by Wol-vriey
Crank peered into the rearview mirror once more. The Pumas were now just two hundred meters behind them. “
***
Flying down the road as fast as their steamcar would carry them, they suddenly found themselves under attack from the front as well. Sharp metal disks whizzed past on both sides of the road, narrowly missing them as they careened along with little more than a hope and a prayer.
“Shit!” Alice cried, ducking down.
Upon closer inspection, however, they realized that the flying death disks were actually silver cake trays. Slowing down to synch up with the car’s speed, they gradually came to float at a height suggesting they were held by invisible men along each side of the road. Each tray had a large printed card floating over it, bearing a description of its contents.
“Texas sure is a very odd place . . .” Alice muttered to herself.
“
They began reading off the labels on the trays as they flew past in a steady rush:
. . . Beards . . . Mustaches . . . Noses . . . Legs . . .
. . . Eyes . . . Penises . . . Heights . . . Lengths . . .
Without slowing down, Crank impulsively reached out a hand and snatched up the ‘Lengths’ tray as they passed it. He handed it over to Alice.
“
Alice stared down at the cakes filling the tray in her lap. They were not numbered like Baker’s cakes had been.
She picked one at random and took a bite. Her nose lengthened instantly, extending out six feet ahead of her like a meat spear.
Alice could only shriek in horror at this new facial appendage of hers, which resembled nothing so much as a giant compass needle pointing their way back to New York. She was about to throw the cake away when Crank cautioned her against it.
“
She did so, causing her nose to instantly shrink back down to its normal size.
“
Meanwhile, they continued reading off the labels on the trays they passed:
. . . Cockroaches . . . Mosquitoes . . . Grasshoppers . . . Butterflies . . .
Wondering why anyone would want to eat a cake made from insects, Alice kept trying in spite of herself. Without even reading their labels anymore, she blindly grabbed several trays into the car, biting cakes at random.
One cake grew her ears long and floppy like a rabbit’s.
“Ugh . . .” Alice said, examining herself in the rearview mirror before quickly taking a second bite.
Another cake extended all of her fingers an additional three feet. With paper-thin folds of skin stretched between them, her hands looked just like batwings.
“Double ugh!” she cried, fumbling with her spindly digits until she got another bite of cake into her mouth.
Behind them, the Pumas were now close enough to hear.
“STOP in the name of the Clockwork Goddess!” the she-lions shrilled, just barely audible over the steamcar engine and the clanking of their horses’ hooves.
Gut-wrenching fear was all that kept Alice from looking back to see just how close they were getting. Desperate now, she popped a cake that ending up affecting the steamcar itself – stretching it so long that it reached all the way back to the Pumas pursuing them.
Alice didn’t pick up on this, however, until she felt the steamcar’s body rocking upon its suspension. Looking back, she saw several she-lions leap from their horses to land in the rear seat, one hundred meters back. Axes whirling fiercely, the Pumas charged up towards them, their paws pounding the steamcar’s stretched-out surface.
Alice swallowed the lump in her throat and then quickly ate another mouthful of cake, watching with satisfaction as the Pumas tumbled to the ground – the added length of car immediately disappearing beneath them.
The next cake Alice bit into stretched the car sideways, until the driver’s seat was so far away from her that see could hardly see Crank anymore. Thankfully, they’d reached a portion of road with nothing but desolate plains on either side. Before they could collide with a rogue sagebrush, Alice ate another piece of cake and the car normalized once again.
After eating a piece of cake that grew her head so large it almost broke her neck from the sheer weight of it, she had to hold it up with both hands while Crank reached over to feed her another chunk.
“That almost killed me just now . . .” she gasped, still feeling the phantoms of her gargantuan skull. “Find me another one!”
Doing as directed, Crank plucked a tray labeled ‘Distances’ from the roadside and handed it over.
“
Alice considered the cakes before her very carefully now. Her neck still ached badly from that last one.
The first one she tried closed the distance between them and the Pumas to several feet. Their pursuers were just as stunned as they were by the sudden leap forward. One of their metal horses rear-ended the steamcar with a loud bang, the impact causing Alice to lose the cake over the side.
She quickly grabbed another cake and bit into that, sighing with relief as the Pumas disappeared behind them. Then she shrieked in horror.
“Crank, the ground’s gone beneath us!”
