The Crocodile's Jaws: An Alice in Deadland Adventure (Alice, No.7)

by Dhar, Mainak

  He didn't know how much Bunny Ears registered, but at least Bunny Ears held back while John dashed across the street to take cover behind an abandoned and burnt-out newspaper kiosk. He could now see into the complex through one of the gaps in the wall and he spotted several people inside, coming in and out of the main building. Two men came out, got into the jeep and drove off. Thirty minutes later, they were back, carrying a box. As the jeep drove past, bouncing on the ruined road, something fell out its back. John picked it up to see that it was a box of pills.

  'Bloody cough medicine. I'm sure they're not running a charitable hospital in there.'

  He got back to where Bunny Ears was, and knelt beside him.

  'There are at least twenty people in there, but most seem to be workers. I spotted maybe five armed men other than the two guards on the tower. You know what we've got here, buddy? This is a factory making drugs that our scaly-skinned friends seem to be high on. I don't know why, and I don't know how they're linked to the men who took Alice, but they will be the key to finding out. I wish I had some more reinforcements to help out, but for now, it looks like it's just you and me.'

  Bunny Ears looked at John, and John could have sworn the Biter grinned. Bunny Ears held out his good hand, as if motioning for John to wait, and then trotted off.

  'Imagine. I spend all the last years trying to kill Biters and now I have to take orders from one.'

  ***

  Neha was back, ostensibly to tend to Zohar's injuries, but as she leaned over Zohar, she whispered to Alice.

  'If you can do half the things the men here say you can, you can get us freedom at last.'

  'Us?'

  Alice was surprised that there were others on board who were captives of the captain and his men. Neha further lowered her voice, as if afraid that giving voice to her hopes would attract the attention of the armed men just outside the door.

  'There are two cooks, three cleaners and me. Not to mention the dozens of people outside to get food and supplies. All little more than slaves.'

  'What do you do, Neha?'

  A look flitted across Neha's face, a mixture of shame and fury, and it was apparent what an attractive woman like her would be doing on a boat like this.

  'I am not the first one, or the only one. The captain fancies me, so I stay on the boat, and if I do not submit, he says he will kill my father who works in his drug factory on the mainland. Please promise me one thing, Alice.'

  As Neha gripped Alice's shoulders, she looked straight into her eyes.

  'No matter what happens, no matter if I live or die, please avenge the hundreds whose lives have been ruined by killing the monster who calls himself the captain of this ship.'

  As Neha walked out of the room, Alice was left sitting there, staring at the wall, thinking of all the ways in which people managed to destroy each other's lives. Tyranny did not require a group of powerful men like the Executive Committee or the Central Committee; it did not need an army of mercenaries like Zeus to enforce it. Instead, tyranny lay coiled in the heart of every man, whether the captain or Robertson, waiting only for the excuse of motive or opportunity to uncoil itself. And servitude lay not in hiding from air strikes or Zeus raids, but from the innate willingness to submit to brute force in every free man and woman. The ability to shove that aside, to let the desire for freedom override the need for self-preservation, was at the heart of every struggle against tyranny. Alice had fought huge battles before, and now she would have to fight again, for herself, for Zohar, for Neha and for her parents and others who were caught up in the grip of the captain and his men.

  Nikolai appeared at the door.

  'Okay, we've set up the video link on your tablet. It's showtime.'

  Alice walked to the bridge, once again ringed by armed men. The captain knew that was not the most powerful leverage he held over her. That was instead the gun that Nikolai had pointed at Zohar's head and the missile that would obliterate Wonderland at his command.

  Alice picked up the tablet and within a few seconds, Danish's face appeared. Arjun was behind him.

  'Alice, we saw your mail and it's amazing that you found someone there. People with technology and tools that we could use. A naval installation, you said? How many of them are there? Is the airfield there in working condition?'

  Alice had sent the mail on the captain's instructions. She cringed at the fact that she was deceiving those who counted on her, those she had vowed to keep safe. Yet there was no option. She just hoped to buy herself a bit more time so that she could plan an escape and destroy the captain and his ship.

  'Yes, they have a lot of supplies and would be thrilled to be a part of a city like ours. The airport here is still unusable, but now that they know that their days of isolation are over, I'm sure they will get it repaired.'

  She thought back to what John had said—about the stretch of highway potentially being used as a landing zone. She had not yet revealed that to the captain, and he had not yet thought of the possibility. He had instead put several men to work on trying to see what they could salvage of the airport. There were a couple of former engineers among the local crews he used to get supplies, and they had said that they would need heavy machinery and even then, it would take a month or more to get even one runway open.

  What Arjun said next made Alice flinch and the captain gripped the table in front of him so hard his knuckles reddened.

  'President Robertson was on the line with us yesterday and when he heard of where you are, he told me that his men have an idea. It seems their satellites have shown a large stretch of highway near Karachi that is clean of debris and could be used as a landing zone. He is sending a transport aircraft to land there and get people out.'

  Alice remembered John having passed on that information to Robertson, and she had no doubt that he was sending a strike force to take out the captain. When the tablet shut off, the captain shouted to no one in particular.

