Population Zero

by Wrath James White

  His bike never slowed. His hand reached into his messenger bag and this time Stephanie was expecting him to pull out a bouquet of roses or, better yet, an engagement ring. When she saw the hammer in his hand a look of confusion crossed her face. She was still wondering what the hammer was for when he buried it in her stomach, doubling her over.

  Stephanie dropped to her knees, writhing in agony and vomiting uncontrollably while trying to catch her breath at the same time. Her guts were on fire. She looked up at Todd as he walked over to her, still carrying the hammer. He was sobbing and shaking his head as if trying to deny some unspoken truth.

  "I'm sorry, Stephanie. I'm so sorry."

  She tried to get to her feet and instead rolled over onto her back, reeling in pain and holding her belly. Todd brought the hammer down again. And it felt as if the baby inside of her collapsed beneath the blow. Her belly seemed to deflate a little and blood stained the crotch of her sweatpants.

  "I love you, Stephanie."

  He brought the hammer down again and again. Stephanie never even screamed. She moaned and whimpered but she never screamed. Her mouth filled with blood that exploded out onto the jogging path as he struck her again.

  Stephanie never heard his declaration of love. The pain was so huge that it blotted out the entire world. Her only thought was that her baby was dead. She had a dead baby inside of her. Her next thought was worry for Todd. Cathy was going to kill him for this.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Todd could not think straight. He pedaled as fast as he could. His eyesight was obscured by tears. He had no idea where he was going or if he was being pursued.

  I killed Stephanie.

  The words were unbelievable to him. He couldn't rectify the person he knew himself to be with what he knew he had done. He wasn't a murderer. He loved everyone. He only wanted to save the planet, save everyone from extinction.

  How could he have murdered two people and vivisected another? This had to be some kind of nightmare.

  But hadn't I always said that if taking one human life or even a hundred would save millions for countless generations than it was a moral duty to take those lives? Hadn't I said that?

  Heimlich had said that. Those were his words, from his book. And now Heimlich was behind bars, probably for the rest of his life, for trying to sterilize hundreds of millions of women. And Todd would probably get locked up too for what he'd done to Nicolene and Terrence and now Stephanie.

  I killed her. I killed Stephanie.

  Todd had been conflicted right up until the moment he'd swung the hammer into her pregnant belly, pulverizing their unborn child. He wasn't positive that he'd killed Stephanie. He had intended to crack her skull with the hammer to finish her off but he'd hesitated. There had been a tenderness in her eyes, a sadness and a sympathy and it had been for him. She'd felt sympathy for him as he was standing above her after repeatedly bludgeoning her stomach with a hammer, preparing to split her skull open with the next blow. She'd looked confused and frightened but still in love, still in love with him. He supposed that it was some perverse version of battered women's syndrome. She had been abused before. Perhaps, somewhere deep inside her, she equated abuse with love. He didn't know – wasn't sure – didn't want to psychoanalyze it. All he knew was that she hadn't hated him, even as he was preparing to beat her to death, she hadn't hated him. And so he had hesitated.

  A group of men, who'd also been jogging on the path, came charging toward him. One of them was pushing a stroller.

  Todd had a moment to register the absurdity of someone pushing a baby stroller toward a guy who'd just bludgeoned a pregnant woman with a hammer before he picked up his bike and pedaled out of the park as fast as he could.

  He didn't know if Stephanie was dead but he was pretty damned sure she wouldn't be having any babies.

  Todd didn't know where to go now. He didn't know what to do. The police would be looking for him now. His mission would be over soon and he'd done so little. Heimlich was about to sterilize an entire city and all he'd done was talk an overweight trailer park welfare queen into getting rid of her baby, murder a womanizing insemination machine, sterilize a crackwhore and abort her baby, and now murdered his own unborn child. It didn't seem like nearly enough.

  He hadn't continued Heimlich's work. He hadn't made a difference. He needed to do more. Before the cops caught up with him, he needed to make a real impact. He'd probably murdered Stephanie for the cause. He couldn't stop now.

  He rode down to Market Street, tossed his bike into an alley and caught a bus uptown. His heart was beating as if it was trying to pound its way through his ribcage. He must have looked like a criminal, looking over his shoulder and slouching down whenever a patrol car passed. He was just about to exit the bus when an advertisement caught his eye.

  It said, "Life begins at conception. Let us help you save a life." It was an ad for a place called Haven House, a shelter for unwed mothers. This was the place his supervisor had told him about. Todd walked to the front of the bus. He leaned down and spoke to the bus driver.

  "How do I get to D Street and Fifth Avenue?"

  "Get off here and catch the westbound subway. Get off at the Fifth Avenue station."

  "Thank You."

  Todd left the bus and headed to the subway. He still had his messenger bag full of medical supplies and hand tools.

  There was still more good that he could do.

  On the subway, Todd stared openly at a young couple, teenagers, obviously in love. They hugged and kissed each other with a tenderness that only came from hard times and a relationship too new to have become accustomed to grief and strife. Todd wanted to tell them never to have kids. He wanted to make them understand.

  "Hey."

