Urban Prey (4 page)

The door opened up onto a short, wide hallway. This one had unpainted cinderblock walls and a bare cement floor. The ceiling looked like an afterthought, with a metal framework supporting uncovered fluorescent lights. The lights were on the dim side. They gave an effect of gloom and foreboding to the scene. He could see one door to the right, one to the left, and another one at the far end of the hallway. They were metal, and painted dark gray. He could hear a woman’s shrieks coming from behind the door to the right.

“What the hell’s
that
?” he asked.

Carla’s smile was predatory. “Let’s go in and find out, shall we?”

They passed through the door into a large room with the same walls, floor, ceiling and lighting. The far wall of it was taken up with a row of cages. They looked like the kind used to transport big dogs. A naked woman huddled in one of them, staring with open-mouthed dismay at the scene in the middle of the room, but Ron’s eyes were drawn to the naked woman there. She was standing, stretched taut into an “X” by chains attached to leather straps fastened to her wrists and ankles. She was standing on her toes when he first saw her, but she quickly slumped in her bonds, letting her head droop. She seemed exhausted. Her long, dark hair was damp with her sweat. It hid her face, but not before he’d seen a heavy bit gag wedged between her teeth. She was whimpering now. The lighting, dim as it was, picked out highlights from the sweat on her body. He saw a trickle of saliva drip from her mouth onto the floor. There were a lot of wet spots there under her, and a floor drain as well. Two burly men, identically clad in black jeans, heavy boots and black hoods that hid their faces, looked towards them as they came in. They both nodded towards Carla and went back to whatever they were doing. One held some sort of vibrator. The other held a short leather strap. He used it to lash the woman’s ass once. She jerked, threw her head back and shrieked again as she got back up on her toes. Ron could see her leg muscles straining and quivering from fatigue. She looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties, average height and fairly pretty in spite of the physical strain she was under. She had nice, full hips, but her breasts were on the small side: “Teats” according to his own classification. The man with the strap used it on her ass again. This time she couldn’t work up anything more than a weak, gurgling moan.

“What is this?” he turned and whispered to Carla.

“Sex slave training,” Carla whispered back. “The real hard-core stuff. This is part of the breaking procedure. She has to stay on her toes or she gets whipped. They use that vibrator to force orgasms out of her and wear her out more quickly. Sooner or later, she can’t take any more and she starts begging for mercy.”

“How can she beg with that gag in her mouth?”

Carla chuckled nastily. “With the proper incentive, she’ll find a way.”

“And if she does, then what?”

“Ahhh…” Carla grinned. “Then they let her down. She’s so eager to please by then that she’ll do almost anything they want. Usually that means sucking and swallowing. After that, they’ll put her back in her cage and let her rest while they move on to that other woman there.” She pointed towards the woman in the cage. In spite of her look of horror, Ron noted that she was as close to the action as the cage would permit, instead of cowering at the back end of it. Her fingers were gripping the thick wire mesh of the cage so hard that even in this bad light her knuckles looked white. For the first time, he noticed that the caged woman seemed Eurasian. Her bare skin was a faint tan all over. Her long, straight black hair was in need of a good brushing.
“I suppose that other woman will come out of her cage already willing to do whatever they want,” he whispered, so close into Carla’s ear that she shivered.

“It won’t make any difference,” Carla said. “Do you do anything similar out in the woods?”
“Out there, it’s usually one woman at a time,” Ron answered. “We use their isolation and sense of helplessness to help break them down.”

“Don’t you ever have multiple women at a time?” Carla asked. “No, never mind that now. You can tell me later. Would you like to have a closer look?”

“Of course.”

Carla clapped her hands once. The two men stepped away from the woman without a word. “Come,” she said over her shoulder to Ron. He followed her over to the captive.

The woman stirred and whimpered as he stood very close to her. He was so close that he could easily smell her sweat and her musk, intermingled. She looked up at him, her brown eyes pleading. He smiled down at her. Even with her standing on tiptoe, he was more than a head taller than she was. He could see the telltale marks that told him she’d been wearing nipple clamps recently. There were faint red marks across her breasts and belly and thighs, from something much narrower than the strap. She’d been put to very hard use. Up close, she looked to be in her mid to late twenties.

