Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 Author: Hoop
Title: Incarceration Ch.24
Part: Chapter 24
Summary: Zoe's punishment, which involves a lot of hypodermic needles.
Keywords: FF, bd, tort, sad



   Laura's skin was pink and tingling by the time the sushi-residue had
been cleaned from her body.  She didn't have much of an idea about what had
happened during the previous hour or so, having been strapped down to a
bench and completely unaware of her surroundings apart from the occasional,
very painful pinches and prods where somebody seemed to have been molesting
her with a pair of chopsticks.

   Post-shower, she had been clothed in a big t-shirt and thin, flimsy,
hospital-patient trousers.  There was still no sign of Zoe anywhere, but
the other two girls were in the cell when she was returned - Emma, lying on
her side and curled up into a ball, was crying hysterically.  Claire was
kneeling behind her, visibly distressed that she couldn't do anything to
comfort the girl apart from laying a reassuring hand on her shoulder, which
didn't seem to help.

   Laura tried her best as well, but nothing they could do seemed to be
making it any easier for her.  Emma calmed down a little when Laura simply
pulled her up off the floor and hugged her tightly.  Her shoulder soon
became wet with the girl's tears.  Another ten minutes of that, and Emma's
weeping gradually abated.  Maybe she had just become dehydrated.  She
pulled away from Laura, to regard her with damp, reddened eyes, the dark
circles beneath them prominent against her paper-white skin.

   "T-Thanks," she said.

   "It's okay," said Laura, "it's okay.  You want to talk about it?"

   Emma's next word came out as a heaved sob instead, as if she were about
to launch into another bout of crying.  For the first time since they had
met, Laura saw a look of genuine, helpless fear on the girl's face, rather
than defiance.

   "It- was- so- horrible," she managed, gasping in between each word.  She
sniffled, and wiped her nose with her hand.  Then she rubbed her eyes.

   "I had- I had a lot of time to think," she said.  Emma took a steadying
breath, regaining the ability to speak a whole sentence without sobbing in
between words.  "I thought it was bad when she did all those things to us,"
she continued.  "But just being there, completely alone...  you start to
wonder what's going to happen next.  About how long you're going to be left
like that.  How...  how long has it been?" she asked.

   "She took you there last night," said Claire.  "Maybe sixteen hours?"

   "Right," said Emma, "right..."

   She stared at nothing in particular for a while, eyes unfocussed.  Then
her lip started to tremble.  "Why isn't anyone looking for us?" she said.
"It's been what, a week?  I don't even know how long you two have been
here," she added.  "How does she get away with it?"

   "Who knows?  I mean, we still can't really remember, right?" said
Claire. "At least, I can't."

   "It could be a drug or something," said Laura.  "On the basis of what
she gave us yesterday, I could believe she had some kind of chemical that
messes with short-term memory.  I guess we were all abducted somehow."

   "Someone's going to have noticed.  There's no way we can just disappear
without some sort of investigation."

   "Yeah," said Emma, "sure." She was nodding exaggeratedly, as if trying
to convince herself of the fact.

   An hour elapsed before Helen came to their cell, accompanied by an
attendant carrying three polystyrene cartons.

   "Got some very positive feedback from those gentlemen," she said. 
"Which means you two did a good job.  So you get to have these."

   The attendant gave a carton each to Laura and Claire, but kept hold of
the third.  Laura opened hers, and saw that it contained a clump of greasy
chips and an unappetising cheeseburger - a sad, grey piece of meat, topped
with a fluorescent yellow square of cheese and sandwiched inside a soggy
bun.

   "As for you," she said to Emma, "I suppose you must be famished by now.
But you're only allowed to eat if you promise to be a good girl from now
on. I don't want to have to repeat what happened last night."

   She knelt down in front of her.

   "Are you going to be a good girl for me?" she said.

   "Yes, mistress."

   "Good." Helen kissed her on the cheek.  "I knew you'd understand after
that.  Here you go." She handed her the third carton.

   "I've got a few more things to do with number 271, now," she said.  "Got
to get her ready for the last part of her punishment.  I'll send someone to
get you later, and you can watch!  Won't that be fun?"

   Her face grew sterner as she awaited her answer.  Finally, it was Emma
who appeased her with another "yes, mistress."

   "Until then," she said.

   The girls ate after she had left.  The food wasn't actually that bad.

   "I wonder what she's doing to Zoe," said Laura.

   "Don't.  Just, I don't want to think about it," said Emma.  "So let's
not.  It sounds like we'll find out soon, anyway."

   They finished their meal in silence.

