The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

‘Herd Instinct’

(mc, f/f, m/f, nc)

DISCLAIMER: This material is for adults only; it contains explicit sexual imagery and non-consensual relationships. If you are offended by this type of material or you are under legal age in your area, do NOT continue.

SYNOPSIS:

Rebecca is heavily modified by her kidnappers. She does, however, have some surprises of her own.

INTRO COMMENTS:

This one includes heavy body-mod and lots and lots of drugs. Also sadism. Consider yourself warned.

* * *

‘Herd Instinct’

part ONE

* * *

I was in Montreal when I was kidnapped.

It was fall, with the leaves red and gold on the trees, and I was visiting Ingleterre Printing on a business trip. My company, Morgan Mills, was a paper mill in Alabama, and they’d sent me to try and convince Ingleterre that they wanted to buy from us.

Paper is a terrible industry—there’s no margin in it, and the few remaining giant conglomerates are slowly bleeding each other to death. My boss, Cynthia Morgan, had bought a defunct mill from one of the majors ten years ago, and slowly carved a niche for herself making ultra-high grade paper, the type you make out of linen rather than wood pulp. The type dissertations and wedding vows get printed on.

I’d been with her from the beginning, and was instrumental in helping the company slowly clawed open our market niche. Rebecca Hill, saleswoman extraordinaire. Few people could sell boring old paper like I could.

Of course, that’s all over now.

As I say, it was fall, which comes a lot earlier in Canada than it does in Alabama. (At home, we only notice “fall” when the skeeters get a bit sparser and some of the deciduous trees change color, which they do in late October or November. Some years they just skip it entirely.) I knew it would be cold, so I’d brought my heavy jacket, but had then stupidly packed only dress skirts and hose. So my legs were freezing in the stiff wind as I waited for a taxi.

The trip had been successful. (It would be immodest to add ‘of course’, but that’s how good I was.) Ingleterre had agreed to carry not just one but all three of our product lines, starting with a fifteen thousand dollar order just for stock and display purposes. So I was in a good mood, despite the goosebumps going numb on my legs.

Then I saw a red taxi and waved madly. It pulled up to the curb, and I gratefully hopped in.

“Où puis-je vous emmener?”

“Uh, I’m sorry—”

“Oh! My apologies. Ey, where do you want to go?”

“The airport. Uh, Dorval.”

“Bien sûr.”

The driver smiled into the rearview mirror at me, then pulled away.

I busied myself in the back of the cab with some paperwork, and was happy enough that he didn’t try to engage me in conversation. Most cab drivers did. I don’t know if it was a common trait for cabbies to be garrulous, or if they just did it because I was a woman. Cynthia said the latter. But this guy, perhaps on account of his limited English, stayed quiet. Which let me get some work done.

So it was twenty minutes before I looked up and wondered where we were.

“Uh, excuse me?”

“Oui?”

“Are we almost there?”

“Almost. Ey, sorry—I must stop at a station to get some gas. Okay?”

“Sure,” I said. What the hell, I wasn’t in a hurry. I’d be waiting at the airport for three hours anyway.

He flipped on the radio, but it was in French. Sounded like a hockey game.

We passed a gas station. Then another.

“Um,” I said, “I thought we were going to get some gas?”

“At the, ey, cab station. Just a few minutes.”

“Oh.”

Three minutes later, we turned left into a black brick building. I got that cool feeling you get when something slightly worrisome happens. This didn’t look like a gas station.

“Where are we?”

“Eh, here we get the gas. Un moment.”

We were in a garage of some sort, it was true—tools and parts of cars lined the shelves. But I didn’t see a gas pump. A few men in overalls were loitering around, and several of them came over to the cab.

Then my door was yanked open.

“What the hell?!” I managed to yell, as large hands jabbed into the cab and grabbed my arms, and then I was being hauled out of the back seat.

I screamed, or tried to, but a rag was thrust into my mouth, and when I tried to spit it out my assailant—one of them—only took the opportunity to stuff it deeper, wedging my jaw painfully open. I was spun roughly around, facing away from the cab, which I had tried to dive back into.

