Through the Killing Glass (21 page)

That evening,
Alice went to the Looking Glass, where Danish hooked her up via the new tablet
the Americans had sent. It had a camera on it, and Alice soon found herself
looking at a grizzled, bearded face.

‘Alice, I am
General Konrath, but you may call me Jack. Danish has been telling me about
your battle, and the tale of your victory is being spread far and wide across
America. Now, all we need is for you to share your story with our people. The
camera will record everything you say.’

Alice spoke for
the next twenty minutes, starting with her childhood, her life in the
settlement at the Deadland, the day she jumped into a hole after a Biter, and
then the adventure that had followed. Reliving it all left her emotionally
drained, and while Biters did not cry, she knew those who heard could feel the
pain that could only come from reliving the loss of loved ones.

‘Thank you,
Alice. One day we will meet, and our battles for freedom will become one. By
the way, Danish knows of one more operation you could lead. Good night.’

Alice looked at
Danish, who was grinning.

‘What did he
mean?’

‘The Americans
have managed to hack into the Central Committee’s servers and broadcast
systems. We can do this only once, because I’m sure the Central Committee will
block all further transmissions, so we have to make it count.’

‘What do you
mean?’

Danish pointed to
the tablet the Americans had sent. ‘Reports of the battle for Wonderland are
spreading through the Mainland. Many Red Guard officers have been arrested for
questioning orders, and it seems General Chen is also in custody after he
refused orders to assault the city. Their plan is unraveling and once those
veterans are killed or carted off to labor camps, you can bet their families
and comrades will seek answers. The Mainland has been brimming with discontent,
and one spark is all it will take to set it off. That spark could be you. They
have made you out to be either something scared conscripts have dreamed up, or
an evil witch. Seeing you, hearing you in your own voice, hearing all you have
gone through, hearing about the Red Queen and her Biters, could change that.
Also, Satish had recorded Captain Tso’s testimony. So far only some Red Guards
have heard it on their radios. Now we can broadcast it to every citizen in the
Mainland. But we have only a few minutes that the Americans can assure us of.
So let’s get started.’

Alice held the
tablet in her hands after Danish had told her they were ready. The people of
Wonderland were gathered around the TVs, and they saw the usual news broadcast
and soap operas replaced by Alice’s face. That same face was now being streamed
into millions of homes in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing.

Commissar Hu
was in Shanghai, dreading his meeting with the Central Committee the next
morning, where he would have to explain how their plan to conquer Wonderland
had turned into a bloody fiasco. He whirled around in shock as he heard the
voice on TV. The most devastating salvo in this long and bloody war had been
fired, not from a gun or a missile launcher, but from a small, glass covered
room called the Looking Glass. That was perhaps appropriate because in any war
against tyranny, the most effective weapon is not a bullet or missile but the
freedom of information. Hu held his breath as Alice started speaking, her
yellowed eyes looking straight at the camera.

‘People of the
Mainland, your Central Committee calls me a witch and a terrorist, but today I
want to speak to you directly so that you may know the full truth of the war
they have been waging. My name is Alice Gladwell, and this is my story.’

***

Two months later

Alice and
thousands of other citizens of Wonderland were at the airport, eagerly awaiting
their visitors. Danish had reported that the plane had left Calcutta over two
hours ago, and it could be arriving at any time. Vince was already airborne in
his helicopter to watch for any Red Guards who might pose a problem, but that
possibility was remote. Red Guards were seldom seen anywhere in the Deadland,
though the people of Wonderland had learnt their lesson well. That lesson was
the fact that freedom from the shadow of tyranny was not one that was earned or
kept easily, but required constant vigilance. So Satish and his men were, as
usual, roaming the Deadland in their jeeps and captured APCs, making sure that
there was no danger lurking anywhere near Wonderland. Arjun and Alice had been
busy helping repair the damage to Wonderland and making sure the many hundreds
of wounded and displaced got medical care and new homes. Bunny Ears and the
Biters still preferred to roam in the open spaces of the Deadland but every
night they returned to the Reservation, where Alice would meet them and read to
them from the charred and damaged book she carried.

Of all of them,
only Danish felt as if he had little work to do any more. Alice’s transmission
had unleashed a firestorm of dissent in the Mainland. Crowds had gathered in
the streets, demanding to know the truth. Friends and relatives of imprisoned
Red Guards had attacked official buildings, and most disturbingly for the
Central Committee, units of Red Guards had started to rise in open mutiny.
Within weeks, the Central Committee had done what tyrannies often do: shut off
the flow of information in the hope that would silence dissent. All networks
from the Mainland were down and the TV showed only propaganda speeches of the Commissar
and old footage of Red Guard parades and exercises. That did have one side
benefit for the people of Wonderland: No longer slaves to soap operas beamed
through the TVs, they quickly found other, perhaps more useful ways to spend
their evenings.

Alice heard
Vince on the radio.

‘White Queen,
the White Knight sees the White King approach.’

Alice strained
to see a black speck in the sky, which soon resolved into a propeller driven
airplane. Danish had been in daily contact with the Americans and knew that
over the last month, they had converted Calcutta into a fully operational base,
with a serviceable runway and a permanent detachment of Marines to guard it
against any Red Guard attacks. For now, that was not really a worry, since the
Red Guards seemed to have their hands more than full with the unfolding chaos
in the Mainland.

The plane
landed and taxied towards the old terminal building. The thousands of people
waiting burst into uproarious applause. A ladder was lowered, and a moment
later Edwards descended. He smiled broadly at Alice and walked towards her, his
arms outstretched.

‘My girl, it
can now finally be over.’

