Pets 2: Pani's Story (22 page)

The conditions here were truly horrific. Ten cages lined each side of the barn, every other one housing an uncountable number of human men, huddled in the dark on beds of straw with little more than a series of buckets for food, water and urination/defecation needs. The battered wire of each chicken-coop-like cage showed wear and systematic battery from years worth of angry occupants. An empty stall, crowned in the center by a wooden T, provided a buffer between groups of men, and it wasn’t hard to guess what the T was for. Strategically placed rings for wrists and widely-splayed ankles stuck up through the straw on the floor both before and behind it. Pani’s breath caught fearfully, and she almost stumbled except for the woman’s grip on her hair.

Shadowy, unkempt men came to the front of their cages as Pani was marched past, dragged straight to the back of the barn where a man was filling food buckets inside a small control room. He glanced up when he heard Pani’s whimper, his dark gaze settling briefly on her. With a snorting laugh and a shake of his head, he set the buckets aside and came out to greet the woman.

Wasting little time with pleasantries, the woman handed Pani off to him, already issuing orders in a brisk, no-nonsense fashion. The man snorted again when she showed him her bloody thumb, ringed with tooth marks. She frowned at Pani again, enduring Pani’s unrepentant glare in return before retreating to one of the breeding stalls. Reaching up high on the wall, she took down a thin, crop-like whip. When she again turned to confront Pani, the dimness of the lights gave her eyes an almost demonic glint.

Dragging Pani to a nearby wall, the man reached for a length of rope to tether her. She bit him, too, sinking her teeth savagely into his forearm until he shouted, his grip loosening. In that half second of carelessness, she wrenched with both arms and slipped right out of his fingers.

The caged men made very little sound at all when she raced back past them, running as fast as she could for the doors. She almost reached them too, but suddenly her hair was grabbed from behind. In that instant, she could almost have sworn that she’d been scalped. She grabbed at her hair with both hands, trying to relieve the pressure, but the unamused male who had recaptured her hauled her right up onto her tiptoes by both braids and marched her back to the unsmiling woman.

“Bad. Bad girl,” the woman said, trailing the length of that whip between her slender fingers. The look in her narrowing eyes enough to make Pani cringe. A pitiful last resort, she kicked at the male’s shins and knees, but at a gesture from the woman, he dragged her into the last empty stall and without preamble bent her over the wooden T-post.

“Told you.”

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She knew that voice; low and familiar, the darkly-brooding breeder male.

Pani fought being put over the T-post, but the giant male leaned his weight into her until she lost the leverage with which to struggle. He snapped her wrists into the manacles chained to the first floor ring, and though she kicked and screamed frantically, it didn’t alter her fate one bit.

Each ankle was captured and manacled to separate rings, the short chains pulling her legs wide apart. Panting from the exertion, her scalp aching where they’d pulled her hair, Pani twisted in her chains, trying to see where everybody was all at once: the woman with her crop trailing through her slender fingers, her companion as he lumbered back to the control room for a knife, the group of males in the cage to her right, watching her silently, hungrily through the cage bars, and the breeder male that she’d met at the pet store—what had it been now, a good month ago?—to her left.

He was squatting at the bars, forearms resting across his knees, almost eye-level with her as he said, “I told you she’d buy you for me.”

“She didn’t buy me!” Pani threw herself into another useless round of exhausting struggles, making the manacles and short chains rattle. Her strength gave out quickly, however, and she dropped back into place, panting and fuming and more than just a little bit scared.

“Six of one, half a dozen of the other,” the breeder male said, off hand.

A hand settled on her back and Pani arched trying to see the knife the male companion had in his other hand. She twisted one way and then the other, but stiffened the second he began to cut away her clothes. He left both her dress and diaper in pieces in the straw at the base of the T-post, leaving her chillingly naked but for her stockings and shiny-buckle shoes.

“Don’t scream,” the breeder male said.

Pani jerked her head up, looking first over and then under her arm trying to get a better look at him. “What?”

“Don’t,” he emphasized, “piss her off.”

