Generation XX Exodus by D.Night
Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2023 5:11 pm
Generation XX Exodus
By D. Night
Part 1 of 2
Lori started awake, blinking in confusion. What was that? As she was trying to kick her brain into gear she heard shouting.
“Lauderdale Sheriff’s Deputies!”
Sitting up, she reached for her glasses as she heard the shout repeated. It was a man. Then another man, his voice just as loud as the first. “Clear kitchen.”
They were in her apartment, Lori realized with a start. She got her glasses on just as her bedroom door flew open and bounced off the wall. The scream escaped before she could control it, then a bright light transfixed her. As she heard the door rebounding off the man’s leg, while he moved through the doorway, she heard him shout before going back to barking at her. “In here. Lori Pena? Sheriff’s Deputy, don’t move.”
“What—what?” Lori stammered before she felt twin spikes of pain lance into her chest as she sat in the bed staring at the light, trying to see past it. Then her body convulsed as every bit of her lit up with fire that just went on and on and on. She heard her teeth clack together, and she fell back against the pillows, shaking violently. A moment later the fire went out, but she kept quivering as she felt someone heavy kneeling on the bed.
She was rolled over, roughly, and fast enough to knock her glasses askew. Her hands were pulled behind her and handcuffed. Then she was pushed back over and the light went in her face again, dazzling her. “Yeah, it’s her,” a man said.
“What—” Lori tried again before she was swiftly yanked out of the bed to her feet. Her glasses slipped off and fell away somewhere, but she was more worried about how her body didn’t seem to want to cooperate. Her legs felt like jelly, and she could barely keep her head upright as it wobbled and swung about on her neck.
“Lori Pena, we’re serving a warrant for your enslavement,” a man behind the one holding her said.
That spiked a jet of icy fear right through her, and her lungs found enough energy to summon sufficient coordination to draw and properly expel a breath to talk with. “What’s going on?”
“Failure to stay current on credit cards,” the same man said, while the first started ripping at her nightclothes. Cloth was tearing.
“Let me go!” Lori said in alarm. “I’m not behind on my credit cards. I don’t even carry a balance.”
“Tell it to the judge. Bank already filed with the court.”
Her nightgown was in tatters as fabric parted, then the man holding her grabbed a handful of it and tore the rest. The ruined garment fluttered down her body, revealing her breasts. All she had left on was her panties, which lasted barely a few seconds before he started ripping at them too.
“I’m not behind on anything. This is unlawful. Let me go! Help, help, hel—” Lori said, her voice getting stronger as she went on, until she was finally screaming. Then she felt the fire again, and almost bit her tongue as her teeth slammed together and her body locked up. She fell over on the bed, bounced, slid off the edge, and landed on the floor gasping for breath through the pain.
Before she could catch it, she felt a knee on her back, then her head was yanked up and she felt something being strapped across her mouth. Before she could get her muscles to cooperate properly, whatever it was had been buckled down tightly. Gagging her.
“Got it,” the man over her said, in a lower voice.
“Same here,” the other said, followed by a sort of heavy thump as something was tossed on the floor. He was also speaking quieter now.
The man on her stood her back up, muscling her off the floor with both hands like she was a doll. She was entirely naked now, her hair swishing against her shoulders and back as he swung her around ahead of him. Then she was stumbling forward as he shoved her into motion.
Ahead in the doorway, just turning to lead the way out, was a blurry figure wearing brown; light brown shirt, darker brown pants. She couldn’t see more than that, not with the lights off and her glasses somewhere in the bedroom she was being frogmarched from.
She was propelled down the little hallway, through her living room, and out into the apartment stairwell. As it began to register she was outside fully naked, she heard the voice of her next-door neighbor. He sounded sleepy.
“Hey, what’s going on.”
“Get back inside sir,” the man ahead of her said in a brusque, borderline hostile tone. Loud again. “Not your concern.”
“But—” Steve said, sounding a little less sleepy and a lot more confused now. She could just make out his face, pointing in her direction.
“You wanna go for a ride too?” the deputy said, and she heard the click-clack of metal, along with a faint jingle of chain.
“No, but—”
“No buts, inside now or you’re coming with us. In a collar, not just handcuffs.”
Steve’s face came into vague focus as she was walked past him, as naked as she’d never been outside a doctor’s office or her home. He was staring at her with wide eyes and a pale expression. Then his eyes flicked down to her body, where they lingered for a second.
As horrifying as this was, her next door neighbor staring at her full nudity was worse. Just for a moment or so, but it sent fresh humiliation coursing through her. Yanked out of bed, stripped nude, handcuffed and gagged was all bad enough. Now a man who’d been sneaking peeks at her a few times a week when they passed each other on the way in or out of their apartments was getting a full view.
She wanted this to stop, but the deputy wouldn’t quit walking, wouldn’t let her go. Her naked form was just being shoved along the walkway like she was so much meat.
“Now sir!” the man holding her said.
Lori lost sight of Steve, but a moment later, as she was moved away from his unit, she heard the door close. She tried to pull away from the deputy holding her, but she was handcuffed, gagged, and he was both taller and stronger than she was. His fingers were like vice grips on her upper arms, and when she tried to dig her bare heels in she winced in pain as her flesh abraded on the concrete.
He didn’t stop, not even at that brief attempt to slow her progress. His hands stayed on her, and his strength kept her moving. Lori stumbled down the stairs, nearly falling four times except for his grip, and then out across the lower hallway to the parking lot where a black SUV with rotating blue lights was parked in the handicapped spot near the stairwell.
It was still night. She had no idea how long she’d been asleep, but she didn’t feel sleepy. But she wasn’t sure if that was from the shock of what was happening, or what they’d done to her in the bedroom, or just because she’d gotten enough sleep before it all began. All she could tell was it was still gloomy in the parking lot, with the barely adequate street lights doing their usual pathetic job of casting more shadows than illumination out from the handful of poles.
She wasn’t taken to one of the SUV’s doors, and barely had time to wonder why before she was at the back of the vehicle. The deputy ahead of her reached it first, but paused with his hand on the rear latch until the one shoving her along had circled past him and had her at the far side. Then he opened the back hatch, pulling it back swiftly.
Lori blinked as she dimly registered two more people inside. Naked, women from what she could tell. They were struggling, but she only heard a few faint sounds. Muffled screams. Muffled like hers. She started trying to wrench away from the deputies again, but she was pushed forward against the bumper and tipped inside like a piece of furniture.
She landed on her front, compressing both breasts painfully. Her breath drained away from the impact. Someone kneed her shoulder, which hurt. Then her legs were picked up and she was shoved all the way in. Her body bumped against the other two women, forcing them aside like a wedge as she was pushed in between them. She was struggling as hard as they were, picking up impacts that hurt even as she felt her knees and elbows landing on them that probably did the same right back.
Trying to roll over, she felt the man’s hands come down on her back, and the vehicle dipped as he climbed in after her. The door closed, then as he yanked her head back by her hair and began pulling a hood down over her head, she heard one of the front doors open. A moment later, as she lost even her uncorrected fuzzy sight, the engine started
* * * * *
Eric tightened the locking collar on the hood and double checked that it had in fact locked. The brunette was struggling, but the other two had settled back down when he smacked at them with his gloved hands. There wasn’t a lot of room in the rear, and the whole task became harder when Alejandro backed out of the space.
Bracing himself, Eric used his body weight to keep the brunette’s legs stabilized so she couldn’t kick at him, and waited. Alejandro shifted into drive and pulled out, but Eric kept waiting. Two more swift turns and the SUV was at the apartment complex’s front entrance. When Alejandro turned out onto the road and straightened out, Eric got back to work.
An athletic bandage captured her ankles as he wounded it around and around, then a ziptie from his police style belt ensured she couldn’t wiggle out of it. He checked the ziptie carefully, making sure it had engaged and didn’t loosen when he tugged on it. Another bandage went around her wrists, then he retrieved the handcuffs and replaced them with another ziptie.
Then he got off her and forced her legs to fold up behind her so he could use a third tie to secure her ankles to her wrists. Now she could not straighten, stand, kick, or reach. Now she was secure.
“How you doing?” Alejandro asked.
“Triple checking now,” Eric said.
“Good, be sure.”
Eric checked Lori’s bonds once more while using a small pair of nippers to clip the excess off the ties. She wasn’t going anywhere. Since he was back there, he checked the other two as well. Joyce, the blonde, was just as she’d been when they’d picked her up in Shreveport, but Stephanie, another brunette, had managed to somehow tighten her wrist tie a click or two and her fingers felt a little cold. He replaced it with a fresh tie, cut off the old one and the excess, and sat back to look over all three women.
They were all hooded securely, hogtied, on their bellies, and even as they struggled and tried to cry out, he couldn’t hear very much. Not even this close. “Okay, we’re good,” he said, looking at the front.
“Alright, hang on a sec,” Alejandro said. Eric waited, while the SUV pulled over to the side of the road. “Wait,” the driver said again.
Eric could see the headlights from behind them and did as Alejandro instructed. The vehicle went past them without stopping, and he heard the locks disengage. Opening the rear hatch just enough to squeeze out, he did so and closed it back, heard it lock and made sure it didn’t open when he pulled on the latch. Then he went forward to the passenger side and waited for the locks to click off long enough for him to open that door.
As they thunk-kachunked again, relocking the vehicle, Eric slid into the seat and closed the door. “Okay.”
“Great,” Alejandro said, checking his mirror, then looking over his shoulder, before pulling out into the empty lane and getting the vehicle back underway.
Neither man said anything else. Eric tucked his black tac-style gloves into a compartment on the police belt, and lifted a bottle of water from the cupholder on his side for a long drink. But after replacing the cap, he just continued to ride in calm silence. Alejandro followed the dash screen and it’s automatically updating map to the interstate, and rolled up the ramp to I-20 to head east.
Less than half an hour later they were over the border from Mississippi into Alabama. Alejandro left the interstate for US-80, and pulled off on a small two-lane country road two minutes later. It curved after half a mile, and they were in the middle of nowhere for the moment, with dawn still an hour away. The driver hit buttons on his door that unlocked the vehicle and rolled both front windows down, and took something out of his shirt pocket. “Make it fast.”
“Got it,” Eric said, getting out with the window scraper from his pocket already in hand. He closed the door and used the scraper to peel up the corner of the Lauderdale Sheriff’s Department logo, then continued using it to help the magnetic sticker detach from the door as he pulled on it. He got it off in one piece and dropped it inside the car. Then he did the same on the rear passenger door for the other logo’s other half.
Alejandro was already waiting when Eric opened the passenger door and dumped the second logo half before stepping up on the running board so he could comfortably reach the roof. He flipped the light bar’s electro-magnets off and accepted the whole bar when Alejandro did the same on the other end and helped lift and ease it over to him.
With it in hand, Eric stepped down and dumped the bar into the back seat atop the logos. Then he grabbed the other license plate before getting out. At the back, Alejandro had already used the power screwdriver to spin the plate’s screws out. He caught them but let the plate fall to the gravel on the shoulder. Eric held the new plate in place until Alejandro had the screws back in the holes and was tightening them down.
He took the old plate with him back up front and set it in the back seat, then returned to the rear of the SUV. While Alejandro started a circle of the vehicle, studying it and the ground around it carefully, Eric opened the rear door to check on the women.
All three were still hogtied, still hooded. They moved some when they heard the door, but the gags continued to stifle every attempt they made to communicate. Anyway, there was no one out here to hear them. Eric checked their bonds, then reached for the cargo cover he and his partner had rigged up.
