What's a Prisoner Among Friends? Multiple m/m

[Jason Toddman]

Something I posted on BarefootEthan's story, but makes as much sense here.

I didn't make a connection at the time (when I had original read this back in 2011), but there is something truly reminiscent of your writing style and BarefootEthan's.
I'm not surprised you enjoyed his works as much as you did.

Both of you were expertly able to develop light hearted, multi-character oriented tales of young/older teens tormenting each other (sometime cruelly)

I've noticed this myself, but how much of it is subconscious or deliberate i could not say. However, there was some consciously deliberate choices made in writing this particular story, and when i first posted it in the old site I even stated outright that it was written in the spirit of Barefootethan. Barefootethan himself even seemed to agree before he disappeared altogether.

[Jason Toddman]

Part 28.

The two boys remained in (reasonably) companionable silence as they walked into the elevator and Will went the car down to the first floor. Will was quite cheerful however, and his mood was so infectious that even John found himself jollied out of the doldrums despite being handcuffed and hobbled. The fact that they were about to have another one of Tasha’s elegant homemade dinners helped get John out of his somber mood as well. By the time they entered the kitchen John was even tentatively returning Will’s smiles – even though he feared that something would put the frown back on his face before long.

However, true to his word, Will un-cuffed John’s right hand; leaving it free while John’s left hand was cuffed to the arm of his chair. His hobbles were made secure in the usual fashion as well. However, by this time Paul had loaded all three of their plates with Tasha’s Chicken Tetrazzini and had served them each their drinks as well. His appetite aroused, John quickly forgot all about everything he’d just been through and ate with gusto – which amused the other two boys as much as if they were watching a beloved but famished dog eating out of its bowl.

“The final Harry Potter movie is coming out in July,” Will told Paul casually. “Want to see it with me when it comes out?”

Paul normally didn’t give a hoot about Harry Potter movies and Will knew it, but Paul quickly realized that Will was up to something and was quick-minded enough to follow his friend’s lead. “Sure, Will. I’d love to see it.” Paul lied amiably.

“What about me?” John began to ask in a normal tone of voice. Instead, it came out as “What ab-OOWWW!” as the shock collar once again zapped him. Undaunted, he tried to ask again in a whisper, but all that came out was, “Wh-oowww!!”

“Sorry, John… but no one gave you permission to talk!” Will pointed out with deceptive kindness. “What I told you about staying silent still applies. Now be quiet and eat your dinner.”

John pouted but, even though his appetite was now greatly diminished, kept eating lest he be punished for disobeying a direct order.

Will and Paul amiably continued their idle conversation between themselves; deliberately leaving John entirely out of it. This treatment made John feel even worse than when they forced him to kiss their knees and lick their feet. It was one thing to be treated like a slave or, worse, like a pet… but to be snubbed like this rankled worse than anything else the boys had done to him during his captivity so far. He hoped this wouldn’t become a regular part of the way they treated him from now on! He’d rather be horse-whipped than to endure snubbing like *this* for an entire summer!

But Will didn’t ignore him during the entire meal. Just as John was finishing the food that was on his plate, Will turned to him and asked, “Want some more?” in as friendly a tone as John had ever heard him use.

Despite himself, John nodded his head in the affirmative; though he still didn’t say anything. At a quick, subtle gesture from Will, Paul served John another helping of Chicken Tetrazzini and refilled his glass with more soda. John nodded his thanks but – still mindful of the shock collar - again said nothing.

Will smiled, pulled up the shock collar remote, and showed John that he was dialing the sensitivity level down to a relatively lenient ‘3’. “How do you like the casserole?” Will then asked him kindly.

“Ummm… it’s really nice,” John answered truthfully but tentatively – suspecting another trick. “Tasha’s a great cook.”

“It’s okay to talk aloud if I ask you a direct question,” Will reassured him. “Afterward you may answer questions aloud, but otherwise don’t speak unless spoken to. Whenever I tell you to stay quiet again, then do so at once. Understand?”

John took the safe expedient and warily nodded his head in assent.

But for the rest of the dinner Paul and Will included him in their conversation as John would have normally expected that they would, and he gradually felt more relaxed. As long as he didn’t try to venture any comments unasked, he was all right. John was allowed to finish his meal in relative peace, with no teasing or taunting by the other two, and was even served a generous helping of Apple/Rhubarb Crisp (with whipped cream on it) for dessert. By the end of that, John was feeling almost blissful and content.

However, time was passing and Will was apparently in a rush to get the rest of the estate’s huge lawn mowed. As soon as John had finished his dessert, he was released from the chair, made to clear the table and wash the dishes, re-gagged (mercifully with another clean pair of socks and a shirt rather than either the panel or muzzle gags), and escorted back out to the yard where his lawn mower awaited him. Will quickly refilled John’s mower’s gas-tank while Paul did the same with his riding mower.

“I have some business to take care of before it gets dark,” Will told John and Paul as he pulled on the cord of John’s mower to get it started. “I’ll see you guys when you’ve finished with the lawn.

“What business? Where are you going?” John tried to ask, but his gag rendered the query into a totally meaningless mess: “Whaaameefness? Whaarrrrruuuoooiinnn?” This in turn was completely drowned out by John’s own mower, which revved to life just as he started asking his question. Therefore, he was simply ignored and urged to resume his mowing with a threatening thumb poised over the shock collar remote’s Send Shock button. With that, John’s curiosity completely evaporated and he got busy.

Paul showed no curiosity at all about Will’s doings, but simply smiled, nodded his head, waved, and called out a cheerful “See you later!” as he started his own mower up. Will gave him a sly grin and a thumbs up as Paul proceeded to drive the riding mower away.
If John noticed and wondered about Paul’s lack of curiosity, he quickly forgot it as his own curiosity was drenched with a threat of shocking if he didn’t get on the ball. If he thought of it at all, he assumed Paul already knew what Will was planning (even if John himself didn’t).

If so, John would have been right.

The moment Paul and John were out of sight of the front door, Will took his cell phone off of his belt and hit the speed dial.

“Okay, Corey… John’s out of the way,” Will said quietly into the phone the moment the other boy picked up. “Are you on your way back here yet?”

“Yeah, I’m only a few minutes away from your front gate now,” Corey’s voice replied. “As long as I get to those two cleaning jobs I’m supposed to do tomorrow afternoon, mom and dad don’t mind my being out until Monday.”

“Cool!” Will replied happily. “I’ll buzz open the small gate now. Make sure you close it behind you when you come in. I’ll meet you at the old greenhouse; John won’t be able to see you there from where he is now.”

“Will do, Will! See you in five.” Corey replied before he clicked off.

Several minutes later, Corey rode in on his mountain bike wearing a tight-fitting and rather colorful set of Aero shorts and an equally tight striped short-sleeved racing jersey. He also wore a set of Race Compression socks inside a set of SIDI Ergo 2 Carbon Lite cycling shoes, a Giro Aeon racing helmet, and a sporty set of Giro Havik 2 compact sunglasses. He looked as if he was ready to compete at the Tour de France.

“Hey, Lance Armstrong! How’s it hanging?” Will greeted Corey good-naturedly as the latter climbed off his bicycle and the two exchanged high-fives.

“Pretty good,” Corey replied with a grin as he removed his helmet and wheeled his bike to the interior of the greenhouse to park it. “I hope though that you saved some of that Turkey Tetrazzini for me! I’m starved!”

“Sure! There’s plenty left!” Will assured him as the two stepped out of the greenhouse and Will locked the behind them. “Plenty of apple crisp too. Least I could do after taking you way from your own hardworking mom’s great cooking.”

Corey made a pretend a pretend gagging noise and grinned; both boys knew that Corey’s mom didn’t even remotely compare to Tasha when it came to the culinary arts. In fact, when Will offered to save some of Tasha’s casserole for Corey of he could make it back here today rather than later, wild horses couldn’t have made Corey stay at home to eat his own mother’s cooking. “Liver and onions! Oh yeah… I was *really* reluctant to walk away from that!” Corey replied in a tone of voice that made it perfectly clear that he was actually delighted to escape eating supper at home.

Besides which, there was the lure of the night’s entertainment prospects too!

Corey eagerly stuffed himself with Turkey Tetrazzini and Apple Crisp while Will, who was still full, merely watched him eat. Despite this, as Tasha had said, there was still plenty of Turkey Tetrazzini left; enough to give each of the four boys on the estate another good meal later.

“Man, that hit the spot,” Corey said with a satisfied belch as Will put the leftovers and dirty dishes away. Then, rather than simply sit back and relax like any boy would be tempted to do, Corey promptly stood up and pushed his chair back. “Okay, give me a few minutes to wash up and change clothes, and I’ll be ready.”

“Everything’s laid out for you in John’s room,” Will told him. “You go ahead and change while I wash the dishes and stuff down here.”

Corey nodded agreeably and headed upstairs. Ten minutes later he was back. He now wore a sleeveless red T-shirt, a pair of very short gym shorts, a set of ankle socks, and a brand new pair of Reeboks. “Okay, I’m ready to get to work!” he told Will. “Where’s all the stuff we’re working with?”

“Back at the greenhouse!” Will replied as he escorted Corey out the kitchen door. “Hopefully we can get it out where I want and set up before it gets dark!”

“If you’re any good at all in pitching tents, we’ll have plenty of time,” Corey assured him. “I could probably do it all myself before dark, but with a little decent help I can get the thing lugged out there and set up in forty minutes!”

Will knew Corey was just ribbing him; they were both eagle scouts in the same Boy Scout troop, and had pitched similar tents many times by themselves before this. So he merely grinned in response as he re-opened the greenhouse door and escorted Corey to where the tent and other gear they needed was stowed.

It took one trip just for the both of them together to lug the two-man tent out to the isolated spot in the woods within the estate where Will wished to pitch the tent. As Corey boasted however, it was little more than thirty minutes before the two boys had the tent pitched in the middle of a grassy spot on the far side of the duck pond.

“You sure your folks won’t notice this tent out here?” Corey asked doubtfully as Will pounded in an extra set of four tent pegs in front of the tent. “We’re only about five hundred feet away from your house.”

“More like six hundred,” replied Will casually as he tested the tent pegs to make sure they were fastened securely, and idly imagining first John and then Corey helplessly staked out between them. “And yeah, I’m sure. The woods between here and the house are so thick I doubt anything less than a campfire would show very well once it got dark. As long as you and Paul stick to use using your pocket flashlights when necessary and don’t make too much noise, no one will ever know you’re out here!”

“It’s John who’ll likely be making all the noise,” Corey replied with a grin as he looked at the stakes; but he was imagining Will staked out there instead of John or himself. The idea made him grin even wider, but he kept this thought completely to himself. He knew there was no real chance such a thing would ever happen anyway; certainly not on Will’s own home turf.

“Tonight won’t matter anyhow, since no one will be here until morning,” Will replied. “So entertain John as much as you like even after I leave for bed. But come sun-up, you three are going to have to be as quiet as mice out here. A whole swarm of gardeners, landscapers, and cleaning staff will be on the estate bright and early to get the place cleaned up before my folks and relatives invade us in the afternoon. They couldn’t get the professional lawn mowing service to get here in time, so we got stuck with that chore. And you got the pool cleaning chore doe today. But there’s going to be a whole bunch of people here tomorrow, and it’s vital that John isn’t able to attract attention from *any* of them! Understand?”

“No worries! I won’t let anyone else get in the way of your fun… especially since now *I* get to share in that fun too!” Corey assured Will with a smirk. “I’ll make sure that John stays very, VERY quiet while your folks are here. They won’t know that John, Paul, and I are anywhere on the estate!”

“Good! Now let’s get all the other gear we need out here while Paul and John are still mowing the lawn.” Will suggested.

The two boys made several more trips between the house and the tent, carrying two folding cots, two sets of lightweight sleeping bags, a blanket and pillow for John, and a large Thermos cooler containing several sandwiches, various snacks, and ice cold drinks nestled within numerous ice cubes. They also brought various other sundry items necessary for roughing it in the outdoors for a weekend and keeping an unwilling prisoner both secure and entertained.

By the time it got dark outside, John’s new temporary home was ready for his reception. At the same moment the silencing of two lawn mowers announced that John was now ready to see his new accommodations – however unaware he was of that fact as yet.

Exchanging sly grins, Will and Corey walked over to the garage where Paul was putting away the mowers. They could see the garage from a long distance away and, as they quietly approached, watched Paul unlock John from his mower, re-cuff John’s hands behind his back, remove his gag to give him a drink of water from a canteen, and replacing his gag. Paul was closing the garage door just as Corey and Will finally came into John’s sight. The moment they did, John was immediately suspicious. Both were grinning like the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland and looking straight at John for a start. The fact that John had no idea that Corey had returned until now was also a clue that something he wouldn’t like was about to happen to him.

“Good work, John,” Will said to him with a casual smile and a relaxed manner as he clipped John’s leash onto his collar. “Come on, it’s time for you to get a nice rest for the weekend.”

John’s concern only deepened. At these words; especially as Corey was now snickering.

“What’s going on?” John wanted to know. “Whaasssoooeeinnnoonnn?” he actually asked through the effective cleave gag blocking his mouth.

But Will didn’t answer; he simply gently tugged on John’s leash while Paul and Corey flanked him and gripped him by one arm. John’s wrists were once again cuffed behind his back while his ankles were once again hobbled; making resistance worse than futile. Even gagged as he was, there was no mistaking the weary sigh of resignation John then heaved as his three escorts marched him away.

John grew more uneasy when it became obvious that they were not going back into the house, and this feeling grew to something akin to alarm as they walked into the increasing gloom of the nearby woods beyond the backyard. He began to feebly struggle and protest through his gag. “What’s going on? Where are you taking me? What are you going to do to me?” he kept trying to ask the other three over and over. But all that came out was a series of muffled sounds that the others made no attempt to interpret, let alone answer… unless Corey’s quiet chuckling counted.

John started to drag his feet; he wanted no part of whatever the others were up to! Even when Will started to impatiently tug harder at his collar, John dug in his heels and refused to move an inch farther.

“Don’t make me use the remote, John,” Will said with an ominous tone of voice.

“Aw, we don’t need a shock collar for this lightweight,” Paul asserted. “Corey; you grab his legs and haul him up, and I’m lug him along by his arms and shoulders!”

John squealed and tried struggling even harder, but it was no use. It was a simple manner for Corey to grab John’s hobbles in one hand and his upper legs inside his other arm and heave, and from then on Paul and Corey lugged a writhing John like they would a sack of potatoes until they reached the site where the tent had been pitched.

At sight of the tent… and especially at the tent pegs staked into the ground in front of it, John’s eyes grew wide and frantic. But any thought of resisting when his hands were freed from being cuffed behind him were dashed to pieces when an irritated Will pulled out the shock collar remote and pressed the Send a Sock button with no warning.

*ZAAAAAP!!!*

For about two seconds John writhed and thrashed as he endured a Level 6 shock. Then Will took his thumb off the button and allowed John (who now went entirely limp but was clearly still conscious and alert) a few seconds to recover.

“Quit fighting us or I’ll do it again, and for a lot longer,” Will warned him ominously. “Now then, since I’m sure you need to take a whiz by now; we’ll un-cuff your hands and give you a minute to do so. Don’t try running though, or else.”

John didn’t need to be told what ‘else’ was. He simply faced away from the others, unzipped the fly of his shorts, and took aim at some bushes.

“You need to do number two?” Will asked somewhat more kindly.

John felt some need to do so but, at first, decided he’d rather die – or crap right into his pants – rather than do *that* in plain sight of these three.

“You won’t get another chance tonight, you know,” Will warned him when he declined.

John gulped, turned the thought over in his head… and changed his mind.

At least the other three looked away, gave him a roll of toilet paper, and left him free rein to do everything himself as he stepped behind some bushes and answered Nature’s Call.

Once he’d finished, John was bidden to walk over to where the tent pegs were staked into the ground, lay down unassisted, and spread his arms and (still hobbled) legs out as far as he could between them. His arms were not bound, so he was able to place his wrists adjacent to two of the pegs quite easily. His ankles however could not even come close.

“Good enough,” replied Will as he walked up to where John lay, stood over John’s legs, and then sat down on his shins to keep John's legs pinned down. Corey then knelt down by one of John’s arms and Paul knelt by the other as they quickly and efficiently tied his wrists to the tent pegs. Once his arms were secure, Will got off of John’s legs and unlocked the hobbles holding them together. Paul and Corey then immediately got to work; each pulling an ankle up to a tent peg and securely tying it in place.

Within moments, John was staked out securely and was unable to move a muscle below his neck, except to uselessly wiggle his fingers round a little. The other three boys stood around John and smiled down at their helpless captive with glee as John looked back up at them silently. He no longer attempted to plead uselessly for mercy through his gag, but simply looked back up at them with wide, soulful eyes.

[Jason Toddman]

Part 29.

Somewhat to his relief, the first thing that the others did was to remove his gag for a few moments to allow him a drink of water. Unfortunately however, the gag went right back on again the moment he was finished; despite all his pleas for mercy and promises to be quiet and cooperative.

“Sorry, John,” Will told him with a grin that reeked of insincerity; “but once I leave you alone with Paul and Corey they’re likely to do things that’d make it impossible for you to keep your promise not to make any noise.”

John’s eyes understandably widened and bulged out with alarm at this. Sinister chuckles and evil grins from the two boys named did nothing to reassure him either.

“Sorry that you’re going to have to rough it for the weekend,” Will continued. “But my folks are coming back tomorrow, along with some relatives I rarely see. So I can’t have any company lying around all tied up and gagged; especially as my folks have no idea you’re here in the first place.”

John made a muffled noise that was unmistakably a question even through the gag.

“Lemme guess… you’re wondering about *your* dad talking to *my* dad for permission to stay over for the summer?” Will ventured to ask.

John nodded his head in affirmation.

“That was *me* your dad talked to,” Paul spoke up with a barking laugh. “I’m pretty good at sounding older than I am. Will’s dad knows nothing about you at all. He knows *I* visit Will from time to time, but he has no idea I’m spending the whole summer here either. And my own folks think I’m at summer camp!”

“Paul’s been nice enough to leave your quick, reassuring text messages to your folks on your cell phone every night too,” Will added. “That way your folks won’t worry about not hearing from you directly; and of course that keeps them out of our hair, too. So far they haven’t called back on their own either; they’ve simply texted back.”

John groaned; that probably *would* be enough to keep his folks happy for the entire summer at that!

“Anyway, there’s going to be a whole bunch of cleaners sprucing the place up right at the crack of dawn,” Will continued. “That’s so they’ll have time to clean up the place and get lost before my folks show up. Since having you stay in your room tonight… to say nothing of over the weekend once my folks are home… would pose some awkward risks of your discovery in the morning, we all decided the best thing for you was to let you have a small taste of summer camp yourself. I’m sorry the accommodations aren’t quite up to what you may have gotten used to, but Corey and Paul will keep you company. And I’m sure they’ll be happy to make sure that you don’t get bored.”

This brought about more evil leers and sinister chuckles from Corey and Paul. John gulped a trifle noisily and more than a trifle nervously; he hoped Will was simply trying to scare him. However, he understandably had his doubts.

