by Mainak Dhar
'Goddamit, Colonel! You've been patrolling these areas for years. Don't tell me you don't know where these people can be.'
Dewan looked Appleseed straight in the eye, and waited for a few seconds before replying, as if weighing how best to phrase his reply.
'Sir, General Chen insists on flying in Red Guards straight from Tibet or mainland China who know nothing of the local people or terrain. That's why they walk into one ambush after another. If they let me and my boys get a free reign, we may actually produce better results.'
Appleseed turned on Dewan with a fury. 'Colonel, the reason he does that is because he is not sure whether any of the local troops can be trusted. I hope I don't have to remind you of the number of desertions we've seen over the past couple of weeks.'
Dewan thought of how to reply to that, and when he did, Appleseed noticed that the colonel was not looking him in the eye.
'General, the boys are no longer sure of what the truth is. These posters from the Deadland are sending out messages that challenge the very reason we are doing what we are. I haven't really seen the Central Committee counter those with any compelling arguments other than to censor the posts and send out Red Guards against locations where the posts were supposedly uploaded.'
'Colonel, I hope you realize that such statements about the Central Committee border on treason!'
Appleseed noticed that Dewan did not flinch under the implicit threat, and an idea came to him.
'Colonel, would you say that anyone not in approved settlements can be considered at the very least a sympathizer, if not an active collaborator with the counter-revolutionaries among the humans and no more deserving of mercy than the damned Biters?'
Dewan was taken aback by Appleseed lapsing into the lingo used by Chen and his Chinese masters, and his hesitation led Appleseed to press ahead.
'I take it that this Alice and her cohorts could not move so freely in the Deadland if the remaining human settlements there did not at least implicitly support her?'
Dewan did not know where this was going and he knew that anything he said would not help his cause, so he just stayed silent as Appleseed continued.
'So, Colonel Dewan, from your response, I take it that anyone still in the Deadland in unauthorized settlements is probably a human sympathizer of this Alice or have been subverted by the Biters and their supposed Queen. For years we have resisted taking active measures against the Biters in the Deadland because we wanted to minimize collateral damage among the human settlements there. Perhaps that equation has now changed.'
Dewan felt a chill go up his spine as he realized where this was going. Appleseed picked up his radio to call Chen.
'General Chen, I have a plan that may help us eradicate the threat we face once and for all.’
As Dewan heard Appleseed outline his plan, he was seized with panic. He had to do something to warn Alice and the others, but there was no way he could do that without compromising himself.
***
'It's her!'
Over the last couple of weeks, Alice had slowly got used to this kind of reception whenever she walked into a human settlement in the Deadland. While Nikhil had kept up a relentless barrage of messages aimed at the Zeus troops, Alice had never really accounted for how fast the news would spread among the settlements. Most of the deserters found their way back to their settlements, and there they shared tales of the lies they had been told, of how the Central Committee, far from being a benevolent power, represented forces that had perhaps brought upon the catastrophe of The Rising in the first place to serve their pursuit of power. Most people found it hard to think of the Biters as anything other than the monsters they had always taken them for, but once doubts were sowed about the true nature of the Central Committee, they proved hard to undo. Add to that the heavy-handed tactics of the Red Guards and Chen, and one settlement after another had started to side with Alice.
Alice found herself facing more than three hundred people in the settlement, located just west of what had once been the suburb of Noida. Their leader, a grizzled old man, walked up to her and looked at her as if sizing her up.
'You are but a young girl, little more than child, and a foreigner at that. What makes you expect that we would side with you and risk facing the Red Guards?'
Alice looked the old man in the eye. 'I don't expect you or your people to do anything other than to hear me out. After that, you can still choose to send your young ones to serve Zeus and to slave in the Central Committee's labor camps. Or you can choose to fight.'
The old man snorted derisively. 'Fight for what? You speak very fancy words for someone so young. Do you even know what those words mean?'
