Ming

Chapter 9

The fourth time around was no easier than the first. Maybe worse. "When you think about it," as she told Lyle on the long trip in, "each lottery you survive means you're that much closer to the one you don't survive."

"And yet you say the prospect . . . or rather, the knowledge that you will be turned into meat at some point is irresistibly exciting."

"Yeah, well . . . it is."

What else could she say? Was she brave or just a fucked up? Did the extreme high she reached at the beginning of another lottery mean she was high spirited or loony? Did it really matter? She had never thought of herself as a gambler; but then, this was a convoluted kind of gambling where winning was a relief but the prospect of losing was a giddy, erotic blast-off. Nor did she think of herself as kinky. Not her real self. She would never have gotten into any of this — the bondage and sado-masochism, the feasting on human flesh — if she hadn't been trying to please her lover, if she weren't in constant fear of losing him to one of the many female temptations in his life. Even marriage had not substantially reduced that fear. Yet, the truth of it was that everything about this bizarre and precarious life did turn her on. The humiliation, the pain, the sex with strangers, the lotteries, the banquets and the knowledge that sometime in the future, maybe even today, she would be dragged to the kitchen, cooked and eaten. Especially that! It was monstrous. It made her sick with fear. But it also made her wet with anticipation.

"That was fun, last night," Lyle was saying. "And you came five times while we were doing it. Don't try to deny it."

"Only three, you asshole," she said, punching his arm. But he was right. Five glorious orgasms! Maybe six. She snuggled up to him as she relived it in her mind.

They had been lying naked on the bed working on the Will she would submit to Millennium today. He kept trying to put it aside so they could take care of a certain tumescent body part.

"Relax," he had said. "There's plenty of time to tweak your Will later, probably years."

Probably years. Was that supposed to be a comfort, that the odds favored later rather than sooner? Did she want comfort, or did she prefer the thrill of uncertainty. In any event, she didn't want to go into a fourth lottery as a potential Chef's Surprise. The Millennium Chef's surprises were boring. She was a pro herself and wanted to be a truly memorable entrée when her time came.

She had cleverly managed to parry Lyle's growing efforts to plant his body part in her garden by diverting his attention to the different ways girl meat should be prepared, but he had employed some cunning of his own.

"So where are the best cuts?" he had asked. She was about to answer when he held up a hand. "Wait! I've got an idea."

He was out of the bed and the bedroom before she could protest. He returned with a black marker — the water erasable kind used on white boards. He plopped himself back down on the bed beside her, propped himself up on his left elbow and grinned down at her.

"Since you're the expert in the kitchen and I'm the ignorant layman, how about a graphic illustration of where the meat cuts are in a tender young woman such as yourself, using your own lovely and well-proportioned body as the model? You show me the cuts, and I'll mark them off."

"Oka-a-a-y," she drawled, sizing up the game and where it might lead. She placed her hands demurely over her bosom.

"These are the breasts," she said with the air of a culinary arts professor. "They are by far the most popular cut of girl meat, partly because of their unique flavor and texture, but mostly because they are, after all, when all is said and done, tits. They are exceptionally sweet, as meat goes — even sweeter when they're filled with milk, if one happens to cook up a nursing mother. Or so I'm told, although I've not yet had the opportunity to try it. But the texture is very thin, similar to pork fat, so it's important to slice the breast vertically and include part of the underlying brisket. Combining the denser and lighter meats makes a succulent mouthful."

She began flicking her nipples with her thumbs, making the nubs spring erect.

"These dark pink protuberances are the nipples and are considered a delicacy, but they have to be prepared properly. Otherwise, they have little flavor and are quite rubbery. They are tougher than the surrounding skin so that babies and grown men can suck on them. And they're loaded with nerve endings that connect directly to the brain's pleasure center so that the female, in life, enjoys great stimulation when they're suckled. On a whole-body roast they crisp up nicely; otherwise, it's best to deep fry them separately in girl fat. Either way they make nice crunchy treats. But again, I'm going by what others have told me because I've never had a chance to taste them myself. The men snatch them up too fast. Got all that?"

"Breasts and nipples," he echoed, quick study that he was. He drew circles around the firm rise of her mammary glands and wrote BREAST within each circle. Then he drew smaller circles around the teats with the word NIPPLE and a little arrow next to them.

"By the way," Ming purred as he worked, "the best tasting breasts are the small firm ones, like these, not the big floppy melons."

"Like Candy's, you mean?"

"And Katerina's, and a lot of others I've see you ogling. They may get a rise out of your naughty bit when a girl flaunts them in your face, but when cooked they melt down to a greasy pile of sludge."

"Noted," he said, giving each of her breasts a gentle squeeze. "Actually, I agree. Huge double-D titties are rather eye-catching, but these babies are perfect handfuls, ideally sized to your exotic Chinese form. They're delightful for suckling 'in life,' as you so temptingly put it, and ideal for their eventual gourmet destiny in my tummy." To cap his point, he licked and kissed the erect nubs of her nipples, being careful not to smear the circle enclosing it.

"You're a good student," she said, giving his jewel sack a friendly squeeze. "Now stop distracting the teacher and pay attention." She tapped her upper left arm with her right hand. "This is the upper foreshank, the whole upper arm between the elbow and the shoulder. The meat can be a little tough if the girl has worked out a lot and built up the muscles, but the flavor is rich. The lower foreshank is below the elbow and there's some tasty meat there, but also a lot of tendons and gristle. It's best for stews and sausage."

"Upper foreshank," he said, and drew an oval encompassing the soft biceps of her upper left arm. "Lower foreshank." He drew a smaller oval between her elbow and wrist. He kissed the center of each and wrote in the labels.

"Now this," she used a finger to trace an invisible path around her entire rib cage, "is where you get the ribs. Girl ribs don't usually have much meat, but what's there is well marbled and juicy."

Lyle drew a line around the area and dutifully labeled it RIBS .

"Aside from the breasts, the tenderest girl parts are the loins." She rubbed her hands around her waist from the small of her back to her sides. "Especially the tenderloin here." She patted her sides. "Again, you should avoid the athletic types with hard bellies. The best tenderloins and sirloins are from soft, lover type girls." She leaned over, licked his chin and brushed her lips back and forth over his, immersing herself in the incredible blue of his eyes.

Their lips still touching, he said, "How about cute Asian girls whose husbands adore them and pamper them with honeymoons in the Bahamas, palatial homes and exciting banquets at exclusive and luxurious country mansions? Are their loins tender?"

"Theirs especially."

He spent a few minutes delving deeper into her mouth, then rolled her over on her belly and drew a broad oval stretching from one side to the other. He wrote SIRLOIN across her back, and TENDERLOIN on both sides.

After letting him wet her sirloins and tenderloins with kisses for a while, she rolled over again to be face up.

"Now this part," she patted her belly, "is called the flank. Lots of flavor, but best if the girl has spent her life stretched out on a couch watching TV."

"Or getting screwed?"

"That too."

Lyle drew a rounded square around her belly, kissed the area thoroughly and labeled it FLANK.

"Not to doubt your expertise," he said, "but isn't the flank sort of on the outside, like the outside of your thighs?"

"Only to arrogant ignoramuses who mistake military malapropisms for proper culinary terminology," she replied, and bit his nose.

"I feel your point," he said, and nibbled her upper lip.

"Anyway. We now arrive at a most delectable part of the female anatomy. This part here." She rolled over and patted her bottom. "It's called the rump. Again, one should choose a girl who has led a pampered, sedentary life to be assured of maximum tenderness; but the flavor from this cut is outstanding in any event."

She sighed in contentment as Lyle drew a large circle around her buttocks, kissed them lavishly and wrote RUMP on each cheek.

"Now we come to the hams," she said. "See the backs of what you lay people call the thighs?"