The robot looked as surprised as its metallic features would allow, noticing the clouds all around them. Peering over the side of the car, he was no more expressive at the sight of the ground, far far below.
“
“You know, Crank,” Alice began, testily. “I’ve really had just about enough of you bossing me around!”
Watching as the Earth grew ever closer, Alice grudgingly stuffed her mouth again and swallowed. Within the space of an instant, they were safely back on the ground, only now they were about a hundred meters behind the Pumas. The she-cats rode furiously on, doing their best to catch up with the car they imagined up ahead of them.
“This is insane,” Alice groaned. “We could have been killed just now! Okay, I could have been killed – you’d just have broken into a million pieces.”
“
Alice groaned. “But my belly’s so FULL already . . .”
“
Alice conceded this was true, gagging as she crammed still more cake into her mouth.
Both she and Crank suddenly perceived the landscape passing by in a blur, as if God himself were erasing reality prior to repainting it.
Passing right through the she-lions, they could almost feel the Pumas’ confusion as their mounts were blown out from underneath them. Pulling far ahead of their pursuers now, Alice and Crank were suddenly traveling so fast that they lost sight of them completely within a matter of seconds.
“
With the last bit of room left in her stomach, Alice applied the brakes.
Chapter 2
Soda Pop
They were rolling slowly along a prairie road, ringed by hills on all sides.
Crank stopped the car. “
“There’s a sign right over there,” Alice said, pointing.
Disembarking their steamcar for the first time since leaving Tulsa, Alice got out, stretched, and walked over to read it. The sign was tacked onto a miserable-looking cactus.
It read:
WELCOME TO THE STATE OF TEXAS, LOUISIANA BORDE
R
“Oh, shit . . .” Alice groaned, collapsing on the grass. “After all that bother?”
“
“Forget it, Crank. Whatever happened, the end result is we’re still in Texas. And we need to get out of here A.S.A.P!”
Just then there was a loud boom in the distance, seeming to emanate from back the way they came, causing Alice to turn her head in alarm.
“What was that?”
Crank peered intently across the grassland emptiness. “
“What?”
Crank helped her to her feet, then began shoveling coal into the steamcar’s furnace.
“
Crank scanned the landscape, searching for a good hiding place.
“
Alice pointed to a patch of forest up ahead. “Let’s head for those trees!”
Crank agreed. “
Alice got back into the steamcar, taking their last remaining tray of cakes into her lap. She examined them dubiously.
“We’ve still got the cakes, at least . . .”
In the driver’s seat now, Crank turned to glare at her, his eye dials wagging in silent disapproval.
“Okay, maybe not the cakes again,” Alice said, laughing as she tossed the tray out the window. “With our luck, my next bite might warp us right into Queen Anna’s bedroom!”
Crank drove slowly as they rolled past the border sign, keeping their telltale smoke emissions to a minimum.
***
They reached the cover of the forest without incident. Crank drove deep into a thicket of trees and parked their steamcar beneath the boughs. They were perhaps not as surprised as they should’ve been when a large cake went SPLAT on the hood.
Taking a closer look at their surroundings as they cautiously exited the vehicle, they discovered that the forest itself was made of cake. The trees themselves were all covered in thick chocolate icing and colorful cupcake leaves. Large fruits in the shape of soft drinks dangled pendulously from their branches.
“I wonder what these cakes do . . .” Alice wondered aloud, reaching for a leaf with sprinkles overhead.
Crank plucked a soda fruit from a branch and read the inscription on the bottle.
“
He tossed the bottle onto the cupcake-littered ground.
Alice shuddered at the thought. Withdrawing her hand, she pulled her new six-shooter from its holster, forgotten during the Puma chase. She checked its chambers – five bullets.
“
Alice smiled at the robot. “I’m just tired of getting captured every time I turn around. Everyone in this entire goddamned queendom seems to be at each other’s throats. One wonders how they ever got themselves organized enough to invade New York!”
“
They fell silent then – the sound of a stranger’s voice approaching.
Alice and Crank ducked behind a chocolate tree trunk as the man-sized rabbit hopped into view. It was white and clad in leather with a ten-gallon hat.
The rabbit passed their hiding spot without even a sideways glance. Pausing for just a moment, it pulled a pocket watch from its jacket pocket to check the time.
Its expression suddenly became very worried. “Oh dear dear dear me!” it moaned, “I’ll be late now, for sure!”
