The Soldier

SHOCKS

It is another full day before the door to my cell is unlocked.

Thirty-six nightmarish hours in a state of pain-crazed delirium, my state ranging from disorientation to sheer panic. I am barely aware of Rachel and her two guards entering the bare room, until my numb feet hit the floor, and I collapse in a greasy heap. My arms have lost all movement, and I lie weakly as the rope around my wrists is loosened. My hands are purple, icy, my wrists grazed, black with bruising. My joints seem to have frozen solid: even if I wanted to, I am unable to move.

"Well? Have we thought any more about telling all?"

"Can’t," I manage to croak. My voice rasps, my lips so dry they crack when I speak.

"You dumb, stubborn bitch," Rachel growls. "Do you really want me to string you up for another day, just to prove my point?"

"You don’t need to prove anything," I groan, my bowels weakening at the thought that I might be put through the ordeal of hanging by my wrists again. Tears squeeze from my eyes. "Please, I don’t know anything. I’m no help to you."

"You can say that again." Rachel puts her hands on hips, scowling down at me. Finally, on impulse, she drives a kick square into my belly. Her boot slams into untensed muscles with a THUD, and I fold with a shriek, the breath thrown from my lungs, pain exploding through my abdomen. Urine dribbles from between my legs as I writhe, gasping. Rachel gathers her hair, impatiently ties it into a knot. "Give the bitch something to drink, then tie her up again. I don’t want her getting loose. We’ll get some answers tomorrow."

I am easy to work, paralysed with pain, and weak from twelve hours hanging from the ring, and offer no resistance as I am rolled onto my belly on the cold floor. My arms are pulled behind my back, wrists bound tightly together, then elbows - drawn in, cruelly roped. The blindfold is again put over my eyes, tightly tied behind my head. Finally, I hear the sound of a water flask being opened.

"Here."

I am hauled onto my knees. Without the use of my arms, I suckle on the flask like a calf sucking milk, gulping desperately in case the water is taken away, trickles running down my chin and throat. When I have emptied the vessel, it’s taken from my mouth, although I’m still thirsty. I lower my head, kneeling, naked and painfully bound.

"Damn," I hear. "She’s gorgeous."

"You think?"

"Look at her. Body like a gymnast. Gorgeous legs. And those abs are something."

"Tiny tits."

"But nipples the size of thimbles. She’s a honey."

"Are you kidding?" A hand grasps my hair, lifts my face. "Cute mouth, but what’s with the hairy bush? She should shave it."

"It’s natural. She’s gorgeous."

The humiliation is unbearable. As I kneel, these two men are openly debating the issue of body hair on women, and I am their conversation piece. If I wasn’t so weakened by my ordeal hanging from the ring, I would protest, beg with them to leave me alone, but all I can do is kneel there, bound, open to their scrutiny.

Finally, tiring of their conversation, the guards leave.

It seems a mere instant later that I’m being woken by Rachel’s guards. I am at once hit by a thousand pains in my twisted arms, and I groan. Regardless, hands grasp the ropes at my elbows and haul me into a sitting position.

"Get up," one of them snaps. "It’s time."

"Time for what?" My voice is barely there. I have no idea whether it’s day or night. I don’t know how long I have been here. All I want is to be left alone, untied, free from my misery.

Somehow, I find myself stumbling along a passageway: my bare feet slapping on concrete, accompanied by the sound of boots. Naked, hands bound behind me. My nipples betray me, swelling in the chill like rosebuds, embarrassing and vulnerable on my chest.

My sense of vulnerability increases tenfold a moment later as they remove my blindfold.

"Oh, dear god, no! Oh, no!"

Bright spotlights bathe a table of sorts - a plastic gridwork surface, some kind of drainage surface beneath. The table is perhaps two metres square, angled slightly: at each corner of its raised head are retractable straps like seat-belts, ending in thick wrist-buckles. At the base, anchored to adjustable carriages in an arc that spans the width of the table, ankle-straps. Alongside is a gurney outfitted with innumerable devices that I can’t even bear to look at: wires, clips, some kind of battery.

"I’ve been looking forward to this."

Rachel’s smooth voice comes from a fold-out chair to my left. She wears a simple red sundress, as if for a summer picnic; its strapped bodice and short flip-skirt baring her tanned and muscled limbs.

