Stories – Page 7 – POW's Fiction

Disclaimer: the following story is a purely fictional account. Any relationship to any real person living or dead is coincidental. The narrative contains non-consensual male-on-male sexual activity, restraint, torture, mutilation, and death. It is extremely gory, depressing, and unpleasant (though see the comments for an alternative, less-depressing ending). It is intended for mature readers who wish to view such material, and for whom it is legal to do so. The author in no way condones or promotes such acts in real life.

The author is grateful to slavebladeboi, a reader and friend who agreed to review this story before publication, for the valuable help and insight he provided.

Copyright © 2021 by POW. For spam prevention, an animal name has been added to the author’s e-mail address. Remove the animal name to get the actual address: POWauthor zebra at yahoo dot com. This story may be freely copied and distributed so long as it is copied in its entirety, unchanged, including the author credit information and disclaimer. Other POW stories are available at https://powauthor.wordpress.com. The author welcomes feedback.

Code Of Silence

Note: this story is a sequel, though an indirect one, to Hopeless. If you have not yet read both parts of Hopeless, I recommend doing so before reading Code Of Silence.

1 – Derek
2 – Job Interview
3 – Tour
4 – Dinner Party
5 – Guard Duty
6 – New Arrival
7 – Welcoming Ceremony
8 – Perks Of The Job
9 – Mr. Onyx
10 – Change Of Plans
11 – Silence
12 – Transformation
13 – Coda

1: Derek

When Derek was seven years old, his happiest times were spent with his dog.

Rocky was a German Shepherd mix, alert and playful and everything a seven-year-old boy could want in a dog. Indoors and out, the two spent hours together. Rocky was a bundle of energy and Derek had plenty of his own to match. When the noise level became too much for his mom (or for her boyfriend Cliff, a man Derek mostly tried to steer clear of due to his unpredictable mood swings and generally foul temper), then taking the dog for a walk was the perfect escape. The park was two blocks away and Derek could be trusted to take Rocky there (or vice versa) and return home by suppertime.

The hours they spent at the park were heaven. There was a small stretch of wooded creek running through it which was a source of endless discoveries and entertainments. They would splash through the water on warm days, throw rocks in on cool ones, chase frogs and birds and squirrels, squeal with horrified delight upon finding crawly water critters with more legs on just one side than Derek and Rocky had all together. They would play with a Frisbee on the grassy stretch beyond the woods, or play keep-away or tug-of-war with a stick they found lying under a tree, or chase each other around the playground equipment with Derek clambering high above on the monkey bars while Rocky tried frantically to figure out how to reach him until at last Derek dropped down and the two of them rolled around on the ground in a heap, laughing and licking and wholly wrapped up in a timeless, eternal summer afternoon.

When Derek was fourteen years old, Rocky died. Derek mourned, of course, but in all honesty, he and his pet had been growing apart. Rocky was twelve years old by then, an old man by dog standards. He couldn’t get around as well as he once did. His hips clearly pained him and frolicking at the park had given way to lying in the sunshine. Derek, for his part, had outgrown frolicking as well. He was more interested in hanging with his friends and checking out the tiny breasts that had started sprouting on the girls in school. He loved his dog, of course, and was saddened by Rocky’s passing, but it wasn’t the devastating blow that it would have been two or three years earlier.

Cliff was long gone, succeeded by a steady stream of replacements who stayed a while and then left. Derek stopped bothering to try to remember their names and just avoided his mother’s “friends” as much as possible. That meant avoiding his mother as well, but even at fourteen Derek was experienced enough in the way of how parents should act to know that his mother wasn’t the greatest example. He had learned long ago that voicing an opinion – or even being seen – at home was seldom a good idea. And so he just kept his mouth shut and stayed out of sight, out of mind as much as possible.

When Derek was seventeen years old, he left. There was no reason to stay and every reason to leave. He headed south, down out of New Hampshire and into Massachusetts where he landed in Chelsea, just across the river from Boston. With just a high school diploma to his name, career options were limited but there were opportunities to be found in fields that valued brawn over brains. Derek worked a string of construction jobs and found, somewhat to his surprise, that a few months later none of his clothes fit him any more. He had to spend some of the money he earned on shirts and pants large enough contain his newly-enmuscled physique.

After a couple of years, he left construction for work as a bouncer. The pay in the security industry wasn’t any better than in construction, but it wasn’t any worse either, and it involved a whole lot less sweat and effort. His long years of practice at keeping his thoughts to himself helped, too. He had somehow, without trying to do it, developed a keen observational talent and was able to read people well, while his stony silence and poker face tended to keep others from reading him nearly as effectively. That trait combined with his bulk and brawn made him very effective at his job.

At twenty, he wasn’t yet old enough to drink legally himself, though that never stopped the friendly folks behind the bar from mixing up something nice for him after the place closed down. But he was plenty old enough – and large enough – to serve as an intimidating presence to deter the rowdier customers from acting up. Not always, of course. Some acted up no matter how largely he loomed over them ahead of time. He could handle such troublemakers when he had to, but it was always preferable to defuse a fight before it broke out, which Derek could usually achieve by reading the crowd, positioning himself near where trouble was most likely to break out, and then simply standing there and glaring.

When Derek was twenty-two years old, he met Aaron.

2: Job Interview

Another Saturday night, busy time at the Condor. Derek had had his eye on the guy in the maroon shirt since he’d walked in the door. Long hair, shifty eyes… something about the way the guy held himself set off Derek’s trouble detector. Maroon Shirt was spoiling for a fight.

It took longer to break out than he had expected, over an hour. And it happened when Derek was looking elsewhere. Figures, he thought as he plowed his way through the crowd to the table where the action was already unfolding. I watch the guy like a hawk all night long and he picks the ten seconds I’m distracted to make his move.

He arrived just as Maroon Shirt took a wild, unfocused swing at someone nearby. Everyone at the table was on their feet and Derek noticed that the intended target was not moving toward Maroon but rather away. In the instinctive part of his brain that took over when he was in the heat of battle, Derek marked the target as “victim” rather than “equally guilty”. Such snap judgments were never 100% accurate, but they came close enough. He could always kick the second guy to the curb later if his initial assessment proved faulty. Right now it was time to focus on the guy with the swinging arm.

A flash of light caught Derek’s eye. Something between Maroon’s fingers was twinkling. Knife, he thought on a level below conscious awareness. In theory, everyone was searched for weapons at the door, but this wasn’t the first time some asshole had figured out how to slip something past the screeners. Moving smoothly, surely, without planning anything, he caught the swinging arm as it came to a brief halt at the top of its arc, when it was pointing up and out sideways from Maroon’s right shoulder. Standing behind the would-be brawl-starter, Derek brought the arm down behind the man’s back, then wrenched it upward so that the fist clenching the knife was trapped helplessly between Maroon’s shoulder blades. He pressed forward, forcing Maroon down onto the table and holding him there with his weight.

He might have issued an instruction at that point. “Drop it,” or some such. But Derek was a man of action, not words, and so he simply squeezed Maroon’s wrist until the fingers lost their ability to clench and then deftly disarmed the punk with his left hand. It was over even as the rest of the men gathered around the table were still scrambling to get away. He lifted Maroon up and force-marched him across the crowded room to the door. Maroon kicked and fussed the whole way but he was helpless with his arm pinned as it was, and Derek couldn’t make out a word of his protests over the thumping beat of the music.

At the door, he finally let go of the arm and gave Maroon a shove, not hard enough to send him sprawling but hard enough to convey that he could have. Maroon turned around and started shouting again but Derek held up his hand. “Not my problem,” he said, then spun around and went back inside. Benson, working door duty tonight, would know to not let the jackass back in. The entire episode, from start to finish, had taken less than a minute.

The rest of the night passed uneventfully. By the time closing was drawing near, the crowd was down to about a quarter of its peak. Things were winding down. The music was down to half volume, a subtle signal to the clientele that party time was over; time to take the fun elsewhere.

A man – a customer – came up and stood near Derek, not close, but not far away either. Derek flicked his eyes over to assess for threats, but the guy stood in an open, relaxed stance. He was almost as well-built as Derek, standing just as tall but weighing maybe a few pounds less. He was dressed casually, the colorful hues looking jaunty compared with Derek’s own black “SECURITY” shirt. Seeing that Derek had taken notice of him, he took a few steps closer. Derek watched but said nothing, keeping his face expressionless.

“That was an impressive performance you turned in,” the newcomer said, his words just audible over the not-quite-as-deafeningly-loud music.

Derek allowed the briefest of nods to acknowledge this remark, but said nothing.

“I’m serious. You handled the situation with efficiency, effectiveness, and even grace. It caught my eye. I’d like to talk with you. You got some time after your shift, maybe?”

Ah. So that’s where this was going. “Not interested,” he muttered. If the guy couldn’t make out the words over the noise, that was his problem. He should still be able to read the body language loud and clear.

“Aw, you haven’t even heard what I… oh. You think I’m hitting on you. I shoulda thought of that. You probably get that a lot, a hot guy in a tight T-shirt with muscles from here to Los Angeles.”

Yeah, it did happen a lot. Way too many customers seemed to think that because he was present in a gay bar, he was therefore automatically available for anything anyone wanted to do. It did not seem to occur to them that he was working here; this was a job, a source of income, not a convenient way to pick up tricks. At least this guy was one of the polite ones. They were much better than the sloppy drunks who would stagger up and without warning try to plant a slobbery kiss on his lips or fish his dick out of his pants.

The guy held up his hands, placating. “Look, my name is Aaron, and I’m not trying to pick you up. Don’t get me wrong, you’re hot as fuck, but that’s not what I want to talk to you about. This is strictly professional. I like the way you handled yourself back there. You took care of the problem with a minimum of fuss. My employer could use someone with your skills and temperament.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a card. He held it out to Derek, who continued to stand, arms folded, not even glancing at the offered bit of paper. “I’m serious,” Aaron continued. “Call me. Any time. My employer is actively hiring right now. The pay is superb, the hours are flexible, and the perks are… well, there are definitely perks. I can tell you more details when we talk. Somewhere else.”

Turning to look Aaron in the eye, Derek held his gaze for a few seconds, then reached out a hand to take the card. “I’ll think about it,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Aaron. “Call any time.” With that, he turned and walked out the door.

When he was gone, Derek examined the card. On it was written just a name, Aaron Kindrum, and a phone number. No company name, no address, nothing else you would expect to see on a business card. He thought about dropping it on the floor to get swept up with the rest of the garbage that had accumulated there. But instead he slipped it into his pocket. The Condor gig was good, for sure, but if something better were to come his way, he’d have no hesitation in taking it. Maybe this was worth investigating a little further. Just a little.

“I’m glad you called,” Aaron said after they had seated themselves at one of Bona Fortuna’s outdoor patio tables. “Lunch is on me… or on my boss, rather, so order whatever you’d like.” Derek proceeded to do exactly that, requesting a surf-and-turf special, a steak and a lobster tail that he would never, ever spend so much of his own money on. Aaron didn’t even blink, though he selected something less outrageously expensive for himself.

“So what does your employer do?” Derek asked while they waited for their food to arrive.

Aaron took a pull from his beer before answering. “He runs a specialized supply company,” he said, “providing a very rare product and service to a small but very wealthy set of clients.”

Drugs, possibly, Derek thought. That wasn’t necessarily a deal-breaker, but it certainly made him wary. Young though he might be, he was observant enough to have noticed that while there was money to be found in a business that skated on the thin edge between legal and not – or flat-out blew right past it – there was danger as well. When things went south for such enterprises, it was never, ever the guys at the top who got nailed. It was always the grunts, the guys in roles at the bottom of the org chart where Derek would be, who felt the heat. The big dogs instead got their high-priced lawyers to tie up the courts for years while they “suffered” through house arrest. So there was that to consider, but still… money was money. Aaron hadn’t mentioned a number yet, but the expense account for this lunch suggested there was plenty to go around.

Out loud he said, “And what’s your role in the organization?”

“Same as yours would be: security. We protect the business’s assets and help out on the service end. Assisting the clients, making sure they get the experience they’ve paid for.”

That answer didn’t quite fully mesh with the drugs idea, but no alternative came immediately to mind. He took a swig of his soda and asked, “What does the product need protection from?”

Aaron laughed at that. “Itself, mostly. You’ll see later if you want.” He proceeded to talk then, still in very vague terms, about the details of the job. As he had said back at the Condor, the hours were flexible. It seemed there were eight men on staff; Derek would be the ninth. As long as they maintained round-the-clock coverage on the still-unspecified “assets” with at least two of them on duty at all times with a couple more on call to handle customer visits, they were free to work out the specific shifts among themselves. Shifts could be as short as two hours or as long as twelve, and housing was provided. In fact, though living at the facility was not mandatory, all eight of the current security staff chose to do so.

“Saves a bundle on rent,” Aaron said. “I mean, the pay’s already real good, but not having to shell out five hundred bucks a month just to keep a roof over your head, plus utilities… that’s just gravy. Besides, it makes the scheduling easier – no commute at all. You just roll out of bed two minutes before you go on duty and then walk down the hall. Oh, and there’s a gym that we all have access to. We’re encouraged to use it, in fact. Keep those intimidating muscles in shape, right?”

He talked a bit more about the other staff, assuring Derek that he would fit right in among them. Their food arrived during this monologue and he paused to eat for a while. While Derek was plowing through his meal, Aaron asked about his past experience, which Derek mostly answered in two- and three-word sentences around mouthfuls of meat: construction, then security. Two years at the Condor. Side gigs at various festivals and events. The usual, in other words. Aaron seemed unsurprised by the answers, then turned to non-work topics, probably to make the lunch feel less like an interview and more like a casual chat.

“So… you a local guy? Got family here?”

“Naw,” Derek mumbled around a lump of buttery lobster. “Mom’s up in New Hampshire. Haven’t seen her for a while.”

“Just you, huh? Girlfriend waiting for you at home?”

Derek shook his head.

“Wow… not even a roommate, then?”

There were two roommates, yeah. Or housemates, rather. But the relationship was strictly one of minimizing the rent payment, not anything resembling friendship. Days or weeks might go by between encounters. As long as they didn’t get in Derek’s way or wake him up when he was sleeping, he never noticed either of them. And the reverse was almost certainly true as well. “Not really, no,” he answered.

“Hmm,” Aaron grunted, returning his attention to his sandwich.

They ate a while longer in silence. When Derek had at last downed both the surf and the turf portions of his enormous meal, he sat back to find Aaron looking at him.

“Listen, Derek,” he said, “I think you’d be a real good fit for our operation. Like I said before, I liked the way you handled yourself at the Condor. You used just the right amount of force, no more than was needed, no less. Where I work, we sometimes find ourselves in situations where… mmm… extreme persuasion is called for. We need guys who can dish out a beatdown, in other words. But. A lotta guys, they don’t know when to quit, right? They get off on the violence, maybe. And what we don’t need is someone who goes berserk when he’s delivering a beatdown and ends up doing way more damage than he needs to. You showed me that you’ve got what we need. You can dish it out but you know when to stop.”

Derek nodded at this. He still had no idea, even after all of Aaron’s talking, what the product was, nor what sort of security it would need. Maybe his first guess about drugs was accurate after all? That would fit: maybe he’d be dealing with itchy-fingered customers, junkies who needed their fix so bad that they had to be reminded to pay for the product before snorting it up their addict noses. You’d want to convince them to play by the rules, but not hurt them so bad that they were no longer able to be customers.

“Tell you what,” Aaron said. “Why don’t you come by for a tour? I’ll show you the place, you see what you think. You can see the assets for yourself then. My boss will want to talk to you, of course. If he likes you as much as I think he will, he might even make you an offer right away. I can tell you this much… the newest guy we have has less experience than you do, and the doc offered him what I think are very generous terms.” He named a figure that was more than twice what Derek was currently pulling in.

That was tempting indeed. The promise of steady shifts was alluring as well. The Condor only needed muscle on the weekends, leaving him struggling to fill the other days with an income stream. The product, whatever it was, was almost certainly illegal, and that was a factor that made him wary but wasn’t enough for him to turn down the offer before one was even made. And the lunch had been tasty, and he had nowhere else to be this afternoon… he decided he could spare another hour or two.

It turned out the place was only a five-minute walk away and not in the sleazy sort of neighborhood Derek would have expected of a drug-runners’ den. It wasn’t exactly upscale, though, either. The building was large and mostly windowless, with bland tan stone sides and nothing whatsoever indicating that it was a place of business. Not surprising since Derek was more convinced than ever that the product was, at best, right on the blurry line between what the law allowed and what it didn’t, and more likely squarely on the far side of that line.

3: Tour

Aaron’s next words confirmed that hunch. He paused right at a bland grey steel door. “Now… one thing before we go in. You’re going to see some sensitive trade secrets on the tour. We don’t want these secrets to get out to the world. Now, I’ve just spent almost an hour having lunch with you, and I can tell you are a man who knows how to keep his mouth shut. Hell, I don’t think you said twenty words the whole meal! All I’m saying is… we would appreciate it if you would consider what you’re about to learn as confidential.”

“You want me to sign some paper or something?” Derek asked.

A big smile spread across Aaron’s face. “Noooo, no no no. We don’t like to work that way, forms and lawyers and all that shit. No, we’re an old-fashioned business with an old-fashioned mindset. We believe in trust. If a man gives us his word about something, then that is good enough. So… do I have your word that you will keep what you are about to learn to yourself?”

Now Derek’s mind started racing down other pathways. This didn’t sound like a drug-running operation any more. This sounded organized. Mafia-like, perhaps even actual mafia. In which case… was it already too late to back out? If he said “you know what, I changed my mind, this isn’t for me,” would he turn to go and only get two or three steps down the sidewalk before feeling the thud of bullets into his spine?

He could ask, but what good would that do? He couldn’t trust whatever answer Aaron might say.

“Yeah,” he said. “You have my word.” He meant it, too. If he didn’t want to be a part of whatever he saw inside, it was no business of his. Keeping quiet wouldn’t be a problem.

“That’s good enough for me,” Aaron said. “C’mon in.” He keyed in a long combination on an electronic pad set next to the door, then pulled the door open and preceded Derek into the building.

They climbed a set of steel stairs, their footsteps echoing all around them as they wound back and forth and upward. On the third floor, Aaron exited the stairwell into a hallway whose floor was covered in a sumptuous carpet and whose walls were tastefully papered, hung here and there with flatteringly-lit art and dimpled with niches containing decorative urns or sprays of greenery. It was like entering a different world, the sort of posh hotel that Derek had seen only in movies, never in real life.

“This is the customer-facing space,” Aaron explained. “Some of our clients go for the whole ‘elegant’ thing. Others don’t care so much – they barely notice what the hall looks like on their way to one of the playrooms.” The space he found himself in was not at all consistent with a drug-running operation. This Ritz-Carlton hallway was the last place he would expect some quivering junkie to come looking for a fix. He remembered now that Aaron had said the clientele was high-end. So the “product” was presumably not crack or heroin, then… so what was it? And… playrooms?

Aaron swung one of the doors open. Inside was what appeared to be an operating room, all stark white and stainless steel. Aaron’s words confirmed the impression. “This is our OR, or one of them. This one’s for the customers to use, which means it’s mostly for show although the equipment is all real enough. The doctor – that’s my boss – doesn’t use this one, though. He does his work in the other one, down on the first floor. That one sure sees a lot of action, lemme tell you.”

Derek nodded as if this string of words made sense, looking around the room. There seemed to be more sharp, pointy instruments than would typically be needed in such a setting, and the table and chair that were set out for the patient to occupy were both equipped with a surprisingly large number of tan leather straps. Aaron didn’t go in past the doorway, and so neither did Derek. After a quarter of a minute, Aaron closed the door and they continued on.

The next room was dominated by a large wrestling mat, and the one after that contained a gym. The next two were decorated as a bedrooms – very expensively-furnished bedrooms. After that came a jail cell, or rather, several of them, a small maze of barred walls and doors. At the sight of this Derek let out an breath of air, not quite a fully-formed word. “Wha…?” Aaron glanced over at him, a hint of a smirk on his face. “For prison scenes,” he said, though that didn’t alleviate Derek’s confusion at all.

He closed the prison room door and gestured down the hall. “The other three are all variations on your basic dungeon theme. So… have you figured what our business is yet? I’m guessing not. You have a pretty good poker face, but I think I can read you well enough to say that you haven’t connected all the dots yet. Am I right?”

Derek shrugged. Clearly he wasn’t supposed to have figured it out. “Yeah, you got me.”

“Sex,” Aaron said. “Sex and bondage. And a bit of roughhousing.”

Ah. Not drugs at all. Prostitution. That was the illegal bit, the part that called for all the secrecy. Derek nodded slowly, absorbing what he had seen and heard so far. So it wasn’t junkies who needed to be given reminders of proper behavior, it was johns. Only… no, something still didn’t add up. This was clearly not your basic sleazeball rooms-rented-by-the-hour operation. Serious cash was changing hands here if this one hallway was anything to judge by, not to mention each of the elaborate “playrooms”. This was high-end, so…

“Ah,” Derek said. “So there’s girls here…?”

Aaron laughed. “Not quite, no. Not boys either, at least not any more. I’ll take you to see the assets now. Usually we take the stairs, but since you’re a guest and all…” He pressed a button that summoned an elevator and they stepped inside.

“I’m sure I don’t need to remind you,” he continued as they descended, “not to say anything about this outside these walls, so I won’t. But I do want to say this: what you’re about to see… they look like people, but you need to remember that they are not people. They aren’t even animals. They are things, they are furniture, they are objects that happen to be able to get up and move around and make noises that sound like words. You’ve got a good poker face, like I said, and you’re gonna need to keep that poker face on for this next part of the tour. No matter what you see, no matter what happens, you keep your poker face on. If the assets detect even a hint, a whiff of an idea that you have a weakness, then they will zero in on it and exploit it. You need to keep your armor on full, and not just now, but every time you’re on duty. The pay in this job is excellent, like I said, and the perks are awesome and the work isn’t hard… but you do need to have the right mindset to do it.”

Derek’s mind started racing, suddenly realizing what the “product” was likely to be. He also realized that this was the real job interview. The casual questions at lunch were just filler: he was going to be judged on how well he handled himself in the next few minutes, and an offer was either going to be extended or not on that basis. He could feel his stomach starting to do somersaults inside him. But a poker face? Yeah. He’d had a lot of practice at keeping his emotions to himself. That he could do.

The doors opened and the stepped out into a space that was much less lavish than the hall above them had been. Bare walls, hard floor, harsh industrial lighting. Aaron led the way down a short hall, then another, until they came to a space where a man stood outside a barred doorway.

“This is Brogan,” Aaron said. “Brogan, this is Derek, here to take a look around.” The two shook hands. Brogan gripped his hand firmly while giving him a long, searching look.

“Harris is monitoring from the control room. We’re gonna take a look inside.” He looked Derek in the eye. “Poker face,” he said.

With that, he punched in some numbers on the door’s keypad and the lock sprang open with a loud clang. He swung the door open and they stepped through. Derek set his face like stone and prepared himself for anything.

The room had the same harsh lighting, hard floors, and industrial white walls as the hallways, though these walls were smeared and stained. It was the smell that Derek noticed first, an odor of locker room mixed with barnyard. The air was permeated with the stench of piss and dirt and the stale sweat of unwashed bodies.

Then he noticed the bodies themselves. There were five of them. Three were lying on thin mats on the floor, one was pacing, one was sitting on a toilet at the far end of the room. All eyes had snapped to the door at the sound of the lock opening and thus Derek and Aaron were the center of attention as they strode slowly in.

The third thing Derek noticed was the way the bodies all seemed slightly misshapen, oddly proportioned in some way. It was only when he took a solid look at the one who had been pacing and was now staring back at him like a rabbit caught in the glare of headlights that he realized why: there were no arms. Each shoulder ended in a stump where the arm had been removed right up to the armpit. The skin had been folded over the space where the arm had been, leaving only a puckered dimple at the center.

“Asshole, c’mere,” Aaron barked. One of the prone bodies rose and walked over, head down, eyes averted. Like the other, this one had no arms… none of them did, Derek realized. And all of them were naked. And he realized that the term “asshole” wasn’t just a careless insult – it was emblazoned across the chest of the man walking towards them. No, not a man, Aaron had said to not think of the “assets” as men, but that was tough to do when they very obviously looked human (though maimed) and understood commands and moved around the way humans moved. The man… the thing… had been scarred across the chest, right between the shoulders where his arms should have hung, by seven large capital letters. They looked like they had been branded on, spelling out the word “ASSHOLE” for all the world to see. Derek swallowed hard, managing to hold his poker face but feeling his guts twisting and churning inside.

Asshole finished his shambling walk and stood before them, eyes still down on the floor.

“Bang your head into the wall,” Aaron commanded. To Derek’s astonishment, Asshole did exactly that, taking two steps over to the wall by the door and then slamming his forehead into the cinderblock, hard enough that if Derek had done it he’d be seeing stars. Reeling slightly, Asshole returned to stand in front of Aaron.

“Spread your legs.” Asshole did. “More.” Obediently, the ankles moved farther apart until Asshole’s legs were spread so far that he could barely keep his balance, especially with no arms to assist.

“Beg the new guy to kick you in the nuts,” Aaron said. Immediately, Asshole turned his face toward Derek, still not looking up from the floor, and mumbled something that sounded like complete garble.

“Again,” Aaron ordered. “So he can understand you.” The creature spoke again; this time the words sounded recognizable, but only because Derek knew what they were supposed to be: “pleahhh kick me inda nuhhh”. Something was wrong with Asshole’s mouth, or else he had some kind of speech defect. He stood there waiting, legs spread obscenely wide, somehow not flinching or cringing away in a manner that Derek could not imagine himself having the strength to do. The silence stretched on.

“Up to you, man,” Aaron said, this time addressing Derek. “If you don’t do it, I will. One way or another, those balls are taking a boot.”

Oh. Right. This was an interview. There was only one correct response. Still not allowing his face to show any hint of his thoughts, Derek took aim. Up until now, he had been avoiding looking at the groins of the naked men… no, things… out of some reflex politeness, or out of long habit of not staring at other guys’ junk lest people get the wrong idea, but now he lowered his eyes to line up his foot. He was startled to discover one more deformity: Asshole had no dick. The balls were there, but the dick was gone, all that was left was a tiny stump. The creature’s balls dangled from its body unshielded by the fleshy tube that they would usually be parked behind. The sight gave him a brief moment’s pause, but only a moment’s. It’s a thing, he reminded himself. And it was going to get bashed no matter what Derek did. He regained his poise and took aim once more. His booted foot swung up and made contact.

