From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (95 page)

Day 168. Ground rules.

As things turned out, I didn’t have to think too hard to make the rules as far as crime and punishment went. Call it paranoia or call it intuition, I had a feeling something would happen last night, so I had taken up position in the back, armed with my rifle. I had been there for an hour and was beginning to regret freezing my butt off for no good reason when two of Sumit’s buddies came out. They were fully armed and were carrying an extra set of warm clothes. It didn’t require a genius to figure out that their plan was to make a getaway, and to fight their way out if it came to it.

I waited till they were trying to break open the lock on the outhouse door, so that at least one of them had his rifle on the ground, before confronting them. I never thought they would fight, but the other one raised his rifle, so I broke his nose. I wanted to shoot them there and then, but when I thought about it later, it was good I held my fire.

This morning, I called everyone to the living room and without much ceremony or debate, laid out the rules. I am putting them down here in an attached piece of paper so that if anyone has any doubts, I’ll pull this out. Every resident has signed below the rules so that there is no debate later.

If you assault, rape or murder a fellow resident (or try to), you will be sent down into the city with no food or weapons and not allowed back in.

If you steal anything from another resident, you will have to go down alone on a sortie to the city and bring back food and supplies for the community.

Feel free to argue, bitch and squabble (and we will all do that at times), but before you escalate any argument, remember rule 1.

If you have any doubt about whether you’ve violated a rule or not, come and talk to me. I can explain, with some practical demonstrations, the subtleties of assault and battery.

The world is a fucked-up place, and we have very little other than ourselves, and very little going for us other than the fact that we are stronger together than scattered. So don’t sweat the small stuff and remember the big, bloody, fucked-up picture we are dealing with.

As Sumit and his friends were led down, one of them was crying. Sumit glared at me, not brave enough to challenge me, but angry enough to vow that he would kill me one day. Good luck to him.

Negi came by and asked me why I didn’t have Sumit killed as many people were demanding. I simply told him that there was a fine line between fighting for survival against the Moreko and killing a fellow human being in cold blood. Killing a man is a bit like unleashing a genie, it changes you in ways you can’t possible imagine, and before you know it, you start developing a craving for it, even if you don’t want to ever admit it. I wouldn’t bring something like that upon the people in our community. I know it only too well – for I unleashed that genie years ago, and I struggle to keep it bottled up every single day.

When everybody was having a breakfast of rice (rice is pretty much the staple for every meal) and some beans, we heard screams from the city. Most of the folks rushed out, and our lookouts halfway down the hill radioed in to say that they had seen Sumit and his friends run into some buildings, followed by at least a dozen Moreko.

A couple of the guys were scanning the buildings below through binoculars and I took one to have a look myself. We couldn’t see much, but the sounds were terrible. The screaming stopped, only to be replaced by an even uglier noise, part whimper, part sob. The fact that it carried all the way up told us just how much pain was behind it. Then the sounds stopped. I could see movement in one of the buildings for a second, but then there was no more movement. Someone muttered next to me that the Moreko might have exited through a back door not visible to us. I thought they might have stopped to feast on the bodies, but as usual, I kept my morbid thoughts to myself.

I put the binoculars down, and when I looked at the people around me, I saw something curious. Many of them had moist eyes, and one or two were crying openly. Shedding tears for a man they were ready to lynch a day ago. I guess humanity is as fickle as conscience – there one minute, and gone the next.

After all I’ve seen, I’ve stopped believing in simplistic concepts of people being good or bad. Some people are able to keep their dark sides in check a bit longer than others, that’s all. Anyways, I was happy that folks were troubled by the deaths of Sumit and his friends. I hope it teaches them that it is far easier to bay for blood than to actually deal with its aftermath. Killing a man is easy, dealing with the dreams that come night after night afterwards is not.

Day 170. Where there is smoke...

We went out in the morning to grab some supplies from the city. Knowing the Moreko were out just yesterday, I didn’t take any chances. I had a dozen armed men cover the thirty other adults who went foraging, so that if it came to a fight, people wouldn’t have to juggle bags, bottles and guns.

People consciously avoided the building where Sumit and his friends had been last seen, but I went in to have a look. There was blood everywhere, but no bodies. So they must have been bitten and attacked but they were not butchered, otherwise there would have been something left of their bodies. I went outside, wondering if becoming a Moreko was a fate in any way better than death.

