Off With Their Heads (5 page)

As she looked around, it struck her just how silent it was. Normally, the bridge in front of her would have been full of cars and trucks, honking their horns so much one would be forgiven for believing that was a prerequisite to getting a driver’s license. There would have been children flitting around the huts on the side of the road, where their parents would have been hawking whatever they could – motorcycle helmets, coconuts, magazines. The huts were there, but there were no people in sight. Vehicles were strewn all over the bridge as if a child had scattered them around after playing with them and forgotten to put them away. As Protima approached the bridge, she realized that there were people there after all; it was just that they were not alive any more. The stench of death permeated the whole area and decomposed bodies lay in the cars and on the bridge.

A school bus stood abandoned on the side of the road and Protima wondered if any of the children had made it to safety. She walked closer, and was shocked as she heard a whimper, quickly cut off. Protima called out, ‘If you’re in there, I mean no harm. Come out and we can help each other.’

Someone moved inside. Her hopes lifted for the first time in days. The prospect of meeting another human being was so exciting that she threw caution to the wind and ran towards the bus. A small girl emerged first, perhaps no more than five years old. Behind her was a young woman. Both were cut and bleeding, but looked to have avoided serious injury. The little girl took a step towards Protima but the woman held her back with a hand on her shoulder, her expression changing to undisguised horror. She screamed and broke out into sobs.

‘What’s wrong? Are you hurt?’

The little girl was now staring at Protima and she spoke in a hoarse whisper.

‘This Biter talks, Mama.’

Protima stopped, stunned at the words. That was when she caught a look at her reflection in one of the bus’s windows. A gasp escaped her lips as she realized what had happened to her. She sat down on the ground, stunned. The vaccine. Was this what it had done to her? Death would have been preferable to the monster staring back at her in her reflection. She had not felt any hunger or fatigue after being bitten, and she had thought it had something to do with the vaccine. It perhaps did, because while she could still think and speak like a human, she looked like a Biter. Her eyes were yellowing, and seemed to be devoid of any expression, and when Protima tried to force a smile, she recoiled at the hideous grimace that was reflected back.

It was then that Protima realized another element of her humanity she had lost. Try as she might, she could no longer cry.

Protima jerked her head up as the familiar shuffling of Biters approached. She peered past the side of the bus and saw a crowd of more than a dozen Biters. She flattened herself against the bus, hoping the Biters would pass. The Biters walked on by, emitting growls and screeches, and Protima kept willing them on.

That was when the little girl inside the bus coughed. The Biters stopped in their tracks. Protima was lying flat on the ground, watching from beneath the bus, as one or two took steps towards the bus. One of them, a large man with most of his scalp missing and his face covered in blood, screamed and the others began moving towards the bus. Protima knew what would happen to the girl and her mother if the Biters got to them. If the mother tried fighting back, she would be torn apart, and then the girl would either meet a similar fate or become another monster like the Biters. With all the death and devastation Protima had seen, what was the life of one little girl worth?

With that thought, Protima stopped herself. No, she had to do something, anything. She stepped out from behind the bus and stood between the mob of Biters and the bus.

The large man bared his bloodied teeth and screamed something at her. Protima was shocked as she thought she understood what he was trying to say. He was telling her that the prey inside the bus was his. He towered over Protima as he approached, the others following him. Protima felt around herself for something she could use as a weapon. Her hands felt something hard and she picked it up. She held it above her head and screamed at the Biters.

‘Stand back! You will not move forward!’

The Biter was now just feet away from her and her impact on him was immediate. He stepped back as if he had been jolted by electricity. The other Biters had stopped, and one or two of them began to whimper. Perhaps it was seeing someone like them who could talk like a human, or perhaps it was the simple fact that someone had taken charge. Whatever the reason, the Biters began to step back as Protima walked towards them. At any other time, it would have seemed absurd to Protima – a pack of bloodthirsty Biters falling back before a frail old woman – but now she had only one thought in her mind: she had to save the little girl.

The large Biter got up, snarling at Protima, and was about to lunge when Protima swatted him with the object in her hand.

‘I said no. No!’

Later, Protima would wonder where she got the courage and strength from, but at that moment she felt as if she could have taken on a dozen Biters in hand-to-hand combat. The Biter shrank before her as she swatted at him again.

Much later, she would come to realize that every pack needed a leader. She was the first and only Biter who had been able to order them around. The object she was holding would also become a symbol of her authority.

A roaring sound filled the sky as four jets flew towards the city center. They dived in and pulled up in steep dives, and fireballs erupted where their bombs had hit. The government was bombing what had been densely populated civilian areas.

The Biters were still kneeling before her and even the large one was now keeping his head down. She called out to the woman and the girl in the bus, but received no answer. They had slipped out. Protima doubted they could last long, but she had done all she could.

Some figures came into view to her right as a long line of Biters emerged from the nearby fields. They moved as a group now, with some sense of co-ordination. They attacked humans on sight, yet they resembled wild animals more than the monsters people had taken them to be.

Protima began to walk away, not entirely sure where what she would do next. She sensed movement behind her. The Biters were following her.

‘Stop following me!’

The Biters stopped, but then they began following her again. Resigned to having the mob of Biters following her around, she kept walking away from the city.

More jets had appeared in the skies and explosions were rocking the city. In the distance, she saw something that froze her heart. A large mushroom cloud was rising into the sky. Protima did not know if this was part of the nuclear madness that had erupted between India and Pakistan or part of the desperate defensive measures adopted by governments to stave off the spread of Biters. Either way, it was clear that it was no longer safe to be above ground. She had already seen that the network of tunnels and sewers under the ground could provide some sort of sanctuary. She laughed bitterly. At least she would not have to worry about finding food or water.

