by Smith, Bryan
She wanted to scream.
Then the nurse in blue scrubs she’d seen earlier came back into the infirmary. She was pushing a medical cart, one with multiple cabinets. A tall, thin woman in heels and a white lab coat also came into the infirmary. Beneath the lab coat, this woman wore a blue dress. It had a plunging neckline and the hem reached her knees. She wore wire-rim glasses and had short, curly brown hair. Clutched in her right hand was a clipboard, attached to which was what looked like a single sheet of paper. She studied whatever was written on it as she followed the nurse down the aisle between the rows of beds.
The nurse parked the cart at the foot of Sally’s bed. She opened its top drawer and began sorting through items Sally couldn’t see, though imagining what they might be did nothing to calm her already highly agitated nerves. The doctor—or the woman Sally assumed was a doctor—also stopped at the foot of the bed and continued to study the sheet of paper attached to the clipboard.
After a seeming eternity, the woman in the lab coat smiled and approached the head of the bed. She turned the clipboard so Sally could read what was written on the sheet of paper. Sally frowned as she read through the single brief paragraph.
She frowned. “What? Seriously?”
The woman in the lab coat nodded. “You complained of a pain in your hand. The right one, correct?”
Sally’s frown deepened. “Um…”
For months she had been experiencing occasional twinges in her right hand. Joint pain. She figured it was the first symptom of arthritis. It was annoying, but nothing that was too debilitating. At least not yet. She had talked about it just once, in the cafeteria at lunchtime just last week. There had been no guards or other prison staff within earshot at the time, so how this woman knew about it mystified her.
The woman gave her a disapproving expression. “Answer the question. Was the pain you experienced in your right hand?”
“It was the left hand.”
This was a lie.
The pain was in her right hand. Sally, however, was right-handed, and she had been seized by a conviction that being truthful in this situation was against her best interests.
The woman in the lab coat smirked. “Are you quite sure about that, inmate?”
Sally swallowed a lump in her throat and nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Yes, I am.”
The woman smiled. “That is not the information I have, but I suppose it could be in error. Very well, then, we’ll begin our therapeutic efforts with your left hand.”
She thumbed a button on the side of the bed, causing the back of it to tilt upward. The woman kept her finger on the button until Sally was in a sitting position. Sally glanced at the nurse, who was no longer sorting through items in the cart. She was younger than the maybe-doctor and pretty. She pulled on latex gloves and smiled at Sally in a way she might have interpreted as comforting if not for the swastika pinned to her top. Something in the way the emblem was displayed made Sally sure it was worn with pride.
Which, to say the least, did not seem like a positive indicator.
The maybe-doctor snapped the clipboard across Sally’s face, making her cry out in shock and pain. The woman screamed at her: “Look at me!”
Sally whimpered. “Y-yes, ma’am. I’m s-s-sorry.”
“Shut up!”
Sally opened her mouth to apologize again, but she quickly closed it.
The woman nodded. “Good. Submissiveness is recommended. You are weak and worthless. Do you not agree?”
Sally said nothing. She’d been told to shut up.
The woman rolled her eyes. “You may answer.”
Sally managed a single, trembling nod. “Yes, ma’am. I am weak and worthless.”
The nurse, now holding a large syringe, moved to the side of the bed opposite the maybe-doctor and plunged the needle into Sally’s upper arm.
Sally flinched, yelping weakly.
The maybe-doctor smiled. “Nurse Collins is administering a powerful local anesthetic. In a short time, your left arm will become completely numb. This is to render you compliant for the necessary therapeutic procedure.”
True to what the woman said, Sally’s arm became entirely numb in just over a minute. The feeling extended slightly beyond her arm, into her shoulder and the left side of her chest and back.
The nurse dropped the spent hypo in an orange bucket at the side of the bed and returned to the cart. She knelt and removed something from a bottom drawer. She then stood up slowly, carefully hoisting a large glass jar filled with a noxious-looking green liquid. The nurse seemed wary of the jar’s contents, holding it delicately by the handles despite its firmly shut lid. She set the jar atop the cart and removed the lid, unleashing a toxic smell that made Sally’s eyes water.
