by Tiegan Clyne
He read all the books in the bookcase. There were silly and obviously dated novels, treatises on philosophy, and myths from many lands. Nothing in them told him anything about who or what he was, but he found that he enjoyed reading almost as much as he enjoyed sleeping. They both gave him a taste of freedom.
There was music pre-loaded onto the MP3 player. It was calming and gentle, and he enjoyed it. He played it endlessly, looping the entire three-hour-long playlist non-stop both day and night. He could not have named the songs, but they sounded familiar. It was another small measure of comfort in an uncomfortable time.
There had been no more visits from the machine, for which he was grateful, and only one more tap of his gas bladder, whatever that was. He was still at a loss to understand what a dragonel was, or what his place in the world might be.
The days were uniformly gray and dismal. When he could not sleep and finally finished reading everything in the bookcase twice, he began to stand at the window and look at the world outside. From the limited vantage point of his second-story room, he could see a small exercise yard enclosed with an electrified fence. Sometimes there would be children playing basketball, and at other times adults would be standing in little clumps on the court, talking. There seemed to be little for anyone to do. There were always armed guards , their weapons on display and ready, and if he craned his neck, he could see a guard tower where a sniper held overwatch.
He wondered how many of the people he was watching were also dragonels, or if there were other types of prisoners locked away in this facility along with him. He wondered whether he had living parents or if he’d been cooked up in a petri dish in some lab somewhere. He suspected that he had been a science project; the people here certainly treated him as an object rather than as a living being.
On another grey day like all the grey days that had come before, he was standing at the window, watching the people in the open air and envying them, their freedom, such as it was. The adults were in the yard, dressed in their white T-shirts and black jeans. They were all barefoot, which must have been chilly, given the slate color of the sky and the puddles of rainwater on the ground. The group had sorted itself by male and female, with a quartet of rebels speaking by the basketball hoop in mixed company.
The guards began to push the prisoners back, making room for the massive gates to open electronically. A motorcade of sorts rolled into the yard and the armed men manhandled the yard’s occupants. The prisoners were pushed down onto their knees, their hands behind their heads, the females in one row and the males in another. A black limousine parked on the basketball court, and the chauffeur jumped out to open the back door.
The person who emerged was a tall woman, pale as milk with pitch-black tresses that were coiled on the back of her head and held in place with glittering pins. She was wearing a black dress and sky-high black heels, with black leather gloves on her hands. She carried herself like someone accustomed to being worshipped. She was followed by a nervous little man with receding hair and a heavily laden clipboard that he clung to the way a shipwreck survivor clings to jetsam.
She walked along the line of kneeling prisoners, stopping now and then to speak to the man with the clipboard. He would look at his papers and then respond. The woman kept walking, slowly and deliberately scanning each kneeling man and woman with an evaluating gaze.
Finally, she stopped in front of the largest of the men, a dark-haired mountain of muscle who glared up at her in defiance. She smiled down at him, but there was nothing friendly in her expression. For Sebastian, there was the faintest glimmer of a memory attached to that look, and from the way it made his skin prickle, it was the first memory he was glad he had forgotten.
The woman grasped the defiant man’s chin in her hand, and she spoke to him. He grimaced in what looked like pain but spat in her face. Instantly, the guards began to club him with the butts of their rifles, beating him until he lay inert on the ground at her feet. She kicked him with the pointed toe of one shiny black shoe, and he rolled onto his back, lolling. The woman spoke to the guards, and they bound the prisoner hand and foot, then deposited him in the back of one of the vans in the motorcade. The man with the clipboard scribbled furiously.
The woman suddenly raised her head and looked up at his window, and Sebastian took an inadvertent step back. She spoke to her clipboard-wielding lackey, and he flipped through page after page of his documentation, finally ending with a shake of his head. She then spoke to the guards, and with evident reluctance they escorted her inside the building.
Sebastian stepped away from the window and battled the urge to either hide or find a weapon. The woman in the black dress frightened him, although he didn’t know who she was or how he knew her. He could hear the guards approaching his room at a good clip, and then it was too late for him to do anything at all.
A quartet of armed men crowded in through the door, training their rifles on him. “On your knees!” one of them barked. “Hands behind your head!”
He obeyed. As soon as he was kneeling, the woman strolled into the room, stripping the gloves from her hands. Her fingernails were long and painted scarlet red, and they had been filed into points. She had a strange scent, spicy and deep with musk and the hint of copper. To Sebastian, she smelled like blood. She looked at him with a strange and unsettling gleam in her dark eyes.
“Is this the one?” she asked.
The man with the clipboard consulted his lists. “Yes, Countess.”
She looked down at him and ordered, “Strip.”
He hated to do it, but he obeyed. He removed his clothing and knelt again, his hands once more behind his head. The Countess walked a tight circle around Sebastian, observing him from every angle. “Such pretty scales,” she commented. “Has he been bred?”
The lead guard answered, “Yes, Your Grace. There have been six in vitro attempts recently begun via the program.”
Sebastian felt his stomach fall.
“Any viable births?”
“Not yet.”
