Alice in Deadland Trilogy (14 page)

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 mark, 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 moved, 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.

She saw a Biter appear in the doorway and a single round to
the head put him down. Two more followed and she fired again, missing twice but
then compensating with two more head shots that put them down. She retreated
further up the stairs and hoped she had not drawn too much attention to
herself.

When no more Biters presented themselves for a few seconds,
she breathed a bit easy and looked out the window through her scope. She saw
the flag that Arjun had put up, partially hidden behind an old lamppost. She
thanked the Red Guards for their high technology scopes since it told her
precisely that their base was two thousand meters away. She didn't know if she
wanted to risk trying to walk alone in the darkness with an unknown number of Biters
around, so she took out her tactical radio to call Arjun for assistance. That
was when several gunshots shattered the silence of the night. There were a few
scattered single shots but then someone began firing on full automatic. The
gunshots were coming from the direction of their base, and as Alice looked
through her scope, she could see several muzzle flashes. Sweeping her scope
around, she saw several dark shadows shuffling towards the base and she knew
what the Red Guards had done. They did not have to land and fight house to
house after all. They had stirred up the Biters by bombing them, and now the
Biters were streaming towards the areas where the humans were based. Alice
gripped her rifle and prepared to rush to her friends' aid.

The Red Guards had just opened a new, deadly front in the
war in the Ruins.

***

When Alice reached her base, she saw several Biters lying on
the ground, their heads shattered by direct hits. However, when she got closer
she noted with dismay that many of her team were also dead. The Biters had
taken them totally by surprise. Used to days of airborne attacks by the Red
Guards, they had never really anticipated a ground attack by Biters. She saw
Arjun point his pistol at a writhing man on the ground and shoot him in the
head. Better dead than undead was a fine slogan, but from the pain in Arjun's
face, she knew how tough it was to have to shoot a friend.

She saw Satish running, his rifle in hand, screaming to his
men.

'Get snipers on the roofs now. Watch for any stragglers!'

He stopped in front of Alice.

'They caught us with our pants down, Alice.'

Alice looked at the devastation around her and asked how bad
their losses were.

'As best as I can tell, we lost eight or nine people. Also,
we cannot stay here any longer. If the Biters are being driven from their
hiding places and coming into our areas, we need to find a place that can be
more easily fortified and defended.'

'But that makes us a more visible target for air strikes,
right?'

Arjun gave a wan smile, showing that he knew well the kind
of dilemma the Red Guards had placed them in.

The next morning was a dark one, where they buried their
dead, which in itself was a tough decision for many of the Hindus among them. Funeral
pyres would have been a beacon for air strikes to home in on. Then they began
the search for a new stronghold.

After more than an hour of walking through the Ruins, Alice
clicked twice on her radio. To avoid attracting attention, they had spread out
into five separate smaller groups, and now gradually they would converge where
Alice was.

'This is such a visible target, Alice. Are you sure we
should be here?'

Alice smiled at Arjun. 'Take a look around. There are so
many underground parking lots and rooms that nobody could really take us out
from the air. With our friend Li and the other prisoners, I doubt they'd use
any heavier weapons. Also, its walls mean that we can set up defenses against
any Biters or Red Guards coming from outside.'

They were inside what had once been a large sports stadium.
The bleachers around the stadium were all long devastated but the huge sloping
roof was still largely intact and hid the giant field and rooms below.

One of the former Zeus officers walked up and whistled.

'Good idea, Alice. This is a perfect headquarters for us,
but as more and more people join us, I'd like to see them set up homes in the
adjoining buildings. These were once built to house thousands of athletes
during some big events. Take a look. Many of them are still livable, and being
close to the stadium means that we can still create a safety net for each
other, but they also get some space for themselves and their families.'

'Makes a lot of sense.'

Within a week, the stadium started becoming the focal point
for what was essentially the beginning of the resettlement of the Ruins that
had once been Delhi. Word spread and people began walking in, at first in small
groups, and then entire settlements from the Deadland. Alice was suddenly
seized with all the administrative challenges that came with taking care of
more than a thousand people who essentially depended on her. Luckily, there
were enough people around with skills from the Old World who could help. A
former accountant took charge of maintaining inventories of food and supplies.
Satish took charge of base security, which consisted of ensuring security for
the stadium and for all the families now settling around it. Several of the
settlers jury-rigged generators powered with fuel that could still be easily
scavenged in the Ruins, and now the main eating and meeting rooms in the
stadium had electricity, and there was already talk of extending that to all
the apartments occupied by families.

Arjun and his Rats took charge of what he called forward
security, which meant venturing deeper into the Ruins to look for supplies and
also find other humans. Within days, their community numbered in the thousands,
and Alice’s legend seemed to only grow in the telling. One day, Alice confided
to Arjun that she felt bad that a lot of the things people believed about her
were not true. For example, she most certainly had not destroyed an APC
single-handedly. Arjun smiled and told her that her legend was one of the glues
that was binding everyone together, and if it could help achieve such a
wonderful thing, it was perhaps best left alone.

In the daily meetings that Alice called where people could
talk about issues and ideas to make their lives better, an old lady asked her a
question that perplexed her.

‘Alice, what should we call this little town of ours?’

It was then that Alice remembered the charred book that the
Queen had carried with her and how much it had meant to her. She had heard
nothing of the Queen since she had slipped away, and thought it may be a
fitting way to remember her, so she said that their community be called
Wonderland.

There was raucous laughter, especially among many of the old
folks who knew the fairy tale. It was hardly an uneventful period. Red Guard
sorties continued daily, and every once in a while a helicopter pilot would
fire a rocket or two, but given the thick stadium roof and their dug in
positions, these caused little damage. Air raids also started to lessen when
the Red Guard pilots realized that some defecting Zeus troopers had taken with
them man portable anti-aircraft missiles looted from armories. These had been
positioned in the tallest buildings around the area and while Alice knew that
they did not have enough if the Red Guards mounted a large scale attack, she
also knew that the cost of any such attack would be prohibitive. So an uneasy
peace came to exist between them and the Red Guards, and at least for the short
term, Wonderland knew some measure of security from attacks by the Red Guards.