Piper's Price

by D. A. Maddox

  Nurse Reyes-Garcia lifted first one foot, then the other, and fastened them into a similar wooden frame at the ankles. His feet still dangled off the side.

  “But you need to keep controlling that pretty little mouth of yours, Robbie,” she said. “You have done a singular job of it so far. The terror of the blinding medicine is usually too much for our charges, and they earn additional punishments before ever arriving here. Most admirable. Keep it up. Tomorrow will be easier if you do.”

  Equipment being unpacked. All around him. No way to tell what it was.

  “Split screen multi-view video gear,” Officer Kersey explained. “It’s a classic bit on Consequences, Live! Top frame shows your face during punishment. You should see your eyes. Your ordinary, boring blue has gone gray with chemicals, no pupils at all. Real big with the fetish crowd. Second view from the side for the widescreen nude angle, and one more from behind for the impact shots. Cable crowd can see through one angle, two, all three at once—whatever they’re into.”

  Robbie struggled against the stocks, just to test them, knowing he wouldn’t be able to wrench himself free but unable to keep himself from trying.

  “My gosh, is that number even right?” asked one of the volunteers.

  He had no idea what she meant until Nurse Reyes-Garcia answered her.

  “Twelve million viewers—more than half the subscribers, and at this hour on a weekday. And on delay.” Then, addressing Robbie: “My goodness. You see, Robbie? You are most popular.”

  Do I see? he thought, panic creeping over his flesh in lines like army ants. No, I don’t fucking see, not a fucking thing. I’m the only one here who doesn’t see.

  “Oh, look.” Another of the volunteers, the nice one again. “He’s crying. I—I feel kind of bad for him.”

  “Don’t,” Officer Kersey said. “This little wuss cries all the time. He does the crime and doesn’t want to do the time. Remember that.”

  Shut up! Robbie wanted to scream at her. I haven’t said a damned thing!

  “Tears are a normal response,” Nurse Reyes-Garcia said with considerably less vitriol. “Robbie is a sensitive young man and he is being punished. You are helping him make amends with society. Now, listen. Each of you may take one shot of him on your phone, if you wish. No more than that—and no video. Personal collection only. Any sharing or duplicating of the picture over public channels will result in charges against you, so have a care. The state does monitor these things.”

  Rustling. Hands in back pockets, in handbags. Robbie couldn’t see the flashes go off, but he felt the women take up various positions around his person—and there was no ignoring the pair of hands that spread his butt crack and the sound-effect of an old flash camera going off when one of the women immortalized his anus and scrotum for posterity. He ground his teeth. The rushing blood in his head, his cheeks, was dizzying.

  “Payment time,” Officer Kersey then said. Robbie felt something brush over his face. More leather—but loose. Several strips of it. “This is a flogger, 186. It has a bullwhip handle with a stainless-steel stud on the butt—but unfortunately current law won’t allow us to hit you with anything that’ll permanently mark you. You should be grateful.” She passed it over the top of his head, the runners trailing over his tousle of hair. “The ends are referred to as tails, or tresses, or falls. There are nine of them.”

  She withdrew.

  “Shouldn’t have opened your mouth out of turn yesterday, 186. If you hadn’t, you’d already be at the service stage today. So sad.”

  This is going to be worse than when Officer Thompson did it. Worse than the paddle. Fortify me, God.

  “Who’s first?” Officer Kersey’s voice echoed throughout the Intake bathroom. “The line forms right here. You get three swats each, but no running starts. Our floggers are specially made and won’t cut him. Everything at Huntington passes the safety regs, so no worries there. Oh, and no do-overs—so for your love of country, make them count. Anyway,” she finished regretfully, “the boss will stop you if it’s too much.”

  Three each? Robbie thought, horrorstruck. That’s fifteen. My God, my God, my God—

  The flogger came down. He heard it in the fraction of a second before the nine tresses striped his backside, a quick whoosh in the open-aired chamber of the prison lavatory. It passed high at the top of his cheeks, not touching his balls. Nevertheless, it lit his ass like a gas-powered bonfire, and he had to bite his bottom lip to cage the words that threatened to spill from his lips. He howl-grunted, eyes bulging, but he said nothing.

