Alice & Dorothy Read online

  ALICE & DOROTHY

  A Fairytale of Sex, Drugs, and Murder.

  by

  JW Schnarr

  Also Available by JW Schnarr

  Collections

  Things Falling Apart

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  The Children of the Golden Day

  Medal of Honour

  eSingles

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  Edited Anthologies

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  War of the Worlds: Frontlines

  Timelines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells’ The Time Machine

  Forthcoming

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  Alice & Dorothy © 2011 JW Schnarr

  This edition of Alice & Dorothy © Northern Frights Publishing

  Alice & Dorothy by JW Schnarr

  Cover Art by Damian Pannell

  Cover Design by Damian Pannell and JW Schnarr

  Interior Layout and Design by JW Schnarr

  This book is protected in Canada and the world by copyright laws. All rights reserved.

  This book is an original work of fiction. It is inspired by the stories of L. Frank Baum and Lewis Carroll and in some cases quotes directly from the public domain works of Lewis Carroll. The author makes no claim to the public domain work as their own. Some of the characters in this book are also inspired from the public domain works of L. Frank Baum and Lewis Carroll, but apart from sharing a name the characters themselves are derivatives created by the author.

  Please do not make illegal copies of this book.

  If you do, I might have to punch your face. A bunch of times.

  Also, stop touching yourself, because you’ll go blind, and you won’t get to finish the end of this book unless your mom reads it to you. Believe me, you do NOT want your mom reading this book to you.

  FIRST PRINTING

  Digital ISBN: 978-0-9868777-2-8

  “I wanted to clear all the lies and let the truth come out. I have hate crawling through my system.”

  —Aileen Wournos

  A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.

  —John Lennon

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to thank everyone who has ever had a kind word, a criticism, or an interest in anything I’ve ever written. I’d also like to thank friends and family who have always stood by me and pushed me when I needed a shove; especially for all the impromptu book signings that have sprung up over the years. I’d like to thank my sister Janice for being an unending source of support and good ideas, and thanks to my parents Dave and Eleanor for putting up with me. As always lots of love and thanks for my daughter Aurora, my light.

  Mostly I want to thank you, the reader, for taking a little time out of your day to make a dream come true.

  —JWS.

  For Jessica and Aurora,

  For love.

  ‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  The

  Beginning.

  Chapter 1

  Rabbit dropped heroin into a soupspoon and smiled at Alice.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Whatever happened, it’s all gonna be fine in a couple minutes. You’ll see.” He let his eyes drop down over the swell of her tits, under the pink shirt she was wearing.

  Alice sniffed. Her eyes were red from crying. She nodded. Black makeup and cheap glitter ran in streams down the sides of her face, like a birthday present in a mud puddle. She watched as Rabbit added a thumbnail of water to the spoon with a syringe, and then heated the mixture with a lighter. Part of her wanted to run screaming from the room; part of her knew this was the last thing she needed right at this moment with her life crashing down around her head and the holy shit meter going from 0-60 in under ten seconds.

  The other part, a much larger part of her, saw the drugs dissolving on the spoon, smelled vinegar and baby powder as it cooked down, and smothered the first part of her with a pillow. Get high and forget it. Put it all behind her. Life in the big city, baby. That shit happened.

  Right now Rabbit was looking at her, his smug mouth half turned in a smile. His two front teeth capped gold. His namesake. They made him look like Bugs Bunny kinda. His blue eyes were shining like a fat kid in a candy store. She knew the look. Rabbit was going to fuck her as soon as he finished fixing for her, and Alice was going to let him.

  She rubbed her nose; her hand came away wet. Rabbit turned off the lighter and dropped the head of a Qtip into the mixture on the spoon. Then with his other hand he moved the cotton head around to soak everything up.

  “You know, you’re lucky you came by today,” Rabbit said. “I already sold most of my stuff off for the week. This is from my stash.” The message was clear. Be grateful.

  Alice watched him and said nothing. She’d come to see Rabbit because there was nobody else. She’d been living rough too long; all her friends were gone. Her family was ashamed of her because she was hooking for party money. Or to buy groceries, though that was less often. She stayed where she could. She slept outside sometimes, and used motel rooms to get out of the weather when it turned bad.

  Rabbit didn’t care how much cock she sucked though. He still kissed her on the mouth. He let her crash whenever she wanted to get high and had nowhere to go. She paid him back with lots of freebies. Alice thought maybe Rabbit loved her, in his own way.

  “Ok, Alice.” Rabbit flicked the end of the filled syringe. “Roll your sleeve and let’s find a pretty blue line.”

  Alice lifted her shirtsleeve and grabbed onto her bicep. Tight, so the veins below bulged under the pressure. She squeezed her hand open and shut to get the blood moving.

