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The Revolution’s Pig Contest, by counterparts199; part 01.
“Stay away from the window; they’ll see you and come barging in before we can call nine one, one,” I told my wife. I picked the phone up, but my heart dropped when I realized that the dial tone was dead and had been so for over a week.
“See me? My god, George, that’s the least of it. You know the rumors. They’re all over the neighborhood, starting at the end near the main road. They have us all trapped here in this part of the neighborhood. There was that frantic call from my Aunt last week when the phone went dead. Do you remember?” She paused as her eyes got big at something out there. She screamed, “Oh, my god …” My lovely forty-three year old wife pulled a shawl over her shoulders, as if hoping to keep both the chill and the threat of a gang of black men in our neighborhood away.
“What is it?” I asked, going to join her at the window. I saw the trucks lined up near the end of the street. Across the street and down at the house closest to the main feeder road to our forty house cul-de-sac, Mister Daws and his wife were standing in front of their house - naked. Their kids were being pushed into what looked like a refrigerated truck trailer, it thick of walls and remiss of windows.
Strange people in pale coveralls were inside of the distant neighbor’s house, a whole crew of them it seemed, all busy bearing out the furniture and sorting it into groups on the lawn or right into a stream of trucks. Other men were picking through the goods the minute they hit the lawn and putting them into a trailer full of boxes.
“I can’t believe it. They’re stripping that house on the end of the block clean in nothing flat. Damn! Look, they’re starting to do the same thing to the next one and I think the one across the street from it too!”
“It’s just like the rumors. Ever since the revolution,” said my wife.
“Haw! There was no revolution. I watch FOX. Sure, some of the tone of their news did change that day a few months back, but it’s the same news crews. I know the faces. They say everything is fine and normal. “Don’t worry; be happy.” They wouldn’t lie to us. Even the President was on TV assuring us that the BHP, you know, that new black and Hispanic party’s takeover, had been appeased. President Jenna Bush comes from a good and solid family! She wouldn’t lie to us!”
“Solid family? You have to be kidding me! They and the news propaganda have turned us into a country where only the richest few can have real jobs and healthcare. What did they think would happen when ninety percent of the country became Hispanic, black and poor white people with nothing but hamburger and WalMart jobs? Did they think they’d not have to live with the disenfranchisement? Did those guys at FOX and the other corporate owned stations think they could propagandize us, lie to us and spin us eternally without someone organizing and fighting back? No, I’ve seen your beloved FOX news, and I can tell you that the guys on there are sweating like pigs every time they talk now, probably with a gun to their heads, the way I figure it. They got their way too often, and nothing was there to let the steam off. Now it has exploded. Someone’s telling them to reassure us now. I can even see their eyes shifting during their delivery, and you might have noticed a whole new tone to their news. Someone’s in the studios and telling them to act like it’s all business as usual, when any fool can tell it isn’t,” said my wife, who, let’s face it, was a bleeding heart liberal who even voted with the BHP in the last election. It was the one thing that separated us most severely.
“Rubbish,” I told her. In the mean time my heart fluttered. She was busy ranting at me and missed the Earlharts being dragged out of their house as well. I glanced over, pressing my head up against the glass and saw that the same thing was happening on my side of the street, only they were three houses into it over here; six away. Two more kids went into the truck. Its door lit up, allowing me to see some of the kids sitting on bench seats to each side as they ushered the other two in. They fastened the kids into some heavy duty seat belts and then closed the door again, cutting off the brief light as the truck backed up closer to us.
I felt my face flush with a newfound and heightened level of fear. Maybe what my cringing wife was saying wasn’t rubbish after all, I was thinking as the gangs of workers got closer and I could see them better: All of the people hauling people out of their houses by force were big and black or Hispanic! The trucks were manned by Hispanics! Sure, some of the furniture movers and sorters were white, but all of the white workers wore strange looking coveralls and all of them had shaved heads. As I watched them pilfer another house, I saw that not one of the white workers as much as raised his head to meet any of the black or Hispanic people’s eyes. There was none of that four standing around and one working crap either. They all nearly raced to do the bidding of just a few big black men and women who seemed to be their overseers. Some of the white laborers were women, and some men, but each worked in different groups on opposing sides of the street, as if segregated by sex.
Big bulges protruded at the ankles of the white laborers. I had the distinct impression that they were something like those home arrest devices.
I noticed that the adult neighbors were starting to make two lines, one for men and the other for women, each to the opposing sidewalks. All of the neighbors out there in that line were naked, or nearly so, though the light was too bad to tell with my aging eyes. The fact that I knew every single one of them was revealing of the intent of these invaders as they got closer to my own house. It was pitch dark outside, so I could have been mistaken on a few of the details, but I suddenly dreaded that I didn’t think so. God of mercy, what was going on?
Angela wasn’t watching, but was instead lecturing me: “So, smart ass, why did they fire you at the warehouse? Why did they revoke your license and why did the bank mistakenly foreclose on your car? Why did all of this happen to everybody on the block, for crying out loud! Answer me that, Mister smarty-pants Meredith Limbaugh fan? Why are there all of these new terrorist and disease emergencies, confining all of us to this part of the city? The National Guard is out there holding us in. The guys with the guns are all in uniforms. I can see more of them now, out on the fringes, keeping us from getting away. Don’t you see them out there on Lampton Street! Oh my god, look! They’re bringing the Winters boy back to that line. He’s limping and in cuffs. He must have been trying to make a run for it.”
