Dedicated to my dear friend Ana, who puts up with my madness.
Alice gripped the handle of her butcher knife tighter. Taking a stance with legs slightly bent for quick motion and a temporary double-handed grip on the knife. She surveyed the sight around her.
The doctors surrounded her. Most had fled at first sign of trouble, but the longstanding veterans at the asylum stood their ground, probably having lived through these kinds of situations before.
The knife had been procured in the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning when Alice went missing from her cell. Not a single lock on the door had been disturbed, it was as if she had escaped by evaporating and reconstructing outside her cell. Maybe the atoms. Of her being molecularly passed through the bonds of the wall which had allowed her to pass from the cell to the hall.
The doctors, or, what HAD been the doctors had found her in the hall outside the kitchen shortly after she got the knife. They had looked like doctors before, but now their skin was white like milk, their eyes glazed over with a thick opaque haze, and some had bandages over their faces.
They tried to take the knife from her, but after what they had done to her she swore to never give them ANYTHING.
Blood that hadn't been there the day previously now was violently strewn down the walls as if someone had filled a bucket and spun around the room in fast circles, letting itself go where it's will and gravity allowed it. A macabre scene from a story.
But the blood was fresh. Not as wet as fresh from the body, but it was almost finished collecting in pools on the white institutional linoleum floor. Not even flaking brown yet.
Alice brandished the knife over her head and charged a doctor. A man, short and stout. (Here is my handle, here is my spout. Hee hee). He grabbed her wrist but she released that hand from gripping the knife and stabbed him in the throat, just right of the jugular. The knife sank in deep and a squelching noice could be heard as she yanked it free from his flesh.
He fell to the ground with wet coughs and clutched his neck. Alice dropped to her knees with the balls of her bare feet and toes on the ground, steadying herself. She, with a double-handed grip, stabbed and hacked repeatedly at his stomach. Blood gushed, staining his clothes as the scarlet further and further extended its reach and saturated the cloth. Similar to the way madness extends its way through the mind.
Jumping to her feet Alice whipped around to face the other direction to find all but one doctor had fled. A lanky and tall man with a small mustache and a cold look in his eye stood in a ready stance, ready for her to charge him. She obliged and gave a blood-chilling shriek as she brought the knife back and connected it with the hollow above his collar bone.
The knife sank deep but portruded awkwardly, like when you snap of a barbie's arm and stick it back in, but it just isn't the same again. The man angled his head downward with his eyes wide with shock, looking at the knife in disbelief. His eyes rolled back in his head as he fainted. Alice gripped the knife with both hands and let the pull of the falling of his body do the work of freeing the knife for her.
Blood now stained Alice's hands, lower arms, a splash going down her neck still dripping, and a bloody mist covered her face. An eerie smile played at the corners of her lips like a cat with a ball of yarn. Her loose white shirt was covered in splotches as well. An early abstract of destruction. She wiped her hand down her lightweight white pants leaving a smeared and elongated bloody handprint.
Alice could hear the women screaming in their cells. Not screaming from pain but from their demons that posessed their minds, the reasons they were here.
Patting down the bodies, Alice felt for keys. Finding the silver hoop containing dozens of keys, she gave a fleeting smile and ran down the hall. She was looking for a room. Peeking in every small window on the doors of cells, as she ran down the hall before abruptly stopping at one far down the hall.
The woman in the cell, a tall woman, thin as a rail, with the dirty look of an emaciated feral dog stared at a point of the wall in her cell just to the right (her right) of the little window Alice peered in from. Alice gave a light tap on the window with a fingernail.
The woman looked at Alice almost the very second her nail touched the glass. The woman had blonde curly hair, big blue eyes, and sunken hollows underneath her portruding cheek bones. She gave a mad smile revealing her yellow teeth which had been filed down into fangs, no doubt by her.
Alice squinted her eyes shut tight and blocked her eyes with her forearm as she took her. Knife and smashed it through the glass. The woman, who had been crouched in the corner in a full-body straightjacket, now stood up and flashed her sharp teeth in a vicious smile.
"Alisssss." She said in a voice like a hiss, pronouncing the 'ce' of her name like a snake would if it spoke words as we do with a very snake-like accent.
"Take me back to Wonderland." Said Alice as she unlocked the door with the key labeled 666.
Alice undid the leather buckle keeping the long sleeves of the woman's straightjacket fastened in place. Alice grew weary of trying to take it off the way it was intended to and cut the sleeves of to a shorter length which allowed arm movement.
"Alissss, its been very long. We've been missed." the woman said as she shot her arms out and gripped Alice's wrists, bringing their two faces inches apart. "The caterpillar, the very very blue one, he whisper in my head. He tell me of the rabbit. I can smell him, I can smell his smoke in my nose." She said bringing her hands up and covered her nose, as if it were a gas mask and would filter out the supposed smell.
"Where is the white rabbit?" Alice said, observing this woman, wondering if perhaps she truely was insane. Alice had heard through other patients of a woman claiming to have been to a place called Wonderland. Telling tales of white rabbits, blue caterpillars, and red queens. If Alice herself could have been there, its quite possible this woman could really have been there as well, Alice thought.
But still cautious Alice remained, for you never knew what went on in the minds of the women who were imprisioned here.
