by Dhar, Mainak
‘Maybe it’s nothing. I thought I heard many engines in the distance. They didn’t sound like cars.’
Vince chipped in.
‘I doubt Zeus would send a patrol out so far into territory it does not control. If it’s a bunch of bandits we can more than handle them.’
Perhaps Vince was right. After all, he knew more about what was happening in his land than Alice did, so she tried to focus on the mission ahead. If the forests around the bunker held thousands of Biters, Zeus would need to bring in heavy weapons and many troops to fight their way through. While Alice thought she could control Biters, doing so in the middle of a battle zone would be difficult. As she thought that, she unconsciously tapped the book at her side. Their only real hope was to get there before Zeus did, and she had no idea if they would make it in time.
Her thoughts were brought back to the present when Josh slammed on the brakes.
‘What’s going on?’
The Jeep in front of them had stopped and the driver, Jamal, had got out and was walking to the side of the road. Cynthia shouted out from the back.
‘Hell of a time for him to take a leak.’
Alice felt something. Call it instinct, call it paranoia. She tugged at Josh’s arm.
‘Back up! Something’s not…’
She didn’t have time to complete her sentence before two rockets slammed into the Jeep in front of them, exploding it in a fireball.
‘RPGs!’
Vince’s scream was cut short as bullets pinged into the side of the Jeep and he ducked for cover. Josh backed the Jeep up at high speed as another RPG narrowly missed them. Alice had no idea how many attackers they were up against, but remaining in the vehicle made them sitting ducks for whoever was out there firing rockets at them. Josh was still backing up when Satish shouted from the back.
‘They’ve blocked the road with a truck. We can’t go back.’
Josh slammed the brakes, and in that instant, Alice knew what she had to do. She grabbed her rifle and pushed the door open.
‘Get out! We fight on foot.’
Bunny Ears was looking at her, perhaps wondering what was going on, and she certainly didn’t have time to explain it all, so she pushed him out and jumped out of the Jeep. She had barely made it a few feet when another rocket exploded on the road just in front of the Jeep, showering Alice with shrapnel. Something sliced through her shoulder and she was thrown forward by the impact of the blast.
When she got up to her knees, the Jeep was covered in smoke and Bunny Ears was lying prone a few feet in front of her. Men’s voices rang out, and above them all, the guttural laughter of a man who was calling her name.
‘Alice, come to the Jabberwock.’
Alice grabbed her rifle and rolled into the undergrowth on the side of the road as the first bullets pinged off the road behind her. She brought her rifle up, ready to fight.
***
NINE
Another rocket snaked out towards the Jeep and Alice screamed as the Jeep exploded. All her friends and companions, gone.
Bunny Ears was not dead, indeed a Biter could only be permanently put down by a shot to the head, but he was bleeding from shrapnel in his back. He pulled her deeper into the undergrowth. His eyes were vacant, but as Alice thought back to the moments before the first rocket, she could have sworn that Bunny Ears had pushed her ahead. Her old companion had taken a lot of the shrapnel that would otherwise have hit her.
It just reinforced what she already knew—that far from being mindless monsters, Biters could show loyalty and friendship, in many ways in a more selfless way than humans. That made her hate Zeus and its masters with an even greater intensity, because their hold over humans depended on demonizing Biters and pitting humans against them.
She didn’t know how many attackers she was up against, but she would never go down without a fight. The man’s calling out to her had told her that this was not a chance ambush. Someone was specifically targeting her, and she would make him regret having chosen her as a target.
Movement came to her right and she raised her rifle, only to hear a hoarse whisper.
‘It’s Beaver. I’ve got Baker with me.’
‘Are you okay? What about the others?’
‘We’re a bit cut up, but can fight. I don’t think Satish made it. Vince was thrown out of the Jeep with Tom, but I think they’re okay.’
Alice took that in. Satish, the Zeus officer who had left a life of security to fight in the Deadland with her and her friends. They said that Biters didn’t feel any emotion, but Alice felt it all right. Another comrade gone.
Cynthia told Josh to be quiet, and they heard boots approaching, crunching on the gravel. No doubt their attackers were closing in to finish the job. Alice moved back a bit more and now she could see Josh and Cynthia. Josh winked at her, one of his eyes closed shut with blood flowing freely from a cut to the forehead.
Alice was now about fifty feet away from the Jeep and she looked through the scope on her rifle, trying to see the attackers and her companions. Through the smoke that obscured the still-burning Jeep, she saw some movement.
There!
Vince was sitting on the ground, holding his stomach and slumped over. Tom was next to him, with his sniper rifle by his side. One of his legs was bent at an awkward angle. What she saw next made her get up and start towards the Jeep before Josh tackled her and brought her down.
‘Alice, no! If we lose you, we lose everything!’
‘They’re trapped. I saw John with his legs trapped under the Jeep, but he’s moving. Tom’s leg looks broken and I don’t know how badly Vince is hurt.’
‘Alice, listen to me. If you die on this highway, it’s all over. They’ll send a Snark to Wonderland and destroy your people. Then they’ll wipe us out. All that we’ve fought for, all the friends we’ve lost, will be for nothing.’