“Move over, and let me see,” I said, moving to the other side of the window to see what she was talking about. I saw just in time to catch them pushing the eighteen year old into the line of males. He was two back from his own father and three back from his granddad, all of them as naked as the day they were born. Some kind of chain connected them, making a kind of centipede out of the whole neighborhood. The Winter’s house was three beyond mine. Then I saw the national guardsmen flash by and into the house just next to ours. We were all in a trap! I turned to find my shoes and bent over to put them on so we’d be ready to run out the back door.
“Forget the window. We have to get out of here,” I told my wife as I grabbed her arm.
My wife persisted, as if she still needed to convince me that something was the matter. I think she was in shock, to be honest, because she was limp in my grasp and just kept on ranting her political junk: “There’s something going on, and they’re not telling us. They’ve saturated the entire cable with the illusion that everything is normal. Why is that? Why isn’t any of this on the news? Why is all of the news suddenly so bland and about nothing but Hollywood actresses? Why are all of the Billy O’Reilly shows old reruns? I’ll tell you why. The masses have finally had enough of being lied to while all of their jobs and security are being sold off to foreign countries by fatcat white men. Five percent of us have gotten everything while the rest have suffered more and more each passing year. That five percent used to be most of us, but has steadily dwindled. None of the votes are accurate even; the exit polls not even close to matching the official results. Nobody poor is fooled by the rich ownership society anymore, and now there are so many of them. They have put a plan into action, just like that radical author they put into jail said they’d do when it got this bad. Have you seen any more stories about him? Have you? Maybe he’s our real President now? Maybe this is his plan; it sure looks like the kind of thing he wrote about.”
I slapped her to get her to stop, though I wasn’t a violent man and wished I could take it back. There was no time, so I shoved her down onto a chair and shoved her shoes on her. Then I pulled her up by her arm and tried to drag her towards the back of the living room, but it was futile, and she knew it, her body dragging.
“Look, something’s wrong. I get it,” I said, loudly and to myself as I coaxed her away from the front door, hoping to gain the kitchen and get us out of the house before they came in. “Don’t you hear me. You’re right. Let’s get out of here!”
Then I looked over and the look on her face shifted to personal accusation. For all of her warnings and omens, my wife seemed to understand that being right and liberal wasn’t going to save her from suffering any of the justice the rest of us white, lifelong Bush voters had earned us, now that the penance was due. She was right, but she was also in the wrong demographic and sure to suffer for our sins right along with the rest of us – double injustice in her eyes.
Of course, I could be wrong, but the banging on our door was not polite. We both physically shook. I almost peed my pants in fact, as we bounced to face the doorway in one shake of utter terror. I turned to look at the back door that was through the kitchen, but bodies filled the glass behind it; all of them big, mean, black and in official looking uniforms.
They didn’t wait for us to answer. The wooden doorframe splintered. Two men burst in, and shoved both me and my wife down to the floor. I’d tried to defend myself, but it was as if I didn’t even have hands, they were so well trained and used to the routine. Even before I got up, a bunch of those white workers in orange coveralls came in behind them and were taking the pieces of furniture closest to the front door out.
I felt a knee on my back, and a pair of hands was tugging at my shirt. As soon as it slipped off, plastic tie-wraps were clipped around my wrists. I was fighting and kicking, but none of it delayed the cheap tie-wrap cuffs, I looked over at my wife, and saw that they were doing the same thing to her. A black male hand was carefully unsnapping her bra hooks, and then he brutally pulled the thing off in one yank. Her tits bounced to the side with the force, but then the knee was back onto her back, pushing her face first into our carpet. The rapist handed the bra over to an orange clad worker who already had both of our shirts in his hands. The worker had his eyes diverted, as if he didn’t want to see my half naked wife. He just stuffed my wife’s bra into a big box marked ‘underwear’ before walking off toward our bedroom to collect more lingerie.
Four men walked by with our couch, while two more were wheeling a dolly into the kitchen. They slammed it up to the refrigerator and then reached the dolly strap around. Smaller men and women in orange suits were clearing away nick-knacks on the furniture and pictures on the walls. I spent a few seconds watching all of this before I realized that the world had slowed down due to me being so completely overwhelmed and in shock.
Fingers fumbled at my waist, drawing me back to real time. My belt was yanked free of the loops. A nightstick banged me across the sides of both of my knees, causing me to slow my kicking long enough for four hands to yank my pants off. Someone with a knife sliced my shorts free, telling me that they weren’t keepers. I again looked over at my wife and saw that they’d already stripped her completely naked. Her eyes looked over at me, wide in total terror. It was too humiliating for words, even if we had the courage to utter them.
Plastic tie-wraps were put around my ankles after the socks were gone, but they freed my hands and yanked me up to a kneeling position. My wife got the same treatment, her older and sagging tits swinging from the suddenness of it. My own little dick was swinging limp and eager to hide.
“Your wallets say you have been going by the names of Joe and Mary Wilcox. Is that so?”
“What are you doing in my …” I started to say before he hit me in the mouth with a nightstick. I felt two teeth loose when the pain faded to numbness. A cap was missing and on the floor in front of me.
“You do what I say or I’m going to hit your wife. Same goes for you, cunt. You speak, and I hit him. You keep on being chatty and don’t care for one another, I hit both of you. If I beat you both dead, then we don’t need none of this business anyway,” the man told us. “Now that we understand one another and you are properly put in your place, butt naked and on your knees where you belong, your hands are free so you can sign the paper. I, of course, insist that you do this of your own free will,” he explained as he put a clipboard in front of us.
A pen on a string was with it. There were a stack of documents, but the one on top was ours, I guessed, our address having been quickly jotted on some of the topmost few lines. At the very top it simply said, “Power of attorney to dispose of the property, assets, legal entanglements, etc., etc., spousal commitments, and assume all rights to,” followed by the finest print I’d ever seen in my life. After a reference to supportive documents, supposedly attached, the names, Joe and Mary Wilsox were in type. A pair of lines for signatures were at the bottom.
