“Let’s go, female,” he said. He led her away down the trail. Alexa winced once she didn’t think he could see. She was flexible enough so that having her arms pulled back like that didn’t hurt too much, but it certainly wasn’t comfortable. She looked down at her breasts. Her posture made them stick out proudly. She could see and feel her nipples slowly swelling, just enough for them to stand out a bit.
It seemed as if one moment they were on a forest trail and the next they were on the main street of Gordburg, just inside the mock old-Western part of the town. Will never looked back to see how she was doing. Alexa found that the wide, sandy street was easy for her to walk along in bare feet, and wondered if that was why they kept it that way. Men and women, but mostly men, stopped to watch as she was led past them. More men, and a few women, came out of the wooden buildings to get a better look. Alexa tried to ignore them, but having so many strangers see her like this made her want to walk hunched over, trying to hide as much of her naked body as she could. The cuffs above her elbows made that impossible, and she was glad that she had asked her master to put them on her.
She heard some whistles from the watching bystanders, followed by some whoops and hoots, all in excited male voices. Now she wished that she had asked Will to gag her as well, because suddenly she had to fight an almost overpowering urge to smile. She gritted her teeth, but started putting one bare foot in front of the other as she walked. She knew it would accentuate the movement of her hips. More whistles, whoops and hoots rose from the watching men, and she had to clench her jaws all the more tightly. Those men were looking at
her
. They were cheering
her
. They were looking at
her
naked body and lusting after it. Just in front of her, towing her along at the end of her leash, her master walked along as if there was nothing at all unusual about the scene, and somehow that enabled her to enjoy this very unusual but very flattering experience.
They came to the wide side street that led to the slave market. Will turned, and Alexa followed. She’d been in that huge, barnlike building once before, but that was during her orientation, when she was a woman, clothed and free. Now she was entering it as a female, naked and chained. Doubts began prodding at her. Her step faltered, but Will neither looked back nor gave her any slack. She stumbled for a moment, regained her footing, and followed her master. Behind her, she could still hear the occasional shrill whistle.
There was a small crowd gathered in the slave market, composed almost entirely of men. They parted to let Will and Alexa pass. As they did, Alexa saw that one row of the slave cages had been removed and replaced with four very different cages, each on its own stand, and each one on a slightly different level. She saw Martina in the nearest cage. It was more than long enough to let her stretch out, wide enough for her to turn around, but the solid wooden top of it was far too low for her to stand, or even sit upright. She could get up on all fours, and that’s the pose she was in now as she glared angrily at Alexa. The cage next to Martina’s was empty, and sat higher than the others. To the right of it was an identical cage, set lower than Martina’s. Naomi was in that one. And furthest off to the right, Alexa could see Lynette lying on her side. Her cage was only a foot or two above the floor. Something about the arrangement struck her as familiar, but she didn’t realize what it was until Will made her stand facing the highest cage and began removing the handcuffs from her arms. Then she knew: The cages were set at different heights to imitate the little stages that winning athletes stood on as they were awarded their medals. Number one always stood on the highest part, number two on a lower part, and number three on the lowest. They’d had to add a fourth cage for this. She managed to keep herself from grinning as she realized that she was going to be put into the highest-standing cage.
As Will removed not just the handcuffs on her wrists but her leash and collar as well, one of the older men who worked at the slave market opened the door of her cage. It was too high for her to climb into without help, so another man brought a hay bale for her to use as a step.
“Get on in there, female,” Will ordered. Alexa worked her shoulders for a moment before she put her foot on the hay bale. It tickled. She got up onto the bale, and it tickled her other foot. She could climb into her cage easily now, but the thought of the view she’d present to all the people standing around made her hesitate. Will slapped her ass.
“Get in,” he ordered. Alexa clambered into the cage as quickly as she could. There was some sort of thin pad on the floor, covered in black vinyl. She heard the cage door clang shut behind her and turned to face the crowd.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Will said loudly as he also turned to face them. “I present Alexa Marx, the last female captured in this contest!”
There was some applause, more whistling, and a couple of cheers. This time Alexa wasn’t sure who they were for.