My arms were pinned by the man behind me, who had yanked me from the cab. There was a second man in front of me—the one shoving the rag into my mouth, and at least two more. I could feel their hands holding me in place as I fought them.

Then they all looked to one side; I couldn’t help but follow their gaze. A new man was walking quickly towards us from out of a doorway in the wall. Unlike my assailants, he was wearing a white apron, over a shirt with a collar and tie. From one of the pockets of the apron, he pulled out some sort of vial.

With a snapping sound, he pulled the top off of it and shoved it up under my nose. His other hand grabbed the back of my head, and kept me from jerking away.

I fought to tear my head away, but his hand on the back of my head was too strong. I tried not to breathe, but after what seemed like an eternity of fruitless struggling my lungs won and I sobbed in a deep breath.

It smelled like nail polish remover.

Then I passed out.

* * *

When I woke up, it was dark. Pitch black. It wasn’t warm, or cold.

I was curled up on some sort of plastic surface. My back and curled legs were against walls, and as I tried to stretch out, I realized I was in a box. I pushed up, but the ceiling of my box didn’t budge at all. Nor did any of the walls.

It was maybe three feet long on a side. At the top, an inch down on one side, were three small holes, covered in a fine mesh.

Air holes.

They hadn’t raped me. I even still had my clothes on.

In an unlit box, not large enough to lie down in.

For a moment, then, panic took over, and I started to scream.

Several moments, actually.

Screaming gave way to sobbing, and half-hearted pounding on the walls of the box. My eyes hadn’t adjusted at all—it was totally black. No light at all.

Some time later, I stopped crying.

“Hello?” I tried. Maybe whoever was out there would talk to me. “Hello?”

There was no reply.

* * *

Some time after I had woken up, I began to get thirsty. Then very thirsty. Then extremely thirsty. I also had to relieve myself.

The thought of doing so in my box had me crying again.

I tried to sleep, but my body’s needs kept me awake. I kept shifting around in the box, trying to find a comfortable position, but I didn’t have enough room to sit up without my head pressing against the roof. Most of the time I just sort of slumped diagonally.

Finally, I gave up, picked a corner of the box, and began to pee.

The floor of the box turned out to be almost perfectly level—my urine pooled out and covered the floor.

I had no choice but to sit in it.

My thirst kept getting worse. Pretty soon it alone was enough to start me sobbing.

Then I heard a noise.

I froze. It was a tiny sound, but any stimulus at this point was like a thunderclap.

There was a sound at the top of the box like a panel sliding open.

I thrust my hands up, feeling for it. No light had appeared, but the noise had sounded like it was dead center on the box, and sure enough, there it was—two inches of open space! I slid my fingers out.

Something stung them like a wasp.

I shrieked, and pulled my burning fingers back.

The panel slid closed.

That was all.

My fingers hurt like hell, but slowly the pain faded. It took some time to work up my nerve again but I did so, gingerly reaching up to where that little hole had appeared.

There was a tube there.

The tip of it was wet.

I’d like to say I hesitated, but my mouth was around that tube in an instant, sucking. And I was rewarded by wetness, filling my mouth and swallowing down into my stomach as fast as I could suck.

It tasted bitter, but felt like water on my tongue.

I drank until my stomach hurt. Then I lay back down in my urine.

I woke up again later, hungry. The tube was still there, and I sucked at it and got more of the bitter water. It took the edge off, a little.

I had to go again.

Number two.

I held off. The box stank of slowly stagnating urine already.

There was another noise.

I froze. Another panel had slid back, this time on a side of the box.

I didn’t stick my fingers towards it.

Something rustled into my box, and the panel closed. I snatched at it.

It was a Ziploc bag. Five of them, actually, gallon sized.

I pooped in one, and peed in another.

A while later, I slept again.

No more panels opened for a while. I slept, and drank from the tube. Now and then, I cried. I thought about using the plastic bags to kill myself, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even seriously consider it.

