Subjugated (2 page)

But nothing would do. Her parents would be shot, and Jenna would undergo precisely the same fate, except with much more cruelty and a noose awaiting her at the end of her
service
.

She looked into her mother’s eyes. She could not even speak the thing that came into her mind, because the monitoring devices—the same ones installed in every house in the Western Republic to ensure law-abiding conduct—would surely be watching this scene very closely, now that the envelope had come.

Jenna blinked twice.
Plan Beta.

Louisa gave a little sob and blinked twice back at Jenna.

Jenna turned her eyes back to the envelope that could only contain the most shameful, terrible object in the twisted little universe of General Dumfries’ Western Republic. With trembling fingers, she picked it up. Then, without another word to her mother, she turned and carried the red panties upstairs to put them on.

The video feed from Jenna Caprio’s bedroom didn’t satisfy the officers in the mess.

“Clark,” said Colonel Davies, “did you forget to have the camera upgraded?”

Colonel Davies, commanding officer of the 35th Regiment, had, rumor said, subjugated twelve girls thus far, and was known to be resentful when a captain or even a major got the honor, seeing as General Dumfries had expressed great enthusiasm for every one of the colonel’s efforts. He had introduced the practice of sending a tech team to check the quality of the feed from the house of a girl who would soon receive the red panties, though there was nothing in the standing orders concerning the matter.

Bradley thought it best to go along with the licentious spirit of the mess, as he had gone along with the many dirty jokes his fellow officers and even his sergeants had already made about the week that awaited him in Springfield.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “It’s my first time, you know, and I just got very busy with all the paperwork.”

The colonel regarded the monitor that showed Jenna starting to open the envelope.

“Well,” he admitted, “it was a fine view of her crying when she saw the package. Don’t mind saying that it got me hard, thinking about what a good rogering you’ll give her soon.”

Colonel Davies had been born in England, which still maintained a modicum of national integrity and hadn’t suffered greatly in either the first or the second collapses. The little news that came in from overseas indicated that the British power grid had held together and that even the currency had reached some semblance of stability.

Colonel Davies had immigrated to the Western Republic as what some Western citizens called a
true believer:
a man who subscribed to General Dumfries’ self-proclaimed traditional values with regard to men’s and women’s sexual relations. The ranks of the Army of Western Liberation continued to swell with many such true believers, including a large number from the Eastern Commonwealth.

Nor did Colonel Davies make up the whole contingent from the former United Kingdom; Bradley had met two majors from Ireland and a fellow captain from the now independent Scotland who had made their way to Las Vegas based upon the general’s promise of unlimited pleasure for those who pleased him, in his high-rise Palace of Joy.

Bradley chuckled, trying to show himself sensible of the compliment paid him by his commander—that he, a mere captain and not a true believer, could be trusted to do his rogering correctly. Strangely, or perhaps not, the true believers looked down upon the natural citizens of the republic. Men like Colonel Davies seemed to think that their struggle to make their way to Las Vegas through the terrible wreckage of the modern world set them apart, and General Dumfries appeared to foment the tendency, elevating them quickly through the ranks.

How could a maniac be so cunning?
Bradley often wondered. The general clearly knew how to maintain the bizarre little civilization he had created.

The
Sons of the Liberation,
as Bradley and his fellow Las Vegas-educated soldiers were known, born of the
celebrations
in the towns freed by the Army of Western Liberation from fear of outlaws, might develop the sort of ideas Bradley and his old friend John Leese of third company had developed. They might recognize in themselves their dominance, and their desire to have girls like Jenna Caprio at their mercy, and yet at the same time they might understand that the compulsion that forced Jenna to submit to Captain Bradley Clark, and forced Bradley to subjugate her, violated their dignity as human beings and made the necessity of overthrowing General Dumfries absolutely clear.

