by Colin Gigl
The voice of Javrouche bellowing instructions rolled like thunder in the distance. Alice darted quickly to her left.
“What now?” she yelled as they suddenly found themselves in the kitchen. It was modestly sized, or so Alice imagined, given the premium space went for in New York. The cooks’ reactions to her and Charlie’s unannounced entrance were a mixed bag: some were shocked, others angry, a handful way too busy frying potatoes to give a crap. Apparently, just like in the movies, no good diner kitchen was complete without the obligatory cook who saw a pair of strangers running through his kitchen and shrugged.
“You need to cut off my hands!” Charlie called from behind her. He stumbled momentarily after he bumped into one of the more visibly upset cooks, but he managed to keep his feet.
Alice stopped midstride. “I need to what?”
“I need to get these cuffs off and that’s the quickest way to do it.” At her look of extreme shock, he continued with waning patience. “They’ll grow back, you know that. Come on—we’re wasting time. Grab that knife and close your eyes if you have to.”
This wasn’t quite the escape Alice had envisioned. The cooks were now chattering ceaselessly, mostly in Spanish, as Alice eyed the cleaver that just so happened to be sitting right in front of her. Even though she knew Charlie was telling the truth, the simple thought of actually chopping off someone’s hands, immortal or not, made her gag.
Charlie, meanwhile, had already turned around and placed his arms on one of the prep tables as straight as he could. Oh man . . . this is totally going to suck, she thought.
She wrapped her fingers around the heavy blade and lifted it up just as one of the cooks—apparently the most brazen of the bunch—approached her with a look she didn’t quite care for. He rattled off something she didn’t catch, but his body language was pretty universal. Alice translated it to something like, Tell me what the fuck is going on here before shit gets real.
For Alice, the proverbial shit was already the genuine article, so she honestly couldn’t care less about explaining the situation. However, she wanted him off her back, and yesterday. It occurred to her then that she might be able to kill two birds with one stone. She inhaled sharply, held her breath, then brought the thick knife down twice in quick succession just below Charlie’s wrists. Two loud THWHACKs silenced the room as the sharpened blade separated Charlie’s hands from his arms, cuffs and all, with an easy grace. Without stopping, Alice whirled around with the knife still gripped tightly in her fingers, eyes blazing. She just so happened to find herself pointing it at the outspoken cook who’d been—or at least had seemed to be—threatening her and who now—again, seemingly—appeared to be shitting a brick. Like riding a bike, stilted Spanish she’d picked up from playing against the more culturally diverse soccer teams of Central Jersey combined with several years of half-remembered high-school classes into one fantastic outburst.
“¡Cállate! ¡Fuera ahora, estúpido mexicano, o voy a cortar tu pene!”
Much like the diner patrons earlier, the chef and his amigos didn’t need to be told twice. Everyone bolted for what she assumed was the back door with the realization that la gringa was clearly loca. The outspoken chef, whose unmentionables she’d just threatened to chop off, turned as he reached the back of the kitchen and gave her a menacing but almost tired glare.
“¡Soy dominicano, puta!” And with that, he was gone.
“I had no idea you were so racist,” Charlie said as he surveyed his new stumps. Already, they seemed to be reextending themselves back into hands. “He was obviously Dominican.”
Alice winced. “You speak Spanish?”
“I’ve picked up a few languages over the years. Comes with the territory.”
She lined up a snide retort, but wasn’t given the chance to use it. The noise in the kitchen suddenly escalated as a group of Ferryman officers burst in. With a small yelp, Alice bolted toward the back. She was getting nervous—the adrenaline was pumping, and the few undigested bits of garbage food she had managed to stuff down her face were roiling in angry protest. There was no time to be sick, though—not now. They needed to escape, to find Cartwright, to get this whole thing cleared up.
The past few minutes had given Alice a very good idea of what was waiting for her if she was caught—it rhymed with breath, which, coincidentally enough, she was running out of. A hallway cut sharply to the right at the back of the kitchen, the same direction the cooks had run, and she prayed to whatever god would listen that there was an exit at the end of it.