He reached out slowly with one hand. When Carla said nothing to stop him, he ran his fingertips slowly and lightly up and down the captive’s flank, from hip to armpit and back again. She flinched at his touch at first, as if she was expecting a blow. Then she whimpered. Carla still said nothing, so he fondled her teats gently. They were soft and warm, but her nipples were hard. It couldn’t be due to cold. It was almost stiflingly warm in the room. The woman shivered violently and whimpered again. She drooled around the bit gag.

“Have you seen enough, sir?” Carla asked from behind him.

“Yes,” he smiled at the woman. That prompted another whimper and she tried to draw away from him. “Yes, quite enough.” He pinched a nipple lightly before stepping away.
Carla led him out of the room. He took one last look back, just in time to see one of the hooded men apply the vibrator to his captive’s vulnerable pussy. She started to moan immediately.
“Oh,
my
!” Carla almost giggled as she shut the door behind them. “You say your people skills are rusty, but you’re very,
very
good at what you do! I’m sure that poor woman thought you were going to fuck her right then and there. I almost thought it myself. And you’re very good at picking up on cues, I might add.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Ron grinned. “I assume that ‘that poor woman’ isn’t…what did you call them…a freshman?”

“Definitely not,” Carla shook her head. “In fact, this is her third time here in four years. She’s savvy enough now to know exactly what she wants. And she likes it very, very rough indeed.”
“And the other woman?”

“This is her second time here. She doesn’t like it quite as rough, but witnessing what happens to her cellmate will give her a vicarious thrill. No doubt she’s imagining how the strap would feel on her own body, how the vibrator will feel…she’s probably wondering about you, too.”
“You give me too much credit.”

“I think you’re not as aware as you think you are about how women think.”

“All right,” Ron conceded. “I’m sure that’s possible. I haven’t had to worry too much about how they think. Once I’ve gotten my hands on them, it’s all about how they respond. It’s more like training an animal.”

“You take it all out of their hands,” Carla smiled, tilting her head to the side as she looked up at him. “That can be a very liberating thing to a woman: No words, just pleasure and discipline. All she has to worry about is sexually pleasing the man or men she’s with.”

“It does strip things down to their essentials.”

“Come on,” Carla took his arm again. “I want to show you something else.”

She led him through the door at the end of the hall, and then along a series of corridors, some long, some short. Inside, he quickly lost his sense of direction. Soon he was half convinced that the building had to be twice as big inside as it appeared to be from the outside.

“Where are we going?” he asked at last.

“We’re almost there,” Carla replied. “Right through those double doors up ahead.”

“What’s in there?”

“Sssh. You’ll see.”

They entered an area even more aggressively undecorated than the first one. The walls were still unpainted cinderblock, carelessly laid. He could see crude graffiti spray-painted in places. The floors were bare cement, and irregular, as if it had been poured at different times. Naked light bulbs hung overhead, suspended from the same metal framework that supported the bare fluorescent fixtures found elsewhere. It was a big room, and all along three of the walls were what looked like small cells, each one behind a barred door. There were twelve of them, four to each wall. He could see into a few of them. One was empty. The others held more naked women, lying on thin mats. They were all lying on their sides, facing away from the doors. Their hands were shackled behind them with leather cuffs linked by short, heavy chains.
“Hello. May I help you?” A man, impeccably clad in a dark three-piece suit appeared from what seemed to be an office. He was tall and slim, with an equally immaculate goatee the same color as his brown hair. Ron guessed he was about thirty-five. He stopped a little short when he saw Carla’s face.

“Yes,” Carla spoke up quickly. “We’re looking for a trained slave for the night. We were told to come here.”

The man seemed to think for a moment, his eyes darting from Carla to Ron and back again. Then he smiled.

“Yes, of course!” he said a little too heartily. “That’s what we have here, lovely women trained to serve. Come with me, and you can take your pick.” He led them over to the nearest cell. The woman in it had short dark hair and a gorgeous ass.