  Even when it came down a second time, and then a third. He was panting, puffing, as the first volunteer passed the flogger to the second.

  Wait, he wanted to cry out. Give me a minute. I’m not—

  It passed over the wide-open plain of his middle ass and his scrotum—crack!

  “Fuck!” he screamed.

  The flogger came down again.

  “Stop! Please! I’m sorry!”

  And again. His body bucked in the stocks, hard enough that the very wood groaned. His wrists and his ankles and his neck lurched against the immovable restraints, quite against his will. He simply had to break free.

  “I’m sorry! I’ll never be bad again! Matron, make them stop! God, please, help me!”

  The word he had been given was “mercy”. Had he said it, the punishment would have ended. The program would have ended. His case would have gone to appeal. He would have been bailed out of jail—to face real prison time later.

  “Robbie,” Nurse Reyes-Garcia said from not far away. “Get a hold of yourself. You have now earned Friday punishments already, poor thing. Do not make it worse on yourself than it already is.”

  The flogger passed to volunteer number three.

  Robbie bit his lip again, sobbing, nose running. His frame went limp. The tension drained from his muscles. His body, along with his mind, submitted itself to the inescapable.

  Hold on, he said to himself. Please, hold on. Getting there, almost there.

  It came down a seventh time.

  Robbie wailed without speaking.

  ****

  The final one to take the flogger was the kind volunteer with the soft and unsure voice. Robbie heard her draw the instrument of punishment back, heard the tails (or tresses, or falls) cut the air as she wound up…

  And they fell over his buttocks with a soft, gentle thwap that brought with it no additional agony.

  “You’ve suffered enough,” she said, doing the same thing a second time. She’d been crying.

  “Oh, puh-lease,” said the other one, the one who had been called “slut” by a fellow volunteer. “Jesus, you make me want to hurl. Ruining everything, you know?”

  But the finishing stroke was equally gentle, and with it, the punishment ended.

  She patted his back. Robbie cried with her, facing away from her, unable to see her, not allowed to thank her. But he thanked her in his prayer mind, over and over and over again: Thank you, miss. Thank you, thank you. You’re … you’re an angel.

  Even so, his backside felt like it had swollen to twice its size. The residual anguish was still more pain than any he had ever borne before. And tomorrow he’d be getting more of it.

  Such an idiot, Robbie thought, heaving in breath, letting it out. So fucking weak.

  It was Nurse Reyes-Garcia who applied the ointment to his flaming skin, quieting his mind to a blissful, if brief, slumber. She took him out of the stocks first, but insisted he remain on his hands and knees. Robbie obeyed, head down, and drifted to a half-sleep under her skilled ministrations.

  A half-sleep which ended when Officer Kersey inserted the flogger, butt end first, into his anus and left it there, anchored in place by the stainless-steel ball. Pre-lubricated, it passed into him without much trouble, but Robbie still let fly a strangled dolphin yelp of surprise. Would it kill you to give me half a second’s warning? he wondered with bitterness.

  “Fifteen-minute break, pony boy,” she said. “Th
en, service time.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Glaze

  Lesbian, Maddy thought, jogging in time with her friends. Dyke.

  They weren’t words that normally sprang to her mind. She liked to think of herself as an open-minded person when it came to people in love. But the words came anyway—not in her voice, but in a voice that used those words all the time, in a tone rich with loathing and contempt: her mother’s. It derided her because what she had done was not an act of love. It had been a surrender, the fulfillment of a need, whether for absolution or mere distraction she could not have said. But she had wanted to do it. A new experience, simple and forbidden and disarming. A little scary.

  And fun. She was an adult, after all. There’d been no harm in it. Mother need never know.

  Your mother and my mother should hang out, Robbie, she thought. They’d get along.

  Her feet slapped harder against the pavement. Faster. Pulling away from Jasmine and Heather.