“We can’t sign …” I started to say, which ended almost immediately when the nightstick bashed into the face of my wife. She crunched over, but wasn’t knocked out, the blow also to her mouth. She wailed and cried, and spit out at least three teeth. When he prodded her up, she had a bloody tooth gap in the middle of her teeth that showed through her puffed up lips.
“What are you pigs, fucking stupid? One more sign of disobedience and I will beat your wife so badly that she’ll have to be carried out!”
I picked the pen up and signed the paper so fast that it didn’t even look like my handwriting. Obviously it was coerced, so it wasn’t worth dying for it, I decided. My wife hesitated, and only the turning of my head spared me a tooth due to it, though my ear still rang for half a day. Her hand trembled with weakness and fear, so her signature didn’t look anything like normal either. Still they’d extracted it, earning us both a fresh pair of tie-wraps around our wrists when our hands had been pulled back to our backs.
“You stand accused of being vagrants and trespassers in a house that, according to this document, doesn’t belong to you. As you must have some debts, you are also debtors. The new law says that any white person owing debts and trespassing in someone else’s house is guilty of two federal crimes. The third crime is talking back to a peace officer. You are also guilty of being white and having conjugal sex between whites. Ain’t either of you vagrants working, I will assume. Three strikes you are out, and in your case it is up to four or five, or whatever. That’s life in America. Under the rules of military justice, I so sentence you. Since the jails are overcrowded with white folks already, the only practical thing is to make you our slaves until some better solution can be worked out. All slaves are pigs. All whites are slaves. So you are both pigs. Here are your pig tags,” said the black man.
Two white people in orange coveralls came up. One grabbed my head and the other pinched my right ear. The one guy took a tool and crimped me in the lobe with a rivet. I felt a round tag affixed after the piercing jolt of pain. My wife cringed away, but the same pair of cowering white laborers did her. I could only see my own out of the corner of my eye, but seeing the one on my wife told me that the thing was round and a good four inches across. It didn’t swing like an earring, for it was held fast and tight by the one rivet. Hers was blue; mine was pink. Hers read, PIG-OH. Under that was the combination, TITS-756,336.
“You can read huh? What’s the bitch’s name, pigboy?” The black man told me.
I was terrorized, so I did my best to guess at what he wanted and said, “Pig Ohio, Tits, 7 5 6 thousand, three hundred thirty six.” It wasn’t right that he was doing this to us. I glanced at my wife’s mascara streaked face, and I could see that she was both terrorized and angry with me for not standing up to the man.
“No, piggy!” He beat me on the side of the knee again with a short rap. “Too wordy for a retarded meat animal. Just tits, seven, five, six, three, three, six. Good enough for you. What do you care where she comes from and if she’s a pig or not. All whites are pigs, so that’s redundant. Do you think I am stupid? She’s white. That means she’s a pig, duh. Ain’t no reason to tell me that. Not that you’re capable of remembering her new name, but I like to think that even pigs want to at least try to remember the serial number of the pork they used to runt. Next time say sir too. I won’t take no more disrespect. Now, you, cunt, what’s the name of your former runtmate?”
Her voice was a trembling whisper as she said, “Longpig, six, four, four, two, three, seven.” Her voice was shaking so badly that I barely could hear her.
“Squeak, squeak, squeak. I can barely hear you, tits, when you don’t concentrate and start squealing like a pig before you are taught such an advanced skill as talking!” He reached down and grabbed a nipple, pinching so hard that I could see it purple. “What’s that you said? He’s a what?”
“A longpig.”
“Sir!”
“Sir.” She was weeping as he persisted, his thumb rubbing across her nipple as his fingers squeezed.
“Longpig, sir!”
“Longpig, sir. Oh, please, stop pinching me.”
“He’s a what, tits? And, this time say it like you mean it, you old, useless tit bag!”
“He’s a longpig, sir.” He squeezed harder, so she yelled, “He’s a longpig, sir!”
He dropped her tit and then put his hand over my ear tag, and asked, “What’s this longpig’s number, tits?”
“Six, four, four, nine, nine, oh, I can’t remember, sir!”
I wanted to reach over and throttle him, but I was in no position with my hands tied and him so big and with his whole army of support. Behind us the people were stealing everything in the house. I saw my treasured coin collection being moved, and then our office files with all of the family records.
“That’s OK, bitch, because you are just tits and this ain’t man enough for you anymore. You have enough to live down, knowing that you let a longpig sow you for all those years. Ain’t no reason to remember his whole name, now is it? Ain’t no man anyway, is it, tits?”
“Ain’t no man, sir,” she whimpered, thinking that she’d get off without any more molestation if she just went ahead and showed some enthusiasm, I figured.
He let go of my ear tag and then said, “Alright now, let’s get these new fucking meat animals out of here! Come on, move those hams, you filthy piggies. Lots of fat on those loins, so let’s start working it off and leaning it up right from the start!” His hand reached behind us and yanked each of us to our feet by the painful lifting of our plastic cuffs.
We were shoved across our barren living room, and then out the door between two orange covered laborers, one carrying our microwave oven and the other a box of my good suits. The living room in which we’d started was completely stripped, save some trash and dust. Even the curtain rods were gone; all of it in that first room gone in the three minutes it had taken us to sign everything away on one tiny form, get our faces smashed in by a nightstick, be raped naked and finally tagged like animals. One other thing too: We’d learned in just that amount of time to shut up and do as we were told.
