Alice & Dorothy

by Jw Schnarr

  Dorothy tucked her head and ran full out for the car.

  Rabbit steadied his hand and took aim, ignoring Dorothy.

  But Alice already had a bead on him. She pulled the trigger just a second before Rabbit did, her bullet just a bit quicker. It left the barrel of her gun and entered Rabbit’s arm. The bullet cut through flesh and was already shattering the bone in his upper arm even as he was pulling the trigger on his own gun. His shot sailed wide. Rabbit went down in a heap of blood and screams.

  Dorothy made it to the car and threw the door open, and then dove in head first across the passenger seat. She clamoured behind the wheel and reached for the keys...and they were gone.”Fuck. Fuck!”

  Rabbit was screaming from behind his car but Alice could barely make out what he was saying. The black guy with him was either unarmed or too busy dealing with Rabbit’s arm to be a danger to the girls. Alice slipped around the side of the Volkswagen and pulled the keys out of her pocket.

  “You stay out of here!” Dorothy yelled. “Get away from me!” she reached over and slammed the passenger door just as Alice reached the car, then popped the locks. “I saw what you did!”

  “Dorothy!” Alice cried. “I have the fuckin’ keys, remember?”

  “I DON’T CARE!” Dorothy screamed. “I HATE YOU!”

  “Well, that doesn’t make you any smarter,” Alice said. She put the key in the door. Dorothy tried to hold the door shut, but Alice threw it open without a second thought. Then she collapsed behind the wheel and let out a long, satisfying burp.

  “I want you out!” Dorothy’s chest was heaving. She was soaked to the skin; they both were.

  Alice ignored her. She put the keys in the ignition and started the engine.

  “No!” Dorothy said. “You—”

  “Oh would you grow up?” Alice said, waving her gun in Dorothy’s face.

  “No!” Dorothy said. “Shoot me if you have to.”

  “Fine,” Alice sighed. She pulled the trigger back on the pistol and pressed the barrel to Dorothy’s forehead.

  The girl cried out and pulled back, a small red hole appearing where the barrel had touched her flesh. “That’s hot!” she cried. “You burned me!”

  “I was about to kill you, remember?” Alice dropped the car in gear and hit the gas. The little yellow car bolted out onto the highway. “We gotta go. The cops are gonna be here any second.”

  “I hope they catch you,” Dorothy said.

  “They’re gonna catch both of us,” Alice said. She was looking in the rear-view mirror. The silver car Rabbit had been driving was ripping out of the parking lot and heading back down the highway away from them. Back toward the city. She didn’t know if Rabbit was dead or not, but he was gone for now, and that was good enough.

  The heavy rain turned to hail about ten minutes down the road, and the sky was black and green and laced with long strips of lightning. Alice had never seen anything like it.

  But Dorothy had.

  Chapter 38

  The girls drove in silence for a while. The windshield wipers were fighting a losing battle, but, despite not being able to see much further than the hood of the car, Alice refused to slow down. Instead she hammered on the gas, and the car began to shake.

  “You should slow down,” Dorothy said. She was leaning against the door of the car, as far away from Alice as she could get. Her head was against the passenger window, and the moisture in her hair caused that side of the car to fog up. “You don’t want to have to kill anyone over a speeding ticket.”

  Alice shook her head. She was being goaded into an argument, and she knew Dorothy was doing it on purpose.

  “Boy, Rabbit sure is a terrible shot,” Alice said. “Couldn’t hit his ass with a couch.”

  Dorothy gritted her teeth. Her eyes watered up on her, traitorous and salty, and she shook the tears free.

  “You cryin’ again?” Alice said.

  “YOU USED ME FOR BAIT!” Dorothy shouted, hammering the dashboard with her fist. “I thought you were going to protect me!”

  “I did protect you,” Alice said. “I got him, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, you did,” Dorothy said. “But you weren’t supposed to let him shoot at me so you could get a clean shot! Jesus Christ, what if he would have hit me?”

  “Well, I guess we’d be even then,” Alice said, her voice flat. “I took one already. Maybe it was just your turn.”

  “You’re so fucked!” Dorothy said. “I can’t believe that so much crazy can be rolled up inside one person!”

  “You don’t know me,” Alice said. “Besides, you’re more fucked up than I am.”

  “That’s impossible,” Dorothy said. “Nobody could be more fucked up than you. You shot a kid. You killed that black guy, and you hacked up that fucking guy in the office—”

  “Woah, woah,” Alice said. “I hacked that guy up? Sorry missy, but you are not pinning that one on me, no way.”

  Dorothy sighed. “I saw the eyes you drew on the mirror,” she said softly. “I saw the same eyes on the office glass drawn in that guys’ blood. The next day you had all our money back. I know it was you.”

  Alice barked a laugh. It made her shoulder wound bleed more, and she grabbed it to staunch the flow. “Oh my God. You really have no clue, do you?”

  “I saw it,” Dorothy said. “I know it was you. No sense lying about it, you’ve done way worse since then.”

