This story examines another angle of the theme Smith laid out in two earlier tales: "The Abattoir" and "The Culling Lottery." Most anthropologists agree that many prehistoric human tribes practiced cannibalism; the premise here is that in a world ravaged by overpopulation and hunger, desperation has brought it back and profiteering has turned it into big business. With a high demand for young female flesh, huge breeding farms have sprung up to provide not only meat products, but other services for which thousands of beautiful young women can be put to profitable use before slaughter. It's a horror story of greed, male tyranny and the all-too-human tendency to accept slavery when presented as the normal way of life.

APRILLE

©2004 by C. Smith

Chapter 1

Tucker could see that Aprille was a little nervous as she walked to the front of the class. But that was to be expected. She was by nature a shy girl, seemingly unaware of her exceptional beauty, and she was speaking on a subject that bored the know-it-all girls, frightened the faint-hearted approaching activation and incensed those who resented the role they were born to fill.

"The advent of gynopophagy in the United States," she began softly, "officially started with the thirty-second amendment to the Constitution during President-for-life General Moamar Bormann's administration."

As soon as she said "advent" the sullen girls in the back row began rolling their eyes. Well, it did sound a bit stuffy and he would speak to Aprille about the need to dumb down her vocabulary a bit. But shit, any word with more than one syllable was beyond the reach of some of these girls, even if they had been marked for future Pleasure Girl status, a ranking that would ward off slaughter for a few years, at least. They sure as hell knew what gynophagy meant, though. Their turn to be meat would be coming up within the year if they failed to make Pleasure Girl. They were all sixteen and God knows they were fully mature, body-wise if not brain-wise. They were practically busting out of their halters, thanks to the company's breeding standards and breast conditioning lab. The only reason they were here was a pathetic hope that they might pass the course and be selected as Pleasure Girls. They were M1's, dreaming they could become M1-P's and extend their life span a couple of years. Fat chance. He guessed most of them would be on a spit within a month after their seventeenth birthday.

Aprille continued nonplused. "But it really began five years earlier when General Bormann signed the Treaty of Shanghai. General Bormann saw that the world was heading for all-out terrorism and nuclear war. He realized that a primary factor in all the discontent and political upheaval in the world was the combination of extreme overpopulation and, with it, the failure of global food supply systems. It was a vicious cycle feeding on itself."

Tucker would also have to talk to her about redundancy.

"So he and the other leaders of the so-called Nuclear Thirty nations hammered out a solution based on successful experiments in Asia and Africa where, in desperation, anthropophagy had been legalized in certain places. At first both men and women were selected by official lotteries and their meat offered for sale. It soon became obvious, however, that poor families were willing to sell their excess girls to the meat factories. Boys were considered more important to families because of social and religious concepts and because they represented social security for the family. Girls, on the other hand, were liabilities. A girl had to be gotten rid of by marrying her off to someone, which often meant offering a hefty dowry."

More eye rolling at the words liability and hefty .

"But what happened was that because the demand for meat was so great, the girls were easy to sell and became even more valuable than boys for poor families. That, in turn, meant that instead of families using gender-control drugs to favor delivering boy babies, they began to prefer having girls and selling them. Later, when the pool of marriageable girls threatened to drop too low, the governments outlawed doweries. In the end they had solved four problems at once. There was now enough food, the average family income rose, and they were able to enforce population control without trying to restrict sex or depending on abortion. In addition a balance had been struck between males and females available for marriage."

Tucker could see that this was much too esoteric a history lesson for the would-be Pleasure Girls. Their attention was wandering. They would pay for their insouciance in a few weeks when they failed their tests and found themselves still M1's with no cushion against immediate activation as meat.

"In Shanghai," Aprille was saying, "the concept of cannibalizing females for profit was adopted on a world-wide basis. To squelch objections from troublesome women, the treaty also stripped freewomen of all political rights, including the right to vote at any level or hold any political office. Later, when General Bormann's son, our current President-for-life Osama Bormann, came to power, more restrictions were placed on freewomen to maintain order and decency. The two sexes were restored to their natural relationship in which men govern and support the family and women obey and nurture their men and children. That is why everywhere in public life and in the business world every freewoman must be under the supervision and direction of a male. Marriages must be approved by an authorized male relative or guardian and a wife is legally obligated to obey her husband. Freewomen who get pregnant outside of marriage must turn themselves in to authorized institutions such as this one. Male fetuses conceived out of wedlock are aborted. Female babies, along with their unmarried mothers, become the property of the institution for appropriate disposition."

That last phrase was too much for the other girls and inspired a grand display of eye rolls. Tucker decided to shake them up a little.

"Mariah, what kinds of 'appropriate disposition' is Aprille referring to?"

A back row girl whose cute, round face outclassed her mental acuity, jerked to alertness. "Ah . . ." No further erudition was forthcoming.

Tucker could see moisture appear on her pretty forehead. She knew the penalty for failing to answer. He decided to help her get off the hook. "What do those words mean, Mariah? 'Appropriate disposition.' What can an institution like this do to unwed freeborn mothers?"

"Oh! It can turn her into either a breeder or meat, Sir." She managed a look that was both insolent and relieved.

"Right," Tucker acknowledged. "And her baby, if it's a girl?"

"Same thing. It's raised for meat or as a brood-girl."

"And which are you, Mariah?"

She hesitated, beginning to get the point.

"Stand up, Mariah!"

She jumped to her feet. "Yes, Sir."

"What is your classification, Mariah?"

"M1, Sir. But I'm hoping to get to M1-P."

"Which means?"

"Pleasure Girl, Sir."

Tucker detected a little too much smugness in her response. "Pleasure Girl," he echoed. "Wow. I'll bet you'd get a lot of sex as a Pleasure Girl."

"Yes, Sir. Lots!" she said, saucily thrusting out her enviable bosom.

"And you'd like to get work at a Pleasure House, right? Be off campus, get better accommodations, more perks, frequent sex, a longer life?"

"Yes, Sir."

"And what about the M?"

"The M, Sir?" Her face clouded over.

"Yes, the M. You said you're an M1. What does the M stand for?"

"It means I'm going to be meat."

"Going to be?"

The cloud yielded to fear. She had finally figured out where this was leading.

"I am meat, Sir."

"And the '1,' what does that mean in terms of you being meat?"

"It means I'll be spit-roasted live, Sir."

"Exactly. Do you look forward to that, Mariah?"

"Not really, Sir. I mean, not right away." Her voice was barely audible now, just a whisper.

"No?"

"I'd like to work as a Pleasure Girl for a while, Sir. I'd really enjoy it."

"Do you realize I'm on the Commission that decides which girls will be activated, and when?"

"Yes, Sir." She had begun to chew her lower lip. He wouldn't do this to her, would he?

"How would you like a "D" added to your classification, Mariah?" She turned pale. He hoped she wouldn't faint and ruin the effect he was building.

"Please, Sir!" she whispered, putting a hand on her desk to steady herself. "Please don't do that. I'll do whatever you want me to do, Sir. Please!"

"What I want you to do, Mariah, is give full attention and respect to your betters, including Breeder-Girls like Aprille. If you put as much effort into improving your vocabulary as you do in developing your cunt muscles, maybe you will get to be a Pleasure Girl, instead of just Prime Class meat."

"Yes, Sir. I'll do better, Sir. I promise, Sir!"

"Right. Because if you don't, you're apt to be activated sooner than you'd hoped, and as an M1-D. Do you get the picture?"

"Yes, Sir." Color began to return to her pretty face as she realized she'd dodged the bullet.

"Sit!"

"Yes, Sir." She dropped into her seat and stared at the floor as her pulse slowed to normal.

"You may continue, Aprille," Tucker said.

"Thank you, Sir. Anyway, the laws vary from country to country, but most nations now participate in gynopophagy under the terms of the Shanghai Treaty and, with the exception of a few rogue states, it's all strictly controlled and regulated. For example, our institution, Musgrave, Inc, is a Class-A breeding facility turning out over ten thousand spitted roasters a year, about three thousand of them live, plus well over five hundred thousand pounds of butchered meat. Musgrave is also authorized to buy females of any age from birth onward. As you may know, President-for-life Bormann recently signed an international agreement making it illegal for any female who has been sold or bred for meat to be freed. We may only be sold to other authorized facilities. That came about because of situations where girls were sold to individuals, and even married, as a way for them to avoid activation. That, of course, was causing losses among the meat producers. The same agreement, however, has also made it possible for both meat and brood girls to work outside their home facility, but we must always be on call for sale or activation. And that's my report. Thank you."

Aprille cut her eyes to her teacher for approbation. Tucker smiled.

"Very nice, Aprille. That was a fine job of encapsulating the history of gynopophagy and more recent developments. You may be seated now."

"Thank you, Sir."

Her attempt at nonchalance as she walked back to her seat didn't quite hide the glow of pride in her teacher's praise. Tucker glanced around at the rest of the class. He knew that fewer than a quarter of the M1's here would live to celebrate their eighteenth birthday. Roasters reached their peak sale price at seventeen, the minimum legal age. M1's who proved to be good money-makers as Pleasure Girls could remain in the inventory as long as the computers showed that the potential of their work income outweighed their one-time sales value as meat. The instant it went the other way, they were activated and processed as roasters or packaged cuts. It was a business like any other. What mattered was the bottom line.

Many M1-P's developed a large clientele of regular customers enamored of their particular charms and talents. A girl could begin to think she had escaped the specter of the roasting pits indefinitely. That, of course, was self-deception. Sooner or later their clients would drift away to fresher, younger models and their income would begin to sag. The computers knew just when to switch a girl's career from fucking to feeding. There was always a bountiful crop of younger M1's, plus almost as many purchased from parents, guardians, husbands, orphanages, prisons and other institutions, from which to draw replacements.

The brood-girls were also available for pleasure work, although on a much more limited and supervised basis. The lovely Aprille was one of these. Tucker kept glancing at her during the tedious balance of the class, constantly amazed at how radiant she looked when her shaky self-confidence was shored up by approbation from an authority figure. How could such a stunning girl have such low self-esteem? Her bright golden hair, clear blue eyes and exquisitely contoured figure made her the perfect breeder. Her sharp intelligence and coy nature made her irresistible to her certified stud customers, and to certified faculty members such as himself. Damn President-for-life Bormann and his anti-marriage rules for meat-raised females! Tucker would sweep her up and carry her home, if he could. He was fairly sure she'd like it, too, although neither one of them could discuss such a thing. Nevertheless, when they copulated she was wonderfully passionate, frenzied, almost brutal at times, tender at other times, caressing him all over with her fingers and tongue, kissing him everywhere. He hungered for her, but would have to make do with the opportunities allotted to him by Musgrave as an authorized breeding stud.

He had been ordered to assign her as escort to an important guest this afternoon. When the red lights came on indicating the end of the class hour, he beckoned her to his desk. This, of course, made her instantly nervous again because it could mean anything from a rollicking sex session to an appointment to be prepped for roasting. Tucker tried to relieve her anxiety by smiling at her as she approached, but it didn't ease her mind any. Was it a pleased smile or a crocodile smile?

"Yes, Sir?" she whispered, pretending confidence, her heart thumping.

"Aprille, that was an excellent report, and well delivered. You covered a lot of ground in a short time and gave a respectful accounting of the role of our two beloved presidents-for-life. You also kept your cool in the face of some rather impertinent M1's who are in need of, and will receive, greater discipline.

She unleashed her brilliant smile. "Thank you, Sir."

"What is your current grade status, Aprille?" As if he didn't know.

"B1, Sir."

"Which means?"

"I have been classified as a Prime Grade Breeder. I will be expected to produce at least one baby every eighteen months, and at least fifty percent of them must be prime grade."

"And I have every confidence you will, Aprille.

"But I've been in the breeding program for three months now, and I'm still not pregnant."

"How often have you been inseminated?"

"Almost every day."

Tucker felt an irrational surge of jealousy storm through him, but he didn't let it show. This was standard procedure for brood-girls. Drown them in semen until they conceive. There were plenty of approved studs willing to pay the fee.

"Don't worry about it. First pregnancies often take a little longer. If need be they'll use drugs. You're far too beautiful to waste as meat. They want a couple dozen more little Aprilles, just like you. Right now, though, I have a special assignment for you.

"Yes, Sir?" She brightened up.

"Musgrave Industries is interested in expanding its European presence and has been wooing an Austrian meat-packing company for a friendly takeover. This is a company that has only handled beef and pork products up to now. But it has connections with extensive cattle operations that can easily be converted to breeding girls. This purchase will give us a toehold in the Austrian, German, Hungarian and Czech markets. They seem to be agreeable to the merger, so it's up to us to make sure they remain happy. They have sent some representatives to check us out and find out more about the business. The name of the gentleman you will escort is Richter. Werner Richter. You are to give him a tour of our facility and answer all his questions. He's been cleared by both the Medical and Genetics departments and has his Stud Certificate, so both the breeding stock and the meat stock are available to pleasure him, if he wishes. Including yourself, of course. Any questions?"

"When and where will I meet him, Sir?"

"This afternoon at 1:00 o'clock, right after lunch. You will meet him at the Hospitality Desk. This is an important assignment, Aprille. You are expected to make him very happy with what he sees, and to make sure his experiences here are memorable and pleasant. Whatever he wants, he gets. Within reason. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Sir. I will do my very best!"

"I know you will, Aprille. Normally we would assign one of the Pleasure Girls to this duty, but this particular gentleman requires far more than mere sexual gratification. Management has tasked me with the responsibility of finding a girl who can also answer his questions intelligently. You were my first choice. He's also a virile young man and has been fully processed as a Stud, so he's clean and can only beget female children. As I said, he will probably want to have sex with you, and you, of course, will oblige."

"Of course, Sir. I will not disappoint you."

"I know you won't." Tucker was painfully sure she wouldn't. How grotesquely old fashioned of him to feel so possessive of this remarkable girl, so jealous, like some dick-driven adolescent swept away by her beauty and the brilliant glow of her personality. He wanted to sneak her off to a place where she would be his alone, forever. But he knew that could never be. He could only smile at her and pat her small hand. Feel its silky skin. Send her off to the arms of another. Many, many others.

"Thank you, Sir!" she said through her iridescent smile. Breaking his heart.

Chapter 2

Werner Richter turned out to be a highly attractive man. To Aprille he looked to be somewhere in his mid thirties. Studs had to be good looking as well as healthy, of course, but since the aim was to produce beautiful girls, most had rather feminine builds and features. Richter had a curly mop of almost-but-not-quite-blond hair. His sharp blue eyes were much like her own. His wide build and squarish face gave him a strong look. He was not terribly tall, only five or six inches taller than she, but he certainly appeared fit and trim. She hoped he would exercise his stud privileges so she could see what was under his all-black attire, even though any girl resulting from his sperm would probably only make Grade 2. His features were far too masculine. But she was a healthy female and her sex centers began to tingle just thinking about him (with generous help, no doubt, from the O-drugs she'd been getting since becoming an active brooder). She snapped her man-killing smile in place.

"Guten Morgen, Herr Richter. Du heisst Werner Richter, n'est-ce pas?"

The man's eyebrows shot up and he stared back at her, as if uncertain of how to answer. Suddenly she realized why and clapped a hand to her mouth in embarrassment. The anguished look on her face made him burst into laughter.

"I'm so sorry," she blurted. "That was . . . that was . . ."

"That was charming!" he said. "I've never before been addressed in two mangled languages at once. I appreciate the courtesy, but I think we'd better stick with English."

"Yes, Sir. I'm really sorry. I've been studying German but I've never used it and I keep mixing it up with French. Will you forgive me, Sir?"

"Forgive you?" He laughed again. "I can hardly wait to hear what you'll say next. Are you Aprille?"

"Yes, Sir. I'm to escort you on a tour of the facilities. I really can do better than that, Sir. I'm just a little nervous. I hope you'll give me another chance, Sir. You're my first tour guide assignment and I'd really like to do it right. They'll pull me off it if I don't."

His mirth subsided to a crooked grin. "And I'd really enjoy having you do it. I'll make sure they don't pull you off it. I think I'm going to enjoy having you do a lot of things. You're a truly lovely young woman. Breeding stock, they tell me."

"Yes, Sir, but I haven't had any babies yet."

"You want one?"

