by John Everson
Now that she had led him on a leash into The Red, she warmed to the idea of what would become of him.
When she handed Perry’s chain to Kharon, his eyes stared deeply into hers. He put three fingers on her cheek. Rae could almost feel him reading her soul. The longer he held her eyes, the more weak her knees felt. Looking at Kharon did something to her…Rae couldn’t explain it, but she knew she couldn’t bear it for long at any one time. Still, she craved that weak, tingling feeling that spread through her spine as he stared into her eyes.
Then he broke the contact, straightened up and led her and Perry to where the other rabbit was chained. He clipped Perry’s chain to the wall and walked to the corner, where a long row of whips and flogs were hung. There were also some metal devices which, Rae had to admit, were completely alien to her. She really wasn’t sure what they were for. Kharon didn’t demonstrate them to illustrate their function though. He pulled a simple black-leather whip from the wall and presented it to her. “You’ve done well,” he said. “This is for you. Your first mark of honor. Use it well tonight, and perhaps someday, you may even reach The Black and meet the Night Mother.”
Rae opened her mouth to ask what The Black was but Kharon had already turned away. “It is time for the race,” he called out. Another pale-faced Watcher came into the room then, leading a burly man in his wake.
“Rae,” Kharon said. “This is Gordon. He brought in Travis, our other rabbit. Perhaps you’ll play together one of these nights.”
Rae looked at Gordon and had her doubts about that. The man looked ugly, fat and mean. There was no attraction there for her, though his arms looked thick enough to handle giving a good flogging.
The other Watcher unhooked Travis from the wall and handed his leash to Gordon, while Kharon handed Perry’s to Rae.
“They are your catches, so you will start them down the course.”
He led them out of the room and down the dark hall.
“Where are we going?” Perry asked. His voice sounded lonely in the dark. The Watchers didn’t answer. Instead, they continued silently down the long hall, passing the torture rooms one at a time until they emptied into a long, cavernous hall.
The hall felt like a sauna. Red steam hung low to the floor, lit by the bloody glow of the ceiling. Two rows of people stood facing each other, several feet apart. They were clothed solely in weapons. To protect their bare skin they held chains, whips, cudgels…
“Here are the rules,” Kharon said. “There are thirteen red snakes, and thirteen black snakes. The Living Path has these snakes pinned to their bodies-I have chosen where, so you will find them in different places on each person. Perry is to collect all of the red snakes and put them in his bag. Travis will search for all of the black. Whoever gets all thirteen of their color first is the winner and will be allowed to Crossover.” He pointed to the shape of an arched bridge on the far end of the room. It was half-hidden in eerily swirling, colored fog, and Rae couldn’t see its end.
“The loser will face the pit,” Kharon pointed to a glowing hole in the floor beneath the bridge. Rae could see the occasional flare of flame from the glowing hole. Now she realized why the room was so warm.
“You can see how it might be beneficial to work your way quickly past the hardships. Because…there will be hardships in this race. The Living Path cannot move from their places or they will also face the pit…but they can use the implements in their hands.”
Kharon led Gordon and Rae to the start of the Living Path and raised his hand in the air. Rae felt Perry straining against the leash, anxious to run to the first person in the Living Path to search him for a snake.
Kharon’s hand flagged down. “And…let the rabbits run!” he said.
Rae released her leash and watched as Travis and Perry ran to the first two people in the human line.
She watched as Perry ran to the first naked man who began the Living Path on the left. And she cringed as the man brought a long iron chain down to smack against Perry’s ass.
Travis had been excited at first about this scene. It was far more imaginative than most of the scenarios the bondage magazines dreamed up. When Kharon’s hand signaled the start of the race, he ran to the right and saw a small black snake pinned through a woman’s belly button. The snake was just a couple inches long-and fake. It was a rubber representation of a serpent. He bent to try to undo the safety pin that cut through the snake and into the woman’s skin. He slipped his fingers against the warmth of the woman’s belly, trying to cup the snake so that he could press the safety pin open, when all at once the air cracked behind him, and he felt the sting of a whip across his back. Then another whip cracked. And another. Travis fell to his knees, as the leather cut him deep across the ribs. He tried to fumble with the pin again and the woman hissed, “Just rip it off, you idiot.”