"Yes."

"Well, those are the hams. The taste is terrific, and there's plenty of it. More so on some, of course."

"Gee," he said. "You seem to be deficient in that regard."

She reached behind and swatted him.

"What I meant," he said, kissing the back of her thighs, "is that your legs are too elegantly shaped to provide as much ham as some others. Like Candy, for example."

"And Katerina?"

"Certainly Katerina. She has much hammier legs."

"A true connoisseur," Ming pronounced.

As Lyle wrote Ham on the back of her thighs, she continued.

"Finally, there is the hindshank, or calf as you amateurs refer to it. Extremely tasty and excellent for stews and such, but a little tough if eaten straight off the leg."

She allowed him time to mark it off and label it on each calf. Then rolled over face up and said, "And that, my dear student, is how one carves a girl up into her component edible parts."

"But what about the leftover parts? These pretty feet and hands, and that lovely neck?"

"Oh, there's some meat there, too. It's considered scrap meat and the best way to utilize it is to grind it up with the edible organs, like the liver, heart, womb, kidneys . . ."

"And tongue?" He touched hers with his index finger. She licked the intruding digit, kissed it and pretended to bite at it. He withdrew it quickly.

"And tongue," she amended. "You can blend it all together and make nice sausage meat out of it. Nothing has to go to waste, even the bones. What can't be eaten by man or dog can be ground up for fertilizer."

All this talk of being eaten and the sight of her body all marked up for butchering had brought Ming's hormones to a boil. At that critical moment, Lyle had spread her legs and drawn a circle around her freshly shaved sex.

"And what about this part? Anything useful here?"

"As I recall, you found a good use for it last night."

"Foodwise, I mean."

"You did a pretty good job of eating it out, too."

"You know what I mean, you slatternly wench."

"Well, there are certain afficionados who think the lips of a girl's cunt, when properly seasoned and fried, are a delicacy."

Lyle scuttled down to where he could address that area closeup, opened her labia with his fingers and nibbled lightly, first on one side, then the other, then on the little button hidden in the cleft above them. He felt a series of tremors rack her body, heard the slightest of moans and, at the same time, his mouth became slick with her telltale secretions. He capped the marker and slipped it deep inside her birth canal, now dripping wet.

"And how about here?" He wiggled the marker about and flicked her clit with his tongue. Her spasms became more pronounced, the moans louder.

"Yes!" she hissed. "Yes! Yes!" She was clutching and pulling at his thick black hair.

"Yes what?" His voice impish.

Her spasms became rude thrusts, her answer a series of impassioned cries, devoid of sense but full of meaning. "Ah! Ah! Ah!" By the time he pulled out the teasing marker, she was panting and urgently needful of the real thing. When he crawled obligingly upward over her body, she grabbed at his manhood and pulled it into her. She dug her fingers into his back and pulled him down on her, heedless of the damage his body was doing to their carefully constructed chart. When he withdrew and flipped her over to assault her from the rear, the last of the chart of her future reduction to meat was erased against the bed sheet and his own belly.

Four orgasms? Five? Twenty? Who counted? The delicious memory of the lesson kept her mind occupied and her gonads humming for the duration of the long trip to the estate, including the final quarter hour behind the blindfold as she nestled against Lyle's strong right arm.

"You called me an asshole," he complained many miles belatedly.

"Mmm. You're a gorgeous asshole. And if you stop this car, I'll rim it for you."

She heard him chuckle.

"I'll take a rain check on that. As soon as we get to Millennium, you're on."

"Like a dog on liverwurst!" she murmured.

Some time between that loving exchange and when they cleared the front gate and Lenny had whisked away the Mercedes, Ming's thoughts had shifted to the secret gallery in the basement of the East Wing. It was now only mid-morning, leaving plenty of time before the lottery for the Members and guests to amuse themselves with various pursuits. For some that meant a quick (and possibly last) fuck. For Ming, still satiated from last night, it meant a need to revisit "The Hall of Feasts." Taylor and Jade had introduced it to her on her second visit to the estate. Now, for some perverse reason, she felt compelled to see it again.

Lyle's thumb print opened the lock.

The lighting came on automatically as they entered the gallery. Ming remembered her first reaction on entering this room, the eerie mixture or awe and foreboding as she walked slowly around the perimeter gazing on the faces of young women who had preceded her as Millennium guests and whose tenure had ended in the ovens, or in the roasting pit, or the cauldron. The gallery walls were subdivided into a large number of sectors, at least fifty, each one arrayed with a collection of photos featuring a woman who had provided the main course for a past banquet. The pictures were partly candid moments captured by hidden cameras of happy times spent with friends around the estate — in the pool, on the volleyball or tennis courts, out on the golf course, at the stables and at the banquets. Mostly, however, the montage included a photographic record of her final day, including the lottery, slaughter, cooking and presentation in the Banquet Hall. Pointedly missing were the names of the women. Jade had explained that omission during her first visit.

"Honey, when your number comes up and your man gives you that last kiss, you don't have a name any more. You're just a piece of meat, and that's all. Christ! Every time I think about it I want to rub my cunt until I explode!"

As she toured the Gallery once again, Ming counted the women whose contribution to the banquets were recorded there. An invisible hand gripped her bowels as she approached the last three. There they were: Celine, Tai and Jade. Numbers 53, 54 and 55. In Jade's pictorial, Ming recognized her own face in two photos. One was taken during her first visit. She was in the pool beside Jade, both of them nude, playing water volleyball. The other showed her hanging from the Brandenburg Room gallows with Jade and Cheyenne. She shuddered at the memory of it. At the same time, the sight of it was incredibly erotic. No wonder people used to flock to public hangings!

Poor Jade. Lucky Jade. Entrée number fifty-six at the Millennium Estate. How she would have enjoyed seeing her photo layout! How poignant she looked in the photo as the Chef began to slit open her belly! How sexy she was, tightly bound and on her knees in the glass cauldron as the water began to boil up around her!

But it was not Jade's pictorial that electrified Ming the most and made her private places prickle with excitement. It was Celine's. Ming stared at the images of Celine being disemboweled and packed with spiced stuffing. Her memory of the event flooded back as she gazed once again at the gleaming spit jutting from the girl's cunt and mouth; at her carcass glistening with coats of buttery basting as it turned over the fire; and at the final presentation in the Banquet Hall where she lay stretched out, rump up, dark brown and steaming, with an apple in her mouth.

Ming squeezed Lyle's hand, then pulled it to her sex so he could feel the heat of her excitement. She did some math in her head.

"There are fifty-five girls pictured here who have been cooked for banquets. At three a year, that's over twenty years of dispatching and eating beautiful young women. And there have probably been a lot more killed than that if we include Lenny's enforcement activities. So, my darling husband, how have you guys been able to keep all this a secret for all these years?"

"For one thing," he said, fingering the valley of her womanhood right through her dress, making her squirm with little thrills, "everyone here, except the newbies, is a seasoned cannibal. We eat the flesh of our own friends and lovers, a fact no one is eager to reveal about themselves to the outside world. That tends to keep mouths sealed. That and the fear factor. Meaning Lenny. Furthermore, if anyone does come snooping around, it's unlikely they'll find any evidence. All the scraps and leftovers, all the cast off clothing, everything —is all incinerated in a crematorium adjacent to the kitchen and Banquet Hall. We also prepare convincing documents for every one of our PG's that logically explains her sudden disappearance when she eventually wins a place in this gallery."

"Oh? How about me? Where will everyone think I went?"

"Not for you to know. Enough for you to know that I plan to screw your brains out after we've dined on the next girl to be honored here."

"Actually, anyone searching the joint would certainly find this gallery and it's a treasure trove of evidence. Shows you killing, cooking and eating all your guests."

