Hunting The Snark: An Alice in Deadland Adventure (Alice, No. 4) (11 page)

When she got up to her knees, the Jeep was covered in smoke
and Bunny Ears was lying prone a few feet in front of her. Men’s voices rang
out, and above them all, the guttural laughter of a man who was calling her
name.

‘Alice, come to the Jabberwock.’

Alice grabbed her rifle and rolled into the undergrowth on
the side of the road as the first bullets pinged off the road behind her. She
brought her rifle up, ready to fight.

***

NINE

Another rocket snaked out towards the Jeep and Alice
screamed as the Jeep exploded. All her friends and companions, gone.

Bunny Ears was not dead, indeed a Biter could only be
permanently put down by a shot to the head, but he was bleeding from shrapnel
in his back. He pulled her deeper into the undergrowth. His eyes were vacant,
but as Alice thought back to the moments before the first rocket, she could
have sworn that Bunny Ears had pushed her ahead. Her old companion had taken a
lot of the shrapnel that would otherwise have hit her.

It just reinforced what she already knew—that far from being
mindless monsters, Biters could show loyalty and friendship, in many ways in a
more selfless way than humans. That made her hate Zeus and its masters with an
even greater intensity, because their hold over humans depended on demonizing
Biters and pitting humans against them.

She didn’t know how many attackers she was up against, but
she would never go down without a fight. The man’s calling out to her had told
her that this was not a chance ambush. Someone was specifically targeting her,
and she would make him regret having chosen her as a target.

Movement came to her right and she raised her rifle, only to
hear a hoarse whisper.

‘It’s Beaver. I’ve got Baker with me.’

‘Are you okay? What about the others?’

‘We’re a bit cut up, but can fight. I don’t think Satish
made it. Vince was thrown out of the Jeep with Tom, but I think they’re okay.’

Alice took that in. Satish, the Zeus officer who had left a
life of security to fight in the Deadland with her and her friends. They said
that Biters didn’t feel any emotion, but Alice felt it all right. Another
comrade gone.

Cynthia told Josh to be quiet, and they heard boots
approaching, crunching on the gravel. No doubt their attackers were closing in
to finish the job. Alice moved back a bit more and now she could see Josh and
Cynthia. Josh winked at her, one of his eyes closed shut with blood flowing
freely from a cut to the forehead.

Alice was now about fifty feet away from the Jeep and she
looked through the scope on her rifle, trying to see the attackers and her
companions. Through the smoke that obscured the still-burning Jeep, she saw
some movement.

There!

Vince was sitting on the ground, holding his stomach and
slumped over. Tom was next to him, with his sniper rifle by his side. One of
his legs was bent at an awkward angle. What she saw next made her get up and
start towards the Jeep before Josh tackled her and brought her down.

‘Alice, no! If we lose you, we lose everything!’

‘They’re trapped. I saw John with his legs trapped under the
Jeep, but he’s moving. Tom’s leg looks broken and I don’t know how badly Vince
is hurt.’

‘Alice, listen to me. If you die on this highway, it’s all
over. They’ll send a Snark to Wonderland and destroy your people. Then they’ll
wipe us out. All that we’ve fought for, all the friends we’ve lost, will be for
nothing.’

Alice had seen near and dear ones die before. She had seen
her father fall while making a last stand against Zeus in their settlement back
in the Deadland, and she had seen her mother and sister die in an air raid. But
seeing a horror repeatedly did not necessarily make it easier to bear. As Alice
watched through her scope while a line of men appeared on the highway,
approaching the Jeep with assault rifles in their hands, she felt a rage she
had not felt in a long time.

She would make these men pay dearly.

***

‘Your leg doesn’t look too good, Broker.’

‘So says the man who’s got his legs under the Jeep.’

Vince looked at the two men and shook his head.

‘How the hell can you guys joke at a time like this?’

Tom looked at Vince and smiled, though Vince could see he
was in a lot of pain from the grimace that soon overshadowed the smile.

‘Flyboy, if you can walk, get into those bushes and help
Alice get to those damn Snarks or Boojums or whatever the hell they are.’

