The Novice Prey & the Daring Prey (3 page)

It was getting dark by the time she got back. She took the time to arrange her little campsite. She still seemed to be very much alone, but she decided to forego a hot meal for tonight. It would mean starting a fire, and she didn’t want to risk it. Later, if she found a more sheltered spot, she’d build a fire. She didn’t feel particularly hungry at the moment anyway, since she’d had a huge breakfast shortly before she let them bring her out here. The darkness grew and closed in. Now she could hear crickets, and something making a high-pitched shrilling noise that seemed to come from everywhere. Somehow, none of the books she’d read had told her how noisy a forest could become at night. She lay quietly on her opened sleeping bag and thought back over how she’d come to be here. There was nothing else to do but go to sleep, and she wasn’t feeling tired.

***

They all knew each other. They often competed with each other in one kind of sport or another, and while they were friendly, their contests had an edge to them that was almost ferocious. Even outside of athletics, there was still a simmering competition between them, since they were all attractive women, young, superbly fit, and eager to stand out and be noticed. It was not an easy thing to be a part of that group, and Alexa had wondered why she had been allowed to join at first. It was only later on that she realized she was ‘safe’, and that was why. She wasn’t as tall as most or as hot as any of the others, and didn’t excel at any one sport as most of them did. If she entered a competition she could be relied on to put up a good effort, but never to take first place. So, she was accepted because none of them saw her as a real threat. The discovery had galled her at first, and then she came to accept it as she had accepted never taking first place. Besides, where else could she bask in the glitter and glamour, albeit on the fringes, of gorgeous women athletes? As long as she was with them, she could enjoy at least a bit of the high life, and occasionally draw the attention of a good-looking man who had been rebuffed by some other member of the group. That had been flattering to begin with, but after a while she found that she resented being someone’s second or third choice. But what else could she do, being the only beta amongst a pack of alpha females?

It had been a bright and brutally sunny afternoon around a plush hotel pool and they’d all had a teensy bit too much to drink when Martina had begun a familiar diatribe of hers about how boring and safe most of their contests were.

“Now, take the Mayans,” she said after another sip of her margarita. “Or was it the Aztecs? Well, it doesn’t matter. Whoever they were, they had this game that was all about putting a ball through a stone hoop without using your hands. The winners were treated like gods. The losers got sacrificed.” She snickered. “I wonder how their gods felt about getting the losers sacrificed to them instead of the winners. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love the competition, but lately it just seems to me that whether I win or I lose all that happens is there’s another tourney down the road.” Alexa, listening from a distance, didn’t try to correct Martina about who got sacrificed.

“Yeah, and you usually win,” Lynette spoke up. She was tall, with long, light brown hair and looked absolutely stunning in her tiny black bikini. Years of skiing had kept her body toned and hard. Since Martina’s preferred sport was beach volleyball, they never competed head-to-head. Well, not in sports, anyway. Martina’s butter-yellow bikini was every bit as barely there as Lynette’s.

“Yeah, but how long can that go on?” Martina responded. The drinks were making her a bit less cautious than she usually was. “Let’s face it. We all make good money at whatever sport we’re into, mostly from endorsements. But how many years have any of us got before we get elbowed out by someone younger and hungrier?”

“What’s your point?” piped up one of the other women there. Alexa thought that her name was Mara, but she wasn’t sure. “We all know this, even if we don’t talk about it much.”

“I’d just like to try something different before I get too old,” Martina said. “Something more edgy. Something dangerous.”

“Skiing’s dangerous,” Lynette spoke up.

“So’s snowboarding,” Nikki put in. “You could break your neck.”

“No, no, no,” Martina shook her head and banged her drink down on the table. “I’m talking about something you go into knowing for
sure
that you’re putting your ass on the line.”

“Like what?” Lynette asked. She leaned forward, smiling, clearly waiting for an answer.

Martina looked around the table, apparently realizing that she’d said more than she’d meant to. Being Martina, she shrugged and went on anyway. She leaned forward herself and lowered her voice so that only the women at the table could hear her. Alexa had to move closer, and she tried to do so unobtrusively.

