mark sessnatz
Tribune
This was written about 2 years ago and originally posted to my now-abandoned tumblr blog. It's set in a near-future authoritarian dystopian state called the NAFR. I have a few other stories-in-progress set in the same world. Hope you all enjoy!
PART I:
"PRISONER 3019, YOU HAVE BEEN BROUGHT BEFORE THE TRIBUNAL FOR PROCESSING! YOU WILL ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS HONESTLY, CLEARLY, AND CONCISELY! IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?"
Katie squinted into the blinding halogen lights pointed directly into her face. She was in a roughly twenty by thirty foot concrete cell. The wall across from her was replaced by an enormous mirror, which she instinctively knew could be seen through from the other side. When she looked, however, she couldn't see her interrogators, only the pitiful sight of herself.
She was completely naked. Her pale bare arms were stretched above her head and cuffed in steel chains to the rough, damp concrete wall behind her. Her straight brown hair was disheveled, and her breathing was ragged with terror. She was shaking, from the cold or the fear, she couldn't tell.
"IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?"
"Yes!" She meant to shout, but it came out as more of a squeak. She heard a low buzzer, then a roar, then the breath was knocked out of her as two torrential jets of icy water erupted from the corners of the room, drenching her, drowning her, stinging her bare skin. It was hellishly cold. She twisted this way and that, gasping for breath, until after ten seconds that felt like years, the hoses turned off. She slumped against the wall, drenched half-choking, half-sobbing. She hadn't seen the hoses with the lights in her face.
"ALL QUESTIONS WILL BE ANSWERED PROMPTLY. IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?"
"Yes!" She shrieked reflexively. Now shivering in earnest, her teeth chattering, she dragged herself back to her full height. She felt as though she'd been dunked in ice. At least, she thought grimly, they couldn't see her crying when her whole face was already soaked. The loudspeaker crackled again.
"PRISONER 3019: YOUR FULL NAME IS KATHERINE CLAIRE FARREN. CORRECT?"
"Correct." She spoke robotically, distracted by the ache in her shoulders.
"YOU ARE NINETEEN YEARS OLD, CORRECT?"
"Yes." Her bare feet were starting to go numb from the cold.
"ON APRIL 10th, 2038, YOU WERE APPREHENDED AND ACCUSED OF POSSESSION AND CONSUMPTION OF A CLASS 1 PROHIBITED PSYCHOACTIVE SUBSTANCE AS DESIGNATED BY THE NORTH AMERICAN FREE REPUBLIC DEPARTMENT OF CRIMINAL CORRECTION. CORRECT?"
"Correct." Katie closed her eyes. She hadn't even smoked the weed, it was Vanessa's. She had just been at the party.
"DO YOU PLEAD GUILTY TO THE CHARGES?"
"No!" She looked around, hoping she could somehow meet someone's gaze through the mirror, someone who would understand. She hadn't smoked. "I'm innocent!"
The buzzer sounded again. Then the water returned, drenching her anew, stinging her face, her chest, her shoulders, the cold cutting right into her, right to the bone. She screamed with what little breath she could draw, but no one could hear over the roar of the hoses. Then once again, it was over. She crumpled against the wall, still shaking, desperate for breath.
"Please," she whimpered, "You have to understand, I didn't-"
"DO YOU PLEAD GUILTY TO THE CHARGES?"
"But I didn't-"
Another buzzer, then the water came again, so cold that it might as well have been scalding hot for all that her shocked nerve endings were able to differentiate. It was just pain. The force knocked her off her feet this time, but her manacled arms caught her before she hit the ground. She tried to stand but caught the jet right in her face. It filled her nose and mouth, it stung her eyes. She fell once more. She couldn't breathe. Then it stopped, and she slumped and dripped and cried.
"DO YOU PLEAD GUILTY TO THE CHARGES?"
The electronic voice had not altered its intonation once. Katie understood. She knew people who had been arrested by the Republic before. This wasn't a trial, it was an inquisition. They didn't want an explanation. Just a confession. She turned to face the mirrored wall.
"Yes," she choked in the smallest voice of her life. She heard a quiet electronic chime.