“I’m getting rather tired of chasing you, Mssr. Dawson,” came Javrouche’s voice, pushing through the room like a foreboding wind. A cacophony of pots and pans crashing into various things enveloped the room.
Alice followed the hall to the right and was buoyed by the sight of an unremarkable brown door with a rusty-looking bar handle. Please don’t be locked, please lead outside, and please, for the love of God, be easy to open.
She finished her quick prayer to the Saint of Door Opening (she had no idea if that was a thing, but decided “Saint Jeremiah the Opener” sounded plausible enough) and, without slowing down, slammed her body into it. Her right arm went numb with the impact, but it swung open easily enough (Praise be to you, Saint Jeremiah) and she found herself stumbling out into a small alleyway. Off to her left, a dilapidated chain-link fence leaned forward, while to her right, the sound of Eighth Avenue traffic—and hopefully escape—played endlessly on a loop. It was the easiest decision she’d had to make in a while.
“Go!” Charlie yelled. “I’m right behind you!”
Though she wanted to shout something snappy back at Charlie, Alice found herself lacking the necessary oxygen required for sarcasm. She winced slightly from smashing into the door, only just realizing that she still held the knife from the kitchen in her right hand. Given the previous night’s accident, probably not the smartest thing she’d ever done.
They burst out onto the sidewalk, Eighth Avenue straight ahead. Alice didn’t exactly have directions on what to do at this point, so she turned to her left to head uptown, away from the fateful diner. She’d only taken two steps when she saw them—a group of Ferryman officers, four or five strong, heading toward them. One about-face later and she was heading in the opposite direction, only to see a trio barreling out of the Tick Tock. She froze.
“There!”
Alice took a peek over to her right, only to immediately regret it. Three more officers, with Javrouche keeping pace behind, his gun in hand, were following in their footsteps. She kept her eyes focused on the Inspector as she cut to her left, her brain telling her she needed to not have that godforsaken gun pointed at her again. She needed to get away. She needed to escape.
Alice never saw the taxi coming.
By the time she realized that she was standing in the middle of a car lane, the taxi was already bearing down on her. Its horn blared in protest, its tires squealing in horror as the brakes clamped down in an effort to stop on a dime. This cab was in rough shape, however, and its brakes probably couldn’t have stopped on a runway, let alone a dime. She caught a glimpse of the driver, but it was hard to tell what he really looked like the way he was screaming from behind his windshield. Alice realized quickly that it was too late. She’d practically jumped out in front of it, and like the notorious deer in the headlights, she just stood there, staring at the lit-up words OFF DUTY.
A pair of hands suddenly pushed her farther into Eighth Avenue, her body tumbling through the air both from the force and the sheer unexpectedness of it. Behind her, she could hear the cab slam into something with a muted crunch, followed by a heavy thud. Several loud snaps and pops scattered out into the night air, almost the same sound that wet logs make when placed in a fire.
Next thing Alice knew, she was hitting pavement. She could feel her clothes and skin ripping and tearing as she skidded along the street. Her right shoulder, which bore most of the initial impact, seared with an ungodly pain before her head bounced off t
he ground.
Hard.
For an instant, a burst of colors dazzled her, dancing across her eyes. She lay there for a moment, wondering what the hell had just happened. Then, some unconscious function of her body implored her to get up. In a daze, she staggered to her feet. Her mind felt wrapped in cotton, most of it seemingly lost to the reaches of shock. The only thought that drove her on was that of escaping, a notion that felt embedded into her psyche now at a subconscious level.
Though she’d made it to a standing position, her legs wobbled as if she were caught in the middle of an earthquake. The cabdriver jumped out of the car with his hands on his head, bewildered by the scene in front of him, but she ignored him. She barely registered Charlie’s crumpled body at first, splayed out in front of the cab though it was. He was saying something to her—what was it? She couldn’t make it out. Nothing audible seemed to be registering properly, actually. He was telling her something through gritted teeth. Alice frowned. She wanted to see him smile again.