   They were collected from their cell some time later.  A pair of
attendants bound the girls up in straitjackets that had thick collars
bearing metal rings.  The attachment points allowed them to tether the
three girls together by their necks, a few feet of thin chain between each
of them.  They grudgingly opened their mouths to accept the ball gags they
were to wear, the bright pink spheres of rubber pulled back snugly into
their mouths by the tightening of leather straps.  Once everything was
secured to the attendants' satisfaction, they were escorted to a familiar
room - the place where Emma had endured a number of throat-fuckings from a
gang of attendants two days previously.

   This time, it was Zoe on the other side of the glass partition.

   Some of Helen's other victims had been brought to watch the spectacle
too - there were five other girls in the room, all of them restrained to
varying degrees of severity.  A pair of nude girls were sitting on the
floor cross-legged, their wrists cuffed in front of them.  A girl with
bright, dyed-pink hair, and wearing an uncomfortably tight-looking
straitjacket, was resting her head in the lap of one who had her arms held
back in some kind of leather sleeve, secured about her shoulders with a
harness.  The last girl's legs were kept folded beneath her by thick belts
that had been looped around her shins and thighs.  Another set of straps
around her arms held them together in front of her.  She looked away
self-consciously, wiping the spittle from her ball gag.

   As for Zoe, she was strapped to a sloped bench lying face-up, head
angled downwards.  There was a wet cloth covering her face, and Helen was
pouring water over her from a jug.  Zoe was screaming and begging for
mercy, in between bouts of coughing and spluttering as the water was poured
over her head.  Laura could see where the cloth was being sucked inwards as
the girl struggled for breath.

   Helen set the jug down, and removed the cloth from Zoe's face.  She was
wet and bedraggled, her hair a damp mess.  She lifted her head up with some
effort, and sneezed water out of her nose, her whole body shuddering.

   "Please!  Please stop!" she begged.

   Helen's response was another pint of water poured over the girl's head.
The jug was emptied, and Helen dumped the ice cubes it had contained
between Zoe's legs, where they came to rest up against her crotch due to
the tilt of the bench.

   "Maybe it is time to finish the waterboarding after all," said Helen. 
"I'm not sure I can be bothered to go and fill up this jug for an eleventh
time.  Besides, there's one more thing I want to do with you."

   She turned to address all the other girls through the glass partition.
"I hope that what you've seen today will discourage you from doing
something as stupid as this girl," she said.  "271 here is going to
discover just how seriously I take escape attempts." She prodded at the
tattooed number on Zoe's breast.  "You'd do well to remember that you
belong to me, now," she said.  "All of you.  You are mine."

   She undid the straps holding Zoe to the bench, and pushed her off onto
the floor.  Zoe struggled to raise herself on trembling arms, coughing up
the last dregs of water from the previous torture.  Meanwhile, a pair of
attendants were removing the bench, and a third was hooking a length of
chain to the ceiling, each end bearing a locking, metal cuff.  Zoe was
pulled up by her hair, and the manacles were fastened around her wrists to
hold her arms above her head.  It seemed there would be enough slack in the
chains for her to stand upright, until one of the attendants locked a metal
bar between her legs, a cuff around each ankle spacing them far apart
enough that she was now only just standing on tiptoes.  He dried her face
and hair a little by towelling them roughly, and she was left to stand
facing the rest of the girls, nude and exposed.

   "I'll be handing over to someone else for this punishment," said Helen.
"Someone with more specialist skills."

   --

   Zoe's throat and nose were raw from the water that had trickled into
them during her last torture.  It had been an indescribably horrid feeling
- the wet cloth over her face clinging to her claustrophobically, the
struggle for breath, the water triggering every biological response that
said, "You are drowning.  Panic.  Now." The inability to move at all had
made it even worse.

   She was intensely grateful for this moment of respite where nothing was
happening to her, although her wrists were already hurting from where the
cuffs were digging into them.  The bar parting her legs exposed her
genitals in full view for all the other girls in the room to see, but it
was the least of her concerns - embarrassment at being seen naked had long
become a non-issue compared to the other things that were happening to
them.

   Another person entered the scene, and Zoe recognised the coppery-red
hair of the girl who had tattooed her on the previous day, her face once
again covered with a surgical mask.  She was carrying a roll of cotton
wool, a bottle of disinfectant, a spool of fine thread sealed in
shrink-wrap, and two cardboard boxes.  The label on the first proclaimed
the contents to be "Latex gloves, powder-free, sterile A, for clinical
use." The box beneath it bore considerably less pleasant words:

   "Hypodermic needles x 100, 21 G x 1 1/2" (0.8 x 40mm), sterile."

