oneortheother
TMF Expert
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2008
- Messages
- 375
- Points
- 18
Walking Dead TK: Atlanta Hospital
“Re-ci-pro-ci-ty.” Lieutenant Dawn spoke each syllable slowly clearly as if Beth were some child. The stern, dark-haired policewoman looked down at the handcuffed blonde, shaking her head. “Is that so hard to understand? That’s how this hospital can keep running. We help you, and you help us.” The cop’s cold, loud voice rang out in the spacious waiting room of the Atlanta Hospital, where most of the survivors had been gathered so they could witness this public chastising.
“Is that what you call it?” Beth spat, shaking her head in disgust at this foul woman. “You force people into debt. You turn us into slaves!” She glared at the Lieutenant’s right hand, a brown-haired man by the name of Officer Gormon, a cold-eyed bastard who had well-earned a foul reputation for pressuring females into sex.
“Slaves? This is how any society works.” Dawn ran her fingers through her hair, which she kept bound back in a no-nonsense ponytail. “Quid pro quo. And if you don’t understand that, we’ll have to keep continuing till you do. If you don’t want to be a productive member of the community, you’ll be our entertainment, instead.”
Beth had not understood Lieutenant Dawn’s words—how did they expect her to serve as entertainment? Do a stand-up comedy routine? Juggle? They didn’t want to kill her outright and lose valuable personnel, that was clear, but it was unfathomable how they planned to coerce her without violence.
Stripped to her undergarments, the young blonde girl had been strapped to a hospital bed, with rubbery cords around her wrists and ankles that kept her body taut and immobile. At first, she had felt a shiver due to being so scantily clad and feeling the draughty Atlanta wind whistle through the hallways. She seemed to be in some kind of rec room for officers off duty—there were old magazines with faded, torn covers, a few board games (though most were missing a few pieces), and even a battered old stereo player, but that wondrous device seemed to perpetually be on the fritz and its sound quality was crackly even when it worked.
They had gagged her, which didn’t make a lot of sense to Beth—the point of this was to break her off her pride and dignity while simultaneously providing some kind of profane entertainment, wasn’t it? If she was unable to spoke on account of a rag stuffed in her mouth and sealed in place and secured in place with duct tape, how would she be able to vocalise any kind of surrender? Then again, they probably knew that Beth planned on giving them a good cussing out, so they had taken pre-emptive steps to snuff that out.
But now understanding had crystallised thanks to a plethora of horrific experience. With her arms crossed and frowning, Dawn stood over Beth. “You brought this upon yourself. Once you learn your place, we’ll welcome you back into our little society. Until then, we’ll force you to accept that your attitude is, for lack of a better word, childish. And this is what we do to children.”
Dawn’s voice could have frozen lava. The dark-haired policewoman leaned forward and prodded a rough hand at Beth’s side. The blonde girl’s first reaction was a strong confusion. Why was she being poked? Was this some kind of medical examination? The brunette ran her fingers up and down Beth’s bare ribs, which were exposed due to the way the straps on the medical chair. Beth grunted and groaned as the unwanted touching started to reach spots that created a reaction she had not expected—it didn’t hurt, it tickled! Reluctant giggles began to form in her throat to slam against the barrier of her gag, but Beth didn’t want to laugh at all! There was nothing funny about her situation at all, yet the mirth kept coming, as implacable as the tide or a horde of zombies. She closed her eyes, clenched her fingers and toes and tried to block it all out, but there was nothing that could distract that insistent itch of fingers counting and stroking along her ribs.
“What’s wrong?” Dawn spoke in a tone dripping with condescension, as if she were speaking to a toddler or someone who was mentally deficit. “I can see you smiling. Does that tickle?”
Beth screamed denials, but they were absorbed into the gag and turned into muffled yelps. To physically deny the vile woman’s statements, Beth twisted left and right, throwing her body against her restraints in the hopes of overturning the medical bed she was strapped to. However, the hospital apparatuses had been designed with patients that might suffer from ailments like violent seizures, so the white frame of the hospital bed whinged a bit, but little else happened. The bed stayed upright and steady, and the poor girl took the terrible tickling without a single thing she could do to alleviate the surging sensations.
The surly policewoman possessed a set of fingernails that had surprising bite to them, and as they dug in a bit deeper to Beth’s ribs, the revelation of how awful this experience would be finally sunk in. Tickling was beyond juvenile, a silly thing that kids did when playing, but Beth was rapidly learning that this was only because of its duration. When it lasted only a few seconds, it was hard to take it seriously, as any young girl with a male lover soon discovered. But after several minutes of those cruel fingernails pushing all kinds of perilous buttons on Beth’s trim and toned torso, her perspective was starting to change. Sweat was starting to form on her brow, and her muscles were aching a bit from all the impotent struggling. She still had hardly an inch of wiggle room for all her bucking efforts.
And it was seemed Dawn had only been warming up. Cracking her knuckles, Dawn gave her shoulders a little roll, grinned, and launched a campaign of newfound aggression. Her bare, slightly callused fingers were stronger now, and they reached deep into the soft flesh along the midsection to tear laughter out. Equal parts methodical and merciless, Dawn would press her fingers in till they found the beginnings of each rib, then she would stroke and glide her fingers all over that prominent bone to explore the shape as if she were an archaeologist examining the more delicate and unusual of specimens. After that, she would begin her meticulous work onto the next rib in line with the same level of meticulous precision so no sensitive spot would be uncovered.
When she finished going up and down the ribcage, there was always a nasty little surprise in store for the poor blonde girl. If Dawn had been working her way down the ribs, her traumatising travels would lead her to Beth’s bare stomach. The tummy was flat and had hints of abdominal muscles that were the natural result of an active lifestyle, and it was unable to handle to rigours of vigorous tickling. For this finale, Dawn would skitter and spider her fingers in wild circles for a few moments before finishing her off with a finger burrowing into the belly button and twisting around for several minutes. Every time this happened, Beth would try to buck hard against her restraints, but doing so only accentuated the contours of her ribcage and appeared to make her upper body look like an even more appealing target for Dawn’s demonic fingers.
