Chapter 2: Arriving on Korpius

Donna hadn't known anything about Girl Hunt until she'd stepped off the ferry on the first day of her vacation, holding a British passport tightly in one hand and hauling a tatty green suitcase with the other.

She'd been exhausted, not just because she'd travelled for eleven hours via a combination of train, plane and boat to get to the island, but because it was two o'clock in the afternoon and this being Greece, it was unbelievably hot. The sun was melting Donna's makeup and sapping her spirits.

Worse, a line of two hundred people were zigzagging their way down a wide, metal ramp before arriving at a small immigration kiosk at the bottom. Here, they were would be questioned, scrutinized and processed by Korpian immigration officials who weren't yet ready to accommodate them, and so Donna, Elizabeth, Derek and Richard were stuck in a line going nowhere. Donna sat irritably on the rump of her suitcase in the hot, baking sunshine feeling tired, frayed, irritable, sweaty and uncomfortable.

She could pick out the backs of Richard and Elizabeth further down the line. They were amongst a group of thirty nervous schoolgirls from a Swiss finishing school who were visiting Korpius to attend a Dolcett acclimatization course. The girls were formally dressed in lilac school uniforms. Each was wearing a jacket, blouse, pleated skirt, thick grey tights, skew-whiff tie and flat black shoes.

Yet despite the overbearing heat of the day and their abundance of clothes, each one of them appeared cool, relaxed and perfectly presented. Donna was envious.

Richard engaged spoke to two of them, asking their names, backgrounds and ages. They answered as teenagers do, with that air of arrogance, shyness and naivety that vanishes with age. He discovered that they were sixteen years of age, still too young to be legally allowed to run in the Hunt. For them, the running would come later once they were of age and had married a titled Lord with a country estate, a double-barreled name and an appetite for Korpian sports.

That was the future that had been mapped out for them and laid down according to the principles of inherited privilege and noblesse oblige. It was how the Dolcett Swiss Finishing Schools were funded; but for the present, the girls were stuck on the ramp waiting to be processed with everyone else.

And indeed, as the time stretched interminably on, Donna began to wish that she'd taken advantage of the bathroom back on the ferry.

"What's going on?" she asked, craning her neck and forbidding her mind from thinking about such matters as taps, waterfalls and warm springs.

"Immigration," Derek sighed wearily, studying the officials at the bottom of the ramp. These were dressed in short sleeved blue shirts and black trousers with crisp ironed creases and thick leather belts. Most were standing, talking and doing little. "They're checking passports. Or rather, they will be checking our passports when they get round to it."

"But we did that in Athens," Donna protested. "I need to pee!"

"Then go use the bathroom on the ferry."

"But it's dirty!" Donna glanced back across her shoulder. "Have you seen it? I walked straight in and straight out."

"I'm sorry, Dee. What do you want me to do? There's nowhere else. There's either the boat or you hold it, or you do it in your knickers."

Donna scowled. "That's disgusting!"

"I'm sorry, but those are the choices."

Donna remembered the insect infested cesspit that she'd shunned on the ferry and she shivered. She couldn't go in there! And besides, there were too many people pressing down from behind.

And then, to her relief, the immigration officials managed to get their acts together and the queue started moving, although slowly - much too slowly for Donna.

"Don't they have computers?" she panicked, jumping about uncomfortably on the spot. "It's not the eighteenth century! At this rate, we'll be waiting all day!"

"It is Korpius," Derek observed wryly. "It's is the way they do things here. It's slow, but it's thorough."

Donna grumbled under her breath because the officials were copying everything's details from their passports into a grubby red book, but the futility of this was that they were doing it by hand! "This is stupid," she wailed. "Don't they know that we've paid to come to their wretched island? This is supposed to be the birthplace of civilization. It's Greece. There has to be a better way than this!"

