by Z. Rider
He feels like everything inside him is going to let loose.
She clutches his knee to pull herself forward.
Steel legs tap over concrete and against the inside of his skull, like an itch he can’t scratch. With every panicked inhale, his belly pushes on his bladder.
The girl’s knee bumps his leg.
She leans the hand holding the tube on his thigh, and the hard edge of its opening digs into his muscle as she crawls forward.
Don’t, he tries to say, eyes wide—he wants to bring her gaze up to his, he wants her to look at him so she could see he doesn’t want her up here. Doesn’t want her to fuck with his already vastly fucked situation.
She pats his belly, like he’s a good dog. The mound makes a dull thump, like a ripe melon.
Hauling herself the last of the way up, she straddles his thigh, her knee in his crotch.
The worst comes to his mind—the absolute worst, that she might make a circuit with that tube, connecting him end to end. He bucks, his belly sloshing, his guts cramping. Garbled pleas vibrate the tube in his throat. His face crawls with heat. His pulse pounds in his ears.
Her weight nudges the bottom of his bloated belly, pushing everything tighter.
It could all come back out of him, gushing through his esophagus, spilling around the tube, gurgling up the back of his throat—where it would pool, choking him. He cries for help, but that makes him feel like he is choking, and his throat muscles spasm, clamping around the tube with a sharp ache.
The length of tube between him and her hangs off the table. She leans over to tug it up. His stomach cramps under her weight. She coils the excess tube on his chest.
When she sits up, she pats his belly, the thing like a beach ball full of sewage.
He moans, his eyes rolling back—on the fringe of passing out from pain and panic. He wouldn’t mind if everything did go black, if he didn’t have to be present for this. But the theme of this experience seems to be that he doesn’t get anything he wants, and when she begins to knead his exposed belly, he’s still with it. He still feels the pressure and pushing against his insides. He yells, throwing his head back, gripping his hands into fists. This is the worst thing to ever happen to him. He feels like he’s on the edge of shitting himself, but at the same time nothing is coming out. He tries to catch the girl’s eyes again, pleading—and she looks right at him, her brown eyes eager and empty at the same time, like the shiny plastic buttons on a stuffed animal.
She puts one of her fingers to her lips, the others curled around the tube. Shh.
When she opens her mouth, her chin forms a knobby point. Her cheeks stretch. She puts the end of the tube between her lips and snugs them closed around it.
Don’t blow. Please don’t fucking blow.
Her cheeks hollow. Her belly rises, pushing against her nightgown. She pushes air back through her nostrils, keeping a seal on the tube—then she sucks again.
The thing on the floor click-click-clicks under the table. The girl sounds like a piece of hospital equipment: the slow suck of air through the tube, the pause, the release of it out her nostrils.
A.J. can’t breathe. Can’t struggle. Can’t look away.
11
A.J.’s Not Coming
I slump, heavy as a sack of potatoes, in the middle of the small padded room.
And I’m thinking, what the hell? They can’t just lock me up and leave me. What are they going to do—come let me out when the place closes up?
Hey, dude, ride’s over. Exit’s down that way.
Or maybe—
I tip my head back. The ceiling’s flat, white—no tiles or trap doors, nothing but a caged bulb. An itch crawls over my jaw.
I will not think about the girl with half her face gone. This is a fucking funhouse. It’s designed to freak you out.
I wonder if the padding on the wall hides another door somewhere—if something’s going to jump out at me just as I start to get my shit together. My pulse thumps in my neck.
They’re not going to keep me.
That just doesn’t happen in real life.
The tight straps dig into my groin. I feel sweaty and sticky and hot. I could use a drink—cool, clear, delicious water.
My wrist hurts. The cut from the glass is sharp at the edges, but deeper in it throbs like a puncture wound. I can’t see if it’s bleeding. It’s a hundred degrees under the jacket. I can’t tell if the hot damp against my side is blood seeping through or just the sluice of sweat.
