Chapter Text
Stubborn fire kindled in ragged flesh. Hot blood pumped into dormant capillaries and suffused clammy skin. Impulses shivered down a silent spine, awakening stiff limbs with the power of motion.
Vaishu woke to the blaring of an alarm and the screaming of a human throat. Both were muffled, coming from beyond the steel walls of her coffin.
Freeze.
That was the first thing her instincts told her. Mustn't panic and bang on the coffin she was crammed inside. Mustn't gasp for breath – all that would do was make her need to cough up the slime that was always in the lungs of the newly resurrected. And then some monster might hear her. Might know she was awake.
There could be opportunists out there. Early scavengers, waiting for her to awaken, because they needed her to be conscious for what they were going to do to her. And then she would be dragged, still naked, from the coffin – she would be thrown down, her still-slimy skin to the cold metal floor – and then of course her legs would be forced apart, by something much stronger than unaugmented human arms – and then she'd feel – pushing inside her – fingers if she was lucky – probably worse – probably much worse –
No! She couldn't think about that! She would start to hyperventilate. She knew didn't need to breathe – she was a zombie now, just like everyone else – but fear could rule the body in defiance of any true need.
How many times had she died in this accursed afterlife? How many times had she been raped and drained of her energy by stronger revenants, then left for dead? "Nanomachine extraction", they called it. She'd overheard enough conversations between stronger revenants, on the few occasions when they gossiped over their spoils instead of being just as quick to fight each other. She'd picked up the details fast – she had to, after all. How it worked. How all of their bodies had been remade out of tiny machines, too small to see. How, with every orgasm that wracked her body, they were making her disgorge more of the tiny machines that kept her going. How they could absorb those same machines to feed themselves. To make themselves stronger. To grow those accursed, monstrous limbs they so often used to violate her – to steal yet more of the nanomachines from her body.
But Vaishu called it "life energy", because that's what was being ripped away from her. The strength to lift her arms. The will to keep moving. Again and again she'd been left naked and broken on the ground – empty, hollow, so weak that even her fingers wouldn't answer her. On the luckiest of days, her attackers would be wary enough to drag her to a corner where she wouldn't be found right away, and sometimes she could recover enough to crawl – not that she would make it far. More likely, another scavenger would find her first. Then they would use and abuse her still-helpless body, until even her deadened senses were overcome by the intensity of their touch, and her aching cunt spilled yet more of her precious life onto whatever appendages they had pushed inside her. And then it would repeat. And repeat. Until her body had nothing left to give, and the darkness took her. To next wake in a coffin just like this one… With the same fate awaiting her.
How many times? Dozens? Hundreds? It was so hard to remember. Every death left her more confused. She couldn't remember the order. Could barely remember who she'd been before this hell. Memory was reserved for the sensations. The feel of rough hands and claws holding her down and pawing all over her body. The ache deep inside her vagina, repeating in endless variations in the endless cycle of brutality. The substances they squirted on her, aphrodisiacs that made her skin flush and her body squirm even when her muscles were too spent to twitch of their own accord – when she thought she had nothing left to give –
But she had learned! Learned the layout of the tombs, learned where to run and where you'd only get trapped. She could go faster and further, getting a head start while the early predators gorged themselves on the freshies who didn't know any better. She could hide from the stronger revenants – at least, the ones who couldn't see through solid metal, or smell her from fifty meters away, or hear her traitorous heartbeat resonating through the floors of the tomb. Again and again she'd run, trying a different tactic every time. Again and again she'd been chased down. But even when her mind knew it was hopeless, her body wouldn't let her give in. Couldn't accept pain now, not while there was still a chance for pain later. So she had kept trying. Again and again. Until finally she'd been lucky enough to escape the tomb, and lose herself in the ruined city beyond.
By then, she'd known the predators' ways by instinct. No barrier could truly hide her from them, but they would always go for the easy pickings – so if she wasn't the easiest, she would be left alone. She'd avoided the main roads, slinking down an alley too narrow for the larger monsters – but not the first alley she saw, because that was the first place someone would lurk in ambush. She slunk deeper and deeper into the city, avoiding open spaces, avoiding too-convenient shelter alike, until at last she found a refuge for herself: a ruined office building, where you had to crawl between collapsed I-beams and squeeze through doors mostly-jammed by rubble. Only when she had barricaded herself deep inside the building did she finally allow herself to collapse. Alone. Still naked. But after so many violations, it was bliss. The total darkness. The silence. The knowledge that, for now, there were no monsters at her heels.
For days, she had lain motionless, enjoying the chance to merely breathe, to merely live.
And thus, for the first time, she had survived long enough to feel the hunger.