I just had to survive this. People were looking for me. I knew they were. I had family, friends. I thought about them, wondering what had happened to me.

That was usually when I cried.

I got hungrier, and hungrier, and then my hunger started to fade, to become background noise.

I used the bags for my waste.

Soon enough, I realized that I didn’t have enough bags. Not to pee in, at any rate. Not surprisingly, after what must have been days, a week, without food, I stopped having to defecate. But I filled the bags with urine remarkably quickly.

I started to dump it out the air holes, saving one bag to pee in and then dump out the holes. I couldn’t reach them to pee out of directly, but I could fill the bag and raise it to them.

Once, my hands slipped, and I dropped the bag, which splashed all over the floor. I cried for what must have been hours.

That was the last time.

It was a tiny universe. Me, my water tube, my pee-bag, and the four bags that I must not open.

I realized, at some point, that the water tasted different. After much internal debate, I used my pee-bag to hold some, sucking from the tube and spitting into the bag. Then I went as long as I could without peeing. When my teeth hurt and I was almost starting to leak, I drank from the tube, and then tasted the water in the pee-bag.

Definitely different.

What were they feeding me?

Whatever it was, I wasn’t starving. Hungry, yes, but that was my stomach demanding solid food. But my ribs weren’t jutting out or anything.

My clothes were filthy, soaked in old urine, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that. I’d taken my bra off long ago, because it was uncomfortable, and my nylons.

I hadn’t had any ideas how I could use them to escape. The underwire in the bra didn’t even seem to scratch the inside of the box, and I wore it down to almost nothing trying. Same with my fingernails.

One day, I went to suck on my tube, and the water tasted more bitter than usual.

Then I passed out.

* * *

I woke up blinking.

I could see!

I could stretch out!

My joy at my sudden mobility totally overwhelmed the fact that I was lying on a concrete floor. I stretched my arms and legs, and shivered with pain/pleasure as long-neglected muscles tried to respond. It hurt a hell of a lot, trying to stretch out my cramped extremities, but I could move!

The room was dim, for which I was thankful. It was also spartan, industrial, with concrete walls, floor, and ceiling. A metal door, painted green. A silver metal table, the sort without legs that just rose in a solid cube from the floor. From where I was lying, I could just barely see the bottom of the casters underneath it.

The door opened, and I winced at the bright light.

A man walked in. He was dressed in white, young, maybe twenty-five. Younger than I was.

In one hand, he had a metal stick.

He walked up to me, and jabbed me with it.

It HURT! My whole body clenched, and stars danced in my just-regained vision. And it kept hurting, all my bones stinging, even after he pulled it away, and took five long steps back.

“Listen to me, and obey,” he said.

As the pain slowly ebbed, I stared up at him, disbelieving.

“You will not speak,” he said. “That is first.”

His head cocked a fraction to the side. “Second, you will do whatever you are told, when you are told.”

I opened my mouth, but fear kept me from replying.

“Take off all of your clothes.”

I just looked at him.

He started forward, and I jerked into action, my hands reaching for my shirt. I didn’t want him to hit me with that prod again.

He did anyways, stabbing it into my chest, and the agony flared through me. I shrieked and curled into a ball.

He stepped back again.

“You will obey when you are told to, not when you are threatened with violence. Failure to obey immediately will bring punishment. Now, take off your clothes.”

With shaking hands, I reached for my shirt. I pulled it off, baring my naked chest, and paused, looking at him.

He stepped up and shocked me again.

“I said ‘take off your clothes’, cow. That means all of them.”

Weeping, I reached for my skirt with hands that were curled into claws. I pulled it off, along with my panties.

I was naked. There was no word of acknowledgement.

“Follow me,” he said, turning to leave.

I put a palm on the ground, to push myself to my feet, but my legs were too weak to hold me, and I slumped to the floor.

He frowned, and stepped back from the door. “You are to crawl, cow. Cows do not walk erect. Now, follow me.”

