Warden was uneasy. It wasn’t about the execution itself—god knows he oversaw too many of them, and as inhuman as it sounded, he was no longer bothered. It wasn’t about the secrecy either—the situation was what it was, and you either went along with it, or ended up on the other side of that big window. Still, something felt more wrong than usual.
Part of it must have been the man who joined him on this occasion - or rather, the person who sent him. The little, restrained, perpetually smiling man sat straight, holding his briefcase filled with strange tools in his lap and sharing his attention between the monitoring screens and the preparations happening on the other side, calm and unflinching, like a lizard.
The major source of uneasiness was, of course, the method. The warden was glad that violent criminals with a profile low enough for a secret execution didn’t arrive in The Citadel too often. Though perhaps if they did, it would all be over by now. There must be a purpose to all of this, some sort of endgame he didn't really want to see, but even more so, didn't want to keep awaiting.
It should have been something he’d gotten used to—but it was worse each time.
The two guards, old Mike and a new guy whose name the warden had not memorized yet, were already finishing the preparations. The prisoner hadn’t been told anything, and he clearly did not understand what was happening. He stood in the middle of the well-lit execution chamber, strapped tightly to the metal holding frame, unable to move anything except his head, which was not yet secured with the neck lock. The frame looked different from the last time, with even more grips and supports surrounding the immobile figure, looking like a cross between bondage gear and a bouldering slab.
He tried to appear calm, but the way he looked around, blinking, showed that the panic was slowly taking hold. He wasn't important, just a thug who shot a couple of cops. One of them was somebody’s cousin or some other relative, and that had earned the guy a quiet little fast-track past the courthouse line, straight into this room.
Lights from the ceiling reflected on his cleanly shaved and oiled head. He was completely naked, which was something new. One more reason to avoid a public trial, thought the warden, glancing from the handsome face down the muscular, tattooed body with irritation. All those dumb women who’d send him letters on death row once a picture hit the newspapers—at least they’ll never learn he even existed.
He frowned and asked,
“This sausage display is a requirement from her… or her?”
“Yes,” answered the lizard guy calmly, without bothering to turn his head. ”We are fine-tuning the process. ”
Old Mike finished checking the straps and stood back. He was sweaty and pale, jaw clenched, displaying a level of nervousness the warden never saw in him during all his years of work—until this shit started. Mike had asked for a transfer half a dozen times already, but with little hope—he knew just as well as the warden that this was a one-way trip to hell for all of them, and he had a front seat on the roller coaster.
Mike turned towards the window between the chamber and the dark observation room, looking in the direction where he knew the warden was sitting, and nodded. Warden spoke into his mic.
“Bring in the device.”
“What fucking device?” asked the convict, but Mike ignored him and left the room, followed by the other guard.
Warden turned to his screens to follow their movements. Nothing unexpected ever happened during this part, but he was still nervous.
The whole wing containing the special execution chamber was almost unused; the empty concrete walls of its corridors were barely lit by ancient fluorescent lamps, of which perhaps a third were still working, humming loudly. Nobody had cleaned down here; the damp, musty odor of dust and mildew filled the stale air.
Larry, the new guard, was falling behind, curiosity fighting against growing doubts. Their footsteps echoed in the corridor, and behind them, within the hum, he could swear he heard rain banging on the roof, just as it had that night. He shook his head, trying to banish the memory, but he could still hear her voice, just a whisper, “Larry, what are you doing?”
He hadn't thought about it in years, only starting a few days ago because of all the weird questions they had given him when hastily discussing the reassignment. ‘Have you ever hurt anyone?’
‘Who hasn’t?’ he had thought, but he only said ‘no’.
“This is where we found him, by the way,” said Mike, not turning his head back, his voice hoarse from the long silence.
“What?” asked Larry, jolted back to reality.
“Your predecessor. Under that wall over there,” he nodded as he passed the place.
“Natural causes, they told me,” said Larry, probing.
“Heart attack. Yeah, natural causes. Time and place, not so natural. The guy wasn’t even forty.”
“Stressful job?”
“Do I look stressed?”
He did, thought Larry, but said nothing.
They quickly crossed the last few yards of the dim corridor and arrived at the entrance to an old storage room. Mike opened the lock, and they both stared into the dark opening for a few seconds, fighting against the sudden, hair-raising feel, before the older guard composed himself and walked in with fake confidence.
