by Selena Kitt
Jack learned what he could, even though he continued to doubt his sanity. The fields stretched for acres in all directions, each tended by different groups of men. He saw, in the middle of the fields, some strange device that was connected via a beam of some kind of light or energy to a great disc far above them. The bottom of the disc flooded the area with light for growing the beans. That same disc, Patrick told him, was the sky castle or cloud city that the giants lived on. Away from the city and the light it produced, the strange alien world was dark and filled with mist and haze. Harry had opined that they built their city so high up so they could get above the clouds and see the stars.
Jack’s five days were up before he knew it. He turned a blind eye whenever someone was called away by the woman’s voice to the door that opened in the wall. Now it was his turn, and when she said his name, he could only stare for a long moment at it. Sweat beaded on his forehead and fear and shame raced through his belly, making it flutter and tighten.
Finally, after her third call, he rose up and began to walk. The third time, it seemed, was too late. He was suddenly overwhelmed with agony. It felt as though his hands and feet were on fire, then his arms and legs. It dug deeper into his limbs, setting into the muscles and threatening to burst his bones open. Jack was writhing on the ground, crying out incoherently and struggling when it ceased as quickly as it had come.
“Jack,” the voice called again, for the fourth time. His breath shuddering in his chest, he pulled himself to his hands and knees and started forward in a crawl. He managed to climb to his feet before he reached the door, and wondered as he did so, how it was possible that his body appeared untouched. He felt as though he had been burned alive.
He stood in the room, the aches in his body fading to memories. He was alone, aside from the couch. He glanced behind and saw the door had shut silently, sealing him off from his fellow prisoners.
“Please Jack, lay on the table for the procedure,” said her disembodied voice.
Jack stared at it for a long moment, hesitating. He remembered the pain then, even as he was ready to refuse to do it. He could not forget that he had wished he had the strength left in him to smash his head against the floor until he felt no more. With a ragged sigh, he climbed onto the table and settled himself into position.
Immediately the straps shot out and secured themselves around him. A few seconds later, he felt her hand on his lower back, just resting there softly.
“Do as they say, Jack,” she said compassionately. “I promise I’ll give you what pleasure I can...it’s all I can do.”
“Who are you?” Jack managed to say.
“Hush Jack, just relax,” she urged, spreading the lube against him gently.
“Why do you do this?” He insisted, struggling to turn his head back to her.
“They make me,” she said so softly he could barely hear her. “We don’t have a choice.”
Her finger probed against him. She was soft and gentle, but firm and insistent. Jack groaned in discomfort at the full feeling that invaded him against his wishes.
“Bollocks! There’s always a choice,” Jack hissed. To prove his point, he tried valiantly to resist the procedure, bending all of his concentration to it.
“Jack, you’re making this difficult,” she said reproachfully. “I know you don’t like it—neither do I! But we must, or they’ll punish us both. The first time they hurt you is just a taste, just a warning of what they can do. The second time drives some men mad. Nobody’s survived a third punishment.”
Still Jack resisted, but the milkmaid was persistent and he was forced to feel disgusted by his body for its betrayal in the end. The hand departed, though not until he felt it pat him sympathetically on the hip. When she left the room, the straps retracted and he was able to dismount and return to the others, sore for his fight but otherwise physically relaxed even if he was in emotional turmoil.
The weeks came and went and before long, harvest was upon them. Jack quickly learned that the others were right—harvest was a brutal time. The beans were gathered by hand and taken, in buckets, to great bins stored in the transport craft the alien giant had flown down. Jack got his first glimpse of his captors and had to be reminded by Ben to stop staring and move on. They were a white skinned race, twice as tall as a man. They looked humanoid, although hairless and only possessing three large fingers on their hands, each opposable and multi-jointed.
Jack also found himself growing stronger. Gone was the baby fat a sedentary life behind a banker’s desk had given him. Now, like the others, he was deeply tanned by days spent working under the alien lights and stronger than he thought possible. Their food was never satisfying—some paste with varying bland flavors made, largely, he was certain, from the beans they grew. It was available every morning and every night. What it lacked in variety, it seemed to make up for in nutrition.
Planting season was torturous as well, requiring farming tools the likes of which he imagined had not been used on Earth for nearly a hundred years. His team of twenty men was responsible for fields five-thousand paces across. He had counted it off and it matched what the others had counted as well. Nearly five kilometers of fields, hand sewn by twenty men. Their fields were near the center, judging by the beam of energy that erupted from the ground nearby, but some of the other fields were dozens of kilometers away.
Still Jack fought against the milkmaid as well. It almost became a game, after more than a dozen weeks had passed. She would talk to him, soothingly and reassuringly, while he struggled to fight against what her skillful fingers coaxed from him. Occasionally she would let slip bits of information as well, things about her life before she had been taken or, less frequently, what she knew about their captors.
Jack began to realize, after a fashion, that when she had finished draining him, he missed their contact. He certainly did not miss the sodomy, but he did miss the chance to talk with her, even if she was the closest thing to an identifiable oppressor he could find.