Asshole crumpled. He totally lost his balance and sank to the floor, body curling in on itself in reaction to the assault. Aaron bent down to inspect the result. He forced Asshole’s knees apart then groped the freshly-battered testicles with his fingers. Asshole mewled like a wounded kitten and flailed the stumps of his arms around.

“Nice work,” he said, rising up from his crouch. “Clearly hard enough to register in that piece of trash’s little pea-brain, but not enough to burst ’em open. See, I knew you had the right sense of balance for this job. Now… as for the perks I was telling you about… Shithead, get over here.” The one who had been pacing obeyed immediately. This one, Derek saw, had no problem staring defiantly into Aaron’s face. Like Asshole, his name had been branded across his chest.

“Suck my dick,” Aaron commanded. Shithead gave him an insolent glare, but only for an instant before beginning to drop to his knees and comply. Derek had figured out by now that sex was the point of all that he was seeing, but was nevertheless surprised to have it happen here, now. Presumably the “product” was intended for the customers to use, paying extravagantly for the privilege, so to give that away “for free”, so to speak, to the hired help just seemed wrong. And yet, as he thought about it, as Shithead sank down to his knees, as Aaron opened up his fly and let his half-hard dick flop out, as Shithead opened up to embrace it with his lips, he realized there really was no cost to the operation at all. It wasn’t like Shithead was getting “used up” the way that a line of cocaine would be if one of the security guards snorted it. Shithead could suck this dick, indeed the dicks of all the guards, and still be put to work servicing paying customers exactly the same way a minute later.

Aaron fucked the deformed creature’s face for a minute or two. He made sure to pull Shithead’s face in close once, jamming his cock into Shithead’s throat and prompting choked-off gagging sounds to emerge, muffled by the way that Shithead’s mouth was pressed into Aaron’s crotch. At last, he relented and resumed pistoning. It went on long enough that Derek started to grow uncomfortable, having one of those “what do I do with my hands while I’m standing here?” moments, and wondering whether this was also part of the interview, if he would be expected to face-fuck one of these pathetic wretches to prove he could. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that – he started having visions of his cock failing to get hard, because why would it have any reason to stiffen up when he was turned on by girls, not guys, let alone maimed, deformed guys? These were the thoughts that were swirling around in his head while the rest of the creatures in the room paid no attention to what was being done to one of their number, as if this kind of thing happened every day, which meant it probably did.

Shithead, meanwhile, tried to snatch breaths when he could, drool spilling out of his mouth. Aaron must have felt some soak into his pant leg because he shoved Shithead away. Either that or he just wanted to manufacture an excuse to not take the forced blow job all the way. “Aw, fuck, you got my pants wet, you piece of shit!” He shoved Shithead away, sending him tumbling backward to the floor. Shithead landed well considering he had no arms to break his fall with. Aaron zipped up and nodded toward the door.

He led the way back out through the barred door, leaving the roomful of pitiable things behind them. Derek found his heart was pounding hard in his chest, but he still carefully made sure nothing showed on his face, thankful that he had had plenty of practice at it.

The made their way up a flight of stairs. “One last person to talk to – Dr. Cresh himself, the leader of the operation. Question for ya: you gay?”

Derek shook his head, then managed to get enough control over his voice to trust himself to supplement the gesture with words that he hoped came out sounding casual. “Naw. Is that a job requirement?”

“Heh. No. Of the eight of us, four are gay – including yours truly – two are straight, and two are bi. All we look for is enough of an open mind to not piss off the customers. You’re obviously comfortable enough to work security for a gay bar, so I don’t expect that’ll be a problem. But as far as that perk I was showing you goes? You’ll find it just doesn’t matter. See, those things aren’t men, so the whole idea of gay or straight doesn’t apply. Think of them as like sex toys – vibrators or sleeves to wrap around your dick while you jerk off. Sex toys aren’t gay or straight or anything else; they’re just things.”

Maybe. But those particular toys very clearly used to be men. Derek wasn’t sure yet how much of a factor that might turn out to be.

They reached a closed door. Aaron rapped twice, smartly. “Come in,” a voice from within called.

“Dr. Cresh,” Aaron said, entering, “I’d like you to meet Derek Wright. Derek, this is Dr. Cresh.” They shook hands and the doctor gestured for him to take a seat.

“Thank you, Aaron. Welcome, Derek. Aaron has spoken very highly of you.”

Derek heard the closing of the door behind him and realized Aaron had left the room. “Ah… thank you.”

“This place is not what you were expecting, I’m sure. By which I mean: whatever you were expecting, it was almost certainly not this. Be assured, I have a fair idea of what you are feeling right now. Aaron’s job during the recruitment process is to bring you in and act as if everything you’re seeing here is perfectly normal, knowing of course that it’s not. He then monitors your reactions, seeing how well you keep your cool, that sort of thing. And you passed his screening. If you had not, he would have knocked on my door and asked you to wait in the hallway while he spoke with me for a brief moment. Then he would have returned and regretfully informed you that I was occupied with another matter and escorted you out, making vague promises of getting in touch later that would never come to pass.”

He clapped his hand once, sharply. “But! That is not the case. You have demonstrated sufficient self-control to earn Aaron’s approval, and I find him to be an excellent judge of character. Now we come to my role in the process, where we can dispense with the pretense that there is nothing unusual going on here. You’ve seen the product that I provide my clients, and we both know that it is very much out of the ordinary. I’ll try to answer some of the questions you have before you even ask them, but if any remain after that, please do ask.

“First, the assets in my stable have all been modified in a way to ensure that they pose no danger to my clients. Their arms have been removed as have all their teeth. Their gums have been reshaped so as to provide a roughly penis-sized hole just behind their lips so that even if they clamp their mouths shut, they can do no harm. Second, they have all been trained to obey any instruction given to them, and I do mean any. Aaron will have given you a demonstration, I’m sure, but you’ll need to know the reason why they are all so obedient. They know that if they are given an instruction, even an instruction to hurt themselves, they need to do it or else I will arrange for the instruction to be carried out in a way that causes them immeasurably more pain than they would have felt if they had complied on their own.”

The doctor leaned back in his chair. “This is relevant to you because the security staff is often involved in the implementation of that corrective pain. If you accept this job, then one of your roles will be to hurt the assets when necessary, and to do so in a very precise way. You have demonstrated that this is something you are capable of doing and that makes you valuable to me. As we talk, consider whether this is something you feel you would be willing to do.

“Finally, to answer the question you probably most want to ask but can’t think of a way to phrase tactfully: no, none of the occupants of my stable are volunteers. I did once have a willing subject approach me with the intention of undergoing the modifications voluntarily, but it seems that his fantasies exceeded his capability to handle them. He changed his mind rather early in the conversion program and, unfortunately, did not complete it. Approximately half of the enrollees don’t make it all the way through; it’s a rather grueling program. Aside from that one volunteer, all the others were abducted from their lives and made to disappear. I have a separate team that handles the external cleanup, but internally, you would be expected to take part in the transformation process of new subjects as they come in. Again, as we talk, consider whether this is a duty you consider yourself capable of fulfilling.

“So. That should cover the main points. I like to get that out of the way early in the discussion with a prospective candidate. Otherwise we spend long, awkward minutes tiptoeing around the elephant in the room, which is that this entire operation is based on a premise that, in the words of a previous candidate, is ‘seriously fucked up’.”

Derek’s mind, already spinning from the episode in the cell downstairs and the disclosures about the lives of those… things… and how they came to be there, nevertheless got hung up most on Dr. Cresh’s language. Hearing the word “fucked” spoken in his cultured, highbrow voice was jarring, out of place, like a fart at a fancy dinner party and somehow that wrong-footed him more than any of the rest of it. Which was ludicrous, as he thought about it. All the crazy shit you’ve seen and heard in the last hour, that’s the thing you decide to focus on? He snapped his head back and forth once quickly to clear it. Dr. Cresh was still talking.

“That’s the job in a nutshell. Monitor the stable, apply corrective measures as needed. Escort individual assets to and from their appointments with clients. Assist clients as needed during their appointments, though this is seldom a burden. Most clients rarely require assistance and in fact prefer privacy during their visits here. Work out your specific duty shifts with the other staff; you’ll find that we are very flexible in that regard. Pete keeps track of the scheduling, so coordinate with him.

“We do have gatherings on special occasions. Dinner parties with many clients in attendance at once. These don’t happen often, but when they do I ask that all staff be available to assist with setup, food service, and tidying up afterward. And finally, you would assist me as needed as I develop new additions to the stable. This is, perhaps, the most challenging aspect of the work and I would not expect you to take part in that right away. We’ll slowly acclimate you to those duties.”

He then named an hourly rate that was even higher than the one Aaron had mentioned over lunch, something like two and a half times his Condor gig’s rate. “Work as much or as little as you would like, subject to coordination with the rest of the staff to ensure that we have coverage at all times. So. What do you think? Do you have any questions for me?”

Derek, never much of a talker, thought for a bit. On the one hand, the money was incredible. Even if he worked only twenty hours a week, he’d soon be swimming in more cash than he’d ever had before. Working thirty or forty would just be gravy on top of that.

On the other hand, there was the work itself. Hurting troublemakers at a club was one thing; they were asking for it. These guys, though… they had been abducted from their regular lives, mutilated, turned into depraved sex objects. They hadn’t done anything to deserve a beating from him… or had they? Derek realized he had no idea what the history of any of the victims might be. Maybe they’d been murderers or rapists or child molesters, now enduring their just, if off-the-books, punishment.

But no, that didn’t seem likely. The doc had said the guys had been “made to disappear.” That didn’t sound legal no matter how you sliced it. No, tempting as the money was, it would be best if he had no part of this. And yet, he couldn’t quite bring himself to say no, not just yet. Something was nagging at the back of his head and he had learned to trust his instincts. Better to keep the doctor talking.

“No girls, then?” he asked.

“Ah, no,” Dr. Cresh replied. “My operation is a very specialized one, catering to men with specific tastes. You will find no females here, neither in the stable nor among the clientele, not so much as a secretary. This is an all-male establishment… although it would be a stretch to apply the word ‘male’ to the occupants of the stable. While that term might have been accurate prior to their modifications, at this point it would be better to think of them as inanimate objects. Things, not men.”

Derek nodded. That was what Aaron had said. “Can you tell me more about the training process?” he asked.

The doctor did, at length. Derek half-paid attention to the words but mostly wanted a chance to think. What he heard out of the half that was paying attention to the doctor’s words was horrifying: men not unlike himself ripped from their former lives and forced into captivity, torture, and sexual service. Most stomach-turning of all, they were required to perform their own amputations, prying out their own teeth, lopping off their fingers and then hands and then whole arms, learning with each removal that if they did it themselves they would receive painkillers and comfort, but if they refused, the doctor – or the aides – would do the mutilation anyway, and it would be brutal and barbaric and far, far more painful.

At the same time, the other half of his brain was trying to make sense of the nagging sense of wrongness that he was feeling. It was difficult because everything about this whole setup was fundamentally wrong so it was difficult to identify what was probably one small out-of-placeness that his subconscious had picked up on hidden among the rest of the appalling inhumanity of the operation. But it was there, he was nearly certain. His ability to read people and situations was generally accurate, though often his subconscious mind couldn’t put what it had detected into words. Something here just wasn’t adding up…

“… as I said earlier, only about half of those who start the program complete it. The rest simply don’t have the fortitude to learn the necessary lessons.”

“What happens to them?” Derek asked, fairly sure he knew what the answer would be.

Sure enough, the doctor cocked his head at him as if in puzzlement that he would ask a question with such an obvious answer. “There are certain among my clientele who specialize in the disposal of such unfortunates,” he replied. “It actually works out rather well. The asset has already been removed from its former life so there are no awkward questions to be answered. The client can take as much time with the actual disposal as he wishes. And, not inconveniently, they pay me for the privilege! It’s an effective way to recycle products that are unsuitable for the main business. No loose ends, everything tidily wrapped up.”

And then he got it. It wasn’t due to anything Dr. Cresh had said. It was more a matter of several little pieces falling into the right places. The whole picture was still incomplete, but the pieces that he could see were arranged in such a way that he could deduce what the rest of the puzzle must look like. Sure enough, as he suspected when he was about to walk into this building, he was in grave danger. And it was already far too late to back out.

He was being recruited for a job here, that much was true. What he wasn’t being told was what would happen if he turned the job down, but his subconscious had figured it out. If he said no, he would then be recruited for a different role in the operation. A much less pleasant one. And there would be no option to decline that second offer.

Shithead, back in the pen where the victims were housed… he had to be a previous guard recruit, but one who had made the wrong choice. He had the build for it, taller and broader than any of the other mangled wretches in that pit. He may even have been the one who had described this operation as “seriously fucked up,” the guttural words that sounded so out of place on Dr. Cresh’s cultured lips. The insolent way Shithead had glared at Aaron before dropping to his knees… that was the look of a man who, deep down, still considered himself a man, not a beaten-down wreck. He still believed himself Aaron’s equal, though he knew exactly how far he could push his attitude without getting punished for it.

Then there was the way Brogan had sized Derek up when they were shaking hands… that wasn’t a “welcome aboard” look, that was a “wonder which side of the door this one’s gonna end up on” look.

Oh. And back at lunch. Aaron had asked those oddly personal questions. At the time it had just seemed like get-to-know-you fluff, but now… he realized his answers had basically told Aaron “I have no friends or family here. You can make me disappear and no one will notice.” And Aaron would have taken that bit of data straight to Dr. Cresh.

Derek had no doubt that at this moment, Aaron and two or three buddies were standing right outside the office door. If he accepted the offer, they would be all smiles and good cheer and great-to-have-you-on-board. If he declined, on the other hand, they would easily overpower him with their advantage of numbers, and then his one-way trip to hell would begin.

All this flashed through his mind in an instant. The doctor was still wrapping up his speech. The words were all benign enough, refined phrases masking the real story of how defectives who couldn’t make the cut were tortured and slaughtered by some sick bastard who probably skull-fucked the corpse before it was even cool. Possibly again afterward.

There really was only one option. And he would have to keep his poker face on not just now but for the foreseeable future. But first, one small, delicately probing question. He waited until the doctor had finished speaking, then nodded thoughtfully for a few seconds.

“Well, it’s a tempting offer. Very tempting. You mind if I go home and sleep on it, let you know in a day or two?”

Dr. Cresh steepled his index fingers. “That’s certainly a reasonable request and ordinarily I would of course agree. Unfortunately, we have an event coming up shortly – tomorrow night, in fact – and I very much need to bring the new hire on board as soon as possible. You are the top candidate for the position, and the job is yours if you want it. But I’m afraid I’ll need to ask you to make a decision sooner rather than later so that I have time to follow up with the next man on the list should that be necessary. I hope you understand.”

Oh, Derek understood all right. There was no next man on the list. Those calm, measured words were code for “either take the job now or spend the next few weeks slicing your own limbs off one bit at a time.” Like it or not, his life had just changed. Any plans he might have had – not that there were any, really – had just been thrown out the window and replaced.

“Well, then,” he said, because what else could he say? “I accept.”

4: Dinner Party

There was paperwork to sign, though remarkably little of it. It seemed the doctor’s cover for his underground activities was an import business specializing in small but expensive items – embroidered carpets from the Middle East and Central Asia, hand-crafted porcelain elephants from India, carved hardwood figurines from South America, silk prints from China and Japan. Derek, along with the other security staff, were paid to guard these “priceless treasures”, all taxes withheld, all completely aboveboard.

The treasures, of course, were actually cheap junk picked up at yard sales and secondhand stores. Clients would purchase a piece of trash for a vastly inflated price, and receive “free with purchase” an off-the-books hour or two or a whole night with their choice of armless, dickless, toothless torture toy.

As Derek expected, Aaron and two others named Moose and John, were waiting for him outside the door. They greeted him with hearty handshakes and claps on the back when Dr. Cresh told them the good news, that Derek would be joining them, effective immediately. Derek smiled back, determined to play the role to its fullest. There really was no other choice.

As Dr. Cresh had stated, his initial duties were light. The rest of the day was taken up by the paperwork and with meeting the rest of the staff. There was Aaron, of course, and Brogan who he had met at the stable door, then Moose and John from his “welcoming committee”. There was Pete, who acted as the doctor’s right-hand man, organizing the rest of the staff and making sure things ran smoothly. The others were Harris, Roger, and Kerchek, a man whose gigantic size made him stand out even among the other beefy members of the security team.

That night he rode the T back to his rented room to sleep, unsure whether they would even let him out of the building. But they did, still all smiles and see-you-tomorrows, although there was one serious moment when Pete took him aside and reminded him of the need for discretion about what went on inside these walls. Derek assured him that he had no reason to go running his mouth, and that seemed to be enough. Either they trusted him, or else his reading of the situation had been way off… or else he was being monitored and if he didn’t behave they would hunt him down and then it would be Door Number Two for him. He lay awake a long time on his lumpy, uncomfortable mattress and spun out what-if scenarios in his mind. By the time he fell asleep, he had convinced himself that the only practical option was to grit his teeth and see it through, hoping that the blood and gore wouldn’t be too much for him.

The following day he returned to the unmarked facility, this time through the front entrance. The “exotic imports” shop was closed, but there was a bell, which he rang as he had been instructed to do. After a long wait, Harris came to the door and let him in. The shop was a dense, crowded space, filled with shelves containing artfully arranged, tastefully lit trash-trinkets. They were through the display of crap quickly enough and then descending the stairs to the basement, where the preparations were underway for the evening’s banquet.

He helped out with moving tables into position and then covering them with white linen cloths. Then chairs and a podium, then plates and silverware and napkins for the tables. A few bulky furniture items whose purpose Derek couldn’t guess at. Nothing too strenuous. After that, Pete took him aside.

“I want you on door duty tonight,” he said, handing Derek a piece of paper with maybe eighteen lines written on it in an elegant script. “John’ll be with you to start, but once most of the guests have come I’ll need him down here and it’ll be just you at the front. Your task: do not admit anyone unless he’s got an invitation with his name on it and that name is on this list. No one, got it? If they do not have an invitation, they do not get in. If they’re not on the list, they do not get in. I don’t care how much cash they flash under your nose or what they threaten you with. They do not get in.”

“We expecting trouble?” Derek asked. If so, it would be good to have a bit of a heads-up as to who or what to be on the lookout for.

“Naw. Not tonight. We rarely get gate-crashers, but we run a tight ship here, and I want to make sure you know: you are the authority here. Someone tells you ‘oh, but I know Dr. Cresh would let me in if he just knew blah blah blah,’ that’s just too bad. They gotta take it up with the doctor tomorrow because he’s busy tonight and does not want to be disturbed. You will not get into any trouble by not letting someone in no matter how much they claim they’re gonna nail your ass to the wall if you don’t. Doc’s got your back.”

That warning kept Derek on high alert, but door duty turned out to be uneventful. As evening fell, he and John went up to the shop entrance and waited outside. As guests came up in ones and twos seeking admittance, they checked invitations against the names on the list. Every one was a match. One of them would unlock the door and escort the new arrival downstairs, then return to the post. When there were only two names left unchecked, John headed downstairs himself. Derek retreated inside and watched the door from there.

It was boring duty. He kept the shop lights off so the glow wouldn’t illuminate him and make him visible through the plate glass windows. In the gloom, he could see carpets and elephants, carved eagles and owls and hawks, a vast and cramped array of trinkets and tchotchkes. The basement room where the party was being held was far enough away that only the loudest sounds reached him: an occasional roar of laughter. A clang of dropped metal. Twice, a blood-curdling scream that faded to a harsh bark before disappearing entirely. Poker face, he reminded himself. One or more of the deformed freaks from the cell was getting hurt for the enjoyment of the men he had just admitted. Not my problem. Nothing I can do about it.

The tantalizing smell of barbecue wafted up through the stairwell and hallway. Derek, along with the rest of the staff, had eaten already – cold cut sandwiches and pasta salad – so the aroma was just a distraction rather than an overwhelming, mouth-watering need. He sat, then stood, then paced, then sat again, knowing that at this late hour of the evening the last two guests would not be arriving but there to greet them if by some chance they did.

Hours of dull sentry work later, the guests departed all within about ten minutes of one another, coming up the stairs in ones and twos and filing out wordlessly through the glass shopfront door. Derek kept count as they left, and when all were accounted for, he made sure the door was locked and then headed downstairs. The other guys had furniture cleanup already well in hand, so Derek pitched in with the dishes, scrubbing pots and pans and metal grill grates.

Having had enough silence and solitude to sate even the staunchest of introverts, he tried to strike up a conversation with a guy dressed in a chef’s apron wiping down the counters in the kitchen area who introduced himself as Christian.

“So what was the occasion tonight?” Derek asked, elbow-deep in dishwater.

“The usual,” Christian replied. “Coupla washouts from the training program.” Ah. So not wretches from the cell, but wretches who were once destined for the cell but who now would never see the inside of it. Derek kept scrubbing as the awareness that two lives had been snuffed out tonight sank in. Not my problem, he mentally repeated, a mantra to keep him sane. Nothing I can do about it. Those guys were dead men already, even before tonight’s festivities. Now their bodies had just caught up with the fact.

Keeping his poker face firmly in place, he tried to sound nonchalant. “Mmm. Doc told me those usually get taken care of private-like?”

“Yeah, usually,” came the response. “Tonight he happened to have two at once. That’s why the banquet.”

Sure. Why not? When you’ve got two bodies to snuff, it’s a party! Might as well invite the neighbors over, make an evening out of it. Decorate the place, hire a band, get a caterer, the works. Sick fuckers. That’s why I pulled door duty, he realized. This is them easing me into the job. It was a good call. Even with all his practice at keeping his emotions in check, he would have had a hard time watching cold-blooded murder taking place right in front of him. One day, no doubt, he would be called on to participate in a more active way than he had tonight. But they were giving him time to work up to it. And he would need to work up to it or else he would be the one on the slaughtering block. He steeled his spine and tried to keep his voice casual. Talk about something else.

“Musta been a nice spread. Sure smelled good from upstairs.” Derek dunked a batch of grill utensils with charred-on bits of meat clinging to them into the soapy water. “What’d you guys have, ribs?”

There was no reply and when Derek turned to see if the chef was still there, he saw him staring back with a puzzled expression on his face. As Derek watched, the puzzled look turned into one of calculation. “Yeah, we served ribs,” Christian replied at last. “Some thighs and shoulders too.” He smirked, just a hint of turned-up corners at the edges of his mouth. Then he left, carrying a heavy tray of silverware out the door.

That’s when it sank in.

Derek dropped the meat-crusted spatulas and forks as though they had seared his hands. He abruptly felt like he was going to hurl, that the sandwiches he had eaten hours before were going to come rocketing up out of his stomach and through his throat. OH, FUKKKKK! This was… no one warned him… every single one of those people who had walked past him on their way out not ten minutes ago had… How could they??? The room began spinning around him. No, can’t lose it now. He grabbed the edges of the sink and forced the room to stop its tumbling swirl. Bit by bit, he brought his panic under control, forcing himself to take calm, deep, even breaths. It helped. After maybe half a minute, his stomach settled back down and he was no longer on the edge of totally losing his shit. He glanced around, but there was no one else in the kitchen. No one had seen his near-meltdown.

I can do this, he told himself. I have to do this. There is no other choice. He dipped his hands back into the soapy dishwater, forced himself to pick up the grill utensils and continue scrubbing. It’s just hamburger. Burned-on burger bits. Nothing out of the ordinary. Charred meat yielded to the pressure of the sponge. For the thickest, toughest chunks he used a scrap of steel wool, resolutely not thinking about anything but the mechanics of moving his hands.

Rinse, dry, repeat. Before long, Harris came by and took over the washing while Derek dried. Then Pete came in and pointed out where to stow the cleaned equipment, and then it was time to head out. His next shift started at 2:00 the following afternoon.

It was about 1:30 AM by the time Derek arrived home and collapsed into bed. He fell asleep right away, but woke up constantly throughout the night, tossing and turning and constantly fighting off the sense that something in his dreams was chasing him.

5: Guard Duty

The next day, Sunday, marked his first normal shift. Derek was assigned to shadow Brogan until 9 PM. He showed up about fifteen minutes early, determined to take whatever came at him in stride. Things. Not men. Things.

The day turned out to be almost as dull as the previous evening’s door duty. He and Brogan spent the first three hours in the control room where they watched the inmates over four separate camera feeds and listened to them yammer at each other. They didn’t talk all that often, but when they did it came in bursts, all of them speaking up at once or in quick succession.

“You want to listen for five words,” Brogan instructed him. “I, me, my, mine, myself. Those things in there don’t have the right to say those words, and we enforce that. You also want to listen for anything that sounds like a name. We got the list of names of the current set here.” He pointed at a yellow piece of paper, taped to the table and curling at the edges.

Derek leaned in to see. In varying colors of ink written by various hands, he saw names, some of which had been crossed out with vigorous strokes:

Loser (Harold)
Fuckwit (Chris)
Stumpy (David)
Worthless (Brian)
Useless (Cameron)
Cockwhore (Carl)
Shithead (Alan)
Asshole (Kirk)
Toilet (Raymond)

Brogan continued speaking. “But me? I don’t bother learnin’ em. The list changes too often to keep track, right? So I just listen for any name at all. One of those turds says something that might be a name, that’s enough for me. I don’t bother checking it against the list. I just go give ’em a reminder lesson.”

Derek was having a hard enough time making out any words. The deformed mouths of the creatures in the cell couldn’t make certain sounds at all and left others weirdly warped. The idea of recognizing not only words in the stream of babble but being able to make out which voice had spoken it seemed impossible. “How do you know which one to punish?” he asked.

Brogan laughed, a sharp bark of sound. “Makes no difference. Just pick one. The rest figure it out fast enough. But that almost never happens. The ones that made it through the doc’s training program have all figured out the rules. Every once in a while, a new arrival will slip up, but the rest of ’em do our enforcing for us. It’s funny to watch them pile on trying to shush the new one ’cause they know we ain’t too picky when we’re dishing out a smackdown, only none of ’em can say ‘sh’ so it comes out KHKHHHHKHKHHKHH. Like radio static. Hilarious.”

“Yeah,” Derek murmured. Hilarious, sure. Damn, this was gonna be tough to get used to. “So what do we do if one of them breaks the rule?”