She smiles. But there is danger in her eyes. "Put her on."

I want to throw up, but I am propelled towards the awful table. "Please," I quaver, my voice as loose and unsteady as my legs. "Can’t we come to some arrangement, please, I’m begging you, please -"

"You have had time to cooperate," Rachel tells me, "and you have refused. Now, time is a factor, and we must force your cooperation."

"I don’t know anything!" I shriek, in desperation and panic. Still bound, I am lifted onto the table. Its plastic surface is rough to my bare bottom, and I fight desperately as my arms are freed. "Please, believe me!"

"You know plenty. You’re just not saying." Rachel watches as I am forced onto my back. My arms are stretched out to the corners of the table, wrists strapped securely. My legs are spread, ankles fastened a metre apart. I jerk wildly on the restraints.

"Please!!" The guards step away. I lie, incredibly exposed. Naked, stretched on the table for all to see, my bare body laid out, my tiny breasts drawn into my heaving ribcage. My nipples, two pink thimbles, stand easily a centimetre.

Rachel slowly rises, strolls to where I lie, and looks critically over my stretched body.

"Please, please, please," I babble, sobbing uncontrollably.

"Nice muscle tone." She runs a hand over the hard packing of my abdominals. "But Jesus, don’t you ever shave?"

"I’m sorry," I wail in terror. "I’ll shave myself, I’ll do anything, please, just don’t hurt me!"

The door of the torture room has been closed and locked. I’m unsure how many people have remained to watch the session. Rachel puts a hand to my chest, closes her thumb and forefinger deliberately over the swollen stub of my right nipple. "Lovely nipples. Shame, really."

I take the bait. "Why?"

"Because I’m going to hurt them very much indeed."

While I explode into a fresh barrage of terrified pleading and sobbing, Rachel walks to the gurney. She very deliberately picks out two coiled leads, like jumper cables, each terminating in a fat alligator clip. The spring creaks as she opens the first.

"Ohhhhh!" I arch my back in pain as the clip sinks into my left nipple. It’s savagely tight, its teeth all but crushing my tender flesh. The second clip bites viciously on to my right nipple. I clench my jaw, writhing. I know nothing will dislodge those clips, no matter how hard I try.

"I don’t know if it interests you," Rachel is saying calmly as she steps to the gurney again, "but each jaw of those clips is independently circuited. Which means most of the shock will simply snap through the nipple, rather than into your chest." She smiles. "Good news for your heart, darling, but bad, bad news for your tits."

I squeeze my eyes shut, willing this to just be a nightmare. But the bite of the clips on my nipples, the teasing of the wires on my bare chest, the straps about my wrists and ankles, the heat of the spotlights, all tell me it is real. I hear a switch being thrown, the rising whine of a charging regulator.

"Shall we begin?" Rachel asks.

"I told you, I don’t know anything," I gasp desperately.

"Wrong answer."

It feels as if my nipples have burst. My back arches, the breath is knocked from my lungs, and for a few seconds it feels as if some terrible force is trying to pull my breasts from my ribcage. Then the current ceases, and I fall back, my squeal evolving into a long cry of pain.

"Ohhh god!"

"I shouldn’t expect any help from her in a hurry," Rachel snorts. She throws the switch again: this time I hear sparks crack on my nipples, and as my spine arches, I let out a scream of agony. Urine squirts from between my legs, my fingers splay. The pain is like nails driven into my nipples, every muscle rigid, my mouth wide.

The current ceases, and I drop, chest heaving. My heart is a jack-hammer, sweat springs from every pore in a liquid varnish over my skin. My pee trickles slowly from the drainage grid beneath me.

"Please," I pant, my voice thick with dread, "please stop!"

"Stop?" Rachel smiles. "I’ve only just started! That first shock was fifty volts: the second was sixty-five. I thought we’d go up in increments of fifteen until you talk. Or your tits burst. I mean, you’ll go through a hell of a lot of pain before that happens, but I’ve seen it. The fat goes everywhere. Or maybe I’ll put the clips on your armpits. You’d be amazed how sensitive your armpits can be to electric shock torture."

I can only cry, so Rachel turns up the current, and hits the key.

Sparks fly, my breasts swell with pain as my whole body arches off the table. I am screaming, helpless to stop the torture. I have never even imagined this much pain, and my body has no way of coping other than complete panic. When the flow stops, I struggle dazedly to free myself.

