From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (89 page)

Day 134. God is on the side of the big battalions (or is he, really?)

It’s dark and I’m scribbling by the light of the single lamp at the back of the cave. I went out twice and checked that its glow was not visible from the outside, but Negi told me I was being paranoid. He’s probably right, but after all the trouble we stirred up today, I’d be surprised if Bharti’s troopers weren’t coming after us. And of course, one can never predict when a group of bloody Moreko decide to camp out near our cave again. At least now we’ll be well prepared. But wait, let me back up and start from the beginning.

I set my plan into motion early in the morning. Back at the Academy, my instructors had drilled into me the importance of numerical superiority and of concentration of forces – something that was reflected in the quote by Napoleon that I used to headline this entry. In light of that, our plan didn’t have a ghost of a chance of success. We had a total of twelve bullets among us, and I loaded them all in a magazine for my rifle. With twelve bullets and a bunch of untrained civilians, I intended to ambush heavily armed soldiers. Actually it didn’t matter whether our targets ended up being Bharti’s troopers or their enemies. It was their weapons we were interested in.

All morning we had heard the chopper up in the sky, and occasional gunshots, indicating that the battle for Gangtok was still on. I had set out for a brief recce in the morning and saw that the forest nearby was teeming with soldiers. I had glimpsed at least twenty Chinese soldiers carrying assault rifles, heading towards town, and I had seen a group of six of Bharti’s troopers setting up an ambush. Twenty was way too many for us to take on, but the troopers were too attractive a target to pass up.

Our plan unfolded with three of the civilians walking into the path of the troopers. The troopers recognized them from the camp and shouted at them to stop. Our men told the troopers that the rest of the civvies had got lost in the fighting and were in a nearby cave. I was some twenty meters away, hiding behind a tree, and I heard one of the troopers radio in, asking for instructions. Clearly he was told to fetch the lost civvies, and the troopers followed our men. My initial plan had been to ambush them, but with twelve bullets, it would have been a small miracle for me to kill more than a handful of them before they got me, so I had decided that when ammunition was not sufficient, we would make up for it with some good old theatrics. It was a risky move, and I was praying we didn’t mess it up too badly.

When the troopers passed me, the kids came out of the bushes, shouting greetings. They may have been brutes, but the troopers were human, and they involuntarily lowered their rifles. That was when I screamed at them to drop their guns, as did Danish and another elderly man called Pratik, who had been an English professor at the college in Gangtok. Negi had the second rifle and Pratik had the pistol. Both of those were empty and I was praying that the troopers would not call our bluff.

As I ventured into the open, covering the troopers with my rifle, one of them started raising his rifle towards the kids. Bastard should have known better. I dropped him with a shot to the neck. As he fell, there was a brief moment when it looked like the other troopers would fight. A couple of them began to raise their guns, but Negi screamed that we had them surrounded and they had one chance to live, otherwise we would kill every one of them.

Remind me never to play poker with Negi.

The troopers threw their rifles to the ground and raised their hands. We quickly gathered all their weapons and supplies and then one of the women gasped on seeing the troopers. Turned out at least three of them were known to have raped women in the camp. That sealed their fate. We stripped them, figuring that the uniforms might come in handy, and I had half a mind to shoot them then and there. That was when we heard the Moreko nearby. The troopers were crying and begging us to take them with us. We left them in the clearing and as we walked into the forest, I could hear them start screaming as the Moreko tore into them.

I figured they had it coming to them, but in the evening, I asked Negi if he thought I had done the right thing. He shrugged, as he seems to do a lot, and told me that everyone in our group supported my decision. I saw the glint in Negi’s eyes as he held his new assault rifle and also saw how the other men were carrying their weapons. I know only too well what it is to be seduced by the power of holding a gun, and how killing can become a habit. I just hope that Negi and the others don’t go down that path, driven by their hatred for the troopers and Bharti. You know what they say about us sometimes becoming what we hate the most.

Day 135. The school of hard knocks.

Now that we felt a bit more secure with our new-found arsenal, I led a couple of the men out this morning to try and recce the area around our cave. As winter sets in, we wouldn’t be able to stay in this cave. We’ll need somewhere more secure and permanent. The problem was that all around us there was little but forests and hills. However, Negi had an idea that I liked a lot – we could easily shack up in abandoned houses or shops on the outskirts of Gangtok. From what we had seen and heard, Bharti and his Chinese enemies were still duking it out, but they seemed to be focused on occupying the centre of the city, especially the hill where I had been just days ago. Bharti had perhaps a hundred troopers at best with him, and there was no way he could secure the whole city. My guess was that he wanted to make the hill his citadel and secure the nearby areas. That still left a lot of space for us to hide in till we got any better ideas about where to go.

