by J. Thorn
The next round came soon enough, exploding close enough to send a shower of shrapnel slicing through one of the troopers’ legs. He began screaming in pain and I saw that the officer was on the verge of panic. The imbecile had a brand new assault rifle in his hands, as did his men, but instead of returning fire, he was looking around, a vacant look in his eyes. I had seen it before, and I too must have looked like that the first time I came under fire.
His gaze met mine and I ran over to him, wrenching the rifle from his hands. I had no intention of playing hero, but nor did I want to die in this godforsaken place because of the incompetence of my escorts. The third round landed even closer, but didn’t do any damage as we were all under cover. The way they were zeroing in on us would mean one of two things – either the shooter had us in line of sight or there was a spotter close by relaying our location. I checked that the rifle was loaded, and asked one of the troopers to run to the left and take cover behind a rock there. The man hesitated and I pointed the rifle at him, telling him I would shoot him myself if he didn’t do as I said.
As the man ran, I looked through the scope, sweeping the hills above, and sure enough, I had my man. The glint of the morning sun off his binoculars gave him away and he was so intent on following the running trooper that he didn’t notice that he was totally exposed to me from the chest up. That was all I needed. I put two rounds into him. Actually, I think I may have missed with the first round but certainly after the second he went down. I waited for thirty seconds and when no more mortar rounds came, I clambered up the hill to discover that my victim was wearing a Chinese Army uniform. What the hell is really going on here?
We resumed our trek and reached our destination, a small valley surrounded by armed checkpoints. I am sitting in a tent now waiting to meet their leader. One thing is for certain – after the ambush on the hill, my cover story of being a writer is blown. Whether that’s good or bad is something I’ll have to wait to find out.
Day 117. Introductions.
If I knew more about diplomacy and subterfuge, I’m sure I would have woken up today in a nice, luxurious cottage with a fireplace and thick bedding inside like the one I saw yesterday. Instead, I’m sitting in a torn-up tent back at the settlement, in what I’m coming to think of as the civilian quarter, freezing my butt off and thinking of what to do next.
Here’s what happened last night. I was led to the cottage where their leader lives. I was surprised to see that far from being an Army officer or a government bureaucrat, the man leading this community and with a small army at his disposal was a fat priest with ash smeared across his forehead. When I came into the cottage and saw him sprawled on a bed, he reminded me so much of Jabba the Hutt that I wanted to laugh. He was wearing saffron robes like priests do, and had a platter of fresh fruit placed in front of him, which made my stomach rumble in anticipation.
He was actually quite deferential to start with, and in a few seconds, it was apparent why. He thought that I was the owner of the huge bungalow where I had been holed up. He explained that his men were looking for a vantage point from which to establish a foothold in the city and the hill with the bungalow had been a perfect location. He offered me an apple that I dug into gratefully, and he mumbled on about his vision for recreating a perfect society the way it had been envisaged in our ancient scriptures, and how someone like me could help him do it.
He must have thought I was a millionaire or some government big-shot to be living in a bungalow like that. Idiot that I am, I told him I was just a writer. That certainly didn’t go down well, and he began asking me what I was doing there. One thing led to another and the bloody toad of an officer who had accompanied me came in, whispering into the priest’s ears. He stood up, and even though he came up only to my shoulder, when he waddled up to me and glared at me, I was scared. He asked the officer to grab my diary, and if I had any thoughts of resisting him, the two troopers behind me with rifles pointed at my back were quite persuasive.
He looked at the diary with a puzzled expression and it was apparent that Jabba didn’t know how to read English. The officer helped him out. I didn’t catch everything that was said, but the fact that I was an ex-soldier who just happened to be hiding in the bungalow was clear. I saw the officer’s eyes narrow when he came to the last page when I described him during the incident on the hill. Fuck him (and yes, if you’re that officer with your paws on my journal again, that means you).
I needed to stay alive and wanted my diary back so I apologized and groveled. I must be good at looking miserable, because they did give me the diary back and let me go without much further abuse. The officer did shoulder me hard once on the way back and I dutifully fell and apologized. One of these days, I’ll break his nose.
So here I am, shunted off in a filthy, torn tent. The priest said that he was angry that I had lied to him, and that he would call for me again to let me know if I could be of any use. Till then, he said that I was to live with the Shramiks. That’s Hindi for workers. What kind of place is this priest running here? I don’t have a very good feeling about this. At least they returned my notebook to me so I can keep scribbling away.
Day 119. A Worker’s Paradise.
Two days of living in this community and I’ve learnt a fair bit. The fat priest is called Bharti, or so he claims. According to him, he spent years meditating in the Himalayas, where he had a vision of undead demons overrunning the Earth. He also claims that God came to him in a vision and told him what to do. He claims that modern society is corrupted, and that’s why we are all being punished. He claims to be an expert in ancient scriptures, though I suspect he’s an illiterate village priest, and he says that our society needs to go back to how things were. In short, if I had a rupee for every one of these claims that he pulls out of his backside, I’d have a bungalow and a harem of my own.
I think he’s just another crooked `holy’ man out to exploit people, but then who am I to argue with him? He’s the one with the armed guards.
