There was a flash of light and my head snapped back as my body was thrown to the floor. It hit with a thump and my head bounced hard against the polished floor making a wet, hollow sound like when you break open a ripe melon. There was a loud snap as my neck turned sideways under the weight of my falling body. I couldn't hear anything around me other than the ringing of the blast in my broken and bleeding ears. My vision swam like a school of tropical fish, blurred and indistinct, filled with after images of the flash of light. I could feel the blood pooling against the charred skin on my stomach and chest, the incendiary having burned away the front of my blouse and part of the bra. The shrapnel left deep bleeding tracts through the carbonized wasteland of my skin. Mostly second degree burns, it felt both painfully cool on the burns and burning hot on the edges and in the shrapnel wounds. The air in my chest wheezed and bubbled out through one such hole where it had pierced my lung and collapsed it. Every breath I breathed hurt like hell and whistled like the devil's own breath. Unable to move my head I wheezed out a cough and limply flopped a hand toward a wound in my side.

I felt a new pain as a hand wrapped itself into my hair, pulling my head around. The faint sound of a gruff voice pushed through the ringing in my ears as I was lifted up and off the ground by my scalp so I was face to face with him. "Hey, Frank! This one's alive!" he said, "She's mine!" My vision started to clear a bit as I heard the clatter of an automatic weapon somewhere else in the room. There was a very ugly and large man holding me up in front of him. Bald and heavily scarred, one eye augmented, probably because of a previous injury. He smiled a cruel broken toothed smile. His dark green shirt did little to hide the stiff body armour underneath, it also failed to show any insignia or crest.

The other man walked over, swinging a rifle from his left hand and a cigar in the right. His dark skin blending in with his similar outfit of a dark green shirt, body armour, and black tactical pants. "Bill, that is disgusting. Her jaws been burned off, you can see the bone and teeth. Not to mention her skin and the blood everywhere."

Bill grabbed the front of my pants and pulled, ripping the waist open and dragging them down to my knees. "I don't need her face or most of the skin," he said with a throaty chuckle.

"What about all the blood?" Frank sounded genuinely disgusted.

"Like fuckin' a virgin, makes good lube!" He leaned back and laughed deeply, to the obvious disgust of his partner.

"At least take her to one of the offices, no one wants to see that," Frank walked away shaking his head. A man groaned and tried to crawl away from the blast zone, one leg and arm little more than a mangled mess of blood and tissue. Frank put three rounds into his head as he walked by, silencing the groan.

Bill dropped me down again, but kept hold of my hair. I hit the ground and one of my ankles rolled and caused my left leg to twist under my body. There was a loud crack as my kneecap slipped up and my leg broke. I tried to scream but could only get out a gurgling hiss of bloody spit. I couldn't feel where my tongue was, but I figured it was hanging out past my disfigured face, lolling like a panting dog. "Woops," Bill said, laughing again, "I think I broke something else!" He started drag me, but all I could see was the ceiling, drop-down tiles hanging helter-skelter out of the grid work, thrown around by the blast. "Not that it will matter, I'll break you over a desk soon, then I'll put a bullet in your head to end this miserable life you've stumbled on."

Both my shoes got pulled off by debris on the floor as he dragged me across the floor. After a moment he stopped and then my body jerked hard as he kicked a door off its hinges. He fired a short burst from his automatic and continued to drag me into the room. There was a warm iron smell in the room as he tossed me stomach first across the desk. My head hung over the far side and I saw another woman in a business suit staring up at me, eyes huge and teary. She was trying to breath, or scream, but nothing came out except a bit of wet splashing from the hole in her throat where one of the bullets went through, opening her trachea and severing her spine. Paralyzed, bleeding out, and unable to breath, thankfully she will be dead in moments.

I felt his hand slide down between my legs as he rubbed warm, fresh blood into my pussy to lube it up a bit. I heard him unbuckle his belt and unfasten his pants, he spat and slapped my ass hard, "Ready for the last pleasure of your life?" He laughed and shoved his dick into me. My pelvic muscles involuntarily tightened around his cock and he groaned like an animal. He started thrusting and I slid back and forth across the desk, making my head shake like a ragdoll. Below me on the floor the other woman's eyes got even wider for a second as she realized what was happening, the tears streaming faster than Bill's thrusts. Then her eyes slowly lost focus and she was no longer staring at me, or at anything.

