Phantoms of the North: An Alice in Deadland Adventure (Alice, No. 6) (9 page)

‘We’ve been at this for an hour.
There are no bandits out here, and even if they are, they have better sense
than us than to be walking about in the heat. Should we get back to the farm?’

Brittany nodded.

‘I hear Haroula’s making some
cake. It’s Christopher’s birthday celebration in a couple of days. Haroula told
me we can’t touch the cake till his birthday but she’s also making some sweets
that she’s promised us.’

That put an extra spring in Salil’s
step. Christopher was one of the kids who had come over to join their parents
at the farm. He was about to turn twelve, and was a good kid, always eager to
help out on the farm. He had been fascinated by the sniper rifle Salil carried,
and even more in awe when he heard how Salil had taken it from a Red Guard sniper
who had shot three resistance fighters by crawling up behind him and killing
him in hand-to-hand combat.

‘Come on, I’ll race you to the
Jeep.’

Salil set off, but soon regretted
his challenge. Brittany was a good few steps ahead of him and he was struggling
to keep up.

That was when he heard the horses.

‘Brittany, get down!’

She turned to look at him,
wondering what had gotten into him, and he ran towards her, pulling her down
behind a rock. As they peered over the side, two horsemen galloped into view.
Each one had a rifle strapped to his back over a cloak that totally covered
their bodies. Their faces were masked, and they were riding from the direction
of the farm. Salil looked through his scope and saw that the front of both
their cloaks were streaked red.

Salil had his rifle ready, but the
horsemen veered away and galloped away at top speed.

‘What do you think that was about?’

Salil’s face was grim as he
answered.

‘Can’t be anything good. Let’s get
back and let Alice and the others know.’

Salil drove as fast as he could
and when they reached the farm, they ran out, weapons at the ready. Haroula was
there, a bemused smile on her face.

‘What happened, kids?’

Salil was still breathing hard
from his sprint to the Jeep and then to the farm and looked around with visible
relief.

‘I thought they…’

Brittany sought out Patricia and
Phoenix who had been on guard duty.

‘Did you see any horsemen?’

Both shook their heads, which didn’t
reassure Brittany much. If the horsemen had been in close proximity and managed
to get by the farm unseen and unheard, then they knew their stuff better than
the average bandit.

When Alice heard on the radio, she
came right away, with Bunny Ears along. With the birthday celebration coming
up, they decided not to spook everyone but to take a closer look at what had
happened. An hour of tracking made it clear. The two intruders had kept their
horses about a kilometer away and then come on foot, perhaps crawling the last
two hundred meters, judging from the marks in the sand. They had hidden behind
a small dune and watched the farm before going back the way they came,
retracing their tracks. As Alice watched the tracks, she felt a new stab of
concern. These were not ordinary bandits, but men who knew what they were
doing, trained in the ways of surveillance and war. The distance at which they
had surveyed the farm meant that they would have seen little detail with their
naked eyes. That meant they had scopes or binoculars. Their footprints showed
heavy soled boots, not the tattered footwear of ordinary bandits.

Just who were these new enemies
and what did they want?

***

FIVE

The Khan lay curled in a fetal
position and coughed again, covering his mouth with his hand, trying to muffle
the sound as best as he could. When he removed his hand, he saw blood on it.

He had long known it would perhaps
come to this. Many of his men had met a similar fate over the years, others
fallen sick suddenly and died. They were illiterate tribesmen, well trained in
the art of war, but with no real idea of what had happened to their bodies.

The Khan sat up and looked at his
reflection in the mirror, and then took out a faded photograph from his pocket.
It showed a blond, handsome man with his arms around a beautiful woman. Then he
put the photo back. That had been a dream, something he did not often try and
remember, because remembering the past never helped him cope with what he had
become and what he had to do. The world of his past, one he had devoted his
life to, had betrayed him, and he had been reborn as The Khan. In this new
world he would make sure he was never again as vulnerable and helpless as he
had been in the old world. In the early days, he had yearned for what he had
lost, and he had remembered who he had been. Matt Kobold. That name meant
nothing to him now.