I couldn’t believe it. The night was chill, and goose-bumps arose on my arms and legs as I raced toward the line that had walked itself up in front of my own house. The terror of those within the lines was palpable. The one on our side of the road was men, and Old man Jennings was being hooked up as I was shoved in behind him. I looked around, seeing my wife being pushed across the road in little shrieks of pain as they swatted her ass and she pranced over the rocks in her bare feet. Once there, they swatted her to bounce up and down, laughing at her tits as they flopped like rabbit ears.
I was dumbstruck by the array of female bodies standing on the other sidewalk. Almost all of the women I’d seen at one time or another. Like this though, other than their face, which they avoided showing as they hid behind one another’s shoulders, they seemed foreign. It was like something out of National Geographic, and maybe a bit out of one of those movies about the Holocaust. Every type of naked female body was represented, some young, some old; some obese, some anorexic; some tall and some short. Every pair of breasts was different, most of them not perfect in some way or another in our Playboy indoctrinated way of thinking about them. Some had big bushes of public hair, while on others I could catch a wink of lip from partial or full shaving. I couldn’t help looking, not from any kind of sexual attraction, but from the macabre novelty of the ordeal we were all made to share.
Ties were cinched around the ladies’ necks loosely, and than another long one that linked the tied wrists behind their backs to the ties looped around their necks. They looked like plucked chickens with their elbow wings sticking out of their backs. It was a strain for some of them, the ladies wincing in pain and bending over to avoid the discomfort. Those few with long hair were most fortunate, for it allowed them to hide their faces and in some cases, their breasts, though the short fashions were dominant.
Once my wife was braced up with the tie-wraps, they connected her neck to the lady in front of her with yet another long one. She glanced over at me and moaned for help, afraid to scream out, but her eyes eager for some kind of salvation that I simply didn’t have at my disposal. Finally, she moaned again, casting her eyes down and was simply a part of the chain. As soon as she was done, the neighbor to the right of our house was set into line behind her, causing my wife to scamper nervously when the second neck was attached to hers, this one from behind and close enough for my wife to feel the bodies of both women abutting her. Some of the short women were straining on their toes, while the taller ones were hunkered down, making for all sorts of body to body configurations. It was like one big cluster-fuck, and all the more immodest for it.
God, they were doing the neighborhood compact and fast, and would be done with the whole forty or so houses of us in a half hour or less, the way they were going, I realized. It was a classic Henry Ford assembly line. I was doing the math, and accounting for grandmothers and older siblings, each of our lines was sure to be well over fifty long by the time this abomination was over with. Then what? What did they plan to do with over a hundred linked human beings who’d been turned out and stuffed together like sausage links in the middle of the night?
I trembled with uncertainty, taking all of this in within seconds as they shuffled me to the back of my own line. The pause to see my wife’s dilemma unfold was afforded by a brief lack of connecting equipment on my side of the road. The Hispanic woman responsible soon corrected that by refilling her pouch with materials from a van and then shoving me forward so that I almost touched the man in front of me.
We were meant for heavier bonds, I realized, seeing in the dark that the man in front of me had some sort of handcuffs on his hands that had been fastened behind him. I felt the woman putting the same kind of cuffs on me. When they clicked tight enough, some kind of cutters were used to snip off the tie-wraps. That was helpful, for it gave my wrists enough room for circulation, which I was beginning to worry over. Finally, she came in front of me and knelt down. Her head was close to my cock when she did that, but in spite of a twitch, I wished my cock to hide, knowing that she meant me harm.
I saw the manacle on the right ankle of the man in front of me. It was, in fact, a long chain with many manacles on it. The one a foot from the man in front of me was picked up by the female Hispanic guard. She smacked my ankle with it, the force alone swinging the cuff latch around and securing my right ankle to the man in front of me.
I was part of the human chain, I realized, but the worst was yet to come. She grabbed the cuffs on the man in front of me, and I noticed a third cuff on the assembly. With a hand covered by a thin rubber medical glove, she grabbed by cock and balls as one, as if she had a lot of experience at such grabbing and knew just how to gather the whole package in one grasp. She then moved the third cuff over the whole wad of my genital and clicked the cuffs tighter than the one on my ankle and wrists. I took this as a message of particular disdain, and the glance she gave me confirmed it. It was an odd glance. One of pleasure, but at the same time, one of a woman who was too busy to dwell on it because she had hundreds, if not thousands of more little pleasures to amuse herself on in her profession of chain making our of hapless men.
I was in utter turmoil. I was connected to the human chain, not once, but twice. To make matters even worse, the hands of the man in front of me were connected to my genital chain by only one link. He had no choice but to rest them on or mostly under my cock and balls. There simply wasn’t the slack to afford him otherwise. Then I felt my own hands being pulled back, and as quick as click, click, click, I was holding the cock and balls of Jim Baxter, my other next door neighbor.
Throughout all of this, we were being cinched up and then marched forward at such a clip that nobody had any time to think about how we might organize and bull rush some faction and escape. The more men on the chain, the more unwieldy we were, and the more the prisoners of an immovable mass. It struck me that the bastards doing this to us would require less and less guards to keep us in order, the more of us there were. Soon, only one person would be needed to corral us all, maybe even both lines of us.
Nerves were digging at us as well. I was weak with exhaustion, mainly from nerves. One of the men up front had pissed right on the sidewalk; not a soul complained, not even the guards, which told us that they were used to seeing us as nothing more than weak animals. This revelation only heightened my anxiety as the night dragged on and as we came to the end of the block that ended in a cul-de-sac. There, two semis waited with their back doors yawning and ramps awaiting.
