“Let’s just check your womb health and see if you’re pregnant yet,” the doctor said. And then he inserted the glowing tip of the medical wand into the entrance of Penny’s pussy.
Penny had hated this exam back when she’d been in the female breeder dorm and she had an even greater reason to hate it now. It was very possibly going to expose her as a fraud and let the doctor know that she hadn’t been doing her duty and getting bred like a good little breeder should.
And that was going to spell trouble.
Sure enough, there was a frown on the doctor’s face when he withdrew the wand and examined the tip, which was glowing a perfectly ordinary dark pink.
“This is very strange,” he said, consulting his lighted clipboard. “According to the Watcher’s notes, you and your Forever Mate have been engaging in sexual activities during the Mandatory Breeding Hour every night. Your womb and vagina are healthy and your breasts are producing nectar normally, yet you are not pregnant.”
“I’m not?” Penny tried to sound disappointed. “Oh, that’s too bad! My Forever Mate, V’rex, and I have been trying so hard. We wanted so much to contribute to the Glorious Cause!”
“It’s all right—you have two more chances to conceive before you’re recycled,” the doctor said consolingly.
“B-before I’m recycled?” Penny squeaked, feeling like he’d just slipped an icicle between her ribs. She’d known this was a possibility but having it said out loud made her feel sick and scared “But…but I’m still relatively young and healthy!” she protested. “You wouldn’t really recycle me that quickly—would you?”
“I’m afraid rules are rules.” The NeverBreeder doctor shook his head sternly. But then he seemed to thaw a little and patted Penny on the knee. “Don’t worry, though—I’m sure this is just a fluke. According to your charts, your reproductive system responded extraordinarily well to the compounds in the Mother’s Milk. You should be extremely fertile and well capable of conceiving before your time runs out.”
“Uh…thank you,” Penny whispered faintly. She couldn’t help remembering her very first night with V’rex, when he’d pretended to breed her and had shot his seed all over the outside of her pussy. It was a wonder she hadn’t gotten pregnant then, she thought faintly, if she was so incredibly fertile right now.
“You can get dressed,” the doctor told her. “A nurse will be here in just a minute to show you out.”
“Thank you,” Penny said but he was already turning away, clearly intent on something else.
Penny slid off the metal exam table, shivering, and got back into her blue toga, which wasn’t nearly warm enough for the chilly interior of the Breeding and Conception Center. She was about to try to find her own way out when a NeverBreeder nurse bustled in and gave her a bright, Jack-o-lantern smile.
“Well, now, dearie—time for you to go,” she said briskly to Penny. “I’ve got a note here for you to give to your supervisor at work so you don’t get into trouble for being late.” She handed Penny a folded slip of paper and then nodded towards the door. “Come on then—let’s get a move on, shall we?”
Her smile reminded Penny so much of Mother Toone, that she couldn’t help asking the nurse as they traversed the long corridors where her old NeverBreeder attendant was.
“Oh, Nurse Toone?” the other nurse said. “Why, she was recycled just yesterday, I’m afraid, along with a few others who were due for recycling. She’d reached the end of her usefulness, so she had to go.” She shrugged as though it was no big deal but her words struck Penny like a hammer.
“So…you NeverBreeders get recycled too?” she asked. “I never thought—”
“Oh, certainly, dearie! Why, we only live about twenty-five standard cycles, you know. Which is much shorter than you breeders, I’m sure. But when you account for the fact that we come out of our grow-baths fully formed and don’t have to go through the nasty business of childhood or adolescence, it all evens out.”
“I…didn’t know that,” Penny said faintly. She was still stunned to hear that Mother Toone had been recycled—no killed, because that was what it actually amounted to. She had known that the NeverBreeder attendant wasn’t really on her side, but she had been kind while Penny was in the dorms and always very cheerful which had helped to make a bad situation somewhat bearable.
