Mainak Dhar - Alice in Deadland

'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 Guards umbrella, especially when Commander Li had revealed the inhuman conditions in the labor camps were 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.