Chapter 108: S1 NNF Tyler EP 108

The days that followed bled into one another, a smear of misery punctuated by the squeal of the portable milking cart, extra hormones, and the clanging of gates. The routine was the only thing that had shape.

Twice a day, that squeaky-ass wheel made sounds. They’d kept me inside this fucking pen for so long that I was going stir-crazy.

Hell, at this point, I’d welcome a shower… a real one in a stall, the communal feeding troughs, and the milking station. Staring at the same enclosed walls day in and day out made me want to rip my hair out.

Once a day, a handler with a high-pressure hose would spray down the concrete aisle, the water splashing under our gates. He’d even hose me down with the cold-as-fuck water. Every hour during the night, the rhythmic sweep of a flashlight beam swam across my face, then hers. A metronome counting down to nothing.

Alice never ate on her own. After the first few days, the handlers stopped trying to coax her. They’d shove the tube down her nose and force-feed her. Guess it was better than no nourishment at all.

I kept talking to her once the handlers had stepped out of earshot. My voice felt loud and stupid in the quiet, but it helped to keep me sane. Plus, I was sure some part of her listened, even understood every word spoken.

I told her stories from my shitty childhood, I described the faces of the handlers in excruciating detail, and I recited the plot of the last movie I saw before all this. I got nothing back. Not a twitch. Not a glance. The silence from her stall was a solid thing, a wall thicker than the one I was chained to. It absorbed my words and gave back only a profound, echoing emptiness.

After about a week, or what I guessed was one, my stories dried up. My anger had burned down to a low, bitter ember. All that was left was a cold, creeping dread. It wasn’t that Alice was broken. It was that she was gone. Reddy hadn’t just silenced her with whatever the fuck he gave her; he’d scooped out whatever made her Alice and left a shell behind. This quiet, compliant thing wasn’t the woman who’d gone on two escape attempts with me. This was just… an asset. Repaired. Ready for use. The thought made my stomach clench.

This morning, I stopped talking. What was the point? I was whispering to a ghost. The silence I had been fighting against seeped into my own stall, filling the cracks in my resolve. I found myself watching her, mimicking her stillness. I’d crane my neck for hours, my head hanging off the bench at just the right angle to see her face… her vacant stare.

The distant lowing of the other women and the sound of my own breathing surrounded me. The world shrank to the size of this box. The chains became a part of my body, a cold, heavy extension of my own bones.

This was how they won. Not with fists or threats, but with silence and routine. The hormones helped too. They’d built a process designed to grind a female down into something manageable, something that wouldn’t fight back. And it was working.

Fuck. I could feel it working on me. The fight was leaking out of me, replaced by a dull, hopeless resignation. What was the point in fighting the system? I was alone. Utterly, completely alone.

When night fell, I remained silent. I hadn’t spoken a word all day. Hadn’t mimicked a fucking cow either. I wasn’t ready to fucking moo. Not yet.

A bowl of mush sat untouched by the gate. The handler, Tim, was in a hurry to fuck some woman on another row, so he left it for me to self-feed. The fucker had even rotated the bench so I could press my face into the container.

The hunger was a dull ache, but the effort to reach for the food, to eat, to sustain this pointless existence, felt monumental. Despair was a heavy blanket, and I was ready to just lie there and let it smother me.

I was staring into the sliver of darkness between our stalls, my eyes unfocused. My mind was blessedly, terrifyingly blank. The rage was gone. The hope was gone. There was just the concrete, the straw, and the waiting.

A sound.

So small I thought I’d imagined it. A faint scraaaaape. Like a mouse in the walls sounded. I didn’t move. My senses were dull, coated in apathy. It came again, closer this time. The sound of something being pushed across a rough surface. It was coming from her stall… from Alice.

My head lifted as far as I could manage. I strained my ears, listening past the ringing silence. There it was again, right at the base of the divider that separated us. A flicker of movement in the deep shadows.

My heart gave a single, painful thud against my ribs.

I leaned forward, the chains dragging and clinking against the floor. The sound was obscenely loud in the quiet. I peered into the darkness at the bottom of the divider.

Something was there. A small, dark rectangle, no bigger than my thumb. It slid another several inches into my stall, pushed by a long sprig of straw, and then it stopped.

I stared at it. My brain couldn’t process what it had just witnessed. It was an anomaly. A disruption in the perfect, crushing monotony. It didn’t belong here. For a long moment, I did nothing. Fear, sharp and sudden, pierced the fog of my despair.

A trick. It had to be a trick. A new, demented way for the handlers to fuck with me.

But the handlers were clumsy and loud. This was quiet. It was methodical. This was a secret.

My hand shook as I reached as far as the chains allowed. My fingers stretched, straining. It was just out of reach.

Fuck. I shifted my body, twisting until my shoulder protested, the chain on my right wrist digging into my skin. My fingertips brushed against it. It felt like thick paper, cardstock. Gritty. I hooked it with my nail and dragged it closer.

I pulled my hand back; the small message was clutched in my palm. It was flimsy, torn from a box label or something similar. It was damp and smelled of dirt and straw. I held it up to the faint sliver of light coming from the high, barred window at the end of the aisle. It was barely enough to see by. I had to squint, turning the paper over and over, trying to make sense of the faint scratches of writing on its surface.

They weren’t random marks. They were letters. Scratched into the grime with a fingernail or something with an edge that dug deep into the pulpy, thick paper. It was a single word.

My breath hitched. I read it again, my lips forming the shape of the letters without making a sound.

Alive.

The word hit me harder than any fist. It wasn’t a plan. It wasn’t a promise. It was a signal fire in the dead of night. A single, defiant spark against the overwhelming darkness.

She was in there. Alice. Behind the empty eyes and the silent mouth, behind the wall Reddy had built, Alice was still in there. And she was fighting. Not with defiance or insults, but with silence.

A sound escaped my throat, a raw, choked thing that was half sob, half laugh. I pressed the paper to my chest, the sharp edges digging into my palm. The great silence was still there, all around me. But it wasn’t empty anymore.

I wasn’t alone.

The crazy bastards hadn’t won. The fucking doctor and shrink hadn’t won. And I’d be damned if I was going to crumble under the pressure now. I looked at the untouched bowl of food below me. My stomach growled, a fierce, demanding cramp.

I reached for nasty shit, my chains rattling a triumphant, metallic song in the dark, and ate.

After all, I had to keep up my strength for the fight ahead.