“I’ll hurt you!” he said, which only drove the woman to laugh.
“Why do you think we’re here?”
Travis grinned. He couldn’t disagree with that. He grabbed the snake and yanked as the woman rained a flogger down across his back. When he grabbed the snake, however, her attack subsided, and instead the woman gasped, as the pin that had held the snake to her skin came away with a sliver of her flesh still attached.
Travis moved to the next person in line, a brown-skinned Middle Eastern man. A black snake was pinned to the skin of his hairy inner thigh.
“Sorry,” Travis said, and this time he wasn’t gentle or tentative. He yanked hard on the snake. At the same time, three more whip cracks split the air, and one of them sank a hook into Travis’s ass. “Fuck,” he cried out, and stumbled away from the man with another snake. He shoved it in the small leather satchel that Kharon had given both “rabbits” to hold their prizes in. It was the only item they were allowed to have on their bodies. The sting on his backside was starting to make him question the ingenuity of this game…
On the other side of the aisle, Perry was having a similar experience. The people with the black snakes whipped at his legs and back as he pulled red snakes from the arms and breasts and legs of the Living Path. Soon his hands were slippery with blood from the skin he tore out of those who’d held the snake, but it wasn’t nearly as much blood as was now coating his back.
Part of him loved the pain, but part of him cried in agony. And he knew, with ten more snakes to claim, that it was going to get much, much worse.
Back at the starting line, Kharon took Rae and Gordon by the elbows. “Come with me,” he said. “You began the race, and you will end it.” He led them behind the Living Path until they arrived at the foot of the bridge of The Crossing.
“Take off your clothes,” he commanded. Despite her usual lack of inhibitions, Rae felt funny releasing the hooks of her bra in front of Gordon. But he had no problems stripping off his T-shirt and letting the bulge of his belly hang free as he dropped his jeans. Rae thought his cock looked like a stub, not a stalk. No, she decided, pulling her panties down to expose herself to him, Gordon would not be a man she played with. She needed more than just a hand that could use a whip. And he clearly didn’t have it. Maybe that was why he needed so badly to dole out the pain.
Kharon reached into a deep, wide bucket and pulled out a snake with two hands. It must have been twelve feet long, Rae thought, staring at the copper-red scales. Its head was a diamond, eyes beady and yellow-green. Its tongue flickered nervously as Kharon brought it to her. “You are the red flag, and Gordon the black.” Carefully, he draped the snake around her, laying its head in one of her hands and then wrapping the cool scales of its belly around her breasts and middle. Its tail curled and tightened around her thigh.
“Be calm, and it won’t bite,” Kharon warned.
“Is it poisonous?” she asked, an edge in her voice.
He grinned, lips pale and wide. “Only if it bites you.”
Then he stepped to Gordon and repeated the same thing, this time with a snake as dark and glossy as obsidian.
Rae turned to
wards the Living Path and watched the whips cracking down on the two men. Perry had reached the halfway point. He was a person ahead of Travis, and quietly she rooted for him to win. He was her rabbit, after all.
But then suddenly Perry yelped and fell to the ground, his head disappearing into the low-hanging cloud of bloody fog.
When he came back up, he was holding his leg and screaming. The steel fangs of a wolf trap gripped his ankle. “Jesus Christ,” he cried, struggling to pull the jaws apart to release his foot.
Every time he tried to loosen it, the trap only snapped back and his screams grew more horrendous. Meanwhile, the whips continued to lash out at him, now catching him in the face and the balls as he rolled around trying to loosen the jaws.
Travis was now two snakes ahead of him and Perry thought of how much worse being thrown into a pit of fire might be than the agony of the thing biting off his leg. He took his hands off the trap and instead crawled forward. The next guy was a tall, thin man, who was so busy whipping at Travis, he didn’t even notice Perry until Perry yanked the red snake off his body. He noticed then, because the snake had been pinned to the foreskin of his cock.