The woman in the lab coat said, “My name is Dr. Woronov. I graduated near the top of my class from Harvard and I worked for many years at one of the top trauma centers in Manhattan. You are in capable hands, I assure you.”
Sally glanced at Dr. Woronov. “What’s in that jar?”
The doctor smiled. “A magical, healing elixir.”
Tears leaked from Sally’s eyes. “Really?”
Exchanging a glance, Dr. Woronov and Nurse Collins laughed and failed to answer the question. The nurse wheeled the cart into place next to the bed. She undid the cuff encircling Sally’s left wrist, took hold of her limp hand, and began to guide it toward the jar.
Sally began to blubber. “Please don’t. Please…”
Dr. Woronov scowled. “I believe you told an untruth earlier, didn’t you? About which hand was troubling you, I mean. But that’s okay. I forgive you. Hush, now, no need to scream quite so loudly. You would have soon felt those early onset arthritis twinges in your left hand, as well, so we might as well treat both of them.”
Sally continued to scream as Nurse Collins dipped her fingers into the disgusting green liquid. It was something highly corrosive, some kind of powerful acid. The fleshy parts of her fingers dissolved upon contact, diluting the green with plumes of bright red. Though she couldn’t feel it, she knew the bones beneath the flesh dissolved just as easily.
Nurse Collins’s eyes were wide with something very close to sexual delight. She licked her lips as she lowered Sally’s hand deeper into the jar. She did this slowly, inch by inch, though it was clear the acid was capable of dissolving her hand at a much faster rate. The reason for this was simple and obvious—to prolong the mental anguish of the experience for Sally.
She stopped, finally, when Sally’s hand had been dissolved to the wrist. The stump had been cauterized by the acid. Nurse Collins flipped the mutilated arm away from her and it thumped down on the thin mattress. The remaining trace amount of acid ate a hole through the bedsheet.
Dr. Woronov laughed. “How are you feeling, Sally? Any better?”
Sally mewled pitifully.
Then she mustered the strength for another scream.
Dr. Woronov nodded. “Oh, good. Still with us. Nurse Collins, do what you need to do.”
The mad doctor moved out of the way as her underling came around to the other side of the bed. Clutched in the pretty nurse’s right hand was a fresh syringe.
5.
This room was easily the smallest of the several she’d been shuffled through thus far. Its dimensions were roughly the equivalent of a police interrogation room. Jessica suspected it served a similar purpose. The room was sparsely furnished, with just a small rectangular table at its center. Two chairs on one side of the table, just one on the opposite, where she was seated.
The chair was bolted to the floor and the shackles around her wrists and ankles were tightly affixed to its sturdy steel frame. She had some small range of motion available to her upper body, but otherwise she was absolutely immobilized. Jessica craned her head around, taking in as much of the room as she could from her restricted vantage point. Given the room’s small size, this was actually quite a bit of it, not that there was much to see.
She sat facing a metal door with no window. A Nazi flag adorned the wall to her left. The flag was the room’s only wall decoration. Though she couldn’t see the wall directly behind her, she knew it was blank from her initial entry into the room.
There was nothing new to see. She was looking again only out of boredom. Approximately a half hour had passed since the guards had shackled her to this chair and walked out of the room, closing the door behind them. She wasn’t surprised to have been left alone. It was a standard tactic of psychological manipulation. Leaving her unattended was a way of emphasizing her utter helplessness. Her captors had total control of her, was what this said, and there was nothing she could do about it, even when no one was directly monitoring her.
Jessica knew this because she’d employed similar tactics in the past. She also was certain the unmonitored aspect wasn’t true. Though she hadn’t spotted it yet, she was sure there was a camera in here somewhere, likely a very small one, and somewhere out there someone was observing her on a screen. This was why she chose not to unduly fidget or test her bonds. There was no point. She would be watched from afar and studied until someone came in to interact with her directly.