“I’d like to stay and help keep you entertained, but since the cleaners are coming bright and early I have to go to bed now if I want a decent night’s sleep,” Will concluded as he stood up. “So you have a nice night. I’ll try to look in on you sometime tomorrow but more likely it’ll be tomorrow night. Bye.”

And with that Will walked away to the waves and spoken goodbyes of Corey and Paul (and the muffled frantic noises made by John which could have meant anything). Once Will was out of sight, John found himself the exclusive focus of their attention.

John looked up them nervously and broke out in a sweat. What fiendish torture were these two undoubtedly planning to do to him?

Corey and Paul exchanged amused glances, nodded, and hunkered down beside John’s helplessly bound feet. “Oh no!” John cried, and even through the gag the meaning was his muffled outcries was quite clear. His wide eyes grew even wider. His sweat now flowed in streams, even though it was a reasonably cool (though not chilly) night. He began to tug and pull at his bonds with frantic energy; but he may as well have been trying to move the Earth out of its orbit for all the success he had.

Paul began tickling the bottom of John’s right foot, while Corey began tickling the left.

“Ohh noo! Nooo!” John squealed frantically; thrashing, straining and struggling mightily but futilely like a fly caught in a spider’s web as he sought to escape or at least pull his feet away from those fingers. But it was no use. He could hardly move his feet at all, and what movement he *was* capable of only added to the tickle torture. He tried then to keep from laughing into his gag, but this struggle was just as futile. Within seconds, he was laughing hysterically amid pleas for his tormentors to stop.

“Noooo! Hahahahahahaha! Don’t! Hahahahahahahahaha! Pleeasse!!! Hahahahahaha! Mercy! Hahahahahahaha! MERCY!!! Hahahahahahahaha! No more!! Hahahahahahaha!”
He tried to plead. But he gag rendered his attempts to beg all but incomprehensible, and the tickle assault soon made it impossible to even try forming words that the gag muffled anyway. Soon all that could be heard was unceasing, muffled laughter.

But the gag was a blessing in one sense; it was so effective that despite his uncontrolled laughing, squealing, and begging, the shock collar was not aroused to shock him even once. However, it *did* make his jaws ache after a while.

After a while, John’s tormentors finally gave him some respite and allowed him to catch his breath. But after a while they resumed tickling him, and this time Paul knelt beside him and tickled him under his arms and along his ribs while Corey tickled both his feet by himself. This was even worse than the first tickle assault in consequence, and John nearly pulled several muscles in his arms, shoulders, and legs in his frantic struggles to evade those teasing, tickling fingertips. He was utterly exhausted by the time they finally decided to let him have another rest.

“My God,” John thought to himself. “If they do that to me again, I’m sure to bust a gut, pull my arms or legs off, or wet myself!”

And indeed, Corey and Paul did not look as if they planned to extend John any mercy and call it quits for the night. In fact, they were discussing what to do to John next.

“I’m for putting ice cubes into his shorts,” Corey asserted; an idea which left John cold when he heard it.

“I was planning on putting some itching powder in there,” replied Paul; producing a small canister of the insidious stuff and waving it about where a wide-eyed John could see it.

“Will left me in charge, and I say we use ice cubes next!” Corey insisted.

“He left *you* in charge?” Paul snorted in amazed contempt. “Were did you get *that* dopey idea? *I’M* the one who says what goes here, not you!”

“Oh yeah? Who was tying up who *last* summer?” Corey asked rhetorically. “Maybe I’d better do it again and teach you your place!”

“You and what army?” Paul snapped. “Bring it on, you pool scrubbing nerd!”

And without another word, the two boys grappled and wrestled each other while John served as a literal captive audience. They did not fight dirty however, but simply wrestled as if they were in their school gym class; each seeking to pin the other any way they could. There was no biting, clawing, hitting, or yelling; each wrestled with grim and silent determination just as if their gym teacher were watching them closely. Although their fight caused them to perambulate all around their makeshift campsite (and even crash into their tent once or twice), both were careful not to kick, step on, or otherwise hurt the helpless John in any way. The fight weaved all round him but it did not touch him once. Even so, John was certain one or the other would eventually trip over him or fall upon him at any moment.

The wrestling match lasted for more than thirty minutes, and the outcome was in doubt until close to the end as the two boys were pretty evenly matched in size, strength, determination, and stamina. But Paul’s stamina proved to be just enough greater than Corey’s that eventually he managed to get him down on his back in a bully pin. Corey continued to struggle even after a count of ten however, and so Paul decided to simply tie him up hand and foot while simultaneously holding him down. Although Corey was now too tired to resist effectively, this process took up another half hour or so.

John watched with silent interest (not wanted to attract the victor’s attention more than he could help) and some amusement as Corey found himself rolled onto his belly and his hands securely tied behind his back with some spare rope. When he continued to struggle, Corey’s ankles were tied as well, and then he was put into a tight hogtie. Paul then rolled Corey upon his back again, straddled his chest, and began slapping his face.

“Cry uncle!” he told Corey. “Come on, cry uncle!”

The names Corey called Paul did not sound even remotely like ‘uncle’.

“Oh, a tough guy huh?” Paul replied with rough good humor. “Well, let’s see how tough you are after I squeeze the fight out of you!”

Paul got off of Corey, wrapped his long muscular legs around Corey’s middle in a scissors grip, and then began to constrict Corey’s middle with all his might.

“Cry Uncle!” Paul insisted loudly but more amused than genuinely angry. “Come on! Say it! Or I’ll squish your guts out until you look like you got run over by a motorcycle!”

Corey grunted and gritted his teeth as he writhed and thrashed in futility, but still he refused to give in. Paul’s legs squeezed his belly even harder, and a wide-eyed, staring John could see that Paul’s bare legs were really constricting Corey’s middle very hard. Corey gave a loud yell once, but then gritted his teeth and bore the discomfort with a few hard out-takes of breath now and then.

Watching all of this, John doubted he could have endured half of what Corey had already endured before surrendering. But Corey was just as stubborn as he was tough, and he wouldn’t give in to someone he seemed to consider his rival.

Paul shifted tactics – and his body – and trapped Corey head between his two scissoring thighs. He squeezed and he squeezed until Corey’s face was as red as a beet; it looked like his skull would cave in at any moment, and still Corey would not give in.

“Okay, tough guy!” Paul said as he finally relaxed the grip from his legs and stood up. “You want to be stubborn? Fine! Then you can stay tied up like that all night long!”

Paul sat down on a nearby log and pulled off his shoes and socks. Then he pulled off his now thoroughly sweaty shirt as well.

“Oh no you don’t!” Corey exclaimed in sudden agitation. “Don’t you DARE!”

Paul did not speak, but simply laughed in a sinister fashion as he strode toward where Corey lay and straddled him again. Corey struggled and protested again as Paul began to force the rolled-up socks into Corey’s mouth. Naturally Corey closed his mouth tightly, but Paul got around this with the time-honored method of pinching Corey’s nose shut while bracing Corey’s head between his thighs so that his victim could not turn his head away. Before long, Corey was forced to gasp for air… but he was clever. Rather than gasp with wide open mouth, he simply clenched his teeth and let air in and out through the sides – giving Paul’s fingers little purchase to force the (extremely) unwanted socks in. But Paul persevered, and eventually (with a few punishing slaps to his victim’s nether regions) managed to pry Corey’s jaws open and insert the thick, heavy (and stinking) wadding in before cleave-gagging Corey with his sweat-soaked shirt.

“Not so tough now, are you sport?” Paul bragged as he straddled his victim’s stomach and began bouncing on it rather vigorously. Corey growled, glared back at Paul with an expression of anger and reproach, and once again tried to free himself. But he was as much at Paul’s mercy as John had been, and there was no escape.

“Say, you wanted to put ice cubes down John’s shorts, didn’t you?” Paul suddenly asked Corey gleefully. “Let’s see how much *you* like that!” Paul then jumped up, opened the cooler, pulled out a heaping handful of only slightly-melted ice cubes, and shoved them down inside Corey’s own shorts.

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” Corey squealed.

“Now let’s try *my* idea,” said Paul, who then rolled Corey over onto his front, pulled down his shorts, and applied itching powder as if it were baby powder. Then then pulled Corey’s shorts back up with a loud snap, rolled him onto his back again, and sat on him.

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” Corey said again.

“Like both the same, huh?” Paul asked with an evil, remorseless grin.

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” Corey replied as he writhed and thrashed; making the itching in his derriere even worse. Paul did not seem to be even remotely sympathetic however, but simply laughed as Corey continued writhing underneath him.

John watched the proceedings silently; doing everything in his power not to call attention to himself. As long as Paul was occupied with tormenting Corey, John could get a little rest and respite from his own sufferings at the hands of either. It wouldn’t bother him if Paul’s attention remained fixed on Corey all the rest of the night.

And so it was.

For an hour or so Paul straddled Corey as he slapped, pinched and pummeled him – though he didn’t hurt Corey anywhere near as much as it sounded from all the noise the both of them made. Eventually however, Paul decided to take the matter indoors; so he got off Corey and dragged his still struggling and feebly protesting victim off to the interior of the tent. Once inside, Paul laid Corey down on one of the cots that had been set up inside and then lashed him to it with even more rope the two of them had brought. By the time he finished, Corey was as secure in his cot as a baby in its papoose.

Paul then turned about and looked outside the tent at John,. He stepped out of the tent, and John began to get nervous. But Paul simply laid a blanket over John’s body to keep him warm for the night and then bid him good night as he walked back toward the tent.

“Good night,” John called back, although his own gag made it all but inaudible.

Paul turned to face John again from the inside of the tent, grinned mischievously and then shut the tent flaps closed – completely hiding the interior of the tent from John’s viewpoint.

John sighed with a release of tension; relieved that his own night’s torments were apparently at an end. However, from the sounds John heard for a long while afterward, Corey’s torments for the night were just beginning.

John finally drifted off to sleep to the sounds of Corey squealing, laughing, and crying through his gag.

[Jason Toddman]

Part 30.

John slept somewhat fitfully through the night, though rather better than he would have expected had this happened to him a week or more ago. Sleeping outdoors under the stars was rather different than sleeping inside a luxurious, air-conditioned bedroom. It was a warm and humid night without a breeze, and the night seemed to be alive with creepy crawling things that paid him a visit at various times. At least the area seemed to be free of the biting mosquitoes that had plagued him earlier in the day when he was mowing the huge lawn… otherwise sleep would have been impossible rather than merely difficult.

But John was tired from his exertions and he had gotten used to being tied up over the last three nights, so sleeping while staked out on the ground was less difficult than he would have supposed. It helped that a blanket had been spread out on the ground for him to lie upon before he’d been staked out, and another, thinner blanket laid on top of him when Paul and Corey called it a night. Even so, during his frequent wakeful periods John wished he could be sleeping inside the tent with the other two boys – as long as he wasn’t being actively tormented by them overnight anyway.

However, occasional muffled squeals from a still tightly bound and gagged Corey indicated that perhaps John was better off right where he was. It definitely sounded like Paul wasn’t letting his tent-mate get much sleep after all! “Better him than me,” John thought to himself unsympathetically as he fell asleep once again.

John awoke somewhat later to the sensation of his ribs, thighs, and feet all suddenly being tickled at the very same time. “*Ghaaaaack!*” he snorted as he came wide awake all at once and strove to move away from whatever was tickling him; only to find that he could not move away from the spot on which he lay! Writhing and squealing as his eyes remained tightly shut; John heard laughter from all three of his tormentors.

“This is your challenge of the day, John,” Will’s voice said to him right beside him; evidently he was the one tickling his ribs. “If you can keep from wetting yourself until the first rays of the sun become visible, you get to go free!”

Still writhing and squealing, John managed to open his eyes and look blearily around to see how much of a challenge time-wise this was going to be; for all he knew, sun-up was still hours away! But somewhat to his surprise the clear, cloudless sky was already considerably lightened by the approaching dawn… but not lightened enough! By his estimation he had perhaps thirty minutes before the sun’s first rays could be seen clearing the horizon – even assuming there weren’t so many trees in the way to make it difficult to tell precisely when that moment finally arrived.

Before even five minutes had passed (let alone thirty), it was quite obvious to John that he wasn’t going to make it! It was probably quite obvious to Will, Paul, and Corey (who’d been untied and was now tickling John’s thighs) as well, who didn’t let up on him for a single moment. Once he was certain he was going to lose it, John attempted to appeal for mercy with his eyes and with increasingly frantic begging noises “Pleeeafff! Noo mohh! PLEEAAFFF!!” However, the boys were either determined to prevent any accusations of cheating later (“I’d have made it if you hadn’t stopped!”) or simply wanted to see John disgrace himself into his shorts.

There is no way to tell if they succeeded with the first goal, but they definitely succeeded in the second goal!

John’s muffled laughter was already turning into muffled crying by the time he felt his outraged bladder finally let go, and then his muffled sobs turned into groans of mingled discomfort and sheer embarrassment. This did not seem to bother his captors very much; they simply stood up, backed away a couple of steps, and watched as a pool of moisture began dribbling out from various places along the upper and lower hems of John’s shorts. Rather than feeling sorry for John, they simply laughed mockingly and exchanged ribald comments among themselves.

“Poor little baby wet himself!” Paul said with a mocking smile John would have paid good money to wipe off his face with a well-aimed fist.

“Is the little bitty baby going to *cry*?” Corey asked with a tone of voice that definitely grated on John’s nerves.

“Little baby needs a diaper,” Will added dryly. “Good thing Little Baby has three baby sitters who’ll take care of all of his needs! Okay, Little Baby… we’re going to let you up and get you cleaned off. Little Baby had better behave or Little Baby is going to get one HELL of a spanking!”

John nodded his agreement in mute misery; *anything* was better than being forced to remain laying in his wet shorts and a pool of his own piss like *this*!

Paul and Corey freed John’s ankles first and then quickly pulled off John’s soiled shorts and undershorts and tossed them away as if they were toxic waste. This left John naked, much to his dismay. To make things worse, they proceeded to wash him from head to toe – and *everywhere* in between – with wet, soapy wash cloths Will had brought for the purpose as if he were an infant in a basin. They even washed his forward nether regions, though thankfully they did so impersonally and did not linger in the task, stare at him, nor mock him… much. By the time they finished washing John’s naked and bound body, his face was beet red from sheer embarrassment.

Then they brought him something dry to wear in their place.

Will hadn’t been kidding about that diaper, John saw with even more dismay than ever – and his face grew even redder than ever.

“We’re going to free your arms and tie them behind your back, and then we’ll put on the diaper,” Will told John as he hunkered down beside him. “We also brought some baby powder and some itching powder. Which you get depends upon how well you behave.”

John didn’t need to be told twice; he remained very still, very quiet, and very cooperative as Corey and Paul released his wrists from the remaining two stakes, rolled him over onto his belly, and tied his wrists behind his back. John was left lying on his stomach as his captors then proceeded to finish washing him in place they could not reach before and then put the adult-sized diaper upon him as if he were an actual infant… or an incontinent invalid. Not wishing any itching powder added to the baby powder they were now liberally applying all over his naked butt, John remained very quiet and made not even a murmur of complaint.

“Good baby,” Will said teasingly. “No spanking for baby now! Of course, the day is still young!” And indeed, only now were the first rays of the sun (that might have liberated John from his slavery had his bladder been stronger) now shining past the trunks of the intervening trees.

“I brought you guys some breakfast,” Will told the others. “Sorry I can’t stay, but the cleaning crew should be coming any time now. I had to open the gate when I left the house to make sure no one would have any trouble getting in. So from here on in you’ll all have to stay very quiet… not just John. You’d better feed him *his* breakfast first so you can gag him again before anyone working outside arrives and hears him.”

“And John, you should know something,” Will turned to look straight at his captive as he took his shock collar remote out of his pocket and began making adjustments in plain sight of John.. “I’ve just turned the sensitivity of the remote up to ‘6’ and the shock level up to ‘8’. So if you even whisper, let alone call out loud for help, it’s going to hurt… a LOT! You won’t be able to get your voice up to a shout before the shock collar shuts you up. So spare yourself some needless agony and keep nice and quiet. Paul and Corey won’t treat you bad while I’m away because they can’t make much noise either for fear of attracting attention. But there are still plenty of ways of punishing you without making much noise if need be, so just behave yourself and everything will be okay. Understand?”

John mutely nodded his understanding. He knew when he was defeated.

The sound of a car driving in through the gate and approaching the house a few hundred feet away came to them through the intervening distance. The trees and bushes between them and the house blocked all view of the new arrivals, which also meant that the four of them were equally out of sight to the cleaning crew as well.

“Enjoy your breakfast, guys,” Will said to all three of them, and then he hurried off out of sight through the bushes as a couple of car doors could be heard slamming shut.

Corey bent down over a knapsack John had not noticed before, which Will had evidently brought with him while John had still slept, and opened it. The first thing he pulled out was a large plastic baby bottle full of milk. Then came a large jar of Gerber’s baby food with a spoon.

“Yes, let’s definitely feed baby first,” Corey declared with a happy grin as he handed the jar to Paul.

Paul smiled with agreement as he squatted down behind John (who was still sitting on the grass well away from where he’d been staked out before) and removed his gag. John sighed quietly with relief and worked his jaw to ease the soreness put.

John’s relief did not last long. With the baby bottle still in hand, Corey stepped over John where he still sat upright on the ground, pushed him over to make him lie flat on his back, and then straddled him knees down. “Drink it up good, baby!” Corey said with a chortling laugh as he held the nipple end of the baby bottle up to John’s mouth.

John considered refusing, but only for a moment. Considering the apparent theme of the moment, he had a very good idea what Paul and Corey would do to him if he didn’t do everything that they told him to do! And so he sighed quietly, swallowed his pride, opened his mouth, let Corey stick the milk bottle nipple in, and did as he was expected to.

Naturally, the milk was quite warm. Yeech! He *hated* warm milk!!! Nevertheless, he drank it as rapidly as possible to hasten the time when Corey would get off him.

Corey stood up and stepped away as soon as John finished the milk, but then Paul came up and took Corey’s place with a low but annoying laugh. Unlike Corey, Paul made no effort to take some of his own weight by going on his knees but sat on John’s belly with the full weight of his upper body on him by sitting in a knees-up position. “Eat up, baby,” Paul said mockingly to John as he ignored the smaller boy’s discomfort and held out a spoonful of Gerber baby food.

John might normally have resisted eating the revolting stuff despite the threat of a spanking, but now – desperate to get this big buffalo off of him – he simply ate the baby food and swallowed it as quickly as possible. It was difficult not to make nasty faces with each mouthful however. My God, no wonder babies cried so much! John idly wondered how many little babies were traumatized being forced to eat such swill as this for the first year or so of their lives! Maybe this was why nobody ever remembered *being* a baby later in their lives – the memory of the horrors of babyhood were just too much for them!

Although John was cooperating as best as he could to get the ordeal over with, Paul seemed to be in no hurry finishing his feeding and then getting off of him. Instead, he moved languidly as if nothing was more pleasurable in the entire world than to feed a tied-up boy Gerber’s baby food! John wanted to yell out loud with frustration and anger but dared not for fear of punishment from shock collar and captors alike.