“I’ve heard of a place,” Martina began, “where the game is men hunting women.”

“What? Like that TV show?” Lynette asked. “I watched it once. Thought it was kind of lame.”

“No, not exactly like that,” Martina shook her head. “It’s not something where if you get to some spot you win, and even if you get caught you’re safe. Nope. In this game, if the men catch you they get to fuck you.”

Alexa saw Lynette’s eyebrow creep upwards. “That sounds like that weird website, with guys shooting women with paintball guns,” the skier said.

“Oh. That.” Martina waved a hand dismissively. “That’s all fake. I think. Anyway, it’s got nothing to do with what I’m talking about.”

“Uh…they get to fuck you?” Nikki drew back. “I don’t know about that.”

“What did you think I meant when I talked about really putting our asses on the line?” Martina snorted.

“How did you hear about this place, dear?” Lynette asked.

“I have a friend,” Martina shrugged. “She thought I might be interested.”

“And are you?” Lynette’s smile turned into a smirk.

“It’s another form of competition,” Martina replied, looking at her. “So it’s a little interesting, yeah. And I was thinking…”

“Yes?” Lynette prompted.

“Hardly any of us here ever get to compete head-to-head,” Martina said. She kept her gaze fixed on Lynette. “Haven’t you ever wondered which one of us would come out on top in that kind of contest? I know I have. Well, here’s a chance to find out.”

“Is that a dare?” Lynette asked as she stared back at Martina. There was a palpable tension in the air.

“It’s an idea,” Martina replied. “I think the whole thing is kind of interesting. What do you think?”

“I think I’d have to know more about it,” Lynette answered with a lazy little smile.

***

And that was how it had started. Somehow, Martina and Lynette had talked six other women, Alexa included, into joining the contest. Well, to be honest, Alexa thought, she hadn’t needed all that much convincing. A lot of that was probably because she’d had a bit too much to drink that afternoon, and as the beta female she’d had to sit in the one chair that wasn’t shaded by the big umbrella looming over the table, so she wasn’t thinking clearly. But once she’d agreed to be a part of it, something inside of her wouldn’t let her back out, not even when Martina suggested that they all bet on the outcome just to make it all more ‘interesting’. She’d expected it all to happen soon, but apparently it was a lot more complicated to arrange than Martina had led them to believe. It was probably more complicated than Martina had believed herself. There were physicals that they had to take, but those were nothing compared to the barrage of psych evaluations they were all subjected to at intervals over the next six months. Some of them didn’t seem to have anything to do with sex or fantasies at all, while others were almost embarrassingly probing and clinical. They were also separately shown a number of explicit videos. Some of them had whipping, some had what looked and sounded very much like mild sexual torture, most of them involved some sort of bondage, either with ropes or chains or straps, and every one of them had very graphic sexual content: Straight, oral and anal. Those had been a bit rough for Alexa to sit through, especially with all the wires that hooked her up to all those different machines, checking on who knew what. Sometimes she felt like she was reenacting a scene from ‘A Clockwork Orange’.

Whatever all the testing had told the people conducting it, it had weeded out four of the original eight. Two of them backed out themselves, while two more were turned down as participants. Apparently their test results indicated that they couldn’t hack it. That had just left four of them: Martina, Lynette, Alexa, and Naomi, an intense, dark-haired little surfer. Even after all that, there were more tests, once a month right up until the contest finally started. Actually, most of those were simply face-to-face interviews apparently intended to find out if anyone wanted to bail. Nobody had. They’d also had to read and sign elaborate non-disclosure agreements. Basically they weren’t allowed to tell anyone any details about the contest, where it was held, or what happened during it. Ever.

Alexa didn’t think she’d want to tell anyone about it, and as for knowing where it was being held, she didn’t think she could. They’d all flown in on a small plane, and it had followed such a meandering course that she wasn’t at all sure where it had finally landed.