It was just a roller affixed to the rear of the back seat, with the free edge of the cloth tied to a wooden rod. When he pulled it out, the fabric stretched out and covered the cargo compartment, and the hogtied women, completely. He slotted the rod into the brackets they’d added next to the rear door, and put in the cotter pins to ensure it stayed. Magnets on both edges of the cloth caught against others super-glued to the sides of the SUV, holding it from gaping or flapping loose.
Eric closed up and went to the back seat, where he shook out a black blanket and tossed it over all the gear and logo trash, then got in the front passenger seat again. A few moments later Alejandro finished his circle inspection and joined him, sliding in behind the wheel.
The locks reengaged, the windows rolled back up, and Alejandro performed a five point turn to back and fill the SUV across the quiet empty lanes so he could direct the vehicle back to US-80.
When they were on the road headed east again, Eric stripped off his police belt and got out of the vest with the patches and badge indicating he was Mississippi Lauderdale County Sheriff’s Deputy. It all went into a duffle bag waiting on the floorboard next to his feet. Alejandro did the same, shrugging carefully out of the vest and the belt as he drove and handed it all over to join Eric’s items in the bag.
Eric clicked on a mini-flash and checked Alejandro’s shirt and pants, then his own. “Good,” Alejandro said after glancing over to eyeball Eric’s clothes when the light swung to them. His seat belt clicked into place as he drew it down across himself.
Zipping the duffle up, Eric put it back on the floor and took another sip of water, then put his seat belt on and settled back for the ride. They were just two guys wearing brown cargo pants and light brown buttoned shirts in an unmarked SUV.
* * * * *
Lori was being pulled out of the SUV when she woke up again. The vehicle’s rough carpet hurt against her bare skin as she was slid across it. The trip was a blur. At first she’d tried to calm herself, reassured by how they would have reached the office or wherever they were taking her, and run her ID. After a records check, they would have discovered they’d made a mistake.
Sure she’d been hauled out naked, and scared shitless, but she did have no balance on her credit cards. So they’d process her, whatever it was they did, and then she’d be free. Revenge or compensation could come after they’d set her loose. At this point, Lori almost didn’t even care if she had to call a coworker or even her dad to bring her clothes while she huddled naked in a bathroom, as long as they let her go.
But as the hogtied ride had stretched well past what had to be an hour, she began to worry. The restraints didn’t hurt, but that wasn’t the same as saying they were comfortable. And the folded up position was making her knees and shoulders start to ache a little as the vehicle kept rolling and she stayed tied up. Her mouth was dry. She wanted to stretch out and couldn’t.
She had no idea what was ‘normal’ when someone was taken into custody for enslavement. She’d always structured her life to be certain she couldn’t fall afoul of such issues.
Military, not college since she’d been born to parents who had little means. In the service, the worst she needed to endure was being screamed at and having little control over when or where she slept, ate, and worked. But she kept her clothes, and didn’t have to fuck anyone. After being trained as a radar operator by the Air Force, it wasn’t difficult to pay for and pass the additional training she needed to be a qualified air traffic controller. The FAA was happy to take her and put her in an airport.
She owned her car, her apartment lease had no enslavement clauses. Neither did her credit cards unless she was more than ten thousand dollars behind in her payments. She had certified letters from a lawyer she’d paid to painstakingly explain all the legal documents to her in plain English, confirming she was at no risk of a collar.
Yet here she was, naked and hogtied in the back of a vehicle with a hood she couldn’t shake off her head. With two other women. She knew they were women because whatever her blurry nearsighted eyes had or hadn’t told her, she’d bumped and rubbed against them enough by now to know they were women. Soft bodies, rounded hips and breasts, and they were as bound and gagged as she was.
They sounded scared. Whatever was going on, Lori was scared too.
Yet nothing else had happened. The vehicle stopped once, and she heard some noises as the men puttered around with it for a while. They checked her, but just to make sure she was still bound. Then it stopped again, and hands checked her restraints and her once more. As bad as this was, worse didn’t happen; no one touched her. Not in the ways she was most scared of anyway.
As the ride kept going, and she began to accept that she couldn’t wiggle or break out of the restraints, she fell asleep from sheer boredom. She woke up being checked yet again, but went back to sleep as the trip continued. And now she was being hauled out, apparently at some sort of stopping point.
“On your feet,” a man said. She didn’t know if it was one of the same pair who’d done this to her. The trip was like a nightmare, as blurry as her vision, and just as dark thanks to the hood. It seemed so long ago since she’d been shouted at in her bedroom. Her arms and legs ached from the restraints. Then she felt the ziptie on her ankles loosen with an audible snap, and whatever they’d wrapped around them fell away.
He pulled on her and she swayed as she stood up, but her legs were weak. She stumbled, then would have fallen if not for his hands on her arms. Her skin felt hot as she struggled to get her feet beneath her. She heard him swear softly, but he stood her back up and she felt his breath rippling the fabric of the hood.
“Walk,” the voice said in her ear. “If I have to carry you, it’ll come with bruises. Understand?”
Lori nodded and tried to walk when he moved her again. Her legs didn’t really want to cooperate very well, but he seemed satisfied with her efforts. She felt the rough concrete turn into something smoother, hard but without the ridges and texture that hurt her feet. Now they were mostly just cold. The heat on her skin was gone as well, then she heard a door and she was in air conditioning. She felt her skin prickle with the abrupt change in temperature, and blushed as her nipples hardened some in the cold.
She was thrust down on the floor, and she heard the voice again.
“Don’t move. If you move, you’ll get about a step before I light you up with this,” he said. Then she heard an electric crackle, very close to her ear. She flinched violently away from it, and bumped into a woman next to her. “Understand?” the voice said.
Lori nodded as the woman she’d brushed against adjusted her bodyweight to push Lori away from her. Lori started to shift to sit, then remembered she was naked. She didn’t want to sit cross-legged and expose even more of herself, so she pulled her legs together and knelt there.
After half a minute or so she heard footsteps, then someone landed on the floor next to her.
“Don’t move,” a different man said. She heard the scary crackling noise again. “You want some of this, go ahead and move, got me?”
Lori felt whoever was next to her brush against her arm, and a muffled word that might have been ‘yes’ sounded. Then the touch on her arm was gone, and she heard footsteps retreating away. A minute later they came back. More than one, then she heard the woman on her left trying to say something past the gag. Then she felt fingers at her neck, and started to scream before she realized they were fiddling with the collar on the hood.
When it came off, she blinked. Everything was bright, and it wasn’t just the hood. She couldn’t tell where they were, even after her eyes stopped watering. Some sort of room, high windows near the ceiling with sunlight streaming in. What she could tell of it seemed kind of industrial, rough and rugged. Warehouse maybe, but it was all so fuzzy. She couldn’t see crap without her glasses.
There were four men in view. Two of them wore brown clothes, another wore black, and the fourth had on a suit that was blue. Their faces were just muddled masses of skin, three of them Caucasian, the fourth either tanned or Hispanic. When she looked to either side of her, she saw she was on her knees between two women. One was brunette, the other blonde, and they looked as scared as she felt. They were doing the same thing she was; peering around wide eyed.
The man in black worked his way down the line of women, closing collars around their necks. The click sounded more ominous than an air raid siren she’d heard once at a forward base overseas, knowing a drone attack was hurtling in under the control of people who were pissed America was there blowing them and their country up.
That sound had meant she might be injured or killed. This sound meant she wasn’t a person anymore.
“Up,” the same man said, when he’d finished with the last collar and grabbed the blonde, lifting her. She stumbled back to her feet as he pulled, then followed him several steps forward. There, she was held in place, turned a few times, while the man in the suit looked at her. Up and down. Then the blonde was passed to one of the men wearing brown and she was walked through a set of double doors.
Lori was hauled to her feet and pulled over to the suit, who studied her. Up close she smelled coffee when he stood there looking at her. He had black hair and eyes, and looked normal to her. Not mean, not excited, not rugged or weathered or rural, nor elite or blue-blooded. Just a guy in a suit who cleaned up nice and apparently drank a lot of coffee if his breath was gushing it out at her.
His eyes clung to her, face and body both. Lori realized she was being evaluated, and wanted to do something. Say something. But she didn’t know who had the electric stunner she’d heard, and anyway there were four of them. Even if she weren’t tied and gagged, she couldn’t overpower four people by herself.
The suit finally gave a slight nod, and she was handed over to the other man in brown, who walked her through the doors. The air wasn’t as cool in here, and was a little more stale. They passed the first man in brown, coming back without the blonde. After turning a corner, Lori saw the blonde. She was in a holding cell, floor to ceiling bars set in the concrete and disappearing up into the ceiling.
A fifth man was standing next to the open door to the cell, and he took Lori’s arm as the man walking her in let her go.
“Inside,” the new man said. “Bench, floor, I don’t care. Just shut up and sit.”
Lori was shoved, not hard but definitely pushed, into the cell. She stood for a moment, still wary of her balance after the long hogtied ride, then went over to the bench the blonde was on and sat down near her. The blonde glanced at her, then looked back down at the floor. She seemed terrified.
Which was fair, because so was Lori. What on Earth was going on? None of the men had badges, guns, nothing. They had that stunner, but nothing that seemed official. This cell, this wherever they were, it didn’t seem official either. There were no signs on the wall, here or in the hallway. Even if Lori could read them, which she couldn’t, they still weren’t there. Every military facility she’d ever been in sprouted signs like trees did leaves.
If this was a government building she’d sign herself into slavery willingly, because no government building would look this dumpy and haphazard. No official government building anyway. Instead, she had a sinking feeling that enslavement was about to happen with or without her cooperation.
Everyone heard the stories. Possession wasn’t nine-tenths of the law when it came to collars. Collars were possession. Everything the Slavery reforms had done made it impossible to get out of a collar once it went on. If she’d been kidnapped, a good old fashioned kidnapping, there might be hope. But she’d heard the stories. And they weren’t good.
Not if a collar was involved.
The brunette joined them, this time in the grip of the man wearing black. After she was thrust into the cell, the man at the door closed it and rattled it briefly to ensure it was locked. Then he walked away, turning the hallway corner and leaving the three naked women locked inside to wait. They stared at each other, eyes wide, still gagged with their wrists bound behind them, unable to do a single thing about what was happening to them.
* * * * *
“Thirty-five is a fucking joke,” Alejandro said, shaking his head.
“I got expenses,” Everett said, spreading his hands and shrugging.
“You’re gonna get one fifty for the three of them, easy. And they come with signed papers so they’re ready to Register.”
“Everyone above me wants a taste for their trouble. This doesn’t work if there’s no room for them to take theirs when these pieces come along to them.”
“We’re the ones who did the heavy lifting.”
“And me and the folks I know are the ones paying for it, but the connections that keep it running don’t come cheap.”
“Even so, no way we’re letting them go for thirty five.”
“The blonde is on the heavy side.”
“So you melt her down for a few weeks. Don’t even cost you all that much to hang on to her if you’re not feeding her. And one of the brunettes has really big tits, which more than covers the blonde’s extra weight and you know it.”
“I can’t hold on to any of them and you know that too,” Everett said. “This whole thing starts falling apart if they’re still on-site when anyone comes looking.”
“No one’s gonna come looking. Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Same routine; there’s not here, no one here’s looking for them.”
“Sure, today, it’s local. But give it a day or two and who knows what’ll happen.”
“Yeah, right,” Eric said, a touch sourly. But he subsided when Alejandro glanced at him. He shrugged, and Alejandro returned his attention to Everett. Who spoke before Alejandro could.
“Third party rule works in my favor, as long as I move them to that third party,” Everett said. “Once they’re all the way registered, their testimony is invalid because they’re not people anymore. But that doesn’t happen if they’re still here, and if I ship that fat one now she’s worth less than the other two.”
