an excerpt from:
My Name Is Rand
by Wayne Courtois

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(Setting the scene: At this point in the novel, our hero, Rand, has become a “trusty” in the Compound, a bizarre prison camp tucked into the hills somewhere in the rural Midwest. Here, on the grounds of an old abandoned hospital, men who have been abducted by various means are tickle-tortured almost continuously by a whole community of fanatics. Rand, now known as M-36, works with his partner T-49 to transport captives from one tickle-torture scene to another. The very worst treatment a captive can receive is to be turned over to Dred Junior, a telekinetic madman who’s kept locked in an underground cell.

As this scene develops, the daily routine gets disrupted when M-36, T-49, and another trusty are transporting a captive to Dred Junior’s cell, and decide to take a brief detour that turns into a race for survival.)

On a typical day my partner and I might start work by greeting a new arrival. It was like standing on the opposite side of a mirror as I watched the blue panel truck eat up the road that led to the wide front lawn. Michael Loomis would get out—as flustered and agitated as ever, his muscular body well-defined by the wifebeater he wore—open the passenger’s side door and dump a burlap bag onto the grass. Out of the bag would fall a half-naked, wild-eyed man, trembling and twitching, his breath coming in short, shallow gasps, his hands clawing the ground weakly. My partner and I would grab him under the arms. He’d be terrified of touch but too weak to do anything but pant; we’d have no trouble dragging him over to the schoolyard, where the kids would deliver his first torture, playing games on his ticklish skin.

My work partner was none other than T-49, the tall, black-bearded sadist who had helped transport me to my meeting with Dred Junior, of which I remembered nothing. I had no hard feelings toward T-49; he’d been doing his job, just as he was doing it now, with me beside him. I called him T, he called me M, though we worked mostly in silence.

We took one victim, who had been at the Compound several days, to the stocks in what I thought of as the village square, where I had first been tickled by the men and women. He had been in those stocks before, and he begged us to let him go. He was sure they were going to tickle him to death this time. T had little patience, as usual. “You come along quietly,” he said, “or we’ll just take you to Dred Junior right now.”

The victim settled down. He’d been there long enough to know that being taken to Dred Junior was the ultimate punishment. We fixed his trembling limbs in place and watched as the men and women circled around him. Within a few seconds he was hysterical and screaming.

Occasionally we had a victim who was able to walk by himself, like one young man we had to take to the teenaged boys’ party. A big bear of a guy, he moved along silently, refusing to beg or show any fear. The boys, already half-stoned by the time we got there, were overjoyed, reaching out for him before he was properly tied down. As more and more of them gathered around him he looked at me and said, through clenched teeth, “They’re gonna kill me.”

“ Take it easy,” I said. I had learned how to talk like a trusty, never conveying any comfort or reassurance. What else could I do—pretend that the air in that room wasn’t stifling with hormones and desperation?

For such a big man, his screams of laughter were surprisingly shrill.

Another man who had been tickled for several hours needed to be taken to a break room. When we released him from the table he had been tied to he jumped up so quickly that T lost his balance and sat down hard on the floor. Somehow this one still had the energy to try to make a run for it, so before he could get completely out of reach I grabbed his ribcage and started tickling him. “Hey, help me, T,” I said, and together we tickled his ribs and armpits till he sank to the floor.

“ I want his feet,” T said.

“ Go for it,” I said, quite used to T’s insatiable appetite for feet. Now that we had weakened the victim I had no trouble pinning his upper body to the floor while T satisfied his needs. I was facing the wrong way to see what he was doing, but could tell from the expressions on the victim’s face that T’s lips, teeth, and tongue were devouring that tormented, ticklish flesh, and would not stop till the guy had passed out.

One victim did manage to break away from us. He was short and stocky but fast on his feet, and it was a workout chasing him across the Compound. Sheer panic kept him moving, but it proved to be his downfall: he ran blindly into a tickle-torture session in the village square, and before he knew what was happening some of the men in the crowd had him pinned to the ground and were working him over. He was feather-sensitive to the nth degree, and the men had plenty of feathers to use on him. Where he had been running from us a few minutes before, he was now reaching out to T and me, begging us to save him. We were in no hurry to break up the party, since a line had formed and there were now men, women, and children waiting to tickle him. We stayed and watched till it was time for our next assignment.

Throughout all of this I felt nothing; I was just grateful to be left alone. At the end of the day Crystal would walk me, slowly and thoughtfully, to the Chamber, where I would get my sexual release again, powerful enough to clear my mind of any doubts and put me to sleep for the night.