He stepped back into the hallway, and waited.

On hands and knees, tears streaking my cheeks, I crawled towards him.

Seeing that I was coming, he turned, and walked down a hallway. It was bright, and between the tears and the glare it was very hard to see. His wearing all white clothes didn’t help.

But I didn’t want to get zapped again.

Shaking, I crawled after him as fast as I could. He walked past several closed doors—he was walking so fast!—and then turned right, into an open one.

I crawled as fast as I could to reach the doorway. When I got there, I froze.

It was full of people.

The room was small room, maybe twenty feet by twenty. There were about a dozen people in it, men and women. They were all in the white clothes that the man with the cattle prod was wearing. They had been talking, doing other things, but as when I appeared in the door, they turned to look at me.

Me. Naked, crawling on the floor. My cheeks flushed.

Then I saw that they were eating. Doughnuts. From the void where it had fallen, my hunger roared back, like an agonizing wave.

I stared at them, filled with emotion. Shame, that they were seeing me naked, crawling on the floor. Fear, that they might hurt me.

And, most powerfully, hunger. It was the hunger that made me shake.

The voice came from across the room. The man with the stick had stopped in an open doorway, and was looking at me. He gestured towards himself.

“Cow, come.”

I looked at him, then back at the people with the food. They sneered.

Then the man with the stick was striding towards me, and even as I started to cower I knew it was useless. He jabbed the stick into my shoulder, and held it there as I shrieked and jerked, my body lit up by pain.

The people in the white clothes laughed.

Finally, he stopped, and looked down on me as my spasms diminished. There was disgust in his eyes.

“Cow,” he said, “come.”

I forced my way onto my hands and knees, and struggled to crawl after him. My cheeks were burning with shame, but worse was the nearness of the food. I never knew how good doughnuts could smell before. I don’t know if I was crying more because of the pain or because I was being led away from the doughnuts.

But the man with the stick walked out of the room, and I followed him.

He led me down another corridor, and walked into another open door. I crawled after him, my arms and legs now hurting as much from exertion as the dwindling sting of the prod.

I didn’t look up as I crawled into the next room. Nothing good could come of it.

“Ah, a new one,” a woman’s voice said. Despite myself, I looked up. The voice had come from a woman in a white lab coat, standing next to another metal table. She had pretty dark hair. “How long in the box?”

“Five weeks,” the man said. “She’s a cow, to get the full treatment.”

“Sounds good,” the woman replied. She looked at me. “Cow, come here.”

I crawled to her feet.

“Get up onto the table,” she said, indicating the metal box-table next to her. But I wasn’t supposed to stand up! I looked fearfully at the man with the stick, then raised myself up on my knees, put my hands onto the table top, and tried to scramble up. But my arms and legs were too weak.

“Here, let me help you with that,” the woman said, grabbing my naked waist, and lifting me to the top of the table. “Lie on your back,” she instructed, so I did. The metal was cold.

Then she proceeded to examine me, starting with my genitalia. As she spread my legs with her hands, I just started to resist for an instant, then realized it would mean the prod, and let her part them. I looked away as she leaned in close.

She had on latex gloves, and slid a finger up into my pussy immediately. She wiggled it around, then stuck another one in my ass.

I just looked at the ceiling.

She made perfunctory noises, then pulled out the fingers and began to feel my legs. Then she walked around the table, and did the same for my arms. She pulled out a light, and shown it into my eyes, and looked in my ears, and touched me all over.

She never said a word to me, and I just let her do whatever she wanted.

“Okay,” she said, finally, stepping back from the table. “She should make a fine cow. She’s rather old, but her body is in good shape. I’ll get her prepped for stage one. Marcus, give me the prod. You can go back to lot four.”

“You got it, doctor,” Marcus replied, handing her the cattle prod. “Don’t go easy on her.”

“I never do,” the doctor said. Marcus left, without looking at me at all.

“Now then, you’re not going to be any trouble, are you?” she asked me, walking back to the table.

