9.
The camera crew was setting up, running extension cords across the bare concrete floor so they could plug in their lights. Meanwhile, that very muscular punishment officer, George, was taking advantage of the hiatus to warm up for the task ahead, swishing his cane through the air. It certainly looked formidable, longer than his arm and as thick as his middle finger, which, like the rest of him, was well on the large size of the population mean.
The rattan stick looked remarkably flexible for something that substantial and the whooshing sound it made as it cut through the air was chilling. Windar could only imagine how frightening it must be to Barb, who would soon be feeling its awful bite on her most attractive butt flesh.
‘What could have possessed her have done something so foolish as to chain herself to Marty’s courtroom door?’ he wondered. For that matter, what was her thing with that silly course she taught, “History 369 - Injustice to Women through the Ages”?
Had women suffered injustice in the past? No doubt, but so, of course, had men. What injustice had Moore experienced herself? He knew that she had grown up in a nice college town much like Dorsbury, the beloved child of academic parents. She had excelled throughout her early schooling, then gone on to the Ivy League for undergraduate and graduate studies and quickly snagged a tenure-track job here at Dorsbury.
The world, it would have seemed, was her oyster, at least until she somehow managed to end up strapped naked to a caning frame about to undergo a very severe chastisement for the entertainment of himself and Marty and whoever would watch the film that the crew was recording.
Was this unjust? She had to have known, from the experience of the students who had been caned for egging the Attorney General’s car, a fate that had certainly not been unknown on campus, that such an act would likely result in her meeting the same fate as them. The law, whether one liked it or not, was the law.
Dean Windar knew that students often felt the urge to protest one perceived wrong or another. He certainly had participated in campus protests back in the day, though he’d never done anything that got him into the kind of trouble that Dr. Moore was now facing.
But she wasn’t a student. Rather, she was a faculty member, a mature adult, charged with molding young minds. Yes, there had been that other professor, Susan Gelden, who had gotten herself caned for protesting, but she was the mother of one of those students, so she had a personal stake, unlike Moore. Anyway, she had long since left Dorsbury and she was some other Dean’s problem, not his.
His problem, on the other hand, was looking between her lovely breasts, which hung down below her horizontally arrayed chest, and through her widely parted legs, past her slit, which was pulled open by her stretched position, and staring straight at him. Not sure of what might be called for in such a situation, he smiled at her and gave her a big thumbs up.
Barb looked away, as Beth, sitting in a folding chair in front of the frame, took her head in her hands and lifted it so that she could look into Barb’s eyes as the punishment proceeded.
Finally, it looked like the camera crew was done. They had one camera aimed more or less at Dr. Moore’s prominently displayed hindquarters, which, Dean Windar had to admit were certainly photogenic. Another camera on the other side of the caning frame, was pointing towards her face. The lights were placed to illuminate those two features.
He presumed the cameraman would want to film both the impact of the strokes on her butt and her reactions and would later splice them together into some kind of montage. It should make interesting viewing, Dean Windar imagined.
He noticed that George had stopped swishing the cane through the air and had taken his position behind and slightly to one side of Professor Moore’s tight little ass. The large brute was tapping her cheeks lightly with the tip of the cane, adjusting his feet. Finally, he was satisfied, and nodded to Sue.
Sgt. Miller stood and announced in a loud voice. “Barbara Moore, you have been sentenced by the Honorable Judge Martin Powers to eighteen strokes of the judicial cane upon your bare buttocks for contempt of court. Five additional strokes have been assessed for tardiness, presenting an expired identification and failure to follow lawful orders. Proceed!”
That was all the permission George needed. He drew the cane behind him, twisted his body like a coiled spring and then lunged forward towards his target. The cane moved far too quickly for Windar to see it, but he heard the whoosh as it cut through the air and the thwack as it struck her ass. He saw the flesh indent and then spring back and saw, a moment later, two red lines blossom on the soft pale skin.
***
Beth liked sitting in front of the offenders, holding their head up and looking into their eyes as they suffered. It was necessary of course that someone observe them carefully to make sure they didn’t lose consciousness and to alert the doctor if they did so that they could be revived.
More importantly to Beth, it allowed her to fulfill what she saw as the true purpose of the punishment, to reach the mind of the offender and re-inforce the message that their neurons were sending from their buttocks, up their spine to their brains. The message that screamed, “Break the law and you will suffer!”
Beth felt that message was even more salient in the case of someone like Barbara Moore, who had broken the law not out of need or desperation, but willfully, as a “Fuck you!” to society. Well, this was society’s “Fuck you!” right back.
Beth had seen Barb looking back behind her in the direction of her boss at the College that Dean Windy something or other. She was glad Barb was having to display herself in front of her boss and the judge. Served the bitch right!
And that little speech she had read was such bullshit! Beth was a woman and she didn’t see herself as oppressed, nor treated unjustly. If you committed a crime, you paid the price, man or woman. What was unfair about that?
