Alice in Deadland Trilogy (47 page)

DEADLAND: UNTOLD STORIES OF ALICE IN DEADLAND

In the Amazon.com
bestselling Alice in Deadland series, we meet a fifteen-year-old girl called
Alice living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland ravaged by undead Biters. Alice
follows a bunny-eared Biter down a hole, triggering an adventure that forever
changes her life and that of everyone in the Deadland. The true conspiracy behind
The Rising which destroyed human civilization is revealed, and Alice discovers
her destiny in defeating the dark forces behind it.

But what was life
like for Alice growing up in the Deadland? How did she first come face to face with
Biters? How did she come to be such a skilled fighter? In a world full of
violence and death, did she ever know friendship, and even love?

This collection
of stories answers all those questions and reveals to you the hitherto untold
story of Alice in Deadland.

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READ ON FOR A FREE EXCERPT

FREE EXCERPT FROM DEADLAND

'Daddy, I saw a hellocottor again.'

Robert Gladwell rushed out of his home, assault rifle in
hand.

'Alice, get back here!'

He caught up with his four-year-old daughter near the gates
of their settlement and dragged her back. Bewildered as to why the simple
pleasure of seeing such a wonderful and strange flying machine had been
interrupted so rudely, Alice began bawling. Gladwell took cover behind the wall
of the old building that he and his family had made their home and watched
skyward, looking anxiously for any signs of the black helicopter that had been
circling over their area for the past few weeks. He heaved a sigh of relief
when he saw no more sign of it, and then turned to his little daughter. He
knelt in front of her and wiped away her tears.

'Alice, sweetheart, you know I told you that when those
things fly around, we must stay inside our houses, and you know it's not safe
to go wandering about without a grown-up, don't you?'

She nodded, still choking back her tears. Gladwell sensed
movement all around him as others in their settlement came out from behind
cover. They had agreed that till it was clear who the men in the helicopters
were and what they wanted, it was best to lie low. Four years of surviving in
what had come to be known as the Deadland had taught them all to be naturally suspicious
and cautious if they wanted to survive.

Jane, Alice's elder sister, came and fetched her.

'Alice, come on. I'll show you the puppy who wandered in
last night.'

All her sorrows forgotten in an instant, Alice's face lit up
in a smile.

'I'll name him Doggie. Can I please? Please, can I?'

Jane tousled Alice's hair and took her hand as she led her
away. She was ten years older than Alice, and in the last four years, Gladwell
sometimes thought his older daughter had aged four decades. Gone was the sometimes
rebellious and always active girl who had been knocking on the doors of what
promised to be a trouble-filled stint as a teenager. Jane seemed more mature,
more composed, but in her eyes, Gladwell saw none of the old spark. The
lifelessness of the land they lived in was reflected in his daughter's eyes.

'Bob, you okay?' His wife, Joanne, had come up behind him
and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

'We still don't know who those choppers belong to or what
they want. As if the Biters weren't bad enough, now we have to worry about
them. Sometimes, I wish we could have given our kids a better life than one
where we count surviving one more day as success.'

Jo faced him.

'We're all alive, and you've kept us all safe. That's what
matters now.'

Jones, who had been a Marine at the US Embassy where
Gladwell had worked as a diplomat before their world was torn apart by the
series of events called The Rising, came up.

'Boss, who do you reckon those flyboys are?'

'I don't know. I took a look through field glasses last
time, and they had no insignia. Let them show their hand first, and then we'll
talk.'

'Hey, we're supposed to all meet in an hour's time. Should
we go ahead or wait for the patrol to get back?'

Gladwell looked out over the short walls that ringed their
settlement, hoping to get a glimpse of the four men who had left in the
morning. 'I don't want us to meet again and have people panic over news of
Biter hordes coming our way till we know more. Let Arvind and the boys get back
with some more news and we can meet then.'

What was left unsaid was that, in the event of their patrol
not coming back, they would know for sure that they faced imminent danger.
Gladwell knew that there was no point in fretting over things he couldn't
control, so he decided to focus on something which was under his control—making
sure their little settlement was secure.