“No,” I croaked.

She pushed the prod into my ribs, and I shrieked.

And she held it there, and I just kept screaming and bucking.

Finally, she took it away, leaving me boneless and whimpering.

“You are a cow,” she said. “You do not talk. Not even to acknowledge a command. You simply obey anything you are told.”

She walked around to the little table that held her examining equipment. “Now then,” she said, “let’s get you started on your transformation.” She picked up a small vial, and a syringe, and filled the syringe from it. “First, a little of this, to start things off.”

I looked at the needle fearfully, but didn’t flinch as she walked up, stuck it in the side of my ass, and injected me with whatever was in it. I didn’t want to make her mad again.

It was the first of a dozen shots she gave me.

I didn’t shy away from any of them. This got easier, because after the first few I was starting to become dizzy. I began to get the distinct feeling that I was floating, and my vision—so precious!—began to blur. But I felt okay with that. All in all, I felt pretty good. Worried, intellectually, but physically quite relaxed.

“There,” she said, putting down the syringe, “now you’ve had the full initial battery. Of course, the water you’ve been drinking has been full of drugs, too, but these are much more powerful. They’re going to alter your body composition, continue eroding your free will, and most importantly, start making the necessary changes to these,” she said, squeezing my breasts. “You’re what, a C cup? Not bad, but to be a production heifer you’ll need a lot more than that.”

She winked at me. “Of course, that’s why we’re here. Now, time for your trainers.”

From under the table, she pulled out what looked like some sort of sports padding, or maybe armor. She lifted my leg, bending it at the knee. It felt detached, distant, as though I was feeling someone else’s leg being manipulated.

The padding went around my upper calf and lower thigh, and then she tightened it. My knee was now locked in a bent position. She pulled out another device, and repeated the process. Now both of my knees were locked at ninety degree angles.

“And for the arms,” she said, taking out a straight tubes, which she opened like a clamshell and clamped around my limp arm. She tightened it, and then I couldn’t bend my arm at the elbow. My other arm was then also locked up similarly.

She produced a belt. “Okay, cow, lift your hips.” I did so, raising my ass off the table—it was a little tricky without the ability to flex my knees.

She slid the belt around my waist, and cinched it tight. I lay back down, and the belt clinked against the tabletop. It had rings attached to it, one large on in the small of my back, and one on either side.

“And now for your collar,” she said, holding up a black and silver metal strip. “Raise your head.”

I did so, and she fastened the collar around my neck. It was thick, maybe two inches wide.

She bent to adjust it around my neck. “Now, this little beauty will help keep you from speaking, cow. Any time it detects vibrations in your vocal cords, it’ll shock you until they stop. So don’t talk in your sleep.”

She stepped back and surveyed me. “Looking good,” she observed. “Just one last thing.” She turned around to her tray, and turned back with the needle again. “Give me your hand.”

I raised my hand to her, and she stuck the needle in my thumb, injected some of the fluid, pulled it out, and then went to each of the other fingers, injecting something into each fingertip.

My hand went cold, and then numb.

“That will keep you from using those fingers. Cows don’t have hands, you know. You won’t be able to feel anything beyond your palm for weeks. Be careful not to get your hands caught in a door or anything, or you could bleed for a long time before you noticed.”

I stared at my left hand. I couldn’t feel it at all.

She had refilled the needle. “Give me your other hand,” she ordered.

With just a soft whimper, I did so.

Soon, I couldn’t feel it, either.

“Well, that’s that,” she said. “Boy, you’re a docile one, aren’t you?” she asked, tweaking a nipple. “And I appreciate that. But you’re not going to like this next bit.” She walked over to the wall, and did something with a white panel. My vision was all blurry, but it must have been an intercom, for she said “The cow in room tau forty-five is ready for branding.”

Branding?

She walked back over to the table. “Well, Bossy, you’re not my last cow today, so I’m going to be on my way. One word of advice—you are a cow now, and will be for the rest of your life. There’s no way around it. So give in. Things will be a lot more pleasant for you if you accept that, rather than trying to fight it.” She tweaked a nipple again, and winked at me. “Enjoy your new life.”