I saw my wife and her line stumbling up the ramp of the truck trailer beside ours. She didn’t even look over at me, her fright and stumbling on the ramp being too much of a distraction, and then she was gone … forever … followed in by another thirty or more women, all of them naked and weeping. No less than half of them stumbled up the ramps. Men with shocking batons and leather straps took advantage of any mistake and slapped those who stumbles, as well as those to either side, as they had to work together on the chain in order to recover. Women shrieked in despair, but it only increased the beatings.
I realized once again that we were not human to them, as I stumbled up the ramp and saw the inside of the trailer. It was covered with straw and the smell was ungodly. Others had been in the trailer before us, signs of it being the smell and the wetness of some of the straw. In one place I saw blood, a pool of it so big that it was worth my distraction. I almost stumbled, but the hands on my balls prevented me from falling far enough to make a difference.
A guard at the end locked the foot long lead on the first man’s collar onto a hook two feet from the floor. His face was shoved right up to the front wall of the trailer as others were shoved in and commanded to butt right up against him in order to make room for the lot of us. They had numbers on the wall, one to sixty, and when I got to twelve, a young and not unshapely female black kicked my ankle. I fell to the floor, seeing it as her intent. Mostly though, as tightly bound as our hands were to each other’s genitals, the whole of us went down as if a wave. We were soon all in, and the last man, number 55, secured to another round eyelet of heavy metal that had been bolted on by the swinging doors.
The doors closed, pitching us into blackness. Nobody spoke. Some of us were weeping like women. Finally, I said, “This can’t be happening. Someone will notice. They can’t just take over a whole neighborhood and ship everybody off like animals!”
A red light flashed from up above, followed by the loudest PA horn I’ve ever heard. My ears were nearly bleeding even before the female voice commanded, “Silence! First warning!” The PA itself was punishment. Nobody answered me but the ringing in my ears.
The silence dragged on while the truck waited patiently with its engine rumbling, but not engaged. I could smell the diesel smoke, thinking it better to my nose than the foul human waste smell of the straw just under my butt.
Someone well behind had an idea, saying with a whisper that carried in the cave-like trailer, “Let’s lie down. It’s probably going to be a long and uncomfortable ride.” It had occurred to me as well that we’d not be able to even lie down if it wasn’t a group decision.
The PA horn shook the trailer once again, followed by the warning, “Second and last warning!”
The line of us started to sway towards the far side wall, and somehow we all managed to get ourselves laid over.
Suddenly, the men closest to each end were both pleading for us all to get back up because their neck chains were only a foot long and the eyelets were two feet off the ground. That meant that they couldn’t lie down and the further the man beside them went to the ground, the more of a hopeless strain it was on them.
The PA horn blared and the command was simply, “Stand by and do not resist!”
“God, damn it!” I screamed. My nerves were shot and my emotions were peaked and my mind was thinking that the last thing any of us needed was more attention from the bastard women who were guarding us. Others, too, were moaning as they heard the locks on the trailer door being unlocked.
We’d been in the dark long enough to be blinded by the slight brightness of the suburban streetlights. That was followed by two flashlights that probed the mess of us.
“Get up, pigs!” Screamed the first woman up into the trailer. She kicked the first man so hard that thought I could hear one of his ribs breaking. We all struggled upwards, and it was a huge struggle, the mass of us being so unwieldy.
There were two of them, both in trucker dungarees, but both with those ugly looking electric cattle prods. They walked by counting, “One, two, three, four.” When they got to four, one of them would put the cattle prod to a man’s genitals and light him up. There was a scream, and then the whole chain shifted uncomfortably and the whole of us struggled to get back up on our knees, which was the best we could do. “One, two, three, four, and then the next fourth person was shocked in his nuts. They missed me by one man short, but I swear that I could feel the shock in my own nuts. I know that my hands did, them linked to the man’s nuts by the tri-cuffs. One of my little fingers actually went numb from the shocking voltage. Then I had to do what I could to hold him up when all of his weight fell into my hands and all I had to hold him up with were his balls and cock. The man behind him, of course, was doing his part as well, both with his body and his neck.
I felt nauseous, but held it back until the women left us, a quarter of us maybe half sterile. The door closed, and I heaved into the straw as far towards the far side wall as I could get it. That started it, no fewer than a quarter of us adding to the stench before it subsided.
The PA horn sounded, cutting off the regurgitations with the warning, “That’s the first warning!” All of us fell into the deepest silence I’d heard all day. Those who wished to clear their throats, swallowed.
After a while a truck cab groaned somewhere close, and I heard the one holding the women depart. We waited what seemed like twenty minutes longer. I realized that my wife was gone, and the longer time passed, the further we were separated. We weren’t far from the freeway, so she could be as many as ten or fifteen miles off by now, I bemoaned. Finally, our truck cab engine groaned a few times and then the gears were engaged. We leaped up and down and up a few curbs as we turned and made our way down what felt like a lawn and some driveways, crosswise and finally into the main street. We swung around some corners, stopped twice, and finally I felt us accelerate onto the freeway ramp.
We were all still kneeling. Every slight movement of the truck made it hard to hold position, mainly the brunt of it in our knees and backs. All of us were afraid that if we found better positions, we’d strain someone in our group and he’d be forced to complain. The man behind me was still trembling, and I was still doing a lot of the work holding him up by his nuts. Everything about that was wrong, and I didn’t have the guts to want to see a repeat of it.
Time went by though, and as it did, it seemed like hours. Gradually the line shifted so that most of us were sitting on an ass cheek, doing what we could to stretch our legs out some and hoping that the whole of the line didn’t get kinked or something and someone be forced to complain.
