The Pleasure of the Hunt

Part 7

Seconds after landing, the helicopter was surrounded by a cheering, rowdy throng of revelers. Lewd encouragements were shouted as each of the four girls was unloaded and carried through the crowd, slung like a dead elk from her pole. The ends of the wooden stakes protruding from Amelia's privates evoked lots of pointing and bawdy jocularity. A few men reached out and tugged at them, but although the effort produced amusing squeals and writhing from the wretched girl, the stakes remained firmly anchored in place.

The parade of captured prey and well-oiled celebrants snaked its way through the main doors of the lodge, the place where both quarry and hunters had begun the Hunt the previous morning. It continued through the Great Hall where the feast, dancing and closing ceremonies would take place. At this point most of the guests peeled off to the bar to reload. The hunters and those who enjoyed watching the cleansing process accompanied the quarry carriers into the Prep Room.

The four girls were laid out on the floor and the carrying poles extracted from under their wrists and ankles. One by one, each girl was picked up by the three surviving hunters and a volunteer assistant from the crowd, one to each arm and leg; her bindings were cut and she was flopped face down on the rim of a wheel. There were four such wheels, one for each captive. They were just wide enough to support the torso — about twelve inches — with the top of the rim about four feet off the floor. The arms and legs of each girl were firmly strapped to the sides of the wheel, which were then rotated so that their rumps were on top. The technicians attending Amelia shook their heads at the sight of the wooden plugs.

"You've been up to your old tricks, Kevin," one of the technicians observed.

"She needed some extra care. Her and that bitch Shala killed Taylor."

"Got cha. Well, they'll have to come out. They're going to rip her up if we just yank on 'em, right?"

"You bet!"

"Gina, go get the hot rod and pliers."

A gray haired woman went to a drawer in a steel cabinet and returned with a large pair of channel-lock pliers and an electrical appliance in the form of a smooth metal rod about two inches in diameter with a rounded tip and an insulated handle. A 12-gauge grounded electric cable extended from the handle. She plugged it in to a floor outlet. While they waited for the rod to heat up they checked Amelia's straps, adding two more, one over the small of her back, the other over her upper thighs. All straps were cinched extremely tight. By the time they were satisfied that her hips were totally immobilized, the rod was glowing a dull red.

"Let's remove the anal plug first," the male technician said to the woman. "You get ready with the rod." He took a grip on the exposed end of the anal plug with the channel lock pliers and positioned himself so he could yank it out. When his assistant nodded that she was ready, he yanked out the plug. Blood gushed from Amelia's anus as the assistant shoved the red hot rod into it. Amelia's ability to scream had been destroyed when she ruptured her larynx, but her body made the effort anyway as immense pain blasted from her rectum, an agony more terrible than anything she had yet suffered. She was still trying to deal with that as a second explosion of pain from her vagina reeled her into unconsciousness.

When she revived, a cold shower was soothing the burns inside her intestines. But as her belly filled, the pain of her burns was crowded out by a desperate and escalating need to empty her bowels! But she could not! The enema nozzle that continued to pour liquid into her was sealed inside her sphincter by an inflatable balloon. Turning her head to each side, she could see that the girls on the wheels beside her were in similar distress, gasping and crying and begging for relief as their bellies swelled enormously. Tears rolled down her own cheeks as the incredible filling went on and on! Just as she was certain she would explode, someone rotated her wheel so that her ass was pointed down, then deflated the plug so it could pop out. A gush of liquified intestinal contents poured out to the applause of the audience. Through the framework of the wheel she could see there was an opening in the floor through which the contents of her intestines were pouring. She could hear the torrent landing in some kind of collection basin but could not see it. Any time earlier in her life the humiliation of being forced to shit in public would have devastated her. Now she no longer cared. She just wanted her torment to end.

But it was not yet to be.

"She ate Taylor's food supply," her captor volunteered helpfully.

"Did she! Well, that's good for two more cleanouts."