Then she crossed the room to the door, and left.

I was alone. Curious, I tried to move my leg. It moved. An arm? It moved too.

I couldn’t feel my hands.

I should be able to get out of here, though.

Although my arms were now clamped straight, my legs bent, and my hands were useless, I could still get off the table and try to crawl somewhere. The door didn’t have a lock, I didn’t think. I could figure out a way to work the handle.

I looked over at the door, and thought about what the doctor had said.

With a sigh, I let my limbs relax.

The door opened. I could smell ozone. A man was entering, wheeling a small cart. In his other hand, he had one of the shock prods. He saw me, and blinked.

“Sweet mercy, you’re still on the table.” It seemed to surprise him. “I’ll be damned.”

Then he shrugged, and walked into the room, wheeling the cart with him. It smelled like fire. He stopped right next to me, and I could feel the heat from it.

He put the prod down on the table next to me, and I flinched, which made him chuckle. He picked up a clipboard from somewhere on the chart, and held it up to read.

“Let’s see... ah, here we are. Well, five forty two, you’ve got your new name.” He looked down at me. “That’s you, you know. Five hundred, forty two. Remember it, because we’ll expect you to come when called.”

He put the clipboard down, and bent to fiddle with something in the cart. Then he stood back up, and lifted up the branding iron.

My eyes widened. It was huge, maybe three inches across by one tall, and red-hot. The head was modular, and right now it consisted of three blazing numbers.

I started to tremble.

“Don’t worry, five forty two. This will hurt a hell of a lot, but it will be over soon enough. Now, I need you to hold your head real still...”

I stared at him in horror. My head?!?

He was already putting a hand on the top of my head, holding it against the table. The other arm lifted the iron, aiming it at my forehead.

I closed my eyes and whimpered.

Then my forehead was on fire, and I could smell my flesh burning. I shrieked, and bucked, but his hand held my head steady, and then the iron was lifted away, and I was sobbing, and my forehead hurt...

While he put the iron back into its furnace, my arms came up instinctively to feel my scarred and agonizingly painful forehead—but I couldn’t reach it. My arms, unable to bend at the elbow, couldn’t come anywhere near my head.

And I couldn’t feel my hands, anyway.

I started to cry, and then he was rubbing something into my forehead, and I looked up at him through doubly-blurred eyes.

“This’ll help the pain,” he said. “It’s also a disinfectant. And it’s got some stuff to help ensure that your number scars over nice and legible.”

It did feel better, although just a little.

“Th—” I croaked, then shrieked again as my collar shocked me violently. It was almost as bad as the branding.

He shook his head. “And here I thought you were a smart one.” He poked me in the ribs. “You are a cow. Cows don’t talk. And if we catch you talking...” he picked up the cattle prod, and I stared at him in disbelief until he stuck it into my stomach, and I screamed some more.

I was shivering uncontrollably, as he took out something else from his cart, put a hand on my head again, and brought whatever it was near.

It was buzzing. A razor.

In just over a minute, he’d cut off most of my hair. There was some left—how much I couldn’t tell. Maybe half an inch. The razor only seemed to have one setting.

My long chestnut hair piled on the floor at the base of the table.

Then the man with the cart was wheeling it to the door.

“Get down off the table,” he said, not turning around.

Oh no. No more pain.

With the restraints on, I didn’t see how I could get down, but as I had just been instructed to do so, I slid my legs off the table. I’d forgotten that my hands were useless, so when the weight of my legs started to pull at the rest of me, I had nothing to hold on with, and slid off in a heap.

The man laughed. “Come, cow,” he said.

I got onto my hands and knees. There was feeling in the bottom of my palms, just. I crawled to him.

He stepped out into the hallway, pushing the cart in front of him. “Look down the corridor,” he said, pointing. “See that flap at the end? That’s a cow door. Go crawl through that.”

