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see through your own eyes.'
     
    She nodded and Bunny Ears grabbed Alice by her arm and led her out. She was dragged more than led up a series of winding tunnels and then suddenly she found herself outside again. It was getting dark outside and she was in a thickly wooded area. She saw a broken sign and she recognized the symbols from some of her training when they had been familiarized with the surrounding landscape. They were near the Yamuna River, or rather what used to be the river, but now was a dried up trickle after the 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 of 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