Chapter Text
They always came in threes.
Three of the men in black on black body armor. Faceless monsters hiding behind pitch-dark shades and breathing masks.
I huddled in a pile with the other women, nude and shivering except for the bonds and masks forced on us. There was no way to escape the unrelenting cold. It radiated from every wall of our concrete holding cell. The lights beyond the cell’s one door were searing white after so long – how long I couldn't say – locked up in unrelenting darkness.
One of the guards always stood in the doorway blocking the way out. A red laser light shone from the gun he held, a weapon that otherwise faded into the hulking silhouette of his body.
The next stood to one side holding a gun on me and the others. Just waiting for the chance to release a spray of bullets if anyone made a rush for freedom.
They tried once. Just the once. It happened right when I was first captured and thrown in here. Four of the other women charged the door, angry cries muffled by their gags.
It was only blind luck that I wasn't one of the ones killed on the spot. Or one of the unlucky three hit by the casual spray of bullets and left where they fell.
The ones who bled to death in that dark cell.
I could still almost feel the hot copper leaking around my fingers. Putting pressure on the wound didn't do much when no help was coming.
The next time the guards arrived, they dragged away the bodies like sacks of garbage. That was the only way people got out of the cell, that or...
What the third guard did, while the other two kept order.
He grabbed women by the hair, jerking their sobbing faces up, shining a pen-light over their features. Looking for someone specific. Whoever they chose got dragged out. Sometimes the women went limp, sometimes they struggled.
Didn’t matter. They never came back.
Today the pen-light hit my face and lingered.
I knew what that meant and felt my eyes widen. The numbness I'd settled into drifted away, replaced with fresh terror.
One of the other women, the one who stroked my hair when I sobbed over a still-warm corpse, clung to my arm. It was a clumsy gesture with her hands cuffed in front of her body.
She made a sound behind her gag, a mewling kind of plea. The air reeked of piss, blood, and sweat. But, as she tried to push her body between me and the guard, a new scent added to the acrid miasma. Something I couldn’t identify, a bitter and angry smell.
I refused to beg. I wouldn't give those fucking bastards the satisfaction.
The man, the kidnapper, kicked the other woman square in the face. There was a sickening crunch.
She fell over, clutching her bloody nose, her screaming muffled but still shrill enough to sink into my bones.
He didn't spare her another look. Instead, he grabbed the thick chain connecting my collar to my cuffs and dragged me to my feet.
I was drag-marched out of the cell and down a twisty-turny set of hallways. Deep down, I believed a firing squad was waiting for me. But it turned out, I wasn’t getting out of this so easily.
There were four of us in the cell. When one died, another would be brought in, keeping the place at capacity.
The new cell should have been an upgrade. A sink and toilet, two bunk beds, stained mattresses topped with a single blanket apiece. Baggy t-shirts and elastic-waist shorts for everyone.
Light in here, instead of the unbroken dark. A cold, blue-tinged fluorescent light overhead. It was recessed in the ceiling and too high to reach.
A light that never, ever turned off. Days and nights had no meaning anymore. The fluorescent bulb made me miss the dark.
It made true sleep impossible. Instead of sleeping, I’d give in to the fever and chills racking my body. I felt like I sank under a sea of misery and came up out of the grey some unknown time later. I opened my eyes to the same view as always: a room divided by a wall of iron bars. Our beds in the cell, and the door out in the other partition. A door that had a keycard reader and no handle. Not that we had anything to use as a lock pick.
If I slept, I didn't dream. Probably for the best. The days were nightmares enough
I was by far the sickest of the four prisoners in the bright cell. The two kids, a stubbornly calm teenaged girl and delicately built younger boy, would take turns sitting with me. They'd hold my hair back when I puked in a plastic bucket, cuddling me when I shivered hard enough to rattle my teeth.
The fourth woman was new, replacing our last cellmate.
Middle-aged but muscled like a serious athlete. White-shot grey hair buzzed short. Never took her eyes off the door. If she slept, I never saw it. Not once. Her days whiled away by rocking back and forth on the mattress, bulging eyes fixed on the iron bars separating us from possible escape.
She was totally off her rocker, and she hit anyone who tried to get close or offer her kindness. So we left her alone.
The guards still came in threes. They’d take one of us but this time, those people were returned.
I don't know what they did to the others, but I'd end up strapped to a table as a doctor injected me with god knows what. Not just one or two shots. These bastards absolutely shot me up with ten injections, always to the same places.
Inner thighs just below the crotch. Inner arms just above the armpit. Wrists. Twin shots at each side of the lower neck and the final pair higher, just behind the angle of the jaw.
And then they'd bring me back with fresh needle marks and a fever burning stronger than ever.