“Oh yes,” the NeverBreeder nurse said brightly, continuing their conversation. “And of course, we NeverBreeders are stronger and tougher than you humans. Also, we don’t need the whispers to keep us in line, either—we get them in our grow-baths as we develop, which means we never have cause to doubt the perfection of the Glorious Cause or the wisdom of our Glorious Leader.”
“I see,” Penny mumbled. She had often wondered why the Glorious Leader would go to the trouble of creating an army of NeverBreeders at all. With the use of the hypno-whispers, it seemed he could turn anyone to his will. So why not just cut out the middleman and make an army of hypnotized breeders?
But now it made sense. The NeverBreeders might be small but they were incredibly tough and unflinchingly loyal. They didn’t even seem to mind the idea of being recycled—it was just a part of their circle of life, apparently.
Just then, as they traversed the seemingly endless labyrinth of hallways, a voice spoke over the intercom.
“Nurse Zoone,” it said. “Please report to exam room seventeen at once.”
“Oh dear!” The NeverBreeder nurse who had been leading Penny stopped short. “That’s me, so it is! Look, dearie, can you just wait here for a moment? I’m sure whatever they want it won’t take long.”
“Oh, uh, sure.” Penny nodded. “I don’t mind waiting.”
“That’s sweet of you, dearie. I’ll be back in a flash.” And Nurse Zoone hurried off, leaving Penny standing there in the middle of the corridor.
After she had turned a corner and was out of sight, Penny sighed and looked around herself. Though she’d lived in the dormitories here at the Breeding and Conception Center for quite some time, she’d never been allowed to explore at all. Everywhere she went had been as part of a group with Mother Toone and a bunch of the NeverBreeder guards surrounding them.
Curiously, she looked down the deserted hallway. It was lined with doors with various labels on them. Thanks to the translation bacteria she’d been given on the Mother Ship, Penny was able to read the alien language.
Transcription, read one door. Neurotransmology, read another. Fibroscanning, said a third.
Huh, wonder what the hell that is? Penny thought, as she walked past the door. And what else do they have down here?
She decided it couldn’t hurt to explore a little, while she was here. If Nurse Zoone came back and asked what she was doing, she could always say she was looking for a bathroom.
She wandered further down the hallway and saw a door marked Baths. Putting her ear to the door, Penny heard a strange gurgling-whispering sound. Well that was weird.
Her curiosity getting the better of her, she tried the door’s latch and found that it was open. Slowly, keeping an eye on the empty corridor in case the NeverBreeder nurse came back, she pushed open the door.
The room was completely full of tanks—at least a hundred of them. The gurgling sound was coming from them. As for the whispers, she wasn’t sure where they were coming from, but they sounded suspiciously like the hypno-whispers she heard from her pillow each night.
But it was the tanks that drew and held her attention. There were so many of them and each of them was big enough to hold either a large child or…
“Or a NeverBreeder,” Penny whispered to herself. Because floating in the cloudy liquid in each of the hundred or so tanks was an orange body. And all of the bodies she saw were in various stages of growth.
In one tank she saw a naked, fully formed NeverBreeder who looked almost ready to come out and be a functioning member of the Compound. In others she saw smaller bodies, still obviously developing.
In the last tank she looked in, a baby, who appe
ared to be a newborn, was floating. The poor thing was just beginning to have an orange tinge to its delicate skin but already it was clear what it would become, because there were no genitals between its legs and no hair on its head.
“Oh, you poor thing,” Penny whispered to it. “I wonder who they took you from?”
What breeder woman here in the Compound had that little infant taken from her womb when it was only three months into its normal gestation? And would she even know her child when it emerged as a fully formed NeverBreeder and went to work in the Compound?
Penny was sure she wouldn’t.
That’s going to be me—that’s going to be my baby if V’rex and I don’t get out of here, she thought and shivered. Unless she got recycled first for not getting pregnant, that was.
The thought sent a cold shiver down Penny’s spine and she left the room with the gurgling tanks filled with cloudy liquid and orange bodies quickly.
