Carolyn Faulkner
Generation Stables
Amanda Matthews was a woman who demanded respect and accepted nothing less in every aspect of her life; even to her friends – who were not thick on the ground by any means – she was Amanda, never anything as casual as “Mandy”, and to her underlings she was “Ms. Matthews” no matter how late at night they worked. She had a powerful, responsible position as the youngest executive in the investment department at a large commercial bank. She was, in her business as well as her personal dealings, what used to be referred to as “prim and proper”. Having a very singular mind towards her career goals, she had never found a man who attracted her enough to pull her away from her job, thus, at twenty-nine, she was an unapologetic and highly successful virgin, and she kept her sexual preferences, whatever those were, to herself, disdaining those who brandished their own in public.
Before she’d died, her mother despaired of her ever “finding a man”, but Amanda was quite satisfied with her life and needed no man to complete it. She had her job and a few close friends, and that was all she aspired to in this life; spinsterhood was not a concern.
It was enough, she kept telling herself as she left her job one evening, the last person out of the building as usual. The parking garage was dark and the attendant was nowhere in sight, of course. She had her keys already out, though, and looked around carefully for anyone else. She saw no one.
By the time she noticed the van pull up beside her, it was too late. A big, burly man had already jumped out, clamped a damp, chloroform soaked cloth over her mouth, and dragged her unconscious body into its dark interior, closing and locking the door with a loud clunk.
Across town, a nubile eighteen year old woman stepped out the abandoned building where a huge rave was ongoing, and had been for several days. It was so loud in there she could barely thing, and she was getting a headache, partly from the noise and partly because she hadn’t eaten in three days. Debbie Townsend took a deep, deep breath of clean air, indulging in a fullbody stretch with no concern at all about the need to be careful in that part of town. She was newly homeless; a runaway with no place to live and no one looking after her. As yet she had no pimp and was not hooked on any of the drugs that were so readily available inside.
When the blue van pulled up alongside her, she paid it no attention, nor did any of the others milling about outside. As soon as Debbie turned the corner away from the crowd, the sliding door on the side of the van opened, and she was dragged inside, the sounds of her screams drowned by the still booming music.
Generations Stables had been in business for, as the name implied, generations. It functioned in complete secrecy, with a blind eye from the government, who occasionally provided new bloodlines for the operation, or new farm or field stock.
Aaron Johnson, whose family had run the Stables for more years than anyone liked to remember – probably since its inception – rubbed his hand through his full head of black hair, drawing in a lungful of sweet smelling, early morning air. He’d just gotten a call on his cell telling him that there’d be two new arrivals in a few minutes, so he set a groomsman to making sure that all of the necessary arrangements were made in the receiving room and that there were two immaculately clean stalls ready.
When the blue van arrived, the two women were still woozy from the chloroform, bound and gagged and undressed while they were unconscious, so it was relatively easy to move them into the reception area, which was a large room with soft dirt on the floor strewn with a layers of clean hay and sweet smelling herbs, which was the required flooring in all stalls. Each animal’s stall was scrupulously cleaned out morning and evening, and Aaron was known to fire on the spot any groomsman or stable hand that passed by a stall with a mess in it and didn’t clean it out. He applied the same rule to himself, too – he would not tolerate his valuable animals standing around in filth under any circumstances, and could often be found in a mare’s stall – he definitely favored the females – with a shovel in his hand, and more often than not a sweet treat for the mare like a sugar cube or a bit of apple or carrot – or the highly prized chocolate, but that was only given out on very special occasions.
The women were arranged together in the receiving room; Aaron had found that, in the beginning, it was often beneficial to keep the mares together. They tended to be a little bit less hysterical when they were with their own kind. Each had been put into the stable’s special type of restraints for newcomers that would keep them – as well as any trainers, groomsmen, or stable hands that got near them for a while – safe. They could – and, Aaron acknowledged with a smile to himself, did quite prettily – buck and writhe and wiggle and arch, but there was truly no way out of the system of straps and stocks he had created himself. The flesh displayed before him was quite arousing, and that was no mistake at all. Each animal’s neck was encircled by a very pretty, soft leather collar that had three D-rings, one on either side and one in front. A short leather length bound the front ring to a bolt in the floor, limiting the females’ ability to raise their heads. Each feminine wrist was secured in a highly padded cuff that was chained to the floor on either side, so that neither of them could raise their hands off the floor. Each mare’s shoulders were, because of the shortness of their lead, inches above the pot pourri’d hay. Generously padded wooden stocks both supported their waists, enhancing and lifting them into the “present” position, and capturing them, holding their torsos as still as possible, and framing the lovely heart shaped asses that spilled out of them. Knees were bound and bolted, more than twenty inches apart, ankles in much the same cuffs as the other areas of their bodies, short-chained to prevent scissor kicking or, truly, much movement at all.
Amanda’s long mane of chocolate brown hair was arranged in an artful bun at the base of her neck to keep it out of the way for training. Within the next two to six weeks – depending how she took to her new situation – it would rarely be allowed to flow loose unless she was being groomed, but despite that fact that no one as yet would see its rich glory, her groomsman would wash, condition, and brush it every day until it shone. The bun covered part of the back of the bridle she was wearing – that they both were wearing. It was a training bridle with the bit removed, in consideration of the minor dental surgery that had been performed; the average person had thirty-two teeth, they now each had thirty. Two bottom molars had been pulled to make a place for the bit to rest well-back within their mouths. But for now, until their gums healed, they wore only the leather harness part of the bridle which consisted of straps over and around the head and beneath the chin, with big blinders on either side of their eyes.
They were just starting to come around, testing their bonds by reflex more so than anything else. Aaron stayed behind them deliberately. Her handlers’ looks should be of no concern to a mare. Eventually she would be able to recognize and differentiate each one of them by sound and smell alone. Debbie seemed groggier than Amanda, who, once she woke began to diligently pull at her wrists and ankles, but then Debbie could simply be more inherently submissive than Amanda. Time would tell, and the grooms would carefully note each mare’s personality traits, moods, and menstrual cycle. Of the two, if Aaron had been pressed to make a snap judgment, he would say the Debbie was going to have the easier time of it, but then, he wasn’t always right about those things. Sometimes the little fillies surprised him.
His voice was calculatedly firm and reassuring, pitched low to make them strain just the slightest to hear him. “Right now you’re probably wondering where you are. You’re in a safe place where you will never be harmed, but your lives have changed irrevocably. As of this moment, you are no longer whoever you were before you came here. Those two identities – those two human women – are gone, and from what we’ve observed, not a lot of people are really going to miss you.”