  Todd leaned over and whispered to the couple that was practically spooning in the subway seat. They didn't look at him or even appear to notice that he had spoken.

  "Hey!" Todd said a bit louder. This time they both turned and looked at him. The woman looked annoyed but the guy, who looked like some hybrid of a grunge rocker and a hippy, smiled pleasantly as if awakening from a beautiful dream. He even blinked and yawned.

  "What's up, man?"

  "You two are in love, huh?"

  This time they both smiled. The girl was just a tad overweight with tiny breasts and wide hips. She was dressed in all black with black lipstick, eye-shadow, and blood red fingernail polish. Her hair was dyed completely white. She'd probably spent many a lonely night reading Ann Sexton and Emily Dickenson while listening to The Cure and Depeche Mode, or whoever their current day equivalents were, before she'd met the man of her dreams. They both looked like they'd once kept lists of schoolmates they wanted to murder.

  "Yeah, we're in love."

  "I love him."

  "Don't have kids. You can get married and love each other forever, but never have kids. Adopt kids. There're plenty of kids out there that need parents without adding to the backlog. But this world is already overpopulated. In your lifetimes the world's population will double. Just think about that. For every asshole, every criminal, every annoying bothersome pest, in about sixty years, there will be two of them."

  The two lovers sat there with their smiles falling and rising as they tried to figure out if he was serious.

  "Man, you are crazy as hell!" the boy declared, laughing, slapping his knee, and shaking his head. He looked at his girlfriend but her face was dead serious.

  "He's right though. It's just like that guy on TV, the one who tried to poison the water in New York. He said the same thing. We're like a cancer growing out of control, killing the planet. But what should we do?"

  "Get yourselves fixed. Sterilize yourselves."

  "But what about everyone else? What do we do about all the other breeders?" the boy said, still giggling, taking the entire thing as some sort of joke.

  The subway pulled into the station at 5th Avenue. Todd rose to leave. The two teens were still looking at him, waiting for a reply, waiting for him t
o speak some profound words of wisdom.

  "Sterilize them too."

  He stepped out of the subway and the doors swished closed behind him. The young couple was still staring at him as the subway raced past. It was time to make a difference.

  It didn't take him long to locate the women's shelter. It was an old red brick Victorian with a big wooden sign that said

  "Haven House" hanging from the porch roof above the steps to the front door.

  Todd didn't know anything about the woman's shelter except that its owners were the type who'd bombed abortion clinics in the eighties and stood outside of women's clinics with posters of aborted fetuses. The only reason the shelter existed was to convince women who would have otherwise aborted their babies to carry them to term. This place was the negation of everything Todd stood for. Todd pulled the hammer and the stun gun out of the messenger bag and rang the doorbell.

  A woman in her sixties opened the door. She had deep crow's feet in the corners of her eyes, flabby jowls that hung down past her jaw like a Bassett hound, turkey-like waddle hanging from her neck and breasts that looked far too perky for a woman her age, an obvious boob job. When she smiled her teeth were far too white – caps, dental implants, or dentures, but definitely not her own teeth. She was the very picture of a woman struggling desperately to hang on to the last vestiges of youth. Todd didn't bother to return her smile. Instead he zapped her with the stun gun and clubbed her over the head with the hammer. He felt the resistance of her skull and then felt it give with a wet crack.

  Her legs folded under her as she collapsed like an imploding building, tumbling straight down and whacking her already bloody skull on the hardwood floor with a loud "Thwap!" Blood gushed from the wound and stained the floor.

  She didn't appear to be breathing. She was probably the owner of the place so, in Todd's mind, she'd gotten what she deserved. Her death would hopefully prevent any other young girls from having babies they didn't want and that the world didn't need. He stepped over her and walked into the house, kicking the door shut behind him and then locking it.

  Chapter Twenty

  There was a woman lying on the living room couch watching television. She barely looked up when Todd entered the room.

  "Who was it at the door?"

  "Me," Todd answered as he walked up behind her and clamped a hand over her mouth. He zapped her and taped her up before she could make a noise.

  An old man who was probably the husband of the woman he'd cracked at the front door, was sitting in the den typing away on a laptop when Todd stormed into the room. The old guy jumped and almost fell out of his chair.

  "Jesus! Who the fuck are you?"

  "I'm sort of a Pro-Life activist also."

  The old guy squinted, trying to see Todd standing in the darkened doorway. He fumbled for his glasses on his cluttered desk.

  "What organization are you with?"

  Todd stepped further into the room.

  "Mass-Murderers for the Preservation of Animal Life."

  The old guy found his glasses and slipped them onto his crinkled, liver-spotted scalp.

  "Mass-Murderers? Wha-what?"

  Todd stepped closer and the old guy flicked on his desktop lamp and turned it up so that it shone directly onto Todd's face.

  The old guy looked Todd up and down, noting the bloody hammer still clutched in Todd's hand and the stun gun clasped in his other hand. He reached into his desk and Todd sprinted across the room and cracked him with the hammer before he could pull the. 357 Colt magnum revolver out of his top drawer. The gun tumbled to the floor and so did the old man. Todd tried not to look at the old guy bleeding on the floor as he reached into his bag and retrieved the duct tape.

