Phantoms of the North: An Alice in Deadland Adventure (Alice, No. 6) (15 page)

The men in the valley near their
cage were still smoking and a couple tottered as they walked, trying to hold
onto the wall for support. Another one got up and started screaming in some
foreign tongue, only to be battered down by a comrade. They were drugged out of
their senses, but that made them unpredictable and even more dangerous. Their
leader, The Khan, was nowhere to be seen, and a small light shone in his tent
on the ledge above them. Presumably, their feasting would start when he came
down to join his men, and Aalok had no intention of waiting that long. He got
back to work, and within a few minutes, he felt Bunny Ears moving his hand
freely.

‘That’s about all I can do. When
it comes to it, I’ll try my best but I’m hardly a fighter so I don’t know how
long I’ll last. Just make these thugs suffer as much as you can. I wish I had
more time to get to know you and perhaps rediscover who you once were, but at
least we’ll go out with a bang.’

He heard a scraping noise to his
left and looked out the cage to see a thick rope being pulled by three masked
men. Tethered to the rope at one end were six men, with the rope tied around their
waists. They were a wretched sight, in tattered clothes and with their ribcages
and bones showing prominently. A few of them looked towards Aalok but then
quickly averted their gazes, perhaps in order to not incur the wrath of their
captors. They were dumped next to the cage and left there. Apparently, they had
come to accept their captivity to the extent that the Phantoms no longer
worried about them making a break for it. Aalok whispered to the group.

‘Hey, there are eight of us. I
just undid the ropes holding my friend and I can try to free one of you. These
guys are too doped up to notice.’

A couple of the men now saw Bunny
Ears and shrank back in fear. They had never anticipated seeing a Biter at such
close quarters in a cage with a man. One of them answered.

‘My friend, we will be kept alive
since we work their fields, but if we try and assist in your escape, we will
join you in their cooking pot.’

Aalok spat in disgust.

‘Are you men? You will stand by
and watch others get slaughtered. Do you not see that one day your time will
come? Who will save you then?’

The man looked away but didn’t
answer. The masked men stirred, and a couple of them got up and headed up to
The Khan’s tent. They were fast running out of time, so Aalok tried a different
tack.

‘We come from Wonderland, where
Alice leads us. She will be on her way to rescue us, and you too can join us
and leave this filth behind. Just help us.’

One of the men looked at Aalok, a
haunted expression in his eyes.

‘There is nobody to help us
anymore, and it’s best you accept that as well.’

***

Alice watched Negi drive back in
the darkness. Now she was on her own.

She turned to look at the narrow
mountain pass that the bandit had said the Phantoms rode down to meet them.
Alice set off on a brisk jog. Fatigue was not a concern and she could run much
faster, but she wanted to be a bit careful in the dark. While only a headshot
would kill her, a broken leg would effectively bring her mission to an end.

She had a small flashlight that
Aalok had attached to her handgun and gifted to her. Perhaps it was only
fitting that she should use it while going to his rescue. She did not want to
keep the flashlight on for extended periods, since she would likely be seen
well before she saw anyone in the darkness, but she turned it on for a few
seconds and swept her handgun around her. There were obvious and recent marks
of men and animals on the move, and also what looked like the marks of wheels.
Perhaps a wagon pulled by horses to carry Aalok and Bunny Ears.

She turned a corner and saw a much
broader path, almost a paved road, and perhaps it had once been one. Arjun had
told her that the armies of old used to move heavy cannon and trucks near these
passes, so it was perhaps a remnant of those days. Now, more sure of the area
she was heading into, Alice increased her speed, running at full tilt for the
next ten minutes, passing a few abandoned check posts that stood like silent
sentinels on the side of the road.

Alice paused as she came to
another turn. Here the road snaked into a valley, ringed by peaks on both
sides. If someone wanted to post sentries, this would be the spot, a great
vantage point to see and strike down any intruders. Alice knew that the
Phantoms likely had night vision equipment, given the accuracy of their night
attack on the farm, and she flattened herself behind a large boulder.

She powered up the scope on her
sniper rifle and brought it up to her shoulder, sweeping the area slowly from
right to left.

There.

A man visible against the rocks,
showing up bright green in the scope. He was facing away from her. Presumably
whatever was happening at their camp beyond the valley was more interesting
than watching for intruders. They were either very incompetent or very
complacent. Given the tactics they had displayed in the attack on Wonderland,
Alice was not going to take their incompetence for granted. Underestimating an
enemy was usually a shortcut to an untimely death.

As she swept her rifle further to
the left, she picked up one more sentry, this one also with his back to her.
Her rifle had a silencer attached, and she would be able to drop both men
without making much of a noise. However, she did not know how they were
connected back to their base. With the kind of equipment they had displayed, it
was more than likely that they had radios. If so, suddenly losing contact with
both sentries would alert them, robbing Alice of the element of surprise.

Actually, Alice had overestimated
the level of sophistication of The Khan’s men. In that he had succeeded in his
ruse, of making her think they were a far more formidable adversary than they
perhaps were. They had a lot of weapons and ammunition and battle-hardened men
to handle them, but living in the remote valleys as they did without any
electricity or steady supply of fuel for generators, they were far behind Alice’s
forces in terms of communication equipment.

Alice moved silently in the
darkness, sprinting to another tree and then seeing whether the sentries had
reacted in any way. Then she waited for a few seconds, waiting to gauge their
reaction before she moved forward to the next tree. It was painstaking progress
and under normal circumstances, Alice would have rushed in without a care for
her safety. In this case, however, there was much more at stake than her
safety. She knew Aalok and Bunny Ears’ lives depended on her. If, that was,
they were still alive. She shut that thought out and ran forward.