“All you have to do for now, missy,” the older man who had opened her cage said to her as he now locked it, “is keep movin’ around so that folks get a nice, complete view of you. You can rest some times, but do it too much and you’ll be punished.”
Alexa looked at him through the solid iron bars and nodded. She saw Will leaving without any word and had a moment of panic. She wanted to call out to him, but that was something that would probably call for punishment too, so she held her tongue. She saw a number of men fall in with him, clapping him on the back and talking excitedly. Maybe they wanted to buy him a drink.
In the cage next to hers she saw Martina prowling back and forth on her hands and knees like an angry, caged tigress, her long blonde hair hanging loose. Every so often she would glare at Alexa again, and the look in her eyes was unnerving. Alexa crawled over to the side of her cage furthest from Martina. Naomi was also moving around on her hands and knees, but she looked worried and maybe even a little scared, very unlike Martina. Lynette was lying on her side with her back to the slave market entrance, but people were free to move around the row of cages and have a look from either side, so Lynette wasn’t actually able to conceal much.
Alexa turned and came face to face with an older woman who was peering at her closely. There were also some men staring at her, but she hardly noticed them. The woman had intense green eyes and long, curling dark red hair. She appeared to be somewhere in her mid-thirties. For a long moment, she and Alexa simply stared at each other.
“What an absolutely lovely specimen,” the woman said. “So very, very fit. I can see why she was captured last. Who brought her in?” She continued gazing at Alexa, but her eyes were roaming over her body now.
“That’d be Will Longstreet, ma’am,” one of the slave market workers replied.
“Really?” the woman kept looking at Alexa, who turned full broadside to her and arched her back. If she was going to be put on display for a while, why not actually put on a display? All the same, she kept away from the bars and also out of the woman’s immediate reach.
“I’ll have to speak with Mr. Longstreet,” the woman said. “It can’t have been easy to bring this one in.” She smiled at Alexa and gave her an enigmatic wink, then moved on.
Men came to stare and speculate. Many of them stopped at Martina’s cage first. Martina did nothing to encourage or discourage any of them. Whenever she wasn’t taking a short break she simply kept up that slow, catlike pacing back and forth on her hands and knees, giving off sparks of restless energy. She managed to seem incredibly desirable and subtly menacing all at once. During her own breaks, Alexa studied her. She could see what the blonde volleyballer was doing, and how it attracted so much attention, from both men and women. But, dammit,
she
was in the cage reserved for first place, not Martina! She should be getting most of the attention, shouldn’t she?
After that first irrational burst of anger passed, Alexa realized that Martina was engaged in another form of competition, one she was smugly sure she could win. And, really, there was no way to successfully compete in exactly the same way, and if she tried she’d just look like a jealous copycat. But this contest was about attracting attention, not attracting attention in a particular way. Alexa smiled as Martina turned once more in her slow, smoldering pacing and presented her shapely ass to Alexa’s view. She knew what to do now.
Alexa yawned widely enough for anyone to see as she curled her pink tongue in imitation of…well it was either a dog or a cat. It didn’t matter which. Then she slowly stretched first one leg, then the other, then each of her arms in turn. Lastly, she arched her back and yawned again before crawling slowly around her cage. She kept pausing to stretch, or work her neck as if it was stiff or her shoulders as if they were stiff…which they still were, a little, from when Will had cuffed her arms. And while Martina kept glowering past the people who came to look, Alexa kept catching their eyes, if only for an instant before moving on to the next pair of eyes. It was absolutely shameless behavior, she knew, but she’d gladly suck her master’s cock right through the bars of her cage in front of the whole damned town if it drew attention away from that long-legged, long-haired treacherous blonde bitch. Besides, this exhibitionism thing was starting to be fun. And it was working, as people began crowding around her cage. Trying to think up new moves rather than just keep repeating a routine, she remembered something Will had told her. She started to turn around, then stopped with her ass and pussy aimed straight at the crowd. She looked back over her shoulder at them for a moment before finishing the turn. That seemed to work especially well. Martina could see what she was doing, but if she tried to copy Alexa’s moves it would be obvious that that was what she was doing. In any case, while their cages were the same size, Martina was so much taller that she just didn’t have enough room to copy Alexa if she wanted to.