So while the other three girls were taken off their wheels, put in chains and led off to the showers, Amelia was forced to endure two additional extreme enemas, and two more rounds of cheers from the enema afficionados.

When the water came out looking as clean as it went in, Amelia was unstrapped and lifted off the wheel. The technicians attached steel shackles to her ankles, oblivious to the fact that one of them was grossly swollen. The ankle cuffs were connected by a heavy twelve-inch length of chain. Handcuffs were snapped on her wrists with her hands in front of her. A steel collar and chain was snapped around her neck and she was led, shuffling and limping badly, to the showers.

She was ordered to stand over a deeply recessed drain in front of a sink, her feet spread as far as the chain would allow. A tap and turned on and a technician held her hands under the flow of water.

"Pee!" she was told. But there wasn't much there, her bladder having already emptied during the three enemas. The dribble that came out ran down her left leg, off her foot and slithered into the drain.

She was brought next to the center of the shower room where a meat hook hung from the ceiling. It was hooked under the links of her handcuffs and winched up until she was standing on her toes, arms straight over her head. The technicians used hand-held nozzles and scrub brushes to clean her off thoroughly, with special attention to her ass and the inside of her legs. Her hair was wound into a tight bun and clipped in place. My final coiffure , she thought, and I won't even get to see it.

The meat hook was lowered. She was freed from it and led out of the showers into the Great Hall. There, cheered on by leering guests, she was brought to the steps that led up to the stage, but kept falling when she tried to climb them on her broken ankle. Finally a technician helped her up the stairs and to the display frame reserved for her. The other three girls were already in their frames, their feet spread wide as they hung by their ankles from the top bar.

As she stood on the stage in front of her frame, Amelia's handcuffs were removed, but her arms were quickly brought around to her back and bound together with rope, forearm to forearm. Other ropes that ran through pulleys at the top corners of the frame were tied to her ankles before the shackles were removed.

The head technician stepped to the front of the stage and called out, "Who'd like to help hoist the last of our quarry?" Several men shot to their feet waving their hands. The technician picked out two and they hurried to the steps and up on to the stage. As all this was going on, the other technician stuffed a ball gag into Amelia's mouth and strapped it in. The two volunteers, having watched the first three girls hoisted, knew just what to do. They gripped Amelia's upper arms, turned her back to the audience and lifted her off her feet as the two technicians hauled on her ankle ropes, drawing her feet all the way up to the top bar. When the two guests released her arms, she swung from her ankles, upside down and facing out toward the crowd. The pain of the rope crushing her injured ankle was immense, but in a way she was glad for the added suffering. It would help take her mind off the humiliation of being publically displayed like this, naked and demeaned. Death would be a welcome release.

Tables had been set up for the Grand Barbeque and the guests were settling in with platefuls of food. Two prime girls had been acquired from a meat farm and had been roasting on spits all afternoon over applewood fires. Their once shapely bodies, now bronzed and shimmering from multiple bastings over the fire, were now being carved up and dispersed amongst the guests. Amelia was glad she had been spared the sight of them being gutted and spitted alive. She wondered how long and how horribly they had suffered as they cooked over the low flames before they died. Her own end would be easy compared to theirs.

She'd always thought it was a bit of an irony that the Lodge brought in farm-raised roasters when they were in the business of providing slaughtered human game for the National Meat Service. The reason, of course, was simple economics. Free-range females were far tastier and worth five times more than girls raised in a cage on industrial feed.

The scene, upside down to her as she hung in her frame, had a surreal quality, a perspective that helped her come to terms with the rapidly approaching end of life. How upside down it was to have put everything on the line for freedom from debt and an opportunity to create new life! All her bravura had accomplished was the end of her freedom and extinction of her own life. Had she been too greedy? Did cupidity breed stupidity? The crazy rhyme lilted in her head to the pounding rhythm of her pain.