It was nearing the time of Jack’s second harvest when another of their crew, a quiet man named Andrew, threw down his water bucket and stared up at the giant city above. He opened his mouth and screamed a primal roar that shattered the silence of the fields and made everyone stop and look up in surprise.
“Andy! No!” Patrick called, but he was too far and too late to do anything.
Andrew was already running. He aimed for the base station of the beam that tethered the cloud city to the ground and made it well over halfway there before he stumbled and fell. Andy rose up, fighting against the agony that threatened to overwhelm him, and struggled on several more steps before he fell to the ground again. He continued writhing, rolling over and going into the tell-tale spasms of a seizure. Several minutes later, his jerking rapidly decreased. With a final twitch, he lay still.
A few seconds later, the man’s body dissolved into nothingness. Nothing remained save the impression on the ground where he had been. The remaining nineteen went back to work, although some more slowly than others. Jack stared the longest, and finally fell in beside Patrick.
“That’s why nobody ever runs, old son,” Patrick told him before he could ask a question.
“So this is it?” Jack hissed. “We work until we die, no love, no family, no success? And if not, then we die early? That’s bloody brilliant.”
“You never know what can happen,” Patrick told him, eyeing him warily. “But I’ll do what I got to in order to keep breathing just in case, you know?”
“You’re mad,” Jack spat. He glanced at the others, tending to their own tasks. “You’re all institutionalized, you know that?”
Patrick shrugged. “I got everything I need here,” he said defiantly. “Andrew snapped, get it? They don’t let nobody near that energy beam! No warnings, they kill anyone that goes near and he knew it.”
Jack slowed to a stop and watched Patrick as he kept walking with his bucket of water. He shook his head after a moment and hurried to tend to his own
assigned crops, wondering all the while what he had just seen and why the beam of light was so important.
* * * *
“We lost a man yesterday,” Jack said when he felt the milkmaid gently stroke his left leg. Her touch was familiar now, intimate even. He wondered if she treated the other men this way.
He heard a catch in her breath before she responded. “Who was it?”
“Andy,” he said. “He just...snapped. Screamed and ran towards the…”
“Andrew? What a shame. He was a good man. Quiet guy, but he had a tender side.” She reflected sadly. “What was he running towards?” she asked, moving slowly again to apply the warm lubricant.
“Whatever the thing on the ground is that connects to the city above,” he said, not tightening up at all for the first time as she began to work her finger against him.
“You’re not fighting me,” she pointed out.
“Sorry,” Jack said. “I was thinking. Distracted.”
“That’s better,” she said, a bit of humor in her voice as she had to work more tenderly to fight her way past his clenched muscles.
“Humph,” Jack said disapprovingly. “Better would be if you were on the table instead of me.”
She laughed softly, but quickly silenced herself. “I’m sorry, that was inappropriate. I don’t want to mislead you.”
“Mislead me about what?” Jack groaned, fighting the beginning stages of the warmth threatening to spread through him.
“Into thinking I would enjoy you having me on this table or into thinking that I have come to care very deeply for you. That would be inappropriate, if I were to ever let you think anything like that,” she said, her voice trailing off in a whisper.
Jack jerked a little, trying to lift his head, and failing. He nodded and smiled though, understanding her message. “I understand,” he said, and gave her finger a squeeze the only way he could.
Jack relaxed then, allowing the milkmaid access without any resistance. It felt strange for him at first, but the sudden intake of breath he heard from her and the way in which her finger began to move inside of him reassured him of his decision. She even brushed up against his testicles and penis, pretending to do it accidentally, while she milked him.
When it was time, he groaned as the feelings overwhelmed him. It was a groan of relief and pleasure this time, not one of dismay. He felt his release issue forth and collect in the receptacle built into the table, then felt her continue to stroke him, coaxing out a second, weaker surge. He could tell she was leaving reluctantly by the way her hand hesitated. He was left alone on the table at last, all the unspoken promises between them doing him no good.
He walked back into the room and headed for the open door that had breakfast waiting within. He stopped briefly as he passed Ben and Patrick. “Ever see a sunrise over the ocean?” he asked them, then moved on before they could respond.
Jack glanced back to see them staring, confused. He smiled and winked, then turned into the room.
“Maybe he is gay?” Ben mused, confused.
“Naw, he’s just English—they’re all like that.” Patrick shrugged.
* * * *
“Fishing,” Ben said. “That’s what I miss. My dad and I could spend a lazy Sunday on the boat catching pan fish until we had no more room for them.”
Jack glanced up at him. They were in line for their nightly showers and next to one another. Jack smiled and nodded approvingly. The showers themselves were not only communal, but really little more than a giant spray from above that was spread out enough to cover the room. It was quick and to the point, but given the lukewarm water, there was little encouragement to stay for more.
Back in the sleeping quarters, the door opened and a new recruit emerged. He was a young man, soft around the middle but with wide green eyes and close-cut dark hair. He looked around frantically, taking everyone in and gaping like a fish out of water.
“Welcome to paradise,” Patrick quipped. “You must be Andy’s replacement.”
“R…re…replacement?” he asked, stunned.
“Bollocks, was I that bad?” Jack asked Ben.
