Andromeda part 1: http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?335831-Andromeda-part-1-(fff-f-non-con)
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KI
Andromeda, part 2 (fff/f, non-con)
by
Kid Indy
She had been there for a few weeks, but the hum of neon lights never sounded right accompanied by the roar of ocean waves. For that matter, she never imagined the swampy beach country of South Carolina could be this cold, but she never thought about its existing in February. For someone who had spent most of her adult life in the pulsing center of world power, the largely-empty tourist bars of Myrtle Beach were something approaching a different planet. But the chilly beach was where the story led, and Katie always followed the story.
After all, that’s what had put her on the radar when she was fresh out of J-school, and that’s what had brought her up through the ranks of Washington’s reporters. And her persistence on the case of Traci Carter had finally pushed her to the top of her game, Senior Reporter for Interest, a magazine for Washington insiders and policy experts who now knew that the top lobbyist in the healthcare-policy world had not in fact disappeared into the Great Plains on her own accord but had been abducted, tortured, and terrorized into fleeing a career by the mysterious group known only as Andromeda.
In the cold salty evening beach bums were out in force, roaming the boardwalk to score drug money from the few frightened tourists trying to get back to their hotels. Soon Spring Break would bring the gigantic crowds back, but right now the neon-lit sand was simply a dimly illuminated, multi-colored strip between the bars and the shops to the west and the endless, empty water to the east. Katie allowed herself a quick look at her phone and at the day’s notes. She knew that her only ticket back to the big city and the life she missed was making the connections that would establish the corruption narrative she was working.
The American Firearms Coalition, a gun-lobbyist and general right-wing group, was on the rise, and several seats in the US House had flipped from moderate Republicans to their hand-picked, gun-obsessed voting bloc. So far, nothing illegal. But something was happening beyond the bounds of the uncontested Republican districts. The AFC had started out as a Facebook group run by a farmer’s family in Iowa with time on their hands. They had amassed several thousand followers as such groups do, and they had even become one of the lucky no-compromise indy platforms to climb into the tens of thousands. But then something had changed.
Without any on-the-books funding, suddenly the organization’s influence had become so pervasive that it rivaled the big lobbyists like the NRA and the agribusiness firms in reach and precision, and that’s what Katie knew that she had to investigate. No viral video was going to bring the kinds of names to a tourist beach that were showing up soon–something beyond the white boys on the videos was going on.
Money doesn’t grow on trees, and it always leaves a paper trail.
Cause and effect are funny things in the world of politics. Ignore the big social forces, and you start looking for powerful individuals and malevolent conspiracies under every rock. Rule out real conspiracies–and they do happen–and you end up inventing fake social and historical forces that are nothing but shields for powerful men. That’s what all the big news outlets had done with the previous year’s emergence of HI-Fed, a public-option federal health insurance provider. After all, that’s the kind of story that flattered the politically progressive: America had just gotten fed up with being the slowest runner on the international track, and progressive Congresswomen deserve credit for bringing the good old USA into the twenty-first century. (Twitter, of course, could not help but to start the hash tag #welcometo20thcentury trending in response.)
But Katie wasn’t satisfied with that story: the big insurance companies had billions on the line, and they had the best in the business in Traci Carter, whose connections meant that she could maintain unimaginable wealth not only for Congressmen but also for their staffs and their larger circles if they would play ball with her clients, and none of it would ever cross any lines into illegal territory. But Carter, against everyone’s expectations, failed to block HI-Fed, and American healthcare and its billionaires took a hit that news outlets’ headlines compared to the Sack of Rome, to Napoleon at Waterloo, to Sherman marching on Atlanta. How in the world did Washington’s Queen Midas drop the ball on the biggest legislative battle in a decade of health policy?
As it turned out, she just didn’t show up.
Nobody else was looking into this possibility; with their reduced reporting budgets, they had all left the health-insurance story and turned to the newest news-cycle sensation, the ballooning influence of the American Firearms Coalition. Katie convinced her editors at Interest to stick with last month’s story just a bit longer, and the result was the story that had Katie on the short list for the coming year’s Pulitzers. A criminal contractor called Andromeda had abducted Carter, tortured her into absolute terror without leaving a mark on her body, and driven her out of Washington and into flyover country, presumably for the remainder of her life. Carter would not go on record for the story, but Katie would not let that end the story. Her harrowing night interviewing three agents of Andromeda, all on probation after a sentence-reduction deal, also uncovered a second jaw-dropping torture story in prison. In her three-issue expose on the group’s influence, she had tracked down state documents confirming both the witness-protection deal given to the prison drug kingpin Mama Sam and the deal that the state had cut with the three Andromeda girls, and just like that, one journalist had put the health-insurance story back on the map.
The liberals and progressives who constitute Washington’s press corps, of course, were furious with Katie Jones: she was now the new face of Whitewater, the Clinton email server, the Hunter Biden energy company connections, and every right-wing conspiracy rolled into one. None of that mattered to Katie; she spent a year doing the morning shows and the evening shows and NPR and the big podcasts, championing a vision of journalism that never stops chasing the truth even when it unveils the corruption of one’s political allies. A few of her appearances–especially with the podcasters–had ventured into creepy territory with hosts who were more than a little bit too interested in the methods that Andromeda used on Carter and Mama Sam, but Katie had been around long enough to remember the same fascination with White House interns and how their dresses got stained, so par for the course, she figured.
She did decline an offer to sit in Howard Stern’s infamous chair.
But several months and a Pulitzer snub later, she was back on the hunt, where she had made herself famous, where she knew she belonged. While her counterparts at the big-city newspapers fought their editors for time and money for week-long trips to investigate the AFC, Interest, now a national power in political journalism, knew that their golden goose was going to go wherever she wanted, so she had been in the field for months pounding the pavement, connecting networks of influence, and now roaming the bars of a beach town asking after recent visits and meetings between Southern and Midwestern legislators and their mysterious benefactors. Myrtle Beach was where Republicans go to stop being Baptist for the week of Spring Break, so Katie’s prominence in the renewed national battle over public-funded health care lent her a strange kind of celebrity among people who watch too much Fox News. That opened doors for her that would have slammed in the faces of many reporters from the northern stretch of the East Coast.
Katie, of course, always knew how and when to find and use leverage, and she had figured out certain patterns: the Representatives and lobbyists who were already AFC-supported were all scheduled to participate in a conservative conference at a local convention center, a cover to get them and their handlers all in the same place but out of reach for most New York and DC newspapers. But the names who didn’t ever appear alongside the AFC before this year, the ones who were going to be the “special guests” on the final night, were the real money. Katie had confirmed that Senators and Cabinet secretaries and other real movers were going to be in town a couple days before their official arrival, moving in the secrecy that a depleted journalism industry, all concentrated on the convention center, would allow them.
Local papers would be so caught up in the celebrity visits and famous politicians’ photo-ops with the public face of the up-and-coming rival to the NRA that they wouldn’t take the time to follow the Senators and their staffers after dark, so the mysterious money behind the AFC could hold their own meetings after hours, when the beach-town’s sunshine wasn’t lighting the shots that access-journalists started and stopped with. This much Katie knew, and moreover she knew which bars in town had scheduled late-night back room reservations during the convention. (There was the HI-Fed-buster credibility doing its work.)
Katie was going to be in the right place, at the right time, and she was going to have photographs from hotel lobbies and the sidewalks outside of bars to go with the good timing. Soon America was going to know who was meeting with whom, and when, and where, and they were going to find it all out from Interest magazine while the big-city newspapers were still figuring out where to start on the story. And the action was going to start in less than 24 hours: the planes would start landing that night, and the first session of the convention was the next day.
Katie slid a finger along the plastic edge of her hotel’s magnetic room key as she saw its sign ahead. She went over her personal plan: get a good night’s sleep tonight, rest while the rest of the news industry covered the front, and then hit the bars tomorrow night when the real story started. She pulled the card from her jacket pocket and prepared to open the hotel’s lobby door when she heard the voice.
“Long time no see, sugar!”
No. It couldn’t be.
Katie turned slowly, and her vision, already accustomed to the well-lit hotel lobby, could only make out a smile in the darkness. She squinted towards the ocean, and the form leaning against the light pole was unmistakable.
Casi. Casi the perverted Andromeda girl whose story had propelled Katie almost to the stars. Casi, whose hands had almost made Katie abandon the story of Traci Carter. Casi, who was now taking long, casual strides towards Katie.
“I love when I meet old friends on the beach, don’t you, Katie?”
Katie’s eyes darted to the right and to the left. “Casi, what are you doing here?”
Casi’s laugh cut through the ocean’s rumble, making Katie shiver. “I’m not Casi to most people these days, sugar, but you can call me that if you like. Strange time to vacation at the beach, isn’t it?”
Katie’s heart pounded as she pondered whether she could outrun the much younger girl. “I’m in town covering the Republican politicians’ conference. Conservative celebrities and Congressmen and such. You know–Washington stuff.”
“You’re right, Katie. We do know. And we know that you’ve been hanging out in some scary bars these last few weeks.”
Now Katie knew she had to run. But something made her go for one more line. She raised a finger and pointed at Casi’s face. “I don’t know who you think you’re dealing with here, but I’m breaking this story, and nobody is stopping me!” With that she pivoted away from the glass door and took off running as fast as she could for the corner of the building. She didn’t hear Casi in pursuit, but nonetheless she slid into her car as fast as she could and backed out of her parking spot with screeching tires.
Katie turned and burned out of the side parking lot and onto one of the broad, restaurant-studded roads that connected the beach to the world. She had dealt with corrupt politicians with goons before, and she knew that a secondary safe house was absolutely a must. Taking turns almost fast enough to tip the car onto two wheels, she sped out towards the Interstate to get to the back-country motel. Her eyes darted from the road ahead of her to the rearview mirror and back. Nobody was following her. She kept her foot on the gas, though, hit the exit ramp, and put miles behind her, feeling her jacket pocket for the phone where she kept her notes.
Katie whipped off the Interstate, then off the state route to a side road, heading for a small town she had scouted with one motel. She’d call for backup from the paper from there, but first she had to make sure that she was behind a locked door. For all she knew, Gina and Zoe had been waiting in her beach hotel’s lobby, waiting to grab her, but none of them could guess which nowhere small town she might head to wait out the night. Checking the rearview one more time, seeing no lights behind her on the back road, she settled back into her seat to finish the escape.
Then her tire started limping.
Katie pulled the car under control and suddenly remembered: Traci Carter. Radio-controlled tire sabotage. This was the same MO. She pulled her disabled car to the side of the dark road, got on her phone, and dialed 911. The dial tone let her know that someone would pick up soon.
“Horry County dispatch. Is this an emergency?”
“Yes, I’m being pursued. I’m between Aynor and Cool Spring, and my tire has blown.”
“Wait. Pursued?”
“Yes, pursued! I need help fast! Please send police!” In her side-view mirror Katie saw a pair of headlights appear. “Please hurry!”
“Which road are you on?”
“Williams Road off of highway 22. Please send someone fast!”
“Stay where you are, and we’ll dispatch a squad car as soon as we can.” The headlights were coming on fast.
Katie screamed, “Send one now! Andromeda! Andromeda!” Screeching tires brought the other vehicle to a stop in the middle of the back road. Katie heard three pairs of boots hit the ground, and she desperately fumbled to lock her doors.
A hand slapped the glass of Katie’s passenger-side window. She could hear Zoe’s voice in the darkness. “We’ve got fifteen minutes minimum before anyone gets here, Katie!” And with a crash, something rammed through the back seat’s passenger window, dropping the glass onto the back seat in one mass. Before Katie could react through her shock, Casi was reaching in and opening the back door. The door opened, and Katie tried to launch herself over her seat to push Casi away, but Casi just grabbed her wrists and held tight. Zoe leaned over Casi and disengaged the automatic locks, and within seconds Zoe was coming through the passenger door as Gina opened the driver’s side door. Katie struggled, but the three dragged her out of the car, put handcuffs on her behind her back, and put a bag over her head. Then she felt some kind of cord being tied around the ankles of her blue jeans and knotted so that she couldn’t kick. She heard her rented car start up, and she heard it roll slowly off the road and into the dark water of a swamp on the side of the road. Katie knew that nobody would be finding that car in this darkness until she was long gone. Meanwhile the two whose hands were on her marched her to the trunk of the car, where they lifted her off her feet, put her inside, and closed the trunk on her. She felt the car start to move.