The fingers on that hand are cold. My pulse is reedy but fast. It echoes with hard thumps in my fingertips. I have no idea how much I’ve bled, but it occurs to me I could be bleeding to death in my canvas cocoon.
I jerk my chin down. It hits against the jacket’s collar. I shift my elbows in the confines of the sleeves. Blood smears the canvas from when they struggled to get me into it, only it was less like a struggle and more like dressing an upset doll.
The memory of not having control of my muscles floods back, the pain of that Taser, and I turn my head to study the other wall, not wanting to think about that.
The inside of my wrist throbs. My fingers tingle. I think the side of my thumb is numb, or it could just have lost its surface sense of touch from the roughness of the fabric.
My pajama bottoms rustle against the canvas padding as I twist, scoping out my surroundings. Smooth bolt heads dent the pads where they’re attached to walls and floor. The pads’ seams are dingy rolls of cloth like dead worms. I rock back and push to my feet. The padding at least warms under my heels, unlike the metal floors earlier just sucked the heat out of me.
The room’s the size of a generous bathroom. I walk a circle. Even the door has padding tacked to it. No window, no handle. Too bad those assholes didn’t accidentally kick it shut while they were inside with me. I’d have laughed at them, trapping themselves in.
I probably wouldn’t have laughed long.
Cherry Bomb Babe comes back to mind, and my brain runs for a safer place to spend its time. I think of how to add this twist to the game. It’s a losing card, isn’t it? You pull a straitjacket, get thrown in a padded cell—you’re pretty much out.
Maybe not permanently out though. Help could come.
A.J.’s still out there after all.
Somewhere.
I hope.
My scalp crawls. My breathing is amplified, close. It’s all I can hear as I jerk my face toward the ceiling, down along the walls.
A.J.’s not coming. I don’t know where the fuck A.J. is, but the chances that he’d be coming after how I last saw him…
My mind quickly sketches the tentacle on a card. My pencil-holding fingers twitch. I used to draw a lot. I haven’t so much lately. Even the game I was working on last year, it was mostly text, some roughed-in mock-ups. I’d gotten lost in the technicalities of the gameplay instead of the beauty of it.
I can’t remember when or why I stopped drawing. It was just one of those things I left behind.
I miss it.
With my eyes closed, I see the pink shading of the tentacle in colored pencil, the shine in A.J.’s wide eyes, the splash of blood jumping from the tub as it yanks A.J. in.
It might be we’re both fucked.
I pace to the wall and drop my forehead against it.
When I breathe in, it’s the stale sweat of former occupants, their hair oils and desperation, their resignation.
I bounce my forehead on the padding.
It’s comforting, kind of. Some small thing I can control. A feeling I understand. The gentle thump is something I can focus on, so I don’t have to think about everything else.
I’m so fucked.
12
She’s a Tick
The tube has acclimated to the temperature of A.J.’s mouth. If it weren’t for having to push his tongue against it to swallow, he could almost forget it was there. Its curve leans against the back of his throat, and as the girl, her face darkening like a cherry, sucks and gasps and sucks
some more, the tube grows hot on his tongue.
He’d been drifting off, exhausted from all of it, but the heat brings his eyes open. The girl’s little belly fills with air as she sucks in. The folds in her nightgown deepen as she pushes the breath back through her nostrils. Her thin fists clutch the tube at her mouth.
The heat of his stomach contents rolls up the back of his throat again. The tube presses on the back of his tongue, heavy with what he has inside him. The heat pulls forward, sinks back a little, then surges forward again as the girl’s cheeks hollow once more.
Inch by inch, the tube between them darkens. The contents of his stomach round their way through the coils on his chest, making them heavy on his chest, heavy and hot.
The spider-legged bot scrabbles around the table, its steel tips clicking across the inside of his skull.
The girl sucks.
The liquid moves past the last curve of the coil.