__________

The most difficult duty was taking a victim to Dred Junior. I remembered part of my journey to that underground chamber, including the part where my current partner had taken a detour so he could have his way with my feet. But what had happened when I finally reached Dred Junior wasn’t clear to me. I couldn’t picture how he had looked or what he had done. I only knew that I’d made the transition from captive to trusty so successfully that I could view these tormented souls with little or no emotion; and when T-49 wanted to break the rules one day to take another detour on the way to Dred Junior, I could only shrug my assent.

The naked captive strapped to our gurney, a young man of Hispanic origin called S-73, was so scared he was hyperventilating, a steady stream of Spanish escaping softly from his lips like prayers from a deathbed. T, at the foot of the gurney, kept looking back over his shoulder and licking his lips, turned on by the young man’s fear. We hadn’t even reached the hallway where the audio effects would begin, the overhead playback of the captive’s own screams and laughter recorded at some earlier date; nor had we reached the “tombs” with the inscribed list of all the men who had been tickled to death. But S-73 was twitching and panting and praying at such a rate that he was going to wear himself out before we got halfway there. That was when T said, “Let’s take a detour.” There was another young man with us, H-80, a new trusty who was catching on quickly. He had no problem with helping to maneuver the gurney through a set of swinging doors off to the right, into a side corridor.

I leaned over the captive. “S-73,” I said, “you’ve got to calm the fuck down, man.”

Could he even hear me? His eyes were rolling wildly, his muscular brown chest heaving. I reached out and gently took hold of his legs, just above the knees. That one touch galvanized him, his body leaping as if he were having a seizure. It was a tough body, right from the streets—a body that had kicked and fought and fucked with no care for anything but unleashing its relentless male energy. His brown pecs and abs, arms and thighs were accentuated here and there by a scar—from a knife wound, maybe, there in his side?—or a tattoo, the primitive rose curled enticingly close to his right nipple and, more intriguingly, REYES LATINOS stenciled in large ornate letters across his abs. How was that possible? Wouldn’t tattoo needles be torture on a ticklish man’s belly?

I let my fingers crawl across his thighs, feeling their strength and resiliency, the life pulsing just beneath the surface. As my fingers moved faster, tickling, kneading, squeezing and stroking, his whispered prayers and curses gave way to a bubbling stream of laughter. The sound was both odd and familiar—odd in its squealing, insane pitch, yet familiar because it was the kind of laugh that all the victims developed, having been tickled so much that they would never laugh normally again. Meanwhile T and H-80 were down at his size-12 feet, licking his soles and sucking his toes. I remembered very well having T’s merciless tongue between my toes, and it made me shiver. Reaching up, I traced the letters on our victim’s belly, REYES LATINOS, with one finger, making him yelp in ticklish panic. That a man so powerfully built could be so devastatingly sensitive….

T had unzipped his coverall, his enormous cock swinging free at the foot of the gurney, so I unzipped mine too. H-80 followed suit. Obedient kid, he wouldn’t do anything unless T and I did it first, but he was game, his hefty dick as hard as ours. I continued to spell REYES LATINOS over and over, tracing the ornate letters on skin that broke into a sweat, making my fingertips glide that much faster. T was fucking those strong brown feet, turned on by the long toes wriggling against his dick. He stopped, though, before he could shoot, and backed away. After a moment he tucked his hard dick carefully behind the zipper of his coveralls. I did the same, without knowing exactly why. I knew only that I got my sexual release in the Chamber, once every morning and once every night, and must have learned at some point that any sex play with the captives could only go so far.

H-80 stepped up. He was a strawberry-blond farmboy, indigenous to these Midwestern hills—unlike the Hispanic kid, who must have looked like an exotic piece of tail to the new trusty. Certainly that brown torso with its crude rose tattoo was a novelty, and H-80 grasped either side of the ribcage and set his fingertips loose to explore. Judging by the agonized expressions on S-73’s face, it didn’t take long for the new trusty to find the most tender spots. Mercilessly clinging to them, he actually raised the victim’s torso off the stretcher, lifting him by his ticklishness. S-73 arched his back and screamed, not at the top of his lungs but at the bottom, a hoarse, scraping sound of utter despondency. He was losing all strength, his hands useless, his fingers frozen in a curled, desperate shape. In another minute he would be nothing but pliant flesh.

