Chapter 5: The Orchid

I’m getting tired of waking up in medical beds. This time, I’ve been tied down. My restraints are harsher than before. They pin my wrists, ankles, and hips flat to the mattress. I wiggle, but I have no space to move. I’m not locked away in a room either. I haven’t been allowed privacy. I’m tucked in an open pocket, made to face a front desk alongside other beds. They’re all empty. But the chair beside me isn’t. Dad sits there, watching me. His eyes are glazed over, like he’s deep in thought, but when he notices I’m up, he startles out of his trance.

“Good morning,” he says, nodding. There’s a bandage on his head where the gun hit him.

“It’s morning?” I ask, swallowing a yawn.

“Not quite dawn,” he says. He yawns, too. “Doctor Brockhoist had to keep you asleep for a while. We couldn’t risk stripping your body of needed rest. You suffered quite an ordeal yesterday.”

My stomach growls, and I whimper. That had to have been almost twenty-four hours ago. Have I really been asleep that long? Even outside of my dog cage, I’m still losing days of my life. Like I’m a toy they can turn off and on whenever they feel like.

“Is Mommy okay?” I ask. She was still moving when I was scooped up. But the bullet must have been close to her heart.

Dad stretches out his weariness. He seems less than interested in what happened to her. “She’s fine. Patched up. Resting. Don’t worry about her right now. I’m more worried about you.”

“Nothing happened,” I say. “He told me some weird stuff, I guess.”

Dad’s jaw clicks. “That’s what I’m worried about. Do you think you can stand? I want to have a conversation about this in private.”

I shrug. “I can’t feel my legs right now.”

Dad runs a hand over his face and huffs. He rises with a groan and says, “That’s fine. I’ll get a chair.”

He disappears for a moment, dragging his feet up to the front desk. He’s changed clothes and washed his hair. As for me, I’m still wearing the same dirt-stained ensemble I had on yesterday. And my hair is still folded into a braid that has halfway fallen out. I want to untangle the knots, but when Dad comes back with a guard, I am carried into a wheelchair that binds my wrists to its arms.

“Daddy, this hurts,” I say as Dad tightens my restraints. He straps two more belts around my chest, creating an X shape that pinches my tits.

Dad nods. “I know. It’s for your own good. You escaped yesterday, don’t you remember? This is the consequence.”

“But I didn’t!”

Dad slaps the back of his hand against my cheek, throwing my head to the side. My face throbs as I struggle to find my composure. His wedding ring has cut me, and a dribble of blood creeps out from the gash.

“Don’t talk back to your father,” he snaps. He grabs me by the throat to make sure he has my full attention.

I lock my lips together and nod.

“Sorry, Daddy.”

Dad’s mouth twitches. “Better.”

He excuses the guard to wheel me down the hallway in silence. I remain perfectly still as he drags me past more suites full of screaming and pleading subjects. I try to drown the noises out, but my attempts are in vain. How long until I’m going to be like that? I guess it already happened ... My pussy quivers at the memory of Doctor Brockhoist torturing me with that vibrator.

I’m taken into the elevator, since I am apparently unruly. Dad punches in a special code when we get inside. I glance up at the sign above all the glittery buttons with a codex for the building staff. 111 calls for guards to arrive at the next available floor to subdue a subject, 222 stalls the elevator for ten minutes for “needed disciplinary actions,” 333 opens a hidden compartment with sedatives inside, and 555 locks the elevator to disallow anyone to get on until the current riders get to their destination. That last one is what Dad punched in.

I stare at myself in the warbled reflection of the doors. They’re streaked with fingerprints, like some people had once tried to claw their way free. I’m so distracted by the sight that I don’t even realize until a couple of minutes have passed that I’m being taken to a basement floor. By the time I notice, the doors ding and open up.

From a sterile hospital hall to what looks like an industrial garage, I am wheeled into a wide open corridor that’s lined with armed guards walking up and down a balcony overhead. They peer at us, shining flashlights at me. Dad pays them no mind as he drags me to a set of double doors that open when he signals to one of the guards.

The room behind it looks like a prison, but sounds like an asylum. The space is a massive circle, fully surrounded by jail cells on both the ground floor and the floor above. Guards are walking around here, too. They peer over the balcony, brush past us, and carefully study us from a short tower in the center of the room. Subjects shriek louder than they did in the hospital. Their screams are guttural, like they’re being skinned alive. Yet they crackle and pop with static. I notice as Dad takes me across the floor that there are speakers positioned everywhere. They pump out screams on a loop, pounding in my head like a hammer.