Community colleges are a real asset and every good-sized city needs one. Ours is on a beautiful campus including three hundred acres of rolling countryside that was once my grandfather’s farm. We offer enrichment courses for older people who want to learn how to weld or do pottery, and there are also several two-year associate programs that train young or middle-aged adults and allow them to enter the workplace as skilled nurses, auto mechanics, or firemen. Most of the students, however, are eighteen and nineteen year old local kids just out of high school taking regular college courses. The first two years are available right here in their hometown at a fraction of what the large sate universities charge for the same education, and the courses are fully accredited for transfer to any state college. There is some student housing available on campus but most of the kids live at home to save even more money.

These kids are just like any other kids, or as we like to say, young adults. A stroll around campus on a warm springtime day will reveal that some have the hairy backs and male pattern baldness of older men while some, like the one sleeping in my car, still sport the fresh beardless faces and slender bodies of much younger boys.

He was sitting alone in the student union when I brushed up against him. He assumed it to be just a careless bump from a clumsy old fucker, but it was carefully planned to deposit a dab of absorbable Rophynol onto the thin skin of his neck. He was nodding and almost incoherent in a few minutes, and I suggested that he go out and wait for me in my car. A search of his pockets revealed his student ID card. His name was Tobias Norman Taylor and he was eighteen. Hell of a name for a kid, I thought, and I wondered what name he went by. Toby? Norm? TNT? TT? Surely not Tobias. His ubiquitous book bag revealed the basic necessities of college life: Books of course, study materials, a calculator, a high tech phone, MP3 player, several computer discs, a baggy containing an ounce of grass, rolling papers and Bic lighter, and a three pack of Snug Fit condoms. Snug Fits? Does he like them tight or does he just have a little dick? I’ll find out soon enough. Or he’s still a virgin and doesn’t know the difference. Not Likely.

I injected him with a powerful sedative and drove him to my house. He’s lucky in a way; when I was his age I was subject to being drafted and sent to fight and quite possibly die in the jungle. He will be spared all of that and after a while he probably won’t even care that he’ll have to his life out as a eunuch.

In a few hours he’ll start to wake up. At first he’ll be confused and disoriented. Eventually he’ll figure out that he’s naked and lying in a small cell. About then he may discover that a metal collar has been fastened around his neck, and the dim overhead lighting will reveal that a small wire cable leads from the collar through a hole in the floor of his cage. When he tries to stand he’ll probably figure out he has fouled the straw floor of his cell, an unfortunate side effect of the sedative, but someone has thoughtfully provided a chemical toilet and a large supply of Handi-Wipes so that he may clean himself and there is a large supply of clean straw piled in the corner. He should be grateful that there is plenty of slack in the cable and that he can easily use the toilet and also reach the supply of energy bars and bottled water that are stacked in the corner.

He’ll probably hammer on the walls and doors of his cage, testing their strength, and he’ll no doubt holler out to try and contact someone but he will still be alone. His probing fingers will explore the collar on his neck and he’ll correctly surmise that it is riveted in place and that he can’t possibly remove it with a mirror and some special tools. Eventually he’ll connect the rumble of the diesel engine and the road noise with the swaying that he feels and deduce that his cage is in the back of a truck rolling down the highway. Eventually the noise and the motion will cease and if he stays quiet and puts his ear to the crack in the door he may hear the truckstop chatter of drivers commiserating with each other about the avarice of the company, incompetence of the dispatchers, and predatory nature of the state cops. He’ll do his best to get their attention but his shouts and hammering will go unheard.

The motion and the noise will start again, and denied of any reference to time, he’ll fall into kind of a stupor, dozing and eating and masturbating out of sheer boredom until he’s unsure if it has been a matter of hours or days since his kidnapping.

Back on campus things are in a stir. Another student has turned up missing; the fifth this year and it is getting very difficult for us to contain the rumors. He was last seen leaving the student union, stumbling a bit as if stoned. His book bag has been found in a trash container at an Interstate highway truck stop so it is assumed that he is no longer in the city. The net has been cast wide, but given the nature of the highway system and the time that has elapsed there is little chance of finding him in time to prevent what happened to the previous four boys.

Once recovered enough to talk lucidly, each boy recounted how he had apparently been drugged and had awakened in a crude wooden cage in the back of a truck on the highway. They had traveled that way, naked and alone, for some undefined period of time. Some thought it had been only a few hours while other swore they had been on the road for days. Eventually the truck stopped, the cable around their necks had been drawn taut against the floor and they had been repeatedly sodomized over a period of days, and finally castrated. While barbaric in nature, their castrations hadn’t been acts of butchery. Their feet and hands had been tied to opposite corners of the cage, their scrotums had been shaved, and their genitals excised with surgical cleanliness and precision, and their slits in their scrotums expertly sutured. Each boy had then been drugged and had awoke still naked at an Interstate rest area without a clue as to how he had been delivered there. Their assailant had worn a leather hood at all times and had never spoke to them, and had been unremarkable in every way, even in respect to the penis that had penetrated them multiple times.

Their descriptions were accurate. Surgeons are highly trained and can perform any number of different surgeries; I can only do one and I do it very well. They are mistaken about the truck, of course. Their cage has never left my basement, where it is mounted on hydraulic gimbals that allow it to replicate any motion, and had a built in sound system that accurately reproduces the sound of a truck. They have all left out the part about their begging and screaming and pleading with me to stop. All but the last, that is. He’d probably heard about the others, because instead of pleading against the inevitable he just stoically asked “Why?”

Why? I’ll tell you why. Granddad was a cagey old bastard. He bequeathed the land for the college and provided the money for the core structures, buy he also insisted on two stipulations: One was that his son, grandson and great-grandchildren all receive free educations and jobs at the college. The other was that should the college ever lose accreditation or if the enrollment fall below twenty-five percent of the area’s college bound high school graduates the facility will be dismantled and the land and the building will revert to his estate. That’d be me. I want it all. Even though I have a good job for life I want more, and someday I’ll get it. I’m the only one with anything to gain and the police took a look at me right at first, but I’d been working when the kids had disappeared and certainly had no access to a truck or time to have driven them anywhere.

I figure five or six more will do it. Kids will abandon this place like rats deserting a sinking ship and it will become all mine to develop for housing and make me a millionaire. I’ll sure miss all the tight young ass though.