The Novice Prey & the Daring Prey (10 page)

“She takes off the black dress, sure,” Albert replied. “When she puts it back on, she’ll be a proctor again, but right now she’s just a naked, captive female.”

Alexa suddenly felt more than a little uneasy about how Albert was looking at her.

“What makes you think I’d be interested in seeing her?” she demanded.

“You want to get a look at what it might be like for you,” Albert replied easily. “You want to see what got done to her, and think about it bein’ done to you.” He took a swig of his coffee. “Miss, I seen it before, and I expect I’ll see it again. You got guts comin’ out here in the first place, but you got some doubts too, since this is your first time. And, since you’re a woman, you’re curious.”

“A woman? Not just a female?” Alexa folded her arms and tried to stare him down.

“You get caught, and stripped, and collared, you’ll be a female,” Albert said in a disturbingly matter-of-fact way. “And if you get brought here, you can bet I’ll have a nice, long look at you. But right now, you’re runnin’ free, so you’re a woman. Now, do you want to go see the female or not?”

Alexa put her arms down and sighed. “All right,” she admitted. “Yes, I’d like to go see her.”

“She’s around back,” Albert said. “You’ll see three sheds back there. She’s in the one with the red and yellow flag flyin’ over it.”

“A flag?” Alexa frowned.

“Yeah. Special flag. Lets people know there’s a female captive available.”

“Oh.” Alexa gulped. “You mean available to anybody who comes by?”

Albert just smiled. Alexa retrieved her bundle of dirty clothes and went out the front door, feeling oddly disturbed and excited at the same time.

There were indeed three sheds out back, all built of timbers and planks weathered gray. Two of them had only three walls, with the open ends pointed towards the trading post. She saw crates and boxes stacked in one of them. The other appeared to be empty, though the floor was thickly strewn with straw. The third shed sat between and behind the first two. It looked like it had all four walls. Alexa saw a striped red and yellow flag hanging limply from a short flagpole atop the middle shed. There was a double door set in the middle of the near wall. She paused and took a deep breath before approaching them.

They weren’t locked. It looked as if they were kept shut by simple latches, which meant they couldn’t be locked anyway. Alexa slowly swung the right-hand door open. It creaked and groaned on ancient hinges. She really, really wanted to see what was inside, but at the same time she dreaded what she might find.

The dirt floor inside was also strewn with straw, but it was so dark inside that at first she couldn’t see anything more than that. She took a hesitant step forward, and saw something moving in the corner. It was a woman, naked, her long dark hair in disarray with bits of straw stuck in it. She’d apparently been lying on a blanket thrown atop the layer of straw. As Alexa watched, fascinated, the woman got up on her knees, her back towards the door. Alexa could see that the woman’s hands were shackled behind her with heavy handcuffs, and there were red stripes across her ass. The woman slowly bent over until her head was on the blanket, and spread her knees wide. Then she remained still, except for a slow clenching and unclenching of her hands.

Alexa approached the woman slowly. Her pose was incredibly submissive. It looked as if she had been trained to adopt it anytime someone entered the shed where she was held captive. It was a little unnerving, and yet, at the same time, compelling. She stopped a few feet away, fighting an urge to reach out and touch the woman. Her eyes had adjusted to the dimness inside the shed, and now she could see that the red stripes were welts.

“I am here to serve, Master,” the woman said. “Use my body as you will.”

“Uh…thanks for the offer,” Alexa replied. “But I just came here…for a look.”

The woman straightened up, but remained on her knees as she turned around. Alexa had been half-expecting her to be Lydia, but it was still something of a shock when she recognized that it was indeed her.

“My God!” Alexa exclaimed. “What did they do to you?”

Lydia looked tired and worn. There were some welts across her upper thighs, her hair was a mess, and her face looked drawn. Her breasts, which were average-sized but firm and well-shaped, were unmarked. There was a black leather collar buckled around her neck, with a heavy chain linking it to a ring set in the wall, secured with a padlock. She smiled wanly up at Alexa.

“Everything,” she almost crooned. “Everything, all night long.”

Alexa was pretty sure she knew what ‘everything’ entailed, so she didn’t ask any questions along those lines. “Are you all right?”