Alice did not even flinch as she replied, 'I fight for the freedom that we all have as human beings. The freedom to live the way we want, the freedom to choose our leaders, the freedom my father and hundreds of others have died to protect.'
The man averted his eyes and turned to the assembled crowd.
'Let us hear her out.'
When Alice finished, twenty more young men and women had joined her ranks. She never quite realized when her struggle to ensure safety and survival for her settlement had become something more. Perhaps it was when she watched her father and his friends be killed by the Red Guards; perhaps it was when she realized the full extent of the conspiracy behind it all – but what mattered now was that whether she liked it or not, she was effectively leading an ever growing army that fought back against the Red Guards. The Biters still would not really take orders from her, but she noticed that they were always lurking in the background on the Queen's orders, waiting to wade into the battle to support her.
Alice waited on the small hill outside the settlement as Nikhil uploaded his latest message, about how more and more desertions were taking place. They had actually met a dozen deserters who had returned to their settlements, and Nikhil had used the tablet’s camera to record a few of their testimonies that he was also uploading. When he finished, he looked at Alice.
‘I’m almost out of juice. We need to be heading back.’
Alice realized that the small tablet in Nikhil’s hand had proved to be a more devastating weapon in their struggle than any amount of firepower, and she also understood that it needed recharging. Dewan had left a charger behind, but only one of the underground shelters had an old generator which was being carefully husbanded to provide limited electricity and now also to power up the tablet. Alice and Nikhil set off at a brisk pace, jogging more than walking through the forest. Along the way, Alice spotted three men with rifles who waved to her. Even if people had not met her, almost everyone seemed to know about the blond haired girl who was fighting back.
As Alice ran faster and faster, she felt Nikhil fall behind, but she wasn’t worried. There was no sign of Red Guards nearby and they had only about five kilometers to go before they could disappear underground. Running always helped clear her mind, and Alice realized just what a motley crew she was leading. There were, of course, the people from her own settlement, who she knew would follow her to the end; then there were some from other settlements in the Deadland who had supported her but would not trust the Biters and so chose to stay in their own settlements while helping her with scouting; and finally there were those who said they wanted to help but would not bring themselves to follow a young girl, and remained uneasy allies at best. Even among the Biters, Alice had realized that while the Queen commanded the loyalty of many of them, there were small bands in the Deadland who had gone almost rabid, crazed with fear and hate, and would attack any human on sight. That made it tougher for her to sell her story of how the Biters could be worked with. It was all such a complicated mess that it made her head hurt and made her wish that she did not have to be the one to deal with it all.
‘Alice, stop!’
Alice slowed down and saw Nikhil bent over, holding his knees, trying to catch his breath.
‘Nikhil, the Red Guards will be at the site of our last transmission any time.
We need to get underground as soon as we can.’
Nikhil closed his palms together in a theatrical show of begging for mercy. Alice laughed out loud. Nikhil was not much of a fighter, but he was fun to have around, and he was the only one who knew how to use the tablet, and that made him invaluable.
‘Ok, get a drink of water and we’ll be on our way.’
Nikhil took out a bottle from his backpack, and drank and when he was about to put it back, took out his tablet for one last look.
‘Let me see if they’ve already taken down my message.’
Alice watched his expression and knew that something was very wrong.
‘Nikhil, what happened?’
He called her closer and showed her the screen. There was a single message.
‘To all friends in the Deadland: keep you heads down. Heavy downpour expected soon.’
The message had been uploaded from Dewan’s account. Alice ground her teeth in anger and frustration.
‘Why the Hell would he expose himself by posting like that? Appleseed and the others will be sure to question him.’
Nikhil turned the tablet off.
‘Alice, he was trying to be as cryptic as he could, and I guess he could claim it was aimed at his men and comrades on mission in the Deadland, but he would take such a risk only if he desperately needed to get a message through to us.’