The place had been a surprise. She’d been expecting some ramshackle setting, with minimal facilities and was surprised to find out that it was actually more like a resort, half of it built to look like some Old West town. The other half, which included the very nice hotel they’d been put up in, appeared to be only a few years old at most.

And now, here she was, all alone out in the woods, prey for the hunting parties. According to the rules, she could still back out at any time, but that would cost her the money she’d put up for the bet. That would be painful, but she could endure it. What would be even more painful, and impossible to endure, would be to lose yet again, especially after coming so far.

She sat up and stretched. The sleeping bag wasn’t the most comfortable thing to lie on. She missed her bed, she missed her television, she missed her computer, and right now, most of all, and she missed her bathroom. There was no help for it. She got up, retrieved the little folding shovel they’d given her, and went off into the woods, carefully and slowly, since it was very dark now, looking for a suitable spot.

Some little time later, she returned to her sleeping bag, stowed away the shovel, and leaned against a tree, looking up at what she could see of the night sky through the trees. The stars seemed unusually bright out here. She’d once had a boyfriend who was an amateur astronomer. He’d told her that each and every star had a name, but she couldn’t remember any of them now. It didn’t really matter, since she couldn’t see enough of the sky to even make a guess at what she was seeing.

She hadn’t expected things to be so boring. She wasn’t sleepy yet, and there wasn’t anything for her to do to while away the time until she was. Were the other women going through the same thing? She hoped so. There was a clear spot near her bag, so she went over to it and ran through some stretching exercises. While it kept her body busy, she found her mind wandering. What had she gotten herself into?

They’d all been extensively briefed on what they might expect if they were captured. Some of it had sounded distinctly worrisome. She was no virgin, and she’d given enough blowjobs to have acquired a little skill at it, but anal sex was something she’d never even considered. Now it was a distinct possibility, and the thought bothered her. Oh, they’d all been assured that the men hunting them had some experience at this and could be relied on to take precautions, but still… She was sure that it would hurt no matter what. And what if she fell prey to a gang of hunters? The only threesome she’d ever participated in had been back in college, with her roommate and her roommate’s boyfriend. She didn’t remember much of that clearly. They’d all been too drunk for that, and things between her and Carol had been distinctly awkward for weeks afterwards. Some of the videos they’d been shown had not just double penetration, but triple. She broke off her exercises and shuddered. It was something she told herself she could endure if she had to, but she hoped that she wouldn’t have to. The terms of their bet were pretty clear: The last one of them captured won the pot as long as she stuck it out to the end. There were a lot of tiebreakers tacked onto the agreement, but she hoped it wouldn’t come to that. No, she planned not to get caught in the first place.

But what if she
did
get caught? It was a possibility; no matter how determined she was to avoid it. If she was taken her only chance of winning depended on being the sex toy of a bunch of men and hoping that she could stand that longer than the others could. Hell, after they’d caught her and used her they could even sell her in that slave market, and then she’d have to endure whatever her buyer wanted to do to her. It was a daunting prospect, but she just couldn’t bring herself to back out, no matter how smart that might appear to be. No, she just had to finally beat those other women at something.

She sat down on her sleeping bag and sighed. Well, if she couldn’t stop thinking, maybe she could use that to plan what she was going to do tomorrow. Staying in one place probably wasn’t a good idea. Sooner or later someone might stumble across her. Of course, if she moved around that might happen anyway, but sitting still had no appeal. She could hide most of her stuff here and make short forays into the surrounding woods. That would at least keep her busy. And she could check out what might or might not be one of those ‘trading posts’. It should be safe, based on what Lydia had told her earlier. And if she was traveling light, she should be able to avoid, or at least outrun, any hunters she happened to come across. She’d been pretty good at track in high school.

It suddenly occurred to her that while they had all gotten a lot of information on the rules of the hunt, they hadn’t been told much about how to survive in the wilderness. Had that been on purpose? If the men doing the hunting all had experience at that sort of thing wasn’t it kind of unfair to send the women out all unprepared? Well, she wasn’t exactly totally unprepared, thanks to all the reading she’d done, but right now she wished she’d taken the time to get a little hands-on training. It was too late for that now.