Mercifully, even Paul could draw the drama out only so much out of spoon-feeding John the contents of a two-ounce jar of baby food. Finally, the nasty stuff was all gone and Paul got off John to eat a leisurely breakfast of Dunkin Donuts and some juice boxes as he and Corey seated themselves on the grass to either side of John. By the time they finished their own breakfast (one half-dozen donuts for each; sharing none with John), the sun was well up in the sky and the day was getting distinctly hot.

“Okay, little baby… now that we’ve gotten you fed, it’s time to take baby for a stroll,” Paul announced as he and Corey abruptly stood up, grabbed John by the arms on either side of him, and hauled him up to his feet. Before John could try expressing whatever opinion he had of the matter, his socks were re-inserted into his mouth and his shirt gag replaced. A general application of duct tape was added on top of this for good measure.

Rather than lead him along on a leash, John was simply tightly hobbled – allowing him only twelve inches of slack. He was then made to walk along unaided as best as he could – literally taking baby steps and striving to keep from falling over – under threat of getting spanked (with a couple of Will’s sister’s hair-brushes) if he didn’t do his best. As he was quite certain that Corey and Paul were seeking any excuse to spank him, Will did his best to hobble along. Hobbled as he was, barefoot, and with his hands tied behind him, it was difficult to make steady progress without falling over, but he managed it.

It belatedly occurred to him to be concerned about the shock collar; wasn’t it set to shock him if he strayed more than a certain distance from the remote? However, they’d already gone much further from it when they’d tested its ‘invisible fence’ function on him before, and it wasn’t bothering him yet. Will must have foreseen that this would be a problem under the current circumstances and had either greatly increased the allowable range or turned that particular function of the remote off altogether.

Paul and Corey took John to as remote and as hidden a spot as they could find on the large, wall-in estate to ensure that no one would see them - or, at least, John. This was not at all hard to do, as the estate was large, and much of it totally invisible from the house because of the trees and underbrush. Although the area between the front gate and the house - and the area around the house itself - was kept carefully cultivated like a park, the majority of the 320-acre estate was still in a pristine state. Only the fact that it was closed off from the surrounding forest by the surrounding 20-foot-high stone wall kept it from being indistinguishable from the actual wilderness. Once away from the sounds of activity around the mansion, John could easily imagine himself being hundreds of miles away from the nearest house instead of just a few hundred feet.

The three boys skirted the duck pond and moved on into territory John had never gotten to see before. John realized now that his initial estimate of the estate’s size, high as it was, had fallen considerably short. If only he’d had a chance to get this far out during their game of Fox and the Hounds a couple of days earlier, John could have easily found a secure place to hide until the time limit was up. If only they hadn’t caught up with him too quickly for him to take advantage of the estate’s vast extent, he might be free now!

The estate was so large and so beautiful that John almost forgot his predicament in his simple enjoyment of the walk in the woods. However, his state of bliss was soon rudely interrupted when his escort decided that they had gone far enough and wanted to rest for a while. However, the ground was rather rough and unsuitable to sit down on.

This problem was solved was John was made to lie on a reasonably smooth, level patch ground; *then* Paul and Corey had a nice, dry, comfortable place to sit! And then, just to help pass the time, the two boys leisurely tickled tortured John in the ribs and under the soles of his (now rather dirty) bare feet while they all rested.

[Jason Toddman]

Part 31.

Will returned to the house just as the cleaning crew was arriving in force. They’d been contacted by Will’s father the previous day and needed to have the entire house spic and span by early that afternoon. As they’d thoroughly cleaned the entire house just a week ago, and there was only so much even an active boy like Will (and any equally active guests he was sure to have invited over in his family’s absence) could do to undo their hard work, they did not expect to have too much problem getting the place back up to the high standards that were usually expected of them.

Of course, Will had invested some time in carefully concealing all evidence of his recent activities involving the other boys (such as removing the store mannequin he’d placed into the dog cage in the cellar and putting it back where it belonged up in the attic) from where curious eyes might find them. All his bondage supplies that were not currently in use had long since been carefully gathered together and placed under lock and key. The shock collar remote looked like any normal TV remote however, so it was simply placed inside his bureau where it could be easily accessed.

The house cleaners, gardeners, and landscapers were all professionals and quickly did their jobs with great efficiency. They did not need Will’s supervision in the least, and in fact the boy was encouraged (repeatedly) to ‘simply go watch TV somewhere’ and stay out of their way. But though Will would have liked to have left the cleaners to their own devices and rejoin his friends, he wanted to be close at hand if he was unexpectedly wanted for something or – more importantly – if he’d missed something he’d need to quickly cover up with a quick explanation or a glib lie.

It was just as well, as he found a set of handcuffs lying on the floor in the rec room that had somehow been overlooked, and shoved it hastily out of sight inside his pants mere seconds before a maid came in to vacuum the rug. That might have been easily explained away, but could still have been awkward for him if his family had ever caught wind of it!

Will wasn’t needed for anything else. The main gate was simply kept open so that different crews (it apparently took quite a few people to clean such a large house and its immediate area) in just a few hours) could come in and out freely, so there was no need for his alertness on that score. But Will couldn’t be certain that he wouldn’t be expected to locate something (where are the vacuum cleaner bags?) or help with something (could you fetch a bottle of Mr. Clean for me, dear?) and didn’t want anyone trying to look for him in such an event (however unlikely that was).

So for Will the entire morning was spent in a haze of dull tedium and feelings of jealousy for his friends getting to spend the morning at play!

The afternoon would almost certainly be even worse!

At least Will would likely have some free time between the time the cleaners left and his folks arrived with Aunt Nancy and Andy to have a little fun with John. But in the meantime, he had to stay around the house just in case something happened that needed his immediate attention.

Will’s determination to play it safe and stay around the house where he could keep a wary eye out for things lasted barely an hour.

It was boring with the cleaners all running around, and with John and his attendants out in the woods waiting for him. Moreover, the cleaners not only saw no need for his supervision but kept commenting aloud that he was continually in the way. Youthful impatience, a growing realization that he was utterly wasting his time, and a desire to get back to having some fun also took their toll. Before many people would even have begun breakfast, Will got fed up to the teeth while waiting. Acting quickly on his new decision, he went into the kitchen (which the cleaners had not started working on yet) and made several sandwiches. He packed these along with some chips and soda inside a thermos-lined backpack. He then left his cell phone number where he could be reached if needed (why the hell didn’t he think of *that* sooner?), and sneaked away to rejoin his friends.

If any of the cleaners noticed his absence, it was only with a sense of relief that he was finally out of their way so they could do their job!

Of course, the others were long gone from the site where the tent had been pitched, but Will’s woodcraft skills were more than adequate enough to enable him to follow them as if they were in sight just a short distance away. Traveling at a steady jog that was over twice as fast as the others could have proceeded with a hobbled John to herd along, Will caught up with them in less than ten minutes after leaving the house.

“Hey, Will!” Paul called in greeting the moment he saw Will coming. “Over here! Is everything all right?”

“Yeah, it’s cool,” Will replied as he reached them. “I decided I was wasting my time watching the cleaners. They don’t need me underfoot, so I may as well be with you guys until my folks show.”

“Cool,” commented Corey. “Got any ideas how to keep John-boy here entertained?”

“Yep!” Will replied with a grin as he held up a canister of itching powder. “Let’s tie him between a couple of small trees so he can’t wiggle around much!”

John suddenly put up a struggle as his hands were freed from behind his back, but as he was still hobbled and outnumbered three-to-one (and each boy was larger and stronger than he was as well) the struggle was very short-lived. He was made to lie on his back with the tip of his head beside the trunk of a sapling, and his wrists forced around it. In mere seconds his wrists were cuffed together again over his head, with his arms trapped against the tree. Moments later, one of his ankles was released from the hobbles so that his feet could be trapped likewise around another tree a few feet away. John was now trapped lying on the ground face up between two trees and staring at his tormentors.

Will stood over John’s prone body – one foot to either side of him – and grinned down at his friend as he opened the bottle of itching powder, squatted down until the bottle was only a few inches over John, and began shaking out its contents like salt being shaken onto a slice of steak.

The powder was liberally shaken into the insides of John’s shorts (front and back) and then all over John’s arms, legs, belly and chest (and some in his hair for good measure) as he lay upon the ground. It was very amusing to watch John writhe and thrash around and squeal frantically into his gag as the others kept him pinned down by the shoulders (they were careful not to coat these where they might get powder on their own hands) and unable to roll around to rub any of the powder off of him on the grass. With Paul holding down one shoulder by himself, Corey the other, and Will pinning down John’s ankles, their captive’s struggles were as unavailing as they were energetic.

“Let me go!” John tried to yell through his gag. “Get this stuff off of me!” But his muffled and incoherent pleas – the gist of which was easily understood even if individual words could not be – feel on deaf and unsympathetic ears. The other boys surrounding him simply grinned widely as they kept him pinned down and laughed every time he swore incoherently at them or struggled vainly to relieve the maddening itch that tormented the entire front of his body.

To make matters worse, the shock collar had been set to unforgiving levels of both jolt strength and sensitivity to noise. Not only John’s own struggles but even the sounds of the others’ laughter seemed to be continually setting off the damned thing; adding its electrical shocks to John’s continuing woes.

Then, as if this were not cruel enough, Will turned himself around and, still straddling John’s ankles, began to tickle him on the soles of his unprotected feet. He did not use his fingers as those feet were still coated with itching powder; instead he did so with the leafy tip of a small plant growing nearby. John squealed into his gag in mingled outrage and laughter and his slender body convulsed harder than before. “You God-damned (Hahahahahaha) Son of a bitch! (Hahahahaha) I’ll (Hahahahaha) I’ll get you for this! (Hahahahahaha) I swear I’ll (Hahahahaha) get you for this! (Hahahahahaha)!” John swore. However, except for his uncontrollable laughter (and the cries of pain that followed as the shock collar acted up again), his cries were totally incomprehensible through his gag.

Naturally, Paul and Corey could not resist joining in this. They pulled up similar plants that were within their own reach and began tickling John’s ribcage and underarms with them. Naturally, John’s reaction was less than pleased. “Damn you, Will! Hahahahaha! Ooowww! Eeeeeeee! Damn you all, you f***ing bastards! Hahahahahaha! Owwww! Hehehehehe! Owww! Bwaahahahaha! OWW!” he yelled (or tried to yell) through his gag. By now, the shock collar was zapping the poor boy almost continually; greatly adding to the strength of his exertions as he writhed and thrashed about.

Naturally, the fun of all this lasted for no time at all for John. It took a very long time for the amusement value of all this to wear off for the other three, however. Eventually they seemingly got bored, stopped tickling him, seated themselves on some boulders that were strewn all around the spot, and started talking among themselves about various unrelated subjects of interest (such as the latest sci-fi picture at the movie theater). But even then, they were watching John’s sufferings with avid (if covert) interest while seemingly ignoring him altogether.

John wasn’t remotely fooled of course, but he made no further protest. Not only would it have been futile, but he was much too tired after all they had put him through that morning. Now that he wasn’t being tickled or shocked by the collar, he was content to simply wallow in relatively minor misery as his body continued to itch without relief. Even without the others pinning him down flat on his back, he could not twist himself around enough to rub (let alone scratch) any of the itchy portions of his body against something substantial enough to give him any relief. And so, even though he continued to itch like crazy, his plight was better than when they actively gave him their attention.

[Jason Toddman]

Part 32.

Finally, John’s companions took some pity on him and decided to let him wash off the itching powder. Paul and Corey freed him from his connections to the trees, hobbled him and cuffed his hands behind his back for trouble-free (if rather slow) foot travel, and walked him to a small, secluded pond at the back of the fenced-in estate. It was smaller than the duck pond and not quite as clean, but John wasn’t terribly fussy about how clean the water he bathed in was - by that point he’d have dived into anything short of raw sewage to get off that horrible itching powder!

John didn’t even hesitate when his hobbles were removed and he was invited to drop his diaper so that he could wade into the pond – escorted by the others – buck naked and still hand-cuffed. The others wore only their Speedos as they waded in with him; holding him steady so that he could not slip and fall while he was unable to catch himself or swim. They didn’t tease or splash him or otherwise torment him while he was in the water, but let him enjoy a few relaxing minutes while all the itching powder was washed off of him.

John was escorted out of the water and had to endure being towel-dried and re-diapered by the others, but he endured it in silence. He had no choice in that regard anyway; his gag had never been removed the entire time, and he saw no point in continuing to make incomprehensible sounds through it that were totally ignored except to be laughed at.

While this was going on, Will had a sudden inspiration and went back to his house while the others saw to Will’s bathing, re-diapering, and feeding (it was lunchtime by then) with the food supplies Will had brought with him before. John was of course kept handcuffed and his food and drink held for him by other hands as he sat on a smooth stump, but he was used enough to that to make no complaint.

Will returned, carrying one of his Star Trek outfits with him. This was not the gold shirted one he wore before at the ‘foxhunt’, nor was it the red-shirted one Paul had worn. Instead, it had a blue shirt such as the one worn by Mister Spock. “I got this for you before you arrived,” Will explained with a grin. “I figured you could be Mister Spock if you wanted to pay ‘Star Trek’ with Paul and me. So you may as well wear it now. Maybe it’ll help you stay cool and logical in the face of captivity by us… umm, hostile aliens.”

John made no protest at all about putting on the Star Trek uniform; it certainly beat wearing only a diaper (which he still wore underneath it) any day of the week; especially as the day was now turning cloudy, windy and somewhat chilly for June. Once he had it on, John was given as much water as he wanted (or dared, under the circumstances) to drink, gagged again and tied to a tree; standing upright and facing outward.

With his wrists cuffed behind him and his hobbles wrapped around the tree, binding John further seemed to be a rather superfluous activity as far as he himself was concerned. Will and the others apparently did not see it that way however, and took great delight in eroding his ability to move even further.

John watched with a jaundiced eye as Paul wound loop after loop of rope around his belly, chest, and arms – pinioning John so tightly to the tree that he could not move even a fraction of an inch away from it but not so much as to impede his breathing or totally remove his wiggle room. Corey did the same thing to John’s legs –tying them together above and below the knees and then to the tree trunk and making it totally impossible for John to bend them at all. Will took a third rope and tied them around John’s shoulders and under his arms around the tree – ensuring that John could not have been budged even by a tornado roaring past unless it tore the tree out by its roots.

John tried to struggle at first, but a few gentle (but not *too* gentle) face slaps ended that! Afterward, he remained still as a statue while the others ensured that he would continue to have all the mobility of one long after they were finished with him. Finally, after what seemed like the entire afternoon to John, the other three boys finished, backed away, stood in front of him and smiled with satisfaction.

“Go on John, try to get loose,” Will offered, as this seemed to be an obligatory ritual at this point.

John made a half-hearted attempt, got absolutely nowhere (after all, he recognized that this was a mere formality), rolled his eyes, made as noisy a sigh of resignation as possible, and hung his head; preferring to look at his own bond feet rather than into the amused stares of the others.

But John’s humiliation was not quite complete yet. Will also had a set of fake Vulcan ears as well, as insisted on pasting them onto his hapless victim. In addition, Will rubbed his fingertips up along John’s eyebrows to make the outer edges point upward in a Vulcan-like manner. Moments later, a young, rather irate, blond-headed, slanted-eye-browed, pointy-eared Vulcan stared stonily back at his captors.

“There, Mister Spock can keep there by himself for a while,” Will decided happily with his arms folded across his chest. “Let’s go back to the house. We can check on him later once the cleaners leave.”

John watched less stoically than Mr. Spock would have as the others walked away from him; laughing and joking among themselves. For a long while he’d not bothered making any noises through his gag, but now he was complaining as loudly as he could to beg them no to leave him there all alone in the middle of the woods.

“Hey! NO! Where are you all going?! Don’t leave me here tied to this tree!” he tried to yell. All that came out however was something that sounded more like “Huu! Ooo! Waa hhuaar ruu ooiinn!” And even that was perfectly inaudible from about thirty feet away.

Unheeding (if not unaware) of this, John kept up his efforts to bring the others back. He might as well have just been another tree for all the attention he got, however. Will and the others walked on without once looking back at him until they were out of sight. John hoped they would simply stick around just out of his sight and watch him, but he could hear all three of their voices continue to fade away with increased distance until it was obvious that they really were leaving him all alone.

Soon John was all alone with the trees… with a few assorted birds and squirrels for company every now and then. Continuing to mutter sullenly into his gag, John began to try to squirm out of his bonds.

This was also perfectly hopeless. Besides the ropes that wound all around him, his wrists and ankles were still secured by cold, hard, unrelenting steel cuffs rather than with rope which could – hopefully - be loosened, given enough time. Other than his head (which he could still turn fairly freely), he could barely move a muscle other than to wiggle his fingers or slightly turn a limb or – even more slightly - his torso. All his efforts accomplished were to cause the ropes to chafe against his skin where it was exposed and where he’d managed some all but imperceptible movement. Were it not for the Star Trek outfit Will had thoughtfully given him, his entire body would have been covered with raw rope burns in short order. As it was, the ropes were tight enough to hold him relatively immobile but not enough so to put him into any special discomfort as long as he didn’t squirm around too much.

John heaved another weary sigh and – not entirely patiently – waited for the others to return. Hopefully they would at least check on him before his bonds caused him too much distress.

However, things hit a snag.

The first snag occurred at just about the same moment Corey and his two companions came within sight of Will’s house. A brightly colored van drove in through the left-open main gate at precisely the same moment.

“Who’s that?” Paul asked; pointing down the driveway at the oncoming van.

“It’s my folks!” Corey replied with some chagrin. “What are they doing here? I wasn’t supposed to start my first pool cleaning job today for another two hours!”

“They don’t look too happy,” Will pointed out grimly as the van (advertising ‘Aqua-Ace Swimming Pool Cleaning and Maintenance’) stopped and its two occupants came out.

“Mom. Dad. What’s wrong?” Corey asked apprehensively.

“Mister Freeman’s called us for a short notice pool cleaning job,” Corey’s father told him. “We need you to take care of it. Why is your cell phone off?! We tried to call, but -”

“Is it off?” Corey exclaimed in feigned surprise as he dug out his phone from its pouch on his belt and looked at it. “Gee, I didn’t know…”

“Oh, stow it, get your bike, get it into the van, and let’s go!” his mother interrupted rather impatiently. “We have to get you there in ten minutes.”

“Sorry guys,” Corey said to his friends and parents together as he rushed to the garage. Will hurried along after him to unlock it while Corey wheeled his bicycle out, and then closed it again as Corey hasty wheeled it over to the van. Paul and Will waved goodbye to a chastened Corey as he got into the van – flanked by his mom and dad on either side of him. Without any goodbyes voiced by the parents, the van immediately drove off.

“Well, so much for Corey,” Paul muttered as the van rolled down the driveway. “Now it’s just you and me and… Oh, S**T! What are THEY doing here?!”