"Not all of them."

"Right. Only the female guests. But you gotta admit: this is all fairly graphic evidence. These aren't paintings; they're photographs. There's Tia having her head cut off. There's Celine impaled on a spit. There's Jade having her guts ripped . . . "

He put his fingers on her lips. "Okay. Point taken. Look overhead, Ming. See those little sprinkler spigots? They aren't there in case of fire. They're there in case a fire is needed. If any law enforcement types ever show up with a search warrant, those spigots will spew a flammable liquid all over this room. A few seconds later an electrical spark will turn it into a furnace. All the cameras around the estate are digital these days and the server with the hard drives is in a cabinet in that corner. It'll melt in the holocaust."

"Okay, but what if cops show up while one of us girls is on the spit, or being chowed down by her friends?"

"There's a series of formidable barriers any law enforcement party has to get past between the perimeter of the property and the mansion. It leaves plenty of warning time to clear the kitchen, the roasting pit, the ovens, the cauldron and dining tables of all traces of human meat. It all goes straight into the crematory chamber. If necessary, the kitchen and Banquet Hall can also suffer a tragic fire. It's all been designed into the structure of the building."

"How about any telltale teeth or bone fragments that survive the crematorium?"

"This is not your ordinary crematorium furnace. The fire is much hotter, and once started, it can't be stopped without a special computer code. Or it runs out of fuel. In short, nothing comes out but fine powder."

In actuality, Ming didn't care much about Millennium's whiz-bang security features. She didn't want to be saved by a SWAT team when her turn came. But there was one tiny burr that caught in her craw. It was stupid, but she couldn't resist niggling at it.

"Show me which of these girls were your previous guests, before me."

Lyle's face darkened. "Why would you want to know that? Haven't I told you how deeply I love you? Haven't I promised to cherish you till death do us part? Why stir up jealousy over dead predecessors?"

"Because they're part of you. You were as intimate with them as you have been with me. And you ate them as you will eat me someday. Maybe even today."

"Don't talk like that. There are eleven other women in today's lottery. The odds are way in your favor. We'll have lots of time together."

"I just want to know. I'm not competing with your earlier girls. They're gone. But can't you understand my curiosity? These are my sisters, in a sense. We've shared your affection and your penis. Eventually I'll be a part of your cells, as they are already. How many are there?"

"Only two."

"Let me see their faces."

After a long moment, still dubious, Lyle said, "Nothing good will come of showing you who they were."

"Oh yes it will," she said, too close to satisfaction to give up now. "Show me the first one and I will give you a blow job this afternoon that will uncurl your hair. Show me the second one and I'll call in Candy's little fifteen year old fuck-tart, Cherry, to help rev you up for that screwing you promised me tonight."

His eyes lit up. "Okay, you're on. But if your little green-eyed monster shows up now or at any time in the future to throw this in my face, I'll call Lenny and have you hauled off for dog food. You hear?"

"Got it. Dog food."

"And FYI, Lenny's standard procedure for slaughter, after he rapes his victim, is to torture her, then string her up and skin her alive. He does her arms and legs first. Then he starts a three inch wide strip over her left breast and begins winding her skin on to a stick in a continuous strip, going around and around her body, all the way down to her cunt. After the skin is all peeled off, he starts carving off slabs of her meat. He avoids the main arteries and veins, so the girl can last ten or fifteen minutes before she bleeds to death."

"Considerate. Lenny's such a charmer."

"He is. And just so you can fully appreciate his dedication and the consequences of bad female behavior, let's first go over to the display showing him at work on a girl who made an unfortunate decision."

"Which was?"

"That she didn't want to be a Permanent Guest here."

He took Ming's hand and led her across the gallery to a block containing six photos featuring a slightly younger Lenny and a pretty dark-haired young woman whom Ming guessed to be not much more than twenty and about five foot nine. She was suspended by her wrists with her ankles spread and tied to ring bolts in the floor. Even stretched out to a taut X it was obvious she had a lush figure with long shapely legs and the firm, upright breasts of youth. In the first photo Lenny was grinning into the camera and holding up a bowl filled with four huge pine cones. The girl looked both angry and terrified, an expression that changed to sheer pain in the second photo as Lenny forced a pine cone into her pussy. In the next one he was holding up four fingers of his left hand; the same four fingers of his right hand were deeply imbedded in the girl's sex. Her head was thrown back in a scream. Blood was flowing over his hand and streaming down her thighs. The bowl, now on the floor, was empty. Four pine cones jammed inside her most sensitive place? Ming shuddered. The third picture was worse. The girl's face was a mask of agony as Lenny stripped the skin off her left arm. He had made a shallow cut all the way around her wrist just below the rope and another around her shoulder. A long slash from wrist to armpit joined those two cuts and he had peeled the skin nearly down to her shoulder. In the fourth photo both arms and both legs had been skinned. He had moved on to her torso and was on his second trip around her body, rolling a strip of skin on to a baton, exposing a horizontal swath of raw meat from just below her throat to just under where her nipples had been. In the fifth photograph Lenny, covered in blood, stood beside a still living girl whose skin had been entirely removed, except for her hands, feet and head. It reminded Ming of the anatomy drawings in her biology textbooks: the musculature and mammary glands of the human female in vivid, gory color. Lenny looked pleased with himself. The girl was clearly beyond agony, waiting for the blessed release of death. In the sixth and final photo he had removed most of the meat from the girl's frame and her intestines had tumbled into a pile on the floor. Her meat was piled on a table, her skin draped over a rack. All that remained of the beautiful young woman was a picked-over skeleton.

Ming was fully aware that Lyle had shown her this grisly montage to cow her into a docile acceptance of her situation. He was obviously afraid that seeing the actual faces of her predecessors would break the love spell he had cast over her, that she would see herself as merely his latest contribution to the livestock inventory at Millennium. But the pictures of Lenny's brutality had just the opposite effect. The prospect of being strung up like that and used so cruelly was intensely exciting to her. She knew she would not be able to bear such extreme pain, but the idea that it might be forced upon her released a powerful rush. She smiled up at Lyle, her face aglow with the adrenalin surge.

"Wow! How many lucky girls has Lenny flayed and butchered alive over the years?"

"Many." Lyle couldn't tell if she was serious or facetious.

"And all that good meat goes for dog food?"

"Well, no. A lot of it is eaten here between banquets, or frozen and shipped to our affiliates around the world. We don't waste the good stuff."

"Meaning the younger girls."

"Precisely. Now, do you still want to see your ghostly rivals?"

"More than ever."

He led her to a display about a dozen pictorials before Celine's. Ming's mouth fell open.

"My God! She's Chinese! Or looks it. Is she Chinese?"

"Yes. What's so amazing about that?"

"I don't know. I guess it just hadn't occurred to me that I wasn't one of a kind for you, that you might have a thing for Asian women. She's lovely!"

"Was. These photos are all that's left of her now."

"What was her name?"

"Liaohongmei."

Ming cocked an eyebrow at him. "Spell it."

He did. "She was from Zhenzhen, China. I called her Lia for obvious reasons."

"How'd you find her?"

"On the internet. An international dating site. She was eighteen. I remember her blurb, word for word. 'The beautiful, well educated and kind me is a girl who cherishes love, likes adventures and persistent in affections. Hope to find strong man who likes into same and takes new places of me.' How could I resist a sales pitch like that?"

"Tell me about her."

"She was about five-one, weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet, had cute little boobs and a radiant smile. Just like you see in that first picture."

"She couldn't have provided much meat for this crowd."

"No, but the kitchen supplements with meat from the freezer when they need to. And she did look great on the spit, as you can see. Had wonderful flavor, too. Very juicy. She had herself cooked à l'orange ."

"How old was she at that point?"

"Twenty. She'd been a PG for two years."

