Phantoms of the North: An Alice in Deadland Adventure (Alice, No. 6) (7 page)

‘Please, no. No, please.’

Alice walked up to him, her knife
in her hand.

‘What were you looking for? Who
were those men on horseback?’

The man hesitated and Alice
provided him some encouragement by punching him hard in the solar plexus. The
man doubled over, wheezing.

‘What were you looking for? Who
were those men on horseback?’

When the man looked away, Alice
hit him again.

‘Two of our men are wounded and
may not make it. I am not in a mood to wait here all night for you to answer. I’ll
ask the question again. If you don’t answer, then Bunny Ears will bite your
face off.’

Arjun was watching impassively,
but something in him was troubled at the sight of the girl he had seen a few
years ago transformed into the fearsome warrior in front of him. As Alice repeated
the question, the man spoke.

‘I cannot. They will kill me.’

‘They left you here to die
anyways, and I don’t think a vermin like you is important enough to them to
come and rescue you. Tell me what I want to know and we’ll treat your wounds,
give you some food and set you free in the Deadland. That’s all I can do for
you, but it’s better than dying here tonight or being turned into a Biter.’

The bandit had of course not been
vaccinated and still had the supernatural fear of the undead that had been so
common before people began to understand that coexistence with Biters was
possible. He had heard about it, and thought of negotiating the best deal for
himself.

‘Vaccinate me and I’ll tell you
what you want to know.’

Alice glanced at Arjun, who
nodded.

‘Tell me and you better be telling
the truth.’

‘We were made to come here by
them. They promised us Dreamweed and AK-47s and this time two of them came
along to show how serious they are.’

Alice thought back to what she had
seen and heard previously at the bandit camp they had attacked.

‘Why would you do this for some
drugs and weapons? Are they so important to you that you would throw your lives
away?’

The man’s eyes had a haunted look
in them, a fear even greater than Alice had seen when he had been thrown at
Bunny Ears’ feet.

‘You don’t say no to them, and you
have brought them upon your people. You chose to mess with their plan out in
the wastelands, and they have decided to come to your land to take what they
want.’

‘Who are they? What do they want?’

‘They want people, and they are
monsters. Monsters we call the Phantoms. And you and your people don’t know
what you’ve brought upon yourselves.’

***

FOUR

The next morning, Wonderland woke
to a much more somber mood than the festivities of the previous night. Everyone
had been shaken by the attack on the farm, and while Alice had asked people to
not spread too much news about the attackers on horseback, rumors were already
spreading about mysterious attackers on horses with automatic weapons.

Alice was at the Looking Glass
with Arjun, Danish and Doctor Edwards, talking over the events of the previous
night. Arjun had spent the morning interrogating the captured bandit and Alice
asked him if he had got anything new. He shook his head. ‘No. This guy didn’t know
much—their leader was in contact with these Phantoms, and all our man knew was
that they were offered weapons and drugs to supply people. Seems like they were
new to this business. They had been small-time bandits, but these Phantoms
reached out to them recently, probably because we cleaned up many of their
usual crew.’

Alice had been thinking about the
men on horseback.

‘What does Phantom mean? Who could
they be?’

Doctor Edwards answered that one.

‘It literally means a ghost, and I
guess if they’ve spread the name then they are led by someone who’s educated
and knows English. From whatever we’ve heard so far, they live across the old
border, in what would have been wild tribal areas. There was no shortage of
horses and men who could ride them, and the area was awash in weapons. Also,
that area was a big drug route, so the Dreamweed also fits in. Could just be a
tribe that survived The Rising and the nuclear explosions.’

Arjun looked skeptical. ‘They may
have started as a tribe, but the way the bandits are terrified of them, there’s
something more to them than just another tribe with guns and horses. Also, why
do they need to capture people? I had assumed it would be for slave labor, but
then we caught them capturing Biters.’

There were many more questions
than there were answers, but shortly Alice got the first good news of the day.
Norbert radioed in from the clinic to say that both Kevin and Kris would make
it, though both of them had lost a fair bit of blood and would need several
days of careful observation and rest before being able to leave the clinic. At
least they were alive, and Alice was thankful for that.

In all the frenetic activity of
the past day, she had totally forgotten something which Danish reminded her of.
‘The next flight from the Homeland is due this evening. Konrath knows nothing
about yesterday so the flight’s left.’

With the farm going so smoothly,
they had agreed for more machines and yet more settlers, and this time families
were on the way, enthused by the early reports from those who had arrived. They
had no idea that they would be landing in the middle of the new danger
Wonderland faced.

Alice sat down, wondering what she
could do. ‘Can we have them turn back?’

‘No, they would be more than
halfway here and wouldn’t have enough fuel to go back.’

‘Get Konrath on the line. At least
he can then decide if he wants to call his people back.’

‘Would that be wise? I mean we’ve
had one attack that just two defenders beat off. Whoever these horsemen are,
they would be operating far from home and on our turf.’

The speaker was Aalok, who had
just joined them. His eyes were still red from the excesses of the previous
night, but he had been jolted wide awake by news of the attack.

‘Things could get worse, and now
we’d have families living on the farms.’

‘We could have the families inside
Wonderland, defended by our patrols. The farms are off to a great start, and
the plans for the factory are also well in the works. If we scare off the
settlers, we’ll be back to dealing with the problem of how to feed our people.’

Alice saw the sense in what Aalok
was saying, but she had long learned that the best way of getting into trouble
was to underestimate the threat posed by adversaries. Best to overreact and
with decisive force than to wait till the enemy was at your doorstep. She
looked at Aalok, who struck a more conciliatory tone.

