Jane regained consciousness slowly, and with a pounding head. Sensations started to filter into her brain even before she opened her eyes – she seemed to be lying on her bed, and the air conditioning must be broken or switched off, because it was hot and stuffy in her bedroom.

She pushed herself up on one elbow, whilst holding her sore head with the other hand, and wondered what the hell she had been drinking to give her such a bad hangover. She didn’t remember drinking much more than a glass of wine, she had been in her apartment, with Shaun, and then… nothing. She sat up on the edge of the bed and, unable to put off the evil moment any longer, opened her eyes.

This wasn’t her bedroom, or even her apartment. Overhead, an unshaded light bulb harshly illuminated a small, square room, with bare walls covered in peeling paint and cracked plaster. The floor was bare concrete and the only furniture in the room was the bed on which she was sitting – an iron bedstead and a thin, dirty mattress. There was a plain wooden door to one side, but no windows at all. The only other thing in the room was, high up in one corner, a CCTV camera, its lens pointed at her, and a red light burning brightly.

She looked down at herself – she was still wearing the blue cocktail dress she remembered, but it was heavily creased, there were sweat stains under her armpits, and she felt like she’d been wearing it, and her underwear, for days. She wasn’t wearing her shoes, and she couldn’t see them anywhere in the room. She pushed her auburn hair out of her face, and wondered where the hell she was.

She was about to stand up and go to the door, when it burst open and two men came in. Both were dressed in green sleeveless vests - stretched tight across their muscled chests - camouflage pants, and army boots. Their bare arms were tattooed and bulging with muscles, but what really scared Jane were the balaclavas which completely covered their faces, with gaps only for eyes and mouth.

As they moved threateningly towards her, she stood up, but her slender 5ft 8in frame was still dwarfed by the men, who grabbed her arms roughly and twisted them behind her back. She struggled, kicked and screamed, but there was nothing she could do as they bound her arms behind her, wrist to elbow, so they were folded and held in place. It was then that she saw the man who had followed the others into the room, the man holding the TV camera, trained on her, filming her futile struggles and recording her cries for help. She stared at it, suddenly frozen in fear and confusion, her mouth open in surprise. Moments later, her mouth was filled with a rubber ball which stretched her full red lips tight and wide, and a leather strap was being tightened behind her head to hold it in place. One of the men who had bound her now marched out of the room, while the other grabbed her arms with one hand, her hair in the other, and dragged her out, past the cameraman, along a narrow corridor and through a door, out into the blazing sunlight.

As her eyes adjusted to the brightness of the day, Jane saw that the building in which she had been held let out onto a dusty square, bounded on two sides by buildings, and on the other two by what appeared to be virgin rainforest. At the centre of the square was a wooden platform or stage, and this is what she was being roughly led towards, to join a line of about a dozen women, all similarly bound, gagged and held tightly by their own hooded guard. Jane looked at the other women, and saw the same expression of fear and confusion on each face as she assumed was written on her own. All were struggling, most were trying to shout out, and several were crying. There were blondes, brunettes and redheads; black, white, Asian and Hispanic; tall and short. They seemed to be dressed in whatever they had been wearing when they were brought here – some were in jeans, some shorts, a couple in evening dresses. One was wearing a nightgown, another pyjamas, and one appeared to be in a bikini. They only had two things in common – they were all beautiful, and they were all scared as hell.

As she stood there, sweltering under the burning sun, struggling vainly against the fingers still twisted into her hair, Jane noticed that there were two more TV cameras out here, either side of the stage, rostrum mounted, panning along the line. Meanwhile, the man with the steadycam had followed her out, and was now moving along the line getting close-ups from various angles – up skirt, down cleavage, in the face. Whoever had set this up, Jane thought, had spent some money on serious equipment, this looked professional. But what the hell was going on?

She watched as a woman marched across the square towards them. She was wearing the same as the guards holding the women – green sleeveless vest, camouflage pants, and army boots – but no mask. Her black hair was tied back in a tight ponytail, showing off the tanned skin and high cheekbones of her perfectly made-up face. She climbed the steps onto the stage and stood, legs apart, hands on hips, looking down at them. Jane could see her nipples standing erect through the material of the vest, pulled tight across her ample breasts, clearly unrestrained by a bra. The line of women stopped fighting their minders and turned to look at the woman smiling down at them.

“Ladies!” she declaimed, clearly for the cameras as much as them, “Welcome, to X-Treme Boot Camp! I’m Kandy Turner, and I’ll be your drill sergeant during your time here with us! Your husbands, boyfriends, or ‘loved ones’” – the air quotes could be heard in her voice – “have arranged for you to be here and undergo eight weeks of the most intensive, gruelling training programme ever devised!”

Kandy began strutting along the stage, getting into her role as hostess / presenter / camp commandant.