"She didn't object at all?"

"Well, sure. At first. Most do. But she wanted to please me more than anything. And once she got into it, she enjoyed it here. Until she lost the lottery, of course."

Ming was studying the picture of her roast. "There's no head."

"No hands or feet, either. Just little cuffs with ruffles. European style."

"Guillotine?"

"No. She wanted to be treated like a livestock animal. So they hung her up by the feet, cut her throat and bled her out."

"And the supplementary meat from the freezer: would that be one of Lenny's contributions?"

"Probably. Or sometimes a PG fails to survive a preliminary lottery round, like when you were hanged."

"They told us we'd be dog food!"

"Which might well happen. But first you'd be butchered and put in the freezer. Any meat that stays in there too long they eventually sell for dog food. They're going to be amending their meat storage policy, though, because some Members and PG's object to the frozen stuff. They're converting a block of rooms as a dungeon to hold Lenny's retrievals and keep them alive until needed. That way they'll have a ready supply of fresh meat to supplement the featured presentation. There's even talk of going to double features when needed, one girl supplied by the lottery and the other from the dungeon, so that we'll always be assured of a live spitting."

As he spoke, Lyle moved Ming further down the line of displays until they reached one featuring a young blonde woman with huge blue eyes and a bosom that triggered Ming's instant envy.

"This was Layla," Lyle said. "She was from Odessa, Ukraine. I got her through the same dating site."

"Is that where you'll go for my replacement?"

"I'm counting on not having to replace you for years to come, my love. But yes, it's an ideal venue. A girl brought in from another continent who has no resources of her own and barely knows the language feels isolated and dependent. Those handicaps, plus the potential of a visit from Lenny, are highly persuasive factors in her decision to go along with the program."

"To accept the pleasures of cannibalism and the thrill of being a future dinner, you mean."

"Exactly." He kissed her, pinching her nipples through her dress.

"She was from Ukraine, you say. Same place as Katerina?"

"Same country. Different city. Katerina is from Donetsk."

"Did Tom find Katerina through a dating site, too?"

"Matter of fact, yes. Same site."

Ming's attention drifted from Layla's cleavage to her hair. "So, you don't always go for the raven-haired Asian types."

"I have eclectic tastes."

"And you don't always prefer small, firm boobs."

He crushed Ming's in his hands. "Variety is the spice of life. But I'll admit, you were right on the money about tits. Layla's jugs were as soft and mushy in bed as they turned out to be on a plate. Whereas yours are an infinitely more arousing mouthful. I can only imagine how scrumptious they'll be when properly cooked."

He leaned down as if to bite one off. Ming backed away coyly.

"I see, also, that she had herself all tucked up on the spit with her legs folded under her up against her belly, and her wrists bound together under her shins. That looks very sexy."

"Yeah, but the Chef hates it. Hard to roast the carcass evenly. And when they do it that way, they have to run the spit through her asshole instead of her cunt."

"So what's the problem with that?"

"The hot metal spit helps crisp the labia. When it's not there, they have to cook the cunt lips separately. Not as dramatic a presentation as when they slice them off right there at the carving table."

"Was she spitted live?"

"You bet. She was one scary pain slut! From her first introduction to the Iron Feather Club she could never get enough whippings and canings. She loved to be left on display for hours in a severe hog tie, often with heavy weights clamped to her nipples. She loved tit torture, cunt torture, tongue torture, you name it. I hung her by her hair once for fifteen minutes. I'd hobble her, hands and feet, and chase her around the house with a whip or a cattle prod making her scream for mercy. The next day she'd plead with me to do it again. I hung her by her wrists for a whole weekend once. She'd made me promise not to take her down no matter how hard she begged, so I strung her up in the cellar and went off to a golf tournament. But I left a camera to record her suffering, which was considerable, to say the least. She watched that tape over and over, reliving the agony. She practically went nuts when I brought her here! Couldn't wait for her turn. Didn't take long, either. The final test of her second lottery was a joust on a plank. She let herself get knocked off it by a girl six inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter. I'm sure she did it deliberately, because she stood up and winked at me as Lenny cuffed her. Her meat was good, too. Not as tender and sweet as Lia's. More gamey. But good."

"How old was she?"

"Eighteen when I brought her over from Ukraine. Nineteen when she was spitted."

"They wrapped her hair in foil."

"Yeah. She was very concerned about that. Her wild blonde hair was her greatest glory and she wanted it saved from the fire so it could be wrapped in a bun and pinned with a red rose for her presentation at the banquet."

"Very pretty." She sighed. "I guess I may as well say it. I've decided I don't mind being third in your line of edible girls. I don't even mind that there'll be more after me. In fact, that makes it even better. Being your wife is nice and I love you for granting me that, but knowing that it's just a cover for my real relationship to you, that secretly I'm your property, soon to be turned into meat just like your previous girl properties, makes me hot as hell!"

"I'm glad. But actually, Ming, you're the property of the Millennium Group. I just have you on loan until it's your time to be our meal."

"That makes it all the more deliciously erotic! Think about it! They own me now, just a piece of livestock, because you brought me here and gave me to them. You can only give away what you own. And you do own me Lyle, or did. I insist. Come here!"

She grabbed him with both hands by the waist and drew him in, kissing his neck and mouth voraciously. Then she dropped softly to her knees, zipped open his pants and pulled out his fast responding manhood. She was still sucking and licking it with fervor when another couple entered the gallery. Lyle grinned sheepishly at them but Ming never let up until he gasped, bucked into her face and jetted hot spunk into her throat. She continued to swallow and suck feverishly as the couple turned away, smiling, to peruse the pictorials.

She cleaned him off meticulously with her tongue, so well, in fact, that he started to rise for more. She tapped it with a finger.

"No, no. That's enough for now." She tucked it back in his pants. "Save it for tonight. You promised to fuck my brains out, and since I'm only on loan, you'd better try to keep me happy."

"And you promised me a threesome with Cherry."

"All the more reason to keep something in reserve." She zipped him up and stood. "Come on, dear doctor. Let's find Cherry and set it up."

They found her on the tennis court lazily returning lobs from a sweating Member four times her age. She was wearing her usual thin cotton ensemble of low cut, high-riding top over low-riding micro shorts over nothing at all, affording her opponent plenty of distracting glimpses of ripening fifteen year old body parts. When the older man had finally suffered enough humiliation and left, they fell in step with her on the way back to the mansion.

"You booked for tonight, Cherry, after the banquet?" Ming asked.

"Maybe. Maybe not. Why?"

"Cause me and Lyle thought it would be nice to get to know each other better. Y'know?"

Cherry eyed them. "You? And Lyle?"

"Yeah. If you're free."

"I'm hardly ever free , honey. But you did say Lyle, huh?"

"Very definitely Lyle."

"Yeah. Okay. Tenish, okay?"

"Tenish. In Suite 207."

"I'll be there!"

Ming bet she would! It was her experience that all women everywhere wanted a piece of the wickedly handsome Dr. Bach. The best piece, of course. The very piece she intended to monopolize herself for the brain-devouring sex he had promised to deliver tonight. She would have to work on how to accomplish that with the busty and bouncy Cherry competing for it.

Hand in hand, Ming and Lyle wandered into the center courtyard. The grounds crew had strung a half dozen cables between two horizontal beams about twenty feet off the ground. Ropes dangled from pulleys at each end of the cables, a distance of some fifteen feet. To Ming each cable looked for all the world like a dog run set up for a dog at each end. It had obviously been put up for the lottery. She tried to imagine how it would be used.

At that moment the gong sounded.

All conversation, all activities on the estate ceased.