Will turned to look to see what had his friend so alarmed, and saw another unexpected and vaguely familiar vehicle come up the driveway. “Who’s *that*?” Will asked mildly, although he already suspected he knew the answer.

“*My* parents!” Paul exclaimed in a tone of voice usually reserved for foul swear words; confirming Will’s unspoken guess. “How’d they know I was *here*?”

“Reckon we’ll know that in a moment,” Will replied blandly, although his insides were churning almost as badly as Paul’s by now. What if *John’s* parents suddenly showed up here?!

Corey’s parents had merely been in a hurry rather than actually angry. Paul’s parents, on the other hand, looked as if they had caught someone burglarizing their home. “What are *you* doing here?” Paul and his father asked each other in almost perfect harmony of voice - if not in harmony of temperament.

“You’re supposed to be at summer camp!” Paul’s dad said to him as if he were a drill sergeant. “Why are we spending money on a camp you’re not even attending?! Get into the car! You’re going to that camp RIGHT NOW!!!”

Paul’s self-defensive protests were drowned out by his mother as if he’d been gagged as thoroughly as John had been. His father grabbed him by the arm and pulled him along; he might as well have been tied up like John as well for all the good his struggles did him. Yelling like an unruly boy half his age, Paul was hustled into the waiting car by his father (who was built like Hulk Hogan and had a passing resemblance to J. Edgar Hoover) and his mother (who was very similar to Roseanne Barr but much bigger). Paul was neither a weakling nor a midget, but he was no match against both his parents together.

Will started to explain that it was all a misunderstanding, but Paul’s parents paid him no attention at all. They simply bundled Paul into the back seat of their car, got into the front, and immediately drove off with their son without one word to Will.

Then, as Will watched with wide, unbelieving eyes, another car drove in and approached the house while the other was still approaching the gate. Will groaned in misery; it was his parents – along with his aunt and cousin. They were at least three hours early!!!

Will groaned again as the two cars stopped adjacent to each other and the driver of each had a conversation. Paul’s father sounded rather loud and annoyed, but the vehicles were too far away from Will for him to hear what was being said. He had little doubt that he would not be in the dark for very long however; and no doubt at all that he wouldn’t like what he was going to hear about it either.

For the first time that week, Will suddenly had a pretty good idea how John had been feeling for the past few days.

John! Shoot! Without Paul and Corey around, what was he going to do about John?!? He would have no time to check on him, let alone spend any time with him, while his folks were at home! But he couldn’t just leave him out there the whole time they’d be around either!

Pressed for time and not being completely without a conscience, Will decided that the best thing to do would be to hurry away from the sight, find John, swear him to secrecy (by use of threats or bribes if need be), get him untied, and either send him home or bring him back to the house as if he were a normal house guest.

Before he could act on this impulse however, the two sets of parents apparently finished their conversation and the cars resumed driving. Already in full view of his approaching parents, Will decided that he’d better stand fast rather than appear like a skulking fugitive evading the forces of the law. He awaited them with the appearance of calm but inside feeling much like a mouse watching the approach of the cat.

“Hi mom! Hi Dad!” Will said to his parents cheerfully the moment the car stopped and the engine was shut off. “How’s your trip been?” he then asked to forestall any unpleasantness that might be about to develop.

“Just fine, son,” his father replied in a much more jovial tone of voice than Will was expecting as he opened the driver side door and stepped out.

“What’s gotten your friend’s folks all wound up?” Will’s mother asked as she emerged from the passenger side. “Paul’s dad acted like he’d just committed a murder!”

“Uhhh, Paul was staying over with me, but his parents thought he was somewhere else,” Will replied evasively but quite truthfully. His somewhat guilty conscience suddenly grasped the fact that maybe he wasn’t in hot water after all – at least, not as far as Paul’s parents were concerned. Now, if he were discussing John’s parents…

Two other people abruptly emerged from the back seat of the car Will’s father had been driving. One was a rather plain but pleasant young woman in her early thirties; his aunt Nancy. The other was a cute and excitable nine-year-old boy named Andy. Whereas his aunt emerged from the car in a quiet and dignified manner and smiled a quiet greeting to Will, Andy all but flew out of the car as if fired out from a cannon and charged at Will with a yell.

“Hi ya, Will! Are you glad to see me?” Andy yelled at the top of his voice - sounding (ironically) very much like the younger kid from the movie Old Yeller – as he tackled Will’s legs like he was a rugby player and began to try climbing the older boy like he was a monkey climbing a tree.

“Sure Andy,” Will replied patiently (and insincerely) as the exuberant child climbed up onto his shoulders for a pony-back ride. “You’re my favorite cousin.”

Which was true; Andy was also his *only* cousin… at least, the only one he’d ever met, thank god!!!

“It’ll sure be nice to have you around to play with,” Andy yelled into Will’s ear as if he were calling from far across the yard.

“Yeah… nice,” Will replied almost inaudibly as he began to wish he could exchange places with Paul or Corey… or even, at this point, John… rather than spend the weekend watching over this little hyper-active hellion.

Better yet… if Andy and John could change places for the weekend… no, he wouldn’t get away with *that* for a moment! *Sigh!*

“Come on, giddy-up,” Andy said to Will as he kicked his older cousin’s sides with imaginary spurs.

Keeping calm by imagining Andy cocooned from head to toe in a mile of rope, Will began to ferry his cherubic passenger across the yard while his parents and aunt smiled at them indulgently. His honest concerns for John in his current predicament were far from forgotten, but there was nothing he could do while (literally) saddled with his annoying little cousin. He hadn’t intended to leave John unattended for very long of course, he’d counted on Paul to keep an eye on him (or, alternately, keep Andy diverted). Now, left to his own device, Will would have to deal with helping John if and when he could get away from the others for a while. Especially away from Andy!

Fat chance of that happening any time before bedtime.

This was going to be a long, loonnnng weekend!!!

[bondagefreak]

Oh my god. Andy! You have no idea how many memories his arrival brings back.
I don't want to ruin the punch for new (first-time) readers, but the next chapters are definitely gonna be fun.

What a funny little kid Andy will turn out to be.
I remember this part pretty damn clearly and it's definitely one of the more memorable parts of the story


P.S. See? I told you'd overtake my own tale. Was only a matter of time.
I can't match your rate of publishing.

[Jason Toddman]

P.S. See? I told you'd overtake my own tale. Was only a matter of time.
I can't match your rate of publishing.

Another subtle dig that I post too often? Remember, I'm an old man with a huge post backlog, and I want to make sure everything I've written and finished gets reposted here before I either expire or go senile.

[Xtc]

Slowly catching up with the re-post.

I belive this was unfinished in its previous incarbation, ws it not? I do remember Andy, though.

[Jason Toddman]

Slowly catching up with the re-post.

I belive this was unfinished in its previous incarbation, ws it not? I do remember Andy, though.

No, this was finished a long time ago, topping out at 60 chapters. You're probably thinking of one of my other stories; many of which were never finished such as Captive Babysitter and The slave, Hunter.

[bondagefreak]

Another subtle dig that I post too often? Remember, I'm an old man with a huge post backlog, and I want to make sure everything I've written and finished gets reposted here before I either expire or go senile.

Nonsense. It's not at all a complaint. I'm up to date with your chapter count! It's simply a personal note to express how your rate of re-publishing puts mine to shame

As for going senile...aren't we not all a little senile on here?

[Jason Toddman]

Another subtle dig that I post too often? Remember, I'm an old man with a huge post backlog, and I want to make sure everything I've written and finished gets reposted here before I either expire or go senile.

Nonsense. It's not at all a complaint. I'm up to date with your chapter count! It's simply a personal note to express how your rate of re-publishing puts mine to shame

Uhhhh... no, not really. Not in the literal sense I mean anyway.

[Deleted User 520]

I've read parts 1 and 2 so far. Loving it! Hope to read the rest soon. I have been focusing so much on writing my stories that I haven't been able to check out others. Great read though. Thanks for posting. I never got to reading them on the old site.

[Jason Toddman]

I've read parts 1 and 2 so far. Loving it! Hope to read the rest soon. I have been focusing so much on writing my stories that I haven't been able to check out others. Great read though. Thanks for posting. I never got to reading them on the old site.

Always glad to have new readers.


Part 33.

The afternoon progressed slowly but steadily, and still none of the others came back to check on John or keep him company. At first he figured that they were simply watching him from hiding and smiling and laughing among themselves as they watched him squirm in his ropes. However, as time passed and he heard and saw nothing but little birds and squirrels among the trees, he began to become more certain that he really had been left all alone and unwatched.

Had John possessed even the slightest chance of getting free of his ropes and escaping from the estate, he would have been glad of having so much time being left unwatched by the others. But as it was, as time went on and he made no progress whatsoever in getting free while growing steadily more uncomfortable being forced to stand so perfectly still, he began to wish the others would come back. Even if they teased, taunted, tickled, and tortured him without mercy, their company would have been much preferable to the growing sense of abandonment that he was experiencing now.

Will had promised to check on him before long. He’d never broken an actual promise before now, but he’d seemingly causally broken this one. That didn’t seem like Will at all! Could something have gone wrong; preventing Will from coming back? The idea of being left out here all alone, tied to this tree, began to chafe worse than the ropes did. Where *was* everybody?! How much longer would he be left out here like this?

Will and the others hadn’t *forgotten* about him, had they?!

*****

Will had most definitely not forgotten about John; in fact, his friend and captive was uppermost in his thoughts at every moment that his cousin Andy was not (consciously or not) monopolizing them. But the playful little youngster just would not give Will any privacy or time to himself for even a moment! In an indirect sense, Will was as much Andy’s prisoner as John was Will’s – only his bonds were subtle and invisible. Rather than ropes, it was his stubborn pride in refusing to give up John as his captive and his unwillingness to let Andy or the others know about John that restricted him so severely. He could move as freely as ever, physically; but, unable to evade the ineluctable Andy, his movements were nonetheless almost as constrained as John’s were.

It wasn’t until about four o’clock that Will hit upon a solution; when he did, he literally whacked himself in the head for not thinking of it sooner.

They had just gone into the kitchen to get a couple of sodas when the idea struck him. “Hey, Andy… you want to play hide and seek?” he asked his little companion suavely.

“Okay!” Andy replied enthusiastically; it was one of his favorite games.

“Okay, you sit at the kitchen table here and count to 100, while I hide,” Will told him; seating the tyke down himself and unable to believe that dodging him could be so easy. “Not too fast now, no peeking, and no looking for me early! Understand?”

Andy nodded eagerly and bent down with his head in his arms on the table so that he could not see anything around him.

“Okay, start counting out loud,” Will told him as he began to back away quietly.

“Onetwothreefourfivesix…” Andy chimed as loudly and as rapidly as an auctioneer trying to get rid of an especially undesirable item.

“Whoa whoa whoooaaa!” Will urged him. Jeez; Andy would reach 100 before he could leave the house at *that* rate, for God’s sake. “That’s way too fast! Slower! Like this! One… two… three…”

“One… two… three…” Andy chimed in time with Will with eager cooperation.

That was better! Now he could get well out of sight before Andy ever left the kitchen. With the unopened can of soda in hand (he was saving it for John, who must be really thirsty by now), Will began to tip-toe out of the kitchen.

“Will!” the voice of his mother all but shouted in his ear.

Will started guiltily and turned around to see both his mother and his Aunt Nancy looking at him with mild curiosity.

“Aren’t you supposed to be looking after Andy?” His mother asked him almost accusingly.

“I am, mom!” Will replied in the aggrieved manner of the unjustly accused. “I just left him a moment ago. We’re playing a game together. Hide n’ seek!”

“11… 12… 13…” a small child’s voice could be heard chanting from the kitchen.

“Gotta go now,” Will told them virtuously. “Don’t want to make it too easy for Andy, now do we?”

Both women watched him with raised eyebrows as he walked away. Turning to look back and seeing that they were still watching him, Will suddenly changed course and, instead of going out the front door as he has intended, ran up the stairway – unopened soda can still in hand.

“21… 22… 23…”

Thinking quickly, Will ran into his room and closed the door quietly behind him. He opened his bureau, grabbed a panel gag from his dresser drawer, stuffed it and the soda into a small backpack, and put it on. He then went to his window and looked outside carefully. Seeing no one outside, he grabbed onto some of the thick ivy vines that grew along the outside wall and climbed down them from the second floor as nimbly and as a monkey down to the ground.

“51… 52… 53…” a small child’s voice could be heard chanting as the through the kitchen window right beside him.

Gritting his teeth in dismay, Will hurried quickly away before anyone else wanted to have a word with him. He managed to slip past the kitchen window unseen and get around the corner of the house just as Andy reached 60. After that, he exchanged stealth for speed and ran away from the house as if it was Dracula’s castle and an entire horde of bloodthirsty vampires were on his heels. Fortunately, though there were many windows along the side of the house facing the section of woods towards which he ran, no one inside the house was looking out through them at the time, and Will entered the woods unseen by anyone.

“64… 65… 66…” Andy continued counting. Outside the kitchen, his mother and aunt listened to him with some amusement as they watched the stairs and elevator to see if Will tried to pull a fast one by slipping away unseen. These were the only two ways to or from the second floor; or, at least, so they thought.

“98… 99… 100!” Andy finished chanting. He raised his head, stood up, and announced to the world at the top of his voice, “Ready or not! Here I come!”

“Where are you going?” his mother asked him kindly as she and Will’s mother entered the kitchen at virtually the same moment.

“Me and Will are playing hide-n-seek,” Andy announced happily.

“He went upstairs,” Nancy offered with a grin.

“Thanks mom,” Andy relied happily as he charged up the stairs like the Road Runner.

“I wondered how long it’d take Will to think of that old dodge,” Will’s mother said with a weary sigh but also with a gentle smile of amusement as she put some water in the tea kettle.

“At least he didn’t tie Andy to a tree this time,” Nancy commented with a laugh as she went to the cupboard for some tea bags.

*****

Just as John despaired of seeing anyone again before dark, he saw Will jogging rapidly toward him. Even through his gag, his sigh of relief was quite audible from thirty feet away.

“I’m really sorry I was gone so long,” Will told him with unfeigned sincerity as he undid John’s gag, opened the can of soda, and gave him a sip. “Both of the others had to leave suddenly and my folks showed up way sooner than I expected. It was all I could do to get away from my pesky little cousin. I probably won’t be able to get out here again until after everyone else has gone to bed!”

“Huh?!” John exclaimed; nearly choking on the soda he was sipping as Will said this. “Wait a...” he started to say. *ZAP!* “OWW!” he exclaimed instead as the shock collar jolted him. “You’re not going to leave me here all alone all that time, are you?” he asked pleadingly in a much quieter whisper. “Please! Untie me! I promise I won’t go anywhere or tell anyone! Just let me go! At least for the night! Please! You – you can even tie me back up again and resume where we left off when your folks have left.”

Will considered it for a moment, but then shook his head. “I’m sorry, John,” he replied with a quirky smile. “It’s not that I don’t believe you… not really, anyway. But it’s just too much fun keeping you as my prisoner. And you’re so cute when you beg. But don’t worry; I’ll come back after dark tonight, feed you, and make you more comfortable.”

Despite the shock collar, John moaned even more loudly than before at the prospect of being left tied out here alone the rest of the day. It was all he could do not to start crying as well. Perhaps he would have, except that Will cut him off by putting the still half-filled soda can back to his lips. “Drink up! And quit that God-awful moaning!”

“It’s not just that!” John replied sotto voce just quietly enough to keep the shock collar from jolting him again. “But these ropes are starting to cut into me!!”

Will wasn’t entirely heartless. So, with a sympathetic smile, he undid all the ropes that secured John’s body so tightly to the tree. However, the hobbles and the handcuffs that still bound John’s wrists and ankles still left John’s freedom of movement at almost zero. Will made no effort to unlock any of these at all. Even so, John felt considerable relief; at least the metal restraints weren’t on anywhere near as tightly as the ropes had been.

“I… I need to pee pretty badly, too!” John pled.

But instead of removing the handcuffs from John so that he could relieve himself, Will simply smiled. “Tough! That’s what the diaper is for. Just do your business into it. I’ll change it tomorrow if I get the chance!”

And then, as if that were not bad enough, Will produced the panel gag that he’d grabbed from his bureau on his way here. “I’d figured you’d like this better than the shock collar,” he said to a feebly protesting John as he locked it in place. “Awww… I forgot to bring the collar key with me. But don’t worry… I’ll take it off you when I come back tonight and feed you.”

John moaned miserably again and turned the pleading puppy dog eyes on Will again.

“Aw, you’re so cute,” Will told him. “I hate to leave you feeling so sad. I know what will make you feel better.”

John reached out as if intending to loosen the handcuffs binding John to the tree but instead he began tickling John under his arms. “Eeeeeeeeee!” John screamed into his gag as he frantically and futilely sought to evade those tickling fingers. But with the handcuffs and hobbles holding him and restricting his movements so much, he could neither evade those fingers nor wriggle around more than fractionally even in the midst of his writhing and thrashing. “EEEEEEE! Hahahahahahahaha! EEEEEEEEEE” he continued to scream and squeal into his gag. However, the gag muffled his cries so effectively that even his shock collar took no notice of them.

John wriggled, twisted, thrashing, and even tried hopping up and down as he continued to make the most pathetic noises into his gag. This amused Will considerably, and he tickle tortured his helpless captive for a full fifteen minutes straight – letting up only for a few seconds at a time once every two or three minutes – before finally relenting.

“Still sad?” Will asked pointedly as he wiggled as fingers as if readying to launch another tickle attack.

John shook his head in negation quite vigorously.

“Still in need of cheering up?” Will insisted as he moved his hands forward as if planning to trickle John some more anyway.

John shook his head again; adding pleading muffled cries and more puppy dog eyes. His bladder would surely let go if Will tickled him again!

“All right then, I’ll leave you be,” Will replied as he backed away with a smile. “See you tonight,” he continued as, with a jaunty wave to his prisoner, Will hurried back to the house.

John didn’t bother with any further futile protests, but simply glared back at his youthful captor as he hurried home. Abandoned once again! And his bladder couldn’t hold out for very much longer!

In no particular hurry, Will leisurely walked back to his house.

Meanwhile, Andy looked high and low for Will, but of course was unable to find him anywhere. After a while, he gave up and went to Will’s room to explore… giving no thought as to how his absent older cousin might react to such a thing.

The first place Andy decided to check out was Will’s bureau.

Wow! What was this thing?

Andy picked up the shock collar remote and looked at it with pure fascination. Wow! Neat! It looked something like one of those phasers they used on the original Star Trek, which was one of Andy’s favorite TV programs. He turned it over and examined it from all sides. Cool. Look at all those knobs. Wonder what they do? Maybe they set the phaser from stun to disintegrate. Oh, look! That must be the firing button!

Andy pressed the button. Suddenly, a small LED at one end lit up and there was a faint buzzing noise that lasted until he released the button. Cool! He pressed the button again. The LED lit up again and again the thing buzzed. This time he also noticed a small display screen on one side; indicating power levels, sensitivity, battery charge, and some other things as well – none of which he understood but which looked Way Cool!!!