The white rabbit hopped over to a nearby tree and picked a ‘drink me’ soda fruit. Taking several glugs from the bottle, it immediately shrank down to normal rabbit size.
“Well, that answers the question of what the drinks do,” Alice said.
“
“We’ll follow the rabbit,” she said. “It must’ve made itself smaller for a reason.”
Against Crank’s wishes, she opened the bottle and took several swigs of its fizzy contents, which tasted of strawberry. Alice, Crank, and the steamcar instantly shrank down to the same size as the white rabbit. Taking this as proof that they were on to something, they hopped back into their miniaturized vehicle and drove off after it.
The rabbit didn’t appear to notice that it was being followed, distracted as it was. It just continued hopping right along, checking its watch intermittently with the same worried look on its face.
“I’m so so so late for work!”
“
Alice looked up over the tops of the prairie grass, now towering above them like trees.
While she couldn’t quite make out the Pumas through the thick vegetation, she could plainly see the thick streams of smoke from their metal horses.
“They can’t see us, Crank. Oh don’t be such a spoilsport – Let’s see where that rabbit’s going. Surely it’s headed somewhere . . .”
“
“Just follow it a bit longer. I promise we’ll stop before we get close enough for the Pumas to notice us.”
Alice had evidently been seized with a mad urge to learn the rabbit’s secret destination at any cost. She’d follow it down into Hell, if need be.
“
Off in the distance, the Pumas had split into pairs and fanned out across the prairie to search for them. Two of the she-cats were galloping toward the cake-tree forest.
“
Alice was adamant in her resolve. “Just keep following him!”
Thankfully, the rabbit deviated from its course just enough to lead them out of the path of the oncoming Pumas. As they drew up alongside the towering beasts on their metal steeds, Crank cut the engine to prevent the steamcar’s smoke from revealing their position. They waited until the Pumas had galloped past before starting it up again.
***
Meanwhile, the white rabbit had vanished into the jungle of prairie grass up ahead. Hoping that it hadn’t strayed too far from its previous trajectory, Crank drove blindly on.
“
“No, keep following him. It’s just got to be around here somewhere . . .”
Crank’s eye dials flickered his displeasure, but the robot continued on as ordered. The further they drove, the more insistent his protests became.
Far from the cake-tree forest now, they eventually reached the hills on the other side of the prairie.
“Oh, here we are!” Alice squealed with delight, pointing to the little green door in the hillside. “It went in there,” she stated with absolute certainty.
Crank had no reply. The door would take them out of the open, at least, and there was no way they could return to the forest now – not with the Pumas still about.
“We’re going in after it,” Alice insisted.
“
Alice leapt out of the steamcar, making a beeline straight for the miniature door.
“
He dr
ove the steamcar back into the grass a good distance, making a sharp turn so it would appear they’d made a run for the border instead. After forcing the accelerator down by wedging a water can against it, Crank returned to meet Alice by the green door in the hillside.
Along the way, he heard the Pumas shrieking across the prairie and stopped to look back. Just as he’d hoped, the ruse had worked. Even in its miniature state, the Pumas had noticed the speeding vehicle and were riding their metal horses after it, apparently unaware that its passengers had already bailed out.
Chapter 3
Behind the Green Doors
Alice pushed the green door open and they entered.
They found themselves at one end of a short, stone corridor lit by suspended oil lamps. At its opposite end was another green door.
Once through the first green door, both Alice and Crank immediately felt themselves growing back to normal size.
“We’re not getting out that way again,” Alice said, noting how small the door appeared to them now.
“
Now that the effects of the soda pop had worn off, Alice wasn’t sure why she’d insisted on following the white rabbit before. It had just seemed like the proper thing to do at the time. She shored up her fading courage with the knowledge that they’d at least escaped the Pumas.
“Only thing to do now,” she told Crank, “is keep going.”
Together they walked down to the other end of the corridor. Thankfully, the second green door was still large enough for them to fit through.
Alice realized that she’d made a mistake immediately upon stepping through it.
The immense chamber was dominated by a mountain of metal machinery at its center, reaching almost to the ceiling in a staggering heap of gears and steam pumps. A multitude of white rabbits carrying clipboards rushed up and down the mechanical mass, checking their watches every few seconds and proclaiming how late they were.
This, however, was the least of their immediate concerns – in walking through the green door, Alice and Crank stepped out directly in front of a Puma.