“Wha—” Pani froze when she felt a broad hand settle between her shoulders and then the tip of the knife touched her skin. As bad as it had been to have the microchip inserted under her skin in the pet store, here in the barn, without anesthetic or antibiotics, having it dug out of her again was far worse. As the blade sliced ribbons of fire along her spine, regardless of the breeder’s warning, she screamed. The post creaked under her writhing as the knife cut deeper, and Pani screamed and screamed, her shoulders awash in fire as the tip of the blade picked to get under a corner of the chip. It seemed to go on forever before he finally managed to pry it from her flesh.

Shaking, Pani drooped in relief, but it was a short-lived relief that lasted only until a hand came into view, passing inches before her eyes. The woman turned her wrist into the dim light to show off the bright red crescent Pani’s teeth had left in her flesh. Without a word, she allowed Pani to look at the wound until, the pain in her back dimming enough for her to comprehend what she was seeing, she whimpered. Withdrawing her arm, the woman simply beat her, lashing her with that willowy crop of a whip, everywhere from the small of her back to the backs of her shins.

It was brutally fierce. It was also mercifully brief, and then it was over.

Replacing the whip back upon the wall, the woman disappeared for a time into the back 99

control room and the male returned to Pani’s side, pressing something cold and wet to the hole he’d dug into her back. Of the zigzag of welts swelling and pulsing across her back, buttocks and legs, he offered no relief. Those were allowed to flame across her skin until it felt as if though she steamed in the air. And for the first time Pani began to understand what her neighbor had meant when he’d said things could have been worse. Nothing Papa had ever done compared to this.

This was much, much worse.

* * * * *

She had been bent over the T-post for so long now that her head was beginning to ache.

Despite the diminishing hurt in the welts that striped her, Pani couldn’t seem to stop moaning.

Having finished feeding the men in the cage, the companion male came out of his control room long enough to gag her. It was a dirty and unwashed cloth, and Pani could taste the salty tears of countless other women in the folds cutting into the corners of her mouth.

And there were other women here. At least two others, from the sounds of it. Bent over, her arms and legs stretched taut and aching, Pani couldn’t see much, but there was no mistaking the reluctant scuffling of bare feet dragging through the straw as one unseen female was shifted into a different cell.

“Here we go again,” the breeder male to her left said dryly. Keeping her company from his own cell a good ten feet away, he sat with his back to the bars, knees drawn up to her chest while he occupied his hands with picking at lengths of straw. “That’s Karen. She’s new here, too.” Metal rings clinked as the woman was restrained, bent at the hips over another padded T, her shaky protests dissolving into a single sharp cry and then wailing sobs.

“There goes the plug.” The breeder turned his head, looking halfway over his shoulder as he said, “You know what the plug’s for, don’t you?” As intimately acquainted as she was with Papa’s tendencies, she could guess.

“Can’t have us fucking the wrong hole,” the breeder said, bitterness darkening his tone to a low growl. “What a waste of sperm that would be.” He tossed away the piece of straw he’d mangled and picked up a fresh blade, or at least as fresh as could be found in the muck of his cage. “Considering where you’re from, you probably don’t think there’s anything wrong with that though, do you, Red? Hell, by now you probably like it, don’t you?” Now he did look at her, craning his neck to better see her face, his hard and angry glare at complete opposites with the lover-like silkiness of his voice. “Is that what you like, Red? Big, hard alien cock battering at your insides, fucking so far up your ass that you can feel it in your guts? You’ve got that look about you. I’ll bet you’ve been fucked so much there ain’t nothing a man like me could do for you, is there?” He snorted laughter, turning his back to her again and mangling another blade of straw. “Yeah, you’ve got that look all right.” From elsewhere in the barn, that unseen woman continued to cry, while another further down began to sniffle and whine to the accompanying rattle of more chains.

“Know how many women I’ve fucked, Red?” the breeder said, conversationally. “Honestly, I don’t even know anymore. I’ve got babies all over this fucking planet. Little girls,” he twisted his head, casting her another derisive glare. “Little girls probably being dressed up just like you.

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Little fucking Pomeranians on parade, being fucked up the ass by their owners, just like you.

Little boys in breeding programs like this or, for all I know, being fucked just like the girls.” He laughed that hard, mirthless sound. “Yeah, I’ve got babies all over this place.” He threw the straw away, his hands growing still as a green light suddenly flicked on above his cage.

