Chapter 3:

A considerable time passed in Sarah’s room, and Joseph said nothing. Without much thought or intention he’d found himself sitting upon Sarah’s unadorned and unoccupied bed, as opposed to the chair that was gestured out to him by the guards—it was a mere two feet away. Joseph was completely lost in his quiet observation of the half-naked, half-woman in front of him. His right hand hung itself over one of the two chains that held the metal bed frame off the concrete flooring, slung around it at the elbow. His left hand tugged down on his chin and held his mouth ajar in an indictive suspense.

The place was equally silent on Sarah’s side of the room. She sat tightly bound from torso to extremities, and her body was poorly clothed and presenting itself on a dirty, surgical-steel chair. The chair’s legs were formidably stamped into the flooring, as a dozen thick brackets bolted its existence to the territory, and swore an oath to utter immobility. The whole set up reminded Joseph of an electric chair, sans its crown. It was synonymous with the prison, and damned its occupant’s life just as verily. Sarah was limp in it, with open eyes, so unblinking and unwavering, that it was something Joseph had only ever seen in death. Sarah was no longer a part of this world.

Apart from the normal anxiety you could expect from Joseph during such a first encounter, he was now sickened with the realization of something worse than seeing Sarah alive and in the flesh—seeing her dead and in decay. He visually searched for any pulse of life in her body, something that was gradually becoming an increasing point of pensiveness. She was motionless, statuesque, and squelched to the rest of the world, to a mortifying degree. Joseph was beyond anxious now—he was petrified.

He continued his wide-eyed scrutiny of Sarah’s lifeless body. She appeared whole, but with a few peculiar injuries: her ebon black lips were thinly lined with blood, with a history of it trailing and drying down her chin, and finally being absorb by her wavy stomach fur from an old drip. Her final couple of injuries paired themselves on both her hands, whereas the tips of her fingers had been eroded upon and were near mutilation. The blood from this had smeared upon the underbelly of her hands, wrists, and a good deal of the arm rests. This looked like a torture’s work, beaten and pulled until she succumbed to some kind of death internally; it was likely that the rest of her physical signs of punishment were hidden away by her thick and matted fur.

Joseph heart sank into his stomach and digested painfully. For all he could remember, this was the only time he’d ever felt so powerless and weak to his circumstance. His empty expression reflected his disbelief. It all felt surreal to him, everything leading up to this moment in time, and the way his life had finally reached its point of no return. Everything was wrong—a backwards reality. He wanted nothing more than to believe this wasn’t happening, and he wasn’t willing to accept a nightmare crossing over to reality. So, he fought his senses for just a moment longer, his depression turned to bitter conniption, and in an absence of mind, a moment of desperate insanity, he hurled his handheld radio at the floor, landing it in untold pieces.

“Who the fuck touched her!?” snarled the colonel. “Who did this!?”

Of course, there would not be a reply.

Not yet sated by his current level of destruction, he bust from his seat, kicked over the chair that had been set out for him, and grabbed at the first native object in his reach, coiled up, and pitched it at Sarah as hard as his might could handle. Hard enough to throw him off balance, and hard enough to hurt his arm in the swing of the action.

Joseph quickly fell back into the bed with an undignified landing, cradling his arm on the ride down. With no arms to cushion his crash, his spine poked into the white concrete wall behind him, and caused further pain to rip thought his body. As to add insult with injury, he also missed his intended mark, and only managed to hit a greater depression than before.

Little moved him after that for a while. He ignored his back in favor of nursing his arm, lurching over his lap to peer at the shatter pieces of the radio in a knowing kind of sympathy, like they were fragments of his life. He was now locked in a room without a key, and a prisoner in Sarah’s world.

He knew it was only a matter of time before they came to get him, but there was no rightful way of knowing how long. The stillness and quietness of the room was at its most quintessential, it seem to make his thoughts almost tangible. They were buzzing loudly on the surface of his mind, close enough to swat away. He couldn’t help but humor the concept of such a prolonged lifestyle in this setting. He tried hard not to understand how maddening it must have been, and how torturously empty it was from an outside world. A warming airflow was suddenly kicked through a line of miniscule vents near the ceiling, with each gap in the grate punched out in a polka-dot pattern. He latched his focus to its distant drone, as it hummed away some of his buzzing thoughts. At that, he was able to sigh away some of his melancholy.

At some point he began to wonder what exactly he threw at Sarah’s corpse. The blur of his pain and the object’s momentum didn’t offer much of a clue as to what he actually was sent flying across the room. The lithe metallic clank of silver on concrete bouncing against the opposing wall managed to offered some clue to the identity of the unknown item, but it wasn’t an answer, so he scanned the other side of the room vehemently. Joseph recalled its features between his fingers with a small measure of nostalgia, and eventually came upon something that fit his suspicions: a dented bell pinned to a black leather choker that was lying between Sarah’s feet. He produced a sarcastic snort and a wry smile when he suddenly realized what it was… and what it meant to Sarah. And, with a fraction of satisfaction, he realization that he’d just put a dent in that only possession that Sarah was know to prize. From the look of the rest of the room, it was probably the only possession of worth in her whole hovel. But ultimately, it amounted to nothing—Sarah was past the state of manipulation or interrogation.

In all this though, Joseph found enough strength in his fragile mirth to empower himself to his feet, and advance upon the bell in an indulgence of pure curiosity. Just as he was previously warned, the room smelled, but it only got worse as he approached Sarah, and he pulled the neck of his shirt over his nose for shelter.





<sub>I Starterd riting again an i liek much beter this version chapter three... STAY TUNNED GIVE ME MONEY I"M PROO

This really is just a first draft teaser though, so ignore dem bad gramarz n typooz k thx.</sub>