Deadland: Untold Stories of Alice in Deadland (Alice, No. 5) (14 page)

Jones stood there, impassive as usual, but his eyes were
moving, considering options. Even at her age, Alice knew he faced a terrible
choice—the safety of his son or that of the settlement. She knew how he must
have felt, since part of her wanted to pick up a rifle and take a large patrol
out there to look for Junior. With the number of Biters out there, that would
however mean exposing them to severe risk. She had heard about how her father
had faced a similar choice when she had been younger, and he, Jones and Sunil
had gone out to rescue her, potentially sacrificing themselves but not risking
anyone else.

Gladwell had been thinking along similar lines, and as he
looked at Jones and remembered all the times that Jones had put his life on the
line for the settlement, he knew with certainty that he could not just wait for
the boys to get back.

'Jones, gear up. I'm coming with you to go look for them.'

Without being asked, Sunil hefted his rifle, but Gladwell
stopped him.

'Not you. If things go wrong, we'll need your experience
back here. Jones and I'll go out and look for them. We sent them out and we're
responsible for bringing them back.'

Alice walked to her father and tugged at his arm.

'Daddy, I'm coming with you.'

'Alice, no...'

'Daddy, it's Valentine's Day. I told him I didn't want his
flowers.'

Alice didn't know quite to put into words all that was going
through her mind—that she was afraid that the last thing that she would ever
say to Junior was her nasty, flippant remark about not wanting his flowers,
when she actually wanted him to return, wanted to celebrate Valentine's Day
with him, wanted him to give her flowers. All that came out now was a stream of
tears.

'You know how dangerous it is out there. We never allow kids
to go out so far, not when we know what's going on there today.'

Alice wiped her tears, and they were replaced by a look of
defiance. 'You can waste your time trying to stop me, or we can go out now.'

Gladwell looked at Jones, seeking some help. Jones shrugged.

'Let's go.'

The three of them set out on bicycles, Alice sitting behind
her father. She had her handgun and knife at her belt. She had wanted to take a
rifle but her father had explained that if they did get into a running battle
out there, a rifle would be too heavy and unwieldy for her to handle. It was
one thing to be in the settlement, with the wall to support the rifle, quite
another for an eleven-year-old to run around with a loaded assault rifle.

At first, the Deadland didn't seem like anything out of the
ordinary but then Alice began to notice the change. The first indication was
not anything she saw, but the smell.

The smell of death.

Anyone alive eleven years after The Rising would have seen
enough death to not get squeamish at its sight or smell, and so Alice analyzed
the smell with the kind of detachment that would have been unthinkable for
someone her age before The Rising. Many men had died recently, perhaps the Zeus
troopers they had heard of. There wasn't much wind to carry the smell, so they
had to be close to the scene of the massacre.

Gladwell and Jones had also come to the same conclusion and
they stopped their bikes. Gladwell just nodded at Jones and turned his head
slightly to the right. Jones got off his bike and, assault rifle at the ready,
crept to their right to get a better look. He went past a few abandoned
buildings and was back within five minutes.

'Nothing left there but the bodies, or rather what's left of
the bodies. Looks like the Biters were in a frenzy, and I can't imagine any
trooper got out alive. Payback for the attacks Zeus has been launching on the
Biters.'

Gladwell looked around anxiously. The Biters could be
anywhere around them, and as the Zeus troopers had just learned, they could
attack from hiding.

'No point hanging around here, let's go West, where Ravi and
Junior were last spotted.'

They began pedalling again, and Alice kept looking around
her for any sign of Ravi or Junior. She thought she spotted some movement behind
a tree. Something looked familiar, the backpack, the rifle across the shoulder,
the tall, lean and gangly physique.

'Daddy, Ravi's over there!'

Gladwell stopped to take a closer look, and Alice caught up
in the excitement of having found him, called out.

'Ravi!'