Katie tried to remember all of the turns that she felt the car make, but they drove for something like half an hour, and Katie’s mental map was soon looping back on itself. When they finally came to a stop, Katie could hear all three pairs of boots coming around to the trunk of the car, and when the trunk opened, she could not hear any of the beach-town traffic or music from bars. Wherever she was, only the sounds of the cold coastal wetlands rang out in the night air.
Four hands untied her ankles, and she tried to stretch her legs as they lifted her out of the trunk and marched her in the darkness. She heard Zoe’s voice say, “Three steps up,” and she complied, remembering her training from when she had begun reporting on right-wing militias. The captors would eventually get tired, the security consultant told them, and when they did, that was when to escape, get to a secure place, and contact help. The temperature changed and a door shut behind her, and Katie knew that they had entered an indoor space. But after a few more twists and turns through the house, she heard another door open, and this time Zoe’s voice said, “Twelve steps down.” She swallowed hard but did as she was told. The air grew cooler, but not as cold as the outdoor air, and Katie did some mental math, figuring out that they were in a deep basement space.
A door, heavier-sounding than the first two, shut behind her. A heavy latch, maybe a deadbolt, threw.
A hand grabbed the bag over Katie’s head and pulled on it. Katie tossed her hair away from her eyes and looked around. She tried not to gasp, but the sound happened before she could stop it. On one side she saw what seemed to be a queen-sized bed with tall posts, and ropes ending in leather cuffs trailed from each of those posts. Worse, Casi was leaning on one of the posts, licking her lips. In the middle of the room was a long upholstered couch. Next to it was some kind of wooden construction, and Katie let out a second gasp as she realized that she was looking at vertical stocks, the same kind that the Andromeda girls had told her about. A table, perhaps a kitchen table, was surrounded by about six chairs. And finally, sitting in a recliner, Gina sat, eyeing Katie, looking her up and down. This was an Andromeda safehouse, just like the ones the girls had described to her. But now Katie was not a reporter but its victim.
Katie heard Zoe’s voice behind her. “Let’s sit you down on that couch. You’ve had a rough night.”
Katie’s training kicked in. “I need to use a bathroom first.”
Gina leered at her. “Of course, Katie. We’re going to be spending a lot of time together. We want you to be comfortable, don’t we?” With that she stood and led Katie and Zoe, who still had a grasp on her elbow, to an alcove in a corner of the basement. In a nook in the side of the room were a small toilet bowl and a sink.
Katie’s mouth curled in disappointment that this plan wasn’t working. “No door?”
Zoe started to uncuff Katie’s wrists. “We’re all going to be really friendly here, Katie. We’re all roommates for the next several days.”
Katie rubbed her wrists, then felt for a pocket as she prepared to sit down. She wasn’t planning to stay for days. “You think it’ll take them that long to find you?”
Gina answered her. “We aren’t trying to get caught this time, Katie. It’s not part of the job. So yeah, I think you’re going to stay here with us as long as we say, and not a minute shorter.” Then Gina held up a small rectangle in her hand. “And don’t worry about your phone, Katie. We’ll hold on to that for you.” Zoe laughed at Katie’s scowl.
Katie did in fact have to go, and she did, and when she started to stand up, Gina and Zoe were inches away from her. Zoe was the first to talk. “Keep your panties, but lose the jeans and the boots.”
Katie attempted defiance. “And the socks?”
From behind the other two Andromeda girls Casi’s voice emerged. “No, leave the socks. I want to take those off.”
“I’m going to get cold down here without any pants.”
Gina looked over her shoulder. “Bring it up a few degrees down here, Casi. You’re spotting first.” Katie took in a sharp breath. They were using the jargon that she had heard at that DC nightclub, the jargon of torture. Gina folded Katie’s jeans neatly and placed them on the arm of the easy chair, then set her boots down beside the chair, and Katie let them sit her down on the couch. Katie watched as Casi pulled two simple chairs away from the table, then went back for two more, then for one of the two remaining. Zoe just stayed with Katie to make sure she didn’t go anywhere.
Katie tried to establish eye contact with Gina, who was moving towards one of the chairs. “What is it you want from me? Are you working for the AFC?”
Gina didn’t even look up; she grabbed Katie’s calf and guided her foot up to one of the chairs as Zoe, seated beside Katie, grabbed her arms in a bear-hug and looped her own long legs around Katie’s waist to immobilize her. Gina guided Katie’s foot through the gap between the chair’s back and its seat, then started lashing Katie’s lower leg to the seat with leather straps. Casi did the same with the other foot. Within a minute Zoe could let go, as Katie’s sock feet protruded through the chairs’ gaps and came to rest on the front of each chair, each leg tied to one chair (they were surprisingly heavy, Katie, realized as she tried to move her legs). Moving into a new position, Gina and Zoe scooted the heavy chairs away from each other, pulling Katie’s legs into a V, and each sat down in front of a foot.
“I know what you’re going to do. And it’s not going to work–my editors already have my research. Whatever you do to me here, they already know what’s going on. I don’t care what they’ve told you–keeping me here is only going to make things worse for them!”
Gina looked over the chair’s back into Katie’s eyes as Casi took her position as the spotter. “Come on, Katie. You know how this works–you wrote the story on us! We’re not here to talk politics.”
Zoe spoke from behind Katie’s other foot. “We’re just here to have some laughs!” She cast a knowing look over at Gina before she locked eyes with Katie again. “I think I already know the answer to this, but I’ve just got to ask.”
“Listen, kid, you don’t have any idea what kinds of people–”
Zoe held up a long finger to her lips. “Shh. Just tell me, Katie, are you ticklish?” Katie clenched her teeth; somehow the word, spoken out loud, just told her skin, which was already on edge, that this was really going to happen. Zoe grinned her terrible grin. “That’s what I thought!”
Katie grunted in displeasure as she felt two of Gina’s fingertips press against her sock, on the ball of her foot, and start to circle. She leaned forward and tried to grasp at her attackers, but the chair’s back stood between her and her torment, and Gina got faster the further forward Katie leaned. Her other foot felt Zoe’s long fingernails scratching against the cotton of her sock at the edge of her heel, and Katie felt her hips start to squirm in a futile attempt to get away. The sock-tickling continued, and Katie’s hands went to her mouth to cover the contortions that were grasping her face. She wanted to threaten and she wanted to bargain, but all her body could do as the tickling got faster was to try to swallow the building pressure, the bubbling giggles that Katie could feel actively trying to escape her body. But these girls knew what they were doing; Katie’s last wish silently to withstand her torture quickly was melting away by the second beneath a wave of sensation scribbling across her soles.
Gina seized on the mounting sense of indignity. “I know what you’ve been thinking all this time–there’s no way that getting your feet tickled is going to make anyone do anything, right? Something must be wrong with those women you were writing about? And yet here we are, aren’t we, Katie?”
Katie tried to answer back, but as soon as she vocalized she began to laugh, and the musical, bouncing, girlish sounds that she made were not remotely in her control. Why did she try to talk? Her hands went from her mouth to the couch cushions beside her, and she slapped their surface trying to fight back the sensations.
That wasn’t happening either.
Katie giggled and moaned her protest as the fingers kept tormenting, and she realized that the sensations were even worse than the girls led her to imagine as they told tales of torture back in the big city. She leaned back against the couch’s generous cushions as the laughter took over her body. These girls really could play her skin like a musical instrument, even through her socks, and they did. Katie moaned “No!” through her laughter as they continued.
Then she let out a shriek. Leaving one hand to tickle her foot, Zoe had reached the other up between her legs and started scratching at the bare flesh of Katie’s inner thigh. To her terror, the tickling on her feet got more intense even as her hips bucked to escape Zoe’s ravenous fingers.
Zoe laughed at Katie’s indignity. “Look who’s getting hot already!”
Katie tried to growl, but it came out as a petulant scream: “I’m not getting hot! You’re not going to stop this story!”
Gina, still tickling, leered at Katie. “You’re not the only one getting hot, Katie. Just wait for the tag-in!” Katie was well aware that nobody in the stories that the Andromeda girls told had been wearing cotton socks during any of the tortures, and she could still do that math: with an advantage that neight Traci Carter nor Mama Sam enjoyed, Katie had already lost her ability to talk like an adult, and she still didn’t even know what the Andromeda girls wanted. She guessed that they were trying to keep her from publishing her story on the AFC, but she hadn’t even taken the photos yet–the meet-ups were happening later that day.
Wait. They might be–
Katie couldn’t even finish that thought in her mind before she saw Casi’s form, silhouetted against the lights behind the other Andromeda girls, stand up. She tapped Gina on the shoulder, and all three girls stopped their tickling to lean forward and fill Katie’s field of vision. Casi was the first to speak. “You have two choices right now, Katie.”
“What do you want?”
“No, asking questions is not one of them. We’re going to take your socks off now so that we can get started for real.” Katie heard herself groan as she thought about what had already happened as not-for-real. “When we do, I’m going to tickle one spot on your foot. You get to choose the spot.”
“You go to hell.”
Casi settled herself in the chair and traded a knowing look with Zoe. “Hey, girls, she’s still trying to be hard! Isn’t that cute?” She stared Katie in the eyes. “If you tell me the most ticklish spot on your foot, I’m going to tickle it like you’ve never been tickled before, and it’s going to be utter torture. But if I think that you’ve got better spots, and if I find better spots…” Katie couldn’t help but squint at the delay, even though she didn’t break her eye-lock. “...I’m going to tickle your real spot for a little while, and then I’m going to start sucking your toes.” Katie winced as she imagined it. She could tell that all three read that reaction. “I’m going to give those delicious toes of yours a tongue-lashing that you’re not going to forget, and you’re going to get blazing hot on me.”
One last time Katie tried to talk tough. “I’m not a lesbian.”
Zoe’s smile somehow lit up even in her silhouette. “You might not think you are, Katie, but Casi has turned more than one married woman into a smoking hot mess.” Her tongue ran over her top teeth. “And it won’t take long.”
Casi again: “Where should I tickle you once we have that sock off, Sugar?”
Katie just glared at her.
“You have until we pull these socks off, and if you haven’t answered, I’m going to get my tongue going while Zoe here tickles your other foot. You’re ticklish through those socks, Katie. You have no idea what this is going to feel like once you start feeling what a real woman can do on those sensitive toes!” With that Casi used two fingers to pluck at the sock at the top of Katie’s toes while Zoe grabbed the top of the other sock’s ankle and started to peel it down her foot. Katie felt Casi’s sock clear her ankle, then her heel, then pull down the top of her foot towards her toes.
“Alright! The middle of my sole! The middle of my sole!”
“That’s where you’re most ticklish?”
“I don’t know–I just want you to tell me what you want so we can make a deal!”
“No deals, Sugar. But now I’m going to tickle the middle of your sole, and you’d better be right, or I’m going to start snacking early!”
Zoe already had one sock off, but Katie didn’t even notice: all she was focused on was Casi’s sock sliding off the tips of her toes. Then Zoe started scratching at the edge of Katie’s bare heel, and all of the compounded tension exploded from Katie’s mouth in a sliding squeal and a desperate, rolling laugh.