“Eh, it varies. Depends what you’re in the mood for. You can give ’em a beating if you want to get a quick workout in. The doc likes for us to hurt ’em in the mouths, though. It’s poetic that way – the tongue caused the problem, so the tongue takes the punishment. We got all kinds of ways to cause pain there… stub a cigarette out on the tongue… or hit it with a taser… or attach one of them black binder clips for a coupla hours. Oh, and there’s a spiked ball gag floating around here too, just wedge that in and watch the little bitch try to hold his mouth open even wider to keep the spikes off his gums.”

He shifted in his seat, adjusting his crotch. “Heh. I’m almost hoping for an excuse to hurt one of ’em now just talking about it!”

Derek blinked a bit. “You get off on that, then?” He asked the question as casually as possible, though prior to two days ago it would never have occurred to him that he would be saying such a thing at all. Here, though, it seemed as normal as asking about the weather.

“Aw, yeah. Best part of the job, no question. C’mon bitches, just gimme an excuse!” But the bodies on the view screens were lethargic and still and no voices came through the speakers. Brogan and Derek sat and alternately shot the breeze or passed the time in silence.

At 4:00 they traded places with Pete, who was covering the door outside the cell. The routine was the same there: sit. Talk, or don’t talk.

“Why are we doing this?” Derek asked at one point. “Those guys in there… they can’t get out, right? I mean, the only keypad for the door is on the outside, and they don’t have fingers. You’d need hands to reach through the bars and punch the buttons. And Pete in the control room can see and hear more than we can from out here. So… why?”

“It’s a precaution, mostly,” Brogan replied. “Sometimes we need to get in there fast. Sometimes there’s a fight, right? Two of ’em go toe to toe or else a couple of ’em join up and start pounding one of the others. Now, we don’t mind if they smack each other around a little, but if it looks like it’s gonna get out of hand, we step in and break it up. Doc’s invested too much time and effort into shaping ’em the way he wants ’em. He wants to keep ’em around long enough to recoup his investment, right?”

Ah. Suicide prevention. Or homicide prevention.

“We hear a scuffle, we watch from the door. A little bit of blowin’ off steam is fine, but if it looks like it’s gettin’ too rough, we go in, break it up.” A wicked gleam lit up his eyes. “Then we punish the troublemakers.”

He banged on the cell door. “Hey, Toilet!” he shouted. “You want me to hook you and Shithead up to the rebreather again?”

There was a long pause, and then “no hir” came floating out from the cell. Brogan snorted.

“See, this one time he and Shithead were getting it on, kicking and head-butting each other. Shithead was dominating, of course, but Toilet was eggin’ him on, talkin’ trash at him. That one’s got a mouth on him, I’ll tell you. So he was equally to blame. I broke it up, then decided to teach ’em how to get along nice with each other. Put gas masks on each of ’em, then screwed the out valve of one to the in valve of the other, real close together, maybe two inches apart. They had to figure out how to hold themselves with their faces right up next to each other. Toilet could breathe in any time he wanted, but he could only breathe out when Shithead was breathing in, or else the air couldn’t go nowhere. Then Shithead could breathe out whenever. They had to work out how to stay in sync if they wanted to keep the air moving. I left ’em like that for a coupla hours, then swapped it around so the air was going the other way, left ’em there a couple more. Taught ’em a lesson on how to play nice.” He banged on the bars again. “Di’n’t it, you little cocksuckers?” There was no reply, but Brogan didn’t seem to be expecting one.

At 5:30 it was feeding time. Moose came by carrying a bucket and a stack of five bowls. Derek took a look in the bucket and saw a bland brown mush. He followed along as Moose entered the cell, set the bowls on the floor, filled each with slop from the bucket, then stepped back as the occupants of the cell came forward. It was surreal: five naked bodies, all armless, dickless, toothless, worked their way down onto their knees, then onto their bellies, using the stumps of their arms to help prop their bodies up as they dove face-first into the bowls. They slurped and swallowed, smearing glop all over their faces in the process. Derek just watched in silent amazement.

When the first two had polished the bowls clean with their lips and tongues, they laboriously worked their way back up onto their knees, then began to clean each other off. They took turns licking the other’s face until all traces of the meal had been consumed. The remaining three soon performed a three-way version of the same process. It was revolting and yet compelling to watch… and with everyone else in the room acting as if this were a perfectly normal thing, just another routine meal here at Hell’s Prison! Derek’s poker face was in no danger of slipping – this was far less disturbing to witness than last night’s dinner party. But it did make him wonder… how long would it be before the poker face wasn’t just an act any more? How quickly would this become routine for him too?

After the inmates had been fed, Brogan led Derek to the kitchen for their own meal break. The refrigerator was packed with containers of varying sizes.

“Ah, right, leftovers from last night!” Brogan crowed. “Help yourself to whatever looks good.” He buried himself in the fridge, pulling out containers and inspecting their contents.

Ah, shit.

Derek watched Brogan root around and come out with some sort of speckled rice concoction, roasted vegetables, rolls, potatoes, squares of quiche, a few tiny cocktail-sized savory pastries with an unknown filling. He began piling items onto a plate. “Seriously, help yourself,” he repeated, noticing Derek not moving.

Derek took a deep breath. “There’s, uh, no easy way to ask this, so I’m just gonna say it. Is there any meat in that fridge and if so, what is it?”

Brogan laughed, a loud, echoing bray. “HAW! You mean the ‘special’ kind, yeah? What, you a picky eater or sumthin’?” He laughed again, long and boisterous. “Well, don’t you worry about that. That’s reserved for the doc’s paying customers. We staff get some perks, but that’s not one of ’em. You ever find any meat in there, you can be sure it came from a cow or a pig or a chicken. Unless…” A mischievous look came over his face. “Unless that’s what you were hoping to find? Get yourself a little taste, see what all the fuss is about?”

Derek shook his head hard. “No!” Then, calmer: “No, not my thing. I’ll take some of those potatoes, though.” He assembled a plate from a variety of cartons. Not too much; he didn’t want to overload his stomach. Just in case. And no meat except what was inside those little pastry things. Some kind of seafood, crab maybe. That should be safe enough.

They ate in fifteen minutes or so, then it was back up to the control room for another stint there, followed by another tedious hour or so at the cell door, and that was it. He headed back to his cheap-ass room having spent pretty much a full workday doing as close to nothing as was possible to do and getting paid more than he’d ever earned in a single day before. Theoretically. Payday was Friday, almost a week away; he’d learn then whether his new employer would actually come through with the money he’d been promised.

He returned for another six dull hours on Monday, then six more on Tuesday. Tuesday there was a brief moment of variety: Shithead started beating on Asshole and Derek followed Moose, who he was shadowing, into the cell to monitor. It turned out there was nothing they needed to do. Shithead stopped himself before doing too much damage to Asshole and so they left without needing to interfere. Moose gave him some pointers about taking down armless opponents afterward.

“You have most of the advantage already,” he said sagely, “but these guys have had a lot of practice using what they’ve got. Watch their feet. They can’t bite you, they can’t swing at you, their main weapon is their feet, so you want to neutralize that weapon fast as you can. Knock them off balance, take them down quick and then you can decide on a punishment at your leisure. In fact, here, lemme show you…”

They went back into the cell and Moose barked an order at Shithead. “Attack this guy,” he commanded, pointing at Derek. Shithead cast a withering, scornful glare at Moose, but he dutifully obeyed and came charging at Derek. Derek tried to trip him as he neared, but the guy had lightning fast reflexes and danced out of the way. As he passed, he delivered a kick to Derek’s knee and Derek barely twisted aside enough to blunt the impact. The guy was not pulling his punches – that kick would have done real damage if it had landed as intended.

But the lack of arms was too great a handicap. After his first ambush assault, Shithead couldn’t get himself stopped and turned around fast enough, and Derek was able to follow the kick with a shove of his own. He added momentum to Shithead’s forward charge and it proved to be too much for Shithead to handle. He went down with a crash and no way to break his fall. He landed, winded, and tried to get immediately back up again, but by then Derek was on top of him and had flipped him onto his belly. He then sat on Shithead’s ass and glanced up at Moose with an “OK, now what?” look on his face.

“OK, looks like you got the idea,” said Moose. “Let’s get out of here.”

On Wednesday he took the day off just to test whether he could. It turned out to be no problem and he rode the T down to the Common and just walked around, watching the joggers and the moms with their strollers and the hungry young businessmen and the grey-haired pigeon feeders and marveled at how not fifteen minutes’ train ride away there was a basement room with naked torture slaves in it, scarfing their food from slop bowls on the floor in a world far removed from the golden late-summer sunlight here in the park.

He passed a wanna-be executive type wearing an expensive haircut and and even more expensive suit and couldn’t help but imagine what the guy would look like with that perfectly-waved hair buzzed to a scruffy stubble, his arms chopped off just below the shoulders, those gleaming white teeth knocked out of his mouth and his gums reshaped for providing better blowjobs.

Any one of these guys out here, any one of them could be the next victim. But no, that was unlikely. Dr. Cresh wouldn’t take people with real jobs, families, connections. He would sweep them up out of the dirty alleys, the places where no one would even notice the hole where the victim used to be. He would take the dregs. The ones who don’t matter.

A tiny voice reminded him that everyone matters to himself, but it was imperative for Derek’s own survival that he not think that way, and so he resolutely shunted the voice aside, enjoyed his walk in the sunshine, and then got ready to return for another shift the following night.

Thursday he did a late-night stint from 8PM to 4AM. There was no extra money for working the graveyard shift; it was just something the guys needed to work out among themselves. It turned out that John and Kerchek – the two straight guys on the staff, aside from Derek himself – both preferred the dark, quiet hours and mostly slept through the days. So Derek was paired up with Moose for the first two hours and then spent the tedious remaining time occasionally talking with his mentors but mostly watching John reading outside the cell door or Kerchek playing solitaire in the control room. The lights were turned out in the cell at 11PM and came back on again at 7AM and the assets mostly slept during that time, so there was even less to do than usual. John and Kerchek tried to time their shifts for the lights-out period, and the others mostly were happy to let the two of them have the wee hours.

Friday morning Derek stuck around long enough to pick up his paycheck, working out in the gym while he waited, then headed out to cash it. It was more money at one time than he had ever had before. He treated himself to a huge breakfast and tipped the waitress generously even though she was surly and curt. Then he went home and racked out for a few hours. He was due back again for an evening shift. For the first time since he started, he actually slept well, possibly from being up all night but possibly because this job, terrifying as it was, might actually be working out well.

That evening he had his first direct interaction with one of the organization’s customers.

He had been deemed experienced enough to work solo, though since there were always two of them on shift, one in the control room, there was backup available to be called on if necessary. And it was a short stint, just two hours up in the control room and two sitting outside the cell door. He was minding the door, listening to the mindless babble of the things inside, when Pete came down with Aaron in tow. He keyed open the door.

“Worthless!” he called. “Get over here.” Worthless dutifully shambled out through the door and stood with his eyes cast down at Pete’s feet. Pete closed the door and addressed Aaron. “Take Worthless to room D. He’s got a date with Mr. Maroon. Derek, I’ll cover here; you go with Aaron.”

They wound their way up the stairs to the plush-carpeted, tastefully-decorated customer area of the building. Room D turned out to be one of the two elegant hotel-style bedrooms. Aaron knocked at the door and almost immediately, it swung open.

“Good evening, sir,” Aaron said, all smooth graciousness. He nudged Worthless through the door. Worthless, eyes still on the floor, stepped in and meekly waited for further instructions. “The entertainment you requested. If there is anything else you need this evening, please just ring and someone will come attend to you.”

“Thank you,” Mr. Maroon replied in a somewhat distracted way, eyeing up Worthless the way a lion regards a gazelle. “That will be all for now.” He shut the door even as Aaron was backing away from it. Derek followed him back down the hall, down one flight of stairs, and into the control room, where Harris was on duty. They sat at the small table.

“I take it that was one of the guys who pays our salaries,” Derek said.

Aaron nodded. “Relatively new one. This is only his second visit.”

“And Maroon is not his real name. Are they all named after colors?”

“Some of them. You ever notice how there’s a lot of colors that make for girly names? Lilac, Amber, Rose, Violet, Peach. These guys, they all want to be Mr. Black and Mr. Red and Mr. Slate, but there just aren’t enough of those to go around. So we have a Mr. Chartreuse and a Mr. Gray and a Mr. Tangerine. The earlier set was gems and minerals, so there’s Mr. Feldspar, Mr. Quartz, Mr. Sandstone, Mr. Topaz…

“Anyway. I’m sure you saw how it goes. We address the customers as ‘sir’ and we give them whatever they ask for, within reason. Now, doc does not go for that ‘the customer is always right’ bullshit, because that attitude is just bad for business. A lot of times the customer is full of shit and if you let people like that have their way, they bully the staff around and if your staff gets too much of that then they get pissed and quit. So we are definitely allowed to call them on it when they get out of line. But we do it politely. Even if the guy says something so mind-bendingly stupid that you just want to pop him one to try to knock some sense into him, you don’t. You stay polite. Polite but firm. Then you go downstairs and blow off some steam by kicking some ass if you need to vent. Got it?”

Derek nodded.

“Most of the time, the customers don’t want us around while they do their thing, so we just have to wait here until they buzz for us. When Mr. Maroon rings, it’ll sound in here and light up on the wall over there.” Aaron gestured to a board with lights labeled “A” through “I”.

“Our goal is to be at the door inside 30 seconds. You don’t have to run, just get up when the buzzer sounds, walk nice and brisk, take the stairs ’cause it’s just one floor and the elevator is slow, and you’ll be there in plenty of time. Some of them, they start to get pissy if we take too long, so again: polite. Apologize for the delay even if there wasn’t one, assure him you’re there to help, all that. Then go take it out on one of the assholes in the pen later. But in this particular case…”

Aaron flipped another switch on a bank below the board with the lights. Soft voices emerged from a speaker. Aaron turned the volume up a bit and words began to make themselves clear, but Aaron talked over them.

“Cameras and microphones in all the guest rooms,” Aaron said. “For established customers and well-behaved assets, we usually don’t monitor. But if either the customer or the asset is new, we keep tabs. Just audio should be enough for this guy – we watched him on camera his first visit and he kept himself in line.”

One of the sounds emerging from the speaker began to get louder. Derek heard heavy breathing that gradually got raspier and less regular. Before long it was a harsh grating noise, like a file being dragged across a chunk of plastic. Throughout, the other voice remained soft, murmuring “that’s it… just accept it… shhhhhh… don’t fight it…” in a barely-audible rumble.

“Breath control is Mr. Maroon’s thing, it seems,” Aaron commented. “He did this last time, too. Probably starting with some chokeholds, then he’ll work his way up to some bagging, and then maybe end with a series of noosings. We’ll monitor, but I think we’ll be OK.”

“Bagging?”

“Plastic. Over the head.”

“Ah.”

Derek mulled that over a minute. How fucking helpless would that feel, to have your air blocked off by a simple plastic bag, something you could whip off in a second only you don’t have any hands to do that with? So simple, and yet so impossible… no. This line of thinking was dangerous. He was not an asset and needed to stay that way. Identifying with the assets, imagining how they felt, treating them like humans, that was what he needed to not do.

To distract himself, he asked, “How would I know what ‘not OK’ sounds like?” Because he honestly had no reference to judge by.

“You hear the word ‘oops,’ that’s a good sign,” Harris chirped.

“Funny,” Aaron replied. “Eh, you get a feel for it. This guy’s fetish is unusual in that his work keeps the asset quiet. Most of the other customers, they want to get a nice reaction out of their experience. Some deep-throated screams. That can be tough to judge when it’s going too far, but again, you get a sense of it with practice.

“You definitely want to err on the side of not pushing the panic button. Even if one of these guys goes too far and accidentally breaks his toy, there’s always more. He’ll get charged something huge, but these guys can all afford it. And then a little while later we’ll have another one in the pipeline to start breaking down. You’ll get to help with that soon, I hear. Doc’s put some feelers out to his suppliers, letting them know we’re in the market. So maybe next week or the week after, depends how things go.”

Another lull in the conversation, disturbed only by the sounds from the competing speakers: the one covering the stable where the remaining assets had started babbling about something, and the smooth, reassuring drone of Mr. Maroon’s voice as he alternately cut off and then restored Worthless’s air supply, punctuated by Worthless’s frantic panting on the occasions when his airway was open.

“But mostly we don’t care what the customers do, so assuming Mr. Maroon behaves himself, we won’t monitor him next time. When the asset is new, though, we monitor anyway. Making sure they don’t say something they shouldn’t and punishing them if they do.”

“We don’t break in on them, do we?” Derek wondered.

“Nope, just save it up for later. A dish best served cold, right?”

That was pretty much it for small talk. The rest of Mr. Maroon’s session passed uneventfully. There was a second set of heaving breaths about half an hour in. These came not from the air-starved asset but from his torturer, so Derek assumed that would be the end of the session. It wasn’t. Instead Mr. Maroon took a break for a while, leaving Worthless in some sort of discomfort but not actively torturing him while Mr. Maroon recuperated. Then the action ramped up again a while later, but by the time it was getting started, Derek’s shift was over and he got up to head for home.

6: New Arrival

Saturday, Sunday, Monday… the days began to pass in a blur. Work a shift, hit the gym, hang out with the guys, repeat. He was soon trusted to handle the feeding of the assets on his own when his shifts coincided with either the morning or evening mealtime. He learned how to clean them, too, which happened once a week or occasionally more frequently if a session with a client left one particularly grimy. They had their own toilet in the cell and a bidet-thing operated by a foot pedal that they could use instead of wiping, but for all-over body washings, the staff had to pitch in since the armless assets couldn’t do it themselves.

The weekly cleanings involved three staff. They would lock one asset’s arm stump to the next’s using the sockets implanted in their arm bones. Derek was fascinated the first time he saw this up close. It was a titanium socket that had been somehow fused with the bone. All sorts of things could be screwed into it – hooks, loops, long rods, heavy weights. Whatever mechanism the doctor had used to merge metal with bone, it was solid. John demonstrated once that he could lift an asset up in the air by ropes attached to the hooks in his arms, and even drop him a couple of feet without yanking the metal free when he jammed to a halt at the end of the rope.

So by linking one asset to the next, the staff formed them into a line that got marched to a room with a drain in the floor and hoses along the walls. Soak ’em down, scrub with soap, rinse ’em off, then back to the cell. No need to towel them off; the assets could air dry just fine. Like the rest of the work, it was simple, repetitive, dull. He tried to keep his guard up in case one of the assets tried to pull something, but they never did. They had been deeply, thoroughly trained.

Derek found himself spending less and less time at home. He still made a point of going there to sleep, mostly to prove to himself that he could, that he still had a life outside his employer’s influence. After the first week, though, it seemed sort of moot. He was proving a point that didn’t need to be proven. Nevertheless, he stuck to his rule: sleep at home.

He got together with some friends Saturday night. It went fine, but was ultimately unsatisfying. He obviously couldn’t tell any of them about his new job, which meant he couldn’t flash too much cash even though it was burning a hole in his pocket because that would just bring on questions that he did not want to answer. So he sat, drank moderately, and listened, and of course they all knew that his stony silence was just the way he was, so no one thought anything of it.

Tuesday he had off. He hung out on the Commons again, enjoying the last nice days before the cold would set in. The morning was bright and pleasant, but clouds started rolling in around 2:00 and he headed for home, where he sat in his cramped room in the basement of a small row house he shared with two near-strangers, watching TV and wondering why he was being so stubborn about avoiding Dr. Cresh’s place on his days off. Instead of trying to make out the images on his tiny, crappy TV, he could be watching the big-screen one in the common room of the guards’ dorm area. He could be shooting the shit with Aaron, who was fun to talk to and had a wickedly sharp sense of humor and would no doubt have something hilariously nasty to say about whatever was on the tube.

But no. It was important… somehow… for reasons that just didn’t seem as critical any more as they once did… that he maintain his independence. If independence meant watching a crappy TV in a cramped basement room, then fine.

The next day, Wednesday, he got his introduction to the processing of new merchandise. His shift started at 10, but instead of going to either the control room or the cell, he was summoned to one of the doctor’s rooms and told to wait.

“Pete will be here shortly,” Dr. Cresh informed him. “Please wait here until he arrives.” Then the doc left.

The office was not the one where Derek had had his interview. This one was dominated by an imposing-looking chair studded with restraints. It was not at all difficult to imagine what the chair was going to be used for. Derek steeled himself for the events to come. The thing that’s going to come in that door is going to look like a human being, but it’s not. It’s just another asset, one that happens to still have all its limbs intact. For now. It’ll look like a regular dude, but that’s just camouflage. It’s really just another asset like all the rest.

Despite his preparations, his heart still lurched in his chest when footsteps sounded out in the hall and the door opened. But it was only Dr. Cresh, who entered and left the door open behind him. “We’ll be getting started shortly,” he said.

Sounds of struggle began to leak in through the open door. The thud of flesh against a wall, grunted breath sounds, the jangling of a chain. Pete appeared in the doorway, followed immediately by a youngish man with sandy blond hair wearing tan shorts, a somewhat tattered dark blue T-shirt, and a heavy metal chain around his neck. The other end of the chain was in Pete’s left hand and he was using it, and his other hand, to yank the stumbling victim forward into the office. Derek wondered for a brief moment why the guy wasn’t fighting back more, then realized his hands must be cuffed behind his back. There was a blue ball gag in his mouth, which explained why his protests were coming in the form of grunts rather than words.

Pete muscled the young man – the asset – into the chair and hooked the chain in place over the back. He twisted the body sideways to get at the cuffs, then nodded at Derek to be ready to restrain an arm once it was free. Derek moved into place and deftly caught the man’s right arm as it came loose, just before it could start flailing around and causing trouble. It was surprisingly easy to do – this was just another troublemaker at the Condor or any other bar he’d worked before. Gain and maintain control, that’s all there was to it.

Mirroring Pete’s movements, he buckled the young man’s arm in place with three straps at biceps, elbow, and wrist, then secured the leg at the ankle. Pete then wrapped a strap around his waist and cinched it tight. Pete straightened up, taking a position behind the chair on the left, out of the victim’s view, and Derek followed on the right. “Now we wait,” he mouthed to Derek.

It was soon clear what they were waiting for. The victim thrashed and bucked in a useless attempt to tear himself free of the chair. It wasn’t going to happen, but he fought and struggled all the same. Unintelligible shouts issued from around the gag, but Derek couldn’t make out any actual words. Based on the frequency, the guy was probably shouting “FUCK!” a lot but the huge ball strapped in his mouth converted the word to something like a very nasalized “hawngh”. Throughout the impotent tirade, Dr. Cresh waited at his desk, calmly reading through papers and occasionally jotting down a note or a signature.

At last the bucking slowed and then stopped. Still the doctor waited, not looking at the victim. Sure enough, not thirty seconds after giving up the attempt to break free, the victim started trying to attract attention, shouting something like “hey” through the gag. Apparently he thought it was time to negotiate now. The doctor ignored those efforts as he had ignored the earlier ones. Pete stood at a comfortable parade rest as if he were a statue and Derek followed his lead.

Finally, when the victim had given up on attempting to both escape and bargain, that’s when Dr. Cresh put down his papers and spoke.

“I’m only going to deliver this speech once, Zane, so do pay attention. Whatever you thought was going to happen after you hitched a ride from that trucker, just erase it from your mind because it is not to be. Your old life has ended. It would be easiest on you if you would accept that now, but I am fairly certain you will not. Instead, you will make futile attempts at resistance and escape. Know that I and my staff are ready for these attempts, and I will use your disobedience as a way to break your will and prepare you for your new life.

“In your new life, you will provide service to my clients. My clients are men who enjoy sexual domination over other men, acts of sadism and torture. They love to hurt and humiliate helpless victims. You will be one of those victims. There is nothing you can do to stop this from happening, but I look forward to your pathetic attempts.

“In order to provide my clients with a safe experience, I am going to make some modifications to your body. The process of making these modifications will help me to break your will. I want to make this as clear as possible so that there is no misunderstanding: by the time I am finished preparing you, you will be completely broken. If I order you to walk across burning coals, you will do it without hesitation.”

“Hawngh hoo!” the victim – Zane – blurted through the gag. The doctor ignored the outburst.

“Here is how things will work. I will give you a command. You will either carry out my command or not. If you do, your suffering will be minimal. If you do not, I or one of my assistants will accomplish the task for you, but we will do so in a way that causes you vastly more pain. Let’s try one now. Pete, if you please.”

Pete went over to a cabinet, opened it, took out a board, and attached it in place between the armrests of the chair, sliding it under the victim’s hands. The board, once set into place, formed a small table of sorts… one that was smeared with dark brown and black stains. From where Derek was standing, he could not see the victim’s fear-widened eyes following Pete’s movements, but it was nevertheless clear he was watching just from the motions of his head.

Pete next retrieved a small hatchet from the cabinet and set it on the board, between the victim’s still-strapped hands. Then he returned to his parade-rest posture behind the chair. Dr. Cresh waited until the victim looked at him again before speaking. “Zane, remove the little finger of your left hand. You have five minutes to comply.”

The victim exploded into useless struggle once more, shouting unintelligibly through the gag and yanking on all the restraints. “Undo just the wrist,” Pete told Derek, barely loud enough to be heard over the commotion. Derek bent down and released the wrist strap on the victim’s right side. As he stood up, Pete caught his attention. He gestured with two fingers, pointing first at his own eyes, then down at the helpless captive in the chair, dipping his head without breaking eye contact to indicate the significance. Watch the guy closely was the message.

The victim railed and struggled for perhaps a minute. Then he picked up the hatchet. It was tough for Derek to read his body language from behind, but even with that handicap, Zane’s intentions were clear – he had just realized that he had been handed a weapon and he planned to use it… but not against himself.

Before he had even had time to register the thought consciously, Derek reached down and plucked the hatchet out of Zane’s grip just as the asset-to-be was flexing his forearm to hurl it toward the doctor. Dr. Cresh didn’t even blink. That was kind of freaky… either he trusted his new hire’s reflexes way more than Derek’s brief tenure here seemed to deserve, or else he realized that with the victim’s upper arm and elbow still secured to the chair, any attempt to throw the hatchet would be a feeble one. Either way: nerves of steel, that guy. Derek was not sure he would have the ability to sit so calmly mere feet away from someone who had just tried to hurl a bladed weapon at him.

