It looked like a certain fate worse than death indeed, as the stranger’s hands became more and more intimately involved with her breasts and butt. And there was nothing she could do about it, bound as she was. She couldn’t even protest loudly because of the gag, which turned he piercing screams into muffled sounds that probably didn’t carry much beyond the little clearing they were in.

The stranger sat on the log behind her. She felt something hard and bulbous probing her inner thighs.

Anne couldn’t believe it. For so long she’d been a gun-toting hottie conservative who stood ready to ventilate any varmint who should even think about assaulting her, and now here she was trussed up like a Christmas turkey and bent over a log, gagged and helpless as any liberal ever was during the glory years of the Bush administration.

And now she was about to experience what the democrats had experienced during the 2000 election. And now she understood why they’d squealed so loudly about it.

Just then, her would-be rapist froze. Anne looked back to see why and saw that he was in that “listening” mode with his head tilted to one side. He rose suddenly and walked over to “his” log and picked up his sword and brought it with him as he returned to the log Anne was on.

A moment later ANOTHER Renfair guy -- the woods seemed to be crawling with them -- walked into the clearing, this one carrying netting coiled over one shoulder.

The new guy and the stranger started doing that gorga-gorga-gorga stuff, only this time it didn’t have the harsh, sharp sound of the words that the stranger had exchanged with the two men with whom he’d fought. These gorga-garga-gorgas were a lot more relaxed and casual.

Anne did her best to make things considerably less relaxed and casual by screaming for help as loud as she could through the gag and twisting violently in her bonds to indicate that her damsel in distress status was not voluntary. Her nudity, bondage and gaggage might not be enough in this day and age --the guy might think this was some kind of freaky sex scene. But the man ignored her as if she wasn’t there, except for one look that was kind of … evaluative. After that he exchanged a couple more “Gorgas” with Anne’s captor, who was just as naked as she was and yet seemed very comfortable about it, and then the man left them alone, splashing downstream. He must be a fisherman, that’s what the netting would be about. Anne watched his large, muscular back dwindle in the distance with a sinking feeling.

Company gone, Anne’s captor returned to the log and began fondling her anew while she writhed uncomfortably, both because of the unsought feelings his surprisingly expert fingers roused in her, and because her body was sore and tender from the day’s hike.

But the stranger’s hand and fingers were relentless, tender and sure in their touch. Soon Anne’s hands were writhing in their bonds, and her butt was grinding against the log, and her teeth were clamping down hard on the wadding of her gag to keep her from crying out, but still soft whimpers and moans escaped her lips.

Then the stranger mounted her, and rode her. He rode her like she was a beast, with hard direct thrusts that had her body sliding across the fortunately smooth surface of the log (all of it’s bark lay fallen around it). Anne felt herself cumming despite herself, despite the soreness of her body and the fact that she was being not just raped but used, used like an animal. When she came, she came like an animal, spasming despite herself, uncontrollably thrusting against her bonds and crying into her gag, as her captor behind her thrust even harder and groaned and cried out as he came as well.

Almost as soon as he came, he rose and walked back to his log, taking a long drink from the water bag and sitting in a very relaxed, satisfied sort of way.

Hot tears slid down Anne’s cheeks to the log. To be so used, and to respond so to it! What kind of woman was she? She had always despised the liberal women who were so promiscuous and slept around with men because they were so little in control of themselves and their bodies that they had to be, what was the phrase? Oh, yeah, “Young, dumb and full of cum” to be happy.

But now, in an instance when her only feelings should have been anger and contempt at how she was being used, she had had an ORGASM. A BIG orgasm! What kind of woman was she? Was every precept her morality and sense of self worth founded on a lie?

Fortunately for Anne, these musings did not last long. She was so tired and so used (and to tell the truth, so relaxed from her most recent use) that her eyes closed and consciousness fled almost immediately. Anne did not wake up when her captor untied her legs and gently laid her on the ground beside the log. She did not notice him tying he legs back together, either. She was out cold.

When Anne woke up, she had a brief moment of bliss as she imagined herself to be at home in her bed. Then her body started reporting in. Every muscle in her body informed her that it was sore as hell with her for whatever it was she’d done the previous day.

Then her feet reported that they were stuck together. Then her arms reported that her hands were stuck together behind her back, and her upper arms were furious with her for keeping them in such an unnatural position and then lying on top of them while she slept.

