It was perhaps an hour--she lost track of time quickly--before Melanie ran across some of the other girls who had been assigned to the Preserve. When she first saw them--and when they saw her--they scattered like deer, vanishing among the trees. That had confused her, but, after a short while, one of the girls emerged to talk to her.

The girl who came out was Asian--Korean, as Melanie would later learn. She was of medium height, a little taller than Melanie herself; she had a slender body, very shapely legs, and a pretty face. Her breasts were small but delicately lovely. "Hello," she said in accented English as she came stepped out from behind a thick tree. She seemed extremely nervous, she kept glancing around as she moved slowly into the open. "I'm called Sunni. Who're you? Are you one of us?"

"I guess so," Melanie answered. "If you're convicted criminals, here to be hunted."

"We are all here to be hunted," Sunni answered shortly. Other girls began peeking out from among the trees.

"Why'd you all run like that?" Melanie asked. She gestured toward her naked body. "Isn't it obvious?"

"No," Sunni told her, shaking her head. She began to relax. "It isn't. Sometimes the hunters come as couples. More than once the woman has stripped naked and pretended to be one of us to lure us out of hiding."

Melanie stared. "That's a dirty trick!" she exclaimed. "But how'd you know--?"

"That you weren't bait?" She shook her head. "We didn't. Someone has to take the chance. We draw straws, take turns; we call it 'walking the point.' If you decide to stay with our group, you'll have to take your turn too. It isn't as bad as it sounds, we check to see if there's a hunter around or if anything's suspicious. None of us have been taken 'walking the point' in more than a year."

"That's good to hear."

Sunni laughed bitterly. "And it doesn't matter much anyhow. We all get taken, sooner or later." She gestured toward the girls now coming out into the open. "Six years now," she went on. "That's the longest anybody we know has made it."

"And that's me," an auburn-haired girl said. Melanie turned to look at her; she was sleek and slender, very athletically built, with a classically-beautiful face. The muscles in her arms and legs were so taut her skin looked almost as if it had been polished. "I'm Jane. And I've been lucky, that's all." Taking the lead, she introduced Melanie to the others: Angie, Lila, Pi, Audra, Juana, Jill, Erin, Diane, Cindy, Dana, Nadine, Allison--fourteen in all, not including Melanie. They were from all over; Orientals, Caucasians, Hispanics, American Indians, and blacks. All were athletic in build, all were pretty, and all had at the most only moderate or even small breasts. All typical, she told herself, of what the instructor back at the induction center had called "Class B."

From the first moment, Sunni and Jane took her under their wings. They were at their most vulnerable, Jane explained, when they were trying to make their way back to the safety of the villages in the afternoons and when leaving them in the mornings. The hunters, many of them experienced and skillful, often lurked near the half-mile perimeter as the time for the afternoon siren drew near. That first afternoon, Jane and Sunni taught her how to circle the village before approaching it, showing her how to spot the hunters hidden in the nearby woods. Melanie saw her first hunters that day, a pair of men hidden along a sometimes-used but poorly-defined trail leading to the village. Having spotted them, the girls left a lookout--as with "walking the point" they took turns with this--and then, with Melanie in tow, slipped in on the far side just after the ear-splitting blast of the siren. The hunters did not move, and the lookout--Angie, a tall teenager with a very youthful face and long flowing strawberry-blond hair who seemed to be always finding something to smile about in spite of her circumstances, made it back safely as well.

The village itself was fenced in with real logs, but the huts inside--there were three concentric circles of them around a central firepit--looked to be made of thatch but were in fact constructed from some sort of plastic. One of the huts on the back row, larger than the others, contained perfectly modern toilets and showers. There were four gates, and on a stool just inside each one sat one of the night guards, Park Rangers armed with submachine guns--these men, as she would later learn, were all business, they rarely interacted with the girls at all. The hunters, who were commonly in the village in the daytime, were shooed out at night, an hour before the afternoon siren went off, and, as she'd been told at the induction center, they then had thirty minutes to clear the half-mile perimeter. Practically all of them did; they'd been told at their own orientation that it was very annoying to the rangers if they had to come out and track someone down to get them out of the safety zone, and the rangers had the power to expel a hunter they found "uncooperative"--without giving him a refund.

"You have to be really careful leaving in the mornings, though," Jane told her. "That's one of the most dangerous times for us. In the evenings we can scout out the perimeter, but you can't do that coming out--not thoroughly, anyway, although we do send lookouts up into the trees if we're suspicious. The hunters know that the mornings are our most vulnerable time, and they're always hanging around here then. Most of the time when an experienced girl gets taken, it's from a perimeter ambush in the morning. It's a matter of luck, you can't expect to scout out all of them."