Speaking of that bladed weapon, it was still in Derek’s hand. He glanced up at Pete, uncertain what to do with it now that he had it. Give it back to the guy who had just demonstrated his intentions so clearly? But that’s what Pete indicated, pointing at the makeshift table and then gesturing with his palm flat down. Lay it on the table, right where it had been before. So Derek did.

The next attempt was aimed backward instead of forward, but Derek again saw it coming and intercepted in plenty of time. They guy was working at too much of a handicap; he would never be fast enough. Derek had figured it out now – there was only one way that hatchet could move if the guy actually planned to carry out the doctor’s order (vanishingly unlikely though that possibility was). Any other motion was to be prevented. And with only one forearm free to move, Derek’s attention could remain laser-focused on that one spot. There was no way for the guy to distract him with a feint.

After two more repetitions, the guy stopped trying. He left the hatchet alone and just sat there, fuming, watching the doctor flipped blandly through his paperwork.

“Time’s up,” the doctor announced. “If it makes the coming ordeal any easier for you, no one has ever accomplished that first assignment. Every single one of your predecessors has chosen to have his first amputation performed the hard way. When you’re screaming your throat raw ten minutes from now, perhaps the thought that you’ve had plenty of company on this first step of the journey will give you some comfort. A pity… it could have been so much easier on you. If you had done the work yourself, I would have supplied you with bandages and painkillers. It would have been much, much less traumatic. But now… well… I can’t complain. I do enjoy these little surgeries. Pete and Derek, I’d like the angle brace today, please.”

Pete gestured for Derek to strap Zane’s right hand back down. Pete, meanwhile, retrieved another bit of equipment from the cabinet and proceeded to set it up around the other hand. The thumb and first three fingers all went into little sleeves that held them in place. There was no sleeve for the little finger. In its place was a slot, a groove in the structure’s base that the finger fit into. Finished with strapping the right wrist down, Derek watched Pete work.

It seemed futile – Zane’s hand was trapped, but the pinky finger was free to move, and so Zane moved it as much as he could. It couldn’t curl up completely – the ring finger and the rest were held straight by the sleeves they were confined in, flat down on the board’s surface. But the pinky could curl a bit. And Zane could lift it up out of the groove. It seemed like there was no way to compel him to keep the finger in the slot the doctor clearly intended it to be in.

Then Pete started making adjustments. With the structure in place and secured to the board and through that to the chair arm, he turned a crank and the groove under the pinky began tilting. Pivoting on a hinge just beneath where the pinky joined the rest of the hand, it tipped upward, the far end rising up until it was not quite at a 45° angle. Zane’s freedom to move the finger steadily disappeared as the brace tilted until no movement was possible except for a tiny bit of side-to-side motion. Then that freedom, too, was removed – Pete turned a crank that gradually narrowed the groove until the finger was completely immobilized.

It was an ingenious design – the finger was held absolutely still, and yet it was open to the air all along its top surface and much of the sides. Exposed to whatever Dr. Cresh decided to do to it. Seemingly free, yet thoroughly restrained.

Pete handed Derek a pair of plastic safety goggles. Derek put them on, closed his eyes briefly as he did, swallowed, then resolutely opened them again. The sight of blood didn’t bother him on its own. The sight of blood deliberately shed for the purpose of torturing someone… that was another matter. But this was part of the job, and he was not going to throw it away now. He braced himself, unsure what gruesome technique the doctor was going to use to destroy Zane’s finger, but certain that it would be stomach-turning.

Dr. Cresh pulled out a Dremel. He fastened a thin wheel to the shaft. He spun it up, The Dremel whined and screamed, thousands of RPMs keening like a tortured soul in hell. He took his time bringing the screaming wheel into position, lining it up, lowering it close to the immobilized finger, drawing away before making contact. Stretching out the anticipation to sear the horror more firmly into the victim’s brain. This sadist sure knew his stuff.

At last: contact. To Derek’s surprise, the wheel was not applied crosswise to the finger, down at the base. Then he realized that should not have surprised him at all. A single, clean, cross-wise cut, neatly severing the finger at the base? That would hardly count as doing the job with “vastly more pain,” as Dr. Cresh had threatened. No, instead, the cutting blade was being brought down parallel to the trapped finger, starting right at the tip.

The first contact was with the nail, which couldn’t possibly have hurt since nails have no nerve endings. Nevertheless the victim’s screams grew both louder and higher-pitched and his frenzied thrashing grew even more intense. Neither the screams nor the thrashing made any difference. Then Derek realized that even though there might not be pain, he was probably feeling heat. Wisps of smoke began to rise up from where the rapidly-spinning cutting disk was slowly slicing through the nail. That would explain the reaction.

That first contact lingered for long seconds before at last the disk sank down until it touched skin, then flesh beneath skin, and then the first blood began to spray. None hit Derek where he was standing, behind the chair on the far side from where the action was taking place. Some splattered onto Pete, and some hit the doctor, but most landed on the victim or the chair that held him. More seeped and dripped down the angled brace to join the older stains already soaked into the board. Zane was screaming for real now. These were no longer the screams of fear of anticipated pain; these were screams of right now, at-this-very-moment, oh-god-make-it-stop pain. They were almost as loud as the whine of the Dremel itself.

The Dremel didn’t care. It just kept spinning, and Dr. Cresh kept digging it deeper and deeper into the finger. Soon he must have been chewing into bone – the pitch of the Dremel’s scream dropped slightly at the increased resistance the wheel was encountering. But it was far, far stronger than mere flesh and bone and it just kept slicing.

It took almost five minutes for the disk to make it all the way to the base of the finger. The victim looked like he was about to pass out from all the screaming a couple of times, but he didn’t. When at last the base was reached, the doctor switched the Dremel off and let the wheel coast to a stop. One set of screams died away; the other kept going, though the volume did fall off a bit.

Calmly, the doctor removed the wheel from the Dremel and Derek relaxed the muscles in his shoulders that he hadn’t realized he had been clenching from the tension in the room. OK, that was bad, he thought, but it’s done now. I made it. He felt vaguely guilty about feeling sorry for himself at having to endure this as a spectator when the guy in the chair had actually had to live through the bifurcation of his finger. But it was important to maintain that separation between guard and asset. Very, very important to remain on the correct side of that equation.

The doctor attached a new wheel to the Dremel and fired it up again. This seemed to catch the asset by surprise as much as it did Derek. When the wheel made contact again, Derek saw that it was now aimed halfway between the line that had just been carved and the edge of the finger. The doctor was planning to carve a second line all the way down the length of the trapped digit. The second line took at least as much time to slice as the first.

Derek was not at all surprised when doctor swapped the wheel out again and carved a third line down the other side of the center line. By this time, the victim’s screams were merely hoarse barks, no competition at all for the singing wheel of the Dremel. Then, at last, one more wheel swap, and the doctor finally aimed the cutting tool crosswise on the finger.

Only he didn’t aim at the base. At least, not right away. Instead, he started at the tip and worked his way down, a quarter of an inch at a time, slice by slice by agonizing slice, fifteen in all. Pete adjusted the brace to allow room for the Dremel to do its work. There was no chance at all of the asset being able to move the finger out of the wheel’s path – too much muscle and nerve had been destroyed.

When at last Dr. Cresh was finished, nearly an hour had passed. The victim was a drooling, gibbering wreck. The thing that used to be his left pinky had been sliced into dozens of pieces of cubed meat, each one barely larger than a grain of rice. The doctor put a bandage over the seeping open wound where the finger used to attach to the rest of the hand. “Are you paying attention, Zane?” he asked as he taped the gauze in place. “This lesson needs to sink in, so try to focus. When I give you an order, you need to obey. Otherwise, things will go much worse for you than they need to.” Derek doubted Zane was understanding any of it. The asset looked totally drained.

Dr. Cresh finished his taping. “Take him to storage,” he instructed. Pete and Derek unstrapped the very limp victim and hauled him off to recuperate in one of the small individual rooms downstairs, well away from the stable.

“I got this,” Pete said to Derek once they were in the holding cell. “How about you go help the doc clean up.”

Derek returned to the doctor’s office and assisted with scrubbing, sanitizing, stowing equipment away.

“You did well,” the doctor remarked from his desk.

“Thank you,” Derek replied after a moment, unsure what the proper response might be but figuring this was a safe one. That was the end of the conversation, though. He stashed the cleaning supplies away once the blood was all mopped up, then headed out.

Somehow, serving out the rest of his shift sitting either in the control room or outside the basement cell, he couldn’t quite get his mind to stop circling back to the horrific amputation he had witnessed. He kept feeling imaginary hot wet droplets spattering against his skin, and he couldn’t stop hearing the whine of the Dremel constantly in his ears, like a mosquito constantly hovering just outside swatting range.

As he was heading out after the end of his shift, Pete intercepted him. “I know you’re not scheduled to work tomorrow, but can you arrange to be here between, say, two and five in the afternoon? Paid time, of course.”

Derek didn’t really have any plans for the day. “Sure, no problem. What’s going on?”

“We’ve got this tradition every time we bring a new asset on board. A little welcoming ceremony. Since this is your first time, I’d like you to be there.”

“Yeah, fine,” Derek replied. “Nothing else going on tomorrow.”

“Sounds good. See you at two.” Pete headed downstairs.

7: Welcoming Ceremony

The next day, Thursday, was wet and dreary. The golden late summer had made a sudden departure overnight and been replaced with the worst that autumn had to offer. Autumn’s good side always got all the press: glowingly-bright leaves, crisp sunny days with a playful nip in the air, pumpkin pie and spiced cider and all that. But the dark, nasty flip side of autumn was that it also brought days like this: gloomy, with bone-chilling dampness that somehow felt colder than winter. Cars raced past as Derek made his way to the T, heedless of the spray that they threw up from the puddles they smashed through. Even though he tried to stay vigilant, there was no way to avoid one blast of icy water that soaked his legs all the way up to mid-thigh. Asshole.

He arrived at work in a mood that matched the day: piss-poor. But he put his poker face on. He had a pretty good clue of what a “welcoming ceremony” for a new asset would involve. It couldn’t be any worse than yesterday. He’d soldier through for a few hours, make the wet slog back home, and then try to forget about both today and yesterday with the help of a couple of beers. Make that a bunch of beers.

Aaron met him as he arrived, in a mood the exact opposite of Derek’s. He was giddy, practically dancing on his toes, oblivious to Derek’s own mental state.

“Hey, Derek, you’re just in time! Doc’s got the new boy up in his office and is giving him the news, telling him how his afternoon’s gonna go. That always gets them wound up. Six weeks, he tells them, like any of us could go that long, right? I’ve saved it up for a week before, but any more than that, man, no way… Hey, when’s the last time you shot?”

“What?” Derek asked, still shrugging out of his sodden coat.

“You know, your load? How long’s it been?”

“Dude, that is none of your damn business!”

That drew Aaron up short. “Huh? But… oh… Pete didn’t tell you, did he?”

“Pete told me to be here. That’s it.”

“Uh huh. Well, what he didn’t say is that we’re going to be spending the afternoon giving our new arrival his welcoming rape. All of us.”

Dammit, this day was not getting any better.

“Dude, I told you guys up front. I’m straight. Not into guys.”

“Yeah, and I told you: that doesn’t matter. These aren’t guys.”

Just then Pete appeared from around a corner. “Ah, good, you’re here. Come on up – it’s show time.” Derek tried to catch his attention, but Pete vanished back the way he had come and by the time Derek and Aaron caught up, he was opening the door to Dr. Cresh’s office. Roger, Brogan and Kerchek were there as well, but there was no sign of the other three.

Dr. Cresh’s voice came from the office. “… have been celibate for the last six weeks, so they are primed and ready. And they know that it’s because of you that they’ve been denied so long. Don’t expect them to go easy on you. Pete? He’s all yours.”

Zane, the victim-to-be, was already frantic, squirming and shouting as the huge guards boiled in through the open office door. Pete unhooked the victim’s neck chain from the chair and Kerchek – the largest of all of them – picked him up and tossed him effortlessly over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. The group headed off downstairs, the laughter and taunts of the guards not quite drowning out Zane’s protests. Derek trailed along, certain beyond any doubt that his totally-uninterested dick was going to be completely useless for the job it was expected to perform.

He tried to catch Pete’s attention once again, but the raucous calls of the others as they made their way to the dungeon space were too overpowering. He hung back and watched as Kerchek dumped his burden on the floor and then Aaron and Brogan began going to work with rope. They worked smoothly together as if this ritual were a well-practiced routine. It probably was.

First they tied Zane’s wrists together behind his back, then they did the same to his biceps. It took several iterations of tightening the ropes, each time drawing the arms a tiny bit closer together while Zane fought to draw enough breath to shriek. Derek took the opportunity to sidle up to Pete.

“Look, man, I don’t know if I’m—” he began, but Pete cut him off without even turning his head, keeping his eyes locked on the struggling victim as his ability to move was steadily removed.

“Make it work,” Pete commanded in a voice that tolerated no objection. Derek stopped talking but continued standing at Pete’s side, looking at him while he tried to figure out what to say. Even if he wanted to take part in this – which he absolutely did not – how the hell could he possibly do it with uncooperative equipment?

After long seconds, Pete turned his gaze toward Derek. “This is not optional. Make it work.”

Derek swallowed, and Pete seemed to relent a bit.

“Look, I get it. This is your first time, you’re nervous, you’ve never fucked a guy before, you’ve never wanted to fuck a guy before, you’ve certainly never wanted to fuck a guy with a roomful of other guys watching. But that’s why it is critically important that you find a way to get it done. Because if you don’t step up now, the next time will be that much harder, and you’ll never do it. Make it work.”

Derek closed his eyes and nodded once, but something in his body language must have told Pete he wasn’t entirely convinced. “This might help,” Pete continued. “Rape isn’t about sex. It’s about power. That’s true even with straight rapes. Men don’t rape women because they’re attracted to them, they do it because they want to demonstrate the power they hold over their victims.”

Aaron and Brogan apparently had arranged the ropes to their satisfaction. They lifted the kicking victim up onto a table and plunked him face-down on top of it. They spread his legs apart and began fastening them to the table legs while Roger set about attaching the chain to the far end. Derek could see the brutally tight ropes cutting into the skin of Zane’s wrists and upper arms. He couldn’t help but imagine what Zane must be feeling: overwhelmed, overpowered, dominated, helpless.

He understood Zane’s struggles. It’s what he would do himself in that position. The odds may be hopeless, but he would not just sit back and take it. Which was just what Zane was doing. Damn, there was so, so little difference between them! If just one of fate’s dice had landed slightly differently, it could have been Derek down on that table feeling the squeeze of those ropes.

“The same is true here,” Pete continued, dragging Derek’s attention back to the conversation. “Not a single one of us is sexually attracted to that piece of shit on the table. I’m not, and I’m as gay as they come. So are Aaron and Roger, and they’re not doing this because they like the guy’s pretty face. Brogan is bi, Kerchek is straight… it just doesn’t matter because it’s not about sex. We’re doing this because it feels good to hurt someone. That’s what you need to find inside yourself. Somewhere in there is a part of you that you have kept contained all your life because getting along in the world requires all of us to do that. But it’s there. You need to find that part and let it out. Find that part that loves power and feed it. This is your chance to let it out of its cage for a little while. Got it?”

Derek nodded again. “Yeah. I’ll… I’ll try.”

Pete wrapped an arm around his shoulders and gave a quick squeeze. “You’ll succeed. You’re fourth in line. Be ready when your turn comes.”

He released his grip on Derek’s shoulder and strode forward, calling out in a voice loud enough to cut through the victim’s constant stream of protests. “All riiiight! Now let’s see how bad we can mess up this faggot’s guts.” Hoots and catcalls greeted this pronouncement. Derek managed to muster a “fuck, yeah”, but it sounded unenthusiastic even to his own ears. He vowed to do better. Fake it till you make it.

Aaron went first. He dropped his pants and his erection was already out and proud, eager to get to work. Aaron spit generously into his palm, then worked the slime around and into Zane’s hole, teasing the rim with his finger for a while before eventually slipping it inside. The other guards formed a loose ring around the table and kept up a steady stream of abuse of the struggling victim: “yeah, stretch that hole!” and “fuck that faggot ass” and a lot of drawn-out “fuuuuuuck”s. Derek took his place among them, slipping in between Roger and Kerchek by the victim’s left shoulder, adding his voice to the chorus.

It occurred to him that the chatter was not unlike what he’d heard at baseball games as a kid: “hey, batter batter, swing”. The point of the chatter was not necessarily to screw up the batter – in this case Zane, who was already about as helpless as he could get. Screwing up the opponent was a nice perk when it worked, but the real point was to show support for the pitcher, currently Aaron. The point of the chatter was to let the point man know that the rest of the team was behind him.

And yeah. After two weeks with these guys, Derek was part of the team. These guys were his friends; he belonged here with them. What mattered was fitting in with the team, and if doing so required him to get over a particular hangup he had… well, he’d just have to get over it.

What he needed to do was stop identifying with Zane. He needed to stop thinking about how his own ass would feel if it was being invaded by a hard cock. Clearly Zane was suffering. His head thrashed and his ribs heaved and he squirmed as much as he could in the tight restraints. It was all too easy for Derek to imagine himself down there on that table, tied and helpless and screaming… but that was the wrong thing to be thinking about. He was not tied to the table, he was standing around the edge where the guys with the power were all standing. Zane’s suffering didn’t matter, or rather, it mattered, but only inasmuch as it made Aaron’s pleasure greater. Derek wasn’t really naturally suited to deriving sexual pleasure from another man’s pain the way that many of the guys here were, not to mention all the clients, but he could certainly find parallels. The pleasure he derived, for example, from imposing his will on a troublemaker, someone who deserved to be taken down. Well, this was taking a guy down, all right, about as far down as it was possible to go. Perhaps that was something he could work with.

It didn’t happen right away, but he got there. The key was to stop thinking about the asset as anything other than an asset. Which was what they had been telling him all along, and he had dutifully thought about it. But over the course of Aaron’s opening salvo in the gang rape, it really sank in. Derek realized that before this moment, he had been putting an asterisk on the thought: “It’s a thing* (*he’s really a man but I’m pretending he’s a thing”). Now, today, as Aaron grunted his way to a climax, the thought became reality. The struggling wretch on the table was not a man, was not even an animal. It deserved no consideration at all, no more than he would give a chair or a bar of soap. It existed to be used, and the team was going to use it hard. And Derek was part of the team. He resolved to not think of it as “Zane” or “that guy” or even “the victim” any more. It was just “the asset”.

He reached into his pants and began squeezing his dick, which began to respond. He felt a brief twinge of shame, a reflex feeling of “I shouldn’t be doing this in front of other people, especially other guys”. But the twinge vanished quickly because the other guys were all doing the same thing. Derek was, in fact, the last to begin working his meat. Pete’s and Brogan’s were already out on display; Kerchek’s and Roger’s were still tucked away but each man had his fly open and a hand inside his underwear. Derek lowered his own zipper. His cock thickened to half mast.

Aaron finished up and pulled out and Pete immediately took his place. He bent down over the asset and crooned in its ear while pumping his hips back and forth. “That’s right, little boy. Big daddy’s gonna take good care of you, don’t you worry. Big daddy’s gonna fill you right up, oh yeah.” It was a bit off-putting, almost nauseating, to hear tender baby talk accompanying such a brutal action, but apparently that was just Pete’s style. When Roger took his turn next, the words were a much better fit for the action.

“I’m’a fuck you up bad, bitch, I’m’a rip you in fuckin’ half,” was typical of what Roger liked to say while he was in charge. And this worked, somehow, for Derek. Yeah, deep down inside of him there was a part that enjoyed power. That part, long suppressed by the need to conform to society’s expectations, thoroughly enjoyed the idea that he didn’t have to hold himself back here. Those troublemakers at the Condor or the other bars where he had worked… there had indeed been times when he had wanted to do more than just escort them out. There had been times when he’d felt like bashing their faces, punching them in the gut… so yeah, why not raping their ass?

His cock, fully hard now, was on board with the idea. This was not love-making. His dick was just another weapon like his fists or feet, a weapon that would demonstrate his dominance and superiority. Cement his position of power over the damaged wreck on the table.

Roger gasped and grunted and then pulled out, leaving a slippery trail of slime dripping down the asset’s thighs. Derek had lost his pants somehow (and good riddance – they were still soaked from his walk in the rain) as he was stroking his way through Roger’s turn and was now ready… eager… for his own shot. He took up his position at the end of the table. Slipping into the hole was effortless, as if it had been custom made to fit his dick. Lubricated by the fluids of those who had fucked it before, it welcomed him with a warm, wet embrace.

Never much of a talker, Derek didn’t do any speaking himself during his time at the fuckhole. The mouth attached to the other end of the fuckhole made noises and the muscles attached to the fuckhole made movements, but those were irrelevant. What mattered were the calls of support coming from the other men in the room. He let the supportive chatter wash over him, spurring him on as he drove in and out. This was his team, his tribe, these were more than his friends, they were his brothers. He was not an individual, he was part of a larger body with unity of mind and purpose. The others wanted him to succeed just as he wished success for them. Success for any one of them brought strength and power to the whole group. And success right now meant delivering a brutal fucking to the piece of meat on the table.

He reached the peak awash in feelings of belonging. He squirted his load deep into the asset’s guts, thrusting hard and long as the sensations flooded through him, then holding it there as deep as he could until the last trace of orgasm drained away. He slid back at last, letting his dick flop free and stepping to the side to make room for Brogan, who was eagerly awaiting his own crack at the now-stretched hole.

He felt spent for about five minutes after his climax, but soon enough the spirit of the others buoyed him back up and he got right back into the mood, adding his voice to the chorus of support for Brogan’s pumping hips. Brogan soon finished up, and then it was Kerchek’s turn.

Kerchek still had his pants on and as he started to undo them, Aaron nudged Derek in the ribs. “Now you’ll see why we always let him go last. After he gets finished stretching out that hole, the little cunt won’t even notice any dick smaller than a baseball bat!”

Sure enough, Kerchek’s endowment was massive. Kerchek’s body was huge and his dick was sized to match. It wasn’t the length so much as the girth; the thing was almost as thick as a Coke can, rock-solid and ready to go. He lined it up behind the asset, who was now barely conscious, and slowly, slowly eased his way in. That woke the asset up. It scrabbled its fingers helplessly behind its back as the monster slid inside and stretched its ass further than it had ever been stretched before. A few more screams issued out through its mouth, though the way its arms were compressing its lungs, it didn’t really have enough air to make much noise.

Kerchek delivered a matter-of-fact, no-nonsense fuck, exactly what Derek would expect from a fellow straight guy. Pete and Aaron and Roger and maybe even Brogan too might enjoy the grip of a tight ass on their meat even when they were getting it on with a willing boyfriend, but Kerchek was only here for the pain his tool caused when he wielded it. Derek could identify with that. The other guys on his team, they were his brothers too, of course, but their tastes were different. He could never share that taste with them. With Kerchek, though, he got a sense of how a straight guy did his part for a gay gang-rape. No drama, just deliver the pain, let the pathetic little fucker have it. That fit well with Derek’s personality; he felt he could hold his own alongside the rest. They may be united in purpose, but they didn’t have to be identical clones about it. Buoyed by the camaraderie, he goaded Kerchek on along with the others until at last the massive man pulled his equally massive weapon out.

“Did he…?” Derek wondered, not really intending to ask out loud. Aaron heard him.

“Oh yeah. Guy hardly shows it when he shoots, but yeah, there’s six loads buried in bottom-boy’s guts now. Time for a little break, then on to round two!” Aaron was in his element. Clearly, for him new-asset day was all twelve days of Christmas plus his birthday rolled into one.

Brogan began untying the asset’s arms. “Wait, round two?” Derek asked.

“Mmm hmm,” Aaron replied, distracted by the fresh screams that the asset emitted as the circulation began flowing in his arms again.

“Dude, I don’t know if I can do that twice in a row.”

Aaron shrugged. “No problem. Wait till round three!” He muscled the asset off the table and hurled it to the floor where it lay there whimpering and mewling.

Three rounds? Shit, these guys would need to save it up for six weeks to get through that!

They let the broken wreck rest for ten minutes, then it went up in the air. They suspended the asset by its wrists and ankles with its ass conveniently at waist height, as though it were in a sling but with nothing actually supporting its weight. There was nothing to support its head and so it was forced to strain its neck in a constant fight against gravity. Everyone but Derek had a second go; Derek just couldn’t keep the erection stiff enough to be able to penetrate. But he enthusiastically cheered the others on as they went through the cycle once more, ending as they did before with Kerchek.

Then they gave the exhausted victim another break, and then it was on to round three. Aaron went first, then Pete. Roger bowed out, but Derek was feeling recovered enough to have another go. The asset was locked into a pillory this time, bent at the waist with its feet spread apart and locked in a wooden frame that matched the one holding its neck and wrists. Derek found the hole to be noticeably looser this time around. Clearly the preceding rounds had done substantial damage. Or maybe the damage was all Kerchek’s doing. One way or another, this new addition to Dr. Cresh’s stable had now been well and truly fucked. Welcome to hell, you little piece of shit, Derek thought as he drove his dick into the shattered, bruised chute.

Aaron actually had enough gusto for one last poke, and then they were done. Pete held the victim’s mouth open. They all spat into it, Derek following the others’ lead, and then Pete closed the jaws and waited until the victim swallowed. That was the end. Kerchek carried the broken wreckage back to the holding cell and the group broke up, each man going his own separate way.

For Derek, that meant clocking out and heading back out into the spitting rain. He opened the door, took one look at the steady drizzle, then closed the door and turned right back around. “Fuck that,” he muttered, heading upstairs to the guards’ dorm area.

When he got there, he heard both showers running. Brogan was standing outside the door to his room, clearly waiting for a turn to wash up. “S’up, you forget something?” he asked.

“Nah. It’s pissing cold rain out there. Don’t feel like walking to the T and then home. Figured I’d hang out here a bit.”

“Sure, no problem. You wanna get cleaned up? Aaron and Kerchek should be done soon. Usually two showers are plenty and there’s always one open whenever you need. But on newbie day, after the fun’s over, well…”

“Yeah. There’s a line, sure.” Derek really hadn’t thought about it, had just found his pants and yanked them back up into place afterward. But… some dude’s shit and blood were all over his dick and now that he had started thinking about it, he couldn’t stop. He needed to get into one of those showers. And he was going to need a new pair of underpants at least. In fact, fresh clothes all over wouldn’t hurt.