“So you tell the buyer they’ll get a couple of weeks of light feed on that one. Thirty-five is, what, not even twelve each? Forget it. Ninety.”
“Now who’s joking?” Everett said, but Alejandro just gazed at him steadily. “Alright, forty.”
“Eighty.”
“Forty-five.”
“You wanna be cute,” Alejandro said, “then I’ll drop to seventy-five.”
“Now don’t be like that,” Everett said, smiling suddenly. “Remember, my contacts want to turn a profit too. Forty-eight”
“Which they’ll get when they train them. Seventy-two.”
“I ain’t giving you seventy-two for three ungraded girls in their thirties.”
“One of them’s twenty-eight. The old one’s only thirty-four. You saw their IDs. There’s a good solid fifteen years in each of them. At least.”
Everett shrugged. “Okay, fifty.”
“Sixty, or we load ’em back up and hit the road to Savannah.”
“Fifty-five.”
“No, we split two ways,” Alejandro said, waving at Eric. “Fifty-six but you say anything other than deal before you start counting cash out and they’re coming with us.”
Everett smiled. “Alright, fifty-six.”
Alejandro returned the smile. “Deal.”
Everett shot his cuff back and held his hand out. Alejandro shook it, and they both let each other bask in their smiles.
“Follow me boys,” Everett said as he released the man’s hand.
Everett led them inside, and past the receiving pens, past the storage pens, and into the vacant auction room. The blocks were vacant since the house was closed until the weekend’s regular consignment auction. A bar lined one long side of it, shelves of bottles and beer taps decorating it and the wall. A bored looking man was behind it, leaning on the wooden surface while he fiddled with his phone.
“Make yourselves comfortable,” Everett said, waving at the stools. “Luke, whatever they want. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Coffee?” the man behind the bar asked, straightening and putting his phone down as Alejandro took one of the stools. “Shots? Mix something up for you?”
“No, soda. Something without caffeine,” Alejandro said as he sat.
“Nothing for me,” Eric said.
“Sure,” Luke said, taking a glass from a stack waiting upside down on a towel next to the taps. Everett left him filling it as he went behind the bar at the end and through the administration door. The air conditioning was on full blast in here, the way he liked it.
After locking the door to his office, he opened up the safe and took out six stacks of wrapped hundred dollar bills. Four he split into pairs and laid side by side. A fifth stack he broke open before punching at the counting machine for a moment, then dropped the loose bills in and let it run. Money rifled through, piling in the output tray and paused when the counter read fifty.
Everett scooped that up and set it atop one of the wrapped stacks, then the other half on the second stack. Tearing off the wrapper on the last stack, he dropped those into the machine and set it to thirty. He ran that twice, adding each count to the separate stacks, then put the leftover cash back in the safe and took the counted amounts back to the bar.
“Here you go, as agreed boys,” Everett said, setting the money down.
Alejandro set his glass down and took one of the stacks, thumbing through the bills carefully. Everett waited while Eric did the same, then saw them both relax. “Pleasure,” Alejandro said, getting off the stool.
“Likewise. Let me know the next time you’re coming through with stock on your hands.”
“No sweat,” Alejandro said. Eric nodded to him, and they both headed for the door they’d come in by. Without prompting, Luke followed them. Everett took out his phone.
“Hey Marilyn, Everett. Got three if you’re interested. Yeah? Okay.”
* * * * *
Special Agent Katherine Pierce arrived at the weekly update meeting first, and claimed her favorite chair. She liked it, middle of the building side, because she had a nice view across the table. And out the windows at the park beyond. Twenty-three floors down but the trees could be seen and she found them soothing.
She opened her portfolio and spread out the paperwork from her active files, then brought her tablet to life, already pointing at the shared space the SRC unit used for electronic data. The other agents arrived in ones and twos, all men except for Jill Wilson, who had transferred into the unit just before Katherine came in as a trainee.
“Hey Kathy,” Knox said, before shaking his head with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Sorry, Katherine, my bad. How are you?”
“I’m good Agent Knox, how are you?” Katherine returned as he sat down, still smiling that non-smile at her.
“I’m well, thanks. Still not interested in grabbing a drink with me?”
“No, sorry. I just don’t—”
“—date coworkers,” Knox finished with a small sigh, shaking his head. “Pity, I know a great steakhouse. We could have a nice night out, you know, away from the office.”
Katherine just shrugged at him, offering a polite smile, and he shrugged back and looked at Franklin as he arrived and sat next to Knox. Before his eyes drifted away though, Knox let them drop down across her chest in the shirt and jacket. But he didn’t say anything, and didn’t linger more than a moment. Letting it go, Katherine went back to sipping her coffee and offering polite nods to new arrivals as they filtered in.
She didn’t dress up, she dressed professional. But she was fit and in shape, with a nice shape and brunette hair that even pulled back in a braid or wound into a tight bun still drew male eyes to her. She never wore low cut blouses, and never, never, appeared in the office in a skirt. Drawing attention was far too dangerous these days. Despite it, she was still a woman, and men looked. When that happened, problems could start.
While they talked and settled into chairs, she sat sipping at her coffee and studying the notes she’d made to field Hershey’s likely questions. Or trying to. The conversation the other agents were having kept pulling her attention, pushing her thoughts away from her cases.
The hot topic of the last couple of days was an article in The Atlantic that had been picked up by the Times – New York and Los Angeles both– and expanded on as those papers dug into the piece as well. The usual slew of online repost sites who’d add a few sentences and just copy most of the entire piece before linking the rest were fanning the publicity. Now after almost a week of gathering momentum it was hitting TV news as well.
“I don’t know,” Franklin said, “it seems like something probably should be done.”
Cook set his coffee down, looking mildly troubled as he glanced at the other man. “What can they do? Close the borders?”
“That’ll never happen,” Phillips said, shaking his head.
“Yeah, no way. That’s not America.”
Katherine held her tongue. She knew the article, and saw what was happening in the country that’d prompted it in the first place. America was a concept that was starting to die, being replaced by a new order that was anything but. It was a reversion to an older order, one before trivialities like rights and justice had made it so hard for some to organize things the way they wanted.
The article was titled Generation XX, all about the mass exodus of middle class women from America over the past decade. Rich and poor women were leaving too, more the former than the latter, but the bulk of those leaving the country in droves were middle class. More than half of that population in some states and locales. Some states had lost a lot more than half of their middle class women.
New York City alone had seen more than a million disappear from the census in the last decade, and the city was now over seventy percent male. Even if you added back in the enslaved population of women that only brought it back down to about sixty-five percent.
Congress had been rumbling about the change in the country’s demographics for a while, but the growing media thread started by The Atlantic had kicked some Senators and Representatives into gear to offer statements and use it for attention grabbing antics. Reporters had also been tracking down think tank wonks, university professors, slaving industry professionals, and economists from around the country to get their thoughts and add them to the growing gestalt of public debate.
The chaos in the online back-and-forth of debate didn’t even bear mentioning unless one was armed with a chainsaw and a bucket of bleach, to wade through all the wild notions and cleanse one’s self of the ickier ones being brought up.
“Well sooner or later they ought to do something,” Knox said.
“Like what, remove the implants?” Cook said.
Phillips rolled his eyes. “Who wants to fuck a pregnant slave?”
“At least it would boost birth rates.”
“What does that do for any of us now though?” Knox said, complained really.
“Just reduce emigration, make it harder to leave,” Franklin said, sounding like he thought it was a good idea.
“That.” Knox said, nodding. “That’s where they need to start.”
“Why?” Ramos asked. “This ain’t a police state.”
Yet Katherine thought, but she kept her mouth shut.
Ramos was still talking. “Someone wants to move, then they move. That’s how it’s always worked.”
“But there’s a limit, there’s just gotta be. Have you seen the dating scene?” Knox said before shaking his head at the older man. Ramos was a solid decade older than Knox. “No, of course you haven’t.”
“Hey fuck you, I date.”
“Sure you do,” Knox said.
“Yeah,:” Franklin said with a laugh. “Swiping your card at a Hourly Truck Fuck parked down on West Broadway and Hudson doesn’t count as dating.”
“Fuck you both,” Ramos said, glaring at them. “A man’s got needs.”
“All I’m saying is my options are pretty much either some socialite who won’t give me the time of day, much less even come out from behind the velvet rope to let me chat her up. Or some rube skank from the Bronx who’s probably going to end up in a collar before I can get to the third date with her,” Knox said, his tone grumpy.
Katherine held her tongue again. Fewer and fewer women in the country wanted to trust a man enough to date, or marry. The rational response increasingly was for the women who had the choice to flee. Congress and the States, the men, had left them little option but to get out before more laws changed.
Which was exactly the notion the article’s original writer, and now a growing swell of the hangers-on piling into the debate, were starting to solidify behind. Even some Congressmen, men not persons, were issuing statements saying as much. That something should be done about the women who were emigrating. Not something about why, just that the women could in the first place.
Increasingly large numbers of women trying to live their lives were ending up collared. Even traditional methods of staying or moving into the middle class, like attending college, were nothing but big gotcha games thanks to the slavery laws around loans. Especially college loans. Which funnily enough never seemed to focus on men, just women.
As more and more women recognized the dangers and how the changes were beginning to accelerate, those who had means were using their modest resources and looking for countries that would take them. If they could make it through college without ending up on their knees, or survive a collar with their sanity intact and then go back to work after it to bank some cash, they had some options that might open immigration doors.
The rich who stayed were retreating to closed estates. Behind trusts and foundations, layers of lawyers and bodyguards, setting up oversight to protect themselves from the collar. Even as they bought and sold less fortunate individuals who didn’t have those advantages and were collared and turned into living commodities. People pawns literally manipulated and discarded at the whim of someone wealthy.
Of course, some wealthy families had already begun to turn their female relatives into slaves. Maybe not common slaves, who mingled with the unwashed masses, but slaves regardless. Sure the trophy wife or blue-blood arranged match mate didn’t have to serve time in a corner brothel, but she was still trotting around naked behind her rich former husband. So were any of her daughters, her sisters, her mother, whoever else carrying that wealthy name who hadn’t seen it coming and hopped a flight to a non-slavery country.
And as for the lower classes, they lived in fear. They didn’t have the money to flee or to protect themselves. And the laws were stacked against them. Few people who lived on the bottom half of society didn’t know just one or two others who’d been naked on their knees for years. Most knew many.
“What would you know about dating then?” Phillips asked Knox. “If you can’t get any?”
“That’s my point, it’s impossible these days,” Knox said.
“Yeah,” Franklin put in. “When there’s no one to woo, might as well just get a membership at a brothel and jump in on the volume discounts and frequent fucker plans.”
“While saving up for a visit to the auction house.” Knox said with a laugh.
“I did that,” Cook said. “Best investment I’ve made.”
“How’d it go?” Ramos asked, looking interested.
“After Andrea left, I decided I could either spend money trying to date, or stay home saving my pennies,” Cook said with a shrug. “Skipped a new car even, drove government wheels for eighteen months, ate a lot of noodles, drank less beer. But then I had enough banked to become a regular in front of the blocks.”
“Yeah, but that’s expensive,” Phillips said.
“So’s shelling out for thirty or sixty minutes of fun at a time, even only two or three times a week.”
Ramos didn’t sound entirely convinced. “Yeah but still, you’re paying up front.”
“To save on the back end.”
“Long payback isn’t it?”
“Not if you look for bargains.”
Phillips leaned in, sounding interested. “How?”