And if Dawn had been tracing her way up Beth’s vulnerable ribs, instead of ending with an assault on her tummy, she would rummage all ten fingers into the soft milky flesh of the armpits instead. The slight perspiration from all of Beth’s thrashing about made her fingers skate across that flesh easily, and far from being disgusted by the sweat, Dawn took full advantage of such natural lubrication to really rake her nails in those underarms. With ten fingers scribbling into her hellish underarms, Beth screamed such wild laughter in her gag that she wouldn’t have been surprised in her face was turning an ominous blue—it was hard to keep up with such raucous chortles when you could only breathe through your nose.
In fact, considering that Dawn never kept up her onslaught in those armpits for more than around twenty seconds, Beth’s suspicions might well have been accurate—that villainous woman didn’t want her passing out until she had been humbled. But those twenty seconds still felt like twenty minutes when Dawn’s strong, dexterous fingers wiggled and probed those exposed coves with an expert touch. Sometimes, she would toy would Beth by only using a lone finger to spiral around or by grazing her nails along the biceps and triceps that weren’t nearly as sensitive as the soft flesh of the underarms proper. Other times, she eschewed the light teasing for a fierce, ferocious of wild scrabbling into those armpits till the pale flesh grew pink. Dawn would push in hard with her fingers so Beth could really feel those short fingernails of her as they scratched numerous intricate patterns. And all these variations made Beth feel as if she were in a jerky car that constantly started and stopped, never allowing her to get used to the pace and rhythm of the torture that was being inflicted.
While Dawn was abusing her upper body, she no longer talked as her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth, her grey eyes narrowed, and a frowning look of quiet and intense concentration spreading across her features.
“Are you afraid?” Dawn lifted up those ruthless hands of hers and slammed them down palms-first into the soft fabric of the bed with a thump, laughing when Beth jumped and burst into nervous, panicky laughter out of sheer reflex. “Good. You should be. I have duties to attend to now, but my colleagues will help ensure that the lesson is learned.”
The next face that Beth saw was one that she would have happily never seen ever again. Officer Gorman, with his glassy, dead eyes stood over her with a small smile stretched across his pale, thin lips. His dark hair went with his black eyes and blacker soul. During one of Beth’s first days at the hospital, Gorman had insinuated that she was standoffish and combative, and he had insinuated that she ought to be “friendlier” if she wanted things to go a bit more easily around here. His words might have even been kind had they not been accompanied by a lecherous smile, eyes that wandered to her bodice, and roving fingers.
Beth had declined his oh so generous offer, and it seemed Gorman was going to do his damn best to make sure that she regretted it. And to make matters worse, there were a crowd of hazy faces around her. The way Beth was angled on the hospital bed gave her an awkward angle, and she struggled to identity the features of the figures looming overhead. Some of them wore police uniforms, but some didn’t. There were about half a dozen around her.
Gormon cleared his throat and spoke in a loud, clear voice, as if he was some guest lecturer at a distinguished university. “You folk ready? Got your notes out? Well, the lesson starts now, with the help of our lovely volunteer.” He coughed and wiped the back of his mouth with a hairy hand.
Beth grunted into the gag in confusion, enough that Gormon looked down and her and chuckled. “Ah, our little helper seems a little clueless. So let’s clue her in, shall we? Before I joined the force, I spent some time in the army, and my specialism was enhanced interrogation. I knew all the ways to make those terrorists talk, and our kind and benevolent Lieutenant has allowed me to show you wonderful people a few tricks of the trade.” He gave Beth’s bare thigh and squeeze, which prompted an angry squeal from the bound blonde. “I’d love to show you all the fun things you can do with knives, but the Lieutenant doesn’t want to damage our valuable personnel, so we’ll do something a little more old-school but no less effective for it—classic tickle torture.”
The policeman gave Beth’s socked feet a little pinch to illicit a startled yelp from her. “In addition to the armpits, the soles of the feet tend to be a particular weak spot for many.” The way he leered at her when he said weak implied that this was exactly what he thought of her, or maybe even the entire female species. Beth’s green eyes narrowed in a glare, but Gormon just snorted with laughter.
“Blondie here doubts it! Look at that stare she’s giving us, boys! She thinks she can take it all with no problem whatsoever. Who wants to prove her wrong?”
Her heart pounded in her chest as murmurs of ascent, “hell yeahs”, and low curses were heard all around her. What had she ever done to these guys? Why did they want to see her suffer so badly? Gormon laughed and ushered one of the men forward. The pupil was a tall, stocky man with sandy hair and a sharp nose.
Gorman flicked a finger down Beth’s right foot, which was still encased in the thin cotton of her white socks. “Of course, these socks here provide a bit of protection, but we’ll let her keep them on for the time being. There’s nothing more precious than when you strip away what meagre defences they have.” The naked relish in his voice made Beth’s stomach turn, and if she weren’t gagged, she would have had some choice words for him indeed.
But there was little time to dwell on her wrath when Gormon brought the fingers of his hand to her soles once more. This time, he used one hand to hold the fighting foot steady while the fingers of his other hand curled into a scythe which he slashed into her sole. He would knife up and down the arch in zigzagging patterns, reach the apex of the ball of her foot, and then do the same crisscrossing move back down to the heel.
“This is a little something I picked up,” Gormon said, with a voice that was loud and proud. “There’s just something about all those hard, sharp angles that seems to really hit the nerve clusters in the soles.” This sudden stimulation was making Beth whimper and shriek into the gag, and as much as she hated to admit it, the foul policeman was right. Each time his clawing fingers changed directions, it was like a red-hot brand poked the pressure point of ticklishness on her feet. Beth’s slender toes fought to escape, but his grasp was iron. After what felt like ten minutes but probably had been less than one, Gormon stopped. The stocky man who had been watching stepped forward, and his big, uncoordinated fingers tried to mimic Gormon’s technique.
