Hunting The Snark: An Alice in Deadland Adventure (Alice, No. 4) by Mainak Dhar Read Free Book Online Page A

three hours away where they would get another vehicle
to resume their journey. The problem was that it was now night, and their best
bet was to camp for the night and resume at dawn.
    ‘Where’s Bunny Ears?’
    Alice looked around and groaned at Satish’s question. The
last thing she needed was for Bunny Ears to get lost in the darkness. ‘I’ll go
look for him.’
    As soon as she got up, a bullet slammed into the tree behind
which she had been hiding, missing her head by inches.
    ‘Incoming!’
    As Vince shouted out his warning, everyone took cover. Alice
looked out through the night vision scope on her rifle and saw shapes moving in
the forest ahead.
    ‘More bandits?’
    Josh answered her, ‘No, not the way they’re moving. Looks
like a Zeus team.’
    Tom’s sniper rifle barked out once, and one of their
attackers fell. The others scrambled for cover, the advantage of surprise lost.
    ‘Barrister here. Get them to move to the right.’
    They opened up a barrage of fire to the left of their
attackers. In the darkness, and against trained attackers who were moving from
cover to cover, they didn’t score any hits that Alice could be sure of, but
certainly they were causing their attackers to move to the right. Satish
shouted on the radio for Butcher to hold his fire, and despite being in the
middle of a firefight, Alice had to suppress a laugh. The big man was screaming
obscenities and firing away on full auto. During the drive, Alice had heard
tales of how he had killed Zeus troopers with his bare hands, and she could
believe it.
    There was a loud boom and men began screaming. John exulted
over the radio.
    ‘Gotcha! Unfortunately that was the only Claymore I had.’
    ‘White Knight here. We can’t get pinned down, otherwise
they’ll have reinforcements all over us. Let’s move out. Make sure the White
Queen gets out first.’
    There was no way she was going to be herded out to safety
while the rest of her companions were engaged in battle. So she shrugged off
Cynthia when she tried to pull Alice back and then crept towards their
attackers. It had been a while since Alice had been in such a pitched battle.
Her entire childhood had been spent preparing her for moments like this—when she
would be locked in a life-and-death struggle against attackers—human and
undead. That training had been tested time and again in the battles against
Zeus and the Red Guards in the Deadland, and ever since she was transformed
into her current form, her abilities had taken on a whole new dimension. She
retained all her old training and instincts, but now she felt no pain, felt no
fatigue and could be killed only by a direct head shot.
    Alice moved from cover to cover and was more than halfway to
the Zeus troopers when as she crawled to cover behind a fallen tree trunk, a
bullet grazed her foot. One of the Zeus troopers screamed in triumph.
    ‘I think I got her!’
    Alice lay behind the tree, her foot in the open, watching
the Zeus troopers through a gap below the trunk. Her companions were doing
their best to cover her and she could hear them shouting into her headset.
    ‘White Queen, are you okay?’
    ‘White Queen, we’ll provide cover fire, please retreat!’
    Alice just lay still, ignoring the calls streaming into her
headset, while the Zeus troopers moved closer. By now her eyes were accustomed
enough to the dark to not need her scope and she watched as three troopers
moved towards her as their comrades pinned Vince and the others down with heavy
fire. The lead trooper was less than four feet away when Alice sprang into
action. She had put her rifle on the ground and leaped over the trunk, her
pistol in her left hand and the knife in her right. The Zeus trooper was too
surprised to react before she fired three shots into him at point-blank range,
and he went down. The second trooper was about to bring his rifle up when she
threw her knife, which buried itself to the handle in his chest. As he grabbed
at the knife, Alice