by Mainak Dhar
Alice had grown up seeing little beyond the immediate concerns of her family and settlement and being worried about little more than her immediate survival. It was a bit hard at first for her to grasp the true scale of the struggle they were a part of. But a life spent surviving meant that her instincts were razor sharp and she looked at both Satish and Arjun.
'First, if this Li is the son of such an important man, they will not hit us from the air. They will try and negotiate or come on the ground. We need to be ready.'
Arjun nodded, a slight smile on his face as he realized that the young girl everyone saw as their leader was taking charge.
'Second, if food and people to work the farms is what is so critical to them, we need to hit them where it hurts. No food will mean their own people will start turning against the Central Committee.'
She saw Satish hesitate, so she continued, 'Yes, I know it's harsh and some people may starve, but we cannot be soft. Finally, we need to find some way of coordinating with the Americans if we can.'
She had not told any of the others about the vial of the vaccine she carried, but while much of India had been reduced to the Deadland, she hoped that the Americans might still have people and facilities available where they could put the vaccine to some use. She had no idea of how they could contact the Americans or how they could be of any use to each other from half way across the world, but the knowledge that other people were waging the same war against the same enemy gave her hope and made her own effort feel less lonely.
Just two days later, the first strike in Alice's plan was put into motion.
'Queen of Hearts, I am at the dinner table.'
Alice clicked her mike once by way of acknowledgement and then looking at the airfield spread out in front of her.
'King of Hearts, is the Knave in position?'
She heard a click from Arjun affirming that Satish and his men were also ready. Once Arjun had heard of the book that the Queen carried with her and the prophecy associated with it, he had suggested the code names. That had brought about much laughter among the older folks there, though Alice, never having read the book, really didn't know where the names came from.
They were about fifty kilometers from their base in the Ruins, near what had once been the international airport at Delhi. It was now a small, barely serviceable airfield, but it was the key lifeline through which local settlers were sent to farms in China, and also produce grown in farms around the region were sent to storage depots the Central Committee controlled. Alice could see three large transport aircraft and two helicopters there through her binoculars. There were several guard towers, at least two of which had remotely controlled gun turrets, and she could see many armed Red Guards walking along the airfield perimeter.
It was clearly too heavily defended to attack in a frontal assault, but that was not Alice's intent. The heist from the Red Guards’ helicopter had proved to be quite valuable, and together with what the Zeus deserters had bought with them, they now not only had far superior firepower but also many more tactical radios to help in their communication. Alice was sure their transmissions were being intercepted, which was why they were using the code names Arjun had thought up.
'The Knave sees some tarts on the table.'
That meant that Satish and his men had seen the convoy approaching them from their position about five kilometers away. They were dug in below the ruins of what had once been crisscrossing flyovers that had provided easy access to the airport from the city. With a combination of the rage among the remaining human settlements in the Deadland after the air raids, and the increasing desertions among Zeus troopers, the intelligence they had on Red Guard movements had increased exponentially. So today, Alice knew that three APCs would be escorting a convoy of trucks packed with settlers to be flown to labor camps in China. Her intent was not to hurt the settlers but to take out the APCs and free the settlers. That was the job that fell to Satish and his crew. She, Arjun and a dozen others were to wreak some havoc at the airfield.
Satish's next transmission came ten minutes later. It was simple and terse.
'The Knave of Hearts, he stole some tarts.'
Alice smiled. That meant his part of the mission had been accomplished. Now she would have to put into motion her own plan. Word of the raid must have gotten to the airfield because she saw several Red Guards clamber onto APCs and two helicopter gunships begin to take off.
Alice and the others had made their way to their positions two days ago, traveling largely underground, through old sewers, and often lying still in the filth for hours when Red Guard patrols flew overhead. It had been a hard journey, but now it was all going to pay off.
As the helicopters approached their position, Alice spoke into her radio. 'King of Hearts, beat them sore.'
She saw two smoke trails emerge from the ground across the road from her as RPGs snaked out towards the approaching helicopters. One missed its mark, but the other hit the lead helicopter just behind the cockpit. The helicopter seemed to shudder in mid-flight and then began to spin out of control as it crashed to the ground. The second helicopter began to turn towards this sudden threat when Alice screamed at her men to fire. Two more rockets flew towards the helicopter and Alice shouted in triumph as they both struck home. There was a fireball and the helicopter seemed to break into two as it fell. As Alice saw four APCs speed out of the airport gates, she was tempted to wreak some more damage, but she knew that standing and fighting in the open would mean heavy casualties. So they retreated back to their underground tunnels and began the journey back to the Ruins.
***
When Alice got back, the first thing she did was to sleep, trying to make up for the three days she had just been through with barely any rest. When she awoke, Satish told her that they had managed to destroy the APCs accompanying the convoy and liberate more than three hundred settlers. The men and women, all angry at the casualties they knew the air raids had caused at other settlements and at being taken away from their families, were keen to join in the struggle against the Red Guards.
