the superpower. A covert mission was authorized and we dropped the agent into a village in Mongolia. It was the first time it had been used on humans outside controlled conditions, and nobody knew what to expect. I had pleaded against the decision, so many of us had, but we were overruled. Thousands fell, then tens of thousands as it spread.'
Alice knew only vaguely of the politics between countries of the Old Days, since national boundaries and the old countries now hardly mattered, but she found it hard to believe that people could have done this to themselves.
'What happened then? If you were in America then how did it spread there?'
The Queen sat down again.
'Hundreds of people were injured in the blast at the lab and were exposed to all the toxins and agents we were working on. The next day, they started transforming and biting all those around them.'
A chill went up Alice's spine, yet her mind refused to believe what she was hearing.
'Why should I believe you?'
The Queen went to her desk and fished out an identification card and some papers. Alice struggled to read what was on them, but the emblem of what she knew to be the United States Government was there.
'I was one of the head researchers on this project. I was born here in India but did my Doctorate in the US and joined the Department of Defense. I thought it was exciting, to be able to come up with new ways of treating our wounded, to make the world safer, but then we all got a bit drunk with our own power, and we started meddling with things we should have left alone. We tried to play God, and we were not ready for what we unleashed. When the decision to attack China was made, I quit and came back to India, but by then, nowhere was safe any more. At first, after being bitten, people changed after a few hours, so you had many cases of people being attacked in airport terminals and boarding their flights after what they thought were minor cuts. In days, all air travel was banned, but when you have tens of millions traveling by air every day, it spread like wildfire.'
Alice still refused to believe what she was hearing, so it was only harder for her to believe what came next.
'And the Great Fires, that too was of our making, of our petty jockeying for power. It began with the US and China using tactical nukes on each other. It had nothing to do with making the world secure from the so-called Biters. It was man destroying the world when it looked like all that mattered to us then-power, money, oil, were now going to be worthless. It was as if all the old rules and taboos were broken. Then Pakistan joined the party, and India retaliated. Iran and Israel nuked it out. Between the attacks and the spreading of the virus, the world became what it is, and nobody bothered to do the one thing that could have stopped it all.'
'And what was that?'
The Queen looked straight at Alice.
'We had a vaccine, Alice. We could have cured them all if we had chosen to co-operate and not turn on each other.'
***
Alice barely slept that night, despite being placed in a much more comfortable room with a mattress and a table with clean water on it. She didn't want to believe the Queen, she didn't want to believe that humans could have been so savage. All her life, the Biters had been the boogeymen, the monsters of our nightmares that had emerged from the dead to turn on humans. Her mind found it impossible to process the possibility that humans had been responsible for starting it all.
Unable to contain her curiosity, she went back to the Queen's chambers and found her sitting on her chair, reading the charred book that she held so dear. Did Biters never sleep? She looked up as Alice walked in.
'So Alice, as the story in this fine book goes, have you become curiouser and curiouser?'
Alice had no idea what she was talking about so she got to the point.
'You have no proof for anything you've said. Maybe you did work in the Government, but everything else could be a story. I don't know why you think I have anything to do with this, or why your finding that book makes it a prophecy, but there's no reason for me to believe you.'
The Queen got up and went to her desk and brought out a small vial with a red cap that had a syringe in it. She held out the vial in front of Alice.
'Here is the vaccine. The last and only dose I know of. When the outbreak started, one of my colleagues in the US sent me a couple of vaccines. The Government had limited stocks and was starting to vaccinate key leaders, so it was a really big deal for her to try and save me.'
'If there is a vaccine, why didn't they save others?'
The Queen stopped, looking at the vial.
'Good question. Many of us believed that they did not want to.'
'Why would they do that?'
'There were always rumors, but nothing more than rumors about how some powerful groups were actively manipulating events to create a New World Order. They believed the world was getting overpopulated and wanted to start over, with a select group of elites in charge. Powerful people, in Government, in the Military, in Banks engineering all this behind the scenes. The times before The Rising were one of chaos-many economies were in deep decline, and common people were starting to rise against the elite who seemed to get richer even as common folks lost their jobs and got poorer. The rumors said that these elites were seeing their grasp on power slip away and so they had a long-term plan to wipe out much of the population and start afresh. That's where people like Zeus come in-they could not rely on the Military to do all their dirty work, and that's why in the last few years before The Rising, Private Military Contractors were getting so prominent and powerful.'
For Alice, this was all too incredible to believe. Secret private armies, human elites trying to re-engineer the world and so on. What she had grown up knowing was so much simpler, and it was tempting to believe the simpler version than even consider such a possibility.
'If that was their plan, they succeeded, right?'
The Queen looked and Alice saw the hint of a smile on the corners of her lips.
'We came in the way. They had never bargained for just how…..contagious this turned out to be, or indeed the fact that so many of us survived by going underground into sewers and bomb shelters. They thought we would be mindless animals who would wander around and get nuked, but I led so many of us underground and then we emerged.'
Alice now asked the question that had been on her mind from the beginning.
'Excuse me, but what happened to you?'
'As things unraveled, and I found out more about the possible conspiracy behind all this, I got very disillusioned and angry and started reaching out to people. One of my sources told me that there were elites in the Unites States who were colluding with elements in the Chinese government to orchestrate all this. They tried to kill me twice with the Zeus thugs and I went into hiding. But when the chaos took Delhi, I was attacked and bitten. I had two doses of the vaccine on me, and I injected myself seconds after being bitten. I was unconscious for several hours and I woke up the way I am. I don't understand it entirely but perhaps the combination of being bitten and than taking the vaccine within seconds left me this way. Many aspects of me were transformed, but I could still think like a human, and I was furious at what we had done to ourselves, and what we had allowed to happen.'
'What about the other Bit…'
'I saw them for who they really are. Yes, they are very unlike the people they were as humans. What the virus does, especially as it mutates over time, is activate the most primitive parts of the brain-so you get no sensation of pain, hyper aggressiveness and an almost reflexive desire to reproduce-in this case, bite others to increase their numbers.'
Alice refused to think of the Biters as just innocent victims.
'Wait a minute, I have seen so many innocent settlements and groups massacred by the Biters. They aren't just scared innocent animals.'
The Queen sighed, a gesture that made her suddenly seem much more human.
'We are all animals. We all experience fear, and when scared, we lash out. That's what you and the other human survivors have been doing. I can't make them understand everything I know since their brains have regressed a lot, but they are in awe of me because I am like them yet I can speak and can think more rationally-I helped save thousands of them by bringing them into these underground shelters.'
'What about this prophecy of yours?'
