by D. J. Molles
Angela grasped at the one hope that seemed tangible: “Please, Jerry. Just let me be with my daughter. I won’t cause problems.”
“Ah,” Jerry smiled without pleasure. “You say that now, but when some time has passed and you’re getting comfortable again, you’ll talk. You’ll have…unkind things to say about me. You’ll be the little bad apple that spoils the whole bunch.”
Angela shook her head firmly. “I won’t, Jerry. I won’t. Just let me be with Abby.”
Jerry’s eyes glimmered with a strange light. He reached out to her, speaking as he did. “I’m going to let you be with Abby. I’m going to do that for you, Angela…”
His hand touched her shoulder, glided up towards her neck.
Without thinking, Angela jerked her body away and swatted at his hand.
Jerry lurched in close, so that she had no room to run and he reached the other arm around her shoulder and pulled her down. She wasn’t sure what he was doing, but then she felt his fist slam into her stomach. Just once. But surprisingly hard.
She doubled over, wheezing, and then collapsed onto her side.
She tried to catch her breath, tried to force air into her lungs, but it just kept leaking back out of her mouth with a weird groaning noise. It shocked her, but then the pain started to grow. Dull at first, and then sharp. Made her stomach feel hollow and achy.
She finally caught a breath and coughed. She watched a gob of saliva fly out of her own mouth and hit the metal floor, still trailing a glistening strand back to her lips.
Jerry sank down to his knees over her, put his hand on her neck, squeezing hard enough to let her know that she should be very still, but not so hard that it pinched her airway. Then he leaned down close to her face so that his lips brushed her ear and his hot breath moistened it.
“You see, Angela, I would never hurt you. Not like that. Because I’m just not that kind of person. But I know men that are. And if I were to allow you this kindness, if I were to let you stay in Camp Ryder and live peacefully with your child, and if you were then to repay my kindness with disrespect...well, then those men that do things for me might find you, Angela. Maybe in the middle of the night when you’re snug in your bed, cradling your daughter. They might find you there, and they might do terrible things, Angela. Things that don’t heal with time. Things that fuck you up in the head. Things that might fuck Abby up in the head, because she’ll see it happen. She’ll see every bit of it. Do I make myself abundantly clear?”
Her face pressed against the floor, staring at the trail of her own spit across it, she nodded slowly under the pressure of his hand on her neck. “Yes, I understand.”
Then Jerry stood up and brushed the knees of his pants off. He regarded her with disdain, then turned and left her lying there, apparently with nothing further to say. Behind him, the doors to the trailer remained open, and another freezing gust of wind whipped through as though it might sweep her out of the enclosure like a pile of dead leaves.
Angela coughed again, sat up, rubbing her neck. She shook all over. But there was something else to it besides plain old fear. There was a tension that spread itself across her frame. Like there was a winch in the core of her body and it was connected by steel cables to all of her limbs, and someone had just tightened it a few notches. The kind of tension that eventually breaks, and breaks violently.
She picked herself up off the floor, the throbbing in her gut making it difficult to stand up straight. She bent over, hands on her knees for a moment, staring at the ground, trying to make the pain subside. Finally she forced herself upright and stepped to the edge of the trailer.
She stood there, looking right and then left.
No guards.
No people to see her leave.
She could run right now. Escape Camp Ryder.
But where else would she go?
She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling suddenly and incredibly alone. Abandoned. Without hope. Like she was caught behind enemy lines. What was there for her now? To quietly go about her life like everything was normal? Ignore Bus’ murder? Ignore Jerry’s threats?
She touched her stomach again, found it tender like a bruise.
A reminder that Jerry was not all frills and politics, as he often seemed.
He was capable of violence as well.
But so am I, she thought, remembering the feel of the bat as it struck her own husband’s skull and toppled him. Because Abby stood right behind her. She remembered the smell of gunsmoke in a dark upstairs hallway in some little abandoned house with Lee battling for his life, and she remembered how the shotgun bucked in her grip, remembered watching that lead payload as it ripped flesh and bone from human beings. And she never stopped because Abby stood right behind her.