  'That bastard Robertson thinks he is smart. He is dealing with me, but at the same time is double-crossing me and sending forces to attack me.'

  Then he leaned over the table to look Alice in the eye.

  'You are already proving very useful. Thanks to you I know what my enemies are planning and when they land, we will ambush them, kill them all and take their aircraft to our new home in Wonderland. Of course, Robertson is bluffing on one count. If he did have operational satellites, he would have known all this sooner. Was it you who gave him that idea?'

  He looked closely at Alice's reaction and turned to Nikolai, who was standing at the doorway, holding Zohar, his right hand looped around the boy's neck.

  'Nikolai, it wasn't her. She's many things, but she is not trained in such matters. The man with her was a Special Forces operator from what I gather from the mail she sent her people earlier, and he is out there. I cannot risk having someone like him on the loose, helping guide in Robertson's men. Find him and kill him.'

  ***

  It was now just past sunset, and John kept taking occasional glances through his scope in order to get a better idea of the defenses at the place. A lamp had been lit in the guard tower, and he could see more lamps lit inside the complex. Clearly the workers at this factory did not get much of a break. It looked like they were going to be working through the night.

  The jeep appeared again, and this time there was a blond man on board, together with two local gunmen and the driver. In the back of the jeep there was a very different sort of cargo from what John had seen earlier—human cargo. The two local toughs dragged out an old man and a young woman, who appeared to be his daughter from the way the man tried to shield her from the men. One of the men slapped him and he fell. The blond man walked up and grabbed the man who had slapped the prisoner and threw him down effortlessly in a shoulder throw.

  'You fool. We got him to work here because he was a Doctor and knows more about making this shit than the others. Hurting him won't help us. I'll have the girl first and then you can enjoy yourself.
She's from the Crocodile—the captain told me that she was talking to the Biter witch and sent her here as punishment.'

  It was clear to John what was going to happen if he didn't intervene. He was alone, he was outgunned and the chances were slim that he would walk away alive. Still, he could not sit still while a woman was raped. A woman who had been in contact with Alice and could lead him to her.

  What the blond man said next chilled John.

  'The captain says that there is only the one American special forces man out here somewhere. I don't want to have to look for him in the darkness, so stay sharp and we'll have some fun tonight and go hunting for him tomorrow morning.'

  John was certainly not going to wait around to be hunted down by these men, and he was not about to give up. That left only one option—to take the initiative and become the hunter rather than the hunted.

  The old man lunged at the blond man who sidestepped him, sending him sprawling to the ground. The men laughed as the old man scrambled on the ground to get up, and the blond man held a rifle to his head, addressing the girl.

  'I'm trying to keep him alive. Tell your fool of a father that I will shoot him if he tries anything.'

  The girl was now on her knees, pleading with her father, and she kissed him on his forehead before she was yanked to her feet by one of the thugs.

  'Come on, let's get you inside so that Vasili Sir can have a go, and then you're all ours.'

  The girl's face was suddenly splattered with a spray of blood as the man holding her fell, his head blown apart by the bullet John had fired.

  The other men scrambled for cover behind the jeep and the two men on the guard tower began firing wildly, most of their shots coming nowhere near John. As bad as their aim was, John could not afford to let the enemy have the high ground, which would severely restrict his freedom of movement, so he put two aimed bursts into the guard tower. One of the men was hit and tottered for a second before falling off to the ground below where his dead body landed with a sickening thud. The other man lived only a few seconds more as John took aim again and fired, hitting him in the neck and sending him slumping down on the floor of the guard tower. The driver and the man who had been called Vasili had disappeared into the building, dragging the girl and the old man with them. The remaining gunman was behind the jeep, firing the occasional shot in John's direction.

  John knew what was to come next, and six armed men ran out of the gate, taking cover behind the jeep and nearby buildings. He got one before the others disappeared behind cover, but a firefight against five opponents was always going to be a losing proposition. It would be a matter of time before they had him pinned down and one or more men flanked him and got him.

  John shot another man as he leaned out from behind cover to take aim and then jerked his own head back as a bullet struck the wall inches from his face. His face stung from the spray of bricks that had cut it open and he could taste his own blood as it seeped down from his cheek and nose.

  There was a momentary lull in the firing, perhaps because his attackers were trying to move to new positions to flank him, when he heard the unmistakable roars and shuffles of a group of Biters on the move.

  He leaned out to see at least a dozen Biters appear out of the darkness beyond the far wall of the factory. With the guards on the tower dead, nobody had spotted them coming. Leading them was Bunny Ears.

  The gunman nearest the Biters had no time to react before several pairs of hands reached out for him and dragged him down kicking and screaming as teeth tore into him.

  The three remaining men saw that the odds were now suddenly turned against them and began to retreat towards the gate. One of them fired, hitting a Biter in the head before John dropped him. The other two disappeared behind the gate as John sprinted across the street and into the compound. As he passed Bunny Ears, he mumbled to himself.

  'I never thought the most welcome sight I'd see was a bloody horde of Biters.'