“No!” she thought, “I have to laugh at Casi, not Zoe!” In reality she had no idea which particular spot was most ticklish–her ex-husband had no interest in her feet, and neither had the sparse one-night stands she had indulged in since the divorce, and the longest she had ever thought about tickling was during her interview with the Andromeda girls in DC. But she had to convince Casi that she had disclosed something real–she couldn’t stand even the thought of Casi’s sadistic moaning or a tongue on her toes. So she fought the surge of giggling energy from Zoe’s tickling for seconds that seemed to stretch out over minutes until she felt Casi’s fingertip on her bare skin. Then she opened up the throttle: she let loose a shriek that she had been holding onto since they started touching her feet and let herself respond full-volume and full-body to what Casi was doing to her foot. Flopping backwards into the couch cushions again, as long as Casi’s finger was in the middle of her foot, Katie let herself laugh as loud as she wanted, to squirm at the torturing touches. Then she discovered just how hard it was to shut the gate when Casi moved from the middle of her sole to the ball of her foot. She managed to do it, but her body, given free rein, wanted to keep… what? Enjoying this? But she couldn’t let Casi see that this was an act.
And it wouldn’t be until long after her captivity, reflecting on this terrible night, that she realized that Casi’s moving from the middle of her sole out to the edges of her foot twice, then three times, and then once more, was giving Gina, sitting on the spotter’s stool and reading Katie’s act as the Andromeda girls always learned to read false and true jolts, a perfect, detailed map of the spots on her feet that were really going to drive her out of her mind. Katie was an investigator, not an actor. And besides that, it didn’t take an investigator to know that, when the time came, sexual arousal was going to be the lever that they could pull to exploit Katie’s real fear. Katie had handed them that card.
But that was later: in the moment, Katie was, in spite of her act, starting to fear that she was going to lose her will to fight the same way that Mama Sam and Traci Carter had in her story, and they hadn’t even gotten to tools or oils or any of the other terrible things that she knew were likely coming. Just fingers on her feet were going to be enough to drive her out of her mind. She giggled and squirmed and laughed for an eternity, and then the tickling stopped, and she opened her eyes–she hadn’t even realized that she had them shut for so long–to see Zoe moving back to the spotter’s stool and Gina taking a position at her feet.
“Please, just tell me what you want. Just let me go!”
Gina, making herself comfortable, leered at her. “What, begging already? We’re just starting to have fun, Katie! You’re a ticklish girl, you know that?”
“Please just let me call Washington. I’ll call off the story. Just let me out of here!”
Zoe’s grin dissipated. “Oh. I guess we’ll just have to stop tickling her, then. Mission accomplished, right?” She looked in disappointment at Gina and Casi, whose overwrought miming of disappointment managed to infuriate Katie. “Undo the straps, I guess.”
Katie’s fury mixed with her desperation. “Just take my phone! You can let your clients know that I’m abandoning the story. I’ll go back to Washington and take on another story.” Then Katie screamed as she felt Casi’s finger run up her sole, from her heel to the ball of her foot. “I can pay you! I’ll do what you want! What do you want?”
Casi licked her lips. “You don’t get to say when we’re done, sugar. We’re just getting started!”
“No! Please! I’ll do whatever your bosses want me to do!”
Gina laughed. “Our bosses aren’t politicians, Katie-girl. We’re Andromeda. And you don’t call the shots here!” And Katie suddenly felt Gina’s fingers start to work the ball of her foot, and Katie screamed at the renewed ticklish sensations. She cursed herself through her own laughing: her body believed that the ordeal was over, even though her memory knew better and should have known better. And Gina’s fingers were tickling her more intensely by far than what Zoe’s had done. Gina must be the real genius at finding ticklish spots here. That must be it.
Of course, in days that followed, when the ordeal was over, Katie would remember what the Andromeda girls had told her about chasing the jolt: ticklish spots move around, and Andromeda’s techniques made sure that their victims always had fingers and feathers and hairbrushes and worse tormenting those ticklish spots, wherever they popped up. Gina was following the jolt right now, and even when Casi, tickling her other foot, moved away from the middle of the sole, Katie couldn’t even make herself act: the tickling was just too terrible, and somewhere in a dark corner of what remained of her mind, she feared that everyone in the room knew she had lied to Casi. (Only much later would she remember that ticklish spots, according to these evil masters of women’s skin, weren’t so predictable as to stay in one place. At some point in the night the middle of her sole might have been the spot, but then it would have migrated.)
Casi’s and Gina’s fingers continued to torture Katie’s feet, and when the reporter managed to look up, Zoe’s grin was the crescent moon in a dark sky, her eyes taking in the jolt as she waited to relieve Casi and take another turn on the feet that had turned Washington’s most feared investigative reporter into a begging, giggling, squealing mess.
When they stopped this time Katie collapsed sideways, lying down on the couch and unconsciously reaching down between her legs with one hand and starting to rub lightly on the front of her panties. But a strong hand pulled her wrist away. Katie looked up to see Zoe’s grin again. “Not getting hot, huh?”
“Please just tell me what you want! I’ll do it.”
Casi’s hands grabbed her other arm, and the two pulled her to an upright sitting position, and Gina started to unfasten the leather straps around her calves. Casi was smoldering as she whispered, “Nothing you can do is going to make this stop. We’re going to tickle you as long as we like, and you’re going to hate it every second, but whenever we say so, you’re going to love it.”
“What?”
“You’re already getting hot, Katie. But the volume is really low right now. When we decide it’s time, you’re going to get hot like no man has ever made you hot. And just when you think you’re going to explode, we might just decide to keep you right on that edge.”
“Please…”
As they walked her to the vertical stocks, Zoe whispered in her other ear. “Save the begging, Katie. You’re really going to find out how much you can beg soon.” The three girls lowered Katie’s weakened body to the mattress and turned her on her back. The journalist, though she always thought of herself as a fighter, hardly had any energy to resist as they raised one leg, then the other into the padded cuffs and then as they fastened her wrists to the floor. They maneuvered a soft pillow between the back of her head and the mattress, but she felt utterly spent: she couldn’t imagine that her head was in any danger from thrashing. For a moment she could appreciate the cool basement air on her bare thighs.
But then Zoe started tickling her foot, and all of that energy shot back into her limbs. But this time she couldn’t even pull her wrists more than a few inches above floor level. When Casi joined the attack, Katie tried to thrash from side to side, but her wrist-cuffs wouldn’t let her turn. She could only laugh and shut her eyes with all of her might. She knew that her hands wouldn’t reach, but she felt her arms reaching desperately for her panties now. She shook her head violently from side to side, laughing like a madwoman, trying not to let her arousal show. And as her focus tried to stay there, every shift of focus on her feet, whether Casi’s spidering down from the base of her toes to her heel or Zoe’s fingernails lightly scratching between her toes, brought another desperate giggle into the air. Somehow she felt Gina looking into her mind, right through her eyelids.
And through the darkness of her own shut eyes, Katie heard a new sound: a high-pitched humming, and it seemed to come from behind Casi. The distraction drew her attention away from her feet for a moment, and both Zoe and Casi seized on the distraction to switch their tickling techniques. Katie squealed, but her neck craned and her eyes desperately searched for the source of the sound.
Through her own laughter Katie heard Gina’s voice: “Scoot forward on the stool, Casi!” The high hum was over on Casi’s side–now Katie knew that–and she couldn’t see Gina. Once again, with Katie’s attention drawn to the foot Casi was torturing, Zoe changed the pattern of her tickling, and Katie dissolved into giggles at a surprise attack that never should have surprised her. And then a new horror emerged: Casi’s fingers slowed down, and even as Zoe continued to tickle, Katie saw Casi’s head tilt upward, her lips forming an ecstatic ring breathing out pure, vaporized arousal. She couldn’t see what was happening below that because of the vertical stocks, but Casi’s head rocked back for what seemed forever, and she let out a moan that filled the basement, and the tickling on that foot stopped entirely. Then Casi’s eyes returned to lock with Katie’s, and Katie saw a hunger there that made her pull even harder–in vain–at her wrist restraints.
Gina stood to her full height behind Casi, and Zoe stopped tickling. The humming sound stopped. Katie’s eyes couldn’t decide which girl to watch, her eyes darting from one to the other, and Gina said, “Now we need to talk, Katie. Casi here is too hot to handle, and I think it’s almost time for her to start her taste test.”
“No… you can’t…”
“What we need from you, Katie, is your phone’s passcode. Our clients want to know everything you have, not just what you’re printing.”
Katie’s mind, drowning in her own body’s confusion as the tickling turned her brain into soup, nonetheless felt a sudden moment of clarity: if they turned her phone back on, it would connect to a local tower, and then at least the people looking for her would know she wasn’t on the beach any more. This could work! But she couldn’t seem too eager…
“Time’s up, Katie. Casi, let us know how those toes taste!”
“Wait! Please, you don’t know how dangerous these AFC people are!”
Gina smiled a closed-lipped grin, and Zoe’s toothy leer was its terrifying counterpart. Zoe was the one who spoke next. “And you don’t know how dangerous Casi’s tongue can be!” Zoe turned her back on Katie, then held up some kind of container in her hand as she returned to face her. She tipped the vial so that something came out on her hand, and Katie’s ankles tried in vain to twist away as those toe-tickling hands rubbed something slippery between Katie’s toes. Katie squealed in spite of herself as the skilled hands covered her skin. “Alright, Casi. They should be nice and minty now!”
Katie realized, as Casi’s face drew nearer to her foot, that this must have been the peppermint oil that she had written about months ago. “Wait! I’ll tell you the passcode! Just don’t let her lick my feet!”
Gina was the one laughing for the moment. “You’ll tell us the passcode when we’re ready for you to, Katie. You’re not getting out of this!”
“NO!” Katie’s shout, already high-pitched from being tickled by six merciless hands, shot up in pitch as Casi’s lips enveloped her second toe. Both of the Andromeda girl’s hands grasped Katie’s foot, keeping it steady as Katie felt Casi’s tongue start to work its way along the stem of her toe. Katie screamed frantically; she could almost feel a moan start to expand in her lower abdomen, then work its way up to her diaphragm and start to take over her chest as Casi tasted her toes. It tickled–maybe more than anything in her life had ever tickled–but this was much worse; as the moan worked its way to the base of Katie’s neck, she would have given these girls anything–her money, her passcode, anything–to stop what was about to happen.
As Katie let out the sound that she never wanted to make, her hips started to writhe on the mattress. Casi’s tongue kept at her toes, torturing her in ways that Gina’s and Zoe’s fingers never had. Katie panted, laughed in spite of her fury, growled at the monster who was taking her closer and closer to exploding. Then another moan came out of her mouth, and she realized a new terror: her hips had betrayed her, and she was starting to want that tongue to stop what it was doing to her toes and release the energy that they had discovered between her legs. Katie’s fists clenched as she laughed and moaned.
Then Gina’s fingernails started scratching at Katie’s other sole, and Katie screamed. Suddenly the dark, enveloping, aroused pleasure was receding beneath her as her ticklish skin bounced her into the sky. Her mind’s eye could see her own body, restrained by this cruel wooden frame, unable to swat away the awful fingers or the hellish tongue, and as she returned to the dark cloud of her own arousal, the gravity of her mind’s world drawing her closer, Gina started to scrabble her fingernails across her sole again, and Katie could not descend fast enough to re-enter. Her own climax was a mile away from her ticklish mind, and she could feel herself spiraling further into a strange madness as one foot’s tickling made her lose all sense of where she was and the other foot’s tickling cut like a laser beam through that erotic fog. As moments passed, and as Katie realized she had no idea how much clock time was going by, Katie heard her own mouth shouting out her phone’s passcode over and over through her laughing and moaning. Casi’s mouth departed from her foot.
Katie still couldn’t stand where her body was–she wanted Casi’s tongue back almost as soon as it left, and more than that she wanted her own hands back so that she could touch herself, rub herself. When Casi and Gina started to tickle her soles with fingernails again, she felt the arousal give way to an all-too-clear sensation of ticklish torture on her soles, and she screamed at the girls as she realized that they hadn’t even looked at her phone.
“Wait! I gave you the password! Turn on my phone!”
Zoe, who was spotting, laughed out loud at her look of betrayal. “What, and let the state police know where to find us? No, Katie, now we’re going to take our time with you. We didn’t really want that passcode! We just wanted to know how much you’d give up if you thought we’d stop!”
