MEAT

©2005 by C. A. Smith

Part 1

Blue wouldn't admit it to the other girls, of course, but she was a little scared. The next regular meat collection was tomorrow. Her twenty-second birthday was last month. She'd already delivered seven babies and the Products Manager had turned down her request to start an eighth, so now here she was in the holding area waiting for the Gaths to pick up their next shipment.

The Foxbush staff had started her prep routine this morning. She'd been put on the cleansing diet, the stuff all the girls referred to as steel-wool. Actually, it didn't taste all that bad, sort of like candied fiberglass. Eating it was better than the alternative, which was being strapped to a bed and having it pumped into your stomach through a tube.

Blue knew a lot about the Gaths because she'd taught herself how to read, unlike most of the fuck-bunnies in this place. While those pea-brains were playing computer games or screwing the boys, she'd been figuring out what letters were and how they formed the words that the free-people on the farm could read. There were no formal classes for the livestock at Foxbush (aside from lessons on Sex, Beauty, Birthing, Nursing and getting ready for Collection), but the staff had been supportive of Blue's efforts at self-education.

On the matter of the “steel wool,” for example, she couldn't even pronounce the actual name of the stuff — gastroenteric fibralaneus — but she knew it swelled up in the stomach juices to create a fibrous mass that cleaned out the entire digestive tract on its way through and out. Having spent half the morning on the toilet, she was in no doubt of its effectiveness. Furthermore, chemicals in the fiber fooled the nervous system into thinking it was satiated and satisfied. The effect lasted about five hours, then collapsed into a sinkhole of hunger. She was actually looking forward to another meal of steel wool. She knew that by the time the Gaths arrived to collect their shipment, her guts would be thoroughly cleansed of anything resembling normal waste products. Only sanitary, unpronounceable fibre. No shit, so to speak.

But beyond this technical knowledge of her intestinal preparation, Blue's ability to read words had enabled her to gain a perspective on the nature of the Gaths far beyond that of her fellow Foxbush livestock. She learned, for example, that a long time ago, perhaps during the lifetime of her great grandmother (whoever that might have been), there were no Gaths. The world had been very different. There used to be wars in one place or another practically all the time. There were these huge stockpiles of things called “nuclear weapons” and “weapons of mass destruction” that could have wiped out the whole planet. The Gaths had put an end to all that, not out of altruism, of course, but because it threatened their meat supply.

It amused her to learn how the Gaths had first made their presence known. According to the historical accounts she had found on the web, a garbled story had come out of a region in Russia called Siberia somewhere on the other side of the globe. The inhabitants of an entire village had suddenly disappeared overnight. A newspaper called Izvestia mentioned it the next day as an “unconfirmed report.” Outside Russia only a few tabloids deigned to pick it up, but who takes seriously any story that runs alongside accounts of an angel being shot by a hunter and a two-million-year-old man revived from a block of Antarctic ice?

Four days later another story emerged from the hinterlands of India. This time witnesses from outside the affected zone described a “circular gray wall” enveloping the area. The next morning the “wall” was gone, and so was every human being who had passed into or been caught inside it. The Indian government immediately assumed Pakistan was behind it and within twelve hours both nations were rattling nukes at each other. If the mysterious vanishings were still too bizarre to take at face value, the prospect of a nuclear exchange got everyone's attention!

Four days into an unnerving standoff of accusations and counter-accusations, it happened a third time. Same inexplicable phenomenon, but significantly different circumstances. This time it was no out-of-the-way village of peasants that was stripped of humanity, it was an affluent town in the heart of Maryland, only twenty-five miles outside of Baltimore. Sykesville was an upscale community of young families and pricey, well tended houses. It was residence to more than its fair share of influential politicians and celebrities.

Before the shocked apparatus of government could smother it under a blanket of “national security” secrecy, the full weight of the media was on it with intense coverage. A world-wide audience was riveted by the unfolding drama, and this time there were no ethnic or religious animosities to muddy the situation. Witnesses by the hundreds talked into cameras in front of a smooth, opaque, gray wall curving off into the distance on both sides. They confessed a mixture of curiosity and fright as they watched it rush directly toward them, expanding like a giant balloon, flowing over houses, streets, lawns, cars and people, then stopping abruptly before swallowing them as well. In its final configuration it encompassed a perfect circle almost a mile in diameter.

They told of mothers running through the wall to fetch their children, of people venturing into it to find loved ones or retrieve their cars. Children poked their hands through it and out again, delighting at how their hands disappeared on the other side, as though it were a curtain of opaque gray air. Some, emboldened by the experiment, walked through to see what it was like on the other side. But none returned. Once inside, they neither came back nor responded to the anxious shouts of those still outside.

Vehicles heading toward the wall slammed on their brakes. The lucky ones stopped in time. A few slid partly through and stalled, but if the passenger compartment was still outside, the occupants escaped unscathed. Anyone in any part of the vehicle who disappeared from sight behind the wall never reappeared, including one cop who felt duty bound to drive his cruiser slowly through. It stalled the instant the engine was enveloped and came to rest with only the back seat still showing. A wrecker was dispatched to pull it out, but the front seat was empty, the driver's door open.

Phone conversations had ceased as the wall advanced. The lines were still open and background sounds could still be heard — radios, televisions, dishwashers, all the electronic and mechanical white noise of modern life (except, curiously, the sound of cars and trucks) — but those behind the wall had simply stopped talking and hung up. Even the police and emergency services fell silent. Not dead, just silent.

Within a few hours the entire mile-wide gray cylinder was surrounded by units of the National Guard, Air Force, FBI, state and nearby police and sheriff's departments, with more on the way. Several dozen military and law enforcement personnel were lost before the word finally got out that it was not a good idea to pass through the wall.

The decision came too late, however, to save the pilot of a propeller-driven aircraft who flew inside to see what was going on. He immediately stopped talking. The microphone on his helmet picked up the sound of his breathing and of the engine sputtering and dying, but the pilot made no response to the frantic calls of the air controllers. His aircraft glided through the opposite wall and crashed a half mile further on, killing him. Oddly, he had started to take off his flight suit in the cockpit.

An Air Force fighter jet passed through more successfully, its engine still running smoothly right up until it crashed in northern Ontario, the pilot having ejected inside the gray cylinder. Military aircraft flying above it had no problems. They reported that the actual shape of the thing was that of a gigantic tin can, more than two miles high with a flat top.

By the time the mysterious gray can suddenly vanished the next day, an army of National Guardsmen, state police and armed citizens had formed a huge ring around its perimeter. What they saw when they ventured inward was a town littered with the abandoned artifacts of human habitation, but not a single human being, living or dead. The hospital, the two high schools, the eight primary and middle schools, the police and fire departments and every last business and residence was eerily deserted. Bags of groceries had been carefully set down, cars abandoned in the streets, strollers left on the sidewalks, merchandise left at the checkout counters, lawn mowers in the middle of half cut lawns and paint brushes next to ladders. Most disturbing of all, the entire zone was strewn with clothing, shoes, under-garments and jewelry, including hundreds of wedding rings, diamonds and body ornaments that had once graced ears, faces, tongues, bellies, nipples and other intimate places. The uniform and underwear of both the cop and the ejected Air Force pilot were also there, as was the pilot's parachute and the cop's 9 mm, still in its holster. Every one of the five-thousand plus men, women and children who had occupied or entered this space a day ago had not only disappeared, but had apparently done so stark naked.

Now the matter of the “gray can” was no longer a bizarre mystery in a remote place. It was serious. It was some kind of terrorism on an international scale using an unknown secret weapon. Every branch of the military establishment was roused to emergency activity. The Pentagon, every state and local police agency, every sheriff's department, every National Guard unit, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA and a dozen wacked out militia outfits were all on high alert, armed to the teeth and ready for action. Similar scrambling took place elsewhere around the world, especially in Russia and India. Hot lines were kept busy. International anti-terrorist coalitions were set up. Nervous citizens were assured that those responsible would be found and put down with a display of shock and awe such as the world had never seen!

Needless to say, it didn't quite work out that way.

Part 2

The holding area was basically a sea of bunks. It was certainly a lively place. If the others felt the same dread that Blue did, most hid it well. But then, she thought she was hiding hers pretty well, too. She had hoped for a little more sex during these last few days, but there were a thousand girls in this cavernous room and only a hundred boys, a ratio that quickly exhausted even the horniest young male.

On the whole, though, she'd had a reasonably good sex life, even though mostly with the studs provided by Foxbush. The studs were okay; they usually gave her a decent orgasm and they did keep her almost constantly pregnant, so she got to live out her full allotment of twenty-one years. But there were damned few certified studs who turned her on. Most of them were prettier than the girls, which was not her taste in men. Of course, the company breeding technicians didn't give a shit about what turned the girls on; their only interest was to put together genetic combinations that would create products pleasing to the customer. “For the Gaths it's not just about flavor,” they would tell girls who groused about their studs, “it's how the product looks when it's prepared. Presentation is equally important.” By that they meant that the Gaths paid premium rates for beautiful girls with shapely, voluptuous figures. Blue was a perfect example of the company's success in gene matching: strikingly beautiful and bountifully fertile.

The Company was also quick to remind irksome whiners that if they didn't like the sex partners Foxbush selected for them, they could always be inseminated artificially. Some girls actually did choose to go that route, but they were the ones who thought penises were repulsive. Blue would play with other girls when there was no other choice, like during the last month of pregnancy when she wasn't allowed a normal fuck, but she preferred to be knocked up by hard, warm flesh rather than a steel tube. She would just close her eyes and visualize a hot movie star. It really hadn't mattered that much, anyway. She got pregnant easily, had rarely been not-pregnant since her first child at fifteen, so she'd never had to put up with boring pretty-boy studs for more than a month. While pregnant she could fuck any Foxbush boy or staff member she could seduce, as long as she was careful not to endanger her current fetus. That proviso eliminated some of her more rambunctious moves, but for Blue, genuine male equipment was always more satisfying than a bimbo with a dildo, even when the action was watered down.

The Gaths had not always been so picky about what their food looked like. The historical accounts of those first encounters made it obvious they'd scoop up anything human, of any age, sex and shape. Actually, they'd still do it to put down troublemakers. But back then it was S.O.P.