She hopped about, clenched her thighs and wished she hadn't drunk as much as she had. "I need to pee," she declared again, her voice wavering because her tummy was tightening and filling with cramps, and the effort was hurting. She stared despairingly at the officials at the bottom of the ramp, despondent at their lethargy and ineptitude, for there was no hurry; or haste, or urgency. Lazily, one official smiled and complimented a female tourist on the color of her top, another on the shape and length of her legs, another on the freckles and depth in her cleavage. Another listened gormlessly and did nothing while a final one copied a woman's name into his red book, chiseling each letter into it as if this were art! Then they searched her, an act conducted in public by the Captain of the team. The woman stood with her legs eighteen inches apart and her arms outstretched while the man patted her down, squeezed her breasts – smirked - and probed diligently between her legs.

"All clean," he said, leering and daring her to complain.

Donna gasped at the inappropriateness of these actions, but her greater preoccupation with holding her water was such that she couldn't concentrate on the audacity of the official for any time at all. "This will take forever!" she muttered, her bladder tightening and hardening yet more. God! She couldn't hold it! She was leaking! She really was going to do it in her knickers! Her face reddened as she imagined the puddle of urine gushing down her legs and how her panties would be sodden and how the water would seep through her shorts.

She imagined the official at the bottom of the ramp probing between her legs in the way he'd done with that other woman and discovering what she'd done.

Jesus. The queue wasn't moving. It was static. What should she do? The first few drips were oozing from her hole! She was about to wet herself and soon there'd be a torrent!

"I am going to pee," she mumbled hysterically, looking again at the officials and rotating her hips and twisting her thighs. They were searching another woman and leerily feeling inside her bra, and then the Captain asked her to remove it. "Oh God! Why don't they hurry? Why don't they go faster?"

The woman shyly extricated herself of her bra without removing her top. She gave it to the Captain who examined it carefully and then gave it back. "Thank you," she whispered, with a coy knowing smile.

"Now the top," the Captain said, staring down at her firm, braless tits.

Donna blubbered at this. "God, what are they doing? They've made that woman remove her bra ... her t-shirt ... she's half naked..."

"It's Girl Hunt," a woman interjected. Donna swung round on her because the voice came from behind. She was confronted by a lady having two big, bold and silicone enhanced tits, perfectly exhibited in a tight-fitting dress.

This was the first time that Donna had heard mention of Girl Hunt and so its significance was lost on her, particularly since she couldn't concentrate on that or the topless woman who was presently shyly putting her bra back on; all Donna could think about was how badly her bladder was burning.

"Read this," the woman hissed, glancing about nervously before thrusting a four page pamphlet into Donna's palm. It had been folded in half. The woman wore sun shades that bestowed her with mystery. Her skin was unblemished and it was tanned as far as the eye could see. Her hair was clipped in a band. "This has been printed for your safety and protection," she said. "Read it soon but don't get curious. Don't ask questions, and whatever you do, don't run in the Hunt."

Donna stared blankly at the pamphlet with a complete lack of comprehension. She saw a picture on the front of it illustrating a decrepit cargo ship docked on the quayside of a small foreign port, only it wasn't cargo that was being unloaded from the ship, but women. There was a line of them, all of black and Arab descent. They stood on a narrow walkway and were being led from the ship in chains by men carrying whips. Their arms were cuffed tightly and uncomfortably to their backs and their ankles were shackled in irons.

"I don't know what we're talking about here..." Donna said, frowning at the woman while she turned the page and scanned the headings.

"The Truth about Girl Hunt," was the first one, but there were others: "Who really are the Mudawana?", "From Panagia to Kreopolis", "Lies About Lake Tomdinika", "A Korpian Confidence Trick", "Weep Freedom Fighters Endure the Cruelest Cut", "Death Mode: The Dolcett Deceit."

The title of the pamphlet was "A Better Way to Die", and at the bottom, tucked in the corner was a single word: "Weep," followed by an address "The Church of the Holy Tortured Virgin. Mount Pevelli. Services 7:00 PM Daily."

"They'll persuade you," the woman said melodramatically. "They'll tell you that the odds of losing are infinitesimally small – one chance in a hundred; or in a thousand, a million - but you mustn't listen. It's a lie. I've seen it. I've seen Mudawana tricked into coming from Africa and led through pitch black tunnels with no idea as to where they were going. I've seen electronic tagging and trucks driven through the villages of Baieasa and Dasiaka at the dead of night to the abattoirs at Kreopolis and Nekrokopela. I've seen everything. I've seen girls riding their spits and screaming in pain, and others hit in the neck by punishment bolts. You have to believe me! You have to know that if you believe them or you weaken, you're meat. I've seen it. Hide this leaflet in your panties. Read it carefully – and whatever you do, when they search you, don't let them find it."

