From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (90 page)

Do you remember that movie, 300? Spartans, all three hundred of them, all bare-chested with sculpted muscles and abs, facing off against thousands of Persian soldiers in a heroic last stand. They died to the last man, but inflicted such damage on their attackers that the Persian Empire’s progress was halted. Our situation is not quite as dramatic, but no less dire.

I have with me not three hundred elite warriors, but a handful of civilians, only a couple of whom I can count on to shoot a gun. We are faced with not thousands of enemies, but considering our own pitiful army, no less dreadful an opponent.

The first Moreko appeared just before noon. I was the first to see him – a thin fellow, with his scalp flapping around his blood-covered face. I immediately told the others to keep quiet. Floppy, as I began to call our stalker, hung around, and as the day went by, I kept praying he would move on. I guess my prayers were not enough to stop a child crying.

One of the kids slipped and shouted aloud. His mother hushed him, but it was too late. Floppy screamed and I dropped him with a round to the chest. When he began to get up, I shot him through the head. All well and good, but he clearly had not been alone. Within seconds, a dozen more Moreko appeared and stood around Floppy’s corpse. I was tempted to open fire, but at a range of over a hundred yards, I seriously doubted anyone would score a hit other than by a minor miracle, and even if I got all twelve of them before they reached the hotel, more of them started appearing. They shuffled closer slowly.

Now, as the light fades, there are at least fifty of them outside, no more than fifty meters away. I’ve got all the adults packing weapons – the men with the rifles and the women with the handguns we captured from the troopers. The kids are all locked in an upstairs room. If we didn’t have the kids with us, we could have tried to fight our way out and get into the jungle, but with so many kids and at night, there’s no chance of them making it through the Moreko. My orders are explicit – I fire if the Moreko charge and everyone else opens up only when the Moreko get within ten meters. I think we have a good chance of getting them all, but it’s a tense standoff, and I realize now that what we had taken to be a safe haven could well turn out to be a death trap. Tonight none of us gets any sleep, and I just hope we survive to see tomorrow morning.

Day 142. Enemy of an enemy.

I skipped a day, but then I was kind of busy trying to stay alive. I am evidently still around, as are all but two of my companions (but more on that later). However, I’m not sure we are any safer than when we were facing off against fifty Moreko.

Before I get ahead of myself, here’s what happened. As they always say, the best laid plans seldom survive first contact with the enemy.

Our plan, if one can call it that, was essentially to hope we got the Moreko before they got into the hotel. As it turned out, the two guys I was counting on to hold the fort along with Negi and myself let us down.

The Moreko were more than a hundred meters away when Ram opened up with his rifle. It goes without saying that he missed, since the recoil jerked his rifle up and all his shots went cleanly above the Moreko’s heads. I was so pissed off that I slapped him with the back of my hand. But then Chetan panicked and started firing, and everyone opened up. I screamed at them to stop, but once the shit hits the fan, you can’t help but be splattered.

The Moreko seemed to be enraged and began moving in faster.

By now it was too late to do anything else, so I shouldered my rifle and began picking them off. I was firing on single shot and scored six hits before I shouted at my comrades to concentrate their fire on one Moreko at a time. With each of them trying to pick off different targets, almost all their shots missed, which wasn’t unexpected given most of them were firing a gun for the first time. So I changed my role from shooter to also being a spotter. I’d pick off one Moreko and then shout out the target to aim at, and everyone would open up on the one target till I switched to the next.

So I screamed out to get the big, fat guy in a yellow shirt, and soon enough, that Moreko was down, hit by a dozen bullets. Next was the old woman with a hand missing, and her head was blown apart by a direct hit. All this time, I kept on picking off my own targets. Our hit rate had improved, but there were still more than twenty Moreko standing and they were now within twenty meters of us.