Taking aim at an invisible monster of his own imagination, Andy fired his phaser at it. The monster of his imagination disintegrated with a blood-curdling scream. Andy imagined a different menacing figure and took aim at it…

Somewhere out in the woods, a series of screams began to rend the air around a particular tree; but they were effectively muffled by a well-locked panel gag.

Idly rummaging through more of Will’s things, he saw a small key attached to a leather circular strap wide enough to wear around his neck… as Andy soon found out when he put it on. Neat. It was just like those bracelets made of animal teeth he had seen on some show about cavemen his mother liked to watch; Valley of the Dinosaurs. Now he was a caveman from the future!

Delighted with his new toys, Andy soon forgot all about Will. He wandered back to his own room, turned on the TV, found a Star Trek DVD, and started playing it. He found an episode that had some creature resembling a gorilla with a horn on its head and started firing his ‘phaser’ at it. When the monster vanished in a flash of light (from a phaser actually shot at it in the show), Andy played back the scene and fired again.

And he played back the scene and vanquished the monster a couple of dozen more times… laughing happily at all the evil monsters he was wiping out with his phaser.

*****

“Eeeeyaaarrggghhh!” John screamed again into his gag as the shock collar once again tortured him with a powerful jolt. No matter how quiet he tried to be, the damned thing kept shocking him! It couldn’t be because of any noise he was making! Granted, it was rather hard to stay very quiet anymore with all the hard breathing and moaning that he was doing now, but he’d been very quiet when the accursed thing started turning against him so relentlessly. It will be Will, John decided. Not content with keeping him tied up to this infernal tree way out here away from anyone who could hear him, now Will thought it’d be fun to just casually torture him! But why? What did he do to deserve this? And how much longer would Will keep torturing him like this?!

*****

“Andy! Time for dinner!” Nancy called to him.

Andy quickly turned off the TV set. Then, suddenly realizing that he still had Will’s phaser and that Will might be annoyed with him if he found out, Andy hid his new toy under the pillow of his own bed before hurrying downstairs.

Will stepped out of his own room just as Andy was about to pass it. “Oh, there you are, squirt!” Will said to him with a friendlier tone than usual. “Guess I won the game, huh? Better luck next time.”

“Okay,” Andy replied cheerfully; relieved that Will had apparently not noticed that his phaser was missing from his room.

Will and Andy were both a little self-conscious during dinner. Andy was concerned how Will might react if he should notice his phaser was missing. Will was concerned about how John was taking to being left tied up to a tree out in the middle of nowhere for so long. But neither boy was so conscience-stricken that his appetite suffered, and neither noticed the other’s mood. Their parents were too busy talking to one another to pay either boy any attention at all; if anyone, they were relieved that neither boy (especially Andy) was chattering away and interrupting their own conversation.

After dinner, the five of them went to the living room and spent the evening watching TV. As they were mainly watching Star Trek reruns on the sci-fi channel (which the parents enjoyed as much as the kids), even the usually exuberant Andy stayed reasonably quiet throughout the evening and pestered no one.

Finally, everyone decided to call it a night. Even Andy went to his own room and promptly went to bed. Finally allowed to be by himself, Will plopped down on his bed to rest for a moment before preparing to sneak down to the kitchen, fix something for John to eat, and taking it out to him. He closed his eyes just to rest them for a moment...

…and fell soundly asleep before he could carry out his good intentions.

Out in the woods, a scared and lonely boy remained tied to a tree - hungry, thirsty, unable to move, unable to sleep, and unable to hold it in any longer.

John was most definitely not a happy camper.

[Jason Toddman]

Part 34.

Will awoke from his sound sleep slowly at first. He wanted to go back to sleep, but something was nagging at his mind. He couldn’t think of what it was at first, though…

Will sat bolt upright and barely managed to suppress a yelled expletive. Shit! John! He’d fallen asleep and forgotten all about John! Oh no! Will looked out the window and saw it was daylight again; and then frantically looked over to the clock on his dresser to check the time. Eight Thirty! Oh god! How could he have slept so long, while John was out there all alone like that?

Angry with himself and anxious about John, Will barely noticed hearing Andy out in the hallway making some kind of ray-gun noises as he hastily got washed and dressed. He then grabbed a fresh change of underwear for John, stuffed it into a small knapsack, and hurried out the door of his bedroom with them.

Andy was outside in the hallway apparently playing, but stopped when he saw Will and hid something behind his back with a guilty look on his face. “Oh, hi Will… did I wake you up?” Andy asked with unusual shyness.

“It’s okay, squirt,” Will said hastily as he rushed on past. “Sorry, got to run!” he continued, barely giving the smaller boy a glance as he hurried down the stairs.

Andy looked at the direction Will went for a moment. Hearing Will’s footsteps retreating rapidly, Andy gave a small sigh of relief and pulled the shock collar remote from behind the back of his shorts where he’d hastily stuck them when he heard Will coming. With a smile of satisfaction on his cherubic face, he resumed firing his phaser at the large and seemingly innocuous vase which in his mind served as the enemy aliens’ citadel.

Andy imagined enemy aliens shrieking in pain as they died by disintegration, but he never imagined that about a half mile away a 14-year-old boy tied to a tree was writhing in pain and shrieking into his gag every time Andy fired his phaser.

Ron hastily stepped into the kitchen. Good; no one was there. He hastily grabbed some orange juice and some snacks for John and stuffed them into his knapsack. Then, taking a quick drink of milk, he proceeded to hurry out the kitchen door.

“Will!” his dad suddenly called to him as he seemed to appear right out of thin air in front of him.

Will began to suck in an outcry of shock before it was voiced as he stopped dead in his tracks. “Uh, yeah dad?” he replied uncertainly; his dad had sounded somewhat annoyed!

“Something is missing from my desk! Did you take it?” his father asked sternly.

“Wha…? No! What’s missing?” Will asked nervously as he saw his hopes for a quick escape vanishing.

“An experimental electronic obedience collar we’re developing for dogs,” his father replied; his voice still sounding suspicious. “I had it inside my desk, but it and its remote control are both missing. Have you taken them?”

Will had already been certain that was what this was about, but had managed to stall for time while he firmed up his composure. Being well practiced in keeping secrets, Will managed to come up with a smooth half-truth ready to use the moment his father finished his inquiry. “No dad, *I* haven’t got them. What would *I* want with them? But I’ll help you look. If I find them, I’ll bring them right to you!” he promised glibly.

His father looked at him steadily for a moment, and then shrugged his shoulders. “I would appreciate that, son. Damned if I understand where they could have gone to, though!” he groused with mild annoyance and confusion as he walked into the kitchen. He stopped and looked back at his son when Will didn’t immediately follow along behind him. “Well? You coming?” he asked with renewed impatience.

“Uhhh… you mean, NOW?” Will asked apprehensively. “Ah, couldn’t I take care of a little something I need to do first? I bet I can find them right away if I can just…”

“NOW!” his father replied in no uncertain terms.

“Yes sir,” Will replied quietly as he followed his father back into the house and on back up the stairs. Good luck finding the darned things though, dad!

Back upstairs, Andy considered putting his new toy back where he’d found it before Will could miss it. However, he just couldn’t bear to part with his phaser just yet; and so used it to mow down another horde of imaginary Klingons, Romulans, and other such alien riff-raff. Then, while he was still in the middle of this, he heard two sets of footsteps coming up the stairs and immediately put his phaser away inside his front pocket; no time to put it away now!

Will and his dad came into sight and started down the hallway toward him. “Can you play Star Trek with me for a while now, Will?” Andy asked innocently; looking for an excuse to get official permission to play with the phaser.

“Sorry, Andy,” Will’s father spoke up. “We have to look for something. Will’s got no time for you right now. Why don’t you go out into the yard and play for a while?”

“All right,” Andy replied agreeably as the two passed him. He finally decided though he’d put the phaser back into Will’s room the moment they went on to wherever they were going, and find something else to do.

Much to his surprise though, and even more to Will’s, Will’s father stopped in front of Will’s room and opened the door. “Dad! What are you doing?! It’s not in MY room!” Will said with an aggrieved tone of voice that hid his panic.

“Well, it won’t hurt to check now will it?” his father replied skeptically as he ignored his son’s declaration of innocence and went in.

Andy suddenly got the idea that Will was in trouble somehow. In any case, he’d never be able to replace the phaser now that Will and his dad were in there. Rather than hang around and possibly get into trouble himself if Will found his phaser on him, Andy decided to do as Will’s dad had suggested and go outside to play.

Besides, those trees were probably sheltering all sorts of sinister monsters getting ready to attack the house; and the valiant Andy and his phaser were their only defense!!!

Will watched nervously as his father poked around his desk looking for the shock collar. He then proceeded to open up Will’s bureau. “Oh great! He’ll find the remote any second now,” Will thought to himself, and he began to quiver. “He’s opening up the drawer. He’s looking in. He’s pawing around. He must see it by now. He’s… he’s shutting the drawer? He’s looking into the second? Huh? What the hell?”

Will watched with slack-jawed amazement as his dad searched the bureau from top to bottom and failed to find the remote. Closing the last drawer somewhat impatiently, his father then opened up Will’s closet and began to poke around inside. However, he missed finding the carefully concealed hidden compartment in the back wall where all of John and Paul’s bondage supplies were kept, and so found nothing at all incriminating.

Will’s dad continued searching Will’s room for a few more moments before finally deciding that he was on the wrong trail after all. He turned to look at Will, who by this time had put on a well-rehearsed act of wounded innocence calculated to make his father feel like an absolute heel. It was only partially effective.

“Look son, I’m sorry if I’ve come off like General Patton just now,” his father said in a milder tone of voice than before. “But I am sure I left the collar and its remote control locked inside my desk inside my den before leaving for our trip. And now I cannot find either one. I need to take those with me when I go to the research lab this afternoon, or we could lose funding for the project. Now, if you have seen them or have any idea what became of them, I would like to know.”

“I don’t have the remote and collar, dad,” Will replied with practiced calm - and not entirely untruthfully. “But I’ll help you look for them right now if you want. I might get lucky, and find them in a place you didn’t think to look.”

Will’s father (whose name, I failed to mention up to now, was Roy) looked at his son in a way that implied he was not entirely convinced his son was telling the entire truth. He understood his son somewhat better than Will realized, because he had been very much like Will himself when he was the same age. He used to be a bit of a mischief maker as a teenager, but hoped that Will would grow out of that the same way he’d done. In any case, Will had always been well behaved at home and was usually as reliable and honest as any man could wish his son to be.

Sure, there had been a few phone calls indicating the contrary from teachers and parents of schoolmates at the boarding school he attended… such as the time a parent had complained that Will had kicked a soccer ball directly into an opposing team member’s groin from a mere six feet away. However, their accusations had usually smacked more of sour grapes than from anything that sounded particularly actionable; surely that kick had been a mere accident! And that business about Will and some other boys having left some older kid tied to a tree all night; there was no proof that Will had anything to do with it other the word of a kid who admitted he and Will had fought previously. Besides, it sounded more like high-spirited teenaged hijinks than anything else to Roy.

In any case, Roy was sure that his son was a good boy at heart. If he *had* ‘borrowed’ the shock collar – which he probably did for some kind of prank – he’d return it as soon as he decently could now that he knew it was needed. So it was time to make a graceful exit so that Will could ‘find’ the collar after enough time had passed for ‘plausible deniability’.

“All right, son… if you find the collar and remote, give me a holler,” Roy said as he slowly walked out of Will’s room to continue his search elsewhere.

As soon as Roy was well out of sight and earshot, Will began combing through his bureau. WTF?! Where *was* the remote?! No wonder his dad couldn’t find it… *he* couldn’t find it either!!! But how could it have…

A vague memory of Andy outside his room making ray-gun noises earlier when Will was still waking up suddenly percolated through Will’s head.

“Andy!” Will suddenly called out as he began hurrying through the house.

Andy heard his name being called. Normally he would have responded immediately when Will called him… but this was unusual enough in itself to make him wary. There was something in Will’s tone as well that spelled trouble for him when Will caught up to him. Guiltily stuffing the phaser inside his pants pocket, Andy suddenly decided that another game of hide-and-seek was in order… only this time Will could do the seeking while Andy did the hiding!

Spotting the bush he was about to disintegrate for being an enemy alien, Andy decided to spare its life and hide behind it instead when he heard Will emerging from the house and coming out into the yard.

Peeking cautiously outward, Andy saw Will emerge from the house at a jog as he fumbled around putting on a small knapsack. To Andy’s consternation, Will was running straight toward him! With a small sound of fear, Andy crouched down and tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible – although he was already convinced that Will had seen him and was coming to spank him for taking his phaser.

Andy was on the point of saying his prayers when Will ran right past him and charged on into the woods beyond through a trail Andy had not noticed before.

Unable to believe he hadn’t been seen after all, Andy suddenly looked up and over in the direction Will took. He didn’t seem to be looking around for Andy very hard. In fact, it seemed to Andy that all of Will’s attention was focused on remaining unseen by anyone else himself as he made a beeline through the woods. If he turned to look back, Andy would now be in plain sight of him… but he didn’t turn to look. He merely looked straight ahead and plowed on down the trail with a look of grim determination on his face until, within seconds, he was completely out of sight.

Andy was a typical nine year old child. The moment he realized that Will could not be after him after all (he’d have no reason to think Andy was in the woods, after all), Andy was consumed with curiosity. Where *was* Will going in such a hurry?

Without giving it a second thought, Andy got to his feet and hurried down the trail after Will to see where he was going.

Will had planned to find Andy and ask him if he’d been inside his room, but his failure to find Andy at once and his renewed concern for John’s well-being made him change his priorities. He knew where the shock collar was, at least; he’d better retrieve it first, see to John’s needs, and *then* find Andy and track down the remote.

After a steady and fatiguing jog through the woods, Will found a very despondent John all but sagging in his bonds. It was obvious even from a distance that John was suffering from various kinds of deprivation by this time, and even the mischievous Will felt rather sorry for him.

Not enough to let him go free, of course.

John looked up at Will with an expression of mingled fear, rage, disappointment, and exhaustion as the older boy came up to him and began removing his gag to give him a drink. “Sorry I took so long getting back here, John,” Will said by way of hasty apology.

“Why?” John asked in a feeble, dry-sounding whispering voice.

“I feel asleep,” Will said honestly as he opened a bottle of juice to give John a sip. “I…”

“WHY?!” John asked with a trifle more strength after getting a mouthful of juice. He was about to say more but got into a weak coughing fit instead.

“I was tired,” Will replied lamely. “I’d had a rough day. Corey and Paul had to leave, and my folks got back early, and…”

“Why did you *torture* me?!” John asked accusingly. “WHY?!”

“Huh?” Will asked blankly. “You mean leaving you tied up all night? I told you: I…”

“Why did you keep *shocking* me?!” John demanded. “Almost from the time you left last night, you kept shocking me… and shocking me… over and over!! WHY? What did I do?! Did you think it was FUNNY?! It fucking HURT, God damn it!!!”

“Shocked?” Will asked lamely. He was feeling a trifle shocked himself, now.

“All through the evening, until way past dark,” John said with anger and the glimmering of hatred in his eyes. “Then you started up again this morning. Right up to a few minutes ago! Jolting me, over and over again… until my throat was sore and dry from all the shocking and all the screaming I wanted to do because of them…”

The light began to dawn inside Will’s head. The missing remote… the unusually reclusive Andy…

“I didn’t do it, John,” Will insisted. “Please, you’ve got to believe me. I think my little cousin Andy found the remote and has been playing with it without my knowledge. But I’ll find him and take it away from him.”

John didn’t look as if he was buying it. Will couldn’t really blame him. He was going to have to make up to John for all he’d been through… somehow.

“But I *do* have some good news for you,” Will assured John as he fed him a donut, which John devoured hungrily. “I’m going to take this shock collar off of you now. Dad’s noticed it missing and I have to get it back to him. I trust you won’t miss it too much.”

Will was smiling as he said this as he fished around in his pants pocket for the keys to the shock collar. His smile faded rapidly away however as it became evident that he wasn’t immediately finding what he was looking for.

“OH NO!” Will growled in dismay. “I must’ve left the keys to the collar in my room with the remote.”

John began to moan, until a sudden *ZAP!* forced him to desist. “Please tell me that you’re joking! You mean you lost the keys to these cuffs too?!”

The openly unhappy expression on Will’s face told John the answer before Will spoke again. “I’ll have to go back to my room to get them and remove the collar when I come back. But first I have to find Andy and get that remote away from him.”

John was about to say something in response when a familiar jolting sensation made him scream in pain instead. “It’s happening again,” he squealed when the jolting stopped. “You… you really didn’t do it? I can see that the remote’s not in your hand. Your cousin really has it?”

“Yeah… he must be playing with it,” Will replied hastily. “He doesn’t know what it is. Look, I’m sorry to leave you handcuffed to the tree like this, but I’d better hurry back and find him and make it stop playing with that remote! I’ll be back as soon as I can do it and get the keys to free you.”

Will rushed off without taking the time to re-gag his prisoner. Hearing John howl in anguish again made Will run even faster, with no thought of using the gag to keep his cries from attracting any attention. No one would hear him way out here anyway.

Will ran straight back to the house; looking neither to his left or his right as he ran.

Had he done so, he would have noticed Andy crouching behind a tree and peering fearfully at him as he charged on out of sight.

Andy was a bit scared now. He’d never seen Will look so angry, scared, and determined all at the same time. What could be the matter? Had he noticed the missing phaser and was *that* upset about it?

Andy idly took the phaser out of his pocket, took aim at a boulder that he imagined was a horta, and fired.

“Yaaahhhhhhh!” came a scream from further into the woods.

Andy was startled. He’d heard that cry a few times before and thought it had been Will yelling for some reason. But Will had gone running of the other way now; so it couldn’t have been him! So what was it?

Curiosity outweighed his timidity as he cautiously proceeded toward the place where he’d heard the yell; his phaser tightly clutched in one small fist.

[lepangolin]

One of the best story i’ve ever red ! Can’t wait for the next chapter...
Thanks

[Jason Toddman]

One of the best story i’ve ever red ! Can’t wait for the next chapter...
Thanks

Well then, I won't keep you waiting!

Part 35.

Andy moved closer to the source of the mysterious sounds, but the further he went the slower he progressed as his eagerness and curiosity began to erode into genuine fright. What had made those awful noises? It sounded like a wounded animal… or perhaps a frightful monster lurking in wait behind a tree; ready to pounce on him and devour him.

Andy stopped and listened. Somewhere ahead of him, he could hear a forlorn moaning sound… but he could not see anything in the thick foliage. Then, steeling up his nerve, he pretended he was Will Robinson. Will Robinson wasn’t afraid of anything, and neither was he…

A frightened bird suddenly made a loud squawking noise, sprang out of a bush and flew less than two feet in front of Andy’s face. Startled, Andy aimed his phaser and fired.

“EEEEYAAAHHHHH!” the horrible sound came from just beyond the bushes dead ahead of him.

“Eeeeyyyiiiiieeeeeeee!” screamed Andy, who dropped his phaser, turned tail and fled – suddenly feeling more like Doctor Zachary Smith than he did Will Robinson.