Cook shrugged again. “Not every girl who goes up is eager, or even knows how sometimes, to push her value so only some rich asshole can afford to snap her up. I landed Susan for less than twenty grand. She’s only mid-thirties, but that’s fine. I straightened her out, and all the parts still work the same you know.”
“Plus she does dinner, the dishes, the laundry—” Franklin began.
“And shuts up during the ballgame,” Cook said with a grin. “Andrea never let me watch anything in peace.”
Katherine glanced at Jill, who was keeping her face as blank as Katherine’s as several of the men laughed. Neither of them were eager to join in the conversation. Especially since they were unlikely to share the views of the men. Or, rather, the men were unlikely to share theirs.
At first, the slavery laws had sold as a way to turn prisoners into assets, into a benefit to rather than a drag on society. But more than ninety-five percent of all criminals were men. In some states it was closer to ninety-eight percent. Throughout human history, men were generally far less well behaved than women. And these days they were writing a new chapter in it.
Sure slaves had to be naked, but protective clothing for job purposes was allowed so really it was just a punishment for those evil criminals to be humiliated some when they weren’t actually working. Americans have never been shy about deciding criminals deserve to be punished.
Congress and the States, and the men in them, had shown their true colors once they managed to empty out prisons into farms and mines that struggled to find employees willing to work for long hard hours at next to no wage. Collared men took over those tasks, and society started adjusting to this ‘modern’ version of slavery.
Debt had been added as an enslavable offense. Suddenly there were legal avenues to collar not just men, but women.
And collar women they did.
When legislatures removed collars from any form of court review to “streamline” dockets and keep the justice system from being bogged down by “nuisance suits” seeking to review and overturn unjust enslavements, that just made the naked lust of their larger plan readily apparent. Every other kind of legal transaction in the country – exchange of goods and services, contracts, fraud, crimes, anything – could be contested in court. Criminally or civilly. Reviewed, monitored, managed, overturned if found at fault.
It was the foundation of every legal system in the world. The line between barbarism and civilized society.
Except in America. Because collars were the exception.
Once it was on, the slave had no standing to object in court. Neither did anyone else. No lawyer regardless of skill or connections could make a case objecting to a collar, or calling for its revocation, since any such motion or suit was automatically dismissed.
A transaction between two free parties over the sale of a collar, for example, could be contested and fought out in court to decide who owed whom how much for the transfer of a collared person. But not the fact that the person had been enslaved.
No, that person stayed under no matter how they’d come to the collar. Which was insane, but it had passed. And courts all the way up to the very top had affirmed it. A collar couldn’t be revoked. But they hadn’t stopped there.
Somehow it wasn’t illegal, or there were no regulations prohibiting, loan officers and other issuers of debt from calling a loan in on the finest of fine print. For auction house wranglers to manipulate paperwork to “accidently” process someone as a sale rather than just a grading. Or for them or really anyone else to outright lie to maneuver someone into a collar.
Funnily enough, men carrying a debt weren’t regularly required to update their slave grades, to “make sure” their value “hadn’t significantly changed.” Yet women on a loan or other contract involving indenture as a possible remedy or payment needed to present themselves for slave grading every few years.
It was surely an accident of the laws that a collar was required for a slave grading. A collar that was just as real as any “actual” collar, even if grading was supposed to be a temporary thing. Needlessly humiliating and cruel, but necessary since a slave had value, and grading offered the opportunity to assess that value.
That it gave any visitor the right to fondle and grope whoever was on the block or post being graded, no matter how patently obvious it was they were never going to be bidding, was just a coincidence. That it required any person, any woman, undergoing that grading to submit collared and cuffed to that intimate handling, as hands and eyes roamed and probed everywhere across and in her body for hours, was just a necessary byproduct of grading.
Once that collar was on, an ever increasing range of shenanigans could be sprung on the helpless woman who could be physically and forcibly compelled to comply. No matter how humiliating or degrading the demands might be. Or how long that collar might be on.
Years in some cases. All because she’d been required to check herself in for a day to be graded.
Marriage was becoming much rarer, but divorce was no longer a problem for men who did secure a wife. Husbands who wanted out just waited for the wife to be required to report for grading for the mortgage or credit cards or the car loan, then gave the auction house new instructions. Suddenly he kept everything and collected a nice chunk of change when she was sold. She went quietly, one way or another thanks to forced compliance.
Families were even getting into the act. Even though by law slavery didn’t apply to those under eighteen, and any woman being graded – or enslaved – had to be eighteen. And thus an adult. Somehow, general practice allowed her relatives, who had no legal authority over her, to take advantage of her collared lack of legal standing to decide she was being sold so Mom and Dad or another relative could collect on the sale.
So when their daughter graduated and applied for a college or some other loan and needed to be graded, the family could just swoop in. Suddenly what would have been a single humiliating day, or two if the auction house was particularly busy, became years naked on her knees. All without anyone going to jail, and with her or anyone else completely unable to do a thing to change it short of writing a bigger check than whoever had bought her had.
If a woman made it to college with loans, she could be yanked out at any time if a loan officer wanted to call her in. Worse, many women in “needed” job categories, like medical or teaching, were “gotcha grabbed” by horny administrators and others who didn’t want to see the newly trained young professional move on with her career.
By maneuvering her into a collar, with the backing of the local community that wanted their small town hospitals and schools to have a trained person staffing a role there, she could be compelled to service that need. That the enslaved woman had to service other needs as well was surely just a coincidental bonus. Doctor by day, back office whore by night, it was win-win for everyone except the woman who’d just wanted an education.
Generation XX mentioned anecdotes like these as examples of an increasingly male society making rational decisions about the lack of available women to match up with men wanting one. The author, and many of those weighing in, found these kinds of stories logical extensions of what America should do with its remaining women. Particularly if those women kept deciding to stop “participating in American culture.”
Katherine had almost thrown her phone across the room when she’d gotten to that line in the article. Instead she’d just gone back to her work. Which was getting harder. She’d joined the Bureau hoping the FBI would show her things she didn’t know about the laws, things that would let her be part of helping roll back the worst of the abuses. She was finding the reality was much different.
She and Jill were saved from needing to use any prepared deflections against questions coming their way about the subject of slavery and the article when one of the Deputy Assistant Directors of Slavery Related Crime arrived, looking polished and poised as always.
“Good morning agents,” Hershey said as he took the chair at the head of the table. Greetings rumbled back while he opened his portfolio and then a file folder. He glanced at the papers, then looked up. “Where are we with that auction house in Philly?”
Katherine listened while she watched the tree branches waving gently outside in the park until she heard Hershey ask about Richmond Shipping. “That’s mine sir. The local office is still running down the company’s board, but so far they’re coming up clean. Staff already checked out.”
“No connection to the missing collars?” Hershey said. “Nothing?”
“No sir, not that they can spot. I’m looking through financials, and if they’re getting kickbacks I can’t spot it. Neither can Forensic Accounting, but I’ll check back with them after they’ve had some more time to dig.”
“Okay, but don’t stop until you’ve got something,” Hershey said, nodding.
“Yes sir.”
“Good.”
No, not good, Katherine thought. The same slave shipping company operating out of Richmond Virginia had seen three separate shipments, each of more than fifteen newly collared slaves, turn up missing in the last two months. Someone was on the take.
You wouldn’t think slaves could just be lost, considering that they – used to be – people. And people could be identified. Fingerprints, photographs, DNA. Yet there was a brisk black market slave trade, designed solely to avoid taxes. Both official, and the fees auction houses, mostly owned by large corporations, tacked onto sales.
Since all three trucks had been headed out of state, that made it FBI’s problem once the right people with the right ears to talk to began complaining. Which led to the people attached to those ears passing along the complaints to still more ears. And so on until the ears were on Senators and Representatives who could make ears belonging to people in the Department of Justice listen.
Since the investigation was turning up no leads in the company, that meant whatever was going on was hidden. Katherine might be barely out of her trainee period, but she knew that if you looked for something that should be there, but wasn’t, that meant someone was hiding it.
Except she knew Joe “Don’t” Hershey did not want to hear it, because that meant turning over stones that someone had gone to lengths to bury. Might upset someone else with the ear of a person who had the word “director” in their title, but not the word “deputy” or “assistant” tacked onto it.
Deputy Assistant Director Hershey was eager to get both of those words out of his title. He was nothing but a political animal.
Joe Don’t was what agents whispered behind his back, because Don’t don’t want to hear it. If it would ruin the nice, easily digested narrative he wanted to be able to lay out and make people who could decide his fate happy, he don’t want to hear it. He don’t want to read it, he don’t want you to bring it up. Just don’t.
“What about the Miami escort thing?” Hershey asked.
“Also mine sir,” Katherine said. “The surveillance there finally caught one of the trainers live and in color. That’s who was leaving security disabled so the after-hours outcalls could happen.”
“About time.” Hershey grumbled. “So they’re moving to arrest then?”
“They need to finesse the warrants a little. I have one in to the court here to have his bank release some additional records to me. When I can see where he’s taking payments from, and where he’s sending them, I’ll fire it off to the local agents and they’ll clean up their paperwork and get the arrest warrants signed.”
“Stay on it. There’s some heavy hitters breathing on us over this one, so don’t let administrative issues screw it up.”
“Yes sir.”
The problem wasn’t that slaves were being farmed out for after-hours sex work. It was just that the trainer was doing it off the books, without his company benefitting. He was taking payments to supply slaves for a night at a time to grey-market pimps, and cutting his corporate employer out of the loop.
When the slaves were deprived of sleep, and their mental states disrupted by threats and warnings and harsh sexual overwork, the company lost money. Customers complained slaves were late, more mistake prone, inattentive, which looked bad and made them customers of some other house that could supply their slave needs without issues.
Can’t stop the profit. The company had found an ear to yell in.
Hershey moved on to other cases. Finally he shuffled a new folder to the top and cleared his throat.
“Something new, this one’s got AD McCoy taking heat from a lot of people,” he began. That was always a bad sign, when he mentioned the man in the chair he wanted to sit in next. Hershey was one of four SRC unit deputy assistant directors, which divided the caseload of slave related crime across the country between them. McCoy oversaw them, and Hershey wanted the slot.
“An air traffic controller in Mississippi turned up missing, and after the locals got done fumbling around they finally remembered to call us in,” Hershey said, not even glancing at the file. Another bad sign, if he’d studied it enough to quote it.
“They waited even though she was Federal sir?” Knox asked. He was another political animal, always eager to score points.
“Even so. I already had a word with the city and county departments down there, reminding them we’re the first call when one of ours goes missing.”
“Good idea sir.”
Hershey traded self-congratulatory nods with Knox, then returned his attention to the table at large. “We found her in the Slave Registry, warming a bed at a brothel in Wilmington, North Carolina. She said she was picked up by sheriff’s deputies out of her apartment in the middle of the night. Who told her she was being repossessed for credit card debt.”
“Was she sir?” Franklin asked.
“Unclear. Doesn’t matter though. They bought her from a curious auction house in Memphis. Once the Memphis office started looking into it a bunch of established houses in the Southeast started clamoring for us to do something to shut them down. Except the local office can’t find anything they can act on, so they kicked it up to us.
“We need to look at the background and financials for everyone involved, figure out what’s going on. Memphis gave us a list of what they’ve come up with, but it’s not much. Knox, Franklin, Pierce, you get on this. Hopefully we can wrap it up quick and get back to bigger problems.”
“Yes sir,” Katherine said with the other agents.
Hershey nodded and looked down at his papers, flipped a page, another, then sat back and closed the portfolio. “That’s it, go to work.”
Chairs began rolling back and people rose to leave the briefing room.