I was getting thirsty and tired, it all had happening close to bedtime, and the trip was running into the hours. Then I noticed a little bit of light peeking through a seam in the walls as the sun of morning came up. Most of the light was on the far side of trailer, I realized, a razor of it showing on the side of the trailer closest to my back. That meant that we were going west. We’d stopped for gas, and then we did again, and my math told me that we’d done at least four hundred miles west. Maybe it was Kansas, I thought, understanding that the state was a sea of corn, wheat and just about nothing else.
There was no lessening of the misery. I tried to shift butt cheeks, but it was almost impossible to get everybody to shift as a team, so I suffered. Someone down the line had apparently taken a shit. Lots of people had pissed. There didn’t seem any point in saying anything about it; our dignity was no longer an issue. Just about at the same time I thought that, the man behind me pissed into my hands. I jerked my fingers away as best I could, but then it splashed across my leg where I had it cramped under me. I just let it happen; what was the point in pretending it mattered. He tapped the back of my head with his own, saying he was sorry, I suppose, given that he was also whimpering like a baby. Then he whispered, “Sorry,” so low that I could barely hears him over the road noise, even with his mouth up to my ear.
“This is warning number two! Talking is not permitted by white pigs!” The PA roared.
I couldn’t believe that they’d heard that. Maybe they were using some kind of infra-red camera. Maybe there was a voice recognition computer at play. Whatever it was, it was clear enough that we simply were not going to get away with any disobedience at all. This was beyond merciless, I thought. They were tormenting us to death. I couldn’t live this way, I realized. Why don’t they just take us out and murder us, I thought. Then I thought, maybe they were? Maybe they were taking us to some kind of new, America Auschwitz?
The whole day passed. It got hot in the trailer cab, the air so stale that I didn’t think I could breathe it anymore. The tiny crack of light faded, and then it was pitch black again. We’d stopped for gas five times, clearly indicating a crew of two or more up in the cab. Somehow I managed to get to sleep leaning over the body of the man in front of me.
I was woken up by somebody screaming, “Stop. No! You have to quit. You can make it, Henry!”
The PA blared, “That is warning number three. Return to your knees, facing halfway between forward and the center of the aisle, slaves! You will face the floor in front of you and not offer any resistence. Failure to comply will result in severe penalties for all of you!” We all tried to get up and turn a little, as best our handcuffs and attached genitals would allow.
The truck stopped and the back doors came open. I saw the freeway, barren and desolate in the late evening. We were on the berm. This might be the perfect time to attempt an escape, I thought, knowing that there’d probably only be the two drivers. I nudged the man to either side of me and made eye contact just before one of the guards could make it up to the bed. The men beside me were in bad shape, I could tell, but they weakly nodded, and then they both nudged the men beside them. We were going to do it, and maybe even die trying, but I was beyond caring about my health by then.
The first thing that happened was unexpected. The lady pointed her cattle prod at the neck chain and shocked the first four or five of us by triggering it there. The first few slumped, and then she came in further, the second driver behind her with a second cattle prod. Any revolt from the first few was stopped in its tracks before it could materialize. When she’d gotten past the first four or five, she said, “One, two,” and then shocked the testicles of the man who was unfortunate enough to be the second numbered one. She went past one and then got the next. It was clear that it was to be every other man this time. My odds were going to be fifty-fifty that I was going to have my nuts electrocuted. Maybe even worse, the odds were fifty-fifty that each of the men to the sides of me were going to need me to hold them up after they’d been shocked into neuterville.
The lady behind her was safe, given that the whole line over there by the door was in bad shape and unable to coordinate itself; thus the first lady always had a good backup. I didn’t think our plan had a chance in hell upon seeing it.
Then I started doing the math, even though it was hard because we were all looking down, faced a bit away from the rear and not supposed to be watching all of this. I just couldn’t tell if I was to be the one or not, glancing about being even harder as they got close. I decided that it didn’t matter. I was going to shove the lady into the far wall as soon as she got close. It was probably not going to work, but I didn’t care if they killed me anymore.
She got one man from me, and put the wand close to the genitals of the man behind, just like last time. Instead of taking it though, he stool my show and bashed forward. I gave him the slack, and went with him, as did the man behind him. The lady just behind the one doing the punishment had gotten too close, and she went down with the first one. It was the second lady whose head hit the wall. I could see her eyes go blank even before she sagged to the floor. Someone got a hand on one of the wands, and struggled to reverse it as the closer lady tried to get up. The wand went off, and she shrieked. It took forever to charge back up, it seemed, but it was only a couple of seconds really. Then she got lit up again. We were such a jumbled mess and had nearly no ability with our hands, so we couldn’t do much more than wait for the damned thing to charge again before the man two men behind me got the damned thing charged up once again and shocked her at the base of her skull. After that the black lady truck driver stopped moving, but I was pretty sure she’d recover. The stuff in the wand wasn’t made to kill a healthy person, but it sure was going to leave the lady in front of me with a bad headache.
Not to mention a piss poor disposition, I realized when we’d all come to notice that we were alone in a trailer and all bound up with a couple of knocked out female wardens on the floor beside us.
I saw car lights flashing, closing, and then streaking by. They could not see us too well, though I suspected that any man or woman free enough to still use the roadways would not be our salvation. Someone honked a horn, as if saying hello and goodbye, the Doppler sound reminding us of how far out in the country we’d been stranded. I grew sure that the few cars that passed us, roughly two every couple of minutes, couldn’t see much of us inside, save for the naked few in the very back and they were still sagging as if to hang themselves.
Some black youth yelled out of the rear window of a passing car. “Hey! Whatsup wit da delivery!?!” As one of the back doors slowly creaked back and forth in the breeze, the PA blared, “That is warning number one!”
