THE LAST DAYS OF MISS PRIMROSE

©C. Smith 2004

1. The Abduction

Damn! He hates to plan these things at the last minute. Too many things can go wrong. But she has to be done quickly and he has, after all, considerable experience at this sort of thing, although never before in haste or with someone he knows. Just means he has to be more careful and more clever. Besides, danger has always been part of the thrill, hasn't it?

So far he's been lucky. The self-righteous bitch was stupid enough to alert him of her intentions. Actually came into his room after all the students had cleared out, pranced right up to his desk so she could tell him in private that she'd been watching him.

"What do you mean, ogling ?" he'd replied, as if shocked at the suggestion.

"Just what I said, Mr. Madden," she'd snapped back. "I've seen you ogling the students — or more specifically, the pretty female students — not only in the corridors but in the cafeteria. You probably do it right in your own classroom, too. It's outrageous! And if you don't put a stop to it, I'm going to say something to the principal."

Something in his look made her change tack slightly.

"It would be for your own good," she had weaseled. "I'm not saying you do anything more than look , but imagine what could happen if one of those fifteen year old Brittany Spears wannabes decided she didn't like the grade you gave her in algebra and accused you of groping her? Do you imagine none of her friends would back her up with recollections of how you've been staring at their boobs and crotches? Never mind that everything they wear is shrink-wrapped. The point is that they wear that stuff for the benefit of the boys their age, not for a presumably grown-up teacher."

Two things had come into his mind. First and foremost, he had better suck up to this trouble maker and go for damage control. Second, he had never before had an opportunity to examine the foxy new English teacher up close. Miss Lili Primrose, he dutifully observed, was a striking beauty. Fresh out of college, she was probably no more than twenty-two or twenty-three, with hypnotic eyes that matched the dark chocolate of her long, flowing hair. She had pert lips, a small, sweetly upturned nose that perfectly complemented the delicacy of her oval face, and a figure that promised to be spectacular, even though it was cloistered, at the moment, in an austere, terribly professional suit.

He had torn his eyes away from her, adopted a stricken look and let his gaze drop to his desk in a convincing display of shame.

"I'm embarrassed," he'd said. "I guess I hadn't realized I was doing that. I mean, I don't really mean to stare at the girls, 'ogle' them, as you put it. But the way they dress these days, it's hard to look away sometimes. But you're absolutely right. It's a matter of propriety. I'll have to be more conscious of . . . of where my eyes are focused."

She backed off a little, her face softening. "They're only children, after all," she went on. Her indignation vindicated, she had slipped into her teacher mode. "We have to make sure they respect us as mentors. It's not appropriate that we appear to be appraising them sexually, even if their hormones are at full throttle. It would break an important trust."

She had gone on, blathering sexual harassment shit, regurgitating the same anal crap the school department threw at them all the time, as if he'd just beamed down from Mars and had never heard it before. But he had kept his mask of shame in place.

"This is terrible. Are other teachers complaining about me," he'd asked meekly.

"No, not yet. But I can't believe they haven't noticed."

"You mean you haven't been discussing it with anyone?"

"No. I don't do gossip. I'm bringing it up with you in the hope that I won't have to go any further with it. But if I see you doing it again. I will report it to the principal. What any one teacher does here reflects on all of us."

"Of course, of course!" he had agreed. "Thank you for your candor, Miss Primrose. I appreciate your telling me all this. I obviously need to control my male impulses better."

She'd been unable to resist another jab. "You need to remember that most of these girls are minors, and as a male you are vulnerable to serious consequences if you overstep the boundaries of your position."

He had looked directly into those magnificent eyes. "Absolutely. Again, I appreciate your bringing this to my attention. I won't forget."

And he has not.

He's been planning ferociously ever since.

She's a loose canon, far too dangerous to his career and avocation to be left bouncing around free. Fortunately, there's still time. The dumb bitch sealed her own fate when she admitted she hasn't yet mentioned her poisonous observations to anyone else. Now he just has to make sure she never does. But in doing so, it would be too bad to waste all that ripe young beauty. No problem. He knows just how to seal her mouth while putting her body to good use.

He happens to possess three bits of information that will make the project easier. He knows she has a boy friend and where he lives. He also knows her routines at the school.

Routine one. Like most suburban high schools, Geoffrey Bartholomew High has barely sufficient parking for the entire body of students, faculty and staff. Miss Lili Primrose had soon discovered that there's always a slot to be found out behind the maintenance building, and that it's not all that far from the classroom complex.

Routine two. For some reason she always stays late on Fridays, probably helping some dullard student. Unlike Byron. He's always off for a weekend of sport, sometimes the kind of sport they show on TV, sometimes the participatory kind in his hidden retreat.

But not today. Today he's still on the school grounds two hours after classes have ended. The school and the lot are empty. Except for Miss Primrose's silver Toyotta Echo and his own black SUV parked beside it.

Finally he sees her coming around the corner of the maintenance building, juggling her purse and her books, fishing for her car keys. He climbs out of his SUV.

"Hello, Miss Primrose."

"Hi." She looks puzzled. "What are you doing here so late?"

"Same as you, I suppose. Unfinished business."

"Oh." she says, a little guiltily. Perhaps she has underestimated his concern for his students. "I mean, usually this parking area's deserted at this time of day. So you're working late?"

"Nope. I just wanted to show you something. This should be of interest to you."

They are standing beside her car now. He's on her right side and has been palming a huge veterinarian's syringe in his right hand, the type used for large animals, except that the needle has been clipped to a stub. He produces it as if from nowhere, like a magician. "See this?" He aims it at her car, pushes the plunger about a quarter of the way and a tight spray of liquid squirts out on to the door. The paint immediately begins to bubble up. It peels away, hissing and steaming.

"What are you doing?!" she shrieks.

He reaches behind her with his left hand and seizes her outside wrist in a painful grip. Then turns the syringe and points it at her face.

"It's filled with an acid concentrate," he informs her casually, "which will remove your face as effectively as that paint if you utter another word. Understand?"

She holds her breath, terrified.

"Put your other hand behind your back!" he orders, his voice suddenly fierce.

She does so quickly, staring intently at the syringe. A drop of liquid detaches itself from the end of the truncated needle and sizzles on the pavement at her feet.

He clamps a pair of plastic cuffs on her wrists, the type that have to be cut off. With a firm grip on her arm and the needle pointed at her head, he shoves her rudely into the back seat of his SUV. In a smooth motion perfected by long practice, he puts her into a half nelson, removes a chloroform soaked rag from a plastic baggy and clamps it over her mouth until she slumps unconscious. In another minute she is trussed up with belts around her ankles, knees and arms. He shoves a thick cotton sock in her mouth and secures it in place with clear wrapping tape wound around her head three times. Then he buckles a dog collar around her neck, attaches a chain leash to it and pushes her to the floor, wedging her between the front and back seats. He secures her neck to the floor track of the front passenger seat with the leash. A waiting length of rope secures her ankles to the seat track on the driver's side. He throws a blanket over her.

Several minutes later he is cooly passing through the well manicured residential outskirts of town looking for a certain unoccupied house which happens to have a long driveway that sweeps around to the back out of sight. He knows that his passenger on the floor behind him will soon begin to revive from the effects of the chloroform. He spots the For Sale sign he's been looking for and pulls into the driveway, just as she starts to thrash about, making muffled noises into her gag. He rolls past the neglected lawns, around the deserted house, and pulls up close to the garage in the back where a six foot high stockade fence assures visual privacy. He leaves the engine idling. They won't be here long.

He peels back the blanket a little, revealing his captive's eyes, flashing with indignant fury. She's trying to protest this outrage, but the words are mangled by her gag. Sighing, he climbs out of the car, walks around to the passenger side, opens the door next to her head and positions the syringe needle directly in front of her face. Her expression quickly shifts from anger to horror.

"Have you already forgotten the effects of the acid, Miss Primrose?" he asks benignly. "Would you like me to spray a little into your eye to remind you?"

She jerks her head away, turning it into the carpet. "'O, 'o, 'o!" she squeaks through the sock in her mouth.

Sympathetic to her speaking difficulties, Byron tells her he accepts this answer as "no," but warns her that she must remain silent and motionless for the rest of their journey or he will be forced to teach her the folly of disobedience by reducing one of her pretty eyes to a smoldering ruin.

"Furthermore," he elaborates, "it will be a fairly long trip, so get used to your accommodations. And let us hope that we're not pulled over for any reason, because if some cop gets nosy about what's under the blanket, I will be forced to use the semi-automatic hidden in my door pocket to quench his curiosity. That, in turn, will cause me major inconveniences, which will really piss me off. In fact, I'd be so pissed, I would undoubtedly inject the rest of this acid into your lovely little ear and watch it boil its way into your brain. Do I make myself clear, Miss Primrose?"

She nods vigorously, still keeping her eyes buried in the gritty carpet. She causes no further disturbance for the balance of their journey.

2. The Cabin

Her heart is pounding. She must calm down, get her fear under control! There has to be a way out of this! Byron Madding is obviously insane, but there must be a way to reach him, to make him understand he can't get away with this, that he has to stop before it reaches a point where there's no way out for him. He has a reputation at the school for being a brilliant math teacher. His students seem to have a love-fear relationship with him. She must have really upset him with that stupid confrontation about him ogling the young girls. But wouldn't he have hurt her already if he planned to do so? Why this crazy business of tying her up and taking her to God knows where?

There was an obvious answer, of course, but it scared her too much to think about it.

Trouble is, this has already gone way too far. He must know that. She must convince him she'll keep quiet about all this if he just comes to his senses and lets her go, then resigns from Geoffrey Bartholomew High. He won't believe her if there are no consequences at all in the deal, so she'll tell him he has to resign. That's her only card. She won't charge him with assault; she won't charge him with criminal threatening; she won't charge him with kidnaping. She won't say a thing to anyone. He'll be scot free if he just lets her go and resigns, effective at the end of the school year. That's only another few weeks. He should be able to find another position easily. A sweet, relatively painless resolution to this mess he's made, if he'll only let her go.

The trip has gone on forever! For hours it seems. And the road has become rougher. She's being tossed about on the hard floor. Her shoulder hurts, and her hips. Where in God's world is he taking her?

When will anyone notice that she's gone? Do the maintenance people work weekends? They must. Will they ask anyone about the lone car still parked there? Normally her boy friend would be worrying right about now; he would certainly be concerned when she didn't show up for their Friday night dinner together, which nearly always led to an overnight of extensive lovemaking. Except, wouldn't you know it, this weekend he's off for some solitary camping and fishing on Long Pond. He won't realize anything's wrong until he gets back Sunday night and tries to call her. Or Monday when he tries again. And how about the school? How long will it be before someone figures out there's something seriously amiss about an English teacher suddenly gone AWOL?

And when she's finally reported missing, is there some automatic wait-and-see period before the police will do anything about it? Or will they find her car still parked at the school with strange damage to her car door. Surely that will alert everyone to the possibility that she's been abducted! But then what? Will they connect her disappearance to Byron Madding and somehow be able to track her down that way? Worse, will it be in time to save her from whatever he has planned for her?

The SUV is really tossing her around now. The engine is grinding in a low gear. This is not good! Wherever they are, it's not the highway, nor even a decent secondary road. It's well off the beaten track. The stale damp air under the woolen blanket is suffocating. She's awash in sweat from fear and her own body heat. Her jaw aches from being forced open so long by the soggy gag. Her ear is resting in a puddle of her own drool. Fright has loosened her urinary sphincter and her pantyhose and skirt are wet, adding an illogical sense of shame to her fear.

The vehicle bounces to a stop, throwing her into a maelstrom of relief and dread. The door by her head opens and the blanket is whipped off her body. A strong scent of pine and earth rushes in. She tries to look cool and collected, the better to reason with him. But she's terrified!

She hears his feet crunch around to the driver's side. That door opens and he's leaning in, untying the rope that holds her ankles to the track of the front seat. Now he's releasing the belts around her ankles and legs, but leaves the belt around her arms and rib cage, just under her breasts. Oddly, he takes off her shoes.

He climbs back out, slams the door and comes back around to the other side. He disconnects her leash from the seat track, pulls her out of the SUV and stands her up. She staggers on her stocking feet, her legs complaining at the sudden return to function, her feet cold on damp dirt and prickly weeds. They're in thick, unkempt woods, the SUV parked on the vestigial remains of an ancient logging road, now thoroughly grassed over and all but swallowed up by the encroaching undergrowth. She sees the road (if you can call it that) splits into a brief Y for a turn-around. Beyond that is the merest trace of a footpath leading off into even thicker new-growth woodland.

"Now we're going to take a walk," her captor informs her. "Give me any trouble and I'll start removing patches of your skin." He brandishes the syringe to make his point. "I've experimented with certain animals and I can assure you it does not appear to be a pleasant experience."

He turns and strides off on the barely discernable path, pulling her along behind him on the leash. A reluctant and fearful dog. The overgrown path is a nightmare of painful rocks, pebbles, vines, cone shards, roots and forest debris biting into her tender feet. Her thin pantyhose is soon torn and bloody. She whimpers as she picks her way along, half walking, half trotting, not daring to stumble and incur this crazy man's psychotic wrath.

The path keeps branching, each new segment more obscure than the last, the man relentlessly trudging onward, yanking on her leash. She trips and falls over a hidden branch that has dropped from a towering white pine, its trunk bristling with dead and rotting limbs snuffed by the light-hogging green canopy at the very top. She looks up to see the syringe pointed at her face and scrambles in an awkward panic, rolling to her knees and somehow to her feet. She moans and begs with her eyes that he not push the plunger! He aims a short burst at the tree trunk and a five-inch circle of bark promptly bursts into steam and boils. Satisfied with the terror that floods over her, he turns and yanks harshly at the leash. Humiliation and fear combine to break her spirit. She cries as the endless trek through the underbrush goes on and on.

In her heart she knows there will be no reasoning, no negotiations. How can she even try with this damned gag in her mouth? The farther he drags her from civilization, the slimmer her chances for coming out of this alive. Or coming out of it at all! Where can this be leading but to a shallow grave no one will ever find? Only wild animals drawn to the stench, looking for a good meal.

She salves her anxiety with proactive fantasy solutions. If she had the guts, she would run up behind him (like Catwoman or Xena), knock him down with a kick to the kidneys and drive a heel into his throat to put the bastard out of commission. She would dig his keys out of his pocket, unlock the handcuffs, wriggle out of the belt, throw off the dog collar and sprint back to the SUV and freedom. But the heady smoke of the fantasy dissipates in the depressing reality of her fast-tiring English teacher's body, and the paralyzing fear of the horror contained in the syringe.

Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, there is a ramshackle cabin in front of them, nearly invisible in the opaque tangle of bushy young trees and undergrowth. Its cladding is rough, uneven and crooked wooden boards, badly weathered. The windows appear to be boarded up on the inside. The roof is an unruly clutter of barely attached shingles. Byron unlocks a heavy padlock on the door — much heavier than the door would seem to warrant — and pulls it open. She sees that, in fact, the door is much thicker and heavier than it appeared. He thrusts her rudely inside the cabin and slams the door behind them, locking it with a bar bolt.

The interior is nothing like the outside. Far from ramshackle, the floor is solid pine planking, the walls and ceiling finished and covered with sound-proofing tile. And the windows are not boarded over at all; light filters through some kind of thick material that must be, she realizes, one-way glass. They can see out, but no one can see in. As she takes in the contents of the room, a frightening comprehension begins to form. Ropes, chains, shackles, pulleys, bars, cages, trestles, poles, winches, a variety of unusual steel tables, chairs and machinery, a large pegboard holding an assortment of whips, canes, belts, riding crops, other items she can't identify.

She has never seen anything like this before and even as a full understand of the implications sinks in, she finds herself positioned under a rope dangling from a pulley. Byron ties it to her handcuffs and pulls on the other end of the rope, drawing her arms up behind her and forcing her to bend over at the waist. He secures the other end of the rope to a wing hitch, leaving her in a position that is most uncomfortable and getting more so every minute as her shoulders register the strain.

Her discomfort is mixed with relief as she sees him empty the syringe into a jar and place both items in a steel storage cabinet. The cabinet is about four feet tall and contains thirty drawers stacked ten deep and three across. She estimates each drawer to be about four inches high, ten inches wide and maybe fourteen inches deep. God knows what other appalling things they contain.

He opens another drawer, pulls out a pair of scissors and starts toward her. She watches him, eyes wide, expecting the worst, conjuring terrible possibilities in her mind. Fearfully, she shies away from him. Constrained by the rope and her awkward posture, she can only scrabble around in a tight circle like a wounded crab. He grabs her arm.

"Stand still, you stupid bitch. I'm not going to hurt you. Yet."

She has no choice. His grip is hurting her arm. She sniffles and keens through her gag.

He's cutting the sleeve of her jacket, starting at the cuff and working his way up to the shoulder where the cut turns ninety degrees and circles her arm. He peels the material away. Then he does the same with the other sleeve.

For the moment her fear is overridden by her reflexive outrage at the mutilation of her expensive jacket. The material, including the pad, is too thick at the shoulder for the shears, so he exchanges them for a box cutter. Fear replaces outrage again as he slashes at the cloth until he can tear the garment entirely off despite her handcuffed wrists.

She still fails to see where this is going until he begins on her pale blue silk blouse. When that is gone, he snips the straps of her bra and with a flick she is naked from the waist up. Now she is crying, both from fear and humiliation.

But he's only half way there.

He unbuttons the waist of her sensible black skirt and slips it down over her hips and legs, careful not to dislodge any of the tiny bits of forest detritus still clinging to it from her fall. When she's reluctant to lift her legs so he can take the skirt away, he lifts them for her, making her produce muffled gasps of pain. She's more cooperative when he removes her pantyhose.

Now she is entirely nude. He laughs at her expression, a wild montage of fear, frustration, anger and embarrassment. She is grunting, bobbing back and forth, trying to talk.

He removes another item from the drawers and approaches her, speaking in a maddeningly calm voice.

"Good news and bad news, Miss Primrose. The good news is that you don't have to worry about the acid any more. I have retired it. It served its purpose. The bad news is that I will be using this device." He held it up. It was a rod with a handle, button and controls on one end. The other end came to a double pronged fork. "Do you recognize it?"

She shakes her head.

"It's a cattle prod. It's used all over the world under a variety of names and for a variety of purposes. Law enforcement loves it for handling prisoners, making bloodless arrests and for crowd control. Among other things. I use it for much the same thing for what I call 'attitude adjustment.' It has both external and internal applications. We will begin with the external. Would you like a demonstration?"

She shakes her head violently, spittle flying off the corners of her mouth.

"Now, see, that's the wrong attitude. We'll have to adjust it."

He touches the prongs to her thigh and pushes the button. She leaps backwards, screaming through the gag, hanging herself painfully.

"Let's try it again. Would you like a demonstration?"

She bursts into tears and stares at him, her eyes huge, caught in a no-win situation. "Silence is not the correct answer," he says and touches her other thigh. She screams and dances away from it in a feckless arc.

"The proper answer is, 'Yes, Sir. Please.' I will then grant your wish and demonstrate it. Unfortunately, until you answer properly I am obliged to continue using it on you anyway. It is rumored, Miss Primrose, that you are fairly intelligent; so why don't you put your brain to work, while you still can, and deduce the least painful course of action. Now, once again: would you like a demonstration?"

After a tearful hesitation, she mushes out the correct words, as best she can. "Eh, er. Eee."

This time he touches it to her right arm. Again she screams and lunges to the left.

"Very good. Now you have the right attitude. See how that works? That's what the external application feels like. In due course you'll have a chance to experience the internal application which is even more . . . intense, shall we say?"

He places the prod on top of the cabinet and fishes a heavy iron collar out of another drawer. It's about two inches high with a five inch diameter, hinged on one side. After removing the dog collar, he closes it around her neck and locks it on with a bolt, using two wrenches to tighten the nut so that it cannot be removed with fingers. The thick rusty iron looks wonderfully incongruous on her dainty neck. He attaches a chain to a ring in the collar, a chain that runs through an overhead pulley. Within minutes her wrists are released from the rope and the chain pulls her up on to her toes. The collar bites into her jaw but her shoulders are greatly relieved.

He stands directly in front of her, his eyes boring into hers. "Now I'm going to remove your gag. This does not mean that you may talk. You may talk only when you are given permission. If you break this rule, I will use the cattle prod on you until you decide to adjust your attitude. The correct attitude is total obedience. Do you understand?"

A look of fury flashes through her face, but she smothers it and nods.

"What do you say?"

"Eh, er."

"Good." He removes the gag.

Her eyes close in bliss as she works her jaw and her tongue, licking up the saliva that had collected around her lips because she could not swallow it. She wants to yell at him, to scream her anger at what he's done to her, at the outrageous affront to her dignity, making her stand here in the nude and play his obedience games! But he has the cattle prod and she knows he'll use it.

He pushes a heavy wooden chair against the back of her legs. Taking two lengths of rope, he ties her ankles to the front legs of the chair. He lowers the chain attached to her collar so she can sit and ties her knees to the tops of the chair legs and her body to the back of the chair. Then he pulls up a chair of his own and sits down facing her. He admires her wide open sex while she fumes in silence, staring up into the far corner to avoid seeing his eyes.

"Now then, Lili . . . You don't mind me calling you Lili, do you? Seems a little silly to call you Miss Primrose when we're on such intimate terms, soon to be much more intimate. Don't you agree?"

"Yeah," she mumbles, seething, holding her temper.

Suddenly his voice has a hard edge. "That is not a proper response, Lili." He extends the double prongs of the prod toward her exposed inner thighs.

"Yes, Sir!" she quickly amends, squirming uselessly and adding "Please don't!"

"Please what ?" he says, his voice rising. "Did I ask your opinion on whether or not I should correct your attitude?"

"No Sir! No Sir! I'm sorry!" she says, emitting little squeaks as the prod gets closer.

"You have once again incurred a need for correction and you will ask for what you deserve. You will say, 'Please, Sir, correct me.'"

"Yes, Sir! No! Please, I'm sorry!" She's becoming hysterical.

She screams as the prod makes contact, searing pain erupting where the voltage arcs between the two electrodes.

"Give me the correct response, Lili," he says, and zaps her again.

She screams again, but the agony sharpens her wits. "Please Sir, correct me Sir!"

"Certainly," he says and puts the points on the flesh right next to her furrow.

Her scream is more sustained this time. She rocks back and forth on the seat, trying to speed up the fade out of the pain, sobbing now.

"That's better," he says, leaning back in his chair again. He can see the tension in her body begin to ebb a little. He's earned her respect. But he's confident he'll have many more opportunities to adjust her attitude before it's time for the final solution to Miss Primrose. "The thing is," he goes on smoothly, "your observation was quite correct. I do ogle the girls. Every chance I get. And why not? If they wear fuck-me clothes in public, their obvious intent is to attract the attention of males who would like to fuck them. I am such a male and they have my attention. I do know better, of course, than to actually fuck them while they're still under age and still students at my school. I am a lech, but I'm neither stupid nor reckless. Unlike you."

He sees her eyes flare up, then flicker to the cattle prod in his lap. She has the sense to hold her tongue. He continues.

"You spotted me looking over the girls and were too stupid to ignore it, like everybody else. No, you had to get up on your high horse and come preach to me about 'propriety' and threaten me. Then you were reckless enough to admit no one else knows about your little morality crusade. That means I can eliminate you and your threat and no one will link your disappearance to me."

Suddenly she realizes her situation is a lot more dire than the pain of a cattle prod.

"That's not true," she blurts out. "I've discussed what you've been doing with several other people and told them I was going to report you!"

"Oh? Who?"

"Several teachers."

"Which teachers?"

"I'm not going to tell you. You've got to stop this craziness and let me go! You can't get away with it. They'll be on to you as soon as they know I've gone."

He smiles lazily. "Somehow I choose to believe your earlier assurance that no one else knew about what you had observed. It surely would have strengthened your hand to tell me they did, yet you denied it. No, I think this change in story is merely to save your pretty neck. But all you've done is create yet another need to adjust your attitude. What do you say?"

"Mr. Madden, this is crazy. I'm telling you I . . ."

He touches the prod to her abdomen and presses the button. She screams! "Please! Listen . . ."

He touches it to her right breast. She screams again.

He leans closer and exaggerates his enunciation. "What . . . do . . . you . . . say?"

She is strangling on her tears in her panic, but she manages to say it. "Please correct me, Sir!"

"Good." He touches her once again, this time on the outer lip of her sex.

She wails in agony before dissolving into shudders.

When she has calmed down, he says, "You must really come to terms with your situation. I will explain it to you. Because of your arrogant indiscretion, your life is forfeit. It is in my hands, now. But you are also a beautiful and very marketable young woman, and that opens up opportunities for both fun and profit. Accordingly, I intend to play with you for my own amusement while I prospect for willing buyers. That is, the highest bidders. I'm confident I can make a handsome profit off you, which is not only poetic justice, considering you were ready to destroy me, but absolutely the finest way to dispose of your enemies. I have extensive world-wide contacts and should have no trouble drumming up acceptable bids. Needless to say, what your eventual buyer does with you is his business. But just so you know, no female who has been in this room has ever reappeared to tell her story. You will be no exception."

Lili remains sensibly mute as he stands up and unties the rope around her upper body, then pulls on the chain connected to her collar and forces her to stand up. He lowers a metal bar to just above her head. It is suspended from two ropes running through pulleys and has a shackle on each end. Using a box cutter, he cuts off the plastic handcuffs and swiftly locks her wrists into the cuffs at the ends of the bar. The bar is then raised until her arms are fully extended upward. He takes another bar from the pegboard; it's almost identical to the bar to which her wrists are cuffed, but the shackles at the ends are slightly larger. He removes the ropes tying her legs to the chair, pushes the chair out of the way and attaches that bar to her ankles, forcing her feet well apart.

He lifts a digital camera out of one of the cabinet drawers and snaps pictures of her from all angles. Then, from another drawer he pulls out an aerosol can of lather and an old fashioned straight razor. There's a sink on the wall to her left with a pump. He draws water from the pump into a basin and brings everything over to where she stands, legs spread.

"I tend to favor a nice thick bush like yours," he says. "More natural. But most buyers these days insist on a cleanly shaved pussy."

He proceeds to shave her, glancing up in amusement as she chews on her lower lip, trying to suppress her outrage, fearful of the primitive razor. But he handles it like a pro, shaving her cleanly and blotting her dry. She yelps when, without warning, he makes a small slash under her right breast. She cries out at the sting and the sight of blood.

"Oops! I shall have to be more careful with this thing," he says with a smile, and stanches the blood with her skirt, pantyhose and bra. It's not a deep cut, and after a while it stops bleeding. He drops the bloody garments carefully into a plastic bag and seals it.

"Now it's time for us to become intimately acquainted," he tells Lili. "If you have any problems with that, I'll be happy to put a gag back in your mouth and show you what the cattle prod feels like inside your vaginal canal." He cocks an eyebrow and waits a few beats, but she says nothing. "Excellent."

He releases her wrists from the overhead bar, slackens the chain attached to her collar, draws a small metal table up against her butt and makes her lie down on it. It's only large enough to support her bottom and the small of her back. He lashes her ankles to the legs of the table at one end and her wrists to the legs at the other end, then ties her hair into a rope hanging from the ceiling to hold up the top half of her body. She is now splayed out and helpless, her legs spread, her sex exposed and her hair pulling painfully at her scalp when she tries to relax and fall back. He adjusts the height of the table with a hand crank, stands between her thighs and unzips. He sticks a finger in her vagina, decides she's too dry and uses some salad oil to lubricate himself (for his comfort, not hers) and rams himself into the private depths of the bitch who tried to bring him down. He hammers away to the rhythm of her sobbing until he comes in a tremendous rush, pounding his ejaculate into her. He remains inside for the afterglow spasms and the tingling sensations from his ultra-sensitized member as he glides slowly in and out of her warm receptacle.

When he's too soft to continue, he pulls out, stuffs a tennis ball in her mouth, tapes it in place and leaves her to endure the increasing strain of her position while he uses his cell phone to start contacting prospective buyers. She listens to his side of the conversations with rising trepidation.

"She's the next thing to a virgin," he tells one. "Young, innocent, beautiful. And intelligent, too. She'll appeal to your most discriminating clientele. She needs a bit of obedience training, but I'll give you a discount for that." To another he says, "She'll pay for herself in a month. After that, it's pure profits. She's young and strong, you can use her for anything. Might last six, seven years. Even then she'll still be good for resale to the snuff market." To yet another he intones, "She's petite, gorgeous and she cries easily. A really cute, sensitive little thing. They'll get tears out of her with very little effort. And for the hard stuff she has a really heart breaking scream." To still another he declares, "She's prime meat. Young, tender. Very pretty, too. Slim but well endowed. She'd be perfect for the upcoming M ä dchenbraten. Sure, I'll e-mail you some snapshots. Believe me, you won't be disappointed! Yeah, she can be ready for shipment as soon as the money arrives. But you'd better hurry; I've got several interested buyers already offering top dollar."

When he finishes, he pulls a full size inner spring mattress to the center of the floor, setting it on four cinder blocks to lift if off the floor. A few minutes later Lili Primrose is stretched out face up on the innerspring, her wrists and ankles cuffed to each corner. The chain still connects her iron collar to the overhead beam — just in case she somehow tears loose from the innerspring. Byron pulls a large pan out of a lift-top wooden box and slides it under the innerspring directly beneath her crotch.

