Silly Girl (5 page)

“
I’m really getting sick of this!”
she screamed into the padded room.

Her eyes stretched to insane lengths, horizons of their own, trapping the beetles behind her lids. She couldn’t see the padded cell. Amanda’s eyes were limitless lines of blood, an interminable razor’s edge.

They had taken her vision, the staff in the lunatic ward. Blood poured down her cheeks, making a pool in her lap. Surrounding her—in the padded cell—blood spread sluggishly to the padded walls.

They’d cut her eyes in half, expanding her vision over a limitless universe. Her eyes turned into infinite lines of red thread. The only problem was she couldn’t
see.

Amanda Dear knew it wasn’t only her eyes. Every pour of her body oozed. Somehow, they’d gotten inside her, stretched every part of her until she snapped like a rubber-band.

Into the bloody view, determined to tear away the constraints, she wailed into the red thread:

“
YOU THINK I GOT IT BAD? YOU JUST WAIT, YOU UNMERCIFUL BASTARDS! NOT ’TIL I GET TO THE LAST ONE OF YOU! I WON’T STOP! YOU’LL BE SORRY YOU EVER FUCKED WITH ME! DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU’RE DEALING WITH?”

No one was listening. What was she doing in a place like this anyway? She had never been committed to an asylum that she was aware, at least not on Earth.

That was okay, Amanda Dear thought, smiling through her blood-soaked face. She could scream all day!

Suddenly, the black wind of death swept her out of the asylum. Her cries echoed down the hallways of a foreign institution. She prayed the end was somewhere up ahead. Amanda was growing tired of this phantasmagoria without a single question answered.

Death had ripped her from the asylum and put her back into the void of space. Stars and cold air surrounded her once more.

To her horror, Jon the Doctor, the giant bug with glasses, stood waiting for her. He was exactly how she remembered: tall, thin, dark hair, wearing glasses, the smug smile telling her who was in charge. He was wearing his long, white doctor’s coat.

What was
he
doing in
her
death? Had he perished along the way, sometime after her? She hadn’t heard about his violent rape in prison.

I hope it was slow for you, you miserable sonofabitch,
Amanda thought.

Were the others here as well? How much more suffering did she have to undergo?

Jon the Doctor smiled and sauntered casually toward her. He had some unfinished business, his smile seemed to say.

“You forgot, Amanda Dear,” he said, “who the
real
polar bear is.”

Amanda Dear closed her eyes. Jon the Doctor had just uttered blasphemy! She wanted to throw up.

“You don’t have the
balls
to be the polar bear,” she said. “Ask Manny. You make me sick.”

Jon the Doctor chuckled, but he didn’t get much farther. He’d waited too long, savoring his arrogance.

From the darkness, dozens of giant forms emerged, strange beasts composed of discharge, disease, and decaying innards. They encircled Jon the Doctor now. The stench governing the air was atrocious. Amanda—if she had hands—would’ve put them to her nose.

They lurched toward Jon, issuing incoherent grumbles. Trails of waste and blood disappeared into the dark.

Jon the Doctor, suddenly, was no longer smiling.

Despite the abominable scene, Amanda Dear anticipated the outcome with relish. It was
her
turn to smile!

Maybe death is kind of cool after all,
she thought.

Something, however, was strangely eerie about the moment. For reasons she couldn’t grasp, Amanda had an inkling Jon’s death had been similar. These monsters had invaded the prison corridors to claim him, leaving him to rot in their lingering offal. For Amanda, it made watching his second death that much sweeter.

I hope it
is
painful, you monster,
she thought, smiling as she watched.
I hope your death lasts a fucking lifetime.

Amanda Dear had no patience for sympathy, not here, not with Jon. He deserved all the punishment death could muster.

If this was the guise of her redeemers, her angels of salvation, she’d gotten it all wrong. She smiled at the irony.

