'Look, kid, you're not one of his spies, otherwise I'd be demon feed today. I don't know who you are but if we hang around here, we will be found sooner or later. Come on.'
The man ran through the corridor, Aaditya struggling to keep up with him. Jim hoisted himself up to what looked like an air vent. He removed the grill and climbed in, then held out a hand for Aaditya.
'Come on in.'
Aaditya followed him, crawling on all fours through a narrow shaft for several minutes. Jim kept taking abrupt turns and Aaditya had a tough time keeping up in the near total darkness. Finally the man stopped.
'Here we are. Home sweet home.'
They climbed down another vent and Aaditya saw that 'home' was a narrow space, probably lodged in between the walls. There were two cardboard boxes in a corner and a dirty mattress. Jim motioned for Aaditya to sit down on the mattress, and then reached into one of the boxes to pull out a bottle of water, which he emptied in a few gulps.
'Ah, that feels good. Today I thought I was done. Years of running like a rat have made me a bit jumpy.'
Aaditya saw the man reach into the folds of his baggy trousers and stood up in alarm when he took out a large, curved blade of the sort he had seen Maya and the daityas carry. The blade seemed to be covered with blood, which the man wiped dry on a cloth he took out from a box. Now Aaditya was really worried and he stepped back, wondering what he had gotten himself into. Jim looked at Aaditya, his soft eyes at odds with the bloody weapon he held in his hands.
'Kid, tell me your story.'
'It's a long one. I don't know where to begin.'
'Start at the beginning. What's your name?'
Aaditya nodded and the man fished out two apples, tossed one to Aaditya, who bit into it before answering. 'I'm Aadi. Look, Colonel, Jim, how do I know I can trust you? For all I know, you're one of Kalki's men.'
Jim laughed, taking a big bite of his own apple.
'Aadi, the blood on the blade was from one of the demons who was chasing me. I got one, but three to one is odds too great for me at my age. As for trust, I'm the one who's taking a risk. I've been hiding out here for almost two years, and at last count, I've taken out at least twelve of the demons. If
After that Aaditya related his entire story starting from the battle at the Old Fort, and then what had happened over the past year. The man's eyes widened when he heard about the Devas and how they had been locked in a war with Kalki and his minions for millennia. He almost whispered, 'So there is hope. We all thought Kalki was just waiting to take over our world and there was nobody to stop him.'
'We?'
Jim looked at Aaditya quizzically, then smiled.
'You have no idea how many people are down here. At least five thousand men and women are kept as slaves to grow food, clean the place, serve food and so on. And then there are the two hundred or so military types. All of them kept in cages, no better than animals.'
Aaditya's mind boggled at the numbers. He had no idea that so many people were kept here as captives. Jim continued, 'Those stories you hear about alien abductions, all those people who seem to be loony bins talking of flying saucers carrying them off-many of them are truer than we'd ever have cared to believe possible.'
'So, you were abducted as well?'
A wistful look came into Jim's eyes.
'Desert Storm, 1991. I was flying an F-15 Eagle over Iraq. Saw a bogey flying low and thought it was an Iraqi trying to get to our troops so I hit the deck and chased him over the Persian Gulf. Bloody saucers ambushed us and splashed us. They picked me up, but my wingman didn't make it. From what you told me, sounds like you at least got some payback on those saucers for all of us. Now how do you plan to get out?'
Aaditya confessed sheepishly that he hadn't really thought that part of his plan through.
'Man, you are on a suicide mission. I wouldn't have cared but if these Devas can help stop Kalki, then we need to get you out. Come on, we need to call a meeting.'
'A meeting? With whom? I thought all the people here were prisoners.'
'Kid, they captured us, but that doesn't mean they broke all of us. There are others like me out there. We have no hope, or a real plan of ever getting back to our lives, but we won't make it any easier for these demons. Let me get a meeting arranged, and then we'll see how to get you out once your mission is done.'
***
Two hours later, Aaditya was in a small opening beneath what appeared to be the main Asura hangar, judging by the sound of vimanas or drones taking off and landing virtually every minute. Half an hour of waiting later, Aaditya was beginning to doubt Jim and wonder if the man he was with was a crazed and delusional prisoner of the Asuras. A few minutes later, his doubts disappeared when he saw four more men appear. One was a tall black American who introduced himself as Deuce, a former US Navy pilot. Another was a slight Russian called Pavel, who said that he had been a test pilot in the Russian Air Force. The third was a Chinese man called Lim, who had commanded one of the Chinese strategic bomber squadrons before he had been captured by the Asuras, and the fourth was a wiry man called Michael, who refused to say any more than the fact that he had been in the Israeli Air Force.
'So, Crazy Jim, why call us here? You know those demons are always sniffing around and I don't want to hang around here a minute longer than I have to.'
Jim addressed Michael, though it was apparent that he was speaking to all the men gathered around. 'We have lived like mice for years. We hide, and once in a while we come out and bite, but at the end of the day, let's be honest to ourselves, what we do hardly matters in the larger scheme of things.'
Aaditya noted that Jim seemed to have struck a chord somewhere, since all the men fell silent. Then Jim pointed at Aaditya. 'This kid could change all that. Aadi, tell the guys what you've been up to.'
Aaditya had not really been prepared to share his story with a large group, but as he began speaking, he saw a visible change in the attitude of the assembled men. Even if subtly, their eyes began to change from showing little more than poorly disguised skepticism and contempt to one of awe. Aaditya began to realize that he was the first sign these men had seen in years that there was some hope beyond waging a desperate, and ultimately futile guerrilla campaign against Kalki and his army in the heart of his base.
Michael was the first to speak. 'Kid, you need to tell them about the narrow window of opportunity they have. We can kill a frigging demon a week, but at the end of the day we are waging a losing battle.'
'What do you mean?' Aaditya asked.
Jim answered. 'Aadi, there are at best ten of us who have escaped and are fighting back. The others have given up, and serve Kalki out of fear more than anything else. But till you got here, none of us had any real hope that anyone could stop the horned bastard. You need to get out and tell the Devas what we know.'
'And what is that?'
'Come with me.'
Jim clambered into another narrow vent, with Aaditya and the others following close behind. A good twenty minutes of scrambling along on all fours later, Aaditya climbed down into another narrow enclosure where there was a woman waiting for them. She hugged Jim and the other men when they climbed down.
'Jesus, thank God you're okay.'
Jim introduced her to Aaditya. 'This is Major Leslie Johnson, of the United States Strategic Air Command, and the commanding officer of the resistance movement down here.'
The wiry woman looked Aaditya over, and then motioned for Aaditya to follow her. All of them walked through the passageway till it intersected with a wall. It seemed to be a dead end, but as Aaditya watched in fascination, she lodged her knife into a corner and pulled out one brick. She then used her bare hands to pull out a few more till there was a small hole in the wall. She squeezed through it and asked Aaditya to follow. He could see only darkness through the hole and hesitated, but Leslie hissed at him to hurry. 'Come on, we don't have all day!'
He was halfway through when Leslie grabbed his hands and pulled him through, making him land in an ungainly heap at her feet. When he sat up, the first thing that hit him was the stench. The smell of human waste,