‘What…’
Alice never got a chance to finish her sentence as her voice was drowned out by the drone of multiple jet engines overhead. Alice looked up see dozens of jets approaching from over the horizon. She had seen the occasional Zeus attack helicopter, but she had never seen aircraft such as this: large bombers with swept wings, flying in formation, darkening the sky like a swarm of locusts.
'Nikhil! Are they coming to bomb where we last transmitted from?'
She saw that Nikhil was staring at the approaching armada, his face frozen in fear.
'Alice, they don't need so many heavy bombers to target one location. That fleet could flatten many, many miles of land.'
'Could they get through to our underground shelters?'
Nikhil never took his eyes off the approaching aircraft as he replied, 'I don't know. Some of them seem to be hardened bomb shelters that were built before The Rising, but the rest are no more than old sewers, maintenance tunnels and underground parking lots. Those wouldn't survive a direct hit. And nobody in the open would have a chance.'
Alice thought of the hundreds of people, including her mother and sister, in one of those shelters, and of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of human settlements overground in the Deadland.
'Nikhil, we've got to...'
Alice stopped in mid-sentence. She really didn't know what she could say that would be even remotely adequate. They couldn't really warn anyone, and there was no question of saving anyone else's lives. They were still more than a kilometer away from the underground entrance that would lead them to where the rest of their group was hidden. She stood quietly for a minute, looking back at the direction they had come from, and she could see several pillars of smoke rising in the horizon. Fires at the human settlements, where people were seeking warmth or perhaps cooking their frugal meals, and perhaps, like Alice and Nikhil, watching the approaching fleet, not knowing what was coming their way.
Alice felt Nikhil pull hard at her arm.
'Alice, they aren't that far away. All we can do is run and try and find some cover.'
Alice ran like she had never run before, and soon they could see the three large yellow leaves laid across a branch that signaled the entrance to their underground passage. Alice turned to say something to Nikhil, and saw that he was struggling to keep up. She screamed something to him, but her voice was now drowned out by the roar of the dozens of engines overhead. Alice dove through the branches and clambered on all fours through the narrow passageway, hoping that Nikhil was following. She knew that there was little cover overhead other than tree trunks and kept going faster, her palms and knees cut and scratched in a dozen places as she reached the near vertical drop that led to the hardened bomb shelter below.
She dove in as the first bombs hit and she fell to the concrete floor. As she managed to sit up and get her bearings, she felt the ground shake all around her and bits and pieces of the concrete roof chip off and fall as the bombs continued to rain down. There was no sign of Nikhil. She screamed out for him several times but heard no response. In the darkness, she felt along the walls for the unlit torch she knew would be there, and from her backpack took out the small can of fuel and flint she needed to light it. When it was lit, she saw that larger pieces of the ceiling were now falling down towards her and when one particularly large piece missed her head by inches, she hung the torch on the wall and lay down in a fetal position, with her head covered in her hands. The rumbling continued and she thought she heard a voice and she looked up to see Nikhil at the edge of the drop. He threw his backpack down and was about to jump down when there was a huge crash that lifted Alice cleanly off the ground and threw her across the corridor.
Then she saw no more.
***
Dewan studied the pistol in his hands, wondering just how much easier it was to take another life than to contemplate taking one's own. He had no family and not much that he could say he had to live for, yet it seemed awfully hard to put the gun to his head and pull the trigger. He had shot others, men and Biters, dozens of times without conscious thought in the years of fighting that had dominated his life, but now he could not bring himself to do the same to himself. It wasn't just fear that held him back, though that was certainly there, but a feeling of infinite sadness that came from realizing that his life had not really amounted to much after all. He had spent most of his life serving a cause that had been a lie, and when he thought he had a chance to make amends, it was all too little too late. He had seen the heavy bombers fly in from Tibet and knew that Chen's orders were as simple as they were brutal. He had ordered a saturation fire-bombing of the Deadland near Delhi, with wave upon wave of flights till nothing remained. Dewan had been unable to face his own troops in the cafeteria, local boys who had looked at him with horrified eyes. He had no answers for the questions behind those eyes. No answers as to why their friends and families had just been sentenced to a horrific death by the same Central Committee they were serving to supposedly help human survivors.