  “Sweetie, that wasn’t me,” Alice said. “I went over there that night and blew him to get some of our money back, and he wanted to fuck too, so we did. I got most of it back. When I got back to the room you were gone. I figured you’d gone for air or something. Maybe the junk made you sick. So I laid down and waited for you to get back. Only when you finally showed, you were naked, and you had fuckin’ blood all over yourself. I was laying there pretending to sleep and I saw you clear as day. You slipped by the bed and watched me for a long time. I actually thought you were going to try something crazy, but then you went into the bathroom and had a shower. You were in there for a while. Later, you came out and crawled into bed like nothing had happened. I was scared half out of my mind. Should still be, but I didn’t much care anymore. You are a first class nutcase.”

  “It’s a lie,” Dorothy clenched her jaw and scowled “You’re lying.”

  “Oh, okay,” Alice said. “How long were you in the hospital before I met you?”

  “Shut up.”

  “I bet it was a long time. Months maybe. Nobody gets kept in a loonie ward because they lied on their fuckin’ psycho aptitude test. They would have found you out a long time ago. And with the state of healthcare being what it is, I seriously doubt they would just keep you in there if all you needed was some attention.”

  “You’re lying!” Dorothy cried.

  “And you’re a fucking murderer!” Alice yelled. “So don’t you think for one second that you are somehow better than me or you’re innocent in all this. You’re just as guilty. And you’re just as fucked up. At least I can tell when the voices in my head are speaking. You had no fucking clue you were a murdering schizo bitch!” She slammed on the breaks. The car bucked and skidded on the road before coming to an uncomfortable stop in their lane. The rain became less and the hail became more, smashing off the road and the hood of the car with thunderous applause. A truck flew by them in the next lane, the driver laying on his horn and spitting up waves of rainwater as he passed. “This actually looks pretty bad. Maybe I should get off the road.”

  Dorothy responded by flying out of her seat onto Alice’s lap.

  In the first moments the gun flew from her hand onto the floor, and then the girls were a writhing, furious ball. Dorothy hit the car horn with her ass over and over again, and the car screamed its mechanical voice as though cheering them on.

  Dorothy and Alice fought, rocking the car, with each girl striking heavy blows to the other but neither seeming to care much. Dorothy tangled her fingers in Alice’s hair and started jerking her head around l
ike a weighted pillow. Alice replied buy jamming her fingers into Dorothy’s throat and clawing at her pale skin. At some point they rolled out from behind the wheel and landed in a heap in the passenger seat. Each girl was giving as good as she got. Dorothy fought with a ferocity that surprised them both.

  Alice didn’t have much fight in her though. Each movement sent spasms of pain radiating from the wound in her shoulder, and soon she was a bleeding mess. Dorothy punched her in the face repeatedly, bloodying her mouth. Finally Alice managed to get her hands up on Dorothy’s head, and she pulled the girl’s face down until they met in a forceful kiss.

  Dorothy fought. She tried to pull her face away and separate their lips. For a moment, she almost made it.

  But then she gave up the fight and they were cradling each other as they kissed and whimpering into each other’s mouths and the hail outside grew bigger and hit the car with more force. It roared off the vehicle in waves, like someone was standing outside with buckets of marbles and was dumping them on the hood and roof.

  Inside the car the girls kissed the blood away from their wounds and sucked on each other’s tits and put their hands into the waistbands of each other’s pants. Their love was panicked and beautiful, and they used their fingers on each other because there wasn’t room for them to do anything else. They came together, crying out with their faces pressed together and their hands clenched, and then sat there quietly for a while breathing each other’s breath. Finally, Dorothy pulled away, and Alice pulled her fingers out of her.

  She settled back in behind the driver’s seat and took a deep breath. She wiped the sweat from her face. The humidity of the thunderstorm had made it muggy in there, and their rapid breathing had made it worse. Alice rolled down the window. Only a crack though, because the hail was still pounding them. She flicked on her hazard lights, and then reached for Rabbit’s bag of heroin. She used the last bit of foil from her cigarette pack and pulled a straw out of an old fast food cup in the back seat.

  They sat there in silence for some time, listening to the rolling thunder and the hail and watching it bounce off the road and collect in the ditch along the road like piles of shoveled snow. They smoked and smoked, until Alice’s shoulder stopped hurting and her head stopped pounding and their lives went from an angry infected mess to something beautiful once more.

  “I need to tell you something,” Dorothy said. “For months I’ve been feeling it. Like some kind of angry dragon inside me, that flared up sometimes. An endless fountain of rage. I used to think that it was a puddle in the bottom of my head, and that if I layered things on top of it I could keep it under control.

  “So I built up layers of earth and dirt and fertile green hills and ran a gold brick road through the middle of it. It was a magic land where I went when I wanted to feel important. And when bad things happened, I went there. A land called Oz. After a while it became easy to slip it on and off, like a mask. If something started to leak through, some bad part of my life, I’d just imagine it harder. I was important in Oz. I was needed. Best of all, everyone loved me there. I became a princess, with a sceptre and a beautiful crown and everything. It was really nice.