After giving her an overview, Jane showed Melanie to an empty hut in the first ring. Inside were more comforts, really, than Melanie had expected; a little stand with a mirror, lights that looked like torches but were actually electric, and a remarkably comfortable hammocklike bed.

The evening meal, which seemed to Melanie like a banquet after her diet of prison food in the various holding centers she'd been kept in prior to being brought to the Preserve, was served hot from a truck that came in an hour or so after the siren and parked near the central fire pit. There were, Melanie discovered, little soft-cushioned stools here to sit on, stools cleverly disguised to look like rocks. Nothing had been spared, it seemed, in the interest of making this look like some sort of tribal village. As they ate their evening meal, Melanie noticed that the fire pit was half full of partly-burnt logs. Knowing that there probably wasn't ever a need for a warming fire here on this tropical island, she asked Jane about it.

"Well," the older woman told her, "there are some extra features about the Preserve here that they didn't tell you about in that class back at the induction center. A long time ago, the hunters got up a petition asking that they be allowed into the villages at night. After a lot of bureaucratic wrangling, it was granted--for those who wanted to pay, through the nose, for a special permit to do so. They come in under very strict rules. They aren't allowed to bring in any weapons of any sort, and if they harm one of the girls here during the safe hours, the law calls it murder. They like for us to put on 'tribal dances' for them, and so we do. We'll teach you."

Melanie stared. "Why in the hell," she asked incredulously, "would we do that? These men are here to kill us! Why would we want to put on a show for them?"

Jane grinned. "Because," she said, "we get extra perks from the administration for it. Our cooperation is why we have these good hot meals instead of prison food. At times they let us know when there are no hunters in the Preserve and when the next group is coming in, and that's worth a lot. Sometimes they give us extra hours before the morning siren sounds, and once in a while we even get a whole day off. That's one day less you have to try to survive the hunt. It all depends on how much the hunters go back and talk about how nice we were to them."

Melanie narrowed her eyes. "I think I can figure out," she said, "what 'being nice to them' means. Not just dancing."

Jane shrugged. "No. That's just to warm them up. If you really want to impress them you have to fuck them and suck their dicks, too. You don't have a problem with that, do you? You know there's no disease problem, you've been immunized against every venereal disease known, back at the induction center. No possibility of a pregnancy either; one of those injections they gave you made you sterile for about twelve years."

Melanie shrugged too, an almost precise imitation of Jane's movement. "No," she said simply.

But there were no hunters there that night, no fire was lit in the firepit, no dance was held. Melanie was awakened the next morning just after dawn by the beeping of the truck's horn; sleepy-eyed, she staggered out to join the other girls at breakfast. Following the example the others set she ate hurriedly, after which they left the village. At Jane's direction the group split into three parts, with instructions to meet again at a landmark she called "Big Rock." Sunni led the group of five that Melanie was a part of; they encountered no ambush and, when the three parts rejoined, she saw they'd suffered no casualties. Minutes later the reunified group was deep in the woods, already far from the village and moving farther. It was just Melanie's second day here, but today was to be the day she'd see her first kill.

She didn't know the name of the girl she saw taken, none of them did. Melanie was told that she was a newcomer as well, a short-haired blond who'd come in two days before Melanie and who had yet to make contact with any of the other women. Overly fearful, she'd fled from Juana when she'd tried to "walk the point" with her. Sunni and Jane had already told Melanie about the blond, and they'd told her as well that the girl probably wouldn't last long. The day they'd met Melanie they'd seen her lurking near the gates, as if she was hoping someone would change their mind and she'd be let out. Again, though, she'd fled from the other women as if they were the hunters.

That morning, the morning of Melanie's first full day in the compound, the troop's first order of business was to try, once again, to find the blond girl and see if they could make contact with her.

Finding her wasn't hard. As Jane has suspected, she was again near the gate, hiding in the woods near the road. That day, it was Pi's turn to "walk the point." Pi was a tiny little Thai girl, a teenager not even five feet tall, a lovely girl with dark skin, long flowing black hair and a slender, small-breasted body. Pi seemed happy with this, since they already knew with almost absolute certainty that the blond was one of them, not bait. With a smile on her face, Pi started down the incline toward the blonde's hiding place.

Abruptly, from right over Melanie's shoulder, Jane gave a cry like a jungle bird. Instantaneously--to Melanie the movement looked so quick it seemed she'd fallen into a pit--Pi dropped from sight into the low growth on the hillside. Melanie glanced back at Jane, received a warning look from her in return, and then looked back down toward the road.

