Alice in Deadland (6 page)

The Queen turned on Alice with a fury, baring her teeth, and for a second Alice was truly fearful that she would attack her, but then the Queen seemed to control herself with a conscious effort of will and answered in a soft voice.

'You just used your usual prejudices to filter out what you didn't want to see. I wanted you to see us as we are- a society, a group of sentient beings. Different from humans, but no less deserving of the right to exist. Not animals to be hunted down and exterminated.'

That did ring a bell with Alice. True, she had never imagined that Biters could be organized in some sort of social unit, and certainly had never bargained for the fact that she would see babies and what appeared to be their parents together. Still, that did not change the fundamental equation. The anger at all the cruelty she had seen Biters visit upon humans in her life came back to her as she answered the Queen with a bitter tinge in her voice.

'I have seen enough innocent humans slaughtered by Biters. I have seen babies bitten by Biters. I have seen good, decent people turn into bloodthirsty Biters after being bitten. So it's not as if your precious Biters are innocent, helpless victims.'

The Queen hissed, though Alice sensed more regret than rage in her reaction.

'I had hoped you would begin to change your mind and embrace your destiny, but it looks like your mind is still too closed. Oh well, I hope you can reflect on it over the next few days.'

With that, the giant Biter referred to as Hatter gripped her arm and pushed her roughly out of the room. She was led to a small, dark room and the door slammed shut once she went in. Alice huddled alone in a corner of the cold, dark room, and took out the beacon from her pocket. She watched the small blinking red light till exhaustion overtook her and she fell into an uneasy slumber. She dreamt of a Biter baby having it's head shot off, and she woke up covered in sweat. There was no more sleep to be had that night.

***

FOUR

If the Queen's intent had been to torture Alice into submission, Alice thought she was doing a pretty good job of it. For the next two days, she got nothing to eat or drink other than a single glass of dirty water that was shoved into her room once a day. The room was totally dark all the time and Alice soon lost track of time. She screamed her rage out for the first few hours but then just sat in silence against the wall. She may have been trained as a warrior from an early age, but nobody had ever trained her on what to do if she were captured. It had never occurred to anyone that someone could be taken prisoner by the Biters.

Finally, hungry, thirsty and disoriented, she was on the verge of asking for the Queen and agreeing to whatever crazy prophecy she seemed to believe in. Anything to get out of the room, anything to get a bite to eat or a drink of clean water. That was when Bunny Ears opened the door and pulled her out, leading her to the Queen's room. Alice found the Queen sitting at her desk, chewing ganja leaves and holding the charred book that seemed so important to her. When Alice entered the room, she called out loudly for food, and Hatter came in, holding a hunk of nearly stale bread. As disgusting as it looked, it was the first food Alice had seen in almost three days and she hungrily wolfed it down.

The Queen waited for her to finish and then sat down in front of Alice, the book on her lap.

'Alice, I was wrong. In my anger, I thought that frightening and intimidating you would bring you to my side, but if you are to fulfill the prophecy, it cannot be through fear. It has to be because you believe in our cause.'

Alice, bitter and angry after what she had endured over the last two days, blurted out.

'Yeah, and locking me in a dark room and starving me will make me believe in your prophecy? Or will it be the bloody ganja leaves you gulp down?'

Alice saw the muscles on the Queen's face tighten and once again she saw a glimpse of the rage she was capable of, but she controlled herself as she responded to Alice.

'No, you remember the old quote about the truth setting us free.'

Alice had never heard the quote, but listened as the Queen continued.

'Tell me, what do you know about what you humans call The Rising?'

Growing up, Alice had heard the story many times from her parents, and then it had been amplified and embellished by countless conversations with other kids, so the answer to her was obvious.

'Everyone knows about it. One day, something happened, and the dead started coming to life. Before anyone could do anything, they started attacking others, and those bitten turned into...Biters, I guess. They couldn't be killed other than through a shot through the head, and they soon overran most cities. Then the governments got desperate and bombed the cities after evacuating as many people as possible....'

She couldn't complete because the Queen had got up and screamed, an inhuman howl that shocked Alice so much that she got up from her chair, which clattered to the ground behind her. The Queen was now speaking fast and with such anger that spittle was flying from her mouth.

'It did not just happen. We made it happen.'

Alice wasn't sure what she was referring to and asked what she meant.

'Us. Human governments or at least some elements in our governments. The US government had been experimenting with chemical and biological agents that would transform our troops into super-soldiers, into beserkers immune to pain. At the same time, there was research on modifying these to create agents that would drive enemy troops insane, a rage virus which would transform them into wild animals who would kill each other. We experimented with rats, with monkeys and.....with humans.'

Alice found that hard to believe and gasped aloud.

'No, dear. We did all that. In secret facilities in Afghanistan and other places. We were drunk with our power, imagining what would happen if we could drop one single canister of this agent in the middle of an enemy army division. It would tear itself to pieces without us firing a shot. Then it all came apart.'

'What happened?'

'The Chinese found out what we were up to, and they knew that if we perfected this, we would be invincible. They infiltrated our program, and destroyed our key research lab in the US. We couldn't prove anything- it looked like an explosion caused by a gas cylinder, but we knew who was behind it. The American economy was in deep recession, China was on the ascendant, and this was our last hope in keeping them in check. We had extra stores of the agent the Chinese did not know about, and we decided to teach them a lesson, to show them that we were still the superpower. A covert mission was authorized and we dropped the agent into a village in Mongolia. It was the first time it had been used on humans outside controlled conditions, and nobody knew what to expect. I had pleaded against the decision, so many of us had, but we were overruled. Thousands fell, then tens of thousands as it spread.'

