This story has content warnings for: gore, corruption, sex with a chair, probably rape, not that gross but also sort of gross. Please take care.
Contamination begins gently. A pinprick hole in the hazmat suit’s thick composite where she stumbles and falls against a forest of needles growing from one of the site’s walls.
Most break.
One finds the perfect angle.
She doesn’t feel its touch on her sweaty skin.
She always felt like part of her was missing. An ache in her heart, an absence in the air around her—skin wrapped too tight around her bones, blood beating in time with a rhythm unlike her body.
She always felt like something was wrong. Always, until she met them.
The first time was nothing special. Their strong hands fumbling beneath her skirt, tearing her stockings; the hunger in their eyes tempered by furtive glances towards the office door. Her stammered protests, the blank animal fear curling around her mind as they fucked her—
The call’s coming from beneath her skin. It’s not yet ready to be dead, not ready to be buried and forgotten, grave bell ringing with wild abandon. Louder with each heartbeat, louder with each breath, an electric shriek filling the too-still air—!
“I’m sorry you had to see me like that. I never wanted you to know that side of me. I wanted,” a drop of blood slides down her perfect teeth, “I wanted to keep you safe.”
This isn’t when the doll found her in the woods, covered in stolen blood. This is some time after.
She’s cleaned up, mostly, freshly showered. Her still-wet mane looks faintly depressed with so much of its volume gone. It smells good, though, like a tropical vacation that she’s never had the money to have.
At 9:34 PM, the party in the red hall was asked to pause their activities and take part in a minute of silence to honor those who died to make their meal possible.
They declined.
By 10:20 PM it became obvious that the estate was in danger of becoming understaffed.
As the estate’s primary objective is the satisfaction of visiting parties, it refused requests from the remaining staff to deploy countermeasures at 10:22 PM, 10:28 PM, 10:31 PM, 10:32 PM, 10:33 PM, and 11:01 PM.
When doll slips from the confines of her bed-box and stumbles downstairs, there’s an odd rectangle waiting at the table: a folded sheet of thick, creamy paper. It’s for her, obviously—why else would her miss have put it there, next to her oatmeal and tea?
But doll isn’t sure.
“Miss, what’s this?”
Across the kitchen (a distance which doll’s eyes easily skip over and her body has never managed to cross), her witch doesn’t glance up from the stove’s vast fire. Doll smells the ashy tang of crumbling pine and the rich, rotting musk of burnt deer.
Poor little thing without a proper name sitting in the corner of a diner, sipping a cup of coffee bought with stolen money that’s running out so much faster than she hoped it would. Victim-coded, trying not to let her body shake; the waitress keeps on glancing over at her, seems halfway to offering her some sort of help or calling the cops. She can’t tell which, hopes it’s neither.