A couple of minutes later the rock-dragging Hellion makes the turn to this end of the corridor. The guards by Alice’s cell don’t even look up. They’ve heard him walk by a hundred times. The guards couldn’t look more bored.
I flatten myself against the wall. As the backwater Sisyphus passes, I get out the black blade and slice through his heavy chains while giving him a little kick in the ass. Not enough to hurt him. Just enough to push him into the side hall so that the guards will be the first thing he sees when he realizes he’s free.
At first he stands there, probably feeling off balance with the big load off his back. Then he looks at his empty hands. Sees the dark and gangrenous flesh around the shackles where they’ve been biting into his wrists for who knows how long. The guards aren’t pleased. They want him to keep dragging the stone exactly the way he always has. They don’t want him to improve himself. The boy with the wrist shackles must be picking up on the guards’ negative waves because he heads right at them for a heart-to-heart. I can’t be sure exactly what they’re saying, but I hear a lot of “ows” and “don’ts” along with the kind of crunching I’ve come to associate with smashed bones. The angel reminds me to be patient and wait for the conversation to die down by itself.
In a couple of minutes a still-disoriented giant wanders out of the side hall. He’s covered in blood and other colorful fluids that I don’t want to think about. He stares at his stones, lost and desperate without them. I go over and pick up the end of one of the chains. He looks up when he hears the links rattle against each other. I hold the chain out to him. He eyes me for a full minute. I’m not sure what he sees. I wonder if the insane can see through glamours? I still have Hellion skin plastered on my face, so I’d be pretty confusing to look at if he can see my living body.
Slowly, he puts out a hand. I wrap the chain around his palms and close his fingers over the metal. He leans forward. The weight is different, but familiar enough that he knows what to do. The moment he puts his head down, he forgets about me. He leans into the weight and pulls. The stones scrape reassuringly along the floor behind him.
I go down the side hall, stepping over pieces of the guards, until I come to the door in the back. It’s locked and the sliding viewing panel is welded shut. I can’t be a hundred percent sure what’s on the other side. I slash open the iron padlock with the blade. Before the lock hits the floor, I kick the door open as hard as I can. It swings back and one of the hinges pops as the door swings open and hits the wall.
As I step inside I hear a stifled scream from the farthest, darkest corner of the cell. It sounds awfully human.
“Alice?”
Nothing.
“Alice?”
And a second later there she is. Eleven years I’ve been waiting for this. I’ve lost track of how many beings I’ve killed, and destroyed everything in my way. I’ve been beaten, stabbed, burned, and maimed across two planes of existence to get to this moment. And here I am and here she is and we’re together in the same room maybe a few hours before the end of everything. I want to grab her and kiss her, but I don’t think the feeling is mutual.
She has her back to the far wall and her teeth are bared. She’s holding a wooden stake. It looks like she broke the leg off a chair and sharpened it on the floor. That’s my girl.
“Alice . . .”
“Keep away from me!” she screams, and kicks a metal dish covered with foul-smelling slop at me. Have these pinheads been trying to feed her Hellion food? Even I wouldn’t eat most of that stuff and I didn’t come here on a direct flight from Heaven.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “It’s me. I’ve come to take you out of here.”
She holds the stake higher.
“I’m not going anywhere with you, asshole! Leave me alone!”
There’s only one small oil lamp in the cell. All she can see is my shadowed profile from the light in the hall. I get closer so I’m not a ghost anymore.
“Alice. I’ve come to save you.”
She lunges and jams the stake deep in my chest. I fall back against the wall. A couple of months ago Candy gave me the zombie-bite antidote on the point of a knife and now this. Why do all the women I like end up stabbing me?
In this case the answer is obvious. I got so excited at the idea of finally seeing her that I forgot I’m sporting a robo-bug arm and a Hellion’s face.
I pull the wood out of my chest and toss it into the hall. Even unarmed, Alice looks like she’s ready to go Frazier and Ali with me. She’s always been like that. She was never big on backing down from anything.
Are you really going to sacrifice yourself to save your great betrayer?
Shut up, Medea. We’re having a moment. And I know you were lying now, so can it.
Getting staked isn’t going to kill me, but it hurts like a rhino giving you a flu shot with its horn. I sit down on a wooden chair Alice didn’t break and push the hoodie back from my head with my new bug arm. My boots are slick with the dead guards’ innards. My coat is covered in blood and smells like the sewer. And then there’s my face. For those few seconds when I first saw her, it felt like I wasn’t Sandman Slim anymore. I was plain old boring James Stark. With the pain the truth comes back. I’m in a Hellion asylum, rank, mangled, and horrible. I’m finally the monster I always said I was.
I have to laugh. There isn’t much else left to do. Go down into the deepest darkest parts of Hell, and you’ll see what I mean. They laugh all the time down there.
I reach into my coat pocket and feel around. For a second I don’t even know what it is I’m looking for. I pull out what Mustang Sally told me to bring through the Black Dahlia. My hands are bloody from my chest wound and I’ve left sticky red fingerprints all over the small plastic rabbit. I wipe it on my coat, but that just smears the blood. Fuck it.
I toss the rabbit over to where Alice is hiding in the corner.
