A Cruel Tale

Someone must have been following her for some time, because one morning while out shopping in Suntec, they came up behind her and jabbed her in the small of the back with a taser. The jolt spurted through her voluntary nervous system, and she crumpled bonelessly to the floor. Her attacker pocketed the taser - disguised as a cellphone - and bent down over her: her body had hidden it from view and none of the other shoppers in the mall had noticed the assault. Before her dazed and swimming eyes, he seemed like just another mall security guard; at first she could not even connect him with the shock in her back. Then another couple joined him, a man and a woman, just ordinary shoppers. The man bent down over her too, and announced, a little loudly, "It's her asthma: she'll be fine once she has her inhaler. He held a plastic tube to her face and squeezed, and a stinging spray forced its way up her mouth and nose.

 

The effects of the taser seemed to deepen. Her eyes reeled in her head and she found she could not focus on anything or move her arms beyond a vague hesitant brushing. Solicitous hands helped her to her feet, the man and woman supporting her between them, followed by the security guard. Half carrying her as her rubbery legs pushed vainly at the floor, they bustled her towards the nearest exit. The other shoppers peered at her, some sympathetic but most staring with shock and distaste. A warm spreading dampness between her legs told her why, and as her head lolled and flopped on her neck, she got one confirming glance: the taser shock had made her lose bowel control, and a yellow trail of piss was seeping out through her panties and out from under her demure little skirt, down her legs. Almost mercifully, her captors bundled her out through a side door and into the back seat of a dark SUV pulled up by the pavement outside.

 

The "security guard" made a show of seeing them off, shut the door, and walked away. The woman on her right fiddled in her bag as the man on her left took her wrists. She tried to say something, struggle, protest as the car pulled out, but everything was so confusing, difficult and dreamlike. Her mouth opened, but all that came out was a sigh and a little drool. Her head drooped and her chin rested on her chest: she felt a tight pain round her wrists and saw that the man had bound them together with a plastic strip tie, the kind used on cardboard boxes. A sting in her thigh and she rolled her eyes with an effort to see the women deftly inject her with some clear liquid from a small thin hypo. The fogginess in her vision darkened and thickened into a whirling tunnel that sucked her in with a rushing sound in her ears, and the last thing she felt before the darkness swallowed her completely was the man gently prising her thighs apart to wipe up the rank-smelling piss with a wad of menthol tissues.

 

The darkness cleared occasionally. At one point, she felt herself being hauled out of the SUV and into another vehicle, somewhere quiet and deserted in the open. She pulled weakly at her bonds with the little strength of will she could still muster, but the tough plastic just dug into her wrists, and her abductors carried her more quickly, and dropped her into a warm windowless padded space in what seemed to be the back of a van. There the drone of the engine lulled her and she soon fell asleep.

 

When her eyes opened again, she was more herself, and at least able to see clearly what was around her. But it did her little good, because all she saw were bright steel bars less than a foot in front of her face and, between the bars, clinical white tiles and brushed metal surfaces, unnervingly like a TV crime drama path lab. The cramped discomfort that had woken her worsened: she swiveled her head round to see that the long rectangular cage was only a few inches wider than her body on both sides, and no higher than a human waist. On the floor of the cage was a coarse mat, but there was no room for her to lie down unless she curled up with her knees close to her chin, and she realized that her wrists and ankles were somehow shackled to the sides of the cage, holding her on all fours, while some kind of brace went round her waist. Also, she realized that someone had removed her clothes while she was unconscious, and she was now completely naked.

 

Chilled suddenly, despite the antiseptic ambient temperature of the air-conditioned room, she opened her mouth to shout, but found she could only produce a muffled wordless panting. Somehow the back of her throat felt numb, and she could not make something back there do what she wanted it to. Really scared now, she began frantically to rattle her cage, from side to side, pulling at the round steel shackles. That brought results, but not welcome ones. A woman's heels clicked across the lino floor towards her, and heaving her head over one shoulder, she glimpsed a thin middle-aged face under a greying perm that eyed her dispassionately through slender horn-rims. The woman reached down between the bars and grasped the back of her neck with long fingers: firmly enough for the nails to dig into her skin, but not hard enough to really hurt, chiding rather than cruel. Then the hand let go, and a shock hit her in the side like a fist, and she gasped as her body tried to double up around it, only bringing more pain to her wrists and ankles. It was like the taser shock only infinitely worse, and with no merciful fainting. She crouched panting for some minutes, squinting the tears out of her eyes, and saw the woman's other hand cross her field of view holding a small black baton with two silver contacts at the tip.