"Ninety-five volts." Rachel hits the switch.

Cr-crack! A blue arc flashes in my eyes, and my body thumps off the table in a spray of flung sweat, accompanied by a scream that tears my lungs. The clips seem to lift my nipples into the air, sending agony into my sensitive breasts.

The shock ceases. I fall back. Steam is curling from my crushed nipples. I can imagine my breasts bursting like microwaved eggs, and I let out a wail of pain and misery as Rachel sets the dial higher. "One hundred and ten volts. Talk to me."

"I don’t know anything," I sob.

My jaw cracks. My shoulder blades and buttocks lift clear off the table, my spine creaking, nipples straining for the ceiling as current surges into them, sparks crackling and sputtering, and I give a long scream. The pain is beyond description.

I flop back.

Rachel keys the switch again, and I buck off the table, screaming, electricity snapping at my clamped nipples. She releases me, then shocks me again, holding the current so that my spine creaks, my steaming, wired breasts straining upwards. My shrieks of pain are endless, my body arched off the torture table.

I fall. Rachel’s expression is predatory as she gives me a few moments to recover, increases the current to a hundred and twenty-five, and lets me have it. It is so easy for her: a nudge of a switch, and I am jolting upwards off the table, muscles straining, sparks snapping and arcing around my swollen nipples, sweat flying off my body like mist. I hold nothing back, shrieking and yelling.

When Rachel stops the torture, I land heavily, panting hard.

"Please," I wail. "Please stop hurting me! I haven’t done anything to you! Please, just stop it, and I will do anything you say ..."

"I want information," Rachel says.

"I don’t know anything," I moan. "Oh, please, let me up!" I jerk my widely-spread legs, tugging my ankles against their restraints, heels digging into the table. I tip my head back, looking along the wide ‘v’ of my own sweaty arms, turning my wrists, fingers open, tugging and jerking the straps. I tense every muscle, put my strength into trying to pull myself free.

Rachel giggles. "Go, girl! God, that’s sexy!"

My face is wet with tears, my body with sweat as I writhe desperately. My nipples burn, clamped within the savagely-tight spring jaws of the clips, wires draped across my gleaming chest. My muscles are pumped from struggling, all in fierce definition as I continue to fight the bonds. But I am helpless. I can’t escape. I am stretched out across this table, naked, with no way to save myself.

"Now," Rachel says coolly, "are we ready to continue?"

The thump of electricity is accompanied by the snap of sparks as my body bows up off the table. My ribcage threatens to burst, my nipples seem to swell within the clips’ bite. The pain is worse than anything yet, and I scream and scream.

She zaps me again, and again, and again. Each shock hits with a sound like a sledge-hammer slamming my chest, jerking my body into a splayed, spreadeagled arch, until I can no longer scream, until it feels as though my nipples have been torn from my chest.

She tortures me for an hour. Each time she questions me, sometimes waiting for a response, sometimes just thumbing the switch regardless, delivering pain into my bare breasts without mercy, perhaps four hundred separate shocks. I lie, spread out, steam curling up from my glossy skin. Then another shock, arching me up off the table. Pain roars into my head, and the world suddenly begins to pitch and spin, bucking on an ocean of agony, my eyes rolling back into my head.

I wake. I’m paralysed.

I try to move, can’t - then recollection comes. I’m still tied up, limbs stretched to the four corners of the torture table. I begin to cry.

"Ah, she’s back." Rachel stands over me. "How are you, doll? Ready for another round?"

"Please." The clips have been removed from my nipples, but waves of throbbing, burning pain lingers in my tormented breasts. "I don’t know anything, really, I don’t!"

"The possibility, lover, is that you’ve been trained to resist torture." Rachel steps to the head of the table, turns a crank three times. The retractable wrist-straps are drawn in several centimetres, stretching my body harder across the table. My spine pops loudly. I imagine that this is what it would be like on the rack: it is uncomfortable, humiliating. Rachel returns to put a hand to my brow, pushing back my soaked hair. "It’s my job to break you, Kirsten. That takes time. And pain." Her free hand lifts, and I gasp: An alligator clip creaks open.