The patrol was due back soon, and
he was keen to hear what they had learned. In a way, he admired this girl
called Alice. They were more alike than not—both survivors, both having become
something very different from what they had been. The Khan put on his mask and
cloak and stepped out of his tent. His men were practicing below. Rashid was
putting them through their paces, and over the last couple of days, The Khan
had asked Rashid to increase the tempo of exercises. That served two purposes—to
not give them much spare time or energy to grumble about the drying up of the
supply of humans and also because The Khan suspected they would be tested in
battle sooner rather than later.

Rashid’s horse peeled off from the
others and he rode towards The Khan, coming to a stop mere feet away, and
dismounted in one expert, fluid motion.

‘My Khan, our two scouts have been
sighted. They should be here in ten minutes.’

‘Good, I am keen to hear what they
have seen in this so-called Wonderland.’

Rashid was about to get on his
horse when The Khan stopped him.

‘There is something that troubles
you, Rashid. I have known you too long for you to pretend otherwise. What is
it?’

Rashid hesitated, knowing that he
was signing the death sentence for the two scouts, but that was a preferable
outcome than bringing The Khan’s wrath down on himself.

‘My Khan, the scouts have brought
back a human captive. It seems to be one of our suppliers, one of the bandits
we have dealt with in the past.’

A flash of anger passed through
The Khan’s mind, but then it was gone. The men would be dealt with, but first
he had to learn what they had seen. He dismissed Rashid and came down to join
his men, riding with them. After a few minutes, the two scouts came in, a
gagged and bound man tied and draped across the back of one of their horses.
The Khan called them over and asked for them to be given water before they
talked to him.

The two men were averting his
gaze, knowing they had erred, and even before they got to their mission, one of
them pointed to the man strung up on the horse.

‘My Khan, we are hungry and we
came across this one. He and his fellow bandits refuse to supply us any more,
they are so afraid of that Alice and her armies. They are of no use to us as
suppliers, so they may as well become our supplies.’

The Khan’s eyes bored into the man
and he looked away, and both men were silent. The Khan walked up to the captive
and inspected him.

‘He is healthy, and seems stout.
Someone take him away and prepare him. We can have a feast tonight.’

The two scouts were looking at
each other, grinning behind their masks, relieved that their infraction had not
angered the Khan. That was when the Khan walked up behind one of them, grabbed
him from behind and broke his neck. As his lifeless body crumpled to the
ground, the other man fell to his knees, begging for mercy.

‘I only need one of you to report
what you saw. As for this fool—he broke our rules and came back bragging about
it. For years we have cultivated these bandits to work for us. Yes, they fear
this Alice, but now they will never work for us if they know we have turned on
them.’

He grabbed the man by his
shoulders and raised him to a standing position.

‘You will live today. Now tell me
what you have learned about this Alice and what you have seen of their
defenses.’

When the man had finished, The
Khan retreated to his tent to think through his course of action. He had
learned much about the armament and numbers of Wonderland, but importantly, he
had learned much about Alice. He knew that the strength of any army, and indeed
the roots of its weakness, lay in its leadership, much more than the number of
foot soldiers or weapons it could bring to bear. His men had interrogated a
bandit who had been a captive in Wonderland and had seen Alice up close, and
what he learned about her intrigued him. She was a warrior, but her strength
and success lay more than in just her prowess on the battlefield. She had
somehow been able to create a fully functioning society that integrated humans
and Biters. Her unique hybrid condition was part of it, but part of it was her
surrounding herself with men and women, and indeed a certain Biter with strange
ears, who seemed to be her core group, the group that kept Wonderland going.

His men in contrast were fighters
and followers, the two qualities that had kept them alive and by his side so
long, but they were hardly the sort to discuss strategy with. The Khan allowed
himself a smile as he recalled the days before The Rising, when he and his
colleagues would talk dismissively of these tribal guerrillas allied to Al
Qaeda or the Pakistani Taliban and their crude fighting tactics. Pray and
spray. That was what they had called it, and at the time, The Khan had found it
funny, basking in the security and arrogance that came with being part of the
world’s mightiest war machine.