***

The first man to get close to
Bunny Ears was swatted away with a blow delivered with his one good arm.
Another man rushed into the cage, knife in hand, but Aalok stuck his leg out,
tripping the man, and Bunny Ears snapped his neck in one smooth motion.

The Khan’s voice boomed out over
the chaos.

‘I bring you fools a half-blind
weakling and a one-armed Biter and you still cannot get them out.’

Aalok shouted out, hoping that his
voice did not betray the terror he felt.

‘Freaks, you won’t get us alive.
Come in and finish us. You wanted a meal, well, you’ll just have to spit out
the bullets.’

For good measure, Bunny Ears
reached out towards the man whom he had struck down and bit deep into his neck.
The man fell down with a scream and flopped around in pain, and then he was
silent.

‘Good thinking, Bunny Ears.’

Bunny Ears growled in
acknowledgement of the compliment as Aalok fished out a knife from the robe of
the dead man. He had no pretensions about his abilities to fight with a knife
but it felt reassuring to have some sort of a weapon.

The Khan saw what was happening
and screamed at his men.

‘Shoot him in the head. Now!’

He was standing on the ledge, and
his guns were in the tent, so he knew he would not likely get there in time. He
saw to his dismay that his men were too stoned to react, too shocked or both.
What was supposed to have been a victory feast before the next day’s raid was
turning out to be quite a fiasco.

‘If you want something done right
around here, you’ve got to do it yourself.’

The Khan got a long machete from
his tent and leapt down amidst his men. They all moved out of the way. This was
not a time to get in The Khan’s way. He had ripped off his mask, and his
hideous, deformed face, further contorted by his fury, was visible to all in
the light of the torches. He raised his sword.

‘I will not shoot you, but I will
hack you into pieces and drink your blood.’

That was when the Khan heard a
flopping sound to his right. He looked up and saw one of his men fall off his
vantage point where he had been put on guard. For a second, The Khan wondered
if the fool had slipped and fallen. Then the other sentry cried out in pain and
fell to his death.

This was no accident. They were
under attack.

***

Alice had ideally wanted to get a
bit closer but then she heard the unmistakable roar that could only have been
Bunny Ears. She would have wanted to wait for reinforcements to come in, for
her to have more numbers on her side, but now there was no choice. She had
known Bunny Ears long enough to know exactly what that roar meant—he was in
mortal danger.

She tracked her gun up and fired,
a single shot bringing down the first sentry. In the same motion, she swung her
rifle left to where she had remembered the second sentry being, and the many
minutes of painstaking progress paid off, since she shot him down before he
even had time to react to seeing his comrade fall. This kill wasn’t as silent
as Alice would have liked as the man shouted out before he fell. She now raced
ahead, knowing that she had lost her advantage of surprise.

The Khan screamed at his men to
get their weapons. He had no idea how many men were attacking his camp, but he
knew who must have led them. Alice. He felt a fleeting admiration for her—it
took guts to recover so fast from the raid and to counterattack. She was a
worthy enemy, and because of that, it would give him even greater pleasure to
cut off her head.

As his men scrambled to gather
their weapons, The Khan realized that in the chaos he had forgotten about the
cage. When he turned, his man was getting up, blood flowing from the wound on
his neck where Bunny Ears had bitten him, his eyes yellowed and lifeless. He
looked at The Khan and bared his teeth and shuffled towards him.

The Khan stabbed him in the head
with his sword and then kicked his body off his sword. A waste of a good man
but better than having him roam around as a Biter. Then he swore in
frustration—the captive and the Biter had disappeared in the melee.

Alice saw the unmistakable shuffle
of a Biter and then saw the big man kill him with his sword. She felt a stab of
panic, wondering if it had been Bunny Ears but then she caught a glimpse of
Aalok and Bunny Ears running behind some rocks. They were alive! Three of the
Phantoms had also spotted them and were in pursuit. One of them raised his
rifle to fire at Aalok and fell dead a second later as a bullet from Alice’s
rifle slammed into his body. Alice picked off a second man with a shot that hit
him in the stomach. As he doubled over in pain, she put another bullet in his
neck, killing him. The third man dove behind a rock and fired a wild,
uncontrolled burst from his rifle that came nowhere near Alice but stitched the
air near The Khan’s head.

The Khan roared in fury.

‘You idiots! Take cover, use your
night vision optics and hunt them down.’

He grabbed the rifle from a fallen
man and scanned the hills, looking for their attackers. For a moment, he
regretted having sent Jamal and Rashid on suicide missions. They had been his
best men, and also the ones most likely to challenge him when his sickness was
obvious. If they had been around, they would have been rallying the men, leading
a counterattack, but now he would just have to do that himself.

He saw another of his men fall and
was about to raise his rifle when he felt a cough coming on. He hid behind the
rock and coughed hard, spitting out blood, using all his strength to try and
pull himself together.

Alice ducked as a few bullets hit
the rocks around her. They had got a bead on her position and were now
unloading on her. She guessed that there were at least three dozen men—much
fewer than she had thought there would be, and also much more than she could
handle alone.

Of course, she was not entirely
alone. Aalok whispered to Bunny Ears to stay down, but he had spotted something
and growled in a low voice which meant that he was pleased with something.

‘Come on, Bunny Ears! Nothing to
be happy about here. We’ll be dead and their dinner soon.’

Then Bunny Ears said something
that made Aalok’s hair stand on end.

‘Aaa…lissss.’

Aalok followed Bunny Ears’ gaze
and thought he saw a quick glimpse of blonde hair disappearing behind a rock.
Alice had come for them. The rocks around her erupted with gunfire, and in a
few seconds Aalok realized that she was alone. Nobody else was firing back. She
had come for them alone.