She wondered if Ken was out there somewhere. Surely he would have checked with the Lodge to find out which of the quarry had been captured and which two had been rescued. If he was out there among the diners, she couldn't recognize him upside down.

She looked across the row of doomed young women. She didn't know their names. One was a dark auburn redhead; another was a honey brown and the third a dark brunette, almost black. Like hers, their hair was tightly wound into a wet bob. Oh well, she thought, it was better than being shaved bald as the live roasters were.

Guests began climbing up on the stage to amuse themselves with the condemned captives. The technicians were keeping watch, apparently to protect the merchandise from damage, although they raised no objections to fingers, spoons, forks and sundry harsh vegetables being stuffed into gaping genitalia, or nipples being twisted hard enough to evoke muffled shrieks of pain.

A gentle feminine hand caressed her buttocks. She looked down (up) into Shala's inscrutable eyes. The tawny beauty was dressed in a short black frock that concealed very little of her lean, elegant body, her height accentuated by high heels. She sank down on her haunches so she could talk directly into Amelia's face, the background noise having become quite raucous.

"Hi. Guess this didn't quite work out the way you'd hoped, huh? Sorry, Babe. But I did my bit to help. Went above and beyond the call, in fact. Kenny didn't plan on my helping you at all, comes to that."

Kenny?!

"You're probably wondering why he hasn't come up here to say goodbye."

Silenced by the gag, Amelia's expression registered a mix of puzzlement and frustration.

"He's chickenshit, that's why. He pretty much set you up and is too much of a pussy to come up here and look into your eyes. That's him back there." She pointed at an unidentifiable point at the back of the Great Hall. "We've been guzzling their liquor and chowing down on girl meat. Those farm grown cows don't have much flavor, but the chefs here season them well. I expect you'll be scrumptious, though. Kenny and me have already special-ordered a couple of your flank steaks, and I gotta tell you, girl, you don't come cheap! Kenny wanted one of your breasts, of course, but you're way too expensive for that. Thought you'd like to know that, girl. Thing is, now you'll be part of Kenny and me forever. Part of your body will be part of ours. Kinda sweet, huh?"

Amelia was making furious attempts to talk through the gag. "Hen . . . hen . . . hen . . !" she kept saying, her face contorted in anger. Shala knew well enough what was bothering her.

"Yeah, yeah. Ken. Dear Ken. Honey, I'm sorry to be the one to lay this on you, but since he's too cowardly to haul his sorry ass up here, you have to know he's been playing on both sides of your fence. Him and me have been fucking regular for over a year now. Couple times a week. But as far as your being here, it wasn't my idea and you can't in all honesty blame it all on him. I mean after all, he did run the Hunt first, so it wasn't like he didn't take any chance himself. And you were the one who brought up that maybe you could do it, too. Furthermore, I gotta say, sweetpea, that you were pretty damn gullible to let him talk you into running stark naked with nothing more than a fucking knife. You don't think he did that, do you? Hell, I trained him on how to survive it, and that included wearing shoes, cap and every stitch of protective clothing they allow. Course he didn't pass on any of the rest of what I taught him, either, and that wasn't very nice of him, I admit. But when you think about it from his point of view, why should he? He was in a win-win situation. If you survived uncaptured, you two would be free and clear of debt, and he'd have a bedmate to fuck whenever he wanted, with me on the side for variety. If you were captured and converted to meat, he'd still be free of your debt and just take me in to take your place in his bed full time." She chuckled, ignoring the angry hurt in Amelia's eyes. "What he doesn't realize, yet, is he's caught a tiger by the tail. The asshole hunters at this place are scared to death of me, as they should be, because if they come after me, they're dead. If Kenny thinks he can run around on me the way he did you, he's gonna wish he'd been captured and had his throat cut, like you. Because I will cut off his gentiles with a dull knife and make him chew them up. Then I'll then boil him alive, one arm and leg at a time, cutting it off and eating it while he watches. The thing is, I happen to know that our boy Kenny can no more restrict himself to fucking one woman than raindrops can keep from falling. So rest assured, little lamb, lover-boy Kenny will one day regret that he duped his little blond plaything into a suicide mission. Me, I don't give a shit. He's a good fuck, but so are a zillion other studs. What I can't stand is when some jerk thinks he can play me for a fool."

