Summer School & After School: The Ponygirl Omnibus Edition (24 page)

      
“Excellent,”
said von Holt, once again finding that he had underestimated Groff. “So you
really did plan to accept the job, didn’t you?”

Pony

      
The
narrow, deeply rutted mountain road turned steeper as she came around the
curve, the strain on her shoulders and waist increased with the degree of the
slope and Lucy had to lean further forward into the harness to keep the wagon
moving. She knew from bitter, former experience that once the large wheels of
the wagon behind her stopped turning, it was much harder to get it moving again
and there was the risk of the entire rig reversing and rolling back down the
mountain, dragging her with it. The U-shaped steel horseshoes, spot welded to
her heavy boots, had carbide mini spikes on them for additional traction, but
the road was dangerously icy and made any footing difficult. Pulling the loaded
wagon was a job for a thousand pound draft horse, not a one hundred and thirty
pound young woman. More than once, when the pulling pony on the cart ahead of
her had stumbled and fallen, the cart stopped and slid precariously backward
before the driver set the brakes, having been more interested in applying his
whip than in stopping the inevitable backward slide of the heavy two-wheeled
cart.

      
Lucy
wore a specially designed, well-insulated rubber body suit that incorporated
various features designed to facilitate the hard labor she was performing. It
looked like a horse’s hide on the outside and mated with the complex leather
pulling harness and bridle she wore. The long horsetail, alert, pointed ears
and the enhanced display of breasts and sex provided for a combination of
practical cart hauling and what often proved to be interesting spectacles to
observers. For example, the suit kept her reasonably warm despite the freezing
weather, but carefully designed vents and porous, one-way panels that allowed
her body to breathe also allowed her to perform this difficult, exhausting work
without having to shed the suit. Various openings in the suit provided overt
views of her breasts with their ringed nipples and partly obscured sex. The
heavy boots encapsulating her hands and feet had cuffs over the tops of the
boots and these were linked to each other with about two feet of slack and a
center chain that rose to her waist, which was also encircled with a chain.
Making balance more difficult were the links from her wrist cuffs which had a
center chain linked to the wide, padded and permanent metal collar on her slim
neck.

      
They
had been on the road since daybreak, hauling an assortment of supplies and materials
up the winding road to the mine. There was a paved road paralleling this one,
but the labor pony slaves and their carts were restricted to this older and
more circuitous route. It was a treacherous track and several ponies and their
loads had, in the recent bad weather, been lost as they and their wheeled carts
slipped over the edge of the track and plunged to the slopes far below. Lucy
knew the route well enough so that she could almost walk it blindfolded.
Although the blinders on her bridle functioned almost like a blindfold,
providing only a narrow field of vision, she knew the trek by heart. The bridle
and wide collar also held her head so that her eyes were focused only on what
was directly ahead. With this and the chain restrictions, plus virtually no
peripheral vision, the ponies had to rely on their experience with the route
and the handlers being attentive enough to prevent accidents. Too often, the
drivers were drunk to the point of just setting the ponies in the track and
drifting off to sleep in the high cart pedestal and wagon seats. When jostled
into consciousness, their first inclination was to use their whips, so Lucy
learned quickly that keeping on track and moving forward evenly was the best
way to survive and avoid an undeserved and hurtful thrashing.

      
What
Lucy von Holt was doing hitched to a cart on a freezing December day somewhere
in the mountains of Central Asia was the question she herself could not answer.
She recalled all too easily the astonishingly well-planned and successful
abduction on the train in Germany months before. She remembered the hours of
bondage and torment as the abductors played with her in the sleeping car
compartment while the train made its way north towards Amsterdam where she had
planned to meet with her boyfriend of the time, Fabian
Moumakis
,
a Dutchman, born in The Netherlands of wealthy Greek parents.

      
Secretly
removed from the train in a traveling container designed to hold an
ompah
band’s tuba, she was later rebound, stuffed into a
coffin-like container and shipped to The States where she was again held in
extreme restraint and trained as a silent and unwilling pony captive.
Eventually, she ended up in a horse stall at the famous Summer School for young
women, a new recruit for the head mistress’s growing pool of pony girls and
women who were destined to fulfill the role of slave animals in one form or
another. From the time she was unloaded from her crate and chained in the
stall, Lucy was forcefully trained and manipulated with one goal: she would be
prepared and sold to a high bidder from anywhere on the globe and shipped to
them for whatever purpose they desired. For all purposes, when she left the
train in the tuba box, Lucy von Holt disappeared from the face of the earth, a
fate that her bored and frustrated Dutch boyfriend orchestrated carefully after
deciding that he had had more than enough of her annoyingly conservative and
insulting ways while taking advantage of his wealth and offering him no sex
whatsoever.

      
Her
arrival at the mine was a blurred series of events. The cloister nuns initially
packed her up in a special shipping container that was kept for just such a
purpose. This large box appearing to contain, if you read the Russian lettering
on the exterior, fragile electronic parts. Sister Angel and two of her cohorts
loaded the crate onto an ox cart and eased the heavy load down the hill from
the cloister and a short distance to an old dirt landing strip with a tattered
windsock that was blowing straight out, pointing east, as though defining the
direction that Lucy would travel. There, they waited, and waited for the plane.
They remained through the noon hour and then it began to rain. Dark clouds
rolled in, blanketing the valley. Just when it was clear that no sane pilot
would try to land in such weather, they heard an engine noise in the distance.
A few minutes later they saw the large, single-engine biplane pop out from
under the overcast, kill its engine and plop onto the far end of the short
runway, rolling up to a stop right in front of the three nuns and their
shipping crate. The double side doors were flung open and a young man in a
sheepskin flying suit jumped down, walked quickly over to Sister Angel and said
that they had to hurry before the weather closed in.

