Alice sat in her lean-to three days later. She sat over a wash basin full of room-temperature water. She scrubbed her hands violently with a stiff brush. In her eyes she was covered in blood. Blood everywhere. In reality the only blood on her hands was the blood that was emanating from the sores on her hands. In just the past day she had bit all ten of her nails right past the quick, and had scrubbed her hands so much they had grown raw, and then into open sores.
Alice was crying, the tears running down her face. In her mind, the blood on her hands was the blood of the countless people she had killed. She had scrubbed her hands non-stop for almost five hours, and the water in her wash-basin was as red as the basin itself.
Somewhere, far back in her mind, she knew what was really happening. She was dying inside as the people she had killed had died. The only reason she ever stopped was because Angel ducked inside.
“Hi Alice.” He glanced down to the basin, “Are you okay?”
“Help me.” Alice said as she cried into the blood.
“Come on.” He reached for her hand, saying nothing about the fact that it was covered in blood. “Let’s walk.”
Shaking, Alice gave him her hand. He gently tugged, waiting for Alice to stand up and walk out.
“I remember when I was like this. It takes a mission before the guilt comes in. I shot myself. That was the way I dealt with it.” He lifted his shirt, revealing a mass of scars covering his chest. “Some people don’t have it. People that don’t kill enough. Redd, in the twenty years he’s been fighting, hasn’t killed half as many as you or I have. He never had one of these.”
“What do I do?”
“Just come with me.”
He led her into his own Lean-To . It was significantly larger than Alice’s and a lot nicer. Rather than a crate, Angel had a coffee table and a gun rack. He had a disassembled handgun on top of the table, lit up by a naptha lamp. He had a mini-fridge and a small bar in the lean-to, which was nice because it was large enough that you didn’t have to stoop.
He poured two small glasses of gin, one for him and one for Alice. He pushed Alice’s glass towards her, which she drained quickly. Two glasses of straight Gin later and she was rather drunk. Things, surprisingly, became a little more clear to her.
“How does this help?” Alice said groggily.
Angel looked to her. “Drink until it goes away.”
After a bottle of Gin and a third of a bottle of Vodka, Alice didn’t feel so bad anymore.
YOU ARE READING
ALICE
Teen FictionAlice McCormick is a 16 year old girl who is ridiculed and hated in her Arizona town of Break Thriven, where the people are near-murderous after a seriously traumatic event that happened in the streets of that very town. Soon, Alice begins to see th...
