Jim once told Alice to always carry his backup badge in her purse if she ever wanted to meet him in the lab without going through all the bother of signing in with the security guard for admittance. She swiped the badge through the reader at the employee entrance that Friday and walked in.
Alice entered the lab and walked towards Jim.
“Hi Alice,” Jim said when he saw her enter the lab. “What a great surprise. I can’t wait to tell you some wonderful news!”
Although livid inside, she feigned happiness to see him and threw her arms around his neck. She knew there might be the scent of another woman still clinging to him but was still shocked and enraged to smell the fading traces of Gabriella’s perfume. Alice’s emotions spiked. She screamed at the top of her lungs and pushed Jim away with all her strength, sending him across the lab floor, banging into a nearby tool bench.
The pain, betrayal, embarrassment, and hurt of past years came crashing together in one gigantic tsunami irresistibly washing over her. She was swept away by its strength and power. Her rage built to heights she had never known before. It possessed her, and she willingly rode the towering wave of hate, venom, and vengeance spewing from her heart. It was refreshing. It was powerful. It was irresistible, and a piece of her flushed with evil pleasure as she gave herself over entirely to the maniacal rage within. She finally felt in control. She finally felt powerful.
Jim tried to explain he had once and for all broken it off with Gabriella. Alice screamed, “Gabriella, so that’s the bitch’s name!” She might have screamed it out loud, but could no longer tell if it was her mouth or her head screaming. Jim trying to explain yet another set of lies poured gasoline on her volcano.
Alice was momentarily startled as she saw the world in front of her flash a bright red as she jumped willingly from insane rage into full insanity itself. She was looking through a tunnel at the scene in front of her, seeing it through fiendish eyes, yet still inside her body. The rage enveloped her, and her fury coalesced into its own being. It surrounding and encased her as an outer shell from the pit of hell. Her hand moved of its own accord and picked up a long screwdriver from the tool bench.
Jim looked at her in alarm. In her crazed state, she was too fast for him to parry the blow. She plunged the screwdriver deep into his chest with both hands, giving it a twist before yanking it back out. Jim’s eyes opened wide with disbelief in the brief moment before he dropped to the floor. Blackness came quickly. He remembered Harry saying even though we are forgiven in heaven, we still might have to pay the price on earth. He knew he just paid the price. The last word his mind screamed before intense blackness engulfed him was ‘Lord.’
Alice looked at Jim lying on the floor, the deep crimson spreading across his lab coat, and immediately regretted her action. The blind rage subsided, and the demons within her which screamed out their hate, were now taunting her for giving in to their demonic will to destroy. They had accomplished their mission.
The voices slowly faded. She was becoming Alice again and realized she had murdered her husband in cold blood. There was no going back. She saw she could have saved their marriage. They could have talked things out. She knew she could have at least listened to what Jim was trying to tell her.
The hopes and dreams she once had in earlier days for healing the troubled union, for scraping the ground clean between them and starting over, and moving forward with a happy life together in old age were now gone forever. She had never felt such all-encompassing pain in her life. The demonic raging high dropped off into a bottomless pit of despair.
With her mind going a thousand different directions at once, she hurried out of the building and numbly walked the several blocks to the subway station. Alice stood on the edge of the platform, cold, dead inside, and with an unbearable sense of despair. No matter what the outcome, she knew her life would never be normal again. There was no way out. There was no peace. There was no hope. “No hope at all,” she said in a whisper as the train approached the platform. “No hope at all,” she repeated as she took the single step bringing her into the fiendish black yaw of eternity in front of the subway train.