Chapter 3: First Night Feeding
The numbness from the milking parlour clung to Levi like a second skin as he stumbled into the employee bunkhouse, a tiny cinderblock cube that smelled of damp concrete and old sweat. He didn’t eat. He just sat on the thin cot, staring at his hands, the memory of Daisy’s heat and weight still imprinted in his palms. The guttural sounds from the barn were a constant, low-grade tremor through the ground.
He must have slept, because the next thing he knew, Mrs. Greeley was hammering on the door. “Night feeding, boy. Up. Trough annex. Now.”
The night was a black blanket, the air cooler but no less thick with the ranch’s ripe perfume. She led him not back to the main barn, but to a connected, windowless structure. The door screeched open on rusted tracks.
The feeding trough annex was a study in wet, echoing darkness. Vaulted concrete ceilings dripped with condensation. In the center of the space ran two long, rubber-lined trenches, each one a grotesque parody of a banquet table, wider than he was tall. They were filled with a sluggishly moving, pale slurry that steamed in the chill air. The smell was different here—less chemical, more organic. A sour, yeasty, clotted reek that coated the back of his throat.
“Supplemental mash,” Mrs. Greeley said, pointing to a stainless steel vat with a spigot. “High-protein, high-calorie. Keeps their production up. Two buckets in each trough. Move quick. They know the sound of the spigot.”
She left him with a plastic bucket that felt flimsy in his grip. The only light came from a few fly-specked bulbs caged in wire, casting long, wobbling shadows. The shadows moved. Along the walls, in narrow stalls barely wider than their immense hips, the hucows were chained by leather collars to rings in the concrete. They stood, swaying, their udders hanging down like grotesque pendulums, tips dragging through the filth on the floor. Their eyes caught the light, liquid and vacant.
Levi filled his first bucket from the vat. The mash was warm, thick as wet cement, studded with swollen grain and pulpy, unidentifiable vegetables. It plopped heavily into the pail.
The sound was a trigger.
A low, collective murmur went through the annex. Chains rattled as figures strained forward. A chorus of wet snuffling filled the air.
He hefted the bucket, the weight straining his shoulder, and approached the first trough. As he lifted it to the rim, a hucow to his right, a redhead with freckles splattered across her cleavage, let out a sharp, hungry whine. He tipped the bucket. The slurry cascaded out with a thick, sucking gurgle.
Chaos erupted.
The redhead slammed her face into the trough the moment the mash hit, not even waiting for him to finish. She ate with a frantic, snorting abandon, no hands, just her wide mouth scooping and gulping like a pig. The creature beside her, a brunette with a truly staggering ass, began rubbing her entire body along the bar of her stall in a slow, relentless grind, her mouth hanging open as she watched her neighbour eat. The sound was a moist, steady squeak of flesh on painted metal.
Levi moved faster, his heart hammering. Bucket after bucket. Each pour was a dinner bell. The annex dissolved into a frenzy of animal need. They shoved their faces into the slop, they slobbered, they moaned into their food. One, missing a front tooth, hummed happily as she ate, golden mash coating her chin and breasts.
He was halfway down the line when he reached Betsy. Her stall card was peeling but legible. She was older, her udders lower, her stomach a soft shelf over her pubic mound. As Levi dumped the mash, she didn’t dive in immediately. She watched him with a curious, dull intensity, her jaw working.
Then, without breaking eye contact, she slowly squatted.
Levi froze, bucket dangling.
A low, guttural rumble emanated from her core. Her face flushed a deep red with strain. Her eyes rolled back slightly.
A torrent of liquid, mustard-yellow shit erupted from between her massive thighs. It was a powerful, continuous stream, splattering violently into the trough she had just been about to eat from, mixing with the fresh mash with a sickening hiss. The smell that bloomed was eye-watering—acrid, sour, profoundly fecal.
Betsy grunted, shuddered, and stood up. A final few drips pattered down her inner leg. She glanced at the fouled trough, then at Levi, as if waiting.
Then she plunged her face directly into the mixture of shit and food, eating with the same frantic gusto as the others.