Alice had seen near and dear ones die before. She had seen her father fall while making a last stand against Zeus in their settlement back in the Deadland, and she had seen her mother and sister die in an air raid. But seeing a horror repeatedly did not necessarily make it easier to bear. As Alice watched through her scope while a line of men appeared on the highway, approaching the Jeep with assault rifles in their hands, she felt a rage she had not felt in a long time.
She would make these men pay dearly.
***
‘Your leg doesn’t look too good, Broker.’
‘So says the man who’s got his legs under the Jeep.’
Vince looked at the two men and shook his head.
‘How the hell can you guys joke at a time like this?’
Tom looked at Vince and smiled, though Vince could see he was in a lot of pain from the grimace that soon overshadowed the smile.
‘Flyboy, if you can walk, get into those bushes and help Alice get to those damn Snarks or Boojums or whatever the hell they are.’
‘I can’t…’
‘You have to, Marine. Only you can fly that chopper to get her there in time. We’re done here. There’s no way we can get John out in time, and with my leg I’ll just be excess baggage. I’ll try and slow them down, but you have to get away now.’
Vince tried to pass on his assault rifle but Tom shook his head, pointing to the sniper rifle he had cradled in his hand. As Vince scrambled to the undergrowth using the smoke for cover, Tom turned to face their attackers, wincing at the pain he felt in his legs. He clasped hands with his old friend John.
‘So this is it. I only wish we could have had one last beer.’
John coughed, and blood seeped out of the edges of his mouth.
‘Shut up, Broker, and give ’em hell. I’ll wait here with a little going-away present for them.’
Tom Riley dragged himself forward and then brought his rifle up to his shoulder. Six men walked towards the Jeep. They were laughing, their rifles casually held at their sides. They thought they had already killed their quarry. Tom would teach them that careless men had a pretty short lifesp
an around here.
Jabber had sent forward six men to mop up anyone who remained, but if the Biter witch was alive, they were to keep her for him. He had kept his ten hardened fighters back with him—no point in risking them for what was turning out to be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. They had been assisted in the ambush by a dozen local boys, not part of his core group, but local gang members who wanted to curry favor with Jabber. They were at least of the faith, and Jabber wanted this to be their initiation. For all their brave talk, they had never really fought in battle, and he had impressed upon them that looting unarmed civilians did not count as a man’s battle. All the rockets that had been fired so far had been fired by his men, and he had sneered at the gang leader, a tall black man called Mohammed, that now at least he and his boys could prove that they were indeed men enough to be a part of Jabber’s group.
Vince came up to them, and he crouched beside Alice.
‘We need to get going.’
‘I can thin their numbers a bit.’
Vince held her shoulder.
‘Tom and John stayed back so that you could make it. Here in the open, with just a few rifles, we cannot fight all of them. I reckon there are twenty of them, many with rockets, and there are just four of us, and of course Bunny Ears. We need to get to some cover and even if we have to make a stand, let’s find a place where we can defend ourselves.’
Vince was right, but none of that made it easy to leave two good men to die. As Alice slowly lowered her rifle and began to turn away, Vince said to her, ‘People say that what makes you special is the fact that you’re half Biter, or that old book you carry. They’re wrong. What makes you special, what makes any one of us special, is what we carry inside. We’ll make these bastards pay, but now we get as far away as we can and find out a way to get to the airfield.’
As Alice crawled through the undergrowth, half dragging a reluctant Bunny Ears, the first shot rang out.
‘Did you get him?’
Tom looked at John, who looked pale and seemed to have trouble keeping his eyes open.
‘Of course I got him.’
The five remaining young men crouched, their rifles up, wondering what they were walking into as they saw their leader’s head blown apart by a single shot. They knew they could not run with Jabber and his men behind them. One of them fired his AK on full auto at the Jeep, spraying it with bullets. As he stopped to see his handiwork and reload, a bullet took him in the throat. As he fell, his friends began to lose their nerve. Jabber screamed aloud.
‘Cowards! It’s one man with a gun. Nobody else is firing there. Finish them!’
Tom smiled and took another attacker, this time a single shot that hit him in the chest. As the man slumped to the ground, Tom put another bullet in his head.
‘No bloody point saving bullets now, is there, Barrister?’
When he didn’t get a reply, he turned to see that John was lying motionless, clutching a satchel to his chest. Tom spat at the approaching men, who now seemed to have at least overcome their paralysis and were taking cover on the side of the road and firing at him.
‘Stupid fucking gangbangers. All they know is how to spray and pray. Time for a little shooting lesson.’
Tom waited till one of them popped up to fire and pulled the trigger. A sudden spasm of pain in his leg made him jerk his hand and his shot went wide, grazing the man on the shoulder. As the man shouted and took cover, Tom tried to concentrate and blank out the pain. He didn’t know how far Alice had got, and he didn’t know how long he could keep firing, but he hoped that he had given her enough time.
Jabber grabbed an RPG launcher from one of his men.
‘That should teach me to send rats to do a man’s job.’
He took aim at the Jeep and fired.
