Bill Underhill

Collars

PZA 5th Anniversary 2007-2012 Story

This is Bill Underhill's version. Click here for the other versions.

Chapter One

Richie studied the old slave collar in his hands, turning it over and inspecting the hinge, the lock, the serial numbers engraved on the inside of it and then the barcode etched into the otherwise smooth matte stainless steel outside surface. He was a sturdy, well-exercised blonde boy of eleven winters' age, and the tip of his tongue was just barely visible between his compressed lips as he hefted the thing. "It's just kid-size, but it's still really heavy."

"Well, yeah," replied Mike. "They're made that way. You don't want a slave forgetting he's a slave, right?"

Though he'd seen his twelfth birthday in May, Mike was shorter than his friend, brunette where Richie's hair was corn-colored, and just a bit too naturally pale to tan all that easily. He was also heavily freckled, and had the most disturbingly blue eyes. Richie's eyes were a mild and appealing hazel, belying his demonstrated capacity for devilment.

Perhaps because of that, it was Richie who always had the better understanding of trouble and how to get into it. If never quite the best way to keep out of it.

They strode along together in an easy, companionable rhythm, each with his backpack over a shoulder, mostly bulked by their sweaty exercise uniforms. Those were kinda like martial arts uniforms, made of tough, coarse cloth and so roomy that they were almost totally shapeless, but without the stupid belts and colored the same kind of sickly green as hospital operating room scrubs.

Because they'd lived almost next door all their lives, Richie and Mike had naturally fallen into the habit of doing almost everything together. Though it wasn't quite summer yet, it was far enough into June to be hot, and they were down to their baggy black shorts, sweat socks and sneakers, their tee-shirts stuffed into their packs with their uniforms, keeping to the shade as much as possible while walking home from the long morning of hard exercise in which boys their ages were customarily enrolled. Though the school year had ended weeks before, the regime of physical conditioning ordained nationwide by the Department of Education to address the old epidemic of childhood obesity never ceased even during the vacation months.

Both boys had been sweated strenuously and systematically, and with those tedious hours over, the afternoon was theirs to do with as they pleased. In their boring small town, this meant getting out into the pockets of woods and only lightly-brushed gullies deliberately kept uncultivated and undeveloped for compliance with Agenda 21 [http://www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-3annex3.htm] as well as for flood control and replenishment of the underlying aquifer.

If they tried to enjoy idleness anywhere close to home, their parents would either put them to the never-ending chores that grown-ups delighted in dreaming up, or – worse! – to summer home schooling on the 'Net. It was for this reason that each boy had 'forgotten' to carry along his pocketphone when he'd left for school that morning. When those GPS-trackable gadgets are sitting atop your dresser, they can't give away where you really are.

"How come they were in your attic?" asked Richie. He eyed his friend suspiciously. "These things are supposed to be government property, aren't they?"

"They were in my Uncle Jack's stuff," explained Mike. "We've got a couple of his old trunks, some of his Army stuff." The boy grinned. "There's uniforms and badges and all kinds of things in those duffel bags and suitcases. Uncle Jack kept 'em to remember, I guess."

"So how long ago did your Uncle Jack die, anyway?" The blond boy spread the collar in his hands wide, then tried to close it, but it wouldn't latch.

"Maybe a couple or three years ago," replied Mike. "It was a big accident out in Kansas or someplace like that. I was too little to go to the funeral, but Andy went." He frowned. "That wasn't fair. I had to stay with one of my Mom's cousins. Uncle Jack was my Dad's brother, and I could've gone."

"Funerals are boring," said Richie consolingly.

"Yeah, but Uncle Jack had been a soldier, a special operations guy. He did, like, three or four tours in El Salvador and then the thing in Guatemala. Andy bragged about how the guard of honor was there, and a bunch of Uncle Jack's friends in their uniforms, and a lot of them had their slave boys with them to serve food and drinks at the banquet."

Richie had to nod silent commiseration at that. Everybody knew about slaves. The farms all around town had plenty of slaves to work them – rounded-up illegals and enemy combatants brought back from Central and South America and even a few from Africa – but neither Mike nor Richie had ever seen more than glimpses of real, live boy slaves.

There was plenty about slave boys in the magazines, on the 'Net, on the vidstream programs and in the movies, and like most free boys Mike and Richie were fascinated by the stuff kids were just barely allowed to see about boy slave sex.

Which wasn't much, doggone it. Everybody knew that slave children were kept for sex, because they weren't good for much else until they grew up, and some of 'em kept on being used for sex even after they'd gotten to be as big as regular men and women. There were slave men and women kept special in the county Comfort Complex over in Hadleyville, all inspected and trained and lots of them specially 'modified' to look and act weird in sexy ways so they weren't really any good for working on the farms or in the mines or in the flood control projects.

One of the really great things about boy slaves was that they were almost never allowed to wear clothes. That was because the law said that they were "…to be kept constantly available for use" by their owners and any other free people who were allowed to do the sex to them.

Girl slaves and the woman sex-slaves were kept naked, too, but neither Mike nor Richie had all that much interest in girls. Maybe later, but except for mild curiosity about cunnies and tits, who cared about girls? Boys their own age, though…

Well, a guy could look at another boy your own size, all naked and collared and scared about getting sex-tortured and maybe dicked up the butt by a bunch of grown-up men or teenagers, over and over, never able to get away from it…

Jeez, but who wouldn't get a case of the shudders and pull a stiffie just thinking about being like that boy?

Then there were those few slaves – grown-ups and kids, too – that got parted out for organ transplants or used for medical research. Not a lot of people talked about that, but the teachers had told them in school that these were necessary things that had to get done for everybody's well-being, and that it was all right because the government did it ethically so the slaves didn't suffer. Much.

Men and women who served in the military were allowed to take on slaves while they served in foreign countries, and bring them home to America. The soldiers got those slaves almost for free, 'cause the Department of Homeland Security didn't charge people on active duty or retired from the Army anything for all the implants and conditioning and medicines and registration and tracking that regular slave-buyers had to pay for when they got personal slaves.

That stuff made slave-owning really expensive for average civilians, and both boys knew that they could go for weeks in their dumb old town never seeing anything but farm slaves and mine slaves, and all of them were owned by one part of the federal government or another, like the Department of Agriculture or the Department of Commerce or the Department of Energy. The ones in the county Comfort Complex were owned by the Department of Health & Human Services as part of the big program to cut down on venereal diseases and prostitution.

Anybody who wants to have sex with strangers for money must want to be a slave, right? So a conviction for freelancing in 'the oldest profession' almost always got the prostitute a sentence of enslavement, and if they tested out good at it, they wound up sterilized and collared in a Comfort Complex for the next ten or fifteen years. Worked out pretty well, didn't it?

"So how come these collars were in your Uncle Jack's stuff, in your attic?" Richie hadn't tired yet of fiddling with the thing. The other one of the pair that Mike had hidden in the bottom of his backpack when he'd come to the Conditioning Center that morning had been tucked back inside. "Everything I saw on the 'Net about these collars is that when a slave dies or they let him go free… What's that word?"

"Manipulation?"

"No, dummy! Something else starting with an 'M,' but ending like 'mission.' What the heck was it? 'Manumission.' That's it. Remember, we had that bit again in school, too, like in October, I think." Richie peered at the barcode on the metal collar. "Well, when a slave's not a slave any more, the government is supposed to get these collars back. Nobody is allowed to keep them."

He held up the heavy hinged ring of steel. "So how come these didn't get turned in?"

Mike shrugged. "Andy told me that Uncle Jack came back from his last tour with two kids from one of the orphans' markets in El Salvador. Almost like Indians, but with a lot of regular Spanish blood in 'em, maybe nine years old, maybe younger." He grinned. "Andy said that my Uncle Jack only liked boys for sex. He never got married, y'know.

"Dad took Andy to visit Uncle Jack when I was only a baby, and Andy told me a couple of times about how Uncle Jack let Andy do sex with Uncle Jack's two slave boys. Uncle Jack kept his slaves some kinda natural – you know, no tattoos except for the numbers thing on one leg, and none of the metal stuff through their titties or their belly-buttons or their dicks like you see in the magazines, just the same as they were when they got sold.

"When Andy saw them all naked and collared," continued Mike, "he begged Uncle Jack to let him do sex with them, and Dad didn't mind, so…"

"Oh, cool!" interrupted Richie. "Andy was so lucky!"

Mike nodded agreement. He didn't get along very well with his brother for a lot of reasons, but knowing that the older boy had always gotten away with lots of stuff Mike couldn't was a biggie.

"Well, it was only just kid stuff the slaves did with him," the dark-haired boy admitted. "Some sucking and jerking-off. I guess Andy was only, like, nine maybe, and you can't do much up-the-butt with a nine-year-old's dick, right?"

"Yeah. So what's with these collars?"

"Oh, yeah." Mike and Richie broke past and around a solid wall of brush and into the little clearing Mike had shown his friend a few years before, shaded but nicely floored with a mixture of grass and moss along what wasn't much more than a trickling creek this time of year. Side by side, they settled to the ground against the trunk of an elm.

"Anyway," continued Mike, "I think that these were the collars those two slave boys were wearing when Uncle Jack bought 'em down in El Salvador. They were Army collars or something like that, and they didn't have to be turned in later on when Uncle Jack's slaves got the new ones that work over here in the States."

"So when they got new collars, your uncle just kept these?"

"I think so. When Uncle Jack died, those slaves of his were still wearing collars, that's for sure. Andy told me that after the funeral, Uncle Jack's Army buddies got together for some kind of memorial dinner, and they read something from Uncle Jack's will. Andy said that our uncle was in something called a 'tontine' kind of arrangement with all the men in his old unit, so that if one of them owned any slaves, when he died the other guys who were still living got to draw lots to see who would get those slaves."

Mike grinned. "Andy said that during the dinner, the old soldiers used Uncle Jack's slave boys for sex, right out in the open, up the butt or to make 'em do blowjobs, like they were all sharing Uncle Jack's property a little before one guy got to keep 'it. The slaves were crying, not because they were getting done up their butts, but because they missed Uncle Jack. Then the men did the raffle thing, and one of the men got Uncle Jack's slaves signed over to him."

"Hunh." Richie's grunt was thoughtful. "I never heard about anything like that, but it makes sense. Weren't those slave boys getting too old for grown-ups to want them for sex?"

"Nah." Mike spoke with the superior knowledge of someone who'd bypassed the child-protection lockouts on the Internet long years before. "You know how they've got all us free boys on the rape prevention shots to keep us from maturating until we pass the sexual aggressiveness tests halfway through high school?"

Richie nodded. "The teachers say we're lucky. When our grandpop's generation got to be as old as we are now, lots of them had to start growing hair around their dicks and under their arms and having wet dreams and running around trying to stick it in the girls all the time. We don't gotta put up with that until we're almost ready to get our driver's licenses, and we'll grow up just as tall and everything as soon as the shots are stopped."

The other boy shifted a bit. "Right. So they can give slave boys even more shots, super-special stuff that can keep them from growing up, like, almost forever." Mike tucked his backpack closer and put an elbow on it to recline. "If they do it right, a slave boy can be more than twenty years old and he'll still look like he's our age. No hair down there, little teensy balls, no squirting when he gets his good feelings, all that stuff."

The blonde boy grinned. "I kinda like that 'no squirting' bit. I can have the good feelings over and over and over if I want to, and my cousin Frank jerks off just once and he can't even get hard again for more than half an hour, and then it takes him forever to bust another nut. That sucks."

"You jerk off with Frank since he got off the shots?"

"Yeah." Richie eased down on his own elbow facing Mike. "A few times. He's maybe a little younger than your brother, but he's been getting some real size to his dick and his balls since they took him off last year." The boy made a face. "He keeps wanting me to suck him. What am I supposed to be, anyway? His sex slave?"

Mike giggled. "Well, you suck me a bunch."

"That's different," Richie said defensively. "You don't shoot sperms and I don't do it because you want to pretend I'm your slave. I do it to make you tickle-bone and go crazy and beg me to stop." He grinned. "I used to do that to Frank before he started getting that big dong and squirting sperms. He was fun to torture that way!"

"Yeah," replied Mike reminiscently. "Andy used to be okay that way when I was little. His dick now is just gross, and he smells weird, y'know? I used to cuddle up with Dad when I was little, and Dad never smelled as weird as Andy's been smelling for the past couple of years. What the heck is wrong with him, anyway?"

Richie shrugged. "Frank's kinda the same way. I just hope that neither of us gets like that when they stop our shots."

Mike returned the shrug, but as an expression of indifference. "Who cares? That's, like, forever away from us."

Richie resumed fiddling with the collar he'd been examining. "How come this thing won't click closed?"

"I dunno," replied Mike a bit uneasily. "I think maybe it's because it was inactivated or something when Uncle Jack switched the slaves to different collars. Must be. I saw online that these things have got tracker stuff inside them, just like in our pocketphones. If they were still working, the slave cops would've come for them, right?"

"I guess." Richie looked down at the collar and then slowly lifted it up to fit the front half of it around his own throat, then swung the back half almost closed. He held it that way for a moment, then glanced up at his friend.

"Jeez," the boy almost whispered. "It feels almost like it fits me."

Mike's eyes were almost glazed as he nodded. "Yeah," he said softly. "It looks like it does, too."

Both were silent for a while. For a free person to wear something that even looked like a slave collar was a federal offense. A legal minor could be publicly caned, and a grown-up could get flogged. It wasn't an 'enslavement' offense, but what boy wanted to risk getting caned?

But a real slave collar, even an old one that didn't work any more…

Richie took it away from his throat. "Well, anyway, we can't even get these to close all the way."

Mike blinked. "Maybe."

"Huh?" It was Richie's turn to blink. "What d'you mean, 'maybe'?"

The dark-haired boy squirmed a little, not meeting his friend's eyes and not really answering. "Andy told me that after he and Dad came home from that visit to Uncle Jack's, he told Mom how neat it had been to use Uncle Jack's slave boys for sexing." Mike grimaced. "Andy said that Mom went totally ballistic. Didn't want her darling little boys to have anything to do with dirty slaves, yelled at Dad, and she's been twitchy about slaves ever since. Won't let Andy or me even talk about them where she can hear us, or watch anything about sex slaves on the vids, nothing."

"Wow." Richie's eyes were round. "She's not, like, an abolitionist or something, is she?"

Mike responded with an impatient shake of his head. "No, she's not crazy like that. She doesn't care about the farm slaves around here, or the slave women who do the cleaning in the hospital and work the laundries and stuff. She's just got a thing about using slave boys for sex." A pause. "I think she looks at them and then thinks about Andy, when he was little, or me right now. It's like she's thinking about me running around bare-assed, and grown-up men making me do blowjobs on them and shoving their big dicks up my butt."

The blond boy scoffed. "That's illegal. No grown-up would do slave sex to a free boy when there are plenty of slave boys in the Comfort Complexes he can do for almost free. That's one of the reasons why they've got slave boys, so that men who like to do boys for sex don't do the molesting to free kids."

Mike took the collar from Richie's hands, studying it.

"Yeah," he said at length. "But if we could put these collars on – if we took off our clothes and put these collars on…" He looked up at his friend. "Big guys in high school, even grown-up men – they'd do slave-sex stuff to us."

Chapter Two

Baccalaureate burger-flippers.

When the DHHS established the Comfort Complexes, these kinds of money pits had been ripe for re-tasking. They were all well-sited to receive traffic, required little modification to make them suitable for their new purposes, and were loaded with goodies like sports fields, gymnasia, computer systems, swimming pools, libraries, and auditoria.

'Comfort' isn't just about sex, y'know.

Hadleyville's local Conditioning Center for the compulsory exercise of children and teens was even sited in a fenced-off part of the old community college campus, and there was a tree-shaded 'picnic area' fronting the fenceline nearest the kids' running track where lots of grown-up men (and even a few women) sat to sip their bottled water and munch their soya crackers while watching the sweaty young bodies thundering competitively over the cinders in operating-room-green shorts and tee-shirts.

Even when you've got collared, naked little boys and girls bringing you your crackers and bottled water – and you can fuck them on the picnic tables if you want to – it's enticing to enjoy the sight of the forbidden fruit out there on display.

Last summer – after their suppression shots had been discontinued – Frank and Andy had started doing their summertime conditioning routines at the Hadleyville complex instead of the one back in their home town. By no coincidence at all, the county's tram shuttle hub was right next to the Comfort Complex, and the boys' commute took them less than twenty minutes one-way.

Teenagers – especially boys – were encouraged to start making use of the Comfort facilities as soon as possible and as frequently as they liked after their shots were stopped. They didn't even have to pay the purely nominal fees that adults were charged.

Andy and Frank and free kids their ages from all over the county would do their summertime conditioning routines in the annex during the mornings and then go over to the main campus to fuck slaves all afternoon. Kept 'em busy, properly exercised, and sexually satisfied.

Adolescent vandalism, teenaged pregnancies, even truancy had been reduced just about all the way to zero since the Comfort Complexes had been opened. Back-sass a teacher, cut a class, disrespect a cop, and they cut off your access to slave ass for a week or even a month. You could go to the Comfort Complex to swim or read or attend 'educational' lectures, but they wouldn't let you fuck (or even get sucked-off by) any of those pretty little slave boys.

Or girls or women, either, but who care about them?

Hell, it had gotten so that the county cops didn't have to cane even a single teenager for months at a stretch.

This summer, Andy and Frank had taken up the routine again with easy familiarity. During the school year, they were only allowed to come over to the big campus on week-ends and holidays, and these last few weeks had been mellow, what with getting laid every day. Even made the boring exercise grunts each morning more tolerable.

The same day that Mike had shown Richie the slave collars he'd found in the attic, the two teenagers were lucky enough to score a nice little redhead, all of eight years old, and had taken the kid to their second-favorite comfort room to use the boy until they got tired of him.

They did this kind of thing a lot. When school was out, even in a big complex like the one in Hadleyville, not every teenager could get a slave kid all to himself, so it was a good idea to share. Gave a whole new meaning to the expression 'asshole buddies' when it meant you and your friend were fucking the same little ass.

"Damn," said Andy to the slave, "I wish you were my brother."

"Master?" The redhead was relatively new to this sex business, but he'd already heard this kind of thing. It didn't mean that the teenager wanted to adopt him or anything impossible like that. It meant that he was getting done instead of the big guy's brother. Little brother. Men – and especially the women – would do a slave boy but they'd be thinking about doing some other boy, somebody they'd always wanted to do, or couldn't do anymore.

The ladies were just plain weird. Lots of them would sex with a slave kid while they were thinking about doing it to their own little boys or girls.

Unofficially, most of the people coming to the Complex had long since decided to call the boy by his old first name – Roger – even though the law said he wasn't allowed to use it. He'd been enslaved by way of the new federal bankruptcy laws when his mom's business had gone bust under the ever-increasing weight of environmental regulations, and after conditioning they'd put him in Hadleyville because it was just about as far as possible from where the rest of his family had been scattered when they'd been indentured.

Lots of grown-ups treated him really nice after he'd sucked their dickies or they'd done him in his bottom. Not most of them, but some. Teenagers, though, almost always were pretty nasty to him. Roger figured it was simply because big guys liked to rough up little guys, just like in school. These two guys hadn't done that to him, though.

Not yet, anyway.

"I mean it," said the teenager. He leaned over with a smile and kissed Roger lightly, affectionately, not like grown-ups did when they wanted to be sexy. "If it was my brother Mike wearing this collar…" he took Roger's brushed-steel symbol of enslavement between thumb and fingertips and shifted it a little "…I'd never go soft."

Roger reached down and got the older boy's big sticky-slippery dickie in his hand, finding it soft but still kind of nice. The little slave had examined a lot of grown-up dickies since he'd been collared, and after he'd gotten used to them he had to admit that he liked them. Not all of the grown-ups who used those dickies on him, sure, but like all little boys, big grown-up dickies had always interested him.

And Roger definitely liked Andy.

The other teenager was snoring contentedly on his side of the big bed. That one – named Frank – had been the first to do Roger in the bottom this afternoon, and after he'd done Roger another time, Frank had settled down for a nap ("…to recharge"). Both of them had come straight over from their Conditioning session, all sweaty and horny and smelling the way big guys always smelled when they'd been exercising, which was nasty and at the same time pretty sexy.

Roger had had these two guys twice before, and he kinda liked both of them, not just Andy. They didn't do stupid stuff like peeing on him (or wanting him to pee on them), and they weren't into poop, which was just disgusting. He hoped they wouldn't get tired of him too soon. Maybe if he let them sort of know that he didn't mind them doing stuff like the spanking to him?

Jeez, but just thinking about that made Roger's dickie go hard.

When Andy had put his dickie up inside Roger's bottom that second time today, he'd done it nice and slow, stretching it out for a long time. Roger had started out hating those kinds of slow screw jobs because when he began getting it up his bottom he'd just wanted the men to do him and get it over with. But then some of the grown-ups had shown him that if they did it right, a big dickie in a little guy's butt could be kinda nice, especially because it showed that the grown-up really liked you and wanted you to feel good, too.

"Master wants to do sex stuff with his brother?"

The teenager chuckled. "Forget the slave talk, kid. You know my name."

Roger smiled a little and shrugged. "They tell us we've gotta, Master. We're never supposed to forget that we're slaves." He leaned over and kissed Andy's chest. "Specially when we get to liking the guys who do the sex to us." Then, still holding onto the teenager's dickie, he nuzzled against the big, strong body, breathing in the smell of Andy's flesh.

"Mm. You got nice muscles, Master."

Excellent! Roger thought. His dickie's getting hard again. I thought that might work.

"Yeah," Andy continued, drawing Roger close against himself and kissing the redhead's hair. "I'd really like to get into my brother's little ass. He's older than you, but not much bigger, and it just about drives me crazy to know that I can't fuck him."

Roger looked up into Andy's face. "I bet he'd like it if you fucked him, Master."

"Yeah? Well, I can't be sure of that, and if he squeals on me, I'll wind up wearing one of these collars for five or ten years." Andy grinned. "A piece of his ass just isn't worth that kind of risk, especially when I can have a nice little slave like you just about any day I get lucky enough to grab you."

The redhead smiled back. "That's lucky for me, too, Master. You and your friend are my favorites."

That wasn't exactly right because Roger had some other regulars who were even nicer, but it was still pretty close to the truth. But grown-ups always liked to hear stuff like that from slave boys.

"Which one of us do you like better?"

Roger gave him a 'Gimme a break!' look.

"C'mon, Master. You know I gotta say you're the one." He glanced at Frank, who was still dead to the world. "But your friend's really nice, too. Did you guys used to do stuff together when you were little? I had a friend like that, back where I used to live…"

Andy could tell that the boy was starting to cloud up at the thought of what he'd lost when the government had enslaved him, and the big teenager drew the naked little kid closer not just to comfort him. He realized that the sight of Roger's tears was a real turn-on.

"You're making me want to fuck you again," he murmured.

The slave boy sniffled, blinking. "'M sorry, Master." He looked embarrassed. "I didn't mean to be a baby."

"Don't be." Andy kissed the kid again. "I like fucking cute little babies like you."

Roger gave him a tight little grin. "I guess I like getting fucked by you, Master. But I don't want to be a baby just so you'll do me."

"Don't worry about that, little baby." Andy squeezed the boy tighter. "When you're with me, just be yourself. I won't make fun of you."

The redhead grunted theatrically as his body was compressed against that of the big teenager. "So – ooh! – how do you fuck a little baby, Master?"

"Well," replied the teenager, "first you let him suck a nice pacifier to calm him down."

Roger felt the strong arms relax a little and he smiled before flipping over to go down on the older boy's big dickie. The slave had started out thinking that sucking on a grown-up's dickie was gross, especially after the grown-up had just done him in his bottom, but he'd long since gotten used to it. After all, Roger had cleaned himself out scrupulously after each of his morning sessions, and the only stuff in his bottom right now were the sperms of these two nice teenagers. While Roger didn't want to admit it too eagerly, he really liked the taste of most grown-ups' sperms.

As he drew back the skin and got Andy's dickie into his mouth, the eight-year-old was delighted to find it getting thicker and harder right away. That was one of the advantages of having teenagers do you. The all-the-way grown-ups did you once or maybe twice and then they couldn't get hard anymore except if they used some kind of injection or stuff. Andy and Frank liked to keep Roger all afternoon, doing it to him over and over, and it was almost like playing sex with his friends when he'd been a free boy.

Except for the sperms and getting it in your bottom, of course.

Sucking a grown-up's dickie was way different from doing the same thing to another kid, and some of the real grown-ups' dickies were so big that they were more than a little bit scary. It still hurt Roger pretty bad when he had to get one of those humongous dickies shoved up inside him, but neither Andy nor Frank were monster-sized yet.

He thought about what might happen if the two friends wanted to 'double-dick' him, and he shuddered. That hadn't happened to Roger yet, but he'd heard about it – in forbidden whispers – from one of the other slaves. There was never much opportunity for slaves in the Comfort Complex to talk with one another.

It had to happen lots to the slave girls, of course. It stood to reason, didn't it? Girls had two holes to take dickies, so that was all right for them. But two dicks in one opening? Yeowtch!

Well, thought the boy as he sucked carefully and considerately on Andy's penis, if it's gonna happen anyway, it wouldn't be so bad if these two big friends did the 'double' thing to him for his first time. How was he supposed to let them know he wouldn't mind that very much, either?

Nobody had had to teach Roger to be gentle with a grown-up's balls. Even if he was little and just a slave, Roger was still an all-the-way boy. They'd decided not to cut his own balls off, the way they did with some other slave boys, and he was really glad about that.

(He hadn't learned yet that as a child indentured for a set period of time – in Roger's case, until after his twenty-first birthday – it was illegal for the Department of Health & Human services to modify him beyond the identification tattoo just below his right hip. Now, if he ever got sold to a private owner…)

Andy's big balls were nice to fool with, too, and as Roger kept the root of Andy's dickie under control with one hand, with the other he explored the balls and the other stuff inside the loose, velvety sac of skin that hung down below. He'd never realized that there were things inside the bag besides the balls, but he had a couple of regulars who were doctors, and they'd been happy to explain a lot of it to him. No grown-up was ever exactly the same down there, and checking it out was still pretty interesting. He didn't try to play with Andy's hole because both of these teenagers had made it clear that they didn't like that kind of stuff, and that was okay with Roger. The clients, after all, didn't clean themselves out the way slave boys were taught to do, and the thought of what might be up there was more than a little bit yucky.

Roger wasn't trying to make the sperms come, of course, so he did the job slow and easy. He thought that he'd gotten pretty good at using his mouth to get grown-ups ready to do him. It was really a lot different from what you did when you were sucking a friend your own age, where you were trying to drive him crazy with the sex-feelings as fast as you possibly could, and if you put a finger or two in his butt-hole they called it "No fair!"

He figured that Andy was just about ready to do him inside, but Andy had tucked his head between Roger's legs to kiss the boy's bottom and then do the tongue stuff to Roger's opening, and it felt so good that yet again Roger wondered why he'd never done the same thing to his friends when he'd been a free boy.

Just too embarrassed, I guess. Oh, that's so great!

Even though he couldn't imagine wanting to be a slave boy in a Comfort Complex, Roger had to admit that there were some really good things about it. Free boys never got to have grown-ups doing the sex to them like this because that was against the law, and wasn't that weird?

Roger let up on the teenager's penis and gasped as he felt Andy's tongue push really hard up inside his bottom.

"Ooh, Master! W-what do you do to your little baby next?"

The older boy shifted, kissing Roger's bottom cheek one more time. "You've got to flip him over…"

So saying, the teenager gathered up the slave boy and plopped him back on the surface of the bed, belly-up, and crouched on elbows and knees over Roger's nakedness to smile down into the redhead's eyes. The child's hands lay half closed on the sheets, either side of Roger's head, lax in an unconscious gesture of surrender, and Andy gazed into clear brown eyes for a long moment before kissing the eight-year-old lightly, as he'd used to kiss Mike when the kid was about the same age.

"I, I bet your brother would like you doing the sex to him," said Roger softly. "Just like this."

Andy chuckled. With his extended forefingers on either side, he moved the boy's collar just a little, up and down, to feel the weight of it. "You're just saying that because you're a good little slave."

The child shook his head. "Unh-uh. I think he would. Jeez, he'd have to like it. You're strong and good-looking and not mean, like some guys. You treat a little kid nice with the sex, even when you're super-horny, and you don't beat me or tie me up, or do other nasty stuff to me." He blinked. "Not that I'd be really mad at you if you did. Honest."

"You forgot to say 'Master,' kiddo."

Roger felt his face go a little bit warm. "Well, I'm just a baby." He shrugged slightly. "Babies don't know that they're slaves. Master."

"Yeah, you're right." Andy leaned down and kissed the kid again, this time sliding his tongue between Roger's lips, and the slave closed his eyes, groaning a little as his mouth was explored by his client. Kissing had started out being so weird when they'd put the collar on him, and he still didn't like it much with a lot of the grown-ups, but Andy did it really nice.

"Does my little baby want his pacifier all the way up his botty now?"

Roger couldn't help giggling just a little. "Yes, big brother. Baby wants it all nice and warm and everything, sliding in and out, to make him feel all better."

Andy had given a sudden shudder when the boy had said 'big brother', and now Roger noticed the teenager looking down at him kind of funny-like.

"Damn," said the big guy in a whisper. "Now I wish that you were my brother. Not that Mike was here instead of you, so I could fuck him, but you yourself, so I could take you home and keep you."

Roger had had a couple of grown-ups say stuff like that, but he knew it couldn't be that way. He was going to be a Comfort Complex boy slave forever, and that made him sad all of a sudden. You weren't supposed to like the clients too much, but everybody knew it was gonna happen. If Andy couldn't be his own big brother…

"How about you pretend that you're doing the sex to him, then?" Roger swallowed hard, trying not to cry. "To Mike, I mean. You already did me in my bottom today as just plain old me, right? This time do me as if I was Mike. H-how old is he? Is he pretty?" He paused. "Prettier than I am?"

That got Andy to smile. "He's twelve," he replied. "And he has dark brown hair instead of these fiery red filaments you've got." The teenager fingered Roger's lank, almost-auburn hair. "He needs a haircut pretty bad right now, but I like your hair the way you're wearing it."

"Is he a lot bigger than me?"

"Nah, not so much. He's on the shots, too, so he's not really any bigger now than he was when he was nine or ten. I still get to see him in the bathroom sometimes, and his piddler isn't much bigger than yours, either."

"S-so pretend I'm Mike," whispered Roger. "I'm twelve years old, but I'm little for my age, and I hate that. I, I've got brown hair and I love you because you're my big brother, but I act snotty because you get to do all the neat stuff and I'm stuck at home. We, we're hiding from our mom so we can do the sex together, the real sex like you've done to slave boys in the Comfort Complex." He could see the change in Andy's expression now, and it made him excited!

"You're showing me what it's like to be a slave boy and take a grown-up penis all the way up inside me, because I want to try being a slave, to pretend that I'm letting a stranger do me, the way a slave boy has to behave for a Master…"

Suddenly Andy's hands were on Roger's legs, pulling his knees up, folding them, spreading them apart, Roger's feet up in the air on either side of the big guy's body, and the slave felt a delicious tingle of scared-ness run all through his naked body as he gazed up at Andy's blazing eyes.

"Okay, Mikey," growled the teenager, his nostrils flaring. His hands gathered up the younger boy's hips, lifting them, drawing the slender little body toward himself. "You asked for it!"

Roger felt the blunt tip of the big penis bump up against his bottom, not quite in the opening there, and then pushing up against the back part of his balls.

"C'mon, Andy!" the child whined, really afraid. "You said this was just pretend!"

"Shut up! You want to play slave boy? Fake up a collar and paint a number on your leg? Okay, this is what happens to little slave boys."

He shifted his body and Roger's as well, bringing his hard-on right into the entryway, and Roger remembered to keep it super-tight so that it would feel like a bottom that had never had a grown-up dickie shoved into it. That made it hurt more, of course, and Roger didn't have to pretend to yelp out his pain as Andy punched the head of it into the ring and through, with a feeling like a silent pop! of anguish.

"Oh, Andy!" he sobbed, feeling real tears on his face as he looked up at his big brother. "Oh, it's in me! It's in me!"

"Yeah," was the response, with a really nasty grin. "That's where I want it to go."

"But it hurts, Andy!" The little boy sniffled. "You're hurting me! Take it out, Andy! Please, take it out!"

"No way, little bro. You're getting it all the way." And the teenager shoved, sliding almost all of his thing up inside Roger's bottom, making the child jump, his eyes round with the pain. And the pain was about as real as it could possibly be! Andy really wanted to punish his little brother.

"Please!" The sob was heartfelt.

"Un-uh! You've been running around for more than a year, playing the little cock-tease, thinking I wouldn't get fed up with you and do you just the way you deserve. Now you're taking it, my cock and my cum, busting your cherry for good. After this, I'm gonna fuck you any time I want, and you're gonna like it. I'll show you how much you'll like it!"

Wow! There was still a part of Roger's mind that was a properly prepared and – well, kinda – experienced sex slave, and while he wasn't going to quit being "Mike" until his client had gotten his satisfaction, the boy knew that the real Mike had turned his big brother into a ticking time bomb. Poor Mike, he thought. He probably didn't mean to do this, but if Andy ever gets the chance for real…!

"I'm all the way, now," reported Andy exultantly. "All the way up your little ass. How's that feel, Mikey? Tell me how it feels!"

"Oh, it hurts! It hurts, it hurts, it hurts!" Roger was struggling now for real, confident that Andy's strength was way better than his own. "D-don't move it, Andy! It hurts too much when you move it!"

"Tough! This is called 'fucking,' little brother. It's what a man does to a little boy-cunt like you, to make the sperm come all the way up inside you." He began the rhythm, shoving it really fast every time he had it almost all the way back inside to make 'Mike' breathe in, a gasp of startlement and pain.

He's been thinking about doing this to Mike for a long time! Roger realized. Probably dreaming about it when he was playing with his dickie, to make the sex feelings better for him.

"Once I've got my sperm in you," continued Andy exultantly, "you're gonna be my boy, my private sex slave, and I'm gonna do you twice a day until I get tired of you. And I'm never gonna get tired of fucking you!"

"Please don't hurt me, Andy!" Roger shifted, trying to blink the tears out of his eyes. The bigger boy had grabbed his wrists, keeping him helpless. "I promise not to tell mom! I won't tell anybody! You can do me if you want to, but please stop hurting me!"

"No way! It always hurts for a tight little boy-cunt like you to get a man-sized cock up his ass. Gotta plow the road!" And Andy started fucking Roger even harder and faster, the kind of angry, sadistic punishment Roger had suffered a few times before at the hands of other grown-ups, but never from Andy or Frank.

This is so mean! thought the boy. So nasty!

And it was so sexy, too! He was pretty sure that if this were happening to Mike instead of himself, that twelve-year-old kid would be getting close to his good feelings, too. Jeez, how could a guy help it, that big dickie working in and out along the thing back behind your balls, making you shudder like your belly was gonna explode…

That's when Roger had his good feelings, coming up from the deepest part of himself and grabbing him hard right down there at the root of his penis, so strong that it was a different kind of pain all by itself, and in spite of it Roger could tell that the client was having his own climax, giving those special short, fast shoves that told a boy there were sperms squirting nice and hot all the way up inside his body, again and again until there were no more sperms to come…

Jeez, that was weird! Roger squeezed his bottom muscles a little around the big thickness now just barely moving in his boyhole, liking the feel of it just the way he liked having Andy's big, sweaty body crouched down over top of him, not squishing him but making Roger feel all safe and protected and happy that he'd pleased the guy.

"Boy!" the slave breathed. "You really wanted to do the sex to your brother." He blinked up at Andy. "It's a good thing we did this. You coulda got into a lot of trouble if you did that to him for real instead of pretend."

That was when Andy groaned and he started crying, bending down to kiss Roger all over his face and neck and shoulders, still keeping that nice big dickie of his inside the child's anus.

"Oh, I'm sorry, baby!" He lifted up a little to look down into Roger's eyes. "I'm so sorry I did that to you! You don't deserve that kind of shit, really you don't! I don't know what came over me…"

Roger got a chance to wipe the tears and sweat out of his eyes when Andy finally let go of his wrists. "Mike's been really mean to you," said the boy decisively. "He deserves to get done up his bottom that way, and if I ever meet him, I'm gonna punch him in the belly for being so mean to you."

That made Andy's tears turn to chuckles, and Roger felt better himself.

"Baby, you're a pretty big boy after all." He kissed the little redhead again and worked his cock out of the lovely young ass to let Roger settle more comfortably on the bed. "Let's get a shower."

Roger glanced at Frank. "You sure your friend won't want to do me one more time?"

Andy reached for one of the pocketphones the clients had parked on a bedside table and checked the time. "If he wanted to, he should've done it earlier. We've gotta get home." He climbed off the bed and helped Roger stand up beside him. "How do you want to wake him up? Just dump him on the floor?"

"No!" Roger was scandalized. "He's a nice guy. You go run the shower to get the water warm and I'll get him up."

"I want to watch."

Roger grinned. "All right." He got back up on the bed, crawled over to Frank, reached down for the sleep-soft dickie, squeezed it gently, then let go and leaned over Frank's face to kiss him again and again until the big teenager responded with a muttered:

"Okay, Mom, I'm up! I'm up!"

Chapter Three

"Yeah, but I realized that I was taking a stupid risk yesterday."

"Huh?" Richie blinked. "Whaddaya mean?"

"Metal detectors." Mike grimaced. "They got metal detectors at the Complex, just like at school. It was only dumb luck we ditched our backpacks with all the other guys' bags, under the trees just back of the old playground. We brought our exercise stuff home with us to get it washed yesterday, and now it would look weird if we didn't bring our backpacks in."

"So what are you gonna do?"

"I'm gonna stick 'em in the place where we usually fool around on our way home. That's why I got you to leave early."

"Oh. Good move. Then we can mess with 'em on the way home."

"Yeah." Mike's expression was troubled. "And I got something to show you I didn't tell you about yesterday."

Richie really wished Mike hadn't told him that – and just shut up. Nothing he could do would make Mike go on and tell him. The morning exercises – boring as usual – just crawled by.

Instead of morning sessions with clients, Roger had the conditioning he had to do with half of the Complex's slave children every other day.

It was only either three or four days a week instead of five, the way it had been during vacation when he was a free boy, and the routine was a lot different, but he liked the exercises, especially the swimming. There was a big indoor pool that got used only by the slave boys and girls during the mornings. The adult slaves and the free folks who worked at the Complex got to use it for their conditioning routines during the afternoons and the evenings.

Sometimes there were a couple or three free grown-ups in the water with the kids besides the Discipline Masters (they were called 'DMs' for short), and they didn't wear any bathing suits or anything, either. They were always touching kids and some would try to distract you, tease you, and talk dirty to you. They paid most of their attention to the new kids, sizing them up to do stuff to them in the afternoon. That's how Roger had gotten picked for a lot of afternoons when he'd first come to the Complex.

Conditioning wasn't supposed to be fun, even for free kids, but for the slave children at the Complex it could get pretty nasty. The DMs all carried little whip things called 'quirts' to whack your legs or your bottom if you didn't do what you were told, and do it right away. Roger hadn't felt it very often because he'd always been quick and alert, but all the DMs would pop a boy just to make the poor kid jump. Girl slaves didn't seem to get it as much except from the female DMs.

Then there were the classes. You wouldn't think that there was a lot to learn about being a sex slave, especially for the kids who had been doing it for years and years. There were plenty of boys and girls who didn't look more than maybe eleven or ten but who were really older than either Andy or Frank.

Well, you couldn't tell unless you looked at them really close. Those were the kids who didn't fidget, didn't swing their legs back and forth when they sat on grown-up-sized chairs, didn't wipe their noses on the backs of their hands or their arms. The boys didn't play with their dickies the way little boys did when they were idle, and they talked more quietly, walked differently, more sure of themselves, with better balance and eyes that were different from the eyes of kids who were really young.

But there were classes for all the slaves. Everybody didn't always sit together, but for a while every other morning Roger had to go into a room with a bunch of other boys and girls who hadn't been slaves very long and had to be taught what a slave had to know to be good for the grown-ups who used them. Lots were older, but none was younger than Roger, and that made him kind of proud. He'd always been a good student.

This week, their bunch was learning more about bondage stuff, right now the kinds of knots to use when you're tying up a client, the special quick-release knots that were strong enough to keep a horse from running away, but that anybody could get out of really quick if he knew how, and wanted to.

He knew that this wasn't the kind of stuff you got to do in Cub Scouts, but it was still pretty interesting.

A kid getting tied up for the sex he could understand. Plenty of clients had done it to him already, and not with these quick-release knots, either. What he wanted to ask – but the DMs didn't like questions – was what kind of grown-up liked to get tied up to do sex with a kid?

Roger was kind of looking forward to serving a client that way.

"Okay," said Richie, "what d'you have to show me you didn't tell me about yesterday."

Mike glanced at his friend as they trudged out of the Conditioning Center grounds, then he looked around.

"I gotta key."

"Huh?"

"I said," Mike responded, keeping his voice down. "I gotta key. For the collars."

"What?" Richie plainly didn't believe his neighbor. "Nobody's got keys to slave collars. Only the slave police have keys, and they keep those in the main station over in Hadleyville."

"I got one key. It works on both the collars. I found it with them."

Richie kept walking, the expression on his face thoughtful. "They're both locked so that they can't be closed." He focused on Mike. "Or they were locked so you couldn't latch them. You mean you've unlocked them, and latched them, and then opened 'em up again?"

Mike nodded. "Both of them."

There was a slow grin on the blond boy's face now. "So we can mess around with them. Real slave collars."

"Yeah." Mike gave the grin back, hesitated, then: "I get to suck you off first."

"Hey, no fair! You got to go first the last time we did it."

They didn't speed up their steady walking pace as they made their way to the little patch of shade they'd staked out as a private refuge. Too conspicuous. Besides, Richie had relayed to Mike the old joke about the two bulls on the hill, looking over a bunch of girl cows down in the valley.

The young one had said: "Let's run down there and fuck a couple of those cows!"

The old one had replied: "Let's walk down there and fuck 'em all."

Especially on a hot day, who wanted to waste energy you could spend doing sex stuff?

Chapter Four

"So?" Andy looked a little irked, and then gave a low-pitched "Gaw-damn!" as the system reported that the slave in question was already reserved for the rest of the day. The system then gave a menu of boys they might like as substitutes, based on Roger's number.

"Let's ask for two this time," suggested Frank. "I don't think the Complex is really busy today, and we might be able to get one each." He punched in a request for himself and got the one he wanted, an eleven-year-old blond kid they'd enjoyed together about six weeks ago, on a Saturday visit, and it was approved. "C'mon, make a choice for yourself."

Andy grumbled, but keyed in his own request, for a mousy brown-haired boy who'd just turned ten. They'd had him before, too, but maybe the kid had learned something in the past couple of months. That one came up green as well, and Andy shrugged his resignation. He didn't know that the system didn't 'like' to let teenagers do the same slave too frequently because it fostered ties of inappropriate affection.

The DM at the pick-up area was a grim-faced old guy who checked the boys' identification and brought the slaves out in brown leather wrist cuffs coupled by short chains to either side of their collars, and ankle cuffs hobbling them by way of chains maybe twice as long, forcing them to shuffle frantically as the DM touched each of them up with a stroke of his quirt. Each boy was robbed of speech by the required red rubber ball gag, and each was formally 'in chastity' by virtue of the usual snug stainless steel woven-wire mesh bag anchored around the root of the penis and the base of the scrotum by a tight steel cockring. The mincing steps they took as they walked told you instantly that if you could see them from behind there would be the base of the regulation red buttplug between each little set of asscheeks. Their serial numbers were tattooed on each one's right thigh just below the hip, together with an old-fashioned scanner barcode, but they weren't decorated otherwise. Government-issue 'plain vanilla'.

Both Andy and Frank had fucked their first slave boys just like that – gag, cuffs, chains and all (except the buttplugs, of course) – because the bondage thing had been such a turn-on, but that had gotten old pretty quick.

In the corridors leading to and from the comfort rooms, rules of the Complex said that the slaves had to be packaged like this, but the chain-link shuffle was a pain in the ass.

And not in a good way.

Once they turned a corner and were out of sight of the DM, each teenager just grabbed his slave and picked the kid up in his arms, carrying the boy the rest of the way. Andy's choice whimpered a little, looking up at him fearfully, and that made Andy wish he could spare a hand to adjust his cock in his underpants. Face it, having a naked little guy in your arms who was scared of what you might be planning to do to him was a turn-on.

Without further discussion, they made for their favorite room – another one with a big bed – and got it, no problem.

"Well," said Frank as he set his little blond down, "we're not totally out of luck." Andy kicked the door closed behind him and put down the brunette near the chair in the far corner. Sitting down, he unclipped the kid's wrist cuffs and unhooked the chains from the collar before unfastening the gag and getting it out of the youngster's mouth.

"You don't remember me, do you?"

The timid little slave shook his head slowly. "I, I don't think so, Master."

"That's fair," Andy replied. "I remember you, but I don't remember your name. What is it?"

The child gulped visibly, scared. "We, we don't have names, Master. My last four numbers are 4-6-7-7. That's what you're supposed to call me."

"Yeah, I know." The teenager bent low to unfasten and remove the ankle cuffs, too. "There. The collar you gotta keep." The little guy sucked in his breath as Andy worked the cockring and its wire mesh bag gently but firmly off the child's little dick and ballsac. As usual, the boy's naughty bits had been lightly lubed to get it on, and removing it wasn't any big deal. "So what name did you used to have? What did they call you before you got that necklace?"

The boy glanced at the other kid, who was rubbing his wrists gratefully and smiling at Frank. Frank always got rid of the gag, first thing.

"I, I used to be Thomas. They called me Tommy."

"Oh, yeah!" Andy smiled. "Tommy. That's Frank and I'm Andy. We did you on a Saturday trip out here maybe three months ago." He gathered Tommy's bottom cheeks into his hands, massaging them gently before getting a grip on the base of the buttplug and – with the expertise of long familiarity – eased the mercifully compressible dingus out of Tommy's anus. The kid gave him nothing more than a suppressed wriggle, a wince, and a whimper in the process. That accomplished, Andy he pulled the kid onto his knee. "I'm sorry I forgot your name. I'll try to remember it better."

"They beat me for using my old name, Master." The boy looked accusingly at Andy. "I gotta do what you tell me to do, but they really don't want us doing that."

"Look," said Andy patiently, "when you're in this room with me or with my friend over there, nobody's going to beat you just for using your name. I like your name. It makes me feel sexy to know that a cute little guy who used to be named 'Tommy' is gonna be getting my cock up his bottom."

Frank put in from across the room, where he sat on the edge of the bed with the blond boy: "This one's name is Jacob." He grinned down at the youngster. "Can I call you 'Jake,' short stuff?"

The older kid smiled. "If you want to, Master. But I'm gonna keep calling you 'Master' because that makes it more sexy for me."

Frank picked up one of the chain-and-wrist-cuff combinations. He looked at Jake with a mildly puzzled expression. "If these things come off so easily, how come you guys don't just take them off whenever you want to?"

The blond boy gave him a look of dismay. "That would be wrong, Master! We'd get punished for sure."

Frank persisted. "What happens if there's a fire or something?"

Jake relaxed. "Oh, that's different. Then we're allowed to take off our chains. We even have fire drills about once a month, just like they used to have at school. Each slave is supposed to take off the chains – you've gotta bring them with you – and get to the nearest exit. You hit the chicken bar and go out to the nearest check-in place. They're all around the Complex. You put your chains back on and you just stand there, waiting until a DM or one of the grown-up slaves comes around with a scanner and checks your butt code." The boy tapped the tattoo just below his right hip, then he smiled.

"A couple of months ago, I was with a client and he took the chains and stuff off me – the way you just did; most Masters do – before he started doing the sex to me. I was sucking his thing pretty good when the alarm went off, and I had to jump up and head for the door." He looked embarrassed. "We're not allowed to speak during a fire drill. Or a regular fire, either, I guess. I just grabbed my chains and ran. He must've thought it was a real fire, and so he followed me, carrying his pants but nothing else, and both of us got outside to a check-in spot.

"I put on my cuffs and chains, and my grown-up put on his pants. We just stood there with him cuddling me, thinking that I was scared, until one of the Discipline Masters came up to scan me. The DM explained to the client that it was just a drill, and my client laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world." The child grinned. "He was an awfully nice guy about it, Master. He's one of my regulars now, and I get to see him almost every week."

Frank and Andy both laughed. Little Jake wasn't any kind of special beauty, but he was all boy.

Tommy tugged on Andy's shirtsleeve, and Andy looked down at him. "D-do you want me to take your clothes off for you, Master?"

The teenager chuckled. "Nah. I'm a big boy. I can get undressed all by myself." He leaned over and gave Tommy a friendly kiss before pulling his shirt up over his head and off. "I forgot how nice it was to kiss you, too. I used to think that kissing a little boy was kinda sappy, but you've helped me learn better."

That made Tommy smile at last. "I thought it was yucky, too, Master. But grown-ups like you are really nice to kiss."

Frank chuckled, kicking off his other sneaker. "How about sucking our cocks?"

Jake was obviously the more impudent of the two. "I've always liked that, Master!" The kid was grinning, helping Frank get out of his shirt. "I can't remember when I didn't want a nice, big, grown-up penis to play with."

"How long ago did you get collared?" Frank asked.

The eleven-year-old shrugged. "Last year, just before school was supposed to start. My dad got arrested for making buckeyball stuff [http://www.gizmag.com/diet-buckyballs-extending-lifespan/22245/], and they slaved me and my sister until his trial is over." Jake glanced up at Frank a bit wistfully. "I dunno where they put her. She's, uh, fifteen now, I think."

(Once convicted – and he would be convicted – the man would be parted out as an organ donor, and his children would be permanently forfeit to the government. Jake had no idea that he'd been marked for sale to a politically-connected private slave owner who intended to modify the boy heavily. His sister had excellent potential as a breeder and host-mother.)

"I've got a big sister, too," said Frank. "She's grown-up and married. Just had a baby, another girl."

Jake's nose wrinkled. "Babies!"

"Yeah." He hugged the kid for a moment, then got on with getting naked, standing up to drop his board shorts. He wasn't wearing briefs, and Jake grinned at the sight of Frank's cock, already getting nice and hard.

"That's no baby!" he said as he reached up to take Frank's balls in one hand and the uncut dick in the other, peeling the foreskin all the way back to reveal the precum-shiny head of it.

Frank ruffled the blond hair as the slave boy played slowly with his cock, and then glanced at Andy. His friend was just sitting there, not even completely undressed, with the skinny ten-year-old parked on his knee, cuddled up against him, the naked youngster's eyes closed as Andy rocked him a little, back and forth, the bigger boy running the fingers of one hand almost unconsciously through Tommy's hair and then all over the kid's body, taking his time to touch the warm smoothness everywhere.

"You're so little," Andy murmured. "When did you get slaved? Not real long ago, right?"

Tommy blinked up at him, blushed a bit. "April Fool's Day, Master. That's when they took me away from my mom. I didn't get my bottom done for the first time until maybe a couple of days later." He shook his head slightly. "I really can't remember. It was awful scary." He shuddered with remembered terror. "I didn't know that grown-ups could want to do that to a kid like me." His fingers were caught up in the tough loose material of Andy's shorts, clutching at it for anchorage. "Mom had our vid system on lock-out, and none of my friends had open access, so all I ever heard about was the stuff they told us in school. I never thought I'd be a slave boy!"

Andy squeezed the child tighter for a moment, then kissed the top of Tommy's head. "It's okay, kid. You'll get used to it." He shifted, smiling down at his burden. "You're an excellent slave boy, y'know. Very sexy."

The child blinked at him, a hopeful expression flickering over the narrow young face. "Y-you think so? I don't, uh, like the sex in my bottom very much yet." A pause. "And I miss my Mom, and all my friends back home. I miss not being able to go outside and play."

Jake looked up from the bed, where he was necking with Frank. "We get to go outside plenty," he objected. "When the weather's nice like this, they make us run stuff out to the people in the picnic areas. Don't you like that?"

The brown-haired boy regarded his fellow dubiously. "Yeah, but that's not playing. I was supposed to start coach-pitch this summer, and now…"

"Baseball!" snorted Frank. "Forget about baseball, and get busy playing with Andy's balls!"

That made Jake giggle. He'd been enslaved long enough to know how teenager clients were almost always different from all-the-way grown men. Only a few teenagers were into the full formal 'Master/slave' rituals that – by contrast – the overwhelming majority of the adult clients expected and insisted upon.

Doing the sex with big teenaged boys, most of them no more than a year or three after having their growth suppression shots discontinued and getting their height and muscle and the big dicks that Jake loved to play with, was almost like fooling around with kids their own size. Sure, lots of them were really mean to little guys, but that was just being bullies, not the studied cruelty of adults who subscribed to the magazines that published articles like Hang 'em By Their Heels: Penetration in an Uncommon Position and Kynodesme for Prepubescents: Chastity Binding in the Classical Style.

What teenaged boys brought to the Comfort Complex, besides their big hard-ons and their Conditioning Center muscles, was a sense of fun that was just squeezed out of most regular grown-ups.

Tommy looked back up at his client. "I'm sorry, Master. I guess I forgot. Let me get up, please, and then you can get undressed and do the sex to me."

Set upon his feet, the younger child watched as Andy stood up to untie the drawstring of his shorts and slide the baggy garment down together with the jockstrap he'd been wearing. Slaves weren't allowed any initiative, but Tommy had already thoughtlessly and innocently violated his conditioning. Out of the kind of simple courtesy a free boy is taught to show, Tommy bent to pick up the clothing, folded it a little, and set it on the nearby table as Andy dealt with his sneakers and socks.

A conscientious DM – or a sadistic adult client – would have found in this failing an opportunity to punish the slave. For his own good, of course.

The big teenager was about to stuff his second sock into his right sneaker when he had a sudden thought, and looked at Tommy. "How long has it been since you last wore any clothes?" he asked.

"Sir?" Tommy blinked. "Uh, I dunno. Last April Fool's Day, I think. Yeah. Not since then."

"Okay." Andy grinned. "Gimme your foot."

Bewildered, Tommy lifted his left foot obediently, and gasped in surprise as the visitor deftly slid the white cotton tube sock over his toes, drawing the overlarge garment all the way up to Tommy's knee.

"My brother borrows these all the time," said Andy. He did the same on the other side, leaving Tommy in stockinged feet for the first time since he'd been enslaved. "They might be too long for you, but you could wear 'em. Now, the jockstrap's a no-go, but these shorts… Pick up your foot."

The board shorts were ridiculously too large, their hems generously well below Tommy's knees as Andy pulled the drawstrings tight around the child's waist and knotted them. "Now for the tee-shirt…"

The khaki-colored cotton hung down to well below Tommy's ass, the slave collar and a smooth left shoulder wholly exposed by the overgenerous neck opening. It presented a silly sight, a little boy in hand-me-downs, smiling self-consciously at the other three pairs of eyes in the room, shifting his legs and arms a little to feel sensations that had become strange to him since the early days of Spring.

"They have us wear jackets and leggings in the cold weather," remarked Jake as he watched his fellow slave standing there. "Not pants, but things like long socks all the way up to your butt, and they don't cover your feet. Even when we go outside in the snow, we gotta go barefoot or in sandals." He shuddered at remembered cold as Frank gathered him close and kissed him on the cheek.

"It's to make you remember that you're a slave, kiddo." Frank nuzzled the blond boy's ear, nibbling a little. "You always have to remember that you're a slave."

Jake turned his head sharply to look into Frank's eyes, his expression fierce. "I remember, Master! All the time! A couple of you grown-ups took me outside last winter a few times, even though my toes were freezing, and they made me lay back on the snow and make snow-angels for them, like a little kid, before they opened my jacket wide and got my legs up and spread 'em apart and did me in my bottom, right there in the cold, shivering and crying while they warmed up their big dicks inside me!"

Uncomfortably, Frank frowned at his bedmate. "Well, it's nice and warm in here now, isn't it?" He caressed Jake's bare body with his right hand, the other around and underneath the child's shoulders to support him, the free hand sliding down to gather up the boy's clean, tight young stiffie and play with it possessively. "Lots of grown-ups like to torture pretty little slave boys like you." He smiled. "And you like that torture, don't you?"

The blond kid wriggled uncomfortably, but not because of the strong hand working on his dickie and his balls. "Yeah, I guess." He gasped as Frank squeezed hard on his balls and penis for a minute, hurting him, and then with widened eyes he looked up at the teenager. "Are you gonna torture me, Master?"

"Why not?" said Frank lazily. "You deserve it, don't you? Slave boy!"

A twist of his hand and the blonde kid's left wrist and arm were drawn behind his back between the sheets and his body, shoved up between his shoulder blades as Jake blinked up at his captor, his eyes wide with sudden fear, breathing hard.

"You're – ah! – you're hurting me, Master!"

"Yeah, I am." He smiled. "You gonna try to get away?"

A vigorous shake of the blond head. "I can't! I, I'm just a slave, Master! I can't get away from you!"

"You were born to be a slave, little boy." Frank slowly got Jake's right wrist in grasp, and pushed it underneath the belly-up child to bring it across its mate, making both of the kid's shoulders sing with sweet pain and the victim moaned softly, looking up at the teenager with pure longing in his eyes.

Without waiting to be asked, Andy pulled open a drawer in the table and got out the ropes he knew were kept there, thick, soft white cord perfect for tying up little boys. He got over to the bed as his friend rolled Jake over on his belly and he helped tie the slender wrists together before stepping away to sit back down on the chair, beckoning Tommy to him. The absurdly clothed little boy was lifted to sit again on the knee of the now-naked teenager.

Together, they watched as Frank trussed Jake's ankles together, and then flipped the child briskly onto his back again. As far as the two people on the bed were concerned, no one else in the world existed at that moment. The boy stared up at this grim, powerful stranger, intoxicated, his breast heaving, his clean, beautiful young penis so tautly erect that with every beat of his heart it seemed almost to bounce against his smooth, sucked-in belly.

The kid's shoulders were tightly held on either side as Frank bent low to kiss his slave boy, and frantically Jake struggled to avoid the lips of the muscular teenager who was going to fuck him. The hands shifted to fix the blond head in place, the whimpering, sputtering, writhing child resisting with all his strength as the kisses began at his brow and descended, over his tightly-squeezed-shut eyes, his cheek, his nose, his lips…

"N-no! No! I don't wanna! Don't!"

And then the little boy went wordless, still struggling, as the kiss fixed him in place, smothering him, overcoming him, forcing him to submit. There was a moment of yielding visible in the bound body, and then soft moans of high-pitched shame and low, growling exultation were heard in the room.

Andy glanced at Tommy, who had at that same moment looked to him, and they shared a silent instant of understanding. Small arms wrapped around Andy's chest and he was hugged with desperate strength by a little kid who had been an almost-perfect stranger only moments before.

He returned the embrace and kissed the top of Tommy's head, breathing in the clean scent of a small boy fresh from the shower at the end of his last morning session.

Together they watched as Frank reached into the headboard compartments for the 'aids, sexual, punishment' that were kept there and began to use them on his victim, his first choice a simple scarlet-colored elastomer band that Frank wrapped expertly twice around his boy's drawn-down testicles and the root of his uncircumcised young erection, then twice more around the base of the testicles as the child gasped, jerking only slightly – as he must – at this treatment of his gender, the reason why so many men preferred little boys instead of little girls for the satisfaction of their sadistic impulses.

It left the child's baby balls uplifted and undeniable proof of the kid's helplessness. None of the band's loops was tight enough to blunt sensation or function, but torture is in the minds of the victim and the torturer, and both – Jake as well as Frank – obviously wanted this.

Tommy trembled on his client's naked knee as he and Andy watched Frank add 'aids' to the service of his lust: small steel clamps with sharp piercing teeth biting into each of Jake's taut young nipples as the boy squealed and pleaded and shuddered with delicious pain, alligator clips into which the delicate folds of the child's scrotum and foreskin were fed, nothing capable of permanent damage or disfigurement, but all of it erotic in the extreme.

Then Frank rolled his pleading, crying captive onto the boy's side on the bed, flexing hips and knees a bit as he reclined behind the youngster, guiding is cock up into the opening between Jake's buttocks and found the entryway with the head of it, settling it in place, and then shoving! it into the much-violated anus of the pretty blonde boy, Jake's expression of anguish genuinely unfeigned despite his months of experience with the people who had been using him for their sexual satisfaction.

The pair of witnesses were quiet, holding each other to regard the little drama being performed before them. Neither Jake nor Frank seemed to be aware of them, taken up entirely in their joining, the older boy seating his prod all the way up inside the warm body of his partner and then reaching around to play with the painfully decorated maleness, squeezing and teasing to make the eleven-year-old lurch and gasp and struggle – uselessly – to get away.

Frank progressed as Andy had seen him do before, marching with increasing force and frequency to his climax, drawing little Jake with him until the pair were striving together toward their mutual fulfillment, the child's legs straining to straighten, his pretty little penis throbbing in his captor's hand, snorting and whimpering, obsessed by the feel of a big adolescent dick plunging and replunging in his bottom, unable to escape, unwilling to beg for more and yet more of it, driven all the way to orgasm in the embrace of the big, handsome teenager who had chosen him for this, and then there was Frank's growling groan of release as well, shuddering as he pounded the younger boy's bottom with thrust after hammering thrust to spill his sperm deep within.

When it was done, Andy heard his friend take one or two deep, satisfied breaths and then he watched the muscular adolescent snuggle the blonde boy tighter against herself, making Jake wince for just an instant before the little slave let his eyes close, a distant look in his dull eyes in the few moments before they closed and one could tell that both of them were… asleep.

Andy noticed that his own little slave had put an arm around his client's neck and the child's head was leaning against Andy's shoulder. After a long few minutes, Tommy shifted to whisper into Andy's ear:

"I think he really wanted that."

Meaning Jake, of course. Andy nodded, turned a bit, and kissed little Tommy unselfconsciously, fondly. "My friend knew that, I think."

Tommy considered that for a moment. "Is that why he did it that way?"

Andy shrugged. "Yeah. Frank tries to be a nice guy, but 'nice' isn't what your friend needed right there."

"He's not my friend," came back Tommy a bit angrily. "I never met Jake before. We never get to talk with each other much, us slave boys." Andy saw the grim look on his companion's face. "I think it's part of the reason we gotta wear those gags all the time. They're horrible!"

Andy thought of his brother, chattering all the time, asking for this, wanting to tell him about that, needing to communicate, and he realized that being silenced that way was a special cruelty for a child like Tommy, so recently brought into slavery.

"Talk to me, then, little guy." Andy held the boy close, looking into those plain, unremarkable brown eyes. "There's no gag in your mouth right now, and I'm here. Talk to me."

He saw the tears welling up, but the boy was trying not to cry. "You're one of the nice ones," Tommy said. "There are some of you, uh, clients, some who are just nice to me. Maybe to other slave boys, too, but I don't know for sure. Guys who treat me like I'm not something to beat and to… to fuck, and to make me take their dickies in my mouth." He sniffled. "Oh, I know you want to do that to me, too, but that's all right." A little smile. "I kinda like the sex stuff, too, y'know? I mean you don't just want to do the dirty things to me. You like me."

A pause, a doubtful look on Tommy's face. "You do like me, don't you, Master?"

"Well," started Andy, "you're not beautiful. But you know that, right?"

"Sure."

"And you're not the sexiest kid in the world, that's for sure."

The boy frowned, but he nodded. "Yes, sir. I'm not."

"You're not the biggest or strongest, you're not the smartest, I'll bet."

"I did okay in school, Master, but… Yeah, I'm not the smartest."

Andy smiled. "But you're here with me right now, and I can tell that you're a decent little kid. Not greedy or nasty, not cruel or mean." He put his fingertips over the center of the boy's chest. "You've got a good heart." The fingers moved to caress Tommy's brow. "And a good mind – so, yeah, I like you. And I hope you like me, too."

The boy didn't smile, but he hugged Andy for an instant before taking his arms away, just holding on to the teenager's shoulder. "Uh, I do like you, Master. V-very much. If you'd talked to me like this when you did me that first time, I'm sure I'd remember you. It's just that so many grown-ups were doing the sex to me, and I was so scared." He swallowed. "I'm getting used to the sex, Master. I don't even have the nightmares, mostly."

"Oh? Was I in your nightmares, little guy?"

A shrug. "I can't remember all my nightmares, Master. There are lots of grown-ups in my nightmares, but I don't think you are."

Andy chuckled softly. "Hey, that's a start. I'm sorry I didn't treat you better that first time I had you, okay? It's important to apologize for being impolite, and I think I just screwed you that time, wham, bam, and not even a thank-you. That was definitely impolite."

"Oh, you don't have to be polite to a slave, Master." Tommy smiled. "They taught us that. We have to be very polite to you, but you're supposed to treat us like garbage." The joy drained out of the child's face as if a plug had been pulled. "That's all I am now. Just garbage."

Andy knew that his cock was going hard now, and he realized what a son of a bitch he really was. Tommy's sudden surrender to despair had jerked Andy back to the realization that the little doll who sat on his knee, wearing his grotesquely too-big clothes, was a slave who had been brought here to get fucked. Sweet and vulnerable and helpless, little Tommy was a legitimate object of Andy's evil, perverted lust, and neither of them were going to be leaving this room without Tommy getting a big cock rammed up his hot young ass.

Sorry, kid, but that's the way it's gonna be.

"I don't fuck garbage," said Andy coldly. He took Tommy's chin between thumb and forefinger, lifting the child's head to look into those eyes. "I'm going to fuck you, a little boy named 'Tommy,' a decent kid with a good heart and a good mind, who isn't the sexiest guy in the world but who's sexy enough to turn me on, right here, right now. You deserve better than just getting fucked, but fucking is what I can do to you, and that's what you're gonna get. Understand?"

"Yes, Master." There was pure misery in Tommy's eyes. He glanced down at his companion's crotch, saw the erection, and reached hesitantly for it. Slave boys weren't allowed even to do that much without permission, and it was a breach in his conditioning, but he got his fingers and thumb around it and gave it a gentle squeeze. Looking up into Andy's face, the boy sighed.

"I'm not garbage, Master. I'm your slave boy, and I have to serve you. D-do you want me to suck your thing, Master? I can do the sucking pretty good now. Better than the last time you did me, if, if you had me suck you then." The tears glistened in Tommy's eyes. "I'm sorry, but I can't remember if you made me suck you that time."

"I remember," said Andy softly. "You sucked me and I liked it a lot," he lied. I don't really remember whether he blew me or not! "So thank you." He leaned forward and kissed Tommy on the forehead. "It wasn't the best blowjob I've ever had, but it was good because you gave it to me. Understand, little guy? You, the sweet little kid who didn't want to do it but toughed it out. Such a nice little kid…" He slid his hand up inside the big tee-shirt, caressing the child-smooth skin over Tommy's ribs and back and under the opposite arm.

Andy had a sudden image of Mike in is mind's eye, the last time they'd messed around together. Had it really been almost two years ago? He'd undressed his little brother slowly, savoring the feel of his flesh, the warmth of it, so familiar after the years of fooling around, ever since little Mike's fifth birthday and not long after Andy's tenth, Mike responding almost with boredom because he'd long since widened his sexual horizon to include other boys, some of them cute little second- and third-graders as well as horny age-peers of nine or ten years old, his fifteen-year-old brother too well-known to be as interesting.

Without realizing it, Andy had gotten the tee-shirt off the slave boy's body and was untying the drawstring of the board shorts. "Stand up," he ordered, and little Tommy obeyed, letting the baggy garment slide to the floor, exposing the child's tasty little hard-on.

Andy took the kid under the arms, lifted Tommy to seat him on the table beside the chair, and then shifted to get close, at the same comfortable distance he'd use if he had a dinner plate before him instead of an almost-naked little boy, between Tommy's spreadapart knees, taking the smooth warm buttocks in his hands.

He smiled up at the slave boy. "I think it might be kinda perverted to have sex with a little guy wearing a slave collar and my own socks," he said, and Tommy returned his smile.

"You're not perverted, Master. It's just a little bit funny. I've never had sex with a client except when my feet were bare." He put his hands lightly on Andy's shoulders and lifted his heels a bit to wriggle his toes in the white cotton sheathing. "It's a first for both of us, isn't it?"

"Okay. But I don't think I missed out on sucking you when I got you the first time." Andy leaned forward and nuzzled the clean, stiff little pecker and the tucked-up pod of little-boy balls. "I do this with every one of you slaves I use." Then he took Tommy's pecker into his mouth and began to savor again the taste of child maleness he loved so much.

It's so much fun to suck off a kid like this one, he thought. How come I stopped doing it to Mike? Was it because he started resenting it so much, and I could tell? All those other little friends of his, Richie and the others, were more fun for him, and it wasn't exciting to play with his big, clumsy brother any more…

And yet Andy knew that there was – in his own mind, at least – real unfinished business with Mike, that thoughts of his brother's face and body had continued to haunt him, the forbidden prize always just out of reach. He'd thought that when he'd gotten approved for the Comfort Complex and started fucking slave boys the longing for his little brother's sexuality would fade away, but it hadn't. Just about every time he did this to a sweet young boy like Tommy, he was thinking (if only a little) about doing it to Mike.

Tommy was responding as he had to respond, his fingers tangling in Andy's hair as the teenager fed upon him, shifting his bare bottom a little with each movement of the client's head, loving the way he was being fellated. How women and girls could possibly do it this good when none of them had a penis of her own to know what it felt like for a guy to get his dickie sucked on…

"Oh, Master!" the child whispered harshly. "It's so good! Oh! Please, Master! Oh!"

And the rippling surge of the good feelings caught Tommy, forcing him to shut his eyes and shove himself upward into the mouth of his client, surrendering his pleasure to the clever tongue of the big, handsome teenager, trying with the in-and-out back-and-forth movements of his pelvis, the strength of his hands and arms on the Master's head, the gasps of his overwhelming orgasmic delight, to tell without words how much Tommy wanted this to go on and on, how nice it was to have a grown-up doing this to him, how intoxicating it was to live for even a few minutes in the illusion that he was loved by someone who wanted him to have these sensations, so exalting and so degrading and so great!

Andy backed off gradually, not taking the still-stiff little penis out of his mouth, but slowing down, giving it less movement, especially a bunch less tongue action, feeling the warm, living body of the boy shuddering in exquisite excess of sensation in what the teenager liked to think of as 'fellatio diminuendo' went on for long, luxurious moments.

He wondered if Mike was getting blowjobs like this from his friends, from the younger kids he was screwing around with. How come I never fucked him? How come I never even thought of getting into his little ass? Not really. Just too damned chicken to bring it up. I bet he would've let me, but now I'm off the shots and shooting sperm and it's too late, it's against the law…

"M-Master?" It was Tommy, gently drawing Andy's head away from his groin, looking down at his gone-away eyes, worried about him. "Master, do you want me to do that? To do that for you?"

Andy said nothing. He got slowly to his feet, pushing the chair back a bit to make room, keeping one hand on Tommy's ass and the other grabbing the boy's upper arm on the other side, pushing the ten-year-old back on the tabletop, his bottom just off the edge of it, belly-up, the kid automatically bringing his knees up, spreading them apart.

He's been fucked like this before, Andy thought. Nothing's new to one of these poor sluts. The grown-ups use them like trick towels, and every cock feels like every other cock that gets shoved up their asses. The teenager felt a sudden wash of profound sorrow surge over him as he gazed down into Tommy's eyes, suddenly wanting the little guy to think better of him, to understand why Andy was doing this, and then he realized that it didn't matter.

Couldn't possibly matter, not really, for either slave (male) 4-6-7-7 or for client (male) 8721.

We're both just numbers to the machines. Just fucking numbers.

Leaning over the average-looking little boy who was so important to him at this one particular moment, conscious of his own tube socks on either side of his chest and the kid's hands each fisted tight and drawn up against its shoulder in anticipation of pain, Andy got the head of his cock set in the buttplug-stretched openness of Tommy's anus and nudged it inside, then delighted in the way the youngster's chest arched up with a gasp of startlement as the wide-eyed chicken got his client's fuckpole shoved all the way up into his body in a single cruel thrust.

Standing room only, Andy thought, as he always thought whenever he did one of these slaves like this. He used to have fantasies about pagan priests fucking the virgin victims of human sacrifice on stone altars, dedicating little boys to the gods with gouts of cum before killing them in various horrible fashions, never quite knowing whether it was supposed to be him – Andy – in the role of the priest or that of the victim.

One hand on Tommy's hip and the other working on the ten-year-old's stiffie to jerk him off, Andy ploughed the flesh with his own hardness, staring fixedly at this average-looking little boy's face, memorizing it.

I'm not gonna forget you again, kid, he promised silently. You oughtta be remembered, at least, by the guys who fuck you. You're such a decent little fella, such a kind-hearted little slave, so patient and accepting and – oh, yeah! That's it baby, give it up to Uncle Andy! Give it big!

Being fucked and jerked to his first orgasm of the afternoon, Tommy pulled his molester gloriously into the Little Death right along with him, relieving Andy of the load of semen being delivered all the way up inside Tommy's bottom, pistoning faster and harder with each spurt until the peak was attained and they were both on the sweetly sad ride down the other side of the mountain.

Breathing hard, his cock still all the way up Tommy's butt, Andy got both his hands under and then onto the kid's shoulders, folding the young torso to hold the boy's ass against his groin, and lifted, bringing the now-sweaty back off the smooth surface of the table.

All the furniture in these comfort rooms was heavy, impossibly sturdy. Designed for fucking, he knew. Stepping back just a bit, Andy lowered his own butt onto the seat of the chair again with Tommy now perforce straddling his waist, the teenager's slowly softening sex an impalement still, the youngster's hands now holding Andy by the arms, the unremarkable-looking child's face filling his captor's vision, both of them breathing in the scent of commingled sex-sweat, still desiring each other, but now without the urgency of lust.

"I, uh, wanted you inside me, Master." Tommy paused. "I really did. I wanted you a lot. C-could you kiss me, Master? Please? You don't have to, but I'd like it." A man-sized cock still thick and living in his rectum, the kid turned his eyes down in bashfulness, blushing furiously.

How the hell could Andy not kiss him? Simultaneously shifting the boy a little and leaning forward, Andy started kissing him on the forehead, then alongside either eye and on the cheeks, and then on the mouth, pleased at the way Tommy responded to that, welcoming his client inside with lips and tongue and a low moan of pleasure.

"Gotta come out of you pretty soon," said the adolescent in a low voice. He chuckled. "I never get enough time with my cock inside a pretty little kid's ass, do I?"

"Yes, Master," murmured the boy agreeable. "But it's nice while it lasts." Blinking, Tommy was obviously trying very hard not to move. "For both of us. Aww!"

"Yeah, there it goes." Andy let it slide all the way out, soft and pendulous now, but the boy was still a tender lapful, and he didn't try to put Tommy down. "You want to take a shower with me?"

Tommy looked at him, not understanding. "A shower, Master? But we have the whole afternoon, You want to do me in the shower?" A smile. "We'll have to wait until you're hard again, won't we?"

"No, cutie," Andy responded. "I'm gonna take a rain check." Another kiss, a brief one. "I'll get back to you another time. I need some fresh air."

"If, if you take me back to the Discipline Master early," said the boy, disappointment in his tone, "he'll just make me cleanse myself and put me in a rest tube until another client comes to pick me. It's lonely in a rest tube, Master. Please don't take me back early!"

"Hey, who said anything about taking you back to the pick-up place?" Andy hugged the kid. "Stay here." He nodded toward the bed. "Frank and Jake are just napping. When they wake up, they'll both want to use you, I'm sure of that."

Tommy had clearly never had such an experience. To stay and do the sex with a client and a slave boy only a little older than himself? "Is that allowed, Master?"

Andy shrugged. "I'm the guy who picked you and brought you back here," he said. "My friend and I have just left our slave boys dozing in one or another of these rooms." He grinned. "We just fucked 'em to sleep, and they looked so cute that neither of us had the heart to wake 'em up. When we picked those boys later, none of 'em said anything about getting punished by the DMs. They just got rousted at the end of the afternoon session and went back to get ready for their evening clients. They told us how nice it was to get a nap, and thanked us."

"Oh. Do you always do the sex to boys with your friend, Master?"

"Almost always," Andy replied. "Couple of times he hasn't been able to come with me, or I got stuck at home, but we've been teaming up for trouble ever since I can remember." He looked at Frank, who was faintly snoring, and smiled. "We're not queer for each other, but things just seem to be more fun for me when I've got him covering me. Same thing for him, I guess."

"I never had any friends like that when…" Tommy blinked, looking intently at his client. "You know. I was a real boy."

"Bullshit," was the response. "You're still a real boy, as real as anybody. You're just a slave. You're not allowed to have friends your own age, but you can have regulars, grown-ups who pick you again and again because they get to know you and like you. How many free boys get to have grown-up friends, anyway?"

"But they're not friends, Master." Tommy's despair was almost tangible. "The Discipline Masters taught us that we're not allowed to make friends with the clients, or to l-love them, or that kind of thing. We have to remember that we're slaves, that we belong to the government, and we're dedicated to the comfort of those who wish to use us for their pleasure."

Andy grimaced. "Yeah, bullshit. Look, I bought that crap when I was a little kid in school, before I went off the shots and started growing big enough to fuck little guys like you. Since then, I've learned a thing or two. There are plenty of guys who come here only to have some sex time with a particular slave. The grown-ups can reserve a kid in advance – Frank and me won't be allowed to do that until we're each twenty-one – and lots of them do. Heck, your indenture might be bought out by some rich guy, and you'll be his personal boy-slave, permanent. Who knows?"

"I'm kinda scared about getting bought," the boy admitted. He writhed ever so slightly in Andy's lap. "What if the man who takes me home is… you know, one of those mean guys who likes to torture boys? I've heard stories about how kids get, like, cut up and tattooed and with sharp things pushed through their titties…"

Andy nodded, his expression serious. "Yeah, that can happen. It doesn't happen very often, and it probably won't happen to you. This is out in the middle of Nowheresville. Boring. If you'd wound up in a big-city Comfort Complex, who knows? Here? In the Plain Vanilla capital of the planet?" He made a little razzberry. "Forget about it!"

Tommy couldn't help giving him a little laugh. "You're awfully nice, Master."

"Am I nice enough for you to shower with?"

"Yes, Master." The boy grinned at him.

"Okay, then climb out of my socks. I am not going home in wet socks."

Chapter Five

From the age of five until he declared his 'big kid' status on his ninth birthday, Mike had been Andy's charge in trips to the Center for their everyday morning sessions. Almost always they'd been accompanied by Richie and maybe one or two of the other younger children on their street who weren't being shepherded by older siblings or neighbors. They'd usually grab the tram from the stop on Dwight Lane and ride it to the Center because nobody ever got up early enough to walk there in the morning.

In the summer, without school to attend, the conditioning sessions extended two full hours beyond the usual 10:00 AM dismissal time, but most of that extra was spent in the Center's swimming pool, so it wasn't like anybody was gonna bitch about more of that "Gimme four laps around the track!" shit.

In the warm vacation months, Andy and Mike would stroll home at noon instead of staying for the twelve-to-five optional 'activities' stuff that served as nanny-state daycare for kids with working parents, preferring to take their time dawdling along the way just to be doing something that didn't involve grown-ups, even if it was nothing more than dicking around in the woods. That had come to an end when Andy's suppression shots were stopped and his awakening endocrine system thrust him undeniably into the physical and cultural status of 'teenager', with different physical conditioning regimes conducted in a separate part of the Center.

Mike and Richie, however, still honored the summertime tradition of stretching the trip on the way home. They'd both learned from Frank and Andy about how a guy should stay away from the folks when you had time on your hands. Chores. Grown-ups always screwed up your goofing-off time with chores.

So those two would probably be messing around in the woods somewhere, maybe jerking or sucking each other off, and Andy figured that he had a pretty solid idea of where they'd be doing that. Moving with surety, he made a beeline for the little clearing by the creek where the three of them had spent so much time 'playing dicks' together and learning how to give each other blowjobs before Andy had stopped getting his shots and started to grow up.

Andy knew when to slow his pace and go 'silent running'. He'd sneaked up on either or both of these younger kids before, so he knew the drill. This time, he wouldn't bust in and yell "Gotcha!"

He'd sneak and peek and enjoy. If you couldn't fuck either of those two little asses, and they wouldn't suck your cock or even give you a handjob, you could at least watch them do it to each other. He heard them grunting and talking before he was close enough to part the branches of the bushes and see them, knowing it was them long in advance of being able to tell what they were talking about.

Cautious in spite of his eagerness, Andy manipulated the greenery enough to see without being seen and he was delighted to discover that the guys had stripped off all the way, both of them. One – Richie – was lying belly-up on an old blanket with his feet spread apart and each ankle tied to the trunk of a young tree on the right-hand side of the clearing. His wrists were tied together and his arms were stretched up 'over' his head, pointing into the center, bound to a stake that had been driven into the grassy/mossy surface. Mike was pretty obviously doing 'ball torture' to his friend as Richie grunted and groaned and writhed as much as his bonds would let him, and that wasn't much. Mike was pretty good with knots. Andy could tell that they'd be getting down to the 'dick sucking torture' pretty soon, and then he saw the flash of matte-finished steel around Mike's neck as the kid smiled cruelly down at his playmate, working hard to hurt him in that special sexy way that made 'torture' so much fun for both participants.

He was wearing a slave collar.

Andy had to urgently adjust his cock. Mike was in a slave collar. It looked real, too! Damn, but Richie had one on as well. What the fuck?

The teenager knew that Richie was a hotshot at making things out of junk and stuff. Could he have made up a pair of slave collars that looked so much like the real thing that you could get caned for getting caught wearing them?

Well, what the hell else could account for those things? If either kid had one of those numbers-and-barcode tattoos on his right leg, he'd be indistinguishable from a real slave, and that thought made Andy want to whip it out and jerk off, right then and there. Feisty little Mike and snotty young Richie, each of 'em enslaved and ready to get fucked by any grown-up picking them out of the Comfort Complex menu. Wow.

Wish I could be the guy who gets 'em!

He thought for a long moment as Mike got down to giving his buddy a 'selfish' blowjob – the kind where you don't give the other guy a chance to do you back at the same time, the '69' thing – listening to Richie sputtering with excitement, cussing in a low voice as his friend tortured him with sensations so powerful that you felt like your dick was going to explode.

I taught him how to do that, Andy thought proudly.

And suddenly Andy realized that this set-up was ripe for exploitation.

Maybe I'm gonna get to fuck Mike – and Richie, too! – whether they like it or not.

He got out his pocketphone and started taking pictures. Plenty of pictures. He'd have to remember to get them moved to a memstick when he got back to the house. You did not want to get caught with that kind of stuff on your phone!

Faced by the prospect of getting their asses caned by the slave cops, would either of them refuse a reasonable request for giving up those asses to cornholing by Andy – and Frank, certainly – out here in the nice, private woods?

Incestuous thoughts dancing in his head, Andy watched Mike blow Richie's dick – and his mind – after which little brother lay down next to Frank's cousin, cuddling and kissing the helpless 'victim' until both of them faded into a light drowse.

Backing away was a bit difficult with his fuckpiece harder than a fencepost, but Andy managed, getting far enough away to finally – finally! – jerk himself off ever-so-quietly, spattering a wild azalea with his jism.

When Frank gets home tonight, he thought, he's gonna buy into this. No question.

"What are those things?" Mike asked next day, indicating the two sheets of paper Richie had pulled out of a big envelope in his backpack.

"Temporary tattoos," the other boy replied. He held up one of them. "I got a shareware program that turns numbers into those old-fashioned bar codes, and then got my graphics software going. This –" he tapped the string of digits at the top "– is the serial number from one of the collars, and this thing below is the barcode version."

He grinned. "It's the right size for the kind of tattoo they put on slave boys. I used my 3-D human body package to get it on the 'artificial boy' figure and then got the dimensions for this thing by scaling it to images of real live slave kids our size."

Mike took the thick piece of paper. It was a mirror-image reverse, and he held it against the right leg of his shorts about where it should go if he were naked. Everybody had messed with temporary tattoos at one time or another. Two years ago, he and Richie had made up a bunch of them from that space pirates CGI show on the vids and done themselves up like Klentroid Invaders so that when they'd been naked in Richie's bedroom they'd looked as if they were little-boy versions of the bad guys. Only not green all over, of course.

They'd taken a bunch of pictures of each other and even made some short videos, and Richie had messed around with them on his computer so that they did come out green all over and looking totally alien. Then he'd inserted them in 3-D backgrounds so that it all looked 'real' for the show. When Richie put the vids and the still images up on the 'Net, they got a ton of downloads, and for a while there were lots of other kids and teenagers who were doing the same kind of thing online, and for real at the vid and comics conventions where free kids could go 'no clothes' if it was for your costume.

"If we had these on," said Mike quietly, and those collars…"

Richie grinned. "You bet. We'd look authentic!"

"I dunno." Mike looked at his friend. "If we got caught, it'd be horrible. The slave cops cane kids who get turned in for wearing fake slave stuff." He swallowed hard. "Remember? They strip you naked and put you in real chains, and they make vids of the caning, and those vids go up on the 'Net."

"Yeah," replied Richie. "I know. Remember, we've watched a bunch of those vids together. Really sexy, weren't they?"

The ones they'd watched – obsessively for months after they'd discovered the punishment vids on the Slave Authority site – had shown free boys getting one stroke of the cane for each year of his life. Children weren't supposed to be able to access that part of the Authority site, but Richie had hacked it without any trouble.

"I'd get twelve," Mike objected half-heartedly. You'd only get eleven."

Besides the caning, the vids included how the boys got stripped and chained and all the other stuff that was done to them to get them ready for it. The free boys being punished got gagged and buttplugged and put in those standard chastity things, the little silvery metal mesh bags held on by the rings that the slave cops shoved a boy's penis and balls into.

Mike winced at the memory of what they'd watched when the men had done that to the kids. In each one, the officers had had a bunch of sizing rings – like what you use to get your finger size in a jewelry store when you're ordering a class ring like Andy's – and they tested each chained and helpless boy to get the proper diameter for the chastity device by pushing one ring after another over the guy's thumb until they got one snug around the bottom knuckle of the thumb on the kid's right hand.

Almost unconsciously, Mike looked at his own thumb, checked out the diameter of that knuckle, and winced.

Then one of them pushed the kid's dick through the ring into the pouch, following it with the boy's balls, first one (ouch!) and then the other (omigawd!) as the boy's yelps of anguish were only made wordless – by no means silenced – by that red rubber ball gag.

And putting in the buttplugs! Mike wasn't really surprised to learn that people had compiled more than a few 'Best of' vids showing nothing but free boys and even girls getting plugged by the slave cops before getting switched, with cuts back and forth showing the kids' faces as they were having the big red rubber plugs worked up inside their bottoms.

Really high-quality vids, too.

Yeesh!

Neither Mike nor Richie had recognized any of the kids who'd gotten caught and were being punished in those vids, but they were from all over the country, dating back to the first years of the enslavement laws. Lots of those boys and girls had to be grown-ups now, right?

Or maybe dead.

"So what are we supposed to do with these temporaries?" Mike asked suspiciously.

"We make vids," Richie said, like it was nothing.

"Are you outta your friggin' mind?"

"Calm down," said the younger boy. "I mess with the faces, change the hair color – all that stuff is really easy – and it's just two sexy little slave boys running around in the woods after escaping from a Comfort Complex somewhere in flyover country, cuddling up together in their hiding place and doing stuff with each other." He grinned. "The kind of fooling-around slaves aren't allowed to do with each other. Vidsters will go bonkers."

Like most boys his age, Mike had been fascinated by slavery for a while – especially about slave boys his own age. He'd learned tons of trivia about them, about the slave laws, about the attitudes grown-ups had about slaves in general and sex slaves in particular.

Slaves in general weren't supposed to be considered human beings. Human beings had rights, slaves just had duties and punishments. For reasons Mike still couldn't fully understand, all right-thinking grown-ups considered sex slaves especially unclean. Except for using them (and that was kind of shameful in itself), slave boys and girls were looked at by most people like toilet tissue.

Used toilet tissue.

A boy who'd been made a sex slave wasn't even fit to sit on human-type furniture, maybe not even if he was ordered to do it. Strictly speaking, they weren't allowed to talk to each other. As for jerking or sucking each other off…

Damn, but a slave boy wasn't allowed to touch even his own junk. It was supposed to keep them focused on serving the sexual desires of their Masters, including the grown-up men and teenagers who used the boys in the Comfort Complexes.

Two sexy slave boys – real, live boys, not CGI videos – with authentic collars and what looked like authentic leg tattoos, rolling around on the grass masturbating each other and sucking each other's dickies…

Like most boys his age, Mike had a fine appreciation of the subversive. He was dead certain that nobody had ever dared make a vid like that before.

"How about we put them in that dungeon background you got?" Mike asked. "And then we show one of them torturing the other, really sexy?"

Richie grinned. He was the technical mastermind, but Mike was the guy with the real imagination.

The first collars required by the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) implementing the provisions of the 26,000-page Indentured Servitude and Human Chattels Control Act – universally called 'the Slavery Law' – were clumsy improvisations made of military-grade webbing material with woven stainless steel wire reinforcement, secured by keyed locks and supporting bulky ballistic plastic boxes containing global positioning hardware and identification systems that could be interrogated by wideband and narrowband radio systems. The batteries were heavy and had to be changed with irritating frequency.

The boxes were designed to be worn at the nape of the slave's neck, but their weight was such that they caused an incessant choking sensation when that was done, and unless brutally and conscientiously punished, the slaves invariably settled them to the right or the left so that they rode on one shoulder or the other.

Enormous ingenuity was devoted to devising better slave collars, not just on the part of the government research and development laboratories but by engineering and manufacturing firms and skilled home hobbyists. It was (as usual) the private sector people who achieved the breakthroughs and all the real innovations, and the first production prototypes were being tested within a year. Bug fixing took another year, and there would be continuing improvements wrought subsequently, but the final form of the standard slave collar – in its various sizes – was in the hands of the Slave Authority with commendably greater efficiency than is usual for government projects.

The heavy, dully gleaming brushed-stainless-steel bodies of the collars were securely sealed but could be opened by Authority technicians to access and update the modules within and the operating programs that ran in these sophisticated solid state computer systems. The collars themselves functioned as Faraday cages to protect the delicate components within from electromagnetic pulse (EMP) or other electronic interference, and their wireless linkages were encrypted to the highest levels of security.

Though it was always intended that the slave collar should be heavy in proportion to the body weight of the slave upon whom it was locked – for no other reason than to keep the wearer at all times aware that he or she was a slave – the reduction in battery mass was accomplished with surprising results. Apart from small cells derived from work undertaken in the development of permanent implantable defibrillators, cardiac pacemakers, bladder regulation systems, and other such devices, the slave collars were designed to run principally on the slave's own bio-electricity, accumulating charge continuously and expending that energy only when the collar's systems were interrogated or otherwise triggered.

An early addition to the collars was a 'stun' function similar to that of a Taser [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taser], which could painfully incapacitate even the most burly male agricultural laborers, miners, and the like – a critical priority both in the early years of slavery's re-institution and going forward, as great numbers of these human cattle were convicted criminals, enemy combatants, diagnosed sociopaths, mental incompetents, and the like.

This enslavement of enemy combatants was one of the reasons why standard slave fodder for all the government-owned indentured was entirely – advertisedly – halal [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halal#Dietary_laws]. Made it easier to keep the wogs tractable.

Enslavement offered many welcome opportunities for neutralizing the government's oppositional and defiant specimens as well as getting economic value out of society's dross. Only the most psychotically homicidal felons needed to be incarcerated, generally in 'supermax' facilities, with tractable convicts put to productive work in the dirty and dangerous jobs throughout the economy, collared and otherwise restrained to prevent escape and further mischief.

The federal Slave Authority – an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, naturally – came to have a presence throughout the country in the form of their Slave Police, garrisoning Comfort Complexes in every city and county as well as patrolling the mines, factory farms, manufacturing plants, breeding stations, and other facilities to which the Authority's indentured human assets were tasked.

Specially trained and equipped, the slave cops assisted local and state police in controlling riots, managing natural disaster responses, suppressing the protests of citizens resistant to the established political order by breaking up their assemblies to arrest them, and generally keeping a lid on anything threatening the unquestionable dominance of the politicians and bureaucrats of the nation's permanent ruling class.

They were, of course, composed entirely of the most useful kinds of compensated sociopaths, uniformed thugs and bullies glorying in the excuse to sadistically abuse all 'civilians' as well as any two-legged animal with a collar locked around its neck.

Not much difference between the two, insofar as the average slave cop was concerned.

"You sure about this?"

Frank had gone bug-eyed over the pictures his friend had taken ("Yeah, that's Richie all right!" and "Day-um, but little Michael's got some kinda mean streak, don't he?"), but the plan wasn't coming as clear in his mind as it had been in the instant it had sprung to life between Andy's ears.

"I mean, if either of them decide to squeal on us, and the cops do those fancy rape-check tests with the microscopes and the DNA swabs and the rest of that, we're so totally fucked." He hesitated. "Not that I wouldn't like to dip my wick in both those little holes, but a sentence of even temporary enslavement is way too harsh for my taste."

"You think either of those little snots would admit to faking up a pair of slave collars and getting a dose of the cane just to nail you and me?" Andy put his confidence (propelled by lust) into his voice. "As long as we handle this right, if we don't hurt either one so it shows, neither kid is gonna 'yell and tell' about us doing them."

Frowning hard, Andy's eyes went 'thousand-yard' for a moment. "Besides, I think both of them really want to get a couple of big, grown-up cocks up their asses. Not because they're queer, but because they don't know anything about it, and they want to learn." He turned back to regard Frank seriously. "Kids their age do not pretend to be slaves – and play sex games like that – unless they want to be slaves, if only for a while, to be treated the way they think slave boys are treated at the Comfort Complex, just to find out what it's like."

Frank got a sort of "Aha!" expression on his face. That would explain why his cousin was still pestering him about what it was like to visit the Complex, how the slaves were packaged for pick-up, what the teenagers did to those little collared cuties, how they were conditioned and punished by the DMs and had to say 'Master' every third word or so.

Richie wanted to go 'Velcro' for a while, and almost certainly not just with his little buddy.

"You understand," Frank said, "we can't be actual, y'know, nasty to either of them, no matter how much they both deserve it. We gotta make sure they enjoy getting fucked. Not just 'no marks' but no pissing them off."

"Oh, hell, yeah," concurred Andy. "You think I haven't thought about that? I want to break in both of them so that they want to go on getting fucked by us regular, all the rest of the summer. Hell, maybe for years. They've got a long time before their shots get stopped.:"

"Yeah. But what happens if we get tired of fucking them? You and me?"

"Hunh!" Andy gave his friend a scornful look. "You think I'm gonna get tired of fucking either of those two kids? I've been jonesing on Mike and Richie practically since my balls dropped. You know that."

Reluctantly, Frank nodded. "Yeah. And to tell the truth, I've been feeling kinda like that about Richie." He sighed. "Maybe Mike, too. It was so nice when I was on the shots and we used to screw around together just about every chance we got." A longing look off into the distance. "How come they dumped us once we got the hairs and some size to our dicks, anyway? Are we supposed to be some kinda freaks or monsters?"

With remembered shame, Andy shrugged. "I used to think that, until we started going to the Complex and getting some slave-boy tail good and regular. Those little guys like me – they like you, too – plenty good enough, and I don't think all of it is just smoke getting blown up our asses with this 'You're so sexy, Master' crap. Haven't you noticed that we've both been treating these slave boys just the way we'd treat Richie and Mike if we could get our cocks into them? We're not the way most grown-ups are, hating those poor kids just because they're collared and have to put out for any citizen with a hard-on who's looking for a people-shaped toilet to jerk off in."

"Yeah, I guess." Frank was definitely not the introspective member of the duo. "They're just so, y'know, helpless. Makes a guy want to cuddle 'em and protect 'em, right?"

"Doesn't stop you from fucking 'em silly, does it?" Andy grinned.

Frank returned the grin. "You haven't noticed the ways they've been teaching us how to do the fucking so they enjoy it about as much as we do?"

And there was something to think about here. Both of the teenagers had tried grown-up female slaves for the sex, but after the first couple of times they'd sickened of it. All other things being equal, a woman putting it out for clients was a prostitute, and a prostitute was just a female animal using her reproductive equipment for anything but the remotest prospect of reproduction. All those woman slaves were sterilized. Breeders were kept on ranches far away from the Comfort Complexes, and they never got fucked at all. They had their babies – nice, white, guaranteed genetically healthy, ever-so-adoptable little future taxpayers – by way of insemination or implantation techniques about as warm and humane as a colonoscopy.

Those Comfort Complex sluts really were sluts, and the little slave girls weren't a whole lot better. Somehow, the slave boys held onto their humanity longer and better than anything female did.

Little boys didn't do sex to have babies. Boys did it to feel alive, and part of that feeling alive involved a connection – real or imaginary – with other members of their gender, especially the grown-up men and bigger boys whose attentions and approval every little boy craved.

That's what Richie and Mike needed, Andy realized. All the laws against free boys getting sexed by grown-ups were really a helluva lot harsher on the kids themselves – all 'protected' out of what they really needed – than on the grown-ups who wanted to fuck them.

"Okay," said Andy, "here's how we do this…"

Chapter Six

"Bullshit," replied his partner, Albert ("You can call me Al") Kemp. "We got no alerts."

The two Patrolmen were both juniors, but Ramirez was only a couple of months out of probationary status, and that meant Kemp was driving. It was some kind of friggin' unwritten law that the guy with more time in grade always got to drive, and the other dude always had to manage the commo and the sensors.

Twenty-five years old and disconcertingly blond, Danny liked being a cop, even though it meant working with cynical sons of bitches like Kemp, who looked a helluva lot more than three years older, black-haired and dark-complected to seem every bit as Mexican as Danny himself emphatically did not.

If you were single and you were junior, you got a lot of temporary duty – TDY – in the slave cops. Especially in the summer months, when stations had to have replacements for the people who were taking their vacations. This was Kemp's third year getting stuck with this shit detail, and Ramirez was pretty sure he himself would be spending summers shoveling the same kind of shit for at least his next four or five in the force.

Kemp was solid certain that this hitch was worse than the one he'd done last year, which had been in Ft. Worth. ("Hotter 'n hell, but a nice, big town," he'd related. "Plenty of places to go when you were off-duty, lots of quim – both kinds.") When you were stuck in the sticks like this assignment, though…

Well, at least you got per diem, and the police barracks was an almost-new building co-located with the county Comfort Complex. Plenty of quim there, too.

The collar tracer signal – and it was definitely a collar trace showing an 'out-of-permitted' squeal – was faint and intermittent in a freaky way that Danny had never seen before, but then he wasn't experienced enough to know everything there was to know about collar traces. Out here in the boonies, though, the runners were almost always workers who'd jumping the fences on the big farms, desperate sonzabitches with muscles on their muscles, lots of them enemy combatants – domestic and foreign – and the worst of those were religious whackjobs on the proverbial Mission From God.

But when a farm worker or some piece of filth who'd gotten stuck down in the mines went over the wire, the wire always picked up the collar trace right away, and flashed an alert to the Authority. You knew when one of those big bastids was out and about. It wasn't some rich guy's household servant suddenly deciding to skip out on his (or her) indenture, or some deadbeat dad bailing on his child support payments.

Then suddenly the trace simply wasn't. "Shit," he said. "Lost it. Like the guy walked into a bank vault and pulled the door closed after him."

"You sure?" asked Kemp.

Danny fiddled with the slide on the event recorder, ran it back zippity, and nodded. "Betcher ass," he replied.

"Got numbers?"

Ramirez face was puckered with concentration, but at last he shook his head disgustedly. "Not one friggin' little bit. Strange signal, like the transmitter was on its last legs, worn out, something like that."

"Bullshit. Those things are so goddam solid-state that they're more reliable than the batteries in a nymphomaniac's vibrator."

That was a thought. "You think that there's a collar out there with its batteries worn out?"

"Are you kidding?" Kemp flashed a glance at Danny. "You know how those gadgets re-charge. The only way for a collar's batteries to go dead is if the critter wearing it is even deader, and even then they've been putting in those little Aeterna cells for the past four or five years. Y'know, like what they put in pacemakers. That's supposed to be enough to jump-start one of those nickel-plated necklaces no matter what."

Ramirez thought about it. "Okay, so it can't be an escaped slave." He held up the commo pad. "Except what the hell kind of signal looks this much like a collar trace flashing an 'out-of-permitted' alarm?"

Kemp shrugged. "Why ask me? Call the on-duty tech at the station."

"I hear and I obey," replied Danny, running the routine to uplink and composing an explanatory message to cover the read-out he was forwarding.

"Up yours, smart ass," growled Kemp wearily.

"Sorry, boss," Ramirez shot back, hitting the Send tab. "You know I don't roll that way."

"My bad luck. We're coming up on break. The diner or the drive-in?"

"The diner," Danny responded. "I gotta use the can, and what they got at the drive-in is just too fucked up by this time of day." He grimaced. "Say what you like about the greasy spoon, but at least they keep their men's room clean."

"Mom," said Frank carefully while clearing away the dinner dishes, "Andy wants to do some camping over the weekend, and he asked me to come along."

"Camping?" His mother was putting the left-over chili into a plastic container. She always made a lot more than enough for any one meal, knowing that her hungry son and husband would spend the next few days raiding it to nuke for snacks and lunches. Chili only got better as time passed. "You two haven't done any summer camping since you got off your suppression shots." She smiled knowingly. "You've had better things to do with your spare time."

"Yeah," agreed the adolescent with a small, crooked smile. "But anything can get a little old, you give it enough time. Besides, these summer week-ends are getting to be extra-busy at the Comfort Complex." He tried to convey frustration in his expression. "We can't always get the ones we want on week-ends."

Which was certainly true. The ones he wanted right now were named 'Richie' and 'Mike'.

"So where do you kids plan on camping?"

Frank shrugged. "Noplace you gotta drive us. There's plenty of good places in the county Agenda 21 [http://www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-3annex3.htm] reserve areas you could walk to from a tram stop. Just camping for the – uh, heck of it. Might even take Cousin Twerp and Andy's brother. Time they learned how to dig a latrine. We'd have our phones with us, right?"

She sighed. "It's all right with me. I've still got a boxful of those freeze-dried foods in the pantry somewhere. You can go through them for yourself. Clear it with your father."

That's gonna be no problem, thought Frank. He's been going off to Daughnton every other Saturday – in the next county over, where their Comfort Complex had been established on the grounds of a former Boy Scout Reservation – to have himself some slave-boy tail.

It was kind of funny. Frank had learned early on that his dad liked slave boys, and even mixed it up some with slave girls too young to have their periods, and he was pretty sure that at least half of his father's regular Saturday trips to the gun club's firing range in Cooper City were actually taking him just a little bit further – to the delights of Daughnton.

Dad was nervous, it seemed, about dipping his wick in sexy little slave kids any closer to the flagpole.

This looked to be one of those week-ends for good old dad, and as Frank stepped into the living room and got his father's attention and his approval ("You got all your chores done, boy?"), the teenager came away silently wishing the old man a nice time.

Their father had long since stuck Andy with the job of making sure Mike took proper care of the kid's rifle. Like Andy's own well-used training piece, it was an obsolete but perfectly serviceable M-16A7. The military had quit equipping combat troops with 5.56mm small arms decades ago, but .223 caliber was still standard throughout the Free Citizens' Militia, and thousands of rounds of 5.56x45mm ammunition were ready for issue in every town and county armory in the country.

Even women and little kids could be taught how to handle a longarm firing 5.56mm. The carbines and assault rifles chambered for 6.8x43mm SPC [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6.8_mm_Remington_SPC] had just a bit too much 'kick' by comparison, the price you paid for better stopping power in CQB.

Like all kids his age, Andy had thought about getting a kit to convert his 'A7 to fire 6.8, but 5.56 was free at the Conditioning Center firing ranges, and you had to pay for 6.8. When you made your spending money mowing lawns and doing odd jobs around town, you kept an eye on your centicreds.

"How come we gotta do this tonight?" the kid groused, methodically disassembling the weapon to lay each part on the scrupulously dust-free cloth with all the outlines to show where the bits were supposed to be positioned. "We don't got our time on the rifle range until Monday."

"Because I'm sick and tired of waiting until the last minute with you," replied his brother truthfully. Andy was just as methodically taking his own weapon apart and was minutely examining the bolt-carrier group for cracking or other signs of damage. He'd taken it to the school armorer for closer inspection just before spring break, and he was still fussing over it every time he cleaned the piece. The guy said there was nothing wrong, but failure to respect a firearm was just an uncertain way to commit suicide.

"Frank wants me to go camping with him this week-end," said Andy as he got the bolt retaining cotter pin out of the BCG, checking to make sure that Mike was doing the same thing. "I don't want to hafta rush getting back Sunday night to run you through this routine."

"Camping?" Mike looked up from his work. "Can I come? Where?"

"Nowhere in particular," Andy replied. "Just to get away from the noise. We got good weather for Saturday, maybe some rain in the wee hours Sunday night."

"Hunh!" Mike shook his head. "We get rain into Monday morning and we can forget about range time at the Center. They'll keep us in the gym doing calisthenics or crap like that." He looked sourly at the parts spread out before him. "My group only gets to the firing range every other week, and if we miss our Monday, they won't let us make it up."

"It's not like you need it," Andy said in a consoling tone. "It's only time on that crappy known distance range, and you've been shooting there in the low nineties since, like, February."

"Yeah, but I wanna get better." The younger boy grumbled. Neither teenagers nor the children who got their first combat rifles at age 10 were allowed ammunition until they were physically on the firing range, and had to account for every round after a session was over. Even the 'bullet' you used in disassembly was an inert piece of metal. Taking care of an M-16 without ammo was like screwing around with a radio-controlled racing car without batteries.

"You and Frank get to go over to Hadleyville, and they got a roof over their firing line. You could shoot all doggone day in the rain – and they give you big guys at least one session every week on the range there."

"Well, it's a bigger range," Andy explained, carefully not mentioning the fact that he and Frank had been using the pop-up targets range in Hadleyville pretty steadily, too. Mike and his age group almost never got pop-up time, and the kid's jealousy was nothing Andy wanted to feed.

After all, I want to fuck him, not fight with him.

"So can I come camping with you guys?" Mike asked. "Richie, too?"

"I'll ask mom," his brother replied. Then, deceitfully: "You willing to get up early Saturday morning?"

"Yeah, sure." Mike thought for a moment. "I better hang up my sleeping bag to air it out. This'll be the first camping we've done since last year."

"No problem," Andy said. "I gotta do that for mine, so I'll dig out yours, too."

The younger boy looked at his brother with a twinge of suspicion. They'd been snapping at each other pretty steadily for almost two years now, and the manifestation of unexplained courtesy was a little bit disquieting.

Mike resolved to watch it when they headed out into the woods Saturday morning. Andy could be a real stinker, and when Frank was around the nastiness got, like, four times worse.

"You wanna time me on re-assembly," he asked.

Andy shook his head. "Why bother? We already know you're about as good as you're gonna get, and we've already done the do-it-blindfolded bit." He reached for his firing pin and the bolt. "Just put it together." He grinned. "And make sure not to leave out any of the fiddly bits this time."

The kid blew him a razzberry and got started on his own rifle.

"Czolgosz called back," Ramirez said as they came into the ready room for the morning brief.

"Hah?" Kemp wasn't quite awake yet. Danny figured the guy was at least one cup of coffee short of minimum necessary caffeination.

"Czolgosz," he repeated. "The tech you told me to talk to yesterday. Remember?"

"Yeah." The older man ran bleary eyes over the screen of his pad, fingertip sliding the images and popping windows open and closed as he familiarized himself with the references and other background stuff. "Whaddid he say?"

"He was goddamned if he knew. Never saw anything like it in all his eight – or was it nine? – years on the job. He said not to worry about it."

Kemp grunted. "Good. You see me worrying about it?"

"You figure some hacker is dicking around with a transmitter or something? Somebody figured out how to fake a collar trace, even an out-of-permitted alert, and he's playing practical jokes on us?"

His senior gave him a glacial shrug. "You," he said solemnly, "are mistaking me for somebody who really gives a fuck." He saw a shadow cast on the open door. "Here comes the watch boss. Shut up and ream out your ears. If you pay attention extra-special good today, I'll spring for the donuts later."

"Shit," was Danny's response. "You better. I bought 'em the last two days running."

"I still dunno about these temporaries of yours," Mike asked, studying the thick paper upon which they'd been printed. "We got swimming every day, and that means we gotta change in the locker room. And we gotta shower. These things last for, what, three days? Maybe four?"

"Not if we don't want 'em to," was Richie's calm reply. "You just gotta use the removal stuff – it's just a half-and-half mix of water and liquid bleach – and it comes right off. I tested it." He held up his left forearm to show where he'd applied a temporary tattoo of four little five-pointed stars.

"I left this one"– the one furthest up the limb –"without using the bleach stuff at all. The lowest one I rubbed off right away. You almost can't see it at all, can you? This one"– he pointed –"I cleaned off the day after, and I scrubbed pretty good with the bleach to get the next one off. You can see the outline if you look at it the right way, see?"

"So the less time it stays on," observed Mike, "the easier it is to rub off?"

"Yeah. I figure we put these things on our legs this afternoon, when we get back to the clearing. We put on the collars, use my dad's fancy camera to make the vids of us doing stuff, then swab off the tattoos and we're done." He grinned. "You got the stuff we're gonna do all planned, right?"

"Sure." Mike was totally confident about that. There was a rough script scrawled on a piece of notebook paper in his hip pocket. They'd been 'rehearsing' the moves and the dialogue for the past few days, and Mike had to grope himself to adjust his suddenly gone-stiff dickie at the thought of it. He studied his companion surreptitiously, visualizing Richie staked out on one of the old army blankets they'd stashed in the bushes at the edge of the clearing, sweaty and glassy-eyed as his neighbor pushed up inside his bottom with the grown-up-sized artificial penis they'd found in Andy's secret stash of sex stuff.

Who knew that Mike's brother had been such a pervert?

At least they hadn't gotten screwed out of their regular patrol car.

Kemp was a real gearhead. They hadn't gotten paired up for more than a couple of days before he'd started nagging Danny into detailing their vehicle, and Kemp had begun tweaking under the hood. It went from being classically 'old and busted' to running pretty well and looking kinda decent. Danny had spent about three weeks now expecting one of the senior sons of bitches to take it away from them.

Ramirez sat in the shotgun seat to bring up the C³I systems while Kemp did the walk-around and was about to check the fluids. Their pads, both piled together on the driver's seat, gave a chirp, and Danny reached for his.

"Aw, shit," Danny said.

"What?" Kemp was near the window checking right front tire pressure.

"Schedule change. We got Militia training this morning, two hours at the Kingstown Conditioning Center."

"So?"

"Introductory year."

"Like I said," Kemp said. "So? Who minds teaching cute little ten-year-old boys? At least they pay attention. Give 'em two or three years, and they'll think they know it all." He spat and tucked the tire gauge into his pocket. "Then you say 'Aw, shit.'"

"Wanna bet? It's not the boys' class we've got. It's the girls."

"Aw, shit."

Swimming at the Center was almost always bare-ass. The staff never put the boys and the girls in the pool at the same time because some of the guys liked to gross 'em out, and if there were no girls around to see, why wear bathing suits? Some of the kids wore shorts or something anyway, but never more than half a dozen or so.

This meant that if you were willing to use the crappy towels the Center kept on the laundry carts instead of bringing one from home, you didn't have to lug any wet stuff back with you at the end of the day. Richie and Mike had been going 'skinny' for about as long as they could remember, encouraged by Frank's and Andy's example before the two older boys had quit getting their shots. You kept a bathing suit stuffed in your backpack just in case, but neither Mike nor Richie had used theirs except for the every-other-month tests everybody had to take, where the female staff sometimes came in to grade you.

This morning's classroom session was in fieldcraft, concentrating on the big sand table map the group had made of the county during the school year. All of the boys liked it because it gave them the kind of view you were supposed to get from Homeland Security's drones and satellites, and it gave them an edge in the back-to-school field training exercises coming up in September.

They were all members of the Free Citizens' Militia, even the two religious conshies, who had to have rifles and did all the weapons training but weren't expected to turn out in emergencies as shooters. The group didn't have any of the nut jobs – the ones with psychiatric excuses – who would have been listed as loggies who did nothing but hump stuff and handle camp set-up and tear-down. Like the conshies, lots of the nut jobs were just fine with training as field medics, for which Richie had had reason to be thankful the previous summer when he'd ducked into a patch of poison oak to get out of a mock ambush.

Ever since the slave laws had been enacted, the government had realized that the ever-growing indentured population posed a terrible risk of insurrection. It took only a few breakouts, riots, and massacres for the politicians to get the message, and the decades-long campaign to reduce Americans to a state of disarmed helplessness turned into a requirement "…that every man be armed."

They even recognized the undeniable fact that women and kids – especially – needed to be armed and trained. There was some noise about going with the descendents of the ancient AK-47, but the derivatives of the Stoner design that became the M-16 were both 'All-American' and had been made to chamber the ubiquitous 5.56mm round. They could also fire the commercial .223 Remington cartridge, and thus were excellent 'varmint' and survival rifles that offered a good compromise between combat utility and tolerable recoil.

America had for generations been described as the country with '…a rifle behind every blade of grass', and now it was that country precisely, by federal statute embraced enthusiastically by every citizen who didn't want to die in a slave uprising.

Little boys (and plenty of little girls) eagerly awaited their tenth birthdays and the issue of their first official Militia individual weapon, almost always an armory'd M-16 that had gone through inspect-and-repair-as-necessary by Homeland Security's contractors. Many families had their kids plinking away with semiautomatic and bolt-action .22 LR longarms from age seven or eight.

Sunday shooting had gotten so popular that lots of big church congregations in Flyover Country had set up their own firing ranges, most of them open to visitors from other denominations.

No Muslims allowed, of course.

Mike and Richie had been soaked in the Militia spirit since they were too young to talk, and though time on the firing line was just about the most fun short of spending a day or a week running around in the woods playing laser tag, they accepted the necessity of classroom time. Everybody knew it paid off. Besides, even the conshies and the nut jobs couldn't get out of it.

The slave cop who took the session was an old guy they'd had a couple of times before, a real no-bullshit type who'd already proved how well he knew how to keep kids under control. He had one of those quirt things, and though he hadn't had to use it yet this summer, both Mike and Richie had felt its sting. Just about everybody in their group had.

Besides, his teaching style was no-bullshit, too. He kept it interesting. He started out by naming three boys and getting them up to the front of the room.

"Grab some red markers," he said, "and use them to show where slaves have gone over the wire in this county."

The chosen kids conferred in low tones as they put out the little red pegs. Everybody living in or around Kingstown knew where the slave barracks were on all the farms and the big mine and refinery that spread out into a neighboring county. There were the perimeters that defined where the slaves were permitted to go, and lots of the red pegs were located right next to new robot snooper stations had been added a couple of years ago in response to the last bunch of escape attempts.

"Okay," said the cop, satisfied. "Siddown." He then named three more boys, one of them Mike. "Yellow markers," he said. Show all the sites of slave attacks on citizens."

"Not just by the escaped ones?" asked another boy. The cop smiled as he nodded.

"Yeah."

"Yes, sir."

Mike and his two fellow students complied, and scattered their markers accordingly.

"Very good," commented the cop. He pointed to one. "Move that one"– he indicated with a laser pointer –"a little bit to the north, over here. Yeah, that's right. Now, all of you siddown." He surveyed the class.

"How many of these attacks – whether fatal or non-fatal – were perpetrated by slaves who escaped from the farms or the mine in this county?"

Back in his seat, Mike was among the kids who raised their hands. He got picked.

"None of 'em, sir."

"Right," said the cop. "All of them were household slaves, slaves leased to businesses, municipal slaves. Trusted slaves, some of them females. What does that tell you?"

All of the boys chorused: "Slaves can't be trusted."

"Yep." The cop nodded approval. "The ones who go over the wire trigger alerts, and we're on 'em pretty quick. It's the ones you deal with every day – the ones who do the janitorial work in your school, the temporarily indentured ones doing their community service, the deadbeat dads and moms – the ones you're used to seeing – they're the dangerous ones."

His face got grim. "They're enslaved for a reason, and even the temporary slaves have to be watched. They've proven that they're not good citizens, and until they work off their punishment, and each has shown that he's learned his lesson, you don't dare treat him any differently than you would an enemy combatant brought back from the Sudan or Nicaragua. You got that?"

"Yes, sir," the boys responded.

"Okay, everybody gather 'round the map and let's take a look at where escaped slaves have come into the county. Keep your hands down. I'll call on you when I want somebody to put down a marker."

Not much thereafter,the group got chased out for physical jerks and the usual long run around the track before they were turned loose in the 'new' swimming pool (so-called because the 'old' pool had been built when their parents had been kids, and the 'new' one had been put into operation years before either Andy or Frank had been born). The only requirement during summertime swimming was that you kept moving, kept making the muscles work, and that didn't take much encouragement from the Center's staff people.

There were three grown-up slaves on the staff – two men and a woman – who'd been assigned there since any of the boys in their group could remember, and apart from the fact that they wore steel collars and their shorts were cut close enough to their hips that you could run a scanner over the barcodes of their tattoos, they just kind of blended in. Nobody talked much to them, but Mike and Richie had been told that if any kid disrespected them, he got chewed out by the free staff guys, maybe even quirted.

Funny thing was that even though they never carried quirts or ever so much as swatted any of the kids, even the snottiest boys addressed them as either 'Sir' or 'Ma'am', so Mike and Richie had never seen anybody punished for mouthing off to them. They were foreigners of some kind, but they weren't allowed to speak their old language – languages? – and had to get along in regular American.

But they couldn't be trusted, could they?

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