There was something wrong with the position of the light switch. Mike had been here dozens of times, and yet, as usual, he frantically moved his hand around for a few seconds before he found it and switched it on. He was close to retirement and had seen some shit, but this was the one room in the world he did not want to be in, in the darkness.
Before the lights came up, he noticed something. There were two patches of dim, flickering blue light on the other side of the room, but before he made sense of them, the old fluorescent tubes washed them away, blinking, screeching, and finally stabilizing. Mike blinked too, blinded by the sudden brightness, before attempting to find out where the pale lights shone before. As he was afraid, it was exactly the area where a few new solid metal lockers stood against the wall. Same place they were heading.
They moved in, passing old storage crates which contained some rather unpleasant things—the old Betsy, the prison’s retired electric chair, was said to be in one of them—and stopped in front of the new, huge storage lockers, each one almost three feet wide and taller than a man. One light splotch seemed to have been the mesh insert in the door of the leftmost locker, not transparent enough to see inside. Mike has not opened that one before. He knew he probably shouldn’t, but with trembling hands, he found the proper key and slowly unlocked the door.
Inside, a pillar made of dark stone stood alone in the exact middle of the cavernous space, as if the walls were afraid to touch it. Almost as tall as a man, around ten inches thick, pointy, and irregular, it was carved in intricate geometric patterns that seemed both strangely familiar and alien, like something no humans had designed… but all remembered, somewhere deep down. It wasn’t shining at the moment, and did not have any obvious means to do so.
Mike had seen it once before, at the very beginning, and it was a horrific memory, even compared to all the rest of this. He quickly shut and locked the door. Larry asked him,
“What’s that?”
“It’s safer not to know.”
“Stop giving me this crap, Mike. A guy died around the corner, and no one knows why. That doesn’t sound like blissful ignorance to me.”
“All right then. I heard them calling it the key; it came with the device. They store it here because when they take it away, the device makes loud noises. Continuously. For hours. That’s all I know.”
“Noises?”
“Screams.”
Mike slowly turned towards the other locker, the proper one. Obviously, this was the other light source. There was a number written on it, ED14. Larry stood by him, scared but a little excited. Mike thought that the ‘excited’ part should be over soon, and for good.
“Is this her?” Larry asked.
“It,” corrected Mike. “Move aside.”
He approached and unlocked the door, then stepped back, letting the door slowly swing open.
The inside of the door had a thick foam padding that extended into the locker when closed. The padding had a cutout shaped like a woman’s body. And in the locker, inside a similar foam cutout, a woman was standing astride, with feet as wide apart as the locker’s width allowed and arms sunk in the foam, kept apart from the body. Under her feet, around her neck, and underneath her armpits, padded supports emerged from the foam, carrying her weight. Another, larger support was forcing her legs apart, with an extension in front covering her private parts, clinging to them tightly.
Her eyes were closed as if asleep, her whole body relaxed, held up by the supports, but Mike wasn’t fooled. He stopped seeing her as anything but a threat months ago. He was looking for any change. Anything new and dangerous.
From the thighs up to where her ribs started, a thick network of tattoos covered her body—writings in an unknown alphabet, criss-crossing, forming waves and spirals, joining and splitting in a complex pattern that seemed slightly different every time Mike saw her. There was also another, much more mundane tattoo—the same storage item number, ED14—inked above her left breast. The last lines of the number 4 seemed sloppy, half-finished, as if the tattooist wanted to be done, and to be somewhere else already. Mike understood this perfectly.
But Mike’s gaze was on the lower tattoos. Within the apparent chaos, a few shapes drew attention as the paths seemed to converge on them and connect, like junctions in some strange network. When Mike first noticed them, they were only four. It was after the fourth execution, and the device was still almost human in its distress, when he carried it back here, sobbing.
Back then, he wasn’t yet afraid to touch it, and it was difficult for him to leave it sealed here in the darkness. Now, releasing it was the unpleasant part.
But today, Mike really needed to count the intersections. He saw six… no, seven in the front. There were more at the back, hidden by the foam. How many?
Now that he had seen the key again, he couldn’t get his mind off the resemblance between the patterns the tattoos followed and the carvings in the stone.