  “And the best part was all my bad feelings or hurts and scrapes just fell into the gutter beside that gold brick road. Then they got washed away down deep in the ground where they were added to the dragon. But it was okay because the dragon was asleep and far away, far deep under me.”

  “That’s pretty crazy,” Alice said.

  “Yeah well, I lived like that for most of my life. It was fine. I wasn’t crazy or anything. Just a dreamer. Then one day the dragon got out and I beat a girl at school with my shoe. Hurt her really bad. I smashed all her teeth in and was trying to pull her head off by her hair when the teacher finally caught up to us. Her name was Shelly. She pushed me on the slide because I was afraid to go down, and I just kind of blacked out. They told me about it later. After that, I was in and out of hospitals for a long time.”

  “What?” Alice said. “What did you just say?”

  “I said I was in and out of hospitals...”

  “No,” Alice said. “That’s wrong. How the fuck did you know about that? Did I tell you?”

  “I was there.” Dorothy smiled.

  “No you weren’t!” Alice said. “That was me! I did that!”

  “I was there.”

  “Stop it, please?” Alice said. Her eyes welled up. “I can’t take this shit right now. Not from you!”

  Another car flew past them in the hail, and Alice heard the driver yelling through his open window as he flew past.

  “You ever feel disconnected from the world because you just knew you were meant for more important things?” Dorothy said.

  “How did you know about Shelley?” Alice said. She needed to stay focused right now. It felt…important, somehow. Like what Dorothy had just said held some deep inner meaning, brought on by the drugs and their love for each other.

  Dorothy looked into Alice’s eyes. Her face was cold and perfect, with no sign of the bruises or scrapes from her fight with Rabbit. She looked perfect, just as she had the day Alice first met her in the hospital. Her face was tipped in a slight frown.

  “I think you know,” Dorothy said.”I think maybe you forgot for a little while, but maybe you know again.”

  “No,” Alice hissed. NO!”

  “I tried to tell you,” The Hater said, sitting in the back seat. We both did. You’re not here at all, Alice. You never woke up from your drug coma. You’ve been lying in a hospital dreaming this entire time.”

  “What?” Alice said. She felt like she’d been hit in the head with a sack of doorknobs. “That’s...That can’t be true.” But was it? She was suddenly looking from The Hater to Dorothy, perfect Dorothy, between a voice in her head and the girl she’d carry to the end of the world, and suddenly she was having a hard time telling which one of them was a figment of her imagination. “That’s not true,” she said again.

  “No, it isn’t true,” The Hater said, laughing. “Wouldn’t that be a trip though? Bet I had yah going for a minute, right?”

  “FUCK YOU!” Alice screamed. She jammed the gun between the Hater’s eyes and pulled the trigger. He had time for a smile and then the car was slammed with thunder and the back of his head exploded outward in a rush of tea and digestive cookies and bits of china. The car smelled like vanilla and tea leaves and Alice clamped her eyes shut. The air was thick with brimstone and smoke.

  “Alice, look at me,” Dorothy said.

  “No.” Alice clenched her eyes shut. Everything was moving in slow motion, but whether it was from the drugs or her own fucked up mind she couldn’t tell.

  “Alice.”

  “I don’t want to. Please don’t make me do it.”

  “You must.”

  Alice opened her eyes.

  Dorothy was covered in strawberry custard.

  But then she really looked, and it wasn’t custard at all. It was blood. A lot of blood, and Dorothy’s pale skin shone under it. There was a small black hole on her tit that she’d gotten from that cop when he’d fired into the car. The blood pooled in Dorothy’s lap and congealed there, a giant mess that she’d been sitting in since before the gas station. She was cold now. Her brilliant green eyes were static and staring off into space. Her head was pressed up against the window, like she was resting.

  And then something in Alice broke, and she saw Dorothy crying and digging at her belly as the blood pumped out of it, and uttering a shaking, final gasp with Alice’s head in her lap. A single bloody tear had run down Dorothy’s face to match the torrents from Alice. She hadn’t made love to Dorothy just now. she’d been fondling a corpse. Dorothy’s blood was everywhere. Alice could taste it, cold and metallic in the back of her throat.

  Why didn’t I pull the trigger when I had the gun in my mouth? she thought.

  But She knew why. It was because her mind was broken; she saw and heard and smelled things nobody else did. She hallucinated at
rocities to cover the horrors of her real life, and this was no different. Seeing Dorothy there with a hole in her tit and blood pumping out of her like a spilled beer can, her mind had done what it did best. It covered the pain with another reality, something to keep on going for a little while. And Alice was such a mess that she had gone right along with it.

  There was no Hater. And now there was no Dorothy. Outside, the wind screamed around the car and hail smashed into the pavement mixed with stinging rain and the roar of the storm was calling to her. Alice could feel tears coming, and she balled her hands into angry fists to stop them, but it didn’t help. They came anyway, and they burned her cheeks with salt.