“Am I doing it correctly?” Beth most certainly thought so, as she was shouting laughter into the gag once more, but Gormon disagreed.
“Watch closely," he said, chuckling. “Curl your fingers a bit more and scratch her right here, right there under the balls of her feet, then go down and zag along the lengths of those prominent arches of hers. Yes, remember the pattern? Good job! Excellent! Just look at how she’s losing her little mind.”
They were talking as if she weren’t even in the room or not even a real person. Beth tried to communicate her anger through her eyes, but it was hard to keep them open with what was being down to her sensitive socked feet, especially when Gormon would take matters into his own hands by demonstrating himself. Beth could always feel when the clumsy, inexperienced hands fingers of the eager learners were replaced with Gormon’s keen, lethal touch.
Things reach a new crescendo of crude suffering when instructor and pupil plied their technique at the same time, with Gorgon’s expert hands brutalising her right foot while the stocky neophyte had a clumsy yet still somewhat effective go at her left. Both men pulled her toes with one strong hand so the other hand could scurry all over the other one. Her feet could do nothing but quiver.
And Gorgon wasn’t even close to finishing the lesson. The stocky man returned to his position overlooking the interrogation, and another fellow was brought forward. This man was short and thin, but with thick arms and a thick head of black hair.
“It’s always important to keep an eye your lovely victim,” Gormon said, his eyes crawling over Beth’s body in a slow, perverse that made her want to retch. “Even gagged, you can watch the eyes, watch the faces, watch the body’s natural reactions. For example, if my intuition is correct, there’s a spot right here—” He straightened Beth’s wiggling foot till it was taut and ticklish, before guiding his fingers to the very centre of the arch for a series of rapid strokes.
Beth shook her head, scrunched up her toes, and closed her eyes, but nothing could stop that insistent raking on such a sinister spot on her sole, a compromising weak spot that she had not known existed until Gormon’s fingers attacked it with such ruthless intent. Her body rebelled against her, fighting to get away from the devastating tickling before her brain could keep up and report that in doing so she only proved Gormon’s words.
“You see?” The smug policeman said, stopping and laughing. “Hear that response even through her gag? See the futile struggles of that hot young body of hers?” He used the index finger to really dig at that small spot on the arch, hitting the same location on one foot then the other to further drive home his point and drive Beth to further hysterics.
If there were anything Gormon would have wanted to know, anything in the world, Beth would have told him. But the gag remained in her mouth, and it remained clear that the only thing he wanted was her body’s utter submission.
After the short thin man had mastered that particular methodology, Gormon beckoned to a man with long mousy hair and a nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. “Can you work out what’s next? Are there a few spots we’ve missed?”
The new pupil nodded and grinned. He was missing a tooth. “Up there?”
“Up there,” Gormon agreed and gave the toes of Beth’s still socked feet a tap. “We’ve been neglecting a few spots along here, haven’t we? Let’s rectify that. Say goodbye to the socks, blondie.”
Beth groaned through her gag. Socks had blocked a percentage of the sensations, and if things were this bad with that protective fabric on, what would it be like without them? Without her white cotton socks, her pale soles, with their pudgy toes and high, pink arches were on full display. And as if being naked and exposed weren’t dire enough circumstances, Gormon brought out a bit of string and used it to tie Beth’s big toes together and to the white plastic frame. Beth fought to evade her plump digits from being lassoed and pulled back like a wild mare, but her efforts only delayed the inevitable and won her toes a few pacifying tickles. After her big toes were yanked back, more string was used around the little toes on each foot as well, so that the gaps and webbing between each of them was wide and prominent.
The panting blonde girl found herself shaking in fretful anticipation as she waited for the next ordeal to begin. It had to be her toes next. She could feel perspiration forming on the small of the back and along her white neck. Her throat was starting to hurt, and her muscles were sore from all the fruitless squirming and twisting that came from sensitive areas under attack.
“Here it comes,” Gormon said with a rumbling laugh, and he lunged at her tied, helpless feet with his fingers.
Instantly, Beth burst into nervous, frenzied giggles out of ticklish defensive reflex, burbling into the gag. But he hadn’t touched her. Gorgon winked at his protégé and made another malevolent swipe towards her feet, this time bringing his fingers less than half an inch away. Feeling the rush of danger once more, Beth found herself gasping and groaning even though he hadn't touched her. Several times, she would be kept waiting as he took his sweet fucking time about getting round to tickling her feet, his dangerous fingers descending and getting ever so close only to pull back at the penultimate moment. With her body restrained, unable to see clearly what was going on, and so very receptive, it was as if every nerve in Beth’s body was at its maximum receptivity and ticklishness.
“You want to try to get your victim in that twitchy, jumpy state if you can,” Gormon said, smirking. “Once you’re there, their fear makes it all even worse. And you’re just a scared little girl, aren’t you?” He gave Beth a mocking pat on the head, but before the anger could bubble away at her, there were fingers running through her toes, and she shrieked.
“Nohohohoho!” Beth whimpered as tears dripped out of the corners of her eyes from the exertion of their constant clenching. Somehow, this logorrheic screaming was discerned by Gormon, who leaned in close and sneered at yes.
“Oh, yes, blondie, oh, yes. And remember you have no one to blame but yourself, you and your rude ways.” Gorgon gave his accomplice a nudge. “But let’s stop our rambling and get to the toe torturing, shall we?”
Beth screamed and reared her head back when she felt their fingers begin their cursory, curious explorations. The long-haired man with the broken nose would try a few experiment flicks along her milky skin, and then Gormon would point out a few choice locations to drive her ever closer to madness. The ridge by the base of the toes made her fingers ball into fists, the webbing between them made her body shake, and the rosy pads made her feel so faint from the forced laughter that she was sure she’d fall unconscious.