Larry exhaled loudly, as if remembering how to breathe after a long pause, and took a step forward, but Mike extended his arm sideways, stopping him in place. New guys. They always started with this stupid… enthusiasm.
Larry didn’t even notice he had moved until he hit Mike’s arm, unaware of anything but the device. Despite all the roundaboutness and strange hesitance that both the warden and Mike showed, he had understood, more or less, what the device was. What he didn’t expect was for her to be naked… and the impression she would make on him.
She was pretty short, but suspended at a height where her head was level with Larry’s. Her dark hair, straight but unkempt, flowed to the side of her head, tucked behind her neck, partially hiding her face. It was pale, almost featureless, like a contour drawing meant to symbolize abstract beauty. Lips nearly the color of her skin, face slim and oval, the one visible eye large and almond-shaped, though at the moment also closed.
Larry’s gaze went down the pale skin, sticking to her round breasts just a few seconds too long, down to the flat stomach, where weird tattoos started appearing, denser and denser as he looked lower, looking like something that grew on her, a skin condition more than an artist’s work. They seemed to have some hidden meaning, but Larry couldn’t concentrate on them, too distracted by the canvas. He looked down, gaze following the outline of the wide, round hips that should have looked off against the slim waist, but somehow didn’t. Tattoos disappeared mid-thigh, leaving only pale, soft skin behind, legs shapely like a dancer’s, slim and long for her height.
It’s just a woman, he told himself. It made no sense—neither Mike’s reaction… nor his own.
He gulped and looked at Mike. The old guy seemed to know what was going on in Larry’s head, because he just shook his head slowly, and walked up to the locker.
Above her suspended body, there was a metallic tank embedded in the foam, with another placed below, between her feet. Connections were not visible, but Mike knew where they were going. Tanks had transparent windows running through their length, and Mike leaned in a bit closer to check. The upper one was almost empty, and the bottom one almost full. Nobody has been here for a couple of days. She—it—seemed to need less and less attention.
Mike cleared his throat and said, “Wake up. You’re needed.”
“I’m awake,” the woman said. “Is it time already?”
“Yes,” Mike said after a few seconds, caught by surprise by the sudden sight of her large, pale blue eye staring right at him. The rest of her face remained unchanged—it was perfectly calm and expressionless. Her voice was soft and feminine, yet there was something off about the way it sounded… Mike could not quite put his finger on it, but it was getting stronger every time.
“Should we help…?” asked Larry and started moving towards the locker, but Mike looked at him sharply, stopping him in place. After a few more seconds of silence, the woman raised her hands and locked them against the walls of her prison, using the uncovered space around the opening that the door padding would occupy when the locker was closed.
She took her legs out of the foam and put her toes on two small, almost invisible ridges that were placed in the same foam-free area, around the height where her knees had been. Then she pulled herself up, and Larry let out a sigh when he saw the shape of two large, dark plugs emerging slowly from below her. Muscles on her arms and legs tightened as she struggled to keep moving up, until suddenly she passed the widest point of the plugs and jerked up quickly with a wet, plopping sound. She lowered her head and leaned forward so as not to hit the upper edge of the locker. Freed, she quickly climbed down, moving her hands and feet on the inside of the frame one by one, like a spider.
She stepped out and passed between the two guards, ignoring Mike completely, but brushing against Larry as she walked by, her eyes meeting his just for a split second. Larry blinked and turned around to follow her, but Mike wasn’t done yet. The thinner plug, the one behind, had an opening on top; a short, rubbery straw was sticking out of it. A thick liquid oozed out of the top before Mike turned the valve on the upper tank to stop it. When moving back, Mike noticed for the first time that the plugs’ material seemed to match the obelisk that was stored in the other locker. For some unknown reason, this similarity sent shivers down his spine. He chased the thought away, turned around, and saw that the woman—the device, he corrected himself—was already near the exit.
“Don’t stare, follow her. Not too close,” he said to Larry, who watched the departing figure, swaying her hips a little more than she should.
Her back and legs were mostly spared from tattoos, which only covered a small part of her upper thighs and criss-crossed on her buttocks, forming a pattern focused on the area that was currently not showing any signs of having held such large objects just seconds before. Mike counted the junctions. Five additional ones. Twelve total.
There were only eleven executions.
“Why?”
“…just don’t. She knows where to go.”