When Alice walked out of her room she saw a sight she was not at all prepared for.
More than five hundred people were gathered among the ruins of buildings that had once been a posh apartment complex. It was almost sunset so a few torches had been lit. She was about to ask Arjun whether it was smart for so many of them to be in the open when a huge roar welcomed her. A man walked up to her.
'My name is Swapnil, and I led our settlement near Mehrauli. Thank you for rescuing us. Some of us would want to go back to our families, but I and many others will fight for you in your army. Just tell us what you need.'
As Alice looked around her, she considered what the man had said. Did she indeed now have an army? To think that so many people depended on her and looked to her for direction was a scary thought, but at the same time she felt an intense surge of pride. If only her father could have seen her now. He had lived and died so that his people could continue to live free, and now she was finally in a position to not just avenge his death but to try and fight for what he had believed in.
The celebrations were short-lived because having so many people in the open was an invitation for an air strike. Alice was sure that the Red Guards would be furious at the loss of three helicopters in just a few days and a threat to what they had taken to be an assured source of supply for their labor camps would cause them to lash out. Add to that the fact that the son of a senior Central Committee official was a prisoner in the Ruins, and she was sure that they would take some action, and soon.
She did not have to wait long. She was in a second floor room in what had once been an apartment when she heard the dull roar of approaching helicopters. She had lookouts on the nearby rooftops and soon enough she saw RPGs reach out towards the helicopters. In the darkness it was hard to see how close they came, but without any signs of explosions, they seemed to have missed. Explosions rocked one of the rooftops as missiles fired in retaliation found their mar
k, and Alice wondered which of her comrades she had just lost.
'King of Hearts, Knave of Hearts. Time to go down the Rabbit Hole.'
Their plan was simple. It would be suicide to engage helicopter gunships with just RPGs and small arms. So, with the initial volley of RPGs they had got the Red Guards interested, but now they would hunker down and wait for the Red Guards to make the next move. The whole plan was to get them on the ground where they could be fought on more even terms.
Alice watched at least a half dozen helicopters hover near the ground as black figures slithered down ropes. Part of her pitied the Red Guards, who were probably ordinary soldiers being forced into an impossible mission because the son of an important man was at stake. But she reasoned that they were doing their job, and she would do hers. Through the night vision scope on her rifle she watched the Red Guards sweep from one building to another. Commander Li was in the same building as her, sitting in the basement parking lot with four men guarding him. He did not have much more by way of intelligence to offer up, but he was a valuable bargaining chip and their best bet that the Red Guards would not just level the entire neighborhood with air strikes.
She watched a four man team of the Red Guards approach the building in front of her, across a small park where perhaps years ago, children would have played. Even today, a slide remained as a memorial to those simpler, happier days. Under that slide was what appeared to be a garbage bin. Inside it was an IED that Alice had rigged. As the Red Guards passed by the slide, she connected the two wires in front of her. The IED went off with a huge explosion that was deafening in the quiet of the night. When she put her scope back to her eyes, she saw all four Red Guards down. The others were now scrambling for cover, and one or two had fired, likely panicking and firing at shadows. Their muzzle flashes gave them away and they were met with a withering volley of rifle and RPG fire from men and women hidden in the Ruins around them. Alice saw a Red Guard run across the park, perhaps separated from his squad in the chaos. She took careful aim and fired a single round, bringing him down with a shot to the leg. As he scrambled on all fours, two shadows emerged from the darkness and took him away. The helicopters were buzzing overhead like angry hornets, but with the Red Guards mixed up in close combat, there was little they could do. One of them tried to come lower, but a near miss from an RPG sent it back up.
The firing went on for about twenty minutes and then there was silence. As per her plan, nobody cheered, and nobody went out to celebrate. In stark contrast to the deafening crescendo of gunfire and explosions that had rocked the complex just minutes ago, there was now no sound to be heard other than the helicopters overhead. Alice wondered if they would have called for reinforcements, but when and if they arrived they would find an abandoned apartment complex with nothing there but the bodies of a dozen or so Red Guards and multiple booby traps to make life interesting for any Red Guard who landed.
Alice and everyone with her, including eight Red Guards who had been captured alive, were already on their way through the Ruins and its underground tunnels to another hideout.
The deadly game of cat and mouse that was to be played in the Ruins had begun in earnest.
