ALICE

Chapter 21 - LSF

Chapter 21: LSF

Alice had drifted off again,  but woke up hours later. She saw she had been stripped to her undershirt and had a bandage wrapped around her torso, around her chest and over her heart, and slung over her arms. She opened her eyes, and managed to become conscious with a sizeable amount of pain. One of the men was sitting at the fire with a stick, staring into the white flames that alternated from a large bonfire to a tiny campfire. He didn't seem to mind, like it was totally normal for that to be happening. Alice sat up a little. 

"Hi." Alice said.

He turned around to look at her. It seemed this other Alice person was quite terrifying apparently, because his hand was on a gun, and she was missing a heart.

"Umm... Hi." She said again, slightly nerve-racked by the apparent threat that she was.

"Uh... Hello." He said, not removing his hand from the handle of his handgun.

 "You don't have to worry, I'm hardly able to hurt you."

 "You're Alice, you killed a dozen men with your bare hands, handcuffed and with a bullet in your back."

 "Please tell me there's another Alice in Landerwon."

 "You're the only one. You killed my dad."

 "I didn't! I didn't kill anyone!"

 "Right."

 "Look, I am not who you think I am. I tried to pick an apple back home, and I landed in the forest."

 His eyes widened. "Oh my god..." He stood up, bringing his rifle with him.

 Alice sat against the rock, and said to herself. "Feel free to fill me in anytime."

(Break) 

 Alice sat there for the longest time, until she saw a tent rise out of the ground. A light went on behind it, and Ecila and Tibbar materialized, their sillhouettes moving comicly.

 "It's coming!" Tibbar said. "We're coming for you, Ecila."

 "I should probably get ready then. Should I expect you?"

 "No, just my friends."

 "Well I hope I'll see you soon!"

 After just a short conversation, they dissapeared. Alice stood up, with a great deal of pain, and tried to get to the tent, discover what it was. A force knocked her back, however, and she hit the rock with a slam and a spray of blood. Her head hit the rock, and she passed out.

 (Break)

 Alice awoke to gunfire.

 "Nine, coming around the left flank! Give me some cover fire!" Kendo screamed in between bursts of deafening machine gun fire.

 "Covering fire!!!"

 Alice got up, confused and terrified trying to figure out where she could go to be safe, trying to decide if either team would kill her or not. She ducked down and ran, causing a lot of pain in her chest, like knives were rattling aroundin her ribcage like coins in a tin-can. She ran and hid behind a boulder, about twice as tall as her. She looked around, and saw a man with what looked like a pair of glowing binoculars on his face. He was firing from a rock just beside and in front of Alice's with an automatic weapon. She did her best not to give herself away. The man had a grey vest on overtop of a tight black t-shirt. His fatigues were showered with someone elses blood, and his hard-knuckle gloves looked like they had broken a nose recently.

 She crouched down, quietly sneaking up to the man. He had a patch velcroed onto the back of his vest, that was a tiger, his head level with the moon and his paws on it. In the empty space it said LSF in white letters. She tried to figure out a way to kill this man, and saw a houlster with a small Colt .45 defender on the back of his waist, with the handle pointing towards his right. Alice pulled it out of the houlster, and as he was turning around, she put a bullet in his head. The gun made a small Prak!  that made Alice smile.

 She held onto the gun that was smaller then her hand, and moved forward, killing two more men in the process. She was carving through the LSF as she made her way to Nine and Kendo. Alice whipped another man in the back of the head with her pistol, killing him. There were just a couple more left, and they weren't in her way. She sprinted across a clearing where Nine and Kendo were holding the rest of the binocular men off with M4 Carbines.

 "Kendo! She's got a gun!" Nine yelled over the gunfire.

 Alice fired the last two rounds of her gun, and then tossed it on the ground, just as Nine turned around with his gun aimed at her.

 "I'm just shooting at them! And only them! But I need a gun if you want me to stay alive, and I can take care of myself with one."

 Nine looked at Kendo with a doubtful look, but Kendo was already sliding a mag into an M1911 pistol. He tossed it to her.

 "Stay in my sight, and don't go behind me."

 Alice nodded and pulled the slide black. She turned around, and double-tapped a binocular man in the chest, pushing him flat on the ground.

 "Okay, let's move! You," He pointed at her. "Stay in front of me."

 Alice ran for it, hearing the bullets clang out behind her. She looked behind her, and saw Nine and Kendo still there, holding the binocular-men off with heavier firepower. She stopped, but continued when Kendo told her to keep moving.

 Alice ran, eventually tripping and crash-landing into a painful ball. She slowly got up, nursing a deep gash on her hand. She realized how much worse it hurt then her chest, which was incredible. 

 "Crazy drugs they got here." Alice said to herself.

 She looked around, and saw Nine and Kendo sprinting towards her. They were tiny, perhaps two kilometres away, and Alice pretended to squish Nine with her fingers. Several dozen binocular-men were behind them, sprinting at full pelt. Alice raised the handgun up, and wondered if she could make the shot from so far away. She looked down the sights, one foot behind the other, both hands on the gun, and one eye closed. She squeezed the trigger, and saw that the man she had aimed at was on the ground, probably with a low-power bullet in his stoumach or something. The ease in which she took another life in this new place she had just arrived in, was delightful and nauseating at the same time. Alice wondered if one of his guys would kill him to put him out of his misery, or just leave him there. No way to see.

 As she raised her gun to kill a second one, she began to hear words from Kendo's head.

 "A...ice... Ru..."

 It may have not been the easiest thing to understand, but Kendo had got the point across.

 She turned, and ran.