Whiplash by Yvie Towers

The brothers met up, and they spoke a few inaudible words for a moment before both retrieving bullwhips from their hip belts.  The twin evils exchanged looks and nods and let their whips snake out over their heads before snapping them simultaneously over the bound woman’s back.
    Her first wailing cry sent a wave of sickness over me, and I barely made it over to my privy hole before my stomach was emptied of its contents.  I stayed bent over that hole for the duration of her lashing, and even when there was nothing left in my stomach to come out, bouts of dry heaving continued to rack my body.  Crack, after crack, after crack of their whips sliced through the morning air for minutes on end.  Then there was silence. 
    I mustered the strength I needed to crawl back over to my peep hole and look out.  I saw Eli and Lucas, both breathing heavily with their whips resting at their feet.  The woman wasn’t screaming anymore - she was hardly breathing, in fact. 
    “Please just leave her,” I whispered. But that didn’t happen at all – not by any stretch of the imagination. 
    Eli got sick on the side of the woman’s face and then urinated on her to wash it off.  Meanwhile, Lucas was making his way over to where a fire was burning in a pit. From a wire rack next to it, he grabbed a long, textile glove and slid it over his hand.  He reached his covered hand down into the mouth of the pit and pulled out a branding iron, still glowing red-hot from the fire.  Hastily, he made his way over to where the woman was restrained, and without pause he applied the heated metal to her flesh repeatedly until the iron went cold and black.
    The half-conscious woman was using all her remaining strength to scream and beg for mercy, her hands and feet thrashing about but unable to break their binds.  She got sick on herself, and when Eli urinated on her again, Lucas set the branding iron down in the dirt and peed on her, too.  I cried for her, then.  I didn’t know what she had done to earn that punishment, but I was sure her trespass couldn’t have warranted such brutality.  Once the brothers were done peeing on her, they just walked away and left her there naked, bleeding, and barely conscious.
    I moved over to another hole in the wall to get a better vantage point so I could see her back. It looked awful, and I knew I’d never see anything so terrible ever again.  She’d been whipped until her skin was laid open, exposing deep rivets of pink flesh from beneath the dark brown exterior.  Some places had been split wide open, right down to the bone.  Countless ‘D’s had seared her flesh, sealing up some of the wounds, and the smell of her burnt flesh stunk up the courtyard and lingered heavy in the air long after the twins had walked away. 
    It took her about 2 hours to die in the stocks where she’d been left, but her body stayed out for us all to see for most of that day.  It was right before supper when three field hands were sent to pull her out and dispose of her body out behind the barn.
    That happened every single day for a solid week.  A total of seven women were stripped, whipped, branded, peed on, and left to die.  I wondered if Julian knew about any of it.  I thought maybe he did, and was just distancing himself with a blind eye turned.  I hoped that wasn’t the case, but either way, by the time that week was over I’d have done anything anyone told me to do, and the rest of the girls felt the same. 
    I was sure that it was no coincidence that on the eighth morning, Vivian came into the barn to wake us with Eli, Lucas, and ten of the biggest, strongest field slaves in tow.   They all came in, and the slaves lined up in the middle of the barn while Vivian, Eli, and Lucas took their places at the front.
    Vivian went around to each stall, ordering each girl to remove the dress she wore and give it to her.  She started with Number 1 and made her way around to each girl in sequence. Lucas was busy doing