Then her mouth chimed in that it was filled with a wad of drool-soaked leather and that something was keeping her from spitting it out.

And her neck reported that it was tender from the feel of an iron collar that had pressed into it as she slept.

The cumulative effect of all these messages on Anne’s muzzy brain was to induce a claustrophobic panic, and for a few moments she struggled wildly and futilely in her bonds, then lay panting and staring wild-eyed at her captor.

Her captor was tending a fire and had his back to Anne.

Anne felt an overwhelming sense of depression as she remembered where she was and how she got there. Damn. It hadn’t all been a bad dream.

But as she lay there, her mind slowly pieced together a rational explanation for what was happening to her.

It had to be a demorat plot. Some wild-ass group of traitorous liberal scum had grown tired of the way she was always calling them on their bullshit, and they devised this whole Renfair rape scenario as revenge, and probably as a way to show her how wrong she was to despise feminism and feminists as well.

That planet she’d been seeing all day yesterday in the sky where no planet should be, was probably some kind of advanced projection trick designed to psychologically rattle her.

Anne did not think the demorat faction was planning to kill her -- they had had plenty of opportunity to do so already, if they’d wanted to. Also, this whole bizarre scenario would be pointless if she was killed during it. More likely she’d wind up tied up in some motel room in some godforsaken place in middle America, with a 911 call to the cops to come get her, and all these horrible memories to deal with, and all evidence vanished.

The scary thing was, apparently the scenario wasn’t over. She was still here, still naked, still tied up and still conscious.

Anne didn’t like that. She didn’t like it one bit. But at least her theory presented some kind of rational framework for all the decidedly irrational trials she had recently undergone.

Anne’s captor took his time by the fire, but eventually he deigned to notice Anne, who was getting kind of tired of not being noticed, even if the guy who was not noticing her had raped her not too long ago. She was used to being noticed, and attended to. A lot.

Her captor came over and untied her feet so she could walk, then raised his foot as if to kick her, his way of telling her she should get up now.

Anne struggled to her feet, her body resentful of having to move even though it was also stiff from sleep. Her captor gave her water from the water bag again, which she drank both because she was afraid of going through the whole nose pinching and choking thing, and because her mouth was dry as hell and she was incredibly thirsty, too. Probably dehydration from all the hiking she’d done yesterday in her role as pack mule to her captor. Fuckable pack mule, but pack mule nonetheless.

After the water came another couple of handfuls of the oatmeal-ish glop -- maybe it was grits, that strange southern breakfast food that looked and tasted like lumpy Elmer’s glue. Anne ate that, rather than be forced to eat it, and also she was getting a little peckish as these few handfuls of grits or whatever it was, was all the food she’d had to eat since waking up yesterday morning.

Fortunately, Anne was accustomed to surviving on celery stalks and carrots and the occasional grilled shrimp, so she wasn’t having as much problem with hunger as others might have.

Then her captor dragged her by the leash to a spot in the woods a short distance from their campsite, where he peed on a tree while Anne watched. She had never actually watched a man pee before, so it was kind of interesting, but not something she was all that interested in. Then he pointed to Anne -- clearly it was her turn.

Anne was in a quandary. Her captor wanted her to pee, and God knows what he’d do to her if she didn’t. But she didn’t have any pee in her -- probably dehydration from all the walking and falling on her face during yesterday’s pack-mule experience. Plus she didn’t like peeing in front of strange men.

Still, Anne squatted obediently in the woods, knowing her captor would have some unpleasant and probably violent response if she didn’t. After a moment she looked up at her captor and shook her head “No” and tried to wear a pleading expression.

Unfortunately, Anne had almost never plead for anything in her entire life. She’d seen pleading expressing before, typically on the faces of her personal assistants when she was tearing them a new one for screwing something up. But Anne had plead so little that she was unsure how to arrange her facial muscles to look pleading.

The expression must have worked at some level because her captor shrugged and gave a perfunctory tug on her leash. Anne correctly surmised that this was his order for her to rise, and she did so, balancing carefully as her hands were still bound behind her back, then following her captor back to the camp.

At camp, her captor casually kicked dirt on the fire until it was out, then loaded the two shields back onto Anne’s back. The feel of the straps sinking into her aching, tender muscles broght a groan of pain unbidden to her lips.