The figure that turned to look at her was no longer quite
Ravi, and indeed no longer quite human. The Biter who had been Ravi had a big,
bloody wound on his neck where he must have been bitten. As he came closer,
Alice saw that the dreamy eyes that had so enamored Jane had been replaced by a
vacant, yellowed gaze. The soft voice that had perhaps sung songs and recited
poems for Jane had been replaced by the grunts of a wild animal. As he
approached them, he opened his mouth and roared.

Alice was paralyzed. She had killed Biters before but she
had never come face to face with someone whom she had known after he had been
turned.

On instinct Gladwell's hand went to the pistol at his belt.
Then he remembered Jane, his little girl who had smiled so little over the
years, the girl whose laughter and pranks from before The Rising had given way
to a sullenness that never quite seemed to leave her. The young woman who
seemed to have finally rediscovered love and laughter in the young man who now
stood before him.

'Daddy, are you going to shoot him?'

Gladwell considered that question. He had put down many
people he had known after they had been turned, and his head told him this was
no different. It was better for people to die rather than roam as the bloodthirsty
monsters they became after being bitten. Better dead than undead. But then,
what would he tell Jane?

As the Biter came closer, Gladwell took out his pistol and
shot him once in the head. The Biter went down and didn't get up. Alice was
watching, a thousand things going through her mind, but most of all, how Jane
would react. Then, another thought flashed through her mind.

Where was Junior?

They found him a few hundred meters away. There were two
Biters lying around him, their heads blown apart by Junior's handgun. Junior
himself was sitting against a tree, and for a while Alice thought he would get
up and greet them. That was when she saw the single hole on the side of his
forehead and the blood trickling down. As they came closer, they saw that a large
part of Junior's left arm had been bitten off and a pistol lay on his lap. He
had been bitten before he had shot both Biters, and then he had taken his own
life to prevent himself from becoming a Biter.

Jones was sobbing like a child. He kept saying the same
thing over and over again.

'My poor brave boy.'

Gladwell had his arms around Jones and was crying as well.
Tears welled up in Alice's eyes. She wanted to scream at how unfair it all was—to
be shown the promise of there being something to look forward to, of her naive
belief that Valentine's Day would somehow magically bring some happiness into
their lives. All to be shattered out in the Deadland, with the reminder that in
the world she lived in, there was no time or space for love. There was only the
certainty of killing or being killed. Alice was learning at a very young age
that there is a thing worse than losing one's life—it is called losing hope.

She glared at the fallen Biters, and felt a rage like she
had never felt before. She would make these monsters pay for all they had taken
from her and others like her. She stood there and kept crying as Jones gathered
his son's body in his arms to carry him back to the settlement for burial.

That was when Alice saw the bunch of flowers lying below
Junior's body.

Her valentine had been trying to bring flowers back for her.

***

ALICE
IN DEADLAND

'We've got ourselves three Biters to the North, about a
kilometer out. The scout who saw them says they're ambling in, but let's cut
them off before they get close enough to create a ruckus that attracts other
Biters.'

The moment Alice heard those words shouted out in the
community center, she needed no more encouragement. She ran to her home and
grabbed her handgun and knife. Normally on short-range defensive sweeps like
this, who went out was largely determined by who volunteered and was not
occupied with other chores. For the longer-range recon patrols and offensive
attacks, it was decided by the leaders of the settlement, including Alice's Dad.
While Alice was repeatedly told that she was still too young to go out on those
longer-range attacks, she more than compensated by going out on defensive
patrols as often as she possibly could. She was joined at the gate by two men,
one of whom looked at her and grinned.

'You again?'

Alice grinned back, but there was no humor in her eyes.
Indeed, all that you could discern in her young eyes was a grim determination
to take a few more Biters out, to continue to extract her own personal
vengeance on the undead monsters who had caused her and her people so much loss
and grief. Her earliest memories were of being terrified by Biters, and the
havoc Biters could wreak had taken on a very personal edge when they had caused
the loss of Junior four years earlier.

