by Jw Schnarr
Chapter 39
After a while, Alice adjusted herself in her seat and did up her pants. She felt used up. She was exhausted and fading from the blood loss. She stared over at Dorothy’s body. The space between them seemed like an eternity now. The irony, of course, was that Dorothy was now inside her, and closer than ever. Like The Hater had been. All of it had been in her mind. Her crazy, fucked up, heroin saturated brain had gone and scrambled everything. She’d had a delusion and fallen into a fantasy world, and now it seemed no matter how much she tried she couldn’t claw out of it.
But she had saved the biggest fuckup for last, hadn’t she? Just like any good story. Because now Alice was slowly dying in a car on the highway, and she was all by herself. Dorothy was gone now. And she didn’t know if Dorothy would ever be back.
Worse, Alice had never told her how she felt about her. She looked over at Dorothy, and then reached over and cupped the girl’s cold, hands in her own warm ones. “I want you to know that I never gave a fuck about anything really before I met you.” The melodrama brought a fresh round of tears to her eyes, and she whimpered through her words. “I had drugs and I had a life, but neither of them really mattered to me at all. And I know I’ve been a real bitch the last few days, but I will never forget you. You were the world that mattered. And I just want you back her for just a minute, so I can tell you that.”
Alice put her head down and cried into her arms.
But then he felt a hand on her head.
And she looked up smiling.
“You too,” Dorothy said. “I love you. So much. It hurts me to think about you.” She squeezed Alice’s hands and then leaned down and kissed them.
Alice beamed. “Let’s drive a bit, okay?”
Dorothy rolled the window down and looked in her rear-view mirror. There was no traffic at all. Behind them, the storm reached across the sky like a green and black oil spill. Dorothy’s face lit up at the sight of it. “Yeah,” she said, rolling up the window. “Let’s go on ahead.”
Alice wasn’t afraid of the storm. She looked at Dorothy and laughed. “I’m so glad you came back,” she said.
Dorothy leaned over and kissed her sweetly on the side of the mouth. “I never left,” she said simply.
Alice considered her words. Then she laughed. “No, I guess you never did. The Hater is gone though. For good. It really is just you and me this time.”
“Forever,” Dorothy said. She scooped up Alice’s hand and laced their fingers together. Dorothy was cool to the touch, but she was still wet from being out in the storm. Anyone would be a little cold after getting soaked to the bone from the rain.
Alice sighed. Now that the adrenaline of the drama and sex was subsiding, she was crashing badly. She was fighting to keep the car on the road. She didn’t know how much blood she’d lost, but she was sure there wasn’t much more to go before she started passing out. Maybe black out for good. Then what? She remembered hearing about people losing blood experiencing a white out when they came close to death, and Alice supposed she would see that.
“It’s called an NDE,” Dorothy said, reading her thoughts. “A Near Death Experience. As the blood leaves your brain, you’re left with noisy, distorted snow. Like you click your brain over to an unused TV channel and slowly turn the volume down until there’s silence. The long black sleep of death follows.”
Alice’s vision was a little gray around the edges, and there was a steady pounding of water in her ears, but that also might have been the storm. The hail was steadily growing in size, and it roared off the sheet metal of the car’s body. She was hunched over the wheel squinting at the black mess in front of them. “This is really bad.”
“It’s fine,” Dorothy said. She’d rolled the window on her side partway down, in spite of the invasive rain water, explaining that the noise and fresh air grounded you when you were driving in miserable conditions. “It also helps if the windows start to steam a bit, because of the moisture,” she said.
“But you are letting the moisture in,” Alice said. “You have the window down. Besides, this car is trashed and half the windows are missing anyway.”
“Trust me,” Dorothy said, and that was new, because Dorothy was a meek and shy creature, and she never said things like trust me because that required a certain level of confidence. Confidence was something Dorothy had in short supply. What she had in very large supply, in barrels stacked on barrels and stored in large warehouses with buzzing yellow lights for protection, was indecision and shyness. Two things Alice was attracted to, but that The Hater had despised in them both.
“Do you know where I’m going?” Alice croaked.
“Absolutely,” Dorothy said. Her face hinted at a smile, but Alice saw her bite down on her lip and kill it.
Alice cranked up the windshield wipers to full, but it resulted in only short lucid glimpses of the road ahead. It showed a wall of black dotted with flecks of gray and yellow. Alice was a city girl, and used to bad weather, but there was something to be said about a full on prairie thunderstorm. The power and size of the disturbance could be enough to stop a person in their tracks. It was raw, natural energy; something people tended to take for granted when all they saw was a dark spot of cloud between buildings. Rain pounded the windshield and bounced in through the holes in the windshield. The wipers scraped across them and pushed more water into the car. It dripped down the glass and onto their legs, each drop a tiny shock of electric energy.
Ahead on the road there was a large train overpass, and underneath Alice could see what looked like rows of grinning silver mouths with red eyes.
