There was air moving over his ugly, riddled skin. The skin was burned so long ago that it had lost its sensitivity. But he still preferred being covered. Why… Why was he exposed?
He moans slightly, head swimming from the drugged gas. His moans are muffled. Something is pressed against his mouth, between his jaw, preventing him from speaking. His arms feel restrained, this time behind his back. His feet as well. His eyes could open, if only they didn't feel so damn heavy…
He eventually comes to consciousness. His hoodie is gone. A ball gag is tied in his mouth, secured behind his head. His hands are secured from behind on a chair that is bolted it seems before a secured table. His legs are tied to the chair legs. What he was feeling was the cold on his exposed skin. All the bandages on his chest and torso had been removed, showing the red, withered looking skin that never healed right. Stuck on his chest were these weird wires. He didn't know, but they were electrodes and EKGs. They connect to two machines on the other side of the table.
He struggles against his bonds first, looking around rapidly. This is not a large room. There is a single door, as well as a monitor screen. It is brightly lit with sickly white light that flickers slightly in intervals. After a few minutes struggling with the leather grappling his limbs, he makes some progress and feels the bonds loosen, but not enough.
The door swings open and the little girl with purple hair steps in. He hadn't bothered trying to recall her name. She was about the size of Rachel.
"Rrn-arnnnnhgh!"
He grunts incoherently with that ball in his mouth, straining to get at her. She merely calmly walks over and takes the seat opposite from him. She places her fishbowl of snow on the table beside her.
"Hello Zack."
She is unfazed by the rabid man's incoherent, raving-eyed response.
"Do you remember me? I'm Kirsten…"
"Nrr-rraagh!"
"Isn't this nice? You should be a bit less unruly though… But that's like asking you to not breathe isn't it?"
The fuck is she talking about? Zack was getting annoyed. She was so… calm. Her eyes were cold, like Rachel's, actually.
"I'm sure you're curious about where the girl is. I've left her to her own devices for now. I quite frankly don't care about how she lives or dies… my target is you…"
She taps a button on the machine beside her side of the table. It beeps and there is a slight low hum for a second.
Then Zack felt that familiar feeling. When he was in the electric chair back on that bitch Cathy's floor. That burning feeing. Instead of being on his head however, this time it was concentrated on those patches on his exposed skin. It was like he was getting fried, inside and out from his torso. His body jerks in uncontrolled spasms, chafing against their bonds. He screams in futility through his gag, and his eyes bug out. His heart felt like it would explode from beating so much as his chest heaved sporadically in agonized, quickened rhythm.
"MNNNNRRRGGHHHH!"
A sadistic grin forms slowly, like a small smile really, on Kirsten's face. She turns a dial down and eventually the shocks cease. The EKG machine, which was beeping with rigor, still shows irregularity in Zack's heartbeat.
Breathing heavily through his nostrils, Zack trembles in his prison chair. The residual shocks made his arms still twitch as he glares murderously at the girl across the table. He coughs and some blood dribbles from his nose onto his lap as he slumps over. Kill her…Fucking kill her….
"Electricity is quite funny… I always imagined lightning was made of ice, because of its color. But then, when it strikes someone dead, it does it more like fire. Both fire and ice do feel like burning in the end though, I suppose…"
Her hand on the dial moves. Another jolt of energy runs through him like savage fire. His body arcs against his will and the muscles stiffen, jerking from the continuous stream of electrons frying his nerves. His muffled screams resound in the room, but Kirsten seems hardly bothered by their volume as she toys with the voltage. The monitor is now absolutely haywire as the man's heart is kicked into a frenzied overdrive from pain.
The screen behind her lights up, showing Rachel waking up in what looks to be an icebox room. Kirsten taps her fishbowl after giving an uncaring glance. She turns down the dial. Zack slumps in his seat, twitching and breathing heavily in snorts through his nose. He barely looks up at first.
"Oh, she didn't die of frost yet… Did you know most people would just sleep there and die?"
She looks impassively from the corner of her eye at the blond slowly gather her bearings in the frosted room. Zack stares fiercely at the screen before struggling against the ties again. What a fighter.