Perry crawled forward and was ripping the snake from a woman’s fleshy arm when he heard a horrible cry from just ahead.
Travis had found that sometimes the fog hid more than just animal traps. It hid small pits with knives. He was lying on his back, crying, with his leg in the air as the blood streamed out of his foot to drip on his chest.
“Oh my God,” he screamed. “It hurts. It hurts!”
Perry nodded his head. Inside, he answered the pain that shot through his leg with every tiny motion. “Yeah, it hurts. But not as bad as fire.”
He pushed forward, passing Travis and getting to the eleventh and finally twelfth person in line. He left them bleeding from where he ripped the snakes from their flesh. He wasn’t tentative about it at all now-he saw the prize-he ripped and ran before their weapons could connect, if possible.
And still, the whips cracked and the chains slammed. Sometimes he saw stars, but he kept moving. Someone with a cudgel beat on his ass as he crawled. He wanted to turn and rip the weapon out of their hands and beat them back with it, but he knew that would only slow him down.
Perry could feel the blood flowing down his back from where leather and hooks had broken his skin. And his leg felt very wet. He wondered how much blood he was losing; after all, he’d already bled once earlier today. He was not in a position to lose much more.
He was ahead though, even dragging the trap behind him. He only had one more snake to go. He saw that Travis had finally stopped bawling and was back in the game. He dragged his leg to the final person in line, and then suddenly, the ground dropped out from under him.
Perry fell into a hole and suddenly he felt his skin stabbed by what seemed to be a hundred knives.
And he wasn’t far off. The fog swirled, disturbed and pushed away by his fall. He had slipped into a small four-by-four pit that was filled with crisscrossed steel spikes. If they hadn’t been so close together, he would have been impaled. It would have been over. Instead, for the most part, they had just broken the skin slightly. One spike, however, had stabbed all the way through his arm, which had hit the bottom of the pit first, and he could see the bloody tip of another coming out of his right thigh. There were sharp, hot points of pain all around his back and ass.
Perry screamed. And panicked. The pain was worse than the trap. His entire body was on fire, and he was afraid to pull his arm and leg off the spikes. He didn’t know if he could get out on his own.
“Help me,” he yelled. But nobody did.
“Please,” he called again.
And then, like a ghost in the mist, he saw the face of Kharon. The man’s eyes were like black holes in a face pinched and thin. “There is no mercy here,” the man said and was gone.
Not far away, Perry heard Travis scream and knew that he’d found his own pit. He grit his teeth and worked his arm off the spikes, screaming all the time. It helped. Slowly the bloody steel tip disappeared through his arm and then the flesh jerked up, fully free. The blood quickly poured from the hole left behind, spattering his chest.
Perry refused to focus on the wound, but instead reached up to grab the edge of the pit with his fingers. His wounded arm wasn’t a lot of help, but he slowly pulled his body up from the spikes, trying not to put any more pressure on the parts of his body that remained on the steel tips. As he did, he could feel the blood pouring out a dozen hot holes in his butt and side. With both hands on the edge, he took one look at the spike that had punctured his leg and said a silent prayer. Then he pulled as hard as he could with both hands, and pulled his body out of the pit.
He could feel the spike pass through his leg, like a cold icicle dragging against his bone. Perry didn’t stop screaming the entire time, and he didn’t even realize he was. His sole focus was on lifting his body out of the pit and getting the final red snake. He would not end up in the pit of fire. He would not.
The last person in line was a thin, heavily scarred woman. She held a flogger with barbed steel points. Perry tried to get close enough to her to find the snake, but she cut him again and again, whipping the barbs onto his back and arms and pulling back.
“Damn it,” he screamed and reached up to grab her arm. He caught it and pushed, dropping her to the floor. She was a smaller woman and obviously well abused but still muscular. She kicked and punched as he squeezed the flogger from her hand. Nobody had said that he couldn’t tackle the Living Path.
