Short Stories

by F. Paul Wilson

  "Who are you?" This time his voice was less calm, his tones less measured.

  "You mean you don't recognize us?" a mocking voice said from the crowd.

  "I've never seen any of you before today."

  "Not true," said another voice. "After our fathers, you're the second most important man in our lives."

  This was insane! "I don't know any of you!"

  "You should." Another voice -- were they trying to confuse him by talking from different spots in the room?

  "Why?"

  "Because you killed us."

  The absurdity of the statement made him laugh. He straightened from the table and stepped forward. "Okay. That's it. This isn't the least bit funny."

  A little boy shoved him back, roughly, violently. His strength was hideous.

  "M-my wife will be here s-soon." He was ashamed of the stammer in his voice, but he couldn't help it. "She'll call the police."

  "Sergeant Morelli, perhaps?" This voice was more mature than the others -- more womanly. He found her and looked her in the eye. She was the tall one in her early twenties, dressed in a sweater and skirt. He had a sudden crazy thought that maybe she was a young teacher and these were her students on a class trip. But these kids looked like they spanned all grades from pre-school to junior high.

  "Who are you?"

  "I don't have a name," she said, facing him squarely. "Very few of us do. But this one does." She indicated a little girl at her side, a toddler made up like a hobo in raggedy clothes with burnt cork rubbed on her face for a beard. An Emmett Kelly dwarf. "Here, Laura," she said to the child as she urged her forward. "Show Dr. Cantrell what you looked like last time he saw you."

  Laura stepped up to him. Behind the makeup he could see that she was a beautiful child with short dark hair, a pudgy face, and big brown eyes. She held her bucket out to him.

  "She was eleven weeks old," the woman said, "three inches long, and weighed fourteen grams when you ripped her from her mother's uterus. She was no match for you and your suction tube."

  Blood and tissue swirled in the bottom of her bucket.

  "You don't expect me to buy this, do you?"

  "I don't care what you buy, Doctor. But this is Sandra Morelli's child -- or at least what her child would look like now if she'd been allowed to be born. But she wasn't born. Her mother had names all picked out -- Adam for a boy, Laura for a girl -- but her grandfather bullied her mother into an abortion and you were oh-so-willing to see that there were no problems along the way."

  "This is absurd!" he said.

  "Really?" the woman said. "Then go ahead and call Sergeant Morelli. Maybe he'd like to drive down and meet his granddaughter. The one you killed."

  "I killed no one!" he shouted. "No one Abortion has been legal since 1974! Absolutely legal! And besides -- she wasn't really alive!"

  What's the matter with me? he asked himself. I'm talking to them as if I believe them!

  "Oh, yes," the woman said. "I forgot. Some political appointees decided that we weren't people and that was that. Pretty much like what happened to East European Jews back in World War II. We're not even afforded the grace of being called embryos or fetuses. We're known as 'products of conception.' What a neat, dehumanizing little phrase. So much easier to scrape the 'products of conception' into a bucket than a person."

  "I've had just about enough of this!" he said.

  "So?" a young belligerent voice said. "What're y'gonna do?"

  He knew he was going to do nothing. He didn't want to have another primary-grade kid shove him back against the table again. No kid that size should be that strong. It wasn't natural.

  "You can't hold me responsible!" he said. "They came to me, asking for help. They were pregnant and they didn't want to be. My God! I didn't make them pregnant!"

  Another voice: "No, but you sure gave them a convenient solution!"

  "So blame your mothers! They're the ones who spread their legs and didn't want to take responsibility for it! How about them!"

  "They are not absolved," the woman said. "They shirked their responsibilities to us, but the vast majority of them are each responsible for only one of us. You, Dr. Cantrell, are responsible for all of us. Most of them were scared teenagers, like Laura's mother, who were bullied and badgered into 'terminating' us. Others were too afraid of what their parents would say so they snuck off to women's medical centers like this and lied about their age and put us out of their misery."

  "Not all of them, sweetheart!" he said. He was beginning to feel he was on firmer ground now. "Many a time I've done three or four on the same woman! Don't tell me they were poor, scared teenagers. Abortion was their idea of birth control!"

