DEPRAVED-3-EBOOK

by Smith, Bryan

  Her first inkling that she wasn’t drowning in the midst of a storm-tossed ocean came when she spat the water out and realized how clean it tasted. More tactile impressions followed on the heels of this insight as the grogginess at last began to loosen its grip on her. There was something solid beneath her. Her fingers clawed at what felt like wet concrete. She willed her eyes open and got her first blurry glimpse of her surroundings.

  She was in a large, starkly lit room with a high ceiling. Despite the influx of water, she was aware of a cottony sensation in her mouth. This told her that what she had first assumed was normal post-sleep grogginess was something else. She had been drugged, probably with a high-level dosage of something strong enough to keep her under for a prolonged period of time.

  Another hard blast of cold water hit her seconds after this realization. She coughed and spluttered again and attempted to roll away from the concentrated water stream. That was when she felt the shackles encircling her wrists and ankles. Her heart hammered in her chest as she experienced a rare thing for her—real fear.

  In the years after killing her corrupt and cynically manipulative father, Jessica Sloan had fashioned a life for herself in which she was the ultimate apex predator. In any given situation, she was the one everyone else in the room—regardless of how big or strong or skilled—needed to fear the most. Her prowess as a fighter and professional killer was rivaled by only the most elite assassins on the planet.

  Jessica had also organized her life in a way meant to reduce the possibility of ever crossing paths with any of her equals. She altered her appearance on a regular basis. She conducted her business with layers upon layers of sophisticated security. These things should have been enough to keep her perpetually beyond the reach of those who might wish her harm.

  About that, however, she had apparently been very wrong.

  She forced her eyes open when the thus far unseen person wielding the hose cut the powerful stream of water. The cessation of the stream was accompanied by a loud, metallic clack. Jessica squinted into the gloom. In a few moments, she glimpsed a tall, shadowy figure. A man. His hands were sheathed in black rubber gloves and clutched in them was the large nozzle of a heavy hose designed for putting out fires.

  Still shivering in the wake of the repeated cold water blasts, Jessica began to perceive low, whispered voices. There were others behind the man with the hose, more shadowy men standing close to the opposite wall. Their words were indistinct and at first she could make out nothing. As the roaring in her ears began to subside, however, she was able to pick out a few repeated words, including “warden”, “security”, and “delousing”.

  Some dim level of understanding came to her. She was in a secure facility of some kind, probably the kind operated by shadow elements of the government. It wouldn’t officially exist on paper. She had been in such places on occasion in the past, during her time as a black ops assassin. Back then, however, she’d been on the other side of this equation, doing morally questionable things in the service of country and national security.

  This current phase of her ordeal was part of an extreme form of delousing procedure, a means of ensuring she was clean and free of bodily parasites. But what was being done to her was well beyond anything strictly necessary. This thing with the hose wasn’t really about cleansing her body. It was, instead, about setting the proper tone at the outset of her imprisonment.

  There was a message inherent in this brutal introduction to her new environment. She now existed in a world beyond the rule of law, and she should have no expectation of fair or humane treatment. Not only that, but her jailers had no intention of ever letting her go. She would die in this place, wherever it was, and never see the outside world again.

  Well, that was the message, anyway.

  Jessica’s eyes narrowed to slits of barely contained rage and a corner of her mouth curled sharply upward.

  We’ll just see about that, motherfuckers.

  This, unfortunately, was not the time to start fighting back. She was at her weakest and most vulnerable. A time to fight would come, but she would first have to recover her strength. She would also need more information about where she was and the layout of this facility. She would need to think and concoct a plan. For now she needed to seem docile and cooperative. With this in mind, she opened her eyes wider and forced the sneer off her face.

  Boot heels clacked on the concrete floor as the men behind the hose-wielder came forward. There were two of them. The man with the hose stayed where he was, his gloved hands still on the big nozzle. As the other men moved into the harsh overhead lighting illuminating this side of the room, Jessica glimpsed polished black boots. She glanced up and saw the men were attired in black uniform trousers and blazers. Atop their heads were black hats with shiny brims. A frown creased Jessica’s brow as she noticed the red armbands encircling their left arms.

  Um…what the actual fuck?

  The Nazi symbols set this place apart from the secret prisons she’d served at in the past. In fact, the staff at such facilities mostly eschewed identifying symbols of any type. There was no getting around it—what she was seeing now was just plain…weird.

  The men stood over her.

  One of them said, “You will cooperate. You will behave.”

  Jessica nodded. “Okay.”

  The same man grunted and said, “Good. We now move to the final phase of the delousing procedure. When that is done, you will see the warden.”

  Another nod. “Where am I?”

  There was a brief silence. Then one of the men laughed softly, a sound soon echoed by the other men in the room. This expression of levity was short-lived, ending when the man who’d spoken first said, “Enough! Ms. Wickman is chomping at the bit to see this bitch. Let’s get her on her feet.”

  The men hauled Jessica to her feet. They then steered her toward a door and ushered her through it. Next she was pulled down a short, narrow passageway. The lighting here was brighter, making her squint. The shackles around her ankles made her gait awkward, a situation made worse by the rough handling of the men clutching her arms. They pulled at her when she stumbled, jerking her upright again with nearly enough force to dislocate her arms.