It was a chilling sound for every female there. It tolled the beginning of another lottery, another trial to determine which of them had eaten her last breakfast, put on her last dress, made love for the last time. Ming felt her heart skip a beat. Eros and fear gripped her with equal and opposite fervor. Risk was so enthrallingly exciting! But death was so frighteningly permanent.

The women of Millennium, pressed on by their lovers and sponsors, arrived in the Great Hall dutifully, if not with great enthusiasm. Within five minutes all were accounted for.

"A warm welcome to all our beautiful ladies," the Lottery Master, boomed. "For our two newest Permanent Guests, Ashley and Tanya, I extend a special welcome. My name is Tad and I know you two are probably a bit nervous, this being your first lottery; but chances are, you'll have a long time and many wonderful banquets to get to know us all. Right now, though, it's time to find out which of our twelve sexy and delectable young women here today will feed the rest of us tonight?

"Today's lottery has been divided into three parts. The first part will be a physical contest that will eliminate half of you. For that we will divide you into two teams: the Yellow Team and the Purple Team. Lenny is holding a sack containing twelve boxes. Pull one out and open it up. The color inside will determine your team."

Lenny appeared at Tad's side holding a sack open with both hands. He made no effort to move among the women, so they began to approach him, reaching into the sack to extract a small cube. Ming was the third to pull one out. It was about an inch to a side and hinged in the middle, the two halves kept closed by a tiny catch. Ming popped hers open to reveal a small swatch of purple material. When all the women had obtained a cube, the Lottery Master spoke again.

"Lenny will pass amongst you with a silk scarf matching your team color. Don't put it on. Just take it and assemble with your team, Purple on my right and Yellow on my left."

Lenny had yellow scarves draped over his left arm and purple ones over his right. Ming took a purple scarf and joined her team. It consisted of Katerina, Candy, Brandi, Tanya and a veteran PG named Apple she'd seen at the previous banquets but only knew by name.

Tad waited until the teams were fully assembled, then ordered them to follow him to the main courtyard. Ming figured she was about to learn the purpose of the six overhead cables. It wouldn't be good.

Lenny and a member of the grounds crew lined up the two teams at opposite ends of the cables while the Lottery Master resumed his oration.

"What you see here, ladies, are six trolley cables. You're going to be tethered to those cables by the ropes hanging at each end. The ropes are hanging from pulleys so you'll be able to move along the path of the cable. You're also going to be equipped with some special mittens and mounted on very special steeds. First, let's attend to those mittens. Gentlemen?"

Lenny appeared with three other male staff members, each carrying a large box. The boxes were filled with puffy oval mitts which he and his assistants began fitting over the women's hands, binding them on with duct tape. The gloves were thumbless, thick and as soft and spongy as nerf balls. Someone could hit you in the nose with one of these, Ming thought, and it wouldn't hurt. Her purple scarf was draped over her left arm.

When all twelve women were mittened, Tad continued.

"Now it's time to mount you on your steeds. Bring on the steeds!"

On cue, all the Members — Lyle included — emerged from another part of the mansion into the courtyard. They were strapped into white straight jackets like a dozen Hannibal Lectors. The women broke into nervous laughter at the sight of them. Lyle came straight to Ming's side.

"This preliminary elimination round," the Lottery Master said, "will be played piggyback with your sponsors as horses. Two members of our kitchen staff have kindly — I might even say eagerly — volunteered to be horses for Candy and Cherry, our lovely Permanent Guests at Large. Now, mount up, ladies!"

The men knelt down so their female partners could climb aboard. Unable to grip anything because of the mitts, it was a clumsy and humorous operation. Nor were their partners able to help because of the straight jackets. But eventually all twelve women were mounted piggyback, albeit precariously. The "horses" stood up carefully. A few of the older men needed some help.

"Now then, ladies, please be patient while Lenny and his helpers tether you to the trolley cable and add a couple of other items."

With the aid of step-stools to boost them up, the four men looped the ends of the ropes around the women's necks, tying them off with almost no slack. It was immediately apparent to Ming that if she slipped off Lyle's shoulders, she would be hanging from the cable. Oh no! Not again! He obviously couldn't help her because of the straight jacket. She tried to snug her legs more securely around his neck, locking her ankles together. She put her forearms under his chin. Now the groundsman was stuffing a ball gag in her mouth and buckling it in place. The last thing he did before moving on to the next horse and rider was to tuck her purple scarf under her left buttock.

Tad resumed. "While the last of you gals gets a noose around your pretty necks let me explain the other two items. The gag is so you can't communicate verbally with your horse. I mean, that would be silly, wouldn't it? Who talks to horses? We don't gag our Members, of course, but they know that horses don't talk either, and if they attempt to talk to you, you're an automatic loser. Let's hope you're on good terms with your horse." He stopped to chuckle at his own drollery. "I'll explain the purpose of the scarf in a minute. Just make sure you don't let it slip out from under your cute little ass.

"Here's how it's gonna go. This is not really a team thing. It's one on one. You ladies will do battle with the gal at the opposite end of your cable. The object is to force her off her mount. Your horses are not allowed to trip, bump or otherwise participate in the battle, except to carry you to where you can do it yourself. You, on the other hand, may employ whatever artifice you can devise to unseat your opponent. If your opponent winds up swinging in the wind with her scarf on the ground, you win. If you both are unhorsed, the winner will be the one whose scarf hits the ground last . So I repeat: keep your little butt down tight against it. Lenny and I will be watching those scarves real close. If there are any slackers, by the way, if anyone decides to just hang on and not fight, Eddie over here, our chief groundskeeper, has a cattle prod he loves to use. Needless to say, although I'll say it anyway, the six winning riders will be free to enjoy the rest of this fine day. The unhorsed six, on the other hand, will go on to the next round. So . . . are you ready, ladies?"

The facial expressions among the women ranged from grim to terrified. Only Katerina responded to the question, raising both mittens high and glaring at her opponent. But all the "horses" gave quick, affirmative nods on their behalf.

Ming noticed Tad had said nothing about when and how the hanging girls would be rescued. But there was no time to worry about it now.

The LM raised an arm. "All right girls, here we go. Ready . . . Set . . . CHARGE!" He chopped the arm downward.

Lyle lurched forward. Ming clung more tightly to his neck and head, suddenly conscious of how slippery the scarf was under her butt, the silk sliding against the fabric of his straight jacket as his body swayed. She looked up at the girl coming toward her, sizing her up for the first time as a mortal enemy. Her name was Ashley, one of the newbies at the last banquet. Unlike Ming, she had not thrown up when she discovered what she was eating. After a stunned "Oh-my-God!" or two with her clapped hand over her mouth, she loosened up, joined in with the general laughter and dug into a second helping. She was quite young, seventeen as Ming recalled, and tall — several inches taller than Ming — with a riotous cascade of curly reddish hair tumbling down over her shoulders. She had the supple and powerful figure of an athlete — perhaps a swimmer or a tennis player — without an ounce of excess fat. The chef in Ming dismissed her as a poor prospect for a tender meal; but the survivor in her warned that this hard-bodied teen was a serious threat.

As if that weren't bad enough, Ashley's "steed" was a Millennium Member named Evan, a man she knew to be an ex NHL pro whose fortyish body was still formidably massive. If push did come to shove, despite the LM's stricture against horse participation, Lyle was pathetically out of his weight class. A thoroughbred vs. a Percheron.

The gap between them was closing quickly. Ming had to come up with a plan fast or concede the initiative to Ashley. She pictured Ashley's strong arm suddenly around her neck, dragging her easily off Lyle's shoulder. She couldn't allow that to happen! She decided her only hope was a preemptive attack. She ached to tell her intentions to Lyle, but the damned gag converted all her words to useless groans. Instead, she spurred him with her heels, hoping that would convey the message.

