by Addison Cain
And the next question loomed larger still: These three eat tonight? What about the rest of us? Another of the women put it to voice.
“We’ll be fed? Housed?” said a short brunette. And then, after glancing around and landing her gaze back on Mather: “Father?”
Buckeye groaned inside. There were people here who knew how to work a situation. She was probably not one of them.
Fuuuuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
The head priest gave the most gracious of subtle nods, affirming.
The brunette made eye contact with the woman next to her, evaluating Mather’s response. They both shrugged. Knelt. Like so many in the VT, the promise of food and shelter went a long way.
Two more priests sank down, brought stiff pricks into the open.
For some, a really long way.
Buckeye coughed. She’d seen Covvies in the houses of Lust, but the graphic reminder that these were still men sent a mild shock through her system.
Now five were down and seven stood. Mather turned his head to fix the hold-outs with a single eye. Muted fleshy rhythms clapped out along the line, a promise. A warning.
“Obedience is service,” he repeated. “Kneel in service. Or kneel in pain.”
The guards stepped away from the wall behind the sordid line of priests and Vicers. One already had a baton in his grip. The threat was enough to take down four more, amid a volley of grumbled swearing.
“Your tongues serve the Church now,” said Mather. “You will not dirty them with profanity.”
Buckeye could have snorted. The way things were going, profanity would be the least filthy thing they might expect on their tongues. Fucking hypocrites.
There were two others left standing aside from Buckeye: a man and a woman. Mather watched them with an indifferent forbearance. Restrained grunts and hisses were coming from the first of the priests to take their knees.
The last standing woman folded her arms over her chest, eyes kindling with hate. Her feet planted solidly apart, challenging the man in white to move her.
Mather’s eyes flicked to one of the guards. In a single, booted step, a baton touched the lower back of the man standing next to the woman.
He yelled, coming up on tiptoe, his whole body in an arc, while the woman pivoted with a shriek of her own. Her hands swept to her face, and wide eyes refused to believe where the jolt had landed.
The guard put his weapon to the back of the man’s knee, and the Vicer crumpled, his body a grotesque parody of his peers who had knelt of their own accord. A second guard stepped in, some sort of complicated metal rod in hand he’d produced from fuck-knew-where. The two began yanking the limbs of the prone lustworker into a specific arrangement.
The woman flung herself at the pair of guards, fingers like claws at their uniforms, but she’d forgotten these weren’t the only two. More hands hauled her back, and the next few moments were ugly.
Buckeye cringed at the sounds the two made. The pointless fight. The odd extra bits on the metal rod she now could see were a type of restraint. Ankles first, and then wrists, the guards had the man bound to opposite ends of the rod. He was useless this way, legs wide and arms alongside his shins, unable to push himself upright.
He was prostrate, just like the others. All the struggle to end up the same way. The woman was no different, bound in seconds, though she swore with surprising creativity and violence the whole time. A guard replaced her gag and she growled into that, instead.
As Buckeye stared down the line of VT rentbodies in various stages of use, a new reality sank onto her shoulders.
She was the only one still standing.
Mather’s gaze was on her. He took slow steps in her direction.
No.
“The ways you learned in the Territories are over.” He looked at her while he spoke, but his voice rose to address the room. “Here in New Covenant, service to the Church is not an option.”
Even the restrained pair bounced in front of black-trousered hips by the time Mather made his way over. The priests had no qualms, mounting men as well as women. A white cassock stopped just in front of her.
“Do you think,” he said, in tones pitched just for her, “because you didn’t serve in a house of Lust, you wouldn’t be called upon to serve here?”
Buckeye scowled.
Don’t do it.
Her tongue drew back into her mouth.
Ain’t no point, Wheeler.
Mather raised a brow. She spit in his face.
“Get fucked, Covvie.”
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t break eye contact, but spoke over her shoulder to the guards, who were done with the last pair of rebels.
“Break her.”
Why? Why, Bucks?
Hands clapped on her upper arms before his mouth had closed on the words. They were hauling her back; her legs had to blunder in reverse to keep her from collapse. Back and back.
The door latch clicked behind her. They were leaving the room.
She refused to look away, all venom and Vice, but the man in white only watched with cool interest. As though she were an experiment that had taken a curious turn.
The guards dragged her out into the crypt. The door shut on her first taste of Virtue.
When forcing her to walk backward became too much of a chore, the guards spun her and switched arms. Now they marched back the way they’d come, under arches and concealed uplighting. She had nothing to say to them.
A left turn just before they reached the way back to the glossy hallway revealed another wood door, aged to match the architecture. One of the men pulled it open to reveal a short stone landing, and then stairs to somewhere even lower in the building.
The grey-clad pair exchanged looks, and the one who hadn’t opened the door shrugged and said, “Just carry her.”
And so she was over a shoulder again, giving up the idea of a fight, as this would be a better choice than the baton. She bounced as the steps spiraled down, the boots of the second guard keeping pace just within her vision, when she bothered to raise her head.
She counted twenty-two steps, more than the standard for a single story, and when they arrived at the bottom, a short corridor receded underfoot. The guard carrying her stopped, and the other moved around in front where she couldn’t see.
