by Glen Frost
"Here, Ray." John Anderson unclipped the mag-lite from his belt and handed it over. O'Malley switched it on and played the beam across the dark form at his feet.
"Jesus H. Christ."
"Holy shit, Ray. That's the new guy!" Joel Mitchell blanched. "What's his name again?"
"Mister Crud, or somethin' like that," Carver volunteered.
"McCrudden," O'Malley corrected him, reading the silver metal name tag on the man's chest. McCrudden was very obviously dead. His face was frozen in a mask of agony, with both eyes screwed tightly shut and the teeth clenched so hard the gums had bled.
"What's that sticking out of his ass?" Anderson wanted to know when the flashlight beam swept over his bare buttocks. A small cylinder of plastic was protruding from the dead man's anus. Whatever it was, it had sure as hell caused a lot of bleeding. The backs of McCrudden's legs were soaked in blood, which had spread out into a wide pool on the tiles.
"It's a breathing tube."
Four heads snapped around to face the direction from which this new voice had spoken: It was a woman's voice, one that was as hard and brittle as cast iron.
All four went for their guns at roughly the same time. Carver was fastest on the draw. His Smith & Wesson cleared its hip holster first.
"Freeze. All of you."
The woman spoke softly, not even bothering to raise her voice, yet something about it compelled the men to obey. Four pistols were held out at varying heights, frozen mid-draw; none of them had Prisoner Zero in their sights.
"You. What's your name?" She sounded genuinely curious.
"C-Carver. Danny Carver."
"I see. And what about him, Carver, Danny Carver...what's his name?" The woman stepped forward and indicated the guard to Carver's left with a flick of her eyes. They gleamed menacingly in the low light.
"Joel Mitchell."
"Danny, what the fuck are you answering her for?" Mitchell demanded. "She's a god-damned inmate, for Chrissakes!"
"Shut up, Joel Mitchell."
To his surprise, Mitchell did exactly that. The words fuck you, bitch begun to form on the tip of his tongue, but now his mouth flatly refused to say them.
"Lady, I'm gonna give you to the count of three..." O'Malley began.
"Oh, go eat a bullet," Prisoner Zero said with studied nonchalance.
Before any of them knew what was happening, Ray O'Malley's gun hand was moving again, swinging upward in an arc that stopped just short of his face. The barrel of his 9mm Glock was pressed firmly against his clenched teeth.
O'Malley's arm was shaking. He looked down at the barrel of the gun that had just parted his lips, wanting to say something, say anything, but compelled to simply...
"Eat a bullet," the woman repeated calmly.
He pulled the trigger.
The gunshot was deafeningly loud in such an enclosed space. Blood, bone, teeth and brains flew everywhere, splattering the three remaining guards. A renegade tooth slammed into the side of Joel Mitchell's temple so hard that it embedded itself under the skin, causing a thin rivulet of blood to trickle down the side of his face. Yet still he did not move a muscle.
The partially-decapitated corpse collapsed onto the hospital bed. For a few brief moments the heart continued to beat, pumping a spray of arterial blood through the massive, ragged holes that had been torn in its brain pan. Carver's uniform shirt got a thorough soaking before the brainless body finally went into cardiac arrest.
"You see," the woman said, sounding completely reasonable, "that's what will happen if you aren't going to be nice."
"You killed Ray, you fucking cunt! I'm going to see you rot in hell!" Danny Carver may have been unable to move, but unlike his buddy Joel he could at least still speak his mind.
"Wrong answer, 'Carver Danny Carver.' Let's see if I can make my point a little more clearly." Prisoner Zero turned her face toward John Anderson. The guard hailed from Oklahoma City and liked to pump iron on his downtime. He was built like a battleship, topping the scale at three-fifty, and pretty much all of it muscle. "You. Put a bullet in his balls. Now."
Sweat beaded on Anderson's head. He was trying to resist, fighting the woman with every last ounce of willpower he possessed.
It wasn't enough.