I learnt a lot more from Negi, a young guy who used to be a tour guide and now lives in the tent next to mine. He was the first person to talk to me, and I realized that he was not just being friendly. He was genuinely curious about what was happening outside and how he could get out. Most of the others I see here are resigned to what’s happening to them, but not Negi. If being here for more than a couple of months hasn’t broken his spirit, Negi seems like just the kind of person I need.
It seems the local ITBP commandant used to visit Bharti to get his fortune told and to pray to the Gods on his behalf, so he quickly came under his spell. Most of the troopers were from small villages and with little education in science so they also went along with Bharti’s rants. The civilians in the community, the so-called Shramiks, are a motley bunch. Residents from neighboring villages, stranded tourists, even a group of Thai pilgrims who had come to visit Bodhgaya and then thought of taking a detour to visit the Himalayas. Doesn’t matter where they came from or what they did. In the brave new world that our resident messiah Bharti is creating, they are all united in being Shramiks – and firmly at the bottom of the caste system Bharti has put in place.
Oh yes, it took the Indian government years of legislation and education to try and fight the caste system that had plagued us for so many years. Three months without law and order, and Bharti has set us back a few thousand years. At the top of the pecking order are the priests or Mahants, led of course by Bharti. Then come the soldiers or Yodhas, in other words the ITBP troopers. At the bottom are the Shramiks.
What that basically means is the Shramiks do all the work – washing clothes, gathering wood and so on. The Yodhas provide security but do no menial labor. I’m not very clear what Bharti and his friends do, but I suspect it involves a lot of lying around on beds and claiming to have visions.
Negi told me that the infected, whom I called Moreko, are called Danav by Bharti, after the mythological Hindi word for demons. I think I’ll stick with Moreko. The firepower of the IT
BP troopers seems to be the only insurance policy in town and the civilians haven’t exactly had a choice in the matter of whether they want to sign up. Negi told me that three men who tried to escape were killed. The official story was that the Moreko got them, but Negi saw one of the bodies with bullet holes in it. Murdering bastards. It also seems that there’s a rival group being formed a few kilometers away, under a Chinese officer. That would explain the ambush.
Oh yes, Negi also informed me that being the newcomer, I get latrine duty. I spent last evening shoveling shit from the latrine pits behind the Yodhas’ tents. A few more days of this, and I think I’ll rather take my chances with the Moreko.
Day 120. The Laws of Physics.
It’s past midnight and I’ve given up trying to sleep. My ribs hurt every time I lie down. Whatever damage the bastards caused is made many times worse by the cold. Thankfully Negi, God bless his soul, came into my tent with some hot soup and a blanket earlier in the evening.
Since I can’t sleep, I may as well write about what happened today. It started as another day of cutting wood, and yes, shoveling shit. The civvies (I refuse to call them Shramiks any more – just writing it makes it feel like I buy into Bharti’s BS) tend not to mix much, even though some of them have been together for close to two months, since Bharti started gathering his flock. I can’t blame them after what I saw today. Being treated like slaves is one thing, but this is something I would not have believed humans capable of doing to each other.
I had been among the civvies for three days, and it had never struck me until today that the troopers are all male – which is not surprising since they were probably deployed at a forward base without their families. The civvies were of course a mixed bunch, families and many young women. You can probably tell where this is going.
This morning I was near the troopers’ tents, carrying shovel-loads of shit and thinking of how I could possibly escape. The prospects didn’t look great. The forests were crawling with Moreko according to Negi and with my one good leg I wouldn’t fancy my chances in a pursuit over the hills, if I got that far. I was lost in my thoughts when I heard a woman’s scream.
Out of instinct more than anything else, I ran towards the sound to see a man lying on the ground, blood oozing from his nose, and pleading with the troopers to spare his daughter. Two troopers were pulling a teenage girl with them towards their tent. One of them looked at me, smiled and continued pulling the woman. That glance pissed me off. In one glance, he had dismissed me as impotent. He could rape at will, and I was powerless to stop him.
I walked up to the trooper who had smiled at me and asked him if he had taken a bath in the morning. He asked me if I was fucking crazy. Then I smacked him across the face with the shit-covered shovel. I’m guessing if he had indeed taken a bath, he needs another one now.
I hit him hard enough to knock him out and send the shovel flying from my grasp. That left trooper number two, who threw the girl to the ground and pulled out a knife from his belt. He was big and getting flabby around the waist and I remember watching his paunch flop up and down as he came towards me – it’s always the weird things you remember after you get the shit kicked out of you.
He was bigger than me, and he had a knife, yet in a second, he was on the ground. I’d like to take credit, but it was actually all physics. Much of unarmed combat is nothing more than an application of the laws of physics. Balance, leverage, counterbalance. In layman’s terms, spread your legs slightly to ground them, grab the fucker coming at you and use his weight against him to throw him over your shoulder. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Of course, physics felled me as well. As they say, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. I had barely begun to walk away, hoping I could avoid further problems, when four more troopers cornered me. Sure, I put up a fight and I think I broke one of their noses, but hey, I’m not Jackie Chan and real life is a not a movie. I got beaten to a pulp and was kicked senseless till an officer asked them to leave me.