Anne’s captor paid not attention to her discomfort, but once again hobbled her legs and grabbed the end of her chain, yanking it as the signal that they were to proceed.

Anne’s feelings where a mixture of depression and dread as they walked down the trail. Yesterday’s hiking had been the most prolonged painful experience of her life. Today promised to be even worse, as they were off to a MUCH earlier start. She wasn’t sure when she’d awakened yesterday, but it had been well past mid-morning, probably more like noon, then there had been the whole assault thing by the Renfair Viking and his buddy, then the big fight -- and only THEN had the hiking begun.

Today they were starting out shortly after dawn.

“Oh, GOD, it’s going to be a looong day,” she thought. And she had no idea how she’d survive it.

They traipsed through the woods for what seemed and eternity, but was probably only half an hour, and then Anne began to see signs of human activity along the trail. She spotted a couple of cribs in the woods near the trail, then for a short distance a split rail fence fringed the trail. Then without warning they turned a corner in the trail and suddenly the trees were thinned out and ahead of them was a cluster of large, unpainted buildings.

Civilization.

Anne stood, both agog and agag, amazed at the size and complexity of the set the demorats had constructed for whatever the hell they thought they were doing.

Then she figured it out. It was probably some abandoned amusement park site that they’d rented out for cheap, in fact probably got for free if the owner was a demorat. (Sadly, some people with money were insane enough to be demorats.)

Then she saw a lot of tiny dots in the distance that were moving. People -- a LOT of people -- were moving among the buildings. Incredible, the trouble these scum had gone to over her. She had always known she was an important voice for sanity and reason in American discourse such as it was with so many liberal voices allowed to speak, but she never would have guessed that she was worth this much trouble.

Then again, these people were clearly insane.

Anne’s captor led her straight toward town. They passed more and more people as they approached town. Anne noticed a few things about the people they passed.

All of the men were wearing Renfair garb, were improbably handsome and had impressive physiques, and they all looked relatively young -- in their 20s, maybe their 30s at most.

They didn’t look like real people -- they looked like Hollywood actors playing villagers for some kind of gay porn film. This was a strong indication to Ann that her theory was correct -- something smelled about this whole situation, there was no way you could sanely take it at face value -- someone was having her on.

The confirmation of Anne’s darkest suspicions contradictorily buoyed her spirits because it proved she was right, and Anne loved nothing more than being right.

There were a FEW people that might have been women on the trail, but their bodies were covered in so many layers of cloth that Anne couldn’t really tell what their gender is, and she only guessed they were women because their legs were always covered by wide, billowing skirts.

Anne was the ONLY naked person on the road, though a few of the men were shirtless. None of these people gave naked, bound and gagged Anne more than a cursory glance. She tried her newly acquired pleading expression on the men that passed close enough to see it, but it did absolutely no good. Maybe it was because of the way the gag she wore distorted her facial expressions.

As they approached the village or city or whatever the hell it was supposed to represent, Anne spotted a few pink shapes in front of a couple of the buildings. They looked like naked people seen at a distance. As they got closer the figures resolved to naked woman, women as naked as Anne herself was -- they wore tiny wisps of silk and such that didn’t conceal their bodies so much as emphasize their naughty bits. And they had spectacular figures, with large breasts, wide hips and thin waistlines.

The women gestured and waved and waggled their butts at the men passing by them. They didn’t call out to them because they were gagged just as Anne was. They moaned and made soft pleading noises through the gags, but the main method they used to communicate was with their bodies. They would kneel and run their hands down their breasts while looking up at the men with actual pleading expressions.

The women would also turn their backs to the men and shake their butts at the men, their legs spread wide. And not one of the women had any hair at all below their necks, so their vaginal lips were blatantly displayed. One woman who got a glance from a man while bending over reached behind herself and pulled her inner thighs apart, the better to display herself, looking up at the man with a beseeching look. And he did go into the building she was chained to.

Anne rolled her eyes at the sight. She had always known that liberal women were cheap, sleazy sluts -- that’s why they favored abortion, they needed them often with all the thoughtless and immoral sex they had.

“This is about as shameful and desperate a display of wanton sex as it is possible to imagine,” Anne thought. But she thought too soon. In a moment she saw part of a naked woman lying face down in the dirt road that the trail had become. She saw only parts of the woman because a clothed man was lying on top of her.