  “Good.” He slapped her arm a couple times to bring them up even more. “You have perfect veins for this, you know that? I mean, mine are shit now, and I’ve seen girls who are already shooting in their asses. Big ugly sores everywhere, vein collapses, stuff like that. Sometimes it’s like sticking your rig in a pound of steak. Don’t know what you’re hittin’. Yours are perfect though. Your skin is like fuckin porcelain.”

  “Oh fuck,” Alice snorted and rolled her eyes. “Rabbit, I look like shit. I feel worse. Quit talkin’ so much shit.”

  Rabbit nodded. “Let’s take care of those bad feelings, baby girl.” He pushed the needle into a hungry vein. Alice took a sharp breath between her teeth. He pulled blood back into the syringe. It was the right colour. He slowly pushed the brown fluid into Alice’s arm. It looked like Rabbit was shooting up with beer or vanilla flavoured cream soda. It always looked like something different to Alice. It helped her cope with her budding drug addiction, maybe.

  Alice bit her lip. Spiking hurt like hell. Like hot syrup being pushing into her flesh and up her arm. The numbness was spreading. Here there were clouds. Here there was euphoria as the heroin started to be changed in to morphine by the chemicals in her brain. She didn’t care how it worked though. Rabbit was right. She killed someone today. Who cared? Sunshine erupted from her chest, making her warm and sleepy all over. Reality faded under halos and sunbeams and the warmth of her soul.

  “Good,” Rabbit said again. He tossed the syringe on the table.

  “Ahhh, much better.” Alice giggled and licked her lips. She could feel her blood slowing. She tipped her head back. The man’s face when she pulled the trigger. A little black dot under his left eye. It stopped him cold. His fuckin brains went everywhere. It wasn’t like the movies. There was more blood than Alice had ever seen. Meat, hair, bone, just erupting from him. They were in his car. The windows were open. There was a starling somewhere close by.
She could hear it barking out orders to other birds. That bird sounds like metal, she’d thought, before he’d stopped being a grateful John and turned into a vengeful one.

  Alice had walked around the driver side of the car when she left, and it looked like someone had puked blood and raw meat all over the door of the car. Who the fuck was going to believe that someone had tried to rape a hooker? They’d gone out there for sex. He’d paid for sex.

  Thing is, he’d gotten sex. And he wasn’t ready to take her back to town. He wasn’t ready to pay again either. He’d slapped her in the mouth and then tried to force himself into her ass. When she bore down, fighting back, he dropped a fist like a hammer just above Alice’s hairline. And then he was inside her, pushing deep inside her bowels, his searing cock tearing and stretching her like a knife. As Carl Panzram said, Alice wasn’t broke to ride. You had to be careful with that stuff. She’d heard it could cause infections or need stitches.

  She screamed for him to stop. She scratched his face. He hit her again, and Alice swooned. Half in and out of consciousness, she reached into her purse under the chair and felt the cold shape of her gun. She pulled it out.

  She stuck it in his fat piggy face.

  There was a moment between the bullet and his realization of how fucked he was, a moment Alice saw slowly dawn on his face. Lust was replaced with fear.

  “Get the fuck off me!” she screamed. She drew the hammer on her rage, and scraped his face with the barrel sight.

  “Oh God,” he whispered. And then it happened.

  He started to come, inside her. As though a gun in his face had heightened the experience for him, as if raping a whore in his ‘79 Buick wasn’t enough, ramming his dick into her ass dry wasn’t enough, the cold circle of the gun barrel scraping a hot, angry line across his cheek was enough. The thought she might blow his pig head off made his orgasm come fast and hard.

  “I’m suh-horry,” he said. And then he closed his eyes. Breathed deep.

  He’s enjoying the ride.

  His look of bliss sent Alice over the edge. Later, she’d give it some thought, and she could have seen herself emptying his wallet and letting him go. If it hadn’t been for that fucking look on his face, like he’d just switched off the situation and tapped out, like nothing Alice ever did mattered, because she didn’t matter. It was the same look she’d been seeing on men’s faces since she was twelve years old, giving handjobs to the neighbour kids in the doghouse while her parents were at work. It was as though a light went on in her mind, a tiny singular ball of heat so terrible it had nowhere to go but out. And a moment later that light crashed through the car in an explosion of heat and thunder. The gun bucked in her hand. Then blood. So much blood…

  On some level, she was aware that Rabbit had her shirt open and was fondling her tits. He could have them. They were attracting the wrong kind of attention from boys. That’s what her mother said, when she’d finally been busted, her hand still hot and stinking like vinegar from those boys early teenage dicks, too young to come but old enough to get sticky. You don’t want to do that Alice, that’s the wrong kind of attention. Too bad she hadn’t told Alice’s dad and his friends the same thing. At the time, Alice had thought maybe they just didn’t know any better.

  Alice pushed on Rabbit’s chest, but it wasn’t enough for him to notice. Her fingers slid along the side of his head, down across his face.

  She was covered in blood.

  She had pulled his slack head up by his hair so she could crawl out from under him. Screaming and crying, like birth. His cock was still half full of jizz when she unplugged from him. Her asshole was on fire. She dropped the gun.