At first it was a clear rotation. Off Her Rocker, me, the girl, the boy. Sorted by age, from what I could tell. You always knew whose turn was up by who’d been taken before.
Then the schedule changed, and I didn’t like the new trend. Three-quarters of the time, they'd be grabbing me. The youngest of the teenagers – he'd written on the wall that he was named "Harley" – sometimes also got special attention from Doctor Feelbad. The other two were basically forgotten.
The fever and aches were miserable. Being muzzled from the cheekbones down was worse. But the part I hated the most was how weirdly sensitive my sense of smell had gotten. When the masks came off, I had to brace myself for what was coming.
You can only get so clean with a torn-off square of wet blanket. The smell of fever sweat and vomit clinging to my skin and hair was bad. All the other smells hit me even worse.
The sickly sweet lemon-creamsicle clinging to Harley's hair. Kaysha's green melon-mint. The leathery musk of Off Her Rocker mingling with the metallic smell of her period, which she'd ignore. She’d just sit in the widening brown stain on her bunk, and punch anyone who offered her a rag.
The cold dust scent rising from the concrete walls and floor.
Unbearable. I never used to be so sensitive to smells. Now I wanted to smother myself in my own blanket. And none of the others even seemed to notice anything different.
They fed us in twos, when we got fed.
A Doorman blocked the open doorway, watching, gun at rest. The second guard came inside to play the part of Lunch Lady. He unlocked the metal gate in our cell long enough to lead us into the other room. We were unmuzzled and allowed to eat a tray of food off the ground, under their watchful eyes. The Lunch Lady's tactical baton ever ready to smack anyone who made a sound. It left bruises that never seemed to completely heal. And if you really made them mad, they'd use the tasers.
They hated when we tried to speak but loved to watch us cry.
The food they brought in was... weird. Plain water all day long, accompanied by the most tasteless solids I'd ever seen. Things like uncooked tofu, boiled cabbage, plain oatmeal. No salt, no sugar, no seasoning.
Today's excellent menu was white bread topped with slabs of unflavored gelatin with unsweetened applesauce on the side.
Off Her Rocker was my dining companion for the day. She shoveled in handfuls of food, never taking her eyes off the doorway with the keycode lock. Rocker didn’t acknowledge me, or react to the disgusting food, or even seem to notice the guard blocking the exit. Her eyes seemed to look through him.
I noticed she was chewing in rhythm to that incessant, back-and-forth rocking.
The guards ignored her in turn. Both their eyes were fixed on me, at least as far as I could tell through the black goggles.
The staring had started a few feedings ago, and couldn’t mean anything good. It sent shivers down my spine.
From the corner of my eyes, I saw the closer one pretend to scratch his stubbly jawline. He subtly broke the seal between his skin and his breathing mask.
Air whistled gently from the tubes that connected his breathing tank to the black device strapped to his face.
I heard him make a snuffling sound. Like his nose was stuffed up. Or maybe like a dog sniffs when he comes across something interesting.
"Crossbones called her," the other guard said, voice sounding robotic through the speaker in his mask.
It startled me. They rarely spoke except for commands like ‘you over here,’ or ‘shut up.’
“Sure, sure.” The Lunch Lady resealed his mask. But he never took his eyes off of me.
Ugh. I tried to ignore them, distracting myself with my food.
I'd never thought about what kidnapping and torture victims eat, but I wouldn't have guessed this. Because we were fed regularly, although the meals were small. And the weirdest part was, the food wasn't as awful as it could have been.
The gelatin was totally gross, of course. And yet, despite the incredible unseasoned blandness, we weren’t given bad food. Everything was freshly prepared. No mold, mouse shit, or rotting ingredients. And relatively filling for such small portions.
Every meal had a careful balance of carbs, protein, and vitamin-rich produce.
That was the real mindfuck here. Someone went to effort to make this food for us. They'd invested time and money into this weird menu. But why?
And right that moment something near our cell blew up.
Kaboooom echoed down the hall, close enough to knock us all off-balance.
Over the ringing in my ears, I heard men shouting and a scattering of gunfire. The air reeked suddenly of the men's typical gun oil and musk, but a new streak of harsh black pepper had joined the choking mix.
There was movement beside me. A bare foot caught me in the stomach.
The pain cleared some of my shock. I opened my eyes to a room hazy with smoke and dust just in time to see Off Her Rocker shove aside our Lunch Lady and make a run for the door.
The guard by the door had popped the keycard door and was staring down the hall at whatever the fuck was happening over there. But when she slipped out the doorway and past him, he raised his gun and –
Rattatat.
Close enough, and loud enough, to deafen me again.
