Alice in Deadland Trilogy

by Mainak Dhar

  He had been rehabilitated just six months later and re-instated with all honors, to be sent to the new base at Ladakh where the Red Guards kept a watch on the community called Wonderland. It had been nothing more than glorified sentry duty and he had begun to wonder why he had been spared. Then the stealthy black helicopter he had just seen land had arrived and started going out on sorties to the Deadland. Its crew and passengers had been flown in from Shanghai and even though he was the base commander, Chen had not been allowed any access to them. They stayed in their own quarters behind a walled complex, and did not report to him.

  He wondered what the old men in the Central Committee were up to now, but knew that whatever it was, the cost in blood would be paid by the young conscripts he was now supposed to lead.

  ***

  The dust was swirling around her and Alice had the hood on her sweatshirt pulled up around her face. She had grown up in the Deadland, but just a few months of living in the relative comfort of Wonderland told her just how brutal and uncompromising life in the Deadland could be in comparison. When she had lived there with her family in their settlement, conventional wisdom was that no human could survive in the Deadland unless they were in a large, organized group. The Deadland was teeming with predators, Biter and human alike, and now Satish and Alice would have to contend with them on their own if they were to try and solve the mystery of the Biter attacks. Alice knew that Bunny Ears, Hatter and her other Biters would be close at hand through their network of hidden underground tunnels, but there was no way for her to contact them, and depending on them to show up when she needed help was hardly a good survival strategy.

  ‘Alice, my boys told me that this was the only sector they did not patrol yesterday. If the attackers came into Wonderland from the outside, then it must have been through here.’

  It was now getting dark, and Satish suggested that they rest. Alice was not going to get tired from walking, and Satish was a professional soldier who could keep going for some hours yet. However, they did not want to take the chance of bumping into unwelcome company in the darkness.

  Alice hid the bike in the bushes and then called out, ‘Up the trees.’

  Satish looked at Alice incredulously.

  ‘Come on, are you serious? Do we have to hang from branches like Tarzan?’

  That puzzled Alice; she came from a time after cartoons had ceased to exist, and she had no idea who or what Tarzan was.

  . She passed over it.

  ‘No, because Biters cannot climb trees, and we’ll see bandits while they’re far away.’

  Satish grunted at the wisdom and clambered up a tree. Taking the adjoining tree, Alice whispered, ‘Take a nap. I’ll keep watch.’

  About two hours later, Alice heard a rustling noise nearby. She raised her rifle, looking through the night vision scope to see three men walking towards them. They were armed, though it looked like they carried a motley collection of homemade pistols and an antique looking shotgun; the hallmarks of Deadland bandits. But despite the nature of the weapons, they were no less dangerousAlice knew that men such as these could be deadly.

  As the men sat down and proceeded to take some food out, Alice relaxed. They had no idea Alice and Satish were sitting just a few feet above them, and they would soon hopefully be on their way.

  Then she saw something that made her take a closer look. One of the bandits was taking something out of a bag. Only it was not just any bag. It was a child’s bag, cobbled together from old clothes, patched together by a loving mother, embellished with cartoon characters that the child must have heard of in tales told by the adults who had experienced them on screen and in books before The Rising. There was only one place in the Deadland where such a bag could be found now: in Wonderland. And it was likely that this had been made as a school bag for a child who had been murdered just two days ago.

  Something snapped inside Alice, and she took a signal flare from her backpack and threw it to the ground, blinding the three men. Before they could gather their wits, Alice was in front of them, her rifle pointed at them.

  ‘Where did you get that bag?’

  One of them men made the fatal mistake of thinking they were faced with a mere girl, and he brought up his pistol. Alice snapped off a three round burst, hitting him in the chest and slamming him against the tree behind him. The noise had awakened Satish and he whistled to let the men below him know that he was just above them. The hood had fallen from around Alice’s head and now the remaining men saw her face in the fading glow of the flare.

  ‘The Quee—’

  A bullet crashed just inches from his foot, cutting his sentence short.

  ‘I asked you a simple question. Where did you get that bag?’

  The men were now shrinking back in fear. Before The Rising they had been convicts on death row, and both men were well accustomed to violence and crime; talents that had served them well in the Deadland. But for all that, they knew that they were no match for this half-Biter girl who could not be killed. They had heard tales of her and what she had done to the Red Guards, and they had given her settlement at Wonderland a wide berth, only now to be faced with her in the middle of the Deadland.

  One of them gathered up the courage to speak. ‘We saw a group of Biters in the Deadland a day ago. One of them dropped this.’

  Alice thought back to the strange Biters she had seen at the scene of the latest attack.

  ‘Where were these Biters going? Were they going towards the Reservation?’

  The man who had spoken now looked at her curiously.

  ‘No, that was the weird thing. We thought all the Biters around here followed you, but not these. These ones were different.?’