To add further insult to Jon’s second death, the monsters held bleeding phalluses between diseased thighs. Jon the Violating Love Doctor was about to experience the perfect punishment. In what little light Amanda Dear saw, Jon opened his mouth, eyes going impossibly wide. He broke the silence of space with a violent scream. It echoed through the stars. Within seconds, Jon the Doctor was not a man at all. He was a living mound of flesh, a slave of crevices and folds. Even Amanda couldn’t help but gape in disbelief. Jon’s mouth had been recreated into a quivering labium. His mouth and feet shifted into similar folds. Amanda’s redeemers were showering Jon the Doctor with discharge and kisses.

She was shocked to witness his soul’s end, satisfied she was able to learn something about the consequences of life and death. Maybe God was showing His unpredictable face after all.

Amanda nodded, watching Jon’s violation. The beasts assuaged every lustful, vindictive thirst. Nothing remained of Jon the Doctor, but a puddle of thick blood and secretion. It spread across the black floor of space. The beasts stood and turned, moving back into the surrounding dark, a job well done.

Amanda Dear closed her eyes, sighing in the vindication of death. When she opened them, the scene disappeared, replaced by another. White pinpricks of light—from every direction—came together, a single point in the black of death. Shelby, of course, always had a way of making a dramatic entrance. As far as Amanda Dear was concerned, she might as well be watching Jon the Doctor all over again. Shelby mimicked the same, smug smile.

Like Jon the Doctor, Shelby’s smile was, also, short-lived. Amanda Dear cried out in victory. To her joy, monsters did not attack and abuse Shelby. Wesley, her paramour of the cosmos—her sweet, poetic polar bear—appeared from out of the black. He stood directly behind him, and Wesley, wearing his security guard uniform, did not look pleased.

Shelby turned and, surprisingly, seemed to recognize Amanda’s lover. Wasting no time, Shelby confronted his enemy, reached out, and grabbed Wesley’s crotch.

This was not in the script of death! This was not how death was supposed to go!

Amanda squeezed her eyes shut. She willed a different scenario. This was
her
death, goddamnit! By her rules and no one else’s would it play!

Within that second—when she opened her eyes—their roles had been reversed. Perhaps she had power here after all.

Shelby was on his knees in front of Wesley now, and the man was begging for mercy.

“You came to the wrong place for that,” Amanda said, from the distance.

Wesley, however, had done considerable damage to Shelby’s face. Much like Amanda in the unknown institution, Shelby held his face in his hands, weeping torrents of blood. He’d always been too manly for tears, she knew. Wesley had, in the time Amanda had closed her eyes, torn Shelby’s eyes from their sockets. Blood spilled in a ridiculous flow down Shelby’s face, plating his shirt and pants. Blood gathered absurdly in a widening pool around his knees. The blood was an entity not of Shelby’s creation, but Wesley’s. It had a life of its own. Huge, white tusks ascended from the blood and swallowed Shelby whole. He disappeared into the solid black of a second death.

His death must’ve been a silent part, somehow rehearsed without her, even though Amanda felt she’d created it. Wesley turned without noticing her and walked away with a single, satisfying nod into space.

Of course, with one act left to go, he was standing here now, the conscienceless marauder who’d left her to die in the August alleyway.

Manny strutted, short and confidently toward her. He didn’t have to smile. After all, he was the reason she was here.

Manny, however, was not aware he was about to undergo a second death. His lack of knowledge took him to unholy places.

In an instant, the darkness came to life behind Manny with another unexpected redeemer. Casting a quick glance at Amanda Dear, Lucifer—in the form of a dragon—winked at her from limitless space. The dragon licked his scaly mouth with a black forked tongue. Amanda had friends in high
and
low places, apparently. How a dragon as hideous as Lucifer could look so radiant was difficult to fathom, but he emanated ecstatic joy. Something about him appeared handsome and child-like, even as a dragon.