 

Not daring to shake the cage again, she gazed petrified at the woman, afraid to take her eyes off her. But then she heard more footsteps from the other side of the room, more solid, a man's. The two adults moved to stand either side at the head of her cage. She blinked up at them, red-eyed. They looked like assistant principals or school inspectors: authoritative but anonymous, white, middle-aged, dispassionate. The woman wore a black tight-cut suit; the man was dressed in a coat cut like a white coat but in the dark blue cloth of workmans' coveralls. Neither had been among her abductors. They paused for a moment, gazing down at her coolly, then the woman bent down and, as she cringed away, did something with a catch on the front of the cage. With a faint clank, the whole front swung open.

 

She had been terrified to find herself in the cage: now she cowered back inside it as the woman reached in with firm, capable hands and took her by one upper arm and a collar round her neck that she had been too distracted to pay much attention to. That solid grip acted more to quiet her as the man unclipped steel snap hooks securing her shackles to the cage bars so her limbs were free again for the first time since her kidnapping. The woman let go of her forearm and tugged at her by a ring on the back of her collar, pushing her long dark hair out the way to get a firmer hold, taking the remote from a skirt pocket and holding it meaningfully in front of her eyes. Painfully, sniffling as the circulation returned to her cramped limbs, she crawled out of the cage.

 

Outside, with her hands and knees resting on the cold floor, she noticed that short flat-linked hobble chains ran between her wrists and her ankles, making it impossible for her to move them very far apart. Without the steel bars around her, she felt so exposed that her skin spontaneously puckered up in goose bumps. The threat of the shock baton left her cowed and frozen, but she instinctively shrank away from the man. He rested one hand on her flank while the woman bent down and clipped a chain leash to a ring on the collar below her chin. She tried whimpering plaintively: it had no effect. Man and woman both grabbed her bodily and hoisted her up on to the top surface of a cold ceramic slab.

 

On the table, the man used some kind of screw catch arrangement to fasten her shackles to one rim, so that she was held down on her side in a fixed semi-foetal crouch. The chill ceramic made her gooseflesh worse, and she wriggled and whined, craning her head up to try to meet her handlers' eyes, mouth open in that dry-throated pointless mewling. But her captors might have been even more mute than her for all the noise they made, as they busied themselves around her like poulterers stuffing a goose. The man took a fistful of her hair and held her head down with it, forefinger extended to rest lightly, warningly on the nape of her neck. Meanwhile, the woman seized her still not fully mature breasts and palpitated them, squeezing the rugose nipples hard and smoothing them both flat with the heel of a palm. It was like a gynae examination back in the girls' clinic, but the sudden shock of it in that setting made her jerk and almost lunge against her bonds. The man's hand tightened, and the woman's fingernails tweaked her nipples sharply, before those hands left her breasts and glided downwards, pausing to press at her bulging bladder. Then they squeezed between her legs and pinched the lobes of her cunt.

 

With a bizarre unvoiced yelp, she really did lunge this time, only to have her head forced down by the man. The woman moved around behind her and pushed a finger up her crack. She squirmed, but the icy penetrating presence was still there, feeling colder inside her than the tabletop. Now she started panting again, faster and faster until she was hyperventilating hysterically with the man's hand clutching her neck. All the time the woman's finger probed deftly inside her, past where the absent hymen would have been, touching the entrance to her cervix. Then it withdrew and slid gently up her perineum over the short distance to her anus. She froze as the slightlę moistened nail tentatively twisted back and forth for a second, then it pushed steadily in. She bucked once more, straining to get away from the invading finger, but the man's grasp on her neck prevented her from using even the small degree of movement she had. The woman withdrew smoothly, and the hand let go of her neck as both adults stepped back from the table. Then the savage shock hit her again, for longer this time. Her limbs locked, tears burst from the corners of her eyes, and her mouth opened in a gasping worldess scream that continued long after the current had stopped.

 

Quickly, the man reached forward and pushed a plastic ring like a tubular pacifier into her open mouth. Now she could make even less sound, and she bit at the hard plastic fruitlessly. The woman took a long perspex dropper pipette from a trolley by the table and sucked up a few cc's of a clear fluid from a glass jar. Then, as the man held her nose between two fingers and her jaw in his other hand, the woman threaded the pipette carefully through the plastic ring and to the back of her throat. She froze again, terrified of breaking off the tube inside her windpipe, and noticed that both of their hand smelled of some sanitary chemical, with the faint trace of her sex on the woman's fingers. The woman squeezed the rubber bulb on the far end of the pipette, and she felt that strange numbness at the back of her throat spread and deepen a little, realizing now how much sensation had already faded from there. The woman slid the pipette out and put it back on the tray.

 

The man opened her mouth a little wider, and pulled the ring back out. This time, she lay passively and let him, petrified that she might get another shock. He unfixed the catches securing her shackles to the table, took her in his arms, the starchy cotton of his blue coat scratching her bare skin slightly, and lifted her down. She hung in his arms for a moment in a curled-up dead-dog posture, and he had to shake her to make her put her arms and legs down to stand on all fours again. All the while, the woman held the other end of the leash clipped to her collar, letting it hang slack.