Their fourth strike was a case in point. It came regular as clockwork, four days after the third, to a town in New South Wales, Australia called Armidale. In spite of frenzied, world-wide, high-alert, finger-on-the-trigger, preparedness, the results were the same as the previous three. Another community denuded of human beings. TVs and CDs blaring at empty air. Cars, trucks, busses, taxis, prams, shopping carts, bicycles, scooters and wheelchairs abandoned helter-skelter. Stores empty, merchandise and groceries ready to be checked out. Schools deserted and littered with backpacks, books, cell phones, homework and the now ubiquitous piles of clothes. Abandoned clothing was everywhere: neatly folded on chairs or simply dropped; in the houses, on the streets, beside cars, in stores, business offices, museums, restaurants, the firehouse, the hospital, nursing homes — even the police station where uniforms, guns, radios, shoes, socks and underwear were dropped in little heaps wherever their owner happened to be when he or she decided to strip. For whatever mystifying reason.

The forces of law and order were far more cautious this time around, having had four days to consider the consequences of earlier follies. No one went charging through the gray wall by land or by air, but the TV stations from Brisbane and Sydney and dozens of photographers were quick to stick the lenses of their cameras through it to see what they could see. The authorities had wanted to keep the images secret, of course, but the media would have none of it. The TV stations would only agree to delay broadcast long enough to sanitize any shots of people getting naked.

What they saw on the inside of the wall was dim, gray and altogether baffling. Traffic lights were working normally, but the traffic was frozen in a confused tableau where every vehicle had obviously stopped functioning at the same time. And they were all empty. In the few hours it had taken the TV remote crews to reach the perimeter of the big gray can of smoke, everyone inside within camera range was out of sight. But there were the clothes: lying in piles beside the cars and on the sidewalks, or dropped in trails — jacket, sweater, blouse, bra, shoes, socks, jeans, panties — as the former wearer had walked along. Some ordinary citizens who happened to live just outside the affected circle and rushed to the wall with cam-corders were able to capture stunning scenes of men, women and children strolling along unhurriedly as they disrobed, all heading in the same direction. Later, after many more cameras had poked through the wall from many other angles, it was seen that all the trails of clothing led toward the center of the zone.

A careless cameraman provided a dramatic confirmation of the phenomenon when he tripped and fell, his head and shoulders disappearing behind the wall. Before anyone could grab his feet and pull him out, he crawled inside. Other cameras caught what happened next. Ignoring the shouting behind him, he climbed to his feet and began ambling directly away from the wall, unzipping his jacket as he walked. By the time he had gone a hundred yards he was completely naked. He never once looked back.

That gave a brave female soldier a bright idea. She and another soldier were standing on a lawn next to a two-car garage. The attached home had been swallowed by the wall. She found a chain in the garage, locked it around her waist and handed the other end to her companion. “Pull me out,” she said, and before he could say, “What?” she had stepped through the wall.

He yanked on the chain, pulling her off her feet, and hauled her quickly out. She flopped over backwards, landing on her ass.

“What the hell are you doing?” It was their captain, his face red with outrage, rushing towards them.

The woman let the other soldier help her to her feet. “Something's happening to their minds inside that wall, Sir. I thought it was time we found out what.”

“Jesus Christ, Corporal Snyder!” the captain yelled. “Don't ever pull that shit again!” Then, caving in to curiosity, “So what did you feel? Did it affect your mind? Are you okay?”

“It was very strange,” she said. “But Private Osborne pulled me out too fast. I need to stay in there a little longer. I think it's important, Sir. We need to know what's happening to people inside that thing. Then maybe we can figure out how to deal with it.”

“You want to go in there again?!”

“Please, Sir, for just a minute. Half a minute! I don't think I need to go in it entirely, just my head. Someone can hold my ankles and pull me out, Sir. I'll be fine.”

“I don't know, Snyder. We don't know what it might do to your brain. I'll have to clear this through . . .”

“Oh for God's sake, it's nothing! Look.” She quickly dropped to her hands and knees and crawled in up to her waist.

The captain's reflex as an officer was to order Private Osborne to pull her out, fast! But he didn't. She was right: this sort of thing was the only way to find out what was happening in people's heads in there. Besides, it wouldn't hurt his career at all if this turned out to be the key to unlocking the mystery. “Grab her ankles and hold on, Private!” was the order he gave.

A few moments later when Corporal Snyder began to move her legs, the captain felt a flicker of doubt. She was trying to crawl all the way in! “Pull her out!” he yelled. “Get her outta there, fast!”

Private Osborne pulled on her legs, but she resisted him, pulling his hands through the gray barrier.

“Fuck!” he cried, “she's got hold of something in there. Help me out, Sir! She's pulling me in!”

The captain seized the chain and tugged hard. Between the two of them, they hauled the five-foot-seven corporal back through the wall, sliding her face-down on the grass. When her entire body had reappeared, they flipped her over quickly to see if she was all right. She blinked up at them, her mouth slightly open.

“You okay?” the captain asked, unsettled by the blank, unfocused look in her eyes.

“Uh-huh,” she murmured without moving her lips.

“So what happened, Corporal Snyder? Where were you trying to go?”

She began to unbutton her shirt.

“Corporal?”

“Mmm?” She undid another button.

“Say something, Corporal Snyder. What happened in there?”

She slipped another button loose.

The captain clamped a hand on hers. “Stop that! What the hell are you doing, Snyder?” He was suddenly uncomfortably aware of a gathering crowd of onlookers and cameras. It wouldn't do to have the world watching a soldier of the Australian Army stripping here on an Armidale lawn.

“Can you stand up, corporal?”

“Mmm.”

“Help her up, Osborne.”

“Yes, Sir.” Private Osborne had hoped to see more of the pretty corporal's cleavage, but that's how it goes. He took both her hands and helped her to her feet. She stared past him, dark eyes in a daze, lids drooping. He had seen that look on the faces of heroin junkies after a major hit. She went back to work on the buttons.

The captain caught both her wrists. “Corporal Snyder! Can you speak?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Words, Snyder! Words! Say it!”

“Uh-huh, Sir.”

He shook her by the arms. Her head flopped like a guttering flame on a dying candle. But her eyes seemed to snap more into focus.

“What?” she asked, her voice filled with profound befuddlement, as though she had been wrested from an idyllic dream.

“Tell us what's going on in your head. What are you feeling? What happened in there?”

Her brow wrinkled. She squinted. “Nothing.” Her head lolled backwards, but she caught herself and looked the captain in the eye. “Sir.”

Her tentative contact with reality was both fascinating and frustrating to watch.

“Nothing? Like hell! Tell me what you're thinking right now. Right now, soldier!”

Gruff bullying was the Army way. He'd been trained on it; she'd been trained on it. The whole military establishment had been trained on it. But for some reason it wasn't working. Instead of standing up straight and barking out an answer liberally spiked with Sir!, she stepped back out of his grasp, her face awash with confusion. His officer's experience kicked in and he went to the next psychological level: really harsh and loud bullying.

“Now, Corporal Snyder! NOW!”

“Now,” she echoed softly, as though tasting an odd new fruit, unsure of whether it was safe to eat. “Now,” she repeated, louder, unlatching the chain from around her waist.

Something in her eyes alarmed the captain, but he reacted too late.

“Now!” she said firmly. “I have to go, now!” She spun around and bolted through the gray wall.

Shocked by her unsoldierlike behavior, the captain snatched a cam-corder from a nearby gawker and stuck its lens through the wall. Corporal Snyder was marching briskly inward, shedding her clothes as she went. She was down to just her Army-issue beige socks when she finally disappeared around the corner of a tastefully understated Burger King.

Part 3

During the night the wall vanished, revealing the now familiar desolation of a depopulated town littered with the shells and detritus of its former human inhabitants. Dogs barked, protecting the turf of their absent masters from the legions of strangers creeping watchfully along the barren streets. Cats yowled in protest at the tardiness of their dinners. Commercials bled through open doors from huge plasma TVs pitching products to empty rooms. Cars and trucks filled the streets, doors agape, each one the starting point for a trail of clothing dropped like markers leading lost and wary outsiders to the center of a labyrinth.

The next strike four days later provided the clue for which desperate authorities had been searching. It happened in Stillwater, Minnesota. Seven thousand men, women and children — half the population of the town — were swallowed up by another gray cylinder. But this time a note had been scrawled at the epicenter of the disaster. It was in red paint on pavement in the center of town, the spray can lying a few feet away.

 

WE WILL CONTACT YOU. BE ONLINE

8:00 PM

The FBI found a clear set of fingerprints on the can. It took only minutes to learn they belonged to Latoya Cohen, a Stillwater police dispatcher listed among the missing.

The Pentagon, FBI, CIA, the Homeland Security Agency and other guardians of the peace went into hasty consultation with the White House to determine whether the internet could be shut down to keep the message, whatever it might be, from alarming the public until an appropriate response could be developed to avert a possible panic. But the President's re-election advisors warned him that any such attempt to keep the American voters in the dark would be political suicide. The President, ever mindful of priorities, was quick to see the wisdom of their counsel.

As it turned out, it was a moot point. At 7:59 that evening, Eastern Daylight Time, nearly every computer connected to the world-wide-web was on line and waiting. Precisely one minute later a pop-up box appeared on every screen, undeterred by any firewall or blocker and blotting out whatever else might have been there. The message it contained was in English with links to translations in more than one-hundred languages and dialects:

DECLARATION OF POSSESSION

We, The Gatherers, hereby inform you that your species, homo sapiens (human), has been determined to comply with all our requirements for meat, both gastronomic and aesthetic, and exists in sufficient quantity to sustain our needs indefinitely. Accordingly, we invoke the Right of Discovery to lay claim to the species homo sapiens in its entirety and without exception as our exclusive property.

It has further been determined that most members of the species homo sapiens are of Level Five intelligence and will therefore, as a matter of efficiency, be allowed to become involved in the selection and management of human livestock. Accordingly, we are prepared to negotiate specific contracts with existing political and business entities that will be satisfactory both to you and to us. In return for successfully providing us with a consistent supply of quality product, we will assure you extremely favorable profits and will cease random harvests.

