Robert Voleman walked slowly into the narrow room. He was fourth in a line of six men. The room was brightly lit. There was a small platform about three feet wide sticking out from the back wall. On the wall behind that very short stage was a series of horizontal black lines interrupted at regular intervals by numbers. The number on the lowest line said “4′ 6″.” On the highest line it said “7′ 6″.”
As Robert took his place on the platform, the number a few inches above the top of his head said “6’6″” He was 6’3″.
The guard’s voice over the speaker said, “Face the mirror,” and the six men turned and stepped back against the wall. Robert’s massive shoulders nearly touched the men standing on either side of him.
He had always been large, even as a child. He wasn’t fat, like many big kids. He was large, as in tall and heavily muscled. He was very heavily muscled, but he wasn’t bull-necked like many modern wrestlers and others who had to bulk up with medical assistance. His neck was large, but proportional to his head. If you saw him in loose clothing, you might not realize his physical capabilities– unless you crossed him and brought out his anger. Then his muscles would be evident as he pummeled you to the ground.
No one was sure what turned Robert evil, but very early in his life, he began to use his physical advantage for a specific purpose. And that purpose was to make life hell for the girls– and women– around him.
At first he was just a playground bully who picked on the girls more than the boys. Then as he aged, his taunting and torment took on a more sexual nature. His juvenile records were sealed so no one– not even the courts– knew what he might have done before the age of eighteen. His adult record, however, showed that four days after his eighteenth birthday he cornered a fellow senior in a little-used back stairway at the high school and forcibly removed her clothing. He might have gotten away with it, but Mister Mills, the chemistry teacher, often used that stairway as a short cut to an outside door to grab a quick smoke behind the building.
The attempted rape caused quite an uproar at the school. It also caused Robert to be expelled. It did not, however, send him to prison. Because it was his first official offense as an adult, he was sent instead to mandatory sexual counseling sessions. The requirement for the sessions was total honesty. And to Caroline Thompson, his court-assigned therapist, his words seemed honest and heart-felt as he sobbed out his confession that he had done something really stupid.
According to him, raping– or at least sex with– a fellow student was an initiation requirement to become part of a very secret club of top athletes at the school. He said he was supposed to video everything to insure the girl would remain quiet afterwards, but he couldn’t bring himself to rape the crying girl or video it. Since the authorities checked his phone, but not the oversized pen clipped in his pocket, they believed him. So did Caroline.
What she didn’t realize was that she was dealing with a psychopath and total sociopath for whom truth was irrelevant. Robert could have been strapped into the most precise, state-of-the-art lie detector and it would have shown him to be telling the absolute truth. In fact, he was so convincing to everyone that his story caused a two-year investigation into all clubs and organizations– official or unofficial– at the school. Several clubs were ruled to be sexist and offensive, but no criminal charges were ever filed.
Meanwhile, Robert was declared sufficiently repentant and rehabilitated that, except for being on a sexual predators list for three years and having to report to his therapist– not a parole officer– for the same time period, he was free to go.
Robert was truly repentant– he was very sorry he was caught. And he was rehabilitated– he now knew that he had to be much, much more careful in the future… … and he was.
For the next three years, he very dutifully attended his monthly sex offenders group therapy meetings and kept his appointments for bi-monthly sessions with his therapist. Her final recommendation was that he be removed from the sexual offenders list and that his record be expunged of his “youthful indiscretion.”
To celebrate, he went out that night to hunt new prey. He found her at a rest stop on the interstate. There were security cameras and even a 24/7 live attendant at the rest stop. But the attendant was at a desk at the front of the restroom building, and all of the security cameras pointed at the front doors and the parking lot. Robert parked on a country road a few hundred yards behind the rest stop and approached through the woods behind the building.
He chose this location because he had stopped at that rest area several weeks before while on a scouting trip. The attendant had left the door to the janitor’s closet in the men’s rest room open while he was mopping. He was actually in the other half of the restroom, but the janitor’s closet opened into both sides and both doors were open. Robert peeked in through the open door and then entered the janitor’s closet.
There was no wall behind the janitor’s sink and bucket dump trough. Instead the closet opened into a labyrinth of pipes between the two halves of the restroom. He moved noiselessly ahead and discovered that at the end of that labyrinth was a larger area with two water heaters and an outside door. Amazingly, that door had a simple lock that could easily be opened from the outside with a credit card or thin piece of metal. Since everything about the building was mirrored on both sides, Robert assumed that the women’s restroom had an equally susceptible door.