"It's been nice," he says, removing the tennis ball gag, "but I've got some details to take care of. Oops! Did I just dangle a preposition? Sorry about that. Even in the most extreme circumstances we must strive for . . . propriety . . . in all things. So let me rephrase that in a proper grammatical syntax: 'There are some details of which I must take care.' Do you approve, Miss morally conscientious English teacher?"

He pauses to see if she'll take the bait. But she remembers the pain of the cattle prod and holds her tongue. He sighs, disappointed, and pinches her left nipple hard, making her grimace. "I asked you a question, bitch teacher." He pinches the other nipple harder, making her yip. "Answer me! Correctly, now!"

"Yes, Sir. It was better," she says, her voice contorted in a conflict of fear and anger.

"That's a good little bitch," he says through a sardonic smile. "And it's all I want to hear out of you until morning."

He finds a roll of clear wrapping tape in the cabinet and presses it over her closed mouth, winding it round and around her head in several layers from just under her nose to the curve of her chin, then vertically over her head and under her jaw.

"I'll be back in the morning to play with you," he tells her as he puts the rest of the roll back into the cabinet. "It looks like we've hit the market at a good time, so I'll be able to nail down a good price for you. In the meantime, if you can't hold your bladder or your bowels, go ahead and disgrace yourself. That pan under your bed will collect it. Perhaps we can even find an imaginative way to recycle what you produce."

He takes more pictures of her spreadeagled on the innerspring, then pockets the camera, unbolts the door and picks up the plastic bag containing her bloody clothes.

"By the way," he says over his shoulder, "you'd better hope nobody comes to rescue you. The place is booby trapped. See those nozzles?" He points to an array of nozzles aimed at the door, windows and at her, all sprouting from a rectangle of pipes attached to the rafters, the pipes originating from what appears to be a propane gas tank in a corner. "That tank over there is filled with cyanide gas under high pressure," he explains. "Once I'm outside and arm the system, anyone who attempts to enter will trigger a discharge of the gas through those nozzles. You and your rescuer will be dead within ten to fifteen seconds. Sleep tight."

He closes the door behind him. She hears the click of the lock. Then silence.

Byron uncovers the hidden control box and pushes the arming sequence, reminding himself to bring a fresh auto battery in the morning. He takes a circuitous route back to the SUV, his standard procedure to help avoid creating an obvious path. He tosses the plastic bag on the floor and revs up the SUV. There's a game he wants to catch on TV. But first he has to take care of a vital detail in the interest of covering his ass.

3. Play and Preparation

For Lili Primrose the night is endless and eerily silent. The sound proofing on the walls and ceiling shuts out the night noises as effectively as it shuts in any sound she is able to create, which consists mostly of a pathetic mewling through her nose. The springs and interlocked wires of her innerspring bed make old-fashioned mattress sounds when she bounces her body, but she soon learns that bruising her back on the cruel metal wires is no way to begin a long night locked down on them. The air grows cold, sending her into spasms of shivering, keeping her perpetually aware of her nakedness and helplessness.

A knot of dread makes her stomach hurt. The conversations she overheard concerning her future, as best she can figure them out, seem to indicate that Byron Madden plans sell her into prostitution, or worse. She has no clear idea of what a "snuff party" might be, but it doesn't sound good. She tries to think of a feasible plan for escape from this cabin, but he has kept her constantly in restraints since he grabbed her in the parking lot. He keeps the wrenches that would unbolt her iron collar on the pegboard, and even if she could rise from this innerspring, the chain would prevent her from getting anywhere near it.

The wires cutting mercilessly into her back muddle her thoughts. Soon she can only think about how to ease her misery. She longs to be rescued from her suffering and from the plans of this mad brute, but her eyes keep fastening on the blunt, perforated finger pointing at her from the pipe overhead, poised to spew death in her face.

The sound of rattling at the door! Her heart leaps into her throat and her body goes rigid! She stares at the nozzle, holding her breath, willing it to remain benign! The door opens.

"Ah, you're still here. Liked our accommodations, did you?"

Her breath shudders out, at once relieved and terrified. She hates being defenseless and at the mercy of this madman. She hates it that she's naked and he can feast his depraved eyes on her at will. She hates it that she'd rather be alive under these conditions than dead in a cloud of cyanide. It can only be that she still hopes to find a

way to reason with him before it's too late.

He's chatting amiably, meanly aware that her mouth is bound up and she cannot respond, even if she weren't afraid of the ever-present cattle prod.

"You'll be happy to know that we won't be interrupted by pesky searchers, at least not until you're safely away to your new career as a whore or entr é e. The first thing the police will do when you're finally reported missing Monday or Tuesday is check with your boyfriend. As we all know, many crimes of violence are committed by spouses and lovers. They'll naturally be a bit suspicious of his tale of camping on Long Pond all by his lonesome, especially if they're smart enough to search his residence and find your skirt and pantyhose hidden in the trash, all covered with blood. Blood matching your type, it will turn out."

His prisoner is thrashing about on the harsh innerspring, making desperate noises through her nose. He can't help but smile at her fruitless protests. She's so cute when she's upset. He sits down beside her and caresses her breasts and smoothly shaved sex as he talks.

"Turns out you couldn't have picked a better week to rile me, what with boyfriend heading off for the deep woods. Helps, too, that you had a big row with him about it and bitched about it to your buddies in the teachers' lounge. In the cops' minds that 'row' will turn into a fight and they'll start searching for your body. But up at Long Pond, not here. They'll probably drag the damned lake!" He laughed and pushed three fingers into her vagina, reaming them around, making her gasp. "How's them apples, bitch babe? They'll be looking for you for months, trying to pin a murder rap on boyfriend. May succeed, too. All because of your big mouth and bad judgement." He crushed her cunt between his fingers and thumb. She made a muffled scream. "Too bad you won't be around to see it all, but I've got other plans for you. One way or another, you'll be long gone."

He fishes the pan out from under the innerspring. It's empty.

"Too shy to use your bedpan? That's all right. I wanted to watch, anyway."

Her heart sinks. He's going to force her to pee in front of him! She won't! She can't! She'll withstand the cattle prod before she'll do that!

He releases her wrist cuffs from the corners of the innerspring and fleeting thoughts of kneeing him in the groin, overpowering him, quickly vanish when he cuffs her hands behind her back again before releasing her ankles. He cranks the collar chain up, forcing her to scramble off the innerspring and on to her feet. Before long her wrists are locked into the overhead bar again. But this time, instead of the spreader bar between her ankles, he ties them into a spread position with ropes attached to rings in the floor. Then he slides the pan between them.

"You will remain in that position," he states firmly, "until you have pissed into the pan. And if you need to shit, you might as well do that, too, because before this day is out, you'll be getting an enema.

She can't believe what she is hearing. She wants to tell him to fuck off — a word she hasn't used since college — but he hasn't removed the tape that keeps her mouth clamped shut. She makes the only protest she can: screeching through her nose and thrashing uselessly in her restraints.

"Oo, that's sexy," he says. "I like that. Keep it up!"

She sags, defeated, held up by her wrists. Despite her determination not to do so, she breaks into tears of impotence and humiliation.

"I'd take the tape off your mouth," her tormentor teases, "but it helps keep you out of trouble so I can get some work done. Tell you what, though: I'll take it off after you piss in the pan. By then I'll be ready to start correcting you again."

He makes more cell phone calls while she concentrates on ignoring the building demands of her bladder. The tenor of the calls remains the same: talk of her sexual uses and of her value for "snuff." The person representing Der M ä dchenbraten , whatever that is, seems to be winning on points, which seems to mean he's offering the most money for her. But she is on the verge of exploding. Urine is starting to leak down her leg. The pain is bringing new tears to her eyes. It finally dawns on her that this monster will not relent; he will force her to disgrace herself (as he put it) simply by ignoring her. And what the hell difference does it make, anyway. He's getting ready to SELL her, for God's sake! As a prostitute! A sex slave! She's naked. He's raped her. He will probably rape her again. She is absolutely powerless to resist any and all debasements he decides to heap on her. She has already been defiled by his fingers and his sex organ and will soon be defiled by many others, or snuffed (whatever that means) or dead. She resigns herself to this ultimate humiliation and unleashes the painful backup in her bladder. It splashes noisily into the pan and draws his attention. He's on the phone, but he turns to watch. Smiling.

She refuses to feel ashamed. He made her do this! Besides, it's a natural function that everybody does. Modesty about emptying the bladder is a mere social convention, a human invention. Toddlers pee for their moms and dads during potty training. Nurses help immobilized or paralyzed patients do it. What's the big deal about peeing? But despite her cool logic, tears leak from the corners of her eyes.

He punches his cell phone off and nods appreciatively. "All right!" he says. "I love to watch a woman piss in public for the first time. It rips away that cloak of self-righteous pride, that phoney pretense of decorum that society lays on us. It's all part of our schizophrenic attitude toward sex: the simultaneous obsessing about it while hiding it; using our sexual attributes to attract attention and stimulate imagination while, at the same time, condemning their display. It's understandable, of course, given our weird concept of morality. Our pee pipes are enclosed in the same apparatus as our sex parts. Therefore, pissing in public, which requires exposing the apparatus, is as forbidden as fucking in public. It's all ridiculous, of course. Strip away the walls and doors and clothes and laws that buttress our pretensions, and we're just another species of animal who eat and piss and shit and rut and mate and give birth to more animals like ourselves. We excuse our absurd sexual contradictions by pretending there's some kind of supernatural being who demands that our species must defy nature and act differently from all the other beasts who also have mouths and pee holes and poop chutes and dicks and cunts and who do all the same things."

This high-toned lecture on sexual relativity does not seem to be cheering up his captive female who hangs dejectedly over the warm pan of urine. The sight makes him chuckle. He loves to humiliate these women, almost as much as he likes to torture them, and feeding them this convoluted philosophical crap helps rub their nose in their disgrace. He can see she wants to argue back but cannot. In fact, enforced silence will be a continuing component of her torture, right up to her final disposition.

He picks up the pan, sloshing its contents around right in front of her face, enjoying her attempts to hide her embarrassment. He carefully pours the urine into a mason jar and sets it on the cabinet.

"I've got good news for you," he says as he lowers the bar to which her wrists are cuffed. "You've been sold. I got a really good price for you from the Society of Isis and I'll be delivering you to them this afternoon. That doesn't give me much time to play with you, but at least it will get you out of the country in case, for some reason, the search for your body brings someone sniffing around this cabin."

He releases her wrists from the bar but quickly snaps handcuffs on them, although this time in front of her. The change provides welcome relief to her aching shoulders and gives rise to a spark of hope for escape. She can do more with her hands in front, even though they're cuffed.

He makes her sit on the floor and does the same thing with her ankles: he releases them from the floor bolts only to clip them together with ankle cuffs. Now he orders her to draw her knees up to her chest, drop her manacled arms over them and hug her legs to her bosom. He takes a metal rod and threads it over her elbows and under her knees, locking her body into a kind of fetal position. Using ropes, he ties her right wrist and ankle together, then her left wrist and ankle. The two pair of cuffs have now become redundant and he removes them. But he spreads her knees as far as they will go and lashes them to the metal bar that way, the bar having holes through which to thread the ropes. He tips her on to her back so her knees are in the air and the furrow of her sex fully displayed.

Feeling no less helpless than before, she explores frantically with her fingers to find a knot she might work loose, but he has taken care to keep them out of reach. Her chances for escape are clearly slipping away. On top of her fright and anger, she's developed a raging thirst. Having skipped lunch yesterday at the school, she's had nothing to eat or drink for twenty-four hours. She puts on what she hopes is an imploring expression and makes pathetic noises, hoping he will remove the tape sealing her mouth so she can ask for water.

If he understands her plight, he ignores it. He has set up a pair of adjustable trestles with U-shaped grooves on top. With little apparent effort he scoops her up off the floor and drops the ends of the metal rod into the grooves, suspending her between the trestles. She hangs from her knees, the weight of her torso angling her so she is almost upside down. Byron pushes her gently so she rocks to and fro like a porch swing, or like a deer slung from a pole being carried home from the hunt.

He takes a position in the V of her legs, the fabric of his pants rubbing against the tender skin of her rump and inner thighs, and against the far more sensitive lips at the entrance to her womb. He tilts her body on its fulcrum to ascertain that the entrance is at a convenient level for the shaft that will enter it. Satisfied, he goes to the pegboard and takes down a flogger, a whip consisting of a handle with a dozen soft leather thongs.

"I need to play with you now so the marks will be faded by the time your buyer takes possession. The Society is very fussy about the quality of their offerings at the M ä dchenbraten. They prefer unblemished. Unfortunately, that rules out some of my favorite toys, like the heavy cane and the nipple clamps with teeth."

Her eyes show her fear. He likes that. "Why Lili, you didn't think you were my first guest here, did you? Hell, you're not even the first one I abducted in a parking lot, although I generally avoid it. Don't like to leave an abandoned car to proclaim that a kidnaping has taken place. Joggers on rural roads make better snatches; they're trim, fit and fetch really good prices. The easiest and safest, of course, are hookers. No one reports them when they go missing. The down side is you never know about the state of their health and have to avoid swapping bodily fluids. But that's okay. I have lots of ways to amuse myself without drawing blood and there are plenty of females around I can fuck. Like you, for example."

He starts to flick the ends of the flogger on her sensitive cunt. Even such small blows with a soft whip produces an amazing amount of pain and she jerks and cries in her restraints, her body rocking on the metal rod. He talks as he watches the tender skin turning red.

"My favorite snatch technique requires the help of one of my clients. We dress up in cop costumes, put a blue light in the front window of the car and pull over some pretty girl. I pretend she matches the description on an APB and make her get out of the car. I frisk her, cuff her and put her in the back seat where she gets chloroformed and tied up, same as you. The client drives her car to the nearest airport and leaves it in the long term lot. He picks up his own car, which he had parked there earlier, and meets me a few days later at a prearranged location to collect her, all neatly packed in her container. I never take clients here, for security reasons. What happens to her then? Depends on the buyer. Most wind up at a brothel in Central or South America, Asia or Eastern Europe. Others go where you're going, to one of the snuff houses run by Isis. There are four: in Germany, Thailand, Indonesia and Columbia. You're headed for Munich; a festival called Der M ä dchenbraten. You'll love it. Meet girls from all over the world."

He switched from the flogger to a small ratan cane and began tapping it directly on her labia and clit. Her reaction was convulsive.

"Hurts like hell, doesn't it? This place used to be a hunting cabin before I found it and fixed it up. It was pretty dilapidated. But the land is now posted so there are no hunters to use it. And if anyone does break in, it will be their last mistake in this life. Hasn't happened yet, though."