We had shifted focus from just finding packaged and canned food to finding water. We had plenty of rice (some of which we had ferried from the Taj Mahal Inn in the car we found there) so we wouldn’t go hungry anytime soon, but we did need water. Today was a good day. We got into what seemed to have been a guest house, and their stocks of water – at least twenty large cases of plastic bottles – were still untouched. Also, importantly, we found a water purifier. Now we can easily collect rainwater or even fetch it from nearby streams and convert it into water suitable for drinking or cooking.

As people were beginning the climb back up, each person carrying as many bottles as they could and two people carrying the purifier, I saw the smoke. It was rising over the city, several kilometers away. I radioed back to the team at our guard post and they said all they could see were three pillars of smoke rising in the distance.

Everyone is excited about the purifier and the water we’ve found but I’m here in the study, writing and watching the smoke. Moreko do not light fires. Someone else is out there. I have no idea what to expect, but I don’t want to take any chances. Tonight, there will be guards at the bunker halfway up the hill, even though it will get really chilly at night, and we won’t have the space there to light a fire. Plus, a fire kind of defeats the purpose of a hidden checkpoint. And I’ve increased the number of guards on duty tonight to ten, four of whom can stay inside but need to be awake and with easy access to their weapons.

People are grumbling, and I overheard one or two of them whisper that I’m too keen on a fight. No, I usually don’t seek trouble out, but I want to be ready in case trouble finds us.

We didn’t get attacks but we did get some unexpected visitors last night. I was one of the two miserable sons of bitches sitting in the checkpoint in the cold. I had Ashok for company, and he produced a half bottle of brandy that he had found in our last foray into town. (Oh yes, that’s another unwritten rule – all food and water salvaged must be put into the communal kitty, but clothes and booze are all yours to keep.) We passed the bottle between us, and I was thankful for the warmth it gave as it worked its way down my throat.

Around four in the morning, I thought I spotted some movement at the foot of the hill. Our torches began only about three quarters of the way down, but my eyes had gotten used to the moonlight well enough.

Still, I wanted to make sure before raising the alarm so I asked Ashok to have a look, and he also thought he saw movement. I radioed back, asking folks to be ready but to wait for my signal before doing anything. At night, we always kept all lights off in the bungalow because we didn’t want to attract any unwanted attention, and so we sat there in the darkness, hoping that the movement was nothing more than a stray animal.

That was till I heard voices. At first it was a man’s voice and I thought Sumit or one of his friends might have escaped the Moreko, but then we heard the voices of at least two women and then a baby crying. Not sure who or what was coming our way, I radioed for backup and asked Negi to come down with six armed men. I had a flashlight and when the voices grew closer, I shone it down the path, to see a sight I had not expected at all.

There were ten of them, six adults and four kids, the two youngest barely a couple of years old. They all looked miserable, cold, and more like walking skeletons than humans.

We took them in and before doing anything else, we got them some warm clothes and food. They’re all sleeping now, and we’ll learn more about our visitors in the afternoon when I hope they’re in better shape to talk. But whatever little I’ve learnt makes me worry. One of them, a man in his sixties who seems to be their leader, kept talking about an evil army on the march, burning everything in its path.

Ruchi, one of our moms, who was a nurse, has been taking care of our visitors, and told me that our visitors are in pretty bad shape.

All of them are dehydrated and a couple have really bad colds. She’s trying to keep them warm and hydrated and told me that it’s best to let them sleep for now. Not that their sleeping is reassuring many of us – the kids keep screaming in their nightmares.

Everyone’s a bit spooked by the talk of an army on the march, and the smoke we see rising in the distance doesn’t help. Till our new guests wake up, let me go and do some morale-building.

Day 171. Welcome gifts and unwelcome news.

It’s been a long day and it’s going to be an even longer night. I don’t think too many people are in a mood to sleep, though Negi has been doing his best to get people to rest, so when their turn comes to stand guard, they aren’t total zombies. Okay, scratch that last bit, inappropriate use of the word given all the shit we’ve been through with the undead.

When I had just joined the Army, I’d wonder why people made such a big deal about regular haircuts and shaving every day. I mean, when you’re sitting on some bloody hill located halfway between nowhere and Hell, who cares if you shave or not? Later on, I got it – small things like shaving make a person feel more in control and give them some degree of normalcy to hang on to. So this afternoon I went down to the city on a little errand. I had every intention of going alone, but Ashok insisted on coming along. I agreed, because I didn’t mind the company or the added pair of eyes.

We had the car we had appropriated from the Taj Mahal Inn, and while it had less than quarter of a tank of gas, I didn’t think we’d need much more. So far, we had been lucky that the Moreko had not trashed it.

