Rusted Stirrups & the Ball-Jointed Doctor
A rumble of wheels tolled through her skull. Dry, metronomic vibration climbed her spine as the cold stretcher rattled underneath her, rushing Na-bi somewhere she could not see.
"Hah... hah... mmph..."
She stared at the ceiling. Fluorescent lights streaked past like comets, and in the flicker between them the air thickened with mildew, disinfectant, and the nauseating reek rising off her own skin.
She could not move. Coarse leather straps had already lashed her wrists and ankles to the frame, tight enough that her hands and feet were going numb—but that was nothing beside the horror of her lower body.
Every jolt of the stretcher sent her belly sloshing. The unidentified fluorescent liquid packed into her bladder leaked in a thin, searing stream around the tube jammed in her urethra, a chemical burn eating at the opening. Behind, it was worse. The cold insect mash the mannequins had funneled into her packed her rectum solid, and her loosened anus could not hold the weight; the contents kept slipping out in slow, helpless trickles.
"Nnh... no... it's coming out... it's coming out again..."
Her inner thighs were soaked. From a vagina stretched so wide the entrance hung slack and gaping, a filth-laced mucus they had smeared on her in place of lubricant ran down mixed with blood. The sheet beneath her was already a ruin of four colors—fluorescent chemical, brown insect sludge, red blood, white mucus—soaked through and glistening.
Where are they taking me...
Terror closed over her. If they dragged her any farther, there would be no coming back. She twisted on instinct. The vitality of Indomitable whispered at her not to give up.
"This—undo this! Let me go! Nngh!"
She bucked her hips and thrashed. The leather went taut; the frame creaked. And then a fist came down.
"Ghk?!"
One of the mannequins pushing the stretcher drove its knuckles into her swollen lower belly. No hesitation, no wind-up—just a clean, heavy blow, as simple as throwing a switch.
"Gyaaaaah...!"
The impact punched through her viscera. Her distended bladder and rectum compressed at once; the fluids trapped inside had nowhere to go and slammed against her inner walls. It felt like a grenade going off in her gut. Her body jackknifed off the mattress, and the shock unlocked her sphincters. Filth gushed from between her legs in a sudden, humiliating flood.
She still could not stop. At the far end of the corridor a chill was waiting, and with it a metallic blood-scent that set every alarm in her body screaming. That place was hell. She could not go in there.
"No... I'm not going! Let me go! Ahhh!"
Foam flecked her lips from the pain, but she twisted again. If she could not break the straps, she would flip the stretcher itself.
Fists again. This time two of them struck her belly at once.
"Agh! Ghk, khhh...!"
Her intestines felt like they were knotting. Her breath caught hard against her teeth. Venom still burned in her eyes. Even if they beat her to death, she would not become a laboratory animal. Ten times, twenty—she screamed and kept fighting.
The mannequins stopped walking. They cocked their heads and looked down at her, and something like irritation flickered across those smooth, egg-blank faces. Too loud. Broken, maybe. Need to shut her up.
Their eyeless faces turned to one another, then back to her. One of them reached for its own groin and, without a flicker of pause, seized the hard plastic phallus mounted between its legs.
A crack. A snap.
"......?"
Na-bi's eyes went wide. It had ripped its own genitals out by the root. In its hand was a grotesque six-inch club of plastic, the broken end jagged and sharp, and it gripped the thing like a truncheon as it stepped toward her face.
"Wh-what are you—stay away...!"
It did not wait for an answer. Another mannequin crushed her cheeks in both hands and wrenched her jaw open until the joint screamed and her mouth was forced wide.
The broken plastic cock punched through her mouth and drove deep into her throat.
"Mmph?! Nnnnmmph?!!!!"
The hard foreign object plugged her airway. Her breath cut off in a single stroke. The chemical tang of plastic and the rotting taste of insect mash smeared on its body slammed into the root of her tongue.
"Ghk, khk... nngh..."
Her face flushed crimson in an instant. She could not breathe. Her lungs clenched, starving, and the world went dark at the edges as stars burst across her vision. Her body convulsed like a wind-shaken aspen—not struggling anymore, but the death throes of an animal suffocating. Her eyes rolled back. Consciousness frayed—
It pulled the cock out.
"Hahk! Hhah, hhah... cough!"
The airway tore open. She coughed so hard bile and saliva ran down her chin. She was alive. Oxygen rushed in, tears streaming, and she tried to catch her breath—
It went back in.
"......!!!!!!!!!"
The moment she opened her mouth to inhale, it rammed the club down to her esophagus. Torture by hope. Give her air, then take it away.
"Nngh! Ghhh..."
She stared, wild with terror. Their faces were blank. They were machines that had learned a single causal chain—do this, and she goes quiet—and they were simply running the loop.
When she was about to die of asphyxiation, they pulled it out. "Hahk! Ghk!" The instant she could live again, they shoved it back in. "Mmph! Nnnnmmph!"
Again. And again. Her will shattered completely. Escape? Resistance? Those were luxuries. All that was left was the raw, animal wish that they would let her breathe—that they would please, please take that hard thing out of her throat. The focus drained from her convulsing eyes.