Bill grunted and pulled out. He set his rifle on the desk next to me, grabbed my shoulder and flipped me over onto my back. He stepped up and shoved his dick back into my pussy, spitting on it again to give it some more lube. "I need those tits," he said as he ripped off the remains of my blouse and bra. The skin over my breasts was fairly unmarred as the extra layer of clothing absorbed a lot of the blast. His hands were warm in a completely different way as he grabbed hard at my tits, twisting them in his hands to hold onto me. He used them as leverage to start fucking me again, thrusting hard and deep inside me. My hips hurt from the stress of being forced apart every time he thrust in. It was a minor pain on top of a hundred other pains, and yet from some reason it was more real; the pain inside me and between my legs. I wanted to cry and puke and rail against the man taking advantage of my shattered body, but I could not move. I only sat as a silent observer to my own rape and murder.

Then, with one extra hard thrust, my head snapped back and forth and there was another click. The pain everywhere came flooding in ten thousand times stronger. I could acutely feel my burned skin, collapsed lung, bleeding punctures, broken knee, and my raw pussy. I screamed in pain, a real scream, even lacking most of my lips from the third degree burns it was obvious what the sound was.

Bill's groaning got louder, "I see you've got some life left in you yet," he said between panting thrusts, then he shoved in really hard and cried out in ecstasy. I felt his hot seed fill me inside and finely the tears started to fall down the sides of my face, digging runlets through the charred remains of my face. Bill stepped back, dripping his semen on the floor as his dick, now limp, slid out of my body.

With a great effort I lifted my head up to see him. He was looking down as he tucked himself back into his pants and fastened his belt. He sighed and said, "Oh, that was pretty good, even if you do have small tits." My arm, relatively unharmed, reached over and grabbed the automatic rifle. I didn't have the strength to pick it up, but I twisted it to point at him. He looked up in time to see me pull the trigger. A moment of confusion on his face as the report from the gun slammed three or four rounds through his crotch and thighs. He screamed and collapsed onto the floor, grabbing at where his dick used to be.

I tried to say, "Fuck you," but it just came out as rasping slur. Unfortunately he bled out in just a few seconds, one of the bullets having severed his iliac artery.

Very slowly and in great pain I sat up. I don't know where I was pulling the strength from, but every motion made me feel stronger, more whole. I looked down at my throbbing and twisted leg, the kneecap having almost broken out of the skin above the joint, the lower half of the socket having ripped loose and was pressed to the side, making another stretched, bruised lump. I pressed down on the bump as hard as I could and screamed again in pain as more cartilage gave way and the bone snapped back into the socket with a sickening pop. I then pressed the kneecap back down, screaming more as it slid down with a near inaudible grinding. I sat trying to catch the half a breath I still had, willing the pain away.

"Bill, you okay in there. We're hearing a lot more screaming than normal," the voice, Frank, came from just beside the door. I picked up the rifle and cradled it in my lap like a child. "Bill?" Frank stuck his head around the corner, his eyes going wide as he saw the barrel of the automatic pointing at him. He started to pull back around the door frame, but it didn't matter, I fired at the wall, opening up with a burst as long as I could hold the gun in mostly the right direction. Frank collapsed in front of the door, blood pooling slowly around him.

I pulled the remains of my pants up over my bloody body and gingerly stood up, every muscle and joint screaming in abject agony. My left leg was unable to support my weight; I collapsed to the ground with another scream. I managed to pull myself up into a sitting position and dragged myself to the wall next to Bill's corpse. I fumbled the magazine release and dropped the nearly empty magazine to the ground. I pulled two fresh magazines from one of the pockets in Bills pants and put one in to the gun. I pulled the bolt and checked that a round was still loaded in the chamber.

I shoved Bills body forward a bit and unclipped the tactical harness from under his arms and pulled it off. I was just about to clip it on myself when a grenade came bouncing into the room. On reaction alone I shoved the slumped forward corpse of Bill and managed by sheer luck to get it on the grenade. There was a loud pop and his body exploded, severing it in half and spraying blood and guts all over the room and onto me.

I sat back and waited, "Check the room," I heard a voice say from outside. A man stepped in and vary quickly scanned the room. I almost fired at him, but hesitated because he looked right over me. I must have really looked dead. He stepped forward around the blood covered desk. At which point his eyes were now totally off me. I held up the rifle and fired for the center of mass. Bill must have been packing armour pricing rounds because they went right through his armour like a scalpel. He collapsed to the ground without a sound.

