The pain at her wrists and ankles brought her back to consciousness. A constant jolting pain of something hard pressing into her flesh and bones at her crossed ankles and wrists also tore at her hips and shoulders in the same regular rhythm. She opened her eyes to clear her head. What she saw made her more light-headed so she closed them again. She tried to uncross her wrists and ankles but could not. Something hard and tight wrapped around them prevented it. Whatever it was cut into her skin, cruelly cutting off her circulation, making her hands and feet feel numb. Still she rose and fell with the same regular cadence, her whole body seemingly suspended in mid-air by her ankles and wrists. She had trouble locating her body in space.

She eased her eyes open again. She saw the same thing as before. Leaves passed before her eyes in a steady stream. Not falling leaves but leaves as if on a treadmill passing under her while she floated through the air above. Now she was aware of her head bobbing in time with the distinct biting ache in her wrists and ankles. Painfully, she raised her drooping head to see the back of a pair of bare feet moving along the carpet of leaves. Still muddled and dazed from the slight concussion she suffered when the plane crashed; she thought for a moment the plane had not yet come to rest. She was still being hurled along from the crash. She stiffened her body for the inevitable impact with the ground or some tree. Strangely, she kept moving at the same speed and height above the leaf carpeted ground. She groaned as the rhythm of her pain and discomfort continued unabated. She tried to wrench her body from the contorted and distressful position she found herself in, discovering not only was she not able to uncross her ankles or wrists, but that some hard objects pressed into her arms and legs inside her knees and elbows, keeping them apart and immobile. She groaned louder this time. Studying the bare feet moving along before her; sure it was some hallucination or trick of her mind, she made a valiant effort to clear her head and properly appraise her situation. Dropping her head once more, her hair dangling toward the ground, she looked back to see another pair of feet moving over the carpet of leaves.

She shrieked as she realised what her circumstances were.

Fiona heard a woman shriek. She knew it wasn't her. She wanted to shriek and scream herself, but couldn't. She had some bitter tasting sour object in her mouth. She thought it might be a lemon from the size and shape of it. Whatever it was she couldn't remove it or spit it out. It was lodged firmly behind her teeth, so big and mouth filling, forcing her jaws open wide, she couldn't push it out with her tongue or dislodge it in any fashion. Her wrists were tied together over the pole along with her ankles. Her head was raised uncomfortably with her long hair tied to the pole above her as she swayed beneath it. She could see the impassive expression on the face of the near naked man through her splayed knees. He was carrying the rear end of the pole. Like some game animal, she hung suspended by her bound ankles and wrists under the pole. The rough texture of the vine-like ropes binding her ankles and wrists cut into her like razors. The rigid pole supporting her whole weight from her bound and crossed wrists and ankles bore into her skin and flesh harshly, agonisingly exacerbated by the slight bouncing motion as the men carrying her plodded through the narrow pathways under the impenetrable canopy of trees hiding the forest floor from tropical heat and light. The combination of her raised head, hair knotted somehow to the pole near her crossed wrists and the long stick between her bent knees, the twin forks at each end pressing hard into her popliteal hollows, absolutely immobilised her in agonising suspended tension. She swayed slightly as the natives returned to their village with their captives.

Fiona was comfortably suspended from her transport pole compared to Margarita. Margarita hung face down with her arms and legs drawn up behind her. The forked branches extending her knees and elbows out wide not only kept her wrists and ankles crossed, but tensioned her hips and shoulders in horrible agony. She began to weep and wail until they stopped to knot her hair to the pole and force one of the bitter, tough skinned seed pods in her mouth. Then she only sobbed and whined as she was forced to watch the rear of the loin-cloth clad native move purposefully along the barely defined jungle track.

It seemed an interminable trip to both girls. Helplessly suspended in contorted agony, heads held up painfully by their long hair, drooling copiously around the bitter tasting spheres crammed in their mouths, they bounced and swayed for what seemed hours before light and heat broke through the high verdurous canopy and they found themselves in the clearing of a small village.

Emotionally, if not physically, relieved by their arrival finally at some, any, destination, they became even more terrified as their poles were suspended about five feet above the ground between two upright posts alongside a grass hut. A dozen women approached with crude looking stone knives in their hands. Fiona wet herself. Margarita writhed in terror in her suspended bondage as the women approached. Then the women began to cut their clothing off.