  Though the man looked nothing like either his father or the priest, the old guy was probably twenty years older than his father had been when he'd taken his own life, something about the scene reminded him of the night of his mother's funeral. The night Todd lost both of his parents.

  The old man moaned and struggled meekly as Todd taped his arms behind his back and put tape on his eyes and mouth. Todd picked up the gun, checked the barrel, then clicked it back into place and cocked the hammer. He left the room and headed back out into the hallway. There were voices coming from the kitchen. Todd walked into the kitchen and pointed the gun from one face to the other. He was greeted with a chorus of screams. There were several women sitting at the small kitchen table sipping coffee and eating some kind of coffee cakes. They jumped up quickly, knocking over chairs and dropping cups to the floor.

  "Shut the fuck up and sit back down. One more sound and I will kill every last one of you."

  Todd tossed a roll of tape to a teenage girl wearing a ponytail who was just starting to show. She looked to be about three or four months pregnant. There were four other women, two more that appeared to be in their early teens, a black woman in her thirties and a Filipino woman in her early to mid-twenties. They were all in varying stages of pregnancy.

  "Tape their hands behind their backs or I start shooting."

  Three more women came rushing into the kitchen and Todd turned the gun toward them. A huge white woman with curlers in her hair, a robe that barely concealed her massive belly and gigantomastic breasts that each appeared to weigh as much as small Thanksgiving turkeys, shrieked like a cat in a microwave when she spotted the gun. Todd cracked the butt of the revolver across her lips. Teeth flew from her mouth against the wall and she staggered backwards almost knocking over the other two women. Todd noted with surprise that the voice he normally heard in his head, the one that was always questioning his actions, telling him that he was going too far, begging him to stop, was silent. Even when the woman dropped slowly to her knees, sobbing and holding her bleeding mouth, Todd felt nothing at all.

  "Get over there with the rest of them." He gestured with the gun toward the women sitting at the table and the three new arrivals shuffled over there hugging each other. Todd tossed the other three rolls of tape to the three girls.

  "Tape up the rest of them."

  He pointed at the teenage girl he'd singled out earlier.

  "I'll tape you up myself. You make sure everyone else is bound nice and tight. Don't think you're doing anyone any favors by not taping them up good. I'll be checking everyone's wrists and ankles when you're done. If anyone gets free I'm shooting them dead as an example to everyone else."

  "Don't kill us, Mister. We're pregnant. We're all pregnant. This is a shelter for pregnant women."

  "I know exactly what this place is." There was no expression on his face at all as he pointed the gun at the girls.

  "We don't have any money."

  "I don't want any."

  "Well, we-we'll do whatever you want. Just don't kill us. Don't hurt us."

  "I don't want to fuck you either. Now everybody stop talking. Tape their mouths closed."

  The three girls finished taping up the other four girls and then one by one the teenage girl with the ponytail taped them up as well. After she'd put the gags on their mouths she turned to face Todd.

  "Please don't hurt me."

  "Turn around."

  She did as she was told and Todd taped her wrists behind her back like the seven other women.

  "Sit in the chair."

  "Please, don't."

  "I told you. I'm not going to kill you."

  She sat down and Todd taped her ankles to the chair legs. He pulled off another strip of tape and placed it over her eyes.

  "Are there any more women in the house? Anyone else here I should know about?"

  The girl shook her head.

  "I don't like surprises. If anyone surprises me you'll all die."

  Todd ripped off another piece of tape.

  "My name is Mary. I'm having a daughter. Her name is going to be Kelli."

  Todd paused. He knew what she was doing. Trying to make herself real to him, to make herself more of a human being. She thought that would make it harder for him to kill her. Todd waited, e
xpecting the sting of conscience to hit him.

  "My daughter's name is going to be Kelli. She's my second child. My other daughter is Cindy. She's two years old. Her birthday was last week."

  He felt nothing. Killing his own child had taken away the last vestiges of his humanity. Todd put the tape over her mouth. He leaned forward and whispered into Mary's ear.

  "You're going to have to give all your love to the child you have now."

  He rubbed her belly with the palm of his hand.

  "This one ain't going to make it."

  Todd reached into his bag and pulled out a scalpel and a wire hanger. He knelt down beside Mary and began cutting off her pajamas. He cut up the inside of her pants leg all the way to her crotch and down the opposite leg.

  "This is really going to hurt but it will be worth it. You are going to save so many people and thousands of plants and animals just by not having this child."

  After straightening the hanger out until it was just a long thin wire with a hook on the end of it, Todd parted her labia with his thumb and index fingers and began winding the hanger up inside of her. The blood came almost immediately.

  Mommy bled too. Mommy bled because we couldn't afford another child. Mommy bled because the child wasn't Daddy's.

  Todd remembered that tiny head with the wire hanger poked through the eye socket being dragged out of his mother's hairy snatch. He shoved the hanger in deeper and the girl jerked and bucked screaming against the tape over her mouth. Rocking back and forth against the chair back and almost toppling the chair onto the floor.

  "This is the best way. This is how my mommy did it. But if you don't stay still and let me get this parasite out of you, I'm going to have to cut it right out of your uterus."