Journey to Mirage

Easton kept Rick in his bed for nearly a week when he wasn't working him on menial and backbreaking tasks around the ranch to show whose slave he was. Then, having assessed Rick's worth in the "tail" marketplace and determined the range of what he could give satisfaction for, Easton unceremoniously took Rick off grunge duty and moved him to one of the cubicles in the trailers. Appropriately dressed and indoctrinated in the rules and procedures, Rick was then sent into the entertainment rooms of the ranch house. Thereafter Easton didn't touch him again; by then he had a new recruit to break in.

The morning after the first pay-day Friday night that Rick was in the "gentleman's gentleman" pool, Rick came to Easton with a request to be released.

"You want to be released from your contract?"

"What contract?" Rick asked. "I didn't sign any contract."

"I paid good money for you. You want out, buy up your contract."

"How much?"

"Well, let's see, I reckon $5,000 would be about right for a handsome young thing like you with a sweet ass and a taste for it."

"$5,000?" Rick said with disgust. "I don't believe you paid Doug Groton anything like that for me—and I wasn't Groton's to sell anyway." Rick had nearly $2,000 accumulated now; he'd figured he could pay out with Easton and still have some cash for the road.

"Training expenses. I couldn't put you right out on the floor in the condition you came in. I put a whole lot of work into you."

"Shit you did. You put a whole lot of cock in me—and I didn't hear you complainin' or callin' it work. And you should have paid

me

$5,000 to take it."

"I don't like your attitude much, son," Easton growled, his tone becoming quite menacing. "And as for leaving here, I think I just might let you get a taste of who will come after you if you try." He stood and bellowed, "Melvin, get on in here."

Then he turned to Rick and hissed, "Melvin's been wanting a piece of you since you arrived here. Time I stopped holding him back."

The club's bouncer, a big bruiser and ugly as sin, his face having been rearranged one too many times in a bar fight, swaggered into the room, a big smile on his face. Rick got the impression this scene had played out a couple of times before with other guys trying to buck the system.

"Rick here's all yours for the afternoon, Mel. He needs to be serviceable for next Friday night—but have fun. I'd like him brought down about two notches in attitude, please."

Rick turned to flee out of the door, but Mel was between him and his goal. A vicious backhanded swipe to the face sent Rick reeling back and to the side, but a steel grip closed over his wrist and Mel's other fist connected with Rick's midsection, bending him toward the floor with a sound of retching. Clenched fists hit him in the small of his back and Rick went down on the floor.

"No blood or puke in here, please," Easton said. "Take him to his trailer. You know which one it is. Try not to rock the trailer off its foundation." Last thing Rick heard as he was being carried out was Easton laughing at his own joke.

Rick groggily came to in the trailer again as a naked Melvin was pulling his clothes off. Rick made a dazed lunge for the door, but Melvin's hand spun him around and Melvin's other fist caught him under the chin.

A dazed and moaning Rick was loose as a rag doll and bent over at the waist, the bouncer behind him and holding Rick's buttocks to his crotch and with his arms locked under Rick's waist. Rick's body just bouncing around, feet off the floor, at the whim of Melvin's cocking, as, standing and thrusting his cock up into Rick's channel, the bouncer administered Rick's first punishing fuck of a long afternoon.

Then Melvin showed that he could keep up that pace all day.

The next Saturday afternoon in the predawn afternoon, the ranch having quieted down from a raucous pay-day Friday celebration, Rick quietly gathered the few things he had together in his duffel bag and, as silently as he could, limped out of the compound and down the three miles to the end of the drive into the Big C ranch.

At the intersection with the highway, he looked east and west, not sure of where he wanted to go. The past—where he'd come from, in the east—didn't seem to hold any promise for him. So, he turned the toes of his cowboy boots toward the west and started walking down the side of the highway in dusty, desolated northwest Texas.

For the first ten miles of his walk, Rick started at the sound of any approaching vehicle from the direction of the Big C ranch, and in this empty space he could hear an engine noise more than a mile away. When he heard the rare approaching car, he went into the drainage ditch at the side of the road. But nothing driving by appeared to be from the ranch. After a while, Rick decided Easton had been bluffing about coming after him. In a strange way, he was disappointed. Rick couldn't think of anyone—with the possible exception of Phil—who shed a tear or gave a damn about him moving on.

* * * *

Once the sun came up, Rick began to realize what a dumb idea it was just to be walking out on the side of a Texas dual-lane highway under the blazing Texas sun.

He hadn't even brought any water with him. He was still bruised and, he suspected, didn't have everything inside him in its right place from the working over Melvin had given him the week before. He was limping and couldn't even stand up straight as he walked because of a pain in his side that had been there for a week. He had had to service three customers the previous night and all of them had been focused on dipping their own cocks, so he felt worse now than he had Friday morning.

And as he walked, he reviewed his circumstances. And the hotter he became and the more thirsty and the more shuffling rather than walking, the more depressed he became. The fight for life was slowly ebbing away.

Cars passed him—but at high speed. None stopped. And each time one passed, Rick took another, more distant, step from the margin of the highway, trying to escape the choking dust their wheels threw up in his face.

He didn't even realize it when he stopped putting one foot in front of another and simply stood and shuddered for a brief time, before sinking down into the desert sand a good twenty feet from the side of the road.

Sometime later, Rick heard the sound of gravel on tires and lifted his head enough to see an old, rusty sedan from the sixties or seventies pulling over to the side of the road just past where he was lying. He groaned and rolled over onto his side.

"Water . . . please," he whispered through parched lips as three Hispanic men approached him cautiously.

But they didn't offer water or any other form of respite. And if any of them said a word, it was not loud enough for Rick to hear. One of them, with a face of indeterminate age, lined with years of weariness and backbreaking scrabbling for hard-fought existence, crouched down beside him, watching him intently for signs of objection or resistance, while the other two pawed through his duffel bag, taking whatever appealed to them, animated and thrilled when they came upon his stash of cash. The last sound Rick heard as he groaned and drifted off into a haze was the sound of doors slamming and gravel being thrown up by the tires of a departing car.