Fiona Greene and Margarita Lopez were the only survivors of the plane crash. Somewhere over the Amazon basin, their small plane developed engine trouble. Although the pilot tried to set it down gently in a tiny beach alongside the river, they had hit a tree and ground looped. The pilot and his right hand passenger were killed instantly. Fiona and Margarita survived only because the rear of the aircraft had broken away from the front. They remained strapped in their seats with the tail of the aircraft half in the water. Fiona remained conscious while Margarita, having hit her head, passed out from the blow.

Margarita was escorting fifty kilos of chemicals necessary for the manufacture of cocaine. Fiona was accompanying her boss, an oil geologist, to the hinterlands for survey work. It was only a short flight between two crude landing strips hacked out of the Amazonian jungle, but the territory between the two was uninhabited as far as anyone knew. Therefore, it was with both surprise and delight that Fiona saw the half dozen tribesmen splashing through the water to lend her a hand ashore. She couldn't speak their language, but tried to help direct them in pulling Margarita from the wreckage. Once the unconscious girl was laid on the narrow strip of beach, they made motions for Fiona to lay down as well. At first, she waved them off. Thinking better of it, realising how woozy she was, going slightly into shock from the awareness of what had just happened, she stretched out beside Margarita. They began to remove both girls' shoes. Fiona was much too muddleheaded to protest. Margarita was still out. Fiona watched as they turned the limp body of her travelling companion over on her belly and breasts. She watched two of them bend her bare legs up behind her thighs and cross her ankles. A third pulled out a stout cord and began to wrap her ankles together. Then her attention was diverted as she felt them raise her legs, bending her knees and crossing her own ankles. Before she could protest, half a dozen turns around her ankles had been taken while two men raised her arms and crossed her wrists. She started to struggle as she felt the cord draw tightly around her wrists, but one of them kneeling above her head grabbed her hair. He yanked hard, Fiona screamed and he stuffed her open mouth with a large native citrus.

Sputtering and struggling against the gag and rope vines, Fiona saw the long stout pole inserted between her arms and legs. While two of them raised it slightly, pulling her arms and legs up with it, another placed a double forked stick between her knees while a fourth gathered her hair on top of her head. Pulling her head up by the hair, he knotted it to the pole just above her wrists. Then she was hoisted completely off the ground. Her head and arms strained taut by her own weight, she watched the yokes of the stick between her knees sink into the popliteal hollows and taut hamstrings at the back of her widely parted knees. The long pole cut into her crossed ankles and wrists, hurting both bone and flesh as she was shouldered by two of the men and carried into the underbrush. Her arms, shoulders and neck ached terribly. Her ankles pulled painfully tight against the carrying pole, the stick between her knees pressed hard into her yielding flesh while her thighs, tautened by her own weight, strained painfully wide under the pole. Looking through her legs, left bare by her shorts, she studied the face of the man shouldering the rear end of her carrying pole. She decided he didn't look like anything she had ever seen in National Geographic.

Just before she entered the darkness of the forest, Fiona saw Margarita picked up by two men at either end of her pole. She envied her the unconsciousness, but not the position she had been suspended in beneath the long transport pole. Margarita faced down. Her body formed a painful looking backward arc. She bore two of the spreading sticks, one between her bent knees and the other between her elbows. Her shoulders looked to be strained back egregiously while her legs appeared terribly strained by her own weight as well as the stick keeping her knees so wide apart. Her head hung down, hair draping toward the ground like a dark curtain around her face. The transport pole looked to be cutting painfully into the apex of her crossed and bound limbs behind her back.

It was astonishing how rigidly immobile and helpless the uncomplicated vine-ropes, wooden sticks and poles held both girls as the women sawed through their clothing with their primitive knives. Every muscle and sinew of their bodies was strained tense and taut. Leverage and weight stymied all attempts at movement. Margarita couldn't raise her hips because of the stick between her knees. Her thighs were spread so wide she couldn't bring any leverage to bear with her legs. All she could do was clench her buttocks as she felt her shorts fall away beneath her, leaving her clad only in skimpy silk panties. Fiona whined uselessly when she felt her shirtwaist cut off leaving her bare breasted. The combination of her raised arms with her head held up between them applied so much strain and tension to her arms, neck and shoulders that she couldn't move at all. It didn't take long before both girls wore only sound stifling citrus in their mouths.

