by Mainak Dhar
'Bob, you okay?' His wife, Joanne, had come up behind him and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
'We still don't know who those choppers belong to or what they want. As if the Biters weren't bad enough, now we have to worry about them. Sometimes, I wish we could have given our kids a better life than one where we count surviving one more day as success.'
Jo faced him.
'We're all alive, and you've kept us all safe. That's what matters now.'
Jones, who had been a Marine at the US Embassy where Gladwell had worked as a diplomat before their world was torn apart by the series of events called The Rising, came up.
'Boss, who do you reckon those flyboys are?'
'I don't know. I took a look through field glasses last time, and they had no insignia. Let them show their hand first, and then we'll talk.'
'Hey, we're supposed to all meet in an hour's time. Should we go ahead or wait for the patrol to get back?'
Gladwell looked out over the short walls that ringed their settlement, hoping to get a glimpse of the four men who had left in the morning. 'I don't want us to meet again and have people panic over news of Biter hordes coming our way till we know more. Let Arvind and the boys get back with some more news and we can meet then.'
What was left unsaid was that, in the event of their patrol not coming back, they would know for sure that they faced imminent danger. Gladwell knew that there was no point in fretting over things he couldn't control, so he decided to focus on something which was under his control—making sure their little settlement was secure.
Their home for the last three years had been a small village just a few kilometers from an Indian army base where Gladwell and his family had taken refuge after The Rising, along with some staff and Marines from the US Embassy and a contingent of Indian Army soldiers and their families led by Gladwell's friend, Brigadier Randhawa. As Gladwell walked around the settlement, he couldn't but contrast the relative peace they now enjoyed to the chaos and bloodletting of the first year.
Hordes of undead, which they now knew as Biters, had risen and swarmed over the cities, biting and scratching victims, turning them into ghouls like themselves. If that weren't bad enough, human governments had gone mad, choosing to settle scores when all seemed lost, and much of the world had been ravaged by nuclear exchanges. Huddled in their base, Gladwell and his companions had faced innumerable attacks by Biters and human looters. They had fought them off, and earned in blood a reputation as a group not to be easily messed with. Part of that came from the fact that they had inherited a veritable arsenal of weapons in a land where private gun ownership was very low, part from the fact that they had had several trained soldiers in their midst, but also part from the fact that Gladwell and others like him had made sure that they stuck together. Randhawa had died soon after The Rising in an attack by looters, and Gladwell had become the de facto leader of their group of a hundred men, women and children.
In the distance, his daughters played with a little puppy that had fallen into the moat that had been dug around their settlement. When one of their sentries had called out the previous night, a dozen men had raced to the wall, guns at the ready. They had shared a laugh afterwards when they discovered that the intruder had not been a Biter on the rampage, but a small, dirty puppy.
As Alice stroked the puppy's head, a lump formed in Gladwell’s throat. Alice had been born in the middle of the worst carnage they had faced after The Rising, and the first year of her life had been a constant struggle for survival against Biters and humans alike. One day, their base had been breached by Biters and they had to abandon it and find a new refuge in this settlement that they now called home. When Alice had been born, Gladwell often wondered what kind of a world he was bringing his new baby into, a world where there was nothing but hatred, death and violence. Now, seeing her laugh and jump with joy, he was grateful that at least, in the middle of all that they had to endure, she was able to find something that gave her such happiness. It was much more than he had been able to offer his family over the last four years.
A commotion began at the gate and he ran towards it. It couldn't have been Biters, otherwise the sentries would have raised an alarm. When he reached the gate, Jones and Arvind, a former officer in the Indian Army, were pushing the gate open. Standing on raised platforms near the wall were three men armed with rifles, all aiming outside. The four men who had gone out on patrol had returned. From the look on their faces, he knew that something was very wrong.
The patrol leader, a man called Sunil, collapsed to the ground as he entered the settlement. Gladwell took the bottle of water at his hip and offered him a drink.
'Sunil, what happened?'
'We've been fighting a running battle for the last two hours. We're lucky to have gotten away alive.'
'What did you guys run into?'
Sunil's eyes had a haunted look in them as he answered.
'Biters. More of them than I've ever seen before and they're headed our way.'
***
ABOUT MAINAK DHAR
Mainak Dhar is a cubicle dweller by day and author by night. His first `published' work was a stapled collection of Maths solutions and poems (he figured nobody would pay for his poems alone) he sold to his classmates in Grade 7, and spent the proceeds on ice cream and comics. Mainak was a bestselling author in his native India with titles published by major houses like Penguin and Random House and with one of his novels (Herogiri) being made into a major motion picture. In early 2011, he began to use Amazon to reach international readers through his ebooks and became one of the leading independent authors in the world with more than 100,000 books sold in his first year. Mainak is one of the top selling horror authors on Amazon worldwide and in March 2013, became the #1 bestselling Horror author on Amazon, momentarily unseating Stephen King. He has thirteen books to his credit including the bestselling Alice in Deadland series. Learn more about him and contact him at mainakdhar.com.