The Viscous Trail of Flesh and the Thirsting Vending Machine #020-1. Discharged Desire & Refilled Shackles
A scrape of cloth on metal. A dull thud. The whisper of a body dragging itself forward.
Darkness lay thick along the narrow passage. The antiseptic reek of the Underground Pharmacy faded at her back, and in its place a stagnant air pooled low against the floor — old dust, mildew, and the musky stink of some beast she could not name. Na-bi crawled on her hands and knees through the cramped vent, an emergency kit slung over one shoulder, dragging herself along like a wounded animal.
"Nngh... hhkk... it's so heavy..."
The groan spilled from her lips, but it wasn't the sting of her torn knees or the ache in her crushed shoulder. The problem was her insides.
When she had opened the pharmacy door, the swollen Living Key had discharged an enormous volume of ejaculate, and that viscous, clinging fluid was still pooled in her rectum, sloshing with every movement. Each time she crawled forward, a blatant wet sound rolled through her belly — a heavy glug, a filthy squelch — and the key, contracted now to the girth of a thick dildo, floated in that liquid and bumped against her inner walls. It felt like crawling with a hot water balloon packed into her guts. Every inch of progress drove her abdominal pressure higher, and that pressure shoved the filth in her rectum toward her anus. A fullness so extreme it felt ready to burst.
"I can't... I can't go any farther... I have to take it out..."
Na-bi stopped, slumping against the vent's cold wall. If she pushed on into the western passage toward the Museum like this, the foreign mass in her belly would ruin her the moment she had to run. Worse, a smell like something rotting inside her was climbing her throat, and her stomach turned. She had to empty it. She had to dump everything she was carrying and put herself back together.
She gripped the galvanized metal wall and, with a shuddering effort, lifted her hips. The space was too tight to even straighten her back. When she hiked the thin hospital gown to her waist, her lower body emerged pale in the dark, a wreck of blood and mucus. Slick and gleaming, the Living Key's handle protruded from her anus.
Na-bi drew a long breath.
"Hahh... hahh..."
She reached behind herself and closed her fist around the slippery handle. The texture against her palm was nauseating — yielding and wet, like taking hold of a live earthworm. She bore down with her lower abdomen and pulled, slowly but without hesitation.
A long, sucking drag — then a wet pop, like a vacuum seal tearing free.
"Aaahhhngh!"
The Living Key came out, and the dam it had been holding collapsed.
A splattering rush. A wet cascade. A hissing gush. Everything that had been pooling in her rectum poured out through the hollow the key had left behind. The milky mucus it had discharged, the bright arterial blood from torn flesh, and the thin secretions still lingering in her bowels — the whole mixture ran hot and heavy down between her thighs, enough of it to form a small puddle on the vent floor.
"Hahh... hahh... nngh..."
A briny, oddly pungent musk filled the cramped space, sharp enough to sting the nose. Shame burned across Na-bi's face, but the sudden emptiness in her belly brought such relief that a sound escaped her unbidden. The vent's cold air seeped into her still-gaping anus and cooled the raw heat inside.
"Hahh... I feel alive again..."
For a moment she stared blankly at the puddle of filth on the floor. That's what was inside me. She pulled the Mayo scissors from the emergency kit and snipped a strip from the hem of her hospital gown, then used the scrap of cloth to wipe the clinging fluid from her hips and thighs.
Wipe. Wipe. Cleaner, at least. The crawling, unclean feeling did not leave her. And the mixture she had emptied — blood and semen and waste, all of it — was already turning in the vent's trapped heat, throwing off a rancid stink. She did not have the strength left to crawl away from it. The moment the tension broke, a lead-heavy exhaustion crushed her from scalp to sole. She curled up beside the filthy puddle and lay down. The cold of the metal floor cut through the thin hospital gown, but the fatigue was absolute. It reached into her skull and switched her off.
The nightmare was waiting. It found her the instant she slept.
Na-bi screamed, kicking at empty air.
"Hahk!"