“Oh,” Lydia smiled softly. “I’m fine. I’m wonderful. And they’ll be back.”

“Did they hurt you?”

“Only for as long as I fought them,” Lydia answered. “And it wasn’t so bad. When they held me down, I was so
ready
for it…”

“I don’t understand,” Alexa shook her head. “I really don’t.”

“Why are you even here, then?”

“I’m beginning to wonder about that myself,” Alexa said. “But…I can’t back out now.”

“Nonsense. Of course you can. You know you can.”

“I know I
can
,” Alexa replied. “But, trust me, I
can’t
.”

“Now I don’t understand,” Lydia frowned.

“Never mind,” Alexa said. “I just came for a look. I don’t even know why.” She backed away for a few steps, then turned to go.

“Wait,” Lydia demanded. Alexa stopped and turned back. She saw Lydia get to her feet with some effort and stand there at the end of her chain, shoulders back, feet apart.

“Look at me,” Lydia ordered. Alexa obeyed. In fact, she couldn’t tear her eyes away. Her eyes were drawn to the trimmed patch of dark hair between Lydia’s legs, to her breasts, back to her eyes.

“Do you know what it takes to become a proctor?” Lydia asked.

“No,” Alexa replied.

“You have to start as a ringer, or a mule, someone they can put in with new females who aren’t quite used to things yet so you can keep an eye on them,” Lydia said. “You work for the company, but you get trained like you were a sex slave. It’s rough and it’s brutal. For the women who can stand it, it’s also the most exciting job they’ll ever have. It pays pretty good, too. If you’re good, after five or six years they pick you for training as a proctor. It’s a completely different kind of work, and it’s necessary for this place to function.” She took a breath. “But I still need release from time to time. So I take off the black dress, and for a while I can be a sex slave again, used and abused by strange men. But do you know what?”

“No,” Alexa shook her head.

“Underneath it all, it’s
safe
here.
Nobody
gets to come here without psychological and physical screening that the CIA would envy.” She sank back down onto her knees.

“I can see you’re worried, Alexa,” she said, “maybe even a little scared. That’s normal. I hope that if you get taken, it’s by a man, or some men, who can teach you all the pleasures of being a captive. It’s like nothing else you’ve ever experienced.”

“Uh…thanks,” Alexa said uncertainly.

“Go,” Lydia smiled. “Go on back out there and make them work for you.”

Alexa left the shed and slowly shut and latched the door securely. She looked around once to see if anyone was watching her. No one was, at least not that she could see. She trotted away from Jackson’s, back out into the woods. Only then did she realize that Albert hadn’t charged her for her shower or her meal.

Days went by. Armed with her stolen map, Alexa ranged as far as the next trading post to the east, called White’s. It was much like the others, but when she first saw it there were a number of men standing around outside it, talking and drinking what looked like beer, so she didn’t dare approach. Instead, she faded back into the sheltering woods, feeling angry and upset that no one had told her that beer was available at the trading posts. But then, Albert had told her that they weren’t obliged to offer information unless she specifically asked. Still, it felt like a raw deal to her. A nice, cold beer would be so good right now!

Once she’d had an unnerving feeling that she was being shadowed. It had stuck with her for most of the day as she crept slowly and cautiously from one patch of cover to another, all the while with her head on a swivel, looking in every direction from which a hunter…or hunters…might come. It wasn’t until after sundown that the feeling passed. She felt more than a little let down when it did, because feeling as if she was in imminent danger of being taken had her incredibly pumped up and powerfully aroused. Her sleep that night kept getting interrupted by vivid dreams of faceless men coming upon her in the night and dragging her, too sleepy to resist effectively, out of her sleeping bag. She always woke up at that point, heart pounding, mouth dry, her hands shaking.

This strange and new experience of being hunted was having an unexpected effect on her. On the one hand, she still desperately wanted to beat her competitors, and that drove her. On the other hand, the constant tension, while it had her feeling incredibly alive, was getting to the point where she could barely stand it. It was beginning to make her jumpy and nervous and, if she couldn’t get a handle on it, it could very likely cause her to make a mistake.