She stopped in front of him, frowning. “He’s valuable stock. I want to offer stud service to the community as soon as possible. Make it happen.”
“But… ” She walked toward the door, and the little man hurried after her. The guard warned, “He can only be bred artificially.”
“Why?”
One of the other guards answered the question. “He’s uncooperative.”
The Countess waved a hand dismissively. “He’s cooperative enough to provide the material for six new dragonels. Do you have any idea how much a dragonel fetches on the open market? And he’s gold. Do you know how rare that is?” She walked away, telling her assistant as she left the room, “Have him expressed until we have enough salable samples to make a profit. A dozen vials should be a good start, but I want double that number on hand for our own purposes.”
The guard who had spoken gave Sebastian a hard look and kept his gun pointed at him while the other guards exited the room. When the last of his unit had exited, he followed suit, closing and locking the door behind him.
In the echoing silence of the room, Sebastian stayed on his knees. He had known that this facility was part of a breeding program, but until this moment, it had not fully occurred to him what that meant. He put his hands to his face and squeezed his eyes shut, wishing desperately that he could just wake up out of this nightmare.
He had to find the semen they had stolen from him, and he had to stop this obscenity.
He had to get out.
Chapter Three
They came for him less than an hour after the Countess left. His usual guard came in, once again armed to the teeth, and while his compatriots bound Sebastian’s hands behind his back, he said, “If you fight...”
“You’ll kill me. I know.” He doubted he was really on the verge of death, given the Countess’s comment about how valuable he was, but he was still outnumbered six to one. He had no choice but to allow them to close the manacles around his wrists. T
he cuffs tingled against his skin, and they were hot, just short of burning him. These manacles were more than metal. The soldiers marched him down the hallway to the elevator, and he knew they were taking him back to that basement cell.
In the elevator, he asked, “Does the Countess own me? Am I a slave?”
The guard leader sneered, “You’re livestock.”
“Who is the community?”
“You ask too many questions. Shut up.”
He fell silent, studying the men around him. They were all large and masculine, physically imposing and grim-faced. They carried themselves with the careful balance and economy of motion of trained soldiers, and he believed that they could overwhelm him even without their rifles. He chose not to test that theory.
The elevator doors opened, and he was force-marched to a different cell than the one where he had awakened for the first time. His path took him to a corridor lined with doors, and they shoved him into one of the rooms. In the middle of the chamber, there was a medical examination table, configured like a birthing chair or a table for gynecological examinations. On the other side of the room, the cart with the milking machine stood idle, waiting for him. He broke into a sweat when he saw it, and his cock twitched in his jeans.
They stripped him and strapped him to the table, his legs propped up in the stirrups and bound to shallowly curving ledges that sat beneath his calves. His hands were bound at his sides, his wrists locked to a strap that went around his waist. His ankles were secured to special rings on the stirrups and his thighs were encircled by leather belts. Chains attached to a ring in the wall over his head were snapped into the rings on those belts, compelling him to keep his knees high and open wide.
He flushed in shame at the humiliating position he’d been forced to assume, and he closed his eyes against a rising flood of panic. An orderly came in, and Sebastian watched the man preparing the machine. He was a different orderly than the ones who had worked on him before. He was matter of fact about it, just doing his job, not at all perturbed about the perverse nature of his duty. His blasé attitude made Sebastian’s humiliation all that much worse. It made it seem as if he and his pain were beneath notice.
When they were certain that he was completely immobilized, the soldiers left the room and abandoned him to the machine. The orderly walked to Sebastian’s side, a paper in his hand.
“She wants 36 samples,” he mused, talking to himself. “That’s going to take a while. I figure we can get up to three samples per session before your body needs time to replenish itself. More than that, and you’ll only be giving seminal fluid, not sperm. That’s going to be at least two weeks of one session a day.”
“Please,” Sebastian begged, “don’t do this. Let me go.”
The orderly looked at him, startled, his dark green eyes wide, as if he was surprised that this lab animal could speak. He put the orders aside and leaned on the table, his hand brushing against Sebastian’s hip. A lock of dark hair fell onto his forehead, and he asked, “You don’t want this? You don’t want someone to give you sexual pleasure every day?”
“It’s not pleasure,” he objected. “It’s torture.”
“I don’t know, man,” the orderly said, shaking his head. “I’m betting it feels pretty good. It’s not like you guys don’t cum every time.” He was going to get no sympathy from this man, so he turned his face away. The orderly chuckled. “Cheer up, dragon dude. It’s only two weeks, and then you can go back to counting your hoard or whatever it is that you do in your spare time.”
“How many men do you do this to?”
“Per day?” The man scratched his five o’clock shadow as he retrieved the cart and rolled it over to the table. “Four or five. Each session is about an hour, then there’s clean up and sample integrity measures and such. Yeah. Four or five.”
“All dragonels?”
“Not all.” He grinned. “You’re not the only critter the Countess bought from GenTel.”
“GenTel?”
“The lab that cooked you up, you and the other livestock.” He picked up a hypodermic needle, already filled with the blue chemical that had been used on him before. “Do you need this, or do you think you can get hard on your own?”