But you know what pisses me off even more than the beating, it’s what these fuckers have reduced people to. The girl I had tried to save came to my tent earlier and thanked me, which was okay. Then she told me that it was not the first time the troopers had taken her, and offered herself to me if I could save her. I don’t cry easy, but I wanted to scream in rage. How could they do this to ordinary, decent people? Is our veneer of civilization as fickle as a power switch? Turn off the lights, and we become monsters.
Day 121. Reunion.
My entries are getting longer. Maybe it’s because I don’t have much to do other than my chores and the occasional chat with Negi, but it’s also because I’m thinking much more than I did holed up in the bungalow. Then it was just me, wondering if I was the only surviving human, thinking of the Moreko down there and planning how I could survive as long as possible. Now that it’s clear that other people have survived, I’m not so sure I’m happy I found them. It would have been better to die alone in that bungalow – of cold, disease or even a bloody Moreko bite (actually, I’m not so sure about that one) – than to have to live in the kind of world people like Bharti are creating, one which brings out the very worst of humans.
And he is not alone. As I’ve mentioned, there is another group – a mixture of Chinese soldiers and others who arrived in the area a few weeks ago. They have some armed men and heavier weapons including mortars, but the ace up Bharti’s sleeve is the solitary chopper his men have. Negi told me that the ITBP commandant died in an early firefight, and Bharti is now the supreme leader, running things from his cottage in the valley. The two sides have an uneasy truce of sorts – a cold war, you could call it. If they cross each other, shots are invariably exchanged, but they don’t seek out battle.
A big reason for that is the fact that the Moreko are spreading. Bharti actually had it easy for the first few weeks – the disease would have spread much faster in the more congested cities. Out here in the middle of nowhere, it would take some time. But as the Moreko spread, they would reach outlying communities, and that’s precisely what happened earlier today.
Word must have gotten around about how I stood up for the girl, because when I walked out of my tent this morning, clutching my ribs, the civvies looked at me differently. A couple of them smiled, more just nodded but almost all of them looked me in the eye, acknowledging my presence when just a day ago, they would have looked through me. Not that it really mattered – I wasn’t exactly looking to contest an election, but it did have one tangible benefit. I was off shit duty.
Negi took me to the edge of the camp where we were to gather firewood for the troopers. I had a small axe and when a trooper who had beaten me walked by and sneered at me, I was tempted to use it on him. Negi must have read my mind and held me back. I’m glad he did – there were four more troopers around with guns. Any satisfaction would have been short-lived.
As we chopped away, I learned that Negi was a college student in Delhi and used to come back home to Sikkim during the holidays and work as a tour guide to earn some extra money. He’s one of those people you instantly like. Ready smile, pleasant personality, always eager to please. If I sound like I know the type well, I should. I’m the exact opposite.
I had just chopped off a branch when I came face to face with a Moreko. Just like that. One moment I was telling Negi about my screwed-up marriage and the next I was staring at a face that looked like it had been put through a meat grinder. Face torn asunder like an open envelope on one side, one eye missing, and blood everywhere. I’ve seen more than my fair share of Moreko, but this was one especially messed-up specimen.
It was the first time I had seen a Moreko in days. I did what any sane human would have done. I screamed, threw my axe at the fucker and ran, followed by Negi. We stopped when we got to the camp and a dozen troopers were headed our way, rifles at the ready. I turned to see the Moreko shuffling our way. The troopers nailed him with bullet after bullet, spinning him around like a puppet on a s
tring, till he lay unmoving on the ground. The troopers whooped in celebration, but it was pretty short-lived because twenty more Moreko followed.
I noticed something that I had noticed earlier in the ambush on the hill. These troopers acted tough enough when they were around unarmed civilians, but it looked like most of them had no real combat experience. A few of them fired, but they were panicking and most of their shots went wide. As the remaining Moreko advanced, the troopers retreated towards the tents. I remember thinking what idiots they were. If the Moreko got in among the unarmed civilians and bit any of them, we were in deep shit.
That was when reinforcements arrived. The officer who had accompanied me to Bharti was there, leading a dozen more troopers. They took positions and began firing. In the open, against armed men, Moreko didn’t stand much of a chance and the firing lasted all of fifteen minutes. The Moreko were wiped out, but all of us were shaken by the knowledge that the Moreko were now close at hand.
Bharti has called a meeting of the entire community tonight to discuss the day’s events. Let’s see what the toad has to say.
Day 122. The Promised Land.
Bharti may be a crook, and quite possibly a murderer if talk of missing and shot escapees is true, but he does know how to lead people. I sat huddled with the civvies as he came to the camp and got up on a raised platform. As he began speaking, I couldn’t help but admire how he had all these people with him, in spite of all the horrors they had to endure. Fear was a part of it, no doubt, and as Bharti spoke, rifle-toting troopers surrounded us. But if you want to truly enslave someone, there is something even more powerful than fear, and that is hope. That hope was what Bharti was doling out, and as I looked around, I could see the majority of people with me were willing to go along with him.
