I pulled my pick-up truck over by the side of the dusty highway. And when I say ‘highway’ I meant ‘dirt track’, but it was the closest you got around here.  The raiders had been through, I could tell by the deep motorbike tracks in the loose sand, and the print of thousands of bare feet, and the trail of chains left behind long after their clinking, and the groaning of their bearers, had faded away into the distance.

The whole country was in uproar after a military coup had put a rebel hard-line matriarchal party in power. I mean; I was a feminist, and proud of it, but they made my policy of ‘we are all equal, so sod off while I change my own fucking tyre’ look like graciousness itself. I’d been accused several times by my own daughter Clarissa of being ‘liberal’ and brainwashed by the years of Patriarchal control. The WFF Party didn’t just want equal treatment in the modern day – they wanted to backdate it, and make it so the male gender would pay for, and really feel what the women had felt for generations.

I kicked the door of my pick-up open and dropped down onto the road, dust speckling my leather cowgirl boots with their stack heels and swirling silver embroidery. Pulling my hat down against the blistering sun and the driving wind, which was kicking up more of the goddamn dust, I tracked back a few metres to check whether I had seen what I thought I’d seen.

I had.

In the ditch by the side of the road was a young man, buff too. His state of pure nakedness left nothing to the imagination, his rippling biceps, his well defined pecs, abs… hell, even his thighs and calves were well developed. I liked balance in a man, and he was in good all round shape. He was also in a literally round shape.

A metal collar was clamped around his neck, a thick chain running to his shackled wrists, and from his wrists to his fettered ankles. He’d been forced into a crouching position with a padlock through the links of this chain, and a length of what seemed to be broomhandle forced between his thighs and calves right behind his knees. The wooden pole was wide enough to sit in the creases of his elbows, trapping him even further. It was nigh on impossible that this guy was going to be able to stand up, let alone walk away. His outfit told me clearly that he had been part of the chain gang that had recently come through, and given his current state, and the red welts all over his entire body, fresh over the older silver scarring, he had been deemed too troublesome to continue herding and therefore had been left for some-one to find, or to die under the hot sun.

His blonde hair had been cropped short, and tufts of it escaped from the complicated metal and leather harness clamped around his face. It incorporated a panel gag, clearly with some hefty filling as his cheeks bulged around the straps, a blindfold and a chin-strap to keep that mouth firmly shut. Not that he was making much noise asides from a faint wheezing sound right now.

The only other piece of… equipment on him (you couldn’t call it clothing) was the metal thing closed over his privates. I’d heard people call them ‘seed pods’ and it was roughly right. Avocado shaped, they were terrifyingly efficient chastity devices as they cut the penis off from absolutely any stimulation – although I’d heard the stories, like every-one else, of women filling the domes with ice cubes, itching powder or stinging nettles, and leaving the slave to suffer, unable to breach the metal wall around their crotch and gain any relief.

The mechanics of it, if I understood it right, was that the seedpod was split in two, and that the man’s dick and testicles were fed in through a hole in the back of the one half, and when the front half was brought up and locked shut, it tightened the in-built cockring, as well as sealing the whole area away from idle hands. It had vents to allow for air-flow, to let fluids out and for minimal washing, but they were narrow slits you couldn’t even get a coin through.

The man squirmed as my shadow fell across him, probably savouring the coolness it brought. The soft nasal sound he made was probably him pleading, and I was glad of the gag. I sighed, thinking about it. I had resisted having a slave man in the house, in honour of the men I had loved and lost years ago, but that might have to change. I couldn’t run the farm on my own now Clarissa was back at school, and when life hands you an ox, make it pull a plough. It was the first streak of good luck I’d had since dropping Clarissa off at her boarding school, and I hoped that it would signal better times to come. And hey, I could always call the Overseers to come and claim him if it didn’t work out. They gave rewards for stray males, and they wouldn’t question where I got him from…

I had no fear of recriminations. The Raiders had left him, it was a free-for-all now. I slipped down the loose soil to the bottom of the ditch and picked up the half buried key next to him. I unlocked the padlock in the chain and withdrew the broomhandle from between his knees. I thought about throwing it away, but you never knew when you might need a length of sturdy wood. I hauled him to his feet and he meekly obeyed, weak after being left in the sun, I bet. If the Raiders had abandoned him for dead, he had to be trouble – and I had no doubt that some time in the cool of my stables would bring his recalcitrance back out.

I grinned. More fun for later then. Forcing him up the bank with prods from the wooden stick, I lowered the tailgate of my truck and unceremoniously loaded him in. Unable to see, he made a bit of a spectacle of the task, grazing his knee doing so, but I had no pity, shutting the tailgate again, and then used the padlock to secure the chain between his hands to a bolt in the floor of the truck. I didn’t want my new acquisition hopping out on me.

In a considerably better mood, I climbed back into my truck and headed on home, humming a jaunty tune. Yes. Things were looking brighter…