All communications with us must be through official governmental or business electronic sites. The full text of the communication along with our response will be posted on the internet in the same manner as this message. There will be no secret negotiations. We are aware of all governmental and business entities and will respond to messages from any of them. Meanwhile, except for those governmental areas where an acceptable contract has been agreed upon, we will continue to harvest humans at random and as needed.

Please note that we will not tolerate waste within this livestock colony. Hostilities among humans that result in mass killing will not be permitted. Wherever we detect such activity, we will immediately harvest all those within the area of conflict. If governments or other organizations wish to settle disputes by thinning out human population in any area for any reason, it must be approved and carried out by us. Upon petition by any government or organization recognized by humans, we will select the appropriate livestock to be culled. We must warn you, however, that this could include the petitioners.

Please do not bother us with questions about our identity. It is beyond your understanding. Be advised that we are capable of harvesting selected individuals. Those who bother us with spurious messages not directly related to genuine business offers will be included in the next harvest.

The initial response was world-wide outrage. The secondary response was world-wide panic. The third response was a flurry of international conferences to determine how to resist these unspeakable demands while at the same time protecting innocent citizens from continuing atrocities.

But who was the enemy? Who were these “Gatherers” and where were they? It was the ultimate guerilla terrorist challenge! Inevitably, action was mired in a swamp of speculation and indecision. One school of thought held that they must be aliens from some distant galaxy. Others noted the absence of the words “planet” or “world” in the message, and took this to suggest they were right here on earth. Still others postulated that they were probably “on earth” but in some kind of parallel universe. The no-nonsense types insisted they were simply terrorists or radicals using some new kind of weapon. None of these theories drew anyone any closer to a decision on how to deal with them.

Four days later the peril of continued bickering and indecision was underscored when the Gaths (as they were soon being called) touched down (or rose up, or materialized, or whatever) in the center of Hamburg, and seventy-eight thousand German citizens vanished in the course of a day.

More desperate consultations followed! Lots of military movement! Howls for action from terrified citizens of every nation! Loud declarations of promised action! Religious and ethnic groups blaming each other for the abominations! It was God's wrath! It was a madman with a new weapon! It was a Satanic cult!

Four days later there was yet another unchallenged catastrophe, this one on the African continent. The center of Johannesburg was stripped of humans. Four days after that more than a million residents outside of Beijing were gone. Iran was the next victim. Then Indonesia.

More frantic conferences! More attacks! England, Hungary, Japan, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Turkey, Mexico, Israel, Brazil, Morocco!

Then came the clincher. The Big One. The last straw. Two and a half million men, women and children vanished overnight in the heart of Manhattan.

The time for prevaricating was over. Military pissing contests weren't working. The world was in a panic! How do you battle specters?

The Congo was the first to come to an accord with the Gaths. Then Nepal, followed quickly by Libya, Saudi Arabia, India and China. Pickup locations were agreed upon where undesirable persons would be assembled to meet relatively modest contract demands for humans to be turned over to the Gaths. Prisoners, mental patients and the terminally ill were obvious choices. The cure was no prettier than the disease, but it stopped the random attacks in each country that drew up a contract. The rest of the world began catching on to this solution. As more and more nations contracted with the Gaths, random attacks increased among the holdouts. When the prisons and institutions began to empty, the collaborating nations came up with more creative contracts.

It was the free market that supplied the ultimate answer. Certain major corporations and independent entrepreneurs proposed using volunteer women to breed babies that would be raised specifically for harvesting by the Gatherers. It turned out that the Gaths were perfectly willing to delay collection of such children until they reached maturity (which they defined as sixteen years) and exempt entire nations (which they called “governmental entities”) from random harvests if they permitted such operations to exist. Their only requirement was that the “breeding farms” produce a sufficient crop of growing livestock to meet specified annual quotas. The Gaths even offered breeding operations generous futures for their young livestock to help them flourish during the initial sixteen year growing period.

Naturally there was much outraged opposition to the idea of “growing slaves as food for godless aliens,” but as more nations signed on to the plan and were eliminated as targets for the random every-fourth-day harvests, the pressure on the holdouts grew exponentially. Terror soon trumped righteous indignation. Within nine months every “governmental entity” on earth had officially sanctioned at least one breeding farm and had a publically avowed contract with the Gaths to sell a graduated annual quota of human livestock for a handsome profit. Within ten years every nation on earth was bristling with breeder farms and the raising of humans as food for the Gaths had become a vital multi-trillion dollar global industry. And, of course, random harvests had long become a thing of the past.

At first the breeding operations had depended on volunteer women to produce babies. Additionally, as each nation joined the bandwagon it passed laws allowing the breeding farms to purchase young women and girls for use as brood moms. It turned out there was no dearth of poor parents willing to sell a fertile daughter or two for a fine profit, and there was no shortage of pregnant women willing to sell themselves and their baby to help their desperate family.

Once the ball was rolling, the Gaths let it be known that they preferred (and would pay premium prices for) young, attractive females. It didn't take long for the industry to figure out that with the judicious use of genetic engineering, breeding farms could produce a crop of highly fertile and mostly female offspring, and they could do so using their own studs and female breeders, greatly reducing the need for buying girls. Aside from maximizing per-unit profits, they were able to assure the Gaths of a product that met their highest standards of flavor and appearance. Females were breed at age fifteen. If they failed to become pregnant and deliver a healthy baby by midway through their sixteenth year, they became part of the next harvest. Fertile girls were expected to produce at least one offspring per year to stay out of the harvest. The Gaths paid top prices for sixteen-year-old females, with prices graduating downward for older girls to about half as much for twenty-two-year-olds. The price for women over twenty-two dropped so sharply that the breeding operations found it more profitable to include even their most productive brood moms in the harvest at that point.

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.

Part 5

“Now you have to remember . . . Oh Jesus! Don't do that!” Blue pulled his hand away from her crotch and gave it a remonstrative slap. “It's hard enough to concentrate with my tit in your mouth. Behave!”

She allowed herself a little moan of pleasure to encourage more of what he was doing with his lips, tongue and teeth, before continuing.

“You have to remember that I don't read all that well. They only teach the girls here enough so we can do our assigned jobs. I guess it's probably the same with the boys.”

“Uh-humm,” he answered without breaking suction. A trickle of milk emerged from the corner of his mouth and ran down his chin.

“And there's no real library here like the free people have outside. So all I've been able to find out is what I can dredge up on the web. But so far as I can tell, no one has ever been able to figure out who the Gatherers are, or where they come from. Or where we go when they harvest us, for that matter. Of course, the Gaths never answer any questions about it, just like they said they wouldn't in that first message. And they won't play by our rules. I've read stories in the newspapers from back then about how this government and that agency tried to make secret deals to get them to stop the random harvests. But the Gaths always responded with world-wide pop-ups, same as the first time, showing the original message as well as their answer. I guess it caused a lot of embarrassment and plenty of heads rolled before people figured out that the Gaths meant it. No secret deals.

“Of course, what the Gaths wanted was impossible. People wouldn't stand for it! Religions wouldn't stand for it! For one thing, the idea of owning people had long been officially considered uncivilized and repugnant . . . not that there wasn't lots of unofficial slavery going on — mostly young girls sold into prostitution, that sort of thing. But no one was going to turn over human beings to be slaughtered for meat! Still, it was that or let the Gaths pick the victims. The first countries to cave were the ones with strong dictators, and at first the sacrificial victims were prisoners, crazy people and like that. But eventually someone figured out how to make tons of money by setting up human livestock farms, like this one. Poof! Problem solved. Big profits, lots of meat for the Gaths and no more random harvests. Everybody's happy and relieved. Except maybe the meat.”

Rush's hand was back between her legs, his fingers making incursions into that moist tunnel where desires are transformed into ecstacy. Blue caught her breath, her last sarcasm melting into a gyrating moan. The deliciously erotic sensations that radiated from her suckled breasts had traveled down her spine to the lower belly, then bloomed into an electric tension that exploded into every nerve. She gasped and rose up over him to insert the slickened knob of his resurrected manhood into the wet cave of her need. She rode him with a desperate fury, fingers clawing at his waist, mouth open in a silent scream, oblivious to the spectacle she was creating in the crowded room. She wept as she came, her tears falling on his chest, a poignant melding of joy and sorrow, a passion both comforting and edged with dread.

When she was calm again, she wiped the tears up with a corner of her discarded robe. He had become soft, but she wouldn't let him go, holding him in as tightly as she could with muscles stretched by seven births. But he drew her down on him so he could kiss her deeply and lick away her tears.

“This is too hard,” she whimpered. “Why don't they just come for us? It won't be so bad, if they'd just get here and do us. Get it over with.”

“It won't? How do you know?”

“Because I know. I've read about it.”

“But how does anyone know? I thought no one ever returned from inside the wall.”

“Some did. It wasn't hard to do. A woman soldier did it first: went through the wall and had herself pulled out. But she ran back in before telling anyone anything. After that all kinds of people tried it: going inside, then being pulled out and interrogated. But no one ever said anything useful, just that they had to go back. I guess their brains had been pretty well fried. Even long after the wall was gone, they would only say they needed to go back. And they wouldn't leave their clothes on. Some of them spent years sitting naked in a cell, until the authorities finally fed them to the Gaths.”

“Great. So we have our choice of being turned into meat or vegetables.”

Blue smiled. Even in the face of death this man could make her laugh. Maybe he was right. If they had been born free, maybe they could have grown happily old together. She picked up his right hand — the one that had so recently incited her to sexual rioting — and kissed each of the fingers, one by one.

“So . . . my darling . . . Rush . . . how'd you get . . . your name?” she asked between kisses.

“Oh, I was five or six. Apparently I was a hellion. Always running around. The nurses, or one of them, kept grabbing me and asking ‘what's the big rush?' I guess it got to be a joke.”

“What were you called before then?”

“Don't remember. Maybe they just called me by my inventory number.”

“Let me see,” she said, and turned his hand palm up. She read the numbers printed on his wrist. “46S349GB. Wow. What a sexy name!”

“Oh yeah? Well let's see yours!”