"THE TRIBUNAL ACCEPTS YOUR PLEA. YOU HAVE BEEN CONVICTED OF THE CHARGES. SENTENCE WILL BE PASSED."
Katie leaned her head against the wall. Her shoulder ached fiercely where she had wrenched it in her fall. Goose pimples covered her naked body. She couldn't feel her feet. She wanted nothing more than to be warm and dry. She thought she might never be warm and dry again.
"TRIBUNAL CONCURS. PRISONER 3019 IS SENTENCED TO RECEIVE SIXTY LASHES. PUNISHMENT TO BE CARRIED OUT IN PUBLIC, TOMORROW AT 0800 HOURS."
Katie's stomach turned a somersault. Her mouth felt dry. Sixty lashes? They were going to whip her. They were going to whip her in public, sixty times. For a first offense! She was no longer certain her shaking was just from the cold.
"TRIBUNAL CONCLUDED. PRISONER WILL BE TAKEN TO HOLDING. NEXT TRIBUNAL IN FIVE MINUTES."
Three faceless giants in jet-black fatigues entered the cell. They loomed like granite tombstones over her as they unlocked her wrists from the manacles and dragged her from the cell. She stared straight ahead, her vision foggy, barely noticing the men's grip crushing her slender arms.
Sixty lashes. Tomorrow morning.
The men led her down a featureless concrete corridor. Her bare, wet feet slapped the cold, rough floor. She began to cry, but silently this time, because she knew that no one cared.
They took her through a steel door into an antechamber of sorts lit by dim fluorescent. A middle-aged woman with one eyebrow sat at a gray steel desk. The guards stopped and held Katie in front of the woman. She looked Katie up and down, then disappeared into a closet behind her. After a moment she emerged and threw a bundle of gray fabric at Katie's feet.
"Get dressed." The woman said in a raspy monotone. The men holding Katie released her arms and she winced as the circulation returned. She bent down and picked up the clothes. They consisted of a shapeless gray tank-top and shorts that resembled baggy pajamas. The shirt had a barcode printed over the left-hand breast. Clumsily, she pulled them on, grateful to have anything at all to cover herself with after the hours she'd spent naked in the facility. There was still nothing to put on her feet though. She wondered vaguely if they would ever return her own clothes they'd taken from her.
A sharp shove from the guard behind her nearly knocked her over.
"Move."
They exited through the opposite door into a wider corridor lined with identical featureless steel doors. As they marched her down the hallway she gazed at all the doors, wondering who was inside each one. The only openings in the doors were the smallest of rectangular slits near the top, not enough to see inside. Finally, they stopped in front of one of the doors about 50 feet from the end of the hallway. One guard with a master key unlocked it and dragged it open. It made a heavy metallic scraping sound
The cell inside was barely larger than a toilet stall and about as inviting. The walls were sheer steel, the floor was pockmarked cement and the only adornments were an inch-thick canvas pallet and a small plastic bucket. Katie was suddenly overcome with a wave of claustrophobia on seeing it, and began to struggle against the guards' grips, begging not to be locked inside. They just laughed at her. Holding one arm each, they hurled her forward. She slammed hard into the cell's back wall, almost definitely bruising her shoulder, and sank down onto the pallet, stifling a grunt of pain.
"Don't worry," said one of the guards, "You'll be out of there bright and early." They shut the door and left her alone and afraid in the darkness.
Katie leaned against the back wall and hugged her knees up to her chest. Her head was spinning, her stomach was in her throat, she felt sick. For what felt like the millionth time in the last half a day, tears welled up in her round hazel eyes.
But then suddenly she was angry. It wasn't fair! No, she thought. They want to break me. I'm not going to break. I'm not going to be afraid. She closed her eyes and forced herself to steady her breathing. She found her hand reaching automatically for her right shoulder and the delicate blue tattoo of a robin etched into her pale skin there. Robin was her mother's name. Her mother had died three years before. Katie got the tattoo to remember her, and to remember everything she had taught her to live by. Katie stopped crying and her breathing calmed. Her mother would want her to be brave.