“See those spread toes? That’s as good as an invitation to get right in there.” Gormon wriggled a finger between two toes and spun all around. “Make sure you spend a healthy amount of time in there. You notice how they’re wriggling even more than usual? The toes that aren’t tied down, of course. If not for the ties, you just know they’d be flinching like crazy.” As ever, his actions emphasised his words as he raked his nails along that little-to-no-contact area where the pudgy toes met the rest of the pale foot, and it didn’t take long before the other torturer adopted his technique so Beth had to endure the undersides of both feet being scratched in this manner.
“Wow, they really are ticklish. Is that her worst spot?” The pupil said, pointing out a fact so obvious that Beth was sure a blind and deaf person would have known by now.
“Why are you asking me when you could find that out for yourself?” Gormon answered with a chuckle. “Come on, boys, let’s give him a hand.”
Beth looked up in alarm as the rest of the eager group moved forward with smiles on their faces. Five fingers had been bad enough, ten had been hell, and twenty had brought her undergarments close to humiliating peril. She felt one hand make contact, and then another, and then another and another. She lost count of how many fingers were stroking away on her soles, but she always knew what spots was under attack, for Gormon always spearheaded the attack with a loud declaration.
It was either toes or arches, but never both, and she supposed that was a tiny consolation as she howled laughter into the gag. The rambunctious men laughed along with her as the long-haired man alternated between digging under her toes to patrolling the length of her arches. When Gormon shouted to go at her toes, every single plump pale digit had fingers probing all over them, teasing the tips, the pads, the sides, and the base. They even went along the nail and the insteps a bit, probably because they were running out of ticklish real estate.
When Gormon directed them at her high, sloping arches, it felt like she was being tickled raw as fingers upon fingers covering the entire zone from heel to ball of the foot. Naturally, the very centre of the arch which harboured an abundance of weak spots was where most of the cruel attention gravitated towards.
“Well, fella, it’s nearing lunchtime, so shall we finish things with a little exam of sorts?” Gormon said, waving a hand to order his men to stop.
As Beth tried her best to get her breathing under control through long, ragged inhalations through her nose, she was dismayed to hear how eager and enthused they all were. Hadn’t they tickled her enough?
“As I’m sure every salt of the earth man knows, you need tools to do a good job. Feathers and the like are a little hard to come by in our post-apocalyptic world, so we’ll have to make do.” He lifted up a pen and started twirling it through his fingers. It was a common ballpoint biro with a plastic cap and metal point, a black one of the type that everyone owned. “Why don’t we do our fellows a favour and mark out blondie’s most ticklish spots?”
Beth didn’t have time to compute what Gormon meant by ‘do our fellows a favour’ before the pen started poking along her feet. She could feel the plastic cap was still on as the point was blunt though still pointy—it seemed that before they committed to using ink on her alabaster soles, they would have to re-confirm her worst spots. As if they hadn’t been doing that for felt like hours already!
But as her protests were subsumed into implacable gag, the familiar haunts of her toes and her arches were being explored once more. It seemed that the latter had ‘won’ the right as being her most hellish spot, so a majority of the attention was devoted there. Beth rolled her eyes as the men spoke with an enthused earnestness about her worst spots that seemed so absurd. She would have laughed if she hadn’t already been in tear from so much forced mirth.
And to her horror, her taut, curvy arches had lost little of their sensitivity from the sustained tickling, and the pen was even better at scratching away at her soles than fingers. After the pen prodded around her feet for a while to trace out the grooves of her arches where she could never stand it, the cap of the pen was removed, and the first man started scrawling squiggles and circles around that part of the sole. The sharp metal point of the writing implement added a new flavour to the tickle abuse—the precise, sharp prang of the implement seemed to go right through her nerves to strike right at the heart of her vulnerability. From the way she was bound, she couldn’t see the dark ink staining her pale, pinkish soles, but she was certain that the centre of the high arch must have been shaded in by now. The pen pressed into the tender skin of her soles in a manner that pierced straight through whatever ramshackle defences remained.
But no, they wouldn’t just let it end. Each merciless man there would pass the pen along so more alternations and etchings could be made into the ticklish canvas that was her sole. It took an eternity for them to deem her right foot fully ‘mapped’, and another eternity before they were satisfied with her left. Only, it seemed that they realised they could have done much better with the right foot, so they went straight back to it and then the left again. Again and again they pressed and stroked that cruel, cold metal point through the lines and wrinkles of her sole.
When they finally finished marking out and delineating all her spots, Beth might have thought she’d get a respite, but instead, her torment was just beginning. Having done the ‘hard work’ of finding all her hot spots, seemingly the entire population of the Atlanta Hospital was invited to have a go at her. Teenagers, grey-haired elders, policemen, hospital staff, and even a few children all took pleasure in scratching her arches or tweaking her toes, with most of them looking down at her as if she was just some ride at the local carnival. But perhaps she shouldn’t judge them too harshly. When society broke down, it was harder and harder to find entertainment, and it wasn’t like they had television to watch.
But after hours and hours of this, the accumulation of torture grew overbearing. It was too much, just far too much. Too much laughter was being forced out her mouth, slamming against her gag, and being redirected through the insufficient passages of her nose. Her blonde hair was sticking to the side of her face from sweat. Her soles seemed to be tingling all over, as if they had been worked raw. The only consolation about her situation was that she hadn’t drunk anything in a while, or she would surely have lost control of her bladder by now. Breathing was a gruelling battle that she wasn’t winning, and the world grew darker and darker till she passed out.
Beth woke up, she saw Dawn and Gormon hovering over her. “Enjoyed your little nap?” Dawn asked. “I just finished my shift, and you know, I’ve been wanting to pick up a few more things.
Gormon crossed his arms. “Hope you aren’t tired or anything. The next lesson’s about to begin, and we aren’t stopping till you’ve pissed yourself laughing.”