Vaishu hadn't understood the thoughts at first. A vague longing, a craving for the closeness of human skin – was she lonely? But the thought of her long-forgotten friends did nothing for her. Instead, her mind kept returning to her fellow victims. The sight of them squirming alongside her, the passion of their desperate struggles. Their trauma was no different from her own… Why then did she crave the thought of it? Why did her mind linger over the moments when their struggling degraded into throes of arousal – when their screams broke from terror into irresistible lust, and then softened into moans of submission? And why – why! – why was she maddened with desire to crawl out from her sanctuary so she could be close to such a struggle again?
She hadn't known why, but she'd known she needed it. She needed it. She needed it.
So she'd crawled out from the safety of the rubble. She still didn't dare go out in the open – the urge wasn't strong enough to make her suicidal, at least not yet. So she slinked only as far as an outer wall of the office building, staying on the second floor, using a shard of shattered mirror to peek out the empty window frames without being seen. Watching. Waiting, hoping she would see someone approach, someone with soft skin like herself, so that she could… could what? All she knew was that she wanted it. That the urge was growing hour by hour as she waited and hoped. She needed someone to come. Needed flesh, squirming flesh. Needed it right here, right where she could have it all to herself.
In hours, the stillness had broken with the sound of screeching metal on brick. A spiderlike monstrosity, eight feet tall, had hurtled down the alleyway, dragging a thrashing victim in four of its arms while the other six scurried along the ground and walls for balance. By sheer luck, it paused directly under the window where Vaishu was watching. Eyestalks and sensory modules whirred, peering back and forth. Seconds later, the spindly arms relaxed, as if satisfied that it hadn't been followed – that it had found a quiet spot to enjoy its meal.
Vaishu had watched with beating heart, fingers clenched tight on her tiny shard of mirror. While she stared, the spider-thing moved. In a single motion, it slammed its prey against the far wall of the alley. It forced a single metallic arm into the victim's mouth, simultaneously lifting her off her feet, pinning her to the wall, and stifling her screams – and indeed, she was undoubtedly trying to scream, her arms clawing uselessly at the metal that pinned her. The spider-thing's second motion shredded the ragged clothing that still hung from her shoulders, exposing soft skin to the city air. Vaishu found her mouth watering at the sight – the soft brown skin of a baseline human, the gentle curves of breasts and belly, the lithe muscle of thighs and abdomen working furiously as the woman kicked in vain against the metal monster. If only Vaishu could be down there herself! She wanted it so badly. Wanted to have access to that beautiful body, with no horrible spider-thing to stand in her way. Wanted that struggling to belong to her. Wanted herself to be the one who could press that squirming body to the wall – no, it didn't make any sense! Vaishu didn't even have arms like that! How could she be wanting to be in the place of the monster – it didn't make any sense –
The spider-thing had worked quickly. Half a dozen arms shot out, yanking and twisting its victim's limbs to inhuman angles, pounding and clawing at the vulnerable flesh of neck and breast and thigh. In Vaishu's little mirror, she saw the victim's eyes bulge wide, as the terror of it's going to kill me ascended to the terror of it's killing me. Another metal arm unfolded an evil-looking device at its tip, and wasted no time in drilling it into the victim's defenseless cunt – her legs already pinned far out to the sides, helpless to twist her hips away.
It hadn't taken long. For scarcely a minute, the victim's muscles thrashed in great spasms, while the vaginal probe pumped fluid from her body into the spider-thing's reservoirs. But then the muscles went utterly limp. Jaw slack. Eyes drooping. Vaishu cursed her own eyes for how they'd followed those dangling breasts, as they tossed back and forth with the victim's dying spasms. How could she be so eager to watch someone suffer such a terrible fate! How could she still be salivating at the thought of it –
When the spider-thing had finished, it wasted no time. It retracted all its arms at once, and fled halfway down the alley before the victim's body had even hit the ground. And then it was gone.
…Which meant the victim was available!
Desire had burned bright in Vaishu's mouth and chest and cunt. It was too strong to ignore. Too strong to worry if this was a trap, if the monster would return to ambush the next scavenger that would follow the scent of its leftovers. Vaishu was already hurrying to the ground floor. Abandoning all hesitation, she climbed through a window to the alleyway, and hurried to where the victim lay.
Vaishu had almost had a pang of regret when she looked down. The victim looked so innocent and helpless, the spread of brown skin confirming her status as a baseline human, with not a single bionic to give her an edge. She had landed on her back, barely conscious, empty eyes staring at nothing. Blood trickled from her lips where the spider-thing's arm had ripped out of her mouth. The remains of her clothing lay in tatters beneath her. Her arms and legs, which had been broken in the assault, were now splayed around her like she was a ragdoll.