Eight hours earlier, everything had been normal. It was Saturday and she didn't have any classes. Her friend Olive had told her that some other friends of theirs were getting together for a casual little party at Vanessa's. Vanessa lived off-campus, across town in a rented bungalow with a couple of grad students, so her place, away from the supervision of the University, was a popular hangout. So mid-afternoon, Katie, Olive, and three other friends of theirs all scanned their pass-cards at the gate, piled into Olive's hatchback and headed for the bungalow.
There were about a dozen of their friends there altogether. There was music, drinks, dancing, conversation, laughter...comfort...normality. When one of Vanessa's roommates brought out a small bag of weed, Katie had been impressed. That was kind of a rare treat. Not impossible to get, but you had to have the right connections. She could remember her parents talking about how much easier it was to come by in their time. The draconian government of the Republic had made a great many things more difficult. But as they passed the pipe around, nobody had been afraid. They were indoors, none of them had any kind of record of dissidence. They all felt invincible, the way you do when you're young and embracing independence. So when the Municipal Troopers had battered down the doors, there was no hope of hiding.
It had been instant chaos. The black-clad troopers were like ghosts, appearing everywhere in the house in a matter of seconds. Some of the partiers tried to fight. Others froze on the spot or dropped to their knees, pleading or crying. Katie and Olive, among others, bolted for the back of the house. They grabbed Olive at the Kitchen doorway and dragged her away, screaming. Katie didn't look back as she scrambled onto the counter. She made it partway out of the open window before a black glove closed around her hair and dragged her the rest of the way through, throwing her to the ground like a sack of bricks.
Her eyes watered, her scalp throbbed and white spots flashed in front of her eyes as she rose up onto her knees, dazed and disoriented. The trooper who caught her held the end of a shock baton inches from her face while another took handcuffs from his belt and grabbed her wrists, ordering her to remain silent. From inside the house she could faintly hear more screams, thuds, and the crackle of discharging batons, however, she was barely aware of her surroundings. Everything was blurry, and indistinct, as though she were underwater. She said nothing, and as a black canvas bag was thrown over her face, she finally fainted.
Katie thought of all the faces in that house, her friends, acquaintances, fellow students. She realized she had no idea what had happened to any of them. It was a psych-out tactic: the troopers isolated you from anyone you were with on arrest. The last person she had seen was Olive, grabbed from behind her as she dove for the window. Had anyone managed to escape the raid? If so, who? Would she ever see any of them again? Was Olive somewhere in this prison with her? What about Vanessa? Or Kieran, Olive's on-again-off-again boyfriend who had been in the car with them; or Jenny, a girl in the year above them who lived next door to Vanessa? Were they here, naked, chained, forced to confess? Would they be whipped also?
From the backyard, Katie had been dragged into the back of an armored van. She could tell from the heat and the smell that there were other bodies packed in with her, but, as they were all too afraid to say anything, she had no way of knowing if any of them were people she knew. She knelt in the dark, wrists aching, and had no idea if they drove for ten minutes or an hour. By the time the black bag was removed, she was alone again apart from her captors, inside a dingy tiled room in the detainment facility.
The guards uncuffed her hands so that a gray-faced man at a desk behind a barred window could scan her fingerprint and access her civilian file, but they kept their own hands on the hilts of their shock batons, sending a clear message. Katie wouldn't have tried to run. She knew she was in way too far over her head.
Once the desk attendant had edited the correct forms, the trooper led Katie through a door into another grim tiled room, this one containing an exam table and a wall of diagnostic instruments. A blonde woman in a lab coat had ordered Katie to strip, while a fat balding man had cataloged and then locked away every article of her clothing: her sneakers, socks, shorts, tank top, jean jacket, even her pale blue panties and bra and her black choker necklace. She'd probably never see any of it again.
Then the lab coat woman had begun a medical examination. She shone a light into Katie's eyes and throat, took down her pulse and blood pressure, looked over every inch of Katie's slim body. She noted down every minuscule blemish, as well as the robin tattoo. Then she had put on a pair of latex gloves. Katie wanted to cry again remembering. The woman had shoved her harsh, probing fingers into Katie's mouth, peeling back her lips, feeling under her tongue and making her gag. She grabbed Katie's breasts, squeezing all around. Then she reached downward. She shoved her fingers into Katie's sex, deep inside, probing around and around, while Katie squeezed her eyes shut and bit down hard on her lip and whimpered. Then she turned Katie around and shoved the fingers up her ass. At this invasion, Katie had let out a little yelp and flinched, her foot involuntarily flying up and meeting the lab coat woman's shin.