The presence of true believers like Colonel Davies, though, in the ranks above them, rendered men like Bradley and Leese powerless to change anything. The occasional arbitrary execution of an officer accused of not exercising enough dominance over the women in his power solidified the general’s reign. Fear of not being able to do anything at all, rather than cowardice, kept men like Bradley and Leese from acting, kept them whispering in one another’s ears to make plans that might never come to fruition. It felt like cowardice, though, especially now that he must subjugate Jenna Caprio.

On the screen, she tore at the envelope with uncertain fingers. Bradley watched along with five lieutenants, three captains, a major, and the colonel, knowing he must not turn away for fear of being thought seditious, and because of his need to know what the girl he must subjugate was like—and because despite his fiercest attempts to quell the instinct, he wanted to feel Jenna Caprio’s young body beneath him and to hear her crying out in the pleasure he enforced on her with his cock. Then, as Bradley felt his heart skip a beat at the sight, Jenna cast a glance straight at the camera.

A whoop of laughter went up from the officers. “She knows we’re watching!” a major said.

“Little minx!” cried a captain.

Colonel Davies elbowed Bradley in the ribs. “She can’t wait for a good hard fuck, eh, Clark?”

Bradley knew he had to say something. He could feel the time expiring before it would be terribly awkward, but he couldn’t get out of his head the expression on Jenna’s face: apprehension, fear, yes… but also… intelligence? wit? perspicacity?

“Yeah,” he managed. “None of ‘em can.”

It wasn’t brilliant repartee, but at least he had calculated it to please the colonel, who guffawed. “I can attest to that, son. Yes, I can.”

The rest of the officers laughed uproariously. Bradley’s eyes, though, remained on Jenna, who had turned her eyes back to the envelope, now open in her hands. She reached her right hand into it, and Bradley saw her shudder as she touched the lacy thing. The red panties, sent to her by Captain Bradley Clark, 4th Company, 35th Regiment.

To put on. To wear, until her officer arrived to pull them down in order to punish her, to have her, and then to pass her on to his company.

Slowly, Jenna pulled them out of the envelope, to the sound—in the officers’ mess—of cheering. Red and lacy, and made of less fabric than a pocket handkerchief. The girl bit her lip, and a tear rolled down her face. Monstrous, to grow so hard at the sight, but, Bradley reflected, if he did not get hard he would not be able to fulfil the general’s will; would not put on the show required. Men who could not subjugate girls properly were executed, and the girl alongside them.

No, Bradley Clark would punish Jenna Caprio, daughter of the mayor of Springfield. Then he would deflower her, and fuck her long and hard. He would enjoy her thoroughly, because otherwise no hope at all would remain for either of them, or for the people of the Western Republic.

* * *

The red panties were of the type that Jenna knew had once been called a
thong
. These days, when anything factory-made was nothing but a tatter, panties were usually just panties: made out of unbleached stretch cotton if any was available, or loose plain-woven cotton if not. Jenna’s mother had always told her that she must feel very grateful to have any underwear at all.

“My grandmother told me once that they used to have stuff made out of rayon and polyester—even silk,” Louisa had said, and Jenna had nodded even though she had only the vaguest idea of what any of the words meant.

But somehow the knowledge of what a
thong
was had passed down through the generations, perhaps encouraged anew by General Dumfries’ apparent obsession with the garment. The underwear Jenna drew slowly (
must put on a good show for the general and his officers
) out of the packing envelope consisted, she could see, of two pieces of fabric, both of them made of nearly transparent red lace and bordered with elasticated frills that would hold the thing securely over a girl’s loins. One piece, narrow and circular, would encircle her waist; the other, tapered from a front perhaps three fingers wide to a narrow band of only a single finger’s width, and then back out a little, where it met the waistband again.

Girls whispered about the red panties, but none of them, save those who had received them, had ever laid eyes upon them, unless perhaps the girls who lived in the Palace of Joy in Las Vegas. Jenna and her friends didn’t know for sure that the Palace of Joy even existed, but they overheard adult conversations from time to time. Occasionally, too, one of the ruder boys would say of a girl who had let him go rather farther than she probably should, “I bet she ends up in the Palace of Joy,” and another might say, “I’d join the army!” or “Can’t wait to see her there!”