 

Once she was back on all fours, the man produced a glass bottle with a long bent metal spout, the kind used on rabbit hutches, and held it to her mouth. She was too thirsty to refuse, and sucked at it eagerly enough. The water had an impure, brackish taste, and she wondered in passing what was in it, but she thought also that if she swallowed enough, it might wash away the stuff at the back of her throat. The woman watched them both impassively, holding the leash. The man tilted up the bottle a little more, almost like a mother feeding a baby, then lifted it away.

 

The woman waiting for a short but seemingly calculated moment, like the pause before a movement in music, then gave a sharp tug on the leash, and she crawled forward, forced to follow, with the man pacing her at her side, his fingers idly trailing along her spine. Throughout her whole ordeal, they had never once exchanged a word between each other. The woman led her along the floor, the hard smooth epoxy harsh on her knees, giving her a groin-level view of more tables, steel trolleys and bare white walls. Then they stopped outside a white-painted door. The woman turned the steel knob and pushed it open, still holding the leash, and flicked a switch to one side. Strip lights blinked and flickered into life in the room beyond. As the woman tugged her forward into it, she saw that it was a more basic, crudely finished cell, with red distemper on the walls and a wet smell, with the drip drip of water from a brass faucet ringing off the walls.

 

The woman pulled her over towards one wall, the rougher cement scuffing her knees, where she noticed a line of oval holes in the floor. In front of each hole was a big steel ring, fixed to a bracket secured by large tough-looking bolts. With a sideways tug, the woman dragged her over the nearest hole and looped the end of the leash through the ring. Another tug, and the leash pulled her head down closer to the floor, forcing her to bend her arms outwards and spread her knees. She could feel a slight cold draught coming up through the hole, breathing on the inside of her legs. The man stood beside her and gave her a single gentle yet insistent push in the small of her back.

 

She shrank from acknowledging what they wanted her to do, quivering and whimpering. With a single short exasperated sigh, the woman bent down and reached past her midriff, gently massaging her distended bladder. A drop or two of piss squeezed out of her urethra, warm and itching. She tried to clench her hips, shutting out the intrusion, while the woman kept up the tension on the leash. Off on one side, the man slipped away quietly and came back with something like a bloated hot water bottle with a plastic hose hanging from the bottom.

 

She cringed as he disappeared behind her: the tension on her collar kept her from lifting and turning her head. There was a soft slurping sound, then a sudden tingling pressure around her anus. He was coating her arse with some kind of cool smooth paste. She gasped and jerked forward as a lubricated fingertip slipped inside and started insinuating itself into her tightly shut sphincter, cramming in dollops of the paste that eased its entry. No matter how she tried to squeeze it out, his finger slid in; it was like a bizarre backwards version of trying to catch a greased pig. Finally he seemed satisfied and withdrew, and she relaxed a bit in relief despite herself, only to feel a hard round thing push at her softened hole.

 

She writhed and struggled, but the leash held her. The plastic nozzle, oiled up and slightly warmed, slipped snakelike inside her, pushed with measured, unrelenting pressure by the man. Mouth agape in a dry-throated half-muted howl, she shook her hips from side to side, trying to dislodge it, but the pressure kept up, unimpeded, sliding the tube further into her. Powerless to stop it, she felt separated from her own body, a prisoner in a meatspace she could no longer will or alter. Then a sensation like an audible thud pulled her back, as some kind of flange or thickening brought the tube up short against her arse. Her trembling hips pivoted round the intruder as she fought against the ghastly stretched sensation, in vain. She half saw, half felt the shadow of the man's arm raised above her, heard inchoate barely audible noises, then felt something thick and oily run down the tube into her.

 

The pressure of the liquid, the odd heavy feeling, quietened her struggles, but she started to sob, tears stinging her eyes and dropping onto the cement. The woman kept her head low to the ground, well below her hips, as more and more of the fluid filled her. At least it was close to body temperature, but all the same her guts started to cramp and spasm painfully, trying to expel it and the hose. The man did something and the flow stopped. Then he slid the nozzle out of her in one smooth motion, as the woman reached under her flanks and massaged her bursting guts. There was no stopping the spasms, and she sobbed brokenly as the oily mixture of fluid and half-dissolved shit spurted out of her, soiling the edges of the hole. The woman kept running a hand down her stomach until every last stool was expelled. Then the man wiped her clean with a wet cloth.

 

Dazed and in shock, she was hardly able to move by herself, let alone resist, as they led her out of the room and back to her cage. They backed her into it by half reaching through the bars and pulling her limbs, then secured the shackles again on either side. After that, they simply turned and walked out of the room, turning off the lights as they went. Her throat and anus both felt dry and raw, and she had a raging thirst. Crouched in the dark and bound in place, with her guts still aching and cold sweat glueing her straggling hair to her face and back, despite her position chained in the cage, she somehow managed to cry herself to sleep.