The Culling Lottery

4. Saturday

By 3:00 most of the heavy-duty partying had ended. A few sloshed couples were still licking and sucking on each other in small cum-coated entanglements of naked limbs, but most had dropped off to sleep, often with intimate connections of hands, faces and sex organs still intact. Briana, sensing that she should be reasonably alert for the activities ahead, had called upon her reserves of self-restraint and called it a night after her fourth partner and seventh major orgasm.

None of the four victims slept that night. The torment of immovability for Sveta, strapped painfully on the toilet bowl, its porcelain edge grinding into her spine, was no less terrible than the torment of ceaseless movement for Lilya dancing on tiptoes to keep from being impaled on the pointed dowel; or Nina doing endless cartwheels on barbed wire, her arms and legs caked with blood; or Cory struggling eternally uphill in her hamster's wheel. Each had resigned herself to the inevitability of death, but how can one resign oneself to another two days of escalating agony?

A klaxon sounded, the call to breakfast for the team members. It catapulted Briana out of a desperate situation: she had been backed to the edge of a cliff by a terrible black beast that she had only recently been cuddling against. Without warning it had turned on her, its rows of sharp teeth snapping just inches from her face, intent on killing her! The noisy alarm saved her, but the dream was slow to dissolve, the fear reluctant to ebb.

There was a pressure on her inner left thigh and she looked down to see what was causing it. Recognizing Roberto's thick, unruly black hair, she remembered. Her last moments of consciousness before slipping into dreams were tinged with the wet tingling sensations of his tongue lapping gently at her clit. Too satiated from her earlier sexual gymnastics to encourage more serious stimulation, she had simply sighed and drifted away. How had those first softly erotic dreams turned into an attack by a murderous, treacherous beast?

But it was not in Briana's nature to spend time or energy on intellectual analyses. She eased Roberto's head off her thigh, wincing at the scrape of his morning stubble on her tender skin, and slipped off the communal mattress. Other couples were coming groggily awake, too, but Briana was quick to draw the attention of the cameras by going into a series of languid stretches, putting the shapely perfection of her small nude body to maximum visual advantage.

As she lathered herself sexily in the open shower, she thought back on her several performances last night and hoped her night-owl fans had enjoyed as them much as she did. Particularly memorable was an impromptu scene she had concocted in Studio 2. Inspired by the sight of Sveta's arched body topped by perky nipples at the summit of those sumptuous boobs, she came up with an idea she knew the show directors (including her mother) would love because it combined sex with torture.

She needed a collaborator and looked around for potential recruits, spotting one immediately. He was one of the Banqueters, a guest who had paid a small fortune to partake of the roasted victims Sunday night and be allowed to wander through the torture studios to observe the fun first hand. On the plus side, he was quite good looking: tall, mid thirties, athletic build, thick brown hair and sexy, commanding eyes. On the minus side: he had a young woman with him, another Banqueter. No wedding ring, though, so there was a good possibility he might cooperate even if the woman objected. Briana, who had put on a filmy cape to tease the viewing audience and was very much aware of her seductive powers, had beckoned the man aside to ask if he'd be interested in taking part in her scene. She watched with satisfaction as his eyes wandered to where her hard nipples poked the flimsy material of the cape outward. It turned out he was more than willing to be cooperative, and the woman was no obstacle. The man, named Paul, was a bdsm Master and the woman, roxanne, was his sex slave. She would do what he told her to do. Perfect! Briana revised her plan to include roxanne — a tall, slim brunette with long legs and a proud, patrician face that gave no clue to her submissive personality. Until Paul gave her an order.

With no need to speak confidentially, Briana explained her scenario aloud. At her Master's command, roxanne stripped down to her high heels and stockings, moved to Sveta's right side and began suckling the breast on that side, expertly pulling on the long bud with her lips and teeth. Briana sat on the floor at Sveta's left side facing away. As Paul straddled her, she opened his pants, withdrew his stiffening manhood, put her lips around the glans and, with her hands on his butt, pulled him deep into her mouth. Holding her head impaled on his cock, he bent over her head and began sucking on Sveta's left teat. The cameras moved in for closeups of all three action points. After a few minutes, Paul lifted himself off Sveta's tit and pulled out of Briana's mouth.

"I'm ready for stage two," he said, and ordered roxanne to come around between Sveta's splayed knees, lie face down on top of her and push her tongue into Sveta's O-ring gag. Then, with Paul's help, Briana climbed up on roxanne's back and laid on her facing up, creating three layers of girl. Paul draped Briana's legs over his shoulders and maneuvered his rigid cock to the entrance of her love hole, already wet with anticipation. The alignment was perfect and he slipped his full length into her, pleased with her gasp of pleasure. They humped at each other feverishly for a full minute, the thumping and the weight of the two women grinding the back of Sveta's neck painfully against the toilet bowl. The cameras caught her obvious anguish.