I started crawling. My forehead hurt unbearably, and the back of my neck hurt where the collar had zapped me, and I was just beginning to realize that there were bruised welts wherever I’d been stuck with the cattle prod.

The ‘cow door’ was a plastic flap, just the size for someone to crawl through. It was opaque, so I had no idea what was on the other side of it, but I had been told to crawl through it, so I did.

* * *

For a minute I thought I was outside. There was a soft, diffuse light, and the room was so large as to fool me. But it had a ceiling, maybe ten feet up, supported by exposed steel beams, and white walls, though they were some distance away.

It also had other naked women.

I stood in the doorway, staring. There were maybe a dozen of them, all clamped onto their hands and knees, all with belts and collars, all otherwise naked. All with about an inch of hair.

All with numbers branded onto their foreheads.

Most of them were ignoring me. A few turned their heads as I crawled in.

Of course, we couldn’t speak to each other.

Most of the other cows—women!—were at the other side of the enclosure. As I looked around, I realized that’s what I was in. There was a low fence running around the edge of the room, and a sort of corridor outside of that which people could walk around in. The only wall that actually fronted on the pen was the one I had just crawled in through.

The floor was some sort of plastic.

Then I smelled the food.

I realized, suddenly, why the other... women were all over at the far side of the pen. There was a feeding trough. About half of them had their heads down in it.

I crawled towards it as fast as I could.

On my way, I passed two women who were watching me, but my stomach was in charge now I and I had plenty of time to deal with them later. I aimed myself at an open space at the trough.

It was full of a whitish gunk, like watery grits, or thick cream of wheat. I stabbed my head down into it, sucking up huge mouthfuls and swallowing as fast as I could. It covered my face, but I didn’t care. It tasted bland, but it was food. I gorged myself.

Sometime later, face covered in sticky goop, I backed away from the trough.

The two women who had been observing me earlier were right behind me.

One of them moved, to make a sort of L-shape with their bodies. The other, a dark-haired girl with pale skin and light blue eyes looked around the room, then shoved with the palm of her hand across the floor. I looked down.

The plastic was glossy, but the heel of her hand had been dipped in the food, and it left smears of less reflection on the floor.

Smears that formed a word.

“Helo,” it said.

Tears sprung to my eyes.

* * *

Natalie and Lynn were their names.

Number five thirty nine and five forty, respectively.

Just like me, they had been snatched off the street, and spent weeks in the box.

That was why Natalie was so pale. We were all that pale. Even the single black girl among us had skin that was sort of a coffee-with-cream from all the time without sunlight.

The black girl didn’t, or wouldn’t, communicate with us. If they caught you, you were punished severely. Lynn showed me the burn marks from the even more powerful cattle prods they used for special occasions.

That wasn’t the only reason she wouldn’t talk to us, though.

The food was drugged.

With regret in her eyes, Lynn told me that the food would slowly make each of us dumber, or at least much less awake. Only the very latest additions remained cognizant enough to communicate with each other.

She gestured with her head at a woman with curly auburn hair, who she called Paula. Paula had been the one to greet Lynn when she was introduced several dozen feedings ago. (The low ambient light never changed, so we had no other way to measure how long we had been in the pen.)

Now Paula spent her days at the trough, or idly wandering around the pen with dull, glassy eyes. To make it worse, she had a sort of half-smile on her face, and looked more than a little like an idiot, or a heroin user.

When Lynn would try to communicate with her, Paula would watch, and look at Lynn, and then eventually wander away to eat some more slurry.

Lynn was next. She could already feel it, she wrote. Her mind was becoming blurry. Thoughts just seemed to seep out the edges.

Sometimes, she’d just stand there and stare at nothing.

Like Paula, and the majority of the cows.

Natalie was fatalistic about it. You couldn’t not eat. So she’d just try and hold on as long as she could.

I tried to not eat. I only lasted two feedings. The third feeding, I was head in the trough with everyone else. It was too hard to resist; my hunger was far too powerful for my drug-weakened willpower.