“Each week the viewers, on Channel X in the US and on the internet around the world, will be voting for who should leave the programme. Believe me, ladies, you do not want to be eliminated! If you are, you will be permanently transferred to a brothel in South America which is not too fussy about whether its sex workers are there willingly or not.

“The lucky girl who wins through at the end of the eight weeks will be given her freedom, plus a $200,000 compensation package, plus she will be able to nominate whoever put her in here, male or female, for the next series of X-Treme Boot Camp!

“Okay, let’s get this show on the road!”

Jane couldn’t quite take in what she had just heard – they were in some kind of X-rated reality TV show?! This could not be happening, it had to be some kind of sick joke! But nothing she had seen or heard indicated that they were anything but deadly serious. Movement further down the line drove these thoughts from her mind, and made her concentrate on what was happening there and then.

The girl at the other end of the row was dragged up on stage and held in front of Kandy. She was Asian, maybe twenty, about 5ft 4in tall, and dressed in a denim miniskirt and a cropped T-shirt. Kandy held her chin firmly in her hand, not allowing the frightened woman to look away.

“Hello, Li, welcome to X-Treme Boot Camp! You were a computer programmer in Boston before you were brought here. I can tell you that it was your dad who nominated you for Boot Camp – he felt your lewd behaviour was bringing shame on the family name, and thought you needed to be taught a lesson! Well, don’t worry, Mr. Hong, your little girl is going to be taught some valuable, if painful, lessons here!”

There was a table on the stage, and Kandy picked up a large pair of shears, which she used to cut away Li’s top and skirt. As the young Asian woman struggled and fought against the man easily holding her in position, the show hostess cut away her bra and panties, revealing her small, pert breasts and bush of black pubic hair. Next, she removed the ballgag from her mouth, causing her to drool onto her now naked body.

“Please! This is a mistake!” the girl pleaded as she squirmed uselessly in the firm grip of the guard behind her. “You’ve got to believe me, I shouldn’t be –”

Her plaintive cries were silenced by a strip of duct tape plastered over her mouth.

“Hey, girl, here’s a heads-up,” Kandy said coldly, “I don’t give a fuck! You’re here, you’re surrounded by a hundred square miles of jungle, and you ain’t going nowhere unless we say you are! You’d better shape up pretty quick, honey, or you’ll be shipping out, and sucking cock in some dingy dungeon in Buenos Aires!”

She went to the table and returned with a set of electric shears. Li’s head was forced down, and Kandy started to shave her, sending great clumps of her long, shiny black hair falling onto the stage. It seemed to be only a matter of seconds before Li was allowed to straighten up, and they could all see that her hair was now no more than half an inch long anywhere on her head.

Kandy ripped the tape off the Asian girl’s face, and as she sucked in air and let out a series of desperate sobs, thrust a rubber bit gag between her jaws and buckled it tight behind her head and under her chin. Another trip to the table brought a much smaller electric shaver. Li was lifted bodily up off the stage and held with her pubic mound presented to the woman in fatigues.

“I’d keep pretty still, honey,” she advised, “you don’t want me to nick you here.”

She proceeded to shave off every last vestige of pubic hair on the young woman held before her, who whined and wailed, but kept pretty still.

Once the job was complete, a muscled guard brought over a set of leather straps and, after more useless struggling by Li, they were applied to her body. There were cuffs around her wrists and ankles, and a collar around her neck, all padlocked in place. Additional leather straps were added around her thighs and upper arms, then the ropes holding her arms were replaced by the simple expedient of clipping the wrist cuffs onto the straps above her elbows. It was obvious the thigh straps could be used for the same purpose if they wanted to remove the use of her legs.

“One last thing,” Kandy told her, as she picked up a can of spray paint and a piece of card, “this is just so the viewers at home can tell who’s who.”

She sprayed the paint through the card stencil onto the Asian girl’s chest, and then onto her back, between her shoulder blades. Jane just caught a glimpse of what it said – the word “Li” glistened on her skin, like the name of a soccer player on the back of their shirt, and she guessed it was there to help if you wanted to vote off Hong Li. The naked woman was finally hustled off stage, and the cameras turned their attention to the next ‘contestant’.

One by one, the women were processed. Each was announced by name for the audience at home, and they were informed of who had betrayed them, presumably to capture a reaction shot of surprise, shock, and maybe anger. There was a black girl, Tulisa, a saleswoman from New York, who had been given up by her boyfriend’s brother, apparently because he was jealous; a Hispanic girl from San Francisco, Ramona, was here because her husband was ‘bored with her nagging’; Stephanie, a tall, blonde white girl from Denver, who Kandy said was a cheerleader, had been sold down the river by her ‘best friend’, a girl competing with her for a place on the cheerleading team as well as the attentions of the college quarterback. Jane could hardly believe these little stories, they were like ideas rejected for the Jerry Springer Show, but she realised her own story would be no better.