Katie’s frustration moaned even as she continued to giggle at the tickling. Casi, whose tongue had stirred Katie in ways that were too intimate for Katie even to think of, had shifted back to the kind of torturer’s precision that Katie knew must have driven Traci Carter out of Washington. Where her tongue had made Katie lose all sense of her surroundings and the moment, her fingertips concentrated all of Katie’s attention on her helpless, ticklish feet. If something like this could ever happen again, Katie knew that she would go to the ends of the earth to prevent it.
And yet they kept tickling.
Zoe tagged Casi out long after Katie lost any sense of time. She started working Katie’s jolt–that term of the torturer’s art that Katie now knew in her very skin–and got Katie squealing through her exhaustion as Casi looked on. The technique was undeniable; Katie was giggling like someone had just then surprised her and tickled her unsuspecting foot, and the fireball between her legs never did depart; her butt bounced on the mattress as she wished for her ex-husband, a high school boyfriend, anyone to let it out.
Then the humming came back. But this time Katie could see its source: as Gina and Zoe kept tickling her feet, Casi now held up a chrome vibrator above their shoulders, and she waved it back and forth so that the room’s light wrapped around it in reflection.
“No! No! Put that away! Get it away from me!” Katie’s voice got higher, peaking at a shriek and once again dissipating into tickled laughter.
Gina smiled as the tickling continued. “But isn’t it what you want more than anything right now?”
“No! No!” Katie didn’t remotely believe her own lie.
“You can only have it if we move over to the bed, though. Do you want that?”
Casi and Zoe’s fingers were jets of fire across her soles. She let out a screaming moan as they kept drawing giggles out of her body. “Don’t do this!”
“They’re not going to stop tickling you, Katie. Do you want this?”
Now the fire had overheard the conversation, and her hips wriggled back and forth on the mattress as she tried to deny them. “No! I’m not…”
Zoe grinned at her. “Not what, Katie? Aren’t we past that at this point?” Her fingernails scratched lightly over Katie’s sole, and Katie started to howl in protest at what she felt happening in her own body.
The fire kept burning.
The chrome cylinder hummed.
“Please…”
Now was Casi’s turn to grin her lascivious grin. “Please what, sugar?”
Casi’s warm fingertips slid between Katie’s toes, and she tried desperately to think about her assignment, her reputation, anything but the tickling. Her world shrunk to her body, her skin, her feet.
“Please don’t make me…”
Zoe: “Nobody’s going to make you, Katie. You have to ask nicely!”
Another jolt along the side of her heel. Katie could feel Gina’s eyes home in on it. Katie screamed in frustration and in ticklish agony.
“Move me…” Katie dissolved into giggles, unable to finish the sentence.
Gina: “Move you where, Katie?”
“Move me to the bed! Get me on the bed!”
The tickling stopped.
Without her bidding Katie’s arms strained against her bonds to reach her own body, and she watched as Gina and Zoe acknowledged the gesture with wicked grins. They efficiently unfastened the stocks while Casi started to work on one wrist cuff. When that arm was uncuffed, Casi grabbed Katie’s wrist with a strong grip and held it while Zoe uncuffed the other wrist. Then all three girls helped Katie to her feet, keeping her arms away from her body, and led her towards the four-poster bed. They sat her down and fastened her ankles in soft, padded cuffs, and Katie made an attempt to pull a wrist free.
Casi smiled at her.
“Not yet, sugar. You have to learn to ask nicely.”
“You have my phone’s passcode. Just let me go now!”
Now it was Gina’s time to grin. “This was never about the phone, Katie. Just get ready for the real fun to begin, lover girl!” They guided her wrists to two more cuffs so that she lay on her back, spread-eagle, her toes pointing towards the ceiling and the back of her head on another soft pillow.
Then she felt Casi’s fingertips on her sole again. She tried to sit up, but her arms, above her head, allowed her no such leverage. She yelled at the ceiling, “You said you’d let me finish!” Then Zoe started scratching at the base of the other foot’s toes, and Katie screamed. “You said you’d let me finish!”
Gina, whom Katie could not see but whose voice came from between her legs–Katie now knew this was where the spotter took her position–mocked her protests. “You said you’d let me finish! You said you’d let me finish!” She shifted back into her own voice. “You’re not finished until we say you are, Katie. You don’t get to decide what happens…” Katie heard the chrome vibrator hum to life. “...or when it happens!”
Katie’s nerves couldn’t bear any more, and her desperate laughter filled the basement as the relentless ticklers chased the latest jolt and their spotter tortured Katie’s ears with the sound of release. Her hips turned from side to side violently, trying to work her bum down the bed towards the sound. Although she couldn’t see the top of the mattress, she felt its top start to pulse as Gina set the vibrator down, still running. Katie’s agony seemed to explode as the bed beneath her started carrying the unseen waves of motion up through her bottom and into her hips. She screamed at the Andromeda girls. “Please!”
Casi’s fingertips rubbed at her heel, and the bedsheets started to bunch, their vibrating fibers touching Katie’s panties.
“Please!”
Zoe’s fingertips ran sprints down her sole from the ball of her foot to the middle, then with a backhand motion ran back up towards her toes. Katie tried desperately to get as much of the sheets against her as possible, but the tickling wouldn’t let her hips move with that much intention.
Katie heard Gina’s voice again. “I can put the vibrator against your panties if you want, Katie. But if I do, for the next hour you’re going to be more ticklish than you’ve ever been in your life, and we’re going to light into your feet with baby oil and hairbrushes. Do you understand that?”
“Please! Just let me finish!”
“You have to ask for the hairbrushes, Katie.”
Katie squealed as Zoe’s technique changed. “I’ll do the hairbrushes! Just do it!”
Gina wasn’t going to let this kind of fun get over with too quickly, though. “No, you can’t just resign yourself to the hairbrushes. You have to ask us to tickle you like you’ve never been tickled before.”
“Please! Tickle me!” Katie giggled all through the plea as Casi kept going to the middle of Katie’s sole. The reporter started thinking that might actually be the most ticklish spot on her body.
“Beg us to tickle you with hairbrushes!”
“Please! With hairbrushes!” Gina loomed over Katie to soak in the look of abjection, and with one hand she picked the vibrator off the mattress and started to move its tip towards Katie’s already-damp panties. With the other she ran her own fingernails down Katie’s inner thigh, drawing a giggling moan from her. “Please just make it finish!”
Katie felt the tip of the cylinder touch her body, and a wave of pleasure threw her head back hard into the pillow. But just as she thought the big finish was happening, she could feel Zoe and Casi tickling her feet again. The vibrator was trying to close the deal, but Katie’s big, ticklish feet wouldn’t let that sensation override theirs.
Katie’s voice was now a high-pitched, scratchy plea. “No! Just stop tickling my feet!”
And with that, Katie felt Casi’s fingers stop, but Zoe’s kept short-circuiting the orgasm that was expanding from a fire to a volcano in her hips. Her body wouldn’t let her finish as Zoe kept forcing her to laugh.
“Zoe! Let me finish!” Her head once again pressed hard backwards into her pillow. And then she felt Casi’s tongue on her toes. And that was the end of the chapter: Katie’s body lurched and fell limp, the pleasure of a woman’s mouth on Katie’s foot driving her into a climax that she had never even imagined before. The unworldly moan that she let out told all three of the Andromeda girls precisely what had happened, and Katie could feel her panties utterly soaked.
All three girls stopped what they were doing. Katie could only faintly feel someone’s hands pull her panties away from her body and cut them free, and the cool air was a good change from the sticky, wet cotton that had been there before, even as Katie knew that at some point before that night she would have been humiliated lying naked that way. Still tied to the bed, Katie’s chest heaved as she caught her breath, and her own arousal filled the air with a kind of perfume.
And then Katie felt the baby oil.
Gina and Casi were rubbing her feet with warm hands and a slick coating, getting oil between her toes and all along the heel and instep and every part of her foot. Katie knew that she should protest, but a coo was all that she could muster. With blurry vision she watched as Zoe walked in from another room with a plastic-bristled hairbrush in each hand. “Casi, I think it’s time for you to spot.” Casi obediently took her position behind Gina and Zoe.
“Isn’t there anything I can do to stop this?”
Zoe’s grin widened. “You don’t have anything left to trade. Now you’re going to feel what it’s really like to be ticklish.”
Katie gasped as each of the girls pulled backwards on her toes, and when the bristles started to work their way across her oily soles, Katie’s post-climax fog disappeared in an instant as cruel, plastic tips ran over slick skin. Katie knew now that no protest, no bargaining was going to slow this down, and something in the back of her mind resigned. As she screamed and bucked and laughed, she couldn’t remember Washington or newspapers or anything: the whole universe was in the soles of her feet.
But the universe didn’t stop there: she could feel the sensations shoot up through her ankles and into her knees, and then up into her thighs and back to her hips. She clenched her lower abdomen muscles tightly as she laughed and screamed, but she could feel a pulse in her own lower body that she wasn’t at all making happen. But as fast as the arousal came back, her feet would not let her mouth moan; all she could do was squeal and laugh as the terrible bristles worked their way across her feet. There was no time any more, only tickling, and even as she felt herself climax again, and felt her feet get even more ticklish as plastic traced lines in the oil, she didn’t even have any way to think about what they might want. Her mind was a blank; everything just tickled.
Spread-eagled, unable to cover up or even touch herself, Katie Jones blinked out of existence, and an electrified string of ticklish nerves thrashed on the bed, naked from the waist down, from the beginning of the universe and into a span of time that was no longer time. This universe had no newspapers, no politics, not even any distinctions between sexes or attractions or dignity or anything else. Just blazing, ticklish lines across Katie’s feet, sliding through oil and drawing at every pass her squeals and her laughing and–she couldn’t remember how many times–the explosive spasms of her hips and abdomen.
The last thing she remembered seeing was the devil’s grin on Zoe’s lips.
* * * * * * *
Katie Jones awoke, and she realized that she still wasn’t wearing any panties, but her hands and ankles were free. Warm skin flanked her on either side, and she realized that Zoe was on one side of her, brown skin pressed against pink, watching a video on a mobile phone. Zoe’s feet were up by Katie’s head. On her other side, face just inches from her own, lay Casi, watching her sleep.
Katie still wasn’t wearing any underwear.
Her faculties were coming back to her, and she addressed Casi. “Where’s Gina?”
Casi grinned at her. “She took your phone into town to log in and download what you’ve got without leading the police here. By the time they get to where she is, she’ll be back on the road here.”
“So you did want my phone?”
Zoe looked over her shoulder from her video. “Our clients said they wanted the data, but you’ll get your phone back with nothing missing.”
Katie tried to be furious with herself for letting that password go, but she only managed to ask: “So can I go now?”
Casi moved so that her nose was nearly touching Katie’s. “You know how Andromeda works, Katie. Our clients let us know that. And you probably still have some time ahead of you in the tickle chamber.” Katie felt Casi’s finger run up her thigh and onto her bare bottom, and she inhaled but did not protest. “But right now, you can just wait with us until we find out.”
Zoe’s feet rubbed together in the open air. Belly down with her legs bent at the knees and her ankles crossed, her soles faced the ceiling as she watched her video.
Casi put her cheek against Katie’s and whispered, “You’re dying to try it, aren’t you?”
Katie thought she heard an echo from another life in which she wouldn’t, but without much thought, she leaned away from Casi’s warm body, rolled over so that she was facing Zoe, reached a hand up to Zoe’s feet, and scratched at her sole. The torturer squealed as she put her phone down and turned to look at Katie.
“Katie! You naughty girl!” Katie felt herself grinning. “Are you going to tickle me now?”
Katie felt Casi’s hand on her stomach, and she inhaled sharply from the onrush of pleasure. Casi whispered in her ear, “You know Andromeda doesn’t recruit girls who aren’t ticklish, right? I’ll bet you could make Zoe scream right now if you wanted to.”
Katie didn’t realize until days later that she never moved to get Casi’s hands off of her body. She just propped herself on one elbow and reached out with her other hand to Zoe’s slender foot. “Tell me something, Zoe.”
“What do you want to know, beautiful?”
“Are you ticklish?”