“Oh, fuck!” I said, the obnoxiously loud and inventively programmed PA replying, “Pigs are to remain silent. That is warning number two! Oink! Oink!”
Nobody knew what to do for the first whole minute of this, but then we did. We struggled forward, an uncoordinated mess, and then various hands and attached genitals searched the pockets of the drivers. We found a change purse and some gum. There was what looked like a spare truck key. We tried it, but it wasn’t even a close match to our locks. I started shaking my chains, and it was complete waste of time. A lot of time went by as we all searched from ankle socks to hairpins.
It got to the point where some of the men were saying that we needed to be more careful, lest they wake up and find us groping them. That was an admission, of course, that we’d failed and some of us were formulating strategies to minimize the damage of our failed escape attempt. “Maybe they’ll think they just slipped,” someone said; we down to preposterously unlikely hope. I had to remind them that we weren’t prisoners, but victims who had been treated harshly, and were not inclined to be treated any worse, regardless.
“That assumes there is some kind of law to protect us. What if the law is different? What if we are prisoners due to some new law? It doesn’t matter what you call it, we’re still what they say we are,” yelled one of the men down by the door. They, of course, had had the worst of it so far, and were sure to be seeing more if we didn’t get loose. All the while, of course, the PA was interrupting with its ear shattering messages of one, two and three warnings to the pigs and slaves that the mindless thing assumed we all were.
“Fucking, goddamit!” I said, leaning back with surprisingly little resistance, given that everybody had abandoned the fruitless search of the pockets and persons of our unconscious black female drivers. Their clothing was a mess with all of the buttons and tails disheveled and the pickets turned out. It would be an easy case of rape if they produced pictures, though nobody had actually had any such thing in mind. A quarter hour passed. Cars went by, one at a time on the lightly loaded plains freeway. The men who had been badly shocked recovered, though we all were in utter horror at what we’d failed to finish. The waiting was unnerving; the time passing in slow, lingering seconds.
Then another pair of headlights came closer. We saw the lightbar on top of the cruiser. Maybe we could show the cop that we were being inhumanly held and he was our salvation? He got out of his car. It was dark out, but I was pretty sure that he looked white. My heart leapt with joy. Then as he got closer my hopes fell. He was light skinned, but still a black man. He sized up the situation with a flashlight, saying nothing. Then he drew his gun, backing to his cruiser and making a call. Not ten minutes passed out there in nowhere before a couple more cruisers came up. They held us all at gunpoint, with our heads down and facing the closer wall, before dragging the women out of the trailer. One of them was coming back to life before she was even out of the trailer. With some smelling salts, the other one woke up as well, though she’d been shocked enough to get up much more gingerly. Amazingly, neither of them looked so ill as to need a trip to the hospital, it was assessed.
“You girls need to do a better job than this. Didn’t you get no training? You’re lucky you’re still alive. You should know that pigs can be dangerous if left unattended?” Shouted a supervisor when a van pulled up. Damn, they’re in trouble now, I said to myself, seeing some hope in the distance of the criticism. Then the recovered women were all apologies and such, as a medic bandaged one head and had the other one do the equivalent of a sobriety test. The verdict seemed to be that for punishment they’d have to finish the trip, headaches and all. Pain pills were passed around. I saw the two women glare at us with a much more personal kind of hate, and then go around to the cab after the supervisor looked them over to make sure they were in enough order to actually do what he’d told them he intended them to do. Not once in all of this did any of the people out there give us more than a glance. We just didn’t matter, once the first cop had ensured that we were still locked tight in our original chains.
The women tucking themselves back in nicely and went up to the cab. In the end, the cops just shut our doors and locked us all back up, no worse for the wear.
“This is fucked,” one of the men said.
The PA blared for the tenth or twentieth time since we’d overcome the women, “That’s warning number two! Prisoners will be quiet, or severely punished.” The last sentence was always inventive.
The truck made it to another gas station and then a few more miles of highway before it pulled over. Dawn was creeping up. I had been dreading this. The doors swung open, and the ladies were there with their batons in their hands.
“Alright, whities, here’s how it is going to be. I want every swinging dick of you facing the center while on your knees.”
We all shuffled as best we could, the arrangement of our cocks and handcuffs preventing too good of a job of this.
“By the count of three, I want to see every last one of you pissing in the hands of the man behind you. Cup your hands, pigs. When we walk by, you’d better all be holding at least a cup of piss, or you will regret it!”
I didn’t even think about disobeying, and neither did the man in front of me as I pissed into his hands and I did my best to keep my hands cuffed and also hold the man in back of me. I held his dick so that it wouldn’t flip over and pee on my back instead.
It was while holding the piss that they zapped the chain. The added conductive liquid had us all jumping with just the one hit. Then they stepped into the foul truck trailer a few feet and zapped the chain again. I struggled to hold the piss in my hand, my mind not doing a good job of figuring out that holding the piss wasn’t the point, and that it was going to be impossible to do it anyway. While the first lady stayed well back, the one that had gotten her head banged nicely came in and zipped the genitals of every single one of us. She waited until a few of us could manage to get back up on our knees. Some she even commanded to piss again, waiting until the foremost man’s hands and the backmost man’s balls were soaking wet before administering the shock. She started beating the ones who couldn’t get back up on their knees with a heavy leather strap. Then she went back to the front of the line and stood in front of the first man.