   "NO!" Zoe screamed.  The chains above her rattled as she wriggled her
arms desperately.  Her toes skittered against the floor as she began to
swing slightly.  "No!  Please, oh God!  Anything else but that!"

   Wrinkles appeared at the corner of the redhead's eyes as she smiled
behind her mask.  "Miss Stanford's instructions," she said.

   "You can't fucking do this!  How can you do this!?"

   She didn't answer.  An attendant had wheeled a small table alongside
Zoe, and the redhead set her things down upon it.  She arranged her
equipment while Zoe screamed at the top of her lungs, rattling her chains.

   She opened the box of needles first.  They were individually packaged;
each slotted into its own plastic tube and sealed in blister-packs that
were joined together at the long edge.  The plastic crackled as she tore
off a strip of a few dozen needles, and laid them down upon the table's
surface.  She worked her hands into a pair of the white latex gloves, and
moistened a ball of cotton wool with the disinfectant.  She used it to swab
Zoe's left breast.

   Apparently the screaming was irritating her - she looked over at an
attendant, and tapped her finger against her mask.  He came behind Zoe and,
midway through one of her screams, a ball gag was shoved into her mouth,
forcing her jaws apart and quieting her considerably.  The straps against
her cheeks were wide and stretchy, made of rubbery material.  The ball was
overly large but also quite soft; she could bite down into it, but this
only made it fill out her mouth even more.  It was very effective.

   The redhead made a show of preparing the first needle in front of Zoe's
face so she could get a good look at it - she peeled open the package with
a thumb and forefinger, extracting the needle and allowing the plastic
wrapping to fall to the floor.  Then she gave the needle a gentle twist,
and pulled it from its protective sheath.  She held up the thin,
murderously sharp metal implement to the glass, so the other girls could
see what was about to happen.

   "Mmuuh, mmuuh," were all the sounds Zoe could manage as the redhead took
her nipple between her fingers and pulled it outwards.  She rolled it
between her fingertips.  Then, like a sudden wasp-sting, she stabbed the
sharp point into Zoe's flesh and out the other side.  Her howl of pain was
reduced to a mute groan, and the chains rattled again.  A tiny trickle of
blood formed at the needle's tip.

   Another needle was inserted, an inch above the first, through the paler
skin over the areola.  Zoe's cry was no less desperate.  The worst part was
the feeling as the needle sank in, effortlessly carving a path to the other
side where the skin poked up for an instant before the tip burst through,
leaving a red, inflamed blotch to spread at either end of its brief journey
through her flesh and nerves.

   More and more needles were inserted.  The girl repeated the process
mechanically: take a needle, remove the packaging.  Pinch the skin, stab it
through.  Occasionally she would twist the needle around, and there was a
strange sort of pain as the metal slid against Zoe's raw flesh.  She found
that she was able to control herself so that she merely whimpered at each
new insertion, saving her throat from the strain of pointless screams. 
Soon, the girl had finished laying down a neat row of needles that extended
all the way from Zoe's nipple to the top of her breast, the parallel metal
spikes laid out like the rungs of a ladder.
The girl swabbed Zoe's other nipple with the disinfectant, and she
wailed through her gag as she realised that, by symmetry, the whole process
was to be repeated on her other breast.  The needles went through in the
other direction this time, sharp ends pointing towards her sternum.  Each
horrible pricking pain gradually abated into a tingling throb; she could
feel her heartbeat in the surface layers of her skin where the needles
impaled her.  Her pulse was fast, she recognised the same, adrenal rush she
had experienced during her escape attempt as her body tried to cope with

the constant pain.

   Once finished, the girl did not take another needle from the roll.  This
time, she unpackaged the spool of thread, and unwound it a little.  The
strand was very thin, almost translucent.  She looped it around the needle
at the top of Zoe's left breast, and tied the thread off with a knot, her
fingers working dexterously and precisely.  The latex gloves and hair-like
thread apparently posed no obstacle to her skilled hands.

   With one end tied off, she began to unravel the thread, and wound it
around the plastic-capped end of a needle on the other breast.  Then she
came back to wind it around the next one down; the tightening fibre pulled
at the pair of needles above in a way that tugged at Zoe's skin with a
gruesome tautness.  She worked her way down in a criss-cross pattern, each
turn of the thread pulling the needles towards each other and driving them
further into their wounds until they dimpled Zoe's skin with the pressure.

   The whole process took ten minutes of painstaking work.  It wasn't quite
as agonising as the application of the needles, but the tugging at Zoe's
skin still felt strange and terrible.  The redhead tied the final knot and
stood back to admire her work: a perfect lattice of criss-cross thread
between Zoe's breasts, both of which were now blotchy and red.  Her nipples
were turned inwards ever so slightly as they were pulled towards each
other. The whole of her chest felt tight, and what was worse, every time
she took a breath it caused all the needles to tug against one another.