We set out deeper into the city. Gangtok had been a small city by most standards, and that had given it a lot of its charm, but the outside world had well and truly intruded in some respects, and the large supermarket called The Loot was an example. We had never tried getting to it, though I suspected it would have a lot of supplies, simply because it was too far inside the city to risk it. But today, I wanted to go deeper in, and not just to get razors and cosmetics.

Our journey to The Loot was uneventful, and I saw that it had already been looted (no pun intended) in the early days of the outbreak.

Much of the food was gone but still we got a lot of stuff that we packed into the boot and the back seats. It was when we got closer to the smoke we had seen that I saw something that really freaked me out, and we drove back as fast as we could

Our visitors are now up, and after they are plied with some more tea and food, I look forward to learning more about what they have been through. Everyone is in a great mood, much of their early sense of dread having dissipated. A lot of it came down to the fact that the men were freshly shaved, and the women had all shampooed their hair. Everyone had taken a bath using not just water as we had been but with soap, and everyone was wearing fresh, clean clothes – all courtesy of our little shopping trip.

Negi caught me looking warily at the city and he asked me why I was worried. I told him that I had seen a large number of Moreko running through the town, only they were not coming to attack us. It looked like they were trying to escape something or someone.

Something out there terrifies the Moreko, and it is coming towards us.

Day 172. The Mahdi.

I’m not going to waste too much time writing today, because we need to get ready for the storm that is coming towards us. If I get more time after preparing the guys, I’ll come back to finish the day’s entry.

Here’s the deal. The leader of the army claims to be the Mahdi, some sort of returning messiah – or is it God himself? He says he is out to reclaim the world from evil. Good intentions, but seriously fucked-up means.

He seeks out human survivors, and they have to agree to worship him. Refusal means death. The refugees say he is a giant, and a cannibal. I doubt he’s as bad as they say he is, but it’s got everyone here seriously mind-fucked. He sets every village or town on fire as he approaches. That explains the smoke.

He drives the Moreko out and exterminates them, and then either takes over or wipes out any human survivors.

All of it sounds ominous enough, but I’m not worried about the tales of his superhuman strength and cannibalism. He’s a man, and any man can be put down with a well-aimed bullet. Nor does his so-called army bother me. He’s supposed to have five hundred fighters, but we are in a good defensive position and I could see us taking them on if we had to. What scares me is that he has tanks.

Fucking tanks.

Day 173. Tanks on my mind.

I woke up at 4AM this morning. Well, saying I woke up would actually be a misrepresentation, since I barely got any sleep. So far we had dealt with Bharti’s half-trained troopers and Moreko who had trouble climbing up the hill. Taking on a force, no matter how poorly trained, in tanks was a totally different ball game. We had absolutely nothing by way of weapons that would do more than scratch the paint off a tank, and I took the old man leading the refugees aside to make sure that they were not just exaggerating. Maybe they had mistaken an armored bulldozer for a tank.

A short talk later, I realized we were indeed in deep shit.

These guys had at least one real tank and men who knew how to operate it. The old man didn’t know who the Mahdi was and hadn’t seen him, but he told me that people said that the Mahdi and his core group of followers had escaped from some prison and that most of them seemed to be high on drugs. If some of them knew how to operate a tank, then it was a fair guess that they were Army guys.

Between hardened convicts high on drugs and guys with Army experience, our prospects were not looking too bright, even without putting the tank in the equation.

When the Mahdi’s men had come to the refugees’ village, they had lined up all the old people and shot them, then raped the women. They had then forced the children to join the Mahdi’s army, after pumping them with drugs and forcing them to kill a family member as an initiation rite. Good God, I had heard stories like this out of Africa. Hard to believe shit like this really happened.

With even one tank, they could park below the hill and blow our bungalow to bits at leisure, and then mop up what remained of us. To be honest, while I spent much of yesterday supposedly co-ordinating our defenses, I am totally out of my depth here. These people are looking to me to somehow keep us safe, but I know nothing of how to deal with tanks.

To share my misery, I woke up Negi and told him that we were basically screwed. He seemed strangely unperturbed. When I asked him if he wasn’t worried, he told me that nobody would have bet on us staying alive so far. The fact that we had survived so long meant one of three things – we were lucky, someone up there was looking out for us, or we were better at surviving than we gave ourselves credit for. He said that he’d rather think one of those was true than worry about this Mahdi and his tanks.

He’s got a point, and this kid is going to be a great leader some time, if we live long enough. I am a grunt at heart, and if he had joined the Army, I can easily see him being one of those staff officers I would have to salute. But that still doesn’t solve the problem of what to do about the fucking tank.