She found an opening and began to pull at the heavy handle. To her surprise, several pairs of hands reached out to help her and in no time, the heavy lid covering the entrance to an underground tunnel was pushed aside. She looked at the Biters following her, now more than two hundred strong, and she saw that they were trying to communicate with her. One of them, a giant who towered over her and wore a hat, growled in a low voice. Protima could not understand the words, but he was telling her that all the Biters would follow her, and that she should lead them to safety. As his eyes scanned the sky, looking at the jets and at the huge fireballs now erupting over the city in the distance, she saw that he and the other Biters were terrified. They might have looked like monsters, but Protima began to understand that there was something more to them. She really did not want to be their leader or to have them follow her around, but there was no way she could turn them back, and besides, with the devastation being rained on the city around them, she did not have much time. So she entered the hole in the ground, and the big Biter with the hat and the others behind him followed her in.

Protima clutched the package she had been carrying close to her and realized she was still carrying the object she had picked up in the stand-off with the Biters. She burst out laughing when she realized what she had been trying to fight off a horde of Biters with.

It was a well-worn and slightly charred copy of a book she had once enjoyed tremendously. Alice in Wonderland.

The first salvo in the Chinese Revolution of 2014 was typed into a Google search bar while sipping on a glass of red wine in a five-star hotel in Beijing.

Edward Johnson had come to Beijing on a business trip from his company’s China headquarters in Guangzhou two days earlier. Wearing a tan suit and carrying a leather laptop case, he looked like many of the other guests at the East 33 restaurant at the Raffles Beijing Hotel – foreign business travelers staying at the opulent hotel in the heart of the capital. He had been employed with an American electronics firm as a sales director for five years and spoke fluent Mandarin, something that had quickly endeared him to his local Chinese business partners in the year he had been there. He had a doting wife and a five-year-old son, who were now back in the United States taking care of her mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer. Edward’s bosses thought him a hard worker, and a stickler for detail, though his evaluations would always call out that he perhaps lacked the leadership to stand out. His Chinese business partners loved his humility and grace, and talked about how despite his senior position, Edward would always be just another member of the team.

Indeed, blending in was critical to Edward’s success. For one did not become a professional assassin by attracting attention to oneself.

Edward was indeed on the payroll of the American company, and his immediate bosses had no idea that he was anything but another dedicated middle manager. However, his real employer was Zeus, and he had been placed in China after a four-year mission in the United States where he joined his employers straight out of a commission in the US Army.

Edward, which was not his real name, had been in the US Special Forces, having seen action in Iraq and Afghanistan over multiple tours of duty. He had seen friends torn apart by bombs and rockets and then been ordered not to retaliate because the attackers were ‘good’ Taliban, on the payroll of supposed US allies in the Kabul regime. He had come to hate how the politicians put young men like him in harm’s way and then micro-managed how they could operate. That was till he met Major Appleseed at Kandahar, where Edward had been placed in detention for snapping and shooting dead three civilians. Appleseed had told him he worked for people who wanted to change things, who wanted to take the fight to the real enemies of America. Edward joined in, partly driven by the conviction in Appleseed’s words, and partly to avoid the court-martial and disgrace he knew waited for him back in the United States.

Ten minutes ago, he had received a simple text message from his wife. It said, ‘The wall near our house is cracked. We should fix it when you’re back home.’ To anyone intercepting the message, and in China that was always a possibility, it would appear to be innocuous. In reality, it told Edward that the Great Chinese Firewall, which restricted the Internet content available to Chinese citizens, had been taken down. He typed ‘Tiananmen Square’ into the Google search bar on his smartphone and smiled. A day earlier, the only images he would have been permitted to see would have been those of happy, smiling Chinese citizens strolling in the square. Today, he saw what the rest of the world saw – tanks crushing demonstrators, troops firing into massed youth. Images from the original 1989 massacre and also from the more recent outbreak in late 2012. Edward copied the links and sent out an email from a secure account to a list he already had saved on his phone: a list of the most prominent political dissidents in China. He finished his wine and walked out of the hotel, planning to walk to the nearby Tiananmen Square. He figured he might as well enjoy the square while he could.

*

‘Chen, we need you. Please help us out.’

Colonel Chen tried hard to not look into the pleading eyes of his childhood friend, Bo Liang. Liang had been an editor at a local newspaper and a published author and had done very well for himself. The two men, the soldier and the poet, had stayed in touch over the years. That was till Chen had received a notice from the Internal Security Service that he should avoid all contact with his childhood friend since he had been placed under house arrest for ‘anti-national activities’. What Liang had done was to post a piece on his blog that had been mildly critical of the force used by the authorities in breaking up the protests in Tiananmen Square in late 2012. Chen had not heard from his friend for some months, and now he had suddenly called him for a meeting at a café. Chen’s wife had told him to not go, since he would be watched, but Chen owed his old friend at least that much.

When Chen did not reply, Liang put some printouts on the table.

‘Chen, look at these. I had blogged about them killing a few dozen young kids, but it seems they did much more. The Net is open for some reason, and we downloaded these. There was a terrible massacre at Tiananmen, one they hushed up. They took away dozens of people and killed them afterwards. Is this why you joined the army, Chen? To kill your own people?’

At that, Chen’s head snapped up. ‘Liang, you sit in your cafes and air-conditioned homes and talk of democracy. Look around us and compare to the poverty we ourselves saw as children. See how much our nation has progressed. You talk of democracy – take a look at the United States. Their poor are protesting in the streets and being set upon by hired guns of the elite. With the Occupy protests, many American cities resemble war zones. Europe is in the throes of rioting by unemployed youth and one economy after another is collapsing like a pack of dominos. At least here the Army holds us together against anarchy.’