I moved to the end of the gurney and studied those big sensitive feet. They had been tenderized by the Compound experience—scraped, scrubbed, beaten, and “roasted” into a permanently reddened and fragile state. I could see how ticklish that faintly glistening skin had become. I started eating those feet, slurping along the soles and between the toes. Their slightly salty taste tingled along my tongue, and they had the mysterious smell of reeds growing at the edge of a lake. I dug my thumbs into the ball of each foot, nibbled at the arches. He was panting again, frantically, his eyelids twitching, his mouth grinning grotesquely from ear to ear as the tip of his tongue swung to and fro like a bell clapper. Soon his panting became as silent as the drool leaking from each corner of his mouth. I wanted to take him even farther into the remote zone he had entered, to test the limits of where we both could go.

“Hey,” T said, “Ease up. I don’t like the looks of him.”

I freed my cock again, let my dickhead probe among his toes, precum lubricating the way around and between them. I took hold of my throbbing shaft and whipped that dickhead against his soles. This was what Duke had wanted, what I’d tried to give him after he’d begged me to tickle him to death.

I didn’t know how much time had passed when T suddenly threw himself at me, pinning me against the corridor wall. “You crazy fucking bastard, you’ve killed him!”

“No…impossible….”

I could protest, but it was true that if a body had ever looked lifeless, it was the one I stared at now: its head twisted to the side, mouth open, no movement in its chest or belly, no more panting, nothing. Yet just a moment before he’d been breathing. I was sure of it…a moment before, a minute before…maybe two minutes, maybe five…how long had I been at his feet?

“You’ve done it, all right,” H-80 said. “Shit! What do we do now?”

T’s lips twisted into an ugly sneer. He looked me in the eye and said, “Dred’s expecting a victim. We’d better bring him one.”

The tone of his voice rattled my bones. “No,” I said.

“Sorry, bud,” T said, “but if it’s gonna be one of us, it sure as hell won’t be me.” He turned his head to the side, toward H-80. “Come here and help me.”

That was my chance, my only chance. I wheeled around and started running—not toward the main hallway we had come from, but deeper into that mysterious building, where there were more dimly lit corridors ahead. Close behind me came T’s boots pounding the floor. I was running for my life but he was running just as fast, if not faster. A continuous row of fluorescent fixtures streamed past overhead, but only a few bulbs were working. We ran in and out of shadows, covering what seemed like a mile before we heard H-80’s voice behind us.

“He’s alive!” he yelled. “Hey! He’s alive!”

I had no breath except for running, and precious little of that left, but I managed to yell over my shoulder at T, “Stop! He’s alive!”

T kept running, I could almost feel his panting on my neck. The corridor we followed would soon end in a blank wall; I veered off to the left, into another corridor just as long. Here the few lights that worked were flickering, breaking up the stretches of darkness with eerie strobe effects.

“Stop!” I yelled again, my chest about to cave in. “T, stop!”

He was so close his words were practically in my ear: “Like hell!”

So it was up to me to stop—but not in a way that would let T get his hands on me. Without even looking I jumped off to the side, right into the corridor wall, which hit me like a fast-moving vehicle and threw me backward onto the floor. I felt bruised all over but the move had worked; unable to stop so quickly, T had run on some distance ahead and was just now turning to face me.

I was so out of breath that it hurt my lungs to talk, but I had to get some words out: “Stop…it’s all right…didn’t you hear… S-73’s alive!”

“Yeah.” Still striding toward me, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “So what.” He moved into a brighter patch of flickering light, and it was easy to see his huge cock straining upward against his coverall.

I held up my hand, palm outward. “Let’s go back.”

He sneered again, the ugly curl of his lips as expressive as the hard glint in his eye or the bulge in his crotch. “Ain’t no going back now,” he said.

I scrabbled, trying to get to my feet but only pushing myself backward in a kind of crabwalk till I hit something and fell. Hard but yielding surfaces met my skin. I had stumbled into a nest of boxes that were empty except for bits of styrofoam and brown wrapping paper. A soft but effective trap, tilting me on my butt with my boots off the floor, walls of cardboard rising steeply on either side of me.

“I’ve got you now,” he said, panting, sweating from the chase, his hair hanging in limp curls. “I hope you’re ready for what’s coming to you.”

“No…please! It’s okay, don’t you get it? I didn’t tickle him to death.”

“Who gives a shit?” His boots clapped the floor, not quickly as when he was running, but slowly, deliberately. “The only thing that matters is your feet are mine!”

It was a strain, but I could lean to my left just far enough to see behind T, down the corridor. “Look out behind you!”

Just briefly his sneer became a laugh. “You must think I’m fucking stupid.”

“I’m not kidding, they’re right behind you!”

“Every word you say is only making it worse for you, buddy….”