Hey everybody! I hope you're enjoying this commission story as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you do, be sure to leave a comment, and then leave a comment on another author's story!
KI
Andromeda, part 2 (fff/f, non-con)
by
Kid Indy
She had been there for a few weeks, but the hum of neon lights never sounded right accompanied by the roar of ocean waves. For that matter, she never imagined the swampy beach country of South Carolina could be this cold, but she never thought about its existing in February. For someone who had spent most of her adult life in the pulsing center of world power, the largely-empty tourist bars of Myrtle Beach were something approaching a different planet. But the chilly beach was where the story led, and Katie always followed the story.
After all, that’s what had put her on the radar when she was fresh out of J-school, and that’s what had brought her up through the ranks of Washington’s reporters. And her persistence on the case of Traci Carter had finally pushed her to the top of her game, Senior Reporter for Interest, a magazine for Washington insiders and policy experts who now knew that the top lobbyist in the healthcare-policy world had not in fact disappeared into the Great Plains on her own accord but had been abducted, tortured, and terrorized into fleeing a career by the mysterious group known only as Andromeda.
In the cold salty evening beach bums were out in force, roaming the boardwalk to score drug money from the few frightened tourists trying to get back to their hotels. Soon Spring Break would bring the gigantic crowds back, but right now the neon-lit sand was simply a dimly illuminated, multi-colored strip between the bars and the shops to the west and the endless, empty water to the east. Katie allowed herself a quick look at her phone and at the day’s notes. She knew that her only ticket back to the big city and the life she missed was making the connections that would establish the corruption narrative she was working.
The American Firearms Coalition, a gun-lobbyist and general right-wing group, was on the rise, and several seats in the US House had flipped from moderate Republicans to their hand-picked, gun-obsessed voting bloc. So far, nothing illegal. But something was happening beyond the bounds of the uncontested Republican districts. The AFC had started out as a Facebook group run by a farmer’s family in Iowa with time on their hands. They had amassed several thousand followers as such groups do, and they had even become one of the lucky no-compromise indy platforms to climb into the tens of thousands. But then something had changed.
Without any on-the-books funding, suddenly the organization’s influence had become so pervasive that it rivaled the big lobbyists like the NRA and the agribusiness firms in reach and precision, and that’s what Katie knew that she had to investigate. No viral video was going to bring the kinds of names to a tourist beach that were showing up soon–something beyond the white boys on the videos was going on.
Money doesn’t grow on trees, and it always leaves a paper trail.
Cause and effect are funny things in the world of politics. Ignore the big social forces, and you start looking for powerful individuals and malevolent conspiracies under every rock. Rule out real conspiracies–and they do happen–and you end up inventing fake social and historical forces that are nothing but shields for powerful men. That’s what all the big news outlets had done with the previous year’s emergence of HI-Fed, a public-option federal health insurance provider. After all, that’s the kind of story that flattered the politically progressive: America had just gotten fed up with being the slowest runner on the international track, and progressive Congresswomen deserve credit for bringing the good old USA into the twenty-first century. (Twitter, of course, could not help but to start the hash tag #welcometo20thcentury trending in response.)
But Katie wasn’t satisfied with that story: the big insurance companies had billions on the line, and they had the best in the business in Traci Carter, whose connections meant that she could maintain unimaginable wealth not only for Congressmen but also for their staffs and their larger circles if they would play ball with her clients, and none of it would ever cross any lines into illegal territory. But Carter, against everyone’s expectations, failed to block HI-Fed, and American healthcare and its billionaires took a hit that news outlets’ headlines compared to the Sack of Rome, to Napoleon at Waterloo, to Sherman marching on Atlanta. How in the world did Washington’s Queen Midas drop the ball on the biggest legislative battle in a decade of health policy?
As it turned out, she just didn’t show up.
Nobody else was looking into this possibility; with their reduced reporting budgets, they had all left the health-insurance story and turned to the newest news-cycle sensation, the ballooning influence of the American Firearms Coalition. Katie convinced her editors at Interest to stick with last month’s story just a bit longer, and the result was the story that had Katie on the short list for the coming year’s Pulitzers. A criminal contractor called Andromeda had abducted Carter, tortured her into absolute terror without leaving a mark on her body, and driven her out of Washington and into flyover country, presumably for the remainder of her life. Carter would not go on record for the story, but Katie would not let that end the story. Her harrowing night interviewing three agents of Andromeda, all on probation after a sentence-reduction deal, also uncovered a second jaw-dropping torture story in prison. In her three-issue expose on the group’s influence, she had tracked down state documents confirming both the witness-protection deal given to the prison drug kingpin Mama Sam and the deal that the state had cut with the three Andromeda girls, and just like that, one journalist had put the health-insurance story back on the map.
The liberals and progressives who constitute Washington’s press corps, of course, were furious with Katie Jones: she was now the new face of Whitewater, the Clinton email server, the Hunter Biden energy company connections, and every right-wing conspiracy rolled into one. None of that mattered to Katie; she spent a year doing the morning shows and the evening shows and NPR and the big podcasts, championing a vision of journalism that never stops chasing the truth even when it unveils the corruption of one’s political allies. A few of her appearances–especially with the podcasters–had ventured into creepy territory with hosts who were more than a little bit too interested in the methods that Andromeda used on Carter and Mama Sam, but Katie had been around long enough to remember the same fascination with White House interns and how their dresses got stained, so par for the course, she figured.
She did decline an offer to sit in Howard Stern’s infamous chair.
But several months and a Pulitzer snub later, she was back on the hunt, where she had made herself famous, where she knew she belonged. While her counterparts at the big-city newspapers fought their editors for time and money for week-long trips to investigate the AFC, Interest, now a national power in political journalism, knew that their golden goose was going to go wherever she wanted, so she had been in the field for months pounding the pavement, connecting networks of influence, and now roaming the bars of a beach town asking after recent visits and meetings between Southern and Midwestern legislators and their mysterious benefactors. Myrtle Beach was where Republicans go to stop being Baptist for the week of Spring Break, so Katie’s prominence in the renewed national battle over public-funded health care lent her a strange kind of celebrity among people who watch too much Fox News. That opened doors for her that would have slammed in the faces of many reporters from the northern stretch of the East Coast.
Katie, of course, always knew how and when to find and use leverage, and she had figured out certain patterns: the Representatives and lobbyists who were already AFC-supported were all scheduled to participate in a conservative conference at a local convention center, a cover to get them and their handlers all in the same place but out of reach for most New York and DC newspapers. But the names who didn’t ever appear alongside the AFC before this year, the ones who were going to be the “special guests” on the final night, were the real money. Katie had confirmed that Senators and Cabinet secretaries and other real movers were going to be in town a couple days before their official arrival, moving in the secrecy that a depleted journalism industry, all concentrated on the convention center, would allow them.
Local papers would be so caught up in the celebrity visits and famous politicians’ photo-ops with the public face of the up-and-coming rival to the NRA that they wouldn’t take the time to follow the Senators and their staffers after dark, so the mysterious money behind the AFC could hold their own meetings after hours, when the beach-town’s sunshine wasn’t lighting the shots that access-journalists started and stopped with. This much Katie knew, and moreover she knew which bars in town had scheduled late-night back room reservations during the convention. (There was the HI-Fed-buster credibility doing its work.)
Katie was going to be in the right place, at the right time, and she was going to have photographs from hotel lobbies and the sidewalks outside of bars to go with the good timing. Soon America was going to know who was meeting with whom, and when, and where, and they were going to find it all out from Interest magazine while the big-city newspapers were still figuring out where to start on the story. And the action was going to start in less than 24 hours: the planes would start landing that night, and the first session of the convention was the next day.
Katie slid a finger along the plastic edge of her hotel’s magnetic room key as she saw its sign ahead. She went over her personal plan: get a good night’s sleep tonight, rest while the rest of the news industry covered the front, and then hit the bars tomorrow night when the real story started. She pulled the card from her jacket pocket and prepared to open the hotel’s lobby door when she heard the voice.
“Long time no see, sugar!”
No. It couldn’t be.
Katie turned slowly, and her vision, already accustomed to the well-lit hotel lobby, could only make out a smile in the darkness. She squinted towards the ocean, and the form leaning against the light pole was unmistakable.
Casi. Casi the perverted Andromeda girl whose story had propelled Katie almost to the stars. Casi, whose hands had almost made Katie abandon the story of Traci Carter. Casi, who was now taking long, casual strides towards Katie.
“I love when I meet old friends on the beach, don’t you, Katie?”
Katie’s eyes darted to the right and to the left. “Casi, what are you doing here?”
Casi’s laugh cut through the ocean’s rumble, making Katie shiver. “I’m not Casi to most people these days, sugar, but you can call me that if you like. Strange time to vacation at the beach, isn’t it?”
Katie’s heart pounded as she pondered whether she could outrun the much younger girl. “I’m in town covering the Republican politicians’ conference. Conservative celebrities and Congressmen and such. You know–Washington stuff.”
“You’re right, Katie. We do know. And we know that you’ve been hanging out in some scary bars these last few weeks.”
Now Katie knew she had to run. But something made her go for one more line. She raised a finger and pointed at Casi’s face. “I don’t know who you think you’re dealing with here, but I’m breaking this story, and nobody is stopping me!” With that she pivoted away from the glass door and took off running as fast as she could for the corner of the building. She didn’t hear Casi in pursuit, but nonetheless she slid into her car as fast as she could and backed out of her parking spot with screeching tires.
Katie turned and burned out of the side parking lot and onto one of the broad, restaurant-studded roads that connected the beach to the world. She had dealt with corrupt politicians with goons before, and she knew that a secondary safe house was absolutely a must. Taking turns almost fast enough to tip the car onto two wheels, she sped out towards the Interstate to get to the back-country motel. Her eyes darted from the road ahead of her to the rearview mirror and back. Nobody was following her. She kept her foot on the gas, though, hit the exit ramp, and put miles behind her, feeling her jacket pocket for the phone where she kept her notes.
Katie whipped off the Interstate, then off the state route to a side road, heading for a small town she had scouted with one motel. She’d call for backup from the paper from there, but first she had to make sure that she was behind a locked door. For all she knew, Gina and Zoe had been waiting in her beach hotel’s lobby, waiting to grab her, but none of them could guess which nowhere small town she might head to wait out the night. Checking the rearview one more time, seeing no lights behind her on the back road, she settled back into her seat to finish the escape.
Then her tire started limping.
Katie pulled the car under control and suddenly remembered: Traci Carter. Radio-controlled tire sabotage. This was the same MO. She pulled her disabled car to the side of the dark road, got on her phone, and dialed 911. The dial tone let her know that someone would pick up soon.
“Horry County dispatch. Is this an emergency?”
“Yes, I’m being pursued. I’m between Aynor and Cool Spring, and my tire has blown.”
“Wait. Pursued?”
“Yes, pursued! I need help fast! Please send police!” In her side-view mirror Katie saw a pair of headlights appear. “Please hurry!”
“Which road are you on?”
“Williams Road off of highway 22. Please send someone fast!”
“Stay where you are, and we’ll dispatch a squad car as soon as we can.” The headlights were coming on fast.
Katie screamed, “Send one now! Andromeda! Andromeda!” Screeching tires brought the other vehicle to a stop in the middle of the back road. Katie heard three pairs of boots hit the ground, and she desperately fumbled to lock her doors.
A hand slapped the glass of Katie’s passenger-side window. She could hear Zoe’s voice in the darkness. “We’ve got fifteen minutes minimum before anyone gets here, Katie!” And with a crash, something rammed through the back seat’s passenger window, dropping the glass onto the back seat in one mass. Before Katie could react through her shock, Casi was reaching in and opening the back door. The door opened, and Katie tried to launch herself over her seat to push Casi away, but Casi just grabbed her wrists and held tight. Zoe leaned over Casi and disengaged the automatic locks, and within seconds Zoe was coming through the passenger door as Gina opened the driver’s side door. Katie struggled, but the three dragged her out of the car, put handcuffs on her behind her back, and put a bag over her head. Then she felt some kind of cord being tied around the ankles of her blue jeans and knotted so that she couldn’t kick. She heard her rented car start up, and she heard it roll slowly off the road and into the dark water of a swamp on the side of the road. Katie knew that nobody would be finding that car in this darkness until she was long gone. Meanwhile the two whose hands were on her marched her to the trunk of the car, where they lifted her off her feet, put her inside, and closed the trunk on her. She felt the car start to move.
