Wonderland (Intergalactic Fairy Tales Book 1) by Robert McKay Read Free Book Online Page B

hand. It tumbled to the concrete floor with a metallic clatter and took Alice’s hopes of escape with it.
    A few moments later the other guard arrived, limping slightly. Alice grinned while the other guard manhandled her to her feet. The limping guard stepped forward and viciously swung the metal club he carried at her ribs. Pain exploded through her chest like nothing she’d ever felt before. That wasn’t any ordinary club. She’d taken her share of falls and even broken a rib before on a particularly nasty one. The pain was terrible, but so very different from the bite of that club. It clawed through her body like a rampaging animal, bent on destroying everything in its path. All thought was impossible. The world was a red-hot blur. Her vision blurred with hot tears and her ears ached from a piercing shriek.
    After what felt like an eternity but was probably only a few seconds, the strange clawing pain of the club’s magic dissipated, leaving only the dull ache of its relatively weak physical blow. She would only have a bruise for a couple of days. Alice found her mouth was open and her throat was raw. The shriek hadn’t been something caused by the club’s magic, it had been her own howling voice.
    The guards each rubbed their ears and then gestured with their clubs for her to walk in front of them. Alice wasted no time complying. She only spared a glance for her fallen sword, apologizing mentally to her father for its loss. She’d do anything to avoid the pain promised by those horrible metal clubs.
     
     

 
     
     
    CHAPTER SEVEN
     
     
    The Red Palace holding cells weren’t at all what Alice imagined they would be. She’d pictured something dark and dank in a basement, with iron bars and stone floors. In short, she’d expected a dungeon. Instead, Alice was led by two of the cards to an elevator and taken to the fortieth floor. Neither of them spoke and Alice was too frightened to ask questions.
    They ushered her off the elevator with gentle nudges from the clubs they held in their hands. Alice lunged away from them, not wanting to feel their awful pain again. The guards laughed at her awkward wriggling. There was no pain to accompany their touch this time. It must have been something they could turn on and off. Alice turned and stared at the guards and their clubs. She noticed there was a round red button on the handles.
    One of the guards caught the path of her eyes and reached up to press the button. A wicked hum filled the elevator and he stepped forward. Alice turned around and hurried down the hallway. The guards laughed again and Alice wished for her lost sword. Clubs or not, she would make them pay for her burning humiliation.
    After a couple of turns down nondescript beige hallways, they turned into a room lined with clear plastic cells. Most held miserable looking occupants who didn’t bother to look up. It was nothing like the jails Alice had seen in the movies, where the prisoners all hooted and hollered, banging on their bars, shouting their innocence. The air in the jail room seemed heavy and oppressive. It made Alice’s skin crawl and her shoulders slump. She looked in at every prisoner as she walked past and found each of them staring blankly into the distance, except for one.
    That prisoner sat on his cot, arms wrapped around himself while he rocked slowly. He looked Alice directly in the eyes, but never stopped chanting. “Off with his head, off with his head.”
    That’s when Alice realized what she was feeling in the room that made her skin crawl: hopelessness. She’d only ever seen it in one person before. There had been a picture of a man in the news. He’d suffered some sort of mental break and been arrested for trying to jump off an overpass and into traffic. That same look was mirrored in all the faces around her. Not a single one of the prisoners expected anything good would ever happen to them again.
    “Open cell two thirty-seven,” called one of the guards. The other one