"Fuck!" I heard a voice yell and the wall exploded in gunfire. Several rounds went through my back and the pain was too much to even scream as they exploded out the front of my stomach and chest. I managed to pull one of the two grenades off of the harness and concentrated hard to read what it said. Around the lip of the green ball with two blue stripes was written, "5 second fuse, thermite cast." I yanked the pin out, wincing at how hard it was, counted to three and tossed it around the door frame.

There was a quiet, "oh shit," then a bang and a blinding light.

Everything went quiet. I waited for what felt like an eternity, but nothing changed outside the small office. The pain from the fresh gunshot wounds dwarfed the other wounds now. It was hard to tell because of the fresh injuries, but it looked like the shrapnel wounds had closed up. Some of the charred skin on my chest was even starting to peel back, reveling fresh pink scar tissue underneath. I slowly stood up and discovered that my left leg could barely support my weight and I limped out of the room slowly, the rifle hanging from my hand, the harness half-forgotten and hanging unclipped over my shoulders with the broken bra.

Outside the room the carnage was intense. The smell of burned flesh curled my nostrils and smoke still rose off of the three bodies that lay ruined around the charred blast zone of the grenade. I slowly started to limp toward the front door when I heard a single loud crack and felt a sharp sting in the side of my head. Then everything went dark.

I awoke in a cell, ankles chained to the end of the steel framed bed, the concrete walls radiating cold. My cloths had been removed and replaced with simple blue cotton. My wounds had been bandaged and cleaned; a lot of the charred skin had been peeled away revealing fresh scar tissue. I gingerly felt around the bandages and peeled them back, the puncture wounds and bullet holes having closed up and were well on their way to healing. The bandage around my head was still tacky with fresh blood in some places and crispy with old dried blood in others. The side of my head underneath still throbbed and was soft.

There was a clattering from the door as someone on the other side unlocked and opened it. Two men walked in, a thin tall man wearing a lab coat carrying a hard case and a large man in a brown military shirt and black tactical pants. The thin man spoke with a sharp Irish accent to match his bright red hair, "Why're you alive dear?" I sat up on the bed as the large man came over to me, the doctor standing back by the door. "Please let him restrain you properly before we begin."

"Who are you?" I asked, nodding to the large man who pulled more chains from the corners of the bed. He stretched my arms and legs out, attaching the chains to my wrists and to the other side of my ankles so I was completely immobilized sitting on the bed, arms and legs pulled apart as much as possible.

"Don't concern yourself with who I am, I'm much more interested in who you are? And also why you aren't dead?" He walked over to me and started examining my wounds, checking my knee, testing the skin. "We pulled a bullet out of your brain, four out of your torso, reflated one lung, properly set your knee, set your left ankle, set three ribs, grafted eighteen centimeters of skin to on your face, and extracted twelve pieces of shrapnel from all over your body." He pulled a stool form the far side of the room and sat down directly in front of me. "Not to mention that the musculature and vertebrae in your neck looks like it had been broken or the massive burns on your chest and stomach."

"Well, that explains the headache." I felt as if I were slurring my words, the new skin that formed my lips still a bit numb and hard to move.

The doctor chuckled, "And even with all those injuries you still managed to kill six men, very impressive." He wove his fingers together and propped his head in them, his elbows on his knees, "I must know everything about you. Where did you come from, where did you train, how you gained this miraculous healing?"

"And what do I get out of it?" I asked.

"It depends on how useful your information is, and how cooperative you are."

"Are you going to let me go?"

He rolled his head back and forth, "Maybe."

It didn't sound very convincing. "One of your men raped me, and tried to kill me. You have got to make this deal pretty compelling," I said with a sneer.

"Oh! They're not my men. I work for..." he trailed off into a long pause, thinking over the proper word, "a third party," he concluded. Putting his hands down he leaned back, "Besides, you killed him and five others, I would say you've been fairly well compensated."

"Since when is killing compensation?"

"Since when is it not?" He shook his head and stood up, "Anyway, I'll talk with my employers about your release. For now I just want to take some fresh blood and skin samples." I nodded as he opened the hard case and pulled out some vials, a syringe head, scalpel, and slides.

He deftly put the syringe head in a vain in my arm and started drawing blood into the vials. He then used the scalpel and gently cut a tiny piece of scar tissue off my chest, he also took a piece of undamaged skin from my arm, and a slightly larger piece from my thigh. He was obviously very skilled, I barely felt a thing as he cut pieces off of me.

He placed the skin on the slides then put them and the vials of blood back into the hard case. "Okay," he said as he closed the case, "I'm done here for now, unless you want to tell me anything useful?" He looked hopeful, but when I shook my head his eyes hardened, and he nodded once, "Okay, than. Until next time." Picking up the hard case he walked out of the room.