“Listen, you dumb prick, they’ve got cameras everywhere, you know that. Did you think they wouldn’t come after us?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He twisted his head to look around. Throwing myself against the side of the box, I spilled out into the corridor. In the second it took him to turn back toward me I pushed some boxes into his path, then jumped to my feet. If panic had sped me before, I was practically flying now with the knowledge that if I stopped I would either be tickled to death by T or turned over to Dred Junior, which would be even worse.

At the next break in the corridor I turned left. Were there cameras, even back here? It seemed to me there must have been, or else the Compound would have sealed this building off completely, whatever it was. But another turn, this time to the right, brought me up to a dead end—a hole in the floor, a drop-off so wide I couldn’t possibly jump over it. I couldn’t even see, in the poor lighting, where the floor picked up again, if it did. Squinting into the dimness I saw only wreckage and ruin, suggestions of collapsed walls and ceilings, ducts and pipes and wires hanging twisted in the air, snapped apart like so many pieces of licorice. T’s footsteps were behind me, a little heavier now, a little slower, but unstoppable. I could either jump into the void facing me, or—a small grate in the wall next to me, some kind of air duct, was my only other choice. It was small, hardly big enough for me to fit through, but I had no time for second thoughts. Thank God two of the screws meant to hold the grid in place were missing, and I could quickly work the other two open with my thumbnail. The space was so small I had to keep my arms extended in front of me, working my hips and using what little purchase I could get with my fingertips to pull myself completely inside. My body heated up the aluminum duct immediately, I was like a potato baking in a foil wrapper.

“ Come out of there, you son of a bitch!”

With no way for me to replace the grate, T had spotted my hiding place right away. He couldn’t follow me, not with his broad shoulders, but that didn’t help me much. I screamed in fear as his fingers clutched my bootheel. Like our coveralls, those boots had been made for quick removal, and one tug pulled my right one free. Then there was the thin white sock that he was grabbing at the toe and pulling, dragging the length of the sock across my ticklish sole. Then my left boot, my left sock. Even in this place my feet had never felt so naked. “T!” I cried out. “T! Can you hear me?”

“ Save your breath, asshole. You’re going to need it.”

“ Wait! Wait, wait! What about…the Chamber?” This was one of the shared areas of experience we never discussed: the Chamber where we got our sexual release, every morning and every night. It seemed a safe assumption that it was as important to him as it was to me. “If you kill me, they’ll kill you, and we’ll never see the Chamber again.” I pressed against the aluminum walls that offered me so little room, so little hope. The thought of never seeing the Chamber again did fill me with overwhelming sadness, and a tear mixed with sweat ran down my nose. “We’ve got to go back, T! We’ve got to go back!”

No reply—but he wasn’t touching my feet, either. Thank God, he had heard me. I could feel him thinking, trying to reason it out, even with my helpless bare feet right in his face. Then it began—such a gentle stroking and caressing of my feet that it might have been a breeze passing over them. But if there had been a catch in my voice as I mentioned the Chamber, there was that same choke of emotion in his as he said, “I want these feet. I had them once, and I’ve been dreaming about them ever since. Even when I was sitting there, in that Chamber, it was these feet that I wanted. And I will have them.”

With that his fingers took on fire, and he growled with pleasure as he set them loose on my ticklish flesh. My panicked, nerve-racked state only intensified the torment, paralyzing me as I gasped and begged him to stop. Of course that made him tickle harder, his fingers scrabbling against my much-abused soles. Too weak to move, I felt all strength leaching from my arms and shoulders as I succumbed to helpless, suffocating laughter: I was going to be tickled to death after all, then abandoned in this aluminum-walled coffin. But the very thought of ending up that way, in such a humiliating grave, gave me one last ounce of strength. Somehow I began to move, hauling myself along with thrusts of my hips and thighs, my sweaty fingertips on the aluminum walls helping to move me forward far enough to finally drag my feet out of reach.

“God damn it!”

I panted, trying to shake off the sweat running into my eyes. I might never get the strength to move again, but at least I had found blessed relief.

Then, incredibly, the tickling started again, even worse. T couldn’t reach my feet with his fingers, but he’d found something—a length of broken cable, maybe—to use as a tickling tool. What felt like a thousand jagged wires dragged over my soles, poked between my toes, making me completely helpless again. “Oh Jesus…oh don’t… you’re killing me this time….”

“Goddamn right I’m killing you! I just wish I could get my fucking hands on you!”

I could see, even in the darkness, a kind of sparkling at the edge of my vision, and knew I was on the verge of passing out. I was also shouting, in a demented voice that was totally unknown to me: “Go ahead, you bastard, tickle me to death!”