‘I can’t…’

‘You have to, Marine. Only you can fly that chopper to get
her there in time. We’re done here. There’s no way we can get John out in time,
and with my leg I’ll just be excess baggage. I’ll try and slow them down, but
you have to get away now.’

Vince tried to pass on his assault rifle but Tom shook his
head, pointing to the sniper rifle he had cradled in his hand. As Vince
scrambled to the undergrowth using the smoke for cover, Tom turned to face their
attackers, wincing at the pain he felt in his legs. He clasped hands with his
old friend John.

‘So this is it. I only wish we could have had one last
beer.’

John coughed, and blood seeped out of the edges of his
mouth.

‘Shut up, Broker, and give ’em hell. I’ll wait here with a
little going-away present for them.’

Tom Riley dragged himself forward and then brought his rifle
up to his shoulder. Six men walked towards the Jeep. They were laughing, their
rifles casually held at their sides. They thought they had already killed their
quarry. Tom would teach them that careless men had a pretty short lifespan
around here.

Jabber had sent forward six men to mop up anyone who
remained, but if the Biter witch was alive, they were to keep her for him. He
had kept his ten hardened fighters back with him—no point in risking them for
what was turning out to be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. They had been
assisted in the ambush by a dozen local boys, not part of his core group, but
local gang members who wanted to curry favor with Jabber. They were at least of
the faith, and Jabber wanted this to be their initiation. For all their brave
talk, they had never really fought in battle, and he had impressed upon them
that looting unarmed civilians did not count as a man’s battle. All the rockets
that had been fired so far had been fired by his men, and he had sneered at the
gang leader, a tall black man called Mohammed, that now at least he and his
boys could prove that they were indeed men enough to be a part of Jabber’s
group.

Vince came up to them, and he crouched beside Alice.

‘We need to get going.’

‘I can thin their numbers a bit.’

Vince held her shoulder.

‘Tom and John stayed back so that you could make it. Here in
the open, with just a few rifles, we cannot fight all of them. I reckon there
are twenty of them, many with rockets, and there are just four of us, and of
course Bunny Ears. We need to get to some cover and even if we have to make a
stand, let’s find a place where we can defend ourselves.’

Vince was right, but none of that made it easy to leave two
good men to die. As Alice slowly lowered her rifle and began to turn away,
Vince said to her, ‘People say that what makes you special is the fact that
you’re half Biter, or that old book you carry. They’re wrong. What makes you
special, what makes any one of us special, is what we carry inside. We’ll make
these bastards pay, but now we get as far away as we can and find out a way to
get to the airfield.’

As Alice crawled through the undergrowth, half dragging a
reluctant Bunny Ears, the first shot rang out.

‘Did you get him?’

Tom looked at John, who looked pale and seemed to have
trouble keeping his eyes open.

‘Of course I got him.’

The five remaining young men crouched, their rifles up,
wondering what they were walking into as they saw their leader’s head blown
apart by a single shot. They knew they could not run with Jabber and his men
behind them. One of them fired his AK on full auto at the Jeep, spraying it
with bullets. As he stopped to see his handiwork and reload, a bullet took him
in the throat. As he fell, his friends began to lose their nerve. Jabber
screamed aloud.

‘Cowards! It’s one man with a gun. Nobody else is firing
there. Finish them!’

Tom smiled and took another attacker, this time a single shot
that hit him in the chest. As the man slumped to the ground, Tom put another
bullet in his head.

‘No bloody point saving bullets now, is there, Barrister?’

When he didn’t get a reply, he turned to see that John was
lying motionless, clutching a satchel to his chest. Tom spat at the approaching
men, who now seemed to have at least overcome their paralysis and were taking
cover on the side of the road and firing at him.

‘Stupid fucking gangbangers. All they know is how to spray
and pray. Time for a little shooting lesson.’