Katie tried to remember all of the turns that she felt the car make, but they drove for something like half an hour, and Katie’s mental map was soon looping back on itself. When they finally came to a stop, Katie could hear all three pairs of boots coming around to the trunk of the car, and when the trunk opened, she could not hear any of the beach-town traffic or music from bars. Wherever she was, only the sounds of the cold coastal wetlands rang out in the night air.
Four hands untied her ankles, and she tried to stretch her legs as they lifted her out of the trunk and marched her in the darkness. She heard Zoe’s voice say, “Three steps up,” and she complied, remembering her training from when she had begun reporting on right-wing militias. The captors would eventually get tired, the security consultant told them, and when they did, that was when to escape, get to a secure place, and contact help. The temperature changed and a door shut behind her, and Katie knew that they had entered an indoor space. But after a few more twists and turns through the house, she heard another door open, and this time Zoe’s voice said, “Twelve steps down.” She swallowed hard but did as she was told. The air grew cooler, but not as cold as the outdoor air, and Katie did some mental math, figuring out that they were in a deep basement space.
A door, heavier-sounding than the first two, shut behind her. A heavy latch, maybe a deadbolt, threw.
A hand grabbed the bag over Katie’s head and pulled on it. Katie tossed her hair away from her eyes and looked around. She tried not to gasp, but the sound happened before she could stop it. On one side she saw what seemed to be a queen-sized bed with tall posts, and ropes ending in leather cuffs trailed from each of those posts. Worse, Casi was leaning on one of the posts, licking her lips. In the middle of the room was a long upholstered couch. Next to it was some kind of wooden construction, and Katie let out a second gasp as she realized that she was looking at vertical stocks, the same kind that the Andromeda girls had told her about. A table, perhaps a kitchen table, was surrounded by about six chairs. And finally, sitting in a recliner, Gina sat, eyeing Katie, looking her up and down. This was an Andromeda safehouse, just like the ones the girls had described to her. But now Katie was not a reporter but its victim.
Katie heard Zoe’s voice behind her. “Let’s sit you down on that couch. You’ve had a rough night.”
Katie’s training kicked in. “I need to use a bathroom first.”
Gina leered at her. “Of course, Katie. We’re going to be spending a lot of time together. We want you to be comfortable, don’t we?” With that she stood and led Katie and Zoe, who still had a grasp on her elbow, to an alcove in a corner of the basement. In a nook in the side of the room were a small toilet bowl and a sink.
Katie’s mouth curled in disappointment that this plan wasn’t working. “No door?”
Zoe started to uncuff Katie’s wrists. “We’re all going to be really friendly here, Katie. We’re all roommates for the next several days.”
Katie rubbed her wrists, then felt for a pocket as she prepared to sit down. She wasn’t planning to stay for days. “You think it’ll take them that long to find you?”
Gina answered her. “We aren’t trying to get caught this time, Katie. It’s not part of the job. So yeah, I think you’re going to stay here with us as long as we say, and not a minute shorter.” Then Gina held up a small rectangle in her hand. “And don’t worry about your phone, Katie. We’ll hold on to that for you.” Zoe laughed at Katie’s scowl.
Katie did in fact have to go, and she did, and when she started to stand up, Gina and Zoe were inches away from her. Zoe was the first to talk. “Keep your panties, but lose the jeans and the boots.”
Katie attempted defiance. “And the socks?”
From behind the other two Andromeda girls Casi’s voice emerged. “No, leave the socks. I want to take those off.”
“I’m going to get cold down here without any pants.”
Gina looked over her shoulder. “Bring it up a few degrees down here, Casi. You’re spotting first.” Katie took in a sharp breath. They were using the jargon that she had heard at that DC nightclub, the jargon of torture. Gina folded Katie’s jeans neatly and placed them on the arm of the easy chair, then set her boots down beside the chair, and Katie let them sit her down on the couch. Katie watched as Casi pulled two simple chairs away from the table, then went back for two more, then for one of the two remaining. Zoe just stayed with Katie to make sure she didn’t go anywhere.
Katie tried to establish eye contact with Gina, who was moving towards one of the chairs. “What is it you want from me? Are you working for the AFC?”
Gina didn’t even look up; she grabbed Katie’s calf and guided her foot up to one of the chairs as Zoe, seated beside Katie, grabbed her arms in a bear-hug and looped her own long legs around Katie’s waist to immobilize her. Gina guided Katie’s foot through the gap between the chair’s back and its seat, then started lashing Katie’s lower leg to the seat with leather straps. Casi did the same with the other foot. Within a minute Zoe could let go, as Katie’s sock feet protruded through the chairs’ gaps and came to rest on the front of each chair, each leg tied to one chair (they were surprisingly heavy, Katie, realized as she tried to move her legs). Moving into a new position, Gina and Zoe scooted the heavy chairs away from each other, pulling Katie’s legs into a V, and each sat down in front of a foot.
“I know what you’re going to do. And it’s not going to work–my editors already have my research. Whatever you do to me here, they already know what’s going on. I don’t care what they’ve told you–keeping me here is only going to make things worse for them!”
Gina looked over the chair’s back into Katie’s eyes as Casi took her position as the spotter. “Come on, Katie. You know how this works–you wrote the story on us! We’re not here to talk politics.”
Zoe spoke from behind Katie’s other foot. “We’re just here to have some laughs!” She cast a knowing look over at Gina before she locked eyes with Katie again. “I think I already know the answer to this, but I’ve just got to ask.”
“Listen, kid, you don’t have any idea what kinds of people–”
Zoe held up a long finger to her lips. “Shh. Just tell me, Katie, are you ticklish?” Katie clenched her teeth; somehow the word, spoken out loud, just told her skin, which was already on edge, that this was really going to happen. Zoe grinned her terrible grin. “That’s what I thought!”
Katie grunted in displeasure as she felt two of Gina’s fingertips press against her sock, on the ball of her foot, and start to circle. She leaned forward and tried to grasp at her attackers, but the chair’s back stood between her and her torment, and Gina got faster the further forward Katie leaned. Her other foot felt Zoe’s long fingernails scratching against the cotton of her sock at the edge of her heel, and Katie felt her hips start to squirm in a futile attempt to get away. The sock-tickling continued, and Katie’s hands went to her mouth to cover the contortions that were grasping her face. She wanted to threaten and she wanted to bargain, but all her body could do as the tickling got faster was to try to swallow the building pressure, the bubbling giggles that Katie could feel actively trying to escape her body. But these girls knew what they were doing; Katie’s last wish silently to withstand her torture quickly was melting away by the second beneath a wave of sensation scribbling across her soles.
Gina seized on the mounting sense of indignity. “I know what you’ve been thinking all this time–there’s no way that getting your feet tickled is going to make anyone do anything, right? Something must be wrong with those women you were writing about? And yet here we are, aren’t we, Katie?”
Katie tried to answer back, but as soon as she vocalized she began to laugh, and the musical, bouncing, girlish sounds that she made were not remotely in her control. Why did she try to talk? Her hands went from her mouth to the couch cushions beside her, and she slapped their surface trying to fight back the sensations.
That wasn’t happening either.
Katie giggled and moaned her protest as the fingers kept tormenting, and she realized that the sensations were even worse than the girls led her to imagine as they told tales of torture back in the big city. She leaned back against the couch’s generous cushions as the laughter took over her body. These girls really could play her skin like a musical instrument, even through her socks, and they did. Katie moaned “No!” through her laughter as they continued.
Then she let out a shriek. Leaving one hand to tickle her foot, Zoe had reached the other up between her legs and started scratching at the bare flesh of Katie’s inner thigh. To her terror, the tickling on her feet got more intense even as her hips bucked to escape Zoe’s ravenous fingers.
Zoe laughed at Katie’s indignity. “Look who’s getting hot already!”
Katie tried to growl, but it came out as a petulant scream: “I’m not getting hot! You’re not going to stop this story!”
Gina, still tickling, leered at Katie. “You’re not the only one getting hot, Katie. Just wait for the tag-in!” Katie was well aware that nobody in the stories that the Andromeda girls told had been wearing cotton socks during any of the tortures, and she could still do that math: with an advantage that neight Traci Carter nor Mama Sam enjoyed, Katie had already lost her ability to talk like an adult, and she still didn’t even know what the Andromeda girls wanted. She guessed that they were trying to keep her from publishing her story on the AFC, but she hadn’t even taken the photos yet–the meet-ups were happening later that day.
Wait. They might be–
Katie couldn’t even finish that thought in her mind before she saw Casi’s form, silhouetted against the lights behind the other Andromeda girls, stand up. She tapped Gina on the shoulder, and all three girls stopped their tickling to lean forward and fill Katie’s field of vision. Casi was the first to speak. “You have two choices right now, Katie.”
“What do you want?”
“No, asking questions is not one of them. We’re going to take your socks off now so that we can get started for real.” Katie heard herself groan as she thought about what had already happened as not-for-real. “When we do, I’m going to tickle one spot on your foot. You get to choose the spot.”
“You go to hell.”
Casi settled herself in the chair and traded a knowing look with Zoe. “Hey, girls, she’s still trying to be hard! Isn’t that cute?” She stared Katie in the eyes. “If you tell me the most ticklish spot on your foot, I’m going to tickle it like you’ve never been tickled before, and it’s going to be utter torture. But if I think that you’ve got better spots, and if I find better spots…” Katie couldn’t help but squint at the delay, even though she didn’t break her eye-lock. “...I’m going to tickle your real spot for a little while, and then I’m going to start sucking your toes.” Katie winced as she imagined it. She could tell that all three read that reaction. “I’m going to give those delicious toes of yours a tongue-lashing that you’re not going to forget, and you’re going to get blazing hot on me.”
One last time Katie tried to talk tough. “I’m not a lesbian.”
Zoe’s smile somehow lit up even in her silhouette. “You might not think you are, Katie, but Casi has turned more than one married woman into a smoking hot mess.” Her tongue ran over her top teeth. “And it won’t take long.”
Casi again: “Where should I tickle you once we have that sock off, Sugar?”
Katie just glared at her.
“You have until we pull these socks off, and if you haven’t answered, I’m going to get my tongue going while Zoe here tickles your other foot. You’re ticklish through those socks, Katie. You have no idea what this is going to feel like once you start feeling what a real woman can do on those sensitive toes!” With that Casi used two fingers to pluck at the sock at the top of Katie’s toes while Zoe grabbed the top of the other sock’s ankle and started to peel it down her foot. Katie felt Casi’s sock clear her ankle, then her heel, then pull down the top of her foot towards her toes.
“Alright! The middle of my sole! The middle of my sole!”
“That’s where you’re most ticklish?”
“I don’t know–I just want you to tell me what you want so we can make a deal!”
“No deals, Sugar. But now I’m going to tickle the middle of your sole, and you’d better be right, or I’m going to start snacking early!”
Zoe already had one sock off, but Katie didn’t even notice: all she was focused on was Casi’s sock sliding off the tips of her toes. Then Zoe started scratching at the edge of Katie’s bare heel, and all of the compounded tension exploded from Katie’s mouth in a sliding squeal and a desperate, rolling laugh.
