To Hell and Back
an excerpt

A few hours later…and maybe he was falling asleep, because a part of Alec jerked awake. Creak. Oh. He had been asleep. He sat up and watched Lani go over to the door.

“Hello?” said a voice on the other side. Alec rolled his eyes. He knew exactly who it was.

“Could you pretty please open the damn door?”

Lani looked to Alec in question. Alec nodded. Open the door…at your own risk. Lani opened it. October Hall stood on the other side, wearing a pair of flannel pajama pants and an orange hooded sweatshirt. He had his headphones around his neck and he held a CD player in his hands.

“What are you listening to?” Alec asked from across the room.

“Megadeth dun dun dun,” said October. “You wanna listen?”

Alec shook his head. “No thanks, kid. I don’t like that kind of music.”

October shrugged, and said, “your loss. So what’s goin on, here? Did I miss the invitation to a sweet party?”

Alec rolled his eyes. Lani went back to where he had been sleeping.

“No, you didn’t miss the ‘sweet party’. You didn’t miss anything.” Alec rolled his eyes once again. “I had another--”

“Oh, hay, guess what?” October said, bouncing up and down. Then he stopped and stared at Alec dead on. Alec shrugged. Go on. “I had a really bad nightmare.”

Alec cocked his head to the side. “Oh.” Dreading the response, he asked, “so, uh…what was it about?”

“There were lines and lines of people…they looked like they were in prison or something, I think…the whole idea of the barren wasteland I think I told you about before was there, too…or maybe that was Dwayne (yeah, I think it was….). Someone kept counting then, over and over again. It got darker and darker. Then that stopped…and I saw a little girl with brown hair, except everything else was in black and white, y’know? It was like that movie…uh…”

“Schindler’s List?” Lani supplied.

October nodded and went on. “Yeah, that movie. Where the girl was in the red coat, but everything else was black and white. So it faded away….I saw a girl behind a table wearing the same kind of uniform…the black and white stripes…so I saw her, and that faded out as well…that faded out as well to…to a pile of bodies. And the girl with the brown hair…she was on the pile…”

Alec sat there…he felt his eyes closing once again. Falling asleep. Something he didn’t want to do…yet it was so dreamlike, the way October was talking. It just lulled him…to…

A girl behind a table. She had no hair, her bald head was covered by a cap. She stared sunken eyed into the sea of faces, all women’s.

“You--” she pointed at a woman in the crowd. “Come here, what is your number?”
The woman refused to move. “I said, come here. What is your number?” with more force, that time.

The woman approached the girl.

“Give me the slip of paper. Wat ist du--” She grabbed the slip of paper from the woman’s hand, looked at it, took her arm, and started the painful process of tattooing the number in. “Don’t worry,” she said. “This is absolutely nothing to the hell there.”

Tears ran down the woman’s cheeks. “Oh god,” she said.

“God?” the girl laughed sarcastically. “Where is GOD? God left. God can’t stand this filthy place, this piece of shit. He left a long time ago. So you can stop praying to him, now.”

One to the barracks…to the camps, another one to the gas. One to the camp, another to the gas. And that was the way it worked, there. Again.

“Wat ist du number?” she asked the next person, who stood in line, sobbing quietly. “I said, WAT IST DU NUMBER?”

And the woman held out her arm, the girl tattooed another number. Tears ran down the woman’s face.

“Ohhh…” she sobbed to herself. The girl looked at her with scorn. She slapped the woman’s cheek.

“You will never do that again, understand? You are in AUSCHWITZ now…the only way out of Auschwitz is through that chimney…”

Alec woke up. AUSCHWITZ…you are in AUSCHWITZ, now…