The second gunshot was every bit as deafening as the first, making all of their ears ring. Danny Carver squealed pitifully, staggering backward for three steps until he tripped over McCrudden's prostrate body and fell on top of it. His crotch was a bloody ruin of shredded flesh and pulped soft tissue. One testicle had been blown completely away, along with most of the ball sack and the end of his dick, the stump of which was pissing blood onto the floor.
The emasculated guard fell to his knees, hands scrabbling frantically to cover what little remained of his manhood and to stem the gush of blood. Ignoring his squeals, Prisoner Zero turned her attention back toward Anderson. "Only one left, gym rat. Let's see just how much of a big man you really are."
The bodybuilder gritted his teeth, close to flinging an obscenity her way, but then remembered what had happened to Danny Carver...what the woman had made him do to his fellow guard. He stared down at the pistol, still smoking in his hand, and knew that if she wanted to, the woman could make him doing anything with it. Shoot Mitchell, the only other guard still left standing. Shoot himself. Something. Anything.
So he simply stood mute.
"Maybe you're not as dumb as you look after all." The woman favored him with a cold smile.
"I swear to God, I am going to put two in your head and one in your chest, bitch." It was Joel Mitchell, his gun hand shaking as he tried desperately to bring it to bear on Prisoner Zero. He was making a small amount of headway, but the barrel was still way off the mark and he could barely bring his finger into contact with the trigger, let alone pull it.
"You, on the other hand, are as dumb as you look." Prisoner Zero sighed, gesturing at Anderson once more. "Okay, meathead. Holster the gun and shut him up. Do whatever it takes, short of actually shooting him. I'm curious to see what you come up with. Special bonus points will be awarded for creativity."
The burly guard instantly returned the pistol to its holster in a single, fluid motion and turned to face his quarry. Joel tried to reverse the direction of his gun arm once more and bring it around to face John, but Prisoner Zero stymied that with a simple, "Drop it."
Joel obeyed without hesitation. The gun clattered onto the tiles. Anderson kicked it by accident, sending it skittering away to disappear beneath the hospital bed.
"That's better." She folded her arms across her chest. "Go right ahead, hunk'a muscle...shut him up."
On a good day, John Anderson could bench press close to five hundred pounds. The other guards liked to joke that even his muscles had muscles, and with arms built like tree trunks and pectorals that bore more than a passing resemblance to slabs of granite, it was hard to disagree. He reached out for Joel's face, unable to fight the compulsion to do what he was about to. Mitchell began to back away, his entire body trembling with fear.
"Stand still," Prisoner Zero ordered. Joel obeyed instantly, but his wide eyes betrayed just how terrified he truly was.
John Anderson stuffed his fingers into either side of his colleague's mouth. They were big and meaty, each digit thicker than the average man's dick. Mitchell gagged as the fingertips probed deeper into his mouth, twisting position as they did so until one set of fingers was anchored against his upper teeth and the other set were pushing firmly against the lower.
Bracing himself, legs spread a shoulder length apart, the bigger guard began to strain. His beefy forearms rippled as the muscles bunched and flexed beneath the tanned skin.
There was a sickening crack, like the sound of a thick tree branch being snapped in half, followed by a shrill wail that was part pain, part agony. Mitchell's jaw had been wrenched out of its socket, dislocating downward and lengthening the bottom part of his face obscenely. Anderson kept going, stretching the flesh of the other man's lower
face as far as it would go. Then it began to rip, finally tearing just below the cheekbones on either side of the face.
John grunted, giving one final, epic heave that shoved his colleague's head backward while also forcing the jaw down. The bottom half of Joel's face was yanked away, skin, tendon, muscle, and connective tissue all tearing themselves loose in a spray of blood. The bodybuilder prison guard let the jaw fall to the floor and stepped back, horrified at what he had been forced to do to his fellow officer.
Staggering drunkenly backward, Joel reached up for his face, which was now only half the size it normally was. Everything from the upper lip on downward was a glistening mass of angry red tissue; the tongue lolled from side to side in an obscene parody of KISS front man Gene Simmons, dripping blood onto the floor of the cell.