Alerted by Paul that he was about to cum, Briana pushed him back, unplugging him, hopped off roxanne and knelt down to accept Paul's load in her mouth. She gripped his pumping rod with three fingers to prevent it from jamming into the back of her throat, forcing her to swallow. Instead, she milked him dry while holding it all in her mouth, then, pushing roxanne aside, spat it slowly through the O-gag into Sveta's mouth. As an added touch, she had Paul order roxanne to clean him off with her tongue, then do the same to the inside of Briana's mouth and Sveta's mouth. To finish the scene, she laid face up on top of the groaning Sveta and had Paul and his sex slave stand on either side of her suckling her own tits while she reached out and played with what lay between their legs.

Paul provided an unexpected bonus when Briana's skillful handwork brought him to orgasm again. This time she had him squirt it directly into Sveta's O-ring. All three helped her wash it down by taking turns peeing into her open mouth, not bothering with the funnel. Who cared if some of it splashed on her face? More fun for everyone but Sveta.

Briana's other exploits of the night had yielded greater orgasms for her, but that was the best one she had been able to contrive involving one of the victims. It was too dangerous to climb into the hamster wheel with Cory. Nina, barb-wired inside the revolving rim, was good for a cartwheel or two if you clung tightly to her body, but you had to be careful not to knock over the rim as you climbed aboard her. Lilya, impaled on the pointed rod, was good for some labia pulling and nipple-nibbling, but not much else. Most of Briana's energies, therefore, were spent on the huge orgy mattresses supplied in all four studios where her lively contributions to the debaucheries unfailingly drew the attention of the camera operators and any males in the area willing to doff their pants.

After toweling off, a process comprising an arousing repertory of salacious poses, she put on a minimal toga-like dress and walked to Studio 6 which had been laid out as a dining hall. There the first of the night's revelers to regain consciousness were swilling down coffee or nursing hangovers. A lavish spread of morning delicacies were laid out on a long, linen covered, flower-laden table. Briana pointedly disdained the fancy confections, croissants, doughnuts, pancakes, waffles, omelettes, meats and other tempting delights, selecting instead a mixture of fruits and a spicy herbal tea. Unlike her sexual appetite, she kept her gustatory appetite under strict discipline. She had no intention of letting herself go like her mother. She planned to be svelte, sexy and in demand far into her sixties and beyond.

When she had finished her bowl of fruit, she picked up a water bottle with a steel straw and brought it to her victim in Studio 3. Nina's eyes were filled with a desperate plea for relief from her barbed wire bonds. Briana ignored it and pushed the straw through a hole in the ball gag. She squeezed water into the girl's throat. Nina swallowed greedily. The gag not only stretched her jaw mercilessly, but resulted in most of her saliva escaping as drool, leaving her throat parched. Briana's action had nothing to do with salving her misery, however. It was strictly business. Without occasional infusions of water, gagged victims could become so dehydrated they might pass out during the latter stage of their torture, possibly ruining a good snuff.

By noon all members of all four teams were back in action and ready to compete for Best in Show. Tiffany watched it all from the cloister of the control room.

Sveta had been equipped with a copper stim pushed deep into her vagina and held in place by rivets through her labia. She had been released from her position over the toilet but her face and hair remained encrusted with semen and dried urine. Her wrists were tied behind her with leather thongs, her gag was removed and Justin lifted her into a glass tank for a "bath." The floor of the tank was covered with inch-high, sharp-pointed spikes, forcing her to hold herself off them as best she could with her fingers and toes. Wiring for the stim ran from between her legs to a coiled heap on the spiked floor and up over the top edge of the tank. A steel grate was locked down to the top of the tank. Immediately water began to flow in from a pipe at the bottom and within minutes Sveta was forced to swim in an eel-like fashion both to stay off the spikes and breathe at the surface. But the surface gradually contracted to a mere inch from the grate, so she had to press her face against it to gulp in air. She (and the viewers) were informed that any attempt to give up and let herself drown would result in a painful shock from the stim. They demonstrated. She screamed and promised she wouldn't let herself drown. (Of course, the team was ready to rescue and revive her if she did. They had something better planned for her actual snuff.)

The Wood Team had placed a wooden broom handle between Lilya's back and her elbows, locking it in place by cinching up her wrists with rope in front of her. Five members of the team held her firmly by her arms, waist and ankles while Tony, the team leader, slowly pushed and twisted a thin, pointed wooden dowel into the side of her left breast, all the way through it into her right breast, and then out the other side. Rivulets of bright fresh blood ran down from all four entrance and exit wounds, drying to match the darker blood smeared on her inner thighs from her long night on the impaling rod. The pinioned girl trembled and sobbed with this new agony. She was led under a beam which extended outwards from a center axis on a vertical pole. Cords were tied from both ends of the rod skewering her breasts to the overhead beam, then down again to her ankles. The cords were pulled taut. Tony produced a short single-tail whip, cracking her on her sore bottom, already well striped from the previous night's caning. "Walk!" he yelled. She began to walk in a circle around the axis pole, the cords tugging painfully at her skewered breasts with every step, forcing her to take small, hurried steps on tiptoe. Soon her leg muscles would be on fire, but she could not stop without a terrible whipping, and could not let herself collapse without hanging from her tit rod. She had begun to pine for death, but it was still a long way off.