He was right. He was also correct in assuming that there were also small holes in the walls on the women’s side where the dividers for two of the stalls had been removed to create additional handicap stalls. He stood in the darkness between the walls and watched… and waited.
It was a little after one am when she came in. She was young and dressed in a party skirt and blouse. She wasn’t drunk, but it was obvious she was close to the legal limit as she stood at the sink and splashed cold liquid onto her face. Then she stood and sent a text from her phone.
She spoke aloud as she typed with her thumbs, “Am at rest stop on interstate. Drank too much. Very sleepy. Going to sleep in car for while before driving rest of way home.”
Robert smiled. He would have all night before anyone missed her. He waited until she had gone into a stall before stepping out of the janitor’s closet. He waited patiently just far enough away so that she could not see his shoes. When she came out of the stall, she turned immediately toward the door, which meant her back was to him when he struck.
The cloth over her mouth was just a rag. It already had a piece of duct tape on the outside of it. He quickly used one hand to wrap the tape around her head. The small squeak she made was unheard by the attendant at his desk outside the restroom door.
Robert pushed her to the ground and pulled her arms behind her back. More tape soon secured her hands in place. He pulled her back to her feet and frog marched her into the janitor’s closet, through the pipe access area, and out the back service door.
Her family reported her missing at noon the next day. Shortly thereafter, the police found her car at the rest stop.
Nothing showed on the security tapes, but an ever-widening search of the area discovered her staked, naked, to the ground in the wooded area behind the rest stop. She was blindfolded and gagged, but she was alive. Unfortunately, even after her hysteria has subsided somewhat, she could tell the authorities little.
She never saw his face. She never heard his voice. All she could say was that he must have been very strong because once he got her outside, he easily picked her up and threw her over his shoulder before running to where she was eventually found.
Her rape had been slow. The rapist began by tying her down on the ground. After he cut her clothing away leaving her naked, he spent at least an hour slowly tormenting her by running his hands over her entire body, pausing occasionally to tweak her nipples or her clit.
Then she felt something cold and slimy on her crotch. When she felt the tug of the razor, she realized that the slimy fluid was shaving cream of some sort. He evidently used several razors to shave her sex bald before wiping everything clean with a rough rag.
He spent a long time licking her cunt before the rape itself began. He entered her very slowly, not to spare her pain, but to draw out the actual moment so that it would be burned even deeper into her memory. Once he was fully in, he began thrusting– again slowly at first, but then faster and more violently. He continued thrusting until the muffled screams from beneath the cloth gag became loud enough to satisfy him. Those screams are what caused him to climax, not the sexual act itself. He grunted loudly and spurted into her.
As she lay crying on the ground, he slowly wiped her down– inside and out– with a very strong disinfectant followed by a strong bleach solution. She screamed into the gag as he squirted the burning solution into her already aching cunt. Then, carefully wiping away any traces of himself and blurring any footprints, he left her there crying into her gag and walked slowly back to his car. He didn’t leave her alive to spare her. He left her alive because he knew that she would relive this night perhaps daily, for the rest of her life.
When he got home, he pulled his car into the garage and changed the tires back to the originals. The four used tires he had purchased from a junk yard he removed from the rims and took out to his grandfather’s farm where he burned them. They weren’t the right size for his car so the police would be looking for the wrong make and model if they found his tire tracks in the gravel of the rural road. The extreme heat from those burning tires totally consumed the tape, rags, razors, gloves, and clothing which he had been wearing. Everything which could have tied him to the rape was now gone.
It was such thorough attention to detail which kept Robert free for an additional three years. In fact, it was pure bad luck, not a mistake on his part, which eventually brought him to justice. A drunken driver ran a stop sign and T-boned him in an intersection from the passenger side. He was unhurt, but the same could not be said for the young woman who was duct-taped in the trunk. She was thrown from the trunk when it popped open on impact and broke several bones as she tumbled onto the pavement.
Witnesses at the scene immediately recognized that something was not right and attempted to hold Robert for the police, but he easily threw them off and started to run. His bad luck continued, however, as he ran straight into two squad cars responding to the 911 calls. It took three policemen and two Tazers to bring him down.