As the number of naked women to her left grew, and the number of clothed ones to her right shrank, Jane became more nervous. She worked out there were fourteen women altogether, and she was the last to be dragged up on stage. When she stood in front of Kandy, she realised that the presenter must be in her forties, but was well made up and still good looking, and the wiry muscles in her arms and neck indicated a former life as a fitness instructor or body-builder – or maybe she really had been a drill instructor in the army.

“Hi, Jane, welcome to X-Treme Boot Camp!” Kandy recited for the fourteenth time. “Before you came here, you were a lawyer’s secretary from Atlanta. I can tell you that it was your boyfriend who nominated you, because you just didn’t show him enough respect. Hmm, I bet you’d show him some ‘respect’ if he was here right now, wouldn’t you, honey? To think, you could’ve avoided all this if you’d just sucked his cock a little more often!” She turned to the camera.

“Remember that, all you ladies out there – show your man some respect if you don’t want to end up here!”

The rest of Jane’s ‘processing’ was the same as the others. She didn’t bother to plead for release when her gag was removed, knowing it was futile, and might result in a vicious slap across the face, as had happened to one of the other girls. She sobbed quietly as her beautiful raven locks were shorn, but apart from that she remained silent. Once she was stripped, shaved, cuffed and marked, she joined the end of the line of sweating, frightened, naked women, and looked up at the stage to see what was to happen next.

“Okay, ladies,” Kandy bellowed down at them, “now you’re all ready, we can begin your training! This will be a combination of physical training, to improve your fitness, and behavioural training, to improve your attitude! We’ll start off fairly gently, with a five mile run. The last three of you to complete the run will be punished, so I suggest you make sure you’re not one of them! Gentlemen, take charge of your woman!”

One of the hooded guards stepped in front of Jane and clipped what looked like a chain dog lead to the D-ring at the front of her collar, and pulled her into a jog across the parade square and down a path into the rainforest. Jane saw that the rest of the women were similarly chained, and that she was at the back of the line of naked flesh. She had to fight down a rising sense of panic at being in one of the losing places, and tried to establish a sensible running pace she could maintain over five miles, relying on the others to gradually come back to her.

Jane was an experienced runner, it was her preferred way of maintaining her fitness and figure. But she was used to running in cool conditions, not in the 95 degree heat and 95 per cent humidity of the tropics. She would also be wearing a sports bra and proper running shoes, rather than running naked as she was now, with her breasts swinging and jiggling painfully with every stride. She kept her focus on the ground in front of her, trying to avoid stones, debris and roots across the path which could send her crashing to the dirt. She found the most difficult thing to cope with was having her arms trapped behind her back, rather than swinging by her sides, helping her maintain her balance.

Pretty soon, she was sweating profusely and gasping for breath, but she was gradually catching and overtaking the other runners. Her breasts ached from their unrestrained movement, but hers were relatively small, being only a C cup, and she was able to cope with the discomfort. As she passed one of the other girls, a teacher called Rebecca, she saw the tears on her face as her very large breasts bounced alarmingly on her chest.

The run seemed to go on forever, and Jane lost track of where she was in the running order – she knew there were girls in front of her and some behind her, but not how many. She was dehydrated and becoming dizzy as she fought to get enough oxygen into her lungs past the bit gag in her mouth, but at last she saw the track in front of her opening out, and she was suddenly out from under the canopy and into the parade square. She staggered over to where the earlier finishers were sprawled out on the ground, desperately trying to count how many had beaten her. There was a metal trough filled with water outside one of the buildings and, despite the scum and flies floating on the surface, Jane fell to her knees and plunged her head and shoulders into the lukewarm water, drinking as much of the foul-tasting liquid as possible. At last, she pulled back, coughing and spluttering, before collapsing onto the ground, gasping for breath and feeling the aches and pains in her body.

She felt a tug on the chain to her collar and opened her eyes. The guard who had accompanied her around the course was ‘encouraging’ her to get up, using the chain and his boot against her thigh to provide the encouragement, and she staggered to her feet so he could lead her to the line of other women, as they waited for the final stragglers to finish. She watched as Tulisa, the black girl, staggered into the clearing and sank to her knees by the water trough. A couple of minutes later, a girl called Sinead, a redhead from Seattle, was dragged to the finish line by her minder, barely able to put one foot in front of the other, and she fell to the ground in the middle of the parade area, utterly exhausted. The guard dropped the lead and left her there, baking in the sun, while he went to get himself a drink.