Alice had heard
from Danish about how Edwards and his colleagues had used her blood samples to
make a vaccine, which had already been tested on humans in America. Just the
knowledge that what the Biters represented was not some supernatural evil but a
disease that could be vaccinated against had proved to be a turning point in
how people in America viewed Biters. Together with Alice’s testimony, it had at
one stroke done away with the fighting between man and Biter, and together with
the turmoil in the Mainland had meant that the Red Guards had largely retreated
from America as well. A cure was the next frontier, and Edwards was already working
on it.

Next down was
General Konrath. Alice had seen him before on video but this was the first time
she had seen him in person. After they greeted each other, she and the general
made a speech to the people gathered. A speech where the general reminded
people that if any good had come out of the years of struggle and bloodshed, it
was that people had learnt just how precious and fragile freedom could be.

That evening,
the general was sitting with Alice and her friends in the Council building. He
was to fly out the next morning, and the question he asked was one he had
already posed twice before in the evening.

‘Alice, are you
sure you don’t want to come along with us tomorrow morning? America was where
your parents were from; that was your home.’

Alice shook his
hand and smiled. ‘No, thank you, General. I am already home.’

The next
morning at the airport, General Konrath looked at the book at Alice’s belt.

‘Who would have
guessed a book would have had so much power. Perhaps now we can begin to write and
read books again. It would be a shame if our children forgot all that we fought
for.’

‘General, I’ve
heard you were a writer before the Rising.’

The general
smiled. ‘Yes, I was a novelist. They started calling me General when I led the
people in my neighborhood to start fighting back against the Red Guards. Alice,
I am now old and tired of all the fighting. Perhaps it’s time I got back to my
old calling and wrote a book. It may well be the first book written after The
Rising.’

‘What’s your
book going to be about?’

Smiling, the
general said, ‘I still haven’t thought it all through, but I do know what I’ll
call it.’

‘What’s that?’

‘
Alice in
Deadland
.’

***

Chen looked out
of his one good eye to see who had come to his cell. He had already lost his
right eye in the beatings that had followed his imprisonment, and his left eye
was also almost closed shut due to swelling and dried blood. He could not walk
very well anymore and had to be dragged out to the courtyard every morning,
where he was beaten by the black clad Interior Security forces of the Central
Committee. Where or how his wife was, he no longer knew. In one of his
beatings, he had been told that she was also on her way to a labor camp. If
that was the case, Chen prayed that she was already dead.

He heard
something being dumped into his cell: a young man in the blood-covered,
tattered uniform of a Red Guard officer. The man looked at Chen and recognition
flashed in his eyes.

‘General Chen.’

Chen spat, a
glob of blood hitting the floor, before he spoke.

‘I am general
to nobody now, young man. I just await the day they shoot me and end it all.
Perhaps they have such a long list of people to execute that my turn has not
yet come.’

Despite a
broken nose and jaw, the officer spoke with a hint of a smile. ‘Comrade
General, you are very much still the commanding officer of the Ladakh based Red
Guards. For the last month, I have been leading them in guerilla warfare
against the liars in the Central Committee. We’ve assassinated four of those bastards
and killed a dozen or more Interior Security officers, but it seems my luck ran
out today. We still owe loyalty to you, General, and we were all inspired by
the sacrifice you made to try and save all of us.’

Chen sat up
straight, warmth permeating his body, bringing back emotions he had no longer
thought himself capable of.

‘What is your
name, officer?’

The young man
sat up, facing Chen, his back to the bars of the cell.

‘Comrade
General, my name is Captain Tso.’

‘So what news
of the outside, Captain?’

‘The people
rage against the Central Committee. Thousands of unarmed civilians have been
killed in Shanghai and Beijing, but bullets cannot silence the cry for freedom.
More and more Red Guards mutiny and follow my example. It is but a matter of
time before the Central Committee falls.’

Chen smiled
despite the pain. ‘So it has been worth it after all. I had thought I would die
a broken man who died for nothing.’

Tso smiled
back. ‘Comrade General, you should have been with me in Wonderland. In the
midst of all the bloodshed and killing, I saw something wonderful, a view of
how our nation can be and will be one day. People living free, ruled by those
they choose, at peace with those different from themselves.’

A guard shouted
from outside the cell, ‘Shut up, you traitors! The Commissar himself is coming
to meet you. I think today is the day you go to hell.’

But when the
two guards outside began to whisper among themselves, Chen heard snippets of
their conversation that gave away what was really happening.

‘The mob’s been
building outside all morning. They want to free all the prisoners.’

‘The Commissar
has said we’ll execute all of them and fly out in helicopters.’

Chen heard a
few shots, which he thought meant the executions had begun. But then came the sound
of assault rifles being fired on full auto. It sounded like a firefight had
broken out outside the prison.

A few minutes
later, the cell door opened and Commissar Hu walked in. He had lost a lot of
weight and Chen noticed a pronounced limp in one leg.

‘Good morning,
Comrade Commissar. It seems being back in the warm fraternal embrace of the
Central Committee has not agreed with you.’

Hu snarled and
kicked Chen hard in the ribs.

‘Shut up, you
fool! Have your last laugh, for I shoot both of you traitors and put an end to
your misery today!’

He called to
the guards, and they entered. One of them pulled Tso to one side and the other
held Chen up, holding his arms behind him. Chen looked at Tso and winked with
his one good eye. For the last week, he had been carrying a razor sharp shard
of glass he had picked up in the courtyard during one of his beatings. He had
been trying to work up the courage to slit his own wrist and end it all. Now he
knew he would get a chance to put it to another use. The man holding him was
strong and young, but he was an Interior Security thug, the sum total of whose
combat experience came down to beating civilian demonstrators.

As Hu took out
the pistol from his holster, Chen rocked his head back, making solid contact
with the guard’s nose. It snapped. As the guard loosened his grip on him, Chen
turned and slit the guard’s throat with the shard of glass.