She held her right wrist as far away from him as she could and made him wrestle her for it. By the time he'd captured her hand, he was lying on top of her, as she had planned. Thanks to his earlier efforts to relieve the pressure building up in her abandoned mammaries, she was no longer sore and could enjoy the weight of his body on hers and the new stirring in her loins.

It took a surprising amount of strength for him to hold her wrist where he could see it and read if off. “24B139KX,”

She bit at his chin.

“Talk about your sexy names!” he scoffed.

She nipped at his lips. He nipped back, and soon they were deep into each other's mouths. She rubbed at his manhood, pleased at how quickly it revived.

“Jesus!” he said during a break for air. “You're insatiable?”

“What else does a breeder have to do around here but fuck and make babies?” she said, licking at his face.

“What a life!” he responded, chewing on her ear. “Lounging around on soft cushions all day, fucking the boys and nursing the babies.”

“Not to mention the joy of having a watermelon work its way through your cunt every nine months, knowing you'll be ripped open with a knife and fed to the Gaths if it can't make it. Meanwhile, you poor guys get all the shit work, like riding around on garden tractors all day and filling the girls with your glorious jizz all night.”

“It is tough.”

“Did you ever think of just riding one of those tractors through the Invisible Wall and getting the hell out of here?”

“Sure I did. But then I decided I'd rather live out my allotted eighteen years than be an early appetizer.”

“Does anyone ever try it?”

“Of course. There's always some idiot who thinks he can outsmart the Gaths. I've seen them try several different ways. Riding out on the lawn mowers, hiding in garbage trucks, all that stuff. They all wound up walking right back to Foxbush and climbing into an individual meat receptacle, never to be seen again.”

“Well,” she whispered, starting to kiss her way down his body, “I'm glad you stayed the course.”

A female voice: “Don't you guys ever get tired of fucking?”

Without breaking off her string of kisses, Blue looked up into a pair of dark eyes filled with mock disapproval. Pouty lips barely repressed a laugh and a well practiced toss of the head sent bouncing waves of hair the color of dark chocolate cascading around her shoulders. She was a strikingly beautiful young woman. Blue reached out and swatted her on her mound of Venus and answered the question by wriggling sensuously against Rush as she ran her tongue around his navel.

The woman reached between them and wrapped her fingers around Rush's growing interest. “It's not working all that great,” she jeered. “I think he needs a new partner to rev things up properly.”

Blue suddenly flipped over and grabbed the dark-eyed girl's crotch with both hands. The girl squealed and jumped back, laughing.

“Jesus Christ, Ariana!” Blue shouted. “There must be a couple other boys here who can get you off before harvest. Rush is mine!”

“All the other boys are fucked out. They're mush. Not a wooden bat in the bunch. But Rush here looks like he's still got something in reserve. Come on now, Blue. Don't be a hog.”

“Oh sit down and shut up,” Blue said, tugging at the girl's robe, pulling her over to the bunk. “And keep your hands off him. Whatever he can get up again is going right here!” She patted her sex, still damp with leakage from the last injection.

“I saw him draining your tits,” Ariana said. “At least let him do that for me, too. They hurt.”

“For God's sake, Ariana, there are scads of girls in this room who'll do that for you.”

“It's not the same.”

“I see Brock over there with Loki. What's wrong with him?”

“He bites. Come on, Blue,” she whined, “you know how sensitive they are when they're overdue like this.”

Blue looked balefully at Ariana, then Rush. She gave the girl's left breast a quick squeeze and saw her grimace as a small stream of milk jetted out.

Rush was smiling and caressing Blue's back. “Don't be mean,” he suggested. “She's your best friend. You've done threesomes before. Why don't you do me while I do her, and if I have another shot left in me, I promise I'll deliver it to you.”

Blue sighed. She had wanted Rush all to herself in these last hours, but breeding studs had no sense of sexual exclusivity. From their earliest glimmer of interest in girls, boys were taught that most females at Foxbush over the age of fifteen were theirs for the conquest, and the more the merrier. The only fidelity that counted was a willingness to have sex with the females selected for them by the Genetics Division of the Products Department. For carrying out that duty they got extra perks. Not that there were any dogs among the moms. All the boys considered those women particularly hot. The only girls off limits were those whose impregnation was being engineered by the Genetics people. Females, on the other hand, were allowed no sex before fourteen and a half. That first pregnancy, and most of those that followed, was controlled by the Genetic engineers who selected her studs to assure quality offspring. The candidates were chosen from among the male livestock, approved members of the staff and approved outside volunteers who paid a steep stud fee for the privilege. But once pregnant, a girl could fuck whoever she wished, right up to the last six weeks. From that point, all sexual activity had to be under the supervision of medical personnel to protect the fetus from damage. The presence of a referee during sex tended to dampen the sexual enthusiasm of some girls. Not Blue. She didn't care who watched. In fact, being on sexual display excited her.

“Okay,” Blue relented. “So how do we set it up?”

“I'll lie on my back,” Rush said. You climb up over my legs and take care of my male parts. Ariana will crawl over me from the other end and dangle her poor sore tits over my mouth so I can drain off some of the pressure.”

Blue punched his shoulder as hard as she could. He chuckled and kissed her. Then whispered in her ear.

“If you and Ariana can make me really hard again, I'll fuck you so thoroughly you won't even notice when they turn you into meat.”

“How do you know I won't bite it off when I see you sucking on Ariana's tits?”

“I don't. But if you do that, you'll have to find some other stud with enough charge left in his battery to fuck you to oblivion. See any good prospects left in this room?”

“Maybe I'll bite off your balls and leave your prick.”

“Just don't swallow them, sweetie. They'll make you take a double dose of steel wool.”

She nipped at his nose, and he fell back laughing as each of them proceeded to carry out his or her part of the triumvirate. It took a while, but eventually Ariana's breasts were comfortably emptied and Rush, resuscitated, had made a final deposit into Blue's well stocked sperm bank, followed by some intensive cunnilingus that enabled Ariana to enjoy a few final orgasms as well. Afterwards, the three friends lay collapsed in happy satisfaction, cuddled together on Blue's bunk.

Rush, who was kneading one breast each of Blue and Ariana, said, “So both of you have been doing nurse duty right up to today?”

“Naturally,” snorted Ariana. “All moms do. We suckle the babies and chase around after the crawlers and toddlers and hell-raisers.”

“Of which you boys are the worst, I might add,” said Blue.

“Yeah,” agreed Ariana. “Little girls are easy. Mostly they play with dolls and help us while we nurse the infants. Thank God they put the boys to work early to get them out of our hair.”

“So that's why they had me cleaning toilets at the age of five,” Rush said with exaggerated indignity, “so you pampered mommies could play dolls with the little girls.”

“Exactly,” said Blue.

“Do you realize my entire youth was spent cleaning sinks, washing floors, digging up gardens and sitting in detention cages. All so you and the girls could play mommy?”

“Serves you right. Did they really put you in one of those cages?”

“Damn right! Twice. By the third time I had graduated to the steel box. No windows. Just tiny breathing holes. They kept me in it for two days, sitting in my own piss and shit and stench with nothing to eat or drink. I thought I'd go crazy. Maybe I did. Told me they'd double my time for the next offense.”

“What'd you do to get put in the box?” Ariana asked.

“Kicked one of you moms. She'd pulled me off some other boy I was fighting with. By the hair!”

“But that ended your fighting days, right?” Blue was remembering her own disciplinary encounters with squabbling boys.

“No. It ended my kicking-at-moms days.

“So,” she said, tracing a finger along his lips, “as horrible as it was, the box served a worthy purpose.”

“I suppose you can look at it that way. Especially if you're a cute little blonde mommy.” He kissed the finger. “But a few years later they used a carrot approach that worked even better than the stick.”

“And I'll bet I know what the carrot was.”

“I'll bet you do.”

“Instead of kicking mommies, they let you plug your little tool into them. Right?”

“Extraordinarily perceptive of you! That's exactly what they did.”

He rolled on top of Blue and sucked more milk from her left breast. She sighed with pleasure.

“So how old were you when you first started putting it to us mommies?” she asked. Funny she'd never asked before, she thought. But then, until now there had always been a tomorrow to ask about such things.

“I was thirteen. That's a tough age for adolescent wanna-be studs. The cock-and-ball set is ready to go and our hormones are clamoring for action, but we're not allowed anywhere near the virgins, and the fifteen-year-old girls laugh at us because to them we're still little kids. They've already been laid by the older, more ‘manly' boys.”

Blue wished he'd stop talking so much because it interfered with the wonders he was performing on her breast. Nevertheless, she couldn't help but ask, “Who was the lucky first girl?”

“Candy.”

“Which one?”

“Does it matter? Shit, that was five years ago. She's long gone. I think she was harvested three years ago. Hey,” he said, “I've told you all about my life of crime. How about you? Did you ever spend time in a cage?”

“No, thank God.”

“Just what I thought. You were too sweet and obedient.”

“No, I was a girl. And a potential breeder. There are plenty of males out there ready to help us girls add to the Gath's meat supply, so they don't care if the little boys get sick and die from sitting in their own shit. They just clean ‘em up, chop ‘em into steaks, roasts and ribs and drop ‘em in the collection bin. But pretty little girls grow into tasty sixteen-year-old females worth twenty times as much. Or become great breeders, like yours truly, who are worth a hundred times as much.”

“So you think you're more tasty than me?”

“No, I'd rather lick up your juices than mine any day. But the Gaths prefer pretty females, and for management that's all that matters.”

“So you girls never got disciplined?”

“I didn't say that. I said they don't put us in the cages. Girls get caned.”

“Caned? Hit with those springy sticks?”

“Wet ratan. You bet. And hard! Every stroke is like getting branded.”

“How would you know that? Ever been branded?”

“No, but some girls have.”

“Who? Anyone I know?”

“Emma. Seems to me I saw you two going at it a few times.”

“Red head? Harvested about a year ago?”

“Yeah.”

“Why'd they brand her , and where was it?”

“They brand the girls who have some defect that makes them ineligible for breeding or even for whole roasting by the Gaths. As I recall, her ears stuck out too much. The brand is placed at the top of the left rump. I'll bet she never let you screw her doggie style. Right?”

“Yeah, now that you mention it.”