      
“I
think, Sir,” Sister Angel said in a rough voice that had not been used in some
time, “that your weather has already closed in. Surely you are not going to try
to fly in this,” and she waved her hands over her head and aimed one finger at
the dark sky, as if she were calling down a bolt of lightning to illustrate her
point.

      
The
pilot, who Angel immediately decided was Russian, ignored the divine warning
from Angel and looked at Lucy’s crate, frowning.

      
“What
sort of airplane is this anyway,” Angel pressed, surveying the beat-up metal
craft that had oil dripping out of the engine cowling and paint peeling from
wings and fuselage. “It doesn’t look very sturdy.”

      
“Sister,”
said the pilot, gritting his white teeth and showing conscious restraint with
the moronic nun. “This is a Russian
Antonov
AN-2. It
has been used and abused more than the contents of your crate and it will get
us where we are going. But,” he added quickly, “I don’t think that is going to
fit,” he said, looking from crate to door and from door to crate.

      
“Try
it,” said Sister Angel. “God helps those who trust in Him.”

      
“Yeah.
Sure, Sister, But this airplane is older than you are and the comrades who made
it didn’t make the door holes to stretch. Whatever you got in there has got to
come out and we’ll tie it down inside.”

      
“That’s
not possible,” said Angel, backing up and spreading her arms protectively over
the surface of the crate. “This is a sacred cargo. Not for your eyes.”

      
“Okay.
Then I guess we’ll just get the heck out of here and you find another transport
to Eastern
Crapsburg
,” the pilot said, starting to
climb back into the aircraft.

      
“Wait,”
shouted Angel. “You and your partner get back in and sit up front. Close the
cockpit door and we’ll load your cargo. Then you can leave.”

      
“Fine,
but you’d better hurry,” the pilot said, getting aboard and walking forward up
the steeply inclined cabin floor. “By the way, sister,” he shouted back from
the open cockpit window. “This isn’t any 747 and there’s no door to our
cockpit. We’ll just look straight ahead and do our preflight.” He began to talk
through his checklist while Angel and her associates conferred.

      
“I
assume,” the young pilot called down through the dirty side window of the
cockpit, “that you’ve got some sort of religious prisoner in that crate, so just
get him out and put him on the plane quickly. There’s tie down rings all over
the deck, but put the weight as far forward as you can. Close the doors, rap on
the side when you’re done and then get away from the airplane.”

      
The
three nuns quickly opened the crate, unstrapped Lucy, lifted her out and thrust
her up through the door, into the plane. Blind, cold and cramped, Lucy did as
they indicated. Then they climbed in and tied her spread-eagle on her back to
the heavy rings in the floor. They tightened the leather hood on her head, made
sure that the built in gag was well up inside her mouth and got back out of the
craft, slamming the double doors and walking around to the side so that the men
in the cockpit could see them.

      
The
starter motor in the ancient craft groaned, the four-bladed propeller turned
weakly. The huge radial engine fired once and then ran erratically with smoke
and a bit of blue flame coming out of the exhaust stacks. The nuns backed away.
The pilot gave them a mock salute, closed his cracked window and, without any
further exchange of pleasantries, the AN-2 rumbled away to the end of the
strip. The engine ran up to full power and the beast lurched down the pot-holed
runway, suddenly leaping into the air after what seemed to be only a few feet
of takeoff roll. All three nuns made the sign of the cross as the plane entered
the overcast and was gone.

      
In
spite of having the nun’s blessing, the trip was not pleasant for the three
mortals on board. The co-pilot looked back at the naked young woman bound in
the shape of a cross on the cabin floor, whistled and went back to trying to
keep the rattling aircraft in the air and climbing high enough to get over the
next mountain ridge. Fog and rain further hampered their efforts and they were
often making steep banking turns away from peaks that suddenly leapt out of the
clouds while they looked for a way through the storm. The plane leaked badly.
As was common in such aircraft, water from the rainstorm surged through the
engine and into the cockpit through the minimal instrument panel, soaking the
two pilots and running down the deck, giving Lucy a freezing shower. Lucy
twisted and moaned into the gag and hood as the aircraft was battered and
tossed about. After three horrible hours of turbulence, hammering icy rain and
sudden updrafts, the craft descended into a small valley between towering
mountains, dropped like a rock and flared at the last moment onto another
terribly short, muddy strip.
      

      
The
two flyers, who throughout the flight were greatly preoccupied with staying
alive, had briefly inspected their cargo visually the moment they were at
cruise altitude and then ignored her. They now untied Lucy, gave her a thin
blanket, a drink of vodka, and told her they were sorry about whatever was happening
to her. Then they passed the nearly naked, shivering girl out the doors to a
man who looked like a common street bum. He wore an old felt hat without a
brim, a ragged coat and high rubber boots. On his hands were fingerless cotton
gloves. Without a word, he grabbed Lucy roughly, threw her down on the muddy
ground, retied her hands and feet in a mild hogtie and rolled her up in a rug
that he then tossed into the bed of an ancient Isuzu pick-up truck. He started
the engine and roared away, leaving the pilots to contemplate the seemingly
remote possibility of getting their craft airborne from this hellishly short
and crummy runway.

      
The
pick-up traveled through the dark mountains for two hours and then stopped at a
slightly more modern airport with a shack and a tower with a red light on the
top. Lucy’s rug was unrolled and she was introduced to a new crate, battered
and well used, similar to the one she had escaped back at the Bulgarian
airport. The plane waiting for her was the same make but a later model than the
previous one, but this time the crate actually fit through the doors and she
was soon off on the next leg of her long trip to nowhere.