Page 1 of Escaping Wonderland

CHAPTER 1

Alice thrashed like a rabbit caught in a trap, battling the cruel, strong hands of her captors. She had only one goal—escape. It didn’t matter that there were at least four burly orderlies dragging her along, didn’t matter that she was in an isolated, locked-down facility. She didn’t belong here. This was a mistake.

This was acrime.

“Would you dose her before she kicks me in the balls?” one of the men said.

A man on her other side grunted. “Hold her still and I will!”

“No!” Alice swung her legs wildly until hands with viselike grips closed around her ankles and calves. “You can’tdothis. Let me go! I know the police chief, and he’d put a stop to this!”

“Why didn’t you idiots sedate her while she was in transit?” asked a woman with a voice as cold and hard as granite. “Get her against the wall.”

The orderlies turned and shoved Alice forward, slamming her face first into the wall. The impact jolted her, knocking the air out of her lungs; for an instant, her struggles ceased. Her captors took full advantage of the respite, forcing her arms behind her back and pinning her against the wall with their bodies.

A large hand grasped her head and forced it to turn, pressing her cheek to the wall. Her breath heaved out of her, lifting the tangled strands of blonde hair that had fallen into her face. The men around her were made into featureless monsters in the dimly lit corridor. A smaller figure stepped forward—the woman—and raised an arm. The device in her hand looked like a gun.

The woman touched the gun to the side of Alice’s neck. Before Alice could resume her struggles, there was a sharp click, followed by a stinging pain in her neck. The device hissed.

Alice flinched and tried to pull away as an icy sensation spread outward from her neck, but the men holding her only further tightened their grips. The chill raced through her veins to permeate her body. Against her will, her muscles relaxed.

“No,” she cried, hot tears spilling down her face. “Don’t do this. This isn’t right. I…don’t…I don’t belong here.”

Her strength faded as the coldness intensified, and, soon, she was held upright only by the unforgiving holds of the orderlies.

One of the men chuckled. “They all say that.”

“But this one isn’t like the rest,” another man said. “This one’s pretty. I wouldn’t mind a taste.”

A hand slipped between her chest and the wall to squeeze her breast.

Terror slithered through Alice, coiling tight around her lungs and heart. She strained to fight back, to shake out of the orderlies’ restraining grasps, to move at all, but her efforts only produced a sluggish twitch of her fingers.

“This one isn’t for you,” the woman said. “She’s here under the director’s personal watch. Do you understand?”

“You spoil all the fun, Doc,” the man grumbled.

Alice’s vision blurred, making the forms of her captors even more indistinct; she didn’t know if it was because of her tears or the drugs they’d injected her with.

The woman—little more than a shadowy mass slightly smaller than the rest—turned away. “Bring that gurney over here. She’s to be put under immediately.”

The corridor spun around Alice wildly as the orderlies pulled her away from the wall and turned her toward the hazy white object that must’ve been the gurney. Despite her limbs refusing to respond to her commands, her captors’ fingers bit into her flesh with a surprising sting—as though the ice in her veins were real, leaving her skin hypersensitive to even the merest touch.

The men lifted her off the floor and laid her on the gurney. Their hands kept her arms and legs pinned atop it while they walked down the corridor. She stared up at the hazy, hypnotic lights, which wove strange, blurred patterns in her vision. The sounds around her—the grumbling orderlies, their heavy shoes thumping on the floor, the squeak of a wheel in need of oiling—echoed impossibly, growing louder and louder with each passing moment.

Her eyelids fluttered; she kept them open only by sheer force of will, though it made little difference—everything around her was a mess of gray and black shadows that merged with each other, separated, and retreated from the overhead lights in a nauseating cycle perpetuated by their motion.

The gurney swung around suddenly and came to an abrupt halt, making her stomach lurch. There was a beep behind Alice; she let her head loll back and looked up to see a dark door open. The orderlies wheeled the gurney through the doorway and into a room lit only by several cones of white light that wavered in her unreliable vision, each separated from its neighbors by patches of relative darkness.

The gurney turned again, granting her a view of several large objects along the wall. She blinked rapidly to clear her eyes for a moment; the long, box-like objects were all identical except for the numbers on their lids. The haze returned to her eyes.

Coffins.They’re going to bury me alive in a coffin, just like my dad was put in a coffin, and I’ll scream and scream but no one will hear me.

She blinked again, struggling to think clearly.

Coffins? No, that isn’t right. This is…this is a psychiatric hospital.

There wouldn’t be coffins in a psychiatric hospital. But then what were those boxes? What was this room?

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