He spreads open her outer labia and gives the pink inner lips a hard whack. She screams and her body stiffens as the pain surges through it like a tidal wave. He does it three more times until she is racked with sobs, her face red from straining against the hemp ropes. He puts the cane away and finds a pair of pliers, carefully taking her right nipple between its jaws. He squeezes and pulls up at the same time, stretching her breast into a cone. Once again she's screaming into her gag, her body stiffened in agony. He stops before she passes out, and after a minute repeats the torture on the other nipple. This time she does pass out, but he simply tilts her body on its rod so her head is down until she revives.

When she's conscious again, he tears off the tape from around her head, jaw and mouth in a deliberately slow and painful manner.

She wastes no time or energy berating him for his monstrous behavior or begging to be released, but goes right to her most critical need. "Please! Water!"

"All in good time," he answers, "providing you learn to ask for it properly. But I insist you show respect by using the correct honorific. I trust you know what that is, Miss Primrose."

"Yes, Sir," she croaks more urgently. "Please give me some water, Sir. Please, Sir!"

"Better. But first you must ask me to fuck you."

She grinds her teeth, wanting to tell him off, but afraid of what he'll do.

"I see you need additional persuasion," he says, picking up the cattle prod.

"No! Please, Sir! Nooooo!" She squirms violently in her restraints, trying to get away from the inevitable.

He inserts the double pronged rod into her vagina and pushes it in until it bumps against the cervical wall. He punches the button.

Every vein stands out in her face and neck as she stiffens, screams and breaks into choking sobs. Her body is still shaking from the effects of the pain, the likes of which she had never dreamed possible.

"Would you like to repeat that performance," he says smoothly, "or are to ready to ask me to fuck you? Properly."

With a shuddering intake of breath she almost shouts, "Please, Sir, fuck me, Sir! Fuck me! Fuck me. Sir. Please."

"Happy to oblige," he says, opening his pants and tilting her to the correct angle for penetration. The sight of her — helpless and in agony, utterly at his mercy — has aroused him to maximum hardness. He plows into her, stabbing against her burned cervix, making her cry out with every thrust. "Enjoy it, bitch!" he taunts. "This will be your last fuck. The folks at Isis don't like semen mixed with the cunt meat. Actually, the women guests don't seem to mind — they're used to eating dick and cum, I guess. It's the males guests who get all bent out of shape." Her tears flow as he humps away in her injured pussy, until, with an animal howl, he fills her with his spunk. He slumps with the softening of his member and pulls away.

"Thank me, bitch," he says.

"Thank you, Sir," she responds through her tears, swallowing her hatred along with her pride rather than endure more bites from the cattle prod. "Please, Sir, may I have water now?"

"You may," he says. He takes the jar filled with her pee and pours some into a glass, mixing it half and half with water from the pump. He carries it over to her and touches the glass to her parched lips.

She looks at him aghast!

"Changed your mind?" he says, eyebrows raised innocently. "Don't want any water after all? Because this is all I'm ever going to offer you."

They both know she has no choice. She closes her eyes and lets him tip the noxious liquid into her mouth, wrinkling her nose as she swallows. Her disgust is more from the idea of drinking piss than from the actual taste, which is fairly bland. In fact, her thirst is so intense she finds herself asking for more. The next glass is three quarters urine and one quarter water, but she gulps it down and licks her lips.

"If you liked that, you're gonna love this next part," her tormentor purrs.

He rotates her on her axis so that her ass is pointed at the floor and slides an old fashioned chamber pot directly under her. Next he fills a huge enema bag and suspends it from a beam above her. She looks on in horror, but dares not object. He rotates her ass back up so that it's well presented for the nozzle, which he twists into her rectum, not bothering to lubricate it. She rewards him with a squawk of pain. He opens the petcock.

She feels the flood of cold water rushing into her bowels. They're already in distress from her refusal to empty them while pinioned to the innerspring. In short order she's ready to explode, can feel it leaking around the nozzle.

"You'd better hold it in!" he warns, the menace in his voice unmistakable. But holding it in is impossible.

"I can't! I can't! Sir, please, please, please! I can't!"

Much as he'd like to torment her longer, Byron can see she's about to gush all over him. He yanks out the nozzle and aims her asshole at the pot. With a cry she lets the contents of her colon spew out in a stream of broken turds and brown water. She is mortified. She has hit rock bottom. There is no greater degradation. Whatever happens after this, she will never be more deeply humiliated.

"You didn't hold it in," he says, bludgeoning her with the obvious. "You'll have to be punished for that. But not right now. You still have more to clean out. If this were hot water, one enema might do the trick, but I've got no way to heat water here without making smoke, which I'd rather not do. So we'll just have to keep flushing you out till you're empty."

He tilts her back up, rams the nozzle home and lets the rest of the bag empty into her. She's groaning in great distress by the time he allows her to release it into the chamber pot.

The third enema fills her intestines with an entire bagful of cold water, making her moan and sob with the effort to retain it in her swollen abdomen. But it comes back out mostly clear.

"Well, that takes care of cleaning you out for the chefs. Time for your punishment." He slides the cattle prod back into her pussy, slippery now with his own ejaculate. "Ask for it."

She weeps. She knows there's no avoiding it, but asking politely for so terrible an agony is the most difficult thing she's ever done. Yet if she doesn't, he'll do it anyway, and keep doing it until she does. She bites her lip and says it, her words scratching her throat. "Please, Sir, give me my punishment."

A wolfish smile twists his lips. "Be specific. Say, 'Please Sir, zap my pussy with the cattle prod.'"

Anger bubbles up to her tongue, but fear holds it back. "Please, Sir, zap my pussy with . . ." she clenches her stomach, her voice trembles . . . "with the cattle prod."

White hot pain sears her delicate vaginal wall and explodes through her body. Her scream ruptures a vocal chord, shredding the sound into silence. She pants, pushing the agony down to a manageable level, able to think again, desperate for a way to make this man stop. She's ready to accept death, but not another zap from that prod. He's saying something to her. What does he want? She must clear her head, do what he wants, say what he wants, anything to keep him from using that cattle prod again!

He sees her head is lolling, her eyes unfocused, her breathing ragged. He'd better not hit her with another jolt, fun as it is to watch, because there's too much money riding on her safe delivery this afternoon. The Society of Isis has no use for damaged goods or corpses. They need live merchandise in good condition. Alive and beautiful and fresh.

He lifts her off the trestles, removes the metal bar and returns the shackles to her wrists and ankles. He stands her up and makes her hobble to the sink to brush her teeth. He makes sure she gargles and rinses out her mouth with Scope to eliminate any odor from the piss she swallowed. He personally douches her over a pail and cleans off all the encrusted remnants of his two orgasms. He provides her with an array of cosmetics gleaned from the belongings of the many women who preceded her in the cabin and orders her to make herself presentable.

It creeps her out to be using the stolen makeup of girls he kidnaped and may well be dead. But anything to make him happy, keep his hands off that damned cattle prod. He even makes her carry the chamber pot filled with her shit outside to dump. But she doesn't complain. He took off the ankle shackle, but there's no hope she can escape. He has her firmly leashed and holds the cattle prod at the ready. She meekly dumps the contents of the pot and returns to the cabin. Her opportunities to live are slipping quickly away and there's nothing she can do about it.

He eats a sandwich and sips a bottle of diet Pepsi while Lili sits tied to a chair and watches. When his lunch is finished, he removes her ankle cuffs, tapes a cotton rag in her mouth and marches her out of the cabin for the last time, dragging her along another circuitous route to where his SUV is parked. He wears comfortable L.L.Bean hiking boots. She is naked and barefoot, suffering the many punishments of the forest floor.

They arrive at the SUV which is already turned around, ready to take her to the next point on her final journey. He pulls a heavy plastic shipping crate from the back of the vehicle and opens the top. The container is lined with thick soundproofing material. Small holes are designed as baffles that allow a minimum influx of fresh air while keeping any sound from escaping.

"It's time, my pretty, to prepare you for shipment," he tells her gaily, and swiftly buckles a strap around her upper body, pinning her arms to her sides. Her hands have already been tied behind her. He binds her ankles and knees together, lifts her up and drops her into the crate, doubling her into a fetal position to fit. As a final touch, he binds her feet and legs to her body so she can't kick the inside of the container, then closes the cover and locks it in place.

Miss Lili Primrose won't be causing him any more trouble. Of course he'd have liked to have played with that nice pristine body and those extraordinary boobs for another week or two, mucked around in that juicy little pussy. But Isis is in a rush, what with their snuff banquet about to start in Munich and some asshole handler in Venezuela damaging one of their top acquisitions. Too bad for the injured cunt because now she'll have to put in six weeks of hard whoring in a sweaty Columbian brothel to pay for her upkeep until the next girl roast in Bogota. Good news for him, though, because Isis was forced to bid top dollar for a quicky top-of-the-line replacement. So bye-bye Miss Lili fucking Primrose. Enjoy your new starring role as substitute snuffmeat!

4. Flight of the Damned

He's made it pretty clear. She's going to die, although she's not sure how. But at least she's fairly sure he won't be using that cattle prod on her any more. Fear and relief make strange bedfellows. Joy and Dread. Her position in this box is becoming more stressful by the minute. The trip seems endless, but she's not sure she wants it to end because the longer she suffers here, the longer she stays alive. As long as she's alive there's hope for escape. Or rescue.

She is in serious pain by the time she feels the SUV roll to a brief stop. There are several more short spurts of travel before the clunk of a door slamming indicates a more permanent stop. A few minutes later she feels her box being dragged out of the vehicle. The fluid motion of the box tells her it's being lifted. She feels it land on something solid. Then it's tipped at an angle and begins to vibrate with a new kind of motion. They must have put her container on a dolly. This new trip is even more uncomfortable because she's tilted ass end up with her head jamming into the end of the box. Finally the rolling stops and she hears the sound of the lock being opened.

A rush of cold air chills her as the top is thrown open. The rope binding her into a fetal position is removed and strong hands lift her out of the container. She's dripping with perspiration from the stuffy heat of the cramped box and now shivers in the fresh air, inhaling it deeply. She sways on her feet momentarily, trying to get her balance in spite of the straps around her arms and legs.

She makes a quick visual survey and discovers she's at the front of a small commuter-size aircraft looking toward the rear. The pilot and co-pilot seats are right behind her, and unoccupied.

Two men, one on each side, take a firm grip on her arm — as if she could go anywhere with her legs and ankles bound up. A short, dark-skinned man with a heavy five o'clock shadow approaches holding a fishhook. Dangling from it is a small oval piece of plastic, exactly like the keychain I.D.s given out by supermarkets for check cashing customers. It even has a bar code on one side. The obverse side has something written on it with a black marker. He holds it up so she can read it. "US-6."

"Dass you," he says in a heavy accent.

One of the guards holding her, a very burly man with a leathery face, sandy hair and a disarmingly friendly expression, says to her, "Hold still, sweetheart. This will hurt a little, but if you move it will hurt a lot. It'll be over in a second."

The dark man takes her left nipple between his thumb and index finger and stretches it out, hurting her. In a smooth, well-practiced motion he pushes the fishhook through the nipple. Lili stiffens and yelps into her gag. The two men hold her tightly until she stops wriggling.

When she settles down — it was more shock and a sharp sting than real pain — the two men begin removing the straps that bind her. As they do, she counts the rows in the aircraft. There are six, each consisting of three seats, two on the side of the aisle to her right and one on her left. Four white plastic containers, exactly like the one she just vacated, are stacked near the door on her right. Four of the window seats on that side are occupied by young women wearing burgundy colored robes. They're all slim and attractive and all look glum, like cheerleaders returning from a losing game.

She looks down at the tag swinging at the end of the fishhook. The nipple is beginning to hurt again from the trauma of the piercing and the crude material of the fishhook. She's been labeled. For some reason the thought makes her feel even more demeaned than her forced nudity.

The large man with sandy hair is talking to her. "Welcome aboard. We're removing the ropes so you'll be more comfortable for the flight. They'll be replaced, however, with handcuffs and leg shackles. You'll be able to walk if you take small steps, but not run. All the guards on this aircraft are equipped with cattle prods and tasers, including me, so don't even think of getting pissy."

His voice is cordial, matter of fact, like his face. But the words solidify her despair. As the men are attaching the steel shackles to her ankles, the big man helps her into a robe, just like the ones the other passengers are wearing. Her gratitude almost overwhelms her. She won't have to endure the flight naked after all, with all these strange men ogling her. She knows it's an irrational priority in the light of what's planned for her, but she can't help what she feels. After the handcuffs are snapped back on, she's led to the first empty window seat, just two rows from the front. She's pushed over to the window seat. The cuff on her left wrist is opened and then clamped to the arm rest between the seats, pinning her right wrist to the seat.

The view from the window is of open fields with trees in the distance. No houses, no people. A very private air strip. It's getting on toward dusk.

Two more men board the plane and slip into the seats at the controls up front. The pilot is half bald with a gray fringe. The copilot on his right is much younger with waves of unruly, brown hair. They go through an elaborate routine of systems checks while the guards secure the last of the five white containers with bungee cords and find seats beside the shackled women. The man who greeted her coming out of the box chooses the seat next to her and buckles them both in.

"This is going to be a long flight, darlin.' I'm talkin' eight or nine hours. Am I gonna have to tie you up and leave that gag in your mouth, or are you gonna be a good little girl?"

She sighs, quelling her annoyance at his condescension, and nods.

He strips the tape off her mouth so she can spit out the saliva soaked cloth. "And you'll address every male you speak to from now on as Sir, " he says gravely.

"Yes, Sir."

He reaches for the oval I.D. and turns it so he can read it. The slight pull on her sore nipple makes her grimace.

He reads it aloud. "U-S-six."

"What does that mean?" she asks. Her vocal cords and jaw hurt from the effect of the gag over many hours.

"That's your I.D. Identifies your country of origin and your inventory unit. The order for this banquet consists of twelve units and you're number six. Eight of you will be on this flight. The other four are part of a separate shipment."

"I'm just a unit now? No name?"

"That's right, sweetheart. I won't tell you my name and I don't want to know yours. One of the perks of this job is I get to participate in the feasts and I prefer not to get to know my next meal on a first name basis. Got that?"

"Yes, Sir."

"I've been assigned to you because I speak English. The only others on board who do are the pilots. Pilots all over the world speak English. It's control tower speak. So, if you wanna ask me questions, go ahead. I'll answer what I can."

"Why the sudden consideration for what I might want?"

"We don't want the merchandise to be a total freaked out mess when it arrives, so the company lets us talk to them if it calms them down."

"That's all we are? Merchandise?"

"Yep. You got it."

"Even to you?"

"Especially to me. I told you. I don't let myself think of you as anything but meat. Talking meat."

"And these other women don't speak English?"

"One does, but she also speaks Spanish. It's the blonde cutie two rows back."

"Where do they all come from?"

"The blonde is from L.A. The other three are from Guatemala, Chile and Brazil."

"What's going on here, anyway? Where are you taking us?"

"Well, first we'll stop at a little place outside Amsterdam to pick up the last three girls for this shipment, then it's on to Munich."