Donna was caught up in the power of the woman's urgency and persuasion, her eloquence and passion, but she didn't understand any of it at all. "Why am I hiding it?" she gasped, not hiding the leaflet at all. "What have you seen?"

But the woman didn't answer because suddenly and without warning, two officials appeared behind her and grabbed her round the neck and pulled her from the queue. Even as the woman shouted that Death Mode was misogyny and genocide against women, one of the officials hit her in the belly with his fist, and the other shoved a needle in her arm.

The woman doubled over: winded and gasping with pain. Donna was a length of a ribbon away when it happened and she was aghast, but then the official struck the woman again, and this time Donna saw the gun resting in his hand. He'd struck the woman across the face with the butt, and she crumpled to the ground in a whisper.

"Oh my God!" Donna screamed. "He hit her!"

One of the officials twisted round and lifted the gun and aimed it at Donna. She saw the barrel staring at her face. "Keep out of this, girl," he snarled, snatching the pamphlet from her hand. "Otherwise you'll get dispatched to Kreopolis as well."

Donna was frozen where she was because a second official was aiming his gun at her midriff and suddenly it was as though she was in a third world country full of unanticipated outrages and rights violations, not in Western Europe. But this wasn't the time to complain, not with what was going on in front of her. "Listen to what I'm saying!" the woman coughed, dragging herself up onto her knees with blood dripping from her mouth. "Don't do it! Don't run! For your own sake, don't be tempted!"

The warnings were immediately cut short. One of the officials hit her again, and this time so hard that the woman fell to the ground with blood gushing from either side of her face. It stained her dress and dripped onto the ramp.

The officials hauled her by the arms to her feet, but she was unconscious and she stood awkwardly and inert between them. Her head flopped forward and rested limply on her chest. Her cheeks were smashed and her bent lifeless legs hung beneath her unresponsively. Donna gasped at the brutality of the woman's gaping wound.

"Well, that's one way to jump the queue," one man joked as he watched the woman carried away.

"Some pert ass!" another voice chipped in. "I bet half the KDS gets a chunk of it before they ship her the slow route to Kreopolis via a lonely detour."

Donna turned on him but she hadn't the courage to speak. She was shaking.

"Korpius attracts weirdoes," another man agreed.

"Religious nutters and bigots."

"And terrorists."

"They come from the church of the holy tortured virgin ... the one at the top of that mountain you can't get to..."

"Well that one won't be a virgin for long..."

"They'll have her hanging over white hot coals, her skin blistered, bubbling and turning golden ... She'll be tortured, all right! I bet she'll regret it!"

"Yeah, I'd like a bit of that when they cook it! Can you imagine the ass!"

"But they hit her!" Donna cried, finding her voice. She stared at the various men that had spoken, and then at Derek: "What about you? Why didn't you do something? Are you feckless?"

"Feckless?"

"You know what I mean!"

"They had guns," he exclaimed weakly. "What do you expect? And even if they hadn't had guns, she broke the law."

"She gave me a pamphlet!" Donna screamed. "That's all she did! What's wrong with that?"

"It's propaganda," a woman interrupted. "You can't do propaganda on Korpius. It's illegal." This new woman was dressed in a semi-transparent swimsuit and lycra shorts which were inappropriate for her figure. She was scrawny, with leathery skin and low hanging tits. "This isn't England, lovey. You're in another county. Here, you observe their laws and keep out of their politics."

Donna was taken aback by the insensitivity of this comment.

"I've run three times already," the woman boasted, hooking her arm into that of her boyfriend. "I know Girl Hunt is controversial and has its critics. I know that it attracts all the crazy activists and zealots, but just because they're the ones with the loudest voices, doesn't make them right. I run every year and it's not done me any harm. And even if I lose, so what, it's my choice. Frank brings me here and he chases me – and we both enjoy it. It gives our sex life excitement and a buzz as we plan the next trip. He tells me that I'll lose and it pleases him to believe it. He explains that he wants to see me strapped to a spit and my udders covered in soot, fat dripping off the ends of them and me screaming as they roast. So if one day he does catch me and he chooses to enforce the contract, good luck to him. He has my permission and I signed a living will, legal and binding. We're adults and he's waited long enough for the chance. No one forces any lady to come to the island. No one forces us to run, so if we do come and we do run, don't we have the right to make that informed decision?"