Speaking of paying the price, she saw George wind up to deliver the first stroke and heard the whistle of the cane and the smack it made as it hit home. Watching their faces as they felt the unbearable pain of the rattan cutting into their flesh for the first time was the best part for Beth. They all tried in their own way to prepare themselves for it, but it never failed to be worse than they could imagine.
Beth watched Barb’s face darken as the pain rose with the blood flowing back into the damaged tissue, her eyes clouding with tears. It looked like she wanted to say something, some words of protest at the unfairness, no doubt, but the shock of the pain had driven the breath from her lungs. All she could do was gasp desperately for air.
Beth could see Moore’s hands gripping the crossbar for dear life and heard the ankle chains creaking as she pulled against them, desperate to free herself, though of course that was impossible.
Already, Beth could see the sweat coating Barb’s face, dampening her full-bodied hair. Of course, all of them sweated like marathon runners from the stress of being caned, but this was worse because of the lights shining into her face.
The time ticked down, half a minute between strokes, so that she could feel the agony rise and slowly, much too slowly, ebb. Finally, Sue called “Stroke two!”
“Fuck!” Barb howled. Not as eloquent as her speech, but it would have to do.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?” Beth asked. It was a rhetorical question and Barb didn’t need to answer. Her scrunched up face and the tremors that ran through her body, causing her tits to sway back and forth, were enough.
The third stroke elicited a loud wail- “Owwww! Fuck!” All that education and yet she sounded just like all the others.
“I don’t know what you thought you’d accomplish with that little protest of yours, but so far as I can see no one gives a shit,” Beth told her.
***
Strictly speaking, that wasn’t true. Dean Windar was looking on with great interest. He was fascinated by the three pairs of parallel lines etched into the skin of Barb’s butt, approximately an inch apart. George was not only powerful, he was very accurate.
The lines glowed bright red under the lights. The unblinking eye of the camera took them in. And he had noted with great interest that each strike had provoked a desperate attempt on Dr. Moore’s part to move to the limited extent that the thick leather straps holding her against the wood permitted. He saw her rise up on her toes her legs pulling against the chains that held her ankles. It was quite a sight.
He heard Beth talking to Moore, though he couldn’t make out the words. He wondered if she was counselling her, explaining the need to follow rules. He hoped she would have more success than he had had.
The next two strokes continued the barred pattern. But Barb’s ass was small, rather tight and little, one might say, and George had about run out of room. The next stroke and the ones after would have to fall on skin that had already been scored by earlier lashes. He supposed those would hurt even more than the initial ones had.
His guess was proven right, when number six landed more or less on top of one of the earlier ones. Barb howled out her distress and pulled even harder on the straps. Dean Windar noticed that her lower cheeks were quivering involuntarily for several seconds after the rattan fell away.
The next two strokes also hit on already bruised flesh, provoking more howls from the poor professor. Windar noticed after the eighth one, that a bit of liquid, mostly clear, but tinged with red had welled up on Barb’s right cheek. And she was barely one third of the way through. George’s strength showed few signs of ebbing, though he was sweating noticeably under the hot camera lights.
***
Beth was sweating a bit herself under the lights that were trained on Barbara Moore’s face. But that was nothing compared to what Moore herself was experiencing. Her skin was coated in a sheen of perspiration and her hair was matted and plastered to her forehead. Beth had to brush some of the wet strands away so that she could look in the offender’s eyes, which registered nothing but pain and suffering at this point, without even a hint of the feisty resistance that she had shown earlier.
“Nine!” Sue called.
“Oh, God! Please!” Moore moaned.
“I bet you’re sorry now, bitch,” Beth told her. It had taken some effort on Beth’s part to suppress the natural sympathy she would normally have felt for someone so clearly suffering, but she knew it was her duty to re-inforce the message that the cane was delivering to Moore’s hindquarters.
“Oh, yes, please, that’s enough,” Moore begged.
“That’s not what the judge said. But, you’d be halfway through if you hadn’t been such a wise ass.”
“Ten!” Sue announced. Moore continued her pointless pleas to which Beth just shook her head.
On the eleventh, which was more or less halfway, with the added penalty strokes, Moore finally gave up her fruitless attempt to ask for mercy and just emitted a low moan. Beth hoped the microphone was sensitive enough to pick that up.
“Twelve!” Sue called. And there was a twelfth whoosh of the cane through the air and a twelfth smack as the rattan struck flesh, but there was little reaction now from the exhausted offender. Moore’s eyes were closed and her hands were draped limply on the crossbar now, too weak to struggle anymore against the restraints.
Beth called a halt. George looked like he could use a break and so could she. “Doc, would you please come and see if you can wake this bitch up?” Dr. Taylor got to her feet, picked up her medical bag and came over to examine the suffering professor.