"We're crossing the Atlantic? In this little airplane?"

"I told you it will be a long flight. This 'little airplane' is a Gulfstream jet modified to fly up to eighteen hours non-stop."

"What's going to happen in Munich?"

"Didn't the guy who recruited you tell you anything?"

"Recruited? He ABDUCTED me!"

"Recruited, abducted. Same thing. What'd he tell you?"

"Nothing sensible! He talked about something called M ä dchenbraten, and about Isis and snuff houses. He said he had to give me enemas to clean me out for the chefs. What the hell was he talking about?"

"Nothing you're gonna be happy to hear about. Der M ä dchenbraten is the name of a semi-annual banquet held in Munich. It means 'The Girl Roast.' The name is self explanatory. It's a snuff banquet. You and eleven other girls are this year's featured entre é s. Isis is the name of the company that puts on the banquets. They put on similar feasts in Columbia, Thailand and Indonesia."

Lila couldn't quite believe what she was hearing. "I don't know what you mean by a snuff banquet. Am I going to die?"

"Be hard to cook you without you being dead at some point. Of course you're going to die. Don't tell me you hadn't figured that out."

"Cook me? You mean they're actually going to roast me? Like in an oven?"

"Over a fire, actually. You and all the others. You're all on the menu."

"Oh my God!"

"Don't worry, you'll be long dead before you go on the spit. I've watched them do it lots of times. Seems pretty quick and painless to me."

"They're going to EAT us?!"

"Sure. That's the whole point of a snuff banquet. Pretty girls slaughtered, roasted and eaten."

"My God! That's cannibalism!"

"Absolutely. And a hell of a rush!"

"Who are these people?"

"They call themselves the Society of Isis, named after an ancient super-star Egyptian goddess. She was goddess of just about everything — home, hearth, creation, destruction, sex, motherhood, apple pie, you name it. Had a gazillion alternate names, too, one for every function and language. She was married to Osiris — god of agriculture, harvest, the underworld and other shit. One of her sons was Horus, a nice guy god who was always getting chopped up by his brother, Set, then patched together again by Isis who had these awesome magical powers. When the Egyptians hit bad times, they blamed it on old Set and prayed to Isis for help. When the good times rolled around again and they were prosperous, guess who got the credit. Isis! Kinda like good god, bad god. Which fits this bunch, because the fat cats who can afford to be members of Isis are over-the-top prosperous."

"Do you . . . join in, too?"

"Wouldn't miss it. I get a hard on just thinking about it. They put on quite a show. And girl meat is terrific! Too bad you won't get a chance to taste it.

She shudders. "That's horrible! Disgusting! Its inhuman!"

"Only from your point of view. And don't give me that 'inhuman' shit. Humans have been engaging in cannibalism and human sacrifice for hundreds of millennia. Just because the self-righteous anal-retentives of the world frown on it doesn't mean it isn't still being done by perfectly sane human beings. Hell, Isis puts on a dozen of these things every year on three continents. They charge ten to fifty thousand bucks per plate. And every banquet draws hundreds of participants. Now, why do you suppose that is? It's because lots of people find the ritual killing and eating of a beautiful human female a turn-on beyond compare. Believe me, your sacrifice is going to inspire a lot of orgasms tonight."

She sits stunned, trying to grasp the horror of it, that this is her last day of life, that this man and others will soon be eating her! The pilots have revved up the engines and the Gulfstream begins to roll along the narrow runway, faster and faster. She has only flown a half dozen times, but this is by far the roughest runway she has ever experienced. By the time the plane bounces into the air and angles up sharply her knuckles are white. How ironic, she muses, that she worries about the plane crashing when she's about to die anyway.

"How will they kill me?" she asks.

"Do you really want to know all the gory details in advance? Why not just let it happen?"

"You're sitting here casually telling me I'm going to die and you're going to eat me, and expect me to just put it out of my mind and watch the scenery?"

"Well now, I don't know that I'll be eating you specifically. There's a dozen girls altogether and I don't know which ones I'll be eating. Only the paying guests get to choose, and it costs extra."

"What do you mean?"

"The employees don't eat with the guests. We get the leftovers."

"The leftovers?" She's beginning to feel light headed.

"Yeah. A table rarely can eat an entire girl, unless she's really skinny."

"A table? What are you talking about?"

"There's four seatings. Four, six, eight and ten o'clock. Each seating has three tables. They cook three girls per seating, one for each table. Everyone gets to look over the merchandise in advance and the high rollers who can afford the extra charge get to choose which table they want to sit at; in other words, which girl they want to eat. Whatever's left over on the carcasses gets served to us employees later. But I don't mind. There's plenty to go around and there's only a subtle difference in flavor between one girl and another. The real difference is in the cut of meat. Most customers go for the breast meat, if they can afford it, because not only is it sweet and juicy, but the idea of eating a girl's tits has a certain erotic cachet. Personally, though, I prefer the rump steaks, especially with mint or apple sauce."

She feels like she's been kicked in the stomach. He was right, this glib-tongued man who is casually escorting her to her death: she doesn't really want to know any more of these terrible details. She'll soon be dead. That's all she needs to know. She's seen her last sunrise, shared love-making for the last time, drawn her final bath. Everything is wasted, everything she lived for, all the years of schooling and training, all her dreams of home and babies and family. She grieves for the waste of the body she's worked so hard to make beautiful for the pleasure of her lover. She grieves for all the things she's about to lose and all the things that will never be.

And yet even death is not as dark and frightening as the unthinkable desecration that lies beyond it. That she will be cooked, carved up and eaten.

She thinks about the alternate fate to which she might have been consigned by her kidnaper. Sex slavery. Instead of being headed for slaughter, she'd be headed for life as a dick-hole for any male willing to pay the going rate to her owner, no matter how scabrous or disgusting he might be, no matter what degradations he might require of her? Would that have been better? At least she'd be alive. Except, she remembered, he had also suggested to more than one prospective buyer that when she's past her usefulness as a whore, she could still be sold for snuffing.

She sat silently, calculating her bleak prospects for escape, unwilling to talk further with a man who is casually escorting her to her death and actually looking forward to eating her.

5. Der Mädchenbraten

Endless hours chained to her seat, flying through the night miles above a frothing ocean eager to swallow them up if they should happen to drop from the sky. She ponders whether it would be better to drown in the cold Atlantic and be consumed by the myriads of creatures who inhabit its depths, or to die on dry land in Munich and be eaten by her own kind. She tries to sleep, but cannot. The man beside her is reading a book. He offered one to her, but the words blurred in the cacophony of her terrors.

As the hours creep by, each girl is allowed trips to the bathroom for relief, but the dignity of privacy is not allowed. The door is kept open, the guard watching, always watching.

Lili, who had thought she could never again put anything in her stomach, is suddenly famished when her sandy haired, pleasant faced guard sits down next to her with a plate of baked chicken fresh from the galley. He declines to share any of it with her, but gives her a candy bar. Snickers. Energy to get her through her impending ordeal, he explains, with minimal roughage to dirty up her intestines. And water is always available. Real water. Clean and sweet to keep the merchandise properly hydrated.

When the plane finally touches down, it's mid-morning of the next day. By her guard's watch it should be 5:00 A.M., but six time zones have lopped yet another quarter of a day from her life. The Gulfstream parks at the far corner of a bustling airport. A runway tractor pulls a cart toward them loaded with three containers identical to the five already stacked up behind the pilots. When the containers are safely inside the aircraft and the hatch locked and closed, three more girls are pulled out and processed. These three are all blondes of varying shades, and exceptionally beautiful. One is crying hysterically. Another is angry, trying to shout through her gag. The third looks bewildered and frightened. Each one receives a fishhook through her left nipple with a little oval tag. Lili can't read them from where she sits. By the time the last of the new arrivals is cuffed to her seat the aircraft is taxiing for another takeoff.

This leg is a lot shorter. Only an hour or two, she thinks, but she's losing track of time. Long before they land the guards begin to repack the girls in their containers. Last ones out are the first ones in. Robes removed; hands cuffed behind them; ankles and legs bound; gags taped in place; bodies doubled up with knees to chest and stuffed into the white crates.

Lili Primrose, known in these final hours of her life as US-6, is the fourth to be plunged back into the sweaty confinement of her container. Condemned and alone. The discomfort of her mind and body is magnified by the ominous bumping and rumbling as her container is rolled down unseen ramps, tarmac and corridors to what can only be her final, unholy destination.

Another click. Light floods into her eyes as the top swings up and she is lifted from her packing case. She's in a long, narrow room centered by a row of salon chairs. Men around her are removing her bindings, but not the short chain connecting her ankles. They speak in a language she does not understand. What she does understand is the painful grip on her arm as she's led through a side door into a shower where she's scrubbed clean and rinsed before being returned to the salon room. There she's thrust into a chair, her ankles locked to the base. Four chairs are already occupied by young women she's never seen before. One by one the remaining chairs are filled with girls from the plane, shuffling awkwardly in their shackles, damp from the shower. Now there are twelve.

Three women in white smocks, two of them quite young, one of middle age, are hustling about among them, repairing the cosmetic damage incurred during shipment. They chatter in German. Lili recognizes the sound of the language but does not speak it. She has the impression they're talking about personal things unrelated to what they're doing. At first a few of the captive girls try to resist their attentions, but the guards put a quick end to their rebellious spirit with cattle prods and handcuffs. Now all twelve sit docilely as their hair is shampooed, dried, brushed out and coiffed. In fact, Lili is impressed at how talented these attendants are at selecting the ideal hair style for each girl. Faces and bodies are glorified with sophisticated applications of makeup. Even the nipples are slightly rouged to give them more definition. She groans as the cosmetologist lifts her tag, twisting the fishhook, the soreness making it obvious that infection is setting in. Just as obviously, her attendant is unconcerned.

The last thing the attendants do is to fit each subject with a pair of high-heeled shoes. Lili has never worn heels this high and wonders if she can actually walk in them. But so what if she can't? She remembers that the guard on the plane told her the guests would be looking her over. These impossible shoes must be for their benefit, and why should she care if they liked what they saw. Either way, they were going to kill her.

The attendants depart, leaving the twelve young women to stew in their anxiety for at least an hour. Talking is prohibited, enforced by the guard with the cattle prod, but it doesn't matter; the only other girl who speaks English, the blond from the plane, is seven chairs away.

Finally there's movement. Two guards and the middle-aged attendant enter the room. One of the girls is unclamped from her chair while a very tall, muscular guard slips a choke chain over her head and hauls her to her feet with it. While the second guard cuffs her hands behind her, the attendant uses a cloth tape to measure her bust, waist and hips, jotting the information down on a sheet of paper. The girl is made to step up on to a scale where her weight is also recorded. The attendant hands the paper to the guard and he leads the girl off by the choke collar, wobbling on her high heels. One at a time the same guards come for each of the captives. Lili is the sixth to be taken. She gasps as the choke collar tightens around her neck when the guard lifts her out of the seat. She's weighed, her measurements taken and her wrists locked behind her. She struggles to keep on her feet as the guard keeps the chain taut, almost carrying her by the neck. He pulls her down a corridor and into a room with a computer monitor where one of the younger attendants scans the bar code on her nipple tag, takes the paper with her measurements, enters the data into the computer and waves the guard and his charge on through another door and into another corridor.

At the end of it she is pulled, half strangling, through a pair of heavy drapes and finds herself on a short runway projecting into a room filled with smoke and a noisy crowd in a party mode. The revelers are about equally divided between men and women, most of them carrying drinks, all of whom turn to stare at the naked new arrival as she's led to a round platform at the end of the runway. An amplified voice makes an announcement in German which begins and ends with what sounds like "sex," or "zecks." With her slight knowledge of German she realizes that the announcer is referring to the number on her tag. "Six." Sechs in German. The guard turns her in a circle on the platform so everyone can get a good view of Number Six as she struggles to keep from stumbling in her heels and hanging herself on the choke collar. Finally he leads her back down the runway and through the drapes to a smattering of applause and laughter.

She's handed off to another guard but is too preoccupied with the effort to breathe and to stay on her feet to care where he is dragging her. They pass through another door (all the doors here, she notices, seem to be heavy steel) and into a large rotunda. Her five predecessors are already here, standing immobile, chained to the hardwood floor by wooden stocks clamped around their ankles. Another wooden stock is locked around their wrists and neck and suspended from the ceiling by chains, stretching them upright. They are placed in an arc, part of a large circle completed by seven other sets of stocks not yet occupied.

Lili is led to the next available set of stocks where two more guards are waiting. One grabs her ankles. He spreads her feet apart and holds them there while the other guard positions the wooden stocks over her ankles and clamps them shut. He uses a bolt in each end to hold the two halves of the stocks together and secures them with a wing nut. Next he removes the handcuffs and seizes her forearms with an iron grip to raise her wrists up to the level of her neck so the upper stocks can be clamped in place and locked on with bolts. To the sound of chains being cranked through pulleys, the upper stocks begin to move upwards, lifting up her chin and hands, stretching her to her full height. Another cloth rag is forced into her mouth and belted in place with a leather strap. Has she been allowed to speak for the last time? The prospect makes her intensely sad. But on the other hand, what is there to say?

She stands, able to move only enough to stave off fainting, not enough to move an inch from where her ankle stocks are chained to floor bolts. She and the other captives have been placed facing the center of the circle so she has an unrestricted view of the girls already in place, as well as the remaining six as they are led in, one by one, and positioned in their own stocks. She's struck by how pretty they all are, some breathtakingly beautiful. And all so young. It breaks her heart.

Another endless wait. At some point an attendant arrives with an armful of small sandwich board signs. She places one sign next to each girl after checking her nipple tag. The signs bear the girl's number along with her weight and measurements. This is obviously an exhibition hall with all the meat on display.

More waiting. She hears weeping on her right. A lovely girl with black hair and a tiny waist is peeing on the floor, miserable with embarrassment. A guard quickly comes out of nowhere and zaps her repeatedly with his prod, making her scream through her gag, finishing by touching the double prongs to both breasts, then up her vagina. The girl is writhing and sobbing, surging against the stocks. The guard returns to his position while one of the young female attendants mops up the urine, washes off the girl's legs and sprays the area with a perfumed disinfectant. Her sobs eventually die down to sniffles.

The episode has made Lili extremely conscious of her own growing need to pee. She wiggles in her stocks, tightening her sphincter, wishing she could bring her knees together, keeping a wary eye on the guard.

Fortunately something distracts her. The sound of voices. The same alcohol laced revelry that she heard from the runway. An ornate set of double doors on her left opens grandly and a cascade of men and woman begin streaming into the rotunda carrying their cocktail glasses and beers. Lili recognizes several of the more flashy dresses the women are wearing. This is the same crowd that had watched her exhibited on the runway, now come to examine the menu items up close and personal. Very personal, as it quickly develops.