Levi’s own guts clenched. He turned away, a cold sweat breaking out over his body. His stomach revolted. He stumbled to a drain in the floor and vomited, a thin, acidic stream that left him shaking. The sound of his retching was lost under the smacking, grunting, slopping symphony.
“Clean it up.”
Mrs. Greeley’s voice came from the doorway. She hadn’t left. She’d been watching. She tossed a long-handled squeegee and a heavy-duty hose towards him.
“Don’t let it clog the drain. Get the big chunks first.”
Tears of humiliation and disgust stung Levi’s eyes. He wiped his mouth, took the tools, and approached Betsy’s stall. The hucow was blissfully slurping, her face smeared with brown and yellow. Levi used the squeegee to push the worst of the mess towards the drain, gagging with every motion. The hose water was icy, and it just spread the smell.
He finished, trembling, and went back to refill his bucket at the vat. The mundane sound of the spigot was a tiny island of sanity. He focused on it, on the metal, on the simple act of filling a container.
He didn’t hear the chain go slack behind him.
A hand, huge and wet with saliva and mash, shot through the bars of a stall to his left. It clamped onto the front of his jeans with shocking strength.
Levi yelped, dropping the bucket, which hit the floor with a booming clang. The hand was warm, insistent, kneading him through the denim. He looked up into the face of the hucow named Clarabelle. She had a mop of curly black hair and eyes that seemed slightly less empty than the others, filled with a simple, desperate want.
“Mister…” she breathed, her voice a husky parody of seduction. Her breath smelled of clover and stomach acid. “You’re new. Milk me, mister. I’m… I’m so full.”
She pulled him closer, his belt buckle scraping against the steel bar. Her other hand came through, trying to fumble for his waistband. He struggled, pushing against her slick wrist, but she was impossibly strong.
“Clary, you slut, mine!” grunted the hucow in the adjacent stall, a monstrous blonde. She reached over and grabbed a fistful of Clarabelle’s hair, yanking back hard. Clarabelle’s moan turned into a shriek of protest, but her grip on Levi loosened just enough for him to wrench himself free. He fell back, landing in a puddle of lukewarm mash and udder drip.
The two hucows began screeching at each other, a violent, guttural argument over territory and attention, their chains snapping taut as they strained towards one another, massive bodies crashing into the bars.
Levi scrambled backwards on his hands and knees, his breath sobbing in his chest. He crawled until his back hit the cold vat.
Mrs. Greeley walked over, her boots echoing. She looked down at him, not with pity, but with a kind of clinical assessment. She watched the hucows fight for a moment, then smacked the flat of her shovel against Clarabelle’s bar. The noise was a sharp, shocking crack. Both creatures flinched and fell silent, subsiding into low, fretful whimpers.
“They’re just lonely,” Mrs. Greeley said, as if explaining a misbehaving dog. “They can smell you’re not like the regular buyers. You smell… fresh. It excites ‘em.” She nudged his dropped bucket with her toe. “Finish up. Shift’s over at dawn.”
She left again. Levi pushed himself up. His jeans were soaked, stained, and stretched at the crotch where Clarabelle had grabbed him. He felt a raw, throbbing vulnerability there. He finished the feeding in a robotic daze, not looking at any of them, just pouring the mash, step, turn, refill.
As the first grey light of dawn seeped around the door frames, he hosed down the annex floor, watching the filthy water swirl towards the drains. The hucows, bellies distended, were mostly dozing on their feet, occasionally shifting with a wet squelch.
He walked back to the bunkhouse in the thin morning light. The terror was gone, burnt away. In its place was a hollow, grinding understanding. This was the job. This was the price. The clarity was worse than the shock.
He entered the bunkhouse and leaned against the door, shutting out the slowly waking world. He looked at the thin cot, the bare bulb. From the main barn, the first milking shift of the day began with a chorus of deep, mechanized suction and a rising chorus of mindless, welcoming moans.
He didn’t shower. He sat down on the cot, the smells of the annex—the shit, the mash, the pungent, musky scent of Clarabelle’s hand—still woven into his clothes, his skin. He stared at the opposite wall, and for the first time, he wondered not about escape, but about what it took to not go mad before the summer was over.