She drifted back towards Jackson’s but only came close enough to it to see if the striped red and yellow flag was still flying over the shed she’d seen Lydia in. It wasn’t, but she saw two more men there, dressed for the outdoors. Since they were almost certainly hunters, she quietly slipped away, unseen.

She’d gotten into the habit of moving her campsite daily. As much work as that entailed, it seemed much safer than trusting that a hiding spot would remain undiscovered. She was running low on food, and water, and clean clothes. She’d found a stream big enough to rinse her things out in, but that was a stopgap measure at best. She still had her third cache, if no one had discovered it by now, so one morning she packed up her gear and set out to find it.

Everything felt strange, somehow. Sounds seemed either unusually sharp or strangely muffled, and there was no wind at all, not even a breeze to ruffle the trees overhead. She picked her way through the woods just as cautiously, but much more easily than she had on her first day out here. She felt as if something was coming, but she had no idea what it might be, or why she should feel this way. As the day wore on, the feeling neither grew nor faded away, so Alexa decided to put it down to how jumpy this whole thing was making her. It was nothing a good night’s sleep wouldn’t fix…she hoped. The problem was that she wasn’t getting any good night’s sleep lately. She rested for a while after she reached what she thought was the general area where she’d secreted away her last cache. Sitting on the ground and leaning against a tree, she surveyed the area, trying to spot anything that looked familiar. After so much time in the woods, though, everything had started to look the same to her.

She got up and started moving through the woods in an expanding spiral, hoping that she might find her stuff that way. As the sun dropped down almost to the horizon, she had to admit that her plan wasn’t working. Maybe she’d picked the wrong place?

“Hi, there!”

Alexa shrieked and at the sound of a male voice practically at her elbow. She whirled, ready to flee, and then saw it was Will Longstreet, sitting on a log and smiling crookedly at her, his air rifle slung across his back. She wasn’t on his list. She was safe.

“You scared the shit out of me!” she gasped.

“Didn’t mean to,” he shrugged. “I thought you saw me. You seem a little jumpy, Alexa Marx. How come?”

“This hunting thing is getting to me,” she said. “I’m just not used to it.”

“You’ve been doin’ pretty well, I’d say,” Will rejoined. “You still ain’t caught.”

“No, but I don’t know how the others are doing,” Alexa said. She wanted very much to sit down, but the only spot to do that wasn’t the ground was on the log right next to Will, and she didn’t want to get that close to him. She hadn’t had a shower in days, and washing off in the same creek that she did her laundry in was an unsatisfactory substitute.

“Well, I can give you some information about that,” Will sighed sadly. “My tall, blonde volleyball player got taken early today, about as far to the east as she could get without goin’ out of bounds.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.” Alexa’s sympathy was genuine. “I know you had your heart set on her. But that means it’s down to just me and Naomi, so it’s good news for me.”

“Well, get set for more good news. Naomi was nabbed late last evening at Jackson’s.”

“That means…I won!” Alexa smiled. She almost felt like dancing. “Thanks, Will!”

“No,” he corrected her. “You beat them out, but the hunt’s still goin’ on. There are still men after you.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess there are,” Alexa turned somber.

“So, now what?” Will asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what do you plan to do now?”

“Oh.” Alexa said. “I guess I’ll keep trying not to get caught.” Now that she knew she’d actually beaten the other women she felt a bit let down.

“Think you can keep it up?” Will asked.

“I don’t know,” Alexa admitted. “This is hard. But…how did you know about Martina and Naomi?”

Will unclipped something from one of his pack straps. He held it up so she could see it. It looked something like a cell phone, only bulkier.

“See this?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Alexa nodded. “What is it?”

“It’s a chip reader,” Will answered. “You hold it up next to a woman’s earlobe and it reads the chip. A hunter catches a woman; he uses this to send the information back to Gordburg so they know she’s been bagged. I’m not sure if these things are connected, or if somebody in town sends a signal back out to all of ‘em, but it’ll also tell all the hunters carryin’ them that the woman was caught.” He clipped the device back onto the pack strap. “That’s how I know.”

“Can you talk to other hunters with that thing?” Alexa asked warily.