That’s it for me—I’ve seen enough. Don’t want to see anymore! she told herself as she slipped out of the room marked Baths and quietly closed the door. I’m just going to stand here and wait for the nurse to come back and not look at anything else in this awful place!
But the very next sign she saw changed her mind. On the door opposite the room full of tanks was a sign that said, Recycling.
Sixty-Seven
Recycling?
Penny stared at the door like a rabbit hypnotized by a snake. There was a dreadful mixture of horror and curiosity swirling inside her. It was the same feeling she got when she had to kill one of the huge flying roaches that were native to her home state of Florida. Squishing one was just the worst, but even more disgusting was checking to make sure it was really dead. But you had to check—the little bastards were built like miniature tanks and they were so hard to kill. They…
I’m stalling, Penny thought to herself. Either I’m going in or I’m staying out. Which is it?
She walked forward and tried the door latch. This room, too, was open. Filled with that same squirmy mixture of disgust and dread but unable to help herself, Penny pulled open the door and slipped inside.
Inside it was a good twenty degrees cooler and much darker than it had been out in the corridor. Penny shivered and rubbed her arms briskly as she looked around. As her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, she felt her stomach drop.
The place was a morgue.
Rows of silver tables filled all available space except the far left corner, which was taken up with some kind of large, bulky machine. On every table was a body—naked and cold and—
“Oh, Mother Toone!” Penny gasped, as her eyes fell on the table closest to the door.
On it, lying stiff and cold, was the corpse of the NeverBreeder attendant. She was naked, which showed that she had nothing between her legs, like all the NeverBreeders. But even missing her silver jumpsuit, Penny still recognized her.
“Oh, you poor thing,” she whispered, taking a step towards the table. “I’m so sorry. I just…”
And then her eyes fell on the table beside her old attendant and her breath caught in her throat. The corpse on that cold silver table was human…a female.
It was Claudette.
Penny’s heart began hammering in her chest.
“No,” she whispered, as her eyes traced her friend’s cold, lifeless face. “Oh, no…oh, no!”
But there was no doubt about it—the corpse was Claudette. She was laid out like an accident victim on a slab, though there were no marks anywhere on her skin.
Hardly knowing what she was doing, Penny walked forward to stand beside her friend’s body.
“Claudette,” she whispered. “Oh God. Oh please, no…”
Her eyes blurred with tears as she looked down at her friend’s cold, still face. At least she didn’t look like she’d died in any kind of pain. Maybe they just gave a lethal injection to the people who were recycled.
But that was irrelevant as far as Penny was concerned. Her only friend in the Compound besides V’rex had been killed. Murdered because after years and years of producing fetus after fetus for the Glorious Leader, her body couldn’t produce any more. And so she was deemed no longer useful and had been “recycled.”
“It’s not recycling, it’s murder!” Penny whispered, feeling a mixture of rage and sorrow. “This place is sick—it’s sick!”
Reaching out, she stroked Claudette’s soft, black hair.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered to her friend. “So sorry we couldn’t get out of here together. I…I’ll never forget you.”
Just then a door opened right beside the huge machine that took up the far left corner of the room.
“Got a big job today,” one voice said and Penny saw that it belonged to a NeverBreeder worker, dressed in one of the ubiquitous silver jumpsuits.
“’Fraid so. They recycled an extra-large lot yesterday,” another NeverBreeder answered him.
“Yep—plenty of meat for the butcher shop. We’ll all be eating well tonight!” his coworker said and laughed.
Their conversation made Penny’s stomach clench. But she knew she had to act quickly. Moving by instinct, she crouched low, hoping to hide among the silver tables filled with bodies.
She was glad it was dim in the room, but what if the NeverBreeders had especially good eyesight? How could she explain being in here if they caught her? She was absolutely sure what she had seen wasn’t meant for her eyes—for the eyes of any breeder for that matter. If they caught her, she was going to be in so much trouble!
As she crept slowly backwards, through the maze of tables, she heard the workers continue their conversation.