The women, who had exercised much better fire discipline than the men (what is it about men that the moment they get a gun in their hands, they think they’re bloody John Rambo?), now came into their own. I must confess, I was impressed. I had fought for my country and for the men next to me, and seen how both patriotism and loyalty to one’s brothers in arms motivated soldiers. This was the first time I had seen mothers fight to protect their children.

They were calling out targets and coordinating their fire, taking down one Moreko after another. Some of them had found the recoil hard to manage and had improvised brilliantly, putting pillows on the window sills and resting their arms on them to stabilize their aim. Mira had, without anyone saying so, become their de facto leader and was encouraging the others on, correcting their fire and in general kicking Moreko ass. I remember when I had joined the Army all the debates that used to rage about whether women should be assigned combat roles. If those old generals had been around to see how these women were handling battle, I suspect they would have had a very different perspective on the matter.

I was putting down Moreko at a decent clip and by now the misguided rifle fire of our men was also beginning to take its toll. For a few seconds, I thought we’d be able to mow down all the Moreko well before they got close enough to be a threat, and even if a handful made it to the hotel door, we could finish them up close with handguns and if needed, knives.

That was when some of the older kids upstairs started screaming about more of the undead coming in from the other direction. I rushed to the kitchen window and saw a dozen Moreko come into view, walking towards the hotel. I took out two of them and called for Negi to get a few people to the back, but even as I got ready to fire again, I had a sinking feeling that we were going to be overrun.

A couple of the men lost their nerve on seeing the Moreko come within a couple of meters and abandoned their positions, moving upstairs to try and hide. That started a chain reaction of panic as people scrambled back from the windows and tried to get back up. Negi was gamely holding his ground and was shooting away, but other than Mira and a few women, most of the others had lost their nerve. I was trying to rally them, but it was a losing battle.

Chetan screamed as a bloodied hand grabbed his gun and another pair of hands closed around his neck and pulled him out the window. Ram was trying to hold onto him when another Moreko reached in and bit his arm. I shot the Moreko’s head off with a handgun but it was too late for Chetan. I couldn’t see it, but his screaming told me just how much pain he endured before he died.

Now that we had lost the ground floor, I asked everyone remaining to move back up – at least we could try and hold the Moreko at the stairs. Ram was looking at me with an expression of pure terror. I still remember how he looked at me and then at the blood pouring out of the wound on his arm. The Moreko were pounding on the door, and given that the architects of the Taj Mahal Inn hadn’t exactly invested in high-quality construction material, I fully expected it to give way in no time.

Ram was still crying and asking me to help him when he fell back and began convulsing. I was stepping back up the stairs when he got up, his eyes yellowed and his teeth bared. He was about to rush the stairs when a single shot took him down and then three more struck him, finishing the job. I turned to see two of the moms, pistols in hand. And they say men are the more ruthless sex – you haven’t seen ruthless till you see a mother fighting for her children.

Anyways, the door gave way and the Moreko streamed in. I shot one but realized I could never shoot all of them in time. That was when the Moreko nearest the door were torn apart by an explosion, showering me with dust (and blood and body parts). I tried to blink away the dust and saw the remaining Moreko being cut down by automatic fire. I joined in, as did my companions from the top of the stairs, and it took about two minutes for us to wipe the Moreko out. Then I got my first look at our unlikely savior, a young man dressed in the uniform of the Chinese Red Army.

We are now at their base, some four kilometers from the hotel, and everyone is sleeping in tents provided by the Chinese troops after some very welcome hot soup. I’ve cleaned myself up but I can’t seem to sleep.

The last time I thought someone had saved me, I landed up a slave in Bharti’s camp at the mercy of his troopers. What is in store for me now?

Day 143. Chinese checkers.

We had our first group meeting with our rescuers. To my discomfort, my companions had spread the word that I was the leader, and also that I had been in the Army. Sitting on the ground near the officer who had led our rescue, I thanked my stars that nobody around knew that I had killed Chinese soldiers before. I’m sure that little piece of trivia would not exactly have endeared me to my new hosts.

