CHAPTER ONE

 

NEW LIFE

 

Ali's first week in captivity was very unsettling.

On the previous Sunday evening, after a weekend she would never forget - however much she might wish to, she, Egg and Red Breast had received the bombshell that their captors intended to keep and enslave them. Naturally, once they had got over the initial shock they had protested, argued and then pleaded. It had been useless. Master Charles had dealt with each demand, threat, attempted bargain and entreaty in turn. He had allowed them to get it all out of their system, and then announced that any future outbursts would earn whippings, and any attempted escape far worse. After their weekend of torment, there was no way that any of them would risk that. Of course once he, the butler and the odd job boy had departed, the girls spent much of the night discussing it amongst themselves. Various plans of escape, most of them extremely far-fetched, were discussed. None seemed to have sufficient chance of success to be worth risking the dreadful punishment that had been threatened if the escapee was caught.

Ali eventually crawled back into her hutch to sleep. She was exhausted, and her body hurt terribly from the weekend's activities. Her sleep was not an easy one.

In the morning Master Charles greeted them again after the maid had brought them breakfast. Ali had expected more of the cold porridge in dogs' bowls that they had during the weekend, but it was a delicious English breakfast. A table had been set up which their chains would just about allow them to reach, and they had as much to eat as they wanted. They even had cutlery, for the first time since Friday! Clearly, although slaves, they were no longer bitches. Red Breast tried to sound out the maid, but the young woman anticipated her and told her not to bother looking for help from either her or the butler. The odd job boy was no longer acting out the part of a servant; he was now to be considered a master, as Master Charles' son. Ali said nothing. She resented the maid, because she hated a clothed, untouched female witnessing the degradations that she had been forced to put herself through last weekend and which would now seemingly go on forever.

As well as the civilised meal, another pleasant surprise was the appearance of some shower cubicles at the other end of the village of kennels. They had been there all along, but had been hidden behind wooden boards to keep the kennels with a Spartan look and feel during the weekend. They were unlocked from their chains, their collars were removed and replaced with new ones which did not have the chain attached at the front, although a ring existed to which one could quickly be attached. Once again a surge of anger went through Ali as the maid attached it. She didn't mind the masters humiliating her, but this woman was a different matter. Still, the shower soon took her mind off that. Instead of the freezing cold hosings down of the past two days, they had as much hot water as they wanted, and each of them luxuriated for quite a while. The showers revived them, although they also reminded them of the weals that they still carried. The cream rubbed into their bodies last night had helped, but they were still in considerable pain.

Master Charles appeared a little later. He first demolished all the escape ideas they had discussed last night, one by one. The girls were taken aback; they had forgotten that the basement had video cameras and hidden microphones. However, in some ways it was for the best: better to find their escape plans unworkable now than when they actually tried them out. The best, or more accurately least feeble, plan they had was for one of them to slash their wrists, hoping that their abductors would have to take them to hospital rather than see them die. It wouldn't work: the butler had considerable first aid training, and Master Phillip, who lived nearby, was a doctor by profession. Besides, it was a very big gamble! Ali had never seriously thought that any of the plans would work. Now she was convinced: as things currently stood, there was no escape from this place.

Henceforth, Master Charles said, any talk of escape, even between themselves, would be punishable. Further, they were to use only the 'bitch names' that they had been christened with on Friday night. They actually hadn't got around to asking each other's real names last night, and now it wouldn't be allowed. They were, until such time as the masters chose to change it, Apples, Egg and Red Breast.

It was explained they would be slaves until their thirtieth birthdays. For Apples and Red Breast, both nineteen, this was a sentence of ten and a half years, closer to ten for Red Breast who was a few months older. For Egg, it was nearly fourteen. Men would come to the estate to make use of them, but also they would from time to time be sold on six month or one year leaseholds. Sometimes this would be to masters in foreign countries where white slavery was only thinly disguised and where, on remote plantations or secluded estates, escape would still be impossible. When the lease was up, their ownership would revert to Master Charles' organisation. When they turned thirty, however, they would be freed, and a large proportion of the income from their slave sales and other "employment" would have been invested for them and would provide them with a considerable inheritance on which to live. There was apparently a very isolated settlement in South America to which they could be sent if they were felt to be a potential security hazard, but if not (and there were plenty of incentives to keep their mouths shut, since to open them would mean losing their money and possibly even being assassinated) they could move freely. They would still be comparatively young, attractive and wealthy; they could marry well and settle down in high society, or just have a ball.