I am violent if the right buttons are pushed. She looked up into the gray-clad sky and her mouth tightened into something harder than what it had been before. She brought her gaze back down to the dirty world she lived in, and she stepped out of the shadow of the trailer and went to find her daughter.
CHAPTER 2: ANOMALY
Jacob stood at the window to the neonatal room of the Johnston Memorial Hospital in Smithfield. The same place where parents had stood to look in at their newborns. Now, though, the light of a few halogen lamps gave the place a more severe appearance, and there was nothing good inside.
It seemed a perverse place to house one of these things, but it made the most practical sense. Concerns about infant abductions had caused the hospital to make the room somewhat of a fortress to keep people out. But it also worked to keep things in. With lockable doors and a reinforced, shatter proof window, it provided Jacob and Doc Hamilton with opportunities to watch their subject without being within arm’s reach of her.
So Jacob watched her, feeling a little queasy.
She was crouched against the back wall, regarding him with unreadable eyes. She was naked and horrific. The protuberance of the thing growing inside of her seemed oddly large. Perhaps indicative of some other medical problem. She still appeared dirty, but Jacob and Doc Hamilton had cleaned the worst of it off the first time they had her sedated. Partly just to relieve themselves of the smell, though it didn’t last long—she continuously defecated in the corner of the room.
The way she was crouched, Jacob could see the cause for his current concerns.
Significant vaginal bleeding.
He broke the uncomfortable eye contact with the creature inside the room and looked to his right. Doc Hamilton stood there with the ultrasound cart, gloves already on, and a syringe in his hand loaded with Propofol. A cold, nervous sweat began to break out along Doc Hamilton’s heavily receding hairline. He was a staunch supporter of Jerry, and their difference of beliefs was a source of unspoken tension between the two of them. Jacob also knew that Doc Hamilton had been slipping information to Jerry. Sort of spying on Jacob and his experiments.
On the cart with the ultrasound machine was a tray from the hospital cafeteria, slopped with some canned chicken, beans, and corn. Pretty decent eating by today’s standards, and it seemed sacrilegious to give it to one of these beasts. But they wanted to keep their subject’s pregnancy viable as long as possible. And that meant giving it as much nutrition as they could.
Everything had to be coordinated. The giving of meals, the running of tests, and checking on any medical problems, such as the bleeding. It all had to be compiled into one session, because they didn’t want to keep pumping her full of drugs. Though the sedative was considered mostly safe for a pregnancy, it also wasn’t intended to be given on a daily basis, so they tried to give the minimum amount and make their sessions brief and fruitful.
Beside Doc Hamilton, two other men stood. One held a riot shield and a pistol. The other held the makeshift dog catcher’s pole that Jacob had originally caught his test subject with. They looked at Jacob, a little nervous even though they’d done it twice already. They were two of the regular guards, and though it seemed they didn’t like what had happened at Camp Ryd
er, they also didn’t really resist it. And when Greg and his crew came knocking, they were clearly friends.
Jacob nodded to them. “Just remember to be gentle.”
“As gentle as we can be,” one smirked to the other.
Jacob turned back to the window. The creature still stared at him, though she had leaned forward, one hand supporting her weight. Jacob got the distinct impression that she’d seen him look away and was going to use that opportunity to creep up closer to him. Unconsciously, he stepped back away from the window.
The sound of the doors unlocking drew her attention. But she didn’t attack. She recoiled away, scrambling away from them on all fours, hissing and screeching at them. This was how she had reacted each time. Defensive, until she was cornered. Then she would start lashing out.
Jacob and Doc Hamilton watched as the two men got her into the corner, using the shield to protect themselves and to pin her down while they got the dog catcher’s pole around her neck.
“We got her! Come on!”