Andy might have kept right on running all the way back to the house if he hadn’t tripped over a tree root before he ran twenty feet. He fell over in an ungainly sprawl and lay stunned (but not really hurt) for a moment; his small size and the thick underbrush he fell into combining to do nothing worse than knock the breath out of him. Then, as he strove to gather his wits and get his feet back under him to resume his headlong fright, he heard something.

“Help!” the voice cried feebly. “Please… (Moan!) Help me!”

Being very young, Andy quickly forgot his fright – at least, for the moment – and looked carefully at the direction the voice came from. Looking carefully, he could just barely make out someone standing in front of a tree at the edge of his vision. Squinting his eyes, Andy stepped forward a few paces and looked again. Was that a Vulcan in a Starfleet uniform he was looking at? Wow! Maybe he knew Mister Spock!

His fear eased when no monsters sprang out after him, and further overwhelmed by his intense curiosity, Andy hesitantly moved closer to the Vulcan… picking his phaser back up and aiming it ahead of him as he went. If this was some kind of trap being set by some Klingons (or, more likely, Romulans), he’d be ready to defend himself! His wariness was still fairly high, as the Vulcan seemed to be making no effort to meet him halfway. Why was he just standing there in front of that tree? Was he guarding something?

Andy moved closer to the Vulcan. Why, it wasn’t an adult! He was just a kid; smaller and probably younger than his cousin Will was! They didn’t let kids that young into Starfleet, did they? Maybe he was a cadet in Starfleet Academy? Naw, too young even for that!

Andy stopped about a hundred feet away and was just about to call out to the Vulcan when a squirrel abruptly skittered up a tree right behind him. “Aah!” Andy cried in sudden panic as he aimed his phaser and fired at the retreating and inoffensive creature. The squirrel was, of course, completely unfazed by the ‘phaser’.

“EEEYOOOWWWW!” screamed the Vulcan, who clearly was *not* unfazed by it!

Andy squealed and almost ran away again before seeing what made the Vulcan yell like that. However, he was so panicked that instead he simply crouched, aiming his phaser at the Vulcan, and froze. But rather than attack him, the Vulcan was writhing as if in pain – and moving as if unable to step away from the tree.

Was it an alien tree monster in disguise? Was it trying to eat the Vulcan?!

“Don’t worry! I’ll save you!” Andy declared bravely as he stood up and began blazing away at the tree monster with his phaser.

“Aaaagghhh! Nooo! Eeeyooowww! NOOO! Aaaaahhhhhhhh! QUIT IT! Neeeaarrgghh!!! Owwwww! Eeeeeeeeee! Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh! Eeeeeeee! Pleeeeeasssssssseeeeeee! Eeeee! STOP Eeeeeee Fiiirrrreeeeeeeing THAT THING!!! Aaahhhh!!!! STOP IT! Aaaahhhhh!” John screamed; his words almost incoherent amid his cries of pain and the fact that he couldn’t speak at all loudly without making his agony even worse.

In a panic now, Andy wasn’t listening to John’s cries anyway. Andy thought the Vulcan kid was being eaten alive and tried valiantly to subdue the tree monster. However, the tree monster seemed quite unperturbed by the would-be rescuer’s phaser barrage and simply continued trying to eat the Vulcan. Apparently very leisurely.

Seeing that the phaser wasn’t working, Andy suddenly dropped it, grabbed the largest stick he could find (and swing), and charged forward with the most bloodthirsty war cry he could manage. “EEEYAARRRHHHH!!!” With the energy and impetuosity of extreme youth, he began beating at the tree trunk as hard and as fast as he could to make it release its prey.

“OW! HEY! WATCH IT!” John cried out as a fair percentage of those whacks were actually hitting him rather than the tree trunk. “OWW! What are you doing? YEOW! Stop that! OWW! OWW! Quit hitting me, you little brat!” Though the cries were fairly loud and rather undignified for a Vulcan (even a merely teenaged one), the words were spoken barely louder than a whisper; making it difficult for Andy to understand them.

It slowly filtered into Andy’s awareness that the tree wasn’t a monster with tentacles gripping its prey but an ordinary tree, and that a set of handcuffs and leg-irons were the reason why the Vulcan teenager was unable to move very much. He stopped flailing out with the branch and instead poked at John’s bonds with it.

“What happened?” Andy asked with a tone of voice that implied mere curiosity rather than real concern. “Who left you here like that? Was it the Klingons? Or the Romulans?”

John was too busy trying to catch his breath (and get over the lingering pain from the ordeal of the last few minutes) to answer for a moment. “Yeah, it was the Romulans!” John answered hastily. “Look! Don’t use that thing over there anymore, all right?” he continued, indicating the remote with his head. “That’s not a weapon like you seem to think it is. It’s a torture device. All it does is make this collar I’m wearing zap me with electricity, okay?”

“It is? Gee, I’m sorry,” Andy apologized. “Gee, I wonder what Will was doing with it.”

At that moment, just as John was about to ask Andy to go for help, he noticed the key ring that the boy was wearing around his neck. Andy had tucked it under his shirt when he’d first taken it, and had kept it out of sight most of the time since. But his recent exertions had caused it to slip around his neck and tumble into sight over his shirt.

Changing mental gears, John suddenly said, “Look, you can help me. See that key you have around your neck? It fits this collar. Use it to take the thing off of me, will you?”

Andy was willing to try, but there was a problem. He was too short to reach the collar while John remained standing, and the lock was trapped between the tree trunk and the back of John’s neck. John was unable to kneel, squat, or sit to get the collar within Andy’s reach because of the tightness of his handcuffs and leg manacles and the ropes that still held them fastened to the tree trunk. And Andy didn’t have the keys for those.

However, John was not tied to the tree directly by his handcuffs and leg-cuffs; both of these had ropes looped around them and around the tree, and it was this that kept him trapped against the tree and unable to move. “Try untying those ropes instead,” he pleaded with Andy in a much quieter voice; which had now gotten somewhat hoarse and phlegmy. Between his numerous shocks, his outcries, and the fact that he hadn’t had much water lately, his throat was very sore and dry.

Andy tackled the job with more enthusiasm than skill. The ropes had simple knots on them but they’d been tied tightly and with considerable skill. It took Andy over half an hour to untie the two remaining ropes that bound John to the tree. Had Will not untied the rest of the ropes earlier, Andy would never have succeeded in freeing John at all.

A second later, John fell sprawling on his face with a startled outcry. His weight had been supported against the tree more by his arms and shoulder than by his increasingly numb legs for quite a long time now without his knowing it. When this support was suddenly removed, his numbed legs could not hold him up at all. With his hands still cuffed behind him and his ankles still hobbled together, he was also unable to catch himself.

“UMPH!” John exclaimed as he hit the ground and began writhing in moderate pain. Then he began to swear in a most un-Vulcan-like way.

An alarmed Andy knelt down to help John sit up. “I’ll be all right,” the older boy said in a hoarse whisper. “Here, please try taking this collar off me now. It’s that little golden key you’re wearing. I’m sure of it.”

Andy obligingly grasped the key and, after about thirty seconds of fumbling with the relatively complex lock, managed to open the collar and pull it off of John’s neck.

“Ahhhh… that feels so much better,” John exclaimed, though his voice was still hoarse and raspy. Even without a gag, he could barely talk above a whisper anymore. Even so, and even with his hands still cuffed behind him and his feet hobbled, he felt better than he had in days. Finally, he was on the verge of freedom!

Andy examined the collar with intense curiosity. “Can I keep this?” he asked suddenly.

“Be my guest!” John replied with a smile. “I never want to see that thing ever again! Don’t forget the remote. Take ‘em both and hide them where no one will ever find them again!” He was especially thinking of Will when he said that last part.

“Gee, thanks,” Andy said eagerly as he scooped up the shock collar remote with his free hand.

“Aaaaann-deee!” a woman’s voice called from far away, in the direction of Will’s house.

“Uh oh! That’s my mom!” Andy exclaimed. “I’ve got to go! See you later, Vulcan kid!” And before John could react, he was running back toward the mansion as fast as his small legs would carry him.

“Wait! WAIT!” John cried out after the retreating youngster as he strove feebly to get up. But his bonds made this difficult, and he was so weakened by hunger and thirst and from being tied so tightly for so long that he was little more able to move at the moment than he’d been before Andy untied him from the tree. “Come back!”

Andy paused and looked back for a moment, but at that precise moment came another call from the same voice. “Aaannnn-deeeee! Where ARE you?!”

“I’m sorry. I gotta go!” Andy said to John as he resumed running. “Mom wants me.”

“Tell your mom about me, will you?!” John called after him as loud as he could manage. Even though the shock collar was off now, the soreness and dryness of his throat made it difficult to talk any more loudly than the shock collar had allowed without jolting him.

“Okay!” Andy called back agreeably but without pausing in his retreat this time. He was out of sight just as another call from his mother came to John’s ears.

John moaned quietly, gathered up his waning strength, and sought to get on his feet. This was even more difficult to do while hobbled and with his hands cuffed behind him than he’d expected; he was weaker from his recent ordeal than he’d thought. But after managing to get his back up against a tree, he finally managed to painfully get himself to a standing position.

“Aaaannnn-deeee!” called the woman’s voice again.

Naturally it occurred to John that whoever Andy’s mother was, she’d probably help him the moment she saw him. Surely she wouldn’t refuse to help a boy who was handcuffed and hobbled and in obvious distress, would she? Of course not! If he could just find get to her before Will got to *him*, he’d be home free!

On somewhat wobbly legs, and impeded by the weight and limited length of the hobble, John took a tentative step toward the sound of the woman’s vice. Then another… and then another. Slowly at first, lurching along like an armless zombie or a young toddler, but gradually becoming faster and more sure-footed, John staggered along after Andy.

*****

A hundred feet away from Will, Nancy was continuing to call her wayward young son. “Annnn-deeee!” Her voice was taking an increasingly worried tone.

Will was bothered by this. It was definitely preferable to the tone his mother was taking with him at the moment however.

“You were *supposed* to keep an eye on him!” Will’s mother told her son angrily. “How could you leave him to go wandering off into the woods like that?”

“Take it easy, mom!” Will exclaimed self-defensively; wishing that his mother hadn’t seen him emerging from the woods just as she and her sister had come outside looking for him; it certainly had looked incriminating! “He can’t get *too* far! The whole area’s fenced in! So nothing can get in to hurt him, either! We’ll find him before long! He’s probably coming right now! Look, I’ll go out there myself right now and look for him, okay? Don’t worry!”

“Wait! Betty, there he is!” Nancy suddenly exclaimed to Will’s mother. Betty and Will both turned to look, and saw Nancy running toward her young son, who now appeared at the edge of the woods along the same trail Will had used to go to John earlier. He was carrying something in each hand.

Will suddenly felt himself grow cold all over when he recognized what Andy was carrying.

“Andy! Where have you been?!” his mother asked him in concern as she reached down, grabbed him by his waist, and hugged him like a teddy bear. “I was so worried.”

“What’s that he’s got?” Will’s father asked suddenly from behind Will. Will suddenly felt himself get even colder, and he began to fervently wish the ground would simply open up and swallow him alive. “That looks like the collar and remote I’ve been looking for all afternoon. And look; he even has the key for them around his neck.”

“Andy, where did you get those?” Nancy asked as she set her small son back down on his feet and looked at the strange electronic items in his hands. “What have you been doing?”

“I met a Vulcan kid out in the woods,” Andy replied eagerly. “He was being attacked by a monster tree, and I saved him! So he gave me these!”

Everyone else stared quietly at Andy. Then they exchanged puzzled glances at each other; all that is but Will - who was too scared to look anyone in the eye but simply stared blankly ahead at Andy. No one else here knew about the Starfleet uniforms he’d special-ordered online and had delivered last Saturday when his folks were already away. But surely Will’s fondness for Star Trek was too well known for his parents to not make an immediate connection between Andy’s fantastic story and him…

“Andy, what did I tell you about making up more of these wild stories?!” Nancy asked her son in a stern warning tone of voice.

“But it’s true, mom,” Andy replied heedlessly. “He wore a Starfleet uniform! The Romulans had trapped him there and…”

“ANDY!” his mom shouted, cutting him off. “I’ve heard enough! Last week, didn’t you tell me you’d met an elf who gave you a silver dollar you said you found?”

“It was a leprechaun…” Andy began in a much more subdued tone of voice.

“And the week before, wasn’t it a genie you freed from an old broken bottle who gave you that candy bar you had hidden inside your room?” Nancy continued relentlessly.

“But there really *was* a…”

“And before that, didn’t you tell me that Superman flew you to Metropolis to introduce you to Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen and Perry White and show you around the Daily Planet to explain why you wandered out of the yard?” Nancy pressed. “No, wait… that was the month before. What was it? Oh yes, it was Will Robinson wanting to show you around the Jupiter 2, and he took you to the Grand Canyon on Mars!”

Andy fell silent and bashfully scuffed the ground around his right foot with his left one. He was looking down at the ground now rather than meeting anyone’s eyes. “But there really was a Vulcan kid in a Starfleet uniform in the woods!” he insisted in a subdued voice. “I saw him! Honest, mom!”

Nancy wasn’t buying it however. She angrily plucked the remote and collar from Andy’s unresisting fingers, pulled off the key chain around Andy’s neck, and handed them all over to Will’s father. “I’m so sorry, Roy!” she said to him with quiet dignity. “I’m afraid Andy has a tendency to make up wild stories, wander off when I’m not watching his every move, and… well… to take things that don’t belong to him. I hope he hasn’t damaged anything.”

“It’s all right, Nancy,” Roy replied with an understanding voice; scarcely looking at the items he’d just spent hours diligently looking for. “I know it can’t be easy raising a nine year old all by yourself. Will there was a real handful too when he was Andy’s age. He used to be quite a mischief-maker, you’ll recall. But he’s grown out of it now and he’s becoming quite a responsible young man.”

Will looked at his father with wide eyes, to see if Roy was ribbing him; but the fond smile on his father’s face seemed genuine. Could it be that this mess wasn’t going to be the total disaster he’d been bracing himself for? He didn’t feel the remotest qualm about letting Andy take all the heat for possessing the missing shock collar, remote, and the key. All his worries were over…

But then… where was John?

“Andy will grow out of it too if you just continue to be patient with him and raise him with love like you have been,” Roy told his younger sister-in-law. “Anyway, no harm’s been done. What do you say the five of us go out to eat then? I’ll show you the lab like we planned, and then we can have a fine meal at the Chateau Briand.”

“But we’ve already arranged to have Tasha come in at six to make supper,” Betty pointed out. “It’s too late to cancel that now. There won’t be anyone here to explain…”

“That’s okay mom,” Will suddenly chimed in. “I think I’d rather stay home anyway, if that’s okay. Corey’s planning to visit me anyway, so Tasha can cook for the two of us, and we’ll save you guys the leftovers.”

“Well, okay… if you prefer, son,” Betty conceded graciously.

“Glad you found the collar and remote okay, dad,” Will told his father with a sly grin that put Roy slightly ill at ease.

“Umm… look son, about before,” Roy said quietly. “I’m sorry I thought that you had…”

“Aw, it’s fine, dad,” Will assured Roy. “I’m just glad you realize how responsible I am now,” he added with a sly grin and a wink.

Roy smiled (a trifle uncertainly perhaps) and turned to the others. “Well, now that I found what I needed, let’s take it to the lab. We still have just enough time to get it there as scheduled. Then we’ll celebrate at the Chateau Briand.” he told the others.

Roy, Betty, and Nancy walked with laughter toward the car, slowly followed by a snuffling and unhappy Andy straggling behind. “But there *was* a Vulcan,” he muttered quietly to himself.

“Hey, Andy? Will called quietly to him so that the others wouldn’t overhear. “You sure it was a Vulcan you saw?” he asked gently.

Andy nodded unhappily. “*You* believe me, don’t you Will?” he asked plaintively.

“Sure, little cousin. I believe you,” Will replied reassuringly. “So, where is he now? What was he doing when you saw him? What did he say?”

“Oh, some big old tree out back there some place,” Andy replied less unhappily now that at least someone knew he wasn’t a liar. “He was tied to a tree, but I got him loose. But he had handcuffs on his wrists and legs. He couldn’t keep up with me when mom called. Say, you’ll go look for him, won’t you? Make sure he’s all right?”

“I sure will,” Will assured his little cousin with un-doubtable sincerity. “I promise you I’ll look for your Vulcan friend the moment you leave! I won’t rest until I make sure he’s well taken of! But meanwhile, you’d better not say anything more about him to the others. They’ll only get mad! Okay? Okay, you’d better go! The others are waiting for you. Don’t give them any more reason to scold you!”

Andy smiled, hugged Will, and ran after the others, who were already inside the car. Roy started up the motor while his mother sat in the back seat, the door on his side open. “Come on, slow poke! Let’s go!” she urged him, but with a more good-natured tone of voice than before.

“Sure you don’t want to come along, Will?” Roy asked him as he prepared to back the car out into the main driveway.

“I’m sure, dad,” Will told him. “I just want to relax for a while anyway. Maybe talk a little walk in the woods.”

“All right, son,” his father replied casually as he put the car into gear. “Don’t worry about closing the gate after us. I’ll just use the car’s remote control to close it after we leave. We’ll be back sometime around eight o’clock.”

Will waved to the others as the car began to drive off, and all four waved back to him… but his mind was on someone else altogether as he turned around, faced the woods, and began walking toward them. It was time to find John and…

“Wait!” a familiar voice called out hoarsely from a considerable distance behind him.

Will turned around in alarm. John was on the far side of the lawn, considerably closer to the front gate than Will was, and running after the departing car as fast as his hobbles would allow him. “Wait! Stop!” John called out frantically. “Help meee!”

Will ran as quickly as he could toward John, but the fugitive was well ahead of him. It would take him several seconds to overtake his escaping captive. If anyone inside the car looked backward and saw John…

John had hurried toward the house as fast as he could, and tried his best to follow the same trail Andy had used. But he was not familiar with the wood trail, and had strayed onto the wrong path which ended near the main gate but took longer to traverse. By the time the driveway came into sight, the car Will’s father was driving had already gone past him. Seeing his chance for rescue passing right in front of him, John exerted himself to extreme effort; practically bounding like a kangaroo as he sought to attract the attention of the car’s occupants before they had gone out of sight.

Seated in back, Andy looked back and saw him. He waved back at John. “Look, Mom! There’s the Vulcan kid I mentioned!” he said to Nancy, grabbing her sleeve and pointing backward. “He’s following us!”

Bored, Nancy decided to humor her son and looked back.

But by the time she did, the car cleared the gate and all she saw was the wall from the other side. She saw no one.

However, Nancy merely sighed patiently and shook her head at Andy while giving him a stern look.

Being a smart child, Andy kept his mouth shut.

Seeing the car drive on without stopping almost took the heart out of John, but he kept going. The gate was wide open and only a hundred feet in front of him. He could escape through it. The departing car was totally out of sight now but - if he were lucky – he could attract the attention of a passing motorist. He could…

A surge of terror stabbed through John as he saw the gate slowly begin to slide closed. At the same time, he heard Will’s voice from somewhere behind him, shouting sternly, “John! STOP!”

