High Kill Shelter

She is naked in a tight, dark concrete cell. At first it has the smell of unfinished building materials. Then her nostrils understand it to be the minerals of a human body, accumulated over time, denser than her body can produce. Many bodies, ghosts of terror, evaporations of salt.

They shave her head. Her eyebrows. Brown hair covers the floor in slivers and scythes. Was it luxurious, once?

Back in the dark. Screams echo through the concrete. Howling in the walls. A throat, or piece of machinery.

They take her out. Lock her into a metal rack that restrains her by the ankles, the wrists, the knees, the elbows, the waist, the neck. The bad smell is stronger here. The metal is sticky, as if never properly sanitized, just quickly wiped down. But it’s hard to tell with the sweaty biofilm on her unshowered skin. She has become the unclean thing.

Her face explodes, blood squirting from smashed cartilage. They break her nose with a single punch. SAP gloves full of steel ball bearings. It is shockingly overkill. The few times she had been slapped or hit in the past were nothing compared to this deliberate, mechanical brutality. They change the shape of her face. Knock teeth out. Dent her skull.

They leave a tuft of hair on her scalp. So when her head falls forward, too stupid and concussed to keep the metal ring around her neck from choking her, they can pull her face back up and keep crunching their fist into the same oozing bruise, the same bleeding socket, the same shattered cartilage.

Thrown back into the dark. Locked by her neck to the floor. A corpse flower of battered facemeat, blossoming to the ceiling.

She wakes up and she’s being pulled by her ankles across the concrete. Her eyes are swollen enough that the light doesn’t blind her this time. Snow goggles for a winter of blood. They bolt her to a new floor. There are others here, scared like her, faces locked and forward facing.

A boy is hauled out and flung in front of them, blond with dried blood highlights. He is skinny and starved, but still has some muscle. He fights, and they punch him hard, in the part of his skull that was already a different color and has knuckle dents in it. Then another one kicks him in the stomach with a steel-toed boot, and he folds up. While he’s trying to get his breath back, someone brings a slab of raw meat, and her tongue lubricates at the smell, and she can hear the others do the same, breathing fast and wet.

Two of them hold him down. Gloves tight as cuffs around his ankles, masked lips laughing into the twitching of his calves. A knee crushing his spine. A boot on his neck.

They slap the raw meat across his face, leaving a crimson patina. Then they drag it across his emaciated ass, and he tries to squeeze his legs together. They shove a boot into his perineum, forcing him apart, tendons straining as they drag the meat between his legs, red juice matting the hairs of his thighs.

Here come the hounds. Bursts of scarred flesh. Jagged fangs sink into his juice-shining ass. He crawls across the floor making horrible sounds. He manages to get on his knees, pushing himself upward. Then sharp teeth crunch around his balls. He can’t do anything but writhe in the trap of that jaw as they worry and mangle at his testicles, rooting the tube out, strips of scrotum stretching and snapping and being swallowed. At the top of his body, he has the choice of screaming, and giving them his tongue. Or holding his teeth shut tight as possible, and giving them his lips.

There is a hot iron at some point. Cauterization. All she can think is. Thank God it wasn’t me.

✦

Darkness. Sleep deprivation. Endless barking. She must have slept at some point. But it’s bad sleep. Gliding along the edge. Hypervigilant, tensed, oscillating. Can’t tell when she’s out there, or in here. Nightmares, hallucination. They won’t stop barking. She thinks she’s asleep. Then the barking is right behind her, panting between her legs. This is real, she thinks. She crawls on all fours, concrete gnawing her knees. She’s shaky with hunger, blinded by a spotlight that forces her face down.

Drool hits her asshole, sopping down her cunt, chasing the terrified gush of piss. Then her urethra clamps up. Just a few drops of dark urine, pattering behind her. Burning squirts of urinary tract infection.

The dog skewers her. Saliva drenches between her shoulder blades. She tries to crawl away but the knot swells, her cunt stretched, impaled, cramps slicing like lightning around the dog’s cock as it rapes the raw walls of her UTI.

Finally, it slumps on top of her, and she gags at the wet fur smell, knowing there will be no showers, that she’ll be smelling it in her hair and the tiny confines of her cell until the scent molecules break down enough to blend into the rest of the bad smells. Fluid drains into her for a long time. The knot slowly deflates. They pull the dog off. Her limbs buzz with pins and needles, circulation cut off. Her itching hole pukes out a little semen. A cold draft cuts her torn, infected opening.

They bring another dog in. This one is bigger, scarred muscle crushing her body into the floor. Saliva hits her shaved head and drips into her eyes, no hair to catch it, adhering slick and smelly to her skull. She tries to move and it growls, and the rumble vibrates her chest cavity. It humps her mindlessly, stabbing with its penis until it punches inside a hole. This is the other hole, inflamed and unready. Only the spit from the first dog and the sweat from their bodies provides lubrication. This cock is so much bigger, but it’s going in the smallest hole. It seems so unfair. The dog is so excited it tries to bite her, and the steel muzzle bangs her ear, filling it with drool, bubbling like she just came out of a pool. She watches her backed-up earwax foam brown across the floor.