  ***

  NINE

  Zohar whimpered in a corner, clutching at his face where Nikolai had slapped him. Alice felt a fury the likes of which she had rarely felt before. If Nikolai had been in front of her, she would have killed him then and there, the consequences be damned. With an intense effort of will, she stopped herself from launching herself at the old man who brought in the tepid soup that was going to be the only food Zohar would get. The old man looked apologetically at her, and Alice realized that he was as much a prisoner as they were and lashing out at him would serve no purpose.

  Her ruse of co-operating with the captain while learning more about his plans and plotting a potential escape had worked well for a couple of days. In that time, Neha had become more and more open with them and had told Alice much about what the captain and his crew had been doing. What Alice had heard had convinced her that there was no way she could let a man like him take over Wonderland.

  The captain and his ship had arrived in Karachi, much to the bewilderment of the human survivors, who had woken up one day to see this behemoth rising up from beneath the waves. While the crew's numbers were limited, with their military training and superior weapons, they had soon cleared out the local bandits and established a zone free of bandits and Biters alike around the old port. However, human survivors who had mistakenly seen them as saviors were to be proven tragically wrong. The captain was a man who sought power more than anything else, and in Karachi, he found a new means of exerting that.

  Nikolai had apparently been involved in the drug trade in the Russian mafia before the Rising, and when he and his men found several abandoned pharmaceutical factories in the city, they began putting their plan into motion. They made drugs which had in the days before the Rising been called krokodil, or crocodile, a potent mixture of medication, thinner and gasoline. It made the people who took them hopelessly addicted and dependent on the captain for their supplies. Being in the submarine far from shore made the captain invulnerable to anyone who tried to contest his grip over the city, and he used his gangs of addicts to round up food, supplies, people to work his factories and more pills and syrups to use as raw material for the krokodil.

  Alice had been with the captain on the bridge reading the latest updates from Arjun when she had heard a commotion. Neha had been caught smuggling fresh food to Zohar and under interrogation she had revealed that she had been talking to Alice about the captain and his plans. The retribution had been instant and harsh—Neha had been beaten and driven from the boat, to be handed over to the captain's local thugs for their entertainment, and the captain had discarded all pretense of civility. Now it was a simple enough transaction—Alice would comply with his wishes or he would kill everyone she cared about. Nikolai had taken that as a license to inflict his own brand of torture—he would push and prod her, stab her and laugh when she bled, saying that it was fun to have a personal Biter as a punching bag. Today when Zohar had stepped in between them to try and shield Alice, Nikolai had slapped him and kicked him.

  Alice sat, stewing, knowing that the only way she could make things right was to kill the captain and destroy this ship before it launched missiles at Wonderland. Nothing else would save her people from ruin, and she wasn't even sure if life under an evil tyrant like the captain would be any better than being wiped out in a nuclear fireball. Then there was the matter of Robertson and his agenda. In one fell swoop, the Homeland, which she had taken to be a reliable ally, had become a potential danger. In his hunger to acquire the submarine, Robertson was continuing to pretend to negotiate with the captain, but she had come to know from Arjun that the aircraft from the Homeland, laden with soldiers, was about to land at Wonderland in two days, en route to Karachi. The captain had made Alice reveal the location of the stretch of highways where they could land, and was planning to ambush them and then use the plane to get to Wonderland.

  Alice was overwhelmed by the dangers she and her people faced, and unlike dangers she had faced before which could be destroyed with a gun or knife, she could see no way o
ut. Alice had once asked her father, long ago in their settlement in the Deadland, why people continued to pray to their gods when clearly there was no method to the madness that had enveloped their world, no divine plan that could explain the ruin of so many billions of people, no proof that prayer could bring any more safety than a loaded gun. Her dad had looked at her, smiling in the easy, warm way that came naturally to him, and told her, 'Alice, God is not some omnipotent being up there in the sky, waiting to settle our affairs for us. God is the courage in our own hearts to do the right thing even when it may not be the easy thing, the kindness to help others and the love that keeps us together even in times like this. Stilling your mind, blocking out all the worries, sometimes helps you connect with that part of yourself. That's why I pray.'

  As with many things her father had told her when she had been younger, she had not fully understood it then, but now was beginning to appreciate it. Alice didn't know how to pray, or even which god would accept the prayers of a half-Biter, but she knelt and closed her eyes and thought of her parents, her sister, all those whom she had cared for and lost, and hoped that she could discover the courage needed within her or get any ideas on what to do.

  When she opened her eyes, she felt a pang of despair as she realized she had no new bright ideas.

  Then Alice laid aside all her skepticism and prayed to whatever god would care to hear her, and asked for some help.

  ***

  John was on autopilot, acting on training from years ago, honed in distant battlefields like Somalia and Libya, all coming to him through pure instinct and muscle reflex. Approach wall, cover flank, identify enemy by gun in hand, double tap to the chest and head, move on to next target. Within ten minutes, he had cleared the factory, and without the advantage of massed numbers or surprise, the thugs he was up against were slaughtered. Six of them lay dead around the factory floor as more than a dozen workers huddled in a corner. Another gunman peeked out from behind a wall, and judging that discretion was the better part of valor when going up one on one against John, he made a run for the door. John spotted him and turned to fire, but the man ran straight into Bunny Ears, who snapped his neck.