Donna was only partly listening because down on the jetty the first woman was being hurled into a van: concussed, reeling, bleeding and unable to stand.

Donna was shaking from the shock of what she'd just seen. "Who is that woman?" she asked, thinking back to the pamphlet that she'd so fleetingly surrendered: "What is weep? What's Death Mode? And what is Girl Hunt? I don't understand."

Derek shrugged his shoulders. "I've no idea what Death Mode is – never heard of it. As for Girl Hunt, it's just one of the local customs they have here ... It's nothing..."

"Nothing?" Donna spluttered.

Frank made a grab for his girlfriend's tits only she adroitly sidestepped him and skipped impishly away, wriggling her hips and fluttering her eyelids in a taunting, come-get-me kind of way. "Too slow," she teased, which made him charge for her again and this time she allowed him to grab her. "What are you thinking, Frank?" she hissed as Frank grabbed hold of her bosoms. "Are you thinking that I'll be on my knees begging you not to cook me and eat me when you catch me? Is that what you're thinking, Frank? Are you getting a hard-on thinking about my titties lying on a plate with roast potatoes, carrots, broccoli and gravy. Are you imagining how wonderful they'll taste?"

Frank grabbed his girlfriend and he arm-wrestled her to the ground. Soon, her hands were pinned to her back and he was pulling at her swimsuit so that her tits were exposed and she was melting against him.

"Jesus," Donna exclaimed, staring at them in frantic disbelief and remembering her groaning bladder. She glanced despairingly at the immigration officers at the bottom of the ramp and saw that there was still a long way to go. One woman was presently being stripped to her underwear and being searched by officials. "Oh my God! What place is this? An how long must we wait?"

"We wait for as long as it takes," Derek answered evenly. "The Korpian government doesn't acknowledge the authority of Athens. They stick to old-fashioned ways. For instance, the most infamous: women don't have rights here: no right to vote, no right to own property, nothing. Korpius is a feudal state where locally born women don't have passports. They can't leave the island. They're bondswomen and chattels. Female tourists, on the other hand, surrender their passports at point of entry and are legally classed as chattels for the duration of their stay, but they're given greater freedom."

"We have to surrender our passports?" Donna injected incredously. "You're joking?"

"Not we, you," Derek sighed. "This is a male dominated society. It's biased against women. We keep our passports. We're free to do as we like. Although everyone surrenders their electrical gadgets: phones, computers, tablets. No phones on Korpius."

"No one's taking my passport or my phone," Donna declared defiantly. "Absolutely not! They're mine! I forbid it!"

"Forbid it? Be practical, Dee. What are you going to do? Fight them? Go back to Athens?"

"No, but they can't arbitrarily take things! It's not legal!"

"Sorry, love, but they do as they like. These are their laws and they'll take both your passport and your phone, and they'll give you your microchip."

Derek tried to explain it. He spoke softly and intently and tried to be tactful and keep Donna calm, but this wasn't going well. "The microchip is what they do to all the girls. It's nothing. It's the size of a grain of rice and it goes in your arm like a vaccination. They inject it with a syringe and it means that if you get lost they can find you."

"It's nothing like a vaccination!" Donna roared angrily, devastated that no one had told her this stuff before. "Why didn't you tell me this in England? Why didn't Elizabeth tell me or even warn me? It's assault! It's an invasion of my rights!"

"You don't have any rights," Frank grinned at her impishly, stretching his girlfriend's swimsuit so that the lycra dug into her slit at the groin, "You forget! This is Korpius and you're a woman!"

The girlfriend squealed, covering her pussy with her hand. "Frank! Stop it! You're not supposed to do that. Not until you after catch me. What are you doing? I'm not a whimpering dam just yet!"