✦

They drag her from the darkness. Is it feeding time?

They lock her into a rack, legs spread, fat trembling on her chest and belly. So long without wearing clothes, nothing but this awkward weighing scale viewpoint, with nothing to contour or sublimate it. Just fear quaking through a horizon of flesh.

They wipe raw meat across her breasts, which heave with her panicked lungs, shiny and pink. Through the terror, her mouth waters, sudden and wet as a stabbing. She’s been eating sludge for so long. This is the exact opposite. An ingot of life, pure and whole and carnal.

Raw meat drags between her legs like a knife. She bucks, hips slicing at the air, helpless in the heavy steel frame.

The dogs come, and she tries to close her legs, even though she knows it’s impossible. The racks cuts into her resisting tendons. A spattering sound. Emptying herself.

They chew her labia off. A tooth sinks into her opening. Thighs burst. Ripped down. Their claws shred her legs and belly trying to reach the meat juice on her swollen breasts. She convulses in electrical, obliterated spasms. Her gasps of pain and their gasps of hunger start to harmonize.

Then, just as the dogs are losing interest, an ear-shredding screech. The rack tilts forward, and her breasts fall into space, dangling above wet snapping mouths. They leap into the air, nails scraping, until one catches her nipple, and she feels the weight of the dog pulling down, down, tearing and stretching until the teeth slide off. The nipple hangs, a detached wire of nerve pain, then the dog snaps again and chews and swallows it, tongue hanging out like a smile. And then the rack is all the way down and the dogs leap on her quivering breasts and her screaming face.

✦

She has become that piece of raw meat. Aching in the dark with her proteins shattered, healing in wrong ways. Nerves like hot slag, fusing randomly. Ridges of dead skin. Bite marks drooling pus. Her chest is a mangle of scars. A loud reminder that something was here.

After that, the other changes are easier to accept.

There is pain at first. Teeth ripped out. Replaced by sharp dentures. Forcing its jaw into a permanent drooling grimace.

Thumbs cut off. Learning a new way to crawl.

Injected with testosterone.
It comes from us now.
Glovefinger in the cleft of your ass, digging between, squeezing your chewed meat and sticking the needle in.
They rape puberty into it, hallucinating and sweating in the dark.

It doesn’t have to be afraid anymore. It’s a dog now. They’re all dogs. Licking each other’s faces. Biting and knowing the scar tissue will hold. Feeling the hair between its legs and the new stink, the stink it smelled when it first came here.

Here boy. Good boy. Rubber fingers fuck violently between your legs, but you can take it. You squirt from beneath your swollen, sensitive dog cock, licking the raw meat until your face is red, and your brain is red, and you could scream, you want it so bad. You tremble and twitch, but don’t bite. Not until the command is given. You’ve been starved for days. The T shots make your muscles hungry. Every time you lick, thick ropes of bloody drool stick to your face. Pulsing and clenching as your handler adds another finger. Your squirt pools with your drool, shimmering pink with meat juice.

Starve. Lick. Squirt. Drool. Good boy.

Again.

Again.

Not yet.

Can’t see through your bruised eyes. You bit too early. You didn’t even get to swallow. They dug inside your mouth with the same gloves they were just fingering you with, stabbing the back of your throat and gagging you on rotten pussy juice UTI rubber until you coughed up the ball of meat. After that, they used the steel gloves on your face for an hour. Then they bring tools and start to work on it.

Through the collapsed tunnel of your broken nose, you smell raw meat. You smell your own face. Your steel teeth grind in your mouth, but can’t open. There is a lock in the side of your face.

Is it going to be good?

Will it listen?

Hhh. Hgghhh!
With your jaw wired shut, anything you say comes out as dumb drool, seething through the steel. You stop thinking in words. You pant and whine and beg and try to show obedience with your whole body, pawing and arching and lifting.

Good boy.

A key slides into the back of your cheek, into the permanent toothache of metal. The lock clicks and your steel teeth are free, a cascade of saliva splatting to the floor. Someone starts to cry. But all you can smell is raw meat. Your nostrils inflate, sucking down the tang of iron. You drool from both ends.

Now.

You leap, and your teeth sink into shrieking flesh. The other dogs slam against you, fighting for a piece. Your hips smack into each other, gnarled flanks grinding. You’re drunk on the taste, drunk on the smell of blood baked into dogstink. A single goodboy with many heads, a scar-tissue Cerberus.

Metal screams as the rack rotates. The sound used to terrify you. Now it’s just another animal. The floor is a red swamp bubbling with drool. You are so full, belly swollen like a litter was bred into you. This one had to learn. Had to be changed even harder than you. You’re chewing it down to a puppy.

You used to know what those sounds meant. The begging and pleading. But it doesn’t mean anything, because it isn’t the voice of your handler. You keep chewing and swallowing until you puke, blood seething through razor fangs in a rich red syrup, pulp sticking in your teeth and you know you’ll savor it later, and your tongue hangs, and you beg for more.