Lab coat woman jumped back, there was an electronic crackling, and then Katie felt a sudden burning in her side and a searing jolt of current shot through her body. The guard behind her had jabbed her with his baton. Panting, Katie leaned on her elbows on the exam table, biting her lip once more, determined not to cry as the woman resumed her examination of Katie's insides.
After another interminable minute, the woman stepped away and threw away her gloves, allowing Katie to stand back up and gingerly turn around. The fat man had the woman sign a form and then the troopers had led Katie away through another door. She walked slowly and awkwardly, everything between her legs still sore. They led her into a hallway and sat her on a cold metal bench, where she was to wait to be called for the tribunal, the "processing" and the hellish water torture. The whole time, she never once saw a single other prisoner.
Katie shifted uncomfortably in the dark cell. The whole experience felt unreal, like a bad dream or like something that happened to someone else, to another girl. It was all too much too fast, she couldn't accept it. But she couldn't deny the cold and the dark and the damp that surrounded her. She couldn't deny the hard steel wall at her back or the coarse cement floor beneath her. And she knew that greater pain awaited her still. Would they even tell her family? At least they would probably let her go after she took the lashes, wouldn't they? With a million questions turning over and over in her mind, Katie finally surrendered to her exhaustion and sank into the most uneasy sleep of her life.
She was startled awake a few hours later by a thunderous banging on the door of her cell. Reflexively, she shrank back against the wall, her heart racing. She winced at the stiffness in her neck from sleeping in the tiny metal box. She had no way of knowing what time it was. The cell door was pulled open by two troopers. They may have been the same ones from before, or two completely different men. In their body armor and face masks, they all might as well have been robots. One of them gestured at her with his baton.
"Come on out, little lady," he said. "Time to take your punishment."
PART I:
"PRISONER 3019, YOU HAVE BEEN BROUGHT BEFORE THE TRIBUNAL FOR PROCESSING! YOU WILL ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS HONESTLY, CLEARLY, AND CONCISELY! IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?"
Katie squinted into the blinding halogen lights pointed directly into her face. She was in a roughly twenty by thirty foot concrete cell. The wall across from her was replaced by an enormous mirror, which she instinctively knew could be seen through from the other side. When she looked, however, she couldn't see her interrogators, only the pitiful sight of herself.
She was completely naked. Her pale bare arms were stretched above her head and cuffed in steel chains to the rough, damp concrete wall behind her. Her straight brown hair was disheveled, and her breathing was ragged with terror. She was shaking, from the cold or the fear, she couldn't tell.
"IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?"
"Yes!" She meant to shout, but it came out as more of a squeak. She heard a low buzzer, then a roar, then the breath was knocked out of her as two torrential jets of icy water erupted from the corners of the room, drenching her, drowning her, stinging her bare skin. It was hellishly cold. She twisted this way and that, gasping for breath, until after ten seconds that felt like years, the hoses turned off. She slumped against the wall, drenched half-choking, half-sobbing. She hadn't seen the hoses with the lights in her face.
"ALL QUESTIONS WILL BE ANSWERED PROMPTLY. IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?"
"Yes!" She shrieked reflexively. Now shivering in earnest, her teeth chattering, she dragged herself back to her full height. She felt as though she'd been dunked in ice. At least, she thought grimly, they couldn't see her crying when her whole face was already soaked. The loudspeaker crackled again.
"PRISONER 3019: YOUR FULL NAME IS KATHERINE CLAIRE FARREN. CORRECT?"
"Correct." She spoke robotically, distracted by the ache in her shoulders.
"YOU ARE NINETEEN YEARS OLD, CORRECT?"
"Yes." Her bare feet were starting to go numb from the cold.