“Dammit,” Dorothy said.
“What the fuck is that?” Alice said. The grinning mouths seemed to stutter in the air, and melt down into one large mouth completely covering the underpass. The smile broadened, and the little red lights turned into bulbous cat’s eyes. They were bloody moons, with craters for pupils.
Jack Sprat, he ate a cat. His wife, she ate a spleen! The Hater’s words, but The Hater was gone. Alice had thought them herself. “I don’t want to go in there,” she said. She tried to push herself up onto the seat but didn’t have the strength; the effort alone was enough to cause her vision to dim. She didn’t know what it was they were driving in to, but she knew it was something terrible. Something with glittering metal teeth ready to rip and feast.
“It’s okay,” Dorothy said. “It’s just an overpass for the train.”
“It has teeth.”
“It’s fine.”
“It looks like a big cat with bleeding moon eyes.”
“It’s fine.”
“Dorothy,” Alice said. “Please.” She let up on the gas and immediately the car powered down. They were creeping toward the cat now, barely moving.
Dorothy squeezed Alice’s hand. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m right here. I’m going to take care of you. You just have to trust me. There’s no cat there, I promise.”
Dorothy was her friend. She was more than that, a part of her.
Alice once asked Dorothy if she could be trusted, and Dorothy had said yes. Alice believed her. They were out on the road now with nothing but death behind them, and nothing but promise ahead of them. In spite of the giant striped cat on the road, red eyes glittering like blood rubies and its mouth wide open to swallow them whole, there was promise in Dorothy’s voice. The meek girl was gone. She was finally in control for the both of them. And it couldn’t have come at a better time, because Alice herself was barely holding on.
And the truth was that there was no cat. Dorothy had said as much, and when Alice blinked, the creature was gone. There was a moment where she could plainly see the eyes and teeth left behind in a vaguely predatory smile, but then they were gone too.
The answer for the disappearance was simple: There never was a cat. So many things the past few weeks Alice had seen or heard and simply taken at face value. It was like sleepwalking. Dorothy was showing her another way, though. Dorothy showed her that sometimes beli
ef was enough to make the monsters disappear.
She felt like she was coming up out of deep water for the first time in a while, since before she’d shot that guy in the car and blown his brains all over her shirt. Maybe this is what it’s like to stop being crazy, she thought. Like a funhouse ride mixed with a horror movie, only at some point your cart banged against a pair of angry coloured metal doors with ruby red eyes and long metallic teeth and you’re out of the dark and into the sunlight of your real life once more.
Maybe you come to the end of the ride and your eyes are squinty from the sun and you think about how the vampires and werewolves and spooks you just survived were made out of chicken wire and Paper Mache with little Christmas lights for eyes and Styrofoam cones for teeth. And then you feel kind of stupid, because for a little while there, for maybe just a minute, you actually believed there were vampires in the world who wanted to drain your life away from you, and werewolves were creeping around outside your cart waiting for you to put your hand outside your seat so they could tear it off. Maybe for a moment you thought the ghosts you were seeing were the spirits of the dead, and were back for vengeance because you blew their head off in a gas station or in an old blue car in a deserted parking lot.
And then here was Dorothy, to make it all go away. Dorothy, standing in the sunshine waiting for you to reappear from your trip; holding your sunglasses and your purse because you didn’t want to drop them in there, and who didn’t come along because this was one of those things you just had to do on your own. By yourself. And then there was Dorothy and she was smiling at you and excited to see you because she kind of missed you even though you were only gone for a few minutes, and she was glad you took a trip on your own but very glad you were back. And she would give you a hug that smelled sweet and flowery and ask you how was it and were you scared and you say no, but maybe you both know that was a lie because for a minute there, just a tiny moment the funhouse was real and your whole world outside the train tracks was a big fucking lie.
You still have a bit more to see. Dr Weller’s voice again. Funny that he should be here, when she barely knew the man. Dorothy knew him though, and loved him, because he had tried to reach out and help her. Or help Alice. Now, who knew what was real anymore. Maybe Dr Weller was another figment of their collective imagination. Hell, maybe Alice was the figment, and Dorothy had made her up so she could stick around the hospital a bit more.
It didn’t matter now, because she was done with all of it.
“Excuse me?” Dorothy started to pull her hand away. She was smirking at Alice, her eyes brighter and greener than ever. “You’re done with what exactly?”
“Not you,” Alice said, holding tight and then pushing her face against the back of Dorothy’s hand. “I’m never going to be done with you. I love you.”
“I love you too,” Dorothy said. “Sooo much.”
They could see cars lining the ditches on either side of the road, and sitting directly under the overpass with its lights flashing was a large one-ton emergency vehicle. Dorothy slowed down as they approached it. The wind seemed to be picking up speed by the second. By the time the car stopped, it was a lion’s roar that rocked the Volkswagen and showered it with topsoil.