“You want to roll the first one up here?” one worker was saying to another. “I’ll get the piecer turned on and warmed up.”
As he spoke, he flipped a switch on the side of the huge machine, which had a long silver chute at one end and a conveyer belt assembly at the other. In between, from the large metal body of the machine, protruded several clear tubes that ran down to a drain in the floor.
As soon as the first worker flipped the switch, the machine he had called “the piecer” started humming. As Penny watched, horrified, the other NeverBreeder worker rolled a table with a dead humanoid male up to the chute at the far end of the machine.
I knew him, Penny thought, looking at the corpse. He worked in the garment shop in the Marketplace, right across from me!
He was a nice looking, older gentleman who had always given her a kind nod when their eyes met as they both did their jobs. Penny had even bought a spare toga from him the day before last and though she didn’t know his name, he had struck her as a kind and courteous man, unlike a lot of the aggressive, younger male breeders.
Well apparently being kind and courteous isn’t enough to keep you alive around here, whispered a little voice in her head as she watched in fascinated horror.
Working together, the two workers lifted the male by his heels and shoulders and dumped him down the silver chute.
The humming of the machine turned into a grinding roar and the clear tubes began spouting crimson down the floor drain at once. A coppery, metallic scent drifted towards her and Penny’s eyes went wide as her nose wrinkled.
Blood, she thought, feeling sick. That’s his blood they’re pouring down the drain!
But even worse was what she saw when the conveyor belt began running at the far end of the machine. A long hairy thigh, neatly cut just above the knee and below the hip, came out from under the plastic flaps.
Like a piece of luggage on an airport conveyor belt, Penny thought faintly.
The thigh was followed by an upper arm and then a forearm and then…
But Penny couldn’t watch anymore. She knew if she saw the nice man’s head come rolling out from under the long plastic strips, she would go crazy and start screaming.
No, she thought. No, no, no, no, NO!
Turning away from the grizzly sight, she skuttled through the rows of tables and towards the door. Luckily,
the loud roaring of the machine covered the sound of the door opening and closing behind her and then she was standing out in the corridor, heart pounding and stomach twisting.
“Oh God,” she whispered in a low, trembling voice. “Oh God, we have to get out of here!”
“Have to what, dearie?”
Looking up, Penny saw Nurse Zoone coming towards her.
“Sorry I took so long,” the NeverBreeder nurse said. “Those pesky—why dearie, are you all right?” She looked at Penny in concern and Penny realized she must still have a look of grief and horror on her face.
“Oh, uh, fine,” she said, straightening up and trying to paste on a smile. “Just, um, worried. I don’t want to be too late to work, you know.”
“No, of course not! That’s why we gave you a note. Come on then.” And Nurse Zoone set off at a fast pace, leaving Penny to trot after her.
As they went, Penny concentrated on having a normal look on her face though inside she wanted nothing more than to break down and cry. Poor Claudette!
“Well, here we are at the door, dearie,” the NeverBreeder nurse said at last, escorting Penny back to the entrance of the building. “I’m sorry you didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to old Mother Toone. I know she was a real favorite with all the breeder girls she watched over and trained here in the dormitories.”
“Yes…she was.” Penny nodded distractedly. “She…she really was.”
“Well, you’d best get on to work now,” the nurse told her. “And go as fast as you can, for you don’t want to miss anything—I’m told there’s to be a bit of excitement today.”
“Excitement?” Penny asked faintly. “What kind of excitement?”
“Oh, you’ll see.” The nurse winked one yellow eye at her and gave her the jack-o-lantern grin that was so like Mother Toone’s again. “Get along with you, now. And next time you come see us, hopefully you’ll have a baby in your belly for the Glorious Cause!”
“Uh, hopefully,” Penny agreed, though the idea made her feel sick. The thought of sacrificing baby after baby to become NeverBreeders was still deeply repellent to her. Though it was somewhat eclipsed by the thought of being killed after years of producing and turned into so much chopped meat. How horrible!
Stolen: Brides of the Kindred 25 Page 33