Hundreds of Red Guards had flown in the night before and all Zeus units where desertions had taken place had been disarmed and were now effectively under arrest. The Central Committee propaganda machine was in overdrive with reports about how counter-revolutionaries and terrorists had subverted some isolated units in the Deadland in North India and were currently being pacified by the heroic efforts of the Red Guards. Dewan had taken the risk of sending out his warning, but he knew it was likely to be too late. He also knew that it was too late for him. The Red Guards would be coming for him soon.
As he put the gun to his head one last time, he heard footsteps outside his door and he paused. No, if he was going to die, he would at least put what remained of his life to some use after all.
He brought up the Browser on his tablet and logged in to his official email account. He had already barricaded his door with a bulky bookshelf and he heard banging on the door as he began typing. He wrote at breakneck speed, writing of what he had learnt, of the deception behind The Rising, and then of how Chen and his masters in the Central Committee were misleading all Zeus troops. He heard shots as the Red Guards outside shredded the door with automatic weapons and began kicking it open. Dewan finished and pressed ‘send' as the first Red Guard came in. Dewan flung his tablet at the man and as the Red Guard lost his balance, shot him twice. Two more Red Guards came into the room and Dewan put them down with single shots to the head. Years of hunting Biters had taught him a thing or two that were finally going to be put to some use, he thought as he picked up the first Guard's rifle and rolled behind his study desk. He saw feet gathered outside his door and f
ired a short burst, hearing screams as the Guards took cover. He heard something hit the floor and looked to see a black cylinder rolling towards him. As the stun grenade went off, he closed his eyes, but he had not been fast enough. When he opened his eyes, he saw little more than flashes of white and black and he stood up unsteadily, trying to gauge from the footsteps where the Guards were, and fired his rifle on full automatic, not knowing if he hit anyone. He was trying to blink away the bright lights when the first bullets struck him.
Alice opened her eyes, and the first thing she felt was the wetness on her face. For a moment she wondered where all the water had come from, but the rusty smell and the acrid taste told her that it was her own blood. She got up gingerly, and as she looked around she saw that the passageway she was in was bathed in light. She looked up to see a hole in the ground above that had been blasted open by the bombing. Several large pieces of concrete lay around her and as she felt the throbbing lump on her head from which blood still flowed, and the countless scrapes and cuts all over her body, she knew that she had been hit by her fair share or more of the debris. Still, she was alive, and that was something to be thankful for. She took a deep breath and felt her ribs hurt, and hoped that she had not broken anything inside. The dust raised by the shattered concrete made her gag with every breath and she found that the passageway leading onto the tunnels she had planned to enter had collapsed. She tried to grab handholds on the walls to climb out of the hole caused by the bombing – and then she saw Nikhil. Or rather, she saw his hand, still grabbing his tablet. The rest of him was hidden under a giant slab of concrete. Alice knelt down beside him for a few seconds, feeling his lifeless, cold hands, and then she took the tablet from his grip, putting it into hers.
'Goodbye, Nikhil.'
She climbed out and saw something that looked like the Hell that the old religions had believed in. Some humans still prayed before their idols and crosses and holy books, but Alice had never really been brought up with any particular gods to believe in. Her father had once told her that there must be a power beyond human comprehension, otherwise The Rising could never be explained, yet it was vain and stupid to create our own vision of these gods and fight over whose vision was right. The fear of Biters and human marauders hunting you down had a good way of making people band together, irrespective of the gods they once worshipped. Nevertheless, Alice now knew what the old religions had meant when they spoke of a place called Hell. All around her, the forests were on fire, vast charred swathes of ashes and burning stumps that finally did justice to the name this area had carried for years: the Deadland.
