Plastic Smiles & Pain Without Memory
A dry clacking echoed out of the dark. Plastic grinding on plastic, joint against joint. Na-bi forced her heavy eyelids open. The world swam. A muscle relaxant and a sedative were riding the IV into her veins, dulling every nerve from skull to sole.
"Nngh…"
She tried to move her fingers. They hung limp as waterlogged cotton, refusing every command. The hospital room had been silent. It was not silent anymore. She was no longer alone.
Faint silhouettes ringed the bed. One. Two. Three. Five shadows stood looking down at her.
"…?"
As her eyes adjusted, the shapes resolved. Smooth, bloodless skin. Faces as blank and featureless as eggs. Metal spheres set into every joint.
The Nurse Mannequins. They wore white uniforms and surgical caps, and they had her surrounded. Across each empty face a grotesque smile had been drawn in permanent marker or gouged with a knife.
One of them cocked its head. The plastic neck joint turned with a dry, papery click.
"Ah… uhh…"
Terror hit her on instinct. Her memory had been wiped clean. She did not remember that these were the same creatures that had slammed her into the lobby floor days ago. Her body remembered. It remembered the nauseating cold of those smooth fingers, the merciless strength of that grip.
Every cell in her screamed to run. She could not run. Her body had been locked in place.
The mannequins stepped toward the bed, one pace at a time. Their gait was uncannily fluid and rigid all at once, like watching a puppet show whose strings had started to snag. They reached for her. There was no violence in it. The gestures were careful, almost tender — the hands of nurses attending a patient.
A cold plastic finger stroked her cheek. Not a person's warmth. The temperature of an object. Na-bi flinched.
They straightened her blanket. They combed her tangled hair. They kneaded her shoulders and massaged her arms and legs. To look at, it was devoted care. The red smiles split to the ears never changed.
"Hiek…"
One mannequin leaned in close. The pupils drawn onto its face stared through her. It caught the corners of its own mouth with two fingers and tugged them up — a gesture, an instruction. Smile.
Kindness, forced. Care she could not refuse. Na-bi's eyes rolled in their sockets, wild with fear.
Then the door opened. The familiar click of dress shoes crossed the threshold. The mannequins froze as one and fell back to either side, parting like the Red Sea. A path opened. At the end of it, the Hospital Director was walking toward her.
He had thrown off his white coat and rolled his shirtsleeves to the elbow. Silver ball joints gleamed at his wrists. He came to the bedside and looked down.
"Awake, are we? I do hope our children have been taking good care of you."
He gave the mannequins an encouraging pat on the shoulder. They bowed, joints clicking.
"Now then. Time for the final treatment."
His gaze settled on the needle taped into her arm. The bag was nearly empty. Today's dosage had all gone in. Her memory had been laundered white, and her body had gone slack.
He ripped the tape off in one harsh pull and drew the needle free.
"Ah — that stings…"
Na-bi's moan was barely a breath. A bead of red welled in the puncture. He did not stop the bleeding. He let it run.
"No IV today. I'll be administering it directly."
He said it with a weight that was not medical, and sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped. Her body tipped toward him.
"Hnn… Doctor… I… my discharge…?"
She asked it through a fog. In the blank of her scoured mind, only one thing remained: the Hospital Director's lie that if she lasted five days, she could leave. She did not know that this was the sixth day. She did not know the promised time had already passed.
He gave a short, amused breath at the innocence of the question.
"Discharge. Hmm. I'll need to examine your condition first."
He undid the buttons of her patient gown. One. Two. She could not stop him. She could not even lift her arms. The fabric fell open to either side.
White skin. And wrapping it, a tattered Bandage — the one she had taken from the convenience-store warehouse, her only lifeline. He laid his palm over her breast through the wrappings.
"Your heart is racing. Still frightened?"
Her heartbeat struck his palm. Thud. Thud. Thud. His hand was cold as it closed over the soft flesh. He did not squeeze. He did not twist. He stroked her as gently as a lover would — thumb rolling the nipple, palm circling the whole of the breast. The gentleness was worse. It was the quiet before a storm. The certainty that he might, at any second, tear the meat from the bone closed around her throat.
"Nngh… please don't…"
She turned her face away, and found the Nurse Mannequins waiting on the other side. They stroked her hair with those painted smiles. There was nowhere to go.
