Meat

Part 4

“You've been kinda quiet, Blue. Nervous?”

“I guess. A little.” She was terrified, of course, but tried not to show it and would certainly never admit it. Rush was the kind of boy who was comfortable to talk to, so much so that she had to restrain a desire to fall into his lap and gush out her fears.

“Me, too,” he whispered.

“Oh? I never would have guessed, watching you and Cicalla getting it on this morning.”

He smiled. “You peeked.”

“Who could avoid it? With you pumping and her screaming it was pretty hard to miss.”

“She was pretty scared, Blue.”

“Yeah, well I guess that's as good a way as any to settle her nerves.”

“Knowing they're about to get turned into meat makes some girls shrivel all up inside.”

“Right. And who better to go in and water their garden than big, helpful you?”

“Who better. Too bad there's so few of us guys to help out, huh?”

“Who needs guys? There's plenty of girls with dildos.”

“She's like you, though. Prefers the authentic article.”

Blue snorted. But it was hollow derision. Rush knew her inside out. Literally. She felt gentle fingers moving in circles on her knee.

“That is your preference, isn't it?” he coaxed. “Seems to me I've heard you say that once or twice. Between moans.”

“Fuck you.”

The fingers stroked further up her thigh. “Would you like to? Would it help?”

“Gee, Rush, that's the smoothest pickup line I've heard since come up to my place and let's fuck .”

“Well, we're way past the need for good pickup lines, aren't we. Shit, if we were free, you and I, we'd probably be married by now. I bet I put at least two of those buns in your oven.” He patted the gentle swell of her belly, rounded from her seven years of incubating livestock for the Gaths. The hand moved up to cup a breast still brimming with milk from her last birthing. “I'll bet these are sore.”

“You win the bet.”

“Were you still nursing your latest when they came for you?”

“I've been nursing non-stop for seven years. I used to have nice little titties. Now look at them!”

He put an arm around her so he could cup both at once, holding them up, squeezing gently. A fine spray of milk burst from the dark red nipples, drawn to hard, prominent nubs by thousands of nursing sessions. “I think they're lovely. Just what the Gaths are looking for. Big and firm and luscious.”

“How do you know what the Gaths are looking for?”

“If they didn't like big bouncy, milk-filled boobs, why would they harvest you? Why not let the good breeders, like you, keep popping them out and harvest the younger girls while they still have tiny titties? How many have you had?”

“Titties?”

He gave her a spank. “Babies, you blonde ditz.”

“Seven. And I didn't say they were ever tiny .”

“Your babies?”

“My boobs, you asshole!” she laughed, feeling warmth return to her belly for the first time since she'd been ordered to report to the holding shed.

“Oh, them. I remember them well!”

“Whadda ya mean, you remember? I popped my first kid when I was fifteen. You'd have only been ten or eleven.”

“But I was a precocious eleven. While the other boys were out in the field kicking balls around, I got my kicks peeking in the nursery window watching you feeding your tits to babies. Sometimes I'd hide in the linen closet of the breeding room with the door ajar so I could see you naked and getting laid by one of the older guys or a stud. I got to watch your tits grow over the years from little and cute to huge and magnificent!”

She elbowed him and made a face. “So what are you saying? That I look like a cow?” She felt herself reverting to fifteen again. Playing coy. Hard to get. Praying he wouldn't let her run him off, just when she needed him most.

He kissed her neck, just under her left ear. “I'm saying you look like you need some relief from all that pent-up milk.” He began to pull her white terrycloth robe down over her shoulders. It was the only garment worn by livestock in the holding area, so that when the Gaths arrived, they could strip to the buff without a lot of fuss.

“And how do you propose to do that?” she asked haughtily, hoping she had guessed right.

“Like this,” he said. He knelt between her legs as she perched on the edge of her bunk, placed his mouth over her left nipple and began sucking on it. She closed her eyes and let herself enjoy the sensation and the gradual relief to the over-stressed mammary.

“Are you sure you're supposed to be doing this?” she sighed. “Aren't we restricted to steel wool and water?”

“Frankly, my darling Blue,” he said, licking his lips as he tipped her back on the bed, “I don't give a damn.” He climbed up beside her and switched to the other breast. “What are they gonna do? Kill me and turn me into meat?”

“Well, yeah,” she said, and moaned as his fingers worked its way down her belly, between her legs and into the wet canal through which six beautiful girl babies and one boy had made their way into the world. “And I think I'm beginning to appreciate Cicalla's technique for dealing with her fears. Think you can do the same for me?” she gasped.

“How's this for starters?” he asked, sliding inside her.

“O my God!” she groaned. “Can you keep that up until they come for us?”

“I'll do my best,” he said.

They spoke no more for many minutes, maybe fifteen or twenty, before she came wildly, clutching and clawing at him, crying out, trying to devour him, pushing him over the edge, feeling him spasm, holding him in with her vaginal muscles, feeling the warm flood of his seed, a familiar feeling of drenching fulfilment. Only this time there would be no new fruit to grow in her womb. This mom was already on a menu somewhere, bought and paid for and about to be readied for shipment.

