Kharon’s hand flagged down. “And…let the rabbits run!” he said.
Rae released her leash and watched as Travis and Perry ran to the first two people in the human line.
She watched as Perry ran to the first naked man who began the Living Path on the left. And she cringed as the man brought a long iron chain down to smack against Perry’s ass.
Travis had been excited at first about this scene. It was far more imaginative than most of the scenarios the bondage magazines dreamed up. When Kharon’s hand signaled the start of the race, he ran to the right and saw a small black snake pinned through a woman’s belly button. The snake was just a couple inches long-and fake. It was a rubber representation of a serpent. He bent to try to undo the safety pin that cut through the snake and into the woman’s skin. He slipped his fingers against the warmth of the woman’s belly, trying to cup the snake so that he could press the safety pin open, when all at once the air cracked behind him, and he felt the sting of a whip across his back. Then another whip cracked. And another. Travis fell to his knees, as the leather cut him deep across the ribs. He tried to fumble with the pin again and the woman hissed, “Just rip it off, you idiot.”
“I’ll hurt you!” he said, which only drove the woman to laugh.
“Why do you think we’re here?”
Travis grinned. He couldn’t disagree with that. He grabbed the snake and yanked as the woman rained a flogger down across his back. When he grabbed the snake, however, her attack subsided, and instead the woman gasped, as the pin that had held the snake to her skin came away with a sliver of her flesh still attached.
Travis moved to the next person in line, a brown-skinned Middle Eastern man. A black snake was pinned to the skin of his hairy inner thigh.
“Sorry,” Travis said, and this time he wasn’t gentle or tentative. He yanked hard on the snake. At the same time, three more whip cracks split the air, and one of them sank a hook into Travis’s ass. “Fuck,” he cried out, and stumbled away from the man with another snake. He shoved it in the small leather satchel that Kharon had given both “rabbits” to hold their prizes in. It was the only item they were allowed to have on their bodies. The sting on his backside was starting to make him question the ingenuity of this game…
On the other side of the aisle, Perry was having a similar experience. The people with the black snakes whipped at his legs and back as he pulled red snakes from the arms and breasts and legs of the Living Path. Soon his hands were slippery with blood from the skin he tore out of those who’d held the snake, but it wasn’t nearly as much blood as was now coating his back.
Part of him loved the pain, but part of him cried in agony. And he knew, with ten more snakes to claim, that it was going to get much, much worse.
Back at the starting line, Kharon took Rae and Gordon by the elbows. “Come with me,” he said. “You began the race, and you will end it.” He led them behind the Living Path until they arrived at the foot of the bridge of The Crossing.
“Take off your clothes,” he commanded. Despite her usual lack of inhibitions, Rae felt funny releasing the hooks of her bra in front of Gordon. But he had no problems stripping off his T-shirt and letting the bulge of his belly hang free as he dropped his jeans. Rae thought his cock looked like a stub, not a stalk. No, she decided, pulling her panties down to expose herself to him, Gordon would not be a man she played with. She needed more than just a hand that could use a whip. And he clearly didn’t have it. Maybe that was why he needed so badly to dole out the pain.
Kharon reached into a deep, wide bucket and pulled out a snake with two hands. It must have been twelve feet long, Rae thought, staring at the copper-red scales. Its head was a diamond, eyes beady and yellow-green. Its tongue flickered nervously as Kharon brought it to her. “You are the red flag, and Gordon the black.” Carefully, he draped the snake around her, laying its head in one of her hands and then wrapping the cool scales of its belly around her breasts and middle. Its tail curled and tightened around her thigh.
“Be calm, and it won’t bite,” Kharon warned.
“Is it poisonous?” she asked, an edge in her voice.
He grinned, lips pale and wide. “Only if it bites you.”
Then he stepped to Gordon and repeated the same thing, this time with a snake as dark and glossy as obsidian.
Rae turned towards the Living Path and watched the whips cracking down on the two men. Perry had reached the halfway point. He was a person ahead of Travis, and quietly she rooted for him to win. He was her rabbit, after all.
But then suddenly Perry yelped and fell to the ground, his head disappearing into the low-hanging cloud of bloody fog.
When he came back up, he was holding his leg and screaming. The steel fangs of a wolf trap gripped his ankle. “Jesus Christ,” he cried, struggling to pull the jaws apart to release his foot.
Every time he tried to loosen it, the trap only snapped back and his screams grew more horrendous. Meanwhile, the whips continued to lash out at him, now catching him in the face and the balls as he rolled around trying to loosen the jaws.
Travis was now two snakes ahead of him and Perry thought of how much worse being thrown into a pit of fire might be than the agony of the thing biting off his leg. He took his hands off the trap and instead crawled forward. The next guy was a tall, thin man, who was so busy whipping at Travis, he didn’t even notice Perry until Perry yanked the red snake off his body. He noticed then, because the snake had been pinned to the foreskin of his cock.
Perry crawled forward and was ripping the snake from a woman’s fleshy arm when he heard a horrible cry from just ahead.
Travis had found that sometimes the fog hid more than just animal traps. It hid small pits with knives. He was lying on his back, crying, with his leg in the air as the blood streamed out of his foot to drip on his chest.
“Oh my God,” he screamed. “It hurts. It hurts!”
Perry nodded his head. Inside, he answered the pain that shot through his leg with every tiny motion. “Yeah, it hurts. But not as bad as fire.”
He pushed forward, passing Travis and getting to the eleventh and finally twelfth person in line. He left them bleeding from where he ripped the snakes from their flesh. He wasn’t tentative about it at all now-he saw the prize-he ripped and ran before their weapons could connect, if possible.
And still, the whips cracked and the chains slammed. Sometimes he saw stars, but he kept moving. Someone with a cudgel beat on his ass as he crawled. He wanted to turn and rip the weapon out of their hands and beat them back with it, but he knew that would only slow him down.
Perry could feel the blood flowing down his back from where leather and hooks had broken his skin. And his leg felt very wet. He wondered how much blood he was losing; after all, he’d already bled once earlier today. He was not in a position to lose much more.
He was ahead though, even dragging the trap behind him. He only had one more snake to go. He saw that Travis had finally stopped bawling and was back in the game. He dragged his leg to the final person in line, and then suddenly, the ground dropped out from under him.
Perry fell into a hole and suddenly he felt his skin stabbed by what seemed to be a hundred knives.
And he wasn’t far off. The fog swirled, disturbed and pushed away by his fall. He had slipped into a small four-by-four pit that was filled with crisscrossed steel spikes. If they hadn’t been so close together, he would have been impaled. It would have been over. Instead, for the most part, they had just broken the skin slightly. One spike, however, had stabbed all the way through his arm, which had hit the bottom of the pit first, and he could see the bloody tip of another coming out of his right thigh. There were sharp, hot points of pain all around his back and ass.