  Satish had now climbed down, but he kept his gun pointed at the two men.

  ‘Why do you think these Biters were different?’

  ‘They were picked up by a black helicopter.’

  The next morning, Alice and Satish had the two bandits lead them to the location where they had seen the helicopter take off. Satish took a look around the area.

  ‘Alice, if they come back, this is where they will come. They’ve flattened the ground to create some sort of a landing pad, and they’ve sandbagged those two hills to create guard towers.’

  Satish got on his radio to call his recon teams. They checked in one by one, but not one of them had seen or heard a helicopter approach the area. Then again, if a black helicopter had flown in low at night, following the Red Guards’ guidance on patrol avoidance, it was possible to pull off such an attack. Why and how someone would bring Biters in to launch such attacks was, however, beyond Satish.

  Alice kicked the dust at her feet, thinking of the dead children back at Wonderland.

  ‘Then we will wait here, and when they come back, we will kill them all.’

  ***

  ‘It’s an attack helicopter.’

  Alice heard Satish’s warning and looked up to see the black, predatory shape hover in the distance. They had been waiting for close to a day, and were about to give up hope and try their luck elsewhere. A makeshift bunker near the landing zone had been their refuge. They had been expecting a troop carrier, of the sort the bandit had described, and with the advantage of surprise, Alice was fairly confident that she and Satish could have handled whoever was being flown in on these deadly missions into Wonderland. However, they most certainly did not have the firepower to deal with an attack helicopter.

  ‘How far away are your boys?’

  Satish grinned. ‘One of them has that chopper in his sights right now. If we order it, a SAM will be going up that chopper’s tailpipe. Should we fire?’

  Alice shook her head emphatically. ‘No. If we show our hand now, they will not go through with their landing. Let’s wait.’

  But it soon became apparent this helicopter did not mean to land. It swept over the area several times, and then one of Satish’s teams radioed in.

  ‘White Rook, I can see two Red Guard APCs and two jeeps filled with Re
d Guards coming. Still four kilometers from your location, but they are closing in fast. Wait, they just stopped, and it looks like an officer is scanning the area with binoculars.’

  Alice asked, ‘What’s going on?’

  Satish responded, ‘They seem to be on a search mission more than an attack. I have no idea what or who they might be looking for. Coming this close to Wonderland on land is a big risk for them to take, especially in broad daylight, so it must be someone important.’

  Alice thought back to what she had heard in the Looking Glass. ‘Could it be those Americans who had supposedly escaped?’

  Satish had his own binoculars trained on the horizon and replied without shifting his gaze. ‘I don’t see how two escaped prisoners would warrant such a search attempt.’

  Then he froze.

  ‘Alice, look, there! At two o’clock, maybe a kilometer out, near that large Banyan tree.’

  Alice had her rifle up at her shoulder and looked through the scope. It was a sunny day and there was excellent visibility, but she did not notice what Satish had seen until he pointed it out again. During her own training in the Deadland, her instructors had taught her the art of escape and evasion, but she had never really been trained to look for a concealed enemy, simply because Biter hordes were not exactly proponents of stealth and concealment. However, in the house to house fighting against the Red Guards that had followed, it had become a critical skill, one she had learnt from Satish and Arjun, and from her own combat experience.

  Satish gave an appreciative whistle. ‘That man sure has guts, that much is for sure. He’s got an attack helicopter on top of him and perhaps fifty Red Guards on land, and he hasn’t lost his nerve and made a run for it.’

  Now that Alice had spotted him, she saw that there was a bit of an arm visible beneath the undergrowth. It was not going to be visible from the air, but once the Red Guard vehicles got there, it was only a matter of time before they discovered the fugitives.

  Alice put her rifle aside.

  ‘Satish, how many men do you have covering the chopper?’

  ‘Just a two-man SAM crew and two riflemen. With the element of surprise, I have no doubt they could take the chopper down, but they cannot hold off all those Red Guards. I have two more teams with RPGs headed here, but they won’t make it for the next thirty minutes.’

  The buzzing sound of a large caliber automatic gun firing made Alice swivel her head around. The attack helicopter had seen something and was firing from its chin mounted turret, the rounds kicking up dust and rocks on the ground below. Alice looked through her scope and saw a frail old man stumbling along the ground. Another man was trying to pull him back under cover, but the older man had clearly lost his nerve. It was hard to be sure from this distance, but their complexion and features suggested that these were indeed the two Americans who had escaped.

  She turned to look at Satish, and he just looked back, an eyebrow raised, silently asking her the question.

  ‘Bring it down!’

  As Satish relayed the order to his men, a trail of white smoke rose from the ground to Alice’s left and snaked up towards the helicopter. The pilot had been so busy in trying to target the fleeing fugitives that he never had a chance to react. The missile slammed into the mid-section of the helicopter, consuming it in a giant fireball.