“Worse maybe,” Ben replied with a smirk.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Mmm ...Mark,” he replied. “Mark Wa—”
“Don’t need no last name, Mark,” Patrick said. “They never give us two guys with the same first name.”
“They? Who...what’s...where are your clothes?”
Jack snorted. “We got no clothes. They don’t give us any,” Patrick said. “And ‘they’ is the giants that live up there and make us do their dirty work.”
“Dirty work? What is this place? What happened? Who is she, the girl in the room? What did she do to me?”
“That’s our milkmaid,” Patrick responded even as Jack’s throat went dry. “They figure having her around keeps us docile. Every five days you get to visit her, and that’s the only woman you’ll ever be seeing again.”
His eyes widened and the color drained from his cheeks. “Only…woman? Are you...I mean, do you…”
“We’re not gay,” Patrick assured him. “Nobody’ll be poking your cornhole late at night or making your drop your soap in the shower.”
“Don’t worry, mate, the finger in the arse keeps us from being Nancies,” Jack added somewhat mysteriously. He knew that when he showed up, if someone had said that, he’d be clueless.
Ben jumped in to change the subject. “I’m Ben, that’s Jack. There’s not much to see yet, but it’s coming up on harvest time. We’ll show you what to do tomorrow.”
“You’re Jack?” he asked, turning to look at Jack.
Jack nodded. “Why?”
“The girl...she said...she said to tell you she was sorry.”
“Sorry? What for?” Jack asked, confused. His heartbeat had picked up at the thought of a message. What could it possibly mean?
“Something about her being forced to leave,” he said. “I didn’t understand...it was...she was...you know, doing things.”
Jack rushed over to him, hovering inches from his suddenly white face. “Try real hard. What exactly did she say?”
He tried to shrink back but Jack grabbed him. Patrick and Ben were there a few moments later and pulled the two apart. It was only when Jack relaxed and showed no signs of going after the man that they let him go.
“Old son,” Patrick began. “You got a thing for the maid, don’t you?”
Jack scowled at him.
“That kind of closeness, I ain’t saying I blame you none. I seen it happen before though, and I ’spect we’ll have a new milkmaid by tomorrow.”
“What about her?” Jack growled.
“Killed maybe, or reassigned. Depends on what else she done I guess.”
Jack swore violently and burst past both of the other men to head for the wall. He slammed into it where the door to the milking room was, to no effect. He punched and kicked it, and even ran his shoulder into it three more times until he finally gave up and walked sullenly away from it.
“Jack…” Ben said, searching for something to say. Jack just walked past him, not caring. He went to his bunk and crawled in, staring at the ceiling without seeing anything. Tears slipped down the sides of his face late into the night while sleep eluded him. The one thing he knew was—enough was enough.
* * * *
The next morning, four men went in one at a time, including Ben, and each reported they had a new milkmaid. Mark had avoided Ben all morning as well, but now that they were headed for the fields, the two found themselves side by side. They were gathering buckets for harvesting.
“Jack...I’m sorry,” Mark stammered in a low voice. “I didn’t know…”
Jack grunted.
“She said something else too,” Mark whispered, glancing around nervously. “I was afraid, you know, to say anything? I didn’t know who or what was going on. I mean...what is going on here?”
“What did she say?” Jack asked, stiffening and turning t
o look at him.
Mark jumped a little but nodded. “Yeah, okay...sure...just...just calm down, okay? She said don’t ever forget her, and she meant everything she didn’t say.”
Jack stopped walking. He just stood there, digesting Mark’s words.
“Jack, get your ass moving,” Patrick called over to him, seeing the man standing there looking clueless.
Jack turned to look at him and then nodded. A smile split his face. He turned to Mark and grabbed his hand, then shook it. “If I don’t get a chance later, thanks mate!”
Mark looked at him, confused, as Jack hurried away from him and headed to Ben and Patrick. “You’re wrong Patrick,” he said with a smile. “This is not living. We may be breathing, but bugger me if this is living.”
“Jack, don’t do nothing stupid,” Patrick warned in a low voice.
“Come on, Patrick, what do you miss? It hasn’t been that long, has it?” Jack pushed.
Patrick stared at him, swore, then nodded. “I had a little place in Northern Wisconsin. I’d sit on the porch with Dolly, my yellow lab, and drink a beer while the sun set.”
Jack smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. “If this don’t work, and I’ve got bugger all reason to expect it will, then it’s been a pleasure knowing you mates.”
“What are you gonna do?” Ben asked, looking around nervously.
“I think Andrew had the right idea. I’m going to see if I can take out that beam of light.”
Patrick swore again and Ben just looked at him for a long moment. Finally he shrugged and smiled. “Tell me when,” he said.
“Ben...no, I don’t want—”
“Shut your mouth,” Ben snapped. “I didn’t say I was going with you. I just said you tell me when.”
Jack looked at him, then nodded. “All right.”
They broke apart and went about their duties, picking the beans by hand and taking them to the bins on the transport plane. The day stretched by, broken only by the fatigue carrying buckets of beans caused. Jack waited until he saw that Ben was nearby. He glanced around, seeing the activity from the other harvesting taking place in other fields, and nodded. Ben returned his nod ever so slightly.