I left Negi back with the rest of the group and picked two of the younger guys to come with me. One is Chetan and the other is Ram. Both were young office workers from Mumbai out on a Himalayan trek with friends when the Moreko arrived and ruined everyone’s day. I had given them a quick lesson on how to use their rifles, but honestly, I just hoped we didn’t run into any trouble.

While I liked Negi’s idea, I didn’t actually want to go into the city itself. I knew there were a number of tea shops and guest houses on the roads leading into the city and I thought we could lie low there more easily than being in a city that was fast turning into a battleground.

We had been walking for an hour when I saw a clearing leading to the highway. Just about five hundred meters from us was a guest house. I asked Chetan and Ram to hold back as I approached the two-storey building. Its paint was peeling off in many places and a cracked sign proclaimed it to be the Taj Mahal Inn. The grand name notwithstanding, it was a piece of junk that I would not have even contemplated staying in for a single night under normal circumstances. Of course, when you call a cold cave in the middle of a forest home, circumstances are anything but normal.

To my delight, I saw a car parked outside the motel and it still had its keys in the ignition. I signaled to Chetan and Ram to come up and we went inside. Chetan had apparently seen too many movies about commandos because he went in first, moving his rifle left to right in imitation of some celluloid hero. And then he screamed in terror as the first Moreko came out from behind the reception counter.

The fucker was emaciated and bloodied, with his left hand little more than a bloody stump. Chetan froze. I can’t blame him because I was shit-scared the first time I saw combat, but the problem was that he was right in my path. So I pushed him out of the way and shot the Moreko through the eye.

Chetan looked at me, ashen-faced and I shouted at him to watch out as another Moreko shuffled into view. Ram had come in and opened up on full auto. It was messy, more than half his rounds went astray but enough did the job to take the Moreko down.

When we drove back to fetch our comrades, both Ram and Chetan were silent. They had learnt firsthand that shooting someone, even a decayed Moreko, in real life is a tad more difficult than blasting enemies in a video game. It took us two trips to get everyone to the guest house. At least we now have a place to sleep and as soon as I finish this entry, we’re going to start cleaning up our new luxurious, stinking and blood-splattered accommodations at the Taj Mahal.

Day 136. Cleaning up.

We spent all day cleaning up our new home. There are twelve rooms, which means more than enough space for all of us to get some privacy. We have four single males, me included, two single women and the rest are families. We gave the larger rooms to the families and the rest of us took a single room each. That still left a couple of rooms that I converted into a ‘recreation room’ and a ‘dining room’.

The only problem of course was that every corner of the Inn was covered in filth and gore. It looked as if a couple of the occupants had holed up in here before being overrun by the Moreko. Of course, we hadn’t added to the charm of the place with the two Moreko we had shot in the lobby. On the positive side, the large water tanks on the roof were nearly full – so we all indulged ourselves with short baths. But that luxury was to be granted only after we had cleaned the place up. We spared the kids, but every adult was busy cleaning up the mess. We burned the Moreko bodies behind the Inn, and even after everything we had been through, a couple of people puked at the stench. I can hardly blame them.

You will not believe what a bath, even one consisting of a couple of mugs of water and no soap, can do to a man. I suddenly feel almost human again. I’ve got to go now – we have dinner in ten minutes. Our meal will be frugal, some fruits and a couple of cans of soup that were left in the hotel pantry. But sitting down at a table for a meal with other people is something that used to be a distant memory for me. For someone who once claimed to be a loner, I am surprised at how much I’m looking forward to the company.

Everyone else is sleeping, but I can’t. Every time a branch moves outside in the wind, I rush to the window, my rifle ready. A few minutes ago, I could have sworn I heard someone walking on the road outside. Either I’m losing my mind, which is an entirely plausible hypothesis, or we are not alone.

Tens of thousands of people became Moreko in Gangtok, and they all have to be somewhere, so it’s hard to hide without the risk of bumping into them. We have a fair bit of firepower now at our disposal, but given only Negi can shoot straight due to his stint in the National Cadet Corps, I wouldn’t want to be besieged here by a horde of Moreko.