Lyle picked up on the clue and plunged suddenly toward the oncoming couple, trying to move left of them so Ming could use her stronger right arm for whatever she planned to do, but Evan blocked him. This brought the two women face to face and within reach of each other. Both threw simultaneous hard, roundhouse right hand punches into the other's face. Ming was rocked back by the force of Ashley's more powerful blow. It had landed squarely on her nose and pain flared through her face in spite of the mitt's spongy padding. She flung a left hook counterpunch, but reaction to the pain had delayed it a fraction of a second too long and Ashley blocked it, landing her own left against Ming's right ear. That didn't hurt, but threw her off balance, forcing her to spend a half-second readjusting her body so she wouldn't slide off Lyle. That was just long enough for Ashley to fling her right arm around Ming's neck, exactly what Ming had feared most.

Seeing his mount had a firm lock on Ming, Evan swiftly began backing up. He had to be careful not to move too far right or left lest she be pulled off by the tether line around her neck. He could see that Ming was leaning precariously forward, both arms around Ashley's waist and scissoring Lyle's neck so hard with her thighs that his face had turned bright red. She was trying to stay on him without losing the silk scarf under her bottom, but it had dragged him off balance, making him stagger. Evan knew a thing or two about breaking and holding tackles and hoped Ashley was as sharp as she was beautiful. Without warning he reversed directions and bolted past a surprised Lyle. He couldn't go far because the pulley's over head collided on the cable. He could feel Ashley's body pulled upward, her legs nearly decapitating him as she tightened her grip. But he also saw Ming wrenched sideways, her purple scarf flying, her legs tearing past Lyle's ears.

Horrified, angry with herself, Ming clung tenaciously to Ashley, hoping to pull her down with her. But it was a useless cause. What would she gain by that? She could see Ashley's yellow scarf still pinched between her thigh and Evan's shoulder. Just barely, but still there, making her the winner of this little contest. Reluctantly, knowing it would mean slow hanging again, she spread her arms and let herself swing away from Ashley, feeling the noose bite into her neck. She also felt Ashley's fingers brush her cheek, saw the look in her eyes. It was not a triumphant look. It was a wan, sorry about that look. A please don't take this personally look. I only did what I have to do to stay alive. Just like you .

Ming was swinging gently, twisting, her feet kicking, searching for ground, her hands unable to grab the rope, climb it, loosen it, her body desperate for air. She could see four other girls hanging, twisting and kicking like her. The scarves made purple and yellow splotches on the flagstones. Then a fifth girl fell away from a grappling match, dragging her opponent with her. Six women hanging, thrashing. But now all Ming could think about was air! Black dots were filling her vision. Drool ran from the corner of her mouth. She felt a bump against the back of her thighs. Something forcing its way between them. A voice broke through her focus on the need to breathe.

"Open your legs, Ming! Open them for Chrissake so I can lift you up!"

Lyle's voice! With her last ounce of rational thought, she made her legs obey, spreading them so her lover could insert his neck between them and rise from where he had squatted beneath her, lifting her and alleviating the deadly grip of the noose. She made mewling noises as she struggled to suck in and expel air past the loosened but still tightly cinched rope. Bless you my sweet, darling Lyle! she wanted to say, but, of course, could not.

Half a minute later the winches holding the cables taut let it go slack and all six hanging women were on the ground, their legs shaky as they gasped in air.

"Well, that was fun!" the Lottery Master announced. Congratulations to our six successful combatants! As soon as your steeds have been relieved of their straight jackets, they'll help you out of your mitts, gags and nooses so you can all order some well-earned drinks and watch our six semi-finalists compete in Round Two. Those semi-finalists are . . ." he paused for dramatic effect and pointed them out: ". . . Katerina, Apple, Ming, Candy, Kayla and Amanda. Beauties all! Any one of them will make an excellent dinner for us tonight. We'll give them a few minutes to recover from their hanging and then we'll proceed to the Rembrandt Room for the next phase of the lottery.

The Rembrandt Room turned out to be two doors down from the Brandenburg Room. It was long and narrow, its walls lined with reproductions of famous 18 ^th and 19 ^th century paintings. Hence the name, Ming assumed. And perhaps some of them were not merely reproductions. But the room's dominant feature was a path about a yard wide and ten yards long that stretched nearly its full length. The path consisted of copper disks, about a foot in diameter, laid out in ten rows of three disks each between foot-high rails. To Ming they looked like round metal flagstones.

Lyle had walked her to the room with his arm around her, murmuring reassurances in her ear. "Don't worry, sweetheart. You've still got a five out of six chance to be romping with me and Cherry tonight. In Vegas that would be considered spectacular odds! No sweat."

But there was sweat. Her nervous system was on full alert! She knew as well as he did that her real chances of ending up on a platter had suddenly dropped from one in twenty to fifty-fifty. God knows what would happen here, but it didn't look to her like it would be a matter of pure chance. Any contest involving skill was skewed, good or bad. In the case of the piggyback fight it had been disastrous. Ming was no fighter, and certainly no match against that strawberry blonde Valkyrie and her linebacker horse.

The voice of the Lottery Master took charge once again.

"All right, let's separate our contestants from their fan clubs. Spectators to the left, contestants to the right!"

Reluctantly, Ming let Lyle's hand slip out of hers as they moved to opposite sides of the path.

"First, ladies, I want all of you to step out of your shoes."

When all six contestants were in their bare feet, he continued.

"This contest is going to test your intuition, ladies. There are thirty copper plates in that pathway there, all wired to an electrical system controlled by a computer. At any one time six of those plates will be hot, but you won't know which ones. The computer will randomly change the configuration for each one of you. Those who travel the whole path from one end to the other without getting shocked are free to go. Those who step on a hot plate or outside the path will go on to the third and final round. Oh, one other little detail. To make sure we know if you've stepped on an electrified plate, we'll be attaching a grounded alligator clip to your body. Where? Well, we'll give you your choice: either your tongue, or one of your titties. You decide. To choose the order of appearance, you will draw one of the playing cards Lenny has in his hand. They're numbered one to six, the ace being number one."

As before, Lenny stood still and let the women come to him to draw their card. Ming was pushed aside by Katerina who made the first choice. Ming managed to draw one of the last three. She turned it over. The four of diamonds. It made no real difference who drew first or last, of course, since it boiled down to pure chance. Still, Katerina's aggressiveness was beyond rude. As it turned out, Katerina had drawn the ace and would go first. Was that good or bad? Ming couldn't help but hope it was bad for the snotty blonde.

Lenny led Katerina to the end of the path nearest the door and picked up an electrical alligator clip attached to a wire that ran along the floor the length of the path.

"Tongue or tit?" he asked in a flat voice.

Katerina pulled the scoop neck of her dress down over her left shoulder and lifted an ample breast out over the fabric. Lenny dipped something out of a small jar with his index finger and smeared it on Katerina's nipple, then snapped the jaws of the clip on the sensitive nub. She winced. Ming would have been pleased at Katerina's well deserved suffering, but knew that she, too, would be making that same choice, suffering the same pain. To clip that thing on the tongue would be far more painful.

Lenny led Katerina through a shallow depression in the floor filled with water. There would be no question of either foot or breast making a solid electrical connection if she stepped on the wrong plate. He brought her to the start of the path. If she entertained any thoughts of procrastination, his hand on the cattle prod at his belt erased them.

She took a deep breath, decided on the center plate in the first row and stepped on it with her right foot. It was benign. Taking advantage of her long legs, she stepped over the second row of plates and on to the outside left disk of the third row. Still okay! She took two more long strides, skipping rows, choosing plates at random. On her forth stride she screamed, clasped her left breast and leapt out of the path.

"Oops," said Tad. "Looks like Katerina will be in Round Three."

Lenny was instantly at her side clamping on ankle cuffs. Any future strides would be twelve inches or shorter and any attempt to escape would be in slow motion.