"Oh yes, Sir. They won't keep me as a brood-girl unless I start producing soon."

"Uh huh. Well, maybe I can help you out in that department a little later on."

He wanted her! That made her breathe easier. If she got kicked off this job, it could have disastrous consequences. But she had been with enough men at this point to recognize the look in his eyes, in the way he was appraising her figure, wondering what she looked like naked. If she didn't make any more stupid slips, he might want to fuck her two or three times before the day was over. She licked her lips.

"How would you like me to address you, Sir? As Herr Richter?"

"Hell no. Call me Werner."

She swallowed. "Are you sure, Sir? I've never been allowed to call a man by his first name before. I don't know if I can do it."

He smiled a little more broadly and asked softly, "Have you been trained to obey all men?"

"Oh yes, Sir! Yes!"

His voice had been gentle, but the words were ominous. Her own words gushed out in a torrent.

"I'll do whatever you say, Sir. Whatever you want. I'll call you Werner, Sir. Please forgive me for asking, Sir."

"You're a little nervous, you say."

"Yes, Sir. Sir, I'm very nervous!"

He laughed again. "Well don't be. I think you're an absolute delight. I want you to calm down, take a deep breath and give me another one of those smiles."

She tried, but she had lost some of her original confidence.

"Not quite as radiant as the first one," he said, "but an endearing smile nevertheless. Put your hands in mine."

He held his hands out, palms up. Hesitating only a moment, she laid her small hands in his much larger ones and looked up at him, puzzled. Did he want to take her now? Should she offer to lead him to a pleasure room? She decided to wait and see what he did next. What he did was look down into her eyes for several long minutes as he gently squeezed her hands. She felt sexual tension growing in her loins. Far from becoming calmer, she was growing more horny by the second. Could he read it in her eyes?

Finally he spoke. "You and I are going to have a terrific day together, little Aprille. You're going to show me all you know about this facility from your point of view as part of the stock. You will include, as part of that education, a personal demonstration of how the breeding stock is inseminated. A role-playing demonstration. Does that fit in with your expectations of today's tour?"

"Yes, Sir," she answered with obvious relief. "Very much so. Would you like to start with the demonstration?"

He smiled. "Highly tempting. But let's begin where you had originally planned to begin. I'd like a chance to explore your mind a little before I explore your body."

She beamed back at him. "I'd like that too, Sir. Just let me know when you're ready." She squeezed his hands, hoping he'd change his mind. She was ready to get laid right there on the Hospitality Desk. "Why don't we start by taking a look at the quarters where the various grades of stock live?"

"Fine."

She kept her left hand in his and drew him out of the main lobby and into a glassed-in walkway that led to an adjacent building. Inside was a long corridor lined with doorways. She stopped at one of them and led him through it. They were looking into a room just large enough for two double-bunk beds, a huge four-drawer bureau and a walk-in closet packed with clothes. There was no one there.

"This is my room," she said. "The B1's have the best accommodations. Only four to a room. This whole corridor is for B1's."

"What's a B1?"

"You don't know the grading system?"

"I've never been to a breeding facility before. I've eaten the final product, of course, but I've never seen how the stock is raised, handled or prepared for market. That's why I'm here. You'll have to explain everything as we go along. Except, maybe, the breeding part."

"If you've never been to a breeding facility, I think you'll have a few surprises there, too," she said with a giggle. Anyway, B stands for Breeder or Brood-girl. Brood-girls are expected to produce at least one baby girl every eighteen months. They begin breeding us at age seventeen and continue until our productivity tapers off. I turned seventeen three months ago and had my first stud on my birthday."

"They don't waste time, here. Do they use artificial insemination?"

"No. They charge the studs for servicing us, so they make some money off us in the process of breeding us. Oh they won't charge you , of course. You're a special guest."

"I'm honored."

"You should be. We don't come cheap. Anyway . . ." Her eyes widened and she grabbed his nearest arm with both hands. "I'm sorry, Sir! That was disrespectful of me. Please forgive me. I shouldn't say such things. I know better, I really do."

He put his other hand behind her head and pulled her to him, kissing her and sliding his tongue into her mouth. He broke it off with kisses to both corners of her lips. "You're cheeky and I love it. Be yourself. I'm not one of your masters here. I won't punish you or complain. If you get to be a pain in the ass, I'll ask for a second girl to go with us and stuff a sock in your mouth. But for God's sake, stop apologizing! Okay?"

"Okay, Sir," she said weakly, still reliving the kiss.

"And stop calling me Sir."

"We're trained to call all men . . ."

"Yeah, yeah. You're obedient. That's nice. Well, now you have new orders to obey. You will from now on call me, personally, Werner."

"Okay, S . . . Okay, Werner. I'll try."

"So what happens when your productivity tapers off, as you put it?"

"First we're put on probation, to see if it picks up again. They add a 'T' to our classification. I'd be a B1-T."

"And if it doesn't pick up?"

"We're reclassified as M's, Sir. Oh! Sorry about the 'Sir,' Sir."

He sighed. "What are M's?"

"Meat. Most of the girls here are M's."

"How long do most brood-girls go before . . . tapering off?"

"Late thirties. Sometimes our mid forties."

"Then you're reclassified as M. Then what?"

"We're activated."

"Activated?"

"Processed as meat."

"So whether you're B or M, in the end you still wind up as meat."

"Yes. That's why we were bred. That's what we are."

"No using freedom as a reward for top producers?"

"No! That's illegal. If you're bred as meat, you die as meat."

"But Musgrave also buys females at auctions, females not bred on farms. Do any of them become breeders?"

"Some, if they're young and pretty enough and genetically suitable. But it's the same thing. Once a female is sold as meat, the law prohibits returning her to freedom. She must be processed as meat, just as if she were bred for it."

"Okay. Now tell me what the 'one' stands for in B1."

"It means Prime. There are three grades of meat. One is Prime, two is Standard and three is Economy. Only girls who make Prime grade are selected for breeding, like me."

"So there are no B2's or B3's?"

"Oh yes. As we get older and have lots of babies, often we lose our figure, or our tits get too heavy and sag too much, or we just start looking too old. As long as we keep turning out good product they'll keep breeding us, but our meat grade is lowered as our appearance degrades."

"So it's all a matter of looks?"

"Absolutely! Prime grade girls, like me, are considered suitably attractive for live spit-roasting and command the highest prices. Standard grade girls are considered suitable for spit-roasting after slaughter. The Economy females are slated for either oven or chuck grade meat. They don't have to be beautiful because no one ever sees them on a spit. They just have to taste good."

"And how does anyone know how good they taste until they're cooked?"

"We're bred for flavor and tenderness as well as beauty. That's why they use only the top grade girls to breed."

"But not all babies turn out to be Grade One, of course."

"That's right, Sir. I mean Werner. Sorry, Sir." She looked stricken and bit her lip.

He laughed and kissed her forehead.

"It's awfully hard to go against my training, S... Werner. But I'm trying."

"Yes you are. Getting back to your lecture: is there a quota in terms of the quality of your babies?"

"Yes, Sir. Sort of. The Breeding Commission reviews every Breeder's production periodically — they don't tell us when — and if the quality or quantity of our offspring isn't profitable, we're put on probation."

"And then? If things don't improve for you?"

"They convert us to M."

"So a B2 becomes an M2?"

"That's right."

"And a B1, like yourself, becomes an M1?"

"If I'm still young and beautiful at the time."

"Do you have to be young, or will just beautiful do?"

She laughed — a bright, trilling sound. "Beautiful is all that counts on a spit. I plan to work hard to keep myself Prime until I'm activated."

"Which would mean live spitting?"

"I hope."

"You hope? Doesn't 'live spitting' mean you'll be put on a spit and roasted alive?"

"Well, yes. But I'm looking forward to it."

"Looking forward to being cooked alive over a fire???"

"I know. It sounds improbable. But you'll see. I've been a server at many live roastings and the girls die happy in spite of the pain. It's much better than just being slaughtered. You'll see."

Werner shook his head in wonderment. "So where is everybody? Where are all these gorgeous B's?"

"Lot's of places. Most live in the birthing facility we'll see later. Some are off-campus working at regular jobs. Others are in training, in classes, taking special courses, doing activities, getting natal checks, all kinds of things."

"Getting laid?"

"Especially that. Why? You want to dally here for a while?" She ran a hand over the front of his pants and felt a quickening beneath the fabric.

He lifted her hand away and put it to his lips, kissing her fingers. "We'll dally later. Let's see where you Breeders live."

She kept her hand in his as she pulled him back out into the corridor, excited now by his teasing delay of their union, more curious than ever about his equipment. She led him through another glass-enclosed walkway into another large building and another long corridor lined with doorways. She picked one at random. The room was the same size as Aprille's but more crowded. The two bunks were triples and the bureau was divided into six drawers. A pretty dark-haired girl was lying on her back in one of the middle level beds; she turned her head to see who had entered and absently massaged her swollen belly.

Aprille called out to her cheerily. "Hi, Miranda. This is Herr Richter. He's a guest of the Company here to look over the facilities and how the operation is run. Miranda is a B2-T, Herr Richter."

"Good morning, Sir," the girl said politely. "Please forgive me for not getting up. I was ordered to stay in bed today. I had some bleeding."

"Good morning, Miranda," Werner replied, silently assessing her quality as a Breeder. She was pretty, but more sturdily built than slender Aprille. She was a girl most men would feel fortunate to bed or wed, although she was not quite up to Aprille's level of perfection. She had rounder curves, however, and would provide a slightly more generous supply of meat, when the time came.

"As you can see," Aprille plowed on, "the quarters for B2 breeders is not quite as good, but still a lot better than the B3's get." She went over to the girl. "Do you have your alert button on, Miranda?" The girl raised her left arm to display a green bracelet with a red button on the top. "Good. Don't take any chances, now. If you start feeling cramps or pains or anything seems to be wrong, call for help. You promise?"

The girl nodded, her eyes closed. Aprille kissed her forehead, drew a blanket over her and pulled Werner quietly out of the room.

"Miranda's had a tough time with her last five deliveries. The last two babies had defects and were snuffed before their first birthday. That's why she's a 'T' — on probation. If anything more goes wrong this time, she'll be converted to M. If that happens she'll almost certainly be activated immediately. Too bad. She's a sweet girl. Come!"

As they took a circuitous route through the building, Werner took the opportunity to ask about the bracelet. "That emergency button she's wearing calls in medical help?"

"Yes. If she were further along she'd be in the birthing facility, but she's only in her seventh month. She works as a housekeeper for this building, so she lives here. They don't want her walking around a lot."

"Why don't they have her work at the birthing facility, then?"

"There are tons of women living there who take care of everything that needs to be done. Because of her past failures, Miranda is low priority and can't get a permanent bed there."

"Will they give her a C-section if they have to?"

"Oh no. We have to deliver normally here with a minimum of fuss. If we can't do that, we have no business being B's. They save the baby, if they can, but downgrade the mother to meat. If we die in childbirth, they butcher our carcass and that's that. They certainly don't want to pass on flawed breeding genetics to another generation. It's not like we're freewomen. Medically assisted birthing is much too expensive for a livestock breeding facility like Musgrave."

"I can appreciate that. I notice that you and all the girls here wear silver bracelets on the right wrist. What's that about?"

She held her right arm up to display it. "It's for I.D. and locating. You can't see it, but there's a bar code that identifies me when I want to enter a restricted area or leave the campus. It also identifies my personal belongings. Plus, it contains a GPS locator so Musgrave Security always knows where I am, especially when I'm off campus."

"Discourages runaways."

"Yes, and abductions. We're all vulnerable to rustlers off-campus. They grab us, rape us, kill us and sell the meat on the black market."

"It's a gruesome thought, but wouldn't rustlers just cut off your hand and remove the bracelet before carrying you off?"

"There's another GPS locator hidden inside our body. No one can leave the campus until it's been implanted."

"An operation?"

"They use an injector. A big one! But it numbs the surrounding tissue as it goes in so we don't feel anything. And it makes just a little teeny puncture hole that heals over and disappears."

"When do they do that?"

"When we're fifteen. That's when the P-girls get trained. But they can't start work on the outside until they've reached the legal age of consent outside, sixteen." "I understand they get sterilized, too."

"That happens as soon as they're classified as M. It's laser surgery. Only leaves a dot sized scar which they cover with a tattoo. The girl gets to choose her own design. They do the little diamond tattoo on the forehead at the same time. It's a big deal for the girls. A rite of passage, sort of."

"But you have the diamond tattoo, as well."

"Yup. Can't go off campus without one. And we're not allowed to cover it up. That earns us a quick D."

"So everyone will know who and what you are when you're outside."

"Exactly. Works, too. We get quite a range of reactions when people spot that diamond. From leers to snubs. Men think of us as meat and whores. Women just tag us as whores."

They arrived at yet another long corridor and another doorway. This room was even more crowded than the last with eight beds stacked in two multi-tier bunks and eight small drawers packed into a bureau the same size as Aprille's four-drawer version. A teenage girl was playing checkers with a woman who appeared to be in her forties. The woman was wearing jeans and a tank top that accented the dumpiness of her figure. The girl was attractive, but she wore no makeup and looked bleached out. She was stark naked. Both were obviously pregnant, the girl more so than the woman. Aside from an initial quick glance, both seemed oblivious to their visitors.

Aprille introduced them to Werner as Janet and Brooke. "This dorm this is for the Breeders who've been reclassified as B3. Kinda tight, but still considerably better than M's get. Janet here is seventeen and this is her first baby. She's a B1 and just visiting. Brooke is . . . what are you, Brooke, forty-four?" The woman nodded without taking her gaze off the board. "This will be, what? your twenty-third child. Right?"

"Twenty-fourth," the woman mumbled.

"She's a B3 and hoping for at least one or two more babies before her plumbing gives out."

"Then what?" Werner asked.

"Then I'm fuckin' chuck meat, is what I am!" the woman snapped at him, and went back to studying her checkers.

Aprille gently pushed Werner out of the room and down the hallway. "Please don't report her for that," she said. "She's desperately afraid they'll activate her as soon as this one is born. It's terribly humiliating to be snuffed for chuck."

"What do you mean? What's this 'chuck' thing?"

"It's the lowest grade of meat. There's Prime, Standard, Oven and Chuck. Prime gets live spit-roasted; Standard is slaughtered and spit-roasted; Oven is slaughtered and butchered for steaks and fillets and other cuts; Chuck is for ground meat, soups, that sort of thing."

"But dead is dead. What do you care what happens to your carcass?"

"Do you care what happens to yours? Do free people care whether they're buried in dignity or left out on the street to rot?"

"Maybe I'll stuff a sock in your mouth anyway."

"I'm sorry, Sir. Please forgive . . ."

"Or maybe I'll stuff my dick in it while I lick your pussy."

Her eyes lit up.

He touched her cheek affectionately. "If you're going to be meat, you prefer to be stylish meat. Is that it?"

"You got it."

"By the way, I haven't seen any bathrooms attached to your living quarters."

"They aren't attached. Each corridor has a communal toilet and dressing area. I'll show you."

She led him to the center of the corridor and an arched doorway quite different from the others. She ushered him in. It was a huge room. Two walls were lined with sinks and open toilets, no enclosures. Half a dozen young women were on the toilets and unperturbed at his entrance. The other two walls featured open showers, the tiled floors pitched to drain the water. Three girls were lathering up, equally undisturbed by the presence of a male observer.

"If you need to go," she said airily, "go ahead and use any of the toilets." When he didn't move or say anything, she realized he might be a bit put off. "I realize in the outside free world males and females don't get naked and take care of bodily functions in front of each other," she said, "but here we do. There are no separate toilet facilities. If you want to empty your bowels or your bladder or take a shower, you have to do it in the open, just like this. Are you bashful about that, Herr Richter?" She gave him a coy look.

He grinned back at her and winked.

She showed him an adjacent room, longer but not as wide, both sides filled end to end with mirrors and dressing tables. Nude girls sat and worked on their makeup and hair.

"Okay," Werner said. "I've seen the high class suites. Now show me where the meat lives. The M's."

"You'll find it's rather different," she told him as she walked briskly beside him, holding his arm and steering him through a web of hallways and another closed-in walkway to a long, tall, rectangular mammoth of a building with absolutely no architectural distinction. It was solid concrete with five stories of barred windows. "We call this The Barn. It's one of six dorms for M class girls. The others have informal names, too, but they're officially known as Dwelling Units Five through Ten. This one is Unit Five. Units One through Four are for Breeders. Mine is Unit Two."