An hour ago I finally couldn’t take it any longer and woke up Negi, telling him that we needed to put people on guard duty. Chetan and Ram are now our de facto combat veterans, so we roused them, and we decided on rotating through two-hour shifts, so that everyone could get some shut-eye, but we’d have someone watching outside at all times. In theory that means I can sleep, but knowing that Chetan is now on guard duty, and remembering how terrified he looked when he encountered the Moreko in the lobby, I can’t get to sleep. I think I’ll go over and keep him company.

Day 137. The perils of civilization

Why is that that the moment you give people the trappings of civilization their basest instincts come out? When we had been huddling together in a cave in the forest, people had not bickered about anything, since we were just so focused on staying alive. One night under a roof and with comfortable beds to sleep in, and two of the women have had a fight over who uses water from the tank first, and Chetan and Pratik have argued over whether the can of soup they were sharing for breakfast had been split fairly.

The most irritating thing was that they expected me to mediate. I’m not their frigging babysitter and I would have thought that when you’ve had the undead at your throat, you would learn not to sweat the small stuff. So here I am, sitting alone by the window, my rifle beside me, wondering how many more days of domestic bickering I can take before I go and invite the Moreko to feast on my companions.

One would have thought that I’d welcome safety, but truth be told, I’m bored. While we were out in the forest, the need to survive was enough for us to put up with each other. Now, I realize that I have little in common with the people around me. I feel like a total outsider. The families are busy amongst themselves and even those who don’t have families here have things in common – they talk about the people they left behind, the plans they have for the future. I have nothing to contribute to any of the discussions. My life was at a dead end even before I came to Gangtok on this assignment, and I had no plans other than drinking the next bottle of rum. My family, if I can call my ex-wife that, doesn’t give a damn about me, and I can’t blame her. I don’t mind just sitting by myself – I did that for three months in the bungalow, but it’s difficult to be totally alone in a house filled with people.

If nothing else, the kids come over and ask me to play with them. That I don’t have a problem with. It’s the fights over who uses the clean towel that I just cannot take.

So I did the one thing I do know. I called a meeting and tried to organize guard, scouting and scavenging duties. Everyone got the scavenging part. With the hotel pantry still holding several bags of rice, we will not starve for some time, but nobody was against going out to the nearby forest to look for fruits and animals to hunt. Where I was stumped was the resistance I got to guard and scouting duties. Two days of safety and they’re behaving like none of this shit happened. Negi told me that if we go out scouting too aggressively, we risk attracting attention to ourselves. I get that, but if we just sit here, we’re blind to what’s happening outside, and that can only lead to unhappy endings.

Day 139.

Domesticity.

Now I know why I made such a mess of my marriage. I hate having to compromise with people. It’s hardly something to be proud of, but after all that’s happened, I owe myself that much honesty. That failing of mine is being sorely tested now.

With so many people packed in this hotel and no entertainment, it’s inevitable that people will begin to rub each other the wrong way. Quarrels over meals are one thing, but this evening, one of the older men accused Chetan of flirting with his teenage daughter. Looking at the girl, I got the feeling that the attraction was mutual, but I wasn’t going to tell her enraged father that. Instead, I took Chetan aside and told him that like it or not, we were still in a combat situation and again, for better or worse, I was in charge. The first rule of combat is not to let personal issues complicate combat readiness. When he looked at me blankly, I told him I would shoot him between the eyes if there were divisions in the group on account of him. I suspect I severely dampened his libido.

There was another argument over dinner. I don’t even remember what sparked it, but pretty soon Chetan and Ram were at each other’s throats. The last thing I needed was for the two young, fit guys I had been counting on to provide security to be fighting. Negi separated them, and I sat there, eating my dinner in silence. Mira, the mother of the girl who had been the object of Chetan’s affection, looked at me accusingly, saying that as the leader I should do something. I told her that I wasn’t good at dealing with domestic squabbles over who got more rice than his neighbor. She told me that what I called squabbles were part and parcel of civilized people living together and adjusting to each other. Clearly, I’m not cut out for civilized living.

Everyone’s asleep now and Chetan is providing his guard duty of dubious effectiveness, since I can hear him snore. So I’m doing what old, bored soldiers do in times of peace when civilized people don’t have need for them. I stay awake, waiting for the time when I’m called upon to bare my teeth again.