   At first, she tried to avoid it by taking as shallow breaths as she
could.  The attenuated breathing, along with the gag, soon had her dizzy
from the lack of air.  She was forced to take a big, inwards gasp, all the
needles pulled tight with vicious tautness, and she wailed in agony.

   She happened to glance through the partition at the other girls.  Some
of them were crying.  Others were looking away.  One of the nude girls was
hunched over against the wall with her back to Zoe, and shivering.  An
attendant jabbed her with his electric baton and forced her back around,
holding her head facing forward, pulling the poor girl's eyelids open with
his fingers.

   The redhead still had plenty of needles left.  Zoe had little remaining
energy to scream.  She could see the reaction in the other girls' faces as
the redhead swabbed the inside of her thighs - some of them cringed.  The
girl with the pink hair buried her face in her hands.  The best Zoe could
do was concentrate on her breathing, to try and cope with the feeling of a
dozen hot points of pain on her constricted chest.  She still gasped as the
first needle slipped beneath her skin, inches below her pussy.

   After a small eternity of stabbing pains even worse than the last, two
more rows of needles had been neatly inserted all the way down the insides
of her thighs.  She glanced down long enough to see that they were bleeding
noticeably more than her breasts, and then decided to look at the ceiling
instead.  She was feeling sick and exhausted, tears blurred her vision so
that she had trouble focussing on anything in particular.

   Her buttocks were next.  She could feel her anus clenching as each
impalement came closer and closer towards it, but the pattern of piercings
turned downwards to trace another needle-ladder down the back of her legs,
all the way to the backs of her knees.  The feeling of a needle sinking
through the softer flesh at the back of the joint was hideous.  Something
wet trickled down her calf, but she refused to look.

   She found that, even now, there was still some energy left to scream.  A
needle through the lips of her pussy was painful enough that everything
else faded to unimportance.  Strangely, she heard her own muffled screams
as if they were coming from elsewhere.  She didn't feel entirely like her
body was her own any more.  Perhaps it was her brain's way of coping.

   The girl slipped two needles through her labia, stepping back to observe
Zoe's reaction.  Zoe had discovered there was a kind of pain and
helplessness beyond even screaming - a crushing feeling of dread as she
realised that there was no escape at all, and nothing could be done to make
the pain stop.  The metal around her wrists and ankles was completely
immovable; there was no give in the restraints whatsoever.  No hope of
freedom.

   She found that there was no longer a need to scream.  The girl pushed
another needle through the top of her navel, sharp end pointing upwards,
and this time she barely noticed the pain.  The girl threaded four more
needles through Zoe's labia, and the last insertion felt like a small
scratch rather than the horrid stab of the first.  Of all the things to be
thinking about at that moment, Zoe found herself recalling a book she had
read during a phase when she thought she might specialise in neurology at
university - a sidebar (she could even remember the illustrations on the
page) about endorphins, and the triggers that could lead to their release.
She could only assume this was what was happening to her - her brain
releasing huge quantities of the chemicals, to prevent her going crazy from
the pain.  The effect was probably intensified by all the other tortures
that had lead up to this moment, and to this state of mind.

   It was as if she was watching the redhead from very far away, somehow.
All the pains had become a mild tingling, and the tightness in her chest no
longer seemed to matter.  Everything felt fuzzy.  She thought there was
probably some significance to the girl holding up a metal weight, with more
of the sterile thread tied through a hoop in the top of it.  She attached
it to the lattice of thread on the breast-piercings, causing everything to
tighten and shift.  Zoe looked down with a sort of detached curiosity at
the weight now hanging from the threads, tugging at her skin.  A girl the
other side of the glass stood up, tried to run, and was intercepted by an
attendant who dragged her over to the partition and pressed her face up
against it.

   There was something comforting about seeing the other girl plead on her
behalf.  Held up against the glass, Zoe could hear her crying "No, stop,
you can't do this to her!" in response to whatever the redhead was doing.
She looked down to see that she was holding another, larger weight, and
that at some point a second network of threads had been tied around all the
needles piercing her genitals.  The weight was attached, there was an odd
feeling of tightness between her legs, and then the fuzzy opioid barrier
her brain had constructed was smashed as a new, brutal pain surged from her
cunt.

   It was too much.  She suddenly became aware, once again, of the myriad
agonies contributing to her maddening hell of pain.  She felt bile rising
in her throat.  Her vision dimmed, and then consciousness left her
entirely.