“Show time,” he muttered, but didn’t move. Not until his door opened and, beyond the post and through her splayed legs. Pani caught glimpses of that tall woman, her whip still in her hands, as she ordered the breeder from his cage. Climbing to his feet, he walked past Pani’s cell without looking at her, stiff and proud despite his nudity, his face composed, with no sign of anger or bitterness anywhere that she could see.

From where she was bound, Pani couldn’t see what happened next, but she certainly did hear the screams. Not from the woman, but from him and in the seconds that followed, the suddenly too small barn erupted into chaos. The breeder’s deep and savage shouts were instantly drowned beneath the deafening roar as caged men all around her threw themselves at their bars, shouting and beating on the walls, shaking the bars until the whole barn seemed to tremble.

The woman shouted too, angry guttural curses that her male companion echoed as he fled the control room and passed Pani’s cage. A cascade of meaty thumps punctuated the shouts, raising the hairs along the back of her neck until an eerie blue light flickered through the barn; lightning accompanied by an ominous electrical zap that made her jump as it struck over and over again.

Then all fell still and silent. Men backed from their bars as, somewhere out of sight, the woman cursed again and the breeder male began to laugh. It was low and it was ugly, and that lightning struck again even more viciously, snapping over and over again, filling the barn with its flickering light until the laughter bit off into teeth-gritted shouts of pain and the pungent reek of burning skin overpowered the reek of stagnant piss and shit.

The breeder was dragged back to his cell at the end of a pole, a loop of rope around his neck and with the woman following close behind him, the whip in her hands having been replaced by an electric prod. He had burns on his back, chest and sides, and there was blood all over his hands. Oblivious to all of it, the instant the companion male released him into his cage, the breeder male crawled, wounded, back to his place by the bars. He eased himself into a sitting position, breathing heavily, each gasp almost a groan as he settled against the bars. Softly, his back to her, he chuckled again and picked up a new blade of straw to mutilate.

Furious, the woman slammed his cell door and stormed away. Pani jumped when she started shouting, venting her fury against her haggard companion; the breeder, however, continued to laugh. He twisted around, checking to see if Pani weren’t sharing in his amusement.

“Guess that didn’t work out like they planned, eh?” He held up his bloody hands for her see, twiddling his fingers to make the sticky wetness catch the dim light. “Don’t worry.” His hands dropped listlessly back into his lap and he turned away again. “She didn’t feel a thing, I promise. You won’t either…when I do you.”

There was a loud bang as a cage door slammed, and then sharp staccato footsteps marched back down the length of cages, heading straight for them.

The woman stalked past Pani’s cell, stopping stiffly in front of the breeder’s. She still held the prod in her hand, the electrified end pointing at the floor and crackling as it encountered 101

loose bits of straw.

He stood up slowly, hardly groaning at all as he straightened, his head low, his face a mask of absolute hatred as he met the woman’s unwavering stare. “You don’t fuckin’ scare me,” the breeder snarled back at her. “Do it. Do it, bitch, and I’ll make you eat that fuckin’ prod.” The hairs rose on the back of Pani’s neck as she watched the two glare one another down.

Caged though he was, it wasn’t the breeder who blinked first or whose mouth flattened in a tight, ugly line. Instead, she fixed her glare on Pani. Already smarting and raw from the woman’s whip, Pani didn’t dare move.

Lifting her chin, the woman snapped at her male companion, who abruptly stopped cleaning up the breeder male’s mess and returned to her side, wiping blood from his hands while he looked in at Pani now too. Nodding at whatever the woman told him, he disappeared back into the rear control room, returning a few minutes later with a cloth draped over one wrist and an anal plug in his hand. Already covered in lubrication, it glistened wet in the light as he paused to open the door to her cell.

Her protesting shriek little more than a muffled squeak, she locked her muscles, clenching down with all her might when she felt his impersonal, two-fingered touch hook one side of her buttocks and pry her open. In all the times that Papa had done this to her, she hadn’t kept him out, either. Tears sprang to her eyes when she felt the nose of the plug press inside her. Had she not tried so hard to keep it out, it probably would not have hurt, but she did try. And she failed.