Another clack, another door opening, this time with a heavy creak. They passed into another space that smelled of emptiness and long disuse. Grey-shirt deposited her on the floor and she stepped away, clutching her own arms in some primitive bid for defense.
They were already backing out through the door. The one who’d carried her had his arm extended, hand on the latch from the outside, ready to pull it shut.
“You’ll need to run,” he said.
The lock snapped into place behind him, and the room went black as a coma.
Then, lights.
Set low in the walls, the same warm hue as the honeycomb above, the illumination showed Buckeye she was in a circular chamber about as wide through the middle as the long side of the room with all the priests.
She pivoted on her heel to see the rest, and found a single, fat central column supporting the ceiling—a massive spindle connecting two ends of a spool. The only visible opening on any surface was the locked door.
And then the floor moved out from under her.
Buckeye yelped and sat down on her ass. Hard.
The fuck?
No, not ‘moved’. Rotated.
She was moving while the smooth stone floor—something poured, like concrete—began to rotate around the central column, and the walls turned past her like some Neolithic carousel.
Her brow furrowed, and she winced at the new ache in her tailbone. Then a grating sound, stone over stone, came from overhead. She followed it up and up, and her jaw went slack.
At a subtle but steady rate, the ceiling was descending.
You’ll need to run.
She swore and scrambled to her feet. Began a brisk walk. Ground her teeth as muscles w
orked against a forming bruise.
The ceiling, about fifteen feet overhead, kept coming.
Buckeye made the walk into a jog.
The grinding noise stopped. And she saw it all.
Sadistic fucks!
She stopped. Stood in place and let the floor turn her about the room, fists on hips as she watched to confirm. The moment she was still, the stone rasp began again. She could mark, by using imperfections on the curved wall as a reference, the descent of the ceiling once more.
Buckeye gnawed on her upper lip and closed her eyes. Shook her head at the relentlessness of New Covenant. No wonder her grandparents had stayed in The Vice.
She put her head down and started up another jog. The ceiling ground to a halt.
There was nothing else to do. She already knew the end of it. The idea lingered to simply go to the door and surrender, to just get it over with, but Buckeye bristled with resolve.
They’d just have to break her then. Because that was the only way this was happening.
She ran.
For how long? Half an hour? A whole hour? The light never changed. The only marker she had was the burn in her lungs, her limbs, as she pushed.
A stitch came under her ribs and she panted. Raised her arms and folded them over her head as she plodded on, faltering. Her clothes stuck down with sweat.
The room and its pale stone was a blur of sameness. Breath became an abrading fire in her throat. She stumbled. Ran on for a moment at a weird, gravity-defying forward lurch. Then fell.
She managed to twist at the waist at the last second, landing on the meat of her hip rather than busting open kneecaps on the stone. The heels of her palms had no such luck, taking the abrasion when she braced against hitting her head.
Buckeye coughed, throat constricting in waves as it tried to work saliva up from some reserves it no longer had. She sat there heaving while a crushing weight of masonry closed in, unchecked.
No. No, you fucking bastards!
With a groan, she rolled onto her knees. Got her feet under her ass and stood, swaying in place. Thirsty.
The ceiling might have been a foot overhead.
Buckeye fell into a drunken jog. Ruin stopped where it was, for now, but claustrophobia was there, bearing down.
Wind sawed in and out of her. The edges of her vision fuzzed to a red-speckled grey. Blood rushing in her ears cocooned her in a pocket of warm bankruptcy.
When she collapsed again, there was no pushing herself up.
Her arms tried to drag her along like some primordial thing slithering two-legged out of the sea. There was no moisture left in her for tears. The ceiling closed in, the lid to a rotating coffin.
She let everything be. Rolled her upper body to watch the descent. If she blacked out before the end, would it still hurt? When the room crushed her flat like a bug?
In her delirium, her surrender, Buckeye thought of Scylla.
Shoulda just gone upstairs. Probably wouldn’t be here.
Everything stopped.
The ceiling kissed her hip. She was too limp to even blink, and then it reversed direction.
Stone twisted up and away, and Buckeye was a puddle. Dull sounds joined her in the space. A guard’s features blotting out overhead light. Arms gathered her. Lifted. She had no ability to care.
Stairs, crypt, door, and bodies, backwards everything went.
Standing priests in black lined one of the short walls of the room. Vicers, stripped bare now, knelt at their feet. Buckeye’s head lolled, her eyes rolled in their sockets on the way down, the guard spilling her onto the floor like so much soiled laundry.
The hem of a white cassock drifted into view, just above the horizon of the floor. Brusque hands tugged at her clothes. Her limbs flopped, joints banged against stone.
Buckeye had nothing left.
Someone turned her with about as much sympathy as they’d show a bad mattress, until she was fully prone. The floor was cool and hard, and squished her ear to the side of her skull. Mashed her naked tits flat beneath her. Bruised her knees and hips.
She wasn’t running. She didn’t care.
Limbs caged her hips. Fabric chafed. Where her ass met her thighs, something rooted, blunt and hot. A body. A cock.