But then that very machine had
abandoned him, leaving him to die in the radioactive wasteland that Pakistan
had become or fall prey to the undead monsters that now roamed the cities. The
prison The Khan ran with his CIA colleagues was secret, and what had happened
in it—torture of suspects without trial, illegal renditions, experiments in
mind control—was too damaging to ever see the light of day. So in the days of
The Rising, when all looked lost, the undead multiplying with every bite and
the threat of nuclear war looming large, he had hoped he would be evacuated
like the other bases in and around the region. That order never came. Someone
had preferred that the secrets of his prison would die with him.

Unfortunately for them, he had
refused to die and made his way to the tribal areas, fighting and killing to
survive each day and ultimately finding a home among the very men he had
tortured and ridiculed. He knew the language, he knew the customs and he knew
that to survive, an outsider like him had only one option—take charge. So he
killed anyone in his path, and carved a swathe of death and destruction along
the way.

For weeks, for months, he hoped
things would go back to normal. That he would find a way home. He saw the
mushroom clouds, he saw the living turn into the undead, he saw men turn on
each other when the food ran out; and soon after his own hope for any rescue
ran out. He had always been a man who instilled fear in others, but now it was
terror he wrought where he went. He had been betrayed, his world, his life
taken away from him. Now he would create a new world for himself, the only one
possible in the terrible new world he inhabited—one he would rule over and
carve with a sword. His name was unknown to all those who served him. They knew
him only as The Khan, and like the great Mongol rulers of yore who bore that
title, he and his horseback horde would spread out and conquer what lay in
their path.

He finished sketching out his
plans in his mind. This girl Alice had done well for herself, but she had made
a big mistake by challenging him. He ruled over his people through fear and the
absolute confidence they had in his strength. For her to challenge him openly
was to put that in doubt. Also, he now knew the riches that lay in
Wonderland—the people to serve as slaves, and yes, as food, the fresh fruit and
vegetables to be had if his men still had the taste for such things, and from
what the bandits had told his men, doctors who might yet be able to do
something to prolong the time The Khan had left.

The Khan smiled to himself. Yes,
his time was limited. He was honest enough with himself to know that, and now
that he had begun to cough up blood, the end would come in months or even
weeks. He had seen many of his initial horde waste and die from the exposure to
radiation during The Rising. Perhaps Rashid or one of the others would come to
know and hasten his end. The Khan was strong, but he knew that if his horde
sensed weakness and turned on him, it would be a matter of time before his own
throat was cut on some moonless night. No, he would die one day, as all men
would, but he would not go quietly.

He would bring his horsemen out of
their valley and into the plains that lay to the East. It would take them more
than a day of hard riding and then they would lay waste to Wonderland.

***

‘Are you coming for the party
tonight?’

Salil looked at Christopher and
smiled. Yes, of course he would be there. The way the boy doted on him had made
him uncomfortable at first, but then as he got to know the kid better, he had
realized he enjoyed sitting and talking to him. Chris was bright, and always
full of questions about everything under the sun. He was about to turn twelve,
but was big for his age, and so always did more than his share of work on the
farm. When the first kids had arrived, Salil had been one of those to worry
about having to babysit their new wards, but now he had no such misgivings.
They were all more than pulling their weight.

‘What do you want for your
birthday?’

The boy’s eyes lit up.

‘You know what I’d really like? I
want a sniper rifle.’

Salil chuckled to himself. That
was not the first time Chris had made the request, and Salil had checked with
Alice. With their small stocks of sniper rifles, it was unlikely they would
hand one out to a kid, especially since there was no imminent fighting to be
done which required such a mobilization.

‘I’ll see what I can do. Now go on
back to the farm. I’ll finish my patrol and get there soon.’

He had been on patrol outside the
farm for most of the day and he checked back with Brittany to see if she had
picked up anything on her side of the farm.