Doc Hamilton was surprisingly quick for such a small man. He ran in and slipped quickly between the two men, sticking the writhing form in the side and squeezing the payload into her blood stream. She became more violent at first, but that was typical. After perhaps thirty seconds, the fighting slowed, and her screeching turned into a hollow-sounding moan. And maybe ten seconds after that she was completely unconscious. Arms and legs twitching. Eyelids fluttering.
“Alright,” Jacob pushed the ultrasound machine into the room. “Get her up on the bed.”
There was already a bed there in the room, kicked off to the side. She didn’t use it—at least not as intended. She would push it into the corner, creating a little den with it, and she would hide underneath sometimes, and often sleep there. But never on it. Like she feared being exposed.
The two guards hauled her up, one at her feet, and the other at her head. As they waddled backwards towards the bed, they heard the steady dribbling sound of liquid hitting the floor. The guard at the feet glanced down and grimaced.
“I think she’s pissing herself.”
Jacob nodded, following them with the ultrasound cart, but avoiding the yellowish puddles left behind. “She’s heavily sedated. Not unusual.”
They hefted her onto the bed and then vacated quickly, wiping their hands off on their clothes, their noses wrinkled in disgust.
Jacob pulled the ultrasound up beside the bed. Doc Hamilton hurried over, disposing the needle in one of the biohazard bins, and then plugging the machine in. While they waited for it to boot up, Jacob put the tray of food on the floor and slid it away from them, then he gloved up and began squeezing the tube of light-blue gel onto the pregnant belly.
“Doing good, Stacey,” Jacob said softly as he worked.
Doc Hamilton regarded him with some distaste. “Why you gotta name the damn thing?”
Jacob glanced at him. They’d already been through this. “We have to call it something.”
“How about Subject One?”
To Doc, the creature before them was just a science experiment. He didn’t want to consider that it had once been a person, and he thought that Jacob’s naming of the thing spoke of some sort of hopeful naiveté, as though Jacob thought they might coax this damaged thing back to sanity. But Jacob didn’t name it because he thought it was still a person.
Jacob shrugged. “She looks like a Stacey.”
“You must’ve had a very bad encounter with a girl named Stacey,” Doc mumbled.
Jacob smiled. He’d never actually known a Stacey—at least that he could remember. But for some reason when he thought of what to call the creature lying unconscious before him, he just kept thinking of her as Stacey. No idea why. It just was.
“It’s ready,” Doc said, handing Jacob the ultrasound wand.
Jacob pressed it against the swollen stomach. The thing called Stacey twitched a bit, but then lay still again. She made an unpleasant gargling sound. Drool coming from the corner of her mouth. The speaker on the equipment crackled like a garbled radio transmission. Fluidic sounds of something squirming through the amniotic sac inside.
The heavy, steady thump-thump of Stacey’s heart.
Then a more rapid beat.
Jacob steadied the wand, kept it there. He eyed the screen.
Doc Hamilton leaned around to get a look at the screen. “Looks like it’s still alive in there.”
He almost sounded disappointed.
Maybe Jacob was too. He didn’t really know how he felt about it.
Doc frowned after almost a minute passed. “That…” he made a face. “That heartbeat doesn’t sound quite right.”
“No?” Jacob eyed his partner. Doc Hamilton was the general practitioner. Granted, he was no OB/GYN, but he probably had a lot more experience with pregnant women than Jacob had, since Jacob had essentially none. Jacob knew about small things. Viruses. Bacteria. Infections.
Not reproduction.
Doc Hamilton raised his wrist and looked at the wind-up watch he still had strapped to it. He seemed utterly focused on it, the little second hand moving about and Doc’s eyes watching it like a hawk, all the while the air in the room filled with the strange slish-slosh of the fetus’s movements, and the rapid thip-thip-thip of its heart.
“What’s wrong with it?” Jacob asked.
“Well,” Doc lowered his wrist. “I guess there’s nothing wrong with it, per se.”
