Alice In Wonderhell Read online

  Alice in Wonderhell

  catt dahman

  Copyright © 2013 catt dahman

  [email protected]

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book, including the cover, and photos, may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher. All rights reserved.

  Poetry by Lewis Carol included.

  Wonderhell © 2013 Tammy Dunning used with permission.

  The nine circles of hell and their descriptions by Dante are loosely used here.

  Any resemblance to anyone alive or dead is purely accidental, and no actual people, places, or entities are implied to be read.

  Dedication:

  To Nic who helped design Alice into a fighting machine

  Jeremy, Trevor, Mark, and Stephanie who were always there.

  The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. crew who came up with some crazy ideas for shops and are super supportive of me.

  To Gary Lucas, my editor, for the ideas to go wild with a story.

  To my copy editor who makes my commas behave.

  Wonderhell

  By Tammy Dunning

  Where am I now? What is this place?

  Not knowing how I came to be

  in such a scary, evil, tormented space.

  What tragedy has befallen me?

  The air smells of sulfur. This inferno is hot!

  A wicked tea party is taking place on this very spot.

  Strange creatures have gathered here,

  Demons they must be.

  Sitting very nonchalant, sipping on their tea.

  A mad man, a rabbit, a cat with a toothy grin,

  Red, evil eyes, they turn to me

  For in me, they see sin.

  The weight of my life is upon me.

  Too late to make amends.

  Their job is to judge all of those

  Whom the devil sends.

  I scream, I cry, then turn to run away.

  It does no good. I cannot move.

  Here is where I'll stay.

  "Who are you evil creatures?

  What is this ghastly place?

  What must I do to be free from you and this horrible space?"

  The mad man answers softly,

  His red gaze upon me lies.

  His pleasure shines upon his face,

  And in it, my own demise.

  "We are your jury, child.

  And you shall never again be free.

  For once you enter through our gates,

  Your soul belongs to me.

  And as for where we are,

  It’s really quite easy to tell.

  Open your eyes, young Alice. Wake up!

  You're in Wonderhell!"

  Chapter One:Coral’s Diner

  My name is Alice, and a few times, people have told me to go to hell when they were angry with me. Regrettably, or fortunately, depending on your view, that is more than my destiny: to head down south; I have a mission to save the entire world, but I need to begin with the beginning, as acquaintances in Wonderland-hell would say.

  When you hear a story and the person telling it begins with, “It was a normal Saturday night, and I was just a normal person but,” don’t you just want to roll your eyes? Because you know right off the person wasn’t that normal if an unbelievable story follows. I felt the same way, so it’s okay if you feel that way.

  But it was a very normal Saturday night, and I really was a normal girl until the one-eyed, long-fingered, big-eared guy and his friend came into the diner and changed my life.

  Like any other Saturday night, tonight we were flooded with hungry people. All day, we had run around the diner, carrying steaming plates of food until we were soaked through with perspiration and needed to cool down and hydrate our bodies.

  Now, it was midnight, and I sat in a booth, the same one I sat in every night after the rush was over and the diner was finally closed. Four others sat with me while we drank sodas and ice water and let the smoke from our cigarettes drift upwards to the ceiling where the residue collected with oils and smoke from the food we had served. My feet ached, so I wriggled my toes to get the feeling back into them.

  “Go smoke outside,” Coral yelled, just as he did every night, telling us that we needed to go outside for our bad habits, but he wasn’t a ball-breaker kind of boss. He knew we would stay seated at the booth while we smoked and rested before trudging off to our homes.

  Then, he finished up in the kitchen, maybe getting his first chance to have a bite of food.

  He banged pot and pans around, as he made sure his kitchen was pristine for the next day.

  “Okay,” I yelled back, but we didn’t get up and go outside. It was too warm and muggy, and the air conditioning inside felt good as it dried our sweat with its chill.

  “Coral said to go outside,” Cory said lazily.

  “Yep, he did,” I said.

  Coral was a fair boss, as well as being calm and friendly to us. He expected good service, honesty, dependability, and hard work from those of us he employed, and in return, he paid very good wages, showed us full respect, and genuinely cared about our families and about us. We could go to him like a dad with any qualms or problems we had.

  He actually paid the best of anyone in town, but he was very choosey about whom he hired.

  Coral was one guy in town whom everyone liked a lot. He was a go-to-guy, and when he expressed an opinion, people listened and cared.

  He was a huge-built African American man with a booming voice. He used to be some big time football star but ruined his knees and came back to his small town birthplace and opened his diner: Coral’s Diner. Original, huh?

  There weren’t many places to eat in town, but his food was really good, there was a lot of the food, and it was priced well.

  The place was always full, and he did a steady business. He served home cooked meals such as meatloaf, enchiladas, or ham steak and served with good vegetables such as mashed potatoes, fresh green beans, fried okra, and seasoned cabbage. Fruit from the farmer’s market across the street went into his cobblers: peach, apple, and blackberry.