“Re-ci-pro-ci-ty.” Lieutenant Dawn spoke each syllable slowly clearly as if Beth were some child. The stern, dark-haired policewoman looked down at the handcuffed blonde, shaking her head. “Is that so hard to understand? That’s how this hospital can keep running. We help you, and you help us.” The cop’s cold, loud voice rang out in the spacious waiting room of the Atlanta Hospital, where most of the survivors had been gathered so they could witness this public chastising.
“Is that what you call it?” Beth spat, shaking her head in disgust at this foul woman. “You force people into debt. You turn us into slaves!” She glared at the Lieutenant’s right hand, a brown-haired man by the name of Officer Gormon, a cold-eyed bastard who had well-earned a foul reputation for pressuring females into sex.
“Slaves? This is how any society works.” Dawn ran her fingers through her hair, which she kept bound back in a no-nonsense ponytail. “Quid pro quo. And if you don’t understand that, we’ll have to keep continuing till you do. If you don’t want to be a productive member of the community, you’ll be our entertainment, instead.”
Beth had not understood Lieutenant Dawn’s words—how did they expect her to serve as entertainment? Do a stand-up comedy routine? Juggle? They didn’t want to kill her outright and lose valuable personnel, that was clear, but it was unfathomable how they planned to coerce her without violence.
Stripped to her undergarments, the young blonde girl had been strapped to a hospital bed, with rubbery cords around her wrists and ankles that kept her body taut and immobile. At first, she had felt a shiver due to being so scantily clad and feeling the draughty Atlanta wind whistle through the hallways. She seemed to be in some kind of rec room for officers off duty—there were old magazines with faded, torn covers, a few board games (though most were missing a few pieces), and even a battered old stereo player, but that wondrous device seemed to perpetually be on the fritz and its sound quality was crackly even when it worked.
They had gagged her, which didn’t make a lot of sense to Beth—the point of this was to break her off her pride and dignity while simultaneously providing some kind of profane entertainment, wasn’t it? If she was unable to spoke on account of a rag stuffed in her mouth and sealed in place and secured in place with duct tape, how would she be able to vocalise any kind of surrender? Then again, they probably knew that Beth planned on giving them a good cussing out, so they had taken pre-emptive steps to snuff that out.
But now understanding had crystallised thanks to a plethora of horrific experience. With her arms crossed and frowning, Dawn stood over Beth. “You brought this upon yourself. Once you learn your place, we’ll welcome you back into our little society. Until then, we’ll force you to accept that your attitude is, for lack of a better word, childish. And this is what we do to children.”
Dawn’s voice could have frozen lava. The dark-haired policewoman leaned forward and prodded a rough hand at Beth’s side. The blonde girl’s first reaction was a strong confusion. Why was she being poked? Was this some kind of medical examination? The brunette ran her fingers up and down Beth’s bare ribs, which were exposed due to the way the straps on the medical chair. Beth grunted and groaned as the unwanted touching started to reach spots that created a reaction she had not expected—it didn’t hurt, it tickled! Reluctant giggles began to form in her throat to slam against the barrier of her gag, but Beth didn’t want to laugh at all! There was nothing funny about her situation at all, yet the mirth kept coming, as implacable as the tide or a horde of zombies. She closed her eyes, clenched her fingers and toes and tried to block it all out, but there was nothing that could distract that insistent itch of fingers counting and stroking along her ribs.
“What’s wrong?” Dawn spoke in a tone dripping with condescension, as if she were speaking to a toddler or someone who was mentally deficit. “I can see you smiling. Does that tickle?”
Beth screamed denials, but they were absorbed into the gag and turned into muffled yelps. To physically deny the vile woman’s statements, Beth twisted left and right, throwing her body against her restraints in the hopes of overturning the medical bed she was strapped to. However, the hospital apparatuses had been designed with patients that might suffer from ailments like violent seizures, so the white frame of the hospital bed whinged a bit, but little else happened. The bed stayed upright and steady, and the poor girl took the terrible tickling without a single thing she could do to alleviate the surging sensations.
The surly policewoman possessed a set of fingernails that had surprising bite to them, and as they dug in a bit deeper to Beth’s ribs, the revelation of how awful this experience would be finally sunk in. Tickling was beyond juvenile, a silly thing that kids did when playing, but Beth was rapidly learning that this was only because of its duration. When it lasted only a few seconds, it was hard to take it seriously, as any young girl with a male lover soon discovered. But after several minutes of those cruel fingernails pushing all kinds of perilous buttons on Beth’s trim and toned torso, her perspective was starting to change. Sweat was starting to form on her brow, and her muscles were aching a bit from all the impotent struggling. She still had hardly an inch of wiggle room for all her bucking efforts.
And it was seemed Dawn had only been warming up. Cracking her knuckles, Dawn gave her shoulders a little roll, grinned, and launched a campaign of newfound aggression. Her bare, slightly callused fingers were stronger now, and they reached deep into the soft flesh along the midsection to tear laughter out. Equal parts methodical and merciless, Dawn would press her fingers in till they found the beginnings of each rib, then she would stroke and glide her fingers all over that prominent bone to explore the shape as if she were an archaeologist examining the more delicate and unusual of specimens. After that, she would begin her meticulous work onto the next rib in line with the same level of meticulous precision so no sensitive spot would be uncovered.
When she finished going up and down the ribcage, there was always a nasty little surprise in store for the poor blonde girl. If Dawn had been working her way down the ribs, her traumatising travels would lead her to Beth’s bare stomach. The tummy was flat and had hints of abdominal muscles that were the natural result of an active lifestyle, and it was unable to handle to rigours of vigorous tickling. For this finale, Dawn would skitter and spider her fingers in wild circles for a few moments before finishing her off with a finger burrowing into the belly button and twisting around for several minutes. Every time this happened, Beth would try to buck hard against her restraints, but doing so only accentuated the contours of her ribcage and appeared to make her upper body look like an even more appealing target for Dawn’s demonic fingers.