By D. Night
Part 1 of 2
Lori started awake, blinking in confusion. What was that? As she was trying to kick her brain into gear she heard shouting.
“Lauderdale Sheriff’s Deputies!”
Sitting up, she reached for her glasses as she heard the shout repeated. It was a man. Then another man, his voice just as loud as the first. “Clear kitchen.”
They were in her apartment, Lori realized with a start. She got her glasses on just as her bedroom door flew open and bounced off the wall. The scream escaped before she could control it, then a bright light transfixed her. As she heard the door rebounding off the man’s leg, while he moved through the doorway, she heard him shout before going back to barking at her. “In here. Lori Pena? Sheriff’s Deputy, don’t move.”
“What—what?” Lori stammered before she felt twin spikes of pain lance into her chest as she sat in the bed staring at the light, trying to see past it. Then her body convulsed as every bit of her lit up with fire that just went on and on and on. She heard her teeth clack together, and she fell back against the pillows, shaking violently. A moment later the fire went out, but she kept quivering as she felt someone heavy kneeling on the bed.
She was rolled over, roughly, and fast enough to knock her glasses askew. Her hands were pulled behind her and handcuffed. Then she was pushed back over and the light went in her face again, dazzling her. “Yeah, it’s her,” a man said.
“What—” Lori tried again before she was swiftly yanked out of the bed to her feet. Her glasses slipped off and fell away somewhere, but she was more worried about how her body didn’t seem to want to cooperate. Her legs felt like jelly, and she could barely keep her head upright as it wobbled and swung about on her neck.
“Lori Pena, we’re serving a warrant for your enslavement,” a man behind the one holding her said.
That spiked a jet of icy fear right through her, and her lungs found enough energy to summon sufficient coordination to draw and properly expel a breath to talk with. “What’s going on?”
“Failure to stay current on credit cards,” the same man said, while the first started ripping at her nightclothes. Cloth was tearing.
“Let me go!” Lori said in alarm. “I’m not behind on my credit cards. I don’t even carry a balance.”
“Tell it to the judge. Bank already filed with the court.”
Her nightgown was in tatters as fabric parted, then the man holding her grabbed a handful of it and tore the rest. The ruined garment fluttered down her body, revealing her breasts. All she had left on was her panties, which lasted barely a few seconds before he started ripping at them too.
“I’m not behind on anything. This is unlawful. Let me go! Help, help, hel—” Lori said, her voice getting stronger as she went on, until she was finally screaming. Then she felt the fire again, and almost bit her tongue as her teeth slammed together and her body locked up. She fell over on the bed, bounced, slid off the edge, and landed on the floor gasping for breath through the pain.
Before she could catch it, she felt a knee on her back, then her head was yanked up and she felt something being strapped across her mouth. Before she could get her muscles to cooperate properly, whatever it was had been buckled down tightly. Gagging her.
“Got it,” the man over her said, in a lower voice.
“Same here,” the other said, followed by a sort of heavy thump as something was tossed on the floor. He was also speaking quieter now.
The man on her stood her back up, muscling her off the floor with both hands like she was a doll. She was entirely naked now, her hair swishing against her shoulders and back as he swung her around ahead of him. Then she was stumbling forward as he shoved her into motion.
Ahead in the doorway, just turning to lead the way out, was a blurry figure wearing brown; light brown shirt, darker brown pants. She couldn’t see more than that, not with the lights off and her glasses somewhere in the bedroom she was being frogmarched from.
She was propelled down the little hallway, through her living room, and out into the apartment stairwell. As it began to register she was outside fully naked, she heard the voice of her next-door neighbor. He sounded sleepy.
“Hey, what’s going on.”
“Get back inside sir,” the man ahead of her said in a brusque, borderline hostile tone. Loud again. “Not your concern.”
“But—” Steve said, sounding a little less sleepy and a lot more confused now. She could just make out his face, pointing in her direction.
“You wanna go for a ride too?” the deputy said, and she heard the click-clack of metal, along with a faint jingle of chain.
“No, but—”
“No buts, inside now or you’re coming with us. In a collar, not just handcuffs.”
Steve’s face came into vague focus as she was walked past him, as naked as she’d never been outside a doctor’s office or her home. He was staring at her with wide eyes and a pale expression. Then his eyes flicked down to her body, where they lingered for a second.
As horrifying as this was, her next door neighbor staring at her full nudity was worse. Just for a moment or so, but it sent fresh humiliation coursing through her. Yanked out of bed, stripped nude, handcuffed and gagged was all bad enough. Now a man who’d been sneaking peeks at her a few times a week when they passed each other on the way in or out of their apartments was getting a full view.
She wanted this to stop, but the deputy wouldn’t quit walking, wouldn’t let her go. Her naked form was just being shoved along the walkway like she was so much meat.
“Now sir!” the man holding her said.
Lori lost sight of Steve, but a moment later, as she was moved away from his unit, she heard the door close. She tried to pull away from the deputy holding her, but she was handcuffed, gagged, and he was both taller and stronger than she was. His fingers were like vice grips on her upper arms, and when she tried to dig her bare heels in she winced in pain as her flesh abraded on the concrete.
He didn’t stop, not even at that brief attempt to slow her progress. His hands stayed on her, and his strength kept her moving. Lori stumbled down the stairs, nearly falling four times except for his grip, and then out across the lower hallway to the parking lot where a black SUV with rotating blue lights was parked in the handicapped spot near the stairwell.
It was still night. She had no idea how long she’d been asleep, but she didn’t feel sleepy. But she wasn’t sure if that was from the shock of what was happening, or what they’d done to her in the bedroom, or just because she’d gotten enough sleep before it all began. All she could tell was it was still gloomy in the parking lot, with the barely adequate street lights doing their usual pathetic job of casting more shadows than illumination out from the handful of poles.
She wasn’t taken to one of the SUV’s doors, and barely had time to wonder why before she was at the back of the vehicle. The deputy ahead of her reached it first, but paused with his hand on the rear latch until the one shoving her along had circled past him and had her at the far side. Then he opened the back hatch, pulling it back swiftly.
Lori blinked as she dimly registered two more people inside. Naked, women from what she could tell. They were struggling, but she only heard a few faint sounds. Muffled screams. Muffled like hers. She started trying to wrench away from the deputies again, but she was pushed forward against the bumper and tipped inside like a piece of furniture.
She landed on her front, compressing both breasts painfully. Her breath drained away from the impact. Someone kneed her shoulder, which hurt. Then her legs were picked up and she was shoved all the way in. Her body bumped against the other two women, forcing them aside like a wedge as she was pushed in between them. She was struggling as hard as they were, picking up impacts that hurt even as she felt her knees and elbows landing on them that probably did the same right back.
Trying to roll over, she felt the man’s hands come down on her back, and the vehicle dipped as he climbed in after her. The door closed, then as he yanked her head back by her hair and began pulling a hood down over her head, she heard one of the front doors open. A moment later, as she lost even her uncorrected fuzzy sight, the engine started
* * * * *
Eric tightened the locking collar on the hood and double checked that it had in fact locked. The brunette was struggling, but the other two had settled back down when he smacked at them with his gloved hands. There wasn’t a lot of room in the rear, and the whole task became harder when Alejandro backed out of the space.
Bracing himself, Eric used his body weight to keep the brunette’s legs stabilized so she couldn’t kick at him, and waited. Alejandro shifted into drive and pulled out, but Eric kept waiting. Two more swift turns and the SUV was at the apartment complex’s front entrance. When Alejandro turned out onto the road and straightened out, Eric got back to work.
An athletic bandage captured her ankles as he wounded it around and around, then a ziptie from his police style belt ensured she couldn’t wiggle out of it. He checked the ziptie carefully, making sure it had engaged and didn’t loosen when he tugged on it. Another bandage went around her wrists, then he retrieved the handcuffs and replaced them with another ziptie.
Then he got off her and forced her legs to fold up behind her so he could use a third tie to secure her ankles to her wrists. Now she could not straighten, stand, kick, or reach. Now she was secure.
“How you doing?” Alejandro asked.
“Triple checking now,” Eric said.
“Good, be sure.”
Eric checked Lori’s bonds once more while using a small pair of nippers to clip the excess off the ties. She wasn’t going anywhere. Since he was back there, he checked the other two as well. Joyce, the blonde, was just as she’d been when they’d picked her up in Shreveport, but Stephanie, another brunette, had managed to somehow tighten her wrist tie a click or two and her fingers felt a little cold. He replaced it with a fresh tie, cut off the old one and the excess, and sat back to look over all three women.
They were all hooded securely, hogtied, on their bellies, and even as they struggled and tried to cry out, he couldn’t hear very much. Not even this close. “Okay, we’re good,” he said, looking at the front.
“Alright, hang on a sec,” Alejandro said. Eric waited, while the SUV pulled over to the side of the road. “Wait,” the driver said again.
Eric could see the headlights from behind them and did as Alejandro instructed. The vehicle went past them without stopping, and he heard the locks disengage. Opening the rear hatch just enough to squeeze out, he did so and closed it back, heard it lock and made sure it didn’t open when he pulled on the latch. Then he went forward to the passenger side and waited for the locks to click off long enough for him to open that door.
As they thunk-kachunked again, relocking the vehicle, Eric slid into the seat and closed the door. “Okay.”
“Great,” Alejandro said, checking his mirror, then looking over his shoulder, before pulling out into the empty lane and getting the vehicle back underway.
Neither man said anything else. Eric tucked his black tac-style gloves into a compartment on the police belt, and lifted a bottle of water from the cupholder on his side for a long drink. But after replacing the cap, he just continued to ride in calm silence. Alejandro followed the dash screen and it’s automatically updating map to the interstate, and rolled up the ramp to I-20 to head east.
Less than half an hour later they were over the border from Mississippi into Alabama. Alejandro left the interstate for US-80, and pulled off on a small two-lane country road two minutes later. It curved after half a mile, and they were in the middle of nowhere for the moment, with dawn still an hour away. The driver hit buttons on his door that unlocked the vehicle and rolled both front windows down, and took something out of his shirt pocket. “Make it fast.”
“Got it,” Eric said, getting out with the window scraper from his pocket already in hand. He closed the door and used the scraper to peel up the corner of the Lauderdale Sheriff’s Department logo, then continued using it to help the magnetic sticker detach from the door as he pulled on it. He got it off in one piece and dropped it inside the car. Then he did the same on the rear passenger door for the other logo’s other half.
Alejandro was already waiting when Eric opened the passenger door and dumped the second logo half before stepping up on the running board so he could comfortably reach the roof. He flipped the light bar’s electro-magnets off and accepted the whole bar when Alejandro did the same on the other end and helped lift and ease it over to him.
With it in hand, Eric stepped down and dumped the bar into the back seat atop the logos. Then he grabbed the other license plate before getting out. At the back, Alejandro had already used the power screwdriver to spin the plate’s screws out. He caught them but let the plate fall to the gravel on the shoulder. Eric held the new plate in place until Alejandro had the screws back in the holes and was tightening them down.
He took the old plate with him back up front and set it in the back seat, then returned to the rear of the SUV. While Alejandro started a circle of the vehicle, studying it and the ground around it carefully, Eric opened the rear door to check on the women.
All three were still hogtied, still hooded. They moved some when they heard the door, but the gags continued to stifle every attempt they made to communicate. Anyway, there was no one out here to hear them. Eric checked their bonds, then reached for the cargo cover he and his partner had rigged up.
It was just a roller affixed to the rear of the back seat, with the free edge of the cloth tied to a wooden rod. When he pulled it out, the fabric stretched out and covered the cargo compartment, and the hogtied women, completely. He slotted the rod into the brackets they’d added next to the rear door, and put in the cotter pins to ensure it stayed. Magnets on both edges of the cloth caught against others super-glued to the sides of the SUV, holding it from gaping or flapping loose.
