Author's Note: This is a Patchwork Fic splicing Carrie's rampage in the book with the ending of the movie.
Carrie White languished in her padded room, wrapped in her straitjacket as if it were the only thing holding her together. Six months had passed since emergency services personnel found her in the sunken ruins of her home, and the powers that be saw fit to commit her to a medical research facility. The National Institute of Health had reason to believe that Carrie would not be the last of her kind, and her study could yield a means of suppressing or even eliminating that terrible power.
No one told Carrie this, but she knew it anyway. Everyone walking past her cell had their brains crackling with thought, and Carrie could no more ignore it than she could an unpleasant smell or a persistent, nagging sound. Locking her away for twenty-one hours a day so deprived her other five senses of stimulus that her mind-sense increased to compensate.
(noisy thoughts busy thoughts stupid thoughts thoughts thoughts)
So though she lacked a newspaper or television—not that her mother allowed such things, anyway—she never wanted for news of the outside world.
(crying relatives want me to die)
(doctors want to poke me)
(sign on my house says burn in hell well lucky you im already here bitch)
For those six months, Carrie remained completely passive, though MRI scans showed that her catatonia wasn't clinical. Like a turtle in its shell, she withdrew her capacity to act. She feared the power she could unleash on everyone around her at any moment, just by flexing an imaginary muscle. When she flexed, beds floated. Cars exploded. Knives took flight. People died horribly.
(they deserved it)
But it still scared her, the power she had, the bomb in her brain. So she locked it up. Layer after layer of psychic locks sealed her telekinesis from ever flexing again.
(ive got hell inside me momma please help me)
Carrie's mother warned her about hell for her entire life, but it wasn't until NIH that Carrie understood hell didn't have to come after you died. The hell she made for herself was stronger than her fragile cocoon of glass, leather and pillows. But she preferred that to turning her world into an external hell, like the Prom massacre. Or the street-level Armageddon she made on her way to kill her mom and their house. Every time her mind struck out, the ruins added kindling to her inner hellfire. Desperate to keep that from coming again she flared with hidden hostility toward anyone who wanted to
(help? they don't wanna help no one wants to help they just want tests on me and stuff)
Perhaps the people she killed brought it on themselves, but the rage so intoxicated her that she extended her wrath to her tormentor's parents. Toward the police and firefighters. People she didn't know and had no reason to hate.
(theyd hate me if they knew me)
This was her state of mind for those six months.
(oh momma im so sorry)
But one day, she felt a different presence. Someone else came to the other side of the wall, neither a scientist nor a patient. This person came specifically to see her.
(huh?)
Carrie reached out and touched this new visitor's brain, reading the pages where her passive, always-on mind-sense only showed her the cover. She did that from time to time when she was bored. No one noticed and usually Carrie could have some private fun at the expense of their secrets. But this new person… she could sense a cornucopia of emotions from this visitor. Loss. Pain. Anger. Shame at being angry. Pity.
Pity?
No one pitied Carrie.
Carrie forced herself deeper into the soul of this visitor, curious as to what could lead her to these emotions. The pain was from the loss of her son. The boy-
(tommy?)
-died at Carrie's hands. That explained the anger. The visitor felt ashamed of her hatred, because Jesus told his followers to love their enemies
(jesus oh no not again)
Sure enough, the woman held a rosary.
(go away)
She prayed for Carrie.
(WHY?)
She thought that Carrie had been through hell already and it would be awful for her to experience the real thing. She prayed that God would take care of Carrie…
(STOP)
Flex.
The rosary jumped out of the woman's hands and snagged around her throat. The cross at its end was pulled back as if by an invisible hand. Carrie pulled harder, HARDER, throttling the visitor with her own rosary. Just when Carrie felt the woman's brain shriek as its blood supply dwindled…
*snap*
The string on the rosary broke, scattering beads everywhere and dropping the woman on the floor.
(DAMMIT)
Carrie's mind-sense flooded with the acrid taste of cortisol as panic flooded the brains of those around her.
"I thought you said the TK cells in her brain were atrophied!"
"They were! Her brain must have found a way around that somehow."
"What? How is that possible?"
"We'll find out in the autopsy! Gas her!"
Flex.
The one-way mirror to Carrie's padded cell exploded.
"Never mind! Call 911! Get a SWAT team here! Anyone with guns!"
"Evacuate the building!"
Flex.
The straps on Carrie's straitjacket unfastened. She slid out of her leather cocoon like a butterfly emerging from its pupa.
(ahh that feels good)
The doctors fled. Carrie had no intent to kill them. Her escape had been driven by that persistent, insufferable survival instinct. As much as Carrie hated her life, she knew dying would be worse. She stepped over the trembling visitor and made her way to the entrance of the building. She briefly considered finishing off the woman she failed to kill
(stupid weak string)
but ultimately decided against it.