"Bitch!" Frank growled at her, good humouredly, grabbing his girlfriend and pulling at the swimsuit, which was already tight across her bust. Suddenly her breasts popped out and were exposed. "See how I can do with her as I want. This is Korpius, and I can play with her and I can hurt her, however I fancy."

"What's a dam?" Donna asked quietly, shocked by Frank's assertiveness but feeling the need for a fast education. This was a question that needed to be asked, yet Derek was reluctant to tell her anything, which gave Frank the opportunity to provide an explanation – or rather, he forced his girlfriend do so at his insistence.

"Tell her what it is!" he demanded, placing his hand round her neck and squeezing it playfully, although it didn't feel particularly playful to his girlfriend. "Put her out of her misery and give her a definition."

"It's a woman," his girlfriend gasped, reaching for his hand which was tightening dangerously.

"Go on, babe. Give us the rest. Let's see how she likes it."

He squeezed her neck more excitedly and her eyes grew wide and fearful. "Explain to the lady here what a dam is!"

He relaxed his hold a little so she could speak. "It's a woman..." she gasped.

"Go on, babe. Tell us more. What is a dam?"

He released his hold so that she could take several deep breaths. "It's a woman condemned to die, she wheezed"

"Yeah? That's good, but you can do better than that, far better than that!"

She swallowed awkwardly. "Condemned ... in a way that's exciting to men."

"Go on. Keep going ... I want to hear you say it..."

"If she's going to be hanged - she'll strip on the scaffold and have a dildo inserted into her pussy. The drop will be a short one so she can suffocate slowly while the dildo juices her up. That's a dam! Or if she's going to be spitted, she'll be fastened to a Jessica, her clothes will be removed and the spit will be pushed into her hole and driven into her until it bursts from her mouth. And it'll be slow! A dam is always killed slowly and in terrible pain."

"An entertaining death," Frank agreed happily, squeezing on his girlfriend's windpipe so that her face turned an apoplectic blue. "It's considered the duty of a condemned woman to die prettily. It's a way of repaying her debt."

"What debt?" Donna trembled, feeling a hard knot pulling at her stomach. She was too numbed to make any other response.

"Yeah. Dam is a noun derived from the verb, damn. It means a woman condemned to die in a contrived sexual manner for the purpose of sexual gratification; a female in the state of being damned. And if you don't give them your passport and have the chip injected in your arm, you'll be damned right now, like the girl who gave you that leaflet. She's damned! She's on her way to Nekrokopela to meet her butcher! Like her, they won't even give you a chance."

"The girl with the leaflet? The one they arrested?"

"Yeah. She annoyed them. Look out for the Blu-ray. Give it a couple of days and it'll be stocked in all the shops and supermarkets ... You'll be able to watch every detail of her butchering in high-definition color."

The stream of jumbled words and assorted images hit Donna without making sense. She'd never been to Korpius before, and here for the first time she was being brought into proximity with a world of athletic hounds and buxom hares; of sexually active women being basted on rotating spits and of terrified dams shackled in irons and methodically whipped and raped, and yet she remained separate from it by a membrane of incredulity. This was a terrifying world, one that was horrifyingly different from the picture postcard scenes she'd imagined she'd be seeing, and for the moment her mind couldn't accept it as real.

How naive she'd been on that first eye-popping day! If only she could have known how guileless she appeared to the man and his girlfriend, but that first day she'd walked down that ramp and onto the island blind and stupid, unaware that Girl Hunt lurked in the Korpian shadows like a psychotic lady-killer stalking his prey.

Indeed, it had taken another full day for Donna's education to make its second giant leap.

She'd been browsing an endless parade of stores - wandering through some and bypassing others, her upper left arm stinging from the insertion of the microchip the previous day. A protective sticking plaster was covering the wound.

But then her attention had been attracted to several gaudy posters taped to the window of one of the many Travel Emporia that lined the High Street.

With her hands resting loosely on her hips, she'd read the words and had examined the illustrations. She'd been drawn by the words 'Girl Hunt' daubed across each of the posters because this had resonated with the conversation of the previous afternoon with the couple at the jetty.

"This is what those people were talking about," she'd scowled.

"What?"

"Girl Hunt. What does it mean?"

Richard had peered myopically at the posters. "Oh, it's something they do around here. It's like a game to pull in the tourists."