Hanging utterly naked from the horizontal transport poles lodged in their sturdy upright stands, the girls remained bound in their contorted agony like game trophies. Shivering in terror and shame, squealing mutely in back of the bitter, galling fruit, eliciting ropy strands of saliva to brim over their lower lips bulging in wet slobbering silence around the bulbous jaw stretchers, they suffered further indignities as they were intimately examined by both men and women.

Margarita's breasts pendulated in twin cones beneath her out thrust ribcage. Men and women hefted, weighed and palpated her soft mammaries. Staring straight ahead, looking slightly Oriental from the tension of her tied up hair at the corners of her eyes, she squealed when some pinched and drew her sensitive nipples down hard and taut. Thumbs prised open the clenched globes of her bottom cheeks, manipulating the dark circle of her anus as she gulped and burbled in mortification at the contemptuous treatment of her most concealed place. Tears trickled down her cheeks as men and women grasped her dark pubic thatch, yanking and pulling on her hirsute pubic mound as if to see if it really grew there. Fingers spread her labia, probing her vagina and flicking her reticent clitoris until the small nub of her sexuality reluctantly hardened and distended from its protective prepuce. All the while they explored, violated and probed Margarita's helpless nudity they jibbered among themselves incessantly as if she were some sort of livestock, bound naked and helplessly suspended for their inspection. She was.

Fiona was not ignored. If her suspension from the transport pole was marginally less agonising, her crude and intimate examination was that much more humiliating. She was forced by her suspension to watch as a dozen or more of the primitives manipulated and handled her most intimate anatomy as she dangled helplessly exposed for the extensive and mortifying process. To be sure, Margarita's thighs were widely spread by the stick between her knees. To be sure, she couldn't defend herself from the intrusive examination of her most private parts, but she wasn't forced to watch as men and women inspected her anally and vaginally. Fiona watched.

Fiona hung in silent agony. Her thighs held open wide in tensioned torment as if to scream for her plugged mouth as her pubic hair was yanked to and fro in painfully degrading torture for reasons she couldn't fathom. Repeated digital penetration of both her anus and vagina continued until the wetness of her vagina provided lubrication for the humiliation of anal penetration. Her breasts were squeezed into painful bulging balls of flesh by hands encircling them at the base while her generous nipples were roughly tweaked and plied until they stood stiff and erect from the unwanted attention. They urged her clitoris out to her utter shame. She flushed crimson from her breasts to the line of her tightly pulled up hair, snorting through her nose while saliva flowed over her lower lip, stranding from her chin to between her breasts. Through it all she stared down the length of her bound and naked body unable to move her head at all.

It took a long time to completely examine both captives. A good deal of the time seemed to be taken up by the rapid and concerned jibber-jabber neither of the girls could understand. Even after they finished mauling and humiliating them, they left them in stringently strung up display while they continued to argue and gesticulate wildly. With a great deal of commotion some agreement was reached. One of the women and two men approached each of the girls while a dozen or more men left the group. Some of the women entered the hut next to the suspended captives.

Things developed rapidly. Both girls' heads fell back as the women untied their hair, releasing it from the transport poles. Fiona's head fell back, Margarita's forward. At the same time the men lifted the poles from the uprights and lowered the girls to the ground. The long poles and spreader sticks were removed, leaving their ankles and wrists still bound. As the knots were loosened and pulled free, the biting cords unwrapped from around their wrists and ankles, activity flourished around the rest of the encampment. Half a dozen pieces of equipment in pairs were dragged or carried to be set up in various places. The two captives were too weary to pay much attention. While they nursed their aching muscles and the deep red impressions made by the cords just released from around their ankles and wrists, the women reached down, grasping their lower jaws. With a deft motion of thumb and forefinger they plopped the saliva drenched bitter fruit from both girls' mouths. Unrestrained, ungagged, the girls still couldn't move or talk. The circulation returned to their hands and feet in stinging torment. The dull ache in their limbs, necks and shoulders dissipated in one way to bedevil them in another as they whimpered in pain from simply moving after being bound so stringently in one position for so long. Their jaws ached from being held so wide open for so long. Their tongues and lips felt nearly paralysed, which they were, from a topical narcotic oil exuded in their mouths as they had worried the sour tasting fruit lodged behind their teeth. Fiona and Margarita grovelled naked at the feet of the stern looking natives as preparation went on around them to induct them as the newest slaves of the Josero.