The Fire and Iron Teams had received permission to combine for a joint torture in the form of a game that Briana had devised. She and Lin, who headed up the Fire Team, had their respective squads stretch out two forty-foot coils of concertina wire side by side. Briana had come across them in the supply area. The coils had a diameter of about three feet, enough to allow the passage of a human body on hands and knees if one didn't mind crawling along in a tunnel of barbed wire. Briana and Lin didn't mind a bit, since they wouldn't be doing it. Nina and Cory were prepped for it by being equipped with special incentive gags. The gags were expansion devices, much like the expansion bolts used in drywall to hold heavy pictures or shelves, except that these were more like clam shells covered with metal thorns. An allen screw opened up the two halves of the "shell" inside the mouth, spreading it painfully open and driving the thorns into the tongue, cheeks and roof of the mouth. The incentive was that the loser would continue to wear the spiked gag right up to the bitter end of her snuff. Further incentives (to prevent stalling) came in the form of a cattle prod and a blowtorch.

The two weeping competitors, blood now mixing with their drool, were led to one end of the twin coils of barbed wire and released from their restraints. Both were tiny — the pretty Russian weighed only 95 pounds and her 19-year old Australian counterpart was only seven pounds heavier — but the Iron and Fire teams took no chances, surrounding them in a solid phalanx to discourage any thought they might have of avoiding an experience that promised to be extremely unpleasant. The girls were inserted head first into the tunnel openings. "Go!" Lin called out, and Nina and Cory began their tentative crawls into hell. Dissatisfied with their progress, Briana touched Nina's ass with her cattle prod and Lin gave Cory's a kiss from the blue tip of the blowtorch flame. With simultaneous screams, both girls scrambled forward, leaving a trail of blood from hands, knees and toes. The disturbed coils bounced around, the vicious barbs slicing into their arms, back and legs. Cory's long blond hair kept tangling in the barbs, forcing her to stop and rip it loose under the threat of Lin's yellow and blue flame. It was the little Russian, her knees shredded to a bloody pulp, tears mixing with the blood now streaming from her lacerated mouth, who emerged from her tunnel first.

Vexed by the failure of her own entry, Lin had her teammates pin the hapless girl over the coils of her own tunnel and burned an "L" into her left buttocks with the blowtorch. "That's for LOSER!" she yelled over Cory's screams.

Briana, meanwhile, gave Nina her reward. She reversed the allen screw to close up the clamshell gag in Nina's mouth. Nina moaned with relief as the thorns tore free and the gag slipped out. Cory would have to suffer with hers until the end.

But there was yet another contest they must endure. This one was Lin's brainchild.

Two new expansion devices were produced that resembled long, black dildos — smooth except for a profusion of small holes. There was an allen socket in the blunt end. While members of the teams tied the arms of the two victims behind them, forearm over forearm, Briana and Lin demonstrated for the viewers how the devices worked. When the allen screw was turned, sharp pins about a quarter-inch long emerged from the holes. There was no need to explain how they would be used, only where . The pins were retracted, the surfaces oiled, and when both victims were bent over trestles, the devices were shoved rudely into the upraised rectums. As Briana and Lin turned the allen screw, the two wretched victims screamed into their gags, Nina into her reinserted rubber ball, Cory into her mouthful of thorns. Once again the two girls were informed that the winner would have her butt plug removed; the loser would die with it still in place tomorrow.

The contest was another race. This one would be on top of a series of seven steel plates, each eight feet long, laid end to end on concrete blocks, heated from beneath by gas burners and covered with a thick layer of old fashioned thumb tacks. Briana and Lin added a further degree of difficulty and pain by jabbing fish hooks through the contestants' nipples and attaching a chain between them; then they connected the girls together with a six foot chain between the fish hooks. Two more pair of fish hooks were pushed through their labia and connected by chains the same way. If one of them fell down or stopped, the other would be forced to stop or have the hooks rip through her nipples and pussy lips. Once again Briana armed herself with the cattle prod for added incentive. Lin switched to a soldering iron. The unhappy contestants were to travel the full forty-eight feet of hot steel plates, touch first one ear then the other to a red hot branding iron, then race each other back to the starting point.

Two pairs of the strongest girls lifted Nina and Cory up and, at a signal, set them down on the starting end of the steel plates. The searing heat of the plates made it impossible to put their feet down long enough to sweep a path through the tacks, so they engaged in a hopping dance as they headed to the opposite end. The piston-like movement of their legs made the spiked butt plugs twist inside their intestinal walls, puncturing and tearing at the delicate tissues. They screamed and sobbed in their agony, high-stepping onward as more and more hot tacks imbedded in their bloody feet. Ten feet from the finish Cory slipped and fell to her knees. Nina danced wildly in place, unable to continue forward because of the chains linking them, while Cory squirmed screaming on the stovetop surface of the plates. A frenzied crowd of team members and guests shouted at them to get going, a demand emphasized by fiery touches of the prod and soldering iron to their thighs. Both girls were in a panic, but Nina, having slightly less pain to contend with, was the first to recover some wits. She turned her back on the thrashing Cory, grabbed a handful of her blond hair and pulled her up to where she could get her feet under her. The flesh on Cory's left arm, hip and leg was seared red by the hot steel plate and covered with imbedded thumb tacks. With no time to feel sorry for themselves, both women started hopping forward again toward the branding iron waiting for them ten agonizing feet farther on.

