Mandy Moo: The Scoop That Swallowed Her Whole
Chapter Three
The Herd
Mandy’s blindfold was removed by a pair of hands that were practiced about it—efficient, unhurried, not rough—and for a moment she simply stood with her eyes closed, completing the last few seconds of darkness by choice. She had found, over years of fieldwork, that this transitional moment—the few seconds between blindness and sight—was useful. It settled the nerves. It cleared the analytical mind of whatever distracting fears had accumulated in the dark and replaced them with a blank readiness.
She opened her eyes.
The barn was unlike anything she had ever seen or imagined. It was large—longer than it was wide, with high rafters and a roof of corrugated metal that had been lined inside with some kind of acoustic dampening material, which explained the muffled quality of the sounds she had been hearing. The floor was concrete, clean, with drainage channels at regular intervals. The lighting was warm and indirect—rows of amber-toned LEDs rather than overhead fluorescents—and the effect was something between clinical and intimate, like the lighting of a very high-end spa that had also, somehow, been engineered for functional purposes.
Along both long walls were what she could only describe as stations. Padded platforms at waist height, each fitted with adjustable s and cushioned rests, each equipped with mechanical apparatus that she needed only a moment to identify: milking machines. Not the industrial bovine variety she had seen at a conventional dairy farm on a story three years ago, but refined, purpose-built devices, smaller and more precise, with soft silicone attachments and transparent tubing through which a thick, creamy white liquid moved in steady, rhythmic pulses.
And at each station, the machines were in use.
Mandy pressed her fingers to her lips. Not to suppress sound—she made no sound, her voice had simply stopped being a thing that was available to her for several seconds—but because the gesture was the body’s instinctive way of managing an input that exceeded its current processing capacity.
They were women. A dozen of them, perhaps more—she would count more carefully later, the reporter in her would insist on precision—each stationed at a milking platform, each in various postures of ed repose. They were beautiful in a way that was almost surreal in its uniformity: lustrous skin with the particular warmth and glow that Lumina Lactis’s testimonials had described in exhaustive detail, full and heavy breasts of extraordinary size—GG cup at minimum, she estimated, though some appeared larger still—swollen and firm and leaking at the nipples where the silicone attachments drew from them their thick, creamy yield. Their eyes were half-lidded. Their faces were soft with something that read, unmistakably, as pleasure—not performance of pleasure but the real thing, the involuntary, physical, deeply present reality of it. Their skin glowed. Their bodies were supple and warm. The air around them was sweet with a scent that Mandy now recognised as the same vanilla-and-warm-skin smell she had noticed since arriving, but here it was concentrated, layered, complex.
It was a few moments before she noticed the other detail. On each woman’s left butt cheek was a tattoo—vivid, precise, and unmistakable. The Lumina Lactis logo, rendered in full colour, its stylised lily glowing in the amber light. Above the logo, each woman’s first name in bold script, followed by the word Moo—so that the nearest woman, the golden-haired blonde, wore the name Bella Moo arched over the crest of her cheek. Beneath the logo, in smaller text: Property of: and then a name. She couldn’t read them all from this distance, but the one nearest to her read Cole.
She stood for a long moment just inside the barn. Her training was performing irably. The journalist’s mind, confronted with something it has never seen, does not shut down—it accelerates, generating hypotheses at high speed, beginning the process of categorisation and evidence-gathering that converts raw experience into narrative. She was doing all of this. She was counting the stations (fourteen, with two unoccupied), estimating the volume of milk in the collection vessels (significant, filling steadily), reading the expressions on the women’s faces (consistently, unmistakably, genuinely content, which was, she noted with professional precision, an unusual finding in a situation that would ordinarily produce distress), and noting the temperature and quality of the air (warm, sweet, complex, not unpleasant, in fact distinctly pleasant, in fact increasingly pleasant with each breath she took).
She was also doing something else that she would not, in the moment, have described as anything other than professional assessment. She was breathing the air. Deeply, involuntarily, her lungs taking in the particular atmospheric composition of a barn full of producing hucows with the same uncritical thoroughness with which lungs always do their work. The air was doing something to her that she was not yet ready to name. There was a warmth developing in her chest that had arrived approximately four breaths after she entered the barn and had been incrementally intensifying since. She attributed it to the ambient temperature, to the slight over-production of CO2 in an enclosed space with many bodies, to any of several physiological explanations that were available to her professional mind and which her professional mind accepted with the slightly desperate thoroughness of a mind that does not yet want to consider the other explanation.
She took a breath and her reporter’s instincts, bless them, kicked in with something approaching violence.
“Oh my God,” she said, low and clear, because the first thing a journalist does when confronted with something extraordinary is name it. “You’re not using cows at all. You’re—these women—” She moved forward, her heels clicking on the concrete, her notebook-trained mind already generating the headline, the lede, the ing evidence. She reached the nearest station, where a blonde woman of extraordinary beauty stood with the milking attachment drawing steadily from breasts so large they rested on the padded , and she said, loudly enough to be heard clearly over the machinery: “Are you okay? Are you here of your own free will? Are you being held here against your wishes?”
The blonde woman turned to look at her with eyes that were wide and lust-drenched and utterly, completely, serenely content. Her lips parted in a smile that contained within it no trace of distress or urgency. A thread of milk ran from the corner of the silicone attachment, and she didn’t appear to notice or mind.