  The track, a complete four-hundred-yard circuit, lay between the protective custody wing of the prison and its much larger main building. It encircled the entire outdoor exercise and recreation yard. Because it belonged to both facilities, the north and south ends of it were ringed with electric fencing and razor wire—a feature that much of the protective facility didn’t bother with. It reminded her that people came here to pay for their wrongdoings. People grew old here, if they were bad enough. Some came to die.

  It was hard to stay warm out in the early morning autumn wind, even in her sweats. Couldn’t have been much more than forty degrees out. Her legs found another gear.

  “Hey, Maddy!” Heather called after her from behind, sounding winded. “It’s not a race! What are you doing?”

  Her feet pounded harder, harder.

  Robbie can see the fencing from his room, she thought, scanning the small windows embedded into brick. He’s right over there, unless they got him up early. Maybe he can see me.

  If he could, he’d know what was in store for him. Or who was in store for him, anyway.

  What will they do to him today?

  It was impossible to guess. She had no idea what had already been done to him, other than to make him take his clothes off in front of a camera so that Doctor Cossack could show him to her. Ironic, that she had gotten to see him in that way, considering the crime that had gotten him here to begin with. But what she and the others would do to him tomorrow was coming into clearer focus. Yesterday’s night training had gotten specific. Roles had been determined, accessories chosen. There was even something like a script coming into focus—albeit with considerable leeway for ad-libbing.

  I can do it, she told herself. I have to, for his own good, and he … he deserves it. He made his choice. Whatever else I did, it’s not like I forced him.

  And he is kind of cute.

  It was seven in the morning. The sun was almost up. In a couple hours, she and Jasmine and Heather would be presented to the media in uniform for the first time. They’d be on Channel 66, a station she was forbidden under law to even watch.

  “You’ll be treated like celebrities,” Officer Jenny had said. “Because, you know, that’s what you’ll be after tomorrow. It’s going to be a big audience.”

  Her parents wouldn’t see any of it, thank God. Their half of the check wouldn’t clear until Maddy had completed the terms of her contract, and premium cable was currently beyond the means of House Piper. It was a blessing, too—both for her and especially for Robbie—that Consequences, Live! didn’t air reruns once a given segment was more than forty-eight hours old.

  “That would be like continuing the punishment after the debt’s paid off,” Officer Jenny had explained. “We don’t do that. There’s a built-in recording scrambler in the video feed to guard against piracy, too. We do have a small clientele of government subsidizers who get hard copy after the fact, and there’s no way to keep some people from filming their own video screens—but there’s really no demand for it. We have new programming all the time, and the people have a short attention span.”

  Maddy’s lungs burned. Her legs had gone rubbery, and her heart thudded like orchestral timpani at crescendo. She was half the track ahead of Jasmine and Heather when she stopped running, bent forward to catch her breath, and waited for them catch up.

  “What … gives?” Heather asked, pulling up next to her, half out of breath herself. She put a hand on her shoulder. “Something wrong?”

  Maddy straightened, waited to get her wind back. “No, I’m fine,” she eventually said.

  Jasmine was still running in place, still cheerful. “Second thoughts about last night?”

  “Maybe a little,” she admitted. “That was a one-time thing, all right? And a total secret. Please.”

  “Of course,” Heather said, her voice thick with promise and understanding. “Was just a bit of fun, though. This whole thing—it’s like an adventure, or…”

  “An experiment!” Jasmine finished for her. “We’re young. We’re supposed to experiment. So, now you’ve done it. It’s done. No worries.”

  “No worries,” Maddy agreed, but her gaze drifted back to the windows embedded in brick.

  “Just glad we got to be in on it,” Jasmine said, blowing her a kiss and starting off again. “Right, Heather?”

  Heather jogged after her. After a moment, Maddy did, too.

  ****

  Nurse Reyes-Garcia pulled Robbie’s head up with a slow but firm pull at the hair on the back of his head. Her other hand went to the whip handle half up his bum. “I am going to take this out in a few minutes,” she said. “But first we need to stimulate you back to some degree of enthusiasm for what comes next. It will require some effort on your part. Just relax.”