The cabbie was looking at her now, talking quickly based on how his mouth was moving, but she couldn’t make out his words, either. He seemed concerned about something, but all she could focus on was a long streak of gray in his bushy beard. Behind the taxi driver, on the side of Eighth Avenue opposite the diner, a man was running toward them. He looked familiar—where had she seen that man before?
That wasn’t important. She needed to focus. What was she supposed to be doing again?
Escaping.
Yes, that was it. Charlie was crawling toward her now, but wasn’t getting anywhere very fast, what with his left arm and leg looking like two snakes slithering next to him. At a conservative guess, they must have been broken in six or seven places. Good thing he didn’t feel pain or anything. Alice watched his lips carefully. It looked like he was saying the word go, over and over again. Well, duh—she knew that, but she couldn’t go without him. They were in this together, and they were going to escape together, too. They just needed to cross the street, that’s all. To get away from the men chasing them. Where were those guys anyway? She turned and looked back toward the diner . . .
. . . and there was Javrouche. Pistol in hand, he grabbed Charlie underneath his arms. The Inspector was shouting something, and suddenly the pistol was pointed at Alice. She could see right down the long barrel of the silencer, almost as if it were an extension of his outstretched arm. Even so, Javrouche’s attention was on Charlie, whom he continuously tried to lift up, but couldn’t. Seeing this, two officers were running over to assist the Inspector.
Except Charlie acted first.
With the help of Javrouche’s partial lift, he was able to spring off with his good leg in a pseudo dive. As he stretched out in midair, he swung something metallic-looking in a long but improbably quick arc. Despite the speed at which things were happening, Alice determined it was her cleaver from earlier. It must have popped out of her hand when she’d been pushed away from the taxi.
Just after the glinting flash of the knife, Javrouche’s pistol was falling. Well, actually, Javrouche’s hand still gripping the pistol was falling, most likely because Charlie had just cut it off. The Ferryman’s dive didn’t take him very far, but he twisted his body so that he would land on his left shoulder. This opened up a path for his knife to find its way almost completely through Javrouche’s right knee. With the sudden loss of support from his right leg, the Inspector crumpled wordlessly to the ground.
Alice could only watch in awe as Charlie scampered along the ground to Javrouche’s now free gun. He didn’t have time to remove the Inspector’s severed hand from the pistol, so instead, he rolled over on his back and depressed Javrouche’s finger. Two muffled gunshots fired in turn. With the oncoming men less than ten feet away, Charlie had aimed for their heads and, sure enough, the two officers tumbled to the ground, much like Charlie had in her bedroom.
The officers who were waiting along the sidewalk began making their way forward, but cautiously. Alice took a step toward Charlie and nearly stumbled, but managed to hold steady. He, too, was finding his own feet. His leg had apparently healed enough that he could stand on it, even if she could still see it mending before her very eyes. He stood for a moment with his back to her, gun pointed menacingly at the targets in front of him, switching his aim every second or so. Then he turned to her.
His expression could only be described as animalistic. Spittle flew from his lips while his eyes, round as she had ever seen them, tried to lock on to her own but vibrated with a frantic energy. He was screaming at her, she realized. It was easy enough to read his lips: Get out of here! he was yelling, mixing in a few Run!s for good measure. The moment only seemed to last an instant before he turned around again. In the nick of time, too—a Ferryman officer was charging Charlie’s momentary blind spot, but he dropped the man with another well-placed shot to the skull.
Charlie began shouting at the men in front of him in a rabid frenzy unlike almost anything Alice had ever seen. Who was this guy, and what had he done with Charlie? This couldn’t be the same person. This man . . . scared her. Didn’t he understand that they needed to leave together? Wasn’t that the whole point? Now that they had the gun in their possession, it wouldn’t be hard to run again. It took most of the danger out, anyway. She had a few cuts and bruises, sure, but she’d be able to move, and Charlie was almost completely healed again. They were running out of time, though—Javrouche was rising up like a wounded viper while the two officers Charlie had shot moments earlier were also beginning to stir.