At last, after about an hour alone in the room, the door directly across from Jessica opened. A tall woman with platinum blonde hair entered and closed the door behind her. She had the build of a porn star or stripper, with long, shapely legs and large breasts. Her hair was long and straight, hanging well past her shoulders. The woman’s face was attractive, its sharply angled planes making her look almost too perfect, like an airbrushed vision of a circa 1970s ideal woman. One of your dad’s Playboy centerfold models come to full, breathing life was basically what this woman was. Even her faux-SS uniform contributed to this impression, with the short, tight black skirt and high-heeled black boots making her look more like the sexy Halloween version of an SS officer than the real thing. Clutched in her hands was a pair of black rubber gloves.
The woman’s heels clicked on the floor tiles as she came around the table to stand next to Jessica. She dropped the gloves on the table and said nothing, just stood there, staring down at her prisoner. Jessica knew this was another intimidation tactic. Despite this, she was getting the slightest bit tired of being played with by these people. She tilted her head up to stare into the woman’s sneering face.
“Are you a hooker? Because you look sort of like a hooker. You know, the kind who specializes in catering to men with kinky tastes. Nazi fetishes, for instance.”
The woman whipped a hand across Jessica’s face, striking her hard enough to sting. She said nothing, surprisingly. There were no threats, no admonition against speaking. She just continued to stand there, staring down at Jessica with that sneer on her face.
Jessica grimaced, working her jaw a bit. “Ouch. You pack quite a wallop. I’m impressed.”
Again, the woman said nothing.
Jessica was disappointed with herself. The quip about the woman looking like a hooker, while not inaccurate, was a glaring slip in her self-discipline. She needed to do exactly what this woman was doing, just be quiet and wait, showing no outward signs of disturbance or distress until the reason for her presence here was revealed. This resolve lasted until a minute later, when the woman slapped her again, harder than before.
Jessica sighed, glancing up at her again. “I’m trying my best to be good, but, seriously, what the fuck was that one for?”
In response, the woman slapped her yet again.
And again said absolutely nothing.
Jessica licked at a corner of her mouth, tasting blood. One of the woman’s long nails had scratched her that time. Jessica tilted her chin up, making eye contact. “If you stop hitting me now, I promise to make your death quick and painless later.”
Inwardly, Jessica cursed herself.
So much for self-discipline.
The woman slapped her yet again, delivering the hardest blow yet. If it had landed with just a little more force, it might have broken her jaw. The woman then took up a position directly behind Jessica. She placed her hands on Jessica’s shoulders, squeezing hard.
Jessica groaned. “Oh, good. I could use a massage.”
She shrieked in surprise as the woman seized a handful of her hair and jerked her head roughly backward, so that her face was staring straight upward as the woman leaned over her. Jessica saw that her plump lips were pursed and that her throat muscles were working. She sensed what was about to happen an instant before it did.
Oh, gross, no.
A warm glob of saliva struck her forehead. The woman released her grip on Jessica’s hair and gave her head a rough push forward, making her wince. Her right hand then returned to its previous place at Jessica’s shoulder. Jessica grimaced as a bit of the woman’s spit dripped into her eyes.
A memory from the early moments of her return to consciousness came back to her then. Those references to a warden. One of the guards had called her “Ms. Wickman”.
Jessica sighed. “Okay, Wickman, you’ve made your point. I’m a subhuman, worthless piece of trash. You have total dominance over me. I am yours to do with as you please. Now that we’ve established that fact, could we maybe get to the fucking point of this meeting?”
The woman laughed. Other than that sneering disdain, it was her first reaction or evidence of emotion since entering the room.
Now it was Jessica’s turn to sneer. “Right, okay. What’s so fucking funny?”
Yet again, the woman said nothing.