Hands roam all over her body and fingers keep slipping inside both her lower orifices. This must be why they've gagged her. Her grunts and squeals only seem to encourage the invasions. The conversation and laughter of the circulating diners are in sharp contrast with the misery on the faces of the twelve exhibits. Most of the chatter is gibberish to Lili who can only guess what these people have to joke and laugh about as they browse among terrified young women waiting to be slaughtered.

Now and then, amidst the babble, she hears English.

". . . and as I understand it they're doing them three at a time. Which seating are you at?"

"I'm in the fourth at ten o'clock."

"I'm in the first. I don't usually like to eat at four. Too early. But I have a flight to catch and I don't wanna rush. Not at these prices. I wanna take time to savor, y'know?"

"I know what you mean. But it's too bad; they usually save the best ones for last. Like this beauty here."

A hand slaps her ass hard.

"I've requested her table. Can hardly wait to sink my teeth into this tenderloin." He pinched the flesh on both sides of her spine."

"Tenderloin, huh? I dunno, I think I prefer the thigh. It may not be as tender but it's got more flavor. Juicier. Course a lot depends on how they cook her. Too much heat tends to make the meat too dry, so if they . . . ."

The voice dissolves into the general gabble of the huge room. Many more hands slide over her belly, her legs, her crotch, her breasts. One foolish woman catches a finger on the point of the fishhook and yanks her hand away, nearly tearing the hook out of the nipple. Lili screams and rocks in her wooden restraints.

A tall, solemn-faced man with black hair and dark eyes, speaking an odd, mellifluous language, squeezes her breasts, thighs and calves. He puts two fingers deep into her furrow and plays there for a while, studying her reactions. Finally he signals an attendant and pats Lili's right breast. The attendant nods and goes to a computer near the double doors. A printer next to the monitor regurgitates a slip of paper which the attendant hands to the man whose fingers have been continuing their cavorting in Lili's vagina. He withdraws his fingers from their wet dance hall and rubs them on the underside of her lips and up inside her nose so she can taste and smell her own secret juices.

She numbs herself to the relentless humiliation, until another burst of English catches her attention. She recognizes the twang. Texas.

"Whoa! Sally, c'mere! Look at this one!" A man stands in front of her, pointing. He's in his mid fifties, sun damaged face, blue shirt with top two buttons undone, square jaw, beer belly, boots. "That's what I call prime," he says. "Looka this!" He grasps each of her thighs with both hands and squeezes hard. "Nice and firm but no hard muscle. And take a look at these knockers!" He transfers his squeezing to her breasts. "Yeah! Firm with good natural lift, no sagging. Nice, small, perfectly formed nipples that stand right out. You could hang your hat on 'em. We're definitely sitting at her table and I'm going to put in a bid for one of them jugs. Whadda ya think?"

A tall buxom woman emerges into her side vision. She's a bottle blonde, probably in her early forties and uses lots of makeup to help hold back time. "I've told you what I think. It's a fucking extravagance. Why do we need tit? Leg meat is almost as good. Besides, would there be enough to share?"

"Hell, yeah! Here, feel this!" He grabs her right hand and plops it on Lily's right breast.

The woman squeezes the captured mammary and raises her eyebrows. "Okay, you're right. Nice and firm. Could be tasty."

The man waves at an attendant. "Hey, sweetheart! Either of these tits still up for grabs, and how much?" He snickers at his own drollery.

The attendant, accustomed to boors in several languages, ignores his lame humor and consults the computer screen.

"The left breast is still available, Sir, for two thousand Euros."

"Jesus, Eddie!" the woman chokes. "Two thousand for a lousy tit?"

"Not just any tit!" he counters. "That's Marilyn fucking Monroe quality tit."

"For two thousand it better be! What's this sudden big obsession with tits, anyway? Don't I have enough for you to chew on?" She puts both hands under her bosoms and thrusts them toward him, almost spilling them out of her dress.

"You sure do! In fact, why don't I volunteer you for the next roast down in Bogota. I'll buy both your tits and chow 'em down myself. You're a little over the usual age cutoff for Isis, but I'll offer you at a price they can't refuse. Whadda ya say? I'm hot just thinkin' about it!"

"Jesus, Eddie!" To Lili's amazement the woman blanches. She's afraid! She knows he would actually do it!

"Well, then, cut the shit!" he snarls. "You can't tell me you don't like a little titty yourself. Every time we invite Jim and Barbara over, who spends half her time suckin' on Barbara's bongos? What's that all about?"

"What that's about is that you pout and bitch if I spend too much time sucking on Jim's dick, so I switch to Barbara's boobs so you won't go into a fucking snit."

"All right! All right! Look, all I'm sayin' is, these are great melons here and I wanna eat one. What's wrong with that?"

"But two thousand . . . ."

"Oh for Chrisake, Sally, it's our anniversary treat. We can afford two thousand lousy Euros. What's the big fucking deal?

"All right, all right. Put in a fucking bid, Eddie. But remember, I get half."

He signals the attendant standing next to the computer monitor. She approaches. "Put me down for it, sweetheart, and put us at her table." He hands her a credit card. He follows her back to the computer but their voices, in English, cut through the hubbub.

"That will be at the ten o'clock seating, Sir. Table one." She taps at the monitor face and the printer spits out a strip of paper which she hands to the Texan. "The chefs will begin preparing her at 4:20. The drawing for the slaughter will be at 4:35, if you'd like to take part in the lottery."

"You betcha!" he says. "Wouldn't miss it! By the way, how much for the cunt lips and womb?"

"Eddie!" his wife screeches, steering him out of the room.

6. The Slaughter

Gradually the dinner guests, or members, or clients — or whoever they are — become bored with the exhibition and wander away to refill their glasses and find some other amusement. The rotunda becomes eerily quiet. There are no more groping hands, no more painful tugs at the fishhook, no more leering and laughing at her naked helplessness. There's no more transparent talk in a dozen incomprehensible languages about how beautiful she is, and how exciting it will be to see her put to death, butchered and eaten.

There are only twelve frightened young women, immersed in silence, awaiting their final moment of life.

Her feet really hurt from standing in these damned high heels. She has been shifting her weight from foot to foot to help alleviate the pain, but it's becoming unbearable. Yet she must bear it.

Two other girls are unable to hold back their bladders, but this time there is no retribution, no punishment by cattle prod. An attendant simply mops it up, washes off the piss-dampened legs and disappears. From this Lili surmises that the exhibition is over and no further guests will be visiting the rotunda. Time is rapidly running out.

The double doors open and a group of guards enter carrying choker chains on leashes. Lili is one of the first to be released from her stocks, but her wrists are immediately cuffed behind her again and the choke collar slipped over her head and around her neck. To her relief, the shoes and the gag are removed. She's led out of the rotunda on bare feet through a series of rooms filled with segments of the same gala crowd she has so recently entertained with her body. The rooms are elegant, each with a bar to help keep the hungry rascals merry. Her sensitive soles tread on wood, then thick carpet, then tiles, then more carpet.

Suddenly she is outside, in a courtyard, surrounded on all sides by walls and balconies, but open above to blue sky dazzled by the sun as it approaches its daily apogee. Long tables project toward the center from three corners of the rectangular yard, each sheltered under an awning with burgundy and white stripes. In the fourth corner there's a platform with a structure that looks for all the world like a soccer goal: a cross bar between two vertical posts. The center of the court yard features an iron roasting pit, low flames already licking through red hot coals. On the wall opposite her and those to her left and right are tall, shallow cages with thick, flat metal bars. They stand side by side in sets of three. Her guard yanks on the leash, pulling her toward the far cage on the left hand wall. Bits of debris scattered about on the tiled floor of the courtyard dig painfully into her soft feet, eliciting winces and small noises in her throat.

"What's the matter, there?" her guard says, the first person to talk to her since she got off the plane! "Rough on your little footsies, is it?"

"Yes, Sir," she says politely, mindful of the prod clipped to his belt.

"Well don't worry about it," he says. "Our guests won't be eating your feet. Those will just get tossed in the incinerator with the rest of the junk parts."

"The junk parts," she repeats, trying to get her mind around the casual dismissal of her body.

"Yeah. Head, hands, feet, bones, guts — all that shit."

"I've kind of grown fond of . . . all that shit," she says, immediately chastising herself for tempting his anger? Why doesn't she just shut up? She doesn't need another dose of pain.

But he just laughs. "Well, you'll have some time to kiss them all goodbye. Lights out for you will be about 4:30."

"What time is it now?" She doesn't want to know!

"Coming up on 10:30. You'll be able to watch the first nine girls prepared and roasted, see how it's done. It's quite interesting, really. In fact, you'll be practically right on top of Table One for the first seating. Get a real good view of how you're gonna be carved up and served later on, right at that same table."

They reach the cage. A small sign with the number 6 has been bolted to the top. The cage is about half a foot taller than her five foot five, barely wider than her shoulders and no more than a foot deep. The entire front side opens up on hinges. The guard removes her handcuffs and shoves her backwards into it, slamming the door and locking it with a heavy padlock. The cage is so tight she can hardly move. The guard cuffs her wrists to the sides.

"That's in case you get an attack of modesty, to keep you from covering up your good bits. The customers like to fondle the merchandise and we like to please our customers. We'll let you hang out here without a gag, but the first time you sass a customer, in it goes. Along with a jolt of this up your twat." He taps the prod.

She keeps silent, hoping to avoid the humiliation of a fawning response. But it is not to be. He puts his hand on the prod and leans close to her face.

"What do you say, bitchmeat?"

"Yes, Sir. I'll be good. I won't sass anyone."

"Fucking A, you won't," he says, and strolls back to escort another girl to her cage.

When all nine cages are filled, three other sets of doors swing open and the courtyard is quickly packed with expectant diners, many of them well into their cups. As the guard predicted, they circulate past the caged girls administering a variety of pokes and pinches through the widely spaced strips of steel. Lili is well beyond outrage and humiliation at this point. She simply endures it as the least of her problems.

Then through the same door by which she was dragged into the courtyard, three of her fellow prisoners are led in to cheers from the well-oiled crowd. All three were on Lili's flight across the Atlantic. All three are very attractive, but two have a little too much padding in the thighs. The third could be a fashion model with her rail thin body, long skinny legs and small breasts; but in the flesh and stripped to the buff she suffers in comparison with her more voluptuous sisters. Lili hates herself for thinking in such terms, but this choice of initial victims seems to bear out what she was told, that they are saving "the best for last."

The girls are led on to the corner platform with the out-of-place soccer goal. Unwilling to challenge the cattle prods of the guards, they allow themselves to be gagged and have their hands tied in front of them. Three hooks are hanging from ropes thrown over the cross bar and are inserted under the ropes between their wrists. Guards pulling on the other end of the ropes quickly hoist them up, leaving them dangling a foot off the floor of the platform. Ropes are tied from their ankles to eye bolts, spreading their legs.

The three white-smocked female attendants appear with bottles and plastic tubing. Squatting in front of the hanging girls, they wet one end of the tubing in their mouths for lubrication and proceed to twist and push them up into the urethras of the girls, ignoring the grimaces they're causing. In the next moment pee is draining from all three girls into the bottles. As the last yellow drops drip from the emptied bladders, the attendants pull out the catheters, pick up the filled bottles and leave through a red steel door.

As they leave, the guards untie the ropes from the ankles of the hanging girls. Working now work in pairs, one guard grabs the girl's legs and holds them up while his partner wraps wire around her ankles. She's then taken down from the hook and stood upright on the platform. Her wrists are untied, but her arms are quickly placed behind her back, one forearm laid over the other, and bound together with wire. Next, one of the guards picks her up, like a husband about to carry his bride over a threshold, while his partner inserts the hook between her ankles and under the wire. Once again she is hauled up to the cross bar, this time by the feet. When all three girls are hanging head down, a second horizontal bar is put in place at about the level of their knees. Their legs are roped tightly to the bar to keep them facing forward.

The attendants reappear through the red door with cordless clippers and shavers. All visible hair is removed from the hanging girls — scalp, eyebrows and pubis. They look much less feminine now. Less human. More like upside down manikins. The piles of hair under their heads are swept up and replaced by large metal bowls.

Two men in formal attire appear from the midst of the crowd and step in front of the three girls. One holds an inverted top hat which he is shaking vigorously. In a strong voice the other man calls for attention.

"Damen und Herren. Madams et monsieurs. Ladies and gentlemen." He makes an announcement, first in German, then French, ending with English. "The drawing to select the first three Swordbearers of Isis will now take place."

The man with the hat holds it above head level so neither can see into it. The speaker reaches up with his right hand; it disappears over the brim and comes back up holding a slip of paper. He reads what's written on the paper and makes another announcement in German. The assembled diners glance around at each other. No one responds.

He does it again in English: "The Society of Isis is pleased to announce that the first winner of the lottery for this sacrifice is number three-hundred-seventy-four." Still only expectant looks from the crowd.

He repeats it in French. The instant he finishes the number a woman throws her hand up, screaming in glee, "C'est moi! C'est moi!"

The other diners congratulate her as she works her way to the first girl hanging from the crossbar.

The process begins again, calling the second winner, then the third, until all three winners are in place beside the three sacrificial offerings.

Two men and a woman in white chef outfits emerge from the same red door used by the attendants and take up positions next to the inverted girls. One of the male chefs begins helping the three lottery winners into long green smocks and disposable gloves. As he does this, the other male chef steps forward. There's some kind of insignia on his white jacket. Lili Primrose assumes he must be the head chef. He pulls a marker from his apron pocket and makes two marks on the necks of all three girls. Lili recognizes the locations of the marks from her biology class days. They identify the spots where the main arteries supplying blood to the head come closest to the skin. She tries to remember the names of the arteries, but cannot. For some reason she is absurdly disconcerted by this hole in her memory, as though she were about to fail a test.

The female chef hands him a tablet and he steps forward to read from it. (Like Moses on the mountain, thinks Lili. Or Charlton Heston pretending to be Moses.) He reads it first in German, then French, then English.

"Members and guests of the Society of Isis, we welcome you to the M ä dchenbraten and to the celebration of our beloved Goddess. It is to the glory of Isis that we offer and dedicate the first of our sacrifices on this day. May the blood of these three young maidens and the roasting of their flesh be acceptable in her sight, that she may grant us health and prosperity. Let us, in turn, honor her bounteous favors by using our health to enjoy the full pleasures of our bodies, and our prosperity to seek those pleasures in abundance."

Meaning, Lili thinks to herself, come back and lavish your wealth on another slaughter. Nothing like a self-serving invocation.

The Chef produces a tube from his breast pocket, uncaps it and pulls out a silvery instrument that looks, to Lili, like an Exacto knife. No, it's a scalpel with a small pointed blade. He holds it aloft like a torch and shouts, "Das Schwert aus Isis!"

The crowd shouts back: "DAS SCHWERT AUS ISIS!"

