Alice & Dorothy (37 page)

“I’m not going anywhere with you!” Dorothy cried. “You can’t just kill people!” she shook her head rapidly back and forth, as though trying to scrape the last few minutes out of her brain. “You’re supposed to protect us! That’s your job!”

“Do you think you can start a fire with a
bullet?
” Alice asked, her voice calm. When Dorothy looked at her, she tapped her gun against the side of the gas pump. As if to highlight her point, Rabbit thunked another bullet off the side of it. It deflected away from the girls, but Dorothy flinched anyway.

“Fine,” Alice said, standing up. “Stay here and die. I’m getting the fuck out of here right now.” She swooned as she stood up, blood loss graying out her vision for just a moment, and she put her hand against the pump to steady herself. The wound in her shoulder was worse than she was letting on, by far. For a moment Dorothy faded from view. When she came back, she was wiping snot off her face with her forearm.

“Wait!” Dorothy said, reaching up and putting a hand on Alice’s wrist. “Okay. I’ll go.”

“Go when I say,” Alice said. “I’ll cover you.”

“Please don’t let them hurt me,” Dorothy said quietly. She got to her feet and crouched behind the gas pump, one hand on Alice’s thigh for balance. Alice resisted the urge to knock her snot hand away.

“
Go!
” Alice hissed, pushing on Dorothy’s ass at the same time. The motion caused the girl to stumble, and it took her a moment to get her balance. At the same time, Rabbit, sensing opportunity, stood up and fired.

Just like Alice knew he would.

The first shot went way wide of Dorothy as she half stumbled, half-fell into view. The second hit the ground just a few feet from where she was standing. A small puff of cloud and shattered concrete hit the ground.

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.

“
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.

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.”

“
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?”

“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
.”

“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 like 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.