"ON APRIL 10th, 2038, YOU WERE APPREHENDED AND ACCUSED OF POSSESSION AND CONSUMPTION OF A CLASS 1 PROHIBITED PSYCHOACTIVE SUBSTANCE AS DESIGNATED BY THE NORTH AMERICAN FREE REPUBLIC DEPARTMENT OF CRIMINAL CORRECTION. CORRECT?"
"Correct." Katie closed her eyes. She hadn't even smoked the weed, it was Vanessa's. She had just been at the party.
"DO YOU PLEAD GUILTY TO THE CHARGES?"
"No!" She looked around, hoping she could somehow meet someone's gaze through the mirror, someone who would understand. She hadn't smoked. "I'm innocent!"
The buzzer sounded again. Then the water returned, drenching her anew, stinging her face, her chest, her shoulders, the cold cutting right into her, right to the bone. She screamed with what little breath she could draw, but no one could hear over the roar of the hoses. Then once again, it was over. She crumpled against the wall, still shaking, desperate for breath.
"Please," she whimpered, "You have to understand, I didn't-"
"DO YOU PLEAD GUILTY TO THE CHARGES?"
"But I didn't-"
Another buzzer, then the water came again, so cold that it might as well have been scalding hot for all that her shocked nerve endings were able to differentiate. It was just pain. The force knocked her off her feet this time, but her manacled arms caught her before she hit the ground. She tried to stand but caught the jet right in her face. It filled her nose and mouth, it stung her eyes. She fell once more. She couldn't breathe. Then it stopped, and she slumped and dripped and cried.
"DO YOU PLEAD GUILTY TO THE CHARGES?"
The electronic voice had not altered its intonation once. Katie understood. She knew people who had been arrested by the Republic before. This wasn't a trial, it was an inquisition. They didn't want an explanation. Just a confession. She turned to face the mirrored wall.
"Yes," she choked in the smallest voice of her life. She heard a quiet electronic chime.
"THE TRIBUNAL ACCEPTS YOUR PLEA. YOU HAVE BEEN CONVICTED OF THE CHARGES. SENTENCE WILL BE PASSED."
Katie leaned her head against the wall. Her shoulder ached fiercely where she had wrenched it in her fall. Goose pimples covered her naked body. She couldn't feel her feet. She wanted nothing more than to be warm and dry. She thought she might never be warm and dry again.
"TRIBUNAL CONCURS. PRISONER 3019 IS SENTENCED TO RECEIVE SIXTY LASHES. PUNISHMENT TO BE CARRIED OUT IN PUBLIC, TOMORROW AT 0800 HOURS."
Katie's stomach turned a somersault. Her mouth felt dry. Sixty lashes? They were going to whip her. They were going to whip her in public, sixty times. For a first offense! She was no longer certain her shaking was just from the cold.
"TRIBUNAL CONCLUDED. PRISONER WILL BE TAKEN TO HOLDING. NEXT TRIBUNAL IN FIVE MINUTES."
Three faceless giants in jet-black fatigues entered the cell. They loomed like granite tombstones over her as they unlocked her wrists from the manacles and dragged her from the cell. She stared straight ahead, her vision foggy, barely noticing the men's grip crushing her slender arms.
Sixty lashes. Tomorrow morning.
The men led her down a featureless concrete corridor. Her bare, wet feet slapped the cold, rough floor. She began to cry, but silently this time, because she knew that no one cared.
* * *
They took her through a steel door into an antechamber of sorts lit by dim fluorescent. A middle-aged woman with one eyebrow sat at a gray steel desk. The guards stopped and held Katie in front of the woman. She looked Katie up and down, then disappeared into a closet behind her. After a moment she emerged and threw a bundle of gray fabric at Katie's feet.
"Get dressed." The woman said in a raspy monotone. The men holding Katie released her arms and she winced as the circulation returned. She bent down and picked up the clothes. They consisted of a shapeless gray tank-top and shorts that resembled baggy pajamas. The shirt had a barcode printed over the left-hand breast. Clumsily, she pulled them on, grateful to have anything at all to cover herself with after the hours she'd spent naked in the facility. There was still nothing to put on her feet though. She wondered vaguely if they would ever return her own clothes they'd taken from her.