That wasn’t the case with number five forty one, though.

She was a short-haired blonde, although who knows what length it had been originally. She didn’t eat at all. She just lay on her side, towards one of the fences.

Lynn said that she’d been there since she arrived, almost twenty feedings ago.

Life took on a sort of routine. Lynn, Natalie, and I would ‘talk’, sharing our lives as best we could by writing on the floor with our palms. At some point, maybe a day apart, the trough would fill with slurry.

However long it actually was between feedings, we were all very hungry when the food appeared, and we all crowded around to eat it even before it finished pouring from the hose. It tasted better fresh.

Every now and then, workers would appear and walk around the pen. They never said anything. The three of us would quickly try scrape over any incriminating words on the floor.

In one corner of the pen there was a hard plastic trough set into the floor, with water running through it. It was a toilet. My embarrassment over using it in full view of the others dissipated quickly.

One day, after I’d been there for eleven feedings, some workers came and took number five forty one away.

I don’t know if she was dead.

As time went on, I could feel the effects of the drugs in the food. I started daydreaming about nothing, and would sort of fade into waking staring at a wall. Sometimes, when I was thinking, I’d lose my train of thought entirely, for no reason.

Lynn ‘spoke’ with us less and less. Mostly she stood around like the rest of the cows, a dopey smile on her face, staring at nothing in particular.

Then, one day, the doctor came in. She opened a gate in the side of the pen, and walked over to a cow—a woman!—with light brown hair. Number five thirty one. She had a striking nose, but above it her eyes had been glassy and mindless for many feeding periods.

The doctor clipped a leash onto her collar, and walked her out of the room.

“They never come back,” Natalie told me later. “Tomorrow, when they feed us, we’ll have a new girl.”

Sure enough, the next day, a new woman, fear in her eyes and a flaming red number on her forehead, came scrambling in through the cow door.

I wondered why it never occurred to any of us to leave through that door.

Her name was Mary. I introduced her to Natalie, and to Lynn, although Lynn rarely wrote anything any more.

More time passed.

Mary turned out to be less complacent than Natalie and I. She kept circling the cow door we had entered through, and occasionally trying to peer under it.

Only a few days later, she tried to escape.

They brought her back tied to a frame, a heavy square thing under her to which her elbows, waist, and knees were fastened.

Then they proceeded to punish her.

Her screams were terrible. Natalie, and I, and Lynn, and even Paula, huddled against a far side of the pen, as they took turns stabbing Mary with a heavy prod. It left horrific black scorches on her skin.

The other cows didn’t seem to notice.

I almost envied them.

It lasted hours, and they came back for more the three days following. Mary got no food, except that which Natalie and I could bring her mouth-to-mouth.

She looked pitifully grateful, when we did.

When they finally released her, she headed right for the trough.

She didn’t try to escape again.

A while later, I noticed that my body hair, which had grown back while I was in the box, was falling out. In a few days, I was totally smooth behind the neck. Natalie had been like that for some time.

It didn’t bother me like it should have. Except for what they’d done to Mary, nothing really bothered me any more. And even that was fading in my memory.

I ate, and stood around, and now and then ‘spoke’ with Mary and Natalie, though that was becoming less frequent.

Like clockwork, number five thirty two left us, and Debbie showed up. Now Natalie was spending most of her days gazing into space.

It was getting harder and harder to think. Although it didn’t trouble me—I was just drifting through the days. Thinking seemed like a lot of trouble, when I could just stand around. Eat when I was hungry. Pee when I needed to pee.

The hair on my head was growing back. I couldn’t reach it with my arms, but I could feel it when I rolled my head against my shoulders. It was almost long enough to start to bend.

The last thing I told Mary was that I used to have long hair.

I don’t remember the next girl who showed up. Any of them. I can still sort of picture them—at least, a few of them. My memories of the rest of my time in the pen are like still photos, without captions.

One day, the doctor came for me.

* * *

END ‘Herd Instinct’

part ONE