“Poor girl was hideously ashamed of it. It does awful things to a girl's self-esteem to be physically branded as second rate. Anyway, she and others have told me that every stroke of the cane hurts just as much.”

“So did you ever get caned?”

“Oh yeah. Twice.”

“Jesus! You were a regular crime wave! When was the first time?”

“I dunno. Twelve . . . thirteen.”

“What did you do?”

“Sassed a teacher. It was a sex class and I was supposed to demonstrate how to get a man erect with just my thumb and one other finger, using the teacher as a live model. But he stayed limp and when he scolded me in front of the whole class for doing it wrong, I told him it wasn't my fault, he just couldn't get it up. I guess maybe I shouldn't have put it quite that way. Anyway, next thing I knew he'd called in another teacher to hold me down over his desk top and was waling my bare ass with that fucking cane. Five hard strokes! O my God, did that hurt! I screamed and kicked like crazy and couldn't sit down for a week afterwards.”

“Served you right, you unruly trollop.”

“Well it wasn't my fault!” She put on an exaggerated pout. “I've made a lot of limp soldiers come to attention with just one finger.”

“I can believe it. I get hard just thinking about you. In fact, it's rising up as we speak, and you haven't even touched it. If your milk weren't so sweet and this nipple so succulent, I'd be inside you again right now.”

She moaned her approval of the idea and wiggled her hips as invitation.

Ariana, who until now had been feigning sleep, spoke up. “So when are you gonna tell us about the second time?”

“Yeah,” Rush said, between licks at the tip of her nipple. “Tell us about the second time.”

“First you gotta switch to the other tit,” Blue moaned.

He pulled his head up slowly, her teat captured firmly between his lips, stretching it like a pink elastic until it popped free. “Sure thing,” he said, and began to lick his way lazily down her firm, sexy belly, shaped into a gentle roundness by seven contiguous pregnancies.

“Where are you going?” she protested.

“To the other tit,” he slobbered between slow, wet laps. “The long way.”

She sighed with kittenish contentment as his tongue circled her navel and continued it's moist travel over her bare mons and into the cleft. She squeaked with delight as it bullied its way between the outer lips, then the inner lips, then burrowed under the hood and seized the engorged little morsel hiding there. She inhaled sharply and held her breath as his lips, teeth and tongue ganged up to torture the poor little thing into unbearable waves of pleasure. Her squeak grew into squealy grunts as her pelvis began to spasm helplessly, thrusting the sensitive little captive deeper into the mouth of its conqueror.

Ariana (perhaps eager to hear the rest of the story, perhaps spurred by envy — who can tell?) pinched Rush's nose until he was forced to flee that gushing canyon and free its all too willing prisoner. “Hey!” he complained nasally, the evidence of Blue's pleasure dripping from his chin.”

“Cut the ‘hey!' crap and head on north again, buster!” Ariana said. “The girl can't talk with you rooting around in her girlie parts. So go on, Blue, tell us about the second time you were caned.”

Blue's mew of frustration turned to giggles as Rush began licking his way up to her right breast. “The second time was much, much worse. It was because of an asshole stud from outside.”

“All studs from outside are assholes,” Rush ventured.

“No they're not. Some are very sweet. But this guy really was a first class jerk-off. I do like sex, as you know, and I almost never complain about my partners, but this guy was really mean. He's the only one who ever made me cry.”

“He hurt you?” Ariana asked, appalled.

“Yeah! Well, he didn't actually cause any damage; he knew better than that. I was not quite sixteen and had already dropped my first baby girl, so I was classified as a prime breeder. Damaging me would have cost him a fortune. What he did was yank me around by the hair, shove me on to the bed, and call me filthy names while he rammed at me over and over. No one had ever treated me like that!”

“What kinda names?” Ariana asked.

“You know . . . . whore, douche-bag, cunt, bitch, cum-bucket . . . things like that. I was shocked and hurt. I asked him why he was saying such awful things to me, and he said it was because he liked to. He said my feelings didn't matter because I was only a cow in the shape of a human. Meat with a cunt, he said. He said I was whore meat that wasn't worth what he'd paid to fuck it, but he came back the next day and asked for me again! I told the Genetics Department no , I wouldn't let me touch me. They said I had to, that he was a perfect genetic match and he'd already paid his stud fee. When he came in and grabbed my arm to take me to the mating room, I kicked him in the shin. He made a grab for my hair and I bit him on the arm. Then he got all pissed off and insisted they punish me or he'd sue. Said he'd file an assault complaint, that I was a dangerous animal and they'd have to put me down and send me off with the daily trash meat. So they gave me a choice. I could go to the stocks and take a forty-stroke caning or stand up willingly with my hands behind my neck and take twenty. That was a no-brainer, except that I had to ask politely for each and every fucking stroke within ten seconds of the last one or be sent to the stocks and do the whole forty. It was the most terrible ordeal I ever had to go through. I was sobbing so hard I could barely get the words out in time for the next one. I had nasty welts all over my legs and butt. I had to hold out my hands so they could cane the palms. They even made me stand on one foot while they caned the other. The pain was incredible and seemed to go on forever! The stud watched and smirked the whole time, of course. He'd wanted to cane me himself but thank God they didn't let him. They knew he'd go right for my tits. I was a nursing mom and he would have put my nips out of commission for sure! They did give me a couple of strokes to my clit, though, and I nearly fainted from the pain. Believe me, I never refused another stud. If some guy decided to act like an asshole, I just made like a log and looked bored. If that didn't cool him off, I'd request a guard to watch the next time, make sure he didn't damage me. That always worked.” She giggled.

Just as Rush's attentions to her right breast were beginning to quell the ache there and reignite the tingling in her sex, a bell rang. The loudspeaker burst to life.

“Please line up for your final meal. Those who do not do so voluntarily will be dealt with forcibly.”

Blue's stomach lurched. Her ‘final' meal. The last time she would eat. Life was coming to an end so quickly. She felt like she had fallen off a cliff, but she was determined not to show it. She gently pulled Rush away from her tit and put her mouth over his, kissing him deeply, tasting her milk on his tongue, seasoned by her own fresh vaginal juices. Reluctantly, sadly, she extracted herself from his arms. She would force down the disgusting steel wool one last time. She would pass the pale, odorless feces and clarified urine one last time. She would clean herself out so the Gatherers — whoever the fuck they were — could cook and eat her with minimal fuss. It was the least she could do to be worth whatever the hell they paid for her.

Part 6

It was a long, long night. What do you do during the last night of your life? Do you sleep and hope for pleasant dreams? Can you sleep at all? Should you? Do you really want to sleep away the last hours of your life when an eternity of sleep comes with the dawn?

Blue had hoped that sex would ease her fear, lift her deepening depression. It didn't. The other side of ecstacy turned out to be a darkling despair, an enveloping sense of things she would never enjoy again: laughter in warm sunlight; erotic pleasures in the soft night; little mouths sucking at her nipples; little eyes taking in the wonders of her face.

She had read somewhere that in certain parts of the world, where government and religion were the same, the females on the breeding farms are taught that God has ordained them with a special status, a vocation that sets them apart from ordinary humans in the outside world. They're brought up believing that they are the chosen handmaidens of God, chosen by God to spend their sixteen or twenty-two years within the “sacred circle” of the breeding farm grooming their bodies to be worthy offerings to “the heavenly hosts” — the Gatherers. The most favored handmaidens — those who presented God with back to back baby handmaidens right up to their twenty-two allotted years — were guaranteed eternal bliss in Paradise. Blue took “eternal bliss” to mean perpetual orgasms with hunky studs forever and ever. On the other hand, if a Handmaiden faltered in her faith and became disobedient or tried to run away, God would turn her miserable mind to mush and send her back in shame to be punished. That wretched girl would be hung up by her wrists in the hot sun to die in agony and be eaten by buzzards. No eternal orgasms for her.

Blue had always had a hard time imagining how anyone could fall for such garbage, even though she knew the reason for it. On the other hand, she knew that most breeding farms forbade their female livestock from learning how to read, as she had done, especially in those parts of the world where even free women were legal chattel — bound to father, husband or some other male. So how were illiterate “handmaids” to know that the Gatherers had nothing to do with some egocentric deity? How could they guess that the ‘heavenly hosts” were simply meat-eating creatures who had decided that homo sapiens made a savory addition to their diet? What did ignorant farm-bred girls know about human avarice and the mutually profitable symbiotic relationship between man and Gath: food in exchange for security and wealth. A hundred million or so of their sisters sold every year as meat to save the skins and fatten the coffers of free mankind.

Not that religion was unknown here at Foxbush as a means of helping the livestock accept their role in life and be prepared to go gracefully to their final call. Attendance at church was required up to the age of twelve. During those years they got the same kind of mumbo-jumbo propaganda about their special place in heaven if they obeyed company rules and submitted beautiful and healthy bodies at the time of their harvest. But it all rang hollow for Blue. Free women somehow managed to please this same God without getting eaten at sixteen or cranking out one or two babies a year to earn an extra six years of life.

The priests at Foxbush sang the same tune as their counterparts elsewhere, albeit with slightly different lyrics. “God expects different things of different people,” they explained to the girls and boys of their congregation. “Free people in the outside world find the journey to Heaven as difficult as passing through the eye of a needle. But you,” they smiled, “have only to have good manners, obey the staff, enjoy lots of good sex, make babies and proudly present a well-kept body to the Gatherers at the time of your harvest.” Many of the girls at Foxbush (and at other breeder farms, she assumed) bought that scenario. They were the ones praying right now with the special fervor of last rites. She knew the words well: “May the beauty of my body and the flavor of my meat be pleasing to the Gatherers, O God, that my soul may be acceptable in your sight.”

But what if their bodies were not acceptable? Punishment, of course. Same as here at the farm. Bad free people spent eternity burning in hell. Unacceptable livestock got an eternity of brutal canings, or were locked up forever in a small metal box. Blue looked at her own body. She had worked hard to keep it well shaped, but repeated stretchings and bloatings from growing, kicking babies had inevitably wrought unwelcome changes. She glanced around at the perfect, svelte figures of the sixteen-year-olds. Was commendable baby production as pleasing to the Gaths as narrow waists, flat bellies, unmarred skin, taut boobs and pink virgin nipples? Would they take into account that those elegant young bodies had never had to make room inside for a new human being the size of a basketball? That those proud, firm tits had never had to carry a heavy load of milk? Would the flavor of a well-endowed mom be as acceptable to God and the Gatherers as that of a fresh young teen?