Nina, who had been pulling Cory along with her tit chains, reached the branding iron first. Deliberately leaning over to touch her right ear to the red hot iron was the most difficult thing she had ever done, but the part of her mind still functioning through her torment told her there was no way out of it. The pain was incredible, but so was the agony radiating from her burned and punctured feet as she danced in place. Quickly, before she could think about it, she turned her head and touched the other ear to the branding iron. She screamed and shook her head violently, trying to throw off the new pain.

Cory meanwhile, nearly crazed with her own pain, was sobbing hysterically, her eyes wide on the branding iron, shaking her head, spraying blood from her thorn-filled mouth. Even touches from the soldering iron on her butt only increasing her sobbing and the height of her hopping. She would not touch her ear to the ruby red iron. She just couldn't do it! Nina knew the teams would let them fry here if Cory didn't do as commanded. She couldn't yell anything intelligible at her through the rubber ball gag, so she reverted to the method that had worked before. She backed up to Cory, grabbed her arm and tried to slam her against the hot iron. Cory resisted and nearly knocked her over. Desperate to avoid more painful shocks from Briana's cattle prod, Nina spun Cory around. Working with her hands behind her back, she grabbed the chain between the hooks and yanked hard. One hook tore through the nipple and was free. Another savage yank tore the other hook free as Cory screamed and fell to her knees again. Nina felt no sympathy. Let Cory suffer the consequences of her own cowardice; they were both going to die and be eaten tomorrow anyway. Nina's only interest now was to reduce her suffering in the meantime. She sprinted quickly back to the starting point and was lifted off the hot race track. She never knew what became of the little Australian blonde. She didn't care. Her only concern was that the tacks were being removed from her feet and the barbarous spiked dildo from her ass. Whatever agonies lay ahead, at least she was rid of those. Unlike Cory who would spend the remaining hours of her life with her ass filled with nails and her mouth with thorns.

From the control room, Tiffany watched little Cory floundering to her feet at the far end of the torturous racetrack, blood streaming from her torn nipples as well as her mouth and rectum, her feet loaded with tacks and splashing blood with every hop on the superheated plate. Tiffany depressed the button that fed her mike into Lin's earpiece and ordered her to have her team remove Cory from the hot plates and prepare her for her next ordeal. She reminded Lin that URP wanted it's volunteer victims alive and well for their eventual snuff, and their flesh in reasonably attractive condition for the following Roast. Their Roast clientele had, after all, paid a hefty price to see these lovely living girls converted into beautiful presentations of meat on a spit. (She didn't mention the special arrangement Justin had just made that would allow a special snuff for Sveta.)

Two of Tiffany's screens showed Briana bouncing around among her team members celebrating Nina's win, oblivious to Cory's anguish. She watched this jubilation with unease. Tiffany was no squeamish bleeding heart, having presided over thousands of executions over the years, but even she felt some sympathy for these poor, damned women. Briana acted as though she might not have been one of the victims herself. Last night she had added gleefully to Sveta's torment as though the two had never been friends and cohorts, working and playing together on two previous shows. Tiffany could not help but wonder if raising her beautiful child in the shadow of her own ugly profession had not somehow damaged whatever connections there are in the human psyche that enable us to feel compassion. Could this be the same golden haired tyke who skipped around the breakfast table singing nursery songs? Who had listened with wonder as Tiffany read her the story of the Little Rocket that Could? Who had cried when the family dog chewed off her doll's head? Were these shows, in fact, dulling not only Briana's sensitivities, but numbing an entire planetload of humanity to cruelty? But this job paid handsomely and this was not a line of thought she could afford to pursue, so she shook it out of her mind and switched to Studio 1 to see how Tony's Wood Team was doing with Lilya.

In one sense they had chosen the easiest and most obvious means to dispatch their victim. On the other hand, they had decided to do it in an historically accurate way, more or less, to make the most of it's extreme cruelty. They had decided to crucify her.

The wooden dowel that had been run through her breasts for the previous night's torture had been withdrawn. She had been dressed in a white gown that draped over one shoulder, leaving the other bare. Tiffany caught their show just as they were ceremoniously stripping it off and stringing her up with harsh hemp ropes bound around her wrists and ankles, holding her spreadeagled and naked, a ready and helpless target. As the Romans had done, they chose for her scourging multi-tailed whips with bits of metal tied to the ends of the thongs. They showed them to the live and video audiences, explaining that their purpose was to rip to shreds the skin on the condemned prisoner's back, not just for the immediate pain, but so that later, when she was hanging on the cross, any movement would result in raw flesh scraping against the roughly hewn wood. And there would be a lot of movement. The Romans would have used the whips both front and back, but — and Tony apologized profusely to his audience — they were allowed by URP to use them only on her back so that her front side would remain fairly presentable for the spit roast. For her breasts, belly and thighs they would use canes. With proper cosmetics, basting and browning, bruises disappear. The chewed up flesh on her back would not be as appetizing, but she would be laid face up for carving, so it didn't matter all that much.