Jacob frowned at the other man, trying to get to the meat of what he was saying.
But Doc just stared at the screen, shaking his head. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
***
Greg hated Arnie’s little red Geo. In a world where you were lucky not to be walking, he still hated Arnie’s little red Geo. It stank of decades of decaying fast food, tiny morsels that were lodged somewhere down in between the seats and glued there by soda. Since those glory days of overindulgence, Arnie had shrunken—all that skin that used to be stretched tight by his immense stores of fat now swung around loosely inside his clothing—but when Greg was stuck in the front seat, with Arnie driving beside him, he couldn’t help but picture the man at his fattest state, driving with his knees while he double-fisted cheeseburgers.
With four men crammed into it, the smell became that much worse. With the weather hitting a cold spike over the last few days and true winter coming on, people were using the outdoor shower stalls less and less. Instead, most of them opted to give themselves a “wipedown.” This consisted of wiping your armpits and crotch with a wet cloth. Or a baby wipe, if you were lucky enough to find one.
Great to make sure they didn’t grow fungus, but it didn’t do much for the smell.
So Greg sat in his quiet misery while Arnie drove them down the highway.
West, towards Lillington.
In the days following Jerry’s movement, and the deactivation of the radios at Camp Ryder, there had been no word from OP Lillington. They’d heard from Doc Hamilton and Jacob at Smithfield. They’d heard from OP Benson. But nobody had seen hide nor hair of Old Man Hughes and his group.
In Jerry’s opinion, Smithfield was necessary, because it was a hospital. OP Benson kept the roads between Camp Ryder and Smithfield clear, so that anyone that needed serious medical attention could go to Smithfield and see Doc Hamilton. But OP Lillington was just a waste. Another drain on their resources. It only existed so that Captain Harden could expand his area of influence, and use Lillington as a jump-off point for his operations.
So Jerry sent Greg, Arnie, and the new guy, Kyle, to scout it out. The fourth passenger, crammed in tight with the others, was Professor White, the leader of the group from Fuquay-Varina. He’d been curious about Lillington, and had been pressuring Jerry into letting him take a group to go check it out. Greg supposed that he held some sort of attachment to Lillington, or perhaps to Old Man Hughes and his group, since they had shared Lillington for a short time.
Who knew what Professor White was thinking?
But he’d been very insistent. To the point of accusing Jerry of covering things up. Suggesting that OP Lillington had contacted Camp Ryder, but that Jerry just refused to render any help to them. And there were other issues souring their relationship. Professor White felt that he’d been promised that as soon as Captain Harden and Bus were overthrown and the supplies accessed, they would all immediately make a run for the mountains. A mass exodus to escape.
Obviously Jerry was in no hurry to do this, and each day it became more evident that it wasn’t going to happen. Which left White feeling betrayed. And Professor White had never been shy in his attempt to sway the court of “public opinion,” if you could call a few dozen survivors living in shanties the “public.”
White’s presence in the already-cramped car was a result of him butting heads with Jerry for the umpteenth time in the past 48 hours. White wanted to know what had happened to Lillington, and Jerry assured him that he would send a group out to investigate. At which point White insisted that he be a part of it. And if he didn’t get what he wanted he was going to make a stink.
So he got what he wanted.
They turned onto S. Main Street and hit the bridge over the Cape Fear River. Arnie slowed them down, but didn’t stop. They continued rolling until they were across the river. They trundled over a set of train tracks and Greg leaned forward in his seat, motioning Arnie to a stop. He pulled out a pair of binoculars and glassed the downtown area of Lillington. The little square of buildings where the outpost had been set up.
“Why are we stopping here?” White asked, shifting abruptly in the backseat and setting the vehicle to rocking.
A look of mild irritation passed over Greg’s face. He pulled the binoculars away from his eyes and waited for White to quit fidgeting so the car would be still, and then he put the binoculars back up and continued to scan, slowly, carefully.