Aaron came out; Brogan took his place. Aaron was still cheerful, though clearly spent. Then Kerchek came out to towel off, so Derek headed in to the stall he had just vacated. There was soap there; he lathered up, studiously not caring that the bar had presumably just been all over Kerchek’s body. He and the big man had just stuck their dicks into the same hole. What was he going to worry about from a shared bar of soap, cooties?

He heard Brogan finish and Roger go in while he was carefully rinsing every fold of skin around his crotch. When he was done, he found that Aaron had thoughtfully provided a towel for him as well as a set of clothes borrowed from Moose, who was the same size. They waited for Roger to dry off and then all five of them trooped down to the kitchen where Christian had prepared huge quantities of chicken, gravy, beans, and mashed potatoes for anyone who was hungry. They ate and then, sated, returned to the dorm area.

Somehow, what with the food in his belly and the relaxation that came from having shot twice in the past couple of hours, Derek found himself comfortably drowsy. The thought of heading out into the icy spitting rain after dark was, if possible, even less appealing than it had been in the daylight. And so it was the most natural thing in the world to simply drift off to sleep in the common room, surrounded by the soothing drone of the voices on Sports Center and the warm familiarity of these men, his band of brothers.

At some point during the night, he roused to find that someone had wrapped a blanket around him and tucked a pillow under his head. Aaron probably. That guy was just the sweetest, most considerate lug you could ever hope to meet. Derek smiled, rolled over, and immediately fell back to sleep.

8: Perks Of The Job

The days continued to pass. The warm-and-fuzzy feeling faded; no emotion that intense could last. In its wake, Derek realized that it, possibly more than anything, was the real reason for the welcoming-rape ritual. It wasn’t to brutalize the captive; there was plenty of brutality coming his way regardless. No, the point was to get the guards involved in a shared activity where they would bond. Even realizing this, Derek had to admit that it had worked. He had been changed by the experience. Not completely, of course: he was still straight and had no interest in going out and getting some random dude’s ass on the side. But he knew that the next time there was a new acquisition to Dr. Cresh’s stable, he would have no trouble getting it up and doing his part. Pete had been exactly right. It wasn’t about sex, it was about power. Derek and his brothers had it; the assets didn’t. That was the way of things, that was right and normal, and that was the way they would stay.

After making his way home the next morning, Derek took a look around the cramped room in the house he paid a third of the rent of, wondering why the hell he was still living here. It had seemed important at the time he first started the job, but now… there was just no point. And yet, there were still five months to go on the lease and his housemates would be pissed if he just walked out and left them to make up his share.

Of course, he had enough income now that he could just buy his way out, pay the rest of the rent, pack up his stuff, and leave. They’d probably be happy to see him go then, using what used to be his room for storage or hookups or gaming or whatever. That didn’t really strike him as the best use for his money. He owed those two nothing, barely knew their names.

Eh. There was no rush. He could think it over yet, maybe spend a couple of nights a week at work while still nominally “living” here. Thinking about the money made him realize that he needed to do something better with it than leave it in the apartment in a box buried under the dirty laundry. The next day he took most of the cash and opened his first bank account with it. From that point on, paychecks went to the bank and he realized what a sucker’s game it was to use those check-cashing places. At the bank, if he gave them a check for five hundred dollars, then the amount he got to keep was: five hundred dollars. Not four seventy-five, not four fifty. It surprised him the first time he deposited a check. Then he kicked himself for all the money he’d basically thrown away before.

New arrival Zane continued his transformation from man to asset over the next couple of weeks. Derek wasn’t directly involved much, but he heard updates from the others. More fingers sacrificed at Dr. Cresh’s insistent instructions; teeth drilled out as well. Damn, that would be some serious fuckin’ pain.

He got his new name, too: Doormat. Derek was there for that, along with John. Their role was easy: just bring the victim in and strap him into the torture chair until he couldn’t move a muscle. Then Doc took over. He heated up these bits of metal until they were glowing red, then held them by the handles and branded seven letters across the restrained victim’s chest. The smell was awful, hair and skin seared and smoking. Derek thought briefly of that barbecue he had done door duty for on his first night here, but somehow the idea didn’t hold the gut-wrenching horror any more that it once had. He was in no danger of suddenly needing to run out of the room.

Once the chest was branded, they flipped the victim over onto a table so the process could be repeated on his back. Zane – Doormat – gave up screaming and just lay there, practically comatose, for the second half. That amazed Derek. How could anyone just lie there and not even twitch when a red-hot iron was applied to his skin?

After he and John had dragged Doormat back to his cell to recover, he returned to Dr. Cresh’s office to help with the cleanup and figured he would ask whether that was normal.

“No, that’s not typical, not at all,” Dr. Cresh replied. “I’m not optimistic about Doormat’s chances, to be honest. I don’t think he’s going to make it all the way through the training.”

“Why’s that?” Derek asked.

“Oh, just a feeling, really. Nothing I can really point to. You know, Derek, one of the things that has come to fascinate me in this line of work is the trait of resilience. We all have it to some degree. Some have much more than others, of course. The thing I find fascinating is that I have not yet found any way to predict in advance which assets will have sufficient resilience to make it through the program and which won’t. There are really only two ways to fail. Either a candidate simply doesn’t survive the rigor; or else it becomes clear that he won’t make it and I decide to terminate the program myself.”

Meaning, schedule a slaughter and barbecue as on Derek’s first night of employment.

“On the other hand, there are several ways to succeed, and all of them in some way involve resilience, the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. At first I expected that there would be some correlation with other, more visible traits. Strength, for example, or feistiness or aggression, or perhaps introversion or intelligence or even a sense of humor. But now, with so many examples behind me, I have to admit I am no closer to predicting which new acquisitions will successfully make the transition to the stable and which won’t.”

Derek had mostly gotten the equipment put away and was now just sweeping up bits of singed hair and skin from the chair and floor. “No way to tell, huh?”

“Not that I can see. And my notes on past subjects are extensive. If there’s a pattern there to be discerned, I have not yet been able to pin it down. I am beginning to suspect that there is no pattern to be found. Take strength, for example. I’ve seen all four combinations of those two traits: strong and weak, resilient and not. Shithead, for instance, is both strong and resilient enough to have survived the transformation and his subsequent life here. But there was another shortly before him with the same build, the same ability to handle himself in a brawl… and yet he simply couldn’t make it. Very little tolerance for pain, I never even finished the first hand’s worth of fingers.”

“What happened to him?” Derek asked, both horrified and yet needing to know the answer.

“His heart gave out. Right there in that chair. Four fingers were off already and I’d told him to remove his thumb. He panicked. His heart started racing at the thought of the no-win situation he was in, his breathing became fluttery. He was shouting and thrashing like they all do and then suddenly, he went limp. I thought he had just passed out at first; that happens fairly frequently. But when we couldn’t rouse him for a while, I checked his heartbeat and heard just static. It was beating, but in a chaotic, arrhythmic way. He had gone into cardiac arrest. I had Pete and Brogan unstrap him and we performed CPR, but we were unable to get it beating steadily again. Even using that defibrillator there didn’t do it. The man literally scared himself to death. He had plenty of strength and yet very little resilience, and even today, I have no idea how to recognize that in advance. If you were to put him and Shithead in front of me right now in their before-modification state, I would be unable to say which one of them would be the survivor.”

He paused in his monologue for a while, then seemed to realize that Derek had run out of work to do.

“Well, it’s a fascinating topic and there’s clearly much more research to be done. Thank you for your assistance, Derek.” It was an obvious dismissal, so Derek headed out.

A week later, a little more than a month into his new job, Derek’s landlord left a letter in Derek’s mailbox. It explained how he was getting out of the real estate business and had found a buyer for the house, and would Derek mind if they wrapped things up a few months early? The letter made it clear Derek was not being singled out; the same had been sent to both housemates. Which neatly solved that problem for him, actually, and so Derek of course agreed, cleaned out his room and the few items he kept in the shared kitchen, gave the address of Dr. Cresh’s office as the place to send the check for whatever might remain of his security deposit and to forward any mail, and by the end of the week, he was out.

Aaron reacted with his usual giddy boyish enthusiasm to the news that Derek was moving into the dorm. He made sure Derek had a bed and sheets to put on it, a chair, a dresser, even going so far as to dust and vacuum the room before Derek showed up with his things.

“What?” Derek said upon walking in and seeing the place. “No lace doily for the pillow to match the curtains?”

“Hey, I got the likes-dick part of the gay gene,” Aaron replied, “but not the fabric-swatch part. You’re on your own for lace doilies!”

That was fine, of course, but Aaron continued. “Now if you’re looking for something to help you keep that bed warm, that’s something I can help you with! A little turn-down service, just part of the hospitality we offer here at Chez Kindrum.” He leered lasciviously at Derek, who felt himself starting to blush.

“Some other time,” he muttered, wishing he was able to think faster on his feet. Some time later tonight, no doubt, he’d come up with the perfect retort, light and bantering in a tone to match Aaron’s, but for now this was the best he could do. Words were not his thing. From they day they’d first met, Aaron had never tried to hide the fact that he found Derek attractive. Derek was in the awkward position of being the object of someone’s affection with no chance of the affection ever being returned… and yet he liked the guy. Aaron was a solid friend, definitely the most comfortable connection he’d made out of all of them here. He didn’t want to ruin that, but he also didn’t want to have sex with him.

So far, Aaron seemed fine with keeping it light, accepting Derek’s demurrals with an apparent air of “oh well, there’s always tomorrow”. This time he bowed ostentatiously and said “As you wish, good sir. If there is ever ANYTHING you need, anything at all, do give us a call. We aim to please.” He backed obsequiously out of the room, then abruptly danced to the side to avoid the pillow Derek threw at him as he left. Words might not be Derek’s thing, but actions… yeah, that he could do.

Three days later, word buzzed around the dorm: Doormat, formerly known as Zane, had washed out of the training program. John had gone to fetch him for a session and found him slumped on the floor by the toilet. Somehow, he had managed to drown himself, though it was not clear at first how. Speculation buzzed about how much willpower it would take, surely more than any man could muster, to hold his head under the water and suck liquid into his lungs when air was only inches away.

Later in the day, footage from the camera in the room shed a bit of light. Doormat had done a dry-land variation of shallow water blackout, which it turned out Moose had some knowledge of from some scuba experience in his past. The whole cadre gathered around to hear the details.

“The fucker actually found himself a not-too-bad way to go,” Moose explained. “Under the circumstances.”

The circumstances were these: Doormat was down to seven fingers. The brands were healing, his teeth had been extracted and he was undergoing the treatment that would reshape his mouth for service as a cocksucker. That treatment consisted of three straight weeks with a cylinder clamped between his empty gums. He was being fed through a tube and the cock-shaped gag was locked on so that he couldn’t remove it. Aside from that, he had free run of his cell, which included a toilet.

The camera showed Doormat getting up and going to the toilet.

“Watch what he does here,” Moose said. There was no sound, but they could see in the grainy image on the screen the way that Doormat’s chest heaved in and out, over and over, perhaps a dozen times. “He’s hyperventilating.”

“What good’s that gonna do?” Harris wondered. “Just let him keep his head down longer before he has to come up for air.”

“Sort of. He’s tricking his body. See, it’s not lack of oxygen that triggers the urge to breathe. It’s the buildup of carbon dioxide. He’s purging all the CO₂ out of his system.”

On the screen, Doormat’s head went down into the bowl. There was no hesitation. Clearly he had done all his thinking and what-iffing on the cot. This was nothing but determination to avoid the fate Dr. Cresh had destined for him, and he wanted to get it done as fast as possible before anyone could stop him.

“Carbon dioxide will start building up in his system once he holds his breath, but he’s got his level down so low that there won’t be enough to make him feel like he needs to breathe before it’s too late. He’s going to run out of oxygen and not even realize it. In fact, as his brain starts to shut down, he’ll probably even feel euphoric. Happy, like he’s floating on a cloud.”

Doormat had positioned his body so that its weight was centered over the toilet, pressing down on his head. He sank down to his knees and spread his legs out wide so that when his muscles went limp, his mouth and nose would stay submerged as long as possible. His arms were braced on either side, adding a small bit of stability to his position as well.

“Takes about two minutes,” Moose said. There was no motion on the screen and the guys all sat around waiting for something to happen. No one even suggested fast-forwarding. Then, at last, a twitch.

“OK, so maybe a few seconds ago, he lost consciousness, floating off into his happy zone. Right then, with his brain no longer calling the shots, his body took over and told him to quit fucking around and breathe already.” The body on the screen convulsed explosively. “Only he got a noseful of water, which hit the back of his throat and made him cough, which then made him suck in even more water, and he didn’t feel a thing ’cause he was already off in la-la land.”

The body at last lost its balance and toppled slowly sideways, landing on the floor where water streamed off the head onto the floor. There were a few more convulsions, but enough water had gotten in to saturate the lungs. They weren’t working, and soon enough the corpse lay still. Moose shut the replay off.

“I bet Doc was pissed when he found out,” Derek ventured. It was clearly a misstep. Several pairs of eyes all turned his way at once.

Brogan explained. “You ever seen Doc pissed?” he asked. “I don’t think it ever happens. That man’s got ice water in his veins.”

Pete confirmed. “Yeah, when I brought him the news, he just nodded his head and said ‘I see. Pity. Well, we’ll have to take steps to prevent such… creativity in the future.’ ” Peter’s impression of the doctor was spot-on, capturing the highbrow, almost British accent of Boston’s upper crust. “Not angry at all about it. Just part of the cost of doing business. Wonder if he’s gonna reuse the name ‘Doormat’?”

That started a round of speculation and reminiscences about other washouts and how some of their names got repurposed while others had not, at least so far. Then the topic veered toward steps they could take to prevent a recurrence. Shackling the convalescing victim to the bed emerged as the consensus. Pete said he’d take the idea to Dr. Cresh.

A month ago, Derek would have been shocked by such a discussion. Now, it still registered as “hey, this is not normal” but there was no gutpunch to it, no visceral horror. Sure, someone had died… but it was just an asset. No big deal. There were plenty more where that one came from.

By the time a week passed since he moved in, Derek had adapted smoothly to his new routine. Work when he felt like working, eat when he got hungry, either having whatever Christian had prepared for the staff or else scrounging for leftovers if it was outside normal mealtimes. Hit the gym regularly, hang out in the common room watching TV or playing video games when he felt like relaxing. He realized at one point that he hadn’t even gone outside for the last three days and hadn’t even noticed. Everything he needed was right here.

Still, it sort of startled him and so he went out that evening to see if he could find some companionship of a kind that wasn’t tall, hairy, and muscular. Mostly because it felt like something he ought to want to be doing, but also partly to prove to himself that he still could. He dropped by one of his old haunts and had a beer, but there was no companionship of the sort he was looking for to be found there.

Moving on to another bar, things started looking better. He managed to connect with a trio of ladies and did his best to charm them. His good looks, powerful build, and rugged grin had an effect that usually worked, at least on certain types of women. Somewhat paradoxically, his tendency to not say much often got him labeled as a great conversationalist too because it allowed his partner to do all the talking while he made a show of listening attentively and occasionally dropping ambiguous compliments into the empty spaces between the words.

Things looked promising at first but then one started commenting on how it was getting late, early day tomorrow, better get going… and all three left. The one he was angling for at least handed him a slip of paper with a phone number on it before she left, but that did him no good even if it turned out to be real. He was not looking for dinner and a movie tomorrow, he was looking for a warm bed tonight, dammit.

Ah, well. He wasn’t too bummed out about the hour he’d spent chatting them up or about the two rounds he’d bought them. It was good to get out and play the game regardless of the outcome. Every fisherman knows you don’t always get a bite, and even when you do there’s no guarantee you’ll land anything. The quest is enjoyable in its own right. As for the beers, that didn’t matter; he was flush with cash these days.

Around 11:30, he almost got a break, but she turned out to be a professional. Once again, cash wasn’t the issue; his pride was. The whole point of this exercise was to prove that, despite his current employment and housing situation, he was still the same red-blooded heterosexual he’d always been, still able to find a date on his own merits. Hiring one just wasn’t the same, so he bid her a cordial farewell and headed back home.

Back at the “office”, John and Kerchek were on duty, as usual for the overnight shift. Harris and Moose were in the common room playing Final Lap and busting on each other. The others were nowhere to be found.

He slipped into his room, closed the door, emptied his pockets, and found the note with the phone number on it. A faint fragrance wafted up from the paper, familiar from the hour he’d spent sitting next to whatever-her-name-was. He suddenly found himself massively, urgently horny. Flopping down onto his bed, he undid his fly and started going to town.

Not thirty seconds later, there was a perfunctory knock on the door and then – much to his surprise – it flew open. Doors in the dorm area did not have locks, but by convention, no one ever just walked in to another guy’s room. People’s sleeping schedules were too erratic and unpredictable so the policy was to always knock first and wait.

Aaron – for of course it was Aaron – acknowledged this even as the door was opening because he apologized even as he barged in. “Sorry, man, but Harris said you just got bac— aw, duuude!”

There was no time, no way for Derek to hide what he had been up to. Sure, intellectually, there was no reason to be self-conscious about it. Openly-displayed dicks, even erect ones, were not at all unusual pretty much anywhere in the building. And he and this man had taken part in a gang rape together, which should put any notion of modesty pretty far back on the shelf. But nevertheless, Derek felt his face flushing and his dick instantly starting to shrivel up. He jerked his pants shut reflexively, but only after it was far too late.

Aaron came in all the way, leaving the door open. “Derek, my friend, my brother. You know of course that I would be happy to help you out with that any time you want, you just have to say the word, hell, you don’t even have to say the word you can just look my way and wink BUT—” he held up a finger and practically shouted to cut off the protest Derek had started to voice. “… aside from that, you are overlooking a crucially important feature of your employment here. We have people here to do that for you! Well, not people, but you know what I mean.”

Derek shook his head, all thoughts of horniness evaporated. “No, aw man, I, just…”

Aaron grabbed him by the arm and hauled him up off the bed, not something a smaller man would have been able to accomplish easily. “I insist. You probably haven’t taken advantage of that perk since you got here, have you? It’s, like, the best part of this job!” He began pushing Derek toward the door. Derek’s pants started to fall and he caught them with his hand before they could puddle around his ankles. He protested, but Aaron drowned him out. “Nope. We’re doing this. Deal with it.” Harris watched them go, shaking his head slightly and not quite suppressing a grin.

Derek found himself led not down to the cell as he had expected, but up to one of the client rooms, one of the posh hotel-room style ones. Aaron pushed him down on the bed. “Now you just lie back and relax, got it? You wait right there. NO!” Derek had moved to stand back up, but Aaron was having none of it. “You want me to tie you down, is that it?” The tone of voice was somewhere between playful and dead serious. “I’ll do it if I have to. Might need to get one or two of the guys to help, but once they hear it’s for a good cause, they’ll be eager to help.”

Derek sagged back. All trace of an erection was gone. “OK. Fine,” he said. “You win.” The thought of being restrained – even just for “fun”, even knowing his buddies would release him afterward – that was just too much risk to take in this place. Once the straps were on, what was to stop the doctor from coming in and deciding he had one too many guards and one too few inmates? Nothing at all. The line between the two was far too easy to accidentally cross.

None of these thoughts were doing anything for his dick.

Aaron stared down at him for a few long seconds, apparently seeing whether Derek was going to stand up and bolt for the door as soon as his guard was down. “OK,” he finally said. “Now. I want you to get your pants off.” He went over to rummage in one of the drawers, talking as he moved. “And I want you… to put… this… on!” He held up a silk bandanna, intricately patterned in black and gold and white. Derek had no idea how he was supposed to “put it on”.

“Like this,” Aaron said, reaching to smother Derek’s face with it. Derek recoiled and swatted it out of Aaron’s hands. “OK, fine,” Aaron conceded, holding has hands up and letting the fabric lie on the bed where it fell, “but seriously, it’ll help. You’ve got this whole gotta-prove-I’m-straight thing going on and having a blindfold on will help.”

Oh. That’s what it was. A blindfold. That actually made some sense. Aaron kept talking, though. “That way you can have your own fantasy going about tits and twats and all that other nasty stuff you like to think about…” – he grinned as he said it – “… just like you were doing back in your own room. Only you don’t need to get your hands tired and messy. We got assets to do that for you!”

Derek picked up the blindfold, folded it, and put it on. It was a bit weird to not be able to see, but Aaron’s line of reasoning made sense. And his hands were free so he could whip the thing off in a hurry if he needed to.

“OK. That’s good. Now. You get those pants off, and you lie back on that pillow. I’m gonna go bring up Asshole. He’s nice and tame, won’t give you any trouble. Not that any of them would, but, like, you wouldn’t want Shithead for this. Sure, you could make him blow you, but he’d resist you every step of the way and you’d have to be the kind who gets turned on by the dominating-him part, and something tells me you’re in the mood for something more easy-going. Asshole’s good, gives great head and won’t give you any problems. Now, you just lie there, right? Don’t go anywhere! I’ll be back in, say, ten minutes, give you time to get back in the mood, yeah? Stay right there!”

He left, but then came right back in. “Oh, try this: keep your hands either behind your head or on your chest. Just let Asshole do his thing, don’t try to direct him, ‘K? It’ll be worth it, trust me.” The door closed once more, then almost instantly re-opened. “One more thing. Do not thank him afterward. Tell him he did a good job, that’s fine, but do not thank him. You do that and he’ll think you’re weak and then you’ll never stop having to put him in his place. When you’re done just take him back to the stable. OK. I’m gone for real this time!”

It took Derek a few minutes to settle down. Jerking off was a private act, and the knowledge that the door was going to open before long and someone was going to walk in on him with his hands on his dick made it tough to get that dick back into the right mood. He tried lying to himself, telling himself that he had made the other choice with the hooker earlier that evening, that he had gone with her and now she was the one who would soon step into the room and give him his money’s worth. With his eyes shut it wasn’t too hard to imagine. The enormous bed was soft and comfortable, exactly the sort of thing that a high-end call girl would have. He visualized her, though her features kept getting blurred with the one he had been talking to at the table.

It helped. The details of the specific face and figure didn’t matter. What mattered was that soon enough he was able to relax and the horniness he had been feeling before started to seep back in. His cock began to rouse itself once more and soon he was languidly squeezing the pleasantly half-hard thing to further encourage it.

When the door opened, he jumped a little. But he controlled himself and kept the blindfold on. He felt a body climb carefully up onto the huge, plushly-covered bed and position itself between his legs. He remembered Aaron’s instructions then and lifted his hands up, interlacing the fingers behind his head. It was a frighteningly vulnerable position. Here he was, lying flat on his back, unable to see, with his legs spread out wide and between those outspread legs was a… well, a thing… that had every reason to despise him and want to cause him massive hurt. His cock shrank down a bit; how could it not under the circumstances?

And yet… the next thing he felt was warm breath bathing the area. Gently, teasingly, even tenderly exhaling onto his bare skin. Then: a brush of warm lips right at the base. Soft nibbles at the creased, dangling skin of his scrotum. More breathing, and his cock began to swell and rise further until it was standing up off his belly. Then, only then, did the lips part and the warm mouth open up to slowly, wetly, pull him inside.

Damn, this could be that hooker! A girl like that would know all the tricks! But no, it was Asshole, just one of the assets down in the pen that Derek got paid to watch and feed and clean as if they were livestock. Livestock with a peculiar talent; Aaron wasn’t kidding, this one gave excellent blow jobs. The fit was absolutely perfect. Derek’s dick completely filled the mouth that surrounded it so there was contact everywhere, all over the head and all along the sides, all those nerve endings lighting up and saying “yes, more, now!” He realized how perfect Dr. Cresh’s reshaping of the assets’ mouths was. No teeth to snag tender skin on, just warm, moist flesh from lips to tonsils and a tongue that throbbed and pulsed along the whole length of Derek’s ever-hardening dick.

It seemed like it took no time at all for Derek to go from half-hard and horny to seconds away from an eruption, but then, just as he was nearing the point of no return… nothing! The lips and tongue and throat abandoned him and left him gasping for breath, his frustrated cock twitching in open space. Ten, twenty seconds it bobbed there and Derek almost brought his hands down to finish the job, but he forced himself to keep them there, away from temptation.

Asshole’s mouth moved in once more, this time biting down with his toothless gums and sending new jolts of sensation through Derek’s inflamed dick. Again Derek was brought close to the edge, only to be left high and dry once more, humping his hips in a futile effort to go that one tiny step further. He allowed himself to get lost in the game, trying to hide his coming explosion from his pleasurer / tormentor, but Asshole was too good at reading his body’s responses. He always pulled away in time, propping himself up on the stumps of his arms and letting Derek’s drooling dick throb helplessly in the empty air. Derek was moaning with delight and frustrated longing.

On perhaps the dozenth iteration, Asshole at last relented. Derek’s body, accustomed now to denial and deprivation, couldn’t accept the fact at first and was prepared for another false alarm. But Asshole kept working, and as a result, Derek spent what felt like three days in that hyper-alert state where the orgasm is getting nearer and nearer and nearer, just barely out of reach but drawing closer with every heartbeat yet never quite arriving, and then at last, with an overwhelming rush, it did. Derek’s body convulsed. He bent at the waist, his hands flying out from behind his head and planting themselves on the bed where they provided support and stability to his spasming body. His dick was absolutely clenching as it spat out globs of sperm into Asshole’s hungry mouth. Asshole kept right on sucking, swallowing the fluid down as fast as it could hit the back of his throat. Derek fell back onto the pillow, utterly lost in the sensations radiating up from his groin.

Best of all, Asshole knew when to dial it back. That was one thing the girls who’d done him like this never got right. They either quit too soon, not wanting to get their mouths all sticky with his spunk, or else they kept going long past the point where it was pleasurable for him until he had to push them off in self-preservation. Not Asshole. At just the right time, he slowed his sucking, then stopped entirely and simply held Derek’s dick, quivering and pulsing with aftershocks, in his mouth, draining it dry without overstimulating it.

It was the best damn blow job Derek had ever experienced. Ever.

He lay there, spent. Some residual part of his brain told him that he owed his partner some reciprocity. Then he reminded himself that this was not a partner, this was a sex toy. A vibrator. He owed it nothing, not even – as Aaron had reminded him – gratitude. It was just doing the task it had been created for.