The team drew lots for the privilege of scourging her. Four were chosen: two with canes in front to deliver twenty-five strokes each; two others alternating twenty-five strokes with the whips on her back. They did it slowly, letting the pain from each blow blossom and careen through every nerve in her body, watching her writhe and shriek, tears rolling down her pretty cheeks. When they had finished, her breasts and belly were a purple network of old and new stripes, her back, buttocks and the back of her thighs a pulpy mass of raw flesh. She moaned ceaselessly in a misery of pain that was only just beginning.

The cross consisted of a fifteen-foot vertical beam and a seven-foot cross beam, both were 6x6s and had been roughed up with an adz. The team detached the cross beam and laid it on the floor behind Lilya. They took her down, toppled her over backwards on to it, stretching her arms out and lashing them to it with ropes. They hauled her to her feet and made her trudge through the studio and out into the street carrying the heavy cross beam. Using whips to keep her moving, they forced her to walk the perimeter of the studio lot twice, a distance of about two miles. The hot California sun seemed to boil her tattered flesh and the beam ground against her wounds with every step. But this was the gentle part. What followed was a horror that had been hundreds of years in development, beginning with the Persians and reaching perfection with the Romans in the third century. They led her into a roped off area in a large sandy lot. The vertical beam of the cross had been laid beside a cement-lined hole in the center of the roped area. Lilya was unstrapped from the cross beam and watched in a kind of detached trance as it was bolted in place on the upright. She knew they were preparing it for her, but she wouldn't allow herself to think about it. But in due course she had to. She was seized by the arms and thrown down backward on the cross. Four team members held her arms down as two others produced large spikes and placed them carefully on spots Tiffany had marked on her wrists. The pain of the spikes being hammered through her flesh was sudden and fierce, but not as bad as the pain the rough wood was causing on her raw back and shoulders. She looked over and was surprised that there was little blood. The spikes missed the arteries and veins, merely smashing through a few bones. The tops of the nails were bent over with the mallets so she would not be able to tear her hands free. As they were doing that, another group of team members had taken hold of her legs and bent them so her knees were pointing outwards away from each other, exposing her sex in the most obscene possible way. One heel was laid across the other and another huge spike was hammered through them. This, too, was bent over so that she would not be able to kick free. As they were taking care of these details, other members of the team were applying honey to her body and to the upright beam to which her heels were nailed. They smeared it on her face, up her nose, on her eyelids and poked it into the corners of her mouth around the ball gag, as well as into her widely gaping cunt and her anus. When that was finished, Tony and four of the strongest team members heaved the cross and it's hundred pounds of suffering girl to a vertical position and dropped it into the concrete sleeve. An auburn haired girl with a shovel scraped sand up to the base of the cross and two others drizzled honey over it to alert ants to the banquet hanging above, mewling now from the intense and constant pain in her wrists and ankles.

Lilya's true agony had just begun.

She soon had difficulty breathing. Stressed by the angle at which her arms were being pulled, her diaphragm muscles started to tire, making it hard to exhale. By pushing downward on the spike through her heels she was able to breathe a little better, but the added pain was excruciating and the strain on her thigh muscles could not be sustained for long. If her knees had been together, she could have lifted her body more easily, but with her knees splayed lewdly apart the lifting process was awkward. She knew she should let herself stop breathing; death was the only way to end this torment. But her body would not allow it any more than it would allow any of us to strangle ourselves with our own hands. Every time the lack of oxygen became acute, her nervous system made her push herself up involuntarily for another gasp of air. This is how she would spend the last days and a half of her life: grinding ceaselessly up and down on the cross, the roughened wood rasping the raw flesh off her back. Up and down. Up and down. Hour after agonizing hour.

Tiffany switched to Studio 2. The Water Team had just finished strapping Sveta to a plank on the rim of a water tank, her wrists tied to the board just above her head. Her gag had been removed. They had wound electrical tape around her eyes as a blindfold and were sliding her on the plank head-first out over the water. Justin was reminding Sveta and the audience that this first dunk would be for ten seconds, but if they saw any bubbles, they would bring her up and zap her with the dreaded cattle prod in a very tender place. They tilted the board downward until her head was completely submerged and the whole team picked up the audible count from Justin. "One. Two. Three . . ." Sveta knew they wouldn't let her drown herself — this was only Saturday — and she desperately wanted to avoid contact with the prod, so she cooperated grimly. The next dunk was for eleven seconds, then twelve, then thirteen — each submersion getting longer. When the count reached thirty-three seconds, her burning lungs exploded and her body thrashed on the plank as water rushed into her lungs. The plank was pulled out quickly and turned over so she could cough the liquid out of her lungs. When she was breathing fairly normally again, the plank was flipped so that she was face up again.

"We'll have to do that one again, darlin,'" Justin drawled, "and here's what you get for failing." He touched the prod first to her left armpit, then the right. Each touch brought a scream and a jerk of her body in its restraints. She broke into tears, knowing from experience it was going to be a long, long day.