“No!” she thought, “I have to laugh at Casi, not Zoe!” In reality she had no idea which particular spot was most ticklish–her ex-husband had no interest in her feet, and neither had the sparse one-night stands she had indulged in since the divorce, and the longest she had ever thought about tickling was during her interview with the Andromeda girls in DC. But she had to convince Casi that she had disclosed something real–she couldn’t stand even the thought of Casi’s sadistic moaning or a tongue on her toes. So she fought the surge of giggling energy from Zoe’s tickling for seconds that seemed to stretch out over minutes until she felt Casi’s fingertip on her bare skin. Then she opened up the throttle: she let loose a shriek that she had been holding onto since they started touching her feet and let herself respond full-volume and full-body to what Casi was doing to her foot. Flopping backwards into the couch cushions again, as long as Casi’s finger was in the middle of her foot, Katie let herself laugh as loud as she wanted, to squirm at the torturing touches. Then she discovered just how hard it was to shut the gate when Casi moved from the middle of her sole to the ball of her foot. She managed to do it, but her body, given free rein, wanted to keep… what? Enjoying this? But she couldn’t let Casi see that this was an act.
And it wouldn’t be until long after her captivity, reflecting on this terrible night, that she realized that Casi’s moving from the middle of her sole out to the edges of her foot twice, then three times, and then once more, was giving Gina, sitting on the spotter’s stool and reading Katie’s act as the Andromeda girls always learned to read false and true jolts, a perfect, detailed map of the spots on her feet that were really going to drive her out of her mind. Katie was an investigator, not an actor. And besides that, it didn’t take an investigator to know that, when the time came, sexual arousal was going to be the lever that they could pull to exploit Katie’s real fear. Katie had handed them that card.
But that was later: in the moment, Katie was, in spite of her act, starting to fear that she was going to lose her will to fight the same way that Mama Sam and Traci Carter had in her story, and they hadn’t even gotten to tools or oils or any of the other terrible things that she knew were likely coming. Just fingers on her feet were going to be enough to drive her out of her mind. She giggled and squirmed and laughed for an eternity, and then the tickling stopped, and she opened her eyes–she hadn’t even realized that she had them shut for so long–to see Zoe moving back to the spotter’s stool and Gina taking a position at her feet.
“Please, just tell me what you want. Just let me go!”
Gina, making herself comfortable, leered at her. “What, begging already? We’re just starting to have fun, Katie! You’re a ticklish girl, you know that?”
“Please just let me call Washington. I’ll call off the story. Just let me out of here!”
Zoe’s grin dissipated. “Oh. I guess we’ll just have to stop tickling her, then. Mission accomplished, right?” She looked in disappointment at Gina and Casi, whose overwrought miming of disappointment managed to infuriate Katie. “Undo the straps, I guess.”
Katie’s fury mixed with her desperation. “Just take my phone! You can let your clients know that I’m abandoning the story. I’ll go back to Washington and take on another story.” Then Katie screamed as she felt Casi’s finger run up her sole, from her heel to the ball of her foot. “I can pay you! I’ll do what you want! What do you want?”
Casi licked her lips. “You don’t get to say when we’re done, sugar. We’re just getting started!”
“No! Please! I’ll do whatever your bosses want me to do!”
Gina laughed. “Our bosses aren’t politicians, Katie-girl. We’re Andromeda. And you don’t call the shots here!” And Katie suddenly felt Gina’s fingers start to work the ball of her foot, and Katie screamed at the renewed ticklish sensations. She cursed herself through her own laughing: her body believed that the ordeal was over, even though her memory knew better and should have known better. And Gina’s fingers were tickling her more intensely by far than what Zoe’s had done. Gina must be the real genius at finding ticklish spots here. That must be it.
Of course, in days that followed, when the ordeal was over, Katie would remember what the Andromeda girls had told her about chasing the jolt: ticklish spots move around, and Andromeda’s techniques made sure that their victims always had fingers and feathers and hairbrushes and worse tormenting those ticklish spots, wherever they popped up. Gina was following the jolt right now, and even when Casi, tickling her other foot, moved away from the middle of the sole, Katie couldn’t even make herself act: the tickling was just too terrible, and somewhere in a dark corner of what remained of her mind, she feared that everyone in the room knew she had lied to Casi. (Only much later would she remember that ticklish spots, according to these evil masters of women’s skin, weren’t so predictable as to stay in one place. At some point in the night the middle of her sole might have been the spot, but then it would have migrated.)
Casi’s and Gina’s fingers continued to torture Katie’s feet, and when the reporter managed to look up, Zoe’s grin was the crescent moon in a dark sky, her eyes taking in the jolt as she waited to relieve Casi and take another turn on the feet that had turned Washington’s most feared investigative reporter into a begging, giggling, squealing mess.
When they stopped this time Katie collapsed sideways, lying down on the couch and unconsciously reaching down between her legs with one hand and starting to rub lightly on the front of her panties. But a strong hand pulled her wrist away. Katie looked up to see Zoe’s grin again. “Not getting hot, huh?”
“Please just tell me what you want! I’ll do it.”
Casi’s hands grabbed her other arm, and the two pulled her to an upright sitting position, and Gina started to unfasten the leather straps around her calves. Casi was smoldering as she whispered, “Nothing you can do is going to make this stop. We’re going to tickle you as long as we like, and you’re going to hate it every second, but whenever we say so, you’re going to love it.”
“What?”
“You’re already getting hot, Katie. But the volume is really low right now. When we decide it’s time, you’re going to get hot like no man has ever made you hot. And just when you think you’re going to explode, we might just decide to keep you right on that edge.”
“Please…”
As they walked her to the vertical stocks, Zoe whispered in her other ear. “Save the begging, Katie. You’re really going to find out how much you can beg soon.” The three girls lowered Katie’s weakened body to the mattress and turned her on her back. The journalist, though she always thought of herself as a fighter, hardly had any energy to resist as they raised one leg, then the other into the padded cuffs and then as they fastened her wrists to the floor. They maneuvered a soft pillow between the back of her head and the mattress, but she felt utterly spent: she couldn’t imagine that her head was in any danger from thrashing. For a moment she could appreciate the cool basement air on her bare thighs.
But then Zoe started tickling her foot, and all of that energy shot back into her limbs. But this time she couldn’t even pull her wrists more than a few inches above floor level. When Casi joined the attack, Katie tried to thrash from side to side, but her wrist-cuffs wouldn’t let her turn. She could only laugh and shut her eyes with all of her might. She knew that her hands wouldn’t reach, but she felt her arms reaching desperately for her panties now. She shook her head violently from side to side, laughing like a madwoman, trying not to let her arousal show. And as her focus tried to stay there, every shift of focus on her feet, whether Casi’s spidering down from the base of her toes to her heel or Zoe’s fingernails lightly scratching between her toes, brought another desperate giggle into the air. Somehow she felt Gina looking into her mind, right through her eyelids.
And through the darkness of her own shut eyes, Katie heard a new sound: a high-pitched humming, and it seemed to come from behind Casi. The distraction drew her attention away from her feet for a moment, and both Zoe and Casi seized on the distraction to switch their tickling techniques. Katie squealed, but her neck craned and her eyes desperately searched for the source of the sound.
Through her own laughter Katie heard Gina’s voice: “Scoot forward on the stool, Casi!” The high hum was over on Casi’s side–now Katie knew that–and she couldn’t see Gina. Once again, with Katie’s attention drawn to the foot Casi was torturing, Zoe changed the pattern of her tickling, and Katie dissolved into giggles at a surprise attack that never should have surprised her. And then a new horror emerged: Casi’s fingers slowed down, and even as Zoe continued to tickle, Katie saw Casi’s head tilt upward, her lips forming an ecstatic ring breathing out pure, vaporized arousal. She couldn’t see what was happening below that because of the vertical stocks, but Casi’s head rocked back for what seemed forever, and she let out a moan that filled the basement, and the tickling on that foot stopped entirely. Then Casi’s eyes returned to lock with Katie’s, and Katie saw a hunger there that made her pull even harder–in vain–at her wrist restraints.
Gina stood to her full height behind Casi, and Zoe stopped tickling. The humming sound stopped. Katie’s eyes couldn’t decide which girl to watch, her eyes darting from one to the other, and Gina said, “Now we need to talk, Katie. Casi here is too hot to handle, and I think it’s almost time for her to start her taste test.”
“No… you can’t…”
“What we need from you, Katie, is your phone’s passcode. Our clients want to know everything you have, not just what you’re printing.”
Katie’s mind, drowning in her own body’s confusion as the tickling turned her brain into soup, nonetheless felt a sudden moment of clarity: if they turned her phone back on, it would connect to a local tower, and then at least the people looking for her would know she wasn’t on the beach any more. This could work! But she couldn’t seem too eager…
“Time’s up, Katie. Casi, let us know how those toes taste!”
“Wait! Please, you don’t know how dangerous these AFC people are!”
Gina smiled a closed-lipped grin, and Zoe’s toothy leer was its terrifying counterpart. Zoe was the one who spoke next. “And you don’t know how dangerous Casi’s tongue can be!” Zoe turned her back on Katie, then held up some kind of container in her hand as she returned to face her. She tipped the vial so that something came out on her hand, and Katie’s ankles tried in vain to twist away as those toe-tickling hands rubbed something slippery between Katie’s toes. Katie squealed in spite of herself as the skilled hands covered her skin. “Alright, Casi. They should be nice and minty now!”
Katie realized, as Casi’s face drew nearer to her foot, that this must have been the peppermint oil that she had written about months ago. “Wait! I’ll tell you the passcode! Just don’t let her lick my feet!”
Gina was the one laughing for the moment. “You’ll tell us the passcode when we’re ready for you to, Katie. You’re not getting out of this!”
“NO!” Katie’s shout, already high-pitched from being tickled by six merciless hands, shot up in pitch as Casi’s lips enveloped her second toe. Both of the Andromeda girl’s hands grasped Katie’s foot, keeping it steady as Katie felt Casi’s tongue start to work its way along the stem of her toe. Katie screamed frantically; she could almost feel a moan start to expand in her lower abdomen, then work its way up to her diaphragm and start to take over her chest as Casi tasted her toes. It tickled–maybe more than anything in her life had ever tickled–but this was much worse; as the moan worked its way to the base of Katie’s neck, she would have given these girls anything–her money, her passcode, anything–to stop what was about to happen.
As Katie let out the sound that she never wanted to make, her hips started to writhe on the mattress. Casi’s tongue kept at her toes, torturing her in ways that Gina’s and Zoe’s fingers never had. Katie panted, laughed in spite of her fury, growled at the monster who was taking her closer and closer to exploding. Then another moan came out of her mouth, and she realized a new terror: her hips had betrayed her, and she was starting to want that tongue to stop what it was doing to her toes and release the energy that they had discovered between her legs. Katie’s fists clenched as she laughed and moaned.
Then Gina’s fingernails started scratching at Katie’s other sole, and Katie screamed. Suddenly the dark, enveloping, aroused pleasure was receding beneath her as her ticklish skin bounced her into the sky. Her mind’s eye could see her own body, restrained by this cruel wooden frame, unable to swat away the awful fingers or the hellish tongue, and as she returned to the dark cloud of her own arousal, the gravity of her mind’s world drawing her closer, Gina started to scrabble her fingernails across her sole again, and Katie could not descend fast enough to re-enter. Her own climax was a mile away from her ticklish mind, and she could feel herself spiraling further into a strange madness as one foot’s tickling made her lose all sense of where she was and the other foot’s tickling cut like a laser beam through that erotic fog. As moments passed, and as Katie realized she had no idea how much clock time was going by, Katie heard her own mouth shouting out her phone’s passcode over and over through her laughing and moaning. Casi’s mouth departed from her foot.
Katie still couldn’t stand where her body was–she wanted Casi’s tongue back almost as soon as it left, and more than that she wanted her own hands back so that she could touch herself, rub herself. When Casi and Gina started to tickle her soles with fingernails again, she felt the arousal give way to an all-too-clear sensation of ticklish torture on her soles, and she screamed at the girls as she realized that they hadn’t even looked at her phone.
“Wait! I gave you the password! Turn on my phone!”
Zoe, who was spotting, laughed out loud at her look of betrayal. “What, and let the state police know where to find us? No, Katie, now we’re going to take our time with you. We didn’t really want that passcode! We just wanted to know how much you’d give up if you thought we’d stop!”