Whilst they digested this, Master Charles and the two other men, Master Ralph (as he was now to be known) and the butler gave them another application of the healing cream in their kennels. Once again the butler dealt with Ali; he seemed to have taken a bit of a shine to her, and chatted pleasantly. Trying to ignore where his hands were, she found that she responded to his kindness rather than resenting him for what he had done to her, both himself (she vividly recalled him caning and raping her on Saturday night) and in conjunction with the others. She began to ask some of the questions that piqued her curiosity. Apparently, his father had been Master Charles' father's servant, and the organisation had been running then. Ali was astonished that it had been going for so long, but he said he wasn't sure, but thought it went back even further. Master Charles' father, also called Charles, now lived in retirement on a Texas ranch, regularly supplied with slaves by the organisation, of course. Ralph, now eighteen, was Master Charles' son, and had been involved with the business for a year now, in between studying business at college. In addition to becoming involved with and eventually inheriting the organisation, he would have to manage the family fortune, and the investments for the slaves' "retirement fund". During the last weekend, it had amused him to act as odd job boy, but he was learning how the weekends operated so that he could run them himself later on.

There were similar organisations in many countries, both European and world-wide. They had links, carefully constructed so that if one organisation was caught by the police or authorities, it was not possible to trace or compromise the others through it. In some third world countries, the authorities themselves were involved.

Ali asked if slaves could really return to freedom at age thirty, and he assured her that it was so. In fact, he himself had married an ex-slave almost immediately upon her release. They had lived happily for over a decade on the estate; she could have afforded much better, but they were very much in love and she preferred to stay with him, working as the maid. Sadly she had died of cancer three years earlier, and the current maid had replaced her. This maid had no connections or leanings towards any of the things which went on at the estate, but was discretion itself.

Forest and Floppy were just as much slaves as the other three, but were not currently housed at the manor: the name given to this place. Forest, who was twenty, had been enslaved eighteen months earlier, after a similar weekend meeting to the recent one. These weekends often featured a competition such as the one in which Ali had been made to participate, and in that one Forest had come third. Very competitive and tough by nature, she had quickly accepted her slavery and trained very hard for the next competitive weekend, which she had won. However, she had missed her sports clubs and after a year, in which she had won two more weekend events, Master Charles had agreed to allow her to "live out" for some of the time with a master who agreed to her going into the outside world in the evenings, having ensured her silence and co-operation by methods which the butler would not mention. Consequently she was a slave by day and a sports fanatic by night, although if required for slave duties in an evening then of course her slavery took priority.

Floppy, who was twenty-two, had been a slave for a year. She had done a weekend voluntarily in order to get a large sum of money for a baby relative in Canada to have a life-saving operation. Unlike most of the other girls who had shown some interest in corporal punishment, bondage, humiliation or whatever had led them to sign on for a weekend, Floppy had never enjoyed anything along any of those lines, and had simply done it for the child. At the end of the weekend she had been abducted just like the three newcomers. At the moment she was contracted to an English master on a three-month contract, but he had released her for last weekend. Forest had missed the previous competition weekend due to another slave contract, and in her absence Floppy had won, so this weekend had seen Forest regain her crown of thorns.

The butler wouldn't answer any questions from Ali about who else that she had met during her experiences was a member of the organisation. Ali was certain that Steve Langley, who had arranged for her to come for the weekend, (see "Animal Farm") was involved, or at least knew what was happening. Her first thought when she had found out they were not to be released was that Steve would realise what had happened and rescue her, but then it had dawned on her that he had set the whole thing up, and she cursed him. She also wondered about Mr. Pugh, whom she had spent an earlier weekend with as a slave. The butler would only say

"If you see them here, then they are involved in some way. Only a small number are active in the running of it, but a lot are aware of what goes on."

Weekends like the one they had just had were quite frequent, although the themes varied. They were quite lucrative, with this one having generated over $5000, including projected video sales. Ali was shocked and humiliated to hear that edited highlights of her being abused and tortured would be sold, and began to protest. The butler shushed her very quickly, and pointed out that if Master Charles heard her protesting she would be whipped. At that she quietened, but she remained unhappy. The only slight consolation was that the videos were mainly sold abroad in case someone recognised her and realised that she was still alive; in this country they would only be available to close members of the organisation.

During the day, little things had been done to make life more amenable. As well as the shower, mattresses replaced the straw in the kennels. The girls were allowed to choose paperbacks to read from a collection upstairs, and were allowed to select others from catalogues of current best-sellers, which would then be obtained for them. They were also allowed to watch or video television programmes, plus rented videos. They were also encouraged to order some educational or mind-broadening things as well. Naturally, each of them scanned the news programmes for reports of any hue and cry about three missing teenagers, but there was nothing. It seemed that the fake accident in which Ali had "died" had worked.