"No, no, please - please!" I struggle desperately, but can do nothing as she squishes the sprung jaws into the saturated hollow of my left armpit, the teeth clamping skin and hairs. The second clip she pinches into my right armpit. I have never felt anything as bizarre or humiliating as having crocodile clips in my underarms, and try to turn my face from the degradation.

"You know the advantage of the armpits?" Rachel asks me. Miserably, I shake my head. "I can give you much, much more, without the risk of killing you. And all that sweat lowers skin resistance to the shocks. So let’s start at seventy-five volts."

"Please," I whisper. "I don’t know anything."

Rachel jabs the switch. Instantly, the clips in my underarms discharge current, and my back arches, my teeth clenching in pain. It’s different from the nipple torture: deeper, more intimate, far more invasive. It’s the most horrible sensation I have ever felt, and I wail in anguish. Rachel keeps the current steady, and the pain seems to buzz into my armpits, sending awful waves of pain along my arms and down my sides. I cry out again.

Rachel doubles the voltage.

I scream in agony as sparks spit. It feels as if nails have been driven into my armpits. "That’s one-fifty, baby!" She releases the switch, hits me again. The paralysing bolts of agony snap into my armpits with daylight-bright sparks, wisps of smoke curling up from the metal clips, the smell of searing hairs as I buck and scream on the torture table. My pits seem to have split open, the clips delivering the most acute agony directly into the nerve bundles that pass so near the surface of each armpit.

Rachel knows her torture methods, and she lets me thud back onto the table for a few brief seconds, before turning up the current and hitting me again. There is a bright blue flash simultaneously in both armpits, and I think my arms have been ripped from my body. I arch off the table, roaring and shrieking madly in agony, drumming my heels and shaking my head as the current continues, like white-hot pokers pressing into my underarms. The sweat is running from my armpits, the salty perspiration a perfect conductor, and the pain continues. I hear my own skin hissing and popping like frying eggs.

Finally, release. Steam curls from my armpits: though the torture is savage, my underarm hair saves them from burns, despite the excruciating torment. I throw my head weakly from side to side, moaning.

"Talk," is all Rachel says. "Talk, or it gets worse."

"I don’t know anything," I whimper in terror. "Oh, please, please, please -"

"One seventy-five!" Crackle. My shoulders jerk off the table, my armpits flatten and lift towards the ceiling as if plucked upwards by the clips, while sparks flash, and agony flares deep in my joints, drawing scream after desperate scream from my torn lungs.

I flop down, my body twitching and jolting with the after-effects of electric shocks. I can smell ozone. If only I could lower my arms, tear my wrists from the straps that hold them stretched above my head, baring my armpits. But Rachel hits the key again. Current jars into my underarms, my arms jerking automatically with the voltage as I shriek and scream in pain.

Rachel releases me.

"Talk, or it’s two hundred volts!"

"Oh, God, God ..."

She shocks my armpits again. This time, it feels as if my shoulders have shattered, and I scream madly, eyes wide, agonised beyond all comprehension. The world begins to spin, the nauseating odours of burning hairs and heated sweat close in on me, and my eyes roll back.

I wake.

I lie, still secured on the torture table.

Surely nothing can get worse than what I have just endured. The world seems to shift and fade around me. I am unbearably hot. My armpits both feel as if they have been flayed and doused in acid, burning, the mere touch of air too painful for words.

But Rachel is not finished. She goes, first, to the head of the table, turns the crank another three times. The straps are drawn in, and my spreadeagled body is stretched grossly, pain in my shoulders and hips. I give a shout. Then, Rachel moves to the foot of the table, turns the lower crank. On their moorings, my ankles are slowly, steadily cranked in opposite directions, splitting my spread legs further still.

"Ohhh! Oww! No, stop, stop!" I shout at the ceiling, helpless as my taut legs are slowly, cruelly spread. A metre five. A metre ten. A metre twenty, and the pain is dreadful. "No more, please, you’re breaking my legs!" I beg, frantic with pain.

"Too bad." Rachel turns the crank: my ankles are one metre thirty apart, and my hips pop loudly with the stress of it. Pain explodes down my inner thighs, the tendons like steel. Rachel turns the crank further: my legs are almost metre and a half apart, the widest they have ever been, truly at their limit. My pussy is hideously exposed, my genitalia opened and presented.