And if Dawn had been tracing her way up Beth’s vulnerable ribs, instead of ending with an assault on her tummy, she would rummage all ten fingers into the soft milky flesh of the armpits instead. The slight perspiration from all of Beth’s thrashing about made her fingers skate across that flesh easily, and far from being disgusted by the sweat, Dawn took full advantage of such natural lubrication to really rake her nails in those underarms. With ten fingers scribbling into her hellish underarms, Beth screamed such wild laughter in her gag that she wouldn’t have been surprised in her face was turning an ominous blue—it was hard to keep up with such raucous chortles when you could only breathe through your nose.
In fact, considering that Dawn never kept up her onslaught in those armpits for more than around twenty seconds, Beth’s suspicions might well have been accurate—that villainous woman didn’t want her passing out until she had been humbled. But those twenty seconds still felt like twenty minutes when Dawn’s strong, dexterous fingers wiggled and probed those exposed coves with an expert touch. Sometimes, she would toy would Beth by only using a lone finger to spiral around or by grazing her nails along the biceps and triceps that weren’t nearly as sensitive as the soft flesh of the underarms proper. Other times, she eschewed the light teasing for a fierce, ferocious of wild scrabbling into those armpits till the pale flesh grew pink. Dawn would push in hard with her fingers so Beth could really feel those short fingernails of her as they scratched numerous intricate patterns. And all these variations made Beth feel as if she were in a jerky car that constantly started and stopped, never allowing her to get used to the pace and rhythm of the torture that was being inflicted.
While Dawn was abusing her upper body, she no longer talked as her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth, her grey eyes narrowed, and a frowning look of quiet and intense concentration spreading across her features.
“Are you afraid?” Dawn lifted up those ruthless hands of hers and slammed them down palms-first into the soft fabric of the bed with a thump, laughing when Beth jumped and burst into nervous, panicky laughter out of sheer reflex. “Good. You should be. I have duties to attend to now, but my colleagues will help ensure that the lesson is learned.”
The next face that Beth saw was one that she would have happily never seen ever again. Officer Gorman, with his glassy, dead eyes stood over her with a small smile stretched across his pale, thin lips. His dark hair went with his black eyes and blacker soul. During one of Beth’s first days at the hospital, Gorman had insinuated that she was standoffish and combative, and he had insinuated that she ought to be “friendlier” if she wanted things to go a bit more easily around here. His words might have even been kind had they not been accompanied by a lecherous smile, eyes that wandered to her bodice, and roving fingers.
Beth had declined his oh so generous offer, and it seemed Gorman was going to do his damn best to make sure that she regretted it. And to make matters worse, there were a crowd of hazy faces around her. The way Beth was angled on the hospital bed gave her an awkward angle, and she struggled to identity the features of the figures looming overhead. Some of them wore police uniforms, but some didn’t. There were about half a dozen around her.
Gormon cleared his throat and spoke in a loud, clear voice, as if he was some guest lecturer at a distinguished university. “You folk ready? Got your notes out? Well, the lesson starts now, with the help of our lovely volunteer.” He coughed and wiped the back of his mouth with a hairy hand.
Beth grunted into the gag in confusion, enough that Gormon looked down and her and chuckled. “Ah, our little helper seems a little clueless. So let’s clue her in, shall we? Before I joined the force, I spent some time in the army, and my specialism was enhanced interrogation. I knew all the ways to make those terrorists talk, and our kind and benevolent Lieutenant has allowed me to show you wonderful people a few tricks of the trade.” He gave Beth’s bare thigh and squeeze, which prompted an angry squeal from the bound blonde. “I’d love to show you all the fun things you can do with knives, but the Lieutenant doesn’t want to damage our valuable personnel, so we’ll do something a little more old-school but no less effective for it—classic tickle torture.”
The policeman gave Beth’s socked feet a little pinch to illicit a startled yelp from her. “In addition to the armpits, the soles of the feet tend to be a particular weak spot for many.” The way he leered at her when he said weak implied that this was exactly what he thought of her, or maybe even the entire female species. Beth’s green eyes narrowed in a glare, but Gormon just snorted with laughter.
“Blondie here doubts it! Look at that stare she’s giving us, boys! She thinks she can take it all with no problem whatsoever. Who wants to prove her wrong?”
Her heart pounded in her chest as murmurs of ascent, “hell yeahs”, and low curses were heard all around her. What had she ever done to these guys? Why did they want to see her suffer so badly? Gormon laughed and ushered one of the men forward. The pupil was a tall, stocky man with sandy hair and a sharp nose.
Gorman flicked a finger down Beth’s right foot, which was still encased in the thin cotton of her white socks. “Of course, these socks here provide a bit of protection, but we’ll let her keep them on for the time being. There’s nothing more precious than when you strip away what meagre defences they have.” The naked relish in his voice made Beth’s stomach turn, and if she weren’t gagged, she would have had some choice words for him indeed.
But there was little time to dwell on her wrath when Gormon brought the fingers of his hand to her soles once more. This time, he used one hand to hold the fighting foot steady while the fingers of his other hand curled into a scythe which he slashed into her sole. He would knife up and down the arch in zigzagging patterns, reach the apex of the ball of her foot, and then do the same crisscrossing move back down to the heel.
“This is a little something I picked up,” Gormon said, with a voice that was loud and proud. “There’s just something about all those hard, sharp angles that seems to really hit the nerve clusters in the soles.” This sudden stimulation was making Beth whimper and shriek into the gag, and as much as she hated to admit it, the foul policeman was right. Each time his clawing fingers changed directions, it was like a red-hot brand poked the pressure point of ticklishness on her feet. Beth’s slender toes fought to escape, but his grasp was iron. After what felt like ten minutes but probably had been less than one, Gormon stopped. The stocky man who had been watching stepped forward, and his big, uncoordinated fingers tried to mimic Gormon’s technique.