"By the way, girls," the LM chortled, "it's no use memorizing which plate was hot. The computer has already reshuffled the deck. Okay, who's next?"

Kayla held up her deuce of diamonds. She was a twenty-two year old heartbreaker of medium build with dark, exotic eyes, short black hair and a quixotic temperament — sometimes aggressively boisterous and adventurous, other times quiet and inexplicably shy. Ming had played a game of badminton with her at the last banquet (losing badly) and learned she had a wonderfully variegated genetic background, a mixture of Native American, Asian, Latino, French Canadian, Middle Eastern, North African and Scandinavian. This was only her third banquet and while she was a rapt observer of the cooking process and an enthusiastic dining companion, the lottery filled her with profound dread. Ming could see the card tremble as she held it aloft, trying to be brave.

But when Lenny approached with his clip and his choice of "Tongue or tit?" she backed away.

He looked surprised, then closed the gap and asked again. "You want it on the tongue or on a tit? Speak up!"

Again she stepped back, shaking her head. Ming groaned inwardly. Big mistake! Besides the cattle prod, Lenny carried a Taser which he now whipped out of its holster. Before Kayla could react to it, he fired. She crumpled like a dropped marionette. It took half a minute for her to regain her senses and the function of her body, more than enough time for Lenny to cuff her hands behind her, stuff and lock a spreader between her jaws, clamp the alligator clip to her tongue, grab her by the neck and stand her up again. She staggered as he dragged her through the foot bath and growled in her ear.

"Now you're gonna walk down that fuckin' path, you stupid bitch! If you hesitate so much as a second, I'll ram this fuckin' prod up your dumb cunt! Now GO!" He shoved her on to the first row of plates.

Her legs still wobbly, she stumbled down the path with scant effort to pick and chose where she put her feet. Astonishingly, she emerged from the other end unscathed, except for a sore tongue. Once disconnected and uncuffed, she ran from the room.

Shit! thought Ming. Maybe that's the secret. Just blunder through it. What's the point of trying to outwit a computer?

The three of diamonds turned out to be Candy and she seemed to have reached the same conclusion. With the electrode attached to her left nipple, she started a sprint across the copper stepping stones. She made it almost three quarters of the way before she shrieked, grabbed at her breast and spun off the path, tangling in the electric wire. A few minutes later she was standing in the corner with Katerina, shackles hobbing her ankles.

Now it was Ming's turn. She, too, chose to have the clip attached to a nipple, but she had to slip out of her dress to make it accessible. That left her standing naked, except for her thong panties, contemplating how she should do this. Run wildly? Pick and choose her steps? Logically, if she ran, she could take long enough strides to avoid half the rows. That would increase her chances of missing the hot ones, wouldn't it? In addition (and arbitrarily) she decided to stick to the plates on just the left side. Why not? She breathed deeply, gathered her courage and started her run. Her second footfall was into a pit of hot lava! A lightening bolt ripped through her from her foot to her breast! Howling in agony she jumped off the track and landed on the floor. Before she could stand, she felt cold steel enclose her ankles. A sharp pain burst from her breast as the clip was removed from her nipple.

Shit!

She stood quietly in the corner between Katerina and Candy. Her dress had not been returned to her. All she could think of was that while they were still attired in their elegant cocktail dresses, she would be forced to go into the third and final round dressed only in a transparent thong.

Remarkably, Amanda — a tall, slim woman in her late twenties with light brown hair, striking grey eyes and an addiction to the Letterman show — picked her way through the path without connecting with a hot plate. She joined her boyfriend-sponsor among the spectators to watch the last semi-finalist, Apple, try her luck.

As it happened, her luck was as bad as Katerina's, Ming's and Candy's. Worse, in fact. The very first plate she stepped on bit back.

"Looks like we got ourselves four fine conductors, folks," the Lottery Master said. "Their tit meat has already been warmed up, so let's go to the Burgundian Room and see which of them Lady Fortuna picks out to be tonight's dinner entreé."

The four finalists shuffled out into the corridor, their steps limited by the length of their ankle chains, all of them contemplating the dark reality that their chance of surviving the day was now only one in four.

It was a short trip. The Burgundian Room was next door and roughly the long, narrow dimensions of the one they just left. The decor, however, was starkly different. No paintings. No furniture except for a large wheel at one end of the room and a small enclosure at other that resembled the prisoner's dock in a British court. The wheel was about four feet in diameter with wooden handles bristling from its rim like the helm of a ship. Its hub was at about the level of Ming's shoulders, its surface flat and compartmented into pie-shaped wedges, at least two or three dozen of them. The dock was enclosed on three sides by a waist-high railing, including the side facing the wheel.

Katerina leaned toward Ming with a half smile. "Worried?"

"Aren't you?"

"Not at all. I've got a seventy-five percent chance of enjoying a nice piece of girl meat tonight. Maybe yours. How do you plan to be cooked?"

"Roasted," she snapped back. "How about you?"

"I'm going to be seasoning you with salt and freshly cracked pepper, slicing you into delicious mouthfuls and washing you down with Chardonnay. Lyle will probably need a little extra comforting, too. I'll be sure Tom and I sit next to him. Tom's only good for one bounce in the sack, so I'll be able to spread a little comfort in that department, too, later on. Maybe even a lot!"

She winked at Ming, whose effort to deliver a worthy retort was cut short by the Lottery Master. He had stationed himself beside the wheel to address the four shackled women.

"Ladies, this final round will involve neither skill nor intuition, nor will any of you have an advantage or disadvantage in terms of size, weight or coordination. It's strictly a matter of chance. I'll explain it to you in stages so everything will be clear. First of all, I am writing each of your names — or rather, your initial — to one of the segments of this wheel. You won't see it, however, because I'm using a special crayon." He proceeded to write something on four equally spaced pie segments. Then stood well back. "Now Lenny will turn on the ultra violet light, the so-called black light. Go ahead, Lenny."

The ceiling lights instantly dimmed leaving the wheel glowing eerily. Four bright purple letters were now clearly visible: M . . . A . . . C . . . K. Tad chortled.

"Couldn't help myself. Those letters just begged to spell out something."

The lighting returned to normal and the LM stepped closer to the wheel.

"Now here's the good part. I get to spin the wheel and you get to throw darts at it. Thing is, though, you don't want to hit a segment with your own initial on it. If you do, game's over. You're off to the kitchen and the rest of us get to go have some fun. 'Course you won't be able to see where your name is on the wheel, but that makes it all the more exciting, right? Doesn't matter where else you hit — a blank segment or someone else's name — except that every time you take a turn your name will be added to another segment.

"Couple of other important rules: pay attention, now. If you hit the bull's eye, your name gets put on two segments instead of one. If you miss the wheel entirely, you earn a spot on three more segments. And if you somehow hit any person in this room, including Lenny and me, you're instant meat.

"You'll be standing in that dock, there. It's twelve feet from the wheel. If there's any one of you who feels she can't throw a dart that far, let me know now and we'll move the dock two feet closer."

None of the four moved or spoke. Ming wondered if it was confidence or fear of looking like a wimp. At what point did self-preservation out rank vanity?

"All right," Tad said after a decent pause. "That's it, then. The first thing we'll do is choose the order of play. We'll do that by giving all of you a free throw at the wheel. Each segment is numbered. Your actual turns will start with the lowest number hit and work upwards. Ming, you're at the beginning of my anagram; you go first."

Ming's heart skipped a beat, but she forced herself to be calm. This was not for real; it was just to establish the rotation. Not that her place in the rotation would not be important. The later she wound up in the order the better the chance that someone would spike their own name before she did. But she mustn't think about that now! She shuffled through the open side of the dock, her ankle chain clanking, and one of the kitchen assistants handed her a dart. All eyes were on her now, making her exceedingly conscious of her naked breasts. She caught herself puffing out her chest, but immediately chided herself. If her size C's weren't boob enough for her oglers, tough shit!