Her heart jumped into her throat. On the road, walking slowly, was a solitary heavy-set man, a hunter. He had his bow in his hands and an arrow on the string; his eyes darted from side to side, but he did not seem to have seen any of the girls yet. Still, even at this distance Melanie could see he was more or less focused on their position; clearly he was a bit suspicious of the "bird call."

"Come on out, ladies," he called after a moment. "I got something for you..."

To Melanie's shock and amazement, the blond stood up, revealing herself completely, and looked toward him. She took one step in his direction; Melanie wondered if the poor girl might've thought he was bringing her release papers.

In a way he was. Her release came in the form of a flashing arrow that struck her almost precisely in the center of her naked body, a little above her navel. Melanie and the others saw it strike, saw it happen. Melanie had to suppress her gasp of horror and shock.

The blond quivered when the arrow struck her, but, amazingly, after that she didn't move. As Melanie watched, she very slowly looked down at the arrow sticking out of her body, as if she simply could not believe it. She reached for it with both hands, but she did not touch it, she just stood there with each of her palms a couple of inches away from the arrow's shaft.

Meanwhile, the hunter had moved into the woods and had closed on her. Unexpectedly, he broke cover not twenty feet away, and immediately he launched another arrow. This one tore into the blonde's right breast, piercing her chest deeply. She bent to the side, turned slightly, and fell heavily. By the time the hunter reached her, she'd become still. The hunter hung her body from a tree branch by her feet and cut her throat open, allowing her blood to drain. He pulled his arrows out of the body, ripping gaping holes in her flesh and pulling some of her intestines out. Then he took a safety pin and attached a bright orange identification tag to her breast. Leaving her hanging there, he slung his bow over his shoulder and started back for the lodge. He'd already killed his limit for the day, and it was not even mid-morning yet.

"I don't understand," Melanie said when the hunter was safely gone. "Why'd he mutilate her body like that?"

"Oh, that's not so bad," one of the other girls said. Melanie turned; the speaker was Jill, one of the girls Melanie had met that first day. Like herself Jill had been a dancer, and her body, after years in the woods, was more toned and athletic than ever. A slender and piquantly pretty girl with coal-black hair, large dark eyes and a wry sense of humor that had not left her even here, Jill had a reputation as one of the fastest runners in their little group, and one of the most agile climbers. "Some of them are really, really mutilated." She pointed at the body. "The Rangers will send some workmen to pick that up for him, it's part of the service," she went on. "Since he bled the body out like that, he's probably planning to eat her."

"Eat her!?"

"Yes." She gave Melanie an innocent look. "What, you've never heard of a man eating a woman before? Honey, you are naive!" Then she giggled. "Sorry. I know, you're new and it's shocking. Me, I've been here three years now and I've seen a lot. No, lots of the guys have cannibalism fantasies, it's pretty common." She leaned back against a moss-covered treetrunk and propped up one knee. "Most of 'em have the chef at the lodge whip up something for them, I guess... none of us really know very much about what happens down there, we only know what the hunters who come to the village tell us, and you know how men exaggerate. But I have seen it happen here." She gazed into space, her eyes distant. "A year ago, about, the hunters took a girl from our group, a girl I'd made friends with; her name was Penny. They shot her in her legs and brought her down without killing her, and they took her back to their camp. We followed them. Sometimes we get a chance to release a captive, and that ain't against the rules, we'll do it if we can." She sighed. "I dunno, though. Penny had three arrows in her legs. The doctor probably would have put her out if we'd dragged her back in. Anyway, we never got the chance."

"What'd they do to her?" Melanie asked.

"They spitted her alive," Jill said flatly. "They made up a thick wooden spit with a sharp point, and they held her down and ran it into her cunt. God, did she scream... anyway, they ran it into her cunt and they just kept forcing it up through her. I guess they were trying to keep her alive like in the Dolcett cartoons, but they didn't manage that. The end of the spit tore through her throat and they had to pull it back and try again. Finally they got it to come out of her mouth, but by then she was dead."

"God... horrible..."

"Worse things happen," Jill said carelessly. "Anyway, after that they put her over a fire and started cooking her. We stayed, we watched. Finally they cut pieces off her thighs and just sat there holding them for a while, looking at each other. Then, all at the same time, they took bites of the meat. You wanna know what happened then?"

"What?"

Jill laughed. "They all threw up! All four them, all at once! I guess the idea is one thing and the reality is another, huh?"

Melanie managed a smile. "I suppose. Didn't make a difference to Penny, though."

"No," Jill agreed, becoming serious. "It didn't."