Tiffany couldn't watch any more. She had spared Sveta the kind of torment Lilya was enduring on the cross, but even was too hard to watch. She switched to Studio 3.

Whatever delight the Iron Team had enjoyed with Nina's recent victories in the concertina wire race and on the hot plates was not being shared with their winning entry. They had taken a long strand of barbed wire and were wrapping it in loops around her breasts. Her arms were being held behind her back, forearm over forearm, and the ends of the strand were looped tightly around her wrists — the left wrist attached to the right breast, the right wrist attached to the left breast, the excess wire wrapped around her forearms to bind them together. A collar had been fashioned out of barbed wire and her hair tied to it in the back so that her head was tilted up. Blood trickled down the pale skin of her neck where the barbs bit in. More blood dribbled down her rib cage and belly from the many punctures around her breasts. Another length of barbed wire was used as a hobble around her ankles. Steel nipple clamps were attached, the kind with teeth, and a leash clipped to a chain running between them. Thus adorned, restrained and bleeding, she was led by Briana out to the street where a mob of guests waited to see live what they had been watching on huge screens. Briana handed the leash over to Corrine for the first of four torturous circumnavigations of the URP lot as elements of the crowd tagged along, sometimes throwing rocks at the suffering girl, cheering when the added insult made her burst into tears.

Tiffany knew what would happen next when Nina's long march was finished. In the meantime she switched to Studio 4 and the Fire Team.

Cory, still trying to cope with the spiked expansion devices in her mouth and ass, was being prepared for something far worse. She was standing on a platform between two gas jets; they were aimed at her ankles but not yet activated. Each wrist was handcuffed to a horizontal iron pipe over her head and one of the female members of the team was locking a choke chain around her neck to the same pipe. All the slack had been taken out of the chain so that Cory had to stand to her full height to breathe. Alligator clips were attached to her torn nipples with wires running to a nearby control board.

Lin, the lovely Chinese team captain, her raven hair swept teasingly over one eye, was holding up a carrot-shaped device with two flanges, an electrical wire and foot-long translucent tail all extending from one end. The wire also ran to the control board. She was lecturing.

"If our victim's other two holes were not already occupied, we would put one of these in both those places, too. But she is already in much pain there, so instead we put it in cunt. Nikki, you have better English than me. Please explain."

The Amsterdam beauty with the multi-colored hair sprouted a broad smile and stepped up beside Lin, lifting her chin and doing what she could to maximize her modest bust. "The device was designed specifically for URP and has proved very popular. Although not by those using it, of course. It contains both refrigeration and heating coils and goes very fast from one extreme to the other. In its A mode when the victim is standing or trotting on the platform it becomes cold, reaching the temperature of ice within a few minutes. In its B mode the heating coils are activated, bringing it to a temperature hot enough to burn flesh in eight seconds, and hot enough to melt solder in thirty seconds. Mode B activates when the victim pulls herself up on the overhead bar. There are two reasons she will be doing that. One: we will shortly be turning on the gas jets which will burn her feet and ankles if she does not keep jogging in place. That is an extremely painful action for her because of the thing in her ass which will be constantly ripping at her intestine, besides which she will soon tire and need to pull herself up away from the flames. The second reason is that if she goes longer than twenty seconds without pulling herself up for a minimum of five seconds, it activates a painful jolt of electricity in her tits which will keep up until she does." She nodded at Lin. "Okay?"

"Yes. Thank you, Nikki. We now insert hot-cold device."

Nikki and another girl took hold of Cory's ankles and pulled her legs apart so the cameras could get a clear shot of Lin inserting it into Cory's vagina. A rivet gun was used to drive rivets through her labia and the flanges to hold it in place. Lin fanned the tail that now hung between Cory's legs.

"These filaments light up red when heat is on so you know when victim is burning inside," she said. She pointed to a light on top of the control board. "Green light there tells when victim gets shock in tits. Also, she will scream. Now we add one more torture."

Two girls lifted Cory off her feet by the waist and Nikki slipped a rubber mat covered with spiked points on the platform. It was the kind of mat put on top of a carpet with spikes to keep it from slipping. Cory cringed as she was set down on it. Right now the points merely jabbed at her feet (already blistered and sore with early stage infection from the earlier races); but if she had to jog in place, as Nikki had said, they would easily puncture through the skin.

Lin circled around to look Cory in the face. "You understand what you must do?"

Cory nodded miserably. No use stalling. They would just start anyway and let her learn the hard way. Like the other three victims, she cursed herself for the millionth time for the greed and stupidity that had put her in this position. With a whoosh the gas jets lighted and flames licked out horizontally, just touching her ankles and quickly creating blistering pain. She did indeed jog, lifting her knees high in an unconscious attempt to escape the flames. The thing in her ass was shredding her colon and with each step the flames burned deeper into the skin on her ankles. There was no help for it! She grabbed the bar and pulled herself up. She hung there as long as she could to let the burn pain subside, but soon her arms were burning from the inside and could no longer hold her up. She had to let herself down and start over. After several such cycles she couldn't imagine how she would survive another hour, much less till nightfall. Or maybe they expected her to keep this up all night, too! Agony was everywhere: her feet, ankles, legs, ass, lungs, arms, mouth! How sweet the thought of death was to her now!