  Alice could now see the Red Guard vehicles fast approaching the two men. She mounted the bike, with Satish behind her, and they sped towards the scene.

  Alice was more than five hundred meters away when the lead Red Guard APC opened fire with its machine gun. Alice swerved her bike to the right and dove off the seat, rolling and coming up behind the cover of a large tree. Satish was concealed behind another tree. Satish’s men were about a hundred meters to their left, but they too were holding their fire. Assault rifles would do little damage to the APCs.

  ‘Over here!’

  The two men heard Alice’s shout and scrambled to her. Alice did not have much time to register their appearances, but they were clearly white, one a reed-thin old man whose ribs peered showed prominently through a dirty vest, and the other a younger man, perhaps the same age as Arjun, wearing a tattered leather jacket. The younger man’s eyes widened a bit as he saw Alice, and he started to back up, when Alice pushed him down.

  ‘Stay here and you may just live.’

  The Red Guard APCs were now advancing steadily, and they had guessed correctly that the absence of any resistance must have meant that they were not up against enemies with heavy missiles or firepower that could threaten their vehicles. The two jeeps stayed behind, and as Alice looked, an officer was standing up in the back of one of the jeeps, speaking on a radio.

  ‘Satish, those APCs will be on us in a couple of minutes. I have a plan.’

  Before Satish could say anything, Alice had reached into her backpack and taken out two fragmentation grenades and raced to her bike.

  ‘Distract one of them!’

  Satish peered out from behind cover and started firing at one of the APCs, and his men started unloading their weapons on it from the other direction. Caught in the crossfire, the commander manning the heavy machine gun on the turret was forced inside, as the other APC came towards it to deal with the sudden threat. Just then Alice’s bike roared to life and she sped towards the second APC, the grenades in her hands. Distracted by Satish’s men, the commander in the APC’s turret did not see Alice until it was too late.

  Alice pulled the pin from one grenade and threw it, jumping off her bike as it went careening into the APC. The grenade bounced off the APC and exploded, shredding several of its tires. Now the vehicle was effectively stranded, and Alice clambered onto its back, a handgun in one hand and a grenade in the other. The commander was struggling to take out his own pistol from its holster when Alice fired at him, sending him slumping back inside the vehicle crashing back. Then she pulled the pin off the second grenade and dropped it into the open hatch, jumping off as it exploded.

  The Red Guards in the jeeps had now disembarked, and were firing at Alice. She felt a round hit her thigh as she sought cover behind the burning APC. The second APC was now approaching and she was effectively trapped between the dozen or more Red Guards approaching her from the right and the armored vehicle bearing down upon her from the left.

  The first few Red Guards were now no more than a hundred meters away and Alice could hear their triumphant shouts as they came closer. Alice leaned out and fired a burst from her assault rifle. One seemed to go down, but there were just too many of them. And as Satish’s men were pinned down by the second APC even as it drove towards her, she was on her own.

  The ground near one of the Red Guards seemed to explode in a burst of dust and sand and a dark figure wearing a hat rushed up, grabbing the Red Guard and pulling him down, breaking his neck in one move. Several more Biters streamed out of the hole, overwhelming the Red Guards around them. Hatter picked up another Red Guard, raising him cleanly over his head before smashing him to the ground. Several of the Red Guards were conscripts who had never seen combat, let alone seen a Biter up close. They began to panic, and that was their undoing. They fired blindly at the approaching Biters, and while many of the scored hits, only a direct shot to the head would be of any use. Within seconds they all fell to the clawing, biting attackers who had come to Alice’s rescue.

  The APC now drove towards the Biters, cutting several of them into ribbons them by half with its machine gun. The Biters were still not finished, but with their bodies mangled and their legs cut off, they were out of the fight.

  Hatter was staring defiantly at the approaching APC, screaming in rage when the APC lurched to a halt, exploding from a direct hit. Alice heard Satish behind her.

  ‘Thank God for RPGs. My boys got here just in time.’

  Alice knew that they owed their survival to had more to it than just a handful of men armed with one rocket launcher. They would not have survived without the intervention of Hatter and his fellow Biters. Several of the
Biters had fallen in the battle and their bodies lay scattered around the ground, their heads blown open by direct hits.

  Alice made her thanks to the surviving Biters, and then they ambled back to their hidden tunnel and disappeared. In spite of having spent so much time with them, and in spite of being like them in some respects, Alice was yet to fully figure out the Biters. They followed her with a loyalty that she had never experienced among humans, even humans who owed her their lives. They would throw away their lives to protect one of their own without a second thought, and unlike humans they never seemed to expect anything back in return. Alice was still young, but had seen enough of the world and of humans to know that those qualities were in incredibly short supply. People fought over power, over money, over control. Biters just fought to protect their own.