Tom had raised his rifle to look for another target when the rocket hit the Jeep just a few feet in front of him, showering him with hot shrapnel. The Broker went down, and never got up again.
Jabber handed back the launcher and looked through his scope. The Jeep was a mangled, fiery wreck, and a sniper rifle had been thrown clear by the last explosion. He called out to the three men who were cowering on the side of the road.
‘They’re dead. Unless you are so pathetic that corpses can beat you, go and check the Jeep.’
The three men approached the Jeep cautiously, and when they reached it, they saw a man lying dead near the side, and two more bodies inside the Jeep. A man was lying trapped under the Jeep, his legs crushed by it. One of the men poked him with his rifle.
‘Is he dead?’
John Garner opened his eyes and raised his head, wincing at the pain. His vision was blurry and every time he took a breath, he felt a stabbing pain in his chest. The man above him looked on with eyes widening in surprise and fear. John whispered as he put his hand inside the satchel, ‘Gotcha.’
Then the Broker detonated his last bomb.
***
Alice paused at the explosion and turned as a pillar of smoke rose in the distance. Vince urged her on.
‘Come on, we need to put some distance between us and them.’
She continued running through the dense undergrowth, with Bunny Ears a few feet behind her. Vince and Cynthia were right next to her, while Josh brought up the rear, making sure they had not been followed.
They stopped after more than twenty minutes of non-stop running. Alice could keep going, one of the advantages that being half Biter gave her, but Vince was winded as he bent, his arms clutching his sides, trying to catch his breath. Josh was on the radio.
‘Beaver here. They’re not following us yet, but it’s about to get dark and we won’t get far on foot. Best to hole up for the night and try our luck tomorrow.’
Alice did not like the idea of staying put in the dark, but there was no option. As soon as they found some sanctuary, Vince would take out the radio from his backpack and try and establish contact with nearby resistance forces to come with some transport.
Cynthia pointed to a small hillock a few hundred meters away.
‘That looks like a good place. At least we’ll have the advantage of terrain.’
Alice did not share her optimism.
‘It also means that we’re trapped up there.’
***
Jabber roared in frustration, grabbing one of his men by the scruff of his neck.
‘Which one of you idiots thought these sons of goats were good enough to be a part of our mission?’
At another time, his men would have shared a chuckle behind his back at how, despite all his years in the US, Jabber lapsed into abuses that must have made sense where he came from, but sounded absurd in English. However, this would not have been a good time to laugh at Jabber, especially when he had his knife out and murder in his eyes.
Jabber threw the man down to the ground and examined the burnt wreckage of the Jeep. All six of the gang members had perished, learning that shooting at unarmed civilians and pretending to be tough gangbangers was very different from taking on men and women who knew what they were doing. Of course that was a lesson they would have ample time to reflect upon in Hell.
‘Did we at least get the witch?’
The two men he had sent to examine the wreckage hesitated and he screamed out aloud.
‘Are you fucking deaf? Did we get the witch?’
One of the men, Malik, a combat veteran of Afghanistan who had been in Guantánamo with Jabber, went ahead. As he poked around the wreckage with his rifle, he paused and then looked back at Jabber.
‘Best as I can tell, there are at most three bodies here of the enemy, other than the imbeciles we sent after them. All of the bodies seem like adult men.’
Jabber swore again, this time under his breath, now conscious that letting his men see him so frustrated and angry was not helping. He rallied his men and sheathed his knife.
‘Come on, the witch could not have gone very far. Malik, take two men on bikes and go along the highway. I’ll take the others and sp
read out in the bushes.’
As Jabber strode into the undergrowth, his men exchanged glances. The grim expression on their leader’s face told them that he would not rest till his blade had tasted blood.
***
‘I think I see one of the sons of bitches. There to the East.’
Alice followed Josh’s cue and took a look through her scope. She saw a solitary man with an RPG launcher slung across his back and a rifle in his hands about five hundred meters away. As she thought of how Tom, John and Satish had died, her finger unconsciously began to press down on the trigger. With some effort, she forced herself to not open fire. Killing this one man might help her avenge her fallen comrades to some extent, but it would also mean exposing themselves to a frontal assault from an enemy that outnumbered and outgunned them.
Vince crouched beside her. ‘Maybe they’ll think we got away and move on. Don’t worry, we will have plenty of opportunities to take revenge.’
For all of Alice’s misgivings about their hiding place, Cynthia had chosen well. There were five or six small hillocks in the area, and the cave they were nestled in was hardly visible from the ground, a fact that Josh had confirmed by going down after they had all climbed up. Vince had established contact with a local resistance cell, only to be told that they would send vehicles once the Zeus air patrols ceased. Zeus drones were unusually active over the area. Alice did not think that a coincidence.
Cynthia pointed to another man who was walking into view, and muttered under her breath.
‘Go on, go on…’
Alice did not think their attackers would give up so easily. As she looked at the small cave where they were lodged, she also realized that they could not afford to hide indefinitely. While they hid here, Zeus forces were no doubt on their way to recover the Snarks based on Bellman’s map.
***
