Accouchement

1.2

It's after she's laying in a corner, exhausted from crying and throwing her hands against the handleless face of the door, and accidentally drifting off, that the door opens. She's awake in a flash, panic ripping through her hard enough that she feels like a live wire, and moving to stand and press herself into the corner.

A figure, dark and hulking and not quite humanoid, lumbers in. It pauses just inside the doorway, its massive head surveying the room and she prays, mentally chants, to every deity known to mankind that it'll just go away, that whatever it is breathing heavily in the doorway is too stupid to actually turn its head around to see her. But then, as she's trying to enfold herself into the corner, it turns and Yoshimoto gasps and sees, even through the blur, two pinpricks of infrared so deep and horribly and unnaturally red it incites a horror so thick that she's buried under it.

Yoshimoto desperately claws for composure as the figure moves - she needs to run or scream or do something right now but she's frozen, unable to look away as it traverses the space between them in lumbering, heavy steps and seizes her in a grip of bone crushing strength. It hauls her up by her forearms, maintaining constant eye contact, and maneuvers her from the room into the hallway.

It's difficult to survey her surroundings - she's trapped in a prison within her own body - but even though she can see a bit through the peripheral of her vision, she is grotesquely mesmerized by the face inches from hers, crimson eyes boring into hers. The face is bunched, as if each feature had been tied by twine and pulled into the very center of the head where it's nose should be. Instead, there only exists a flat expanse of skin, two glowing eyes and a unnaturally large, grinning mouth with teeth the size of hubcaps.

The monster's pupils dilate when they pass through the threshold of a room much dimmer than the blinding white glare of the hallway. It's a transition that makes it difficult to see anything outside of its glowing, crimson gaze, but she knows they're heading deeper into the room by the way the light from the doorway fades into a eerie halo that stretches around the edges of the monster holding her.

Yoshimoto's stomach churns, the nausea breaching through the prison of fear she's encased in and she knows, just knows, that this is it. This is where she dies.

She's maneuvered around into a chair when the frightening creature breaks eye contact and she can finally move. Of course she struggles, but the monster still manages to hold her down and brace her arms and legs and neck with thick, velcro straps against the limbs of the chair. She's crying, shouting pleads to "please please please let me go", but the thing ignores her like a butcher ignores the panicked squeals of a pig and continues to tighten her straps so she can't move.

When it's done, the creature lumbers away, leaving Yoshimoto strung out and defenseless. She's heaving, taking in gulps of breath as if she's drowning, and she can feel her heart pounding against her ribcage, sending vibrations up her neck. Her throat is raw and all she can taste is iron in her mouth as she writhes against the restraints that contain her.

Moments pass in deafening silence as she drowns in her own terror. Her mind flits hysterically through nonsensical images and revelations of people and memories and unfulfilled dreams. And above it all -- or, perhaps, beneath at least the panic and desperation that clouds her mind -- she can feel compulsory nausea over how she must seem exactly like a spooked cow for slaughter.