Then the door across from Jessica opened again and another striking-looking woman came into the room. She was older than the woman who’d spent the last several minutes abusing Jessica, perhaps somewhere in her early-to-mid forties. Her dark hair was streaked with gray and she wore it gathered in a bun at the back of her head. Though not as buxom as the leggy blonde, she was thin and attractive. There was elegance in the way she moved and in her posture as she pulled out a chair on the other side of the table and took a seat across from Jessica.
The woman crossed her legs and folded her hands primly atop her knee. “I am Ms. Wickman. I am the warden of Prison 13. My colleague behind you is Helga. She is vice-warden here. Do you have any questions?”
Jessica nodded. “Yeah. A few.”
Helga’s fingers pressed more firmly into Jessica’s shoulders, the pressure just shy of actually painful.
Ms. Wickman arched an eyebrow. “Such as?”
“What is Prison 13 and what the fuck am I doing here?”
Ms. Wickman smiled frostily. “You are here because some powerful men, friends of your father, decided this is where you should spend the rest of your life.”
Jessica snorted. “Oh, they did, did they? Well, fuck those fucking assholes.”
Ms. Wickman again lifted an eyebrow. “You are a murderer, are you not? Or do you deny killing your father?”
Jessica hesitated only briefly before replying. She could deny the accusation, but there was no real point. They knew she had killed her father. Any evidence they did—or didn’t—have against her was irrelevant. There had been no trial. No due process. This was not a facility to which ordinary criminal offenders were sent.
“Yeah, I killed the son of a bitch, and a hundred other motherfuckers besides. So what? You can believe me when I tell you he had it fucking coming.”
Ms. Wickman shrugged. “Be that as it may, you killed the man and that is why you are here. Any other questions?”
“You still haven’t told me what Prison 13 is. It’s obviously not any ordinary prison.”
Ms. Wickman smiled, a bit more broadly this time. “You are correct. There is nothing ordinary about Prison 13. You are beyond the reach of your country’s legal system. Only a few people outside of Prison 13—none of them your friends—know where you are. No one is ever coming to help you. There will be no rescue. And escape is impossible. You will die here.”
“So I’m just all around fucked, huh?”
<
br /> “Precisely.”
The two women stared at each other across the table in silence for a long moment. Helga continued to slowly increase the pressure of her clawing fingers. Ms. Wickman shifted position in her chair, re-crossing her legs and again folding her hands in that prim way.
The silence stretched out long enough that Jessica became annoyed. “Is there some actual reason for this meeting? I can’t imagine you have these little informational chats with all the inmates.”
Ms. Wickman laughed softly. “You’re right about that. I am a busy woman. Most of the whores we process through here are not worth my individual attention. You, however, interest me very much. You’re special.”
Jessica said nothing at first. This was an unexpected turn in the conversation. She sensed there might be an unusual opportunity here, some advantage she might gain if she played her cards just right.
She strove to keep her tone neutral as she said, “Oh? How so?”
Ms. Wickman chuckled. “I hear the cunning in your tone. You’re trying to hide it, of course, but doing a rather poor job of it. Which is understandable under the circumstances. You’re disoriented. Weak. You’re not really yourself. Not yet.”
Jessica’s expression darkened. “Don’t underestimate me, bitch.”
Helga’s hands abruptly came away from Jessica’s shoulders. She stared down at Jessica with a look of smug amusement as she retrieved the black rubber gloves from the table and began pulling them on.
Ms. Wickman smiled. “Oh, we’d never underestimate you, Jessica Sloan. Have no fear on that count.”
Helga moved back into place behind Jessica, her hands again settling on her shoulders. Jessica’s skin crawled a little at the feel of the thick rubber.
“I have a special vision for you and your ultimate place here at Prison 13, Jessica,” Ms. Wickman said, leaning forward slightly. “You have skills I might find very useful one day. You will, however, have to earn your special place in my organization. My trust isn’t earned easily, either. It might take years. You’ll never leave here, but you might one day enjoy a position of relative comfort and power. That day, alas, is not today. Appearances must be maintained, after all, at least for a time. You are here to be punished and I am obligated to see that that happens.”