He didn’t see the snake on her arms or breasts or legs or…and then he saw it. Just the faint red tip.
The damn thing was pinned up her pussy.
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” he complained. With one hand he whipped her with her own flogger, keeping her down.
With the other, he reached up inside her and got a grip on the rubber of the thin snake, slick with her own excitement. He squeezed it tight and pulled. Hard.
The woman gave out a cry, but Perry didn’t stick around long enough to see the damage the snake had done. He rolled away from her instantly with the wet token in hand and dragged himself past the last member of the Living Path. There were ten yards between him and Rae. He saw her standing there before The Crossing, a red snake her only covering, as it twined and moved slowly around her. He thought of her promises of S &M a few hours before and cursed her beneath his breath. She was a snake all right. She’d never mentioned spike pits and wolf traps and a contest to the death.
“Run, rabbit, run!” one of the Watchers cried.
Perry had to laugh at that. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever be running again at this rate. But he pulled himself forward with his hands, dragging his mangled leg along.
He glanced behind and saw Travis had reached the last of his snake holders, a burly man who was beating the other “rabbit” with a chain. Perry pulled himself to a three-limbed crawl, crying out with every foot he moved forward.
That’s when the floor turned to wire.
Barbed wire.
It bit into his hands and knee.
“God damn it…” He punctured his palms and knees again and again, but Perry would not stop. The pain was just his state of being now…nothing could keep him from moving forward. His cries of pain were as much a part of him as breathing now. Unconscious. Constant.
Travis limped his way forward, warned that something bad was ahead. He was wary, but fast, and in a minute he’d caught up to Perry, who now was just a few feet from Rae.
But then he ran into a thin wire that stretched across the rabbit run. Perry had crawled under it, never even seeing it, but Travis ran right into its razor edge, slicing open his gut.
He fell backwards with a woeful scream.
“Oh, you fuckers,” he cried. “This is not like whips and chains at all.”
Travis held his hand to his gut, crimson flowing fast between his fingers. Perry didn’t waste the moment. He crawled across the last two yards
and placed his bag of snakes at Rae’s feet. Kharon stepped between Rae and Gordon and picked them up. He counted them and smiled. “This rabbit wins!”
Travis was still a couple feet away from Gordon, and he broke down at the pronouncement.
“I don’t want to die,” he sobbed.
Kharon knelt at the man’s chest and patted his head. “There are really no losers in this game,” he whispered. “You won’t die. You both will get what you’ve always wanted.”
Then he motioned to Gordon. “Help me.” Between the two of them, they held Travis aloft and carried him to the edge of the fire pit. The black snake slid slowly around Gordon’s arm. It wound up Travis’s bloody shoulder and then slithered around the man’s neck. In moments it had knotted itself like a spring around Travis.
“You wanted pain,” Kharon said. “You will receive it here. Forever.”
Kharon pushed Travis forward and he fell instantly, toppling face-first into the molten fire below.
His screams began instantly. Strangely though, they didn’t slow as he was swallowed by the fire.
Kharon addressed Rae. “Take him to the bridge,” he said, pointing at Perry. “He has earned the right to Crossover.”
Rae looked at the man at her feet and then back at Kharon. “Shouldn’t we take the trap off his foot first?”
“If you wish,” he said. Kharon bent down and with both hands, pried the trap open and let Perry’s bloodied foot slip free. The floor was instantly covered in a rush of new blood from the wound.
“Cross over,” Kharon said. It was a command.
Rae helped Perry up, so he stood on one foot. As she did, the red snake slipped onto his arm. It coiled around and around until it held Perry in a vise grip.
“The snake will be your strength,” Kharon said and pointed across the bridge.
Perry put his arm around Rae’s shoulders and his other hand on the bridge rail. Slowly, she walked him up the wooden planks to the rise in the middle. Kharon called from behind. “Rae, stop. This is not your time. The Crossing is only for him.”