Tad gave one of the handles on the wheel a strong downward shove and Ming was looking at a spinning blur. What the hell! She hefted the brass dart to decide how hard to throw it, drew back her arm and flung it at the wheel. It made a satisfactory smack about six inches from the right edge. She would have to sharpen her aim. Tad stepped on a brake pedal and the wheel quickly slowed to a stop. He peered at the number near the rim and pulled out the dart.

"Seventeen for Ming. Apple, you're next."

Apple was even more petite than Ming. She had a clear Mediterranean complexion with dark brown hair, large almost black eyes and sultry lips. Barely five feet, she was tiny from the waist up but her hips and legs were thicker than Ming's, although shapely enough to turn heads at any party. Ming couldn't help but envision them on a carving platter. Apple's heave barely made it to the spinning target. It landed on twelve.

Candy's appearance in the dock triggered in Ming the same self-critical comparison it always did. The girl was breathtaking. Even fully covered, her breasts were spectacular. Her perfect, movie-star face and softly flowing blond tresses topped a body that would fit anyone's model of ideal. She was serene as she tossed her dart and nodded her acceptance at the result. Number twenty-two.

Katerina, always vaguely arrogant, flaunted an air of confidence that matched her own uncommon beauty. It annoyed Ming no end. Smiling jauntily, Katerina fired her dart as if to nail it permanently to the wheel, then tossed her head and put on a "who cares?" expression as Tad announced the number.

"Thirty-four."

Now the game began in earnest where every throw could be the fatal one.

Beginning with Apple.

She was tense, but she'd been through this kind of thing several times before. She threw. The black light came on. She'd hit a blank. She shrank a little in obvious relief and shuffled out of the dock as Tad wrote an A on another segment.

Now it was Ming's turn. She could feel her blood pressure climb, but reminded herself that there was a lot of blank wheel to throw at. She closed her eyes, visualized all that safe space, opened them and let the dart fly. The black light came on. She had hit the segment bearing the letter K. Katerina's. Too bad that wouldn't send the blonde bitch to the ovens. She knew she shouldn't think mean thoughts, but couldn't help it. She could feel her blood pressure falling back again as she turned and clanked out of the dock, conscious of the LM adding her M to another segment. And conscious again of being the only one in the room who was nearly nude.

The voluptuous Candy was next. She should be the one flashing her tits! Ming thought, then chastised herself for lapsing into envy. Candy — even with her mighty knockers — was a nice young woman. She had been around a while, too, and took these lottery risks in stride. She squared her shoulders, took a bead on the rotating wheel and hurled her dart. The black light revealed that it had landed harmlessly, as she had expected it would. Another C was added to the wheel.

Katerina's turn now. Her habitual self-satisfied smirk was still in place. Could it be that this haughtiness was her way of coping with her nerves? That it was all just a show? Even the shuffling steps and the clinking of her ankle chains seemed to have no effect on her aplomb. Without a moment's hesitation she snatched up the dart proffered by the assistant and flung it at the wheel. The wheel braked to a stop and Lenny turned on the ultra-violets. She had pinioned one of Ming's segments. She smiled sardonically at Ming. Tit for tat.

Ming was up next. Her second round. She returned Katerina's smile with what she hoped was an enigmatic smile, a fuck you, lady, my odds are just as good as yours smile. She tried to match Katerina's bodacious performance, concentrating on the fact that most of the space on the wheel did not contain her initial. It was extremely unlikely that she'd hit one of the two segments that did, right? The assistant handed her a dart and she deliberately took even less time than Katerina to whip it into the target. The wheel stopped, the black light came on. The dart was stuck in a blank. Ming suddenly realized she had stopped breathing. She let out the air and left the dock with as much dignity as the rattling chain and her solo nudity would allow.

A third round went by. Then a forth and a fifth. Twenty-four of the segments now had names attached — more than half. A sixth round. A seventh. Ming could feel her blood pressure going higher, her heart pounding harder each time she returned to the dock. Her hands were becoming so sweaty she was afraid she'd drop the dart. At the end of the ninth round all the segments contained an initial. That answered the question of how many there were. Nine throws times four throwers: thirty-six. Made sense. It would provide equal space for groups of two, three or four.

Tad spoke up. "Well, looka that! Every tile on our wheel is taken and you're all still here. Well, don't you fret, girls. It won't be long now. I can almost smell dinner cookin' already!

"Hey, I know what you girls are thinking. You're thinking, 'all I gotta do now is hit the bulls eye or miss the target or fail to make it stick and I've got me a free round because there's no place left to add my name as a penalty.' Sorry, that ain't the way it works because at this point the rules change. From this point on if you do any of those things, I'll put your initial on a segment of the girl who went just before you and erase hers. You'll also have to take another shot. If you stall a second time, my friend Lenny over there has a motivational tool that will get you back in the right frame of mind real fast. Ain't that right, Lenny?"

The man with no neck patted the cattle prod clipped to his belt.

"Plus," Tad plowed on, "you get two more extra throws. Two more chances to end the lottery. So don't even think about it. Unless, of course, you're bored with life and ready for the ultimate excitement." He pointed at Apple. "Your turn again, sweetheart. Step right up. We need to resolve this. The Chef is getting antsy."

Having survived so many previous lotteries, Apple had come into this one with a certain amount of cool; but this was the most extended one yet and her nerves were wearing thin. Candy, too, had lost her sanguine sexiness and taken to drumming her long red fingernails on her teeth between turns. Even Katerina was chewing on her lower lip, her smugness more fragile with every passing round. The same unspoken thought occupied the minds of all four: how long could their luck hold? Apple closed her eyes for a moment as she accepted another dart from the assistant, trying to blank out negative thoughts. She took a deep breath, held it, and hurled the dart. The wheel slowed to a stop and the black light came on. The dart had lodged in one of Candy's segments near the point of the pie between two of her own. An eighth of an inch either way and her time as meat would have come. She made a small audible gasp and backed away from the dock, tripping over her own ankle chain. Ming, who was next in line, caught her and held her up until her legs stopped shaking.

Now the Lottery Master's finger was pointed at Ming.

"Our little Chinese cookie is next. Don't keep us waiting, dear. Let's keep rolling. It's a beautiful day and we don't want to waste it."

Ming didn't want to invite a motivational prod from Lenny, so she let go of Apple — who managed to stand on her own — and stepped into the dock. Her heart began pounding again. Her initial was in nine of the wheel segments, but there were twenty-seven safe segments. Three chances out of four that she'd be getting her brains screwed out by Lyle tonight. Great odds! Right? Another brass dart was placed in her right hand, the wheel already spinning. She stared at it fixedly. There was no avoiding another temptation of fate. She had to throw the dart. Three out of four. How could she lose? Sweat was running into her eyes, stinging them, but she had no sleeves to wipe it away. She used her fingers instead. Someone was going to die today but three out of four segments said it would not be her! She blinked away the sweat, drew her right hand behind her, being careful not to drop the dart. She glared at the whirling target as if somehow she could find the safe places to plant the dart, as if she could hit a moving target at a distance of twelve feet, even if she could see it. She let out a shaky breath, bit her lower lip and drilled the dart at the blur of the wheel. It made a resounding thunk. Tad stepped on the brake, slowing the wheel to a stop. She squinted at the placement of the dart as the lights dimmed and the letters on the wheel sprang into purple luminescence. She blinked. She blinked again as her heart crashed into her throat and her bowels threatened to let go.

"Bingo!" said the Lottery Master. "We have our winner! The lovely Ming will be gracing our dinner menu tonight."