Katherine

Naked and drugged almost into insensibly in the shit besmirched cage they had locked her in, Katherine frowned, wondering what the noise she could hear was.
The drugs they had injected her with made her feel heavy and lethargic, and it took all her effort just to lift her head and gaze dully in the direction the noise was coming from, only to belateldy realise that it was the woman in the cage adjacent to hers who was crying and screaming again
The woman, a slip of a Japanese girl in her late teens or eary twenties by the look of it, had short hair and a dirty, tear streaked face. She thrust her hands through between the bars of her cage towards Kate, her face a contorted mask of misery as she near hysterically yelled something at her, her voice bubbling through her tears
Kate blinked slowly and gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head; the words didn't make sense...
This didn't make sense
Her attention drifted
Everything seemed glassy and plastic - unreal; the light reflected off things with weird accented highlights
Was this a dream?
Where was she again?
It looked like a small warehouse or a garage or something...
In one half of the room there were an array of arc lights arranged around a big, heavily marked and scarred table
Why?
Why was she here?
The woman yelled something else, Kate sluggishly realising that she was probably speaking Japanese, which was good, because she knew Japanese
But why couldn't she understand?
Was it the drugs?
They seemed to be screwing with a lot of things; her short term memory for one - She had no idea how she got here or why. She could almost sense the shape of the chain of events that had led her to this place, but the reason why she was here eluded her; it was as if it was there on the tip of her mental tongue, but she couldn't quite figure it out
The effort required to hold her head up was exhausting, and so she let it lol back down with the whisper of a faint sigh
The Japanese woman screamed something else at her and rattled hard on the bars of her cage before finally giving up and lapsing into tear streaked silence, leaving Kate to close her eyes in peace, a dreamy smile playing across her lips
Sleep was better


Chemically induced consciousness returned with the hiss of a gas injector, Kate's eyes flickering open to the cacophony of the other woman's screams
Reality had a nasty, hard edge to it, and Kate was horrfied to see the Japanese girl being hauled out of her cage at the end of a choke chain that had been coiled around her neck. The chain seemed to be biting deep into her flesh, and it must have hurt like hell but she was fighting it every step of the way, her bare feet scrabbling uselessly against the floor as two large, stocky men, each wearing hideously grinning clown masks, dragged her across the floor
"What the smeg's going on?" Kate croaked, suspiciously eying another two men who were filming the horrific scene
Still groggy from the drugs, she was unable to react fast enough to do anything about the length of chain that was suddenly passed through the bars behind her and looped over her head, down around her neck
"Watch" a man hissed in her ear as the chain was pulled tight, near choking her while the two clowns wrestled the violently struggling girl up onto the table amid her hysterical screams, and began shackling her down to it with a set of manacles and leather straps that were produced from within one of the table drawers
"Please!" the woman begged, as the men worked in methodical silence aroud her "Please no. Please, please, please..."
Kate's own scream of horror mingled with hers as one of the clowns produced a large power drill and bored a hole through one of the girl's kneecaps
She knew where she was then; she had heard rumours of the snuff outfit that the Yakuza supposedly used for enforcement, but she had always dismissed these stories as fanciful conjecture
As it turned out, they were horrifyingly real

The girl's torture was prolonged, systematic and frighteningly brutal, involving an array of power tools and caustic liquids
They kept her going with a whole battery of drugs, amping up her pain recceptors and denying her even the blissful release of unconsciousness as they tore her apart; literally dismembering her piece by screaming piece, the clown masked butchers displaying each of the ragged fleshy lumps they hacked off her to one of the cameras, while the other in the meantime moved in for a close-up of the tourniqued amputation site, before drifting lazily up over her ruined body for a lingering shot of her anguished face

Kate tried not to watch, but every time she shied away or tried to close her eyes, the man holding the chain aroud her neck would jerk it tight, choking her until she opened her eyes again
"Watch" was always the same instruction "Watch"
This was why the Japanese woman had been screaming at her, Kate realised; she'd probably been forced to watch someone else being killed some days earlier, in the same way that Kate was being forced to watch her death
This was the way she was going to die, and it was going to be utterly, utterly horrible
The woman's screams eventually subsided into a low background moan of tormented pain, her life only finally ending when they cracked her ribcage open an tore her heart out before her ruined, lidless eyes
"You're next" the man behind her sniggered childishly as he relaxed his grip on the chain around Kate's neck and rattled it out of the cage
Fucking Yori
It was his fault that she was here; he'd sold her out
Her own fucking boyfriend had sold her out to the fucking Yak's