But Vaishu was too far gone with hunger. She dove upon the body, her mouth chomping at those lips to lap up the trickle of blood, her hand diving straight for that tantalizingly helpless cunt.
Vaishu had never touched a woman this way before. Her first attempts were clumsy, rough pawing and probing that got no reaction. But as soon as she hit a spot that made the victim twitch beneath her, instincts took over. That's the stuff! Do it again! Her fingers explored eagerly. She watched close for reactions, seeing which strokes would make the victim twitch again – and repeating those strokes, harder, faster. Her tongue plunged deep in the victim's mouth, drinking up the taste of blood and saliva. Her body heaved rhythmically for the feel of skin on skin. Instincts thundered inside her: This was exactly what she'd wanted. She knew what she was doing now. Soon the twitching gave way to shuddering spasms. Soon the woman's lungs shook with guttural moans. Vaishu's fingers repeated what was working, and the reactions grew and grew. Shudders rocked the whole body beneath her. The lithe abs pulled tight, even as the broken limbs lay motionless. The moans broke to a high keening.
And finally, a shimmering fluid had burst forth onto Vaishu's hand.
The surge of power was almost instantaneous, as the live nanomachines were absorbed through the skin of Vaishu's hand. She felt so strong, so whole! She needed more! She sprang up, maneuvering so her mouth could join her hand – sucking up that delicious, delicious energy that spilled from the woman beneath her, eagerly lapping at the exposed cunt until she had swallowed every drop.
Once there'd been nothing more to lick clean, reality had set in. Vaishu was as exposed as ever. She was far too aware that another monster could come. Anything might smell the tang of fresh nanomachines on the air. Anything might have heard the sounds. So she quickly retreated, back into the office building, back behind her barricades and her heaps of rubble. She held still in the darkness, ears perked for any sound of pursuit, until finally her heart stopped pounding and she was able to think with a clearer head, for the first time since the urge had taken her.
At first, she had been disgusted with herself for what she'd done. How could she have abused someone so helpless! How could she commit the same evil that she had suffered so long and so terribly! But when she thought back to the deed, all she could think of was the rush of satisfaction. The power surging through her body. How it had left her flush with energy, how her body felt stronger and faster and more alive. Now that she'd felt it, she knew she needed more. A spark of optimism burned inside her, for the first time since she had been plunged into this hell. With enough power, she wouldn't need to run and hide anymore! She could be more than just a naked squatter in a ruin. So she had planned her next move. She laid low in her lair, plotting how to find her next opportunity – or make one.
…and then she had died two days later, when a octopus-girl oozed through the building's plumbing in mockery of all her barricades, emerged from a dried-up toilet in the center of her sanctuary, paralyzed her alone in the darkness that she had thought was her refuge, and raped every pore of her body for hours and hours until she was nothing but lifeless flesh.
But when next she'd awoken in a tomb, she'd known that nothing would be the same again. Her next few tomb-escapes were clumsy failures, but soon, she had learned how to get ahead. If you were lucky, you could find a little alcove where you could ambush someone slightly weaker, slightly less experienced than yourself. Vaishu had gotten good at that – spotting the ones who had enough sense to run and hide, but not enough experience to truly escape. Vaishu would run ahead of them, making sure she was the first to arrive at the hiding places they would surely choose – and when they arrived, they would find Vaishu's arm closing around their helpless little necks, choking away their breath so they couldn't scream and draw attention. Vaishu couldn't get enough of the thrill. How desperately they struggled, the naked skin of their backs squirming against Vaishu's chest while they couldn't even see who was attacking them. The rush of adrenaline from knowing she had to make it quick before another predator would find them. The way the women trembled when her fingers plunged between their legs. How their bodies writhed against her own as her fingers worked them, until she felt the glow of life force gushing out of their helpless cunts.
And most of all… The feel of absorbing that life force in her hand.
She wasn't cruel! She didn't drain them dry, after all. They could still stumble away on their own two feet, once she had warned them not to scream. Maybe they would still find a place to hide, to survive long enough to get away. Or so she liked to tell herself.
But it was enough to make her body a little bit stronger, a little bit faster. Enough to get ahead of the other prey. Enough to escape the tomb before the more powerful predators arrived, and disappear into the ruined city beyond. She began to survive longer and longer…
…long enough to meet the true monsters.
The Skulls, she called them. Accursed irony! How they bore the universal symbol of death – but if they captured you, they wouldn't let you die.