Time went by and the crowds, their curiosities satisfied, melted away. Alexa yawned for real and noted that the sunlight in the street outside seemed to be coming in at a sharp angle. One of the men working there came by to tell the women that they didn’t have to keep moving any more, and that they should rest up because they were all going to be taken upstairs after dark. By then Alexa was tired enough not to care about what was going to happen to them after dark. She was feeling loose and limber, but also very tired. She hadn’t gotten enough rest last night. She and Emma had been lying side by side, asleep on that carpet remnant, when Will and Stan decided to wake them up, put them on their backs, and fuck their brains out, side by side. And, while she’d made her activities in her cage seem natural and easy the fact was she felt like she’d been exercising for many, many hours. She laid down on the pad with a grateful sigh, wished there was a pillow, and settled down for a nice little nap.
“You little bitch,” Martina hissed. Wearily, Alexa turned just enough so that she could see her. Martina was lying on her stomach, her chin resting on her crossed arms. Her hair hid much of her face, but the one eye that Alexa could see appeared to be full of anger.
“It’s a contest, Martina,” she whispered. “What’s the matter can’t stand being in second place?”
“You weren’t even supposed to make the cut!” Martina’s voice was full of venom.
“Well, gee,” Alexa smiled lazily. “I guess that’s your fault for not telling me that ahead of time, isn’t it?”
“You never should have gotten this far,” Martina sneered. “You don’t belong here.”
“You mean
here
?” Alexa patted the mat she was lying on. “Here, in first place? Well, I
am
here, Martina, so you can just suck on it.” She smiled nastily and continued. “Whenever they don’t have you busy sucking on other things, anyway.”
“Bitch,” Martina muttered angrily.
“Second-place bitch,” Alexa rejoined with a smirk.
They woke the women up by banging on the iron bars of their cages with lengths of pipe. It was very effective, and it took a moment for Alexa’s heart rate to return to normal. She could see that it was dark out now, and dim overhead lights weakly illuminated the interior of the slave market. She also saw two men helping Lynette out of her cage. They didn’t look like any of the men who had bagged the skier, and they were dressed almost identically in jeans, cowboy boots and loose-fitting white shirts. As she looked around, she saw more men dressed that way and concluded that it was some kind of uniform for men who worked in the slave market. She watched as they put black leather cuffs around Lynette’s wrists and ankles, then buckled a wide, heavy-looking black collar around her neck. Lynette barely reacted to it all, even when they locked her wrist cuffs together behind her back, clipped a length of heavy chain to her collar, and led her away to the long, wide staircase that led to the mysterious ‘upstairs’.
A little while later, they came for Naomi. The dark-haired surfer seemed uneasy. As they cuffed and collared her she kept making small moves that didn’t interfere with the process, and small, wordless noises that could have been of dismay, or protest, or even arousal. Then they led her away upstairs.
“Now it gets really tough,” Martina said. “Think you can handle it? Think you can handle all the dirty, nasty things they’re going to do to you up there?”
Alexa looked at the blonde. “You’ll be up there too,” she said. “I guess you just can’t resist the urge to trash talk your competitors, can you?”
“You’ll break,” Martina sneered. “You’ll quit.”
Alexa sighed. “No, I won’t,” she said. It was clear enough to her that Martina was getting desperate. She was even starting to sound desperate. She was about to say more to Martina, but thought better of it. She just stared at the blonde instead. Martina stared back. Aside from some blinking, both women kept up the contest until the men came for Martina. Even then, she tried to continue but the mechanics of crawling out of the cage forced her to look elsewhere. Alexa took the opportunity to turn her back on the other woman and lay quietly, waiting for her turn. She hadn’t seen Will at all since that afternoon, and that worried her a little. She couldn’t think of any plausible reason why he wouldn’t be here that didn’t involve him somehow abandoning her to her fate. Had that green-eyed redhead attracted his attention? Or was he sitting in one of the town saloons, drinking? Or maybe even having a drink with that green-eyed redhead?