"It's not your kind of thing," Derek had declared with a sniff. "It's a blood sport – think of bear baiting, fox hunting or bull fighting in Spain."

"Without any bulls," Richard had quipped, and he'd laughed.

"I don't understand? Do you mean it's some kind of local custom?"

"Yeah, I suppose, something like that."

Donna had looked askance at the picture, squinting at it because she didn't understood what it was trying to sell, and indeed, why should she have understood, because cannibalism is not, after all, part of an average girl's every day holiday experience. So she fuddled with the various images she'd observed on the pictures, tying them together in various combinations and giving them different contexts, reading the blurb and analyzing it, until, suddenly, her world stopped. Time moved backwards, and the cruel horror came tumbling at her and hit her like a bombshell. In that pivotal instant she'd seen the whole awful truth as it was meant to be seen and nothing thereafter could return her to her previous innocence. "Oh, my God," she'd exclaimed, her expression freezing and her face turning cold and ashen. There it had been in front of her, so brazen and exposed and public and obvious. It had been truly, abhorrently shocking – and the most shocking part was that it hadn't been hidden or embarrassed or contrite, but defiant and brash.

Donna was overwhelmed with embarrassment and disdain. She was open mouthed as she looked in bewilderment at the rude sketch of a bikini clad blonde clinging by red varnished fingertips to a granite rock face, whilst beneath her, a large masculine hand reached towards her with lascivious intent.

There was only one thing that the ethereal hand was after: the girl's panties. What was to be done with the garment wasn't left to Donna's imagination, because a second poster hung alongside the first one, twice its size, and it showed the same woman - still with her red painted nails - but this time hanging from a hastily erected spit. A single tongue of case-hardened steel poked out from between her legs while another emerged from her mouth. She was naked and hanging face down, facing the ground. Her rich red hair was tied into a bun and pinned to her head so as to keep it from her body. Her breasts hung freely and they dangled like udders, heavy, full, and with nipples that were bold, swollen, erect. The breasts occasionally swept across the steady, youthful fire that was burning beneath them so that a covering of fat, sweat and charcoal coated her thighs, stomach and breasts. The fat leached through her skin and then ran in rivulets along her breasts where it dripped from her swollen nipples and sputtered in the fire. The flames were steadily becoming stronger and they were heating her up.

The woman's panties lay torn and discarded and useless in the dust in front of the fire, while her bra dangled erotically as someone's prize from the gantry bearing the spit.

Donna gazed in bewilderment at the poster.

"This isn't serious," she declared, her chin hanging in wild disbelief. "It's a joke. Tell me! It's a wind up!"

She implored Derek to agree with her, to acknowledge that it was a joke and in bad taste, but he wouldn't. So she looked to Richard and to Elizabeth for their confirmation, but they were no more forthcoming than Derek had been.

Donna may have been wearing a black top, skintight shorts and baseball cap, but she was suddenly feeling extremely cold and exposed in the street, vulnerable and confused, as if she were the butt of some joke that everybody was sharing.

"It's no joke," Richard assured her eventually, and Elizabeth assented. "Believe me," Richard added. "We wouldn't joke about this. Imagine that you're on the set of your own private horror film, because this is as real as it gets! This is what Girl Hunt is about!"

Donna shook her head denying what they were saying and what her eyes were seeing. She was convinced that she was being duped by her friends, for to believe an alternative was unthinkable. To accept that these pictures were real was to postulate a belief in fairies, science fiction, Santa Claus and the world of ancient Atlantis. Such ideas were untenable and so for the benefit of her sanity Donna decided that the locals were popularizing a myth.

"It's a prank," she declared to the owner of the local supermarket as he sat behind the confines of his cash register, totting up the items in Donna's basket and methodically overcharging. Donna was too distracted by her thoughts to catch him in the act, because between the cigarettes and the various boxes of novelty condoms at the side of the cash register was a picture of a woman in a maroon bikini posing at the start line for Girl Hunt.

The picture was faded and the lady's smile was sugary, but unmistakably, the woman was holding a blue flag on which the words, "23rd Girl Hunt" were printed in bold white lettering, perfectly legible to Donna's naked eye.