He offered to plead guilty to three of the fourteen charges against him. He did that because he knew that he had allowed himself to become sloppy and the tape used on the other two most recent girls would match the tape on the girl in the trunk. It would also match the roll of tape in his trunk which he had carelessly re-used.
There was nothing, however, which could tie him to the other eleven charged rapes– or the additional nineteen uncharged rapes– so the DA’s office took what they could and made a deal. The deal was forty years. He would be sixty-four years old when he was released… unless he agreed to a body swap.
Body swaps had been scientifically possible for almost thirty years, but had been used in prisons for only a decade. Body swaps were exactly that. The minds of two people were transferred so that each became the other person. The process was extremely expensive– and rigidly controlled by law– but it was much cheaper than keeping a person in prison, especially since the recipient of the prisoner’s body paid most of the expenses.
The reasoning behind the prisoner body swap law was that if a person sentenced to twenty-five years exchanged bodies with someone twenty-five years older than themselves, they had effectively served their sentence and could be released almost immediately.
Of course, it was never quite that easy. The person buying a younger body from the state, needed to show that they were in good physical shape for their age and did not have any terminal– or major– illnesses. The “replacement” would choose a “candidate” through a long process that began with an extensive psychological evaluation. After all, a total change of your body was not something that everyone could handle.
Once approved, the replacement would review the files of various prisoners who would fit the criteria. There were many factors to consider, but primarily, the difference in ages had to be less than or equal to half of the time left on the candidate’s sentence. Prisoners who agreed to a swap were given double time– meaning that the age difference was multiplied by two when calculating the sentence equivalent.
Up until this time, Robert had refused all body swap offers. He had even filed the necessary legal documents to prevent an “involuntary swap.” Without that paperwork, just being in prison was interpreted as being willing to be released through a body swap procedure. If a prisoner did not agree to a specific swap, it could still occur, but they were given triple time, which meant that a fifteen year age difference would balance out a forty-five year sentence.
Some prisoners withheld their consent hoping for a triple time deal. Not Robert. He knew that an even better offer would eventually arise… and it did. For some reason, a replacement was willing to pay significantly extra for someone between the ages of twenty and twenty-five who did not have visible tattoos. They even specified that “double-triple time” apply. That meant that an age difference of as little as six years and seven months would balance out a forty-year sentence.
This was Robert’s kind of deal. Whoever it was had to be only a little over six years older than he was. If he agreed to this special body swap and was chosen, he would be able to get out of prison well before his thirty-first birthday. Now all that had to happen was for the replacement to choose him in the final selection.
He stood impassively staring at the reflection of his own naked body in the one-way mirror. For some of the first body swaps, the men in the selection line-ups had been clothed, but it was soon discovered that if you were going to see yourself naked in a mirror for the rest of your life, you had better like what you saw.
Robert flicked his eyes to the left and then to the right catching a quick glimpse of his competition. His wasn’t the largest package in the room, but he was more than amply equipped.
The guard’s voice once again came over the speaker. “Prisoners number one, three, and six may leave,” he said.
Robert felt a slight grin come onto his face. Normally he could control his facial expressions and prevent any show of emotion, but he was intentionally trying to act natural. He should be happy that he was one of the last three possible choices for this special body swap, so he was thinking of happy things.
In his mind, Lucinda Blake was pleading for him not to take her virginity. She had managed to save it for twenty-nine years and was hoping to remain a virgin until her marriage, which was only a month away. His very clear memory of her pitiful pleading and her shrill screams when he violently broke her hymen made it easy for him to smile.
Lucinda was one of his favorites. Despite not having received an invitation, Robert had attended Lucinda and Marvin’s wedding. He was one of the few present who knew the real reason why she was crying softly throughout the entire ceremony. He was also one of the very few present who knew why Judge Blake looked so angry during the entire ceremony. Lucinda was one of the nine rapes which had never been connected to him… unless you count the fact that he appeared in several of the crowd pictures from the wedding.
She probably would have been one of his favorites even if she had not been the daughter of Judge Blake. Robert had specifically chosen her and stalked her for several months because Judge Blake was the judge who had presided over his trial when he was eighteen. He had waited five years, but revenge, after all, is a dish best served cold.
“Turn left,” the guard’s voice ordered and the three remaining men turned in place.