Tiffany flipped back to Studio 2. Justin was announcing the special arrangement they had made for Sveta's snuff.

". . . and since we don't know how long she'll be able to hold out — maybe an hour, maybe twelve hours — we'll start her final ordeal now. This snuff will destroy much of her body, obviously, which would cheat the fine folks who have registered for the Roast Banquet, so in order to be given permission to perform this snuff, we have made a special arrangement with Ultimate Reality Productions to provide a substitute to take Sveta's place in the roasting pit. The Water Team has all agreed to participate in a drawing which will determine her substitute. For taking this extra risk, the entire Wood Team will receive double our normal compensation and be entitled to opt for the Bonus Option along with whichever of the other three teams wins tonight's vote."

A nice deal, Tiffany thought, for those whose luck held out and didn't get greedier. It did not, however, ease her sorrow for what was about to happen to Sveta.

Tony, who had a flair for the dramatic, was handed a dead chicken. He walked over to a large tank. "This is where the lovely Sveta will die," he said. "This tank contains water bountifully laced with an acid that dissolves flesh on contact. Let me demonstrate."

He dipped half the chicken into the acid bath and lifted it out again. Only half a chicken remained.

"I won't tell you what the acid is, because I don't want to give you unhappy husbands any homicidal ideas," he chortled. "But if you stay with us long enough, you'll see how effective it is at dissolving even the most reluctant female."

The camera's view climbed upwards to reveal Sveta's nude body suspended over the tank. Her hands where taped to the ends of a three-foot bar and her long black hair was tied to the middle of it. She could relieve the pain in her scalp by pulling herself up by her hands, but the hair was tied too close to the bar to allow her to pull up to where she could hang by her chin. The bar was suspended from a winch which began to lower her toward the acid. It stopped just as her feet would have touched the surface, but she had pulled herself up a little.

"As you can see, the winch is holding Sveta just above the surface of the acid in the tank. If she lets her feet droop so that her toes touch the surface, she will lose her toes. We will begin lowering her into the acid at precisely 8:00 in the morning. The winch will drop her one-eighth of an inch every forty-eight seconds. For a while she'll be able to pull herself up on the bar to postpone the terrible pain of the acid burning her flesh and bones away, but muscles can only hold out so long. Furthermore, the acid will cauterize her flesh as it's eaten away, inch by inch, so that she won't bleed to death. We figure she will lose her nice long legs and about half her torso before she dies. That's about three feet of her and will take about six hours. Her scrumptious tits should be ready for harvesting in plenty of time for at least two of our Roast guests. Meanwhile, from now to eight-hundred hours in the morning she can think about it while she hangs by her hair. Oh, and Sveta, be sure to keep your knees bent a little, just like that. You definitely want to keep your toes out of that acid. Nasty stuff! Now then, let's get to that drawing to find out which of us will replace Sveta on the spit."

The twenty-four members of the Water Team were gathered along one side of a series of tables set end to end, stretching some seventy feet. Justin took a position at one end and a technician handed him a deck of cards. He shuffled them as he talked.

"We have agreed to use a normal deck of cards. I will sluff four of them . . ." he dealt the top four cards face up, ". . . which leaves forty-eight. There are twenty-four of us, so that means we could conceivably go down the line twice before someone gets the death card, although I doubt it will take that long. The death card is the Queen of Spades which, as you can see," he gestured to the four sluffed cards, "is still in the deck. Whoever is dealt the Queen of Spades wins the honor of replacing Sveta in the roasting pit, the method of execution to be determined by the Chief Execution Officer. I will deal, beginning with myself. But first, everyone gets to cut the deck."

He set the deck down in front of Jackeline, the first team member in line, and she cut it. Then he continued down the length of the table until everyone had done the same.

"Now there can be no question of a fixed deck. Right?"

"Right," was the murmured response, muted by a discernable nervousness.

"We start with me." Justin dealt himself the first card. The ten of hearts. He realized he'd been holding his breath and let it out. "I got the ten of hearts," he announced cheerfully, and turned to Jackeline who, he noticed, had also inhaled but had not exhaled. She sagged with relief when it turned out to be the four of diamonds. He called it out and moved slowly on down the line, pulling each card off the top and deliberately hesitating just a little before turning it over to build an exquisite tension. His jauntiness deserted him, however, as he neared the far end of the line without having turned up the deadly Queen. Then he was at the end. Still no Queen of Spades.

It was time to put his own life back on the block. He returned to the head of the table, unconsciously biting his lip, and after a brief silent prayer, drew off the top card and turned it over. The two of spades. He swallowed, waited till his heart slowed down a little, announced it, and looked up into Jackeline's terrified eyes. He had now gone through more than half the deck. Luck was swiftly running out for one of the twenty-three women at the table. Their foreheads were all shiny with nervous perspiration.

He turned over Jackeline's card. The King of Spades. A trembling sigh of relief escaped the petite Peruvian.

