Chapter 38: "The Second Sword"
More than two years has passed since Alice's band of kidnapped senators returned from Hell, and some remarkable events have occurred. The United States elected a new president, and for once this one was an idealist rather than just another right-wing hack. The senators languishing in insane asylums were all given pardons by the new president, but their seats in the Senate were long gone, and there would be no return to politics for any of them. In a remarkable gesture, the new president offered Alice a presidential pardon if she would give up leading raids on big box hypermarkets. She angrily refused, and still leads at least ten homeless encampments on raids of such stores every week. She is pressing the hypermarkets in weekly YouTube videos to devote one percent of their shelf space to free basic foodstuffs that anyone can take without any eligibility requirement. She has promised to end raids against any chain that does this. No chain has yet complied. Former Senator Bernie Sanders is now satisfied that his reputation has been restored, and has joined us in Wonderland. He now lives in the same house in Pandemonium as Alice, Mr. White, Bill McGill, and me. He spends his days cheerfully digging in Mr. White's expanded gardens, and is responsible for a greatly increased supply of raw vegetables in Wonderland.
Alice is no longer the person I knew before the accident in her weapons locker, and, I suppose, neither am I. She now does not hesitate to kill in self-defense, and actually did so in one hypermarket raid in which a well-hidden SWAT team was waiting for her. Knowing that Alice and her band of robbers took only food, clothes, cooking equipment, and a few other necessities, and absolutely nothing else, the SWAT team opened fire on her. Not bright. One bullet in the leg was enough to trigger Alice's conversion into the Queen of Hearts. The entire SWAT team lost both hands, and some of them bled to death. Alice feels no guilt. Remarkably, I have no problem with what she did. There was a time when I would have. It is hard to explain the change in my feelings toward the world above. My trip through the Inferno has shown me that the world above is even worse than I had ever imagined. In the world above, evil surrounds, envelops, bathes all of the inhabitants in its mendacity. It suffocates all but the lucky few in a fog of dog-eat-dog competition which the masters of the investor class organize for their profit and amusement. It is slavery in disguise, and somehow the plantation owners manage to stay out of sight and pull their invisible strings to the detriment of the rest of us. I hate them. Am I allowed to say that aloud? I hate them. I feel cold.
Ah, yes. Some of you may still be wondering what I saw in the Mirror of Souls. I saw in the mirror an exhausted schoolteacher slumped over a pile of papers she was grading. She raised her head, and it was obvious that she had been crying - her face marked by a sense of futility. I too feel overwhelmed by a crushing sense of hopelessness. All this effort was a waste. The Senators who witnessed the Inferno and led the charge for a "New America" have been forgotten already. Nobody listened. Nothing changed.
Our new, idealistic president has turned out to be a timid soul who bends over backwards to appease critics and corporations. A monstrous health care reform bill has been floated in the U.S. Senate that requires uninsured individuals to purchase health insurance and threatens to fine them if they don't. The bill even includes threats of prison for those who don't pay the fine. What if someone can't pay for the health insurance or the fine? What then? There are vague promises of subsidies, but no one believes that the subsidies will cover the full cost. Alice detected a near universal sense of panic in homeless encampments across the U.S. that this bill will eventually be used to arrest and imprison homeless people on a mass scale if it passes. Our idealistic president who promised everyone "change" has publicly supported this atrocity. In her frustration, Alice traveled to Washington, D.C. and flung the Angel's Sword into the outer wall of the United States Capitol building where the U.S. Senate meets. To her surprise, the blade caught fire the instant it became embedded in the wall. The Capitol building was evacuated, and numerous fire department personnel attempted to both douse and remove the flaming sword, but both tasks proved impossible. Alice says that she raised her hand several times to retrieve the sword, but it did not return.
After 12 hours, the flames on the blade of the sword spread in the blink of an eye to the entire Capitol building. The flames shot thousands of feet straight up into the sky like a pillar to Heaven and were seen on television screens around the world. As we listened to a radio in the Gnome Library, a newscaster reported that the fire was impervious to both the streams of water from the firemen's hoses and shifts in direction of wind. Alice opened a portal to the roof of a nearby hotel building, and together all of us who lived in the house in Pandemonium - Alice, I, Mr. White, Senator Sanders, and Bill McGill - watched the burning Capitol building light up the night sky of Washington D.C. like the noonday sun of the Sahara Desert.
The End
This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. Electronic Arts (EA) owns the copyrights. The original "Inferno" was written, of course, by Dante.