***
THIRTEEN
Two more weeks passed, where not a single day went by without a raid by Red Guards. After their initial heavy losses in the house-to-house fighting in the Ruins, the Red Guards were increasingly using drones and air strikes. While that meant fewer Red Guard losses, it also meant that casualties on the side of Alice and her teams were also lower, because it was easy to hide in the Ruins or in the warren of underground tunnels and sewers. Alice realized early that they did not have the numbers or firepower to engage the Red Guards in open combat, so they would hide in the Ruins and use IEDs and ambushes to extract as heavy a toll as possible. Alice's army had also been bolstered by increasing defections among Zeus troopers, and while in absolute the numbers may have been low, the experience some of the recent defectors brought with them helped increase their capabilities and knowledge exponentially. Some of them were senior officers who had been lieutenants or majors in the Indian Army before The Rising, and they began a series of classroom trainings. Alice was fascinated by what she learnt. Her knowledge of combat had been forged in the Deadland, where the best schooling was learning to survive every day. But now she learnt of past battles in the Old World, of how insurgents in countries held off mighty armies with air power using low-tech IEDs and ambushes. She learnt of counter-insurgency and quickly grasped how much the Red Guards had bungled in alienating the local people. That was something she immediately set about capitalizing on.
Often in the darkness of night, she and a small group would travel into the Deadland and meet with settlements, telling them of the struggle that was being waged and asking them for their support. Alice had thought that telling them about how evil the Red Guards were and the conspiracy behind The Rising would be enough to get the settlements on her side, but it wasn't always so easy.
One evening, Arjun sat down next to her.
'Alice, only a few people will fight out of a desire for revenge. Maybe some people like you who have directly lost family and friends to the Red Guards. But others want safety for their families, and they won't be motivated only by wanting to destroy something, but the promise of something that is a better life.'
Alice had never thought of it that way.
'Arjun, how do you know so much about this?'
He smiled. 'Remember, I was a salesman. My job was selling things to people which they often didn't want, and the key is that we need to make them want something they may not even have considered before.'
'What would they want?'
Arjun took out a faded photograph. It showed a city street with cars and people walking around.
'Most of the leaders of the settlements were young men and women before The Rising. They remember how life was before, and if you ask all of them, including me, what they would most want, they would say that they want the safety and stability that they once had. Especially in places like India and the US, which were democracies, people would want to be able to choose their future instead of having someone sitting in Shanghai deciding it for them.'
Democracy. Alice had never seen what the Old World had been like, but her father had often talked about the ideals he had believed in, and things he had tried so hard to bring to life in their own settlement. A system where people did not rule because they were stronger or better armed, but where people chose those who would guide them, and decisions were taken by voting on them. She knew that the heavy-handed tactics of Zeus had rankled among a lot of the settlements but they had been happy to trade freedom for safety. Could she really offer them an alternative? The tactics of the Red Guards and defections among Zeus troopers had certainly made them question what they were actually signing up for when they accepted the supposed safety of operating under the Red Guard’s umbrella, especially when Commander Li had revealed the inhuman conditions in the labor camps where people from the settlements were taken. But what kind of life could she offer in the desolation of the Deadland or the Ruins?
Arjun must have read her mind. 'Alice, there are now more than five hundred of us. All of us living in the Ruins. Families, people who till a day ago were strangers, all living together. Think about what we've started here.'
The next day saw several Red Guard sorties over the Ruins. Jets and helicopters seemed to be dropping bombs and firing rockets, but they were nowhere near Alice and her troops. Alice thought they must have been acting on faulty intelligence and the misguided air raid of the Red Guards was the subject of many a joke over lunch.
Alice was leading a patrol in the Ruins the next night with two of Satish's men, when a threat that she had almost forgotten about presented itself. One of the young Zeus troopers ahead suddenly screamed and Alice was instantly on guard, bringing up her night vision scope to her eyes. She saw three shapes emerge from behind the building in front of her. From the way they mov
ed, there was no doubt that they were Biters. The trooper was lying at their feet, his neck bent at an impossible angle. She heard a sound to her left and turned to see three more Biters emerge. Alice hesitated for only a minute, as she thought of the Queen and the Biters who had helped her, before squeezing the trigger on her rifle, sending the first Biter down with a bullet to the head. The others charged at her and she shot another before she ordered the trooper with her to retreat. In such close quarters, and not knowing how many other Biters were around, standing and fighting would be suicidal. She ran through the darkness, more than once swerving away from what she thought was a Biter lurking in the shadows but turned out to be a pipe or a broken piece of furniture.
'Vivek, you with me?'
She got no reply from the trooper and just hoped that he was okay.
A Biter suddenly appeared in front of her, and without breaking her stride she hit him on the face with the butt of her rifle, and as he went down, fired a round into his head. Knowing that she was probably too far from her base to be able to make it in the darkness while she was surrounded by Biters, she made for the nearest intact building and clambered up the stairs to the second floor. She huddled against the wall, her rifle trained at the stairs. She had two fragmentation grenades with her, so if the Biters did try and attack in force, she would give them a nice surprise.