“Up!” the man called out to her. “Position!”

The woman stirred and slowly got to her knees. She turned to face them, still kneeling. She kept her legs together, drew her shoulders back, and raised her head. She was young, fit, and her breasts were as gorgeous as her ass, full and round with large, dark nipples. Her skin was creamy white and unmarked. Ron noted that she also wore a heavy leather collar.

“Speak,” the man ordered. She licked her lips before obeying.

“Kara would be happy to serve you, master,” she said with scant enthusiasm. She looked down and away after saying her piece.

“Let’s keep looking, shall we, dear?” Carla suggested.

There were eight women in all, none of them over thirty. There was one slim blonde who caught his eye, but only because she reminded him a little of Elf-Girl. But she wore her hair long, and he couldn’t get a look at her ears. Each woman took the same pose, each one said the same words, some with actual feeling. Other than that, only the names changed. The blonde’s name was Melinda. After they had looked at all of the women, Carla thanked the man and said they’d be back later.

“What was that?” Ron asked as they left the room.

“That was the slave pens,” Carla replied. “Well, the ones on the second floor, anyway. Some of our clients have fantasies about that.”

“And if I had picked one?” Ron asked. “Hypothetically, of course.”

Carla laughed. “Well, you could use her in her cell. That’s the standard procedure. Or, you could have her delivered to one of the little suites on the fourth floor.”

“Most of them didn’t seem too happy to be there.”

Carla laughed again. “That’s part of the fantasy for them,” she said. “In fact, we have a married couple who come here regularly. She always comes in the day before he does, and goes through training. The next day, her husband shows up, checks out the slave pens, and chooses her. She gets delivered to his suite. Sometimes, he picks a second woman as well. It’s an interesting arrangement. I suppose he gets a bit of a thrill at the thought of his wife naked to the view of other men. I think she gets a thrill out of it too. The training can be pretty intense. I do know that once she goes into his suite we don’t see either of them again for a couple of days. They have meals delivered.”

“That’s something I was wondering about,” Ron said. “Out in the woods, we usually have two or three men to one woman. It’s all small scale, and the men are always company staff. Gordburg’s different. During the season, there are a lot of women there, so the company lets men in from outside of the company to hunt them. They’re as carefully screened as company staff, but they pay very highly for the opportunity. It works out a lot better than paying for a lot of extra personnel. How do you handle all the women here, anyway?”

Much like they do in Gordburg, actually,” Carla replied. “We have a select clientele of men who also pay very highly. Some take their vacations here, I think. They often pick a different woman from the slave pens every night.” She paused. “Gordburg sounds like an interesting place. I might want to visit there one day.” She shook her head as if to clear it. “Let’s finish the tour, shall we? Then we can talk and trade stories.”

The building inside the rings was a confusing maze, but Carla navigated it without effort. She led him up to the infamous third floor. He saw veritable dungeons, dark and gloomy, complete with racks and other instruments of torture. Carla assured him that they were there only for show. The third floor slave pens looked much like the second floor ones, but there were some differences. The women were all naked and collared, but they were secured with handcuffs. Some of them bore marks on their bodies from whipping or caning. The man in charge there was big, heavy, tattooed and wearing a sleeveless shirt and overalls instead of a three-piece suit. He was also quicker on the uptake.

“Fourth floor is next,” Carla said after they had inspected the slave pens.

“Is there anything special up there?”

Carla smiled slyly. “Maybe,” she answered. “Let’s find out. The elevator is this way.”
In the elevator, she took his arm and stood close to him again. Ron turned his head and looked down at her as she looked up at him with an enigmatic little smile. Apparently the tour had had an effect on her. Well, it had certainly had an effect on him, and she
was
an attractive woman. It had been a while anyway.

“You said you started as a ringer,” he said. “What was it like?”

Carla’s eyes looked past him now. Her expression softened. “It was kind of scary at first,” she said. “I had to go through the training. It was strange, walking into one of the rooms with three men I’d never met before. I wasn’t even sure that I could go through with it.”
“How old were you then?”