His hand traveled down. Past her navel, across the lower belly, to the bandaged groin.
"Shall we have a look down here as well."
He pushed a finger through a gap in the wrappings. Wet. Not from her. From the seepage of wounds that had not yet closed, and the pus the bandage had been holding.
A thick, viscous sound. He did not grimace. He seemed to savor it. He did not unwrap her. He worked the seam between bandage and flesh, prying into the gap.
"Ahk — it hurts… it stings…"
Na-bi whimpered. The bandage had been suturing her with a kind of desperate life, clutching torn tissue the way a living thing might. His fingers were interrupting that work — the sensation of flesh that had just begun to knit being forced apart again.
His middle finger found the vaginal opening. A hole left in tatters by the metal speculum and the femoral rod, shredded like a rag. The bandage had started to scarf the surface over with scar, but inside she was still wreckage.
He pressed the entrance with a fingertip. He did not go in. He circled the rim, slowly.
"Softer than before. All that tearing, I suppose."
He put his mouth to her ear.
"You don't remember, do you? How this came to be in such a state."
"What…? Ugh… I don't know… I don't remember…"
She was close to tears. She truly did not remember. All she had was the burn between her legs, a heavy, smoldering pain. Did I get hurt? When? The confusion piled on itself.
He enjoyed that confusion, and eased the finger inward, a little at a time. Damaged flesh caught and dragged.
"Hwaaah—!"
Her hips jerked off the mattress. The finger had found a wound on the inner wall. A scab that had been trying to set split with a small, wet pop, and blood ran again.
"Does it hurt? Pain is proof that you're still alive."
He said it like comfort, and put a second finger in beside the first. Then he spread them like scissors.
A wet, tearing sound.
"Aah! It's tearing — Doctor — it hurts!"
"Hush. It's all right. This is merely an examination."
The lie was delivered without a flicker. He stirred the opened hole, reaching toward the cervix — the place the metal rod had driven through two days before. Uneven scar tissue met his fingertips. Flesh still unhealed, still soft.
"This area is weak. Feels as though it might rupture if I press."
He set a nail and scraped the wound on the cervix.
"Hiek—!"
Her eyes rolled. A razor-thin pain cut through the deep of her belly. The muscle relaxant would not even let her scream properly; her mouth worked soundlessly. Cold sweat sheeted off her and soaked the pillow.
He withdrew his fingers. A sticky mix of blood and pus ran down them. He wiped it on her thigh.
"That should suffice for the warm-up."
He stood. His hands went to his belt. The buckle came free with a metallic clack that landed like a sentence.
"Time to begin the party."
He dropped his trousers. Even in the dark the thing was plain — a grotesquely swollen cock, ugly with blood. The instant she saw it, instinct tried to shove her backward across the bed. Her body did not move. The mannequins caught her shoulders and ankles and pinned her down.
"No… I don't want this… stay away…"
The plea went nowhere. He pushed between her legs. The bandage should have made entry awkward. He did not unwrap it. He peeled it aside and fed himself through the gap.
"The bandage has you healing so quickly. All the tighter for me. How fortunate."
He set the head against her entrance. A hole already raw, already screaming — and now a hot, rigid mass pressed against it.
He pushed in.
"Nngh—!"
Her head snapped back. Slowly. So slowly. She felt every inch of flesh being shoved aside, every half-closed wound splitting open again. The only lubricant was her own blood and pus.
He watched her eyes as he entered — watched himself reflected there, and the way her face came apart around the pain.
He seated himself to the root. The cervix took the weight of it. She could not breathe. The fullness in her belly was so complete she thought she would choke on it.
Around the bed, the mannequins seemed to giggle. The clack of plastic joints came to her like a hallucination. The sixth night. For Na-bi, who had no memory left, the dark stretched out like something that would never end.
He started to move. The gentle handling was finished. What remained was destruction.
Flesh striking flesh. Her strangled sounds filling the room. In the smear of her fading mind she thought of the bandage box under the bed. If I just have that. If I can just wrap it again. Even that hope thinned, and thinned, and went.
When morning comes, will I forget everything all over again and repeat this hell? Or will tomorrow truly be the end? In a terror that would not let her be sure of anything, Na-bi came apart in the Hospital Director's arms.