(already killed momma once felt bad not gonna do it again)
As Carrie got closer to the exit, she paused. She could sense two squads of SWAT officers waiting for her outside the hospital. Their orders sang in their testosterone-saturated minds: "Shoot to kill, motherfuckers!" Once Carrie left the hall and entered the SWAT team's line of fire, she would be blown to pieces.
She couldn't see them, but a quick skimming of their minds showed her the way they'd been trained to hold their guns. The position differed whether they held the little, spraying ones or the big, chomping ones.
(i wanna leave your guns cant stop me)
Flex.
Thirty guns flipped around in their wielder's hands. Thirty triggers pulled on their own accord. Thirty men collapsed with the insides of their helmets repainted. The glass windows and doors at the hospital entrance exploded. Carrie could have just opened the door, but breaking things felt strangely satisfying. Hell was already loose, so Carrie no longer saw a reason to hold back. For the first time in half a year, she had control over something greater than herself. The world struck, so she struck back. If that wasn't in scripture, it should have been.
She telekinetically pushed the glass shards out of her path, using her mind as a broom. The whirring of a helicopter's blade dragged Carrie out of her task. A man in a red suit leaped from the chopper and landed on the ground eighty feet below. To Carrie's shock, the man stood up. Surely such an impact would have killed him.
When Carrie came closer to the point of impact, she saw that it wasn't a man at all.
(not a suit)
(red skin)
(tail)
(hooves)
(aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa)
What remained of Carrie's sanity collapsed. All the abuse she endured at her mother's hands rocketed back to her mind. The rock music. The dirtypillows. The menstruation. Even the prom. Mom said those things would lead Carrie to the devil. There stood before her incontrovertible evidence that Margaret White had been right. Satan had come to take what was his…
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
"My orders are, if possible, to take you alive. That certainly sounds like a more agreeable solution than the alternative," Hellboy said as he loaded his handgun, "What do you say?"
"Go away!" Carrie shrieked
"Sorry, sweetheart, but running scot free's not an option anymore. Cooperate or I'll be forced to-"
"I said go away!"
Flex.
An armored car launched toward Hellboy. The demon somersaulted out of the way, his skin hammered by the shockwave and gravel from the impact he just avoided. "Damn," Hellboy whispered.
Flex.
Carrie lifted shotguns and submachine guns from the hands of the dead SWAT officers. Levitating in the air, the weapons made it look as if Carrie had a private security escort consisting entirely of invisible men. Carrie arranged them in two rows of four, one three feet above the other. That would eliminate any chance of the devil dodging her fire.
She pulled all eight triggers, and every gun jumped backward. The submachine guns kept flying backward the longer she held down their triggers but at least the devil continued to wither under their punishment.
The bigger ones only fired once per pull, but she liked the sound they made, at least: *BOOM*
The SMG's clatter and the shotguns' thunderclap were so loud Carrie couldn't hear the faint tinkling of bullets hitting the ground.
Intact bullets.
Though her one-woman firing squad hurt Hellboy, even he was shocked when he snatched a glimpse of his left arm and saw it perforated not with holes but… bruises? He may have been tougher than the average human but a bullet still went through his flesh like anything else.
Except today, for some reason. "I'm bulletproof? What the hell?" he wondered aloud.
To Carrie, the devil's apparent befuddlement at its invincibility must have been a joke at her expense. She roared like a lioness and hurled her empty guns at the devil. He blocked them with that massive, stone right hand of his. Carrie swing them like baseball bats but they only broke against the devil's stout musculature. He "helped" her along by stomping the weapons into pieces too small for her to use.
"This is your last warning, young lady!" Hellboy announced as he drew his Good Samaritan pistol, "I'll be forced to shoot!"
"Go to hell!" she shrieked.
Hellboy cocked the hammer of the massive handgun. Frankly, he wasn't sure he could do it. Hellboy had no problem killing demons, monsters, creatures like him. It was his job description. Carrie, on the other hand, was just a girl with an incredibly crappy childhood, cursed with powers beyond belief and emotions she couldn't control. Reminded him of a certain someone he'd gotten quite close to.
Carrie let loose a primal scream of hatred. "Oh, crap," Hellboy said to himself as every vehicle or other heavy object not bolted down began to levitate…
(to be continued)
Author's note: I couldn't find a way to make this fit in the narrative, but Hellboy's "resistance" to bullets is easily explained by physics: when a gun fires without anything holding it, the force will be divided between the bullet/buckshot going forward and the gun going backward, resulting in a weaker blast than usual. I've never seen any other story combingin telekinesis and guns acknowledge this. I suppose a TK user skilled enough with firearms could replicate a strong grip and keep the levitating gun "grounded," but Carrie's never used guns before so this all caught her off-guard.
If I got the physics wrong (and if you give a crap either way) let me know in the reviews. I strive to get this sort of thing right.