ALICE

Chapter 14 - LANDERWON

 Chapter 14: LANDERWON

 Alice saw a tunnel of blinding white light as she felt her body being stretched, causing an excruciating amount of pain. She was flying through this tunnel and she was terrified.

 Alice flew and flew, and then, like being fired out of a cannon, she was shot onto an unfamiliar landscape, with brown, crispy grass, and a forest about two hundred meters in every direction. Alice landed on the grass with a crunch, and felt a sharp pain in her pocket. The glass display of her iPhone was shattered, and a piece was stuck in her hip. She pulled out the phone, and saw it was ruined. The circuits were showing, and the back was bent out of shape. Alice tossed it onto the ground in front of her, picked the glass out of her leg, and stepped on her phone as she walked towards a random direction.

 “This is as good as any.” Alice said, speaking her thoughts out loud.

 She walked towards the forest, still in the clothes from earlier. Her pills were still in her pocket, tapping in the plastic cylinder with every step she took.

 Alice heard a hum in the air, not something natural. It sounded like a far-away generator, or music.

 She walked until she entered the forest, where trees were close together, about 10 feet between each, with no branches until much higher up. The shrubbery formed a canopy above, where very little of the twilight sun poked through the branches, making a dark, surreal land.

 The trees were bone-dry cedars, with white trunks that stood out in the dark forest. The hum was louder, and her head tried to desperately to understand what it could be. Alice walked through, scanning the ground for any clues to where she was. She stepped in something brittle, and she looked down to see it was a skull. A human skull.

 “Oh my god.” Alice said as she jumped back.

 She took a moment to compose herself, and continued to trudge on, concerned as to where that skull had met its end.

 The hum began to get a sort of rhythm, then a beat, then some words that Alice could not quite make out. Alice continued to move in the direction that made the music louder, until she could begin to hear just what the words were.

 One pill makes you larger… One pill makes you small… And the ones that mother gives you… Don’t do anything at all.

 Alice continued, thinking about the song, until she heard footsteps further away from her, in the darkness of the forest.

 At first, Alice, thought she had imagined it. The steps tried to confuse her and trick her, waling when she did, stopping when she tried to listen to them. But the crackling footsteps slightly overlapped hers, occasionally, and Alice noticed.

 She didn’t try to investigate or find the source of the steps, until she saw a grey shape flash past her peripheral vision, ducking behind a tree. Alice turned around abruptly, and tripped on her own feet, from which she saw the shape dash behind another tree. She reached into her pocket, and looked for something, anything, to use as a weapon. She found her pen. It was a pen that she had been given by an old boyfriend, Ryan, for her birthday. It was white silver, with a mechanical clicker that made the pen a fine piece of well-oiled art.

 Or something to stab someone with.

 Alice got up off of the ground, and clicked the pen open. She creeped up on the tree that she had seen the grey shape behind, and jumped to the back of it. There was no one there. Alice had a jolt of adrenaline in her stoumach as she realized this.

 “H-Hello?” Alice stuttered.

 A man stepped out from behind a tree, in full military gear, with a grey boonie hat, forest camouflage, and a submachine gun in his hands. He moved into a crouch, and flicked a red light on, which pointed at her. She looked down, and saw a red dot from the light on her chest, right over her heart. She put her hands up.

 “Don’t shoot, please, don’t shoot.” Alice said through shaky breaths, praying that this well-equipped man didn’t put a bullet through her.

 He flicked off the light, and stood up.

 “Sorry general. I thought you were a resistance member.” He said with a scared voice, slinging his rifle over his shoulder.

 Before Alice could question him, a shot rang out in the distance, and a hole appeared in his chest. He clutched the puncture in his ribcage, before falling over.

 Alice picked up his gun, and ran. Another shot clipped her shoe, but didn’t get her flesh. She dodge behind trees, getting face-full’s of splinters as trunks of the trees were shot at.

 Alice continued to run, even after the bullets from the sniper eventually stopped. She ran until her breath was raspy from the cold air, and she was nursing such a stitch that she wanted to cry. She lay down behind a tree, and looked into seemingly endless forest. She noticed the music had stopped, and there was no other sign of human life. She may have run in a circle, unsure if she was somewhere she had already been.

 She sat there for a half hour, looking for a light, listening for a voice, anything. Another hour, and she still saw nothing.

 After two hours, still seeing nothing, walking around, Alice began to get extremely hungry. She had no food except for the pills, and those probably weren’t a good idea to eat.

 Which is when it occurred to her, what if this was a hallucination? Alice was probably staring weirdly into space in Lilacs Rower Park, running around the hedges and telling people about the rabbits in waistcoats. She pulled the pills out of her back pocket, and opened the child-proof container. Alice tapped a single, chalky pill into her palm, and stupidly, looked for a glass of water.

 The strange thing, was that there was on, standing on a low branch of a tree. She grabbed it, and popped the pill.