  He had learned excellent recipes from his mother and grandmother, and no one got preservatives and junk in his food.

  From 4:30 pm-senior-citizen specials until 10:30 pm-the-late-night crowd, the diner was steadily swamped by people coming in to eat.They all wanted burgers:double beef, bacon and cheese, mushroom and onion, avocado and salsa with jalapeños, and every other combination imaginable.

  Luckily, we never got tired of the scents of those burgers, as they always smelled mouth-watering; unfortunately, in the rush, we never had time to eat them.

  The bad part was we were tired; the good part was time had flown by, and we got bonuses for waiting over-flow; Coral was fair that way.

  “I’m tired. Why did the school band all want extra fries tonight?” Dana grumbled. She was the lead waitress and my best friend, “People at every table ordered extra fries after they got their meals, so I had to run for more fries and refigure the bills.”

  After a marathon band practice at the high school, the entire group, thirty in all with ferocious appetites for burgers, double fries, milkshakes, and brownies with ice cream, milkshakes, and brownies with ice cream stormed in the diner.

  “Because Coral added the damned sweet potato fries to the menu and they love those,” Pax said, laughing, “They are fantastic, by the way, in case you were too busy to eat one.”

  He was the new cook wh
o worked alongside of Coral, easy going and dependable, and he and Coral had spent hours coming up with the special recipe for the new fries. They had just been added to the menu: were cut from sweet potatoes, soaked in milk and spices, battered thickly with a mixture of flour and more spices, then fried crisp, and finally drained so they weren’t greasy. They were a little sweet, a lot hot and spicy, and as popular as his home made spicy, garlic-dill pickles, which also vanished. During that night alone, we sold an additional ten jars of the special pickles at fifteen dollars a jar!

  I didn’t bother to tell Pax that Annie, Dana, and I had dinner on the run while we worked: pickles, sweet potato fries, and jalapeño poppers. If we told him we had eaten his special fries and loved them, he would question us forever to make sure they were prefect. I hid a smile.

  Later, when Pax was gone, I would feel a twinge of sadness that I never bragged on his fries, but right then, I could not have dreamed where my destiny would lead me.

  In Coral’s diner, there was no drama: no whining or shirking of duties, no taking advantage of others, and no complaining about problems; if you didn’t follow those rules, you wouldn’t last long. You got what you put into your work.

  That’s why we were there. It was enough to have all that drama and back stabbing in our personal lives; we didn’t want it at our jobs, too. We got along fantastically.

  “The band uniforms this year look stupid,” Dana said.

  “They do every year,” I added. I would make fun of their uniforms but had a healthy respect for their hard work and the band director’s leadership since they played strong, recognizable tunes with few participants.

  “You’re jealous ‘cause you can’t wear one instead of your diner uniform,” Pax laughed at Dana, teasing her.

  “Whatever,” she said, rolling her eyes. Her uniform was her work shirt, light blue, and embroidered with her name and worn with a tight, short denim skirt and high-topped sneakers.

  She got better tips than me because she wore her shirt tighter and unbuttoned two buttons down. As long as we wore our work shirts, Coral didn’t care what we paired it with as long as it was clean and neatly pressed every day.

  “My feet hurt,” I said. I leaned back against the wall, sitting in the booth sideways, with my feet propped up on Cory’s lap. He shrugged, letting my sneakers bang down onto the seat as he got up to get a refill, “Ouch,” I snarled.

  Annie giggled at us. Annie was a great person, humble and sweet, hardworking, and a good friend. She was a far better person than the rest of us, with dreams in her eyes, and she did weekly good deeds.

  She drove me crazy sometimes because she was such a good person and made such an effort to be one; she went out of her way just to find ways to be nice. She might stop at a house and help the owner weed a garden, take soup to someone ill, or take empty toilet paper rolls to the school’s art teacher, simply to make someone smile.

  I admired that and was frightened by such effort.

  Like most of the rest, I worked double shifts for the money and because that’s just who I am: Coral could always depend on me. That was my good deed.

  I worked double shifts seven days a week when Dana was away, and I would take a bullet before letting Coral down. It was better to know I was there and handling the business professionally and honestly than to worry that anyone else might let him down the tiniest bit.

  One frown and I would move the earth to fix things for my boss.

  “We’re closed,” Cory said loudly.

  Cory was one I often wanted to slap but never had good cause or the energy. He was a pain in the ass with smart remarks but always dependable and often even nice. That his smart-assed remarks were usually warranted drove me nuts but in a good way, as if he were an irritating brother.

  “No kidding?” I asked.

  He pointed to the door as he filled his glass with ice, “I’m telling those guys.”

  We looked around. See? He had irritated me and again; he was right. I couldn’t win.

  At the glass door stood a fellow who was wearing black clothing and had an eye patch over his right eye like a goofy pirate. He ignored Cory and waved at us, motioning to the lock on the door. He was tall, over six feet and with an average build. He wore too-tight, skinny-legged jeans and a tight tee shirt. He had long, dark hair and reminded me of a rock and roll singer, maybe one of those death metal guys that never got past the 1980s.

