The Flesh Cartel #3: Choices

handle or knob. He hadn’t eaten in days, if the stubble on his chin and cheeks was any reliable measure of time; he didn’t have the energy for trying to escape anymore.
Or the hope.
He knew he should have been happy. Nobody was hurting him here. He never woke up to a cock in his face or hands on his body, prying at his legs or pinching his nipples or squeezing his balls. He woke up to darkness. And silence. It was all he ever woke up to.
Darkness. Silence. Fear. Hunger. Thirst—he couldn’t drink from the toilet this time; it was chemical, no water. And, strangely, loneliness, as if any human company—even the beasts who raped him—was somehow better than this empty, black nothingness.
He missed Mat.
He was starting to feel a creeping, dreamlike sense that Mat wasn’t even real . All in his head, just like the creepy-crawlies ghosting over his skin. Just like the rest of the outside world. Strange, distant concepts like psych papers and journal reviews and contraband potato chips. And clothes, and happiness, and peace, and dignity.
What that left of him, he didn’t know. Was too afraid to think on it very hard. Easier just to close his eyes and be the nothingness they’d taken such care to shape him into. And maybe that was giving up, but right now it was the best he could do. He just had to hope Mat would forgive him for it.

    The stranger led Mat to a parking garage, where a huge RV was waiting. Opened the door for him like a gentleman.
Mat climbed in, struggling but unwilling to ask for help, using the walls to propel himself up the stairs. The stranger followed, closing and locking the door behind him. Not a simple deadbolt. You needed a key even to open it from the inside. Mat stowed that information away as he took in the rest of his surroundings. A kitchen, a room in the back with a bed. A curtained area up front where the driver’s seat must be. A bathroom. A wall of cupboards. A little living room area. It looked like a place you could take a nice vacation in, except for the part where the bed was fitted with straps at each corner of the mattress, used to keep a person spread-eagled, and the windows looked thicker than the ones in airplanes. His eyes must have lingered too long on those, because a hand fell on his shoulder and squeezed.
“You can see out them, but people can’t see in. And they’re Plexiglas, not anything you can break. So don’t try it. Now go sit at the table.”
The kitchen had a little eat-in nook, a table set into a booth of seats.
“I’d rather stand,” Mat said, with a tone that suggested there was no fucking reason he should have to elaborate on why.
The guy cuffed him upside the head so hard he fell.
A moment later, there was the hand to help him back up again. Which he refused.
“I don’t care what you’d ‘rather’ do. If I tell you to sit, you fucking sit. If I tell you to put on a bra, you fucking do it. If I tell you to suck my dick, you suck it like a porn star. Just because I’m not a pig sadist like those assholes at Madame’s doesn’t mean I won’t hurt you when you deserve it. Unless sadism is the only language you understand?”
Mat thought about it for a moment. Thought about knocking the guy unconscious and taking the key. Running. Finding Dougie. Getting them both safe. Getting this fucking plug out of his ass.
But then the curtains parted and three heavies armed with Tasers filed into the living space, so broad shouldered they couldn’t stand side by side. He knew instantly how this would go: they’d hurt him, and then they’d make him sit anyway.
He was tired of hurting. He sat down.
And lurched right back up. The plug, oh God, he couldn’t, they weren’t really going to make him do this, were they?
“Points for trying, I suppose,” the man in charge said, and gestured with his chin at the heavies. One stayed back, Taser aimed at Mat’s chest. The other two stalked forward, grabbed him by the shoulders and arms, and pushed him back into the seat. He had just a moment to note that these heavies were significantly more skilled than the usual guards—they’d grabbed him effortlessly by pressure points—before the force of his weight and their strength drove the plug deeper inside him.
His hands flexed, his back arched, anything to reject the plug. His so-called friend walked out of his line of vision, apparently satisfied he’d sit still, and came back with . . . a plate of food. Which he calmly set on the table in front of Mat,