The red double-decker bus pulled out of the dark opening of the warehouse in a belch of black diesel smoke and a growl of power as it gathered speed heading for the high street. The destination sign read, ‘Out of Service’. Looking through the windows of the lower deck, one could see the empty seats. The upper deck, because of its height and darkened windows, revealed nothing of its interior. It was here that unseen passengers were seated.

Meredith Montgomery and her former secretary Darlene Scott sat next to each other in one of the front seats behind the windscreen. Their still and silent posture belied the wide-eyed even frantic darting of their eyes as they peered through the darkened windscreen at the tangle of traffic and throngs of people below. Those few who looked up saw only a dark silvery reflection on the glass. More than a dozen women passengers sat in primly erect posture scattered throughout the upper deck of the bus; none spoke. Their rigidly seated posture might have been considered demure and their silence merely decorous had anyone been able to glimpse their dark forms through the windows. An unobscured view would have revealed that they were bound and gagged naked in their seats. The thin silvery panes of glass and tightly drawn leather straps buckled and locked to their nude bodies were all that separated them from view and from their freedom. Crimson rubber balls protruding from their mouths seated securely behind their teeth by leather straps cinched at the back of their necks forced their lips to grasp ball-gags in open-mouthed muteness. Some drooled from the corners of their mouths; saliva brimmed over the lower lips of others. In all cases, the women remained mutely sucking on the rubber balls to keep from dribbling on their bared breasts. They looked to be gluttonously holding a much too large red fruit in their mouths ‑ unable to remove it. Sullen silence interlarded with wet sucking sounds as they futilely tried to swallow their saliva underscored the despair and distress reflected in their frantically darting eyes. Tears of fright and helplessness flowed down the cheeks of some of the younger women, including Meredith’s blonde secretary, Darlene. Meredith drew her lips back intermittently, baring her teeth held in open-jawed distension gripping the firm resilience of the rubber ball crammed in her mouth, trying to arrest her copious drooling by hissing her slaver back into her mouth. Then she clasped the bright red sphere in tight-lipped, open-mouthed and rubber-imposed inhibition that denied her the ability to express her frustration and distress until she again felt the saliva stranding from her lower lip and chin onto her bared breasts when she would suck on the ball once more baring her teeth and helplessness with the same futile gesture. She was as helpless as Darlene, unable to aid herself much less the sobbing girl sitting next who kept looking at her expectantly. She sat as rigidly and severely upright as her secretary; bound as stringently; gagged as silently and stripped as naked as she. Their mutual nudity and restraint erased the former social barrier between executive and secretary. If Darlene were not elevated to higher status, Meredith was certainly diminished by her ignominious fall from favour and power. Although Meredith was humiliated by her nakedness; her tightly strapped and effectively gagged condition rendering her powerless and diminished in the eyes of her secretary, she was grateful Darlene hadn’t witnessed her being stripped of power, position, and her expensive clothing in the board room that morning. She could still taste the after-effects of that rigorous and debasing ceremony‑it had only been a few hours ago.

Now they were both bound to a destination and future where they would be considered chattel. They were to be trained and disciplined to serve in sexual servitude for as long as required under the strict and severe conditions customary at the peculiar institution that awaited their arrival. Both women wondered in retrospect at the wisdom of having signed the employment agreement that brought them to this crushing end of their promising careers. The bus growled; the women whimpered and sobbed, their mutual destination loomed in malevolent, stony anticipation some miles and hours away.

The sustained and rigid immobility demanded of the women by tightly drawn and securely buckled straps was tiring. The myriad buckles each had small brass padlocks locked through tongue rings or brass posts insuring the continuing stress of flesh compressing restraint and wearisome posture without possibility of loosening the straps or escaping the enforced posture. Thus was the appearance of the women bound and naked guaranteed while in transit for delivery to the training institution that was to be the centre of their existence in the near future. The psychological state of the women paralleled their physical disposition imitating in imagination what they experienced in their stringent bondage. The terror of apprehension gripped them as tightly as the buckled and locked straps. Meredith wanted to leave. She strained against her bondage ‑ she burbled her thwarted desire against the stifling ball in her mouth ‑ the bus strained in a low gear, climbing an incline toward an inevitable and dread destination. Her eyes gleamed, open as wide and gorgeous as the sky as she tried to hold back tears forming in watery effulgence against her will. Darlene noted the signs of her employer’s distress trickling down her weary cheeks. She had never seen Meredith cry.

No particular strap hurt unbearably, but their unyielding combination, forcing Meredith to sit upright and unmoving with her back arched and breasts thrust forward; arms and legs bound helplessly immobilised became at first tiresome and then agonising as the bus lurched and groaned through traffic. The constrained inability to move wore on her and the other girls as well. Meredith could only see Darlene sitting a hand’s-breadth away, but she could hear the others behind her groaning in concert with the bus as they sat in the same rigid compliance to their bondage as she and Darlene. What passed for comfort ensued as the bus escaped the outskirts of town and sped along the coast; at least she wasn’t being tossed from side to side and the tightness of her straps simply became a dull agony rather than the sharp cutting pain endured earlier. The harbour receded behind them; the coast unfurled to the right and Meredith knew their destination lay to the east. The view was beautiful. As many times as she had driven the route she had never really appreciated or even noticed how beautiful. The small towns and villages looked interesting for the first time as if she had never seen them before. Darlene whimpered and brought Meredith rushing back to her own misery and suffering.