"Fuck, no," Anderson breathed.
"Oh, that's enough of that. You've done a magnificent job." Prisoner Zero sounded extremely satisfied with what she was seeing. More blood was pouring from what remained of the wounded man's ruined face. It was also running backward into his throat, if the wet, raspy coughing was any reliable indicator. Bloody air bubbles floated upward, creating a layer of froth along the shredded flesh of what had once been Mitchell's top lip.
"It's fucking cruel. Why did you make me do that? Why?"
She turned to look at him. For a moment, Prisoner Zero did not speak. The only sounds were the background noises of the medical equipment, mixed with the sound of a man simultaneously choking and bleeding to death. After a moment's thought she finally said, "I've known my fair share of cruelty, and then some. Most of it at the hands of men like him. Men like you. I figure turnabout's fair play for the likes of you all."
"He's bleeding to death!" John yelled, momentarily overcome by his rising anger. To hell with it...if she killed him, she killed him. All it would take was one command on her part.
"Well, we can't have that. Put him out of his misery. After you blind him, that is."
No sooner were the words out of her mouth than John found himself lunging forward once more. Wrapped up in a world of his own pain, Joel had no conception that his friend was coming at him to finish off the job.
Unable to resist, Anderson resolved to do what he could to make it fast, at the very least. Jamming his thumbs into the bleeding man's eyes, he thrust them inward as hard as he could manage. The eyeballs sunk back as far as they could before each globe ruptured under the onslaught, spewing viscous jelly streaked with pinkish blood down each of his cheeks. Mitchell was screaming again, but this time his throat was hoarse, the cry lower-pitched and raspy. More bloody froth bubbled along the edge of his tongue.
Clamping his hands in a death grip on either side of Joel's head, John forced his thumbs back as far as they would go. Both eyeballs were utterly destroyed. He could feel solid bone beneath the tips of his thumbs now, the smooth backs of the eye sockets. Squeezing, he began to fracture the dying man's skull, sending hairline cracks running through it on either side. Hardware stores sold vices that exerted less pressure than John Anderson's hands were capable of producing.
"AAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHH!!!!"
The scream surprised John when it came. At first he thought that Joel was screaming, but all that came from the dying guard's tortured vocal chords was a death rattle. He suddenly realized that he had been the one who had screamed, the same war cry that sometimes emerged when he was lifting a ton of weight and wanted a little extra kick.
Mitchell's skull imploded with a brutal crack, collapsing in on itself as the bone gave way. Liquid brain matter spurted out through the nostrils, ears, and eye sockets. John released him, allowing the body to fall to the ground, where it lay twitching spastically, voiding its bowels and bladder into the seat of its pants.
"Well done." Prisoner Zero slow-clapped, never once taking her eyes from the corpse.
John fell to his knees and puked. She laid a hand on his shoulder. Here it comes, he thought to himself. It’s my turn now.
"Do it," he gasped in between retches. "Get it over with."
"Do what?" The woman sounded genuinely puzzled.
"Kill me."
"Oh, that! You misunderstand me. I have much bigger plans for you, Muscles."
He looked up at her sharply. His surprise was nothing to do with his new nickname. "Plans?" he said dumbly.
She nodded. "I'm taking over this prison, Muscles. For that, I'm going to need an army. Right now it's just an army of one, but we're going to change all that, me and you..."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Sweat drenched the big man's brow, dripping down into his eyes. Finally, he nodded. "I'll leave."
"Good boy." Anya patted his cheek in the most condescending manner possible. She released his balls. Fatty groaned in relief. "Now, off you fuck."
Scowling, the big man shuffled sideways and stood up. His lips began to form a word, but his throbbing testicles obviously made him think better of it. Instead he simply turned and left without a backward glance.
"What was that all about?" Neil slid into the seat that Fatty had just vacated.
"You saw?"
"Yeah. Figured I'd give you some space. You're more than capable of handling it."
"He got a little too...handsy" Anya explained. "So I taught him a lesson."
"One I'm sure he'll never forget. Come on, drink up."
