Helluva Bonus

4

Helluva Bonus

Could

you get a hangover so bad you’d hallucinate?

Gin lay on her back, one throbbing, bleeding hand flung out and the other clutched to her chest. One of her feet was bare, the other swelling inside a black heel not meant to take the kind of abuse she’d put it through. Her skirt was pushed above her knees, her tights were shredded, and her wool coat was torn. Her hair was still damp, but it didn’t seem to matter.

Her bed was green grass with finger-thick blades, and it smelled like spearmint. If she’d been drinking mojitos she could have understood that, but the huge banana-tree leaves arching over her weren’t familiar either, and they refused to go away no matter how many times she squinted or blinked, closed her eyes, counted to ten like the therapists said you should, or even held her breath.

And it was warm. Not tropical, and not as stuffy-humid as a jam-packed bar on a cold winter’s night. It was simply temperate, which would have been fine if she hadn’t just stumbled through a snowstorm. The light was wrong too, low and reddish instead of the pitiless glare of streetlamp on frozen white, or even the depthless illumination of an ice-choked afternoon.

So Gin lay very still, and thought about this.

Deep philosophical consideration wasn’t easy with the vodka boiling underneath her breastbone, but at least the urge to retch seemed to have passed. The crushed grass exhaled minty sweetness, and the reddish light didn’t sting her eyes. A faint, pleasant breeze whispered through the leaves overhead, and their dancing soothed her.

Oh, I’ve got it

. Soft, alcohol-blurred relief filled her.

I’m dreaming. Okay.

She was probably freezing to death in a snowdrift, too. You went to sleep and never woke up, the stories said. Hypothermia was one of the gentler ways to go.

Not like drowning. Oh, in literature drowning was supposed to be just fine, but medical research said otherwise.

Books aren’t everything

, Ami used to say, but then again, she’d never needed the safety of crawling into one.

Gin scrambled to sit up. She’d hit her head on the tree with the big broad leaves, and the back of her skull was tender. Maybe her brain was swelling, a nice big intracranial hematoma. Her palms were crusted with dried blood, but the scrapes didn’t look that bad. Her right knee was still oozing, though, black threads from the tights caught in shredded skin, and her other shoe was nowhere in sight.

Great

. Even in her dreams, she was a mess.

The grass was chest-high; good luck seeing anything over it. She was tempted to lie back down and let whatever this was go on without her, but she hurt all over. Her ass felt bruised and she was going to be black and blue everywhere, like after some of their nights clubbing in college. Or that one time Gin tried not to think about.

Ami was never the one who fell down the stairs.

Besides, the strange ruddy light bothered her. Gin rocked up to her only lightly wounded left knee, hissing at the pain. The grass slithered, giving like a fragrant mattress. She patted herself down, found out she still had her clutch and her dead, useless phone, and—a helluva bonus—also spotted her missing shoe lying on its side, half covered with grass and rich, loamy dirt.

She grubbed it up in short order, knocking the high heel clean and jamming it back on her right foot. With that done, she could figure out how to stand up.

If it was a dream, why the fuck did she hurt so much? Her knee wasn’t too bad now, but her tights were goners and her coat was full of dirty snowmelt.

Slight comfort that this was the way she would have expected tonight to go, tattered clothing and too much vodka included. Gin blinked furiously, gaining her balance and unfolding. If she was careful, she could just about get vertical.

When she did, though, nothing made any sense. She rubbed at her eyes with grungy fingertips, stared again.

Okay. Definitely a dream.

Only a dream would have a spot of juicy, overwhelming green in the middle of a blasted, ash-choked wilderness spread under a huge, dim, red sun that hung a few handspans above a horizon scarred with dead, twisted trees. Only a dream would show a high grey wall at the fringe of the green smear, cyclopean blocks fitted together without mortar and rearing to crenellated heights, and behind it something that couldn’t possibly be real—a strange building, fantastical towers rising to needlelike points or oddly graceful bulbs, some of them leaning at angles that ol’ building in Pisa couldn’t match.

Gin could have pinched herself, but she already hurt everywhere she could reach. If that didn’t wake her up, what would?

There was something in the vodka. Danny slipped me something.

Or maybe she was having a good, old-fashioned psychotic break. The prospect was largely comforting, though there was a significant problem.

Just like drowning, she had dreamed this before. Not the grass or the big spreading tree, but the sterile grey soil, the trees without a single dry leaf clinging to their skeletal arms, and the giant pile of stone impersonating a castle from some Salvador Dali LSD binge. And each time, she’d awakened in a gush of cold sweat, only now….

Now she wasn’t waking up.

“Oh,

shi

—” she began, but stopped halfway through, clapping her blood-crusted palm to her mouth.

The silence that followed was full of slithering and sliding, tiny crackles, and a low, grinding growl unmuffled by falling snow.

It followed me

.

Great.

Her eyes widened, her hand fell to her side, and she scrambled through the high grass with her heels punching deep divots in soft soil, not only because of the growl but because she’d seen the most wonderful, marvelous of things.

Another door.

It crouched in the wall, heavy wooden planks dark with age and varnished with only God knew what. The knob was smooth, and round, of dark metal as well, and its hinges were, again, thick with blood-colored rust.

It was also half-open.

Behind her, another low coughing growl exploded, and all the breath left her in a rush. She lunged for the door, for snow and miserable sanity, and it gave inward with a screech though the hinges were once more on the outside.

Gin plunged into darkness, expecting to trip and land face-first in snow.

Which was…not

exactly

what happened.