A.J. flattens his fingers against the tabletop. He drags his gaze to the ceiling, dim bulbs glaring at his pupils. The girl’s breathy noises come faster. Her nightgown whispers as she shifts. Her thigh pushes the bottom of his belly. The stuff still inside him surges around the tube, into his esophagus. It burns.
Little gasps come through the girl’s nostrils. The liquid flows quick and heavy through the tube now, her throat pulling it down into her. He clenches his eyes shut, teeth clamping the tube.
He can’t shut off his ears, can’t turn off her greedy grunts and slurps, her breathy gulps.
When he peels his eyes open, she’s clutching the tube to her mouth, her eyelids closed, smooth. Her belly distorts the purple daisies in her nightgown. The fabric bows forward until she looks like she has a cantaloupe under there. Then a pumpkin. The fabric pulls taut as her belly grows to the size of a picnic watermelon. A seam busts with a pop. The gown gapes at the tear, exposing pale skin stretched shiny.
His ears twitch at the scrabbling thing. It’s squeezing itself on top of the bulky machine in the cart.
The last of the weight rolls through the tube, heavy against his tongue. The last of the liquid makes its way around the coil and up the length of tube. It disappears beneath her clutching hands, and reappears in the ripe, stretched mound of her belly.
The lower curve of that great weight rests on his crotch. The thrust of it looms over his deflated stomach.
When the tube is empty, the girl tips her head back. A.J. thinks she’s trying to get the last drop, but fist over fist, she feeds the tube into her throat, her neck bobs, like a snake swallowing a dead kin whole. The tube tugs taut between them, the coil all used up.
She yanks it, and it slides against A.J.’s throat, a length coming up easily. He coughs, reflexively. She swallows the new slack into her. Another tug pulls another cough out of him. His eyes water. He wants to swallow. He tries to breathe, steady and calm, through his nostrils. At least it’s coming out. He might survive this thing after all.
Her belly distorts, bulging and shifting as the tube re-coils itself inside her. The neck of her gown stretches downward. Another seam pops. Her knees and thighs are bare; all the fabric gathers in a tight hug around that great mound in front of her.
The tube jerks upward. Its taste changes—acidy, sharp. Its tail end tickles his throat. He coughs, half gagging, and liquid spills into the back of his nostrils, making him choke and gasp for air. The end of the tube clicks against his teeth on its way out. It tugs his lower lip, then leaves a trail of spit and stomach acid down his chin.
He sucks draughts of air through his mouth as it bounces over his pajama top.
Aware of movement at the cart, he turns his head. He’s groggy, like he’s just woken from an operation, but he’s also light—full of nothing but relief.
A steel-tipped leg feels the edge of the padded table, as if it’s testing the climb from the top of the machine to the top of the table.
In the middle of the table, the girl stuffs her fist into her mouth to push the end of the tube down her throat.
She’s huge now. Grotesque. Tiny breasts rest on the weight of her swollen belly, two plums in the thin-stretched bodice of her nightshirt. The skin peeking through the gap in nightshirt’s tear has stretched to white. Blue veins creep across it, pulsing.
She’s a tick, all bloated belly and stick-thin limbs, her flower-bud lips parted and panting, her cheeks flushed.
The scrabbling thing feels around the edge of the cart’s tray, drags itself up and over.
Putting her fingertips gently on A.J.’s legs, she shuffles backward, her tummy huge and heavy, a prize watermelon about to burst and reveal the worms crawling inside.
A click and a pop come from the cart. A.J. twists his neck as an articulated arm rises from the top of the spider-legged bot. In the pincer’s grasp is a dark, dull sphere. The bot backs up, toppling the bottle of lubricant, which lands with a flat smack on the floor. The sphere, when the bot sets it down, rolls half a turn with a heavy, solid sound before coming to a stop against the edge of the tray. It has a hatch on it, glossy like a square eye.
A.J. doesn’t like the look of it one bit.
The girl gingerly turns herself between his feet, sliding one leg then the other off the edge.
The scrabbly bot puts two steel-tipped legs on the edge of the tray, leaning like it’s watching her. Like it’s waiting its turn.