As it was, Lieutenant Teng seemed like a pretty decent guy.

He spoke impeccable English and joked about how one upside of the epidemic was that he no longer had to keep seeing his friends’ inane status updates on Renren. He echoed my thoughts when he said how being a soldier had kept him alive, even though he had hated being conscripted into the army after college during the tensions with Taiwan. His ambition had been to go backpacking around the world before he found a job in software.

In short, for someone I would have under different circumstances been ready to kill, he was pretty likeable. The kind of guy I wouldn’t have minded sharing a beer with, and certainly far preferable company to the half-educated megalomania of Bharti and his cohorts.

It’s funny how our conditioning makes us assume who the good and bad guys are. Having grown up in India and having served in the Army, I had assumed that the forces battling Bharti’s men would be villains as well, simply because they were Chinese. The others with me were also warming up to our rescuers, and soon many of them were relating horror stories of how Bharti had kept them as virtual slaves. Most of the twenty or so soldiers with Teng could speak only broken English but they got agitated at the accounts of rape and beatings and one or two of them let off wonderfully accented swear words directed at Bharti.

Teng offered lunch but when I saw that his men were sharing their rations, we offered to help find fruits in the forest. We had a decent meal, and while my comrades were pretty much in love with our newfound friends, something was bothering me. After mucking around in the forest for so long, we all looked like crap, notwithstanding the hurried baths at the Taj Mahal. Most of us hadn’t shaved in days, the women had matted hair and all our clothes were torn and filthy. Teng and his men were wearing uniforms that were absurdly spotless, and their gear and weapons were clean. They certainly didn’t look like they’d been wandering around in the forests.

Something doesn’t add up, and I plan to find out more.

Day 144. Hung over and blown away.

My tongue feels dry like sandpaper and my mouth still has the taste of the latest round of vomit I deposited in the bushes a few minutes ago.

My head is throbbing and all I want to do is to curl up and die, but at the same time, my mind is reeling at what I learnt last night.

I may or may not be a good soldier, but I sucked at being a spy. I went to Teng’s tent at night, pretending to strike up a friendly chat with a fellow soldier, to find out what he and his men were up to. He produced a couple of bottles of rice wine, and alcoholism prevailed over subterfuge and I slugged away too fast. Soon, I was blabbering away about my busted leg, my failed marriage and my wretched writing career. To his credit, Teng also got hammered and talked about hating being drafted, about how the whole world had gone to hell and about how he doubted he would ever get laid again. The last bit got us both laughing and woke up most the camp.

Anyways, my terrible hangover does have one worthwhile piece of intelligence to show for it. It seems there is still some sort of cohesive government or at least military authority in China. Teng told me that cities like Shanghai and Beijing had become slaughterhouses and had been nuked by the government to contain the epidemic. That scared the shit out of me – if things were so bad that people were nuking their own cities, even if someone managed to cure the epidemic, what would be left of our world?

Some Red Army officers had managed to survive and kept a cohesive military force going, operating out of Tibet, which had been largely spared the horrors of the infection. With the central government now gone and most of the world in ruins, they were trying to seek out survivors in neighboring areas and bring them to safety. Which was why they had sent scouting parties like Teng’s into Sikkim. That was when Teng had bumped into Bharti’s troopers and he had been waging a battle of attrition ever since to rescue the captive civilians.

Imagine that, Chinese soldiers trying to rescue Indian civilians from an Indian warlord by intruding into Indian territory. The world has indeed turned topsy-turvy… but then, as Teng reminded me, when the border delineating the alive and the dead has been blurred, what sanctity do lines drawn on maps have? Fair point. I chatted with Negi and the others about it, and while none of could have ever imagined wanting to live in Tibet, and that too under Chinese rule, looks like that’s where home may well lie.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system and onto paper, let me do what my body is screaming for me to do – lie down, clutch my head and hope the hangover goes away.