Well, a partially clothed man. He had his pants pulled down so that his butt was exposed, and from the way his butt was pumping up and down, he was obviously fucking the woman beneath him. Vigorously.

The girl in the mud was obviously just as much a captive as Anne was. Her arms were locked behind her body by iron cuffs, and she was gagged just as Ann was. Yet the way her butt moved made it very clear that she was enjoying being fucked there in the road, and her soft moans of pleasure and her lusty groans were muted by the gag but still audible.

The extremely jaded Renfair types in the road ignored the woman being fucked, their feet passing by within inches of her head as it was pushed into the dirt by the man’s thrusts, but those feet never stopped.

Anne herself was so struck by the sight that she had to look, in fact, she couldn’t look away. It wasn’t just because the sight of a woman being fucked in a town square was so strange to Anne. It was also because the way the woman was bound and gagged, just like Anne, brought a thought to Anne’s mind that she would much rather have not had.

“That could be me,” was the thought, and it was chilling. If her captive decided to throw her in the dirt in the next few seconds and take her in public right there in the road, it WOULD be her. Except of course there would me no squirming and moaning in passion from Anne (she had already erased her experiences on the log from her mind, a skill common the commentators of her ilk).

They came to a wagon set in a corner between two buildings, sandwiched between a shed housing a large, hairy buffalo-like beast, and a building that no one frequented.

Anne’s captor hopped easily onto the wagon, and then got Anne up there as well by pulling on her chain and forcing her to climb on as she was being half choked, half dragged by the leash.

Once he had her leashed to the wagon, he began yelling at the passing crowd, pointing to Anne and sometimes running his hands over her body.

For a very long time, nothing happened as a result of this. Members of the crowd glanced at her on occasion, but walked on by.

ALSO FROM PAT POWERS

He said something final and then handed Anne’s captor a few coins. A very few coins. When her captor leapt off the wagon and then shouldered the shields Anne had carried so painfully for the last two days and disappeared into the crowd, and the bald man took Anne’s leash and pulled her off the wagon, Anne had to admit that her suspicions were accurate.

She had just been sold, like a cow or a chicken or a … pack mule.

Anne’s new, bald captor walked down the street with her in tow, holding on to her leash but not sparing the least glance to see if she was following properly. He was dressed in a simple white tunic that came halfway down his legs and nothing else that Anne could see. And he seemed no more concerned with Anne’s feeling than her previous captor had been.

The bald man led Anne a short distance and then pulled her into a large but otherwise nondescript wooden building. The ground floor looked like an arena, with a wooden stage surrounded by seats. A few naked women were washing the arena’s fixtures, but otherwise it was empty.

They walked up a flight of wooden stairs and Anne discovered that it was like a kennel -- the walls were lined with cages. And in the cages were naked women, and also a few naked men. Most of them made pleading noises through the gags they wore, understandably so, as the cages were so small they could barely stand or lie down in them. Their hands were chained behind their backs, probably to prevent them from removing their gags. Such cages would be hell for someone as tall as Anne.

As Ann soon discovered when her captor found an empty cage and shoved her into it and locked the door, ignoring Anne’s protests. But the man was strong, and fast and Anne’s hands were tied behind her back, and she was in within seconds.

For the next hour or so, Anne lay in the cage, frightened and depressed. This was like being in some kind of bad B movie. She just hoped someone would come rescue her soon. In the meantime, she had the past-time of her new hobby to entertain her -- trying to find a comfortable position to sit or stand or lie in.

When she heard steps coming toward her cage, Anne was naturally curious and excited, so when a face appeared in front of her cage, she was staring right at it.

The face was curiously familiar, especially the eyes. She was a short, very curvaceous woman who was wearing a few bits of silk in lieu of actual clothing, and she wore a collar as Anne did, but she was not gagged and her hands were not bound, though her feet were hobbled by a short chain.

She looked into the cage and her eyes widened with recognition.

“Anne?” she said. “Anne Coaltar? Is that you?”

Anne nodded yes, eagerly, and yet with a certain dread. For the voice belonged to none other than her arch-enemy, all that was dark and foul and evil in the world -- the former First Person of the United States, Hilarity Clanton!

Stay tuned for our exciting Chapter 4. Anne is the prisoner of her most hated enemy, Hilarity Clanton! What does Hilarity have in store of Anne? Probably something diabolical!