Alice knew only vaguely of the politics between countries of the Old Days, since national boundaries and the old countries now hardly mattered, but she found it hard to believe that people could have done this to themselves.

'What happened then? If you were in America then how did it spread there?'

The Queen sat down again.

'Hundreds of people were injured in the blast at the lab and were exposed to all the toxins and agents we were working on. The next day, they started transforming and biting all those around them.'

A chill went up Alice's spine, yet her mind refused to believe what she was hearing.

'Why should I believe you?'

The Queen went to her desk and fished out an identification card and some papers. Alice struggled to read what was on them, but the emblem of what she knew to be the United States Government was there.

'I was one of the head researchers on this project. I was born here in India but did my Doctorate in the US and joined the Department of Defense. I thought it was exciting, to be able to come up with new ways of treating our wounded, to make the world safer, but then we all got a bit drunk with our own power, and we started meddling with things we should have left alone. We tried to play God, and we were not ready for what we unleashed. When the decision to attack China was made, I quit and came back to India, but by then, nowhere was safe any more. At first, after being bitten, people changed after a few hours, so you had many cases of people being attacked in airport terminals and boarding their flights after what they thought were minor cuts. In days, all air travel was banned, but when you have tens of millions traveling by air every day, it spread like wildfire.'

Alice still refused to believe what she was hearing, so it was only harder for her to believe what came next.

'And the Great Fires, that too was of our making, of our petty jockeying for power. It began with the US and China using tactical nukes on each other. It had nothing to do with making the world secure from the so-called Biters. It was man destroying the world when it looked like all that mattered to us then- power, money, oil, were now going to be worthless. It was as if all the old rules and taboos were broken. Then Pakistan joined the party, and India retaliated. Iran and Israel nuked it out. Between the attacks and the spreading of the virus, the world became what it is, and nobody bothered to do the one thing that could have stopped it all.'

'And what was that?'

The Queen looked straight at Alice.

'We had a vaccine, Alice. We could have cured them all if we had chosen to co-operate and not turn on each other.'

***

Alice barely slept that night, despite being placed in a much more comfortable room with a mattress and a table with clean water on it. She didn't want to believe the Queen, she didn't want to believe that humans could have been so savage. All her life, the Biters had been the boogeymen, the monsters of our nightmares that had emerged from the dead to turn on humans. Her mind found it impossible to process the possibility that humans had been responsible for starting it all.

Unable to contain her curiosity, she went back to the Queen's chambers and found her sitting on her chair, reading the charred book that she held so dear. Did Biters never sleep? She looked up as Alice walked in.

'So Alice, as the story in this fine book goes, have you become curiouser and curiouser?'

Alice had no idea what she was talking about so she got to the point.

'You have no proof for anything you've said. Maybe you did work in the Government, but everything else could be a story. I don't know why you think I have anything to do with this, or why your finding that book makes it a prophecy, but there's no reason for me to believe you.'

The Queen got up and went to her desk and brought out a small vial with a red cap that had a syringe in it. She held out the vial in front of Alice.

'Here is the vaccine. The last and only dose I know of. When the outbreak started, one of my colleagues in the US sent me a couple of vaccines. The Government had limited stocks and was starting to vaccinate key leaders, so it was a really big deal for her to try and save me.'

'If there is a vaccine, why didn't they save others?'

The Queen stopped, looking at the vial.

'Good question. Many of us believed that they did not want to.'

'Why would they do that?'

'There were always rumors, but nothing more than rumors about how some powerful groups were actively manipulating events to create a New World Order. They believed the world was getting overpopulated and wanted to start over, with a select group of elites in charge. Powerful people, in Government, in the Military, in Banks engineering all this behind the scenes. The times before The Rising were one of chaos- many economies were in deep decline, and common people were starting to rise against the elite who seemed to get richer even as common folks lost their jobs and got poorer. The rumors said that these elites were seeing their grasp on power slip away and so they had a long-term plan to wipe out much of the population and start afresh. That's where people like Zeus come in- they could not rely on the Military to do all their dirty work, and that's why in the last few years before The Rising, Private Military Contractors were getting so prominent and powerful.'

For Alice, this was all too incredible to believe. Secret private armies, human elites trying to re-engineer the world and so on. What she had grown up knowing was so much simpler, and it was tempting to believe the simpler version than even consider such a possibility.

'If that was their plan, they succeeded, right?'

The Queen looked and Alice saw the hint of a smile on the corners of her lips.

'We came in the way. They had never bargained for just how.....contagious this turned out to be, or indeed the fact that so many of us survived by going underground into sewers and bomb shelters. They thought we would be mindless animals who would wander around and get nuked, but I led so many of us underground and then we emerged.'

Alice now asked the question that had been on her mind from the beginning.

'Excuse me, but what happened to you?'

'As things unraveled, and I found out more about the possible conspiracy behind all this, I got very disillusioned and angry and started reaching out to people. One of my sources told me that there were elites in the Unites States who were colluding with elements in the Chinese government to orchestrate all this. They tried to kill me twice with the Zeus thugs and I went into hiding. But when the chaos took Delhi, I was attacked and bitten. I had two doses of the vaccine on me, and I injected myself seconds after being bitten. I was unconscious for several hours and I woke up the way I am. I don't understand it entirely but perhaps the combination of being bitten and than taking the vaccine within seconds left me this way. Many aspects of me were transformed, but I could still think like a human, and I was furious at what we had done to ourselves, and what we had allowed to happen.'