"I suppose this is more fun for us to watch, right Zack?"
…
Rachel awoke in that small room next to cardboard boxes frozen shut. It had been the cold, both calling her to waking, and yet coaxing her into sleep. Her immediate thought had been Zack, who is nowhere to be found.
She looks around and sees a good deal of these boxes, some with dried blood. Likely these were filled with the same sorry saps that were frozen to death. A heavy-duty metal door with a key pad is the only way out of the room she sees.
She tries the door first. Locked. The metal was so cold it hurt to hold.
As her breath made immense fog, she looked about, moving conservatively. There is a camera up in a corner of the ceiling. The floor master is watching. Rachel inspects the boxes. They are all marked fragile. All except one lack codes of any kind.
The one that had a code was not very different in appearance. However, the frosted cardboard had something scratched on, perhaps in blood from a previous prisoner.
"ICE"
It wasn't in numbers. But Rachel got the hint quick enough. There is no number that actually looks like a mirrored C. The closest would be 9. She goes back to the keypad and enters "391."
There is a click and a rush of air as the door unlocks. She hurriedly opens it and feels a rise in the temperature, much to her relief.
This next room has narrow walkways across large pools of water. The water is greenish, like a chlorinated pool. From the ceiling are mechanisms of chains, pulleys and hooks. Some had rusty looking lockers hanging, large enough for a person. At the end of the room are four doors, with two in front and one on each side. A single, large, black screen is set between the two doors in front.
Rachel walks towards the doors. As she passes the pools, she sees some of the pools have forms submerged in them. Some of the pools have disgusting, macerated matter floating on the surface, looking to be human fat and flesh. These must be bodies in there.
When she gets near the end of the room, the screen flickers on, showing the purple-haired floor master. She looks straight at Rachel with unamused eyes.
"Are we enjoying our stay…? Congratulations for getting out of the icebox…"
Rachel was not sure if the other end could hear her, but she speaks anyway.
"Where is Zack?"
The floor master moves out of the way to show the gagged and restrained man, seemingly motionlessly slumped forward in a chair. The ends of his hair seem slightly fried. Rachel's eyes widen.
"He is still alive … Not even arrhythmia…" A small smile creeps onto the other girl's face, "Amusing…"
"Zack!" Rachel calls out to him, but her face shows only the slightest of concern.
"You will both end up in the same place… so don't say goodbye."
Without letting her respond, the feed cuts off. Rachel looks off at the four doorways with some urgency now. They are all marked, from 1 to 4.
She takes a shot in the dark and goes for 3.
Past a short, dim hallway is essentially a walk-in freezer. Rachel this time moves one of the boxes to keep the door open while she looked around after entering. There are human bodies hanging like hams from racks strung on the ceiling. Some are naked while others wear pajamas. Some are hung by the ankles and others by hooks under their pits. The ones hung right side up seem like they fell asleep. The ones hung upside down look like they were in the middle of screaming as they died. All have frost and cold, blue skin. But Rachel didn't care. There doesn't seem to be much of use here, save a sledgehammer.
The wall seems odd on one side of the room, being slightly reflective. Picking up the sledge hammer, Rachel slams it on the wall, making a big dent in the metal and cracking whatever ice accumulated. There is the sound of something hissing, and then a large BOOM that makes her totter a bit. It sounded like an explosion nearby, but not here. She sees the dent she made has ballooned back onto her side. A gas explosion maybe.
She goes around testing the rest of the room's walls now. One other one sounds a bit hollow. When she smashes that one, it crumples to reveal a chute of some sort, with a rather bad smell. This is probably where the bodies are dumped then.
Or was it?
There doesn't seem to be a need to dump bodies, given the whole freezing and brining thing going on. And if it has such a putrid scent, it must be warm enough down there for decomposition to happen. All signs point to some sort of red herring trap. To test it, Rachel takes town one of the bodies and shoves it down the dark tube.
There is no sound of grinding, but she instead hears just a dull thud. Throwing in the hammer, she vaults into the chute after. Despite the odor, the chute is actually quite clean. At the end, she is dropped atop the corpse she had used, alongside the hammer.