With a dramatic flourish he passes the scalpel, handle first, to the woman and whispers something in her ear. She nods and holds it high, as he did.

"Heil Isis!" she cries.

"HEIL ISIS!" the crowd roars.

Then she turns, pushes the point of the small blade into the end of one of the marks on the girl's throat and draws it the length of the mark, looking surprised at how easily it slid through the flesh.

A geyser of blood erupts from the wound and splashes off the side of the girl's face. More blood spurts out behind it creating a widening river that cascades over the shelf of her chin, flows to the top of her shaved head and trickles into the open bowl beneath.

The woman with the scalpel backs away, her face white. She seems to be appalled at what she has wrought. Maybe she hadn't anticipated so much blood from such a little cut. It has drenched her glove and splattered all over her sleeve and the front of her smock. The head chef notes her distress and carefully removes the scalpel from her hand. At the same time a guard materializes at her elbow and quickly steers her to the nearest chair. The chef completes her unfinished task by slicing through the mark on the opposite side of the girl's neck. A new stream of blood pulses out of the second cut, painting the other side of her face red. The stream splashing into the bowl briefly becomes a cataract, then slows to a rapid pattering of drops. Aside from a twitch each time the knife bit into her throat, the girl has remained motionless. Only her eyes and her irregular breathing betray her terror at the approach of death. Gradually her breathing slows, shudders, then ceases altogether. Her eyes are still open but register only emptiness.

Lili does not want to watch this, does not want to stare at the girl's lifeless eyes, but she cannot help herself. Any more than she can stop trying to remember the damned name of the arteries.

The head chef has passed the knife to the man who has won the privilege of dispatching the middle girl, the tall thin one with the fashion model face. But she has been watching the death of her neighbor and is frantic with terror, wriggling like an eel on a hook, shouting muffled pleas into her gag, crying. The bearer of the Sword of Isis is at a loss. How can he hit such a lively target without making a mess of it. The chef standing behind the thrashing girl solves his problem by grabbing her ears and holding her head steady. She is in such pain from the grip on her ears that she doesn't even realize her throat has been cut until the chef releases her and blood flows over her face.

I won't do that! Lili tells herself. I won't struggle so they can add that further indignity to my death. Yet it's important that she display her contempt for these monsters. But how? She can't give them the finger because her arms will be wired together behind her. She can't spit at them because she'll be gagged. Damn them to hell!

The ritual repeats a third time. When that girl is dead, the guards take down the bodies and lay them out on steel tables. The three chefs spring into action. They slit open the abdomens and systematically eviscerate the carcasses, handing the long ropes of intestines and other internal organs to the assistants who drop them into a plastic garbage container on wheels. The kidneys and livers are placed in covered pans to be cooked separately. The chefs make a show of pouring olive oil and wine into large mixing bowls, then adding crushed or chopped apricots, lemons, oranges, cloves, parsley, garlic and onions. They stir the mixture and apply it to the inside of the stomach cavities with a paint brush.

The next step is to slide the carcasses up the tables so that the heads are hanging off the end. The assistants wash off the blood and sew up the eye lids. (This, Lili guesses, is so if the eyeballs split in the heat of the fire, it won't create an unappetizing mess. Her stomach lurches at the thought.) The pointed end of a thick iron skewer is threaded between the wired-up ankles of each girl and pushed upward between the legs to where it can be inserted into her vagina. It's then slowly pushed and twisted up through her body and neck until, thanks to the angle of the head off the end of the table, it emerges easily from her mouth. A short metal cross bar is bolted to the skewer under each girl's knees and her legs are firmly wired to it. This well keep her from slipping on the spit as it's turned.

Meanwhile, the assistant cooks arrive with a basket of stuffing which the chefs pack into the open abdomens before sewing them up. Aluminum foil is wired in place over the heads to keep the faces from charring, and pinned over the vulva to prevent overcooking of the tender flesh there. Lili remembers that some of the discussions in the rotunda as the crowd swirled among the previewed entrees, revolved around discussions of the price and preferred seasonings for "crispy cunt."

Two guards pick up the ends of the skewers and place them on trestles so the bodies can be turned while the chefs baste them with the same mixture they applied to the body cavity. When the chefs are satisfied with the basting, another wire is wound around the upper bodies to keep the arms — still wired together forearm to forearm — from flopping away from the bodies as they're turned on the spits.

The preparations finished, three pair of guards carry the carcasses to the roasting pit where the skewers are set into grooves in the sides. The "pit" is actually a square cast iron enclosure about seven feet to a side where gas jets feed a carefully controlled flame beneath a mesh grid covered with glowing coals. Hand cranks are added at one end of the spits so they can be periodically turned and locked in place. The chefs and the assistant cooks turn the spits every ten seconds or so, basting the steaming carcasses with long handled brushes.

For the next two hours Lili's mind replays the horrendous scene over and over. She tries not to look directly at the three females as they slowly roast over the pit; she tries not to notice their skin turn from pink to red to bronze as they are turned and basted. But her eyes keep returning inexorably to this preview of her own future.

In a way, she is thankful that another misery is becoming a serious distraction. Hours of standing in the cramped embrace of the metal cage has turned into an agony. The flat metal bars of the cage floor are cutting into her feet. Having been standing most of the day on exhibit in the rotunda and now here, she is tortured by pain in her back and legs. The brief moments of relief she can achieve by slumping downward jams her knees against the cruel bars, leaving them bruised and sore.

The courtyard, which had largely emptied as the first set of diners wandered off to find new amusements while waiting for the four o'clock seating, is beginning to fill again. This crowd is even less sober and more noisily crude than the last batch. More hands squeeze her breasts and twist her nipples. More fingers force their way into the sensitive channel between her legs, tender and bleeding from the ravages of countless fingernails. Two couples, well past the inhibitions of sobriety, openly grope each other under their clothes as they grope her through the bars. A man whose face is a mass of old acne scars opens his fly and masturbates as he fingers her pussy and presses his face against the bars to suck on a nipple. He's still sober enough, she notes, to avoid the one with the fishhook.

Too bad.

Most of the crowd's attention is focused on the three cages against the wall directly opposite her. Two of the women occupying those cages were on the plane with her: an exotic Latino beauty with full sensual lips and a lush figure; and a tall girl with light brown hair, sad green eyes and elegantly shaped limbs. The third is one of the gorgeous blondes from their first stop near Amsterdam. The reason for the attention they're receiving is soon chillingly clear. As if by magic, guards suddenly appear at all three cages and begin unlocking them. At the same time all the doors to the courtyard are closed and attended by more guards. It's time for the next sacrifice.

The three victims are led to the preparation area without handcuffs or shackles. Their only restraint is the silver choke collar by which the guards lead them. But of course, there's no need to restrain them. Every possible escape route is blocked and every free man and woman in this courtyard has a vital interest in making sure none of the captives leave this place alive. Lili despises these people and what they're doing, yet her body responds to the erotic overtones of the scene: three starkly nude females, on their way to execution, being pulled on leashes between two lines of fully clothed spectators.

The ritual begins again.

The wrists are bound, the victims strung up, their bladders drained.

The invocation is read, bloodlust incited.

DAS SCHWERT AUS ISIS!

Lady Luck selects the three who will cut the throats of the sacrificial maidens.

They're hanging upside down, now, from a hook between their wired ankles. Luscious offerings for the Goddess. Waiting. Terrified. Two of them crying. Forearms wired together behind them. Bodies newly shorn of hair. Nothing left to be singed in the fire.

"Heil Isis!"

"HEIL ISIS!"

Blood gushing, pumped by frightened, racing hearts through the opening in the slashed arteries, coursing down clear young skin into the waiting bowls.

Lovely young corpses, heads tilted back so the skewers can exit through open mouths. Pretty lips sucking on hard iron, the pointed end wet with gore from drilling a passage that began where life itself begins.

Lily watches the spits carrying the three stuffed and basted girls set in place over the roasting pit, their skin glistening with the first coat of oil and spices. A hand tightens over her right beast, but she's thoroughly numbed to such abuse and pays no attention. She's transfixed by a scene she's compelled, against her will, to watch.

Until he speaks.

"Hi, darlin.' You ready for your turn?"

She recognizes the voice of the pleasant faced man from the airplane but won't look at him.

"Are we ever ready to be murdered?" she asks, surprised that she has enough passion left to provoke him.

"Best not to dwell on it," he says. "Think happy thoughts. Like, what did you do before your new career as a main course?"

"You bastard."

"Hey, don't get pissy with me. I'm not the one who kidnaped you, then sold you. I would never have sold anyone as pretty as you to this place, for these creeps to eat."

"But you don't mind eating my leftovers yourself, now that I'm here."

"Exactly. You're here and there's no way out of it. So why not? But don't blame me for putting you here."

"You kept me on the plane!"

"Excuse me! Several Isis employees kept you on the plane, not just me. Not to mention the Atlantic Ocean."

"You could have done something !"

"You think so? If I had tried to save you then, or at any time, including now, I would be dead. Isis is a powerful organization and takes care of its enemies in uncomplicated ways. I prefer not to be dead. I should think you could empathize with that, given your current situation."

"Bullshit! You could have blown the whistle on these people a long time ago. Instead you chose . . . you choose to work with them and help murder young women. And EAT them, for God's sake!"

"I refer to my previous answer."

"Bastard!"

"Watch you mouth. You seem to forget I carry a cattle prod."

Lili takes a deep breath and says nothing for a few moments. "There are at least a couple hundred people in this place," she says, keeping her voice low and even. "How can it stay a secret? I don't know German law, but I'm sure it doesn't permit the slaughter and cannibalism of innocent women. All it should take to stop all this is one anonymous phone call to the police."

"Should, but won't. The answer to your question, lovely nameless lady, is that the top authorities in Munich as well as at the highest levels of the national government are paid-up members of Isis. A lot of them are right here at the M ä dchenbraten and one or two may soon be digging their forks into you. Think that might give me pause? You bet your soon-to-be-cooked ass it does! So let's cut the fantasy crap and get back to my original question. What were you? What did you do?"

"My name, whether you want it or not, is Lily Primrose and I'm a teacher. Grades three through five."

"You were a teacher. Wow. Intelligent and tasty. What a combination! Most of the females who come through here can't tell a verb from their elbow."

"Why do you keep putting me in the past. I'm still alive and I'm still a teacher."

"No, honeycakes. You're meat. And your life was over the minute you were abducted. It would've been nice if your kidnaper had sold you to me as a fuck toy. I'd have kept you around for a while as my own personal pussy to play with. But he didn't. He sold you to Isis as meat. So we both have to suck up our disappointment and deal with it. Right?"

"You son of a b. . ." She stops herself as his hand touches the cattle prod on his belt. She looks away, biting her lower lip.

"I know," he says softly. "I'm a bastard. And I'd love to talk with you further, Miss Lili Primrose, but duty calls elsewhere. It's almost time to . . ." He sighed. "Listen, I'm really sorry I can't be your white knight and save you from . . . from all this. But I can't. I wish it were otherwise." He looks away for a moment, starts to say something more, then suddenly walks off.

Now she's alone. Alone to face all this.

Eternity drags by. The first six girls continue to roast, the chefs constantly checking them, turning them, bringing them slowly to epicurean perfection. The courtyard air is filled with the aroma of cooking meat and spices. A little like lamb, she muses, disgusted with herself at the thought. Endless, faceless tormentors continue the painful violations of her body. She doesn't care any more. She almost welcomes the distraction from the greater agony of her confinement in the cage. And the horrors battering her mind.

Horrors that come to life again for the third time as the doors bang shut and guards approach the three cages on the wall to her left. She recognizes only one of these three as they file past at the end of their silver leashes. The first is one of the blondes from Amsterdam. The second is Indian, exquisitely beautiful and very young. The third girl reminds her of an actress. Who? It comes to her as the girl is strung up by her wrists for the catheter. Meg Ryan. Now if only she could remember the name of the damned arteries!

She turns her head away as the three are hauled up by their ankles. She closes her eyes. She can't watch this time. Bad enough that she can't shut out the sounds.

Damen und Herren . . . the drawing to select the Swordbearers of Isis . . . pleased to announce the first winner. . . May the blood of these three maidens and the roasting of their flesh . . . Das Schwert aus Isis!

HEIL ISIS!

She weeps. Her eyelids cannot black out the vision of three more beautiful girls hung by their feet like sheep in a slaughterhouse, watching their young lives draining into bowls.

She loses track of time. She doesn't want to know the time. She tries not to think about time. When she opens her eyes again the third set of sacrifices are over the fire pit and on their way to the bronze stage. Nine young women are now roasting there. Three to go. One more seating. Her seating.

7. The First Seating

Suddenly there's a lot of activity at the table nearest where she stands pressed between iron grids. Young men in black pants and white shirts unbuttoned to the middle of their well-exercised pecs work alongside young women in dangerously low-cut white blouses and obscenely short black skirts. They stretch white linen over the long table and lay down large square plates and light blue linen napkins. Each napkin is soon weighed down with an arsenal of heavy-gauge stainless steel dinnerware, including three forks, three spoons and two knives. Water glasses and wine glasses sprout up, interspersed with narrow fluted vases bursting with carnations and roses in whites, reds, pinks, yellows and purples. Handsome handcrafted bowls arrive overflowing with steaming vegetables and colorful salads.

The other two tables are receiving equal treatment from other young wait staff.

Lili has counted the chairs at these tables many times during these long dreadful hours. Twenty settings per table times three tables is sixty dining guests per seating, times four seatings is two-hundred-forty banqueters in all. Divide two-hundred-forty by the twelve sacrificial victims, and that's twenty guests feasting on each roasted girl. Then there are all the waiters, guards, pilots, kitchen staff and other employees eating the leftovers. At least there should be no wasted meat, she thinks bitterly. But the frugality brings her little comfort.

With help from the kitchen assistants, the waiters bring out three more trestles for the spits and set them up in a central location not far from the roasting pit. Three stainless steel tables with butcher block tops are arrayed around them. A lower shelf contains stacks of large oval platters, the kind used for serving meat. Hanging from the sides of the tables are a variety of knives, cleavers and forks.

Lili takes in this last detail with great interest. Here's a glimmer of hope. If she can reach those knives, maybe she can slash her way out of here. Assuming the guards stick with their pattern, when they free her from the cage she won't be shackled. The only restraint will be the collar and leash. If she moves suddenly, she may be able to jerk the leash out of her guard's hands and make a dash for the knives? Once armed, she may be able to fend off the cattle prods and Tasers. Would she need to take a hostage? Put the knife to the throat of a smaller female guest? Would they care? Then what? How would she get out of here? She doesn't even know where she is. Doesn't speak the language. Do any of the guards have guns? Shit, none of that matters. She has nothing to lose. She has to take the chance!