I didn't hear the body fall. But I saw her drop out of view, only her twitching feet visible through the doorway.
For a moment, I'm back in the darkness. For a moment, I felt the lifeblood cooling under my hands.
"Watch – the kids – watch out," I gasped, or tried to. Hearing was still iffy. I got to my knees, trying to get between the remaining guard and the young ones.
I had a vague sense that they were screaming behind their muzzles. Or maybe it was the voice in my head.
The Lunch Lady clubbed me with that fucking baton before rushing to the door.
I lay there, feeling blood trickle from my scalp, blinking vaguely in the direction of the ceiling. My ears felt like they were stuffed with cotton, every sound muffled.
When my eyes uncrossed, the first thing I saw was Lunch Lady’s back. It currently blocked the doorway, some kind of weird kraken logo stretching across his frame. This was was the first time I could remember seeing one of their backs. They were usually so careful, locking us in the cell again before backing out...
Doorman was gone, maybe headed down the hall. Where things were going badly, from what I could tell over my ringing ears. It was all fuzzy shouting and crackling firepower out there.
Lunch Lady eased his head out beyond the doorjamb, back turned to me, and squeezed a few shots off. Slow and careful, taking his time to aim.
I looked at that stretch of body armor. And then at the back of his knees, which seemed pretty well protected by the reinforced ... leather? ... pants all the soldiers wore.
Then my eyes traveled up to the back of his neck. There was a thin strip of skin visible between his body armor and helmet. His darker skin looked pale and fragile against the carbon black armor.
My ears popped, and my hearing.
I could hear angry shouting from outside. Military commands interspersed with waves of bullets and explosions. And then a lull, punctuated by my raspy breathing and the kids' muffled sobs.
A man's so-assured voice rang out clearly from just down the hall. He was saying, "We can do this easy or hard. And you know our Sigma won't take it easy on you."
"Fuck you and fuck that traitor!" the Lunch Lady shouted back. "Hail Hydra!"
He stuck his rifle out of the doorway and fired off a few blind shots. Not being nearly so careful anymore.
More gunfire took up his lead, coming from both directions.
I cringed backwards, hands over my aching ears.
The gunfire suddenly died down to a few random shots from my end of the hallway. I watched the Lunch Lady smoothly eject a clip from his gun and fit another in its place.
"Well alright." The commanding voice down the hall didn't even sound angry. Just... amused. "If you want it the hard way, I'll let the White Wolf off his chain."
My eyes widened. That sounded pretty bad.
Also bad: the smoke seeping in through the open door. It curled around the guard's figure, as if he needed any help to look sinister.
Lunch Lady twitched and touched the radio built into his helmet. A faint, buzzy voice came through.
"Copy that," he answered. Then he kicked the door closed behind him.
The lock clicked, keypad glowing red. And just like that, we were locked away from the chaos outside. And locked in with the guard.
He looked at me again. Really looked this time, not just keeping an eye on me in case I made trouble.
I watched him peel back the edge of his mask again, taking another whiff of the air.
"Awaiting extraction,” he told his radio. “Bring a crate." He tilted his head, the fluorescent light skating across his goggles and shiny helmet, and looked over at the children huddled in their bunk. "Only need the one."
"Please," I whispered, and my voice died in my throat. Because what was I begging for? For the kids to come with me to some worse future? Or be left here at the mercy of the mystery man with the bombs and his wolf?
"Something tells me you aren't as sweet as you smell," the Lunch Lady said. "But we'll find out in the cage. Now put this back on."
He kicked my muzzle at me.
I threw my arms up on instinct, protecting my face. The muzzle bounced off and knocked it into the tray of food still on the ground.
"It'll fit just as well over a broken jaw," he threatened me. He dropped his hand to the handle of that baton I'd gotten to know up close and personal.
The fever I never managed to shake was rising up, throbbing in my bloodstream. I could smell the guard so clearly, sweat and smoke and bitter musk.
Over the sounds of distant shouts, screams, and gunfire, I heard the kids behind me. They were taking faint, hiccuping breaths as they fought not to sob.
I crawled forward, pretending to grab the muzzle.
Instead, I caught the edge of the tray and whipped it at the guard's face.
Various half-eaten items spattered his chest, legs, and the wall behind him. But I also got lucky. The applesauce splatted across his mask.
He shouted, staggering back against the wall, squeezing off a random burst of gunfire.
The bullet whizzed over my shoulder, right past my ear. Immediately followed by muffled shrieking. High-pitched, like small animals being tortured.
I thought the awful sound came from me. Then that sweet citrus smell in the room was tainted by bright copper.
Time seemed to slow.
Oh god, he shot the kids.