Eric closed up and went to the back seat, where he shook out a black blanket and tossed it over all the gear and logo trash, then got in the front passenger seat again. A few moments later Alejandro finished his circle inspection and joined him, sliding in behind the wheel.
The locks reengaged, the windows rolled back up, and Alejandro performed a five point turn to back and fill the SUV across the quiet empty lanes so he could direct the vehicle back to US-80.
When they were on the road headed east again, Eric stripped off his police belt and got out of the vest with the patches and badge indicating he was Mississippi Lauderdale County Sheriff’s Deputy. It all went into a duffle bag waiting on the floorboard next to his feet. Alejandro did the same, shrugging carefully out of the vest and the belt as he drove and handed it all over to join Eric’s items in the bag.
Eric clicked on a mini-flash and checked Alejandro’s shirt and pants, then his own. “Good,” Alejandro said after glancing over to eyeball Eric’s clothes when the light swung to them. His seat belt clicked into place as he drew it down across himself.
Zipping the duffle up, Eric put it back on the floor and took another sip of water, then put his seat belt on and settled back for the ride. They were just two guys wearing brown cargo pants and light brown buttoned shirts in an unmarked SUV.
* * * * *
Lori was being pulled out of the SUV when she woke up again. The vehicle’s rough carpet hurt against her bare skin as she was slid across it. The trip was a blur. At first she’d tried to calm herself, reassured by how they would have reached the office or wherever they were taking her, and run her ID. After a records check, they would have discovered they’d made a mistake.
Sure she’d been hauled out naked, and scared shitless, but she did have no balance on her credit cards. So they’d process her, whatever it was they did, and then she’d be free. Revenge or compensation could come after they’d set her loose. At this point, Lori almost didn’t even care if she had to call a coworker or even her dad to bring her clothes while she huddled naked in a bathroom, as long as they let her go.
But as the hogtied ride had stretched well past what had to be an hour, she began to worry. The restraints didn’t hurt, but that wasn’t the same as saying they were comfortable. And the folded up position was making her knees and shoulders start to ache a little as the vehicle kept rolling and she stayed tied up. Her mouth was dry. She wanted to stretch out and couldn’t.
She had no idea what was ‘normal’ when someone was taken into custody for enslavement. She’d always structured her life to be certain she couldn’t fall afoul of such issues.
Military, not college since she’d been born to parents who had little means. In the service, the worst she needed to endure was being screamed at and having little control over when or where she slept, ate, and worked. But she kept her clothes, and didn’t have to fuck anyone. After being trained as a radar operator by the Air Force, it wasn’t difficult to pay for and pass the additional training she needed to be a qualified air traffic controller. The FAA was happy to take her and put her in an airport.
She owned her car, her apartment lease had no enslavement clauses. Neither did her credit cards unless she was more than ten thousand dollars behind in her payments. She had certified letters from a lawyer she’d paid to painstakingly explain all the legal documents to her in plain English, confirming she was at no risk of a collar.
Yet here she was, naked and hogtied in the back of a vehicle with a hood she couldn’t shake off her head. With two other women. She knew they were women because whatever her blurry nearsighted eyes had or hadn’t told her, she’d bumped and rubbed against them enough by now to know they were women. Soft bodies, rounded hips and breasts, and they were as bound and gagged as she was.
They sounded scared. Whatever was going on, Lori was scared too.
Yet nothing else had happened. The vehicle stopped once, and she heard some noises as the men puttered around with it for a while. They checked her, but just to make sure she was still bound. Then it stopped again, and hands checked her restraints and her once more. As bad as this was, worse didn’t happen; no one touched her. Not in the ways she was most scared of anyway.
As the ride kept going, and she began to accept that she couldn’t wiggle or break out of the restraints, she fell asleep from sheer boredom. She woke up being checked yet again, but went back to sleep as the trip continued. And now she was being hauled out, apparently at some sort of stopping point.
“On your feet,” a man said. She didn’t know if it was one of the same pair who’d done this to her. The trip was like a nightmare, as blurry as her vision, and just as dark thanks to the hood. It seemed so long ago since she’d been shouted at in her bedroom. Her arms and legs ached from the restraints. Then she felt the ziptie on her ankles loosen with an audible snap, and whatever they’d wrapped around them fell away.
He pulled on her and she swayed as she stood up, but her legs were weak. She stumbled, then would have fallen if not for his hands on her arms. Her skin felt hot as she struggled to get her feet beneath her. She heard him swear softly, but he stood her back up and she felt his breath rippling the fabric of the hood.
“Walk,” the voice said in her ear. “If I have to carry you, it’ll come with bruises. Understand?”
Lori nodded and tried to walk when he moved her again. Her legs didn’t really want to cooperate very well, but he seemed satisfied with her efforts. She felt the rough concrete turn into something smoother, hard but without the ridges and texture that hurt her feet. Now they were mostly just cold. The heat on her skin was gone as well, then she heard a door and she was in air conditioning. She felt her skin prickle with the abrupt change in temperature, and blushed as her nipples hardened some in the cold.
She was thrust down on the floor, and she heard the voice again.
“Don’t move. If you move, you’ll get about a step before I light you up with this,” he said. Then she heard an electric crackle, very close to her ear. She flinched violently away from it, and bumped into a woman next to her. “Understand?” the voice said.
Lori nodded as the woman she’d brushed against adjusted her bodyweight to push Lori away from her. Lori started to shift to sit, then remembered she was naked. She didn’t want to sit cross-legged and expose even more of herself, so she pulled her legs together and knelt there.
After half a minute or so she heard footsteps, then someone landed on the floor next to her.
“Don’t move,” a different man said. She heard the scary crackling noise again. “You want some of this, go ahead and move, got me?”
Lori felt whoever was next to her brush against her arm, and a muffled word that might have been ‘yes’ sounded. Then the touch on her arm was gone, and she heard footsteps retreating away. A minute later they came back. More than one, then she heard the woman on her left trying to say something past the gag. Then she felt fingers at her neck, and started to scream before she realized they were fiddling with the collar on the hood.
When it came off, she blinked. Everything was bright, and it wasn’t just the hood. She couldn’t tell where they were, even after her eyes stopped watering. Some sort of room, high windows near the ceiling with sunlight streaming in. What she could tell of it seemed kind of industrial, rough and rugged. Warehouse maybe, but it was all so fuzzy. She couldn’t see crap without her glasses.
There were four men in view. Two of them wore brown clothes, another wore black, and the fourth had on a suit that was blue. Their faces were just muddled masses of skin, three of them Caucasian, the fourth either tanned or Hispanic. When she looked to either side of her, she saw she was on her knees between two women. One was brunette, the other blonde, and they looked as scared as she felt. They were doing the same thing she was; peering around wide eyed.
The man in black worked his way down the line of women, closing collars around their necks. The click sounded more ominous than an air raid siren she’d heard once at a forward base overseas, knowing a drone attack was hurtling in under the control of people who were pissed America was there blowing them and their country up.
That sound had meant she might be injured or killed. This sound meant she wasn’t a person anymore.
“Up,” the same man said, when he’d finished with the last collar and grabbed the blonde, lifting her. She stumbled back to her feet as he pulled, then followed him several steps forward. There, she was held in place, turned a few times, while the man in the suit looked at her. Up and down. Then the blonde was passed to one of the men wearing brown and she was walked through a set of double doors.
Lori was hauled to her feet and pulled over to the suit, who studied her. Up close she smelled coffee when he stood there looking at her. He had black hair and eyes, and looked normal to her. Not mean, not excited, not rugged or weathered or rural, nor elite or blue-blooded. Just a guy in a suit who cleaned up nice and apparently drank a lot of coffee if his breath was gushing it out at her.
His eyes clung to her, face and body both. Lori realized she was being evaluated, and wanted to do something. Say something. But she didn’t know who had the electric stunner she’d heard, and anyway there were four of them. Even if she weren’t tied and gagged, she couldn’t overpower four people by herself.
The suit finally gave a slight nod, and she was handed over to the other man in brown, who walked her through the doors. The air wasn’t as cool in here, and was a little more stale. They passed the first man in brown, coming back without the blonde. After turning a corner, Lori saw the blonde. She was in a holding cell, floor to ceiling bars set in the concrete and disappearing up into the ceiling.
A fifth man was standing next to the open door to the cell, and he took Lori’s arm as the man walking her in let her go.
“Inside,” the new man said. “Bench, floor, I don’t care. Just shut up and sit.”
Lori was shoved, not hard but definitely pushed, into the cell. She stood for a moment, still wary of her balance after the long hogtied ride, then went over to the bench the blonde was on and sat down near her. The blonde glanced at her, then looked back down at the floor. She seemed terrified.
Which was fair, because so was Lori. What on Earth was going on? None of the men had badges, guns, nothing. They had that stunner, but nothing that seemed official. This cell, this wherever they were, it didn’t seem official either. There were no signs on the wall, here or in the hallway. Even if Lori could read them, which she couldn’t, they still weren’t there. Every military facility she’d ever been in sprouted signs like trees did leaves.
If this was a government building she’d sign herself into slavery willingly, because no government building would look this dumpy and haphazard. No official government building anyway. Instead, she had a sinking feeling that enslavement was about to happen with or without her cooperation.
Everyone heard the stories. Possession wasn’t nine-tenths of the law when it came to collars. Collars were possession. Everything the Slavery reforms had done made it impossible to get out of a collar once it went on. If she’d been kidnapped, a good old fashioned kidnapping, there might be hope. But she’d heard the stories. And they weren’t good.
Not if a collar was involved.
The brunette joined them, this time in the grip of the man wearing black. After she was thrust into the cell, the man at the door closed it and rattled it briefly to ensure it was locked. Then he walked away, turning the hallway corner and leaving the three naked women locked inside to wait. They stared at each other, eyes wide, still gagged with their wrists bound behind them, unable to do a single thing about what was happening to them.
* * * * *
“Thirty-five is a fucking joke,” Alejandro said, shaking his head.
“I got expenses,” Everett said, spreading his hands and shrugging.
“You’re gonna get one fifty for the three of them, easy. And they come with signed papers so they’re ready to Register.”
“Everyone above me wants a taste for their trouble. This doesn’t work if there’s no room for them to take theirs when these pieces come along to them.”
“We’re the ones who did the heavy lifting.”
“And me and the folks I know are the ones paying for it, but the connections that keep it running don’t come cheap.”
“Even so, no way we’re letting them go for thirty five.”
“The blonde is on the heavy side.”
“So you melt her down for a few weeks. Don’t even cost you all that much to hang on to her if you’re not feeding her. And one of the brunettes has really big tits, which more than covers the blonde’s extra weight and you know it.”
“I can’t hold on to any of them and you know that too,” Everett said. “This whole thing starts falling apart if they’re still on-site when anyone comes looking.”
“No one’s gonna come looking. Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Same routine; there’s not here, no one here’s looking for them.”
“Sure, today, it’s local. But give it a day or two and who knows what’ll happen.”
“Yeah, right,” Eric said, a touch sourly. But he subsided when Alejandro glanced at him. He shrugged, and Alejandro returned his attention to Everett. Who spoke before Alejandro could.
“Third party rule works in my favor, as long as I move them to that third party,” Everett said. “Once they’re all the way registered, their testimony is invalid because they’re not people anymore. But that doesn’t happen if they’re still here, and if I ship that fat one now she’s worth less than the other two.”