“It knows, you mean?”
“Right.”
Static covered the warden’s monitor for a moment, and when it cleared, he saw ED14 leaving the storage room. They had no cameras inside, not anymore. Equipment kept breaking down, and eventually, they gave up on replacing it. She was placing her feet cautiously, rotating them inwards. The two guards followed a few steps behind, adjusting their pace to her slow movement.
The static noise came and went a few more times. Warden glanced at his companion, who waited inattentively, with a slight smile on his thin lips and a blank, unfocused look. Then something on the screen caught his attention, and he snapped back towards it.
It was full of static again, but he could have sworn that when he was looking away, it briefly showed a face, staring coldly, the almond blue eyes unmistakable. Soon, the noise disappeared, showing her in the corridor, a couple of yards too far ahead compared to where she should be. Warden raised his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“Why is she walking like that?” asked Larry back in the corridor.
“They did something to her pelvis to make it… open up… easier. Cut the cartilage between the bones in the front, and inserted something there so it would not heal up. It makes walking difficult… but walking is not her job.”
“Is she in pain?”
“That’s not your problem.”
“Shouldn’t we get her a wheelchair or something?”
“Not. Your. Problem.”
Larry looked at Mike’s face. Despite the indifferent tone, his discomfort was obvious. Yet there was some additional coldness in him that Larry didn’t yet understand.
“Why are you like this?”
“I wasn’t… so they made me read her files. Why do you care? Did they pick you because you’re such a gentleman?”
Larry got pale and stopped talking, thinking he heard the raindrops again.
The woman designated as ED14 remained completely silent as they crossed the few remaining corridors, but her posture kept deteriorating as she was getting exhausted. A couple of feet from the entrance to the execution chamber, she dropped to her knees and started crawling ahead. When she reached the door, the warden unlocked it remotely from his computer. Mike and Larry entered the control chamber and stood by the door. Mike did not want to see it again, but they needed to stick around, in case their help was needed.
The convict was alone in the chamber for maybe twenty minutes, but it felt like an eternity. First, he waited patiently, focused on not showing fear to whoever was watching him. Then, a sudden anger overcame him, and he struggled against his bonds, screaming profanities at the Venice mirror, achieving nothing. The frame was very sturdy. During the moment he saw it, when he was brought into the room, it seemed strangely complicated, with lots of bars and little surfaces of unknown purpose sticking out in all directions, except the front, which he now occupied. Maybe it was some sort of modern-day cross, and they just left him tied to it to die there. Just when he almost believed it, he heard the doors unlocking.
As the door opened, reality seemed to blur, and all his thoughts vanished.
A naked woman crawled slowly through the door and towards him.
It was a sudden, complete focus, like the ‘bullet time’ experience he once had in a car crash - everything was silent & calm, every movement seemed to slow down to a halt, and he forgot completely about himself - the only thing that existed was the woman, getting closer, moving one limb after another.
He noticed every detail - dark hair covering her face, flowing down on the floor, strange tattoos on her lower back and buttocks, paleness of her skin almost matching the white floor tiles.
Then the moment passed, and time flowed again, and suddenly she was right at his feet. She crawled up, grabbing pieces of the frame, brushing against his body with hers. It was cold and yet soft, and his mind was torn between two instant, equally powerful sensations: a repulsion as if he unexpectedly touched a snake, but also an electric desire, opposite yet coming from the same source. She kept climbing and clung to his body as hard as she could, dragging her breasts and stomach up across his skin, as if she, too, felt something equally strong, until he saw her face before his, just centimeters away. Freeing one of her hands, she moved her hair aside, and he saw her eyes, light blue, calm and deep. She studied his face, moving her head to the left, and then to the right, and she raised her hand again and stroked his head gently.
“You are pretty. But so much anger. I have a place for you. I will keep you safe.”
Her voice was soft and deep, and it sounded like it was coming straight into his soul. He asked, “Who are you?”
“I was… a thief. A murderer. A prisoner, like you. I was made… into something else.”
“What… what are you?”
She stepped down and stepped away, tilted her head innocently, and said, touching the tattoo over her breast,
“Oh, just another piece of prison equipment. See?”
Now, when he heard both his own words and hers, he realized it was about the echo. The small, empty chamber was resonating when he spoke, blurring the words, but she had no echo, no distortion. Once more, he felt sharp anxiety, but as he looked down, he noticed his erection.