No matter what body I will be in,” Robert thought to himself, I will always have my memories to keep me warm.
He felt a stirring and immediately willed his twitching member to be still. He had total control over his body, and that included the ability to deflate his engorged member to avoid looking suspicious while stalking prey.
“Number five,” the guard’s voice said, “you may leave. Two and four face forward.”
It was now down to prisoner two and himself. As Robert turned he moved his eyes to more closely examine his final competition. It was prisoner Carlson. William Carlson was also a large man, but was rather fair-complected and had reddish blond hair. His beard– and his pubic hair– however, were deep bronze. Overall, he had a slightly soft appearance to him.
“If they want someone large and manly,” Robert thought to himself. “I’ve got it hacked.”
It was silent in the room for several minutes. Robert stood impassively looking at himself in the mirror. “I wonder what I will look like?” he thought to himself. He was mentally calculating how much exercise– and steroids– it was going to take to regain his heavily-muscled body.
“Number two,” the guard said, “you may go. Prisoner number four, you may return to your cellblock for now. The transfer procedure will be done in the morning.”
Robert walked back to his cell. His step had even more swagger in it than normal. He was getting out. By law, the replacement had to be at least six years older than he was, so at the least he would be receiving was thirty-six years off his sentence. Each two months beyond that meant another year, so he potentially could be getting out as early as tomorrow night.
As he stepped into his cell, he was smiling broadly. For once, even his extreme control couldn’t hide his pleasure.
***
The prison medic came for him at 7:30 in the morning. He was instructed to removed all of his clothing and sit while the medic carefully shaved his head. He then lay naked on the gurney and was covered with a sheet. Several broad, webbed, straps went across his body to hold him in place. One smaller strap went across his forehead holding his head in place.
The body swap procedure itself was relatively simple, but the skull cap, with its myriad of electrodes has to be positioned exactly and tested several times before anything could begin. A mild sedative was given in an IV to keep both the replacement and the candidate calm while the technicians checked and rechecked their data.
Once the transfer began, it would take approximately four hours for the minds to be exchanged. Calling it a body swap was actually a misnomer because it was the minds, not the bodies, which were transferred. The swap started a little before eleven and was completed around three thirty.
While Robert was lying on the cart in recovery, the warden stopped to speak with him. “The replacement,” he began, “was exactly six years, four months older than you. That means that you have had thirty-eight equivalent years removed from your sentence. You have served one year, five months, so you have seven months remaining on your sentence.”
The warden coughed and looked slightly uncomfortable. “The law is very specific,” he said, “that you must serve out those remaining months in the same facility in which you were incarcerated prior to the transfer. The supervising Judge has ruled that, even in this case, that includes remaining in the same cell block. You will be returned to your cell as soon as the doctors say you are ready.”
“No problem, warden,” he replied. The sedative made his voice sound tiny and far away, but he was still able to hide the pleasure that was flowing through him. He could do seven months standing on his head. He would be free to hunt again in less than a year.
An hour later the prison medic was wheeling him back to his cell. As he rolled through the cell block, he could hear the prisoners hooting and hollering. Someone getting out on a body swap was often cause for celebration. It was expected that the prisoner would provide some sort of contraband for that celebration and Robert had stocked up a supply of smuggled whiskey and other goods for his going away party.
“You know you made history today,” the medic said as he started to unstrap the restraints. “When Judge Blake’s daughter got raped,” he continued, “she was ready to commit suicide. But the judge told her that she was always his daughter no matter what.”
He gave a short laugh. “Her older sister evidently took him at his word and came out of the closet a few weeks later as a transgender.” Another short laugh. “She didn’t want that surgery, though,” he continued. “She said it would make her an artificial man and she wanted to be a real man. Soooooo……”
Robert’s sat up on the cart trying to comprehend what the medic had just told him. He slid off and stood in front of the metal mirror above the sink in the cell. A bald, slightly smaller version of Lucinda Blake looked back at him from the mirror.
Over his shoulder he could see his cell mate smiling and laughing. “Hello Roberta,” he said with a deep chuckle. “We are going to have a lot of fun at your party today.” He laughed as he added, “At least I and the rest of the boys on the block will.”
Despite having almost total control over his body, mind, and emotions, a terrified scream burst from Robert / Roberta’s lips. It was going to be a very long seven months.
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END OF STORY
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