A sharp shove from the guard behind her nearly knocked her over.
"Move."
They exited through the opposite door into a wider corridor lined with identical featureless steel doors. As they marched her down the hallway she gazed at all the doors, wondering who was inside each one. The only openings in the doors were the smallest of rectangular slits near the top, not enough to see inside. Finally, they stopped in front of one of the doors about 50 feet from the end of the hallway. One guard with a master key unlocked it and dragged it open. It made a heavy metallic scraping sound
The cell inside was barely larger than a toilet stall and about as inviting. The walls were sheer steel, the floor was pockmarked cement and the only adornments were an inch-thick canvas pallet and a small plastic bucket. Katie was suddenly overcome with a wave of claustrophobia on seeing it, and began to struggle against the guards' grips, begging not to be locked inside. They just laughed at her. Holding one arm each, they hurled her forward. She slammed hard into the cell's back wall, almost definitely bruising her shoulder, and sank down onto the pallet, stifling a grunt of pain.
"Don't worry," said one of the guards, "You'll be out of there bright and early." They shut the door and left her alone and afraid in the darkness.
Katie leaned against the back wall and hugged her knees up to her chest. Her head was spinning, her stomach was in her throat, she felt sick. For what felt like the millionth time in the last half a day, tears welled up in her round hazel eyes.
But then suddenly she was angry. It wasn't fair! No, she thought. They want to break me. I'm not going to break. I'm not going to be afraid. She closed her eyes and forced herself to steady her breathing. She found her hand reaching automatically for her right shoulder and the delicate blue tattoo of a robin etched into her pale skin there. Robin was her mother's name. Her mother had died three years before. Katie got the tattoo to remember her, and to remember everything she had taught her to live by. Katie stopped crying and her breathing calmed. Her mother would want her to be brave.
* * *
Eight hours earlier, everything had been normal. It was Saturday and she didn't have any classes. Her friend Olive had told her that some other friends of theirs were getting together for a casual little party at Vanessa's. Vanessa lived off-campus, across town in a rented bungalow with a couple of grad students, so her place, away from the supervision of the University, was a popular hangout. So mid-afternoon, Katie, Olive, and three other friends of theirs all scanned their pass-cards at the gate, piled into Olive's hatchback and headed for the bungalow.
There were about a dozen of their friends there altogether. There was music, drinks, dancing, conversation, laughter...comfort...normality. When one of Vanessa's roommates brought out a small bag of weed, Katie had been impressed. That was kind of a rare treat. Not impossible to get, but you had to have the right connections. She could remember her parents talking about how much easier it was to come by in their time. The draconian government of the Republic had made a great many things more difficult. But as they passed the pipe around, nobody had been afraid. They were indoors, none of them had any kind of record of dissidence. They all felt invincible, the way you do when you're young and embracing independence. So when the Municipal Troopers had battered down the doors, there was no hope of hiding.
It had been instant chaos. The black-clad troopers were like ghosts, appearing everywhere in the house in a matter of seconds. Some of the partiers tried to fight. Others froze on the spot or dropped to their knees, pleading or crying. Katie and Olive, among others, bolted for the back of the house. They grabbed Olive at the Kitchen doorway and dragged her away, screaming. Katie didn't look back as she scrambled onto the counter. She made it partway out of the open window before a black glove closed around her hair and dragged her the rest of the way through, throwing her to the ground like a sack of bricks.
Her eyes watered, her scalp throbbed and white spots flashed in front of her eyes as she rose up onto her knees, dazed and disoriented. The trooper who caught her held the end of a shock baton inches from her face while another took handcuffs from his belt and grabbed her wrists, ordering her to remain silent. From inside the house she could faintly hear more screams, thuds, and the crackle of discharging batons, however, she was barely aware of her surroundings. Everything was blurry, and indistinct, as though she were underwater. She said nothing, and as a black canvas bag was thrown over her face, she finally fainted.