She followed his eyes and kneeled, taking his penis into her mouth without hesitation. When she started moving back and forth, he got overwhelmed by opposites - the intensity of the touch alone felt like he was going to cum in mere seconds. Yet, he felt a sharp, localised and almost painful danger, as if he had put his dick into a meat grinder and now helplessly waited for somebody to push the button. He didn’t know if he would cum, or start screaming in panic first, but she did not allow him to do either. She moved back, looked up with her large eyes, and asked,
“Will you help me?”
He realized he was straining against the bonds again, not sure if trying to escape, or to reclaim the initiative. He had always been the one doing things, but now all he could do was nod, trembling. She stuck out the tiny triangle of her tongue and traced the entire length of his shaft, from the tip to the soft spot right above where it started. Moving up slowly, she didn’t break contact on his skin, the smooth, wet touch of her tongue in the sharp line dividing the twin ridges of his abs. It was almost unbearably pleasant, focused like a spotlight over every piece of his skin she moved through, the rest of him disappearing in darkness, making him tense until he felt the sharp pain of a cramp forming and forced himself to relax and straighten up. He looked around, reminding himself that his arms, all the rest of his body, still existed, uselessly. It was all wrong. He should be the one doing things to her—the things he’d have known she needed, whatever her lips would say.
Her tongue started meandering, moving across his pec, tingling the nipple, as she pressed her body into his and started climbing the frame once more when she ran out of height. The tongue stopped at his neck; she hid it and nibbled his chin in passing, but kept moving up. He saw her face passing before his eyes, then her breasts, and he snapped his head to the side, trying to return the favour, barely catching her nipple in his mouth before she pulled it out, leaving him with the salty taste of her sweat. Then he saw her stomach, covered in weird tattoos, licked her navel in passing before he finally saw her slit, a little piece of perfection inside a free spot within the complex arrangement of symbols, inner lips just slightly more rosy than the pale skin around it.
She put her legs over his shoulders and, holding some unseen part of the frame behind him, rocked up and down, back and forth, as if his head were a hobbyhorse. He bent his head back as far as he could and extended his tongue, trying to match her movement. Soon he tasted her juices flowing, sweet and sour and fresh, and in between all the strangeness, completely ordinary.
For a second, he was almost glad for the restraints, because without them, he’d be all over her already, pinning her down on the cold floor, whether she’d like it or not, following his instincts, as dull as they were strong.
He was trying to focus on the alphabet trick, getting as far as the letter H, when suddenly she moved up and started moving back and forth on top of his shaved head. It was a weird feeling, but not unpleasant, and soon she came back down to his face. This repeated a few more times until he got lost in the feeling, almost as if he was going to come from the cunnilingus itself, and forgot all about the fear and the strangeness and the entrapment, when suddenly she got back up again and stopped moving.
“Thank you. You are a nice boy,” he heard. “I will bring you inside me now.”
He felt her turning around, with her pussy lips still split wide open on the top of his head, her warm juices dripping all over it. Suddenly, something cold clicked around his neck, and he couldn’t move his head anymore.
She started again, but it was different. He didn’t feel the softness and wetness in one place anymore; it was spreading around, touching more and more of his shaved head, all drenched in her juices now. She moved back and forth, and the weight of her ass on top of his head was greater each time, and suddenly he felt like she was all around it, squeezing his forehead. Changing direction, she slid up and down now, slightly lower on each repetition. First, he could not understand what was happening, and then he couldn’t believe it. Then the opening moved below his eyes, and there was only warm, moist darkness, and the pressure, enclosing him. It didn’t feel like a threat. It felt like home.
The warden realized he had been staring at the scene behind the window without blinking for the last couple of minutes. Unlike the convict, he dared not look down at his pants. He didn’t really want to know whether he was horrified or aroused. In any case, he’ll need a shower. He cleared his throat and asked the envoy,
“Are we trying to save some money on lube now?”
“We think this will make the bonding stronger. Leakage is becoming a problem. Be quiet.”