“Open your mouth, white boy! I want to fry your tiny little brain so it can’t come up with any new ideas of disobeying your new black owners!” She commanded, threatening his balls again by waving the wand up and down from his mouth to his nut-sack. I couldn’t even imagine the threat and the pressure the first man was under. My own balls were feeling as if they were fighting each other in a boxing match, and I’d have let her shock any other part of me than my nuts at the moment. All of my bones had this dull ache to them from the shocks. I was still trying to catch my breath from the chain having half hanged me while I’d last been stunned too. The men on the ends were the worst for it, their chains up on the wall and inflexible.
The first man by the door was beyond any kind of mental sanity. He made the only decision he could, the one the woman had demanded. He opened his mouth. Maybe he was hoping that by doing so she’d kill him and give him some peace? I’d have done what he did. Surely the woman was kidding him and wouldn’t really shock his open mouth, I reasoned.
She put the wand into his mouth, shoving it in so deep that he choked, and then she surprised us all by pulling the trigger. His head banged back, and a quarter of the line went with him. “This might help you all remember! No talking. No disobedience. No attitudes or unauthorized glances! No attempts at escaping. You will yield to your new life and situation at all times. Pigs!”
Then she counted, “One, two,” and stopped in front of the third man in line. “You will open you mouth when counted. There will be no hesitation or we will repeat the exercise. Open your mouth and let me fry some of your tiny little white brain cells, slave!” She said while holding the wand on the third man’s balls. He opened his mouth. She raised the wand, pushing it into his open mouth. Then she shoved it up to his tonsils. The man was choking by the time she pulled the trigger. Two men were now sagging and hanging themselves on the far end. I thought they were both dead. It wasn’t until the fourth man shocked that I saw the first man take a breath and start to recover.
This went on until I discovered that I was fucked. I was a two. I only half opened my mouth, or so I thought, the utter fear really the one in control of my body. She shoved her weapon in past my loose teeth and then so far that I had to swallow the tip of it. “That’s it, swallow my cock, bitch!” She railed. Damn if it wasn’t in my throat. My tongue was wrapped around the base of it, as if to hold it and keep it from slipping too far back. If the end of the thing came off, I’d choke to death, I feared before she lit it off and my head slammed back. I passed out. I woke up still choking up the little I still had of a two day old meal in my stomach. The tormenting black truck driver was six people down and still doing it. I was dizzy and had a sick headache, and parts of my brain felt numb, as if whole bunches of brain cells had been smoked. The repeated shocks down the line could still be felt on the common chain, giving me relapses. I thought up my own name, and when I found it I gained some hope that not too many of my brain cells had been burned up, though I was sure that I’d permanently lost a few points of my IQ. On the floor under my dick, yet another puddle had formed, though I couldn’t even remember having pissed a third time in my neighbor’s hands.
I knelt there with my head bowed and looking at a spot on the floor two feet in front of me as she passed by and stood by the door. My nose held the smell of burning flesh even when I wasn’t breathing in. She said, “There will no longer be three warnings. First, second and third warnings are the same. Next time it will be each and every one of you, too. First on your useless balls and then in your cocksucking mouths. If we are not respected, some of you will not survive this trip. The rest of you will come to understand your situation. Is that clear, pigs?”
We all nodded. Not a one of us as much as moaned, though some of the men I imagined to be so far out of their minds that it was the only way they had remaining to speak. Just before the door closed, I looked down the line at each of us and noticed that some of the men were drooling and wild eyed, as if they’d had their brains lobotomized. If there was a weak heart among us, someone would have been dead by now, I thought, it being just about the only moment I’d thought up something to be thankful for.
The truck returned to the road, but the lady lied. After two more hours, it stopped and in spite of the fact that we’d been quiet and the PA hadn’t issued any warnings, the women returned, doing otherwise as promised and shocking every single one of us on our hopelessly abused nuts and then every other of us in the mouth. That I was spared, being an even number, but as a part of the line I suffered from it anyway. I’d already lost enough fried brain cells to even think about escaping. Nobody said a word. Nobody looked up. Nobody refused to open his mouth and let her stick the wand in. We were as putty in the black lady of death’s hands. I don’t think it was enough for her, but I suppose that she couldn’t intentionally kill us for some reason unknown to us all, and thus was constrained to do no more harm than she did. An hour later the morning was well up and the truck shimmied back into some kind of dock. We’d been a day and a half in misery and utter terror.
I didn’t have a clue as to how I was going to get out of the truck. I didn’t think that anything on me was still working. I was sick and sore and stiff and tired and nearly dead with thirst. It was no longer about the petty stuff like pain and dignity. Even the loss of a few brain cells seemed petty; we unlikely to need them for what they had in store for us. All of those concerns were gone and much further from me than even my home, two days down the highway. I’d even forgotten about my wife. When the thought of her came back to me, it came with a shudder of concern that I simply didn’t have the strength to allow continue. I resigned myself to the self defense of brainless subservience. I was sure I’d need as much of the skill as I could muster for the foreseeable future.
Then the doors opened. Six well spaced, heavy, black and Latin women in uniforms confronted us with dogs, two assault rifles and smiles. Behind them was a maze of piping and heavy chains. I couldn’t make sense of it in a glance, and dared not stare, knowing that I had to concentrate upon keeping my eyes down, lest I draw attention to myself. I felt that my best strategy would be to remain as small as possible and not draw attention to myself.
The smallest of the guards, an attractive Latin lady in her middle years, stepped up and said, “Welcome, pigs. I hear that you have all been disobedient. This pleases me to hear. Usually they restrict us in how many we can cull on the first day. Your rebellion, however, will save us some space and trouble, while it also allows us to show you how things are here more swiftly than we normally do!”
I did not like the tone of that.
I was right; subservience was the only skill I’d need to master. I kept my eyes on the floor; it was for the better that I did not know, nor relish even the next moment of my new life as a pig in the food-chain of the new order.
