Nusquam

“How will this happen? What can you tell me?”

Kelly reaches to her bag for a tape measure, sensing a deal is to be struck.

“Not much to tell. Just give me a spare key to your apartment and leave everything in plain sight. An extraction team will quietly enter. Don’t resist... don’t fight... they’re all martial arts trained so if for some reason you change your mind, it will be futile for you. They’ll prepare you for the flight and you’ll awaken in your new home.”

“Never to be found? The Marshals are good.”

“Never to be found,” Kelly assures, suppressing the urge to add... ‘and never to escape’.

“Comfortingly. There are things to do there? Don’t want to be bored.”

“You’ll have some tasks to perform. It’s a communal life. Everyone is obliged to help in some manner.”

“Though We

ndy’s firm took a bucket load, there’s enough to live on for years. But what if it runs out?”

“Yes I can imagine it’s substantial, Muskrat. With your long career of fraud, deception, stock manipulation, Ponzi schemes... it must have added up. But once you’re tucked away, there’s no need to worry about funds. It’s a onetime payment. Thereafter, all you need will be provided.”

Muskrat Mansfield smiles... with a disgusting sense of pride, envisioning a retirement so unjustly earned.

“Yeah. For every charged crime, there were a dozen they didn’t know about. It all piled up over the years, the dough. Not like I could keep it in the bank.”

“Cash?”

“Some. But mainly gold bars. Bullion. Compact, easily hidden, not traceable. But it has become little heavy over the years.”

‘Bless Wendy,’ Kelly thinks but cannot say. Otherwise known as Wendy the Whip, ostensibly for her slashing court room style, as a member of Nusquam her sobriquet is more appropriately applied, an unrelenting sadist. She slipped Kelly the word. Her client is due to surrender himself for a long prison sentence... and his homophobia has brought cold feet. For obvious reasons Wendy cares not to know the details of this meeting, not to know of the alternative Muskrat Mike has decided upon. All that happened was a brief text message... not even from Wendy’s phone... suggesting Kelly should meet someone... a prospect for ‘a trip south’ was the coded phrase.

“Just need some simple measurements,” Kelly cautiously peering about from the dark booth of the seedy bar.

“What for?”

“Ah... for things to wear. Once you disappear it’s not like you’ll be able to shop.”

“Yeah. Makes sense,”

The con artist... so easily conned, Kelly thinks to herself as she begins measuring... wrists... biceps... neck... feigning to pick a napkin from the floor for a quick ankle and thigh measurement.

Should she tell him? She is so tempted to join the extraction team and detail the drudgery of life at Nusquam as the sociopathic embezzler and thief is restrained... wrapped and boxed for a flight from Teterboro.

Yes, with no sexual proclivities, no masochistic drive... lacking the insatiable urge to submit to the power of a superior, it will be straight to the pump house for Mike Muskrat Mansfield... no member finding joy in tormenting. But not before being defanged... declawed... and degloved.

At least he’ll keep his balls, Kelly mentally shrugs. Castration, the fate of most of the male subjugants, is deemed counter to obtaining a long day of physically exhausting labor, pulling with vigor to rotate the huge heavy capstans which turn the generators. Electricity is so ironically offered for the visiting members... generated by the sweat of slave labor.

The pump house, so named because the original apparatus worked the pumps to clear water from the ancient silver mine below, has been converted. No more mules plodding in endless circles. It is now human toil... the final role to be fulfilled by subjugants no longer found desirable for sexual servitude.

Unfortunately, there are never enough naked shackled bodies. Thus the recruitment of the likes of Muskrat Mike, a miscreant the world will not miss... but for the U.S. Marshals service.

‘I’d like to personally deglove him,’ Kelly’s mind distracting. Having read of his crimes, his victims the old, the feeble, those least able to afford dealing with the unctuous and unsavory Mike Muskrat Mansfield, she relishes the overdue comeuppance.

Federal time is too soft for the likes of Mike Mansfield.

Jotting down her last measurement, Kelly recalls the forlorn looks of males newly deprived of their overly sensitive penile flesh. Attempting to masturbate, their stroking hands fruitless... realizing for the first time that pleasure is of the past... there comes such a wondrous sense of capitulation... to a woman’s surgical hand... to face a life of sweat, suffering and the pain of the sjambok should a capstan slow.

“So that’s it?” an incredulous Muskrat inquires, sliding a spare apartment key across a stained bar table.

“To your new life,” Kelly counters with a toast,` joining the miscreant in a cheap glass of suds.