  At the end of the corridor was another door. It swung inward when one of the men rapped his knuckles against a frosted glass window laced with security wire. Jessica was then dragged into a room in which the walls were lined with cubbyhole shelving. Inside the cubbyholes were stacks of clean garments. At a glance, it was clear these were inmate uniforms and that she was here to be outfitted with one.

  Providing prisoner attire, however, was not the room’s sole purpose. At its center was an examination table. Stretched across it was a fresh expanse of white paper. This table differed from the type common to doctor’s offices everywhere else in one important way—the sturdy metal rings affixed to each corner. Each ring was equipped with a shackle.

  Jessica grimaced, sensing what was coming. She was guided over to the table. There her minders hefted her up and stretched her out on its surface. Primal instinct screamed out at her to fight, to resist the violation that was about to occur, but she again ignored this, knowing that, for now, it remained in her best interests to stay as cooperative as possible. She would endure this insult. However, she would not forget it.

  Payback would come, one way or another.

  The shackles she was wearing were the kind with brace bars. They were designed to inhibit range of movement. These were now removed, but the physical relief this afforded her didn’t last long. Using the attached shackles, the guards cuffed her wrists and ankles to the metal rings at the corners of the table. After that, they walked out of the room, leaving her alone for a short time.

  She relaxed and waited, controlling her breathing as she stared up at the gray ceiling. Then the door creaked as it opened again. In a moment, she heard an approach of heavy footsteps. Soon a very large woman was standing at the side of the table. The woma
n was tall, middle-aged, and weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds. Her shoulder-length dark hair was streaked with white. Her face was doughy and impassive.

  The woman pulled on latex gloves. Her face remained expressionless as she said, “I will now verify that you are free of contraband. This will entail a mandatory cavity search. It will be a thorough search.”

  Her tone as she spoke was mostly devoid of inflection, though she did seem to lend extra emphasis to the word “thorough”.

  Of course it’ll be thorough, you fucking hag, Jessica thought. And you’re going to enjoy every second of it, aren’t you? Well, have your sick fun while you can. You’re on my fucking list now, bitch.

  The woman smiled faintly, as if sensing Jessica’s thoughts.

  Then she reached a gloved hand between Jessica’s legs and began an inspection that was every bit as thorough as she’d promised.

  4.

  They came for Sally Nielsen first thing that morning. She was lying in her bottom bunk, with the single thin, tattered bedsheet she was allowed pulled up above her breasts, when she heard the clacking of boot heels on the landing outside the cell she shared with Laura Grier.

  Though the sound stirred a reflexive fear, she believed she would be okay. She wasn’t a troublemaker and did little to draw attention to herself. The belief persisted even as the guards paused at her cell and began to open it. Her cellmate was a more obvious target for guard scrutiny. Laura started fights with other inmates on an almost daily basis. She had killed a woman in the D-Block showers not long ago and had openly boasted about it. Laura also delighted in tormenting her far meeker cellmate, torturing her in various ways and forcing her to service her sexual needs.

  But the guards had not come for Laura.

  Sally was still blinking sleep crust from her eyes when a guard tore the thin sheet away from her body, revealing the slender nude form beneath. She shrieked as she was seized by a rough pair of hands and yanked off the bunk mattress. Instinct made her try to jerk free of the man’s grip. This earned her a hard, backhanded slap across the face. Then she was crying and pleading for mercy and an explanation.

  The last thing she saw as she was dragged out of the cell was Laura Grier. The commotion had awakened her cellmate, who was in a sitting position on the top bunk. She did not look pleased. Of course she didn’t. Her personal slave was being taken away without explanation, probably never to return. Inmates who were unceremoniously taken from their cells this way were rarely seen again, at least not alive.

  Now Sally was in Prison 13’s infirmary. The room was large, with plaster walls painted a light shade of green. A row of old-fashioned hospital beds with stainless steel frames lined each wall. Hours had passed since her arrival in the infirmary and still she’d received no explanation for her presence here or for the forced removal from her cell.

  Just two more of the infirmary’s approximately two dozen beds were currently occupied, both by women she recognized, though she’d seen neither in a long while. One was a redhead named Samantha Blair. Samantha had been gorgeous. Emphasis on the past tense. In the months since her unexplained overnight disappearance from her cell, horrible things had been done to her. Her gorgeous, flowing red locks were gone, her shorn scalp showing evidence of multiple deep incisions. A row of fresh stitches stretched from her left temple to the crown of her skull. This, however, was the least of the many awful things that had been done to her.

  Parts of Samantha Blair had been removed, including limbs and breasts. What remained was a large lump of mottled-looking flesh, much of it burn-scarred and lined with fresh, stitch-lined incisions. Samantha’s eyes stared straight up at the ceiling, never blinking because her eyelids had been removed.