“Am I doing it correctly?” Beth most certainly thought so, as she was shouting laughter into the gag once more, but Gormon disagreed.
“Watch closely," he said, chuckling. “Curl your fingers a bit more and scratch her right here, right there under the balls of her feet, then go down and zag along the lengths of those prominent arches of hers. Yes, remember the pattern? Good job! Excellent! Just look at how she’s losing her little mind.”
They were talking as if she weren’t even in the room or not even a real person. Beth tried to communicate her anger through her eyes, but it was hard to keep them open with what was being down to her sensitive socked feet, especially when Gormon would take matters into his own hands by demonstrating himself. Beth could always feel when the clumsy, inexperienced hands fingers of the eager learners were replaced with Gormon’s keen, lethal touch.
Things reach a new crescendo of crude suffering when instructor and pupil plied their technique at the same time, with Gorgon’s expert hands brutalising her right foot while the stocky neophyte had a clumsy yet still somewhat effective go at her left. Both men pulled her toes with one strong hand so the other hand could scurry all over the other one. Her feet could do nothing but quiver.
And Gorgon wasn’t even close to finishing the lesson. The stocky man returned to his position overlooking the interrogation, and another fellow was brought forward. This man was short and thin, but with thick arms and a thick head of black hair.
“It’s always important to keep an eye your lovely victim,” Gormon said, his eyes crawling over Beth’s body in a slow, perverse that made her want to retch. “Even gagged, you can watch the eyes, watch the faces, watch the body’s natural reactions. For example, if my intuition is correct, there’s a spot right here—” He straightened Beth’s wiggling foot till it was taut and ticklish, before guiding his fingers to the very centre of the arch for a series of rapid strokes.
Beth shook her head, scrunched up her toes, and closed her eyes, but nothing could stop that insistent raking on such a sinister spot on her sole, a compromising weak spot that she had not known existed until Gormon’s fingers attacked it with such ruthless intent. Her body rebelled against her, fighting to get away from the devastating tickling before her brain could keep up and report that in doing so she only proved Gormon’s words.
“You see?” The smug policeman said, stopping and laughing. “Hear that response even through her gag? See the futile struggles of that hot young body of hers?” He used the index finger to really dig at that small spot on the arch, hitting the same location on one foot then the other to further drive home his point and drive Beth to further hysterics.
If there were anything Gormon would have wanted to know, anything in the world, Beth would have told him. But the gag remained in her mouth, and it remained clear that the only thing he wanted was her body’s utter submission.
After the short thin man had mastered that particular methodology, Gormon beckoned to a man with long mousy hair and a nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. “Can you work out what’s next? Are there a few spots we’ve missed?”
The new pupil nodded and grinned. He was missing a tooth. “Up there?”
“Up there,” Gormon agreed and gave the toes of Beth’s still socked feet a tap. “We’ve been neglecting a few spots along here, haven’t we? Let’s rectify that. Say goodbye to the socks, blondie.”
Beth groaned through her gag. Socks had blocked a percentage of the sensations, and if things were this bad with that protective fabric on, what would it be like without them? Without her white cotton socks, her pale soles, with their pudgy toes and high, pink arches were on full display. And as if being naked and exposed weren’t dire enough circumstances, Gormon brought out a bit of string and used it to tie Beth’s big toes together and to the white plastic frame. Beth fought to evade her plump digits from being lassoed and pulled back like a wild mare, but her efforts only delayed the inevitable and won her toes a few pacifying tickles. After her big toes were yanked back, more string was used around the little toes on each foot as well, so that the gaps and webbing between each of them was wide and prominent.
The panting blonde girl found herself shaking in fretful anticipation as she waited for the next ordeal to begin. It had to be her toes next. She could feel perspiration forming on the small of the back and along her white neck. Her throat was starting to hurt, and her muscles were sore from all the fruitless squirming and twisting that came from sensitive areas under attack.
“Here it comes,” Gormon said with a rumbling laugh, and he lunged at her tied, helpless feet with his fingers.
Instantly, Beth burst into nervous, frenzied giggles out of ticklish defensive reflex, burbling into the gag. But he hadn’t touched her. Gorgon winked at his protégé and made another malevolent swipe towards her feet, this time bringing his fingers less than half an inch away. Feeling the rush of danger once more, Beth found herself gasping and groaning even though he hadn't touched her. Several times, she would be kept waiting as he took his sweet fucking time about getting round to tickling her feet, his dangerous fingers descending and getting ever so close only to pull back at the penultimate moment. With her body restrained, unable to see clearly what was going on, and so very receptive, it was as if every nerve in Beth’s body was at its maximum receptivity and ticklishness.
“You want to try to get your victim in that twitchy, jumpy state if you can,” Gormon said, smirking. “Once you’re there, their fear makes it all even worse. And you’re just a scared little girl, aren’t you?” He gave Beth a mocking pat on the head, but before the anger could bubble away at her, there were fingers running through her toes, and she shrieked.
“Nohohohoho!” Beth whimpered as tears dripped out of the corners of her eyes from the exertion of their constant clenching. Somehow, this logorrheic screaming was discerned by Gormon, who leaned in close and sneered at yes.
“Oh, yes, blondie, oh, yes. And remember you have no one to blame but yourself, you and your rude ways.” Gorgon gave his accomplice a nudge. “But let’s stop our rambling and get to the toe torturing, shall we?”
Beth screamed and reared her head back when she felt their fingers begin their cursory, curious explorations. The long-haired man with the broken nose would try a few experiment flicks along her milky skin, and then Gormon would point out a few choice locations to drive her ever closer to madness. The ridge by the base of the toes made her fingers ball into fists, the webbing between them made her body shake, and the rosy pads made her feel so faint from the forced laughter that she was sure she’d fall unconscious.
