charger behind, but only one of the underground shelters had an old generator which was being carefully husbanded to provide limited electricity and now also to power up the tablet. Alice and Nikhil set off at a brisk pace, jogging more than walking through the forest. Along the way, Alice spotted three men with rifles who waved to her. Even if people had not met her, almost everyone seemed to know about the blond haired girl who was fighting back. As Alice ran faster and faster, she felt Nikhil fall behind, but she wasn't worried. There was no sign of Red Guards nearby and they had only about five kilometers to go before they could disappear underground. Running always helped clear her mind, and Alice realized just what a motley crew she was leading. There were of course the people from her own settlement, who she knew would follow her to the end, then there were some from other settlements in the Deadland who had supported her but would not trust the Biters and so chose to stay in their own settlements while helping her with scouting, and finally there were those who said they wanted to help but would not bring themselves to follow a young girl, and remained uneasy allies at best. Even among the Biters, Alice had realized that while the Queen commanded the loyalty of many of them, there were small bands in the Deadland who had gone almost rabid, crazed with fear and hate, and would attack any human on sight. That made it tougher for her to sell her story of how the Biters could be worked with. It was all such a complicated mess that it made her head hurt and made her wish that she did not have to be the one to deal with it all.
'Alice, stop!'
Alice slowed down and saw Nikhil bent over, holding his knees, trying to catch his breath.
'Nikhil, the Red Guards will be at the site of our last transmission any time. We need to get underground as soon as we can.'
Nikhil closed his palms together, in a theatrical show of begging for mercy. Alice laughed out loud. Nikhil was not much of a fighter, but he was fun to have around, and he was the only one who knew how to use the tablet and that made him invaluable.
'Ok, get a drink of water and we'll be on our way.'
Nikhil took out a bottle from his backpack and drank and when he was about to put it back, took out his tablet for one last look.
'Let me see if they've already taken down my message.'
Alice watched his expression and knew that something was very wrong.
'Nikhil, what happened?'
He called her closer and showed her the screen. There was a single message.
'To all friends in the Deadland-keep you heads down. Heavy downpour expected soon.'
The message had been uploaded from Dewan's account. Alice ground her teeth in anger and frustration.
'Why the Hell would he expose himself by posting like that? Appleseed and the others will be sure to question him.'
Nikhil turned the tablet off.
'Alice, he was trying to be as cryptic as he could, and I guess he could claim it was aimed at his men and comrades on mission in the Deadland, but he would take such a risk only if he desperately needed to get a message through to us.'
'What…'
Alice never got a chance to finish her sentence as her voice was drowned out by the drone of multiple jet engines overhead. Alice looked up see dozens of jets approaching from over the horizon. She had seen the occasional Zeus attack helicopter, but she had never seen aircraft such as this-large bombers with swept wings, flying in formation, darkening the sky like a swarm of locusts.
'Nikhil! Are they coming to bomb where we last transmitted from?'
She saw that Nikhil was staring at the approaching armada, his face frozen in fear.
'Alice, they don't need so many heavy bombers to target one location. That fleet could flatten many, many miles of land.'
'Could they get through to our underground shelters?'
Nikhil never took his eyes off the approaching aircraft as he replied.
'I don't know. Some of them seem to be hardened bomb shelters that were built before The Rising, but the rest are no more than old sewers, maintenance tunnels and underground parking lots. Those wouldn't survive a direct hit. And nobody in the open would have a chance.'
Alice thought of the hundreds of people including her mother and sister in one of those shelters and of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of human settlements overground in the Deadland.'
'Nikhil, we've got to…'
Alice stopped in mid-sentence. She really didn't know what she could say that would be even remotely adequate. They couldn't really warn anyone, and there was no question of saving anyone else's lives. They were still more than a kilometer away from the underground entrance that would lead them to where the rest of their group was hidden. She stood quietly for a minute, looking back at the direction they had come from, and she could see several pillars of smoke rising in the horizon. Fires at the human settlements, where people were seeking warmth or perhaps cooking their frugal meals, and perhaps like Alice and Nikhil, watching the approaching fleet, not knowing what was coming their way.
Alice felt Nikhil pull hard at her arm.
'Alice, they aren't that far away. All we can do is run and try and find some cover.'
Alice ran like she had never run before and soon they could see the three large yellow leaves laid across a branch that signaled the entrance to their underground passage. Alice turned to say something to Nikhil, and saw that he was struggling to keep up. She screamed something to him, but her voice was now drowned out by the roar of the dozens of engines overhead. Alice dove through the branches and clambered on all fours through the narrow passageway, hoping that Nikhil was following. She knew that there was little cover overhead other than tree trunks and kept going faster, her palms and knees cut and scratched in a dozen places as she reached the near vertical drop that led to the hardened bomb shelter below. She dove in as the first bombs hit and she fell to the concrete floor. As she managed to sit up and get her bearings she felt the ground shake all around her and bits and pieces of the concrete roof chip off and fall as the bombs continued to rain down. There was no sign of Nikhil. She screamed out for him several times but heard no response. In the darkness, she felt along the walls for the unlit torch she knew would be there, and from her backpack took out the small can of fuel and flint she needed to light it. When it was lit, she saw that larger pieces of the ceiling were now falling down towards her and when one particularly large piece missed her head by inches, she hung the torch on the wall and lay down in a fetal position, with her head covered in her hands. The rumbling continued and she thought she heard a voice and she looked up to see Nikhil at the edge of the drop. He threw his backpack down and was about to jump down when there was a huge crash that lifted Alice cleanly off the ground and threw her across the corridor.
Then she saw no more.
***
Dewan studied the pistol in his hands, wondering just how much easier it was to take another life than to contemplate taking one's own. He had no family and not much that he could say he had to live for, yet it seemed awfully hard to put the gun to his head and pull the trigger. He had shot others, men and Biters, dozens of times without conscious thought in the years of fighting that had dominated his life, but now he could not bring himself to do the same to himself. It wasn't just fear that held him back, though that was certainly there, but a feeling of infinite sadness that came from realizing that his life had not really amounted to much after all. He had spent most of his life serving a cause that had been a lie, and when he thought he had a chance to make amends, it was all too little, too late. He had seen the heavy bombers fly in from Tibet and knew that Chen's orders were as simple as they were brutal. He had ordered a saturation firebombing of the Deadland near Delhi, with wave upon wave of flights till nothing remained. Dewan had been unable to face his own troops in the cafeteria, local boys who had looked at him with horrified eyes. He had no answers for the questions behind those eyes. No answers as to why their friends and families had just been sentenced to a horrific death by the same Central Committee they were serving to supposedly help human survivors.
Hundreds of Red Guards had flown in the night before and all Zeus units where desertions had taken place had been disarmed and were now effectively under arrest. The Central Committee propaganda machine was in overdrive with reports about how counter-revolutionaries and terrorists had subverted some isolated units in the Deadland in North India and were currently being pacified by the heroic efforts of the Red Guards. Dewan had taken the risk of sending out his warning, but he knew it was likely to be too late. He also knew that it was too late for