  Seeing what had been done to the formerly beautiful woman filled Sally with revulsion, though she’d seen terrible things in Prison 13 prior to being brought to the infirmary. Murders had taken place right in front of her, but that was prisoner-on-prisoner violence. It almost always happened fast, with someone moving in from seemingly out of nowhere to stick someone with a shank before fading back into the crowd.

  That was always upsetting when it happened, but the quickness of the attacks and the subsequent swift restoration of order also allowed for a kind of disconnect. You sort of got used to it after a while. But this was different. What had been done to Samantha Blair went beyond violence and into a realm of sadism and depravity that took Sally by surprise. This was inhumanity. It was atrocity.

  It was evil.

  The other woman was Agnes Fitzgerald, a grandmotherly type who, as far as Sally knew, was Prison 13’s oldest inmate. Agnes had worked in D-Block’s kitchen for decades. Several months ago, guards stormed into the kitchen and removed several of the cooks and dishwashers. As always, there was no explanation. None of the missing kitchen workers were ever seen again.

  Until now.

  Unlike Samantha Blair, Agnes’s body had not been mutilated in any obvious way. Physically, she appeared intact. Except, that is, for the long, stitch-lined incision at her left temple. The blankness in her eyes and the way her mouth hung open, a line of drool trailing from one corner, led Sally to conclude she’d been lobotomized. The bigger mystery as far as the old lady was concerned was why she’d been kept alive for so long.

  Sally figured she would never know the answer to that question. Not that she cared. She’d liked Agnes—everybody had—but there was nothing that could be done for her. Her own well-being was the only thing she gave a damn about and, based on what she was seeing, her prospects in that area looked bleak.

  One other “patient” had been dragged into the infirmary a few minutes. This woman Sally did not recognize, but she was one of the most stunningly attractive women she’d ever seen. Even pre-deconstruction Samantha Blair would have looked plain by comparison. Unlike the other patients—who all wore hospital gowns—the gorgeous blonde was attired in the standard orange uniform of a newly processed inmate.

  Shackled at the wrists and ankles, she was surrounded by guards, who seemed wary of her, which was strange. Despite their apparent unease, the new prisoner was quiet and cooperative. She stood at the opposite end of the infirmary, staring blankly straight ahead as a nurse in blue scrubs administered several inoculations via syringe. In a few minutes, this phase of the new inmate’s processing was finished and the guards ushered her out of the infirmary.

  The nurse also departed, leaving Sally effectively alone for a time. She figured the ruined husks that had once been Samantha and Agnes didn’t count as actual company. It was too bad. She could use the distraction of a conversation. It would take her mind off the dread mounting inside her regarding her own fate.

  Her occasional furtive glances at Samantha’s unmoving form weren’t helping matters any. She tried willing herself not to look again numerous times, but thus far the temptation had been irresistible. Her gaze lingered longest on the places where limbs had been severed, those grotesque masses of cauterized flesh, all of which had healed badly. Her right leg had been removed at the knee. White pus tinged with green was oozing from a hole in the stump there. Seeing these things made Sally’s stomach twist, but she never failed to take yet another glance in the mutilated woman’s direction.

  This lasted until the time she turned her head yet again in Samantha’s direction and saw the woman’s lidless eyes staring back at her. The unnatural state of those eyes—that exposed roundness—offended something primal within Sally, eliciting a startled shriek. She jerked at the cuffs around her wrists in an instinctual attempt to get away from the horror facing her.

  She didn’t calm down until she realized there was not the slightest glint of recognition in Samantha’s blank gaze. The woman had not turned her head in a deliberate effort to look at Sally. She was still staring straight ahead, only now it was at her rather than up at the ceiling. Her features remained expressionless and now her mouth was hanging open, drool dribbling from a corner.

 
Time stretched out. Minutes accumulated, becoming hours. This according to the clock mounted on the wall across from her. The passage of time did not calm Sally. Quite the opposite, in fact. It filled her mind with imagined horrors. She envisioned leering Nazi doctors removing her limbs with rusty handsaws, procedures they would of course perform without the aid of anesthetic. The pain would be immense, worse by far than anything she had ever experienced or imagined.

  Her terror increased steadily until she thought she was losing her mind. Slightly more than two hours after the new inmate was ushered from the infirmary, Sally’s head snapped in Samantha’s direction. Her mouth curled in a snarl as she said, “Look away from me, you fucking weird-eyed freak!”

  Then she laughed.

  Yes, she thought. I’m definitely starting to lose my fucking mind.

  Then she laughed again.

  A detached part of her realized her subconscious mind was channeling multiple layers of suppressed rage into what she was currently feeling. Sally had been brought to Prison 13 for reasons completely unknown to her. She had committed no crimes of any significance, unless you counted silly things like speeding tickets and smoking the occasional bit of weed. She was certainly no hardened criminal and didn’t belong in a place like this. No one had ever explained it to her and her early demands for an explanation earned her savage beatings.

  At Prison 13, this was a common story.

  Thinking about it now, Sally felt that old bitterness rise up again. She had mostly let it simmer beneath the surface during her time as Laura Grier’s slave. Keeping her vicious cellmate happy had been a full-time job. But now the rage threatened to come roaring out of her. She was shaking with the need to express it.