They both watched as the device rocked gently back and forth, progressing down to the level of the convict’s mouth. Some of them tried biting the rim, but she passed the dangerous area quickly, and this victim did not seem to struggle against her at all. With one quick, practiced move, she bent back so deep that her breasts were almost pointing at the ceiling, reaching with her arms down below to unlock his neck guard, and then straightened up and immediately pushed down for the last time, getting his whole head inside. Her stomach was bulging now as if she were pregnant, and with the shadow play from the lights above, it seemed to the warden that he could even see the features of a face reflected on her skin. It was moving around, and so was ED, still rising and falling, clenching around the convict’s neck as firmly as she could. She locked her feet in the holding frame and freed one hand, which went straight to her clit, and started rubbing furiously. Warden looked at the pulse display, which showed the data from the armband the convict was still wearing. It was almost 200.
“It will be over soon.”
“Yes, look.”
The convict’s body trembled, and so did she. The lights in the room started to flicker. Her orgasm was loud, louder than ever before, and when the last convulsions happened, the convict's penis, still erect, shot its load onto the execution chamber floor.
Warden looked at the pulse reading. The man was finally dead.
He unlocked the mic and said,
“14, you did well. As usual, stay up there for the next ten minutes, just in case. We will tell you when to get down.”
She did not answer. She never talked to the warden. But soon she began to move back and forth again gently, and her hand went down to her clit.
The guards left the room, and in the corridor, Mike asked,
“So, how did you like it?”
“Mike, I… I don’t know. I have all kinds of feelings, and none of them are good. Like… you cannot look away, but afterwards you want to unsee all of it, right?”
“Right. And it only gets worse.”
“What is she? Why is this happening?”
“Let’s just hope we won’t be here when this becomes clear.”
“I want to go home.”
“We need to secure her first. I’ll go get her a tank of juice and a clean potty. You go with her and lock her up for now. I will clean her later.”
“‘Juice’ is what she eats?”
“I only know we let it trickle inside her, and it disappears. If you call it eating, sure. Something eats it.”
Larry stared at the open storage room doors through which 14 had just disappeared. It was dark inside, and he didn’t want to go in. Eventually, he stuck one hand in and felt the wall until he hit the contact, and the lights went on. Entering the room, he saw that 14 was already by its locker. It was staring at him, showing him some attention for the first time since the execution. He didn’t like it. Still, he had no choice but to approach her.
“Aren’t you going back in there?” he asked, because she still hadn’t moved. She approached the locker, turned around, and stepped inside, but instead of doing her spider trick in reverse, she extended her hands towards him.
“You want me to pick you up?”
“Mike always does it,” she said softly, startling him with how normal it sounded.
He looked towards the door, but no help was coming. Uneasy, he wrapped his hands around her waist and picked her up, light as a feather, and put her inside her foam cast. The touch of her skin was like nothing he had ever experienced. The plugs were in the way, and she raised her hands to the upper edge of the locker, trying to push herself onto it. She couldn’t do it. Her hands were shaking. She moaned quietly and leaned over him, tired and weak and fragile. Larry let his hands slide down to her hips, trying to position her, and not to think about the softness of her skin. He looked up, straight into her eyes.
“Larry, what are you doing?” she asked, the voice fearful and trembling and not hers. It was coming straight from his memory.
He let her go and jumped back. Her weakness was gone. She just kept looking at him while she slid down onto the plugs with no visible effort. He forced himself to step back closer, shut the locker’s door, and ran straight out of the storage room, hitting the light switch without stopping. He missed one half of it, and part of the lights stayed on, but he didn’t look back; he ran straight to the staff changing rooms.
There was a bathroom there, and Larry washed his hands, rubbing them until they became red. It didn’t help. He could still feel the electric touch of her skin. It wasn’t going away.
In the dimly lit storage room, the door with ED14 scribbled on it, which Larry forgot to lock, opened slowly. The device was snugly tucked in her form, calm and motionless, with her eyes still open. Suddenly, her stomach, bulging slightly over the locking plug, moved. A smaller protrusion separated and traveled up, and moved back and forth, as if looking for a way out. Then it jumped, stretching the skin, and the tattoos started glowing.
Another bulge appeared next to it, then a few more, and they circled one another, like a dance, or a fight.
She moved her hand and stroked her belly, saying,
“Play nice, my pretty boys. It won’t be long anymore. Soon the gate will open, and we’ll all return home.”
She hummed a lullaby until the glow of the tattoos died down.