They had sufficient time to exchange stories of how they had come to be on that fateful weekend. Ali went first, describing that first spanking on Jamie's boat so long ago, the Wench Whackers' Ball, and her six 'labours'. It was something of a relief to talk about it and it helped to sort out her confused feelings. She realised now that she had enjoyed gentle spankings and being dominated, but hadn't been able to prevent herself getting involved in much more painful beatings. Although Mr. Pugh had beaten her hard at times, he had dominated her so skilfully that she had a good time and had wanted to go to him again. It was this that had really kept her going through the other labours. However, although the party and the video had been bad, they had been nowhere near as bad as the weekend she had just undergone; she hadn't been expecting anything that severe.

Red Breast had also been unprepared. She had started out as a model who had been invited along to a spanking club session. She had gone out of curiosity, and found that the girls were being paid quite well for taking some fairly light spankings. Something of a spendthrift, she started attending these parties in a paid capacity, progressing to slightly heavier but even more lucrative parties where she had gained her basic experience. Attendance at the Animal Farm weekend had been a condition of getting any more work of this nature, and since she by then depended on the supplement to her model's earnings, she had reluctantly agreed. She had supposed it would be either the usual sort of session as a freebie, or a sort of training weekend.

Egg had a rather better idea of what was in store. Possessing a strong family belief in obeying the law, she had kept her virginity until her sixteenth birthday. Three days later the man they knew from the weekend as her master had rectified that situation, and they soon made up for lost time. He introduced her to bondage, C.P. and S/M, and she frankly had enjoyed all three, perhaps more than a little due to the excitement of her new-found freedom. When he told her about the weekend, she agreed immediately, although even she hadn't known much about what was in store. However, she had known that it would involve several beatings, more severe than those she had experienced to date, and sex with other men for the first time. She was nervous, but enthusiastic, even after he had made her strip and shaved her before they set off. Admittedly, she hadn't realised just how much of the time she would spend nude.

The slaves were allowed, or rather ordered, to exercise to keep their bodies in trim. Ali didn't need too much encouragement: without clothes to disguise it, she didn't want to get fat. They did aerobics on the lawn, played tennis on a grass court, and were even allowed to jog to the gates and back. A minimum daily training routine was set up. Their captors were not worried about them escaping. The gates were locked and neither they nor the wall could be climbed; the girls didn't neglect to look discreetly for possibilities, but there were none. Electronic tagging devices in their collars would sound an alarm if they did manage to get out, and would also serve as a homing device as well as the tracker dogs kept near the gatehouse. Barefoot, they would be found in minutes if they tried it, and then . . . none of them wanted to risk the threatened punishment. Their last weekend was still too fresh in their minds.

They were given yet another dose of healing cream at the end of the day, and spent the night a little better than their previous one. They were young and healthy, and by the next day their welts, weals and wounds were showing definite signs of healing. Their shaved mounds were still bare, but Red Breast had been told that slaves were normally allowed hair there, and they were all keen to re-develop a covering. They were always nude except for their collars, which they still found unsettling, but at least they were not now chained to the kennels except at night, although they were locked in the kennels basement.

They had nothing much to do on Monday except recover from the weekend, but on Tuesday they were set work to do around the estate. Egg was assigned to the maid to help with housework, whilst Apples and Red Breast were sent to help the gardener. He was waiting for them at the back of the house. He was an old man, certainly past retirement age, and ogled the two nude teenagers with undisguised interest as they stood before him. Ali found her hands instinctively covering her crotch, although her training subconsciously just about stopped her from covering her breasts as well. She was set to work mowing one of the lawns, whilst the gardener kept Red Breast with him to help him work on the flower beds.

They worked until lunchtime, when the gardener, who only worked mornings, left to go home and the two girls returned to the house for their meal. Red Breast was seething about something, and when they encountered Master Charles she button-holed him and complained that the gardener had taken every opportunity to grope her and had also pinched her bottom more than once.

Master Charles raised an eyebrow. "So?"

The wind was taken out of the red-head's sails. She spluttered, but said nothing.

"You are a slave," he continued icily. "Any free person who comes onto this estate is entitled to do with you as they will." He reached out and fondled the girl's faintly freckled breast. "I trust you offered no resistance." Red Breast shook her head, her face pale. She was obviously being economical with the truth, and Ali knew, because she would do the same herself, that the girl would be very nice and receptive to the gardener next time to avoid being reported for this mistake.