The gurney stopped. A heavy iron door slammed shut, and the air changed. This was not the damp, mildewed atmosphere of the lobby. It was cold here, a chill that sank into the bone, and a thick stench of alcohol and formalin that stabbed the sinuses raw.
The mannequin popped the plastic cock from her throat with a wet, obscene sound.
"Cough... bleh... hah... hah..."
She gasped with her tongue lolling. Her jaw would not close. Her lips and throat were so raw that every swallow felt like downing a razor blade, and she could not hold a thought together.
The restraints came off. She had no strength to run. The mannequins lifted her limp body like a piece of cargo.
"Ah... no... nnh..."
They hoisted her into the air and dumped her onto a grotesque chair in the center of the room. Cold metal kissed her buttocks and the length of her spine, and goosebumps raced across her skin.
It was a gynecological examination chair. Not the white, clean kind from any ordinary hospital. The frame was rusted red all over; the leather upholstery was stained black-crimson. The stirrups had been rebuilt with leather straps and iron chains until the whole thing looked less like medical equipment than a torture rack.
With practiced ease, the mannequins seized her legs and wrenched them apart, hooked her knees over the stirrups, and cinched the leather tight.
"Don't... don't tie me... let go..."
Her legs were spread in a humiliating M, wide open to the cold hospital air. An anus leaking insect mash, a vagina swollen raw and red, a urethra with the tube still jammed in it—every private ruin of her laid out under the lights like an exhibit.
"Hnnk... don't look... please..."
She tried to turn her head, but a leather strap around her neck locked her facing forward. And from the darkness ahead, someone was walking toward her.
Not the light plastic footfalls of the mannequins. Heels. A gait with weight behind it.
"......"
Na-bi's pupils trembled. A man in a white coat was approaching—tall, broad-shouldered, the doctor's gown pressed clean. A white surgical mask covered his face; a neat surgical cap sat on his head.
His skin was nothing like the mannequins' glossy plastic. Pale, but with a flush of blood beneath it, and even fine down visible at the nape of his neck. Human skin.
A person...? A doctor?
A spark of hope flared in her chest before she could stop it. Another survivor trapped in this nest of mad dolls? Someone come to save her? The man in the white coat stepped between her spread legs and stopped.
His eyes watched her through transparent goggles. Cold—but unmistakably intelligent. He reached out slowly. She held her breath, waiting. Then he moved his wrist to pick up a chart, and her hope shattered into dust.
It was not tendon rising and bone shifting under skin. The angle of the wrist was wrong. At the joint exposed by his cuff, instead of bone, a silver metal ball gleamed.
"Ah......"
Her mouth fell open. He wore a human hide, but underneath he was a meticulously crafted ball-jointed doll—far more precise than the mannequins, far more expensive, and so much deeper in the uncanny valley that looking at him made her stomach turn.
He looked down between her legs without a word. That gaze was not a doctor's looking at a patient. It was a repairman's, pricing a broken appliance before he took it apart.
He took out a pen and mimed writing in the air. Then he scooped a finger through the insect mash smeared on her inner thigh. His finger was cold—not the dry cold of the mannequins, but a damp, yielding chill, like meat left in a freezer. He brought the filth on his fingertip up to his mask, near the nose, and sniffed.
Then he shook his head. Into Na-bi's mind, not a voice but a cold metallic will drove itself directly in:
Dirty.
Cleaning required.
Internal damage: severe.
He picked up a tool from the tray beside him. A huge, crude speculum of cold stainless steel—larger than any instrument she had ever seen. Not made for a human being. A hideous dilator the size you would use on livestock. An elephant. A horse.
"N-no... that, you can't... it's too big..."
She tried to jerk her hips back in terror. The chains rattled. He paid her fear no mind at all. With an indifferent touch he poked at the torn entrance of her vagina, and then he jammed the cold metal beak into that narrow gap.
"Hnnngh!"
Dry metal, unlubricated, scraped her wounded inner walls as it forced its way in. A tearing pain—no. It was actually tearing. His face expressionless, he shoved the speculum in to the hilt, and the nauseating kiss of cold steel touched her cervix.
"Gyaaaaah! It hurts! It huuurts!"
Then he turned the screw on the handle.
"Aagh! It's tearing! Stop spreading it! My bones! My pelvis!"
He did not stop. Her vagina yawned open, stretched past its limit until the red mucosa went white. Insect mash and blood pooled inside came gushing out and soaked his white coat; he did not so much as blink.
He zoomed in with his lens-set eyes on her fully exposed cervical os. Then he picked up another tool from the tray. A sharp uterine curette, the tip hooked like a claw—an instrument for scraping the lining of the womb.
"Don't... don't do it... don't scrape..."
She knew, instinctively, what he meant to do with it. His ball-jointed wrist moved with mechanical precision, and the cold hook advanced toward the deepest part of her belly.
The hospital's frigid air was cooling her wide-open viscera. The real repairs they spoke of were about to begin.