Murmansk-13

“It’s not fucking technology, it’s a disease, a disease you’ve said yourself was uncontrollable and you’re selling it to the only bidder for god knows what!” Katja’s voice became thin and hoarse.

Arty slammed his fists down on the table again, passionate rage seared through his response, “I wanted off this fucking station. They offered an opportunity.”

“You’ll kill us all,” Katja replied fragilely as hot tears streaked her cheeks. She pressed the balls of her palm into the bony sockets of her eyes, then heard Arty rushing around the table to console her. She flashed an arm out in a gesture to desist. “No, if you’re not going to help me, just take me back to my friends.”

Katja tried to stand, but found her legs were barely able to withstand her weight. The room spun around her and she grasped for the chair. Even though she was stationary the room ticked with the movement of her eyes. Letting go of the chair left her feeling cast adrift, the low gravity of Central Command creating a sense of vertigo and seasickness. Arty’s arm was across her shoulder now, casually caressing her breast. She remembered the night of the outbreak, when he’d handed her a cup of water from the fountain in the med labs QC. He’d watched her undress in a drunken stupor, only she hadn’t been drunk.

The scene around her kept skipping, not again, please not again. Then she was falling backwards, slowly. Not falling, lowered. Arty helping her to the cold deck of the interrogation room, the linoleum clingy against the exposed flesh of her legs. Arty had already removed her jumpsuit bottoms to her knees, her paralyzed legs unfeeling. “I have wanted this for so long. Wanted you. Only you, do you know how special you should feel.”

Katja wanted to puke, but she was terrified she would choke, her body was immobile. The back of her throat felt deadened as if anesthetised, panic welled within overcoming physical sensation. Arty knelt above her, pulling his lab coat apart and maladroitly fingered the fly on his slacks. She tried to say no, but the muscles in her mouth locked. “I am truly sorry about your father,” he said, his face oddly sincere as he pulled his stiff member out.

Gently, Arty levered himself on top of her. His face was a mask of absent insanity as he looked down on her. Pins and needles shot down her right arm as his hot breath, smelling of stale coffee and old cigarettes, polluted the air before her. Katja could feel Arty trying to penetrate the torn wreckage of her vagina as she covertly tested the movement in her fingers. Each action of muscle, cartilage and tendon caused searing impulses of pain, but her arm could move.

Katja knew she was too weak to fight off Arty alone, as he looked down to see what was preventing him from raping her, Katja wheeled her mobile arm up and clumsily grasped for the row of pens neatly stashed in his lab coat. Arty grunted as he realised Katja wasn’t completely disabled, a blood caked hand tried to grasp her arm, multicoloured pens scattered across the floor. Her arm fell limp, back to her side as he pinned her shoulder. “Play nice Katja.”

Katja was sick of playing nice, sick of Murmansk-13 and sick of being used. As Arty looked down again she felt the weight of his body lift from her shoulder. Katja brought the pen she had jammed into the side of her torso up, swinging it sideways at an angle that tore into the side of his eye, smashing his spectacles. She could feel the membrane of his eyeball shred, with a pop the eye collapsed into sinuous gunge. The pen slammed hard into the orbital socket. Arty screamed a feral scream and fell away.

For a moment, Katja just lay there, felt her chest rising and falling. The curious reawakening of sensation across her torso was debilitating and constricting. With feeling, came pain. All the while Arty screamed, manically.

“You fucking bitch, you scabby faced whore.” Katja couldn’t see Arty, coming at her on all fours but she could hear his shrill madness closing in, skittering limbs on the plastic lino. “My eye, what did you do?”

What you deserved, thought Katja, only there wasn’t time for thought. Her whole body was a writhing mass of raw nerve endings trying to send her into neural meltdown. She flopped onto her stomach, like falling onto a needle bed, she’d barely started crawling when a hand closed round her ankle.

Katja kicked out as Arty struggled to gain purchase where her jumpsuit had gathered around her calves. The jumpsuit may as well have been shackles as her feet flailed, bound by the material, Katja felt her finger nails crack and split where she grasped for traction, trying to pull away. Then she was sliding backwards, the loose flesh around her tummy pinching against the linoleum. “I was going to be gentle with you, but not now,” grunted Arty.