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nuclear firestorms and subsequent battles had
destroyed the dams and reservoirs feeding it. She sensed movement around her
and she saw that there were at least a dozen more Biters hiding among the
trees.
    After more than an hour of waiting, she turned to Bunny
Ears, asking him what it was he had brought her here to see, but he merely
grunted in reply, as if telling her to shut up and wait. Then as she watched,
something strange happened. She saw a large group of Biters emerge from the
trees, perhaps a hundred or more of them. They were all walking in single file,
which was totally contrary to the image Alice had grown up with of them being
savage, mindless brutes incapable of any act of co-ordination or reason. But what
totally took her breath away was the fact that the Biters were not just a
random group out to inflict violence, but seemed to be a social grouping of
some sort. There were a handful of women, many of them carrying small children.
The children themselves looked like something out of a nightmare, with their
yellowed skin and many cuts and bruises on their blood covered bodies, but all
the same, they were children. Alice had no idea if these were families formed
and born after the adults had been transformed to Biters or if these were
families that had retained some of their old bonds even after they ceased to be
human. Either way, yet again irrevocable proof was in front of her eyes that
there was much more to the Biters than she had been brought up to believe.
    As the column came closer, Alice got a better look at them.
With their bowed backs and trundling along slowly in single file, they looked
more like a group of refugees than a band of marauding monsters. She heard
Bunny Ears screech behind her, and two Biters in the group ahead responded in
kind. What was the Queen trying to show her by sending her here? True, there
seemed to be much more to the Biters than what she had grown up believing, but
so far she had seen nothing that would change her mind about joining the Queen
or fulfilling some deranged prophecy of hers. No, if there was one thing Alice
was sure of, it was the fact that she would find the earliest possible
opportunity to escape.
    Just then, the convoy in front of her stopped in its tracks,
many of the adults looking up at the skies. Several of children began howling,
their inhuman cries making Alice's hair stand up on end. She didn't know what
had suddenly brought about the change in their behavior, but within a few
seconds the group transformed from an orderly convoy to a totally
panic-stricken mob. The Biters were now screaming and running in such a panic
that she saw more than one run into trees and fall down. Bunny Ears had now
emerged and was howling, an ear-splitting noise that was taken up by the others
who had been hiding in the trees with him. It almost looked like he and the
others had been sent by the Queen to shepherd the group to safety through the
woods, but now there was no more semblance of order. The Biters were running
around, screaming like wild animals that have caught a scent of hunters, and
one of them, a woman with a bloodied and mangled child in her arms, came within
a few feet of Alice. She glared at Alice with hate-filled eyes, and baring
bloodied teeth, seemed ready to pounce when Bunny Ears knocked her off her feet
with a blow to the back of her head.
    Alice still didn't know what had caused such bedlam when she
heard a familiar sound. The whirring rotors of approaching helicopters. She
looked up to see several black helicopters approach the clearing. Zeus had
arrived.
     
    ***
     
    The female Biter who had been knocked over by Bunny Ears was
getting up unsteadily on one knee when her head exploded in a spray of blood.
Alice screamed and dove for cover behind a tree as more snipers aboard the
oncoming helicopters opened fire. She watch three more Biters caught in the
open fall, their heads split open by high-powered sniper rifles, before the
others scattered among