The Queen of Cats

Chapter 5: I Am Your Alice and You Are My Queen

This chapter is dedicated to @raindrop_on_roses627, an excellent writer with a talent for writing lovely prose. Her story Between Breaths is beautifully crafted and deserves a ton of reads. Check it out when you can. 

"Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future."

― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

My dreams were loud and disgusting. My sensorium eddied and bucked in a steady stream, a current of memories (memories?) and fantasies. I was cut off from the whole thing. Like I was a hawk, adrift in the air currents above my own dreramscape. I started counting seconds, using time as some kind of fervent, desperate anchor to reality.

Then I realized I didn't believe in reality any more.

The dream lasted exactly six hundred and sixty seven minutes.

When I woke up, a little man was hovering around me, dressed in a sordid wife-beater. He was old. He did not lecherous, which was a relief. I was in an underground cavern of some kind, propped up against a cave wall. Bars blocked the exit, with a little electronic card-scanner making sharp little red beeps at its corner. My leg was patched tightly in gauze. I could feel the sharp prickle of ointment below the thin cotton. It hurt, but not excessively.

"Rubber bullets." The old man said. He was fiddling with a rubiks cube. "That's why it doesn't hurt so much. The bandages and stuff are all good?"

I nodded. "Did you patch me up?"

He grunted. "You were squirming around a bit too much, and I had supplies to spare."

"Thank you." I told him.

He went back to his rubiks cube.

"Where are we?" I asked him.

"The Yakuza keep. Pleasant sort of place, if you don't mind the dark. Security detail is polite enough. Food is good. Bit too salty sometimes, but you'll get used to that. What's your name?"

"Priyanka Chopra." I told him.

"Huh. So creative."

I squinted at him in the dark, the only light coming from a warm, orange bubble lamp above us.

"How did you get here?" I asked him.

The man sighed. "Because I promised a man I'd do something and I didn't do it. And now I've destroyed the world."

I raised my eyebrows. He looked at me and gave a little chuckle. "Hungry? Thirsty?"

"Not really."

He turned from his rubik's cube to look at me. "I've seen you before."

"Where?" I asked him.

"I can't seem to remember."

He shook his head. "Doesn't matter. Listen, when your leg gets better, you're going to have to start exercising. You've got to keep fit. It's pretty bloody easy to get flabby over here."

I stretched my body. "I'm locked up here."

"Obviously."

"For how long?"

"Till you die."

I yawned. "Whatever." I went to sleep.

"Get up!" the old man said. "They want to see you."

I got up. I stretched a bit, washed my face and walked up to the bars at the mouth of the cavern.

The door was open. The man in the brown T-Shirt was there at the doorway, gun in hand.