Through the Killing Glass by Mainak Dhar Read Free Book Online

radio
the folks in town, telling them bandits attacked the Looking Glass, and ask for
medical help. Tell nobody we were here.’
    Danish looked
at her, grim determination on his face.
    ‘Alice, you can
trust me. Here, take this so you can know what’s going on inside and I can tell
you what Humpty Dumpty is up to.’
    Alice
gratefully took the portable radio set he had given her and put it in her
backpack. She was about to leave when Satish joined her.
    ‘I’m coming
with you.’
    ‘Satish, you
don’t have to…’
    He never let
her finish. ‘We’ve fought too many battles together for me to let you go alone
on this one.’
    And so Alice
and Satish walked out through the shattered glass facade of the Looking Glass,
the bloodied glass fragments crunching under their feet as they set out for
their trip back into the Deadland.
     
    ***
     
    General Chen
watched the black helicopter glide in and land in a far corner of the airfield.
It was always cold in Ladakh, where he was based, but he felt a chill go
through him that had nothing to do with the temperature. After he had
surrendered a forward base to Alice and her forces, he had been stripped of his
command of the Red Guard forces in the Deadland, and had been sent to an
indoctrination camp near Guangzhou. The Central Committee propaganda machine
called these camps ‘holiday camps for tired veterans to recuperate and regain
their revolutionary fervor’. In reality, it was a torture camp where veterans
who had become politically inconvenient or had started asking uncomfortable questions
were shipped out. Like the purges of all dictators in the past, those who were
perhaps most capable of defending the regime were punished, because the best
soldiers are also those who dare to think. Chen had made that mistake when he
surrendered his base to Alice to prevent his men from being slaughtered. He had
been an officer in the Chinese Red Army before The Rising, and with the nuclear
and biological weapon exchanges with the Americans and the chaos enveloping the
world in the days that followed, he had devoted himself to defending his people
against the Biters. It had been a clear-cut mission, one where he had little
doubt as to whether he was doing the right thing or not. That was until he
learnt of this girl called Alice and the stories she was spreading. He had
dismissed them as propaganda, and had captured her once, intending to send her
to the mainland for execution. But something had changed when he had looked at
her during her attack on the Red Guard base he had been inspecting close to a year
ago. He had seen the Biters following her, had seen that she was not quite
human, yet not Biter either. That had planted the seeds of doubt in his mind,
and he had confided to a brother officer back in Shanghai. He had raised
questions about whether what the Central Committee had been telling the people
about the true nature of the Biters and the war in the Deadland was entirely
true. That more than his battlefield surrender had been his undoing. Chen’s
only relief was that his wife had been spared the horrors of the camp.
    He had been
rehabilitated just six months later and re-instated with all honors, to be sent
to the new base at Ladakh where the Red Guards kept a watch on the community
called Wonderland. It had been nothing more than glorified sentry duty and he
had begun to wonder why he had been spared. Then the stealthy black helicopter
he had just seen land had arrived and started going out on sorties to the
Deadland. Its crew and passengers had been flown in from Shanghai and even
though he was the base commander, Chen had not been allowed any access to them.
They stayed in their own quarters behind a walled complex, and did not report
to him.
    He wondered
what the old men in the Central Committee were up to now, but knew that
whatever it was, the cost in blood would be paid by the young conscripts he was
now supposed to lead.
     
    ***
     
    The dust was
swirling around her