Rachel cranks the handle. I scream in pain as I am forced by the restraints to do the splits, my legs at 170 degrees, my feet almost level with my hips. Tears are pouring down my face: I have never been so degraded, so exposed. My vulva and vagina gape.

"That looks like it hurts," Rachel remarked. Casually, she removes the clip from my right armpit, and, a moment later, I feel her drape the wire across my thigh. "Goodness, you’re a hairy little thing, aren’t you?" Then, a sharp, pinching pain as the clip bites hard onto my sensitive pussy lips.

"Ohhhhhhh!" I struggle, not just with the pain of the clip, but the sheer terror of what this means. I am to be tortured in the most obscene, cruel way imaginable. I can’t help myself: I urinate, pissing all over the wire, worsening my situation. Rachel removes the second clip from my left armpit, and attaches it to the forward edge of my anus.

"Did you know your arsehole is hairy, too?"

"Please ..." My eyes are spilling tears, fear gripping my body, though I cannot move. My hips are burning terribly, my legs in agony, spread so widely. "Please, don’t do this, don’t hurt me like this ..." I’m sweating already. Rachel picks up the control to the machine.

"Talk to me. How many units do you have? Where are they stationed? Remember, I can hurt you very, very much with just a touch of my finger ..."

"Please! I don’t know anything!" I’m desperate, hysterical, panicking.

"One hundred and fifty volts." Rachel hits the key. The charge slams into my most sensitive parts. Somehow, my hips rise off the table, a parody of orgasm, my obscenely-spread legs seeming to invite the electricity’s savage intrusion. I scream in pain,.

Release. I fall heavily, sweat running off me, my heart thrashing, my ribcage heaving two breaths a second. My cunt and arsehole feel as if they are on fire. I’m crying, bawling like a baby, my head shaking between my upstretched and wet arms. Rachel lifts an eyebrow.

"You want more, do you?"

"Please, I don’t know anything," I sob in a small voice.

"I’m going to hit the button again."

"... No ..."

I’m spread on the table, utterly helpless. Rachel hits the key. Electricity jumps between my legs with a sound like snapping wood, my body arches off the table. Little sparks snap in the wet tangle of hairs while I yell in agony.

When Rachel releases me, I splash to the sweat-drenched table. My anus clenches and spasms in response to the shocks, another dribble of urine escapes me. I sob. Torture has drained my limbs of strength, nor can I even tug on the straps, spread as widely as I am. My legs hurt so much, I think my hips are dislocated.

"Talk to me, Kirsten," Rachel sings, turning the voltage up. "One seventy-five!"

"Please," I choke. "Please, I don’t know anything ... I don’t ... oh god, please stop hurting me, stop torturing me, please, I don’t know what you want ..." Saliva dribbles from my mouth, tears from my eyes. My whole body is wet with sweat. The awful spring-clips burn in my anus and vagina, little metal teeth crushing and bruising my flesh. I weep as Rachel poises a finger over the button.

Crack!! Current heaves me off the table. My muscles go rigid, pain ravaging my private parts, sizzling and spitting like a red-hot poker as I roar in pain.

I fall back. My ribcage heaves with every desperate breath. The clip at my anus crackles with heat, sweat sizzling, my sensitive flesh is blistering. It hurts unbearably. The battery recharges with a rising whine. I moan, fire in my anus, my vagina feeling as if it’s been torn with red-hot hooks. My head screams, every nerve raw with latent electricity.

"Where are your units stationed?" Rachel demands.

"I don’t know!"

Two hundred volts explode into my pelvis. My buttocks jolt up off the table, my whole body arching, hips jerking at the ceiling in a mist of spitting moisture and sparks. I scream, shrilly, the clips sizzling, the agony overwhelming. I shit myself. My scream catches, my voice suddenly silent, the only sounds my creaking limbs and the hum and sizzle of the electrodes clamped to my body. My pelvic floor muscles spasm in a gruesome imitation of orgasm.

Rachel releases the switch. I fall hard, the breath knocked out of me, my mind a nightmare of pain. I can taste blood.

Everything fades to grey, then black.

I partly wake, though whether it is soon after or hours later, I can’t tell. I am still stark naked, spreadeagled and bound to the torture table, my body wet still with sweat, but chill. The electrodes have been removed from me. Somebody is inserting a drip-needle into my arm, fixing it in place with tape. I let my head roll, and unconsciousness drags me under.