The large man looked down at, "Frank was a good friend of mine," was all he said before his fist came across my face at lightning speed. The pain exploded at the impact, his fist breaking the fresh skin and blood started oozing down my already bruising face. He hit me again, lower on the jaw; I felt the impact push my mandible out of joint, pain flooding into new areas. He hit me a third time and knocked a tooth out. I spat it to the floor and glared up at him, my vision reddened by the pain and hate that I now felt for this man.

"If you hit me again, I will kill you." I said, my voice slurred and filled with blood.

He simply sneered and punched my again, in the eye. I felt blood vessels pop and I lost sight in my left eye. My right eye was growing hazy and it was hard to keep my head up, I felt him hit me one more time in the face and I blacked out.

I woke to a repeated whirring thump, the sound of high-voltage electricity whirring into a large series of super-capacitors and the thump as they discharged in rapid order. I opened my eyes and saw the smooth plastic surface of an electromagnetic eye staring back at me. No pupal or iris, but I could feel it digging through my head. The MRI slowly slid around my head, taking a good look at what was happening inside me.

My hands and feet were shackled to the gurney I was on with soft leather and padded mesh meant to restrain me without hurting me. It was much more comfortable than the metal shackles on the bed, but much more restrictive. There were also straps across the gurney itself, one across my legs, just above the knees, one across my waist, and one across my shoulders and chest. My head was also in a molded brace to keep it from moving.

"Good morning. How are you feeling?" a familiar Irish accent said through a speaker.

"Like I got punched in the head a couple times too many," I said, feeling my words slur.

"There is a reason for that. But I have got to admit, I'm impressed there is so little damage inside your brain." The speaker popped and crackled due to the interference from the MRI. "I was expecting at least swelling. More so I was more expecting dead zones and creases from the previous damages, but there is barely a line from where you got shot, and that's it."

"Thanks," I responded, sounding more sarcastic than I meant to. "Does this mean you'll let me go?"

"Um," the static buzzed a moment in near silence as the MRI finished its pass, "no, I'm afraid not. There is just so much to learn from you." He sounded awed and excited. "I have to admit, I'm a little baffled by you. No chemicals or nanites that I could find; nothing to account for this. But I have a gene sequencer going through your genetic code." He was quiet a second as he came out of the control room, the speaker having fallen silent. "Once we decrypt your code we'll have a better idea who built you and how." He walked over to me and leaned over the gurney to look into my eyes. His hand brushed a strand of hair away from my face and he lingered with his fingers gently caressing my cheek.

The contact felt good, really good. I hadn't had anyone touch me in such a gentle caring way in a long time. I gently wet my lips with my tongue, gently played the tip over my lips in a slow, short slide. The doctor's eyes slid all the way down my body and for a moment his mind was not on science. "You can call me Anna," I said, quietly, breathing harder than normal.

He flashed me a quick, sharp smile, "I just call you Subject One." He pressed away from the gurney and the mood was gone. "Guards?" he called out of the white scanning room, "Please take Subject One back to her room." Two men came in, same military style clothing.

Picking up a syringe off a table, the doctor walked back over to me, "Here is a little something to help you sleep for a while." He pressed the needle into my arm and the plunger slid down, automatically matching my pulse. I felt myself drift off in a matter of moments.

This time I woke back on my steel framed bed, but I was in considerable discomfort. On my back, my head hung over the side of my bed, my legs hanging off the other side. My face was covered in my own drool, a clasp hung from over my teeth and pulled my head down, another on my lower jaw pulled my mouth opened and immobilizing my head. My legs were trussed so I could not bend my knees, and spread out to be almost straight with the bed frame. My hips ached with the exertion of being stretched so far for so long. My arms were in a similar position, trussed together like chicken wings then pulled away at two different places each, immobilizing them completely. I could also feel ropes crossing my body, tying me down directly to the bed frame.

I had never felt so vulnerable, exposed and trussed up like a character in sick dungeon fantasy. The air was cold and I was naked except for the rope that itched and scratched all over my body. Pulled and exposed in a way that was purely sexual, ready to be dominated and used. I was no longer a woman, or even a test subject. I was just a thing.

I was trying to move, trying to find a weakness in the knots and ropes when I heard a voice, "She's awake." I stopped moving, and heard several sets of feet coming into the room. All I could see was the wall and part of the ceiling. Then someone walked into my field of vision, it was the same man who had punched me out. "Still going to kill me?"