Shara gazed down into Amelia's tear glazed eyes.

"Aw, hon, face it. You didn't stand a chance from the git-go and Kenny knew it. That first hunter out there, Taylor? He caught you fair and square. If I hadn't saved you, you'd still be hanging here, only as Taylor's trophy instead of Kevin's. I gave you a second chance that other girls don't get, and you blew it. Kenny gave you bad advice, but you weren't born yesterday. You should have known better. For that matter you should have smelled me on his dick a hundred times over the last six months and known he had another bimbo in the wings. You were just too fucking trusting and blind. And this is where it got you. So don't look at me that way. Sure, Kenny was a traitorous jerk and I'm the other woman, but when all is said and done, you ignored the clues, the statistics and common sense. You are responsible for your own life and, especially in this case, you have mostly yourself to blame for losing it. You fucked up good, girl!

"But if it's any consolation," Shala continued in a softer tone, "the other survivor is a young woman named Apple. The girl with the pretty green eyes and cute nose, remember? She's the mother of eighteen-month-old twin girls and was about to default on her loan. If Kevin hadn't been chasing you, he would have caught her. That would have orphaned her little girls, who, of course, would then have been sold to a meat farm. So, your fuckup saved three others."

Shala stood up, bent her head between Amelia's thighs and placed a delicate kiss on her exposed vulva. "Bye, sweetie. You really gave them a worthy chase at the end. I am really, really sorry it turned out this way for you. Close your eyes when they do it. It'll be over fast."

She strode away, descended the stairs and disappeared into the upside down crowd.

Amelia was emotionally devastated. The man she had hoped to marry and make babies with was a sham! He had deceived her on every possible level. The man she loved with all her heart had another woman on the side ready to step in and replace her. Already had stepped in. Ken had lured her into a deadly contest knowing she had little chance to survive. She had trusted this horrible excuse for a man with her dreams, her pride, her life.

She wanted to hate Shala for stealing Ken's love and destroying her future, but she knew Shala was right. She should have been more alert to the clues of his infidelity and less eager to agree to participate in a Hunt with such terrible odds. She should have known better than run barefoot and naked when the only reasonable chance to survive was a successful flight over harsh ground in a dense forest.

Then she thought about Apple. She remembered her. A sweet girl, not yet twenty, with light brown hair streaked with blond. She had played soccer in high school and probably had been able to outrun and outlast her pursuers. That made Kevin's decision to switch to Amelia for his quarry more appealing. As Shala had suggested. If there was any up side to her coming death, it was knowing that her sacrifice would at least save a young mother and her two little children.

What a cruel world!

She searched the audience trying to find Ken's face. Why would she want to do that? Hadn't he hurt her enough? Yet she couldn't help it. But the upside down commotion in the huge room made spotting and recognition nearly impossible. The bastard was probably hiding behind a planter somewhere.

Suddenly Kevin, her captor, was standing at her side, laughing. Someone else was holding a camera. Fingers invaded her cunt. The hunter's hand gripped her painfully as he smiled and the camera flashed. Other flashes in front of the other frames. The hunters posing with their game. Lots of flashes. Pictures from various angles.

Then the announcements began over the PA system.

"Gentlemen, prepare for the kill."

This was it. Despite her resolution to be brave, Amelia was trembling. She didn't want to die, and yet she was helpless to save herself.

"Our first hunter on the left is Mr. Anthony Jenkins of Mobile, Alabama. His quarry is the former Mandy Zblowski, age eighteen, five feet five, one hundred seventeen pounds. The capture took seven hours and twenty-three minutes. As you can see, she is a splendid specimen and will undoubtedly yield a tasty product. Congratulations Mr. Jenkins. You may dispatch her, now."