Six guards use towels to wrap the ends of three spits on the roasting pit — the ones bearing the original three sacrificed females — then lift them off the pit enclosure and carry them to the waiting trestles. A fresh roast, Lili remembers, has to be "rested" before carving so the juices can settle into the meat. A while earlier the chefs had removed the foil from the heads and genital areas to help even out the color of the roasted skin. The girls were still clearly identifiable.

A door on one side of the courtyard opens and a hoard of semi-inebriated guests pour through heading toward the newly dressed tables. As they find places to sit, waiters emerge with trays of wine bottles and canisters of ice, some containing bottles of Champagne. Soon every wine glass is filled and the waiters depart, only to return with trays laden with hors d'oeuvres — smoked fish, shrimp with cocktail sauce, steamed mussels, chowders, salads and a myriad of other delicacies.

In due time, the main course is announced. The chefs stand by the spits with their carving knives while the guests who have purchased special cuts flock to the trestle area to make sure they receive their due. The most expensive cuts are the breasts, so care is taken to let each purchaser point out the one he or she has paid for (verified by the computer receipt, of course), before the chef slices it away from the body and places it on a plate.

Once all six breasts have been removed, the bodies seem to lose their aesthetic appeal to the guests and most meander back to their seats to drink and await the platters of hot meat. At this point the wires around the knees and ankles are cut and an electric reciprocating saw is used to sever the legs at the hip. The legs are placed on the butcher block tables to be carved up by the assistant cooks while the chefs carefully slice out the labia from the newly exposed crotch, and as much of the surrounding flesh as is edible. These are put in special saucers and served to the three men who ordered them.

Next the wires around the torsos and arms are snipped, the arms cut off at the shoulders with the saw and delivered to the carving tables. The limbless carcasses are then slid off the skewer and placed on separate carving tables. The bellies are sliced open and the stuffing scooped on to three chargers, one for each table. Last to be stripped from the carcasses is the rib meat and the juicy rump steaks.

Lili had told herself she would not watch this atrocity. But she does. She doesn't seem to have any control over herself any more. Her mind feels as brutalized and helpless as her body. Long after the cooks have departed and the picked-over remains of the dead girls have been placed in the containers for leftovers or dumped in garbage bags and carried out, she's still staring at the dinner guests — noisily conversing, drinking their wine, munching on the meat of their victims, toying with their desserts and laughing.

Laughing!

She has witnessed a multitude of abominations this day as she languished in her cage, but the most cruel and hurtful of all is the depraved indifference of their laughter. Derision clings to their titters and guffaws like slime from an infested gutter. She pounds her head on the steel bars and sobs out her anger and sorrow and frustration, her disgust that the human race could spawn such evil.

Then they come for her.

8. Her Turn

She had hardly even noticed the swelling of the crowd wandering about among the tables, pawing at her through the cage. She had so inured herself to this loathsome swamp of humanity with their endless taunts and rude invasions that she had withdrawn into an anesthetized despair. She failed to perceive the change in the atmosphere as guards took up positions by the doors. It's not until a guard inserts a key in the padlock on her cage door that she's jolted into frightful awareness that her time has come.

The front of the cage swings open and a silver choke collar and leash is quickly slipped over her head and tightened around her neck. A second guard is releasing her wrists from the cuffs that held them to the sides of the cage. Fully alert now to the imminence of death, her heart pounds, every sense sharpened to painful clarity. With a shock she realizes she's looking directly into the pleasant face of the sandy haired guard who sat next to her on the plane, the man who said he wished she'd been sold to him as a "fuck toy." He tugs on her leash and she stumbles out of the cage, her knees buckling from the hours of standing immobile. He shoves a hand between her thighs and holds her up by her crotch until she's able to control her legs. She staggers backwards out of his hand to the end of her leash, angry at his impertinence, yet oddly grateful for his help and appalled at her flush of arousal when her clit slid past his fingers. Most of all, she's disconcerted that he is the one who will take her to her death.

But why? What difference does it make who actually leads her to the platform? Why should she care which one hangs her up for the slaughter?

She remembers her plan for a possible escape and looks past him to the tables. They're gone, and the knives with them. They've been taken away to make room for this fourth influx of dining guests eager to inspect the final sacrificial offering, watch the preparation of the main course for the ten o'clock seating and maybe even help with the slaughter. The high point of a good snuff banquet.

So much for escape!

She glances to her right. All three cages have been opened and the other girls are equally rubbery on their legs. One of them — the last of the Amsterdam beauties — falls to her knees and is hauled back to her feet by her blonde curls. Suddenly Lili feels another grain of appreciation for her own guard. At this point in her ordeal she would rather be helped to her feet with a hand in her crotch than jerked up painfully by the hair.

Another tug on the leash and the little procession begins, Lili joining the other two women on their way to an appointment with the sacrificial knife. She remembers being struck by the eroticism of this scene from the viewpoint of an observer. Naked young females paraded through a fully dressed, jeering, hooting crowd. Strangely, it feels as erotic to be doing it as it did to observe, even though the destination is death. Maybe because of that.

She is acutely aware of the feeling of the ground under her feet, partly grass, partly flagstones, partly brick. The sensation is exquisite, her last contact with the earth, her last experience with the sweetness of life. Of existence. A thing so precious. So short.

Only steps away now from the platform where her life will end, from the upright posts and the cross beam with three ropes hanging down, hooks dangling from the ends. Waiting. Which one will be hers? Where will she die? Her life only minutes long now. Her heart hammering. Her bowels cramped. Will she disgrace herself at the end? No; she's been cleaned out with three enemas. Now she knows why.

The procession comes to a stop. Her legs are trembling. She keeps her face blank. She'll not give them the satisfaction of showing her terror. The guard with the pleasant face and sandy hair turns her to face her audience. Their smiles and excitement sicken her. She notices that he's led her to the number one position. She'll be the first to die. It's better that way. Get it over with. Is that why he put her here?

He's preparing the gag, a red handkerchief with a buckled leather strap to hold it in place.

"Open up," he says softly.

Why resist? He'll just hurt her until she does it anyway. She opens her mouth and feels the dry texture of the cloth on her tongue.

"Shhh," he whispers, as he feeds the cloth slowly into her mouth with his fingers.

"Don't react. I'm going to do you a small favor. I wish I could save you from this because you don't deserve it, Miss Lily Primrose, but I can't. What I can do is make it less easier for you. When they hang you up by the ankles, that's the worst part. The wire cuts right through your skin to the bone. Extremely painful. But I'm going to slip a little piece of leather under the wire so it won't hurt so much. For godsake, don't wiggle or squirm or you'll knock it out."

As he's been talking, another guard has been tying her wrists together, cinching the rope tight. Now he reaches for the hook and works it between her arms and under the ropes. She feels the hook pulling her hands up over her head. Her arms pull painfully in their sockets as she is lifted off the ground. It's worse when the guards spread her legs and tie the ropes from her ankles to the ground bolts. The downward pull of the ropes accentuates the strain on her shoulder ligaments. She holds her breath and bites hard on the gag so she won't cry. She's seen this ritual three times and knows exactly what to expect. But watching it and living it are entirely different.

It seems to take forever for the white-smocked women to arrive with their catheters and bottles. Pain flares up from her crotch as the catheter is inserted hastily into her pee hole and shoved callously up the urethra into her bladder, tearing the delicate tissues along the way. She looks down between her breasts and watches her urine, pink with blood, drain into the bottle. She thinks back to a time when hanging naked in front of a large audience while emptying her bladder would have been unthinkably shameful. Was that only a few days ago? The catheter is suddenly ripped from her urinary tract with a stab of pain. The attendant rushes off with the tube and the bottle of pink piss.

Lili is unaccountably saddened to see this last normal excretion of her body taken away to be discarded. How hard it is when everything you do is for the last time, even peeing. And to be so disposable. How soon will memories of her be discarded at home? When will they decide she's never coming back? When will they start disposing of those things that are a reminder of her existence — her clothes, dishes, photographs, furniture, her little Toyota Echo? Will they give up hope for her only after her absence is taken for granted, when it's too late to shed tears, to honor her with their tears? Perhaps, in the end, that's the true test of a person's value in this world. Has she left her footprint in the sand, or is she just food and garbage? Fertilizer for another generation.

Her ankles come together as the ropes are untied. Her feet touch the ground as the hook lowers. She almost weeps with relief as it drops further, carrying her wrists down to the level of her waist. The guards are waiting, including the pleasant faced man. They untie her wrists and as the blood rushes painfully back into her hands they wrench her arms behind her back and begin binding them together with wire, forearm to forearm. Wire is not rope. It hurts! It's twisted tight because in the cooking process her body will shrink, so they compensate in advance. The second guard suddenly puts an arm under her knees and the other around her shoulders and sweeps her feet off the ground. The guard who would have preferred to have purchased her as a "fuck toy" begins winding wire around her ankles. As he promised, he slips a narrow strip of leather under the wire before tightening and securing it with multiple twists. Lili feels the hard iron of the hook grate between her ankles and begin pulling her feet upward. She has stood on her feet for the last time.

She glances over at the other two girls and sees what she missed with the previous three groups. Their faces are twisted with pain. Blood is seeping out around the wires as they cut ever deeper into their ankles. The gags muffle their whimpering. Her own ankles register considerable discomfort from the intense tightening of the padded wires, but her suffering is obviously nothing like theirs.

The three attendants are back and with a click their clippers buzz into action. Lili feels the cutter bar sliding over her scalp and watches sadly as large locks of her long dark hair fall to the ground. In a few minutes she is bald, her scalp sensitized to the slightest movement of air, unaccustomed to the total exposure. The clippers make a painful pass over each eyebrow. They don't need to bother with her pussy because her abductor shaved it in the cabin.

Lili looks over at the girl next to her. Her blond curls lie in a heaped mass under her head. It matches the narrow strip of pubic hair the attendant is shaving. A natural blonde.

Her own attendant has made a quick application of foam and a few razor strokes to her eyebrows. Now she follows it with a closer shave of the vulva area. Apparently someone has purchased her "cunt crisps." It doesn't take long since the attendant doesn't care if her hurried shaving draws blood or makes the patient flinch.

Once again the three attendants gather their equipment and disappear.

Now it's time for the drawing. What lucky guest will have the pleasure of cutting her throat? Her heart is beginning to hammer again. She knows it won't be long. Maybe she would have preferred to be third instead of first? No. A few more minutes of life aren't worth the anguish of watching the others die. A gruesome countdown to your own execution.

The two men who conduct the drawing are taking their place between the victims and the guests. Their excitement is growing. There's the hat filled with numbers, one for each of them. What fun!

"Damen und Herren. Madams et monsieurs. Ladies and gentlemen."

Lili sees that the girl beside her, still beautiful despite her shaved head and eyebrows, has drawn blood on both elbows where her hands are constantly clutching and releasing them, the long fingernails digging into her flesh. Nervous tension? Or to distract herself from the pain in her ankles? Probably both. Tears are rolling from the corners of her eyes down to the blond stubble on her scalp.

Fragments of an old spiritual infiltrate Lili's thoughts. Hush, little baby, don't you cry; you know your momma was born to die . . . Too late . . . but never mind . . . all my trials . . . soon be over.

"The Society of Isis is pleased to announce that the first winner of the lottery for this sacrifice is number . . . ."

How appropriate it is that the guests have been reduced to mere numbers as well as their victims. A woman squeals with delight! Will this one be as squeamish at carrying out her duty as the first woman was? She hopes not. How hard can it be to murder a helpless young woman?

A moment later the happy winner of the snuff drawing is standing in front of her. Even upside down, Lili has no trouble recognizing the buxom bottle-blonde with the precarious d é colletage, the woman who had argued with her husband over the value of her breast meat. She seems really pleased with herself. Well, why not? It must be gratifying to be able to kill the woman whose tits so fascinated her husband. Happy anniversary!

"Members and guests of the Society of Isis, we welcome you to the M ä dchenbraten and to the celebration of our beloved Goddess. It is to the glory of Isis that we offer and dedicate the last of our sacrifices on this day. May the blood of these three young maidens and the roasting of their flesh be acceptable in her sight . . . ."

Lily wonders how people in the normal world deal with the knowledge of their impending death. People with cancer, failing organs, gunshot wounds. People trapped in the rubble of fallen buildings, or on sinking ships. Does it help when there's pain? Does that make death a welcome relief?

". . . Let us, in turn, honor her bounteous favors by using our health to enjoy the full pleasures of our bodies, and our prosperity to seek those pleasures in abundance."

She thinks about suicide. How much pain, mental or physical, does it take to make someone want to throw away what she herself so dearly wants to keep, that one priceless possession on which everything else depends, and which, once discarded, can never be retrieved?

"Das Schwert aus Isis!"

"DAS SCHWERT AUS ISIS!"

She watches the man in the white chef's costume hand the woman hand the scalpel, handle first, to the woman in the daring black cocktail dress. Its pointed blade, sharper than a razor, glints in the late afternoon sun. Then it disappears from her view as the woman thrusts it aloft.

"Heil Isis!" she cries.

The crowd, flushed with drink and ecstatic with anticipation of the first killing, shouts back. "HEIL ISIS!"

Lili closes her eyes. Her heart is pounding wildly!

A sharp sting on the left side of her neck. Another on the right. Warm liquid washes down both sides of her inverted face in a pulsing tide. It collects on her chin and spills into the corners of her mouth, soaking into the gag. For some reason the taste of it makes her open her eyes. They're immediately flooded by the torrent of blood, blurring her vision. When she tries to blink it away, it collects on her lashes. Blood runs into her nose, blocking it up. Her lungs demand air and she snorts out a spray of blood that rains back on her face. She looks towards the ground at the bowl that's been placed under her head. It's filling rapidly with the blood that her heart is frantically pumping through the severed arteries in a futile effort to restore pressure.

Carotid! That's the name of the arteries! The carotid arteries. She will be dead in a few more seconds, and yet that small triumph, remembering the name of the damned arteries, gives her a little peace of mind. Just when she needs it most. A curious sort of closure.

Her heart is fluttering. It's running out of blood to pump. It can't keep up with the outflow. Because she's upside down, there's still blood in her brain, but it's running out of oxygen. It can't get back to the lungs for refreshment because the pressure in her viens has dropped to zero. She knows this. And there's nothing she can do.

She's getting light-headed, like an overdose of cold pills. Very dizzy.

She closes her eyes again. Doesn't want them open when her corpse is taken down, like some game animal shot in the woods.

She tries to flex her hands at her elbows, but if it happened she can't feel it. In fact, she can't feel anything, even the padded wires gripping her ankles.

Which reminds her, she wants to thank that sandy haired guard for his small kindness. What did he call her? A fuck toy? She tries to remember what a fuck toy would do, but it's hard to think in a straight line. Everything is so fuzzy now. So muddled.

She's spinning. Spinning in numbed silence. A heavy spinning silence. Pressing in on her. She doesn't have the strength to break through it.

She's too tired, anyway. Too tired to think any more.

Or care.

And too sleepy.

So very sleepy.

Best just to sleep.