Nevertheless, he couldn’t let the labor go unacknowledged. He slid the blindfold off up over his forehead and looked down for the first time at the naked, armless asset that had lifted him so expertly to heights no woman had ever taken him to. The creature was still concentrating on his dick, not looking back up at him. Derek slid himself out of the sex toy’s mouth, then patted its head with his hand. “Nice work,” he said. He stood, found his underwear and pants, put them back on and got himself straightened up. Asshole waited calmly all the while. “Let’s get you home,” Derek said. Asshole meekly climbed to his feet and followed him out of the room, back down the stairs, and into the pen.

Damn, these guys were well trained.

Kerchek, on duty outside the cell door, just gave a grin when Derek passed by, opened the door, and nudged Asshole back into the darkened cell. He knew exactly what had just happened. And it suddenly occurred to him that John up in the control room might have been watching the whole thing on his view screen. There were no secrets here, and nothing to feel ashamed about. Derek grinned back and headed upstairs to the followup session that there was no way to avoid.

Back in the common room, Aaron surged up off the sofa the moment he saw Derek walk in. “And?” he asked in that puppy-dog way he had.

“You were right,” Derek said. Aaron beamed. “Absolutely, totally, one hundred percent right.”

“Best blow job ever?” Aaron asked.

Derek nodded. “No question.”

Aaron hooted. “Ha! I knew it! I told you he was good! Technique-wise, he’s the best we got.” He put a splayed out palm on his chest. “I would say present company excluded ’cause I’m no slouch in the cock-sucking department myself, but I have to concede the blue ribbon to those guys and their custom-fitted dental work. They’ve been tailor-made for the job and I just can’t compete with that. Now, if you want to get into something rougher some time, maybe pick Toilet. That guy still hasn’t figured out how to suppress his gag reflex, so he’s constantly choking and gagging and gasping for air. His nose gets all snot-filled, which just makes it worse for him. So if it’s suffering you’re after, he’s your guy. Then, like I said before Shithead’s the one if you want a struggle. He’s still got some fight in him, so it’s less like sex and more like rape. Oh, and then there’s…”

Derek let him rattle off the pros and cons of the oral services provided by each of the assets in the stable, mostly letting the torrent of words wash over his head. He was suddenly very much drained, not just of sperm but of energy. Aaron finally noticed his eyelids drooping and sent him off to bed, where he somehow managed to get undressed and under the covers before sleep swept him away.

9: Mr. Onyx

As the weeks went by, Aaron continued half-jokingly trying to get Derek into bed. He would make outrageously crude propositions that he had to know Derek would never accept, allowing Derek to decline without either of them losing face, but always with an undercurrent of “but what if?” Derek had two reasons for saying no. The first was his own lack of interest, though as time wore on this was tempered by a growing sense of “well, why shouldn’t I do my nice friend a favor?”. The second reason stopped him, though, a gut-level sense that hooking up with one of the guys would inevitably lead to repercussions with the others. He had figured out that Roger and Harris were sort of together, not in any sort of public proclamation of couplehood, but in the sense that they occasionally spent off hours together behind one or the other’s closed door. They were the only two, and somehow they made it work, perhaps because the relationship was strictly physical rather than emotional. Derek didn’t think he could pull that off. Even though man sex was a constant background to the job, for him it was best to keep it strictly part of the job. Fuck the assets, in other words, not the other members of his cadre.

Winter came and settled over the city in its usual slushy, sleety way. Not having to go out for food or work or exercise made it easy for Derek to just not leave the building, ever. On rare occasions when he did it was usually on a weekend when the weather was cooperative. He’d meet up with some friends or hang out at a bar. More and more often, though, when he went out it was with his workmates where they would take a booth at a restaurant, three or four or five massive bodies dwarfing the seats and tables. They would sit and talk about nothing at all, totally unremarkable aside from their unusual size, just a bunch of young blue-collar guys hangin’ out after work. There was never, ever any shop talk at these events. The closest they ever came was a veiled reference to a “product” or an “asset” or a “customer”, which would elicit knowing smirks from the others at the table. But no blatant innuendo, and absolutely never any names, not even the color or gemstone-based aliases the customers all used. What happened inside Dr. Cresh’s walls stayed inside those walls.

One January afternoon Derek was on duty in the control room when the word “mine” came clearly through the speaker. He had only half been paying attention. This was the first time he’d ever heard one of the assets using one of the forbidden words; usually they were very good at policing themselves. He almost doubted his ears, but no, there had been no mistake. The word had come through loud and clear. Discipline was necessary… but for who? He still wasn’t good at telling one asset’s defective voice from another’s. It might have been Worthless… probably… but it could have been Toilet’s or Useless’s too. Dammit, there was no way to be sure.

He went downstairs and explained the situation to Harris, on duty outside the door. Harris got up out of his chair, fetched two objects shaped sort of like sticks and sort of like guns from one of the supply closets, and handed one to Derek. “Ever used one of these before?” he asked.

“Nope. What is it?”

“Stunner. Electric shock device. Turn this switch on… here. Now whatever you touch those two prongs to gets a very painful zap. Let’s go tase some tongues. Use this to get a good grip.” He handed Derek a hunk of gauze.

“But how do we know which one to do it to?”

“Just do ’em all.”

They burst into the cell. The assets knew they were in trouble. Derek watched the group, individual members each torn between competing urges to fight or flee, like a herd of elk startled by a pack of wolves. But they couldn’t overcome the submission that had been drilled into them and so they stood, terrified, waiting for the pain. Useless was closest to Harris. “Stick out your tongue,” Harris barked. Shaking, Useless complied. Harris grabbed it with the gauze between his fingers and the slimy surface, then lowered the taser into Useless’s mouth, lining up the two prongs toward the back.

Contact. Useless bucked and fought, but he couldn’t break free of Harris’s grip. Harris let the shock go on for a good three seconds, then let go. Useless collapsed to the floor.

“Your turn,” Harris said.

“Shouldn’t we be explaining what they did?”

“The fuckers know what they did. They don’t need it explained. They know if one of ’em fucks up, we don’t much care which one it was.”

So Derek turned to Worthless. “You next,” he commanded. Worthless stepped forward and held his tongue out, shaking like a leaf the way Useless had. Derek grabbed his tongue, but the grip was poor. The slippery appendage slid free of his grasp and he had to try again. The second time he made better contact. In went the stunner; Worthless exploded in frenzied panic and fell once the current was finally switched off.

“You need to go longer,” Harris said. “One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi. That wasn’t even two. Do Toilet next.” He looked down at Worthless’s fetal form. “You got lucky, you little shit. I should give you another dose.”

Derek repeated the process on Toilet, this time holding the stunner in place for the full time. It felt far, far too long. Toilet was clearly in agony as the current blasted his tongue, and he was only inches away from Derek, the guy inflicting the pain. It was a weird combination of feelings, to be hurting someone in such a close-up, intimate way. Totally unlike a fist to a jaw, where the jolt is sudden and the effects occur at a distance, this just kept going on and he was right there to see it all close up. This was flat-out sadism, what the doctor’s clients got off on. It was sort of disturbing to be so close to such sustained torture… and yet… and yet… and yet it actually even felt a little bit… good. Powerful. Three eternal seconds finally came to an end; Derek pulled the stunner out and Toilet collapsed, curling up to nurse his wounded mouth.

Harris took care of Asshole, leaving Shithead for Derek. The largest and meanest of the assets glared insolently at Derek, as if daring him to try anything. Derek stared him down for a few seconds, then realized he hadn’t given Shithead any orders. Shithead was not the type to make anything easy on the guards; he would never voluntarily assume the position for his punishment even though he knew exactly what he was expected to do, having seen it happen four times already.

“Tongue out,” Derek said, no emotion in his voice. That was the key with this one, he’d learned. Don’t let him think he can get to you.

Shithead stalled for exactly as long as he could get away with, then slowly extended his tongue. “Open your mouth wider,” Derek commanded, trying to sound bored. He grabbed Shithead’s tongue, set the stunner in place, and let it rip. Shithead took it better than the others, but it was clear he was suffering. Derek let him go a full extra second before easing up. Shithead somehow remained standing and even managed to send a slow-burning look Derek’s way once he’d got his jaw to close again. Fine – let him have his trivial little triumph. Derek had made his point; Shithead’s posturing was a show for the other assets’ benefit, not any threat to Derek or Harris. The two guards turned and left without a word, clanging the door shut behind them.

Back in the control room, he heard no chatter at all from the assets for the rest of his shift.

February rolled around. Derek asked for, and got permission to take, a week off. He spent it on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, fulfilling a dream he’d had in high school when he would be stuck slogging to school on those endless icy, gloomy winter days wishing he were someplace warm. Now he had the money for it, and taking the time was no trouble, so he went. The shipped steamed along, stopping at ports Derek didn’t bother to remember the names of to disgorge the passengers out to soak up the sun and the local atmosphere.

He had a good time, although most of the people on the ship tended to be middle-aged or even elderly. There were very few people his age on board. At the ports, though, that was a different matter. He ate, he drank, he hit on – and landed – several fellow travelers looking for some vacation-time, no-strings-attached fun. It was reassuring to know he hadn’t lost his touch with the ladies. And yet… enjoyable as the romps were, he couldn’t help but think back to Asshole’s tender, talented tongue and to the helpless muffled choking noises Toilet would make as he fought for breath. It was fine, though. He returned relaxed and tanned, happy to have been on vacation but happy to be back among his buds again too.

Perhaps a week after his return, he was asked to take part in a client session. A client wanted spectators to observe his abuse of his victim. It was early evening; Kerchek and John were getting ready to go on duty for the overnight shift and were eating, Brogan and Pete were just wrapping their shift up, Harris and Aaron were asleep, and Roger was out, leaving just Derek and Moose available for the extra duty. Both were willing.

The client had them dress up in costumes that Pete had dug up from somewhere in the uncharted depths of the building. They were black executioner-style robes, complete with half-face hoods. Looking at Moose and at his own reflection in the mirror while putting their outfits on, Derek couldn’t decide whether he found the look to be comical or intimidating and kept alternating between the two.

He had to suppress occasional smiles and snickers at the Halloween getup all the way down to the cell, where they retrieved Worthless, the target of the evening’s activities. Moose and Derek dragged him out and informed him that he was to act the part of a condemned prisoner whose death sentence was about to be carried out, starting immediately. He dutifully obeyed and thus kicked and struggled all the way up the stairs and through the hall, gripped tightly by the shoulders between the two guards, down the hall to the open door of the largest and most well-equipped of the three dungeon suites, where the client waited.

The client himself, a very appropriately-named Mr. Onyx, was dressed in a somewhat fancier version of what Derek and Moose had on, cut in a similar style and still mostly black but embroidered and ornamented in a sartorial proclamation that he was the head honcho and the others were merely minions. That was fine with Derek. A little audience with your torture tonight, m’sieur? And some dress-up? Very good, m’sieur.

Derek and Moose didn’t have to do much besides stand there and look scary, which was basically his job at the Condor, only this time wearing a goofy gown. The actual event wasn’t all that interesting. Mr. Onyx gave a little speech, which took a while and caused Derek’s attention to start wandering. Then when the actual torture got going it likewise took a while to ramp up. Mr. Onyx was in the mood for a lengthy session, it seemed, and he wanted Derek and Moose to stand there like Buckingham Palace Guard statues all the while. Fine. Derek could do that. It would be boring, but he’d cope. Then have a good laugh with Moose about it afterward.

He stood there a while, occasionally shifting his weight slowly and subtly when he felt the need. Mostly, though, he didn’t pay much attention to what was going on. His job was to detect threats and in this case, the only possible threat was a toothless, armless asset vs. three full-grown, unmaimed men. Threat? Riiiiiight.

Then, at one point, Derek sensed Moose tensing up next to him. Without displaying any outward reaction, Derek brought himself back to full attention as soon as he caught the change in Moose’s body language.

Mr. Onyx had stretched Worthless out on the rack, arms held in place by the shoulder implants, ankles restrained the more usual way. Worthless was having a hard time breathing stretched out as he was. There was a bit of blood seeping down the asset’s ribs as he lay there panting quick, shallow breaths; Mr. Onyx had amused himself by carving thin lines with a wickedly-sharp knife, drawing designs on Worthless’s taut belly. That wasn’t too outrageous, though, certainly not enough to have sparked such a reaction from Moose. So what was going on? He started to pay attention to Mr. Onyx’s words.

“Oh, yeah. Does that surprise you? It’s true. The price was steep, but I decided it was one I was willing to pay. Still think this is a game? Still think you’re acting out a role? You’re not. This is real. I bought your life tonight. It’s mine now.” Punctuating the words with flicks and twists of the knife.

That was… well… Derek wasn’t quite sure how he felt about that. Yeah, sure, it was just an asset, and it wouldn’t be the first one to reach the end of its term of service, but… it would be the first during Derek’s tenure. And to actually be in the room when it happened? That was… Derek decided this was just another time when he’d have to keep his poker face on, no matter what came.

Mr. Onyx took his time, but Derek was in no mood to daydream any more. “So what’s it going to be, I wonder? I’ve thought about this moment for years, you know. Ever since I was young. Wondering what it would be like to be there for that undefinable moment when that last spark of life leaves a body. But how to do it? That’s the question. Do you have an opinion, Worthless? Gotta say, Dr. Cresh gave you an appropriate name, ’cause that’s what you are right now. Worthless. A couple of hours from now, what’s left of you is going to be chilling in the freezers, waiting to be chopped up into steak-sized chunks to be served up with mint jelly and a sprig of parsley next time doc has one of his banquets. So I don’t want to spoil the meat, but that still leaves plenty of options.”

He prodded Worthless with the knife. “Hmm? Speak up. You got an opinion? How do you want to go?”

Worthless swallowed hard. “This one does not have an opinion. Whatever the master wants.”

“Oh, bullSHIT!” Mr. Onyx exclaimed, slamming his fist down on the wood next to Worthless’s ear. “You’re still ACTING! Don’t think I can’t tell the difference. You guys think you can play us, and maybe that works with some, but I’ve been here enough times to know how it works. You put on a show. Long before you’ve reached your actual breaking point you fake it. It’s an act. Well, maybe that works with some guys, gets you an easier time of it, but I’m not one of them. So what’s it gonna take to get through to you that this is no joke, huh? You need to lose an ear or something?”

He brought the knife in. From where he was standing, Derek couldn’t see what it did, but he could see Worthless’s body clench and tighten and could hear a piteous cry emerge.

“There,” Mr. Onyx said, backing away. “I just took the lobe, but I will go farther if I need to. So, you got an opinion yet? If so, now’s your chance to voice it.”

“Something painless,” Worthless whimpered.

“HA! Painless? Well. Now I at least know you’re not acting. But, no, that’s not gonna be how it goes. You know what, I changed my mind. You don’t get a say. But I still don’t know how I’m gonna do it. Maybe I should just do you right here, right like this.”

He tightened the rack another notch. “Whaddaya think? I just need to make one of these slices a little bit longer and deeper. Cut right through those ab muscles. Rip your fucking guts out and pile them up on your chest. Think that’d be a good way to go? That painless enough for you? It wouldn’t be quick, I’ll tell you that. You’d have plenty of time to tell me whether it hurt or not.” Worthless was definitely reacting differently now. Even Derek could tell there was a new note of frenzy in his voice that hadn’t been there before.

Then the knife moved higher up. “Or maybe I cut your throat. That’d be quicker, wouldn’t it? Maybe I jam this blade right through your Adam’s apple… no more air for you. You’d drown in your own blood. Or maybe I slit your carotids and just let all the blood drain out of your body. Either one of those would be fast. I might be able to catch the exact moment when the light in those eyes fades to black.” Worthless was choking back sobs now. If he was faking his reaction, he was doing a damn good job.

Mr. Onyx suddenly swung about to face Derek and Moose. “What about you guys? Either of you got any ideas how this piece of shit should go out?”

Derek was saved from having to answer by Moose speaking up first. “No, sir. That’s not our place to say. But we’ll help with any logistics you’ll need.” A purely practical answer. A very matter-of-fact way to sidestep the question “how should I kill this thing that used to be a man?”

Mr. Onyx let Worthless up and forced him to kneel with his head in a pillory. The pillory had arm holes but of course they were of no use for any of the assets. He retrieved a very real, very sharp sword and waved it in front of Worthless’s face. Then he threatened to slice Worthless’s head clean off his shoulders, claiming that he would grab Worthless’s head up from the floor and watch for that moment when the brain realized it had been disconnected from the body and the light flickered out. After describing it a few times he suddenly seemed to grow frustrated with the delay. “Aw, fuck it,” he said, lifting the sword high up overhead and bringing down with all his strength.

Shhhhwakkk!

The sword hit the wood instead of the back of Worthless’s neck, carving an inch-deep gash into it. Worthless gasped and jumped at the impact and from his reaction it became clear to all in the room that he was relieved to not be dead.

Mr. Onyx zeroed in on that instantly.

“Yeah? Now we’re getting somewhere. Explain it to me, boy. Your life is hell. It’s constant misery. I thought you’d react like I was doing you a favor. But no, miserable as your life is, you don’t want to let go yet. You want to live. Well then, boy, let’s hear it. Let’s hear you beg for your life.”

He released Worthless from the pillory and Worthless begged. He fell to the floor, face down. It took him a few seconds to start producing actual words. “Please… please… this one doesn’t deserve your mercy but he… it begs for your mercy anyway… please… let Worthless live.”

“NONE OF THAT SHIT!” Mr. Onyx shouted. “You’re ACTING again!” He planted a booted foot in Worthless’s ribs, knocking him over and prompting him to curl up in a ball on the floor. “Beg like you MEAN IT! Or I’ll cut your tongue right out of your mouth.” He took the knife and wedged it between Worthless’s lips, prying them apart and sliding it into his mouth through the gap in his gums. Worthless batted at it with the stumps of his arms, but he was helpless. Another trickle of blood began to seep from where the edge had caught some skin.

Worthless’s eyes flicked over to the two guards, then rolled wildly until he squeezed them shut. “Please, no, please don’t,” he whimpered, the words coming out in a rush. “I don’t wanna die, don’t kill me, please, please don’t. Don’t hurt me.”

The knife backed away a fraction. “That’s more like it,” Mr. Onyx said. “But tell me… why? Your life is a living hell. Why prolong it? I’m offering you escape. I thought you might even thank me.” Derek wondered if he should try to keep track of the number of times Worthless said “I” and “me”. Three so far, but the number could easily grow huge very quickly. But then… what point was there in counting? Were they going to punish a corpse?

Worthless’s eyes opened and he looked up into the eyes barely visible through the black hood. He spat some blood out. “Thank you? For getting me out of here? News flash, asshole: it’s because of fecal rejects like you that I’m in here in the first place.”

Mr. Onyx stood up and kicked Worthless in the ribs. “I’ve heard enough. One of you, get me that ball gag from over there. The spiky one.”

Derek went to fetch it. It was a nasty piece of work, built like other ball gags with a strap to go around the back of the wearer’s head to hold it in place, but instead of a smooth, round ball, this one had about a dozen sharp fat spikes sticking out of it. No matter which way it went into the victim’s mouth, at least a couple of those spikes were going to be pointing in such a way that he’d have to stretch his mouth open even wider or else feel the spikes dig into his gums and palate. As soon as he saw it, he remembered Brogan describing such a device to him back when he first started, and realized this must be it.

Worthless kept talking even as Mr. Onyx kept kicking at him to try to shut him up. “It may not be much of a life, but I’ve got friends and I can still dream of getting out some day. And when I do, I am going to spend the rest of my life hunting down every last one of you fuckers and making…”

He was forced to stop talking at last when Mr. Onyx crouched down and stuck the knife once more into his mouth. That was followed by the spiked ball gag, and once that was buckled in place, there was no way Worthless could produce anything like recognizable words. But he kept making sounds. Now that the dam had burst, he was apparently determined to let out every ounce of pent-up outrage he’d been holding in since his captivity began. He flailed around with his arm stumps, lashed out with his legs, thrashed his bleeding body around to try to disrupt the proceedings any way he could. Presumably he was trying to hold his mouth open as wide as he could, but that was impossible to sustain and so new trickles of blood came oozing down his chink

With the help of Derek and Moose, Mr. Onyx got a noose positioned around Worthless’s neck. They propped him up in a standing position and he stood there, swaying slightly, held up by the rope, fuming around the gag.

“There,” Mr. Onyx said. “Now. That looks like it’ll work.” He fished his fly open through the front of the open robe and brought his already-hard dick out into the air. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to die for me. Simple as that. You’re going to stand there and when I get close, one of these guys is going to use the winch to pull that rope up a few inches higher. That’s all it’ll take, just a few inches.”

Glaring venom at his tormenter, Worthless deliberately lifted his legs off the ground, taking all his weight on his neck. Immediately his mouth closed a bit and the spikes dug in further. His body turned to the left once his feet were clear of the floor.

“That’s fine,” Mr. Onyx said, stroking himself. “You can try to bring the end on sooner. One of you guys, turn him back toward me.” Moose reached out a hand and spun him to face toward Mr. Onyx. Worthless’s feet kept reaching for the ground but with an effort of will he would lift them up again, though to what end Derek couldn’t figure out. Maybe he just hadn’t thought things through?

Sure enough, as his struggles began to slacken, Mr. Onyx commanded Moose to grab him and lift him up. Moose took hold around the waist and took the asset’s weight in his arms. Derek reached in and loosened the rope a bit. Blood started flowing to his brain again and he revived enough to get feisty again. He thrashed around some more while Mr. Onyx kept working his meat.

Derek, behind his poker face, thought that this qualified as a massive clusterfuck. The costumes, the obvious lack of any sort of plan, the way the asset had been goaded out of its training for no apparent reason… this was just stupid. He wondered if this was one of those “the customer isn’t always right” moments that Aaron had told him about. Perhaps he should call a halt to this now? He definitely considered it. But after a bit of thought he figured that no matter how badly this Onyx guy screwed things up with this one asset, that was fine because it wouldn’t be going back to the pen with the others. As for the billing end, that was Dr. Cresh’s to worry about. So he stood back and observed.

Moose set Worthless back down on the floor. Up went the feet again and the process was repeated. Derek wondered how long it was going to take Onyx to blow his load. He didn’t seem to be anywhere close, not even after all the buildup Derek had snoozed through.

They rescued Worthless again and, after letting him recover, he didn’t seem eager to prematurely end his agony again. Perhaps hanging by the neck was more pain than he wanted to inflict on himself. Instead, he appeared to be concentrating on keeping his jaws apart. After he had stood for perhaps fifteen or twenty seconds, Onyx directed Derek he hoist him up with the winch Derek pressed the button and up the asset went, just three or four inches but that was enough. Moose once more kept the face oriented the right way. Then down again less than a minute later. They repeated the process several times while Mr. Onyx worked his way to the finish line. By the fourth time, Worthless’s attempt to end the session prematurely had yielded to his body’s natural instinct to fight for survival – his legs kicked and flailed, seeking support that wasn’t there. There were several more repetitions after that.

At last a time came when Mr. Onyx instructed them to lift Worthless off the ground and then stepped up close, fingering the dangling asset’s face with one hand while he stroked himself with the other. Worthless thrashed and panicked, fighting to find some support for his legs. Eventually, the kicking slowed, then stopped. A thin trickle of urine began to dribble out of the stump of his cock.

Onyx sprayed his load over Worthless’s legs and feet, stood there breathing hard for a minute or two, then tucked his softening dick away.

“You guys take care of that for me, will ya?” he said, gesturing at the limp body. “Thanks.” With that, he left the room.

They watched him go. The door eased slowly shut as the footsteps faded down the hall. The moment it closed, Moose turned to Derek. “The fuck was that?” Derek just shook his head. This entire setup had felt weird from the start. Sloppy, unplanned… downright amateurish. Derek realized how accustomed he was to Dr. Cresh’s cool, methodical, perfectionist style. Apparently the customers did not all possess the doctor’s level of forethought and attention to detail, and the result was: this. A sloppy, unfocused mess of an execution.

He supposed he should feel something more about the fact that a life had just ended right in front of him, but the circumstances were just too weird. Nothing about this felt real. He lowered the winch down until the body was lying on the floor, then worked the noose free of the red, abraded neck.

Moose went to get supplies to clean up the blood, taking some of the various weapons and tools with him to the cabinet on his way. Derek, for his part, shucked the robe and the hood off and as soon as Moose turned back and noticed, he did the same. It was a relief to be out of that ridiculous costume.

Derek heard a raspy, shuddering breath.

It was a strange, frightening sound, not like a normal breath at all. At first he thought it must have come from Moose because they were the only two people in the room… except for the fresh corpse, of course. But when he caught Moose’s eye, he found Moose looking back at him with the same expression of puzzlement and concern that must be on Derek’s own face. It only took a moment for both of them to realize: the sound had come from the corpse.

Or rather, from the thing that was supposed to be a corpse but maybe wasn’t all the way there yet.

Derek was closer. He knelt down and felt for a pulse in the neck. He couldn’t find one, but maybe that was because of all the roughened skin from the rope burns? He went to try the wrist and actually did a double-take when he saw there wasn’t one, then abruptly remembered the circumstances.

The body drew another breath, in and then back out. Then another. There was no sign of consciousness.

“Shit,” Derek said. “What do we do now?” Moose just shrugged.

In the end, they took the question to Dr. Cresh, which was the only logical thing to do. The doctor had them set Worthless up in one of the holding cells usually used for new acquisitions. They would feed him and hydrate him and Worthless would either pull through or he wouldn’t. If he did, he’d go back to the pen with the others. If not, then it was off to the freezer.

Walking back to the dorm area, Derek mostly felt numb. Some tiny part of him tried to point out that this was not normal, that the Derek of last summer would have been horrified at what today’s Derek was doing so nonchalantly. Such thoughts were unproductive; what choice did he have? Besides, his life was pretty good at the moment. He was surrounded by friends, getting paid good money to do practically nothing most of the time, and his living expenses were minimal so the money just kept piling up in the bank. If all that came at the cost of having to ignore a tiny nagging voice in his head, so be it.

He pushed those thoughts aside and instead speculated about how the conversation would go if at some future point Mr. Onyx noticed Worthless’s name on the roster of available pain slaves and complained. Derek suspected Dr. Cresh would point out that if the client couldn’t be bothered to actually commit the murder he’d paid the rights for, that was on him. Dr. Cresh would probably be happy to sell him another session to try to get it right this time. Or perhaps he would sell Worthless’s final session to another more detail-oriented customer.