  Rabbit was licking her nipples. The spring air was cold on her skin. It was hot in Rabbit’s living room and she was sweating.

  Alice tried to focus. It was like the heroin was splitting her in half, and she was living two lives at once. Everything was jumbling together. It made no sense. Rabbit with his hand down her shorts, fingering her clit. Alice washing blood off in a mud puddle, the water slick and rainbowed and smelling like motor oil. She found out the hard way that bone would float, if the pieces were small enough. Rabbit, with his groping fingers inside her. Alice had her hands on his shoulders. It was for balance, because she didn’t want to fall into the puddle. Rabbit mistook it as permission to continue. The stink of gunpowder and humanity. The guy shit himself when the bullet turned his lights out. He probably pissed inside her. Rabbit splitting her legs. Spitting on her. His mouth rhimed with milkweed, like the big sacs full of plant jizz her daddy showed her when she was little. Sometimes there’s bugs in the spit, Alice, he’d said . Here, lemme show you.

  Her hands were tingling. They were covered in milkweed spit. It smelled awful and made her feel guilty to look at it. Tell your momma and I’ll kill her. Just like these bugs. She never had to worry about that. Momma didn’t need to be killed; she didn’t care.

  Motes of light appeared in both worlds. Alice was standing in the grass by the train yard, nobody around for a mile or two, surrounded by electric motes of light gently dazzling her skin. The motes danced around Rabbit as he fucked her. Her eyes fluttered back in her head.

  The sparkling, tingling sensation moved up her arms and legs. Across her hips. Along her shoulders. She bit down, hard, until milkweed and rust welled around her teeth. Both worlds were washing out. Or maybe there were three worlds. She tried to focus her eyes but Rabbit sparkled and fluttered too much. Halos, White light, the drum of her heart sparkling in her ears.

  Sparkle.

  “Shit!” Rabbit yelled. He pulled out her, leaning back and putting his hands on her knees. His hard cock bounced as if tied to a string, slick and ridiculous looking. “Shiiit!”

  Alice was thrashing. Sometimes when heroin users overdosed they just went to sleep and slipped into a coma. Sometimes they thrashed and spit like they were possessed. This was Alice now. She arched her back and bucked her legs and she fell on the floor even as Rabbit was trying to get out of the way. Alice was spitting all over the floor. She was moaning softly. It looked like electrocution. It was, in a way; her synapses were firing all over the place. Her body contorted and jerked in time.

  Rabbit grabbed Alice by the shoulder and turned her on her side. He pulled his sweat pants over his dick and pushed the bulge to one side. He rubbed his face in his hands. His hands smelled like cigarette smoke and pussy. One more than the other, and the smells lingered in the sweat on his face.

  “FAWK!” he shouted. That was how the word sounded, like in a comic book. Fawk. Not quite profanity, but close enough. He looked down at her fluttering body. He took deep breaths. If he didn’t do something soon she would probably die in short order.

  He had to get her the fuck out of here. Now.

  Rabbit stepped out into the cold air. He zipped his plastic windbreaker all the way to the top and then pulled the sleeves down to his wrists. It wasn’t much, but it would keep the chill off. Besides, the rate his body was running he could barely feel the cold finger bones of spring. He lit a smoke. He looked up and down the street. It was the middle of the night and the street was empty. It was still too early in the year for kids to be out wandering around, even for this shithole neighbourhood in which his parents had eventually settled. This is where he’d grown up, and eventually left for bigger and better. And this is where he’d come home and taken over after the old man had died and his mother had gone off to rot in a government assisted living facility. To Rabbit, it was home. He puffed his smoke, looking up and down again just to be sure. There wasn’t a single asshole he could trust in the entire neighbourhood, but at least they were smart enough to mind their own business. Smart neighbours knew enough to look away when shit started to get loud.

  He went in and thrust his hands under Alice’s body. He’d moved her from the floor to the couch after carefully redressing her. Under the scent of her perfume and shampoo, under the talcum and strawberry deodorant, there was another smell of mingled sex and sweat, puk
e and blood. It was the real smell of a junkie. Sometimes they smelled like piss too. When you were high, it might be too much effort to use a toilet. When you were high, you were usually beyond caring. Rabbit smelled like that himself sometimes.

  She was a small girl, but still a lot of dead weight to lift in her present condition. He wondered how much weight unconsciousness added to a body; the way television cameras seemed to add weight to actors and newscasters. He pulled her up and slung her over one shoulder in a single move. Then he stood, pulled his keys from his pocket, and crossed the threshold of his living room out the front door into the dark of the evening. He resisted the urge to press his face against her side as he locked and shut the door. There was something in her scent that he couldn’t place. Something he loved, though. She reminded him of a better class of life than what he was used to. She was a whore, and homeless a lot of the time, but there was something in her that was like a rod of hot iron. Never bend. Never break.