Jane wondered what they were waiting for, but then realised there were only thirteen of them in the square. It was a full ten minutes before the final woman made it back, and it was clear she was in a bad way. It was the Japanese girl, Li, being dragged along by the chain to her collar, limping heavily as she made her way slowly out of the trees. She was covered in dirt, and there was blood on her knee, her foot, and a trickle from her mouth, as well as a very painful-looking graze on her left hip. It was obvious she must have fallen headlong on the path and, unable to put out an arm to break her fall, injured herself quite badly. She was led to the trough, which she almost threw herself into, before she was dragged away to join the line. Sinead had also been forced up off the ground to complete the line-up, once again in front of the platform. Kandy Turner was up there, staring down at them with a look of despair and contempt.

“Well, what a pathetic bunch of pussies!” she said with a knowing sneer, “I should punish all of you, that was so bad! But I said only the last three, so guys, bring up the useless fucks and let’s get on with it!”

Tulisa, Sinead and Li were dragged up the steps onto the stage, already seeming so broken in spirit that they offered no resistance. There was a wooden frame on the platform, from which hung a couple of chains. The black girl was made to stand under the frame, while her arms were released from behind her back, but only so her wrist cuffs could be clipped high up on the chains, holding her arms above her head and wide apart. The other two women were forced to their knees, and their ankle cuffs attached to the thigh straps so that they were held there, and they watched in trepidation what was going to happen to them soon enough.

Tulisa was fairly calm until she saw the bullwhip Kandy was trailing behind her as she walked towards the frightened New Yorker.

“The third worst of the bunch,” the drill sergeant said, “so that means three good lashes!”

The girl in chains was shaking her head, crying and begging as she pulled uselessly at her wrists, but all it achieved was a dramatic close-up for the steadycam. As the cameraman moved away, the focus was on the drill sergeant as she took up position behind her first victim and planted her feet. With a practiced ease, she swung the whip and a loud crack rang around the parade ground, bring wails of abject fear from all three girls on stage and some sobs from those around Jane.

The next time the whip swung, it made contact with Tulisa’s back with a sickening whack. There was a moment of total silence, and then the black girl let out a scream of such volume and desperation, it struck terror into every woman’s heart. One rostrum camera zoomed in on her back to show the red line which had appeared amid the droplets of sweat, while the other concentrated on her face, capturing the twisted look of shock and agony.

Tulisa continued to scream and cry, but the pitch and volume increased when the second blow struck home and another line appeared across her back, bisecting her shoulder blades and curling down to her hip.

After the third and final stroke, the guards moved in and released her from the chains, leading her down the steps as she staggered off the stage.

“The second worst performance,” Kandy barked out as Sinead, already screaming and struggling, was chained up, “you get six of the best, honey!”

Jane watched in horror as the punishment was delivered, reducing the young Californian to a blubbering wreck. The steadycam focused in on Kandy, her skin now glistening with sweat from the effort of wielding the terrible weapon of torture, but her face twisted into a rictus grin of concentration and, Jane was sure, arousal - the woman was getting a kick out of delivering such unbearable pain.

The seemingly comatose body of the white girl was dragged from the stage, her back streaked with blood. A moment later, the Japanese girl Li, her body already bruised and battered from the race, was brought to centre stage and chained in position.

“And now for our biggest loser of all,” the hostess announced, “I tell you, girl, this is one prize you don't want to be winning - ten lashes from my good friend here!”

It seemed as though Li had already accepted her fate, as she didn't beg, scream or struggle at these words. But when the whip ripped into her flesh, she couldn't maintain her Zen-like equilibrium, letting out a heartrending scream, tears streaming down her face and foam flying from her lips. As blow after blow landed across her back, she lost control of her bladder and the camera gleefully focused in as the urine splashed onto the stage below her. By the time Kandy had completed the punishment, the Japanese girl’s back was just a mass of raw, bloody flesh, and she was taken away, clearly unconscious, carried into one of the buildings, presumably to be patched up.

“Let this be a lesson to you, ladies,” Kandy announced loudly, “you need to perform at your best at all times, because the punishment for failure will be severe. Take them away, boys!”

The line of women was marched away, towards another of the dilapidated buildings surrounding the parade ground. Jane could hear the show’s compere talking directly to the camera.

“Remember, folks, you can vote for your favourite at any time, using the numbers which are scrolling across the bottom of your screen now, or you can find them on the website. The first vote-off will take place tomorrow night in our prime-time show, so make sure the girl that you want to see suffer is not voted off! We'll be back with more live action in the morning, but if you want to see how our girls cope with their first night in X-Treme Boot Camp, go to our website, where we will be streaming live coverage from the dormitory throughout the night. Good night, and thank you for watching!”

As they were led inside, Jane wondered how she could ever survive eight weeks of this kind of torture. But then she realised, the only thing worse than being here for the full eight weeks was not being here! With a grim determination, she set herself the goal of winning this nightmare reality show, of getting back home, and getting her revenge on that bastard Shaun!