Katie thought of all the faces in that house, her friends, acquaintances, fellow students. She realized she had no idea what had happened to any of them. It was a psych-out tactic: the troopers isolated you from anyone you were with on arrest. The last person she had seen was Olive, grabbed from behind her as she dove for the window. Had anyone managed to escape the raid? If so, who? Would she ever see any of them again? Was Olive somewhere in this prison with her? What about Vanessa? Or Kieran, Olive's on-again-off-again boyfriend who had been in the car with them; or Jenny, a girl in the year above them who lived next door to Vanessa? Were they here, naked, chained, forced to confess? Would they be whipped also?
From the backyard, Katie had been dragged into the back of an armored van. She could tell from the heat and the smell that there were other bodies packed in with her, but, as they were all too afraid to say anything, she had no way of knowing if any of them were people she knew. She knelt in the dark, wrists aching, and had no idea if they drove for ten minutes or an hour. By the time the black bag was removed, she was alone again apart from her captors, inside a dingy tiled room in the detainment facility.
The guards uncuffed her hands so that a gray-faced man at a desk behind a barred window could scan her fingerprint and access her civilian file, but they kept their own hands on the hilts of their shock batons, sending a clear message. Katie wouldn't have tried to run. She knew she was in way too far over her head.
Once the desk attendant had edited the correct forms, the trooper led Katie through a door into another grim tiled room, this one containing an exam table and a wall of diagnostic instruments. A blonde woman in a lab coat had ordered Katie to strip, while a fat balding man had cataloged and then locked away every article of her clothing: her sneakers, socks, shorts, tank top, jean jacket, even her pale blue panties and bra and her black choker necklace. She'd probably never see any of it again.
Then the lab coat woman had begun a medical examination. She shone a light into Katie's eyes and throat, took down her pulse and blood pressure, looked over every inch of Katie's slim body. She noted down every minuscule blemish, as well as the robin tattoo. Then she had put on a pair of latex gloves. Katie wanted to cry again remembering. The woman had shoved her harsh, probing fingers into Katie's mouth, peeling back her lips, feeling under her tongue and making her gag. She grabbed Katie's breasts, squeezing all around. Then she reached downward. She shoved her fingers into Katie's sex, deep inside, probing around and around, while Katie squeezed her eyes shut and bit down hard on her lip and whimpered. Then she turned Katie around and shoved the fingers up her ass. At this invasion, Katie had let out a little yelp and flinched, her foot involuntarily flying up and meeting the lab coat woman's shin.
Lab coat woman jumped back, there was an electronic crackling, and then Katie felt a sudden burning in her side and a searing jolt of current shot through her body. The guard behind her had jabbed her with his baton. Panting, Katie leaned on her elbows on the exam table, biting her lip once more, determined not to cry as the woman resumed her examination of Katie's insides.
After another interminable minute, the woman stepped away and threw away her gloves, allowing Katie to stand back up and gingerly turn around. The fat man had the woman sign a form and then the troopers had led Katie away through another door. She walked slowly and awkwardly, everything between her legs still sore. They led her into a hallway and sat her on a cold metal bench, where she was to wait to be called for the tribunal, the "processing" and the hellish water torture. The whole time, she never once saw a single other prisoner.
* * *
Katie shifted uncomfortably in the dark cell. The whole experience felt unreal, like a bad dream or like something that happened to someone else, to another girl. It was all too much too fast, she couldn't accept it. But she couldn't deny the cold and the dark and the damp that surrounded her. She couldn't deny the hard steel wall at her back or the coarse cement floor beneath her. And she knew that greater pain awaited her still. Would they even tell her family? At least they would probably let her go after she took the lashes, wouldn't they? With a million questions turning over and over in her mind, Katie finally surrendered to her exhaustion and sank into the most uneasy sleep of her life.
She was startled awake a few hours later by a thunderous banging on the door of her cell. Reflexively, she shrank back against the wall, her heart racing. She winced at the stiffness in her neck from sleeping in the tiny metal box. She had no way of knowing what time it was. The cell door was pulled open by two troopers. They may have been the same ones from before, or two completely different men. In their body armor and face masks, they all might as well have been robots. One of them gestured at her with his baton.
"Come on out, little lady," he said. "Time to take your punishment."
* * *
Great story so far!!