He was already half erect, which the orderly could see perfectly well. He let out a shaking breath. “Give me the shot.”
The orderly complied, and the process began.
It became monotonously routine. Every day at the same time, they would bind his hands and drag him down to the basement to be “expressed”. The same orderly performed the procedure every time. Sometimes he would hear the cries of other men in other rooms who were undergoing the same procedure, but most of the time, it felt and sounded as if he was the only prisoner in this private hell. The orderly was businesslike about it, not seeming to take any special interest in the proceedings or in him, personally. There was no more conversation.
When they were finished for the day and all their samples had been collected, he was deposited back into his room by himself. He was almost always sore, aching from the contractions caused by the electrodes they used to stimulate his body. Once they left him alone, he would lie on his side on his bed, facing the wall, too numb to think. He wished every night that when he fell asleep, he would never wake up, but every morning he found himself alive and disappointed.
He was so tired.
There had to be a way out. He had apparently run once before, which meant that he had found an escape route. He was certain that he could find it again, or more likely something similar, since they had probably discovered and blocked his first exit path. He needed out of this room.
When his daily delivery of food arrived, he stopped the orderly who had brought the tray. “What do I need to do to be allowed into the yard?”
She looked surprised. “I don’t know, honestly.”
“Could you ask?” He gave his most charming smile. “The guards won’t talk to me, and I really would like to start cooperating.”
She studied his face for a moment, and then she said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
Less than an hour later, another orderly, the one from the expressing room, came into his prison accompanied by three scowling guards. He was pushing the machine on its cart. Sebastian stood, swallowing his conflicted responses at the sight of the mechanism.
The leader of the guards came in, his rifle slung over his shoulder for once instead of pointed at Sebastian’s face. He said, “You said you wanted to cooperate. Now’s your chance to prove it.”
He glanced at the machine, then at the orderly’s placid face. “How?”
“Give us a sample without the need for the machine, or for straps.”
He balked. “With all of you watching?”
“What, you suddenly need privacy?”
Sebastian flushed, ashamed. The orderly unexpectedly spoke up on his behalf. “I have to be there to ensure sample integrity, but the guards don’t have to stay.”
The guard leader frowned. “But…”
The orderly said, “He’s not going to attack me. We have an understanding. Don’t we, dragonel?”
Sebastian looked back at the orderly, meeting his eyes. “I won’t attack you.”
“There. See? He’s a monster of his word.” He retrieved a sample cup from the cart and gestured toward the door. “Step outside, please.”
“All right,” the guard said doubtfully. “But if you need us, call me. We will not hesitate to…”
“Shoot me down,” Sebastian finished for them. “I know. I’ve heard it.”
Reluctantly, the guards left him and the orderly alone. They stared at each other for a moment, and then the orderly handed him the cup. “Just close your eyes, and it’ll be just like I’m not even here. Do you want the shot?”
He took the cup, feeling numb but marginally more in control. “No,” he said.
The orderly stepped closer. “Do you want some help?”
Their eyes met, and Sebastian blushed at the
frank suggestion in the other man’s dark green eyes. “I think I can manage on my own.”
As if he hadn’t heard, the orderly came closer still, his hands opening the button on Sebastian’s jeans, their gazes still locked. The orderly’s fingers slid into the waistband of his underwear, brushing against his skin.
“I’ve been wanting to touch you for days,” he whispered, “and not with that stupid machine. Let me do this.”
He knew that he was in no position to say no, just as he knew that even if he did, the orderly wouldn’t stop. Even so, the illusion of consent was comforting.
He tugged Sebastian’s jeans down to mid-thigh and palmed him through his underwear. Sebastian’s breath hitched in his throat, and to his embarrassment, his body readily responded, hardening beneath the orderly’s touch. He had no memory of another person touching him so sensually, although he was certain it had happened. It must have been a long time ago. The other man pressed a kiss to Sebastian’s lips, surprising him, then to the soft skin beneath his ear. His breath was hot and moist, and it made Sebastian shiver. He had forgotten how tenderness could feel.
The orderly slid his underwear down, releasing Sebastian’s thick cock. He wrapped his hand around it and squeezed gently, stroking up to the tip and thumbing the sensitive slit. Sebastian groaned in the back of his throat and looped one arm around the orderly’s neck, pulling him in for a desperate kiss. He hadn’t realized how much he’d craved a gentle touch, or how much he needed the contact of another man.
“Michael,” the orderly whispered when their lips parted. “My name is Michael.”
“I’m Sebastian.”
“I know.”
Then there was no more talking. Michael firmed his grip and stroked again, setting a steady rhythm that drew a purr from deep in Sebastian’s chest. Their lips met again, and Michael’s tongue gently teased its way into his mouth, sliding in and exploring passionately. Sebastian ran his hand down Michael’s chest and the hard planes of his abdomen until he reached the waistband of his scrubs. He dipped his hand inside. Michael was hard as a rock, the tip of his cock already wet. Sebastian took him in his hand and smeared the droplets with a swipe of his thumb, drawing a shudder.