“So you tell the buyer they’ll get a couple of weeks of light feed on that one. Thirty-five is, what, not even twelve each? Forget it. Ninety.”
“Now who’s joking?” Everett said, but Alejandro just gazed at him steadily. “Alright, forty.”
“Eighty.”
“Forty-five.”
“You wanna be cute,” Alejandro said, “then I’ll drop to seventy-five.”
“Now don’t be like that,” Everett said, smiling suddenly. “Remember, my contacts want to turn a profit too. Forty-eight”
“Which they’ll get when they train them. Seventy-two.”
“I ain’t giving you seventy-two for three ungraded girls in their thirties.”
“One of them’s twenty-eight. The old one’s only thirty-four. You saw their IDs. There’s a good solid fifteen years in each of them. At least.”
Everett shrugged. “Okay, fifty.”
“Sixty, or we load ’em back up and hit the road to Savannah.”
“Fifty-five.”
“No, we split two ways,” Alejandro said, waving at Eric. “Fifty-six but you say anything other than deal before you start counting cash out and they’re coming with us.”
Everett smiled. “Alright, fifty-six.”
Alejandro returned the smile. “Deal.”
Everett shot his cuff back and held his hand out. Alejandro shook it, and they both let each other bask in their smiles.
“Follow me boys,” Everett said as he released the man’s hand.
Everett led them inside, and past the receiving pens, past the storage pens, and into the vacant auction room. The blocks were vacant since the house was closed until the weekend’s regular consignment auction. A bar lined one long side of it, shelves of bottles and beer taps decorating it and the wall. A bored looking man was behind it, leaning on the wooden surface while he fiddled with his phone.
“Make yourselves comfortable,” Everett said, waving at the stools. “Luke, whatever they want. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Coffee?” the man behind the bar asked, straightening and putting his phone down as Alejandro took one of the stools. “Shots? Mix something up for you?”
“No, soda. Something without caffeine,” Alejandro said as he sat.
“Nothing for me,” Eric said.
“Sure,” Luke said, taking a glass from a stack waiting upside down on a towel next to the taps. Everett left him filling it as he went behind the bar at the end and through the administration door. The air conditioning was on full blast in here, the way he liked it.
After locking the door to his office, he opened up the safe and took out six stacks of wrapped hundred dollar bills. Four he split into pairs and laid side by side. A fifth stack he broke open before punching at the counting machine for a moment, then dropped the loose bills in and let it run. Money rifled through, piling in the output tray and paused when the counter read fifty.
Everett scooped that up and set it atop one of the wrapped stacks, then the other half on the second stack. Tearing off the wrapper on the last stack, he dropped those into the machine and set it to thirty. He ran that twice, adding each count to the separate stacks, then put the leftover cash back in the safe and took the counted amounts back to the bar.
“Here you go, as agreed boys,” Everett said, setting the money down.
Alejandro set his glass down and took one of the stacks, thumbing through the bills carefully. Everett waited while Eric did the same, then saw them both relax. “Pleasure,” Alejandro said, getting off the stool.
“Likewise. Let me know the next time you’re coming through with stock on your hands.”
“No sweat,” Alejandro said. Eric nodded to him, and they both headed for the door they’d come in by. Without prompting, Luke followed them. Everett took out his phone.
“Hey Marilyn, Everett. Got three if you’re interested. Yeah? Okay.”
* * * * *
Special Agent Katherine Pierce arrived at the weekly update meeting first, and claimed her favorite chair. She liked it, middle of the building side, because she had a nice view across the table. And out the windows at the park beyond. Twenty-three floors down but the trees could be seen and she found them soothing.
She opened her portfolio and spread out the paperwork from her active files, then brought her tablet to life, already pointing at the shared space the SRC unit used for electronic data. The other agents arrived in ones and twos, all men except for Jill Wilson, who had transferred into the unit just before Katherine came in as a trainee.
“Hey Kathy,” Knox said, before shaking his head with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Sorry, Katherine, my bad. How are you?”
“I’m good Agent Knox, how are you?” Katherine returned as he sat down, still smiling that non-smile at her.
“I’m well, thanks. Still not interested in grabbing a drink with me?”
“No, sorry. I just don’t—”
“—date coworkers,” Knox finished with a small sigh, shaking his head. “Pity, I know a great steakhouse. We could have a nice night out, you know, away from the office.”
Katherine just shrugged at him, offering a polite smile, and he shrugged back and looked at Franklin as he arrived and sat next to Knox. Before his eyes drifted away though, Knox let them drop down across her chest in the shirt and jacket. But he didn’t say anything, and didn’t linger more than a moment. Letting it go, Katherine went back to sipping her coffee and offering polite nods to new arrivals as they filtered in.
She didn’t dress up, she dressed professional. But she was fit and in shape, with a nice shape and brunette hair that even pulled back in a braid or wound into a tight bun still drew male eyes to her. She never wore low cut blouses, and never, never, appeared in the office in a skirt. Drawing attention was far too dangerous these days. Despite it, she was still a woman, and men looked. When that happened, problems could start.
While they talked and settled into chairs, she sat sipping at her coffee and studying the notes she’d made to field Hershey’s likely questions. Or trying to. The conversation the other agents were having kept pulling her attention, pushing her thoughts away from her cases.
The hot topic of the last couple of days was an article in The Atlantic that had been picked up by the Times – New York and Los Angeles both– and expanded on as those papers dug into the piece as well. The usual slew of online repost sites who’d add a few sentences and just copy most of the entire piece before linking the rest were fanning the publicity. Now after almost a week of gathering momentum it was hitting TV news as well.
“I don’t know,” Franklin said, “it seems like something probably should be done.”
Cook set his coffee down, looking mildly troubled as he glanced at the other man. “What can they do? Close the borders?”
“That’ll never happen,” Phillips said, shaking his head.
“Yeah, no way. That’s not America.”
Katherine held her tongue. She knew the article, and saw what was happening in the country that’d prompted it in the first place. America was a concept that was starting to die, being replaced by a new order that was anything but. It was a reversion to an older order, one before trivialities like rights and justice had made it so hard for some to organize things the way they wanted.
The article was titled Generation XX, all about the mass exodus of middle class women from America over the past decade. Rich and poor women were leaving too, more the former than the latter, but the bulk of those leaving the country in droves were middle class. More than half of that population in some states and locales. Some states had lost a lot more than half of their middle class women.
New York City alone had seen more than a million disappear from the census in the last decade, and the city was now over seventy percent male. Even if you added back in the enslaved population of women that only brought it back down to about sixty-five percent.
Congress had been rumbling about the change in the country’s demographics for a while, but the growing media thread started by The Atlantic had kicked some Senators and Representatives into gear to offer statements and use it for attention grabbing antics. Reporters had also been tracking down think tank wonks, university professors, slaving industry professionals, and economists from around the country to get their thoughts and add them to the growing gestalt of public debate.
The chaos in the online back-and-forth of debate didn’t even bear mentioning unless one was armed with a chainsaw and a bucket of bleach, to wade through all the wild notions and cleanse one’s self of the ickier ones being brought up.
“Well sooner or later they ought to do something,” Knox said.
“Like what, remove the implants?” Cook said.
Phillips rolled his eyes. “Who wants to fuck a pregnant slave?”
“At least it would boost birth rates.”
“What does that do for any of us now though?” Knox said, complained really.
“Just reduce emigration, make it harder to leave,” Franklin said, sounding like he thought it was a good idea.
“That.” Knox said, nodding. “That’s where they need to start.”
“Why?” Ramos asked. “This ain’t a police state.”
Yet Katherine thought, but she kept her mouth shut.
Ramos was still talking. “Someone wants to move, then they move. That’s how it’s always worked.”
“But there’s a limit, there’s just gotta be. Have you seen the dating scene?” Knox said before shaking his head at the older man. Ramos was a solid decade older than Knox. “No, of course you haven’t.”
“Hey fuck you, I date.”
“Sure you do,” Knox said.
“Yeah,:” Franklin said with a laugh. “Swiping your card at a Hourly Truck Fuck parked down on West Broadway and Hudson doesn’t count as dating.”
“Fuck you both,” Ramos said, glaring at them. “A man’s got needs.”
“All I’m saying is my options are pretty much either some socialite who won’t give me the time of day, much less even come out from behind the velvet rope to let me chat her up. Or some rube skank from the Bronx who’s probably going to end up in a collar before I can get to the third date with her,” Knox said, his tone grumpy.
Katherine held her tongue again. Fewer and fewer women in the country wanted to trust a man enough to date, or marry. The rational response increasingly was for the women who had the choice to flee. Congress and the States, the men, had left them little option but to get out before more laws changed.
Which was exactly the notion the article’s original writer, and now a growing swell of the hangers-on piling into the debate, were starting to solidify behind. Even some Congressmen, men not persons, were issuing statements saying as much. That something should be done about the women who were emigrating. Not something about why, just that the women could in the first place.
Increasingly large numbers of women trying to live their lives were ending up collared. Even traditional methods of staying or moving into the middle class, like attending college, were nothing but big gotcha games thanks to the slavery laws around loans. Especially college loans. Which funnily enough never seemed to focus on men, just women.
As more and more women recognized the dangers and how the changes were beginning to accelerate, those who had means were using their modest resources and looking for countries that would take them. If they could make it through college without ending up on their knees, or survive a collar with their sanity intact and then go back to work after it to bank some cash, they had some options that might open immigration doors.
The rich who stayed were retreating to closed estates. Behind trusts and foundations, layers of lawyers and bodyguards, setting up oversight to protect themselves from the collar. Even as they bought and sold less fortunate individuals who didn’t have those advantages and were collared and turned into living commodities. People pawns literally manipulated and discarded at the whim of someone wealthy.
Of course, some wealthy families had already begun to turn their female relatives into slaves. Maybe not common slaves, who mingled with the unwashed masses, but slaves regardless. Sure the trophy wife or blue-blood arranged match mate didn’t have to serve time in a corner brothel, but she was still trotting around naked behind her rich former husband. So were any of her daughters, her sisters, her mother, whoever else carrying that wealthy name who hadn’t seen it coming and hopped a flight to a non-slavery country.
And as for the lower classes, they lived in fear. They didn’t have the money to flee or to protect themselves. And the laws were stacked against them. Few people who lived on the bottom half of society didn’t know just one or two others who’d been naked on their knees for years. Most knew many.
“What would you know about dating then?” Phillips asked Knox. “If you can’t get any?”
“That’s my point, it’s impossible these days,” Knox said.
“Yeah,” Franklin put in. “When there’s no one to woo, might as well just get a membership at a brothel and jump in on the volume discounts and frequent fucker plans.”
“While saving up for a visit to the auction house.” Knox said with a laugh.
“I did that,” Cook said. “Best investment I’ve made.”
“How’d it go?” Ramos asked, looking interested.
“After Andrea left, I decided I could either spend money trying to date, or stay home saving my pennies,” Cook said with a shrug. “Skipped a new car even, drove government wheels for eighteen months, ate a lot of noodles, drank less beer. But then I had enough banked to become a regular in front of the blocks.”
“Yeah, but that’s expensive,” Phillips said.
“So’s shelling out for thirty or sixty minutes of fun at a time, even only two or three times a week.”
Ramos didn’t sound entirely convinced. “Yeah but still, you’re paying up front.”
“To save on the back end.”
“Long payback isn’t it?”
“Not if you look for bargains.”
Phillips leaned in, sounding interested. “How?”
Cook shrugged again. “Not every girl who goes up is eager, or even knows how sometimes, to push her value so only some rich asshole can afford to snap her up. I landed Susan for less than twenty grand. She’s only mid-thirties, but that’s fine. I straightened her out, and all the parts still work the same you know.”