March brought with it the next new asset, originally named Allen but soon re-christened “Helpless” by means of block capital letters branded across its chest and shoulders. Derek was present for, or at least heard about, the usual prepwork: the destruction of the first finger, the welcoming rape (which he enthusiastically took part in), the removal of the teeth, the steady destruction of the remaining fingers. They chained him to the bed while his mouth was being reshaped after the tooth removal; there was to be no repeat of Doormat’s premature exit.

Helpless caught on quickly. By the fourth finger, he had figured out that it was better to do it himself than to have the doctor or one of the staff do it for him. Derek watched, amazed, as he severed his own digit with an axe. It took him a while to work himself up to it, but as soon as it was done Dr. Cresh rushed in to tend the wound and give him painkillers. The carrot and the stick. It was a program that worked; Derek saw the results daily. Derek wasn’t present for the next one, but John reported that the new asset had hardly hesitated at all when the time came to destroy his thumb.

As spring ripened into summer, Helpless completed the training program. The final step was the removal of his dick. Derek had heard enough about this process to know he wanted no part of it. It started with a vicious mind game: the now-armless and mostly compliant asset was ordered to cut his own cock off, which of course he had no way of doing even if he had been willing to. He was given hours to stew over the impossible task, then “punished” for failing at it. The punishment involved the slow, steady destruction of his penis. The details varied – heat, needles, electricity, crushing – but the end was always the same: it was slowly sliced off at the root, one millimeter at a time, while the victim was simultaneously fucked by an intact, fully-operational cock. Having to be in the room for such an operation would have seriously strained Derek’s ability to keep his poker face on – or his most recent meal in his stomach – but fortunately, Pete very much enjoyed this scene and was happy to volunteer to do the fucking.

By the time summer was starting to fade into autumn, Helpless had “graduated” to the cell downstairs, where he met with his fellow inmates for the first time. His recently-severed arms had their implants in, but it would be many months before the bone grew in enough that the implants could be put to use. Derek and the other guards had to remember that on wash days Helpless was not to be yoked to the arms of the other assets until Dr. Cresh gave the all-clear some months down the line.

Throughout, Derek occasionally availed himself of the perks of the job. He even tried Shithead and found it to be enjoyable in a way he hadn’t expected about himself. He could actually get into this getting-off-by-dishing-out-pain thing, maybe not quite as deeply and enthusiastically as the clients did, but enough that it gave him a pleasant buzz to force Shithead into submission and then deliver a solid skull-fucking.

Once he joined with Aaron in taking Helpless for a trial run. By now, Aaron had mostly eased off with the over-the-top flirtations and propositions. Derek was actually the one to suggest they both try out the new asset together, a way to do that nice favor he knew his friend would enjoy without it being a one-on-one thing. They spit-roasted him, Aaron plugging Helpless’s ass while Derek worked the mouth. It was great, actually. To be sure, the blow job itself wasn’t all that, but the fact that he and Aaron were fucking the same thing at the same time, working the asset over together, made for a miniature version of that all-for-one, one-for-all feeling that the welcoming rape ceremony provided. It was very satisfying.

Still, for a long, slow, top-of-the-line blow job, Asshole was the one for the job. Derek found himself pulling that one out for some R&R time much more often than the others.

As the leaves began to turn outside (a fact which he only noticed because he went out for one of his increasingly-rare meetups with his former friends), he realized that he had been working for Dr. Cresh for a full year now. His bank balance was fat and happy, despite the huge bundle he had laid out for that cruise the previous winter. He could easily afford to take another vacation, in fact, and so he did, this time deciding to stay landside. He booked a room at an oceanfront hotel in Daytona Beach for a week in November, just when the dark and damp and cold would be setting in. He once again had a marvelous time, then immediately booked another week in February when he knew he would be getting seriously tired of winter. There was no trouble getting the time off; the other guys covered for him just as he stepped in to take extra shifts when any of them were gone.

Winter gave way to spring once more, and then summer. He did his job, he occasionally helped out with the clients, he even did indoor duty at some of the banquets the doctor hosted without even blinking at what was being served on the plates. The little voice inside had finally been silenced. Life was good, life was easy. It was possibly the best job he could ever have hoped to have.

10: Change Of Plans

It was the dogs that did it.

Mid-August, hot and humid, coming up on the end of his third year in Dr. Cresh’s employment. A new asset had arrived back in March, but had quickly washed out of the program. A replacement had been obtained in June and was now working its way through its modifications. Derek hadn’t been much involved with this one, not by any design but just from the way the duty roster happened to work out. He heard some stories about the new guy from the others but figured he’d see for himself at some point.

That point came when he was summoned to help with a training session. This was being held in the room with the wrestling mat and other athletic decor. Derek was instructed to prep the room by laying waterproof sheeting down on the mat while Harris was sent to fetch the new arrival, who was currently down to six fingers and no teeth. The asset had just had the gum-reshaping gag removed from its mouth a few days before and was slowly getting re-acclimated to solid food. Well, “solid” in the sense of “not delivered through a tube” – all the assets were necessarily given food that was soft enough to gum into swallowable pieces.

Derek had finished preparing the room when he heard Harris and the asset approaching. The asset was definitely not fully tamed yet, though its protests and struggles were much quieter now than they had been when it had first arrived. Its screams had been audible all through the building that first week. Now it was being dragged down the hall to the wrestling room. As Harris steered it into the room, it gave Derek a seething glare but did not say anything.

“Any trouble?” Derek asked Harris, totally ignoring the asset.

“Naw,” Harris replied. “The piece of shit kept its mouth shut for once. Kind of a shame, I was in a mood to bust some ass.” The asset glared in impotent fury but had learned to bite its tongue. Figuratively speaking.

They hung out for a while waiting for Dr. Cresh to show up and tell them what would be happening. The asset’s hands had been cuffed behind its back. Derek made a point with the new ones to keep his guard up. He did that with the long-time residents too, but he kept himself particularly alert with the new ones because they still had hands and were therefore much more dangerous. Fingers could pick at knots or other fastenings, hands could be made into fists, and with one of its hands down to just a thumb, there was a chance it could slip that hand right out of the cuff entirely. The cuffs weren’t the only restraint, of course; there was a chain locked around its neck and Harris held the other end wrapped around his fist in a relaxed but alert grip. Still, Derek kept a wary eye trained on it while they waited for the doctor to arrive.

At last they heard voices and footsteps in the hallway, along with some other unexpected sounds. The door swung open and the doctor walked in, followed by a client Derek didn’t recognize who was holding two leashes in his hand.

At the other end of one of the leashes was Rocky.

Or at least, that’s how it appeared. To Derek’s eyes, the dog that came in through the door was the exact image of his beloved friend from almost twenty years ago. It had the same bright, attentive eyes, the same perked-up forward-pointing ears, the same slightly-shaggy coat of warm black and brown fur. Even its tongue lolled out of its mouth off to the right side in exactly the way that Rocky’s used to do when he and Derek were exploring the woods beside the creek at the park. The dog nosed around the room inquisitively, greeting each of the people it found there with a sniff and then moving on to the next exciting smell. There was a second dog as well of a different breed, but Derek only had eyes for the German shepherd mix. His favorite childhood friend had just been brought back to life right in front of him at a time when he least expected it.

He stood there dumbfounded, caught totally by surprise. It felt as if he had suddenly been transported back in time, leaving the cares of adulthood behind, his soul snatched up out of his body and plunked down into that of his seven-year-old self. Images of those summer walks in the woods and frolics by the creek came cascading through his mind, washing over him in a jumbled froth like spume over a waterfall. It took only seconds, but he was overwhelmed by the quantity of memories that came pouring out, memories that had been locked away for so long that he had even forgotten about forgetting about them, all suddenly unearthed and brought to light. The big rock over the deep spot where the really huge fish was rumored to hang out, the toppled tree with the mini-cave under its upturned roots, the cicada shells, the slippery flat stones with the invisibly-thin layer of algae on them that made for treacherous footing for the unwary, the sunlit clearing, the birds’ nest that had fallen down in a storm, the monkey bars, the endless games of tag and chase and tug-of-war with sticks… it all came rushing back, all of it.

Then he caught himself and looked around and found himself… here.

In a torture chamber.

Where he spent his days abusing inmates whose stories probably weren’t that different from his. They had their own happy childhood memories, their own fondly-remembered pets, their own lives full of promise and potential that got cut short when, through no fault of their own other than by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, they ran afoul of Dr. Cresh and ended up… here.

In a torture chamber.

Where Derek assisted in torturing them.

Good god, how could he possibly reconcile the truth of what he had become with the memories of what he had once been? How could he explain to that seven-year-old kid that this was what he did for a living, that there really wasn’t anything personal about it? It was just the way things were because, you know, the money was good.

Dr. Cresh was speaking, something about pheromones and essence of bitch in heat and training the dog as much as the asset. He watched his body move as if on auto-pilot, poker face firmly affixed on his features, helping Harris strap the asset down on a frame in an all-fours position with its ass in the air. He stood back and watched through seven-year-old eyes as some sort of substance was smeared in the crack of that upturned ass, as Rocky and the other dog were brought over to sniff it, as Rocky began to climb up… and… and…

He couldn’t watch. He couldn’t close his eyes, but he couldn’t watch either. He averted his gaze, aiming his eyes over toward a corner of the room where nothing was happening, moving to stand mostly behind the other men in the room so they couldn’t see that his attention was studiously focused away from the action at the center of the room on top of the waterproof sheets that he had diligently spread out to ease the subsequent cleanup from today’s activities. He tried to ignore the sobs and whimpers the asset made while the humiliating assault was going on. He kept his face set in stone.

He made it through the session. Dr. Cresh apparently considered it a success and had decided on a name for the new asset. DOGFUCKER was to be taken to the office where it would have its new name branded in block capital letters across its chest and back. There was talk of attempting to surgically transplant, at some later point, the relevant gland from a female canine donor into the corresponding location in the asset so that it could produce the desired scent on its own without requiring it to be artificially applied. There was recognition that this could turn out to be a difficult modification, one where the transplanted organ might fail to function even if the surgery was otherwise successful, and that training the dogs to react to the asset’s natural pheromones might be easier. All very matter-of-fact, all perfectly normal things to be discussing.

Inside, Derek was ready to explode, but he knew it would be suicide if he did, a particularly long, slow, painful form of suicide. He needed to get out first. He carefully kept his eyes averted from the dog that looked so much like his childhood friend, kept his face neutral, forced his hands to unclench when he realized his fingernails were carving crescent-shaped divots into his palms.

Later that night, lying awake in his bed, he first berated himself for his rank hypocrisy. Today’s event, after all, was far from the worst thing he had seen or done here. It was downright mild, in fact, compared with pretty much any other day. Noosings, amputations, impalements, brandings… those things were the norm in this place. Derek had seen all the ways a man could inflict pain on a helpless victim, and had dished out many of them himself. So what was it about a little bestiality that could prompt such a reaction from him? Why did animal cruelty bother him but human cruelty was just all in a day’s work? And it wasn’t even animal cruelty – the dogs today gave no hint that they objected to the proceedings at all!

The answer that came to him as he tossed and turned was that it wasn’t the dog specifically. The dog was just a window. Derek had allowed himself to become isolated in this building, in this world where casual brutality was normalized. He had fit into the environment he found himself in, telling himself it was OK because this would all be happening anyway whether he assisted or not. The walls kept a firm line between outside and inside. When he went out and visited with his friends or took a vacation or even hung out at a club or restaurant with the other guards, it was like visiting another world. Outside the walls, “normal” rules of behavior applied; inside the walls, an entirely different set of rules took over. Seeing the dog inside, that brought the outside in. It opened a window… no, more than that, it wasn’t just a window, it brought the walls tumbling down completely for a brief while, leaving the inside exposed to the outside and shocking him into realizing just how far from “normal” he had come.

Still later in the night, he began to plan his escape. Physically breaking out would be no problem; any of the guards could walk out the door at any time. Making sure he stayed free would be the part that would require planning. He would allow himself one week to get things in order, no more. Because if he stayed longer, he was afraid he might find that the wakeup call he had just received would recede into memory and he would squelch the voice of his conscience right back down into the dark shadows once more.

This had to stop.

Late August, a Tuesday. Derek informed Brogan, on duty in the control room, that he was heading out for a bit. Brogan nodded and Derek left through the shop door, past the piles of worthless bric-a-brac. He gave no outward sign that he had no intention of ever returning, no lingering backward look, no pause at the door. Just like Doormat before his suicidal faceplant into the toilet: once the decision is made, just do it. Derek went out onto the sidewalk and was gone.

His first stop was at the bank. He closed out the account, getting a thousand dollars in cash and the rest in the form of a bank check made out to “bearer”. Next he bought a backpack and some clothes to put into it, since he’d left everything else behind except for an envelope that he had folded and stuffed into his pocket.

Earlier in the week, he had gotten in touch with one of his contacts from the Condor, a man who had known how to get a fake ID, quick, no questions asked. Derek had opted for “Dwight Jones”, figuring that “Dwight” was not too far from “D. Wright” so his ear would already be trained to recognize it. The “Jones” was just because it was generic. He made himself a year older, but kept his birthday the same. Now the ID was ready, so he stopped by the Condor to pick it up. Then he was off to the Greyhound station for a ticket south. No more winter for him.

It took three days to get to Fort Lauderdale and when he arrived he was a grimy, smelly mess. He found a cheap but clean place to stay and paid for a week in advance, then got cleaned up and got changed into new clothes. Next he found a new bank where he opened an account for “Dwight” using the check from the old one. He figured he could find a new job doing security easily enough and live off the savings from the old one until he got settled. He took a day to recover from having his large body crammed into a small bus seat for so long, then started looking.

His first stop was the nearest driver’s license center, where his Massachusetts ID was good enough to get him a Florida equivalent, making “Dwight Jones” legitimate. His job prospects were somewhat limited due to not wanting to have his real name used for a background check. He wasn’t sure how deep Dr. Cresh’s network of bribery ran but wanted to leave no trace that they could follow. Hopefully Florida was far enough away from the doctor’s influence, but it couldn’t hurt to be careful.

He found another bar bouncer job just to get his foot in the door and start building a local reputation. He knew how to nail the interview; he basically took the observations that Aaron had made about him when they first met and used that as his selling point: that he had a gifted eye for reading a room and that he knew how to apply the exact amount of force necessary for a given situation, no more and no less. They offered him the job that same day. It was tougher work than what he had done at Dr. Cresh’s facility – less sitting around, more actual work – and the pay was about a third of what he had been making. But the change was worth it.

He found a better place to live that was more than he could afford from the bar job’s earnings alone but that wouldn’t deplete his savings too quickly and soon got settled in. He missed his friends more than he thought he would: Aaron’s childlike enthusiasm, Harris’s dry wit, Moose’s eternal willingness to play a game of cards. More than any of those details, he missed the sense of belonging. He had once been a part of something larger than himself and even though it was built on a fatally cracked foundation, it was still real and he found himself mourning the loss. Its absence left him feeling adrift in a way he hadn’t expected, leaving him plenty of empty hours to try to find a way to fill. There was no going back, though. That part of his life was now firmly behind him and it needed to stay there.

September came, then October. The leaves on the palm trees failed to turn orange and fall into the gutters the way the leaves on the maples in Boston were doing. He had met a few people and while he couldn’t call them friends yet they were helping to fill the gap where Aaron and the rest used to be. He had successfully escaped, it seemed. There had been no contact from Dr. Cresh or any of his minions. He dared to think he might have made it.

He decided to risk mailing the envelope that he had smuggled out on his last day.

He had wrestled over the decision since leaving. He was out, he was no longer part of the operation. Yes, he had done some horrible things while there, but he was no longer doing them. Perhaps that should be enough. He couldn’t go back and fix any of the harm he had done, but he had stopped making the problem worse. That had to count for something. On the other hand, the horrible things were still going on. Derek didn’t have a whole lot of power to change that, but he did have some. Did he have some sort of obligation to try to stop it?

The letter was addressed to the Boston Police Department and it contained two hand-written pages detailing the workings of Dr. Cresh’s operation. He had written a few paragraphs describing the setup, then listed all the names he could. The names of all the victims, their real names from before they were reassigned slurs like Toilet and Asshole. More than that, he was able to include a couple of actual customer names, not just aliases like “Mr. Grey”. This was tightly guarded information that only Pete and the doctor had access to, but over the years Derek had seen papers that had been left out or screens that had been temporarily abandoned, and his memory was good. It also contained the names of the guards. His brothers. That, strangely, gave him the most reason to hesitate. But they were a key part of the whole twisted operation, and if the whole thing was going to come down, his brothers necessarily had to go with it.

He made a trip to Orlando and mailed it from there, figuring it couldn’t hurt to put a little distance between the postmark and where he actually lived. Then, at last, he felt he had done everything he could do for those unfortunates without jeopardizing himself. To be sure, there was a part of him that felt that maybe he should do more. Mailing an anonymous letter calling attention to others’ wrongdoings while covering up his own commission of the exact same crimes wasn’t exactly the most heroic approach to take. He certainly deserved punishment for his part in keeping the operation going. On nights when he couldn’t sleep, he wondered if maybe he should fully own up to his crimes. It would be the “right” thing to do, sure, but it would totally screw over the entire rest of his life. There would almost certainly be jail time even though he was the whistleblower, and he would lose all the money he’d been paid. With few other skills to earn a living with, he’d eventually be released from prison and have absolutely nothing.

Well, he’d have his arms. And his teeth, and his dick. Which was more than could be said for the occupants of the stable. But there was nothing he could do about that – those lost limbs wouldn’t ever grow back no matter what Derek did. The best he could do was try to make it so that no one else had to suffer the same fate. Sending that letter was enough. It would have to be.

Damn, he missed Asshole’s blowjobs.

11: Silence

Five days later, there was a knock at the door. When he opened it, half a dozen police were outside. They immediately began shouting at him, swarming in, forcing him to his knees, cuffing his hands behind him, making him lie flat on the ground. Shaking, heart pounding, he learned that he – and they referred to him as both Dwight Jones and Derek Wright – was under arrest for the murder of Zane Van Tripp, which was ridiculous because of all the crimes he had committed in the last few years, that wasn’t one of them! He didn’t even know who the hell Zane Van Tripp was, so how could he have murdered him? As he lay there, a boot on his head, while cops searched every corner of his apartment, he wanted to protest the absurdity of the charge. What about the rapes? What about the times he tied a guy up and stood by while the doctor severed a limb? What about the bodies he had dragged to the freezer so that bits of them could later be served up on gilt-edged plates at black-tie parties? It was ridiculous to be charged with a crime he couldn’t possibly have committed when there were so many others that he had.

Two days later, at the station where he was being held, he learned the poetry behind the charge. They showed him a photo of Zane Van Tripp, the man he had supposedly killed, and upon inspecting it Derek recognized him. It was Doormat, the very first victim Derek had helped to break down, whose name, he suddenly recalled, had indeed originally been Zane before the doctor had re-labeled him. Over the next few seconds, the realization sank in of how deeply, totally, utterly doomed he was. It was the perfect trap. His poker face for once failed him and he began to laugh as he imagined telling the investigators his alibi: “No, see, Zane killed himself, see? Maybe a week or two after me and some buddies tied him up and gang-raped him. He hyperventilated and then drowned himself in a toilet. I know because we watched the recording later, after we tucked the body away in the freezer. But I didn’t kill him – he was definitely dead before we started slicing him up.”

He knew that his laugher was not helping his case at all, but he also knew that it didn’t matter because no prosecutor would ever try him in front of a jury for this crime. Justice would be delivered in a different way altogether.

The investigators just watched him until he laughed himself out. When he could speak again he told them “you’re going to have to put me on suicide watch because the first chance I get I’m gonna off myself.” He followed that up with a lunge across the table, trying to force them to shoot him. But they were professionals. With Derek’s hands cuffed and a chain connecting him to his chair, his awkward attack went nowhere and they simply got up, stepped back, and ended the interview.

Derek waited in a cell while the extradition paperwork went through, constantly on the lookout for opportunities to escape the fate that loomed in front of him. None came. Then a day came when he was laden down with transport chains, transferred into a van, and taken to the airport. Well, well. No Greyhound for the return trip. He’d fly in style. Derek and his handlers boarded the plane separately from the rest of the passengers and were assigned seats in the back of the plane to Atlanta. Then an arduous process of changing planes was necessary to get them onto a plane bound for Boston. Once on the ground, the air marshals handed him over to local Boston PD and Derek was placed once more in a van for the last leg of his journey.

During the journey he had tried to guess whether he would be taken to a holding cell first or delivered directly into the doctor’s clutches. It turned out to be the latter. When the van stopped and its engine shut off, the first face he saw when the door at the rear was opened was Pete’s. “Yeah, that’s him,” Pete said to the cops, ignoring Derek altogether. “I’ll get the transport restraints and the uniform back to you.”

“And?” one of the cops asked.

“And the amount we discussed,” Pete said.

“Yeah. Because this one was a major shitstorm,” the cop continued as Derek was dragged out of the van. They were in the facility’s loading dock area with the garage door down to shield them from any prying eyes. “I don’t know if they’re gonna be able to keep covering this up.”

“Oh, they will,” Pete assured them. Pete locked a chain around Derek’s neck and used it to tug him forward as the cops got back in the van and headed off. Kerchek and John followed along behind.

They went straight to the doctor’s personal operating room, still not speaking a word. Derek tried to remain stoic, knowing what was to come. It was tough, but he was determined to show no emotion. He had resolved to do whatever was demanded of him. The life of an asset was terrible, sure, but he’d seen the way the assets had an easier time of it if they cooperated. So he would cooperate. When that hatchet was put into his hand, sure, he’d take his finger off. The alternative was too horrifying to imagine actually having to endure. With the axe it would be just one clean cut and done. He’d miss having arms, sure. And teeth and a dick. But he’d do every single cut himself.

Pete hooked the neck chain to the ceiling so that Derek had to remain standing while the three guards stripped off the police-issued restraints and the bright orange prisoner outfit. He considered lifting his legs to try to hang himself as he’d seen Worthless do, but such a gesture would be futile. They would let him hang for a while, suffering, then lift him up. He knew how this worked; he’d been part of it. It was now too late for suicide. When he was naked, they fastened a second chain from Derek’s neck to the chair, then released the first, taking no chances with an unsecured prisoner. They forced Derek down into the chair and strapped him in place, wrists, ankles, waist, neck. He was going nowhere. Pete left and soon the doctor came in, followed one after another by every single one of the other brothers he’d tried to betray.

Fuck. In hindsight, was that ever a bad idea.

“Oh, Derek,” Dr. Cresh said. “How unfortunate that you’ve returned to us under such circumstances. Do you have anything you want to say, some explanation of why you decided to betray my trust?”

No. No, it was none of his business. That was for Derek alone.

“I’ve been trying to think if there was something I might have done to cause you to change your mind so suddenly. Nothing comes to mind. One day you were here, the next you walked out. Nothing about that day, or the day before or the day before that, seems to have been substantially different from any other day. Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?”

Derek stayed silent, staring with unfocused eyes at a spot on the floor. Just start the mutilations already.

“We woulda let you go, man.” This from Aaron. Derek looked up and met his former friend’s eyes. As expected, the expression there was one of confusion and sadness. Aaron had no idea why Derek had tried to bring him and all the others down. And he never would. Derek resolved to keep that information to himself. Dr. Cresh didn’t need to know anything about his fondness for German Shepherds because there was no doubt at all that he would use the information to uniquely personalize the hell he would rain down on Derek. Derek started to think up alternative explanations, decoys he could offer up when the pain got to be too much and he had to say something, but it was difficult to do that and still pay attention to his surroundings.

“It’s true,” the doctor continued. “After your sudden disappearance, I made an effort to find you. I like to keep tabs on my former employees, to assure myself that they are doing well after we have parted ways. You took steps to make that difficult, which makes sense in light of your later actions. You’ll understand, of course, then when employees leave under such circumstances it tends to make me feel wary. I braced for difficulties in the next few days. But then nothing happened. It seemed you just wanted to get away to a more pleasant climate. Oh yes, I knew where you were fairly soon after your departure. I have a contact at First American Bank who was able to tell me what had become of a certain check made out to ‘bearer’. Your name was not associated with it, of course, but they were able to confirm that the check had been deposited at a branch of Cocoa Palms Bank in Fort Lauderdale. A private investigator was able to fill in the rest of the story.

“For a while it seemed that all was well. You were settling into your new home and had found new employment. I wished you nothing but the best. But alas. Barely two months later the difficulties I had originally been anticipating came to pass and I found myself having to call in a number of favors and lay out a great deal of additional funding to compensate. I hope you at least got to enjoy some of the attractions in Orlando to make the trip to the post office worthwhile. Strange. One would think you could have found a mailbox closer to home, wouldn’t one?”

“Quit stalling and gimme the axe already,” Derek muttered.

Dr. Cresh genuinely looked puzzled for a moment, cocking his head and furrowing his brow as if he truly did not understand what Derek had said. He recovered quickly, though. “Oh, I see what you are expecting. No, Derek, there will be no axe for you. You will not be joining the rest of the assets in the stable. You wouldn’t last a day in there. Their memories of your treatment of them are too fresh. Even if I were to order them to leave you alive, it wouldn’t work. Shithead, in particular, would find a way to snuff you and then blame one of the others for it regardless of what the cameras might say. And even if I were to punish him, it would be too late. You would still be beyond my reach. No. Your destiny is not the stable. Make no mistake, I will find a way to recoup the expenses you caused me to incur. But it won’t be through the conventional rental program.”

“What, then?” Derek asked. His nerves were frayed to the breaking point. The anticipation of a particular torture had filled his every waking minute since his arrest; now he found himself wrong-footed, having built himself up for a torture that would not be coming. It would be something different, something he had not prepared himself against, and all the worse because of that, and after so many days of buildup he found himself perversely wishing to just get it started already.

The doctor just stared at him. “What already?” Derek snapped after the silence had built to an intolerable level.

“The lesson that you failed to learn,” Dr. Cresh said, “is how to hold your tongue. It was explained very early to you that what goes on inside these walls stays within these walls. You knew this, and yet you went and tattled anyway, and the manner in which you tattled made it clear that you fully understood the consequences of your actions. I am convinced that there must have been some triggering event, something that caused you to change abruptly from a model employee to a traitor. I could probably find out what it was, but I suspect the answer would not do me any good. It will probably turn out to be something specific to you, individually, rather than something systemic that might cause another of my valued staff to behave in a similar manner.”