Her feet thump to the floor. A.J. can tell it wasn’t an easy dismount—she doesn’t move for a few seconds, just stands there with her head bowed, one hand clutching the side of his foot. Then she pushes forward. When she shuffles around the table, she’s cradling the weight of her belly with one arm. Her face is pinched. Her other hand caresses her belly. She doesn’t look at him at all. She’s got what she was after.
He tips his head back, watching her waddle into the shadows.
His stomach hitches. Tight breaths shoot through his nostrils. He leans on his shoulder, stretching his other arm as far as the restraint lets him to watch the shadows swallow her.
Something scrapes his stretched arm.
He turns his head.
The scrabbling thing is climbing onto the table with him.
13
The Only Person Left in the World
Banging my head against the wall gets old. I back up and lower myself to the floor, cross-legged. My shoulders slump. My hair feels like it’s falling into my eyes, so I shoot air from the corner of my mouth while keeping my attention on the door.
And I wait.
And wait.
I can’t hear anything outside the room. I don’t know if it’s because no one’s anywhere near me or because the walls are thick and padded.
“Hey!” I yell.
Nothing.
My wrist is just background noise now. It probably isn’t gushing blood. The blood’s probably clotting.
I’m probably not going to bleed to death.
“HELLO!”
My cheek itches.
I lean back and unfold one of my legs to stretch it in front of me. My toes are a little cold, but the straitjacket keeps my arms and torso warm.
“Anybody out there? Don’t tell me you forgot about me!”
I wonder about the other people who came in—Kate, her boyfriend. I think of them, hunched over their clipboards in their winter coats, sitting on those metal chairs in admissions. Her boyfriend’s knee bumps hers—his legs splayed, hers pressed together. She’d reached out without taking her eyes off the form and given his leg a brief squeeze before putting her palm on her clipboard again, holding it flat on her lap, her pen scratching away.
In my memory, I can hear it scratching, though no way would I have heard it from outside the door. In the cold.
The gold threads in her hat reflected the fluorescent lights, but not as brightly as they had outside. I’d stood out there with my fists in my pocket, shuffling against packed dirt, shivering as the cold reached under the collar of my jacket, wishing they’d hurry up and let us in.
Then she was
in that room—screaming, her lips wet with spit. Her eyes shining with tears. Her body jolting and twisting behind the drawn shade.
It’s only a show, right? I wonder where they are, what they’re doing, if they’re actually okay.
Because it wasn’t like the place could get away with killing everyone who went in. Or even some of the people who went in. So I think they’re probably okay, and A.J. is too, and I’ll be fine at the end of all this. Bored, but fine.
My chin rests on the front of the jacket. I’m staring at the dirty knee of my blue pajama bottoms.
I’m actually not thinking as clearly as I sound. It’s like those whispers that got caught in my head in the ward full of beds. I think I sound rational—you probably think I sound rational—but I have a deep-seated feeling that these rational words are not what I’m really saying at all.
Under the surface, my thoughts look like black mold at the bottom of a forgotten Tupperware container. I jerk my head up, blinking at the spot where wall and ceiling meet. There’s something I almost remember, but it’s as murky as the tub A.J. disappeared into. When I plumb my mind, I keep hitting bottom way nearer to the surface than I think I should.
“Hey!” I yell. “HEY!”
The padding on the walls smothers my voice.
I feel like I’m the only person left in the world.
14
tickticktick
The tip of a spindly leg dents A.J.’s thigh.
He heaves his head off the table, his neck fatigued from doing this one too many times. He hopes the robot is going to cut the leather straps and skitter away, letting him get the fuck out of there, no real worse for wear after all, except for some disgusting shit he’d like to never think about again.
But the thing steps over his wrist and clambers onto his leg, then down into the space between his thighs, where the girl’s knee had been. It uses its legs like feelers, testing his hips gently, his belly. Soft whirs and clicks accompany its movements.