Gibbering in incoherent fear, John hopped and ran as fast as he could toward the closing gate. It moved so slowly. If he could pass through it, it would close before John could reach him. It would cut off John’s pursuit. He could get away… hide… find help.

But the hobbles slowed him down so much, and he was so tired, and the gate was so far away! Seventy feet! The gate was sliding slowly but inexorably shut! It was one quarter closed. Sixty feet! Halfway closed! Fifty feet!

“John! STOP!” Will shouted from all too close behind him… and getting closer!

“Nooo!” John screamed as, with a surge of adrenaline, he recklessly surged forward as fast as he could; heedless of the possibility of self-injury.

The gate was forty feet away… thirty… it was three quarter closed. Twenty feet! Ten!

John was tackled from behind!

“NOOOO!” he screamed, and watched with horror as the gate – so close and yet so far away – slid the rest of the way along its track and reached the other end. With a loud, metallic click, it locked itself shut.

“Nooooo… nooooo… noooo,” John cried like a small child as the larger, heavier Will straddled his back, removed his own shirt, quickly wrung it with a few quick motions of his hands and arms, and gagged a still struggling John with it. John would have been no match for Will even had his arms and legs been free. Even though the situation was hopeless, he struggled valiantly anyway. Futilely, but valiantly.

“You’ve been a bad boy, John!” Will said to his captive gleefully; ignoring John’s tears as he tied the two ends of the gag tightly together at the back of John’s neck. “I’ll have to punish you for that!”

Will stood up, and contemplated dragging John by his hobbles back across the lawn. No, that might ruin the Starfleet uniform John was still wearing. Also, the smell of his now soiled diaper was starting to disgust him; dragging him might grind the stench in and ruin the outfit forever!

Shaking his head with a half-smile and a patient sigh, Will pulled the smaller boy to his feet and frog-marched him back toward the house.

[lepangolin]

Thanks a lot!! Excellent again.

[Jason Toddman]

Thanks a lot!! Excellent again.

You're welcome. Here, have another!


Part 36.

“Let me go,” John screamed into his gag, while at the same time making numerous incoherent squealing, crying and moaning noises and struggling to free himself of Will’s firm grip upon him. “LET ME GOOOO!”

“Hush up!” Will replied sternly as he slapped John lightly but repeatedly across the face. “You’re in enough trouble as it is! Don’t make things even worse for yourself!”

“I’m going to have to get that panel gag on him,” Will thought sourly to himself. “This shirt just isn’t cutting it! He’s still way too noisy! If only dad hadn’t taken the shock collar with him; I could sure use it now! Without it, John’s gonna be a real handful to keep under control all by myself! Jeez; I wish Paul or Corey were here to help!”

John writhed and thrashed about as he continued his feeble and futile resistance. But even at his best he was smaller and weaker than Will, and in addition to being cuffed and hobbled he was tired, aching, and in a great deal of discomfort from wearing a soiled diaper underneath his clothing. All in all, he had a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting away from John through physical effort, and almost as small of chance out of talking Will out of punishing him for his latest failed attempt to escape from him.

Careful not to hurt John but otherwise not being particularly gentle with his stubborn captive, Will compelled the smaller boy to come with him back inside the house and all but threw him into the elevator the moment the door opened. John squealed again as Will stalked after him, hit the button to take the elevator to the second floor, and then pinned his captive’s shoulders against the wall. He thrust his face to within inches of John’s.

“Keep still, and keep quiet… or you’re punishment is gonna be even worse than I’ve already planned!” Will snarled with pure annoyance as he grabbed John by the shoulders and began to shake him.

John looked at the larger boy fearfully. “What’s *wrong* with you?!” he tried to exclaim through his gag. “You’re taking this whole bondage thing way too seriously!”

Will shook John again angrily. “BE QUIET!!!” he yelled; barely resisting an impulse to slap John across the face much harder than he had before. He was very angry all right, but more with the way so much had gone wrong lately than with John himself. His fun tie-up game had almost come to a disastrous end; it had come so horribly close to ending that it gave Will the shakes just thinking about it. If his parents hadn’t been in such a hurry to leave, or had John been just a little faster getting to the driveway, it would have all come crashing down like… like the World Trade Center!

Will struggled internally to calm himself down. It wasn’t really John’s fault, after all. It was only natural for him to want to escape after all he’d been through; especially with the prospect of enduring more of the same for the rest of the summer! Brutalizing John was certainly not the proper way of dealing with things!

Of course, John still had to be punished for trying to escape, but he had to be treated the same way as a misbehaving dog that kept straying out of the yard would be – not like a dangerous felon who was out to commit a crime

Will managed to get a better grip on his emotions by the time the elevator reached the second floor. “Come on, we have to get you cleaned up and out of that stinky diaper,” he said to John much more calmly than he’d been just a moment ago. “You don’t want to keep wearing that any longer than need be, now do you?”

Not daring to say another word, John silently shook his head in resigned negation as he let Will take him back to his room and then to the bathroom. Once there, Will got another set of handcuffs and used them to tether John’s hobbles to the pipe underneath the sink to forestall any new escape attempt by John once his own handcuffs were removed.

“It’s a good thing that Andy and Aunt Nancy are sleeping in the third floor guest rooms beside mom and dad’s rooms,” Will mused aloud to John. “This is my sister’s room, but she’s off touring Europe for the summer and I’m the only other one who ever goes in here except the cleaners. Now that the cleaners are gone, no one else will be in here to find you if I have to keep you stowed in here. The others rarely even come to this floor; it’s generally been the private domain for my sister and me… and our guests.”

Making sure the keys to the tethering handcuffs were far out of John’s reach, Will stood behind him and freed one of his captive’s wrists from its cuff. “All right, John… off with the shirt and sling it into the laundry hamper,” Will told him with a milder tone of voice.

Without trying to speak any further, John did as he was told, leaving himself bare to the waist. He then removed the shoes and socks he’d been given to wear previously at the same time. Finally, he pulled his Starfleet uniform pants down so that they were bunched around his hobbled ankles. With the hobbles on he was unable to get them off however. The soiled and now thoroughly smelly diaper was left on him for the time being.

Will then re-secured John’s handcuffs – leaving his captive’s wrists cuffed behind his back. Untethering his prisoner, Will then walked John over to the shower stall and, as John’s hobbles prevented him from being able to step up more than a few inches, half-carried him into it. Once inside the stall, Will backed John up against the thick towel rack at the rear, and used the second set of handcuffs as a tether again – this time against the first set of handcuffs rather than the hobbles. Again stepping away to place the key to the tether out of John’s reach, Will crouched down in front of John to remove his hobbles.

With the hobbles removed and his pants already pulled down around his ankles, it was easy for John to kick them off the rest of the way; whereupon Will tossed them into the laundry hamper. However, with John’s hands cuffed behind him, he was unable to remove the soiled diaper without John’s assistance. By this time however, he was much less concerned about the humiliation of John taking it off of him than he was with the relief of simply being rid of the horrid thing at last. John therefore made no protest (which would have been utterly futile anyway) as Will reached out and gingerly pulled the diaper down and off of him. He even sighed with relief as Will stepped out of the shower momentarily to dispose of the thing.

His sense of relief was reduced somewhat when Will’s arm reached back in, turned on the shower full blast at a hot but not scalding temperature, and closed the shower door on him. After an initial scream at the shock of the hot water hitting him like a thousand sharp needles puncturing his skin, John endured this in stoic silence for a few moments. He’d been so sweaty and grubby that even this torture by water was far preferable, and he soon got used to the heat of the water.

The solid plastic shower door was opened again, but instead of Will’s arm reaching over to the shower knob to shut it off, Will stepped inside and closed the door after him. He was now wearing only a set of Speedos, and clutched a wet, soaped up face cloth in one hand and a bar of soap in the other.

“Don’t get the wrong idea just because we’re showering together,” Will told John with a sly grin as he approached his captive. “But you need a bath badly; and since I’m all alone with you now, I can’t trust you with your hands free to do it all by yourself.”

John had serious doubts about Will’s logic; surely he could have left John hobbled instead of cuffed while he had his shower so he could have washed himself without assistance. He had even greater doubts that he could trust Will’s hands not to stray in places that they had no business being!

But rather than express his doubts through his now thoroughly wet and quite unpleasant T-shirt gag, John merely stood there and endured it in silence… even when Will washed him in his private areas… though he looked away and sighed a lot. However, at least Will washed him with all the clinical detachment of a professional nurse looking after a baby or an invalid rather than leer at him or fondle him down there unnecessarily. In fact, Will looked him straight in the eyes rather than watch where he was washing when dealing with cleaning that portion of John’s anatomy.

John was still utterly mortified, but anything was better than being forced to wear that soiled diaper any longer!

Finally, Will shut the shower spray of and toweled John dry… thoroughly but again without unnecessary lingering in any one spot. Once this was done, he reached outside the shower door for a moment, and then pulled in a second, dry set of Speedos for John to wear. John’s hands remained cuffed behind him as John put the speedos upon him, but this wasn’t the worst part. The speedos were thin and lightweight, tight, left very little to the imagination, and were a bright shade of pink with red valentines on them.

This time Will’s hands stayed a moment or two longer than strictly necessary on John’s hips once he finished putting the pink speedos on him. “They look good on you, John,” Will commented with a grin as he removed the thoroughly wet T-shirt gag John had worn all through the shower.

John was about to express his thanks of being rid of that gag when Will grabbed the panel gag he’d hung of the outside of the shower door and proceeded to fit it upon his captive. John groaned in disappointment and misery but knew that protest would not only be futile but would likely be punished as well.

Securing the panel gag with its tiny padlock in back of John’s head, Will re-hobbled his captive prior to untethering his cuffed wrists from the study towel rack behind him.

Gripping John’s slender arm tightly within his own more muscular one, Will led John out of the shower stall (half-carrying him over its threshold again) and out of the bathroom. John expected to get tied up to his bed again… but instead Will led him past his bed straight toward his closet!

“Oh no! NOOOO!” John squealed in horror as, despite knowing the utter futility of it, he began struggling once again. But Will led him inexorably forward into the closet and secured the tether between John’s handcuffs and the overhanging bar. Oh no, John thought frantically to himself; not *this* again!

Grinning, Will locked the spreader bar upon John’s ankles again before removing the hobbles he had been wearing up to now. Then, with an even more puckish smile, Will stepped out of the closet, but did not close the door behind him as he had usually done before. John could not see where Will went to, but when he began feeling the now familiar tug on his wrists it was obvious that Will had gone to the control switch to the overhanging bar.

John squealed into his gag with dismay as the rising bar pulled his bound wrists upward - and therefore forced him to bend over forward and downward. The pull continued until John was forced to stand on tip-toe to relieve the ever-growing strain on his arms and shoulders. For a horrifying moment John thought the bar would continue even higher, until his feet were dangling in mid-air and his shoulders threatened to dislocate. However, it stopped just high enough so that his toes and the front portions of his feet were still on the floor to support the majority of his weight. Even so, the strain on his arms and shoulders was terrific, and John began to sweat profusely.

Will stepped back inside the closet and circled around John so that the captive boy could see him – or, rather, see his feet and lower legs; John couldn’t raise his head high enough to see more of Will than that. But Will bent down slightly to show John something he now carried in his right hand; it resembled an excessively large and thick wooden ping pong paddle with a number of holes cut into the middle of it.

“I’m going to spank you with this paddle ten times,” Will announced calmly. “Keep still and don’t make a noise, and I’ll stop at ten. Otherwise each time you move or try crying out while I’m spanking you, you’ll get another smack! So take it like a man and it’ll be over with quickly. Fuss like a baby and you’ll only make things harder for yourself.”

John tried to plead for mercy through his gag.

“That’s an 11th stroke you’ve earned now, and I haven’t even started yet,” Will said warningly as he circled around behind John again. “Want to make it an even dozen?”

John went quiet; knowing protest was futile and that Will meant what he said. He also attempted to brace himself for the spanking, which he was certain was going to hurt; but Will launched his first stroke before John managed to fully prepare himself for the ordeal and he cried out – as much from surprise as from the pain (considerable as that was).

“That’s another one you get,” Will warned him. “Just as well… I hate odd numbers. But this is the last warning you get. Now show some guts and take your punishment!”

Will whaled on John’s unprotected buttocks again; this time John barely managed to suppress another incoherent yell. God that hurt! And the strain it put on him while trapped in this strappado position made things even worse! In his position, his butt made an easy target, and the speedos he wore offered virtually no protection. Swat after swat landed on his behind like a hammer on an anvil; each other hurting more than the previous one as his posterior grew ever more tenderized (and felt like it was throbbing like his heart and swelling to humungous proportions as well).

John managed to keep quiet until the sixth swat, but that one temporarily broke his nerve. He squealed and writhed after that one, and again after each of the next two. But then he managed to get a grip on himself again as he realized that all he was doing was earning more punishing strokes. From the ninth stroke on, John managed to keep still and choke back any audible response to his punishment, until it finally ended with the 15th swat (the original ten plus the five extra strokes he’d accumulated).

John wanted to cry by this point, but suppressed it (if only barely) in case Will took it as an excuse to punish him even further.

“Normally I’d have given you something like *fifty* strokes,” Will told John quietly. “But I felt bad about you having to spend the whole night tied to that tree, hungry, thirsty, getting bitten by mosquitoes, and having to endure that soiled diaper! So I decided to take it easy on you this time. But all that didn’t give you the right to try to escape, and even worse trying to attract my parents’ attention! So now you can just remain in here for a while and think over how bad you were!”

And with that, Will stepped out of the closet, closed the door quietly behind him, and locked it; leaving a still gagged John locked in his strappado position.

John began to moan aloud; how long was he going to be left like *this*? The strain on his arms and shoulders was already so intense it was beginning to make him forget all about the spanking he’d just received!

A few moments later however, the bar lowered itself a few inches before stopping again. John was still bent far forward with his arms and shoulders raised in an intensely uncomfortable position, but at least now his feet were solidly planted on the floor and he could support almost all of his weight upon them. A moment later, John heard Will’s footsteps as he left the room, and then heard his outer room door closed and then locked shut. John was now all alone in his small, dark, silent, private universe.

Once he was certain that he could not be overheard as well as seen and uncaring about how ‘unmanly’ it might seem to witnesses who weren’t even there, John released his pent up emotions and began to cry long and bitterly.

John was unaware of the hidden microphone and infra-red camera Will had installed in one corner of the closet before John’s arrival to the mansion (but after his sister had left; Will wasn’t the kind to peep on his own older sister!). So whereas John thought he wept in complete privacy, Will saw and heard every second of it from the moment he’d returned to his own room across the room, turned on his computer monitor, and connected it to his spyware.

Although Will didn’t exactly enjoy John’s expression of suffering, he smiled slightly all the same. John’s training was coming along nicely; by the time they both returned to boarding school in the fall, John would have become the perfect slave.

[LK3869]

Gee, seriously, I just can't catch up. That Andy kid and the remote is a genius idea ( that's where I stopped today )
If I may say so, this hugely fun caracter is a refreshing event, was starting to feel really sorry for John and less sympathetic toward the others. You're cruel man ... But from what you say we're about halfway through the story so these last parts are a turning point and that's ok.

[lepangolin]

I agree, so cruel, yet, kind of "fair" in a way...
I’m patiently waiting for the next part!
Thanks for this tale, i don’t know why I didn’t get into it on the old site.

[Jason Toddman]

Gee, seriously, I just can't catch up. That Andy kid and the remote is a genius idea ( that's where I stopped today )
If I may say so, this hugely fun caracter is a refreshing event, was starting to feel really sorry for John and less sympathetic toward the others. You're cruel man ... But from what you say we're about halfway through the story so these last parts are a turning point and that's ok.

Andy is my favorite character in this story as well.

I agree, so cruel, yet, kind of "fair" in a way...
I’m patiently waiting for the next part!
Thanks for this tale, i don’t know why I didn’t get into it on the old site.

Better late than never. And here's the next part now.

Part 37.

John’s slave training had been carefully planned months in advance, just as Paul’s had been two summers previously. Corey might have been groomed to become another slave if he’d also attended the same fancy boarding school the other three boys did! As it is, he’d become a pretty valuable assistant and ally, and would have to be suitably rewarded when Will had the opportunity.

Will wished Corey was here to help him now. Once his folks returned home, John would be quite a handful to deal with for Will all alone. Even though he was considerably smaller and weaker than Will and securely tied up for the time being, it would be quite a formidable job keeping him quiet and secure while also dealing with supplying him with such basic needs as food, water, and bathroom breaks. Still, the effort would be worth it if he could get John properly trained to be his obedient slave.

There was no such thing as having too many slaves!

Of course, having an unwilling slave could be quite a lot of work if one had no help to keep that slave in line. If Will still had the house to himself all weekend like he’d expected, it wouldn’t be that much of a problem for him… just keep a tight, unrelenting control over the slave with adequate concerns for his safety but not necessarily for his comfort and the problem was solved! But keeping that slave quiet enough to keep others in the house totally unaware of his presence was a difficulty Will had not counted on – at least, not until John had had more time to train John. Now, without help, that training was likely to be very difficult to keep a secret before the others left the house to Will and John again.

John was just pondering over these difficulties in an increasingly unhappy frame of mind when the buzzer from the gate went off.

As he was not expecting anyone, Will momentarily panicked; if it were John’s parents looking for him…

“Hey, Will! It’s me, Corey!” a familiar voice announced over the intercom. “Lemme in!”

Will heaved a heartfelt sigh of relief as he looked into the monitor scree and saw an image of Corey standing by the intercom holding his mountain bike. Corey was back earlier than he’d expected! “Am I glad to see you!” Will happily told Corey as he pressed the button that would unlatch the little side gate and allow Corey immediate access to the grounds.

“Sounds like you have a special reason to say that,” Corey replied perspicuously as he wheeled his bicycle through the little side gate. “What’s up?”

“Tell you when you get here,” Will replied. “I’ll meet you at the front door.”

“Okay,” Corey replied agreeably as he shut the side gate behind him and rode his bike the rest of the way up the driveway. He rode up to the garage, carefully placed his bike safely to one side where it would not be in the way of any cars, and reached the front door just as Will opened it from the other side.

Will led Corey to the kitchen and quickly explained what had happened since Corey left.

*Whew! What a day you’ve had!” Corey said with a grin. “I saw the car Paul’s folks came in, but thought it was your own folks – I couldn’t see inside it and never saw his folks or their car before. So without Paul you *really* need expert help to train your new ‘pet’, is that it? Well, count me in! So does that mean Paul’s gone for the summer?”

“I dunno!” Will replied glumly. “I hope not, but it sounded like he was gonna be sent straight to that summer camp! Shoot, he’ll probably have a tougher time there than John’s gonna have here!”

“Well, maybe it’ll work out,” Corey said encouragingly. “Meanwhile, let’s tend to John. Sounds like you left him in a pretty uncomfortable position, so maybe he’ll be in a mood to be more cooperative by now.”