That might be his out. As soon as the thought occurred to him, he acted on it. Derek met the eyes of first Pete, then Harris, then Moose, then Aaron, lingering on Aaron’s. “You guys,” he said. “You can stop this. Take him out. You know this is wrong. He can’t fight all of you. Take him down!”

No one moved, no one spoke. They all stared at him, a wall of united brothers. The stillness dragged on for long seconds.

It soon became clear that no one was going to take up Derek’s call for revolution. So much for his vaunted ability to read a room. Perhaps if Derek were the sort of person more inclined to give inspirational speeches, he might have been able to manage it. But he was a man of few words, and he had just exhausted his supply. He sagged in his bonds.

“Well, that confirms it,” Dr. Cresh said. “The problem is not a systemic one but something specific to you and so I don’t really care what it might be. I will now teach you the lesson you should have learned earlier. I will be removing your tongue and lips, and then your hearing, and then your sight. This will eliminate much of your ability to communicate. The rest I will take care of later when I can arrange for an interested donor who wishes to buy the rights to the rest of your destruction. I’ll work out the details with that donor later, which means I don’t yet know what your ultimate fate will be… which means you won’t either, because after the next hour or so there will be no way for me to convey that information to you even if I want to. You’ll just have to guess what I’m doing when the time comes. As to whether you’ll survive the experience? I must say I have no idea. Remember our talk about resilience? We’re about to start finding out how much you possess.”

Derek began shaking his head. Of course it wouldn’t be something quick, of course it would be a mutilation, no, multiple mutilations, that he’d have to live with for the rest of his life… and of course the doctor would find a way to make that last a long, long time if he could. And there was fuckall he could do about it.

Pete secured his head into the restraints, preventing him from thrashing it. Kerchek came at him with some sort of wedge designed to hold his jaws open. He clamped his mouth shut, but then there were fingers grabbing his lips and yanking them apart until his jaws had to follow and then the wedge went in between his teeth and got strapped into place and then he couldn’t stop the doctor from reaching into his mouth with his bare fingers, grabbing his tongue, yanking it brutally forward. After all the days of buildup, suddenly it was real, suddenly it was happening. Derek felt a line of fire far back on his tongue, tasted a bright metallic splash of blood, heard himself grunting and gasping. It took forever and no time at all, then all at once the horrible pressure pulling his tongue forward was gone and he was able to retract it into his mouth… only a giant chunk of it wasn’t there, it was in Dr. Cresh’s hand right in front of his face.

“Tip him forward so he doesn’t choke on the blood,” the doctor said. The head restraint was released and Derek’s head was pushed forward. Blood gushed out of his mouth and spilled on his lap. He let it flow, not that he had any choice with his mouth still wedged open. The doctor came at him with some gauze and pressed it against the wound.

While they waited for the bleeding to stop, Aaron spoke to him. “I gotta say this now or you’ll never know it. I’m gonna fuck you later on. I gotta do it soon while you’re still sexy. I mean, I’ll probably do you after you’re not, too, but you’ll be a thing then and I want to get one in now while you’re still mostly whole. It’s not the way I wanted it to be, but… you brought this on yourself, man. One fuck for the way things might have been, and after that you’re dead to me.” Derek could think of no reply he would want to make, which didn’t matter because he had no way of making it now.

Eventually the stump of his tongue stopped bleeding, though it continued to seep for a long time afterward. Derek didn’t really notice; his attention was occupied with other events.

Derek’s head was restrained once more; the lips came off next. The pain was bad, but the knowledge that they would never grow back was somehow worse. He would never be able to fully close his mouth again.

They took his eardrums after that. The doctor heated up a soldering iron until it was glowing. In it went, first one side, then the other. The heat was appalling as it penetrated Derek’s ear canals, singeing hairs and skin as it went until at last it made contact with – and melted – the thin membrane that allowed Derek to hear. The pain was agonizing and Derek screamed through his still-wedged-open mouth as the doctor waggled the end of the iron around to sear and cauterize the entire area. Somewhere during that operation, Derek noticed that it seemed as though his ear had been plunged into a pillow, as if the world had been suddenly filled with cotton. Sounds were muffled. Even his screams sounded like they were coming from far away rather than his own throat. The effect got worse with the other ear and he realized that the sounds would never be coming back, not even after the flaming agony in his ears had had a chance to die down. He was deaf, or near enough.

With no break, Dr. Cresh moved on to his eyes. This broke him. If he had still nurtured any fantasies about resisting the torture and protecting whatever secrets he might have, the sight of the soldering iron zeroing in on his eyeball would have had him spilling his guts instantly. But the doctor didn’t want secrets, he wanted Derek’s vision, and so that’s what he took. Derek was unable to close his eyes because of the way the lids were being held apart by one of his ex-brothers’ glove-clad fingers. He couldn’t move his head due to the restraints. All he could do was watch while the glowing tip crawled nearer (and Dr. Cresh certainly took his time with the process), feeling the heat on the skin around the tender organ, waiting helplessly for that moment when contact would be made.

There was a sizzling noise as fluid boiled up around the hot iron. Derek’s eye spun madly in its socket – he couldn’t help himself, the action was all reflexive. The effect was to spread the scalding all over the eye’s surface. Then more heat, more pressure, he felt something pop, he felt hot liquid running down his face and dripping off to fall into his lap on top of the sticky, drying blood. Somewhere in the process he realized he wasn’t seeing out of that eye anymore, though he couldn’t quite pinpoint when it had happened. The air was no doubt ringing with his screams but though he could feel the vibration in his throat, there was no sound to be heard.

When the other eye was destroyed, it was much more discernible when the moment of destruction came. There was the same heat, the same boiling fluid dribbling down his cheek. Then: blackness. The iron continued to root around in the socket, destroying the retina and the rest of the contents of his eyeball, but from Derek’s perspective the work was already complete. He would never see again.

At last the pain stopped. Or rather, the application of new pain stopped and Derek was left to deal with the aftereffects of the existing pain. His jaw was unwedged and he was let up from the chair. His hands were cuffed behind him and he was dragged to what was probably the new-acquisition holding cell, where he was chained to the bed and left to recover. It was strange to have no tongue. His mouth constantly expected it to be there, but it wasn’t. He had never realized how constantly he had used that particular organ in the past for all kinds of things: swallowing saliva, probing at a tooth, scratching an itch on his palate. Now it wasn’t there and no matter how many times he reminded himself, it still caught him by surprise again the next time.

He tried speaking. The result was probably unintelligible gibberish, though he couldn’t hear to know. No tongue meant no R or L or N or T or S or SH or TH; no lips meant no M or P or F. All his vowels sounded the same. He could manage a K, it seemed. The motion felt right, at least, because the portion of his tongue that far back in his mouth was still there. H might also be possible, but he couldn’t really tell how the sound came out. So the inventory of words he could produce reliably had been reduced to those that contained only Ks and a generic vowel. He realized that he was basically limited to the word “cock”. Possibly also “gag”. How fitting.

Some time later, he was fed a meal of mush, probably the same stuff he himself had once fed to the inmates. It was utterly tasteless. He sat there and allowed whoever was feeding him to insert the spoon into his mouth, whereupon he would close his teeth and the spoon would be removed, leaving the mush inside where he would attempt to work it to the back of his mouth without the use of the muscle that had previously been used for that purpose. It was a slow process. He wondered which of his former brothers was feeding him. Whoever it was was being far more gentle about it than Derek had any right to expect. Maybe Aaron, then.

Some time after that, Aaron arrived… or returned. At least, presumably it was Aaron. Derek was positioned so that he was bent over the bed, ass up in invitation, legs spread out to the sides. The fuck was… tender. Derek had seen Aaron in operation when he wanted to use his dick as a weapon, and this was not the same. This was slow and gentle and even loving. Considering all the possible ways his first dick-in-ass experience might have gone, this was far from the worst. Aaron used plenty of lube and took his time, letting Derek get used the sensation before he started pistoning. To his great surprise, Derek felt his own dick getting hard against the bed. Aaron never knew that, though. Eventually his pace quickened and he dumped his load in Derek’s ass. If he said anything, Derek would have no way of knowing, but there was a squeeze on his shoulder before Derek was laid back down on the bed.

A long time passed then. Derek was fed and taken to the bathroom on occasion but mostly left to himself. He tried to think of ways to kill himself, but nothing seemed possible. Smother himself with the pillow? He tried, but it didn’t work. There was no way to block enough air. His hands stayed locked behind him and he knew that any suicide plan that needed arms to implement had better be done soon because he had a feeling those arms wouldn’t be there for much longer. But the handcuffs prevented him from doing anything useful with them.

Eventually, the pain in his tongue and his ears and the sockets where his eyes used to be eased back to just a dull ache. All that was left was the glaring absence of sensation. No light, no noise. He still had touch and smell and taste and the freedom to move around a bit on the bed. But there was not enough slack in the chain to allow him to stand on the floor and there was absolutely nothing to do. His life consisted of sitting in silent darkness while his bladder and bowel slowly filled until he was taken to empty them out again, punctuated by occasional feedings.

He wished his hands were free so he could masturbate since he probably wouldn’t have the chance to for much longer. But it didn’t really matter because he wasn’t feeling particularly horny anyway. And so he waited.

12: Transformation

At last a time came when something changed. He was brought into another room, probably one of the client-facing rooms because he had to climb a flight of steps to get there. He was laid down on his back on top of a hard surface and felt his limbs get fastened into place, arms up over his head. He felt strangely calm; the lack of sensory input had caused him to feel disconnected from his body, so whatever torture was to come felt abstract, as though it were going to happen to someone else. When the moment came, he would probably feel differently, but just now there was nothing to get worked up about and so he lay there peaceably. No explanation was forthcoming, of course. He was to be strictly a passenger for this ordeal, not even given the courtesy of a heads-up about how his body was about to be destroyed.

He felt a tautness in his limbs. Ah – he was in the big dungeon room, being stretched out on the rack. It was a menacing-looking thing, he recalled, with oversized wheels to turn that would tighten the strain on the unfortunate victim trapped between the two rollers. Him, in this case. The pain wasn’t bad at first, but the wheels kept turning and turning. Slack kept getting removed from the lines and there was nothing for his body to do but stretch in response. He soon felt it in his shoulders, his knees, his spine right at the small of his back. His body was still strong – he hadn’t been imprisoned long enough to lose his muscle tone yet, and so he figured it would take a lot of pulling before something gave way. But the rack would eventually win, if that’s what Dr. Cresh wanted.

The pattern seemed to be that the wheels would get turned, then he would be left to adapt to the new level of strain on his body for a while. The pain became real; this was no longer happening to someone else, it was happening to him. He couldn’t breathe. The stretch on his body made it difficult to expand and collapse his ribs to move air in and out. He knew he was whimpering from the pain, but only because he could feel the vibration in his throat.

Click. He couldn’t hear the sound, but he could feel the vibration transmitted through the lines to either his wrists or his ankles, depending on which wheel had been turned. Another notch tighter, another degree of pain higher all along his body. He wondered how long it would take before some part of him gave up and snapped. He wondered as well what part it would be. His strength had become a liability – it would take a lot more pull to dislocate something than it would if he had allowed his muscles to atrophy over the last couple of months. And every additional bit of pull brought a corresponding bit of additional pain.

Click again. Every time he thought he couldn’t possibly hurt any worse, that damn wheel proved him wrong. He could tell there would be no going back from this experience. He was already damaged, and though he might heal given the chance, he would probably never walk completely pain-free again. Not that that was likely to happen anyway.

Click. He screamed, weakly from lack of air. Something in his left knee had reached its limit and was slowly, agonizingly, tearing itself apart. He could feel it giving way and fought frantically to stop it. But there was no stopping it and once whatever it was had ripped in half there was a tiny easing of the strain on the rest of his body, though the bright nucleus of agony in his knee outshone all the rest of his discomforts. He begged them to stop, but his words were vague vowels emitted into the all-encompassing silence around him.

Click. That wasn’t the end, of course. Once the doctor noticed that the failure of his knee had yielded some slack in the system, he of course tightened everything up again. Pause to acclimate, then another click and then Derek could feel his right knee going the same way, tissue once again slowly, ponderously, agonizingly shredding itself as the strain became too much for it to cope with.

The clicks kept coming, only now the pain was almost entirely concentrated in his failed knees. They were the weakest point and so all subsequent strain simply added to the tearing that had already occurred. This went on until Derek could feel something larger giving way – skin, perhaps? Maybe the rack was tearing his lower legs right off?

The pressure eased up then and Derek gratefully gasped in deep, full breaths. The restraints were released. He slowly, gingerly, brought his arms down to his sides. He tried to lift his knees, but they didn’t work. He could move his upper legs, but nothing below that responded to his will. The pain was agonizing and he stopped trying to move them. Lying still didn’t feel good, exactly, but it felt less bad than the alternative.

But the respite was brief. He was lifted off the rack and placed into a sitting position on top of the platform. He half expected that they would force him to try to walk. That would be a comedy. He wouldn’t be able to support his weight, let alone take a single step. It turned out they had something else in mind. They lifted him up off the rack and dumped him into a heap on the floor.

His wrists were cuffed behind his back once more. A hook was attached to the connecting chain and then it started to rise. Derek felt his arms pulled upward. There was no hope of getting his feet to support his weight so he just had to take the strain on his already-aching arms. Slowly, steadily, his hands ascended until his body was forced to follow them and he hung, completely suspended, from the chains around his wrists.

He had thought the rack was bad; this was worse. This was all the pain of the stretching the rack delivered but in a way that the human shoulder was not designed to handle. He wanted to ease the tension on his shoulders, but the only way to do so was to try to support his weight with his arm muscles, and the angle his body was positioned in meant they were hopelessly inadequate for the job. In less than a minute, his muscles failed and he was forced to relax them, which meant he felt the strain in the ligaments of his shoulders instead, and that was far worse. But he had no choice. He tried over and over, but his arm muscles simply failed sooner and sooner each time. It was an impossible position. He felt keening noises in his throat as he kicked his legs in a vain effort to find support, forgetting over and over that any movement in his mangled knees only brought him more agony. The metal circles around his wrists cut more and more deeply into his skin the longer he dangled.

Then: worse. They began to bounce him. They would lift him up and let him drop until the chain reached its limit. At first it could only have been a short distance, perhaps an inch or even half that. But the distance kept increasing. They would lift him up and leave him waiting for the drop that he knew would come, letting him anticipate the flash of pain to come for long seconds before it finally came. And then, when it came, it came in the form of an all-too-brief relief, a fraction of a second where the strain was miraculously gone and his arms began to move toward their normal position. Then he hit the chain’s limit and his descent was yanked to an abrupt halt. The moments when his body stopped moving were marked by a vast intensification of the strain in his shoulders and the bite of steel into his wrists. He screamed every time it happened, though it was difficult to draw enough breath for an actual scream. His rib cage was being compressed and his abdomen distended, and so moving air in and out was difficult.

He felt himself being lifted up once more, seemingly higher than ever though it was impossible to judge for sure without eyes. All he had to go by was the vibration that was transmitted to his arms by the motion, and this went on for a long while. They must have hoisted him clear up to the ceiling. The fall, when it came, would be several feet. He hung there, waiting for it, knowing that this was going to be the moment when he forever lost the use of his arms. His body was taut with both the tension of his position and the anticipation.

He felt fumbling at the ends of the dead weights that his lower legs had become and then suddenly the strain on his arms was magnified. It took him a while to figure it out – his brain was not operating at its peak – but then he realized: they had attached weights to his ankles. His body weight was not enough, apparently. They wanted to make sure that the drop to come would do the maximum damage possible. He continued to hang, breathing raggedly, waiting and waiting. He begged them to stop, to not do this, but he couldn’t hear his own words and the others in the room almost certainly couldn’t understand them anyway.

Then, with no warning, the drop began. Bliss. A entire second of free fall, no strain on his body whatsoever. For that second he was floating, weightless, seemingly free from any restraint. This must be what heaven is like, a bird in flight, no pain anywhere, or so it seemed from the suddenness of the release.

Then he hit the end of the chain. His wrists stopped moving; his body did not, and neither did the weights on his feet. His arms twisted upward as his body straightened downward. He felt the strain in his shoulders grow exponentially. There was barely time to experience the pain before it suddenly shifted in form. The pain of stretched ligaments suddenly transformed into the pain of torn ligaments as his arms were yanked out of the sockets in his shoulders. At the same time he felt a pop in each of his elbows. He found himself hanging straight down instead of bent at an angle as he had been before. Meanwhile, the weights – the last to be brought up short – hit their limit and yanked cruelly at what was supporting them: his legs. His knees lit up with fresh agony as the flesh inside them was rearranged still further.

He couldn’t even scream. The pain was too all-consuming. His entire body was on fire with it and there was nothing he could do but endure. His attention flickered from his wrists to his shoulders to his knees and then his elbows and back, circling and obsessing over each flicker of lightning in his agonized nerves.

They bounced him a couple more times, mildly, just to finish any lingering part of the job that the big drop had somehow missed. Then they let him down then and he was once again untied and given a break. Like the first, it was short. Then he was back down on the rack again, which seemed pointless because his arms had already been ripped out of their moorings. And indeed, his arms were left at his sides, flopped uselessly on the table, unable to respond to his brain’s commands to move them.

Instead he felt hands working on his legs, just above the destroyed knees. There was massive pressure on his thigh, as of someone sitting on it with all his weight. Then: sudden agony at the side of his left thigh. He screamed again and begged to be allowed to pass out. Then the other thigh. Then there was some fumbling around, but the pain of this was much less than what had come before. For a brief while, at least. There was more fumbling at his crotch; he felt cold metal, though nothing painful.

When the strain began building up again, he realized what the doctor had done. He had drilled holes straight through the meat and bones of Derek’s upper legs, passed metal rods or hooks or something through the holes, and had attached those hooks to the lower wheel of the rack. Derek’s knees, shoulders, and elbows were all shattered, but his hips remained intact. The doctor was about to make those joints match the rest, and since Derek’s ruined knees would prevent damage from being done to his hips, the doctor had bypassed the knees entirely. The lower wheel of the rack was pulling directly on Derek’s thigh bones, and rods inserted vertically into the table on either side of Derek’s dick and balls ensured that his crotch and the rest of his body stayed put.

The strain kept increasing and Derek once again found it difficult to draw breath. This time it was not due to overextension or compression of his ribs, but from the sheer torment focused on his hip joints. It kept getting worse and worse with each click, and of course those didn’t come quickly. There was a long pause between each while Derek tried and failed to adapt to the stress.

He wondered as the pain continued to intensify exactly how much he had of the mysterious quality called “resilience”. There was no way to know. Would this ordeal kill him, or would he make it through? If he had a choice, the answer would be to have it end here. Already his body had been altered to a point where he no longer wanted to dwell in it and the recent destructions had only made it a less appealing home. But the choice wasn’t really his to make. All he could do was suffer what the doctor dished out. Perhaps he could at least pass out. That wasn’t asking too much of the universe, was it? To let his legs tear free from their sockets without his conscious participation? He tried hyperventilating to help the process along, but couldn’t keep his mind focused long enough to remember to keep at it.

His hip joints proved to be fiercely strong. It took a tremendous amount of force to pop them free of their moorings and Derek was brought to new heights of frenzy as the strain mounted and his body was slowly torn apart. But eventually, one after the other, they did fail with spectacular tearing of tissue as they went. That trauma proved to be too much for him and at last he felt a wave of darkness rise up to overwhelm him. It never quite brought him the oblivion he craved, though. His consciousness kept returning to a greater or lesser degree for a long time afterward. But he was too far gone in his agony to understand what was happening to him after that. There was no way to take the sensations he was experiencing and string them together into a coherent narrative. All he could do was experience the anguish, one eternal second after another.

When he came to, it was a gradual process. The distinction between awareness and not had already become a blurry one in the days after the destruction of his sight and hearing, and Derek had found that he needed to touch things in order to reassure himself not that they were there but that he was there. After the subsequent trauma with his arms and legs, he lay for a long while in a sort of half stupor, neither fully awake nor fully asleep. He hurt, yes, but trying to move made the hurt worse and so he didn’t. Every time something like consciousness tried to claim him, he rejected it and pushed back into the half-dozing state where things still hurt but he didn’t care quite as much.

Eventually, that ceased being possible. Something shifted in his brain and he could no longer pretend to be anything other than awake. The pain was less, somehow, than it had once been. Perhaps he was healing? He tried to feel around to figure out where he was, but it didn’t work. Then he remembered his arms had been yanked out of their sockets – perhaps that’s why they weren’t responding?

But no… there had been worse pain after that, hadn’t there? Oh god…

He tried to move his arms. They refused to respond. Likewise with his legs. Nothing. He knew on some level, of course, what the answer was but he refused to believe it because admitting it would make it real. As long as he didn’t let himself even think about it, he could continue to pretend that this was some form of paralysis, that it would get better if he could just lie here long enough and give his body a chance to heal. He even fantasized about some sort of recovery. Sure, the eyes and ears and tongue were not coming back, but perhaps his body could repair the damage that had been done to the nerves in his arms and legs. He even felt a moment of pride at the fact that he apparently had sufficient resilience after all, at least enough to survive everything Dr. Cresh had dished out on him.

Then he made the mistake of twisting his spine.

That was a motion that was still possible for him in his diminished state and it worked: he could feel his body shift atop whatever surface he was lying on. It should have been a success, but the movement was… odd. He did it again, taking note of how it felt. The second time there was no mistaking it. There should have been a drag below his waist. Even if his legs were completely paralyzed, shifting his pelvis should have been accompanied by the pull of their weight. But it wasn’t. His pelvis flexed freely in a way that felt absolutely bizarre to a body that expected otherwise. He could, for instance, perform a motion that should have lifted his feet high into the air over his head. Effortlessly. In less than a second. That should not have been possible.

He was forced to reach the conclusion he had been denying. His legs were no longer there. They no longer existed. His body stopped at his hips.

And now that he allowed himself to think about it, the same was true of his arms. Gone, with only the memory of how they should feel left to give evidence that they had ever existed. Horror rose up inside him and he keened a high-pitched wail that he could only feel, not hear, through the humming in his throat.

This was Dr. Cresh’s revenge for Derek’s betrayal. He was to be kept alive for a life sentence locked up in a dark, silent prison exactly as large as what was left of his body. There was no day, no night, no way to sense the passage of time. He had no way to roll over, no way to inform his captors / caretakers if he was hungry or cold or needed… well, what could he possibly need? A book, a change of radio station, some slippers? None of that stuff mattered any more! This was it, this was what he had left to look forward to: an endless span of exactly what he was experiencing right now.

There was some variation, it turned out. Dr. Cresh brought him in for oral surgery after the rest of his body had had a chance to heal. One by one, in a series of drillings and yankings that exposed long-hidden nerves to the air where they could be blown on and sprayed with icy water, Derek’s teeth were removed until all that was left were his empty gums. These were then forced closed around a cylinder to reshape his mouth for the service it would be providing to earn his keep.

Another time, his nose was removed. This seemed pointless and gratuitous, an unnoticeable dab of paint on an already flamboyantly-decorated canvas.

After that, his ears came off as well. Another senseless mutilation since their loss didn’t make him any more deaf.

Some time later, his nipples got the same treatment. That hurt, sure, but in the grand scheme of things he didn’t miss them.

And at last, the moment he knew would eventually come did: his dick and balls were removed. He had no idea how it was done, of course, other than to know that it was excruciatingly painful, took far longer than it might have, and was accompanied by his suspended body taking a dick up its ass while Derek’s own equipment was cooked and pulped and severed while he couldn’t even clench his fists or grit his teeth to try to cope with the agony. The dick in his ass was probably Pete’s. He was the one who liked to get off on such shit.

That was far from the only fucking he received, and all of them were nowhere near as tender and gentle as the one Aaron had delivered. They were rough and brutal and the purpose seemed to be to abrade the inside of his ass so that he hurt on the inside as well as the outside. It worked. And once his gums had been reshaped, his mouth was put to use as well. He learned what semen tasted like. He wondered whether he was being used by clients or his former brothers. Probably both, though it really didn’t matter. He was an asset now. A thing like the others. Did a sex toy really need to know who it was being used on?

Most of the time, he just lay wherever he was placed. It wasn’t like he had any choice in the matter. He ate when he was fed, pissed and crapped when the urge took him, felt hands cleaning the filth off him every now and then. Eventually, the frequency of the oral and anal invasions began to lessen. Maybe. Keeping track of time was impossible, but the intervals between sessions seemed to get longer. He thought. Perhaps the novelty of the Limbless Wonder had worn off and the guys were all hot to dump their loads in something else now. Perhaps his tongueless, lipless blowjobs were not as satisfying as the ones Asshole could deliver. Perhaps it was just a random fluke of timing and the pace would pick up again in time.

Or perhaps he really had no idea what was going on in the world outside his body at all.

13: Coda

Now, some unspecified time later, Derek’s life is an endless dull ache, a steady procession of various discomforts that keep him pinned to the here and now. He experiences phantom limb pain from the appendages that his brain insists should be there but that obstinately refuse to respond when addressed. He has bedsores where his skin lies in constant contact with the surface beneath it. He has difficulty breathing through his mangled nose and perpetually dry mouth. These discomforts take turns nudging their way front and center in his attention, each one clamoring to be noticed more than the others.

The borderline between sleep and wakefulness has been utterly erased such that he can no longer tell the difference. His dreams blend into his real world experiences in a way that makes him perpetually unsure what is real and what isn’t. In his more lucid moments, he realizes that under such circumstances, in the absence of any external stimuli whatsoever, reality is whatever he decides it will be. Therefore, he might as well go with the reality that he prefers. And so he thinks about warm brown fur, a playful canine grin, and the endless days of summer. And surprisingly often, it works.

In his mind’s eye, he frolics once more with his beloved friend. They scamper across the grass, they splash in the creek, they explore the hidden wonders of the woods. In his mind’s eye, he is whole once more. He can walk and run and shout and laugh and climb and even fly. In his mind’s eye, there is no phantom limb pain, no bedsores, no blockage of his sinuses. There is only warm sunshine and bright blue sky and Rocky’s eternal eagerness to play.

Now that Derek is twenty-seven years old, his happiest times are once again spent with his dog.

POW's Fiction – Gay S&M Stories

Code Of Silence

Code Of Silence

Table of Contents

1: Derek

2: Job Interview

3: Tour

4: Dinner Party

5: Guard Duty

6: New Arrival

7: Welcoming Ceremony

8: Perks Of The Job

9: Mr. Onyx

10: Change Of Plans

11: Silence

12: Transformation

13: Coda