Their home for the last three years had been a small village
just a few kilometers from an Indian army base where Gladwell and his family
had taken refuge after The Rising, along with some staff and Marines from the
US Embassy and a contingent of Indian Army soldiers and their families led by
Gladwell's friend, Brigadier Randhawa. As Gladwell walked around the settlement,
he couldn't but contrast the relative peace they now enjoyed to the chaos and
bloodletting of the first year.

Hordes of undead, which they now knew as Biters, had risen
and swarmed over the cities, biting and scratching victims, turning them into
ghouls like themselves. If that weren't bad enough, human governments had gone
mad, choosing to settle scores when all seemed lost, and much of the world had
been ravaged by nuclear exchanges. Huddled in their base, Gladwell and his
companions had faced innumerable attacks by Biters and human looters. They had
fought them off, and earned in blood a reputation as a group not to be easily
messed with. Part of that came from the fact that they had inherited a
veritable arsenal of weapons in a land where private gun ownership was very
low, part from the fact that they had had several trained soldiers in their
midst, but also part from the fact that Gladwell and others like him had made
sure that they stuck together. Randhawa had died soon after The Rising in an
attack by looters, and Gladwell had become the de facto leader of their group
of a hundred men, women and children.

In the distance, his daughters played with a little puppy
that had fallen into the moat that had been dug around their settlement. When
one of their sentries had called out the previous night, a dozen men had raced
to the wall, guns at the ready. They had shared a laugh afterwards when they
discovered that the intruder had not been a Biter on the rampage, but a small,
dirty puppy.

As Alice stroked the puppy's head, a lump formed in Gladwell
’
s throat. Alice had been
born in the middle of the worst carnage they had faced after The Rising, and
the first year of her life had been a constant struggle for survival against
Biters and humans alike. One day, their base had been breached by Biters and
they had to abandon it and find a new refuge in this settlement that they now
called home. When Alice had been born, Gladwell often wondered what kind of a
world he was bringing his new baby into, a world where there was nothing but
hatred, death and violence. Now, seeing her laugh and jump with joy, he was
grateful that at least, in the middle of all that they had to endure, she was
able to find something that gave her such happiness. It was much more than he
had been able to offer his family over the last four years.

A commotion began at the gate and he ran towards it. It
couldn't have been Biters, otherwise the sentries would have raised an alarm.
When he reached the gate, Jones and Arvind, a former officer in the Indian
Army, were pushing the gate open. Standing on raised platforms near the wall
were three men armed with rifles, all aiming outside. The four men who had gone
out on patrol had returned. From the look on their faces, he knew that
something was very wrong.

The patrol leader, a man called Sunil, collapsed to the
ground as he entered the settlement. Gladwell took the bottle of water at his
hip and offered him a drink.

'Sunil, what happened?'

'We've been fighting a running battle for the last two hours.
We're lucky to have gotten away alive.'

'What did you guys run into?'

Sunil's eyes had a haunted look in them as he answered.

'Biters. More of them than I've ever seen before and they're
headed our way.'

***

ABOUT MAINAK DHAR

Mainak Dhar is a
cubicle dweller by day and author by night. His first `published' work was a
stapled collection of Maths solutions and poems (he figured nobody would pay
for his poems alone) he sold to his classmates in Grade 7, and spent the
proceeds on ice cream and comics. Mainak was a bestselling author in his native
India with titles published by major houses like Penguin and Random House and
with one of his novels (Herogiri) being made into a major motion picture. In
early 2011, he began to use Amazon to reach international readers through his
ebooks and became one of the leading independent authors in the world with more
than 100,000 books sold in his first year. Mainak is one of the top selling
horror authors on Amazon worldwide and in March 2013, became the #1 bestselling
Horror author on Amazon, momentarily unseating Stephen King. He has thirteen
books to his credit including the bestselling Alice in Deadland series. Learn
more about him and contact him at
mainakdhar.com
.