Probably not. But why be concerned? Eternal damnation was horse manure. The stick that went with the carrot. If her body wasn't good enough or tasty enough for God and the Gaths, tough shit. She hadn't asked to be harvested. She'd prayed her last prayer to that two-faced, unjust, make-believe “God” at age twelve. What all those praying girls in this holding shed didn't know and would never accept was that their destiny was not the plan of some absurdly unfair God; they were merely the victims of a self-serving deal struck generations ago by desperate humans in order to save their own asses.

All Blue needed to help her through this final ordeal was the sweet memory she had just created with a man who had accepted her body and being unequivocally and made love to it with a furious, end-of-time passion.

As she lay in his arms, her thoughts drifted to a subject that had often worked its way into daily conversations in the dorms, nursing rooms and dining halls of Foxbush. What would she taste like? How would she be cooked? Cannibalism was still taboo, even on the breeding farms, so humans did not partake of the human meat they were raising, and the Gaths were characteristically silent on the subject. That left lots of room for speculation. Was girl meat sweet or gamey? Was the texture more like pork or beef?

And for the millionth time she wondered what it was like to live like free people with no preordained destiny laid out for them, with no idea where all those future years would lead. She had always begrudged them their long, long lives — lifetimes three or four times her own — and the freedom to spend those years exploring the wide world and its many exotic treasures, adventures she could only experience vicariously on CompuTV.

She thought about the wasteful way free people buried or burned up perfectly edible flesh that the Gaths would probably pay good money for, if offered. But it was never offered. Why, she wondered bitterly, was it good business to breed and raise humans to sell to the Gaths for meat, but unthinkable to sell the meat of freshly dead free men and women? She knew the answer, of course. It was the caste system of the Gath era. Free citizens were real people. Farm-raised humans were not. Like all other livestock raised to be food, they were kept strictly out of sight and comfortably out of mind. The only free people who ever came in contact with Blue were the Foxbush staff and the occasional outside stud who paid handsomely to fuck pretty, young, anonymous human females. There was no official record of her existence outside the Foxbush Genetics Department because there was no need for it. The laws that applied to real people did not apply to her in her fenced-off stockyard. Her invisible life and profitable meat were merely an insignificant part of the happy deal that enabled free citizens to live long, self-important, unthreatened lives, indulge their pretensions and congratulate themselves on the elegance of their accommodation with the Gaths.

Eventually sleep did come for Blue, but there was no rest in it. She was locked in an iron cage and the water was rising. Then she was pursued through an endless chain of rooms, chased by unseen men with steak knives. She was trapped at the top of a stone tower where flesh-eating birds circled overhead, their razor beaks clattering. Seven children had tied her to a stake and were piling kindling at her feet as they discussed whether she would be best rare or well done.

With each emergence into consciousness came a more intense awareness that time was slipping away. She wanted to crush herself against Rush, absorb the comfort of his body there in the narrow bunk. Yet she would not allow herself that solace. For some reason it seemed more important to appear strong. Was aloneness strength?

Rush was battling his own demons in the form of a massive black dog leaping at his throat. A fierce anger welled up in him and he swung a fist at the beast, determined to kill him with his bare hands. It was Blue who caught the brunt of his rage, crying out as his hand slammed into her arm. He awoke with a jolt and in a moment she was gathered into his arms, being rocked in a torrent of kisses and apologies.

That led, as Blue hoped it would, to a rejoining of their bodies for one last indulgence of love-making. As darkness dissolved in the brightening glow of morning, their thrusting was slow, tender and rhythmic, their touches gentle, caressing. Their fingers memorized the curves and textures of their bodies, Blue's tears seasoning their kisses. They climaxed together, his hands on her breasts, hers over his, her ankles locked behind his back, pulling him into her as she cried out in her ecstasy. Gradually his spasms became more erratic, less urgent. Then ceased. Yet she would not let him go. They remained enjoined though a long bittersweet afterglow, their eyes closed against the light streaming through the barred windows near the top of the room, ushering in their final hours.

All her life Blue had known the number of her days. Even if she had been allowed to carry one more child she would not have seen her twenty-third birthday. It was not permitted. The Gath's weren't interested in mutton. They wanted young, tender flesh, mostly female. Every month past a girl's twenty-second birthday meant a huge reduction in what they were willing to pay for her meat. From the company's point of view, the bottom line did not justify an eighth baby from Blue. She had become more valuable for her meat.

Blue thought about this as she lay quietly gazing up at Rush's beautiful face, milking the wilted rod of his manhood with her sperm-slicked vaginal muscles in the sweet hope of reviving it. Her demotion from mom to meat as a matter of economics had been no surprise since it had been scheduled irrevocably from the same moment she'd been declared a breeder, but it had started her thinking about another economic mystery that had never been solved.

The Gath's paid for their harvest in gold bullion. Where the hell did all that bullion come from? No one had ever figured it out. At this point, of course, no one really cared any more. Human livestock was easy to raise, and obscenely profitable. Special contracts with the Gath's had enabled entrenched rulers to empty their prisons and get rid of political opponents at a profit. For better or worse politically, the world was a far more peaceful place. When insurrections or hostilities of any kind broke out, entire armies, militias and armed bands would disappear. Individual terrorists fared somewhat better, temporarily; but when the Gaths showed no reluctance to depopulate huge regions to cure the disease, they soon faced exposure by frightened friends and neighbors. When even one member of an organization was made known to the Gaths, it wasn't long before all members, along with their entire extended families, would gather together and disappear, leaving their clothes behind. The whistle blowers, however, were not only spared but showered with enough gold bullion to live out the rest of their lives in magnificent luxury. Another carrot and stick that had worked so well terrorism had long ago ceased to exist.

In the midst of her reflections, Blue felt a sudden tingling in her head, and with it an irresistible urge to strip naked. She and Rush broke their embrace simultaneously, rolled out of bed and quickly shucked their white robes. Indeed, the entire room was instantly filled with activity. The clattering and squeaks of emptying bunks blended with the rustle of terrycloth as robes slipped off eleven hundred young bodies and landed in soft bundles next to bare feet.

It's begun, she thought. Shouldn't I at least try to resist? She struggled to ignore an overwhelming desire to walk to the center of the room, but the need was too great. She could no more stop herself than fly. Everyone in the room was pressing toward the center and she went with them.

She noticed that it was a little difficult to see, as though they were in a light fog. She looked for the infamous gray wall but saw only the walls of the holding shed. Why would she have expected otherwise? The wall always formed outside of the building during harvests. A part of her mind was amazed that she could think these rational thoughts and at the same time be unable to resist irrational urges.

It had become impossible to move. Bodies were packed tightly around her, all females except for Rush directly behind her. She tried to turn so she could face him, but it was too late. The crowd was too compacted. She couldn't move. She looked over her shoulder and he caught the dismay in her eyes. He kissed the back of her neck and forced his hands around her until he was able to slide them over her breasts. When she tried to thank him, the words wouldn't form in her mouth. She could only nestle back into him and wiggle a little, letting him nuzzle her hair, mussed into a blond tangle from their multiple liaisons during the night and this morning. Her breasts were already beginning to ache with the need to be emptied, but she said nothing, even when he squeezed too hard.

Groans called her attention to the outside perimeter of crowded nudes. Something invisible seemed to be tightening around the entire group, constricting them into a circle so tightly packed that she could barely inhale. Is this how they were to be slaughtered? Death by overcrowding? Didn't make any sense. A clumsy way kill eleven-hundred livestock. Un-Gathlike. Didn't fit the profile. Struggling to breathe, she hardly noticed when the walls of the shed disappeared.

What she did notice was a sudden relief from the press of bodies around her. She staggered a little as the crowd shifted. A painful brightness blinded her, forcing her eyes shut. She gulped in two lungfuls of air, placed her hands on top of Rush's to hold them to her breasts and gradually opened one eye into a narrow squint to see what was happening. Nearly everyone had clapped their hands over their eyes against the incredible brightness. The world had changed. The walls, ceiling and floor of the holding shed were gone. The bunks were gone. The pale gray fog was gone. The whiteness was so dazzling it took her a while to realize she was looking at walls. New walls. Rush had buried his face in her hair to protect his own eyes since Blue would not relinquish his hands. Gradually the pack of humanity loosened as they expanded outwards, squinting and blinking against the intense light.

Blue felt a new tingling in her brain and a moment later was caught up in an overpowering need to go through a doorway. She glanced around trying to locate a door. There were several along one wall. For two seconds, maybe three, she ground her teeth and tried to resist, but it was hopeless. Rush was gently trying to free his hands. She released them and walked away from him, toward the doors. One part of her wanted to turn, kiss him, tell him goodbye, but the need to go through one of those doors was as strong as her need to breathe. Stronger! It was urgent! It was terribly, terribly urgent that she go through a door! It didn't matter which door! Whichever one she could get through the fastest! She scrambled forward, shoving her way through the crowd of girls, every one of them intent on the same purpose, some of them crying, torn between their burning need to reach the doors and the dreadful knowledge that the doors led to death.

Part 7

Blue manages to push her way through one of the doors. Now she's in a wide corridor. She can't see the end of it. Too far. It's so white here, so painfully bright, that she can barely keep her eyes open. Those ahead of her are shuffling forward and she follows them. She doesn't want to, but she must.

In a final gigantic effort of will she turns to look behind her, hoping to see Rush. She spots his unruly black hair, but there are several girls between them. Before she can catch his eye, something behind him grabs her attention. Another large group has arrived in the center of the room that she and Rush just vacated. Mostly female. All naked. Gathered from another breeder farm, no doubt. She wonders how many thousands are in this harvest. Her graduating class!

She moves slowly forward. No one speaks. Why? She tries to say something to the girl ahead of her. She can't. She tries harder. Do it! Do it! But nothing happens. It's not that there's anything wrong with her voice. It's just that there's a strange mental inertia that she can't overcome.

The line of nude humanity presses forward. The walls, ceiling and floor are featureless and disorientating. Not so much as a scuff mark or blemish interrupts the unrelenting whiteness. Blue wonders if there really are walls, or is it an illusion? Is she just imagining she's in a corridor?

A part of her wants to turn and run the other way, to stop walking mindlessly toward death! But that part of her has been disconnected, it no longer controls her body. Blue has never been in an airplane, much less jumped out of one, but she imagines this must be what it feels like when your chute fails to open and you're plummeting helplessly to earth. During the few minutes it takes to hit the ground there's plenty of time to think about it and no way to escape it. Last night in the holding shed she had hidden from the specter of death under a comforting blanket of sex. There was no hiding now.

She looks down at her feet. She seems to be walking on cushions, yet she leaves no indentations, no footprints. She cannot even make out the floor through the searing whiteness. She has to look up, at the back of the girl ahead of her, to keep her balance. There must be something there, some kind of floor. She can feel her own weight, but she has no impression of the surface she's walking on.

Something is looming ahead, breaking up the otherwise seamless whiteness. More doorways? No, it's more like a set of picture frames. Shimmering metal frames the color of polished silver. A dozen or so, side by side, all empty, seemingly suspended in mid air. Those ahead of her are climbing into them, holding on to the top bar at the corners, spreading their legs to the corners of the bottom bar. As each frame receives an occupant it begins to move forward. Other empty frames materialize in the vacated spaces, waiting to be filled.

Another powerful urge grips Blue, making it difficult to think, to process what she's looking at. She must enter one of those frames! No time to waste! The line ahead of her is fanning out, girls rushing toward the yawning spaces inside the silver rectangles. She's afraid she'll be left out, that they'll all be filled before she can claim one of her own. She starts to run, heading for the nearest open frame! She recognizes many of the girls as she weaves through them, but no one speaks. Their attention is riveted on the frames, on the furious competition to take possession of one before it's too late!

Finally Blue reaches an unoccupied frame. Instinctively she jumps up on the bottom bar, spreading her feet to the corners, reaching for the upper bar to steady herself. She slides her hands to the corners of that bar as well, as though she's done it a thousand times before. Such a natural thing to do! Something closes around her wrists and ankles. Something soft and comforting. She feels safe now. Relieved.

The frame expands vertically, stretching her, and begins to move.

The motion makes her blink. An odd thing is happening in her mind. It's like her thoughts are melting, her satisfaction at finding a frame dissolving in a forgotten fear roiling her belly. What has she done?

She looks up at her hands. Down at her feet. She can't move them! Her wrists and ankles are attached to the corners of the frame by cuffs of some sort, molded to her skin, cool and soft as lambs' leather, and completely unyielding. She is stretched into a living X. She can move her head, wiggle her fingers, hips and toes, but that's all. She's trapped herself in this frame and she's utterly helpless.

She becomes aware of the other frames around her, all filled with naked bodies, mostly female, a few males. Some faces are slack, others contorted with fear; still others seem to be half way between, as though rousing out of a stupor. She wants to cry out to them but no amount of willpower can enable her to activate her voice. She stops trying. The Gaths can manipulate human minds any way they wish, make them do anything they want. It's how they rounded up their original appetizers, then whole towns and whole regions. It's how they pen in the livestock at Foxbush, and probably all the other breeding farms. It's how they got her to walk through that door and rush into these restraints. So why are they freeing her mind now? Why not leave her in blissful serenity, oblivious to her fate? Isn't killing her cruel enough? Or do the Gaths find some kind of perverse pleasure in this psychological torture?

The frames are converging, forming a long line. Now she can see only the backs of the girls ahead of her, dozens of them, dwindling into the distance, all stretched taut and motionless in their frames. Are the frames suspended from the ceiling? Propped up from below? She can't tell. The whiteness blinds her to details beyond the gleaming metal of the frames themselves.

Blue's shoulders begin to ache, but she can't shift a millimeter to ease the stress. She whimpers silently. The forward motion is smooth, like floating on air. Is she, in fact, moving? Or has the line stopped? She squeezes her eyes almost shut against the brightness and peers around, trying to detect walls, ceiling, floor, anything.

Finally she spots something. Strange, complex markings closing in on both sides. Finally! Walls! Then up ahead: vertical poles on both sides of the newly defined corridor. There are horizontal poles, too. And a noise, a rushing sound. And fog. It's water! Those are pipes, not poles. The frames are passing through a larger framework of pipes. The occupants of the frames are being subjected to hard spray from all sides, like an old-fashioned car wash. The girl in front of her is struggling, writhing in her restraints. Then, suddenly, Blue is doing the same as brutal streams of hot, soapy water drive into her skin like nails, clawing into every inch of her body, the soap forcing itself up under her closed eyelids, into her most sensitive surfaces — armpits, nipples, the soles of her feet — even into the tender inner folds of her vulva, stinging and burning! After agonizing moments, the assault subsides; the needles turn into a heavy drenching torrent of pure, steaming water.

Reddened, wet and dripping, Blue is carried past the cruel shower through a section of corridor where hot air swirls from an unseen source around her bare skin. She's been washed; now she's being dried in this Gath version of a meat processing line. But where are they? When will they deign to show themselves, these loathsome creatures for whom she's merely food, for whom she has borne seven children to supply seven future meals?

She gazes downward, watching water roll down her belly and drip from her labia. She can't see where it lands. If there's a floor, it's not visible. Just more whiteness. She looks up. Same thing. Only at the sides is there a continuing sense of enclosure, a physical surface to which the cryptic markings are attached. But wait! There's something more substantial up ahead. Windows! Along each side of the corridor the wall is broken into long transparent sections stretching into the distance as far as she can see. Her stomach knots with a new fear. What will she see on the other side of those windows. Is this where her new owners will finally reveal themselves? Perhaps they can't breathe the same air as humans and must wall themselves away until their harvest is safely dead.

As her frame draws alongside the first transparent section of wall, Blue looks first to the left where she sees great stacks of red and green refrigerated containers. She recognizes those containers. They're for storing meat. During her virginal, pre-pregnancy years she worked in the kitchens at Foxbush where she opened many of them. The green ones kept fresh beef, pork, poultry and fish refrigerated at a constant thirty-nine degrees. The red ones contained frozen cuts at ten degrees. It's not hard to guess what these containers hold.

She turns her head to the right. Through the window on that side she sees much larger refrigerated containers. She's never seen any of that size and shape. They're a good seven to eight feet long. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, stacked and waiting for shipment.

She feels terribly cold, yet perspiration runs from under her arms down her sides. Her heart is hammering.

She looks back to the left. The scene has changed. Instead of neatly sealed containers, she's looking at raw meat stacked and trundling along on more than a dozen side-by-side floating conveyors. The meat is separated into different cuts and whole body parts, some she can recognize, some she can't. She sees hands, feet, tongues, eyeballs, breasts still topped with their nipples, penises, racks of ribs, slabs of meat fileted from arms, legs, neck, rump, belly and loins. She sees a jumble of bones stripped clean of meat and heads with the eyes scooped out and the top of the skull sawn off. There are various organs, but the only ones she can identify are the heart, liver, intestines, brain and testicles still in their scrotum. There's still no sign of a living being. Just automated machinery seemingly suspended in mid-air. What's the matter with these Gath's? Are they so repulsive they can't even show themselves to their livestock at the point of slaughter?

She turns back to the right and immediately looks away! She doesn't want to see this! But, of course, she can't help herself. Morbid curiosity forces her to peek. Machines are wrapping girls in plastic, girls skewered on spits. One end of the metal shaft protrudes from their mouths, the other extends obscenely from the birth canal. Their legs are firmly wired to the spit, their wrists and arms wired behind them. The heads have been shaved. The girls on their spits are being loaded by automated equipment into the coffin-like refrigerated containers she had seen in the earlier window.

Blue realizes now that she's watching the meat packing process in reverse, starting at the end stage — the packaging for shipment — working, no doubt, towards the beginning where she'll be slaughtered. Why are they doing this, showing her every detail of what's about to happen? It's an education she doesn't need. Why don't they just kill her and get it over with? Isn't it enough to have been trained from earliest childhood in the endless “Bodily Readiness” classes about how important it is to maintain a clean, healthy body so that nothing will go to waste when she's harvested? Does she have to see how efficient the Gaths will be at reducing her to edible bits.

Unwilling to watch, yet unable to look away, she sees on the right freshly spitted carcasses arrive on conveyors and transferred to specialized tables where robotic equipment stretches out the legs along the length of the spits, binds their ankles to the shafts and their knees to cross bars so the bodies will turn with the spit in the roasting oven. Other equipment, in the meantime, is gathering up the hair, shearing it off close to the scalp and singeing off the stubble with bursts of flame.

Feeling faint, Blue finally looks away. But on the left her eyes are caught by the blur of fast-moving machinery and a scene that's even more gruesome. Human body parts — thighs, calves, rumps, arms, ribs — are being skinned and butchered for packaging. Laser knives move in a continuous rhythmic flow: lopping, slicing, fileting, stripping bones clean of their flesh. Still there's no living being in sight.

Blue looks away, returning her attention to the right where an earlier stage of roaster preparation is taking place. A continuous stream of beautiful young women, their bodies still pink, are in the process of being impaled on the spits. They have been placed on their backs on short tables, heads hanging off one end, legs off the other, knees spread apart. The bellies have been split open and eviscerated. Robotic sensors zero in unerringly on the orifice between each pair of legs, guiding the pointed end of the spit neatly into it so the thick metal skewer can be thrust smoothly up through the body and out the opened mouth.

Blue shuts her eyes. She has recognized one of the girls. Ariana is as beautiful in pale death as she was in the flush of life less than an hour ago, her eyes half closed, her perfect teeth biting serenely on the silver spit. Blue tries to push from her mind the vision of Ariana roasting in an oven, her body periodically basted with spiced oils as it turns and browns over a low fire. She prefers to remember the vibrant, dark-eyed girl — her closest friend for nineteen years — whose orgasms were always loud and lively, who exhausted her studs with endless requests for encores, and who especially loved the double pleasure of a lively tongue exploring the grotto down between her thighs while she suckled an infant at her breasts. This was a girl whose determination to fill her life with play infected all around her, including Blue. Last night's performance was vintage Ariana: helping Blue through her final night of life by orchestrating a triangular indulgence with Rush.

Blue keeps her eyes closed. She doesn't want to watch the butchering or the skewering. Yet, in the gray dark behind her lids there is no hiding from her anguish. The slightest tug against her restraints reminds her of how absolutely defenseless she is.

Anxiety and frustration boils into rage. Damn these Gatherers! Hateful cowards hiding behind their impenetrable technology! Cynical puppeteers, yanking people around on strings of terror and greed. Cunning predators, convincing their prey to offer up women and children for food! God damn them to hell!

Yet it is neither the predators nor their suppliers who are in hell. It's their inventory that bears the horror. Meat for the Gatherers. Profits for the businessmen.

These thoughts are too painful. Blue lets her mind drift to last night. To Rush. She wonders if he's still behind her. Or did he go through a different door? Is his ordeal already over?

She's been told it's easier for men to face death because they're stronger and braver. But where is the evidence of that? Do men have to face the agony and danger of childbearing year after year? The brood mothers at Foxbush aren't given the comfort of pain killers or medical backup like free women. If anything goes wrong, like if the baby gets stuck, the birthing technician simply slices her open and saves the child. If it kills the mother, there's a Gath collection receptacle in every birthing room. Just pop the carcass in there and poof , it's gone. No sense wasting perfectly good, fresh mommy meat. The Gaths will happily pay for it. At a discounted rate, of course.

Historic accounts make a big deal of how, in the old, old days before the Gaths, “men of great courage” were constantly fighting and killing each other. CompuTV still shows the old movies where gritty men battle with old-fashioned guns and bombs and all those amazingly lethal explosive devices that the Gaths later disabled. More recent movies show men going at each other with modern weapons: knives, pellet guns, razor-disks and gas. But Blue is not impressed. So males like to fight. Is that courage or belligerent stupidity? After all, in real life they don't dare do it openly. The Gaths sweep up troublemakers pretty damn fast, along with anyone unlucky enough to be in their vicinity at the time Admittedly, men have superior body strength over women, but so what? How does that translate to greater courage?

Blue has been working hard at thinking about everything except what's ahead. A strangled cry from a girl further up the line shatters her mental shield. Reflexively, her eyes pop open. A device that looks like a guillotine blade has just sheared downward in front of the girl directed ahead of her, then up again in time for her frame to move past it. It shears downward again in front of Blue, emanating a horizontal beam of red light that scrapes down her body as if scanning a bar code. Its brightness blinds her momentarily, triggering an automatic concern about eye damage. An instant later she remembers how silly it is to worry about such things. In fact, blindness would probably be a blessing. She knows what has happened, of course. The Gath's wizbang technology has just made a map of her body. Whatever computerized machinery lies ahead now knows just where to apply the various strokes that will turn her from living woman to tasty meat.

She glances to her left. The horror of what she sees makes her stomach lurch. Undoubtedly this is what made the girl up ahead try to scream. The frames on the other side of the window have been flipped upside down and laser knives are lopping off the hands and heads of the inverted girls. The severed body parts drop on to a conveyor beneath the row of frames. The carcasses, now freed from the bottom bar, swing from the ankles, spraying blood from the neck and wrist stumps.

Blue looks away, swallowing the bile which is surging up from her stomach. But the scene on her right is no less terrible. Beautiful young women are laid end to end on a conveyor line, their eyes staring sightlessly upward, their skin still glowing with the memory of life. They're being sliced open from breastbone to pubis with a laser. Perfect young bodies are being disemboweled by gleaming equipment that shovels out their organs, flushes out the empty torso, sucks the bloody bath water out of the cavity and sends the carcasses on to be spitted. Blue twists in her restraints, her body unconsciously fighting for escape, but the soft cuffs have welded her wrists and ankles firmly to the frame.

She can't bear to look to either side. She concentrates on the girl ahead of her, a girl still very much alive, her dark hair clinging to her back in straight, damp clumps down to her waist, a sharp contrast to Blue's own tangle of wet, blond curls, bouncing around her shoulders with every turn of her head, like golden springs. The girl is shaking, probably sobbing, although Blue can't see her face. Blue wonders how many girls go through this ordeal stoically, able to swallow their fear and display calm resignation, and how many surrender to the primordial terror that rages in the pit of their stomach, weeping, trying uselessly to wrench themselves away from this path of death.

There's lateral movement up ahead. Blue squints into the whiteness. Some of the frames are turning to the left, others to the right. This is it! The juncture that will determine whether she's to be impaled on a spit or decapitated and butchered. Her heart is racing, pounding so hard she thinks it will burst. She hopes it will burst! Right or left? Who will make the decision? Some invisible Gath ogling the nude bodies as they flow by? A machine? Was that the purpose of that laser scan, so some computer can decide if she fits the profile of a well-proportioned whole roast, or would be better sliced up into neatly packaged cuts?

She studies the body in front of her, assessing it. Well filled out limbs, lean but not skinny. Long shapely legs. A lush, sexy figure. Blue can just discern the outside edges of the girl's breasts as she squirms in her cuffs, enough to deduce that they must be at least as full and firm as her own. Blue is appalled that she's actually doing this, evaluating the wretched girl as meat on the rack. Like a goddamned Gath!

She looks up to see the girl four frames ahead taken around to the left. Blue recognizes her! Her name is Kyra. She was in Blue's dorm and was never able to lose the bulging belly and thickened thighs left by her third pregnancy, a set of twins. She carried three more babies before she was pulled from the breeding stable at age twenty. She's a sweet girl, loving and generous, always willing to help others with their chores during their difficult days of early and late pregnancy. Blue can't bear to think of what will shortly happen to her.

The frame behind Kyra follows in the same direction. It's a boy named Runner. Blue knows him, too. His muscles no longer look sleek as he hangs there trying to appear brave. But she remembers when they did, when he screwed her day after day between her third and fourth baby girls. She's sure in her mind that he's the father of number four, her lone baby boy, whose eyes had the same upturned shape as his. She wonders if they changed to that deep brown of Runner's that helped mesmerize her and lift her to incredible orgasmic heights during their frenetic days and nights of passionate coitus. It occurs to her that the fate of all the males in this (and probably all) harvests is butchering. Only females, and only the prettiest and shapeliest, are turned right to be spitted.

There are just two left ahead of her now. The first of them veers right. Another familiar face! It's Cicalla, the girl Rush was fucking with such relish before Blue claimed him for herself last night. Cicalla's unforgivably lovely face is distorted with fear as she turns the corner toward the spitting operation. Blue feels avenged, and at the same time ashamed of herself for her absurd jealousy. Why does she still resent Cicalla, just because she's so beautiful? Why should she care how pretty she'll look roasting over a fire? Why should it matter that, even shaved bald, Cicalla will be a breathtaking sight?

Blue glances left and sees the faces of Kyra and Runner. They have rounded the end of the windowed wall and have started back in the opposite direction, their frames beginning to tilt, their eyes round with unspeakable terror as they see the conveyor carrying away the heads and hands of those who've gone before them, as they feel their bodies being inverted in preparation for the lasers.

Movement directly in front of Blue takes her mind off the death scene to her left and refocuses it on her own. The dark-haired girl ahead of her is swinging around to the right. Now it's Blue's turn! She holds her breath! For some weird reason she's hoping she will go right. It's terribly important that she go right! But why? Either way she will be dead within a minute!

Her frame begins to bear to the right. So be it. They want her on a spit. Somehow it's a relief. Less demeaning. She's been weighed in the balance and found as worthy as the beautiful girl ahead of her, as desirable as the lovely Cicalla, and Ariana, already shaved and spitted. She laughs at the foolishness of her vanity. How senseless! Every girl at Foxbush was bred and raised for meat, and that's all they are. Beautiful meat. She and Cicalla and Ariana and the lovely dark-haired girl ahead of her. All of them: meat. Did it really matter who would look best turning on the spit?

Blue indulges a last bitter thought. She's only twenty-two and life is about to end. Free women get to live into their eighties. Nineties! They get to know their own children. Even their grandchildren! Stop it! she tells herself. Most of the girls here are only sixteen and would love to have been granted an extra four years.

Blue looks up at the window. Now she's on the other side watching those who will follow her to death. A macabre kind of graduation.

Then she spots him. He has been twisting hard in his restraints, trying to get her attention. She mouths his name: Rush! and he mouths something back to her. The look on her face demands that he repeat it. She reads his lips. I love you. I love you! And then he winks. New tears fill her eyes, but she won't be outdone by his bravery! She winks back! I love you, too! she mouths, unable to make her voice work, weeping in an agony of bitter joy. Did he see it? Does he know?

The frame in front of her tilts. Flips one-hundred-eighty degrees. The girl in that frame is facing her now, but upside down, her dark hair sweeping the invisible floor, her terrorized eyes pleading with Blue. For what? Comfort? Rescue? Commiseration? Out of nowhere a robotic arm wraps a narrow collar around the girl's neck. In an instant the collar expands to cover her entire neck from jaw to shoulder. Transparent tubes run downward from the collar and disappear into the indiscernible floor. A look of surprise sweeps over the girl's face, and a moment later the tubes fill with her dark red blood.

At that point Blue's frame begins to tilt forward. It's all happening too fast, yet in slow motion. She's upside down, looking into the round, trapped-animal eyes of the girl behind her. She feels the collar clamp around her neck and expand, then immediately begin to suck at her skin. Transparent tubes hang down past her eyes.

Something stings both sides of her neck! A few seconds later her own blood is flushing down the transparent tubes. She watches, fascinated, as her wildly pounding heart pushes it along in rapid surges. Her vision begins to fragment. The relentless white is rapidly dimming.

To her surprise she finds she's no longer afraid. What's done is done. It's over. It's as though the fear is draining away with the blood. Her thoughts have turned strangely mellow.

I wonder what I'll taste like . What kind of stuffing will they use? Will they place me in the center of a table , all hot and steaming for everyone to admire before they carve me up? I hope so. It's the least they can do.

The world has gone silent. If her heart is still beating, she can't feel it.

I love you! his lips had said.

She lets the comfort of the words ease her deeper into the soothing darkness.

I love you . . . .