An electronically controlled door snickered open and admitted them to a vast space that encompassed nearly all of the building. The center of the building was a concourse dividing two walls of balconies stacked five floors high and faced with wire cage. If someone wanted to jump to her death, she couldn't do it here, Werner noted. Stairways wound from floor to floor at four points along each side. Aprille escorted him up the first one on the right.

To Werner's surprise, there were no rooms. Only bunks, bureaus and closets. The bunks, stacked five high, were perpendicular to the outside wall. Small tables with chairs were set up along the wire mesh wall overlooking the concourse, leaving an aisle about six feet wide as a walkway between the tables and the foot of the bunks. In the space between the bunks was a six-drawer bureau, two drawers across and three deep, with doorways on both sides leading to a walk-in closet that ran behind the bureau and the head of the bunks. Over the bureau and above the top of the closet was one of the barred windows he had seen from outside. Skylights over the center concourse poured added light into the building. Some of the tables and bunks were occupied by young women sleeping or reading, some wrapped snugly in their blankets, some propped up on pillows, others sprawled out nude.

"Where is everybody?" he asked his escort. "Where do they all go during the day?"

"Working, training, classes."

"Classes? What sort of classes?"

"Reading, English, languages, math, sex . . ."

"Sex classes I can understand, but why bother teaching girls all that other stuff when they're just going to be turned into meat?"

"Because clients and studs aren't willing to pay our prices for some dumbfuck. They want more than just a quick poke. Most of them expect a girl who can hold an intelligent conversation before and after the fucking."

"But how about the M2's and M3's? Why does Musgrave spend time and money teaching them things they'll never use?"

"As soon as the Classification Commission decides a girl is Grade 2 or 3, she's pulled out of all but the training classes for her work here on campus."

"When does that happen? At what age?"

"Depends on how fast a girl develops physically. Anywhere between eight and fourteen. They start giving us hormones to enhance breast development at age nine, so by the time a girl is twelve they can tell if she's going to have really good tits. Then it's just a matter of the face and the shape of the limbs."

"And what is that work here on campus? Where are they all?"

"Mostly tending to children. There's a lot of little girls! I've only taken you to the adult areas so far. By the time we're five years old, we're expected to help take care of all the kids younger than us."

"And the girls lounging around in here? Where do they work?"

"For the most part they're Pleasure Girls who work night shifts."

"So it's not just pretty B girls I can screw," he said, wrapping an arm around Aprille's shoulder, his hand landing lightly on her breast.

"Indeed, no. There are many thousands of M girls here who will be more than happy to relieve your tensions," she replied, patting his increasingly tense organ.

"There must be several thousand right here in this building alone," he said. "How many girls are kept in stock?"

"Including both B and M stock, I'm told about eighty thousand at any one time. Each of the dwelling units holds from seven to twelve thousand."

"I see a six drawer bureau serves for five girls. Who gets the sixth drawer?"

Aprille walked over to a bureau and pulled out the upper right drawer. "Like to see?"

"Aren't we invading some privacy here?"

"God, no!" she laughed. "Nothing here is private. The guards go through our drawers and closets and beds every day. And they can strip us at any time."

"Looking for what?"

"The usual. Drugs, smokes, candy, junk food. They're very strict here about keeping us on a healthy diet. They want us trim and our meat drug free, organically wholesome."

"Except for the tit hormones."

"The consumers never ask about that, and we don't tell."

Werner peeked into the drawer. It was subdivided into six compartments and each was packed with cosmetics and beauty aids. "Don't things get stolen?"

"The makeup and stuff? Naw. It's all free. What would be the point?"

"How about clothes, blankets, all that?"

"Clothing, shoes, blankets, pillows — all those things are impregnated with that bar code ID I told you about. If you get caught with someone else's stuff, you earn a D. No one wants that."

"D for discipline? What, you get a whipping?"

"You get immediate activation and a painful slaughter."

"Just for wearing someone else's top?"

"Without permission? You better believe it!"

"Wow. They don't mess around here. But what if some girl loans you a pair of shoes, say, and then claims she didn't?"

"You're fucked. Smart girls don't borrow stuff. Except the younger girls; it's a popular way of proving you trust somebody, or for getting into cliques."

"Which reminds me, with all the B girls having babies every eighteen months, the birthing facilities must be pretty busy. I'd like to see them," he said.

"Certainly. But do you need to release any tensions yet?"

He laughed. "You're a horny little bitch, aren't you?"

"Only with certain men. I have tensions, too, and it just so happens that you're my type."

"Oh? And what type is that?"

"You're strong. You're sure of yourself. You're incredibly good looking. You talk to me as though I had more intelligence than broccoli. You make me tingle all over. You're male. What can I say?"

"You said it all. I want to undress you and lay you down on one of those bunks right now. But I'm going to hold off until we see the birthing facility. I want to see what trouble my seed will get you into if it latches on to one of your eggs."

"It's quite a factory," she said. "But if that's the only way I can get your pants off, come along."

On the way he said, "I gather the M girls have been sterilized, or they'd be getting pregnant, too. At least the Pleasure Girls would."

"That's right. As soon as a girl is classified as M, she's sterilized. If they're Prime and over twelve, the next step is to be prepped for live roasting."

"Ah! You didn't mention that before. What does 'prepped for roasting' entail?"

"They insert a plastic tube in us from the womb to the throat. It's only a quarter of an inch in diameter and it's inserted through a tiny incision next to our navel. When it comes time to live-spit us, the spit is inserted into our vagina and punches through the uterus into the tube. The spit is about an inch and three-quarters in diameter, but the tube expands as it screws its way up through our body, guiding it safely and fairly painlessly through the various membranes and between the lungs and out our mouth."

"None of that hurts?"

Her laughter had the bell-like sweetness of a Christmas carillon. "Well, yes! But we're drunk on sex stimulants when they tube us and when they spit us. It's actually an incredibly erotic experience." She saw by his expression that he was still a bit shocked. "Really, Werner, they do what they can to make it a happy time for us. When you set up a factory in Austria, or wherever, just, please, make sure that you're as considerate of the meat there as they are here. None of us really wants to die, especially when we're only seventeen or eighteen. But since your girls have to die, at least make it as pleasant for them as possible."

They passed groups of girls scrubbing floors, washing windows, changing beds and doing a variety of housekeeping chores. Werner saw that many of them were just children.

"How soon do they put you to work here?" he asked. "Other than taking care of four-year-olds, I mean."

"That's it. About five years old. It's the principle method of keeping us out of trouble. We don't just take care of the little kids, we get put to work everywhere: the grounds, the kitchens, shipping and receiving, laundry, bathrooms — everything but guard duty and security."

"I notice that everyone is well behaved and the dorms are as quiet as tombs. How do they maintain that kind of discipline, aside from issuing D's?"

"We get rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad. Rewards include perks and clothes and stuff. Punishments range from loss of privileges to confinement in the cages, or the boxes. If that doesn't do it, they subject us to intense electrical torture. If even that fails, which is rare, we're snuffed."

"Even little kids?"

"You better believe it! The law allows for the termination of unruly livestock. They don't have a lot of patience around here. Either you shape up or get shipped out as meat."

"What are the cages and boxes?"

"You'll see. I'll show you some."

They reached a large building painted in colorful patterns of greens, yellows and purples. A vast playground area stretched out on three sides of it, enclosed with hurricane fencing and overrun with little girls running about having noisy fun.

"This is the birthing and infant care facility," she said. "This is a lot more chaotic than the dorms. But I love it! I spend as much time here as I can."

In fact, inside was bedlam. Babies, toddlers, nurses and young women with milk-engorged breasts were everywhere. State of the art acoustical sound reduction kept the noise level down to a pleasant roar.

"Are all the women here pregnant?" Werner asked.

"God, no! Half of them are just here to nurse the babies. Once you have the first child, they like to keep you nursing constantly. See, they're all wearing those support bras that hold them up without covering the nipples. I guess they figure it keeps our boobs attractive for the studs while letting us nurse unhampered."

"So you sometimes nurse other women's babies?"

"We always do. Most of us brooders spend our whole career in this facility. I know I'm hoping to. They don't let us keep our own babies. We share all the nursing babies on a rotating basis between deliveries."

"You don't keep your own child?"

"Absolutely not. No one is allowed to keep her own baby after the first nursing."

"Why not?"

"They don't want us to bond with it. So once it has ingested the initial post-natal enzymes from our milk and is able to digest any mother's milk, it goes into the rotation schedule."

"But why? That seems unreasonably cruel."

"Not at all. It's to protect the brooder from later psychological trauma. Many of our brooders are still producing babies in their mid forties. Imagine how it would affect you to see your own child put on a spit and roasted, or slaughtered for steaks."

"I guess you're right."

"They don't even give the kids actual names until after they leave this facility at eighteen months, only numbers that are tattooed on their arms. And the number is changed when they leave for the Toddler Dorm. A brooder never knows which of the grown meat girls are hers."

Werner thought about this as they walked past the glass walls separating them from rows of newborn infants in bassinets awaiting their next feeding, through rooms filled with young women nursing little girl babies who would one day be meat. His heart began to grow heavy and he decided he'd better leave this place before he was overcome with career damaging doubts.

"You said you'd show me the cages."

"Don't you want to see the delivery room, and the new babies being born?"

"No!" Why was he suddenly squeamish about that? Why did it bother him to be picturing Aprille giving birth to a little girl who would be snuffed and roasted seventeen years later for meat? So what? But he couldn't watch it.

"Show me the cages," he said.

"Okay." Aprille was puzzled. Why wouldn't he want to view the beautiful process of giving birth? But she knew her place and took his hand to lead him out of the building with its muffled background of infant cries and rows of babies sleeping in their little beds, crawling about on the padded floors or sucking happily at ample teats.

"Do you want to see the children's cages or the ones for the older girls?" Aprille asked.

"Older."

"Okay," she said. "We'll go to a dorm for the ten to sixteen year olds. Once we reach age seventeen, they don't bother with punishment. They just activate us for the next shipment."

They trudged to another dorm that was much like the earlier one. But instead of taking one of the stairways to an upper floor they went down into a subterranean level. A heavy door unlocked at the touch of Aprille's ID bracelet. She swung it open and preceded Werner into another hallway. This one ran the length of the building beneath the concourse above, but was lined with wire mesh doors only three feet square, each secured by an electronic lock. It was extremely dim, the only light coming from the open door behind them. The air was foul with the stench of urine and fecal matter, despite the roar of an unseen air-exchanger. Werner bent down and peered into one of the cages. A pair of dark eyes blinked back at him in obvious misery. It was a girl in her early teens, maybe thirteen or fourteen, naked and crammed into the three-foot cube. Her wrists were bound together with plastic cuffs and she was biting on a leather strap cinched tightly through her mouth and around her head, locked in place with a small padlock. Her eyes were teary and pleaded for release, but she made no sound or movement.

"How long do they have to stay in these cages like this?" Werner asked.

"Depends on what they did and how often they've been punished. Anywhere from a day to a week."

"Were you ever punished like this?"

"Oh yes. Three times. Once when I was six for throwing a tantrum; I don't remember what I was mad about, I just remember the cage. Once when I was thirteen for being where I wasn't supposed to be. Then once when I was fifteen, for sassing a guard."

"How long were you kept in the cage?"

"The first time, a day. The second time, three days. The third time five days, followed by electro-torture. That was the end of my rebellious streak. I never want to go through that again!"

"Why? What exactly do they do?"

"Well, to begin with, scrunched up in a little cage like that for days at a time, sitting on a wire screen over your own piss and shit is a horrible ordeal in itself. And you're looking at the light punishment cages. For repeat offenders they put us in those steel boxes further up the corridor. They're the same size, but the doors are solid. It's like being buried alive. Some girls go mental after a week in a closed box and have to be activated.

"For the torture part, they chain our ankles to the floor and our wrists to the side on slack chains. Then they wet our tits and cunt and tongue and several other sensitive places with a conductive gel and attach electrodes to them. Finally, they pull our arms out straight and strap liquid switches on them so that if we raise or drop them more than half and inch we get shocked. The pain is indescribable! After twenty minutes your arms are on fire but the pain of letting them drop is so extreme pain you keep holding them up anyway. I was sobbing and begging them to kill me long before they let me go. And they have worse. Sometimes they spreadeagle you on a tiny little table so that you have to hold up your legs as well as your arms and your head. It's not something you ever want to do twice!

"All I want now is to have sex and have babies and enjoy being alive as long as I can, then have a happy death on the spit. In the meantime, I'll do whatever they tell me to do whenever they tell me to do it, and smile."

"I guess it's really effective discipline."

"Try it sometime. You won't like it."

"I believe you. I also think it's time I followed through on my offer to help you get pregnant. Where can we go that's private?"

"Why? Are you shy? We can fuck anyplace. Nobody cares." She pressed up against him and licked his throat. "I've been ordered to make you happy and, as I've just told you, I always obey orders." She nibbled on his chin and rubbed her pelvis against him."

"I want a better venue than the reeking dungeon of a dormitory. Lets go back to your room."

She licked back and forth across his mouth. "Wherever you say. Come on."

Chapter 3

He held her hand as they strolled back to her dorm.

"So most B girls live their whole productive lives in the birthing building?" he asked, although his mind was really on the movement of her body under her clingy smock. "Delivering babies and nursing babies and taking care of babies?"

"And making babies. Don't forget that," she answered, although her mind was mostly occupied with the waves of tingling anticipation she always felt when sex was imminent.

"I presume they use standard genetic filters to make sure all your babies are female."

"That's right."

"Do they have a special room there for making the babies?" His grin was infectious. And sexy.

"They have rooms all over for that at Musgrave. Anywhere a brooder happens to be, if a certified stud wants to play, we play."

"Do you have to? Do you have a choice?"

"We don't have to. We're not sex slaves. But why wouldn't we? The studs are all great looking, sexy and healthy — like you — or they wouldn't be certified, and we want to get pregnant as often as possible so we don't get downgraded. And we're loaded for bear with O-drugs. Hot guy wants to get laid; horny girl wants to get knocked up. Works out pretty well."

"Are you B girls always horny?"

"When we're not preggers, yeah. The O drugs have quite an effect on female libido. It's a mild version of what we get when we're spitted."

"So you're on them right now?"

"God, yes! You have no idea how hard it is for me not to pull your pants down this second and plug you in!"

Werner's excitement was rising rapidly, and noticeably. Aprille kept glancing down at the evidence. He put his arm around her and drew her close so he could reach his hand around to cup her breast. He could hear her breath shuddering.

"Do they take you off the O when you get pregnant?"

"Unhappily, yes. They don't want the stuff getting into the fetus. I guess they don't want horny babies, at least not while they're still inside. Also, they prefer we put a damper on our sex lives as we get closer to delivery. Each fetus represents a certain investment for the Musgrave Corporation and they don't want us to bang them up, so to speak. But most studs prefer the oversexed svelte girls anyway, so there's not a lot of temptation we have to fight off. Just periods of frustration."

They had reached the doorway to her dorm room. Werner reached out to close it.

"Hey, there's no door here!" he said.

"Just noticed, did you?" she laughed. "We're not allowed to have doors at Musgrave. The guards and management want unlimited access to every girl at all times. That's another reason the cages and boxes are so horrible; we're not used to being closed in. The girls who work off campus, the Pleasure Girls, often find it scary to be shut up in a room. Me, too. I've had dates take me to hotel rooms, shut the door, close the drapes and turn out the lights. I get kind of panicky. It's too much like that box. Spoils the whole date for me."

"Then by all means, lets leave the lights on and revel in openness! By the way, who's this?" He inclined his head toward a girl on one of the lower bunks. She was stretched out on her stomach, naked, reading a book. She paid them no attention.

"That's River. My favorite roomie." When he raised his eyebrows in a silent question, she added brightly, "Why? Would you like her to join in?"

"Well, no. I mean, that's not what I was thinking. I was just wondering . . ."

He paused. Aprille assumed he wanted more info.

"She's seventeen, like me, and not pregnant yet. She's been trying for eleven months, almost twelve. We make a nice contrast, don't you think? She's got long, straight black hair; mine's blond, curly and not as long. She's tall and slim with pretty apple breasts; I'm kinda short and curvy with a big front porch. My eyes are blue and hers are almost black. Wanna add her to the mix?"

Werner wasn't sure she was serious but it added to his excitement. Aprille alone would be more than enough female to ring his bells, but the other girl was a beauty, too, and Aprille seemed genuinely interested in a threesome. He probed a little, just to make sure she really wanted that, although why he was concerned about her feelings when the company that owned her had already given him permission to use her was more than he could understand.

"Which would you prefer? That we fuck as a duet or add River for a trio?"

Aprille burst into delighted laughter! "I believe you're the first man who's ever asked what I would prefer. Frankly, Herr Werner Richter, I don't care whether it's just you and me or whether it's you and me and the whole damn dorm, as long as you fuck me until my head explodes! The question is, would you like an extra cunt and pair of tits to play with while you screw me? I'm sure River would love to join us. Isn't that right, River?"

The girl rolled on her side and looked directly at Werner, who was instantly taken by the astonishing perfection of her nubile figure and the exotic loveliness of her face, half shrouded by a lustrous curtain of raven hair . Like Aprille she was exquisitely beautiful, yet — as Aprille had noted — sharply different in every detail. When she spoke, her voice was dark silk.

"I want to be more than an extra set of girl parts. I want a share of him. Are you willing to share his seed with me, Aprille?."

"Of course. But I want his first load. And I want it soon!"

"No deal," the girl said. "The first load is the biggest and I need it more than you do. You can take him to the edge, if you want, but then we switch. Please, Aprille. You know my situation."

Aprille sighed and slumped a little. "Okay. You're right. I won't be greedy. Your deadline is getting kinda close." She looked up at the randy Austrian. "Can you warn us when you're about to come?"

"Sure."

"Let's do it that way, then." Aprille began to unbuckle Werner's belt.

River turned her book over and laid it open on the pillow, then, moving slowly and erotically, swung elegant legs to the floor. "And what about you, Mr. Herr Werner Richter? Can you handle two of us at once? Will you be able to come twice?"

As she rose to her feet and stretched to her full height, the tawny glow of her skin and the perfection of her figure took his breath away. No wonder she had been classified as a B1! If her offspring were half as gorgeous as she, Musgrave Inc would make a pile of money.

"I'll keep at it until I do," he said, surprised at how his excitement had hoarsened his voice. Aprille was unzipping him and sliding a small hand into the opening to tease the part of him straining against the cloth of his shorts. River slipped behind him, wrapping lithe arms around his chest to unbutton his shirt and peel it away. She pulled him backwards on to the lower bunk opposite the one she had just abandoned, placing her hands on his bare chest and pushing him downward. As Aprille pulled off his shoes and socks and tugged at his pants, River threw a long leg over his groin and straddled him, leaning forward to press her hard little nipples into his chest. She slid up his body, her satin skin grazing the blond hair on his chest, until one of those glorious nipples was poking at his lips. He drew it in and sucked at it gently, then fiercely, drawing the whole firm breast into his mouth. He felt the muscle of his manhood spring free as his pants slipped down his legs. Then something warm and wet enveloped it, tickled the end of it. A soft tongue was licking at it, stealthy lips stroking it gently, up and down.

"O my God!" Tension rippled through his body. "This is too much! I'm coming already!"

In a single smooth motion, River immediately pushed herself down his body, raised her hips and impaled herself on his erection, slippery with pre-cum and Aprille's saliva. His mouth, deprived of River's sweet breast, was quickly covered by hers, their lips and tongues engaging in a wet, passionate dual. He cried out as he humped and spurted inside her, her strong vaginal muscles milking him of his jizm. River kept a tight clamp on his withering member as his spasms subsided, coveting every sperm. When she finally rolled gently off his body and he slipped out of her, she covered the entrance of her sex with her fingers, sealing in his seed while she stole away to the bureau for a vaginal plug.

But it was only the beginning for Werner. River's warm body had barely departed when his cooling skin was wetted with Aprille's kisses. She kissed and licked her way up his relaxing body, nestling into his arms, letting his hand find its way to her substantial bosom, sighing as he kneaded them. She kissed him from ear to ear, from nose to Adam's apple. She brushed his face with her golden hair and squirmed erotically in his embrace. Her loins were ablaze with unfulfilled desire and she forced a knee between his legs to rub her itching pussy against his thigh. Not five minutes had elapsed before his sexual fires rekindled and that shaft she longed to possess within her began its resurrection to new life.

River returned to aid in her roommate's quest for an orgasmic fix and her share of the Austrian's semen. She and Aprille had effectively traded places, the blonde girl laving his face and upper body with licks and kisses, the raven-haired girl now sucking her own juices off his rebounding manhood. Aprille climbed to her hands and knees and crawled over him, brushing her nipples past his lips. He reached up and seized her breasts in both hands, biting gently and sucking hard on each one alternately as River, working the other end, sucked and massaged his cock and ball set. When he was rock hard again and beginning to groan and tremble, River winked a signal to Aprille who adeptly rolled to his side and pulled him on top of her. In an instant he had plunged into her and was hammering furiously. Her eyes rolled up in ecstacy as she hammered back, kicking him with her heels as though to urge a steed to a gallop, clawing at his back as she wailed in the throes of an intense orgasm, then another, and another. When he finally went into the spasms that accompanied a hot burst of spunk into her womb, she clung to him with the strength of a madwoman, mewling in frenzied rapture! He was astonished at her strength, engulfed by her trembling passion, overwhelmed by her beauty! A wonderful dread came over him. He had fallen in love with this woman. It was impossible! He could not allow it! Yet he could not deny it.

She was still holding him tightly ten minutes later as he gently pried himself loose, withdrawing reluctantly from her warm sheath, feeling her vaginal muscles constricting on his softened member, trying to hold it in. Her eyes opened and immediately glazed over with tears. He kissed them dry, licking at the residue.

"What's the matter, Aprille?"

"I don't want it to stop. I don't want you to go away."

"I'm too tired to do it again, just now, little one."

"I don't mean that. I mean . . ." She stopped and exhaled. A sigh filled with sadness. "I'm sorry. It's not my place. Thank you for . . . for being so sweet. It was wonderful!"

He wanted to ask her what she did mean. What wasn't her place? But he knew. He was male and free. She was female and meat. There was no way to change things. He kissed her again. That was allowed. It was physical. The other things — emotions, feelings, love — could only lead to disaster.

He stood up and began to dress.

As River had done before her, Aprille snugged three fingers over the opening of her love sheath until she could reach the bureau and find a restraining plug to block it up lest a single sperm from the millions of freshly injected contenders escape its duty to assault and conquer her latest egg. River, still naked, watched languidly from her bed.

"So Aprille," she said in her crushed velvet voice, "where did you find this one with the cute accent? He's not your run-of-the-mill stud. He's something else! More important, when you're finished with him, can I have him?"

The words were addressed to her roommate, but her eyes aimed them at Werner. He smiled back at her, acknowledging the compliment. But he was thinking about Aprille and the sinuous way her arms and body moved, the way her hair shifted as she turned her head, the way her shapely thighs and calves tapered to delicate ankles and feet — an erotic symphony of feminine grace.

"He's a guest of the company," Aprille told her, but her eyes were thoroughly engaged with the man whose seed was even now beginning its long hopeful journey of conquest and life. "I'm his guide for today. And tomorrow, I hope."

"Certainly tomorrow!" he said. "I'll insist on it."

"You guys look so great together," River said. "Any chance I could tag along? I won't get in your way, I promise. I'll be quiet as a clam, and any time you want to screw all by yourselves, I'll just watch."

Aprille went over and kissed her. "Of course you can come along, sweetie. If it's all right with Wern . . . with Herr Richter."

"Herr Richter would be delighted to have two lovely escorts." Perhaps, he told himself, the added female would enable him to think more objectively about Aprille. Keep his priorities in order. Perhaps if he fucked them both, Aprille wouldn't shine so brightly in his heart. Perhaps. But he knew he was deceiving himself.

"It's noon. Maybe Mr. Richter would like lunch," River suggested. "Find out how tasty we are in the hands of a good chef."

"Then afterward we can tour the training and activity areas," Aprille added. "He's seen where we begin and where we live. We can show him how they keep us good looking and flavorful. Tomorrow we can do production and he'll see how we end up in grocery stores and banquets."

"But that leaves tonight," River said, shrugging into a form fitting black and gold dress that left her shoulders and most of her legs exposed. "Whatever can we do to keep him interested tonight?"

Both girls giggled and each took one of his arms as they led him to the main dining hall.

"There are several places to eat on campus," Aprille explained along the way. "We're going to the largest one so you'll get to see a lot of the girls. But each dorm has its own smaller kitchen and dining room attended by girls who live there. The brooders who live in the birthing house eat almost all their meals there because when we're nursing we have to have very particular diets."

"And once we start nursing," River said, "it's pretty much non-stop."

"If you're always there, how do you get pregnant again?" Werner asked. "What kind of sex life can you have?"

"A lot!" both girls answered in unison.

Aprille picked up from there, her voice sparkling with residual laughter. "The studs are perfectly happy to come there for a quick fuck. They get a discount. If they take a girl off campus, it costs a lot extra. Plus the cost of the motel and dinner or whatever."

"The Brooders make sure they're happy," River said. "It's actually a very nice atmosphere there at the nursery. There are a lot of regulars who come often to see their favorite girls, so the brooders are relaxed and feeling good. They're also back on the O-drugs and horny as hell. The studs get their money's worth."

The trio arrived at the Great Dining Hall. To Werner it looked very much like the food court at a huge shopping mall: a vast area under a glass dome and filled with a multitude of small round tables interspersed with islands of flowers and trees reaching toward the sunlight. Ringing the dining area were a dozen or so window counters offering a variety of luncheon choices, each one including a number code.

Aprille waited for Werner to take it all in, then explained, "As you've probably deduced, we girls have to go to the window that's serving our prescribed lunch. But you can chose anything you like."

"I suppose your I.D. bracelet tells them if you're at the right place," he said.

"You got it. No way we can cheat. Even the P-girls in town have to carry their own meals prepared here. They're allowed no money to buy their own food."

"What about what their customers pay them?"

"They work at company pleasure houses. They never see the money."

"What if the customer sneaks them money under the sheets?"

"All girls are strip searched when we come back, including those parts of our anatomy you're thinking about right now."

He laughed. "Makes sense. Okay. I'll eat what you eat. Take me to your window."

Aprille giggled and led him to a counter serving "spicy Italians" and mixed veggies. When the three of them had found a table and settled in, he discovered his "spicy Italian" consisted of slices of pressed girl-meat pepperoni with Swiss cheese, smoked girl-meat, lettuce, tomato, onions and jalapeño in a honey-nut roll. It was delicious. But for the first time Werner felt uneasy about it.

"Does it bother you to be eating meat that could have been someone you know?" he asked both girls.

"Of course not," Aprille answered.

"Not me," River chimed in. "I know I'm going to be on someone's plate one of these days. I'd rather it be a friend than a stranger."

"Is that how you feel, Aprille?"

"Certainly. There's nothing more intimate than begin eaten. Not even sex. Wouldn't you rather be eaten by a friend than by a total stranger?"

"I confess, I've never given it any thought."

"That's because you're a male, and free. When you're bred and raised to be meat, you think about it a lot. In fact, in some strange way it's a turn-on to think that some day you'll be snuffed and eaten. I've eaten a lot of my friends and acquaintances here. I don't look forward to being dead, but I would be honored to be eaten by River. Or by you."

"Well, maybe I can give you a little early preview of that tonight," he grinned.

"Right now, if you want," she answered, and stroked his leg under the table.

When his hand touched hers, she quickly pulled it over to her delta and pressed it firmly to her sex. His fingers dipped into the smoothly shaved furrow, warm and moist beneath the thin silk of her frock. Her hips rolled gently, her eyes bright with renewed desire. God! Those O-drugs must be powerful! he thought. Then another thought came to him.

"Do any of the girls here wear undergarments?"

"Oo, I think we've shocked him," cooed River.

"No, no!" he said hastily. I like it! I was just wondering. I've seen a lot of naked girls and girls getting dressed and undressed, but no underwear. And those girls at the next table, sitting with their knees apart: obviously there's nothing under their skirts but them."

"Same as me," said Aprille. "Some wear panties, but we don't." She touched her friend. "Do we? River and I like the feeling of air moving across our pussies and our clothes rubbing on our nipples. And we can play with ourselves more easily, and others can play with us."

She snaked Werner's hand under the hem of her frock and directly on to her skin. Now he could definitely feel her wetness. Was it a product of her growing excitement or leakage from his own earlier deposit? Whichever, she was fairly vibrating with sexual desire.

"If I were to lay you on this table and start fucking you right here and now, what would happen?"

She started to rise out of her chair, her eyes hot. "You want to?"

"No, no! Just tell me what would happen. I'm just curious."

She settled back, looking disappointed. "Some would watch, others would pay no attention. The young girls, the ones who haven't had sex yet, would definitely watch!"

"When are the girls here first introduced to sex?"

"As soon as they open their eyes. It goes on all around them. We grow up first in the birthing house where the women often masturbate or play with the studs as they nurse the babies. There are no closed doors there, either, so the kids crawl in and out of the pleasure rooms where the moms are entertaining their men. We see right from the start that sex is fun and normal. When we start asking questions, we not only get straight answers but demonstrations. Except for diapers, no child is forced to wear clothes. In fact, it's a big deal for little girls here when they can around nude without a diaper for the first time. Helps motivate her to potty train. Then, later on, clothes make us feel more grown up."

"And when do you find out that you're meat."

"Same way. The little girls are taken into the same departments you'll be seeing today. Except where the D girls are processed. We see the older girls blissing out as they're snuffed and on the spits. We wave goodbye to them and they smile back. Our nannies tell us things like, 'Some day you'll be able to do that. It feels so good! Look how happy she is!' Gradually we realize that the meat we've been eating right along comes from those happy girls and that they're doubly happy now because they're inside us and have become part of our own bodies."

"And they really do look happy when they're slaughtered?"

"Of course. You'll see. They're on one hell of an O dose. Everything that touches them is a tremendous rush, even the knife. Speaking of which, if you're not going to fuck me on the table, we'd better get going before I really embarrass you! With your hand where it is, I'm about to blow apart!"

He grinned mischievously and wiggled his middle finger into her. She stiffened, eyes wide, mouth open, shocked by his unexpected invasion, waiting for more. His thumb worked its way past the little wet gates that hooded her most private and most sensitive button of flesh. Her eyes closed and her breathing became shuddering heaves as he massaged her vaginal wall with his finger while gently stroking the button with his thumb. Suddenly she grabbed both sides of her chair, threw her head back, arched into his hand and let out a soft wail as ecstatic spasms surged through her body over and over. They didn't stop until Werner finally withdrew his hand. A pool of her juices had collected in his palm. She settled slowly back into her chair as the orgasms subsided to panting. When her eyes fluttered open, she found herself looking into the entranced faces of a group of pre-pubescent girls who had stopped to take in the show, just as she had predicted. She smiled at them and winked. They giggled and moved off.

Werner seemed equally fascinated by the puddle in his hand. When he reached for a napkin, he found his wrist suddenly gripped by long, elegant, ruby-tipped fingers.

"Don't waste it, honey," River breathed into his ear.

She lowered her face to his cupped palm and dipped the end of a long, pink tongue into the viscous nectar pooled there. She smiled up at him as she ran its wetted tip around her lips, then bent down and carefully licked his hand clean.

"Mmmm," she said, smacking her lips. "Part you, part her. Delicious. You taste good together, too."

Whatever Werner had expected when he was given the assignment to check this place out, it was certainly not this. He found himself enthralled by these two beautiful and extraordinary females, so open and comfortable in their sexuality, so blasé about having been born to be eaten. It would be the height of foolishness to be emotionally smitten by creatures destined to be slaughtered by his own company. But smitten he was. He had to break the spell!

He jumped up. "We'd better get going. What are we going to see next?"

Aprille looked like she was melting into the chair, a picture of floppy contentment.

"Come on, sweetie," River said, pulling her gently to her feet. "You can relax later, after he's used that other finger to squirt more of his lovely man juice into you."

"I'm ready for it right now," she said dreamily.

"Sure you are. But he's not. He wants to see more of our home. Go take his hand so he doesn't get lost. I'll take his other hand so he doesn't distract you any more until the tour is over. Come on."

Aprille did as she was told: took Werner's right hand, gazed up into his eyes for a minute, and shook her head to clear it. She brushed the blond curls away from her face and took a deep breath.

"Okay, my magnificent stud. Shall we take in the training, activity and classroom areas?"

"Lead the way," he said.

The course they took brought him to an entirely different area of the Musgrave campus. They passed a pair of soccer fields ringed by two running tracks. A game was underway on both fields and both tracks were filled with jogging girls. All were naked. It reminded Werner of neighborhood pickup games with skins vs. shirts, but in this case the "shirts" consisted only of brightly colored arm and head bands or helmets. Aprille went into her narrator mode.

"The girls on the farthest field are ages seven through nine," Aprille explained. "The closer field are fourteen through sixteen. We're encouraged to play sports to develop healthy bodies and keep in shape. Lean girl-meat is more in demand than the fatty stuff, and if a girl is going to be a roaster she has to be trim and attractive, especially if she wants to be a P-girl. That's the highest objective the M's can shoot for, and it brings a lot of perks."

"Like?"

"Like TV. You may have noticed, the dorms don't have TV, except for the birthing facility. It's a perk you have to earn. Pleasure Girls have TV at work and can go to the TV rooms here when they're not working. Everyone else has to earn it by meeting certain ratios of meat to fat and other things. Sports are a good way to get in shape so you can earn perks. But if you're too lazy to do that, they make you run laps around the field, like those girls are doing. See the ones wearing clothes? They're B-girls assigned to underage girls, to make sure they complete their laps."

"Underage?"

"Sixteen and under. As I told you earlier, their classification — M or B — is set early; but their grade — 1,2 or 3 — can go up or down at any time. If they're too flabby or too skinny, they're graded three or four. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants to be super market meat. They're just snuffed and butchered. That's not much fun."

"So they're out here trying for grades one and two?"

"Exactly! Of course, there are indoor gyms, too, with squash courts and racquetball and floor hockey. All that stuff. But most girls would rather be out in the sunshine getting a nice tan."

"And after you've passed your seventeenth birthday, you don't come out here any more?"

"Oh sure we do! Staying in shape is a never-ending process. And games are fun! My team played just yesterday and is scheduled to play again in three days. Once I get pregnant, of course, I'll be more restricted. We're not allowed to endanger our babies. But it's all the more important that we keep trim and looking good so we don't lose value. It would be awful to be dropped down from roasters to packaged meat when we're activated."

He let that thought drop as they continued walking, passing badminton courts, tennis courts, volleyball courts, basketball courts, fields for softball, baseball, field hockey, la crosse and other games he didn't even recognize — all occupied by mostly naked females in strenuous competition with each other.

"This would make great streaming video or live TV!" he said. "All these naked girls running around playing games! Has anyone ever thought of that?"

"Oh sure," Aprille said. "As I understand it, they tried it for a while, but the viewers began to see us as sport figures instead of meat and it stirred up political trouble. Also, the professional leagues complained about unfair competition because we were nude. They still cybercast some games, but now they stencil numbers on our backs and bellies and refer to us only by the numbers and our meat grade."

"Who does pick your names, by the way? If you're separated from your mothers at birth, who decides on the name?"

"M-dex. It's the computer that keeps track of us for Security. It has several thousand names it rotates through."

"So there are several other Aprilles around."

"Oh yeah, but they're all spelled differently. I looked us all up once. There's an A-p-r-i-l and an A-p-r-y-l and an A-y-p-r-l and . . . you get the picture. Lots of Rivers, too, all different spellings and languages."

"I'll bet. But back to these games, how about live spectators in stands? I should think Musgrave could get a good ticket price for all-nude girls' soccer, or all-nude girls' rugby."

"I remember them doing that when I was little. Remember that, River?"

"Yeah, but they only did it for one season."

"Why?" asked Werner.

"Too much trouble controlling the fans. All those sweating young pussies and titties brought out the usual guy reactions. Some were content to beat off in the stands, but others would rush the field and try to maul the girls. I guess they figured we're raised to give pleasure and if we didn't want sex, we wouldn't be running around naked in front of them."

"Anyway," Aprille put in, "they do sell tickets to some of the indoor games where the crowd is smaller, but they don't allow drinking and there's always a bunch of guards with tasers to cool off the hyped-up jerks. If they want to fuck us, they have to do it like everyone else: pay for a P-girl or get certified as a stud."

"Actually," said River, "the P-girls do a lot of business on game nights. They circulate through the stands in these cute gossamer outfits and schedule sessions."

"Do they get paid for those sessions?"

"We're never allowed to handle money. The Company collects the fees and gives us credit chits and perks, same as in the Pleasure Houses."

They came across a brick building nearly buried in a thick coating of ivy.

"This is the Surgical Theater," Aprille said. Would you like to see how the implants and sterilizations are done?"

"Sure," he answered, not willing to betray his squeamish side.

Aprille touched her silver bracelet to a black box and the door swung open, admitting them to the building. She led the way into a waiting room where she explained their presence to a cold-eyed guard at the reception desk. He ran Werner's visitor's ID through his scanner, then laid his hand on a monitor screen and another door slid open. Aprille led her entourage into a narrow passageway, one side of which was a long window overlooking a series of operating theaters.

In the first, naked girls of about five or six years of age were climbing up on standard operating tables and lying down. A mask trailing a plastic tube leading to a jack in the wall was placed over their faces for a minute or so. Then each girl was trundled into the next theater. At that point she was limp, eyes open but unfocused. Men and women in green surgical smocks began working over her.

"See that long needle-like thing the doctor is pushing into that girl's abdomen?" Aprille said. "That implants the GPS Locator. The woman working on her right hand is implanting an ID chip. That's what they use these days instead of these bracelets. I'm scheduled to have one implanted to replace the bracelet as soon as I'm pregnant. Guess they don't want to waste it on me if I don't work out."

Werner noticed that River also had a bracelet. At eleven months without getting pregnant she was much closer to her deadline than Aprille, and an even worse risk for an expensive hardware update.

They moved to the next theater. The girls were also naked, but several years older, perhaps thirteen or fourteen. Their breasts were still developing.

"These girls have been classified as M," Aprille explained. "They're being sterilized. It's a simple laser procedure. The ovaries keep functioning and responding to the O-drugs, but they no longer have any periods, so if they make P status they're never out of service."

"Do M class girls who don't make Pleasure Girl status have any sex life?"

"Sure. Musgrave has contracts with lots of schools, public and private, to provide female partners for their sex education classes. We go to schools all over to give the boys training sessions, teach them how to do it right while the girls watch. It's lots of fun! For the gay girls, of course, there's plenty of opportunity for sex right here on campus."

"You did that? Went around to schools having sex?"

"Well, yeah!" She gave him a puzzled look. "Did you think I was a virgin?"

"No! I was just wondering how they protect you from STD's if you screw boys at random for sex education."

"Well it's hardly random!" she said, bristling. "The boys that screw us have to be screened by the Company's test department in advance!"

"Of course," he said. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to offend you. I was just asking. That's what I'm here for."

She glared at him for a few seconds, then melted. "Of course you are. And it's not my place to question your . . . your questions," she said, flustered by her inexplicable concern about what he thought about her. "It was an excellent question. But the Company is always careful not to jeopardize perfectly good meat and a potential Breeder by letting just anyone fuck us."

"Of course. That's good policy," he agreed.

River broke the awkwardness of their detent. "This is boring. Can we move on?"

Aprille laughed merrily, magically restoring the warmth to their collaboration. "Sure! That sounds like a great idea. That okay with you, Wern . . . I'm sorry! Herr Richter?"

"Didn't I tell you to call me Werner?"

"But in front of River?"

"Have you already forgotten your orders? Would you like to demonstrate the electro torture device for me?"

Aprille turned pale and swayed.

"No, no!" Werner said, grabbing her arm. "I was just kidding. I won't do that. But really, Aprille, I much prefer to hear you call me Werner. Even in front of River. Okay?"

Aprille smiled and nodded. But a little weakly, he thought, so he didn't let go.

"And moving on sounds like a good idea. You okay now?"

He pulled her toward him and gave her a lingering kiss. When he drew back and examined her again, she had regained her color. In fact, the fire of lust was creeping back into her eyes.

"Okay, Werner," she said, testing him through her fear. "I'm ready to move on if you are, Werner. Shall we go, Werner?"

He laughed, kissed her again and tucked her arm under his. "Lead on, beauteous Aprille! Lead on!"

He let her pull him forward. They wandered past three more operating rooms where sterilizations where being performed. At the end of the passageway they turned right, went past a large open coed restroom, then right again into a passageway running down the other side of the building.

"There are four operating theaters on this side," Aprille said, "and three of them all do the same thing. They install tubes for live spitting. The girls you'll see here are all sixteen years old and they're all B1's and M1's."

A beautiful girl with long sandy hair lay quietly on an operating table. She was naked except for small green pads on her eyes and two large blue pads on either side of her left breast. The blue pads were wired to a control panel and a screen alive with the undulating waves of a heart monitor. A breathing mask was clamped to her nose and mouth with a double air hose connecting it to a machine with a video display showing a horizontal bar expanding and contracting. A man in a surgical smock was working over her abdomen with the assistance of a young woman in a white nurse's outfit. A large TV screen loomed in front of him with a constantly shifting image in the gory colors of the human interior. He referred to it constantly. The opposite wall of the theater was also glass and Werner could see a dozen or more lovely young women , all naked, sitting in chairs watching a game show on a TV screen. A few girls were standing at the window on that side engrossed in the choreography of the operation.

Werner glanced over at Aprille who was enthusiastically resuming her narration. She was so cute in her exuberance that he wanted to kiss her, but he restrained himself. Beside him, River smiled. She knew, as women do, what was going through his mind. And she knew what was going through Aprille's, as well.

"What the surgeon is doing," Aprille said, "is feeding the tube through a tiny hole beside her navel up through the loops of the intestine, past the stomach, between the lungs and right up to the trachea. The tube is impregnated with a material that seals the tissues and membranes it punches through. The tip is also a camera lens which provides the picture on that screen to help the doc aim it properly. His aide handles the part of the tube that hasn't yet been inserted. When he's finished the upper end, he'll insert the lower part down through her guts to just above the womb, or through the back of the uterus in the case of the M's. After that, for the M's, they go in through the vagina and attach a docking collar on the end of the tube. It's like a funnel that guides the spit into the tube. For us B's, there's a ring at the end of the tube that makes it easier for the technicians to guide the point of the spit through the wall of the uterus and into the tube. Either way, when we get spitted, the spit screws its way up the length of the tube, expanding it as it goes. It eventually drills into the trachea and comes out our mouth. They do a tracheotomy on us at that point so we can breathe, but nothing inside gets damaged, so there's no internal bleeding. The tube can stay in us for years. Or we can be transported to the roasting site fully spitted at any time and last for days."

"There are no problems at all after this procedure?"

"Well, we're sore for a few weeks, but that goes away. We can feel it in there when we move around, but we get used to it."

"There's a tube inside you right now?"

"Of course. In both of us."

"What do they use for anaesthesia while they install it?"

"Nothing."

"They don't use anaesthesia?"

"Nope. And yes, it hurts like hell! It's the most incredibly painful thing I've ever experienced. But I didn't mind. They gave me a massive O-drug dose and I had ten or twelve huge orgasms while they operated. It's weird. When you're on the O stuff, pain intensifies the orgasms. I wanted to thrash and scream from the pleasure and the pain, but nothing happened because they also give you Curare-X, which paralyzes you. I was super-sensitive ten times over to everything that touched me, but I couldn't make my body do anything."

River spoke up. "I, on the other hand, endured it without benefit of O-drugs."

"Why?" Werner asked.

"I'd been naughty and had a D hanging over me. I got it wiped out by foregoing the O-drugs during the operation."

"Is all this why those girls in the waiting area look so nervous?"

"It's why," said River.

"No it's not," protested Aprille. For the D girls, yes. Definitely! The others just don't know what to expect. But they'll leave wishing they could do it again."

"The girl on the table seems totally relaxed. She's not unconscious?"

Aprille resumed her lecture mode. "Anything but! She's been injected with Curare-X. It paralyzes all your muscles, except the heart. See how she's hooked up to the breathing machine? Without that, she'd asphyxiate. The drug lasts six to eight minutes. The operation takes four to five minutes. She can't so much as twitch in the meantime. She can't even close her eyes or blink, which is why they put a wet pad over her eyes. It's actually a lot less complex and dangerous than ordinary anaesthesia and lets the surgical team put more girls through in the course of a day. They process nine girls an hour in each of the three theaters for six hours a day. Each surgeon does three girls, takes a five minute break, then does three more."

"How many days a week."

"Depends on the demand for roasters, but usually three."

"And there are three theaters going at the same time?"

"Yup."

"That's nine times three, 27; times six hours is 162; times three days is 486; times four weeks. . . that's almost two thousand girls a month! At what Musgrave charges for live roasters, that's well over a billion dollars!"

"And that's just the live roasters. So you see, we may be just meat, but we're valuable meat."

They watched the operating team slip the last of the tube into the girl's lower abdomen. She was evidently a class M because the assistant picked up a small funnel-shaped device and pushed it into the patient's vagina until her whole hand had disappeared inside.

"Would you like to move on?" Aprille asked.

"I believe I would," he answered.

They passed two more operating theaters with identical procedures in progress. At the end of the passageway the window overlooked another operating theater that was not in use. It seemed to be more elaborately equipped.

"What's this one for?" Werner asked.

"Emergencies and stuff," Aprille said. "Appendectomies, broken bones, that kind of thing." She checked a wall clock. "Would you like to see the shipping department next? If we hurry, we'll be in time to see them spit some of the girls and prepare them for shipping."

"All right," he acquiesced, not at all sure he really wanted to see it.

"Okay!" she said cheerily. She hooked her left arm through his right, and River, eager to become an accepted member of his entourage, hooked on to his left.

They walked for some distance across the campus to another grimly plain building adjoining a garage filled with refrigerator trucks.

"Here we are," Aprille announced. "This is where they spit us for transport."

"To what distance?" Werner asked as they entered the building on Aprille's I.D. pass. "How far will they ship?"

"For live-spitted girls it's anywhere within twenty-four hour travel time from here. If it's farther than that, they send us in a company van to be spitted on site. Or fly us, if it's more than three days road time. Live girls on a spit are susceptible to illness if they're kept on it too long. No one wants to eat sick girl meat."

"And for the twos? The girls they snuff before spitting?"

"They're cleaned and shipped in refrigerated trucks. They last longer, but for freshness and quality assurance the company won't slaughter them more than five days before roasting."

They went into a room sealed off from a spotless white chamber by a glass wall, much like the operating theaters. In the chamber on the other side of the glass partition several naked girls were lined up waiting their turn to be processed while two others, already spitted, were being carried on their skewer through an opened set of large insulated doors into a narrow rectangular room with racks along the two long sides. Studying it more carefully Werner realized he was looking into the belly of a truck backed up to one wall of the preparation chamber. More precisely, it was docked to a collar that sealed both the interior of the truck and the chamber from the outside world, apparently to preserve sterility.

"I'm afraid we'll have to watch from behind this window," Aprille said. "The spitting area and truck are antiseptic so we girls don't develop any infections that look gross when we're roasted. Puss isn't very appetizing, you know?" Both she and River giggled.

Werner smiled politely, amazed at their nonchalance, considering this was where they both would eventually wind up. He saw that two girls had been led to a pair of hooks at the end of chains that ran up to pulleys in the ceiling beams. Technicians had clamped their ankles together with a set of padded cuffs. Their wrists were cuffed behind them. Two pairs of burly male technicians in white uniforms drenched in blood, one of each side of both girls, lifted them up simultaneously and inverted them while a naked young woman inserted the hooks under the chain between the ankle cuffs. At the sound of unseen machinery winching the chains upward, the hooks began to rise. A few seconds later both girls were suspended upside down. The naked attendant began taping a sheet of stiff plastic to the first girl's neck so it formed a cone clearly intended to deflect blood from her face and hair. One of the men slid a round tub under the girl's shielded head and with a few deft strokes of a scalpel slashed her throat. Blood surged down the cone and into the tub. The girl never flinched. The man moved to the other girl, pushed a tub under her cone-shielded head and slit her throat, too. Werner studied the girls still waiting their turn in line. There was no sign of terror on their faces, rather a kind of dreamy look, as though they were watching a romantic movie.

"None of these girls seems bothered by the fact that they're about to be slaughtered," he said to his escorts.

"I told you," Aprille said in an I-told-you-so tone. "They're jazzed up on O. See the two girls twitch as they bleed out? They're having orgasms right now while they're dying. I'll bet most of the girls in line are having them, too, just thinking about it."

When the bleeding stopped, the cones and handcuffs were removed and the two dead girls were taken down and laid out on the tables, their heads hanging off one end, mouths gaping open. The ankle cuffs were removed and their legs spread wide. The man with the scalpel made a long, deep incision from breast bone to pubic bone on each body. The technicians again worked in pairs, one spreading the skin apart and holding it open to expose the interior of the carcass, the other scooping out the organs, cutting them free and depositing them in various receptacles.

"All the organs are put to good use," Aprille assured him. "Hospitals buy some for transplants. The rest are sold to zoos and dog food processors."

Werner glanced at her but saw no indication that the idea of being dog meat disturbed her. She was simply stating a fact she took for granted.

With both carcasses cleaned, one of each pair of technicians stationed himself between his subject's legs and began feeding a long spit between the exposed labia. Werner saw the point appear in the empty cavity of each girl where a second technician guided it through the upper body and on into the neck until it emerged bloody from the opened mouth. The incisions were then taped shut and the legs stretched out along the spit. The ankles were wired to the spit and the knees to a transverse bar so the body would turn with the spit. The two spits were then transferred to trestle racks where the girls were flipped face down so their wrists could be wired behind them and to their hips to keep them from flopping around as the spit turned during roasting. The processing finished, they were carried into the truck where the spits were locked into racks on each side. By Werner's count there was room for forty roasters: four spits racked end to end on each side and shelved five deep.

Aprille chimed in with more information. "Today they're doing M2's. We can come back tomorrow morning and watch them do M1's. The live spitting. It's quite different."

"And even more enjoyable for the girls?" he asked.

But Aprille missed the sarcasm. "You bet! You'll see. We'll also get to go to a live roast where some of the same girls will be eaten. River and I have been given permission to escort you there so we can all enjoy the banquet together. You'll probably want to be there when the roasters are delivered so you can see how that's handled and how they prepare the live girls on site. Roasting time, of course, takes several hours, so we can go other places, too. Do other . . . stuff." She smiled coquettishly. "Anything else you'd like to see in the meantime?"

Werner couldn't think of a thing to say.

But River could.

"I think Herr Werner would like to see one of the pleasure rooms."

Aprille giggled, but recovered herself to ask in a dignified manner, "Would you, Sir?"

Werner put his hands on both sides of her face and drew her mouth to his. As his tongue played with hers, he let his hands slide down the curves of her body, his thumbs brushing past her hardening nipples, his palms feeling the soft shape of her hips, his fingers fanning out around the firm little cheeks below, pulling her against the stiffening answer to her question.

Chapter 4

When Werner showed up at Aprille's room at the appointed time next morning, bleary from too much sex the night before, he was taken aback to see her sitting at the edge of her bed, hugging River and rocking her gently back and forth as the raven haired beauty wept uncontrollably.

"What's happening?" he blurted. "What's the matter with River?"

Aprille looked up at him, her eyes blurred with tears and despair. "She's been activated."

Werner felt a hammer blow of shock. "Activated? How can that be?"

"Her latest fertility test came back negative. It says she . . ." Aprille paused to swallow and regain her composure. "It says her ova are, quote, generally too fragile to survive the trauma of conception. End quote. They've reclassified her as M1 and activated her. She's to report this morning."

"So soon? Why? What's the big rush?"

"Someone at tonight's banquet bought an option on her. One of her regulars."

"One of her regulars?"

"Yeah. He picked her out of the catalog five months ago and has been seeing her ever since."

"What catalog?"

"The video catalog on the Musgrave website. All Ones are on display there. They make videos of us so customers can order a Pleasure Girl or live meat. Or they can get certified as studs if they want to bang B girls, which is what this guy did. And when he found out she was getting close to her fertility deadline, he bought a year's purchase-option on her. The instant she was reclassified as meat, he bought her. He wants her live spitted for the party tonight."

"Do they sell options on all the brood girls?"

"Oh yeah. One of my regular studs says if I'm not pregnant by my tenth month, he's taking out an option on me. If I don't make the grade as a Brooder, he gets the first chance to buy me on a spit."

"How long will he have to exercise the option?"

"Forty-eight hours from notification that I've been reclassified. Then I'm up for grabs."

"But didn't you girls tell me you look forward to being spitted?"

River suddenly bolted upright, her eyes filled with tears and rage. "I was looking fucking forward to having babies, not being dead!" she yelled, then as suddenly shrank into herself. "I'm sorry!" she pleaded. "Please don't report me for that! They'll fucking D me, for sure!" She put her face into her hands and wept noisily.

"Please, Herr Richter," Aprille echoed. "She didn't mean to yell at you. She's just very upset. Please don't report her! They'll spit her and cook her without any O-drugs. You can't begin to imagine the pain. I saw a girl go through it once; it was the worst thing I've ever seen. The poor girl was . . . Oh please, Herr Richter, please, please don't do that to River!" Now Aprille was crying as well.

"It's all right," he said, stroking both girls' heads. "I'm not reporting anything. I'm sorry I upset you, River. This is obviously a tough situation for you. I guess knowing it's going to happen one day, and having it actually happen, are two very different things. I'm terribly sorry that you'll never get to have your babies."

She answered him in a voice so tiny he could barely make it out. "Thank you, Sir. I'll be all right. I'll be good."

He sat down on the other side of her and put an arm around her shoulder. "When do you have to report, River?"

"Twenty minutes," she sniffed.

"Would you like us both to walk you over? Or would you rather go alone, or with just Aprille?"

"Both of you," she whispered. "Thank you." And she crumpled into another weeping jag.

"Come on, sweetie," urged Aprille. "You have to shower. Then we'll all go over together. It won't be so bad. Remember how great that O-high was?"

She pulled her sniffling roommate off the bed and down the hall to the showers. Ten minutes later both she and Werner held her hands as they made the long walk to the same gray building they had visited the day before. She was deathly pale as they entered through a different door from the one that led to the observation booth. Werner was afraid she would faint, but she managed to stay upright as they reached the sign-in counter. River touched her bracelet to a pad. Her name, age, serial number, classification, grade, activation time and photo instantly appeared on a large screen. The counter was attended by a woman in her late thirties or early forties with a diamond tattooed on her forehead. She directed River to take a seat among a dozen other girls who had arrived before them.

Aprille approached her and explained that Werner was a special guest of the Company and she was his escort. After a brief phone conversation with a superior, the woman told them they could stay during the initial prepping, but they would have to go the observation room during the spitting. "Only disinfected personnel are allowed in the spitting room," she explained. "It's to protect the product from contamination. I'm sure you appreciate, Sir, that our customers would not want to be presented with sick roasters. We have a reputation to protect of delivering only the highest quality food products."

She gave Aprille a large stick-on badge, a red circle with a diagonal slash through it. "This is so our technicians won't mistake you for one of the activated girls," she said.

Werner and Aprille sat in the back row to await the last few arrivals. Werner was astonished at how truly beautiful every girl in the room was, even the woman at the desk. Aprille identified her to him as a forty-one year old brooder who was pregnant but had just recently been downgraded from B1 to B2. When the lock on the entrance door finally clicked into place, he counted fifteen girls.

The two burly technicians he had seen spitting the M2's yesterday came into the room carrying small cases.

"Okay girls," one of them said, "stand up and strip. Give your clothes and shoes to Angelia and then sit back down."

They all stood up without enthusiasm and slowly pulled off their clothes. The woman at the desk had come around the counter and began collecting the discarded dresses, tops, skirts and shoes. No one had bothered with underwear. As they sat down again, the two technicians opened their cases. They were loaded with syringes filled with a pink fluid. The two men began at opposite corners of the room, jabbing syringes into exposed upper arms and pumping their contents into the smooth young flesh. Even as the last drops were squeezed out, each girl became visibly more relaxed. By the time all fifteen had been injected, the first half dozen were masturbating and moaning softly.

"That stuff really works!" Werner whispered.

"God, yes! I wish they'd give some to me!" She started to tear off her sticker.

He slapped his hand hard on hers and held it down. "Stop it! What are you doing?"

She stared at him, her eyes projecting some inner frenzy. "We have to leave! Quickly! Please!"

He stood up and pulled her hastily to the locked door, signaling to Angelia at the desk. She smiled lazily and unlocked it.

When they were safely outside, he pinned Aprille to the wall. "What the hell was that about?"

Her eyes teared up. "I'm sorry. That stuff is extremely addictive. I can't be around it like that. If we'd stayed in there, I would have volunteered for spitting just to get the dose. I'm sorry."

"Jesus!" he spat. "How do they give you your regular dosage if you act like that around it?"

"In our food. The normal doses are measured out in the meals they give us. It's only the massive doses they inject." She began to shiver.

"You going to be all right?"

"Just give me a few more minutes. I apologize. Please forgive me. I know I must look stupid."

"You look lovely, as always. But how can you show people this procedure if you can't control yourself?"

"I've never actually been there in that room, where they do that. I know about all this stuff because it's part of our education here. We see pictures and read about it, but I've never been in the actual prep area and I didn't think just seeing those loaded syringes again would have such an effect on me."

"That Angelia woman doesn't seem tempted by it."

"She's pregnant. She knows they won't give it to her."

"So what happens next?"

"They clean out the alimentary canal."

"What do you mean?"

"It's pretty gross. Sure you want to see it?"

"I'm not sure I want you to go back in there."

"I think I'm okay now. But thank you for your concern. You're a lovely man."

He didn't know how to react to being called lovely , and he was not convinced it was wise to bring her back in there.

"You're not going to throw yourself on a spit or anything?"

She laughed, that pretty bubbling laugh he'd come to love. "No. They've put the needles away by now. As long as I don't see it, I'm okay."

"Would they actually have accepted you as a volunteer?"

"Absolutely. They prefer volunteers to conscripts any day. Happy meat is better meat! Right?"

"But who'd pay for you?"

"They'd send one of the others back. Girls do that quite often: offer themselves as a substitute for a friend."

"So you could have taken River's place."

"No, she was ordered specifically. Most girls are just generic M1's. Pretty females on a spit."

"How long does that big dose of O last?"

"Three or four hours. They'll inject them again just before they're mounted over the fire. It's such a delicious way to go."

"So by now River is in seventh heaven?"

"At this point she doesn't care what they do to her. The more pain she suffers, the more glorious the orgasms. There's no way to explain it so it makes sense."

"So let's go back and watch them cleanse alimentaries, or whatever."

The door to the room had been left unlocked. "They won't try to run now," Aprille explained. "All they want is more O."

The last of the fifteen girls was being herded into an adjoining chamber filled with three rows of padded vertical slabs about 2 ½ feet wide by 6-feet tall by 18-inches thick, ten slabs to a row. Each slab stood inside a U-shaped frame, the top of the U coming to the mid-point of the slab and serving as a rotation axis. The two techies were opening up the slabs, which turned out to be more like beds with padded lids hinged on one side. The center of the bed part had a large round cut-out like a toilet opening. The top side, the lid, was shorter than the bottom side.

Each girl was backed up to the opened bed, which was then flipped to horizontal and locked in place. The girl was pulled up so that her butt was centered over the toilet hole and the lid was lowered down over her, clamping her entire body in place. The lid ended just above the nascent swell of her breasts so that her face was not covered. Then at a press of a button, to his amazement, the beds began to fold up until the girls were doubled up into a position close to fetal. Now the beds looked more like chairs that were intent on eating their occupants. The chairs were rotated so that the shapely asses were pointing up at about 45-degrees. Transparent pipes the length of each row lowered from the ceiling. Clear plastic hoses ending with enema nozzles dangled from the pipes. The two men went up and down the rows of girls plugging the nozzles into their upraised rectums and opening the spigots. When the last nozzle was installed, another button was pushed. Water rushed into the overhead pipe, down the hose tubes and into the fifteen waiting intestinal tracts. Within seconds the girls began to moan but the water continued to force its way into their distressed bellies. They were moaning and pleading for mercy when the water flow ended with the clunk of a distant valve. The glass pipe rose swiftly up, pulling out all the nozzles at once and the chairs immediately rotated so that the fifteens bottoms were pointing toward funnels which had risen beneath the chairs. Liquid fecal matter poured out of the helpless girls and disappeared into the funnel openings. There was a brief, strong odor that was soon swept away by a vigorous air exchange system.

While the girls were in this position, the technicians, joined by Angelia and the naked assistant from yesterday, began strapping small ball gags into each girl's mouth. The pipe and hoses had lowered again. This time the nozzles were removed and the ends of the plastic hoses inserted into a hole in the ball gags. The water came back on, this time forcing the girls to swallow or gag. They swallowed. And swallowed. And swallowed. Werner estimated that each girl must have taken in nearly a quart of water. When the hoses were pulled from their mouths, the gags were removed and the girls flipped into the ass-up position. Most of them immediately began to vomit up the water as the nozzles were returned to their rectums. Those who did not vomit right away did so as their guts refilled with a second tide of warm, soapy water. After that they received a third enema — this one resulting in a clear outflow — but no more stomachs full of water.

"Told you it was gross," Aprille whispered.

"On the contrary," Werner muttered. "It was fascinating."

The next stop for the girls was a shower where they received a thorough scrubbing. Werner made it a point to look closely at River to see how she was holding up. She seemed to be as happily muzzy and unconcerned as all the others, limply submitting herself to the lather and scrub brushes. No attempt was made to coif the hair. It was simply tied up in a bun by the four attendants. Werner knew why, of course. Hair burns, so it's covered with foil before the roasting begins. No point to waste time on a beautiful hairdo. If there's any pubic hair (and most of these girls had been shaved bare) it's singed off in the heat of the fire.

The next stop for the girls and their attendants was the disinfecting chamber. Angelia politely reminded Werner and his escort that they were not allowed beyond this room and were directed to the observation deck to watch the spitting and shipping process. Werner had a sudden perverse urge to throw a little weight.

"Are you aware of who I am, Ma'am?"

The woman lost a little of her cool. "Well, ah . . . not exactly, Sir. I was told you are a Class R visitor and Class R visitors are not allowed in the spitting area. Have I offended you, Sir?"

"What is your classification?"

"B2-T, Sir." A look of fright came into her eyes. "I apologize for offending you, Sir. How may I make it up to you, Sir?"

"B2-T. That means you're on probation, does it not? You can always be downclassed to M, can't you Angelia?"

She put her hands over her mouth and backed away.

"At your age that could mean M3 or M4, could it not? Oven or chuck?"

Aprille looked stricken at Werner's sudden turn to bullying, but kept her mouth shut.

Angelia looked terrified. "Please, Sir!" she stammered. "Let me fix things! I'm so sorry I offended you. Please, Sir!"

"I want to know why I'm not allowed to be disinfected along with those two big lummoxes and that other girl so I can go out and see the action up close."

"I don't know! I only do what I'm told! Please don't have me downclassed, Sir. I know I'm good for at least three or four more babies. And I make real good babies, Sir. Pretty and well shaped and good tasting."

"Werner." Aprille was tugging delicately at his sleeve. "Please."

"What?" He transferred his glare to her.

She recoiled a little and wrung her hands.

"What?" he repeated, but softly this time, caressing her with his voice. "What were you going to say?"

"Please don't . . . please don't frighten her, Sir. She wasn't being mean to us. She has to do what she's told, just like I do. Just like River did. Please, Sir? There's not much to see out there, Sir. It will be more comfortable for you in the observation room. Please, Sir."

All the fight drained out of him. He didn't really want to terrify the pretty but aging woman who was already scared because she was nearing the end of her fertility. He didn't really want to watch River being spitted. He certainly didn't want to upset this sweetly brave girl who — although knowing he could destroy her for it — interceded on her pregnant colleague's behalf. All he really wanted to do was pick her up and carry her to the nearest bed. He sighed and turned back to the quailing Angelia.

"Don't worry, I won't say anything about you to anyone, Angelia, except to say you were doing your duty, and doing it well. I was out of line. I'm sorry if I frightened you. We'll go up to the observation room now."

"Thank you, Sir," she whispered, her color beginning to return.

As they stood at the window waiting for the sanitized girls to be led out, Werner asked, "Do you really want to stay and watch this? River is your friend."

"That's why I want to be here, if you'll let me stay, Sir. I promised River I'd be here for her and again when she's roasted. She'll be looking for me. Please don't make me let her down."

"You want to watch as she's roasted?"

"We were scheduled to be at that banquet, anyway. It means a lot to her that we'll be there to see her off."

"But what if they serve her at our table?"

"I'm going to see to it that they do. I promised her."

"My God! You want to eat your own friend?"

"Of course. Some day they'll cook me, too. When they do, I'd be honored if you ate me. That way I'd be in you and part of you forever."

"I don't know what to say to that!"

"Well let me say this. First, I want to make lots of babies so I'll still be around for years and years and we can fuck whenever you're in the area. If you want to, I mean. But when my time comes and I'm just meat again, I can't think of a more beautiful place to end up than in your body."

"You make it sound so . . . natural."

"Would you, when the time comes? If you still have any feelings for me, I mean. Would you merge my body with yours forever?"

"Eat you?" Eating strangers was one thing. Eating a girl you've come to love struck him as outrageous!

"Yes. It would be the most beautiful honor you could bestow. I'd always be part of you."

"If that idea actually makes you happy, yes, I'd do it. But lots of fucking first, right?"

"Lots and lots."

They were still kissing, their hands on each other's sex, when the first two girls were led out. One of them was River. Aprille stiffened.

"Please, may I hold you like this while we watch?" She tightened her grip on him through his pants. "And would you keep your hand on me down there, too?"

"Works for me," he said, trying to concentrate on the scene below.

Neither of the first two girls were cuffed or restrained in any way, although the girls lining up behind them had their hands cuffed behind their backs. The technician assigned to River guided her by the elbow to the nearer table and turned her around, backing her up to it. She looked up at Werner and Aprille in the window and gave them a blurry smile as she climbed up on the table and laid down, face up. The technician adjusted her position so that her head hung down off one end. He placed her feet in stirrups at the other end and secured them in place with binding tape. Straps were used to bind her knees to the table legs to spread her thighs. He threw a leather belt over her hips and another just above her breasts and under her arms, cinching them both down tight. He pulled each arm down beside the adjacent table leg and tied her wrists to the bottom rung of the legs. Next he gathered her long black hair, threaded it between the jaws of a bar clamp and screwed the jaws tightly together; then tied the clamp to the same rung, forcing her head backwards. Although the position made it impossible for her to close her mouth, he inserted a dental mouth-spreader and forced it open even wider.

She rolled her eyes over to the window high on the wall beside her and locked them on Aprille; but she could neither grimace from the obviously painful stresses of her position, nor smile in her drugged pleasure of it.

The technician rolled the train of organ receptacles to a spot he could reach conveniently and picked up a scalpel. With the grace of long practice he drew the same long incision from sternum to pubis that the other man had cut in yesterday's carcasses. Only this time blood bubbled out the length of the cut. The naked girl materialized as if by magic with absorbing materials to mop the blood away as the technician spread open River's abdomen. A green smocked surgeon appeared with an electrical cauterizing gun and deftly stopped most of the bleeding. He handed the gun to the technician and, as the girl held the two halves of abdominal skin apart, began quickly lifting out the long ropes of intestines, slicing them off at the anus and the stomach. The cauterizing gun quickly sealed each new cut as organ after organ was removed until only the heart, lungs and a few other items remained — just enough to keep her alive as long as needed. Werner could now see the plastic tube suspended in mid-cavity between the pelvic area and the thorax.

Then came the spit. The technician inserted it between River's labia and began pushing and twisting it into her. The surgeon reached into the empty cavity and guided it to the ring at the end of the tube. A machine was rolled between her legs, the spit locked into it at the appropriate angle and the machine began slowly and steadily to screw it through the length of the tube. Werner watched in fascination as the tube swelled to five times its size to accommodate the advancing skewer, like a snake swallowing a post. When the point reached her neck, the surgeon helped guide it to the proper position for boring into River's trachea. As it emerged from her mouth and she went into obvious respiratory distress, he cut a hole in her throat and implanted a plastic breathing vent. Her breathing returned to normal. Werner replayed in his mind the silky texture of her voice and secretly mourned that it was now lost forever.

Throughout the procedure, River's face contorted grotesquely and her body bucked ineffectually against her restraints. Werner couldn't tell whether these convulsions were the result of pain or orgasms, but Aprille kept assuring him that the massive infusion of O-drugs made every sensation a source of breathtaking orgasms. He hoped she was right.

The technicians taped River's belly shut, wired her knees and ankles to the spit, lifted her spit to the trestles, wired her wrists behind her back. They carried her, face down, into the waiting truck. Her spit was placed on a lower rack. She'd have a nice view of the floor from now until her delivery to the banquet site.

Werner had had enough. "Let's go," he said. "I don't want to see any more of this."

"Thank you for holding me," Aprille said, putting her hand over his on her crotch. "It helped. It reminds me that River is enjoying these last hours, no matter what it may look like. Even with the tiny dose of O they give me, your hand on my cunt makes my whole body ripple with little orgasms. I remember what the larger dose was like when they implanted the tube. God, it was spectacular!"

"Will they give her more before they put her in the pit?"

"They're supposed to. This dose will start to wear off. I hope they wouldn't let her suffer. Now, where would you like to go next?"

"What's left?"

"The kitchens, the classes, the training rooms, the rec rooms. You want to see how we teach young boys from the community the fine art of good sex?"

"No. I want you to teach me the fine art of good sex."

"I thought you'd never ask. Come with me."

She took his hand and led him at a brisk pace out of the building and across an expanse of the campus to a long brick building that was tall enough to have two floors, but had only a single level of tall arched windows. It turned out to be an Olympic sized indoor pool. She immediately began to unbutton his shirt. He took the hint and slipped her own single-piece dress over her head, leaving her naked except for her heels. She kicked them off as she got to work on his pants. She kissed and licked and nipped at his skin as she exposed it, then knelt down and licked his feet and toes as she stripped off his shoes and socks.

Without warning she jumped up and dove into the water, resurfacing at mid pool.

"Don't tell me you can't swim," she chided.

In one stride Werner bounded to the edge of the pool and leaped out into the water, swimming furiously. In a second he was on top of her, shoving her under the surface and pinching at her nipples. She retaliated by grabbing his cock and pulling herself between his legs to suck his testicles into her mouth. But that backfired when he pushed her head more forcefully against him. Suddenly she was desperate to breathe, so she spat out his balls, wiggled out of his grip and shot to the surface to gulp air.

"Let's see how you like it!" he challenged, and dove between her legs, clamping his mouth over her vulva and pushing his tongue rudely into her, wagging it about inside. He felt her leg muscles tense without moving and tasted the nectar that flowed from her love slot into the cool water of the pool. He kept up his delicious torment, feeling her body twitching with successive orgasms, until the need for air drove him to the surface again.

"O my God!" she said. "If I pass out, will you save me?"

"If I save you, will you fuck me till I go blind?"

"Wait here!" She swam briskly to the side of the pool, popped out of the water and trotted to a wall cabinet from which she extracted two diving tanks with mouth pieces. She checked the gauges then ran back to the pool and jumped in with both.

"Take one," she said, tossing it to him. She strapped hers on and plopped the mouthpiece in her mouth. Werner did the same. No concern about sanitary conditions here, he thought. Nor did he care. Only the golden, wet sex goddess before him meant anything now.

She dove under him and disappeared. He dove after her and found her waiting on the bottom at the deepest end. She spread her legs and beckoned to him. He swam toward her, his speed impeded only a little by the drag from his erection. Just as he reached her, she flipped under him, came up behind him and rubbed her body upward along his back. He twisted quickly to face her and found her right tit in his eye. Seizing her lithe body and pulling it to him, he spat out the mouthpiece and suckled on the tit while her fingers dug into his scalp. She was doing something with her legs. What was she doing? She was scissoring them, scissoring his erection, bringing him to the precipice. He switched to the other tit for a while until he had to go back to the mouthpiece for air. Then he grabbed both her thighs, pried them apart and plunged into the warm wet depths of her. Her body went instantly into the violent thrashing of a huge orgasm matching his own turbulent climax as he pumped pulse after pulse of semen into her. He felt her fingernails racking his back and saw her eyes rolling into her head. The breathing piece fell out of her mouth and bubbles rose from her lips. In a panic he grabbed the mouthpiece and rammed it into her, shoving her jaw tight against it with his palm. He swam upwards, dragging her with him, holding her tightly, still inside her.

When they broke the surface her eyes were open in a weird combination of fright and ecstasy. She coughed out the mouthpiece, gasped in some air, looked at him in amazement and threw her arms around his neck.

"Oh God, Werner, I love you so, I can't stand it. Why didn't you let me drown? I can't bear the thought of not being with you after tonight! Oh God Oh God!" She kissed him and wept and kissed him and wept some more and kissed him again.

"Darling, darling!" he cried, Why do you think you won't be with me again?"

"Because you're free and I'm meat. You're going back to Austria, and I'm here until I die. You'll marry a fine free woman and have a lovely family, and I'll have baby after baby that I'll never know, or not have any, and wind up on a stranger's plate for dinner. It's hopeless. It's like loving a ghost. A big, blond, wonderful ghost. Or maybe I'm the ghost. The point is, it's hopeless!"

"I don't see why it has to be hopeless, my sweet Aprille. My company in Austria will be part of your company here. Surely something can be arranged. I can be transferred here, or you can be transferred to Austria. As long as you make babies and I do my job well, we can find a way to be with each other often."

"We can't marry like real people," she said, sniffling.

"No, but we can love like real people. Better than real people because you're always super horny. Not many women can say that."

She laughed and threw herself against him, and hugged him, and cried. "I'm going to try to believe it will work out like that," she said, wiping her eyes. "And if it doesn't, I can always volunteer to be spitted. If you stop loving me, there will always be someone who wants to eat me."

"What a ridiculous thought," he said, "that I could ever stop loving you."

They climbed out of the pool, took off the tanks and made love again on the wet tiles. A party of girls came in, glanced at their writhing bodies, giggled, stripped and dove into the pool.

Chapter 5

These live-spit banquets were always in two phases, with a lot of drinking in between. The first phase was when the meat arrived. Most of the banqueters were already on hand for that event, standing with drinks in hand as the Musgrave delivery truck backed into the area where the roasting pits had been set up. Gas fires were already going, the artificial coals on the grates above the flames glowing cherry red.

Werner and Aprille had arrived about twenty minutes ahead of the truck. Musgrave girls were forbidden to drink on campus, which made permission to do so off campus a coveted perk. Brooders were not allowed to drink at all while pregnant, which was most of the time, but Aprille was both off campus and not pregnant. As in all things, minimum age laws did not apply to her since she was legally classified as livestock, so by the time the truck pulled in she was well into her second glass of bourbon and ginger ale. She and Werner joined the crowd of banqueters around the back of the truck.

Two male technicians and a woman came around to the back. They were the same three who had prepped the girls in the spitting room, except the woman was no longer naked. She had donned the same type of green smock the surgeons wore. They unlocked the back gates of the truck and threw them open. A cheer went up at the sight of the girls on their spits. At this point, Werner noted, the Company seemed to have abandoned its stance on antiseptic conditions. The two men detached a spit carrying a buxom blonde girl from its wall mount and carried it down a ramp through a knot of leering banqueters to one of three portable steel tables. They placed her belly down on the table and returned to the truck for another.

As the men checked the manifest to make sure they were selecting the correct roaster, the woman approached the blonde with one of the syringe cases. This injection was apparently not going to be a swift jab in the upper arm because she wrapped a tourniquet around the girl's left forearm and tightened it, then carefully inserted the needle of a loaded syringe into the bulging vein.

"Wow!" Aprille whispered. "She's getting mainlined!"

Werner could sense a change in her breathing and feel her tensing as she stared at the pink serum following into the girl's vein. He took a firm grip on her left hand.

The second girl off the truck was much longer on the spit, with honey brown hair and a dramatic figure. She, too, was placed face down on the table and was the green-smocked woman's next intravenous serum recipient.

"Do you know who that woman is, the one in the green smock?" he asked Aprille, partly out of curiosity, but mostly to divert her attention from the all-too-entrancing syringes with their pink cargo of deadly joy.

Several seconds slipped by before Aprille could force herself to close her eyes and concentrate on the question.

"Her name is Harvest. She's a B2. And a very prolific one. She's thirty-seven and has already produced twenty-three babies. That's about one every ten months! But they've made her stop for a year to recover from . . ." Aprille had opened her eyes and was again transfixed by the sight of the plunger pushing the drug into the girl's bloodstream. Werner turned her away from it. She blinked and continued. "She has to recover from an accident. A car accident. She was being driven to work — she worked as an aide at a clinic — when her van was broadsided by someone running a red light."

"So now she works in the spitting room?"

"She's a good nurse. In another month, as I understand it, they plan to start breeding her again."

"How come she doesn't go nutsy-cuckoo around the O-drugs, like you do?"

"Because she's never had it. She's a B2. She's never been tubed."

"Ah ha."

River was the last of the three roasters to be brought down the ramp and placed on a table. Werner saw right away that her eyes no longer registered a dazed, dreamy ambivalence. Now they skittered around like a frightened doe surrounded by wolves. She spotted Aprille and the corners of her mouth twitched. Was it an attempt to smile around the steel spit filling her mouth? A grimace of pain? He couldn't tell. Her hands and feet flexed constantly but her body was rigidly still. Clearly, in the four hours since her spitting she had come down from her drug-induced high. When she caught sight of the roasting pits nearby, her eyes widened in unambiguous terror.

The woman named Harvest arrived at her side and cinched the tourniquet around River's left arm. A minute later the pink liquid was flowing into her vein. The effect was almost instantaneous. Her eyes lost their sharp focus and stopped darting about. Her eyelids drooped. Her breathing slowed. Her hands and feet ceased their restless movement. This time when her eyes drifted over to Aprille and Werner, the corners of her mouth drew slowly back away from the spit in an obvious attempt to smile. A few seconds later her eyes rolled up into her head and she began an odd undulating movement. In fact, Werner realized, all three girls were doing the same.

"My God!" he whispered to Aprille, "it looks like they're humping their spits."

"I'm sure that's exactly what they're doing," she whispered back. "They just got a mainline dose of O, for godsake! Every vaginal nerve is a hundred times as sensitive to pleasure. They're rubbing themselves on the metal shaft and probably drowning in orgasms. O God, how I envy them!"

Werner glanced at her in alarm. She was panting, mouth open and eyes aflame as she gazed at River. He gripped her hand more tightly and nodded to a circulating waitress (a P-girl in an extremely brief maid outfit) to refresh her drink.

As Harvest packed up her syringe case, the two men flipped all three girls over so they were face-up on the tables. Even as they were closing up the truck and preparing to take off for their next delivery, three chefs had moved in with giant syringes filled with a milky substance. They began injecting it into the girls' breasts.

"What is that stuff?" Werner asked Aprille.

"It's a proprietary formula that's mostly milk. Has some flavorings in it, too. It enlarges and firms up the breasts for roasting and makes them more succulent. Breast meat is the most popular cut, of course, and this maximizes the portions per girl. It makes us look great on the spit, too."

The enhancement was, in fact, quite spectacular. The breasts had not only greatly increased in size, but projected proudly upwards without a trace of sagging.

The chefs had produced jars of a clear, viscous substance and were smearing it on the girl's nipples with their fingers.

"Now what are they doing?" Werner asked, relieved to see that Aprille was relaxing again as she pulled back from her fixation on the drug.

"That's a heat-deflecting gel that keeps the most tender flesh from overcooking and shriveling. They'll also put it on the lips — both above and below — and the eyelids and ears. They'll smear a very light layer of it all over the face. As soon as the girls die, they'll apply a thick layer to the eyeballs."

"How long does that take? For them to die."

"A girl can last anywhere from an hour and a half to three hours over a low fire. That's why they start these live roasts so early. They want to keep the girls alive as long as possible, to please the customers."

"My God! They cook for three hours on the spit while still alive?"

"Well, yes. But they have continuous orgasms the whole time!"

"Jesus! How can anyone survive three hours roasting in a fire pit?"

"Part of that last dose of serum is a muscle relaxant. It does two things. It helps tenderize the meat and it keeps the heart from being overly stimulated by the pain and heat, not to mention the orgasms. In other words, it prevents heart failure. What kills us is asphyxiation. Our lungs are gradually seared by the heat until we can't breathe."

"How do you know all this?"

"It's part of our education here."

"I should think that kind of detail would scare the girls shitless!"

"It would, except that they do it along with an O-drug demonstration. Later the Prime girls get a much stronger demonstration when we're tubed."

"So what does the classroom demonstration consist of?"

"I'll tell you in a minute. You should watch this."

The chefs had finished their finger-painting and had stripped off the tape sealing the incision on the girl's bellies. Three assistant cooks had wheeled tubs of stuffing out of the kitchen area and parked them beside the tables. They then grabbed both sides of the incision and spread it open to expose the disemboweled interior, holding it open while the chefs packed stuffing into it. The fragrance of spices filled the air as they worked. The dining guests milled about watching, laughing, chatting and groping the P-girls as they snatched fresh drinks from their trays. Aprille, now on her forth bourbon and ginger ale, had begun to depend on Werner's arm to keep her balance.

"The demonstration?" he prompted..

Aprille's tongue had trouble moving properly, but she managed to speak fairly clearly.

"The teacher first makes us all bend over and expose our ass. He takes a cane and gives us each three good whacks so we'll know how much it hurts. And it really DOES hurt! The pain takes your breath away! Then he asks for a volunteer from the class. If no one volunteers, he has us draw a name from a box. The volunteer takes off her clothes, gets an injection of O, grabs the back of a chair and bends over. The rest of the class gets to give her five whacks each with the cane. She screams after each blow and then, amazingly, begs for another! We can see she's obviously having orgasms because her juices are running down her legs and she's dancing in place and moaning in ecstacy between screams. We're allowed to hit her on the butt, the legs, the feet, the arms, the breast — just about everywhere! By the time we've all had our turn, she's a mass of ugly welts and bruises, but she's still pleading for more! The next day she can't sit down without pain, but assures the class that she'd do it again in a heartbeat and can hardly wait to turn seventeen so she can be activated. That's why no one's afraid to be spitted or slaughtered. The anticipation is a tremendous, erotic rush!"

"But you end up dead."

"Yeah. That's kinda scary. But it just adds to the rush!"

"Wouldn't you rather live and have babies?"

"Oh yes! Yes, yes, yes! That's a rush, too. Making them and having them and nursing them. But especially making them." She rubbed her increasingly inebriated body against his in case he missed the point. "Of course, for me the second two parts are only theoretical. . ." she placed his hand on her breast and squirmed against it, ". . .but all my brooder friends tell me how beautiful it is to watch the baby coming out, and how wonderful it feels when they suckle on your tits. And the best thing is, we get to do it again. We can keep enjoying it over and over."

"Childbirth is painless here?"

"Absolutely! Unless we're being punished for something, they give us all the latest birthing anaesthetics, plus a little O. They tell me it feels like your lover is licking your pussy. You even have little orgasms as the baby is coming through. Of course, it's not the super rush of the final Big O. Look!"

She pointed to the three girls who were being lifted off the tables by the chefs and assistant cooks. Their bellies, now filled with stuffing, had been sewn shut with a stitching gun and the ends of their spits were being set into a trestle frame so the chefs could turn them as they applied the first coat of oils and spices.

The Head Chef made an announcement.

"Ladies and gentlemen, honored guests: at this time, before we begin our first basting of seasoned oils, you may inspect the meat up close, if you choose. You are invited to touch the live meat if you wish, but please do not disturb the bindings or damage the protective glaze on the nipples, labia and face. Also, please do not touch the eyes. The roasters are unable to make any sound because the spits have destroyed their vocal chords; the only way they can convey to us their reactions to the cooking process is through their eyes. We certainly don't want to deprive ourselves of the ability to observe their unique combination of suffering and pleasure. Please keep the lines moving so everyone has an opportunity to visit with them."

The dining guests began moving along the line of spits. Werner and Aprille joined them. The man ahead of them managed to run his hands over nearly every square inch of all three girls. Aprille cupped her hands gently around the faces of the blonde girl and the tall brunette and smiled at them. When they came to River, Werner reached under her and squeezed her hands. Aprille bent down and kissed her cheek and forehead. Tears formed in the corners of River's eyes. Aprille wiped them away with an index finger and licked it off.

"Goodbye, roommate," she said, her own eyes brimming over. "I'll sure miss you, sweetie, but in a little while you'll be inside me and part of me forever. Remember that. Are you enjoying this, so far?"

Werner was horrified that she would ask such a question, but River's eyes lit up and her lips drew back into as much of a smile as the spit allowed. And she winked!

"I thought so," Aprille said. "And the best is yet to come." She kissed her again, a final time, and they moved away so others could file past and fondle the meat.

The chefs kept a close eye on the crowd and the clock, and as soon as the last of the patrons had had his chance to feel up the bodies still subtly humping on their skewers, they cleared the guests from the prep area and touched up the gel coating the nipples. While most guests wandered off to obtain more drinks, several formed a ring around the spitted girls, watching in fascination as the chefs applied the first shiny coat of seasoned oils with wide brushes. The girls writhed on their spits as the brushes stroked their augmented breasts, bringing on a torrent of orgasms. The final step in the preparation was to wrap their hair in aluminum foil.

Finally it was time to carry them to the roasting pits.

All three girls were carried to the pits at the same time. The ends of the spits were dropped into slots in the steel walls of the fire pits with the girls facing up. There was immediate movement on the spits as the intense heat penetrated their backs. Rotisserie motors were swung into place at the blunt end of the spit and locked on to it. At the touch of a button each spit began to turn slowly. River's face rotated away from Werner's view, then down toward the fiery coals, then up. Her eyes were closed and she seemed to be trembling all over. Several more rotations and her skin had turned a bright pink. She was breathing faster. Fifteen minutes of cooking and all three were varying shades of red. It was impossible to tell whether the emotions on their faces reflected pain or erotic ecstacy. Aprille insisted it was both.

The chefs moved in and basted them as they turned, the drippings causing little bursts of flames that touched the still living skin, now made ultra sensitive by the searing heat. Gradually the redness darkened. By the end of the first hour all three girls were a golden bronze. They continued to writhe on their spits, their eyes half open as though they were heavily intoxicated. Perhaps they were. The chefs basted them at regular intervals.

Werner had to shut off the supply of bourbon/ginger ales to Aprille who had thrown up once and could barely stand up. She alternated between bouts of giggling and sobbing as she watched her friend cook.

An hour and a half into the roasting when all three girls were a reddish bronze, the chefs announced that the blonde girl had died. Her rotisserie was stopped long enough to apply a thick layer of the heat-resistant paste to her now sightless eyes, then the fire was turned up in her pit to normal roasting level. She would be the first roast to be served.

After a little over two hours had elapsed, they pronounced the tall brunette dead. Her eyes, too, were treated and the heat under her increased. She would be the second to be carved up for the guests.

River's agony (or ecstacy?) continued. Gradually her fingers and toes stopped clenching and her breathing deteriorated to short rapid gasps. A little before three hours had gone by since she had first been placed over the fire, the gasping stopped altogether. Her browned body, shimmering with oils and spices, became still as it turned on the spit.

April hadn't had a drink for two of those hours but her mind was in such turmoil that she could barely function. With hours still to go before the roasts would be fully cooked and ready to serve, Werner decided it might be helpful to take her away from the scene for a while. She was clearly a mess, her feelings conflicted. Despite what she'd been taught to think, despite her own acquaintance with O-drugs and her experience of pain as pleasure, despite the fact that every day she consumed the meat of other girls who had been slaughtered and cooked — despite all that, the sight of her friend roasting over the fire was emotionally devastating.

This particular banquet was being thrown by one of the larger casino/pleasure palaces in town and a number of special rooms had been set aside for the guests to entertain themselves during the several hours it took to roast a girl properly. Werner took Aprille by the hand and led her to one.

The room he chose at random happened to be equipped with sturdy hooks in the ceiling and a pegboard wall displaying an assemblage of toys ranging from shrink-wrapped disposable dildos to sundry restraints and whips. Aprille, her spirits wavering between slightly drunken giddiness and overwhelming grief, suddenly tilted to the former. She wanted to try everything. What she really wanted, of course, was to drown her pain in play. Or submerge her mental pain in physical pain. He would accomodate her — to an extent.

He chained her up by the wrists and tried out an assortment on whips and floggers on her. She begged him to hit her hard, to hurt her, but he would only flog her playfully, kissing her between strokes. He hung her upside down from her ankles and flogged her some more, gently, despite her demands for severity. He put his face into the V of her legs and licked the nectar from her tender slit, laving it thoroughly with his tongue. He pushed ice cubes into it from the fridge, and carrots warmed in the microwave, and his fingers and tongue. He tied her wrists to her ankles and swatted her bottom as though she were a tether ball. She cried out for more as she sobbed. He lowered her and placed his hardened cock on her face, ordering her to take him into her mouth. She licked and sucked at him so artfully and eagerly that he wanted to explode in her throat; but she turned her head away and begged him not to waste it, pleading until she wept, wiping her tears on his scrotum. How could he refuse her? He let her down, tied her arms behind her and threw her on the bed to "rape" her. But how do you rape a girl who lunges at you with her hips and manages to impale herself on your stone-hard erection using only her legs and feet? And humps you so hard you think the orgasm will tear you apart? And cries out in such joy as you flood her with semen that you want to sweep her into your arms and hold her forever? You certainly don't want to slip out of her, not when her love muscles are milking your last drop, pulling you back in, trying to massage your dying soldier back to life.

God how he loved this girl! Yet he could not keep her, or marry her, or buy her, or save her from the spit. He untied her so she could wrap her arms around him as they laid together, waiting for the call to dinner. And he stayed inside her the whole time, moving softly, getting harder, trading kisses and caresses.

When the bell sounded, calling the guests to the feast, they hugged each other in their mutual love, in their separate pain, in their hopelessly illicit desires. Dutifully, they answered the call, joining the others to watch the roasted girls removed from the fire pits and carried to the three butcher block islands where they were positioned for carving. Their skin was now a deep bronze, shimmering with basting oils and their own bubbling fats. Their faces were still remarkably beautiful, peacefully biting down on the metal spit, still crowned with a bun of hair that had been perfectly preserved by the foil.

Werner and Aprille went to a table being served by River's island and sat down before a pair of elegant china plates, each with a seven-piece silver service, a water glass, a wine glass, a bread dish, individual condiment cups for salt and pepper and a small carafe of olive oil for the fresh baked bread. Werner couldn't bear to watch them carve River into slabs of meat, so he watched them prepare the blonde instead; but Aprille never took her eyes off River until a platter of her roasted meat, steaming and fragrant, was placed on the table. As a guest of honor, Werner was served two slices of her breast on a side dish. He shared one with Aprille. They ate in a kind of referential silence. Tears rolled down Aprille's cheeks, but she ate two helpings of meat and said nothing.

When they had cleaned their plates, when they had drunk their wine and finished their crème brulée, Aprille turned to Werner and gazed at him calmly. He braced himself. What would she say? How could he comfort her?

But what she said was totally unexpected.

"That was how real girl tastes."

"What?"

"That was the taste of real girl."

"What do you mean?"

"Most girls who are scheduled to be activated are fed a prescribed diet for at least a week with specific foods and spices that flavors their meat to the liking of the chef who places the order. River was purchased by one of her lovers for immediate activation, so she wasn't flavored. She was pure girl meat. Au naturelle. Will you do that for me?"

"Do what for you?"

"Order me as I am, without flavoring?"

For a moment Werner was speechless. "Are you telling me you want me to order you up for dinner?"

"Well, you can't right now, of course, but when the time comes?"

Again he was unable to answer.

Aprille suddenly turned away, looking crestfallen. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to presume. It's just that I . . . that you seemed to . . . ."

He took her by both shoulders and gently turned her back to face him. "Are you telling me that it would please you if I placed an order to have you roasted for me? When the time comes?"

The brightness slowly returned to her eyes. "Do you like me, Werner? Really like me?"

He kissed her. "What's this 'do you like me' shit? I love you. I told you that."

"And you must know I love you. But do you love me enough to buy an option on me?"

Before he could answer, the man seating on the other side of her leaned around her and said, "If you don't, my friend, I'll be glad to help her out. She can grace my dinner table any day!" He chuckled in a hopeful kind of way.

"Too late, friend," Werner told him. "I found her first and have special pull with the Company." To Aprille he said, "Certainly I'll buy an option on you! How could have doubted it? And I'll renew it every year. And I mean year after year after year! Because not only do I expect you to do your duty as breeding stock, but I intend to help you become the most prolific breeder we have. I say 'we' because I'll do what I need to do to make sure you and I are at the same facility. And I say 'help you' because while I can't monopolize all your stud times, I'm going to come damned close. I'm going to make sure my sperm delivery system showers your eggs with tons of eager conquistadors. You, in turn, are going to replenish the Company stock with lots of beautiful Prime Grade baby girls. And when your ovaries have finally delivered the last egg and it's time to activate, you'll be all mine."

She took his hands and kissed first one, then the other. "And during all those pregnancies when my belly is all puffed up, thanks to one of your conquistadors? What then?"

"Then my sperm delivery system will see to it that your cunt muscles are well exercised and the baby chute well lubricated so that, at the appointed time, you can pop it right out and we can start the whole lovely cycle all over again. Time after time. Year after year. Fucking and loving and popping. Fucking and loving and popping."

"But after all those years and all those babies, I'll be too old to roast live."

"All the better. You'll still get that last dose, the Big O, only I'll pull strings so that I'll be there at your side when they hang you up by the feet. While you're bleeding out, I'll have one hand on your pussy, one on your breasts and my tongue in your mouth. I'll make sure that you leave this world in the midst of the grandest orgasm you've ever known."

"And my meat?"

"I'll freeze every ounce of it and portion it out gradually for as long as I live. I'll establish a weekly ritual with the table set in fine linen, adorned with candles and flowers, and set with ornate silverware and the finest china. I'll have your bones and inedible parts cremated and sealed in a silver urn with your picture elegantly framed on three sides and in gold bas relief on the fourth. It will be placed in the center of the table surrounded by votive candles while I eat your lovely, pure girl meat."

"Will you invite friends?"

"Would you like me to?"

"Oh yes! Girls, too. Especially them! Both B girls and M girls. I don't want to be remembered with tears. I want to be associated with love and eaten with joy! In fact, you will make my spirit very happy if you make sex part of the ritual. Will you do that?"

He laughed. She was amazing! "What if I'm too old to perform?"

"Doesn't have to be you. Bring in a younger stud. Or several!"

"But I'll run out of your meat."

She thought about that a moment. "I know! Buy one of the M1 girls who's eaten my meat and have her snuffed and roasted. The prettiest one, of course. Once she's digested me, I'll be part of her body, so when you eat her meat, you'll be eating me, too. It's like consecrated meat. That way you can keep me going forever, and have some really big parties! When you run low on the consecrated meat, say once a month, you just pick out the most beautiful girl whose eaten it and cook her up for an orgy in my honor! Then use the leftovers for the weekly meals."

She burst into the same radiant smile that had captured him when he first saw her.

"Will you do that for me?" she asked, her face and voice sparkling with hope.

"Consider it done," he said.

-------------

And he was as good as his word, although it was eighteen years before he had to put her plan in motion. During those long, sweet years there were many babies, many many baby-making sessions, and an astonishing number of birth chute lubrications. But inevitably her ovaries were exhausted and he was forced to exercise his option. Yet, even as they took that final walk together, hand in hand, to the ugly gray building, and even as she hung by her ankles with her long gold and silver hair brushing the floor, and long after her blood had flowed around their mouths, locked in their farewell kiss, he still considered her the most beautiful woman he had ever known.