Dorothy got out of the car. Her attention was far away, past the group of people huddled under the overpass. Past a cop in a raincoat now screaming at them to get the hell off the road. Alice opened her door and fell, but dragged herself across the hood of the car and was able to grab Dorothy’s arm.
“I’ve got you!” she screamed. Dorothy rocked her lifeless head in response.
“I know!” Dorothy said. “For ever!”
On the other side of the overpass, its base black and miles away but kicking up dirt and death around it, was the biggest tornado Alice had ever seen. It looked like the sky itself was draining into the earth in a massive, angry funnel. Lightning cracked around its edges and thunder boomed. The noise of the wind grinding across the plains seemed to grab the sound from Alice’s ears and drag it toward the center of the tornado. The monstrosity picked up a house and a car at the same time, and then Alice saw the car hurtling end over end through the shattered remnants of the house as it broke down into its base components.
The cop in the underpass was motioning for them to join him. Alice couldn’t hear a word he was saying. Dorothy either couldn’t hear him or was ignoring him. Judging from the look of rapture on her face, staring into the heart of the tornado and oblivious to the rest of the world, Dorothy was long gone, into her own funhouse horror ride. Toto was clamped tight in her arms, huddled to her chest, protecting her heart the way he always did. Animals were so much more dependable than human beings were sometimes.
“HEY!” The cop screamed. “HEY GET THE FUCK OVER HERE!” He was waving his hands at them as he approached, and he pointed to the corner of the overpass where the ground rose up to meet the road above it. There were about a dozen people huddled together trying to get out of the wind. It was their safest spot to be, as the concrete of the structure would protect them from a lot of the larger debris while providing enough of a windbreak that they wouldn’t be sucked up by the tornado and thrown God knows where.
When the cop got a little closer he suddenly slowed down into a partial crouch. His hand drifted down toward his holster. He lifted one arm and pointed to Alice.
Alice looked down and realized she still had the gun in her hand.
“I’m going,” Dorothy said, staring straight ahead. “Oz awaits.”
Alice couldn’t hear her.
The cop pulled his gun and pointed it toward Alice, and now he was motioning with it for Alice to lay down on the ground. He was probably telling her to drop her weapon as well, but Alice couldn’t hear him above the roar of the tornado.
Dorothy continued to ignore him; they took a couple shambling steps toward the tornado and stopped. She looked back at Alice, confused.
“HE WANTS US TO LAY DOWN!” Alice yelled into her face.
“WHO?” Dorothy shouted.
“THAT COP!” Alice yelled.
“I HAVE TO GO!”
Alice nodded. “I KNOW!” She pulled the gun up to eye level and pointed at the cop’s head. The act caused the man to crouch into a more defensive stance, and he barked savagely like a trained attack dog.
This is the moment where everything goes to shit, Alice thought, and then shook her head and smiled. No. We’re were way past that moment. They might have passed that moment the second she laid eyes on Dorothy in that hospital, but maybe even before. Maybe when that guy started coming in her asshole with the business end of her gun jammed in his face, shooting hot shame and saying he was sorry at the same time, like the thought of blowing his brains out was the biggest fuckin’ trip he’d ever been on.
“Bark, bark, little doggy,” Alice said. The tornado loomed over top of them. The cop looked at Alice and then peeked over his shoulder. The roar of the beast was beyond anything Alice had ever heard; it drove itself into her skull like hammer hooks and pried the plates in her skull loose.
The cop started backing away from the girls with his gun pointed at Alice, but his free hand was in front of him, palm out. He was looking for a truce while he backed away from the girls. Back toward the safety of the underpass, with a please don’t shoot me when I turn and run look on his face.
Alice let him go. She turned and buried her head against Dorothy’s shoulder. Her weight was lessening int he wind. The tornado was bearing down on them. It picked up cars on the far side of the underpass and tossed them like bricks to be smashed in the dirt or bounced off one another. The air was filled with sand and ozone, like standing inside a thundercloud and a sandbox at the same time, and it made a primal, grinding noise that blocked out the shrieking wind. This is the voice of the earth, she thought. This is mother nature’s singing voice.
“It’s going to be grand,” Dorothy said.
Alice looked into Dorothy’s emerald eyes and kissed the corner of her mouth where
her perfect ruby lips met. That was all they had time for. For a moment, it looked as though Dorothy was being buried in sand, and all Alice could see were those emerald pools and her perfect smile. “I love—”
But Dorothy was gone again.
Epilogue
Dr Weller stepped off the elevator and walked toward the nurse’s station with his hand already up. He knew what was coming; it was the same thing that had been coming for a week now. Every day it was the same. Newshounds, agents, and cops, oh my. All wanting to piece everything together. Hollywood was knocking, and everyone involved with the Alice Pleasance and Dorothy Gale saga was lining up like bums at a soup kitchen, hats in hand and their mouths open. All were eager for a piece.