The rumors said that the red panties were meant to punish a girl for the shortcomings of her town or her region. No one knew how underwear could constitute a punishment, but looking at them, Jenna felt her face grow very hot as she realized how wrong her friends had been. They had all assumed that the panties must be horribly ugly—designed to make a girl look utterly ridiculous—but instead the lovely, tiny garment would do the opposite, Jenna could see now.

Looking at the lacy thing, and knowing she would have to put it on, she understood how simply wearing them would punish not just her, but Springfield, for not meeting its quota of auto parts, or having some citizen who had made a joke about the general or his army, or simply being in the wrong place on the map when the general had stuck his pin into it. To wear the red lace underwear would say to her and to all the citizens of Springfield that Jenna’s pussy and bottom had been appropriated by the general and awarded to the army, to teach her, her town, and the whole republic, the very simple lesson:
The general gives to the obedient, but he takes away from the disobedient.

Jenna’s young body, and this part of it above all—the part that would scarcely be covered, but certainly marked out, by the red panties—had been taken away from her and given to a man she had never seen, to teach them all that lesson.

All Jenna knew of sex came from her friends, and her mother, and it didn’t amount to much. The general’s program of ‘traditional values’ had ensured that boys and girls were separated in school, for the ‘human development’ unit. The girls had learned only about tampons and sanitary napkins, and the joy of child-rearing when it came to be their time.

Along with a stern measure of pointed words on the topic of the need for obedience. When a husband wished to
be
with his wife—and Mrs. Trest, the army-appointed counselor who traveled through the towns with her husband Major Trest, teaching this lesson, placed a very strong emphasis on
be,
as if it meant something more, though what more it could possibly mean neither Jenna nor her friends had any idea—the wife must prepare herself properly. She must dress nicely, and shave her legs and her armpits—and, Mrs. Trest said, her own face coloring a little in sympathy with the girls’, if told to do so by her husband, she must shave between her legs as well.

“Then, probably after dinner,” said Mrs. Trest brightly, “your husband will
be
with you, in the bedroom—though remember, girls, that if he wishes to be with you anywhere else—even outside, girls—you must obey him, and be grateful for his firm, guiding hand, and for the gift of your charms that make him want to put babies in your womb. Though, remember, if he wishes to
be
with you in another way that won’t make a baby—you’ll understand when you’re married, girls—you must obey him in that.”

Or, of course, the paddle, or the strap. Girls over eighteen received the paddle in school, for misbehavior or bad marks. Jenna had never had it.

“Your husband will, according to the general’s traditional values program, probably use the punishment strap upon your bare bottom, girls, to guide you in being a good wife,” Mrs. Trest said. “Though he is permitted to correct you by any means he sees fit that doesn’t harm you. I’m just reminding you about that now because many husbands find they have to punish their young wives in order to teach them how important it is that a husband should
be
with his wife however he wishes, and that a girl’s desires must come second to those of the man who takes care of her, and puts babies in her womb so that they can grow up to be brave soldiers and good wives themselves.”

The red panties did not really explain the matter of what
being
with a man meant, but she had heard enough rumors to have at least a little idea of what it involved. Her mother’s whispers in the garden during that awkward time when Dr. and Mrs. Trest had been staying in their guestroom while they taught the human development lesson to the eighteen-and-overs in Hilldale High had also helped. That
being
was the same thing her mother’s whispers called
sex,
and it involved—as Jenna could have told even from Mrs. Trest’s hints in her lessons—the part of her body that this shameful underwear would enclose.

She laid the panties on her pink-comforter-covered bed, and reached into the envelope again to retrieve the letter. Her hands shook as she unfolded it and began to read.

Regimental Headquarters

35th Regiment, Army of Western Liberation

Las Vegas

Dear Miss Caprio: