by Big Kahuna
She continued crying while Rance caressed her dangling teat, the final shred of her dignity gone, his singsong voice soft in her ear.
Chapter 11
Among the Herd
Melissa lay in the shade of a tree, watching her sister cows as they padded about the barnyard, or drank from the trough that backed onto the milking shed, or generally did nothing. She supposed barnyard was a misnomer, since there was no barn in sight. Just the back of a nondescript yellow-white one-story building, like so many in Texas. It could be a makeshift church, a meth lab, or housing for several hundred illegal aliens.
Or a dairy.
There was one thing that was not a misnomer however, and that was the word ‘cow’. She no longer corrected herself when it came to her mammalian classification. ‘If it looks like a duck…’ the old saying went. But she didn’t look like a duck. She looked like a cow. She gave milk like a cow, she ate like a cow, she even sounded like one.
She was also being treated like a cow, or at least she supposed she was. Despite having been born and raised in Wisconsin, USA, the dairy capital of the Midwest, the closest she had come to working dairy cows was seeing them lying in pastures as her father drove by on the highway.
And now she was one. ‘If it looks like a duck....’
She looked about the barnyard, there being not much else to look at. It was a largish area, about twenty-five by forty feet, and was surrounded by tube steel fencing that was further surrounded by trees and shrubs, effectively screening them from the outside world. Of course there was no grass. You couldn’t have a bunch of naked women lolling about on the fescue without getting dirty, or ending up with all sorts of skin irritations.
Instead of grass, Rance had installed playground mulch. She remembered it from her college days, when she had done a semester working with children at a daycare facility. Made from one hundred percent recycled rubber, it was soft, wouldn’t fade, rot, compress, or lose its lush green color for several years. Even from a short distance it looked like real grass. A very thorough man, Rance, and environmentally conscious, too.
The morning air was cool on her skin, the sun still low enough and the barnyard sheltered enough so that the typical April heat would be held at bay for another few hours.
If it was still April. If it was even Texas. She had no way of knowing if either were true. For all she knew she might be in eastern Europe somewhere, just another hucow in a demented dairy that sold breast milk in glass bottles, perhaps to sparkly fucking vampires that fed on humans as if they were cattle. Which she was.
She didn’t think this was Europe, though. Texas had a feel to it, and this felt like it. It could possibly be Mexico but she didn’t think so, considering how quickly Rance had received his shipments from her. There was also his rapid response to her dalliance with Billy, which meant that this place must be fairly close to the Dallas area, an outer ring suburb at most.
That was good to know, that civilization was not so very far away. But twenty miles might as well be a thousand miles if she couldn’t walk.
Melissa put that out of her mind. There was nothing she could do about it at the moment, so it didn’t bear thinking about. The trouble was that there was nothing about any of this that she could do anything about. Was she going to stop thinking entirely? Well, that was the life of a cow, wasn’t it?
That and pissing herself.
Her mind kept coming back to that. She had probably replayed that scene in her mind’s eye at least twenty times since having come out to the barnyard, at least once every minute, possibly more.
“Jen klid klid, Buttercup,” he had whispered, one hand stroking the back of her neck while she cried it out. “Jistě se teď cítíš lépe, no ne?”
She had no idea what he’d said, but she could tell that he was trying to soothe her. He removed the water hose from her mouth and then reached into his back pocket and withdrew a short screwdriver. The plastic head fastened together in one spot, just under the jaw, hinged in back apparently. He pulled the false head apart and hung it on the open gate next to him, allowing her this one small morsel of freedom, causing her spirits to lift dramatically.
“Aah—” she started to say, but he began washing her face with the same rag with which he had cleaned her nipples, moving her chin side to side with his free hand while he worked. He wiped her tears away, speaking gently to her all the while. She let him tend to her, surprised at his tenderness considering everything he had done to her so far.
When he was finished cleaning her face he smiled down at her, the same amused smile he always had, the smile that people reserve for cute kittens and other animals they feel superior to. Melissa opened her mouth to say thank you, or at least something approximating it, but was startled back into silence as the plastic head was settled into place and snapped shut. Just another one of his cows.
“Tady je naše Buttercup,” he said, giving her another wink, and then settled to the task of washing down her genitals, thighs, and knees; any part of her that might have come into contact with her urine. When that was done, he removed the enema hose from her butt plug and replaced it with her tail, all very neat and tidy.
He let her go then. Removed the bent nails from the yokes and set her free without another word or glance, and then moved off to Moo-Moo so that he could begin washing her down.
Melissa backed slowly down the ramp, feeling dazed and disoriented, though quite a bit lighter in the chest. Moo-Moo joined her a minute later on the padded floor. She turned and ambled off to the right, not wishing to chat apparently.
The next cow—Cinnamon, Melissa presumed—backed down the ramp of her milking station and onto the mat. She gave Melissa a look that could have been commiserating, or supportive, or perhaps meant nothing at all. With only the eyes to judge by, communication was hit or miss at best.
Cinnamon padded off after Moo-Moo, toward a pet door on the right hand wall that Melissa hadn’t noticed earlier. Moo-Moo went through it, sunlight splashing through the flap, followed by Cinnamon, and then Blossom, who Rance had only just finished cleaning up.
Melissa stayed put while Dewdrop and Bluebell were cleaned and then released from their respective confinements. Rance watched them go, and then turned his attention to Daisy, singing softly while he worked the washcloth up and down between her thighs, his movements slow and deliberate.
“Buttercup…?”
Melissa looked up to find that Rance was looking back at her, smiling his infuriating smile. He nodded to her and gestured with his free hand toward the pet door, his meaning clear as crystal. She moved off, there being no reason to stay and certainly more reason to leave.
Curiosity got the better of her when she reached the pet door. She turned her head in time to see Rance getting into position behind Daisy, kneeling just back of her, stroking her hip with one hand while undoing his belt with the other. Melissa hadn’t wanted to see any more, so she’d left.
A noise startled Melissa out of her reverie. It was Daisy, ambling out through the pet door, fresh from her cowpoking. She didn’t appear any the worse for it, neither embarrassed or dejected or even abused. As if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened.
Perhaps nothing had, Melissa considered. For all she knew, Daisy and Rance might be regular lovers. Then again it could be that he was doing all of them, and that she was his especial favorite. It might also be that it was simply her turn in the rotation, or that she was just chosen at random. With only one milking under her belt, Melissa had no way of knowing. She only knew that she didn’t want to be next.
That meant escape, which wasn’t going to happen if she spent all her time lying in the grass, or on the recycled rubber, as it were. She got up from where she lay, a bit awkwardly, but then considering the size of her breasts, as well as the prosthetics on her hands and feet, it seemed that she would be doing everything awkwardly.
She raised her right hoof up to the eyeholes in her surrogate face, so that she could examine it closely. Yes, there
it was, a black screw set into the plastic cuff around her wrist, a six-pointed star with a raised oblong in the center. She sighed. A proprietary screw, which would require a specialized matching screwdriver to remove it. She turned her wrist over and found another such screw on the other side.
She could possibly beat the plastic against a large rock, perhaps break it loose, except that there were no large rocks in the barnyard, or even small ones for that matter. She could try breaking the plastic hoof by beating it against the fence, but that would only attract attention.
Then she would have to find another way. A group of cows was lying off to her right, near another shaded section of fence. Maybe some of them had already tried escaping, or just maybe she could lead them in revolt. So far Rance was the only free person she’d seen. Perhaps the Lone Star Dairy really was a one-man operation.
Gathering her courage, Melissa padded over to the group of them. They lay there, without a care in the world it seemed. Either they really wanted this life, or Rance had broken them. She suddenly realized that getting help from them might be more difficult than she had thought. Still, she had to try.
“Hahh,” she started, trying to form intelligible words around her immobile tongue. “Mah ‘ame ibh Muh—OHHH…!” she bleated as pain shot through her upper body, the result of a plastic-encased foot connecting with her vulnerable udder. She backed away from the herd, but the cow that had kicked her was up on her hooves and knees with surprising speed, ramming a shoulder into her side and tipping her over onto her back.
“Emhh—!” Melissa cried in fright, trying to turn over, to get away, but the mad cow was already on top of her, forcing her back down onto the rubber grass, putting a hoof on each of her udders and pressing down—hard!—the plasticized footwear all but disappearing within her voluminous breast flesh.
Shaking with pain and fright, Melissa lay there as the senior cow, whose name she still did not know, leaned in close, the brown eyes behind the mask blazing with hatred and anger. They were Asian.
“Nnghhh!” the angry cow grunted, almost a snort. She shook her head, a tacit warning to shut the fuck up. She snorted again, and then removed her hooves from Melissa’s chest, leaving behind the reddened traces of her victory over the new meat.
The vicious cow ambled away to rejoin the rest of the herd, though not before kicking a few bits of rubberized grass in Melissa’s direction, spraying her injured foe.
Melissa clutched her damaged breasts with her forearms while she lay there, rivulets of milk streaming across her whitish skin while tears of pain streaked down the sides of her face. This was all so unfair, so wrong. How could people do this to each other? Keeping others captive, treating them like animals. Treating one another like animals! People shouldn’t behave this way!
But they weren’t people, not anymore. They were hucows, the bottom of the food chain, unable to defend themselves, and unable to keep from being exploited. That was what Rance had turned them into, and what he intended that she should become.
She continued crying until the pain subsided enough to allow her to roll over and crawl back to her shaded spot and lie down there. She lay on her side on the soft green rubber, facing away from the others, the little hope she’d had having been sucked out of her as though it were the milk from her udders.
Perhaps she should just give up, put thoughts of freedom behind her. The other cows obviously had. Rance had devised the perfect system, first by making his cows physically dependent upon being milked, and then removing the ability for them to do it themselves.
He was a smart one, no doubt about that. Had he engineered that power outage? Hacked his way into the TWP computers and shut down the grid that so that he could spirit her away during the confusion? She wouldn’t put it past him.
Does anybody even know I’m gone? she wondered. A single woman, living alone, no friends, no family close by. How long before her parents would realize that she hadn’t phoned or emailed? A week? Two weeks? Rance might even impersonate her, steal her identity. He undoubtedly had her laptop. He could keep her mom and dad in the dark for weeks, email them that she was on vacation in the Bahamas somewhere.
And what about her job? She’d only been there for seven months. Everyone was assuming that she’d found herself a Texas millionaire. It wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to assume that she had just up and run off with him. Janice would certainly be surprised, but probably nothing beyond that. No one would miss her, except for her parents, and even then not for a month or so. They would report her missing, after which she would end up with her face on a milk carton. She sighed, remembering that that was already the case.
Melissa looked disinterestedly through the horizontal bars of her barnyard prison. She could make out a few details of the terrain beyond the bushes, shrubs, and trees that ringed the enclosure. There wasn’t much to see: just dirt and sand and scrub. She spied a single-wide mobile home a ways off, presumably Rance’s living quarters. It had a little garden in front of it, a little oasis in an otherwise forbidding environment. There was a pickup truck parked nearby, and a dirt path leading off and over a rise, perhaps to the city, or the interstate, or into the Big Empty.
Freedom lay that way, but at what cost? The cows behind her had chosen captivity. Was that because they had tried escaping but failed? It wasn’t as though there was any security around to stop them. The fence wasn’t even that tall, five feet at the most, though getting over it while wearing hooves might prove to be exceedingly difficult.
Or did Rance have some other kind of security that she hadn’t yet seen? Did he have a dog? Some big brute of a German shepherd or a Rottweiler? She didn’t even want to think about that.
And then there was the weather. It was presumably late April, which meant that the highs could be in the high seventies, possibly warmer, and May and June would be even worse. How long could an unprotected cow survive out in the wilderness, naked, unable to walk, wearing a plastic helmet under a hot sun?
The more she thought about it, the more hopeless it seemed. Without hands and feet she couldn’t walk, handle objects, or even use a cell phone. And even if she did manage to escape, could she possibly survive the elements? What about predators? There were bobcats and coyotes certainly. Were there still wolves in Texas?
Lastly, there were her breasts. How long could she go without being milked? Nursing mothers seemed to cope well enough while weaning baby from the tit, but her udders were several times the size of normal breasts, her pain correspondingly multiplied.
Melissa closed her eyes, all hope having been extinguished. Escape was impossible, and the consequences of trying could be fatal. She was a cow, and cows were put on earth to be milked and fucked. The other cows seemed to have accepted this. Perhaps she should as well.
She felt the sandpaper tongue drag across her breast before her conscious mind was aware of it, fur rubbing against her tattooed skin. Startled, Melissa opened her eyes to find a familiar figure crouched next to her on the rubber earth, licking the last remnants of dried milk from her abused tit.
“Mah-gee!” she cried, surprised by the presence of her cat.
“Prrt?” Maggie replied, looking up from her breakfast curiously, apparently confused by the strange but tasty creature’s speech. Melissa put her arms around the surprised cat, squashing the feline into her pillowy embrace.
She held her cat close, Maggie’s purring reverberating through her, calming her, a feeling of hope returning. But how did you get out here, puss-cat? she asked silently. There was only one answer, of course—Rance. He had obviously kidnapped her, too—or was catnapped a better word?
But why? she asked herself. He could have left her back at the apartment. So why hadn’t he?
Because someone would hear her, she reasoned. With no one there to feed her, Maggie would eventually have started yowling, enough so that she would have ultimately attracted the attention of neighbors, Billy or his father, or even the super. Maggie’s presence was all the confirmatio
n she needed. No one knew she was gone.
I’m going to escape, she decided, her cat’s appearance helping to banish her earlier despair. No one was going to come to her rescue, no Texas Rangers were going to come riding over that hill, so unless she wanted to spend the rest of her days being one of Rance’s milk cows, she had better stop sulking and start figuring out a plan.
Melissa got up, evicting Maggie from her comfy cushions. If she was going to escape, she was going to have to learn everything about her prison, possibly even something about her jailer if she could. Escape might not happen today or tomorrow or even next week, but it would be a better use of her time than just lying on the rubber grass waiting for her tits to fill up.
She began ambling along the fence line, looking for any other scenery outside of the enclosure, finding nothing of note save for a small backhoe, the kind that people used for digging up buried water lines or for doing small landscaping jobs.
Except that there was no landscaping anywhere that she could see, aside from Rance’s little garden, and she doubted he needed a backhoe for that. Then again, perhaps it wasn’t so much for digging things out of the ground as much as putting things into it. She hadn’t considered that. What if she took sick, or got a toothache? An infection? Was Rance a doctor? Did he have access to medicines? If anything unfortunate happened to her—if she died—he could dispose of her carcass in less than an hour. No fuss, no muss, and no one the wiser.
There was one thing she didn’t see that brought her some small amount of cheer, however: Rance apparently didn’t have a dog. She had not seen one running about, nor had she heard one, which she certainly would have by now. She breathed a sigh of relief. She might not be able to get out of the barnyard, but a dog, even a big one, would easily be able to get into it. She shuddered at the thought.
Melissa made one full circuit of the barnyard, stopping only when she came around to the back corner of the milking shed, where the water trough was located. One of the other cows, she didn’t know which one, was dipping her snout into it, drinking away, her elongated teats swaying just above the rubber mulch.