She stared at the white hem, muscles slack.
Just like pirates. Crush the defenses; take what was valuable.
Rigid flesh nudged, pushed. Sweat was a halting lubricant where arousal couldn’t grow. Another human being was inside her. More. More, until open trousers met her cheeks. Thrusting began, mechanical.
Somewhere overhead, Mather spoke.
“Service to the Church in New Covenant is the will of the Lord,” he said, cassock dusting the ground as it floated around her head and out of sight. “The will of the Lord is not a choice made by men. By sinners.” The stiff prick worked in and out of Buckeye. “This lesson will be repeated as often as necessary.”
A faceless priest rode her limp body. Stone ground her skin over her cheekbone, the knuckles of her big toes. Grunting came, and more force behind the snapping of hips. There was no sound in the room now but the slapping of flesh, the rasp of breath.
A palm splayed between her shoulder blades, pressing her further to the floor. Male groin humped at her, two, three, a half a dozen more times. Then there was the kick, familiar. Unstoppable.
Hips connected with her ass. Defeat drove all the way home, jammed to her limits. The pulse came again and again, vomiting thick dominion into her cunt. Where the spurting ended, the violation began anew. Slow plunges glutted semen out around the sated cock, sent it seeping down past the empty buzz of her clit.
And then the invasion was gone. Phallus and body retreated, leaving Buckeye to lie there for dead. Bone-weary and broken.
“We’ve spent enough time on this today,” said Mather from the far side of the room. “Secure the servants. Brothers, you will do penance as you leave.”
Again, like a ragdoll, arms were gathering her up, lifting her from the floor. This time holding her under knees and an armpit to a grey-uniformed chest. She couldn’t look at the guard.
A line of priests formed at the open door. One of the guards stood by, baton held out at chest level. The first of the clergy stepped up and reached for it. His body jerked, and he growled but maintained a grip. It might have been two or three seconds before he let go and passed out into the crypt, chest heaving, neck bent in pain.
The next took his place, grabbing the baton of his own will, suffering for a moment before he left. Then the next. And the next.
Penance.
Mather was punishing the priests? For what? Fornicating?
The man in white spoke as if her barely-coherent thoughts had been aloud. The other captives must have been gaping at the sight, as well.
“Oh yes,” he said, addressing the naked huddle of waiting Vicers, “These Brothers have volunteered to acclimate you to your service, but they are not exempt from payment for their transgressions. Whether they slip off to the Territories, or profane themselves here, even in support of our efforts.” Another priest yelped and then stifled the sound. “They will do penance if they wish to continue wearing the cloth.”
The last of the black cassocks left through the door. Two remaining guards moved in around the lustworkers, goading the sitting few to stand with the threat of their batons. In her idiot haze, Buckeye wondered how strong this one was, to have been holding her dead weight up the whole time. It was the only way she was getting out of the room, though. Her legs were liquid, useless.
The men corralled the Vicers into a line and began herding them out the door. Buckeye’s guard fell in at the end, turning sideways to get her through without hitting her head. As she passed, Mather stepped into view. Cool eyes looked down into hers.
“Do better tomorrow.”
She had almost enough energy to blink at him before he left in an eddy of white.
You’re not dead. You made it.
They deposited her in a cel
l.
They deposited all of them in cells.
Well. The others, the guards goaded into cells. Like cattle. They could still walk. Buckeye could not.
The cells sat end-to-end, segments of a centipede, their doors off the hallway that ran in the opposite direction of Mather’s original right turn toward the crypt.
Rather than solid walls, or bars like some old-timey jail, something clear and thick divided each Vicer from the next. It could have been glass or plexi, but Buckeye was too far to reach out and touch it from where the guard had laid her on the bare floor. Too far, and she didn’t have the strength yet to move much more than her head. Either way, she was certain the stuff wouldn’t shatter, no matter what any of them did.
She coughed, throat still raw from trying to outrun the ceiling. Other parts of her were raw, as well. Buckeye grimaced. Swallowed. Dim, circular lights recessed into the ceiling stared like impassive eyes.
Her face rolled to the side to watch the last of the church’s new ‘servants’ put away, so many tools after use. Though a dozen panels of transparent barrier diluted her view of the furthest cells, she could still see the last three were different.
As the guard had lowered her to the ground, Buckeye had scanned her own personal prison to find it devoid of anything except a single, discomfiting, bucket. No furniture. No bedding.
The cells at the opposite end of the row had something that looked like a thin mattress on the floor. A stainless fixture rising from the ground that she guessed was a toilet. These three cells stayed empty. At least for a time.
When the grey-clad men escorted lustworkers into these by the upper arms, Buckeye saw their hair plastered to their heads, dripping. The doors closed behind them and they each moved to grab up what turned out to be a thin blanket, folded at the end of their mattresses, to wrap around their nakedness.
Buckeye recognized these three as the first to submit to the priest’s demands.
‘Service without question has its rewards. These three will eat tonight. And shower.’
A part of her sneered.
Sold their asses just like that. For fucking nothing.