Double Or Nothing: A Coin Flip Away

The Inhumanity in Humankind

Liana collapsed into her cell, gripping her bruised and blackened shoulder from ramming into the cell too many times. The lawyer caught herself, taking slow, deep breaths. She had ditched her glasses and her hair was fully tied back. If it improved her chances of escaping her cell, dangling above a fiery pit of screaming, tortured souls, she would take it. Unfortunately, her circumstances weren't great: even if she could break through the corporeal form of her cage's bars, she still had to leap over a pit of flames and shrieking souls, clear the gap in the bloodsoaked floor to the window and make her escape that way.

A voice brought Liana and her bruised shoulder back to reality. "You keep throwing yourself at that cage like it'll magically open up. Fact is, I'm the only one who can open it sweetheart." Liana spun around, facing the door opposite the unnaturally luxurious room. In the darkest corner of the drapes beside a vase of abstractly decorated flowers, the glazed, foggy eyeball in the Crimson Stripe's mask socket rolled back and forth, taunting Liana like a thread in front of a house cat. Liana sighed, slumping against the back of her cage.

"Oh, don't be so sad," the voice purred, "you'll get your freedom, just not yet. I've got big plans for you come time when your precious little boyfriend will...oh, right," the eyeball laughed, tossing away the drapes with a hideously serrated smile, "you already got rid of him for me! Well, guess freedom's out of the question." A double blow of that force caused Liana to bury her steaming red face in her sleeves, unable to look up and think of escape. Every ounce of her body hurt, her throat was sore, her eyes too heavy to focus, not heavy enough to sleep.

Liana shuddered a response after a moment. "I should have never believed you were a good person." The Crimson Stripe's jingling beads paused by the window, turning to the defeated lawyer. "Your one mistake as a lawyer, Ms. Winters. Never look for the good in your clients, it'll only waste your time." Liana tilted her eyes upward, peering beyond the barricades of her arm and her torn sleeve revealing her pincers. "If I matter so little to you now, why keep me locked up here? You killed Jack, you've conquered Hell, what else could you possibly want?" The Crimson Stripe pursed his cracked and scarred lips, turning toward the cage suspended in the air.

"Money and power get boring, Ms. Winters. Maybe what I seek is now too far beyond whatever you comprehend as insanity." Liana pushed herself forward, scraping the edge of her scythe-like pincers against the cage. "So the reason you kill and bribe and maim and cannibalize is because, what, you can get away with it? What kind of reason is that??" The tall, thin outline of the bloodsoaked serial killer flashed in the fireplace's light behind Liana, illuminating his ghastly scars and bloodied wounds pouring from his suitcoat and trousers.

"There are motives worse and more unreasonable than mine, Ms. Winters. You're a lawyer. There are always people who, behind your files and folders, you question why they do the things they do. You people of the law are all the same." Liana shuffled herself into a seated position in the cage. Something was tugging at her mind, a plan to escape, but she couldn't reach it. Not yet. The Crimson Stripe continued his monologue. "I wish I could speak of a troubled life, one filled with poverty, sorrow, an unsafe home and selfish people surrounding me everywhere. But I was never a cruel or harsh child. I understood my boundaries.

"I turned away from my morals when I lost a precious inheritance. A pocket watch from my deceased great grandmother, a gift for my birth. It was stolen by somebody who didn't need it. They weren't starving, they didn't live in a terrible home and needed to sell it. They did what they did because it was 'funny'. I didn't see it that way." As Liana began to piece together her plan of escape, she realized her whole plan hinged on one question, a question she had to keep silent until the very end. Else, all of her time had been for nothing. Still the Crimson Stripe pushed onward.

"I tracked this person down and threatened them for my pocket watch back. Instead of returning it, they shattered the watch with a bat, frame, case and all, right in front of me. I was devastated, you see. That watch was the last thing I had to remember my great grandmother. And the inhumanity of the world said, 'If I can't have it, nobody can.'" Liana formed the rest of her plan, but paused. Something was so eerily familiar about that sentence that it resonated with her. "I sliced that person to ribbons with a pair of kitchen knives and a set of scissors. Blood up to my elbows afterward."

The Crimson Stripe turned to Liana with an almost...'human' look in his lifeless white eyes. "When I returned home, I tidied up, washed it all away and sat down at the dinner table, held hands with my guilt and said grace as if nothing had ever happened. In that moment," the Crimson Stripe smiled, pacing across the room, "I realized how the world really works. If you want to rule the world, the only one who can do it as well as you," the serial killer chuckled, gesturing with a hand on his chest and his scissor-blade gauntlet in the air, "is you. How beautifully simplistic!"

Liana took her deep breath, preparing for her escape question. "You're pretty pathetic, y'know that?" Something snapped in the serial killer across from her. It gave Liana a jolt, an unbearably terrifying feeling. Two eyes rolled toward Liana's cage in shock. "All of my windup, all the dramatic bullshit, and the best you can do is insult me?" Liana's expression changed from fear to dread. The Crimson Stripe scoffed, wiping coagulated blood from his scissor blades. "Well, that was a waste of your time and energy. The answer's no, I will not be letting you out of there." The door slammed shut, and Liana was left to clutch her knees and cry herself to sleep.