The two lovers laid quietly in each other's arms for an hour or so, ignoring the bedlam around them, luxuriating in each other's warmth, inhaling the aromas of their coitus. Was it their last? Finally she spoke.

“You're eighteen, right?”

“That's why I'm here.”

“It stinks.”

“What does?”

“That they harvest boys at eighteen and let girls live to twenty-two.”

“Well, you're the campus scholar. You must know why they do that.”

“Yeah. But it still stinks.”

“Guys peak at eighteen, meatwise. Right?”

“Right.”

“But girls are tough and stringy until they're twenty-two.”

She poked at him, a playful punch. “As you know , jerk, the Gaths think girls make best eating at sixteen. It's only us prolific breeders that are allowed to go to twenty-two. If a girl hasn't had at least one baby by sixteen and a half, she's meat. But I guess all that genetic engineering made me pretty damn fertile.”

“And pretty damned pretty.”

Blue rewarded him for the implied compliment with a barrage of tender kisses, and a trickle of tears.

“Why are you crying?”

“None of your fucking business,” she said, wiping her cheeks on his chest, still determined to be tough.

He held her quietly for a long while, running her long golden hair through his fingers, kissing her temples and ears, trying to ease a fear she was too proud to admit. But he couldn't maintain silence forever. There was too little time left.

“Is it true they named you for your eyes?” he whispered, kissing her lids.

She nodded. “That's what they tell me.” She realized she was holding him too tightly to be convincingly brave, but she couldn't bring herself to loosen her grip. “I guess I was born with really bright blue eyes, or big eyes, or maybe both. I know my own babies had huge blue eyes. Four of the girls, anyway. They were really beautiful.”

“And the other two?”

“One had strange slate colored eyes that eventually turned hazel. The boy had greenish eyes that probably turned brown. He used to stare up at me with those eyes as he nursed. They were amazing. Big and soft and alert.”

“How old is he now?”

“He'd be four.”

“Do you know his name?”

“No. They don't tell us that stuff. After the first day the babies go into a scrambled rotation for nursing. There are a couple thousand moms nursing whatever baby the staff hands us. We might never suckle the same infant twice. As they grow older, you can begin to tell one from the other and sometimes I'd recognize a girl or boy I'd nursed before. But we're not allowed to know their names.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?” When he started to respond, she put her fingers on his lips. “I'm sorry. That was uncalled for. You're a guy. You can't know what it's like for a girl to carry a baby in her belly for nine months, then just give it up. It rips your heart out. Nursing hundreds of babies at random kind of glosses it over, but the pain never quite goes away. You want the child that was part of you, that came out of you. But its hopeless. They won't let you keep it and they won't even tell you which one it is. All those little babies sucking on you, and you never know which one is yours. They think it keeps you from getting emotionally attached, but it just eats you up.”

“But you moms are pregnant practically all the time. And you're nursing all the time. Doesn't it eventually become kind of mechanical? Just a job?”

“You'd think so, wouldn't you.”

She didn't elaborate and her eyes began to glaze with water again, so he changed the subject.

“I've always wanted to ask, how do they keep you girls so slim and gorgeous, what with churning out all those babies and all? Most of the free moms you see on CompuTV seem to get kinda heavy.”

“Starvation helps.”

“They don't let you eat?”

“Oh, they feed us lots of stuff. A lot of it's like that steel wool we're getting now, only not as tasty.”

“Jesus! How do you force it down.”

She gave his jaw a gentle bite. “I'm kidding, you nincompoop. They control our diet and make us exercise a lot. What'd you think, that we just sit around nursing babies and waiting for studs to fuck us?”

“So you don't have to eat artificial crap supplied by the Gaths, like this wooly shit?”

“Oh we eat plenty of artificial crap. It controls our appetite, prevents illnesses, keeps our tits firm, makes our skin stretchy so we don't get marks, all that shit.”

“Keeps your tits firm?”

“Absolutely. Foxbush wants us in perfect shape at all times in case we stop shooting out babies, so our value stays up.”

“So in all your research, have you ever found out who these ‘Gatherers' are? Where they come from?”

“Nope.”

“I mean, they must be humanoid themselves. Why else would they care what we look like when they harvest us? Wanting us young and tender and tasty I can understand. But why do they care what we look like? Do we care how shapely a pig is before we turn it into bacon?”

“Bacon! That's boy meat. The girls here don't get anything as tasty as bacon.”

“You know what I mean.”

She kissed him, then slid her body up his to where she could tease his mouth with both breasts to encourage further relief from her painful excess of milk. When he responded with a few wet licks, she inserted a nipple between his lips and stroked his thicket of light brown hair.

“Let me broaden your education a little about these Gatherers,” she said between sighs.