  “Let them in,” Coral yelled from the kitchen. Sometimes, it was if the man had x-ray vision and knew what was going on even when he couldn’t see the front.

  Once, he said we needed to fill all the ketchup bottles during a really fast- paced, huge rush, and we started to argue that we didn’t have time and that the bottles were fine, but sure enough, they were all low.

  He didn’t look out front, but Coral knew. He said it was because he knew how many burgers he had cooked that night and because people insisted on ruining them with ketchup. He could hear a crash and know which one of us had dropped dishes, too. He said Dana dropped them the hardest, which was funny.

  We wouldn’t have let them in if Coral hadn’t directed us to.

  Anyway, Cory frowned and walked over to let the pirate/death metal man and his friend inside, unlocking and relocking the door with no obvious interest in the guys.

  I will say this for Cory, if they had been dangerous, Cory would have sensed it, would have them disarmed, and would have them on the floor at once.Cory was protective of us, and he could sense trouble, maybe even smell it on a person.

  Cory came back, lifted my feet, and settled back into the booth with my feet again hanging across his lap because he wanted to sit in my space.

  Cory was telling us, before he got up for his refill, about a car he was restoring and jumped right back into the boring details as soon as he sat down and lit another cigarette. We didn’t care about his car and the engine he was putting it in; his voice was a drone of monotony, hence why I wanted to slap him at times.

  “That’s the last thing you need,” the newcomer wearing the eye patch said, looking right at me and wrinkling his nose as he saw my hand flick an ash into the ashtray on the table.

  He waved at the smoke dramatically. Maybe the man was an old rock-and-roller and had played at halftime when Coral was playing a football bowl game; I could imagine the man in black, hopping about with a guitar.

  The other man wasn’t dressed like the first; he wore jeans, flat roper boots, a tee shirt, and a cowboy hat. He looked slightly annoyed with his companion and shyly smiled. He was plain until then, but the smile lit his face and made his eyes twinkle, but he didn’t seem the type to smile a lot. Just a feeling I had.

  A cat was with them, and he looked as if he were grinning some of the time; he was a cocky little cat, grey and white and very fluffy.

  “Coral, you gotta a couple of visitors,” I yelled. What I didn’t need after a long, hard shift waiting tables and getting band kids extra fries was some weird looking man, expounding on my tobacco habit, especially in front of everyone else.

  Anyone’s calling attention to me was one of my worst fears.

  “Alice, Coral knows we’re here. But we really came to see you.”

  I felt a huge, heavy lump in my stomach.

  Now, imagine you are already tired and cranky, it’s after work, and a man comes in, makes a negative statement about your habits, and then says he’s there to see you. Can you see my issue?

  Why would he be there to see me since we obviously have nothing in common and don’t know one another? If he wanted a date, he was out of luck. Please don’t let him ask me out, I prayed.

  I didn’t date because no one really interested me.Dana said it was because I didn’t take to small town boys I had grown up with and that I should meet a man from outside town. They seemed as single-minded and boring as the boys I already knew, so what was the point?

  This guy certainly didn’t interest me. He was abnormal but not plain, dressed funny, and was cryptic, so he was e
asy to strike through as a possibility. I didn’t give people chances. If you never depend on anyone and never give him a chance, you will never be let down.

  Dana said that was antisocial.

  I just didn’t like anything that might be a change or effort.I was boring, plain, and normal as could be. I took classes for college online, worked in a diner, lived at home with my parents, and lived in that small town where nothing out of the ordinary ever happened.

  And I liked it that way.

  Adding sweet potato fries to the menu was almost more than I could take, and Coral had to tell me calmly and allow me to get used to the idea before I could handle that change.

  I mean I had to say, “Regular or sweet potato fries, batter with spices and fried golden?” Then, people might ask questions, think about it, or ask my opinion. It was too much responsibility.

  After I finished some online work, I was going to commute to college, (and not go to college parties, join a stupid sorority, go to silly sports events, or anything of the sort), get my college degree, come back, and teach at the school I had attended.

  Teaching seemed the least exciting, least adventurous route I could pick, and that was my choice. I didn’t intend to date, get married, or have children.

  Do you see how uninspired I was? Good. I want to make it very clear that I was very average in looks, personality, and aspirations. Below average in some of those, in fact. I enjoyed solitude and the quiet side of life. I brushed my dark hair into the same ponytail every day after using the same shampoo and never had to wonder if my hair looked different, good, or bad. I was the same each and every day.

  If one actually did anything, especially anything differently, there was room for disappointment or harm.

  “Why?” I asked the man with the eye patch. Asking him that question was a big deal for me; I hadn’t shown that much enthusiasm and interest in ages. I only asked, really, so I could hear his reason and then tell him to move on that I wasn’t interested.

  “We’ll wait on Coral,” the man said. That drove me almost insane. We had to wait. See? If you ask a question or show interest, you’ll get burned every time. There’s no winning.