Her eyes flew open on a heart that was trying to beat its way out of her chest. Her whole body was soaked through with cold sweat.
"Hahh... hahh... a dream... it was a dream..."
With a trembling hand she groped across her lower belly. It had not burst. There was no hole where a knife had gone in. The phantom pain, though, had not gotten the message. Her abdomen throbbed as if she had just been stabbed, and a nauseating fullness — the feeling of something packed inside her that did not belong — scraped at her nerves.
She tried to pull herself together. The sensation that arrived next was worse than the nightmare, because it was real.
"Water... water..."
Her mouth was so dry her tongue had glued itself to the roof of it and would not come free. When she tried to swallow, it was like swallowing sand. She had been pouring cold sweat for hours, and on top of that she had emptied a massive volume of fluid in the pharmacy. The dehydration was severe.
Na-bi lurched upright. There was one mercy. While she slept, the Indomitable trait and the restorative work of the bandages had closed the torn anal sphincter a great deal. The ragged flesh had knit. The stretched hole had found its elasticity again and tightened.
She picked the Living Key up off the vent floor. In its dormant state it looked like a soft silicone dildo, still faintly warm with her body heat.
Should I just throw this away and leave it?
The thought of putting it back inside her made her stomach turn. She never wanted it in her body again. She did not have a choice. This was a master key. They had said it could open locked doors even in the hospital, and she might need it to open locked doors in the Museum as well. She had no pockets, and the bag held nothing but sharp surgical tools. There was only one place to keep it. Its original sheath.
"Hahh... I really hate this... I really do..."
Wearing a look of pure misery, she braced against the wall and presented her hips again. The anus she had wiped clean. Against that small hole, healed now and narrowed, she set the thick head of the Living Key.
"Go in... please..."
Before, torn as she had been, it had slid free without a fight. Now the recovered muscle was taut and springy, and it refused the invader. She had wiped away every trace of lubricant. The friction was dry and ugly.
She smeared what residual mucus remained on the key's tip around the entrance and worked at it, breathing out, forcing the sphincter to yield.
A firm press. A slow, grinding slide.
"Khnnngh...!"
The foreign sensation flooded back — a narrow passage forced open, the intestinal wall stretching around the intrusion with a dull, heavy ache. Na-bi bit down on her lip and rocked her hips from side to side, feeding it in a fraction at a time.
A stretching give. A wet grind. A long, deep push to the root.
"Hahh... nngh..."
At last it was swallowed completely, only the grip left outside. Her anus chewed and clenched around it, holding on. The relief of voiding was gone. In its place the heavy fullness returned, that suffocating packed-full feeling of something occupying every inch of her insides. But it would not leak. Not now. It was locked in perfectly.
Na-bi let out a long breath and started crawling again. After a time, an end came into view. The narrow vent opened onto a passage that was almost a corridor, wider than what she had been dragging herself through. She told herself it was the western passage.
She crawled out of the vent and put her weight on trembling legs. No more crawling. From here she would walk on two feet, like a human being, into the Museum.
She staggered. Her palm slapped the wall. The world tipped and swam. Anemia.
"So thirsty... water... water..."
A thirst so raw it blotted out everything else came down on her. The wounds lining her esophagus burned. She lurched down the corridor, and every time she caught herself on the cement, grit bit into her palm.
That was when she saw it.
Far ahead, in the dark at the end of the corridor, a faint light. Not the bluish stutter of a fluorescent tube — the glow of some artificial machine.
A low motor hum. Humming, waiting.
Na-bi moved toward it as if drawn. An old, massive apparatus resolved out of the dark.
It was not Coca-Cola. It was not cider. Behind the glass sat clear plastic bottles with no labels at all, filled with liquids that looked thick enough to cling to the sides — crimson, violet, a fluorescent, poisonous green.
They were not normal drinks. That much was obvious. To Na-bi's eyes, though, they were only liquid. Her throat clicked as she swallowed what saliva she had left.
Feeling the Living Key lurch and swing inside her, she took one step, then another, toward that suspicious oasis.