A God Without Mercy: Prison Break Fic

A God Without Mercy

 

 

            My name’s Gracie Hollander, maybe you’ve heard of me.  How I was an innocent little girl living in a Chicago suburb until murderer/rapist/escaped convict Theodore “T-Bag” Bagwell showed up.  Killed my mother and stole me away. 

 

What you’ve heard is wrong. 

 

I’m no JonBenet Ramsey.  I’m whip smart, not Elizabeth Smart.  I’m not the girl you think I am.  There’s a wasteland between villain and victim.  That’s where Teddy and I call home. 

 

Teddy’s killed a lot of people (and mark my words, he’s going to kill many more), but my mother, Susan Hollander, wasn’t one of them.  Maybe, once, he’d wanted to kill her; I guess he had his reasons.  After all, she’d been his shining hope, and she’d turned him in, got him shipped off to the Fox River Penitentiary.  Three years later, he busted out and found his way to her again, but he didn’t come back to hurt her.  He came because he needed her.  I remember that morning she found him on our porch, tear-stained and blood-stained, his severed hand on ice in a freezer chest. 

 

My mama never could turn away a wounded man, never could say no to someone needing her.  She took care of Teddy.  Got him to a doctor, got him repaired.  They were together and they loved each other, for whatever that’s worth.  It didn’t last too long on account of my stupid brother, who was always jealous of Teddy, and on account of a gentleman by the name of Brad Bellick, a corrections officer who stepped beyond the boundaries of his jurisdiction and showed up at my mama’s door with a shotgun in his hand.

 

Not much to say about what happened next.  Just that when the smoke cleared, my mother was dead and Mr. Brad Bellick was sure as hell not going to take the blame.  Teddy said I should stay but I knew better.  Sometimes things happen and your life can never go back to what it was.  Gracie Hollander could never be an innocent little girl living in a Chicago suburb again.  No use pretending otherwise.

 

Teddy and I took to the road.  I was thirteen then.  We crossed the country, back and forth, forth and back a couple of times.  In the rest stops, everything seemed so generic and new.  I took to wearing homemade dresses I dug up in thrift stores.  In my handmade clothes and my long braids, I felt like Laura Ingalls Wilder gone wild as we crossed the prairie.

 

At night, in bars, I’d sing old country songs on karaoke, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, and Merle Haggard while Teddy prowled—looking for information or looking for pretty boys to make out with in the back alley or the backseat of the car. 

 

During the days, I’d drive, his head on my shoulder, his bleached blond hair ruffling in the wind.  If he’d stolen a car with a CD player, I’d play the Tori Amos album Strange Little Girls over and over.  My favorite song was “’97 Bonnie & Clyde” which was written by Eminem and was about a father and a daughter and her mother’s body.

 

“You shouldn’t listen to that,” Teddy told me.  “It’s about killing a woman, then getting rid of her and making her kid help.  I don’t think your mother would want you listening to that song.”

 

“It’s about them burying her,” I said.  “It’s about her saying good-bye.  It’s about them being together ever after.  Bonnie and Clyde.  Just like you and me, Teddy.  I’ve got to listen to it.  It gives me power.”

 

“What are you, a witch now?”

 

“That’s right.”

 

He grinned.  “Me too.”  Maybe, once upon a time, I would have told him that boys can’t be witches, but I know what Teddy is.  How he can bewitch people.  How some days he has a hand, some days a hook.  I know there’s bad magic in the two of us. 

 

I’ll be sixteen next week.  Yeah, I’m the age of some of the girls Teddy killed, but I don’t worry about that.  When my mother first died, he said to me, “I’d never hurt you, Gracies, ‘cuz you’re your own sweet mama’s child.”  He never has.  I know he never will.  No one ever will because I carry the gun.  And let me tell you, in the oil fields and forest preserves and the big empty spaces beside the highway, I’ve become quite a crack shot. 

 

Teddy doesn’t like guns.  He says they lack intimacy.  He’d rather use a knife or a razor blade.  He needs to feel it go in … he needs to be close.  I’m not like Teddy; I know the difference between love and hate.  The gun suits me fine.  If I were to meet Brad Bellick, I’d want to blow his head off, not give him a kiss.  Teddy tends to confuse one with the other.

 

Take John Abruzzi.  We’re always looking for John Abruzzi—the man who cut off Teddy’s hand.  Sometimes Teddy growls, “He’ll pay for what he did to me.”  Next thing you know, he’ll say something like, “I just want him to hold me like he did when he thought he saw Jesus.” 

 

Then there’s Michael.  Teddy tells me all about how much he hates this boy Michael.  How he’s bossy and a tease and a control freak.  How he uses people and thinks too much of himself.  How he turned his back on Teddy and left him to die.  And just when it sounds like Michael is the last person in the world you’d want anything to do with, Teddy decides that if we killed the President for him, Michael would have to give him the time of day. 

 

“You’re supposed to be a monster, Teddy,” I tell him, “but this desperate need for love’s gonna bring you down.” 

 

“Gracie girl, the need for love is just what makes me a monster,” he sighs. 

 

“Whatever you want, Teddy.  I got bullets aplenty.  One for Bellick, one for Abruzzi, one for Madame President.”

 

“Save one for me, darling,” he whispers. 

 

                “You and me both, Teddy,” I say.  And we’re on the move again, spreading the gospel of a God without mercy.