready, and she fired at the first Red Guards approaching the apartment. Her bullets kicked up the dirt around them and she saw one of them fall before he was pulled behind cover by a comrade. Before she could find new targets, the other Guards opened fire on full automatic, shredding the window and showering her with glass. With the numbers so stacked against her, standing her ground and hoping to win the firefight was a losing cause.
She saw that Nikhil was crouched against the wall, and while his hands were gripping his gun, they were shaking uncontrollably. An idea came to her as she considered the odds against them.
'Nikhil, just point your gun out the window and fire down at them. You don't even have to aim; just stick it out and shoot once every few seconds and please don't get yourself killed.'
He offered her a wan smile, as she took her rifle and ran out of the flat and down the stairs. She could hear the pop of Nikhil’s gun, immediately answered by an overwhelming volley of automatic weapon fire from the Red Guards. She rounded the corner on the corridor and climbed out an open window that had once served as a fire exit. She crouched on the narrow stairwell outside and saw the Guards, four of whom were now advancing from cover to cover while their comrades kept up a withering rate of fire at the window where Nikhil was hiding. She was almost behind the Red Guards and they had not yet spotted her. She selected single shot mode, not wanting to waste bullets, and aimed carefully at the Guards advancing on the apartment. Her first shot took a Guard in the neck, killing him instantly. Before the others had realized what had happened, another was down. By the time the Guards spotted her and their officer, a tall and thin man, screamed orders to his men, a third Guard was down.
As Alice dove back into the corridor, bullets slammed into the stairwell where she had been seconds ago. There were still nine Guards left and while she had managed to give them a nasty surprise, the odds were still very much against them. She retreated back up the stairs and found Nikhil grinning.
'Did I hit anyone?'
Despite all the stress, she smiled.
'Nikhil, you should stick to that tablet thing of yours.'
As she peered out another window, she saw that the Guards were again advancing on the apartment, and she brought her rifle up, determined not to go down without a fight. Just then, a dark figure wearing a hat rushed out from the forest and picked up the nearest Red Guard, snapping his neck and tossing his body away. Several more Biters jumped out of the bushes, and Alice saw the Red Guard officer shoot one in the head before beginning to run towards the apartment. Taken by surprise and outnumbered, the Red Guards never stood much of a chance, and two or three more were killed before Alice saw Hatter stand up to his full height and scream. The other Biters took his cue and the remaining Red Guards were not killed but bitten. The Officer who had been running towards the apartment raised his rifle, aiming straight at Hatter, who was now lunging towards him. The Red Guard Officer was about to pull the trigger when a single bullet from Alice hit him in the neck and he went down. Hatter looked up with his expressionless, red eyes and saw Alice at the window.
Alice had never been so happy to see Biters before, and as she and Nikhil came down, they saw that the four Guards who had been bitten were now twitching on the ground, as if suffering a violent fit, and then they sat up, all trace of humanity gone in their lifeless eyes, blood from the bites they had suffered streaming down their bodies. They looked at Alice and Nikhil and one of them hissed and started to move towards them, when Hatter hit him hard and then barked something to them. Alice didn't understand what he said, but it was clear that they knew who was in charge because as they ran into the forest to get back to their base, the newly converted Biters made no move to attack them. Alice turned back after a few minutes of running to see Hatter and the other Biters following them. Some distance behind them were the new converts.
Alice smiled and Nikhil asked her what she found so funny about their near brush with death.
'When the colonel talked about us turning Zeus troopers to our side, I'm guessing he didn't have this in mind.'
***
TEN
'Three hundred?'
Appleseed withered in the face of Chen's rhetorical questions. The one thing that Appleseed had learnt about his Chinese boss was that when he asked a question, he rarely wanted an answer. Instead, he was usually passing judgment, and in this case, Appleseed knew that the judgment being passed could be deadly for him. Appleseed had been a career military officer in the old US Army, when as a colonel based in Afghanistan he had been approached by some old mentors who had mentioned certain special projects they wanted him to help with. At the time, a million dollars in cash seemed to be worth the secrecy and subterfuge he had dealt with, and when The Rising had taken place, he actually thought that he had been chosen to be one of the elites to fight this scourge. Fifteen years later, he was not so sure anymore about who or what cause he really served. The money was no longer worth much, but he did have a wife and three kids, and he knew that if Chen ordered it, in an instant he could be reduced to being no more than yet another of the millions of slave laborers who lived and died without much fanfare in the many camps that sustained the utopian new world that the Central Committee promised to usher in. The only currency he knew and recognized that still mattered in this new world was power, and he was determined to cling on to that.
He straightened his back and faced Chen, whom he towered over.
'Yes, sir. Over the past one week, we have had more than three hundred desertions in the force.'
Appleseed saw Chen's pale face darken and his fists turn red as he clenched the chair in front on him.
'That, General, is the problem of using the occupied to manage their own territories.'
Appleseed bit his tongue. He knew how badly the Chinese Red Army had been hit by retaliatory strikes by US nuclear forces in the days following The Rising, and while the erstwhile United States was little better than the Asian Deadland Appleseed oversaw, there was continued fierce resistance from bands of American guerillas t
hat was bleeding the Red Guards dry. He knew that Chen and his Chinese masters badly wanted to nip in the bud any possible insurrection in Asia and that they were counting on him to do it. That was the single most important source of Appleseed's power. For the past fifteen years, he had managed the Asian Deadland with an iron fist, born out of extensive experience in Afghanistan before The Rising, a fiery grounding in counter-insurgency that had helped him decimate the Biters and bring into the Central Committee's fold most of the remaining human settlements. That was, of course, till that silly girl called Alice surfaced and the whole matter threatened to spiral out of control. He felt a familiar stirring as he recalled being alone with her. In his mind, he was a soldier who was doing his duty, but there were dark moments and dark deeds that he tried hard to not consciously face, for in his hearts of hearts he enjoyed the power he held over others, the power to make them submit to his will, the power to make them beg him. He recalled all the grief this Alice had caused him and promised himself that the next time she was alone with him, she would be begging him for mercy.
Over the past two weeks, her cohorts had been bombarding the Zeus Intranet with messages, averaging more than three a day, and while Chen had flown in Information Technology specialists from Shanghai who would delete every posting within minutes, the seditious messages were slowly but surely having an impact. The hardest hit were recruits from the human settlements in the Deadland of what had once been India, and desertions had been on the rise. All attempts to track down the posters had proven to be in vain and the efforts at striking back against them had produced little by way of tangible results other than many scores of casualties.
'Eighty-five Red Guards have died in one week. Does that sound like something the Central Committee will tolerate?'
Appleseed had posed a rhetorical question to Dewan not unlike the ones being posed to him by Chen, and he was infuriated to see Dewan standing impassively in front of him.