Next to her the dark blonde Rumanian pixie, Olga, was chewing on her lower lip, her eyes huge with fear. She followed the course of the card as it was drawn off the top of the deck, laid softly on the table face down, then turned slowly over. The nine of clubs. She closed her eyes and made a sign of the cross.

Justin moved on to the tall American blonde next to her, Sarae. He admired her capacious bosom for a moment, then looked up into her frightened blue eyes as he drew the top card off the deck. She was almost as tall as he, probably five-ten, and wrung her hands nervously as her gaze fixed on the moving card. Justin turned it slowly over. Her eyes widened and she backed away from the table with a sharp intake of breath. He glanced down at the card. And there it was. The Queen of Spades, her gentle aristocratic eyes staring off to her left with nun-like innocence, waiting steadfastly beside a scepter that looked like a bedpost. Perhaps waiting for her King to peel back her chaste red, yellow and black robes and take possession of what lay beneath. Or perhaps averting her eyes from the ominous black spade beside her face. The better to bury you with, my dear; for after I've had my way with you, I plan to put you to death.

"Well, Sarae!" Justin purred. "Looks like you have the honor. No, no! Don't back away. Stay where you are. You know the drill." He was walking around the end of the table. A Studio official handed him a pair of handcuffs. "Be a good girl and don't give us any reason to be angry with you. Remember, we get to decide how you'll be treated until your execution tomorrow. You want to be nice and cooperative."

He was standing in front of her now, her teammates forming an arc behind her in case she should panic and bolt. He allowed himself a minute to let the cameras see him enjoying the vision before him: a tall beauty with naturally honey-blond hair streaked with brighter strands of gold and a well formed athletic figure. But the highlight, of course, was that wondrous bosom of spectacular dimensions. He held out the handcuffs.

"Take them!"

Her lips quivered and she plucked them gingerly out of his fingers as though he had handed her an asp. In a sense, he had.

"Lock one of the cuffs on your right wrist, Sarae."

She pressed her lips together, fighting the urge to run. He was making her put on her own restraints. Her hands shook so badly she had to try three times before she could close it around her wrist and lock it shut.

"Good girl," said Jason, as if to a family dog. "Now put your hands behind your back and finish the job."

Sarae wanted to be strong, but tears leaked from her eyes betraying her terror. She reached behind her with both hands and fumbled for the still open cuff. Cradling it in her right hand, she slipped it around her left wrist, inserted the male side into the female side and squeezed them shut. The click of the lock sealed her fate.

Justin was still eyeing her. "Can't wait to get you naked again, Sarae. And the chefs are gonna love you! Not only are you gonna look great turning on that spit, but you've got lots of nice firm meat on your bones. I bet you'll be tasty as hell, what with all that good mid-western fare they raised you on back there in Mankato, Minnesota. Bet you never thought you'd end up as meat, huh?"

Even as Sarae parted her lips to answer, Olga handed Justin a ball gag and he shoved it into her mouth. He buckled the strap behind her head. Her answer was now buried forever behind a round red ball.

Justin smiled at her. "You like sex, don't you Sarae?"

She knew there was no right or wrong answer. All roads led to pain. She nodded sorrowfully.

"Then let's see that you spend your last hours enjoying yourself," he said, and took her by the arm.

Tiffany, watching on the monitor, knew where he would take her. She switched to Studio 3.

Nina was back from her painful trips around the perimeter of the Studio lot. Her ankles were ripped raw from the barbed wire hobble. Her neck appeared to have been slit, but it was only the blood from her barbed wire collar. Her arms were bathed in blood from the barbed wire that bound them together behind her back. Now she was being mounted on a device that made those torments pale by comparison.

The Iron Team had set up a "pony" for her to ride consisting of a rip-saw blade set into a trestle. The barbed wire hobble between her ankles was cut and she was made to straddle the saw blade. A triangular iron beam had been set on the floor under the trestle and by standing high on the balls of her feet atop the sharp edge of the beam Nina could keep the teeth of the saw about a millimeter below her labia. The ends of the barbed wire from each ankle were fastened to the floor so that standing on her toes to avoid the saw dragged the barbs into her ankles. More barbed wire was used to hold her feet to the beam edge so she couldn't escape its bite. Her gag was removed and replaced with a spreader. A hemostat was clamped on her tongue and it was pulled out as far as it would go. A decorative stud through her tongue was removed and an eye bolt forced through the hole, then secured with washers and a nut. That eye bolt was connected to another in the floor with a wire. A second wire was tied to the barbed wire loops tightly encircling her breasts and connected to a beam overhead. The two wires were pulled taut and adjusted so that Nina had her choice of two agonies. She could rise to her tiptoes on the sharp edge of the beam, pulling painfully at her tongue. Or she could let her heels drop and hang from the barbed wire around her tits, the saw blade cutting into her vulva. She would alternate between these two flavors of torment for the rest of the night.

There would be no sleep for Nina or any of the other three victims. They'd get plenty of that starting tomorrow afternoon. By then it would be most welcome.

Tiffany glanced at the clock. It was time for the viewers to start voting for their favorite team.