on full automatic. The gunshots were coming from the direction of their base, and as Alice looked through her scope, she could see several muzzle flashes. Sweeping her scope around, she saw several dark shadows shuffling towards the base and she knew what the Red Guards had done. They did not have to land and fight house to house after all. They had stirred up the Biters by bombing them, and now the Biters were streaming towards the areas where the humans were based. Alice gripped her rifle and prepared to rush to her friends' aid.
The Red Guards had just opened a new, deadly front in the war in the Ruins.
***
When Alice reached her base, she saw several Biters lying on the ground, their heads shattered by direct hits. However, when she got closer she noted with dismay that many of her team were also dead. The Biters had taken them totally by surprise. Used to days of airborne attacks by the Red Guards, they had never really anticipated a ground attack by Biters. She saw Arjun point his pistol at a writhing man on the ground and shoot him in the head. Better dead than undead was a fine slogan, but from the pain in Arjun's face, she knew how tough it was to have to shoot a friend.
She saw Satish running, his rifle in hand, screaming to his men.
'Get snipers on the roofs now. Watch for any stragglers!'
He stopped in front of Alice.
'They caught us with our pants down, Alice.'
Alice looked at the devastation around her and asked how bad their losses were.
'As best as I can tell, we lost eight or nine people.'
'Also we cannot stay here any longer. If the Biters are being driven from their hiding places and coming into our areas, we need to find a place that can be more easily fortified and defended.'
'But that makes us a more visible target for air strikes, right?'
Arjun gave a wan smile, showing that he knew well the kind of dilemma the Red Guards had placed them in. The next morning was a dark one, where they buried their dead, which in itself was a tough decision for many of the Hindus among them. Funeral pyres would have been a beacon for air strikes to home in on. Then they began the search for a new stronghold.
After more than an hour of walking through the Ruins, Alice clicked twice on her radio. To avoid attracting attention, they had spread out into five separate smaller groups, and now gradually they would converge where Alice was.
'This is such a visible target, Alice. Are you sure we should be here?'
Alice smiled at Arjun.
'Take a look around. There are so many underground parking lots and rooms that nobody could really take us out from the air. With our friend Li and the other prisoners, I doubt they'd use any heavier weapons. Also it's walls mean that we can set up defenses against any Biters or Red Guards coming from outside.'
They were inside what had once been a large sports stadium. The bleachers around the stadium were all long devastated but the huge sloping roof was still largely intact and hid the giant field and rooms below.
One of the former Zeus officers walked up and whistled.
'Good idea, Alice. This is a perfect headquarters for us, but as more and more people join us, I'd like to see them set up homes in the adjoining buildings. These were once built to house thousands of athletes during some big events. Take a look-many of them are still livable, and being close to the stadium means that we can still create a safety net for each other, but they also get some space for themselves and their families.'
'Makes a lot of sense.'
Within a week, the stadium started becoming the focal point for what was essentially the beginning of the resettlement of the Ruins that had once been Delhi. Word spread and people began walking in, at first in small groups, and then entire settlements from the Deadland. Alice was suddenly seized with all the administrative challenges that came with taking care of more than a thousand people who essentially depended on her. Luckily, there were enough people around with skills from the Old World who could help. A former Accountant took charge of maintaining inventories of food and supplies. Satish took charge of base security, which consisted of ensuring security for the stadium and for all the families now settling around it. Several of the settlers jury-rigged generators powered with fuel that could still be easily scavenged in the Ruins and now the main eating and meeting rooms in the stadium had electricity, and there was already talk of extending that to all the apartments occupied by families.
Arjun and his Rats took charge of what he called forward security, which meant venturing deeper into the Ruins to look for supplies and also find other humans. Within days, their community numbered in the thousands, and Alice's legend seemed to only grow in the telling. One day, Alice confided to Arjun that she felt bad that a lot of the things people believed about her were not true. For example, she most certainly had not destroyed an APC single- handedly. Arjun smiled and told her that her legend was one of the glues that was binding everyone together, and if it could help achieve such a wonderful thing, it was perhaps best left alone.
In the daily meetings that Alice called where people could talk about issues and ideas to make their lives better, an old lady asked her a question that perplexed her.
'Alice, what should we call this little town of ours?'
It was then that Alice remembered the charred book that the Queen had carried with her and how much it had meant to her. She had heard nothing of the Queen since she had slipped away, and thought it may be a fitting way to remember her, so she said that their community be called Wonderland.
There was raucous laughter, especially among many of the old folks who knew the fairy tale. It was hardly an uneventful period. Red Guard sorties continued daily, and every once in a while, a helicopter pilot would fire a rocket or two but given the thick stadium roof and their dug in positions, these caused little damage. Air raids also started to lessen when the Red Guard pilots realized that some defecting Zeus troopers had taken with them man portable anti-aircraft missiles looted from armories. These had been positioned in the tallest buildings around the area and while Alice knew that they did not have enough if the Red Guards mounted a large scale attack, she also knew that the cost of any such attack would be prohibitive. So an uneasy peace came to exist between them and the Red Guards, and at least for the short term, Wonderland knew some measure of security from attacks by the Red Guards.
The Red Guards however continued their raids on the areas where Biters were said to be, and much like hunters driving wild animals, they continued driving Biters towards the stadium. The difference was that now in a clearly fortified position with lots of adjoining buildings that provided a perfect location for snipers and overlapping fields of fire, the occasional hordes of Biters that appeared were dealt with at long range, well before they could cause any damage. While Alice felt a bit bad about taking out what she knew were not really evil monsters but perhaps something closer to rabid animals, the safety of those who depended on her was the most important thing on her mind.
When she felt that they were settled in their new base, she began to set two plans in motion.
The first was a renewed campaign against the supply lines of the Red Guards. Arjun volunteered to lead that effort, and there was no shortage of volunteers from the settlements in the Deadland who were eager to take revenge against the Red Guards. The second was a more challenging endeavor-that of establishing communication with the outside world. One of the deserting Zeus officers had brought along a shortwave radio and they set up a communications centre in what had been once been the broadcast room in the stadium. Alice sat there and listened to what seemed to be an endless hiss of static before she gave up. They had much more success with what one of the former Zeus officers called Information Warfare. They used the many tablets they had brought with them and the tablets captured from the Red Guards to bombard the Red Guard and Zeus Intranets with messages of their ongoing struggle. Within a week, the Zeus Intranet was down, a sure sign that the Red Guards had lost almost all command and control over what had once been their primary instrument for maintaining control in the Deadland of India. Zeus deserters spoke of open mutiny and warfare and of whole units of deserting Zeus troopers being slaughtered in air strikes by the Red Guards. However that also meant that more and more Red Guards were streaming into the Deadlands and they were bringing with them heavier weaponry.
Then one day, Alice walked into the communications room and was told that they had a very unexpected and surprising message.
It was a message from the Central Committee.
***
That night, as they all gathered in the underground parking lot of the stadium, the tension and excitement in
