Mike Shevdon - The Road to Bedlam

"Sweetheart?"

She looked so small, so fragile, amid the destruction. My gut twisted at having come so far and failed. What kind of world would put such a gentle soul in such a place? I bent over her and placed a kiss on her forehead, brushing debris from her skin.

She was warm.

Of course she wasn't dead; what was I thinking? If she had been dead then her fey power would be released and it would consume her body, just as it would have done had the drug been administered to her.

I held her hand between mine, rubbing it firmly. "Come on, Alex, come back to me. I need you awake, now. Come on, sweetheart."

In response, her eyelids fluttered and then she began coughing, then rolled over on to her side and retched. I held her and stroked her back until the fit subsided.

"Are you with me now?"

She lay in my lap for a moment, just breathing. "Dad?"

"It's me, honey."

She raised herself on her elbows. "What happened?" She sat gingerly and began brushing dust and debris from her clothes. I got up with her and stood between her and the room. She peered sideways and I leaned to block her view.

"Is that Doctor Watkins?" It was impossible to keep her from seeing so much carnage.

"It was, sweetheart. Try not to look."

A slow smile spread across her face.

"I need to get you out of here."

I took her hand, brought her to her feet and led her carefully out between the bodies. None looked as if they were recovering. Weapons were scattered over the floor amid severed limbs and broken bodies. The stench of iron was over them all where it had been blasted into the walls and ceiling.

Where the corridor narrowed, the double doors were hanging askew from the hinges. I stood to the side, pressing Alex into the wall behind me, and leaned around the doorway. In the corridor, a black cat the size of a tiger was chewing on something that looked as if it might once have been human.

"Wait here," I said.

Walking forward slowly I edged along the corridor. The cat looked up at me, its eyes gleaming momentarily red in the dark. It growled softly, almost below the level of human hearing, and then resumed its meal. The cell with the blood smeared on the glass and the one with the young woman in it were empty, the doors wide. Had someone let them out? Beyond, the corridor was dark and appeared empty.

I went back to Alex. When I reached the place, she was stepping back over the bodies.

"What were you doing?" I asked her.

"Nothing." I could hear the lie clear in her voice.

I grabbed her hand. It was sticky and wet. Lifting both her hands in the dimness, I could see they were slick and black with blood.

"I'll ask you again. What have you been doing?"

She looked away, not meeting my eyes. It brought to mind, then, what Garvin had said: The person you get back may not be your daughter.

I had to know.

She dragged along behind me back to the room, not pulling away, but not going willingly either. When I reached it I saw what she had done. In the centre of the medical table, on the spot where she had been laid, was the head of Doctor Watkins. Sticking out of it, cleaving it partly in two, was my sword. It wasn't a clean cut the way a Warder would have done it. It had taken her several attempts. There were fragments of bloody bone and a wicked gash where an earlier attempt had failed.

I looked at it. "Why, Alex?"

She stood there, bloody hands in front of her, a defiant expression on her face.

"I asked you…" I stopped and took a deep breath, realising I was shouting.

Calming my voice, I tried again. "I asked you, why?"

She turned away and would have left the room.

"Sweetheart, I'm asking because I need to know you're OK."

She stopped, her back to me still.

"I need to know you're going to make it. So tell me, why?"

She turned slowly. In her eyes, blue fire glowed. There was a latency, a sense of something being held back, something huge. A tiny tinkling sound started, spreading through the fragments of glass until the whole area echoed with it.

"Don't tell me what to do," she said quietly.

"I'm not telling you, I'm asking you."

"You don't know. You'll never know what it was like."

"I need to know."

She stood there and slowly the tide withdrew. She bottled it up and pressed it down. The shine on her cheeks and the beads of sweat across her forehead told me what it had cost her, but the tinkling sound ceased. Then, when the glow finally faded from her eyes, she spoke.

"He would sit outside the glass and watch while they poke and prod you, trying to get a rise out of you." She shook her head, denying the memory. "They don't stop, no matter what you say, no matter how you plead."

She was breathing hard now.

"They keep going and going until you well and truly lose it and you scream and it boils up out of you."

She was gabbling, her eyes wide and unfocused, and I knew it wasn't me she was seeing.

"Or if they can't do that, they drug you so you piss and shit yourself, until you can no longer hold it, and then, when finally you let loose, they shoot you up with stuff that burns through your veins until you scream and scream. That's when they dump you back in the goldfish bowls and watch while you squirm."

She was breathing hard.

"Then, when the heat has finally gone from your veins, when the burning stops… that's when he-" She stabbed a finger at the mutilated head "-would tell them to do it all over again."

She walked over to the head and spat wetly on to the dead doctor's face. She grabbed the end of the bloody sword hilt and levered the blade out by sawing it up and down. She pried loose the blade and then hacked it down again in a heavy wet slap. Tears were running down her cheeks, but her grip was firm.

"I'm only sorry I couldn't do that to him while he was alive," she said, and hacked at it again.

I laid my hand on top of hers, "Enough, Alex. That's enough."

"It's never enough!" she shouted, her voice cracking. "Don't tell me it's enough!"

"He's dead, Alex. He can't feel anything."

"No," she said. "But I can." She let out a scream and hacked down again, and this time the head split, leaking gore on to the table, the two halves wobbling crazily, one eye staring askew out of each half.

I waited while the heavy blade swung from her hand, watching her breathe, waiting for the focus to come back into her eyes. Kneeling gently beside the rest of Watkins's body, I ripped the tail from his lab-coat. I stood and offered the blood-spattered rag to Alex.

"Wipe your hands."

She dropped the blade with a heavy clatter on the metal table and opened her palms and looked at them, smeared with gore. She did not take the rag.

"Alex, you've done what you meant to do. Wipe your hands."

She looked up, horror on her face, whether at what she had done or at what she remembered, I didn't know. Edging forward, I moved the sword out of her reach, then did my best to gently wipe what was left of Doctor Watkins off her hands. She stood there while I cleaned one hand and then the other, eyes screwed shut, tears leaking from them down her cheeks.

The sound of automatic gunfire brought her back to me. Her head jerked around at the sound.

"We have to go," I told her, picking up my sword and wiping the hilt with the remains of the rag.

She let me take her hand and lead her through the debris and bodies and out into the corridor. The big cat had gone, along with whatever it had been eating. I opened the well of power within me and wrapped us in glamour, turning eyes away and avoiding notice, extending it as far as I could to include both of us.

The corridors were strewn with slashed and broken uniformed bodies. Many of them appeared burned, with blistered faces and blackened hands. It looked as if a group of soldiers had tried to ambush Raffmir. It had clearly not gone as planned, though there was none of the finesse that Raffmir had shown before. He had simply hacked his way through them and left them to die.