“Plus she does dinner, the dishes, the laundry—” Franklin began.
“And shuts up during the ballgame,” Cook said with a grin. “Andrea never let me watch anything in peace.”
Katherine glanced at Jill, who was keeping her face as blank as Katherine’s as several of the men laughed. Neither of them were eager to join in the conversation. Especially since they were unlikely to share the views of the men. Or, rather, the men were unlikely to share theirs.
At first, the slavery laws had sold as a way to turn prisoners into assets, into a benefit to rather than a drag on society. But more than ninety-five percent of all criminals were men. In some states it was closer to ninety-eight percent. Throughout human history, men were generally far less well behaved than women. And these days they were writing a new chapter in it.
Sure slaves had to be naked, but protective clothing for job purposes was allowed so really it was just a punishment for those evil criminals to be humiliated some when they weren’t actually working. Americans have never been shy about deciding criminals deserve to be punished.
Congress and the States, and the men in them, had shown their true colors once they managed to empty out prisons into farms and mines that struggled to find employees willing to work for long hard hours at next to no wage. Collared men took over those tasks, and society started adjusting to this ‘modern’ version of slavery.
Debt had been added as an enslavable offense. Suddenly there were legal avenues to collar not just men, but women.
And collar women they did.
When legislatures removed collars from any form of court review to “streamline” dockets and keep the justice system from being bogged down by “nuisance suits” seeking to review and overturn unjust enslavements, that just made the naked lust of their larger plan readily apparent. Every other kind of legal transaction in the country – exchange of goods and services, contracts, fraud, crimes, anything – could be contested in court. Criminally or civilly. Reviewed, monitored, managed, overturned if found at fault.
It was the foundation of every legal system in the world. The line between barbarism and civilized society.
Except in America. Because collars were the exception.
Once it was on, the slave had no standing to object in court. Neither did anyone else. No lawyer regardless of skill or connections could make a case objecting to a collar, or calling for its revocation, since any such motion or suit was automatically dismissed.
A transaction between two free parties over the sale of a collar, for example, could be contested and fought out in court to decide who owed whom how much for the transfer of a collared person. But not the fact that the person had been enslaved.
No, that person stayed under no matter how they’d come to the collar. Which was insane, but it had passed. And courts all the way up to the very top had affirmed it. A collar couldn’t be revoked. But they hadn’t stopped there.
Somehow it wasn’t illegal, or there were no regulations prohibiting, loan officers and other issuers of debt from calling a loan in on the finest of fine print. For auction house wranglers to manipulate paperwork to “accidently” process someone as a sale rather than just a grading. Or for them or really anyone else to outright lie to maneuver someone into a collar.
Funnily enough, men carrying a debt weren’t regularly required to update their slave grades, to “make sure” their value “hadn’t significantly changed.” Yet women on a loan or other contract involving indenture as a possible remedy or payment needed to present themselves for slave grading every few years.
It was surely an accident of the laws that a collar was required for a slave grading. A collar that was just as real as any “actual” collar, even if grading was supposed to be a temporary thing. Needlessly humiliating and cruel, but necessary since a slave had value, and grading offered the opportunity to assess that value.
That it gave any visitor the right to fondle and grope whoever was on the block or post being graded, no matter how patently obvious it was they were never going to be bidding, was just a coincidence. That it required any person, any woman, undergoing that grading to submit collared and cuffed to that intimate handling, as hands and eyes roamed and probed everywhere across and in her body for hours, was just a necessary byproduct of grading.
Once that collar was on, an ever increasing range of shenanigans could be sprung on the helpless woman who could be physically and forcibly compelled to comply. No matter how humiliating or degrading the demands might be. Or how long that collar might be on.
Years in some cases. All because she’d been required to check herself in for a day to be graded.
Marriage was becoming much rarer, but divorce was no longer a problem for men who did secure a wife. Husbands who wanted out just waited for the wife to be required to report for grading for the mortgage or credit cards or the car loan, then gave the auction house new instructions. Suddenly he kept everything and collected a nice chunk of change when she was sold. She went quietly, one way or another thanks to forced compliance.
Families were even getting into the act. Even though by law slavery didn’t apply to those under eighteen, and any woman being graded – or enslaved – had to be eighteen. And thus an adult. Somehow, general practice allowed her relatives, who had no legal authority over her, to take advantage of her collared lack of legal standing to decide she was being sold so Mom and Dad or another relative could collect on the sale.
So when their daughter graduated and applied for a college or some other loan and needed to be graded, the family could just swoop in. Suddenly what would have been a single humiliating day, or two if the auction house was particularly busy, became years naked on her knees. All without anyone going to jail, and with her or anyone else completely unable to do a thing to change it short of writing a bigger check than whoever had bought her had.
If a woman made it to college with loans, she could be yanked out at any time if a loan officer wanted to call her in. Worse, many women in “needed” job categories, like medical or teaching, were “gotcha grabbed” by horny administrators and others who didn’t want to see the newly trained young professional move on with her career.
By maneuvering her into a collar, with the backing of the local community that wanted their small town hospitals and schools to have a trained person staffing a role there, she could be compelled to service that need. That the enslaved woman had to service other needs as well was surely just a coincidental bonus. Doctor by day, back office whore by night, it was win-win for everyone except the woman who’d just wanted an education.
Generation XX mentioned anecdotes like these as examples of an increasingly male society making rational decisions about the lack of available women to match up with men wanting one. The author, and many of those weighing in, found these kinds of stories logical extensions of what America should do with its remaining women. Particularly if those women kept deciding to stop “participating in American culture.”
Katherine had almost thrown her phone across the room when she’d gotten to that line in the article. Instead she’d just gone back to her work. Which was getting harder. She’d joined the Bureau hoping the FBI would show her things she didn’t know about the laws, things that would let her be part of helping roll back the worst of the abuses. She was finding the reality was much different.
She and Jill were saved from needing to use any prepared deflections against questions coming their way about the subject of slavery and the article when one of the Deputy Assistant Directors of Slavery Related Crime arrived, looking polished and poised as always.
“Good morning agents,” Hershey said as he took the chair at the head of the table. Greetings rumbled back while he opened his portfolio and then a file folder. He glanced at the papers, then looked up. “Where are we with that auction house in Philly?”
Katherine listened while she watched the tree branches waving gently outside in the park until she heard Hershey ask about Richmond Shipping. “That’s mine sir. The local office is still running down the company’s board, but so far they’re coming up clean. Staff already checked out.”
“No connection to the missing collars?” Hershey said. “Nothing?”
“No sir, not that they can spot. I’m looking through financials, and if they’re getting kickbacks I can’t spot it. Neither can Forensic Accounting, but I’ll check back with them after they’ve had some more time to dig.”
“Okay, but don’t stop until you’ve got something,” Hershey said, nodding.
“Yes sir.”
“Good.”
No, not good, Katherine thought. The same slave shipping company operating out of Richmond Virginia had seen three separate shipments, each of more than fifteen newly collared slaves, turn up missing in the last two months. Someone was on the take.
You wouldn’t think slaves could just be lost, considering that they – used to be – people. And people could be identified. Fingerprints, photographs, DNA. Yet there was a brisk black market slave trade, designed solely to avoid taxes. Both official, and the fees auction houses, mostly owned by large corporations, tacked onto sales.
Since all three trucks had been headed out of state, that made it FBI’s problem once the right people with the right ears to talk to began complaining. Which led to the people attached to those ears passing along the complaints to still more ears. And so on until the ears were on Senators and Representatives who could make ears belonging to people in the Department of Justice listen.
Since the investigation was turning up no leads in the company, that meant whatever was going on was hidden. Katherine might be barely out of her trainee period, but she knew that if you looked for something that should be there, but wasn’t, that meant someone was hiding it.
Except she knew Joe “Don’t” Hershey did not want to hear it, because that meant turning over stones that someone had gone to lengths to bury. Might upset someone else with the ear of a person who had the word “director” in their title, but not the word “deputy” or “assistant” tacked onto it.
Deputy Assistant Director Hershey was eager to get both of those words out of his title. He was nothing but a political animal.
Joe Don’t was what agents whispered behind his back, because Don’t don’t want to hear it. If it would ruin the nice, easily digested narrative he wanted to be able to lay out and make people who could decide his fate happy, he don’t want to hear it. He don’t want to read it, he don’t want you to bring it up. Just don’t.
“What about the Miami escort thing?” Hershey asked.
“Also mine sir,” Katherine said. “The surveillance there finally caught one of the trainers live and in color. That’s who was leaving security disabled so the after-hours outcalls could happen.”
“About time.” Hershey grumbled. “So they’re moving to arrest then?”
“They need to finesse the warrants a little. I have one in to the court here to have his bank release some additional records to me. When I can see where he’s taking payments from, and where he’s sending them, I’ll fire it off to the local agents and they’ll clean up their paperwork and get the arrest warrants signed.”
“Stay on it. There’s some heavy hitters breathing on us over this one, so don’t let administrative issues screw it up.”
“Yes sir.”
The problem wasn’t that slaves were being farmed out for after-hours sex work. It was just that the trainer was doing it off the books, without his company benefitting. He was taking payments to supply slaves for a night at a time to grey-market pimps, and cutting his corporate employer out of the loop.
When the slaves were deprived of sleep, and their mental states disrupted by threats and warnings and harsh sexual overwork, the company lost money. Customers complained slaves were late, more mistake prone, inattentive, which looked bad and made them customers of some other house that could supply their slave needs without issues.
Can’t stop the profit. The company had found an ear to yell in.
Hershey moved on to other cases. Finally he shuffled a new folder to the top and cleared his throat.
“Something new, this one’s got AD McCoy taking heat from a lot of people,” he began. That was always a bad sign, when he mentioned the man in the chair he wanted to sit in next. Hershey was one of four SRC unit deputy assistant directors, which divided the caseload of slave related crime across the country between them. McCoy oversaw them, and Hershey wanted the slot.
“An air traffic controller in Mississippi turned up missing, and after the locals got done fumbling around they finally remembered to call us in,” Hershey said, not even glancing at the file. Another bad sign, if he’d studied it enough to quote it.
“They waited even though she was Federal sir?” Knox asked. He was another political animal, always eager to score points.
“Even so. I already had a word with the city and county departments down there, reminding them we’re the first call when one of ours goes missing.”
“Good idea sir.”
Hershey traded self-congratulatory nods with Knox, then returned his attention to the table at large. “We found her in the Slave Registry, warming a bed at a brothel in Wilmington, North Carolina. She said she was picked up by sheriff’s deputies out of her apartment in the middle of the night. Who told her she was being repossessed for credit card debt.”
“Was she sir?” Franklin asked.
“Unclear. Doesn’t matter though. They bought her from a curious auction house in Memphis. Once the Memphis office started looking into it a bunch of established houses in the Southeast started clamoring for us to do something to shut them down. Except the local office can’t find anything they can act on, so they kicked it up to us.
“We need to look at the background and financials for everyone involved, figure out what’s going on. Memphis gave us a list of what they’ve come up with, but it’s not much. Knox, Franklin, Pierce, you get on this. Hopefully we can wrap it up quick and get back to bigger problems.”
“Yes sir,” Katherine said with the other agents.
Hershey nodded and looked down at his papers, flipped a page, another, then sat back and closed the portfolio. “That’s it, go to work.”
Chairs began rolling back and people rose to leave the briefing room.
(So sorry for language mistakes). I also read both D.Night's stories (Gotcha just looks 'just clever usage of existing features' for me, you shouldn't abuse your secretary).
It would have been funny if it wasn’t real money.