"We are leaving?" Anya frowned, swallowing the last dregs of beer.
"Nope. We're going backstage."
The Navy SEAL led Anya toward the bar, then cut to the left, passing through an open doorway and into a narrow corridor. There were three doors on each side, all of them closed. Wilson went to the last one on the right hand side and knocked gently. A muffled voice answered. He opened the door and disappeared inside, beckoning for Anya to follow him.
The private room was sparsely furnished with a threadbare couch and a pole which hadn't been cleaned in quite some time. It was small — no more than fifteen feet by twenty — but when one considered the reason for its existence, she guessed that most of the visitors probably couldn't care less about its size.
"Close the door," Neil said. Anya complied. Silently, the redheaded dancer stepped out of the shadows, completely naked apart from a silver G-string. She stood with her hands on her hips, head cocked slightly to one side, as though inviting Anya to study her.
"This is Destiny," said Neil, without even the slightest hint of detectable irony. "I told her how impressed you were with her...skills. She's agreed to teach you a thing or two."
"Hi," Destiny said.
"Hello," Anya nodded.
"Now watch and learn." Commander Wilson dropped onto the couch and sat back, stretching an arm out along the back of it.
There was no podium, just a mat surrounding the base of the pole. Destiny stepped up to it and hooked a foot around the smeared chrome, sliding the inside of her calf up and down the pole suggestively.
As the dancer began to writhe sinuously around the pole, skillfully swaying, pivoting, and displaying her physical assets to their best advantage, Anya found herself captivated by her performance. This was no mere improvisation, she realized; rather, it was a carefully choreographed sequence that required both grace and expertise to pull off. She began to make mental notes, scrutinizing the pole dancer's movement patterns down to the finest detail, noting how each weave and bob was carefully calculated to appear as erotic as possible.
When she finished her routine, Anya found herself to be spellbound, captivated by the sheer sensuality of Destiny's performance.
"Magnificent," she breathed.
"Want to try?" Destiny asked, stepping aside and gesturing toward the pole. She was breathing heavily, her milky-white skin covered in a light sheen of sweat.
Stepping up to the pole, Anya placed her hands tentatively at about chest height.
"Not like that," the pole dancer laughed. "You'll never be able to dance in that dress."
"I do not have a change of clothes."
"So take it
off," Destiny suggested, her voice light and carefree. "I'm sure you don't have anything hiding under there that I haven't seen before."
I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Anya thought to herself. But as long as she kept her psychic projection up, which took practically no effort on her part, then Destiny and the SEAL commander would see exactly what she wanted them to see: Her original body, curvaceous and slender, a projected image of how it had once been before Piotr had beaten her to death.
With a shrug, Anya bent down to remove her shoes, and then stepped out of the dress. She had always had little in the way of modesty, which came with the territory when you were a hooker. Standing there in a black lace bra and panties, did she notice a look of sly approval from the other woman? Part of her hoped so.
"Place your hands on the pole, like this." Destiny held out her own hands to demonstrate, grasping an imaginary pole in the air directly in front of her. Anya mirrored her actions, gripping the slippery chrome cylinder loosely. "Now hop up and squeeze the pole between your thighs."
Following the experienced dancer's lead, Anya was soon working her way through some basic pole routines. Destiny's expert guidance coupled with Anya's prodigious capacity for learning meant that she made great strides in less than half an hour. She was capable of dangling from the pole using just one leg to anchor her, which allowed her to spin swiftly while upside down.
"The men love that," Destiny explained, looking down on The inverted Anya from above. "They get the best view of your tits that way. Okay, next up: Lap dancing. Watch carefully."
Destiny strutted over to the couch, where it was taking every ounce of self-control the Navy SEAL had not to spike a boner at the sight of Anya working the pole. The girl was a natural born dancer, and watching her gyrations had turned him on hard. Now he switched his attention to Destiny. Redheads weren't particularly his thing, but there was no denying that this girl had one hell of a body on her. Admittedly she had smallish tits, he mused, but bigger wasn't always necessarily better.