That day had been a turning point for the settlement—Jones
had never really recovered from the loss of his son, and some months later was
found dead outside the settlement. He had been drinking heavily, and had gone
out on a patrol alone and run into Biters. Before he died, he extracted a
terrible vengeance, as was evident from the mangled bodies of nine Biters they
found around him, but he was gone. Jane, who had begun to display some shadows
of the young, spirited girl she had been before The Rising, had sunk ever
deeper into her shell after the death of Ravi, the young man who had begun to
woo her and show her the promise of a brighter future. Jane's father,
recovering from the blow of the loss of Jones, who had been his right-hand man,
and dealing with the stress of keeping his people safe from the full-fledged
war that was now raging in the Deadland, had aged visibly in those four years.
He still had that smile that endeared him to everyone and made him Alice's
hero, but he smiled less often. He still had that confident, erect bearing that
made everyone look to him for answers, but ever so often Alice would see him,
sitting with his shoulders slouched, his head buried in his arms.

Alice saw her father in the distance. A couple of years ago,
he would have tried to dissuade her from going out so often. Now, he just
nodded.

She walked out the gate, with the two men beside her. They
broke into a jog towards where the Biters had been sighted. As they went
further into the Deadland, one of the men hissed under his breath.

'Slow down, kid.'

Alice grinned, but slowed down. Heading towards where Biters
had been spotted was not a good time to show off how fast she was. She smelled
them before she saw them.

'They're close.'

They slowed down and crouched behind some trees, and soon
enough they saw the Biters. Alice had seen all sorts of Biters, big and small,
thin and fat, bloodied and relatively clean, but these were among the most
filthy specimens that Alice had seen. Their clothes were torn off and their
bodies were covered in blood from several wounds and several patches of skin
were turning black and peeling off.

'Did someone shoot them?'

One of the men answered Alice.

'Bullets won't do that. Looks like Zeus lobbed grenades at
them or maybe fired some rockets at them.'

'For all their talk, they're pretty bad at taking out
Biters.'

With that, Alice came out of cover and ran towards the
Biters at full tilt. The first Biter, a woman who had one eye missing, turned
to look at her moments before Alice jumped and brought her knife into the
Biter's head. As they both went down, Alice got up, kicked the Biter down and
took her knife out of her head.

She looked around to see the two other Biters converging on
her. The closest to her was a Biter who had been an old man, and had one arm
torn off, perhaps by the blast of a Zeus grenade. Alice kicked out, catching
him below the knee. The Biter lost balance and went down on his knees. As he
tried to get up, Alice put her knife through his head.

The men with her had now reached and taken out the third
Biter. Alice stood there, cleaning her bloody knife before inserting it into
her belt.

As she walked back to the settlement, the men whispered to
each other. They thought she couldn't hear them, but she did catch a few words.

'I pity any Biter who gets close to this kid.'

***

Alice was having lunch when Jane came down and sat beside
her. Jane never spoke much to anyone, so Alice was surprised when she initiated
the conversation.

'I heard what happened out there today, You need to be more
careful. With Zeus going after Biters the way they are and Biters going crazy,
you can't just run out into battle alone. You need to work with the others,
because they can watch your back just as you watch theirs.'

'I don't need you babysitting me.'

Jane gave a sigh of exasperation and nearly shouted, 'Stop
thinking only of yourself, Alice.'

Before Alice could say anything, Jane got up and left.
Gladwell came and joined her a minute later.

'You okay?'

'Yeah, Dad. I'm fine. What's with Jane?'

Gladwell poked at his soup, considering his reply.

'We've lost two people in the last week to Biters. The
Deadland was always dangerous, but I've never seen it so bad since the early
days after The Rising. Jane's just worried about you, as I am.'

Alice stopped eating and looked at her dad. She could shrug
off what Jane said, but when her dad said something, she had to pay attention.