Manny was oblivious. He had no idea what was going on. He did not see the dragon behind him. For Amanda, it made him look even more foolish, weak, and pathetic, or maybe that was because Lucifer was the size of a mythological sea dragon.

Perhaps Manny
had
been aware, because when the giant maw reared behind him, a puzzled look crossed his face. Satan’s enormous mouth clamped down. With an audible gulp, he swallowed Amanda’s executioner. Soon, Manny would be slowly digesting in the bowels of Lucifer, a torturous process lasting eternity.

Lucifer played the role perfectly. He smacked his lips and smiled. “I told you we’d be seeing each other again,” he told her.

As unexpected and preposterous as it seemed, Amanda Dear accepted the fact that she and Lucifer had become friends.

The monstrous red dragon, however, didn’t waste time hanging around. Lucifer winked at Amanda a second time, slithering back into Hell, leaving her to puzzle over her situation in the lonesome dark of a bewildering afterlife.

*

She hoped things weren’t over yet. She still had questions. What was God doing anyway? And why were the only friends she had (besides Wesley), abhorrent beings of evil from the underworld? Did that make her a demon as well, an unrecognized resident from Hell?

After witnessing the end of her life’s tormentors, Amanda Dear was not flying through space. She was, in all aspects, human. Ropes bound her hands and feet, her mouth gagged by a slimy rag. It tasted like gasoline. The gag, where the knot was tied, pinched the skin at the back of her head, pulling her hair. Amanda wasn’t aware death granted physical flaws, but apparently she’d been wrong.

She was on the ground floor in the ruins of an abandoned skyscraper. Debris, newspapers, grocery bags, and pop cans lie scattered at her feet.

In the coming dusk—outside the broken windows—the entire city had been either bombed or deserted. In the gloom, it was hard to tell. A consummate sense of desertion surrounded her. She was completely alone in the silence. Amanda Dear would welcome even Lucifer’s company.

Ropes bound her to a wooden desk chair, something from high school. A section of the chair dug into her back, forcing her to feel pain she didn’t acknowledge as death. Charred wood, plaster, and the smell of gasoline thickened the air.

Okay,
she thought.
So, maybe this
is
the second death, the horrible twisted conclusion of an already horribly, twisted fate. That’s appropriate, right? Life is unfair. Why shouldn’t death be the same? Nice twist, God. Can we get this over with now, so I can go about my deliriously, comical fate which
You
happen to think so amusing?

Something moved under the floor. Whisperings issued around her. Boards and fallen plaster were pushed aside across the ground.

Okay, so she wasn’t as alone as she’d thought.

To the typical chagrin of death’s reality—its lack of surprise—Amanda Dear tried keeping her fear at bay. Figures clad in thick, dirty rags rose into view from under the floor.

You’ve got to be kidding,
she thought.

Amanda tried shaking her head, but the ropes were too tight. She tried mustering indifference. She didn’t want them to know she was afraid.

Of course,
she thought.
I knew this would happen. Show me what you’ve got!

The smell of aged, unclean skin wafted toward her. Amanda winced at the stench.

They looked like mummies. Heavily draped cloth disguised their features, any trace of anatomy. Some carried baseball bats; others held knives. She counted seven, but more were coming into view from the shadows.

I’m going to die at the hands of Frosty the Snowman and his nearest relatives,
she thought.

Predictable. All too predictable and disappointing. Just like life. The terrible end to all terrible things…

Perfect,
Amanda Dear thought.

She closed her eyes. The figures lurched closer, the smell growing more powerful with each step they took.

Amanda Dear, after the endless charade, didn’t care what they did at this point. She welcomed hell, as long as it was
something
! She didn’t care anymore! Let her hang out with Lucifer. They’d had some good times at least.

One of the figures was close enough to touch her. A diseased, boiled hand reached toward her face. She could just make out its sunken, sallow cheeks, hungry, dehydrated lips drooping from a thin mouth. It was an old, malnourished man on the verge of death—or perhaps his second or third by the looks of him.