She needed to get him to stop, needed to get his attention. He was shuffling backward, drawing closer to her. He changed the target of the gun at a blistering pace, shifting his focus almost neurotically, the quintessential cornered animal. She took a step forward and grabbed his shoulder. Now was their last chance. They needed to run and—
Charlie wheeled around with uncanny speed, the gun pointed at her below her right shoulder.
P-tink!
A small flash jumped from the end of the silenced pistol, and immediately, Alice felt her body spasm. The world seemed to stop moving. She went to take a step back but found her feet glued to the ground. A small, distant pain in her chest floated to her mind. She put her hand to where it hurt. A small hole perforated her shirt somewhere between her right breast and shoulder. When she put her fingers to it, they came back stained red. With blood. Her blood.
Oh, she thought. That’s a problem.
The pistol fell from Charlie’s hand. He slowly began to reach out for her, but a group of officers seized the moment, three of them tackling him. Not that they needed to—Charlie had gone full rag doll. Alice watched as Javrouche’s men loaded Charlie into a van parked in front of the Tick Tock Diner, his eyes staring into hers the whole time. Her vision started to tunnel before her legs gave out from under her. Despite falling heavily to her knees, she felt no pain. With Charlie successfully inside the van, Javrouche took one final, pitying look at her. He moved on, slamming the door closed. Slowly, slowly, her vision continued to fade. The rest of her body hit the ground. Alice felt so incredibly tired. All she wanted was to sleep . . .
A man. There was a man standing over her. It was the man who’d been running toward her before. He looked like Cartwright, but he looked so forlorn, so upset. He smiled at her. She tried to return the gesture, but it was hard. She felt so weak. He was saying something now. She wondered what it was. She couldn’t hear the words, and now the sounds of the world seemed so very far away. Slowly, slowly, she closed her eyes and her world became nothingness. There was no light, no pain, no sound.
Just nothing.
CHARLIE
* * *
HANDLING THE TRUTH
How many hours had it been? Charlie didn’t know. He wanted to guess somewhere in the ballpark of twenty, but it could’ve been an eternity, given how long it felt. He found it slightly amusing that, as far as the human condition was concerned, being happy or in love or experiencing whatever other sappy
emotions there were made hours fly by in minutes, while his current emotional condition stretched minutes into days.
Charlie opened his eyes, though he might as well have kept them closed for all the difference it made. The cell was perfectly dark and, save for his pathetic self, completely empty. At one point, he thought he could faintly make out the outline of his hand held two inches from his face, but as he flexed his fingers, he realized it was all in his head. He leaned up against what he assumed was the wall—his body merely stopped, with no tactile stimulation to tell him why.
The Institute called it Purgatory. It was a uniquely Ferryman punishment, the cells having been specially crafted—some said with the same magic that had created the Ferryman Keys—to be devoid of any and all external stimulation. A prisoner in Purgatory was essentially left to rot.
Except the body of a Ferryman prisoner didn’t waste away. Just their mind did.
Most of what anybody knew about Purgatory was hearsay. It was an extreme punishment even by Javrouche’s standards, which, if nothing else, said something about its efficacy. However, it remained a legal punishment on the books, just one spoken of in hushed voices. Stories circulated about infamous Ferrymen who’d been sentenced to stints in Purgatory—men and women who’d eventually lost their sanity after only a decade, or a year, or a month, or even a day. Charlie suddenly found himself with a much better frame of reference for those stories. Even knowing that he would be taken out of this cell soon for his trial, he could feel the anxiety building in his chest. He’d gone in thinking most of those stories were nonsense. Now he wasn’t so sure.
What made Purgatory so frighteningly potent was its ability to turn a mind against itself. Since his incarceration, Charlie had been avoiding a particular thought. But as the minutes in pure darkness ticked away, he found it harder and harder to escape from it. The thought wormed its way into his head, a parasite hell-bent on lodging itself as deeply into his mind as it could. And then, as the parasite took hold, Charlie realized there was nothing more he could do to stop it.