  He thought they were alone. He was pretty sure his coven of volunteer floggers was all gone, if not Officer Kersey. But his world was still black. “Your sight will come back to you in an hour or two,” she had said. How much time had already passed?

  “You are to hold position, Robbie,” she said. “You may want to touch yourself soon. You do not have permission to do so. You may get hard—I want you to get hard—but that is all.”

  Her hand twisted a plastic knob on the whip handle, right at the juncture of the rawhide rod and his butthole. The lubricated steel ball inside him grew warm and started to vibrate. It tickled him from the inside, near his prostate. Robbie let out another yelp—surprised, and more than a little horrified. He’d never felt anything remotely close to this sensation before, hadn’t been aware such sensations existed, not in his weirdest and wildest dreams. His very hamstrings thrummed with the radiation of feeling. In spite of the pain, both from the flogging and from the intimate intrusion, his cock stiffened to full attention against his belly.

  This is wrong, he thought, knees bucking. So, so wrong.

  Nurse Reyes-Garcia held him down, her hands never leaving the handle, nor the back of his head. “Be still,” she said, quite firmly. “Relax, Robbie. There is nothing unusual about your arousal. The male anatomy is wired this way, although many never take advantage of it. Give in to it—but do not touch yourself.”

  His cock was straining inside its skin. It was more than hard, now. He could feel the tip expanding, the hole expanding.

  Give me five seconds to myself, Robbie thought, and I could finish.

  He wanted to. He needed to. His penis bobbed reflexively, tip dribbling. His mouth made noises he had never heard before.

  “There it is, my blushing young stone boner,” Nurse Reyes-Garcia said. “Non-manual pre-ejaculate. Hold on, Robbie. Untense your butt muscles. I am going to unplug you.”

  He tried. Really, he did. But his ass just wasn’t used to having objects in it, and the voluntary unclenching of his cheeks was impossible.

  Nurse Reyes-Garcia sighed. “All right, then. On three. One … two … three…”

  But she left it in another second. Robbie wailed, helpless, piteous.

  She pulled it free. It glided
out of him with little effort, and once his anus had expanded around the ball at full dilation, his body helped expel it. It came free with a suction-amplified pop.

  “You held position,” Nurse Reyes-Garcia said, her tone dialed down just one degree short of full-on wonderment. “What an obedient pony we have. That was impressive, Robbie.”

  His ass was still up, but his face was down over his crossed arms. He sobbed. In spite of her kind words and his engorged member, he’d never felt so conquered, so … obliterated.

  “Turn over on your back, Robbie. You are now ready to be of service.”

  Am I? he thought. I don’t feel ready for anything.

  But he rolled onto his back, arms flopping to his sides. He was far past any need or inclination to cover himself—nor was he permitted to touch himself down there, even to cover. Get through it, he repeated in his mind. Every torture you make it through brings you one step closer to freedom.

  “Three of your visitors are going to come to you, Robbie. Two have opted out of this part—too bad for them—but the other three will come one at a time. It will be your job to pleasure them.”

  That almost made him sit up. Was she talking about—

  “Do not get so excited. The cave-diver between your legs will do no spelunking today. You will service them, Robbie. You will remain on the table, lying down just as you are now. They will tell you what to do.”

  He heard the door open and shut, the passage of a single pair of feet over the tiles. Bare feet. Whoever it was, why had she taken her shoes off?

  “If you could see your first customer right now, Robbie, you would understand why it is that you are blind—why we protect the identities of our Day Two volunteers.”

  He could sense her next to him now, her scent, her presence, her breathing. When she spoke, he recognized her voice, although it belonged neither to his fiercest tormentor, nor the kindest one. It was the one who had asked about the view count—and, he thought, the one who had been first in line with the flogger.

  “Feels funny,” she said, a slight tremble in her voice. “I mean, I know no one will recognize me on TV or anything, but…”