Through the Killing Glass by Mainak Dhar Read Free Book Online Page A

and Alice had the hood on her sweatshirt pulled up around
her face. She had grown up in the Deadland, but just a few months of living in
the relative comfort of Wonderland told her just how brutal and uncompromising
life in the Deadland could be in comparison. When she had lived there with her
family in their settlement, conventional wisdom was that no human could survive
in the Deadland unless they were in a large, organized group. The Deadland was
teeming with predators, Biter and human alike, and now Satish and Alice would
have to contend with them on their own if they were to try and solve the
mystery of the Biter attacks. Alice knew that Bunny Ears, Hatter and her other
Biters would be close at hand through their network of hidden underground
tunnels, but there was no way for her to contact them, and depending on them to
show up when she needed help was hardly a good survival strategy.
    ‘Alice, my boys
told me that this was the only sector they did not patrol yesterday. If the
attackers came into Wonderland from the outside, then it must have been through
here.’
    It was now
getting dark, and Satish suggested that they rest. Alice was not going to get
tired from walking, and Satish was a professional soldier who could keep going
for some hours yet. However, they did not want to take the chance of bumping
into unwelcome company in the darkness.
    Alice hid the
bike in the bushes and then called out, ‘Up the trees.’
    Satish looked
at Alice incredulously.
    ‘Come on, are
you serious? Do we have to hang from branches like Tarzan?’
    That puzzled
Alice; she came from a time after cartoons had ceased to exist, and she had no
idea who or what Tarzan was.
    ‘No, because
Biters cannot climb trees, and we’ll see bandits while they’re far away.’
    Satish grunted
at the wisdom and clambered up a tree. Taking the adjoining tree, Alice
whispered, ‘Take a nap. I’ll keep watch.’
    About two hours
later, Alice heard a rustling noise nearby. She raised her rifle, looking
through the night vision scope to see three men walking towards them. They were
armed, though it looked like they carried a motley collection of homemade
pistols and an antique looking shotgun; the hallmarks of Deadland bandits. But
despite the nature of the weapons, Alice knew that men such as these could be
deadly.
    As the men sat
down and proceeded to take some food out, Alice relaxed. They had no idea Alice
and Satish were sitting just a few feet above them, and they would soon
hopefully be on their way.
    Then she saw
something that made her take a closer look. One of the bandits was taking
something out of a bag. Only it was not just any bag. It was a child’s bag,
cobbled together from old clothes, patched together by a loving mother,
embellished with cartoon characters that the child must have heard of in tales
told by the adults who had experienced them on screen and in books before The
Rising. There was only one place in the Deadland where such a bag could be
found now: in Wonderland. And it was likely that this had been made as a school
bag for a child who had been murdered just two days ago.
    Something
snapped inside Alice, and she took a signal flare from her backpack and threw
it to the ground, blinding the three men. Before they could gather their wits,
Alice was in front of them, her rifle pointed at them.
    ‘Where did you
get that bag?’
    One of the men
made the fatal mistake of thinking they were faced with a mere girl, and he
brought up his pistol. Alice snapped off a three round burst, hitting him in
the chest and slamming him against the tree behind him. The noise had awakened
Satish and he whistled to let the men below him know that he was just above
them. The hood had fallen from around Alice’s head and now the remaining men
saw her face in the fading glow of the flare.
    ‘The Quee—’
    A bullet
crashed just inches from his foot, cutting his sentence short.
    ‘I asked you a
simple question. Where did you get that