Vaishu shuddered in her coffin. Gods! Whatever gods she had surely once believed in! Memory of her most recent death burst unwanted into her mind. Ghost-pain threatened to split open her head. The Skulls' torture echoed through her cunt, through her wrists and ankles, through her tongue and the soles of her feet. Gods, there was no end to their cruelty! No end to the hideous experiments on her body. She remembered – the memories were so blurry, lost in the pain – how long had she been their captive? Weeks? Months? She remembered a small dark room – her body spreadeagled on a slab, held down by barbed spikes they'd hammered clean through her wrists and ankles. A machine forced inside her vagina, stretching her open, slowly thrusting in and out, absorbing whatever fluid leaked from her. Never stopping, but never enough – never enough to drain her last drop and give her the release of death. She remembered a cruel little voice recording measurements on some handheld device. Nanomachines counts. The decibels of each of her screams. The details of every torture they tried, of every reaction she gave. The cruel voice was always making little adjustments. Did she release more nanos if the machine went faster? Slower? If they attached electrodes across her cunt? If they tweaked the voltage or the frequency? If they raped each of her holes on an alternating schedule, or all at once? If they shone bright light in her eyes, or left her in darkness? Every day was a new agony. Gods, she had even begun to long for the days when she was in an endless loop of dying in the tomb – at least then there had been brief respites between the torture! Every day she begged the Skulls to kill her, and every day they laughed. All she could remember of the later days was the constant pain, her swollen cunt forever twitching under the electricity, the three machines slowly violating her mouth and anus and vagina while she lay there in utter helplessness, unable even to beg for death, with only her eyes free to look in horror at each new device her torturers prepared for her.
But then, one day, they had decided to change the position of her body. They had unmounted the machines; by then, her flesh had long since healed around the spikes that penetrated through her wrists, so they had little choice but to knock the spikes loose from the slab beneath. But Vaishu had been waiting for this. Saving a tiny bit of energy, just for the moment when it would count.
They hadn't thought she had it in her. While they were moving her, the one who recorded the data had thrown a casual insult at the one holding her arm – and for just an instant, the latter had lifted their hands to give a rude gesture in response. But an instant was enough. Vaishu had reared up from the slab, quickly placed her wrist behind her head – and then slammed her body back down, the base of her skull landing on the tip of the spike.
She had made it! She had escaped! She remembered their frantic yelling, seizing her head, trying to stop the bleeding – but they were too already too late. The brain is a fragile thing. It must have been only a few seconds before she lost consciousness. Or at least that was the most she could remember.
And then she was here. Here with a splitting headache echoing from her brutal death – but here. Safe, for the moment.
But she still had to make it count! How horrible would it be, if, after all her effort to escape, she only ended up in the clutches of something just as pitiless? She had to focus on survival.
Vaishu listened closely. What was happening outside the coffin?
There was screaming, yes – but Vaishu could only hear one voice, alongside the tomb's alarm. Was no one else yet awake? Could she be so lucky? Maybe the screamer was fresh meat, still terrified by the unfamiliar world they'd been born into. If Vaishu moved fast, maybe she could steal their energy and leave before anyone else woke up. She could already feel the urge, the thought of feeling a helpless body squirming under her –
No… That wasn't a scream of confusion and terror. Even muffled by the walls of her coffin, she recognized the voice peaking with arousal. So there were at least two revenants awake out there: a quiet rapist and a screaming victim.
She still had a chance! If she moved, the attacker might not hear her over the screams. Then she could sneak away, leaving their sordid little scene to serve as a distraction for whoever came next. Or… maybe the attacker would even be weak enough that she could take them! If they were still a baseline human like herself, she could grab them from behind – and maybe convince the victim to team up with her, if the victim still had strength left. Which she must, for now, given the power of the screams…
But what if the attacker was superhuman? What if the moment she moved, it –
No. If they were superhuman… then the moment they'd had their fill of their current victim, they'd be looking for the next. It was one thing to slip past their guard if they were distracted, but quite another to think you could hide from a true monster just by holding still. No amount of hiding could save her from the kind of monster who would rip open every coffin in sequence, drag out the unfinished bodies and thrash them against the walls to see if they would scream.
Calculated risk, she told herself. Act now or let the chance slip away for nothing.
She wriggled her arms up from beside her, to press the coffin lid open –
– but before her fingertips reached the surface, the hiss of a broken seal overwhelmed her ears. Lurid red light peeked in the cracks around the lid in front of her – except in a few spots where it was obscured by something dark, something too backlit to see clearly from her position. Sounds burst in – first, the screaming and the alarm, no longer muffled – but also something else, much closer. Something unmistakable. The sound of squelching, coming from those dark spots at the edges of the coffin lid.
Vaishu knew that sound. Knew it from brutal experience.
Three tentacle-tips were oozing their way into her coffin.