Katie’s frustration moaned even as she continued to giggle at the tickling. Casi, whose tongue had stirred Katie in ways that were too intimate for Katie even to think of, had shifted back to the kind of torturer’s precision that Katie knew must have driven Traci Carter out of Washington. Where her tongue had made Katie lose all sense of her surroundings and the moment, her fingertips concentrated all of Katie’s attention on her helpless, ticklish feet. If something like this could ever happen again, Katie knew that she would go to the ends of the earth to prevent it.
And yet they kept tickling.
Zoe tagged Casi out long after Katie lost any sense of time. She started working Katie’s jolt–that term of the torturer’s art that Katie now knew in her very skin–and got Katie squealing through her exhaustion as Casi looked on. The technique was undeniable; Katie was giggling like someone had just then surprised her and tickled her unsuspecting foot, and the fireball between her legs never did depart; her butt bounced on the mattress as she wished for her ex-husband, a high school boyfriend, anyone to let it out.
Then the humming came back. But this time Katie could see its source: as Gina and Zoe kept tickling her feet, Casi now held up a chrome vibrator above their shoulders, and she waved it back and forth so that the room’s light wrapped around it in reflection.
“No! No! Put that away! Get it away from me!” Katie’s voice got higher, peaking at a shriek and once again dissipating into tickled laughter.
Gina smiled as the tickling continued. “But isn’t it what you want more than anything right now?”
“No! No!” Katie didn’t remotely believe her own lie.
“You can only have it if we move over to the bed, though. Do you want that?”
Casi and Zoe’s fingers were jets of fire across her soles. She let out a screaming moan as they kept drawing giggles out of her body. “Don’t do this!”
“They’re not going to stop tickling you, Katie. Do you want this?”
Now the fire had overheard the conversation, and her hips wriggled back and forth on the mattress as she tried to deny them. “No! I’m not…”
Zoe grinned at her. “Not what, Katie? Aren’t we past that at this point?” Her fingernails scratched lightly over Katie’s sole, and Katie started to howl in protest at what she felt happening in her own body.
The fire kept burning.
The chrome cylinder hummed.
“Please…”
Now was Casi’s turn to grin her lascivious grin. “Please what, sugar?”
Casi’s warm fingertips slid between Katie’s toes, and she tried desperately to think about her assignment, her reputation, anything but the tickling. Her world shrunk to her body, her skin, her feet.
“Please don’t make me…”
Zoe: “Nobody’s going to make you, Katie. You have to ask nicely!”
Another jolt along the side of her heel. Katie could feel Gina’s eyes home in on it. Katie screamed in frustration and in ticklish agony.
“Move me…” Katie dissolved into giggles, unable to finish the sentence.
Gina: “Move you where, Katie?”
“Move me to the bed! Get me on the bed!”
The tickling stopped.
Without her bidding Katie’s arms strained against her bonds to reach her own body, and she watched as Gina and Zoe acknowledged the gesture with wicked grins. They efficiently unfastened the stocks while Casi started to work on one wrist cuff. When that arm was uncuffed, Casi grabbed Katie’s wrist with a strong grip and held it while Zoe uncuffed the other wrist. Then all three girls helped Katie to her feet, keeping her arms away from her body, and led her towards the four-poster bed. They sat her down and fastened her ankles in soft, padded cuffs, and Katie made an attempt to pull a wrist free.
Casi smiled at her.
“Not yet, sugar. You have to learn to ask nicely.”
“You have my phone’s passcode. Just let me go now!”
Now it was Gina’s time to grin. “This was never about the phone, Katie. Just get ready for the real fun to begin, lover girl!” They guided her wrists to two more cuffs so that she lay on her back, spread-eagle, her toes pointing towards the ceiling and the back of her head on another soft pillow.
Then she felt Casi’s fingertips on her sole again. She tried to sit up, but her arms, above her head, allowed her no such leverage. She yelled at the ceiling, “You said you’d let me finish!” Then Zoe started scratching at the base of the other foot’s toes, and Katie screamed. “You said you’d let me finish!”
Gina, whom Katie could not see but whose voice came from between her legs–Katie now knew this was where the spotter took her position–mocked her protests. “You said you’d let me finish! You said you’d let me finish!” She shifted back into her own voice. “You’re not finished until we say you are, Katie. You don’t get to decide what happens…” Katie heard the chrome vibrator hum to life. “...or when it happens!”
Katie’s nerves couldn’t bear any more, and her desperate laughter filled the basement as the relentless ticklers chased the latest jolt and their spotter tortured Katie’s ears with the sound of release. Her hips turned from side to side violently, trying to work her bum down the bed towards the sound. Although she couldn’t see the top of the mattress, she felt its top start to pulse as Gina set the vibrator down, still running. Katie’s agony seemed to explode as the bed beneath her started carrying the unseen waves of motion up through her bottom and into her hips. She screamed at the Andromeda girls. “Please!”
Casi’s fingertips rubbed at her heel, and the bedsheets started to bunch, their vibrating fibers touching Katie’s panties.
“Please!”
Zoe’s fingertips ran sprints down her sole from the ball of her foot to the middle, then with a backhand motion ran back up towards her toes. Katie tried desperately to get as much of the sheets against her as possible, but the tickling wouldn’t let her hips move with that much intention.
Katie heard Gina’s voice again. “I can put the vibrator against your panties if you want, Katie. But if I do, for the next hour you’re going to be more ticklish than you’ve ever been in your life, and we’re going to light into your feet with baby oil and hairbrushes. Do you understand that?”
“Please! Just let me finish!”
“You have to ask for the hairbrushes, Katie.”
Katie squealed as Zoe’s technique changed. “I’ll do the hairbrushes! Just do it!”
Gina wasn’t going to let this kind of fun get over with too quickly, though. “No, you can’t just resign yourself to the hairbrushes. You have to ask us to tickle you like you’ve never been tickled before.”
“Please! Tickle me!” Katie giggled all through the plea as Casi kept going to the middle of Katie’s sole. The reporter started thinking that might actually be the most ticklish spot on her body.
“Beg us to tickle you with hairbrushes!”
“Please! With hairbrushes!” Gina loomed over Katie to soak in the look of abjection, and with one hand she picked the vibrator off the mattress and started to move its tip towards Katie’s already-damp panties. With the other she ran her own fingernails down Katie’s inner thigh, drawing a giggling moan from her. “Please just make it finish!”
Katie felt the tip of the cylinder touch her body, and a wave of pleasure threw her head back hard into the pillow. But just as she thought the big finish was happening, she could feel Zoe and Casi tickling her feet again. The vibrator was trying to close the deal, but Katie’s big, ticklish feet wouldn’t let that sensation override theirs.
Katie’s voice was now a high-pitched, scratchy plea. “No! Just stop tickling my feet!”
And with that, Katie felt Casi’s fingers stop, but Zoe’s kept short-circuiting the orgasm that was expanding from a fire to a volcano in her hips. Her body wouldn’t let her finish as Zoe kept forcing her to laugh.
“Zoe! Let me finish!” Her head once again pressed hard backwards into her pillow. And then she felt Casi’s tongue on her toes. And that was the end of the chapter: Katie’s body lurched and fell limp, the pleasure of a woman’s mouth on Katie’s foot driving her into a climax that she had never even imagined before. The unworldly moan that she let out told all three of the Andromeda girls precisely what had happened, and Katie could feel her panties utterly soaked.
All three girls stopped what they were doing. Katie could only faintly feel someone’s hands pull her panties away from her body and cut them free, and the cool air was a good change from the sticky, wet cotton that had been there before, even as Katie knew that at some point before that night she would have been humiliated lying naked that way. Still tied to the bed, Katie’s chest heaved as she caught her breath, and her own arousal filled the air with a kind of perfume.
And then Katie felt the baby oil.
Gina and Casi were rubbing her feet with warm hands and a slick coating, getting oil between her toes and all along the heel and instep and every part of her foot. Katie knew that she should protest, but a coo was all that she could muster. With blurry vision she watched as Zoe walked in from another room with a plastic-bristled hairbrush in each hand. “Casi, I think it’s time for you to spot.” Casi obediently took her position behind Gina and Zoe.
“Isn’t there anything I can do to stop this?”
Zoe’s grin widened. “You don’t have anything left to trade. Now you’re going to feel what it’s really like to be ticklish.”
Katie gasped as each of the girls pulled backwards on her toes, and when the bristles started to work their way across her oily soles, Katie’s post-climax fog disappeared in an instant as cruel, plastic tips ran over slick skin. Katie knew now that no protest, no bargaining was going to slow this down, and something in the back of her mind resigned. As she screamed and bucked and laughed, she couldn’t remember Washington or newspapers or anything: the whole universe was in the soles of her feet.
But the universe didn’t stop there: she could feel the sensations shoot up through her ankles and into her knees, and then up into her thighs and back to her hips. She clenched her lower abdomen muscles tightly as she laughed and screamed, but she could feel a pulse in her own lower body that she wasn’t at all making happen. But as fast as the arousal came back, her feet would not let her mouth moan; all she could do was squeal and laugh as the terrible bristles worked their way across her feet. There was no time any more, only tickling, and even as she felt herself climax again, and felt her feet get even more ticklish as plastic traced lines in the oil, she didn’t even have any way to think about what they might want. Her mind was a blank; everything just tickled.
Spread-eagled, unable to cover up or even touch herself, Katie Jones blinked out of existence, and an electrified string of ticklish nerves thrashed on the bed, naked from the waist down, from the beginning of the universe and into a span of time that was no longer time. This universe had no newspapers, no politics, not even any distinctions between sexes or attractions or dignity or anything else. Just blazing, ticklish lines across Katie’s feet, sliding through oil and drawing at every pass her squeals and her laughing and–she couldn’t remember how many times–the explosive spasms of her hips and abdomen.
The last thing she remembered seeing was the devil’s grin on Zoe’s lips.
* * * * * * *
Katie Jones awoke, and she realized that she still wasn’t wearing any panties, but her hands and ankles were free. Warm skin flanked her on either side, and she realized that Zoe was on one side of her, brown skin pressed against pink, watching a video on a mobile phone. Zoe’s feet were up by Katie’s head. On her other side, face just inches from her own, lay Casi, watching her sleep.
Katie still wasn’t wearing any underwear.
Her faculties were coming back to her, and she addressed Casi. “Where’s Gina?”
Casi grinned at her. “She took your phone into town to log in and download what you’ve got without leading the police here. By the time they get to where she is, she’ll be back on the road here.”
“So you did want my phone?”
Zoe looked over her shoulder from her video. “Our clients said they wanted the data, but you’ll get your phone back with nothing missing.”
Katie tried to be furious with herself for letting that password go, but she only managed to ask: “So can I go now?”
Casi moved so that her nose was nearly touching Katie’s. “You know how Andromeda works, Katie. Our clients let us know that. And you probably still have some time ahead of you in the tickle chamber.” Katie felt Casi’s finger run up her thigh and onto her bare bottom, and she inhaled but did not protest. “But right now, you can just wait with us until we find out.”
Zoe’s feet rubbed together in the open air. Belly down with her legs bent at the knees and her ankles crossed, her soles faced the ceiling as she watched her video.
Casi put her cheek against Katie’s and whispered, “You’re dying to try it, aren’t you?”
Katie thought she heard an echo from another life in which she wouldn’t, but without much thought, she leaned away from Casi’s warm body, rolled over so that she was facing Zoe, reached a hand up to Zoe’s feet, and scratched at her sole. The torturer squealed as she put her phone down and turned to look at Katie.
“Katie! You naughty girl!” Katie felt herself grinning. “Are you going to tickle me now?”
Katie felt Casi’s hand on her stomach, and she inhaled sharply from the onrush of pleasure. Casi whispered in her ear, “You know Andromeda doesn’t recruit girls who aren’t ticklish, right? I’ll bet you could make Zoe scream right now if you wanted to.”
Katie didn’t realize until days later that she never moved to get Casi’s hands off of her body. She just propped herself on one elbow and reached out with her other hand to Zoe’s slender foot. “Tell me something, Zoe.”
“What do you want to know, beautiful?”
“Are you ticklish?”