‘I’m still new here, and you guys
have the right to decide what you want to do for Wonderland, but I think we’d
be overreacting. The people and machines will land here anyways, so why not
keep them secured inside Wonderland till we find out a bit more about this
threat?’

Arjun was nodding, and without
anything being said, Alice knew that the balance had shifted against her. Arjun
had known her far too long and far too well to disagree with her openly like
this. He knew how Alice could be when she sensed danger, and how more often
than not she had proven to be all too right.

‘Aalok, give us a minute.’

As Arjun and Alice stepped out,
she turned to him.

‘You agree with him, don’t you?’

‘Yes and no, Alice.’

Alice smiled, with very little
humor in her voice.

‘Have you also become a
politician?’

Arjun laughed at the suggestion.

‘Not at all, Alice. There is a
danger out there, but we don’t know if it’s some small drugged-up tribe or something
bigger. What we do know is that we won’t have enough food to feed all our
people and that these farms and the machines give us the only answer to that
problem we have on hand.’

‘So what do you propose?’

‘Keep the farms going. Increase
security there and keep the families flying from the Homeland inside
Wonderland, but there’s one more thing I’d do.’

As Alice looked at him, he
answered with a smile.

‘We thought we had scattered the
bandits, but clearly these horsemen either scare them enough or tempt them
enough with their Dreamweed to get them to attack us again. We need to put
these bandits out of business. We need to make them fear us more than they fear
these horsemen.’

Alice smiled for the first time
that morning.

***

To anyone watching, the next
morning seemed as if Wonderland had declared war on some as yet unknown enemy.
Three Jeeps laden with armed men and women and more than a dozen bicycles with
armed riders, traveling in groups of three, set out of Wonderland. Add to that
more than a hundred Biters who had set out under Bunny Ears’ command, and you
had a veritable army on the march. The mission was simple—to seek and destroy
any bandits they found, and to strike fear into any who saw them pass.

As a show of force, it was
admirable, especially since the three Jeeps were mounted with heavy caliber
machine guns captured from Zeus long ago during the fighting in the city ruins.
The bandits might have been many things, but they were not suicidal, and for
the first hour, they were nowhere to be seen. Alice had expected that, but what
she was counting on was the fact that the bandits had no idea just how
effective a hunting party of Biters could be.

The humans were all linked by
radio, to help co-ordinate their efforts, but of course Biters could not use
radios, so Alice had asked Bunny Ears to stay close to the jeep she was in. She
saw them in the distance, fanning out, scouring the area around them. She hadn’t
wanted any of them to be killed needlessly, so her instructions to Bunny Ears
had been clear. If the Biters got any sign of bandits, he would call for Alice.

The thing was, humans looked for
vehicle or human tracks, but Biters didn’t look for those, they hunted based on
smell. And on a clear day like this, with the wind blowing at a fair clip,
Alice was betting on the fact that they would find bandits where human patrols
might not have succeeded.

They swept through the wastelands
three times before they made contact. It started with a Biter stopping and
growling. That got all the other Biters to stop and join in the growing
crescendo of noise. Alice got out of the Jeep and ran down the line. The Biter
who had started it all had been a young woman before she had been turned, and
was wearing the bloodstained white gown that she had been wearing at the time.
She turned to look at Alice and began screeching, low-pitched sounds that would
have been unintelligible to any human. After all these years of seeing Biters
up close, Alice knew that they were trying to communicate, perhaps in their
minds they were also formulating the thoughts and words to convey what they
wanted. It was just that they could not express those into words any more when
they spoke. But as the Biter walked towards a group of huts near an abandoned
village, it was clear enough where she had sensed the bandits.

Salil and Brittany, who had been
in the Jeep with Alice, also drove up. ‘There are at least three or four huts
still intact in there where they could be hiding. We’ll be sitting ducks if we
go in with them behind cover.’

Alice considered the situation for
a second and then made her plan.

‘Get the Jeep set up so that you
have a clear field of fire for the machine gun. I’ll get the Biters to fall
back. No point in them rushing in and getting shot. Brittany and I’ll go
closer. If anyone fires at us, destroy the hut with the machine gun.’

Alice and Brittany crept closer to
the huts, and from a distance of about twenty meters, hidden behind a large
rock, Alice shouted so that her voice could be heard.

‘If you’re in there, come out without
your weapons and I will ensure that no harm comes to you.’

There was silence for a couple of
seconds, as if they were deciding what to do, and then a bullet pinged off the
rock.

‘Bad choice,’ muttered Alice as
she took cover and Salil opened up with the machine gun mounted on the Jeep.
The huts were ramshackle structures, perhaps put up by a group of villagers who
used to graze their animals here before The Rising. They were little more than
straw and wood cobbled together. As the first shells hit the hut where the shot
had come from, it literally disintegrated. Salil kept firing till there was
little left standing. As Alice peeked from behind the rock, she saw a man’s
body visible in the ruins of where the hut had been.

‘If there’s anyone else there, don’t
throw away your lives. Come out and you live.’

It took a few more minutes, but
then three men came out of the huts, their hands in the air. They had the look
that all bandits out in the wasteland seemed to share—tattered clothes and a
slightly wild look in their eyes. Perhaps years of surviving out here had done
that to them, or perhaps it was the Dreamweed. Salil and Brittany ran up to
them and made sure they were not armed, and then made them kneel on the ground.
Bunny Ears came up behind Alice, but this time there was no need to frighten
the bandits any more. They were shaking, and one man was crying freely.