Will and Corey leisurely made their way to John’s room and opened the closet door. John immediately began making piteous whining noises that would have softened far harder hearts than what either boy possessed. Despite this, Will managed to act unimpressed and asked John with a hard, unsympathetic voice, “Well, if I let you out of here now will you be better behaved from now on?”

John nodded his head up and down so hard Corey imagined it was ready to fall off, and did the best he could to make it clear that he wished to be very, very cooperative from now on. Corey started grinning but Will nudged him with an elbow before John could see it, and he immediately caught on and set his face into an impassive frown. “I can’t hear you, John,” Will replied harshly. “Maybe I should leave you like this until bedtime!”

John broke down and began to cry.

“Oh, all right, crybaby… I’ll give you a break… *this* time,” Will replied as stonily as he could manage, although it was getting difficult to keep up the pretense of being coldly unsympathetic for much longer. “But if you misbehave again, it’ll all the harder for you!”

John looked up as high as his bent over position would allow and looked upward with large, pleading, tear-filled eyes. Will had to quickly turn around and do his task of lowering the overhead bar before his poker-face disintegrated and he burst out laughing.

As soon as John was able to stand more or less reasonably erect, Corey and Will freed him from the overhead bar. Leaving his feet hobbled and his hands cuffed behind him, they gripped his arms in theirs and hustled him back out into the main room. Weak and limp from his ordeal, John had no strength to resist even if he’d still possessed the gumption to do so. In fact, he could barely stand up straight unassisted; let alone try to escape.

Fully expecting to be secured to some new devilish implement of torture, John was surprised when the two boys led him out into the hall rather than to his bed and took him to the elevator. “A little exercise will ease the kinks out, and then you can rest a bit,” Will told him as they walked over to the elevator and on past it to another room John had not seen before. This proved to be another closet, and for a moment John feared that he was going to be incarcerated in it under new and diabolical circumstances.

But instead of pulling John into the closet, Will stepped in and hauled out something John had not noticed was inside: a sturdy wheelchair. At the same time, Corey stepped behind John and unlocked one of the handcuffs on John’s wrists so that he could let his arms down.

“Okay, John, sit in the wheelchair,” Will bade him.

Seeing no point (or even any particular reason) to resist, John did as he was told - though he needed a little assistance to ease himself into it as his legs were still a trifle unsteady.

As soon as he was seated, Corey grasped the wrist that the set of handcuffs still dangled from, placed it on the armrest, wrapped the slack of chain around the armrest, and then locked the opposite cuff around it in such a way that John’s arm retained very little freedom of movement. Once this was done, Will produced a second set of handcuffs he was carrying and treated John’s remaining wrist the same way. Once this was one, John’s hobbles were adjusted so that he was unable to lift his feet more than an inch or two off of the footrest. Then, for good measure, Will produced a length of rope and tied it around John’s bare torso and the back of the chair several times to reduce John’s ability to move himself within the wheelchair even further.

All in all however, it certainly beat being held in a strappado inside his closet!!

“Comfortable, John?” Will asked with some genuine solicitude as he covered the still nearly naked younger boy with a thin blanket to help warm him up.

Although he could have done with having the panel gag removed, John decided not to complain; this was too much more comfortable than what he was expecting to look a gift horse in the mouth. So he merely nodded and made a positive sounding “Um hum,” and hoped quietly that this wasn’t a prelude to a nasty set-up.

But rather than subject John to any gross indignities, Corey and Will simply proceeded to treat him as if he was really a mute, wheelchair-bound friend and began to wheel him to the elevator, take him downstairs, and wheel him outdoors to the swimming pool. There he was left to his own devices as Corey and Will enjoyed a little swim, but at least he was left in the shade, there was a cooling breeze, and he was far from uncomfortable. So he merely watched the other boys a trifle enviously but uncomplainingly.

After swimming for a half hour, Corey and Will waded out of the pool, checked John over, and removed his gag briefly to give him a drink. Once John was re-gagged, he was wheeled over to a shady spot out on the backyard that was well away from the swimming pool. It was perhaps two hundred feet from the back of the house across a flat (if somewhat bumpy) stretch of lawn, in clear sight of the kitchen door. They set him so that he was facing directly toward the house.

Will looked at the time on his cellphone and then turned to John. “Okay John, you’re overdue for a challenge, so listen up. It’s just turned five o’clock now. Corey and I are going inside the house now to have dinner. We’re leaving you right here. If, tied in the wheelchair as you are, you can manage to get yourself right up to the kitchen door by six o’clock, we’ll let you go free; you’re slavery will be all done. Good luck!”

Corey and Will then walked straight to the house, reaching it in little more than a minute. Looking briefly backward at John, they then entered the house to fix some leftovers for their supper.

John assessed his situation. At least it wasn’t going to be a particularly scary or painful challenge, but it was daunting all the same. John’s fingers could barely reach the rubber tires on either side of him, let alone exert much pressure on them to induce any forward or backward motion. Also, wheeling himself across a lawn (even a freshly cut one) was going to be somewhat more strenuous than rolling across a smooth floor.

John reached out with his hands and fingers and experimentally tried to move the wheelchair forward. It was all he could do to get any forward motion at all against the resistance of the grass and slightly uneven ground, but he gave it his best shot. His limber hands managed to find some purchase on the tires and push on them to make the chair go forward, but it was difficult, tiring, and heart-breakingly slow. All the same, John resolutely did the best that he could to win the challenge, and for a long while thought he was going to make it. Inch by weary inch he managed to crab forward; putting as much strength into his tenuous grip on the tires as he could.

But in the end it was no good. He was still twenty feet short of the kitchen door when Corey and Will came outside after him – not just one but over two hours after his task had started.

“It was fun watching you still struggle gamely onward even after your time was up,” Will told John with a grin as he wheeled him the rest of the way into the house. “We might have let you roll the rest of the way on your own too, if time was running short. My folks will be back home before too much longer, so it’s time to get you fed and tuck you away out of sight for the night.”

For the sake of expediency, John was ungagged and allowed to eat a generous portion of leftovers with one hand free, and then allowed to use the bathroom unfettered to deal with his sanitary needs and put on a warmer set of clothes. He was then wheeled back out of the house to the campsite that had been set up a couple of days previously, where he could spend the rest of the weekend until Will’s family had departed once again.

Once at the campsite, John was taken inside the tent and securely tied to one of the two cots inside of it. He was given some relief from the panel gag until he was securely tied down, and then it was replaced again to ensure he could not attract unwanted attention from Will’s family when they returned. To make sure the gag was secure, John was relentlessly tickle tortured for at least ten minutes. The sounds he made could not have been heard more than a small fraction of the way to the house, and the others were satisfied.

It was just getting dark when the sounds of Will’s returning family could clearly be heard coming from the house. Will gave John a final good-night tickle and left him alone in the tent with Corey for the rest of the night.

Corey watched as Will walked out of sight past the intervening stretch of woods between the house and the campsite, and then turned back to his helpless captive. Then, laughing somewhat like Yosemite Sam at his meanest, he waggled his finger as he knelt down by a frantic John’s helpless feet as he prepared to renew a merciless tickle assault upon them.

John squealed frantically and struggled valiantly to escape, but his situation was hopeless.

[LK3869]

Laughed myself silly in part 35, and good rythm and suspense after that. Will's absolute coldness still messes up my (deep) sadistic tendencies and I genuinely wish John could get some revenge... So maybe you do good at conveying John's suffering, meaning that story is more balanced than I had the feeling untill now.

Those last parts are definitly a peak, guess I'll have no choice than to keep on reading it

In the "let's get to know each other" spirit: I share your thing for T-shirts gags... Not that effective but so much fun to do, and an excuse to strip down to barechest.

[Jason Toddman]

Part 38.

Paul was not a happy camper… quite literally.

Once he’d been shanghaied by his rather irate parents from Will’s house, he’d been driven straight to Camp WillyWonka (where he was supposed to have gone a week ago to spend much of the summer) and practically abandoned there with some of his luggage (packed for him in absentia by his mother). His parents hardly spoke a word to him during the entire trip, and he merely waved when they said a rather coldly formal “Good Bye” to him as they drove off.

He felt like he’d abandoned. Being sent to boarding school ten months out of the year was one thing; did they have to be so insistent on ditching him somewhere out of sight during much of the time that remained as well? Hell, he was content to stay at Will’s house; why force him to come to *this* place?

As far as Paul was concerned, the summer camp was almost indistinguishable from a concentration camp. They weren’t intentionally cruel (well, not *as* cruel, anyway) at Camp WillyWonka as they were at such places as Dachau. However, they insisted on his doing activities such as arts and crafts which he found almost as tedious as if he were fitted with ball and chain and condemned to use a pickax to make gravel at a rock pile. Even taking John’s place as the center of attention as Will’s slave/prisoner would have been far preferable to *this*!

He was almost as old as many of the camp counselors and definitely older than most of the other camp residents. Because of his late arrival, the only cabin that had any vacancies available was the one set aside for the kids who were considered too awkward or too unruly to fit in with any of the other kids. The counselors acted like they thought they themselves were adults and their charges fresh out of kindergarten, and even those counselors who didn’t try acting like marine drill sergeants were smarmy, know-it-all jerks.

“Why couldn’t mom and dad simply let me stay at Will’s house for the summer?” Paul groused quietly to himself. “I would’ve been out of their hair just the same, and it wouldn’t have cost them a dime!”

The only theory that made sense to Paul under the circumstances was that his parents not only wanted him out of the way all summer (just like he was the rest of the year while in boarding school) but wanted him to be miserable as well. Perhaps they thought he was much less happy than he actually was at boarding school, since such places usually had a bad reputation. But Paul had made many friends his own age at boarding school and had been content to stay there. Here, there was no one his age and all the others were dweebs, cry-babies, or punks.

He was plotting his escape the moment his parents had dumped him here; observing the camp closely to find the best way of leaving again as soon as possible and then finding a quiet, out of the way spot to think as it grew dark. He was far enough away from the camp that he could barely see any lights coming from it or hear any sounds of activity from that direction.

Just as the sun was setting, a rustling of leaves nearby appraised him of the fact that someone was approaching, but he was too lost in thought to look up to see who it was. “Hi, you must be the AWOL guy,” a kid’s voice said from close behind Paul as he sat with his back against a tree facing away from whoever was approaching.

Paul looked at the direction of the voice with some disinterest, and then his eyes widened. There was not one boy but three of them; two almost Paul’s age and almost his size, and a third boy a couple of years younger. It was the third boy who grabbed all of Paul’s attention; but not because he was the one who spoke – because he wasn’t. He had all of Paul’s attention because he was gagged, hobbled, handcuffed, and being towed along on a leash by one of the other boys. He also wore only a set of white cotton briefs, socks, and sneakers; all of which, like the boy himself, were rather grimy.

Paul shifted his attention to the boy who’d spoken to him; a well-tanned, black-haired boy taller but lighter than he was. “Yeah, that’s me all right,” he admitted wryly as he slowly stood up. “Who are you guys? And who’s your pet?”

“I’m Brandon,” the black-haired boy introduced himself. “This is Tank!” he then said as he pointed to the second boy with him; a slightly overweight, freckle-faced, bandy-legged, red-headed boy with buck teeth. “And our mascot here is Matt! Say hello to the new guy, Matt!” Brandon told the third boy as he tugged on his leash.

The boy said something, but the gag was so tight (and his mouth was so obviously well-packed with some kind of stuffing that made his cheeks bulge like a chipmunk’s) that Paul was unsure if Matt was saying “Hello”, “Hell no!”, or “Help me!” In any case, he didn’t seem very happy with his situation.

Matt was about John’s age; shorter but slightly stockier, and had somewhat long light brown hair that was probably usually neatly combed but looked badly mussed up at the moment. The kid looked as if he’d been rolled into some mud and then into some fallen leaves from last autumn before being brought up to where Paul had been sitting.

“So where are you taking him?” Paul inquired with some amusement.

“We figured we’d take him to the pond to give him a quick bath, and then tie him up to a tree for the night,” Tank replied with a sly grin. “Want to join us?”

“Sure; sounds like fun!” Paul agreed readily.

“Glad you think so,” Tank said as he suddenly tackled Paul and knocked him flat on his back; knocking the wind out of him. Paul was momentarily surprised by this, but when he saw Brandon closing in on him with an open set of handcuffs in one hand and a second set of hobbles in the other he knew right away what these two had planned for him.

Tank was busily engaged in trying to bully-pin Paul underneath him while his friend tried to render Paul helpless, but Paul was too familiar with such things to be easily subdued. The two other boys had underestimated Paul’s strength and tenacity, and within seconds Paul had managed to throw Tank off of him and surge to his feet in a fighting stance. Tank and Brandon stopped, paused uncertainly for a moment, exchanged brief nods with each other, and then charged at Paul together yelling blood-curdling war cries.

Unfortunately for them, Paul was a brown belt in karate. Within a minute, both were fleeing back toward the camp and yelling loudly for help.

“Screw this shit!” Paul muttered out loud to himself. “I’m out of this dump!”

Paul proceeded to walk in the opposite direction taken by his fleeing opponents in hopes of finding his way back to Will’s house through the woods when a sudden incoherent squealing from behind him brought him up short. Matt was hurrying along after him as fast as his hobbles would allow him to go; pleading urgently through his gag.

With a sigh of impatience Paul undid the younger boy’s gag. “What do *you* want?” Paul asked him with some asperity.

“Are you leaving the camp?” Matt asked somewhat breathlessly after Paul had pulled out a wadded up pair of ankle socks out of his mouth.

“Yeah!” Paul replied tersely. “What’s it to you?”

“Take me with you!” Matt pleaded.

“What?!” Paul exclaimed in surprise. “Why do you want to come with me? You don’t even know my name, or where I’m going!”

“I don’t care!” Matt told him excitedly. “Anyone’s better than the punks here, and anywhere is better than this frigging place! Every night they grab me from my bunk, tie me up, torture me for a few hours, and then tie me up to a tree for the rest of the night! They torment me worse each night. This time they were telling me about what they were going to do to me tonight, and it was really scary! Please, let me come with you!”

“But the way you’re hobbled and cuffed, you’ll only slow me way the hell down!” Paul protested. “And I don’t have the keys to your cuffs. The only way you can get free is to go back to the guys who…”

“Noooo!” Matt wailed. “They have it in for me, I tell you!”

“Then go to the counselors!” Paul suggested impatiently.

“The counselors are the ones who put them up to all this in the first place!” Matt replied. “They won’t help me! Hell, a couple of them even join in! And I heard one say that they plan to haze you too once they catch you asleep!”

Paul might have been interested in staying at Camp WillyWonka after all upon hearing this until Matt had said that last part. But now he was more determined to leave than ever. Once again he began to surge his way away from the camp, while Matt frantically ran after him as fast as he could.

“Wait! Please! Don’t leave me here to them! Please!” Matt wailed in sheer panic. “Please! I’ll do anything you want! But please don’t leave me!”

Paul suddenly stopped, and a cool, calculating look passed over his face; one that would have taken Matt aback and sent him running back toward the camp again if he had seen it. But it was getting dark, and Paul was looking directly away from him at the time. The look disappeared as fast as it came and was replaced by one of weary impatience as Paul turned back to look at the younger boy.

“Oh, all right; you can come with me,” Paul told Matt as the younger boy finally managed to catch up to him. “But you had better do everything I tell you to!”

Matt nodded eagerly and smiled in sheer relief.

Paul grabbed the leash that was trailing along the ground behind Matt and checked the collar. The leash was padlocked on and couldn’t be removed. “I’d better hold onto this,” Paul told him. “Otherwise it’ll slow you down even more, and if it catches on something, you could break your neck!”

Matt showed no inclination to argue as Paul took his leash. Then Paul checked the boy’s hobbles. These were also locked in place and could not be removed from his ankles. However, there was a pair of screw-on clips that determined how much slack the hobbles could have. The chain was fully four feet long, but the pegs could be set to reduce the slack down to as little as a couple of inches by bypassing the chain altogether or anywhere in between. At the moment they were set to allow a slack of roughly eighteen inches; wide enough to let Matt walk briskly (if he took small steps) but not to run or jog. By removing the clips however, Paul was able to allow Matt to run – if he was careful. The chains rattled more freely and made more noise, but Paul decided that the potential increase in Matt’s speed made up for this.

It was getting dark now, but moonlight gave them some light and Matt knew of several trails that ran through the woods nearby. Paul knew roughly where Camp WillyWonka was; about thirty one miles (50 km) northwest of Will’s house. Finding a trail that ran roughly southeast, the two boys followed it as rapidly as the moonlight allowed and made good progress.

By midnight, Paul estimated that they had gone roughly ten miles (16 km). They crossed roads twice, but the trail continued on past the first one – enabling them to make good time until they reached the second one. The trail ceased here, but by this point a stream continued on in roughly the same direction Paul wanted to go. However, Matt was too worn out to continue by this point, and so the two decided to rest until morning underneath a bridge that spanned the river.

Getting comfortable was a bit of a problem for Matt; especially when he announced that he had to take care of certain sanitary needs. There was no way he could take care of needed business without Paul’s help however, but Paul did not volunteer for the job and Matt was hesitant to ask for it. But need eventually overcame pride and Paul helped him with a show of reluctance more feigned than real. Fortunately, although there was no toilet paper available, an assortment of foot-long leaves that were common to the area (though neither boy knew what they were called) served their purpose.

The two fugitives continued down the river the next morning, and two hours later reached a third road. There was a country store near the river at this point, and it was late enough for the store to be open. Luckily Paul had his wallet on him, and it contained more than enough money for immediate needs. Telling Matt to remain beside the river under the bridge out of sight of the road, Paul went into the store to buy a few snack foods and a couple of bottles of fruit juice.

Returning to where he’d left Matt, the two boys traveled a little further along until they could be certain of some privacy and took a break. Paul had to feed Matt and give him something to drink by hand, since Matt’s hands were cuffed behind his back and he was unable to do these things for himself.

“Why can’t I go to that store where you bought this stuff to get someone to help me?” Matt asked Paul suddenly.

“I told you; they’d probably arrest you for indecent exposure and for running away from the camp!” Paul explained patiently. “Don’t worry. When we reach my friend’s house, we’ll be able to get those cuffs and hobbles off of you, get you washed up, fed, rested in a nice soft bed, and get some decent clothes on you. Then you’ll be able to go home with some dignity if of looking like someone who escaped from prison! After all, you don’t really want anyone else to see you like this, do you?”

“Oh, all right… if you say so,” Matt agreed with a reluctant sigh. “How much longer before we get there?”

“We should be there by sometime tonight,” Paul assured him. “Problem is, I can’t call ahead to let him know we’re coming until we get close. Traveling though the boonies like we are, we’re out of range of any transmission towers for my cell phone to work, and will probably stay out of range until we’re within a couple of miles of his house. But don’t worry; once we get to where we’re going, my friend and I will take good care of you!”

Matt didn’t notice Paul’s sly smile when he said this.

“C’mon, let’s get going,” Paul urged the younger boy as he stood up and tugged gently on his leash. “The sooner we get going, the sooner we’ll get there.”

With a sigh, the younger boy allowed himself to be led along the river like a dog going for a walk.

[Carnath]

One of my favorite chapter^^