Tom waited till one of them popped up to fire and pulled the
trigger. A sudden spasm of pain in his leg made him jerk his hand and his shot
went wide, grazing the man on the shoulder. As the man shouted and took cover,
Tom tried to concentrate and blank out the pain. He didn’t know how far Alice
had got, and he didn’t know how long he could keep firing, but he hoped that he
had given her enough time.

Jabber grabbed an RPG launcher from one of his men.

‘That should teach me to send rats to do a man’s job.’

He took aim at the Jeep and fired.

Tom had raised his rifle to look for another target when the
rocket hit the Jeep just a few feet in front of him, showering him with hot
shrapnel. The Broker went down, and never got up again.

Jabber handed back the launcher and looked through his
scope. The Jeep was a mangled, fiery wreck, and a sniper rifle had been thrown
clear by the last explosion. He called out to the three men who were cowering
on the side of the road.

‘They’re dead. Unless you are so pathetic that corpses can
beat you, go and check the Jeep.’

The three men approached the Jeep cautiously, and when they
reached it, they saw a man lying dead near the side, and two more bodies inside
the Jeep. A man was lying trapped under the Jeep, his legs crushed by it. One
of the men poked him with his rifle.

‘Is he dead?’

John Garner opened his eyes and raised his head, wincing at
the pain. His vision was blurry and every time he took a breath, he felt a
stabbing pain in his chest. The man above him looked on with eyes widening in
surprise and fear. John whispered as he put his hand inside the satchel,
‘Gotcha.’

Then the Broker detonated his last bomb.

***

Alice paused at the explosion and turned as a pillar of
smoke rose in the distance. Vince urged her on.

‘Come on, we need to put some distance between us and them.’

She continued running through the dense undergrowth, with
Bunny Ears a few feet behind her. Vince and Cynthia were right next to her,
while Josh brought up the rear, making sure they had not been followed.

They stopped after more than twenty minutes of non-stop
running. Alice could keep going, one of the advantages that being half Biter
gave her, but Vince was winded as he bent, his arms clutching his sides, trying
to catch his breath. Josh was on the radio.

‘Beaver here. They’re not following us yet, but it’s about
to get dark and we won’t get far on foot. Best to hole up for the night and try
our luck tomorrow.’

Alice did not like the idea of staying put in the dark, but
there was no option. As soon as they found some sanctuary, Vince would take out
the radio from his backpack and try and establish contact with nearby
resistance forces to come with some transport.

Cynthia pointed to a small hillock a few hundred meters
away.

‘That looks like a good place. At least we’ll have the
advantage of terrain.’

Alice did not share her optimism.

‘It also means that we’re trapped up there.’

***

Jabber roared in frustration, grabbing one of his men by the
scruff of his neck.

‘Which one of you idiots thought these sons of goats were
good enough to be a part of our mission?’

At another time, his men would have shared a chuckle behind
his back at how, despite all his years in the US, Jabber lapsed into abuses
that must have made sense where he came from, but sounded absurd in English.
However, this would not have been a good time to laugh at Jabber, especially
when he had his knife out and murder in his eyes.

Jabber threw the man down to the ground and examined the
burnt wreckage of the Jeep. All six of the gang members had perished, learning
that shooting at unarmed civilians and pretending to be tough gangbangers was
very different from taking on men and women who knew what they were doing. Of
course that was a lesson they would have ample time to reflect upon in Hell.

‘Did we at least get the witch?’

The two men he had sent to examine the wreckage hesitated
and he screamed out aloud.

‘Are you fucking deaf? Did we get the witch?’

One of the men, Malik, a combat veteran of Afghanistan who
had been in Guantánamo with Jabber, went ahead. As he poked around the wreckage
with his rifle, he paused and then looked back at Jabber.

‘Best as I can tell, there are at most three bodies here of
the enemy, other than the imbeciles we sent after them. All of the bodies seem
like adult men.’

Jabber swore again, this time under his breath, now
conscious that letting his men see him so frustrated and angry was not helping.
He rallied his men and sheathed his knife.

‘Come on, the witch could not have gone very far. Malik, take
two men on bikes and go along the highway. I’ll take the others and spread out
in the bushes.’