This new room she is in seems to be the source of the fetid odor, as two bodies in late stages of decomposition float in a large tank. They have rotted for a time now, she can see. The remains of what must have been their ankle chained to the tank bottom broke off, allowing the bodies to float as they deteriorated. There are at least no flies in here.
The room is illuminated by a single bar of lighting with no windows and a single door. She hears a distant shout that rattles her. It's Zack. He must be near.
The door has a simple knob. With a swing, she smashes it. The door creaks open. The room beyond the doorway flickers with a series of lightbulbs leading to a single door on the right side of the long pathway. On the sides of the long room seem to be many beds with eerie silhouettes in the flickering light. Dragging the hammer, Rachel walks along, under the light. As she does, whatever is in the beds seem to quiver and a low cackling arises around in the darkness. But she walks on, seemingly unfazed.
…
When Zack regained consciousness after passing out intermittently, spots form in his vision and vanish, like annoying blinks. He can see the girl across the table, seemingly doodling on paper. She doesn't seem to have noticed him awake just yet. His eye trails to the screen, which shows Rachel moving about still. How long had he been out? How many shocks was that by now?
Rachel seems to be in a place that is yet again cold, from the puffs of steam issuing from her lips. But she doesn't seem to be freezing like in the first room.
Kirsten gives a bored yawn and stretches, "Hnn... Room number 3, eh..."
So she's on her way? Wait, what room are they in, even? It probably isn't even connected back to where Rachel is. In that case, there's no point in counting on her to come.
The floor master looks to her captive now.
"Oh, good you're awake. I suppose even something that doesn't break still has limits... you were actually out of it this time, weren't you..."
He gives her a silent, murderous glare.
She gets up and walks over to his side of the table after scooping some snow out of her fishbowl. Zack can see something like a human head maybe buried in there. The bit she dug out exposes a bloodshot eye and a cold, blue-skinned scalp.
"Are you thirsty?"
When he doesn't respond, she moves to undo the gag's clasp from behind. He spits the thing out and growls.
"Damn bitch, I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU!" He snarls and strains against his bonds.
She takes a step back, "Tut tut... don't you want some water?"
"GRAAAH!" More beast than man, he struggles like mad to break free, frothing like an animal.
Kirsten looks at him with slight disapproval before throwing the wad of snow at his face. He flinches slightly from the wet, melty cold at first, before resuming his aggressive act. She seems a bit turned off, and returns to her side of the table.
"A beast is no fun... is that your secret..." She mumbles to herself. Her hand lingers now for the dial of the electrifier.
"LIKE HELL IMMA LET YOU!"
With a sudden surge of strength, he grinds his feet to stand. There is a groan and snap of metal bolts as his inhuman strength actually tears the bolted chair legs off the ground. Kirsten's eyes widen at the spectacle, perhaps out of awe more than fear, even as he jumps over the table, bearing down on her with a crash.
"Ngh!" She yelps a bit as his large frame knocks her backwards off her seat, his knees going on her chest. Her padded coat luckily saves her from broken bones, but she isn't out of the woods yet.
"RAAH!" Zack lunges forward with his teeth as his weapons, as his limbs remain restrained. Like a wolf for the kill, he goes straight for the neck. He first gets a mouthful of the collar of the thick parka she wears. But he can feel the thin thing's neck under the layers.
Kirsten squeals a bit under him, fumbling in her pockets. She pulls out a long, needle-like gun apparatus. Before Zack can move, she jabs the syringe tip into his abdomen and pulls and holds the trigger. He felt the initial stab, but he relentlessly bites harder. Even as he feels something alien flood his system, he tries to hold on.
After a few long seconds of the struggle, Zack flops over, drool and froth leaking from his mouth. Kirsten coughs and sits up. She looks at the hypodermic syringe gun. She'd used up all the liquid. Panting slightly, she looks to Zack's listless body. Her face slowly twists into that of queer pleasure, a bit sweaty and red-faced from arousal.
"That was... amazing..."