“Held?” she said, and her voice was warm and low and faintly amused in the way that people are faintly amused when asked a question whose answer seems to them completely obvious. “Honey, we are exactly where we want to be.”
From the station beside her, a dark-haired woman—Italian features, luminous skin, breasts so heavy they caused her to lean slightly forward on the even with the machine’s architecture holding her—reached a hand toward Mandy. Her fingers were slender and warm and her touch, when it found Mandy’s forearm, was gentle. “ us,” she said, and the words had the quality of an invitation to something comfortable and known rather than a lure toward something dangerous. “It’s heaven here. You’ll understand when you try it.”
Mandy looked at the hand on her arm. Her brain was sending a clear, professional message: step back, maintain distance, this is the story, you are the reporter, not the subject. She stepped back. She was very good at her job. She could do this.
Except that the other women in the barn were now aware of her. Some had turned in their stations to watch. Some had disengaged from their milking apparatus and were stepping down from the padded platforms with the careful, deliberate grace of women carrying significant additional weight in their chests. And they were moving toward her. Not quickly. Not aggressively. But convergingly, the way warm water converges toward a drain, inevitable and calm and unstoppable.
“Wait,” Mandy said, taking another step back. “I don’t—I need to understand what’s happening here. I need to document it. I’m a journalist. I—”
The blonde woman was very close now. Mandy could smell her: milk and warmth and the concentrated version of that complex sweet scent, and something underneath all of it that was entirely, overwhelmingly female. The woman cupped her own breast with one hand, lifting it slightly, and pressed the engorged, glistening nipple against Mandy’s lips.
“Drink,” she said, softly and simply. “Just taste it. That’s all.”
Mandy turned her head. Her training, her professionalism, her seventeen years of investigative journalism turned her head. But the hands of the dark-haired woman were on her shoulders now, and another pair of hands had found her waist, and the warmth of all these bodies was something she was absorbing through her skin whether she chose to or not, and the smell was everywhere, in her throat, in her lungs, warm and sweet and insistent. She turned her head and the blonde woman turned with her, patient, unhurried, the nipple brushing the corner of Mandy’s mouth.
Mandy made a sound. It might have been another protest. But the nipple was there, right there, and her lips parted of their own accord—a reflex as old as breathing, older than thought—and then the milk was on her tongue.
It was warm. Of course it was warm. All the testimonials had described it as warm. But none of them had described the taste with adequate accuracy: sweet in a way that was nothing like processed sweetness, nothing like sugar or artificial flavouring, but rather the pure, organic sweetness of something that had come directly from a living body, complex and deep and almost narcotically satisfying. And it was thick—considerably thicker than cow’s milk, closer to cream, with a richness that coated the throat on the way down.
Heat bloomed in Mandy’s chest. Not gradually, not incrementally, but with the sudden, total quality of a switch being thrown. It spread outward from her sternum in a wave: up her throat, across her shoulders, down through her abdomen and into her hips and thighs. Her nipples tightened under the cups of her bra so suddenly and sharply that she gasped. The sound was muffled by the breast against her mouth, but it was there.
Her hands, which had been raised to push away, lowered. Not because she decided to lower them. But because the directive that was running them had been interrupted by something faster and more immediate.
“Mmm,” she said. The sound surprised her. It wasn’t a journalistic sound.
She began to drink.
The heat that moved through her body as she swallowed carried something within it—something hormonal and ancient and overwhelming, a tide of need that rose quickly and displaced everything in its path. Her resistance dissolved not dramatically but quietly, the way a sandcastle dissolves in a wave: still visible for a moment as structure, then simply gone. Her breasts swelled within her blouse—she could feel the fabric tightening, could feel the cups of her bra growing inadequate with a speed that was alarming and, in the same breath, deeply, urgently welcome. Her hips felt wider. Her pussy, between one breath and the next, became wet with a thoroughness and urgency that she had never experienced in this way before, like her body had skipped entirely past desire and landed directly at need.
She stopped drinking from the blonde woman and moved, without making a decision to move, to the dark-haired woman, taking her nipple into her mouth with an enthusiasm that felt completely natural and was absolutely incompatible with any of the things Mandy had been before she walked into this barn. She drank deeply. She moved again. She was no longer thinking about the story. She was no longer thinking about Jake or Channel 8 or the drive back to the city or any of the other thirty-seven items that had been somewhere in her mental queue when she arrived. She was thinking about warmth and sweetness and the extraordinary fullness building in her own breasts—a fullness that ached and demanded and promised something enormous on the other side of the demand.
Her blouse strained. A button, the second from the top, gave with a small, delicate pop. She didn’t notice.
The farm hands who appeared at the barn’s far end noticed, though. Two men in work clothes, moving without haste, exchanging a glance that contained within it a complete understanding of what they were seeing. “Looks like we have a new recruit,” one said, with a grin that was knowing and not unkind. They began to make their way toward her.
The other hucows gently drew Mandy away from the group—not by force, not by restraint, but with the guiding hands of women who knew exactly where she needed to go next and were happy to show her the way. Her blouse was now straining against breasts that had grown at least two cup sizes in the preceding minutes, the remaining buttons under siege, the fabric distorted into shapes it had never been designed to accommodate.
One of the farm hands signalled to Cole as they ed the door.