Amelia caught a quick movement in front of the last girl over. Her body bucked once in its frame, then hung still as the audience burst into applause. More flashes. More pictures.

How cute of the Hunt Masters, Amelia thought bitterly, to mention the girl's "former" name; a tactful reminder to the squeamish that the trussed up female they were killing was no longer legally human. Just so much meat. At the same time, it was an obscene assurance to the prurient that this naked, dying creature whom the hunters had raped and defiled mercilessly before hanging up in this lewd display was a real girl from a real family who was suffering a debasing death for their amusement.

The PA system resumed it's smooth incantation.

"Our second hunter is Mr. Joshua Pendell of Nashua, New Hampshire, where you 'live free or die.'" Chuckles from the audience at his droll reference to that state's motto. "His quarry is the former Andrea Walker, age twenty-three, five feet seven, one hundred twenty-nine pounds of well distributed meat. The time of her capture was twenty-seven hours and five minutes. Congratulations Mr. Pendell. You may dispatch her, now."

This one was closer. She could see the flash of the blade. More applause. More photo flashes.

"Our third hunter is Mr. Jamison Burroughs of Cody, Wyoming. His quarry is the former Paige Lorraine, age nineteen, five feet eight, one hundred thirty-two pounds. Captured in twenty-eight hours and forty-three minutes. A fine specimen Mr. Burroughs. Plenty of meat on those well-shaped limbs! Congratulations. You may dispatch her, now."

Amelia had a clear view of the blade slicing through the girl's throat, the blood spewing into a basin under her head, the girl jerking briefly in her bonds, then growing quiet as her blood poured out in a continuing torrent, finally slowing as the applause died down. A technician was pulling the basin out from under the dead girl and was shoving under Amelia's head. She could hear the blood inside sloshing.

O God! It was her turn! Her breaths were coming in shudders. Her eyes filled with tears . God damn you, Ken and Shara! God damn you all! You stole my life! You stole my whole life!

"Finally on the far right, Mr. Kevin Parrelli of Elmira, New York. His quarry is the former Amelia Harding, age eighteen, five feet three, one hundred ten pounds. A cute little thing, but she sure gave you an exciting run, didn't she Kevin. Thirty-five hours and twenty-seven minutes. Wow! She almost made it, too, but you finally ran her down. Congratulations. She looks like she'll be as good to eat as she was fun to catch. You may dispatch her, now."

She closes her eyes. A sharp sting across her neck. Her eyes snap open with the pain and her body jerks. Flashes of light in her eyes! Blood pouring off her chin, running into her nose, eyes, ears, the corners of her mouth, over her forehead, soaking into her hair. She blinks it away frantically, snorting it clear, trying to breathe. She can hear it splashing into the basin, her life draining from her body, mixing with the blood of the other girls, carcasses now, hanging beside her. She's breathing fast, her heart hammering, missing beats.

Please let this be a dream!

But it's not. Her vision is breaking up. It's getting dark. She can feel consciousness slipping away, spilling into the basin. Applause. Loud at first. Growing more distant. Are Ken and Shala applauding? Is Ken thinking about the last time they made love, how it felt when they kissed as he came, her legs wrapped tightly around his back as if to hold him to her forever? Will he be there when the technicians remove her bloodied head . . . when they drain out the rest of blood . . . when they eviscerate and skin her carcass right here in its frame? Will he and his lover watch as the butchers slice her body into fresh, marketable cuts of meat? Expensive cuts.

Too bad you can't afford even one of my tits, you scheming bastard. They're a lot bigger than Shala's, and firmer and juicier. But you'll never taste them. And you'll never suck on them again while you get yourself hard. And if you go on the prowl for substitutes, Shala has a nice surprise for you. I'll see you in Hell, lover.

The pain in her ankle is gone now.

All her torments are gone now.

She doesn't hurt any more.

It's all going away . . .

and she doesn't . . .

care . . .