“See those spread toes? That’s as good as an invitation to get right in there.” Gormon wriggled a finger between two toes and spun all around. “Make sure you spend a healthy amount of time in there. You notice how they’re wriggling even more than usual? The toes that aren’t tied down, of course. If not for the ties, you just know they’d be flinching like crazy.” As ever, his actions emphasised his words as he raked his nails along that little-to-no-contact area where the pudgy toes met the rest of the pale foot, and it didn’t take long before the other torturer adopted his technique so Beth had to endure the undersides of both feet being scratched in this manner.
“Wow, they really are ticklish. Is that her worst spot?” The pupil said, pointing out a fact so obvious that Beth was sure a blind and deaf person would have known by now.
“Why are you asking me when you could find that out for yourself?” Gormon answered with a chuckle. “Come on, boys, let’s give him a hand.”
Beth looked up in alarm as the rest of the eager group moved forward with smiles on their faces. Five fingers had been bad enough, ten had been hell, and twenty had brought her undergarments close to humiliating peril. She felt one hand make contact, and then another, and then another and another. She lost count of how many fingers were stroking away on her soles, but she always knew what spots was under attack, for Gormon always spearheaded the attack with a loud declaration.
It was either toes or arches, but never both, and she supposed that was a tiny consolation as she howled laughter into the gag. The rambunctious men laughed along with her as the long-haired man alternated between digging under her toes to patrolling the length of her arches. When Gormon shouted to go at her toes, every single plump pale digit had fingers probing all over them, teasing the tips, the pads, the sides, and the base. They even went along the nail and the insteps a bit, probably because they were running out of ticklish real estate.
When Gormon directed them at her high, sloping arches, it felt like she was being tickled raw as fingers upon fingers covering the entire zone from heel to ball of the foot. Naturally, the very centre of the arch which harboured an abundance of weak spots was where most of the cruel attention gravitated towards.
“Well, fella, it’s nearing lunchtime, so shall we finish things with a little exam of sorts?” Gormon said, waving a hand to order his men to stop.
As Beth tried her best to get her breathing under control through long, ragged inhalations through her nose, she was dismayed to hear how eager and enthused they all were. Hadn’t they tickled her enough?
“As I’m sure every salt of the earth man knows, you need tools to do a good job. Feathers and the like are a little hard to come by in our post-apocalyptic world, so we’ll have to make do.” He lifted up a pen and started twirling it through his fingers. It was a common ballpoint biro with a plastic cap and metal point, a black one of the type that everyone owned. “Why don’t we do our fellows a favour and mark out blondie’s most ticklish spots?”
Beth didn’t have time to compute what Gormon meant by ‘do our fellows a favour’ before the pen started poking along her feet. She could feel the plastic cap was still on as the point was blunt though still pointy—it seemed that before they committed to using ink on her alabaster soles, they would have to re-confirm her worst spots. As if they hadn’t been doing that for felt like hours already!
But as her protests were subsumed into implacable gag, the familiar haunts of her toes and her arches were being explored once more. It seemed that the latter had ‘won’ the right as being her most hellish spot, so a majority of the attention was devoted there. Beth rolled her eyes as the men spoke with an enthused earnestness about her worst spots that seemed so absurd. She would have laughed if she hadn’t already been in tear from so much forced mirth.
And to her horror, her taut, curvy arches had lost little of their sensitivity from the sustained tickling, and the pen was even better at scratching away at her soles than fingers. After the pen prodded around her feet for a while to trace out the grooves of her arches where she could never stand it, the cap of the pen was removed, and the first man started scrawling squiggles and circles around that part of the sole. The sharp metal point of the writing implement added a new flavour to the tickle abuse—the precise, sharp prang of the implement seemed to go right through her nerves to strike right at the heart of her vulnerability. From the way she was bound, she couldn’t see the dark ink staining her pale, pinkish soles, but she was certain that the centre of the high arch must have been shaded in by now. The pen pressed into the tender skin of her soles in a manner that pierced straight through whatever ramshackle defences remained.
But no, they wouldn’t just let it end. Each merciless man there would pass the pen along so more alternations and etchings could be made into the ticklish canvas that was her sole. It took an eternity for them to deem her right foot fully ‘mapped’, and another eternity before they were satisfied with her left. Only, it seemed that they realised they could have done much better with the right foot, so they went straight back to it and then the left again. Again and again they pressed and stroked that cruel, cold metal point through the lines and wrinkles of her sole.
When they finally finished marking out and delineating all her spots, Beth might have thought she’d get a respite, but instead, her torment was just beginning. Having done the ‘hard work’ of finding all her hot spots, seemingly the entire population of the Atlanta Hospital was invited to have a go at her. Teenagers, grey-haired elders, policemen, hospital staff, and even a few children all took pleasure in scratching her arches or tweaking her toes, with most of them looking down at her as if she was just some ride at the local carnival. But perhaps she shouldn’t judge them too harshly. When society broke down, it was harder and harder to find entertainment, and it wasn’t like they had television to watch.
But after hours and hours of this, the accumulation of torture grew overbearing. It was too much, just far too much. Too much laughter was being forced out her mouth, slamming against her gag, and being redirected through the insufficient passages of her nose. Her blonde hair was sticking to the side of her face from sweat. Her soles seemed to be tingling all over, as if they had been worked raw. The only consolation about her situation was that she hadn’t drunk anything in a while, or she would surely have lost control of her bladder by now. Breathing was a gruelling battle that she wasn’t winning, and the world grew darker and darker till she passed out.
Beth woke up, she saw Dawn and Gormon hovering over her. “Enjoyed your little nap?” Dawn asked. “I just finished my shift, and you know, I’ve been wanting to pick up a few more things.
Gormon crossed his arms. “Hope you aren’t tired or anything. The next lesson’s about to begin, and we aren’t stopping till you’ve pissed yourself laughing.”