“Goddamn right I’ll tickle you to death…!”

“Ahhhhhh I don’t care anymore!” I broke the final law of sanity by forcing my feet open, unclenching my toes, letting the tickling wires do their work, and now I was singing, fitting a hysterical little tune to my words: “I don’t care anymore, I don’t care….”

T was happy, oh he was a happy winner! He whipped that cable, or whatever it was, all over my feet and ankles while I yelled and laughed and sang and surrendered. My light-headedness only increased when I felt, even in the midst of torment and fear and exhaustion, my dick getting hard. Talk about funny! That omnipresent dick, that mindless fuckstick that had caused me so much trouble, asserting itself one last time…unbelievable! Hilarious! To die with a stiff prick, what could be more fitting?

Yet fitting it wasn’t; there was no room to get properly hard, my dick being trapped between my belly and the floor of my coffin. I tried to suck in my gut so my dick would have room to swell, but there was no way, not while I was laughing and ranting and panting. Weakly I tried to turn or twist, anything to give my cock a little of the room it demanded. The more I tried, the harder it got, as if it enjoyed my desperate state and wanted to exploit it to the max. I sang a little song of pain, Ow, ow, ow, as I twisted and struggled, struggled and twisted, throwing my weight to either side over and over, anything to ease the throbbing that seemed bigger than I was. My vision began sparkling at the edges again, and soon I saw nothing but stars.

Sometime later—a second? a minute?—I became conscious, the darkness inside my head unfurling into the recently forgotten darkness of my prison. Two things were clear, even to my tortured, unhinged mind: number one, I wasn’t being tickled anymore. Number two, my dick still throbbed and ached. And oh, number three: T was somewhere behind me, yelling.

“Come back here, you bastard! I’m not finished with you yet!”

For someone who was now totally insane, I was able to piece the situation together pretty quickly: I had passed out for a moment, but not before my stubbornly swelling cock had helped to pry me out of range of T and his tickling tool. I was free, thanks to my dick! “Good boy,” I whispered to my aching pet. I stretched my arms and managed to move another millimeter forward as T screamed and ranted behind me.

There was no reason to believe I’d end up anywhere but in some dark pit full of rubble; but insanity was now the norm, and if it was insane to keep trying, then that was good enough to keep my hips and fingertips working, even my tortured toes joining in the effort. Soon T gave up screaming at me, and I had the sound of my own breath to keep me company—breath that rattled and grunted like a worn-out engine pulling me along, dragging my hard-on with me. If I could make any sense out of the darkness, it looked as if I might not have far to go. Just a couple more feet and I would be at the edge. Of something.

When I was close enough, I stretched my tired arms to reach and grab onto the edge of the vent opening I now faced. Finally, an end to my sweaty metal prison! But the edge was sharp, so I moved carefully, encouraged only by what seemed to be, if not a light in the distance, a lesser degree of darkness. Hitching myself forward slowly, I was able at last to let my arms dangle beneath me into the half-light. But I had no time to even raise my head and look around before my arms were grabbed and nearly pulled from their sockets.

“Got you now, prick!”

Somehow T had figured out where I would emerge and had found a way to get to it. I scarcely had time to register my surprise, I was begging him to go easy as he pulled me out of the duct: “Hey hey hey watch my dick, watch my dick, watch my dick!”

“I’ll do more than watch your dick, asshole. I’ll do a hell of a lot more!”

With a whump I landed on the floor, which as far as I could see was a white tiled floor like the one I’d left behind, in what seemed like a former lifetime. T stood over me, his coverall unzipped. If my own stupid prick was still engorged, his was positively rapturous, a gravity-defying ramrod swinging wildly in a victory dance. He asked in a husky voice, “Are you ready for what’s coming to you?”

“Oh, absolutely!” I slid to the middle of the corridor, the better to spread myself out, my arms above my head. “Go ahead, you bastard,” I said, writhing, offering up my bare feet. “Tickle me to death! Go ahead!”

“You’re grinning now,” he said, unsuccessfully stifling his own grin. “You have no idea what agony this is going to be!”

I added a laugh to my grin. “Ha! Do your worst, you big dumb piece of meat!”

He stood over me, reaching down. It took all of my will to keep my eyes open. It’s a good thing I did, or I wouldn’t have seen what happened next, it came so quickly: hands appeared, several of them, grabbing T and pulling him from view. There was a sound of scuffling, some urgent, heavy breathing, then nothing.

Click here to read an interview with Wayne Courtois

Click here to buy a copy of My Name Is Rand