Travis was now two snakes ahead of him and Perry thought of how much worse being thrown into a pit of fire might be than the agony of the thing biting off his leg. He took his hands off the trap and instead crawled forward. The next guy was a tall, thin man, who was so busy whipping at Travis, he didn’t even notice Perry until Perry yanked the red snake off his body. He noticed then, because the snake had been pinned to the foreskin of his cock.
Perry crawled forward and was ripping the snake from a woman’s fleshy arm when he heard a horrible cry from just ahead.
Travis had found that sometimes the fog hid more than just animal traps. It hid small pits with knives. He was lying on his back, crying, with his leg in the air as the blood streamed out of his foot to drip on his chest.
“Oh my God,” he screamed. “It hurts. It hurts!”
Perry nodded his head. Inside, he answered the pain that shot through his leg with every tiny motion. “Yeah, it hurts. But not as bad as fire.”
He pushed forward, passing Travis and getting to the eleventh and finally twelfth person in line. He left them bleeding from where he ripped the snakes from their flesh. He wasn’t tentative about it at all now-he saw the prize-he ripped and ran before their weapons could connect, if possible.
And still, the whips cracked and the chains slammed. Sometimes he saw stars, but he kept moving. Someone with a cudgel beat on his ass as he crawled. He wanted to turn and rip the weapon out of their hands and beat them back with it, but he knew that would only slow him down.
Perry could feel the blood flowing down his back from where leather and hooks had broken his skin. And his leg felt very wet. He wondered how much blood he was losing; after all, he’d already bled once earlier today. He was not in a position to lose much more.
He was ahead though, even dragging the trap behind him. He only had one more snake to go. He saw that Travis had finally stopped bawling and was back in the game. He dragged his leg to the final person in line, and then suddenly, the ground dropped out from under him.
Perry fell into a hole and suddenly he felt his skin stabbed by what seemed to be a hundred knives.
And he wasn’t far off. The fog swirled, disturbed and pushed away by his fall. He had slipped into a small four- by-four pit that was filled with crisscrossed steel spikes. If they hadn’t been so close together, he would have been impaled. It would have been over. Instead, for the most part, they had just broken the skin slightly. One spike, however, had stabbed all the way through his arm, which had hit the bottom of the pit first, and he could see the bloody tip of another coming out of his right thigh. There were sharp, hot points of pain all around his back and ass.
Perry screamed. And panicked. The pain was worse than the trap. His entire body was on fire, and he was afraid to pull his arm and leg off the spikes. He didn’t know if he could get out on his own.
“Help me,” he yelled. But nobody did.
“Please,” he called again.
And then, like a ghost in the mist, he saw the face of Kharon. The man’s eyes were like black holes in a face pinched and thin. “There is no mercy here,” the man said and was gone.
Not far away, Perry heard Travis scream and knew that he’d found his own pit. He grit his teeth and worked his arm off the spikes, screaming all the time. It helped. Slowly the bloody steel tip disappeared through his arm and then the flesh jerked up, fully free. The blood quickly poured from the hole left behind, spattering his chest.
Perry refused to focus on the wound, but instead reached up to grab the edge of the pit with his fingers. His wounded arm wasn’t a lot of help, but he slowly pulled his body up from the spikes, trying not to put any more pressure on the parts of his body that remained on the steel tips. As he did, he could feel the blood pouring out a dozen hot holes in his butt and side. With both hands on the edge, he took one look at the spike that had punctured his leg and said a silent prayer. Then he pulled as hard as he could with both hands, and pulled his body out of the pit.
He could feel the spike pass through his leg, like a cold icicle dragging against his bone. Perry didn’t stop screaming the entire time, and he didn’t even realize he was. His sole focus was on lifting his body out of the pit and getting the final red snake. He would not end up in the pit of fire. He would
The last person in line was a thin, heavily scarred woman. She held a flogger with barbed steel points. Perry tried to get close enough to her to find the snake, but she cut him again and again, whipping the barbs onto his back and arms and pulling back.
“Damn it,” he screamed and reached up to grab her arm. He caught it and pushed, dropping her to the floor. She was a smaller woman and obviously well abused but still muscular. She kicked and punched as he squeezed the flogger from her hand. Nobody had said that he couldn’t tackle the Living Path.
He didn’t see the snake on her arms or breasts or legs or…and then he saw it. Just the faint red tip.
The damn thing was pinned up her pussy.
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” he complained. With one hand he whipped her with her own flogger, keeping her down.
With the other, he reached up inside her and got a grip on the rubber of the thin snake, slick with her own excitement. He squeezed it tight and pulled. Hard.
The woman gave out a cry, but Perry didn’t stick around long enough to see the damage the snake had done. He rolled away from her instantly with the wet token in hand and dragged himself past the last member of the Living Path. There were ten yards between him and Rae. He saw her standing there before The Crossing, a red snake her only covering, as it twined and moved slowly around her. He thought of her promises of S &M a few hours before and cursed her beneath his breath. She was a snake all right. She’d never mentioned spike pits and wolf traps and a contest to the death.
“Run, rabbit, run!” one of the Watchers cried.
Perry had to laugh at that. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever be running again at this rate. But he pulled himself forward with his hands, dragging his mangled leg along.
He glanced behind and saw Travis had reached the last of his snake holders, a burly man who was beating the other “rabbit” with a chain. Perry pulled himself to a three-limbed crawl, crying out with every foot he moved forward.
That’s when the floor turned to wire.
Barbed wire.
It bit into his hands and knee.
“God damn it…” He punctured his palms and knees again and again, but Perry would not stop. The pain was just his state of being now…nothing could keep him from moving forward. His cries of pain were as much a part of him as breathing now. Unconscious. Constant.
Travis limped his way forward, warned that something bad was ahead. He was wary, but fast, and in a minute he’d caught up to Perry, who now was just a few feet from Rae.
But then he ran into a thin wire that stretched across the rabbit run. Perry had crawled under it, never even seeing it, but Travis ran right into its razor edge, slicing open his gut.
He fell backwards with a woeful scream.
“Oh, you fuckers,” he cried. “This is not like whips and chains at all.”
Travis held his hand to his gut, crimson flowing fast between his fingers. Perry didn’t waste the moment. He crawled across the last two yards and placed his bag of snakes at Rae’s feet. Kharon stepped between Rae and Gordon and picked them up. He counted them and smiled. “This rabbit wins!”
Travis was still a couple feet away from Gordon, and he broke down at the pronouncement.
“I don’t want to die,” he sobbed.
Kharon knelt at the man’s chest and patted his head. “There are really no losers in this game,” he whispered. “You won’t die. You both will get what you’ve always wanted.”
Then he motioned to Gordon. “Help me.” Between the two of them, they held Travis aloft and carried him to the edge of the fire pit. The black snake slid slowly around Gordon’s arm. It wound up Travis’s bloody shoulder and then slithered around the man’s neck. In moments it had knotted itself like a spring around Travis.
“You wanted pain,” Kharon said. “You will receive it here. Forever.”
Kharon pushed Travis forward and he fell instantly, toppling face-first into the molten fire below.
His screams began instantly. Strangely though, they didn’t slow as he was swallowed by the fire.
Kharon addressed Rae. “Take him to the bridge,” he said, pointing at Perry. “He has earned the right to