  "We know," a number of voices chorused, and something in their tone made him shiver. "We'll see them later."

  "The point is," the woman said, "that you were always there, always ready with a gentle smile, a helpful hand, an easy solution, a simple way to get them off the hook by getting rid of us. And a bill, of course."

  "If it hadn't been me, it would have been someone else!"

  "You can't dilute your own blame. Or your own responsibility," said a voice from behind his chair. "Plenty of doctors refuse to do abortions."

  "If you were one of those," said another from his left, "we wouldn't be here tonight."

  "The law lets me do it. The Supreme Court. So don't blame me. Blame those Supreme Court justices."

  "That's politics. We don't care about politics."

  "But I believe in a woman's right to control her own life, to make decisions about her own body!"

  "We don't care what you believe. Do you think the beliefs of a terrorist matter to the victims of his bombs? Don't you understand? This is personal!"

  A little girl's voice said, "I could have been adopted, you know. I would've made someone a good kid. But I never had the chance!"

  They all began shouting at once, about never getting Christmas gifts or birthday presents or hugs or tucked in at night or playing with matches or playing catch or playing house or even playing doctor --

  It seemed to go on endlessly. Finally the woman held up her bucket. "All their possibilities ended in here."

  "Wait a goddamn minute!" he said. He had just discovered a significant flaw in their little show. "Only a few of them ended up in buckets! If you were up on your facts, you'd know that no one uses those old D and C buckets for abortions anymore." He pointed to the glass trap on the Zarick suction extractor. "This is where the products of conception wind up."

  The woman stepped forward with her bucket. "They carry this in honor of me. I have the dubious distinction of being your first victim."

  "You're not my victims!" he shouted. "The law -- "

  She spat in his face. Shocked and humiliated, Cantrell wiped away the saliva with his shirtsleeve and pressed himself back against the table. The rage in her face was utterly terrifying.

  "The law!" she hissed. "Don't speak of legalities to me! Look at me! I'd be twenty-two now and this is how I'd look if you hadn't murdered me. Do a little subtraction, Doctor: 1974 was a lot less than twenty-two years ago. I'm Ellen Benedict's daughter -- or at least I would have been if you hadn't agreed to do that D and C on her when she couldn't find a way to explain her pregnancy to her impotent husband!"

  Ellen Benedict! God! How did they know about Ellen Benedict? Even he had forgotten about her!

  The woman stepped forward and grabbed his wrist. He was helpless against her strength as she pressed his hand over her left breast. He might have found the softness beneath her sweater exciting under different circumstances, but now it elicited only dread.

  "Feel my heart beating? It was beating when your curette ripped me to pieces. I was only four weeks old. And I'm not the only one here you killed before 1974 -- I was just your first. So you can't get off the hook by naming the Supreme Court as an accomplice. And even if we allowed you that cop-out, other things you've done since '74 are utterly abominable!" She looked around and pointed into the c
rowd. "There's one! Come here, honey, and show your bucket to the doctor."

  A five- or six-year-old boy came forward. He had blond bangs and the biggest, saddest blue eyes the doctor had ever seen. The boy held out his bucket.

  Cantrell covered his face with his hands. "I don't want to see!"

  Suddenly he felt his hands yanked downward with numbing force and found the woman's face scant inches from his own.

  "Look, damn you! You've seen it before!"

  He looked into the upheld bucket. A fully formed male fetus lay curled in the blood, its blue eyes open, its head turned at an unnatural angle.

  "This is Rachel Walraven's baby as you last saw him."

  The Walraven baby! Oh, God, not that one! How could they know?

  "What you see is how he'd look now if you hadn't broken his neck after the abortifacient you gave his mother made her uterus dump him out."

  "He couldn't have survived!" he shouted. He could hear the hysteria edging into his voice. "He was previable! Too immature to survive! The best neonatal ICU in the world couldn't have saved him!"

  "Then why'd you break my neck?" the little boy asked.

  Cantrell could only sob -- a single harsh sound that seemed to rip itself from the tissues inside his chest and burst free into the air. What could he say? How could he tell them that he had miscalculated the length of gestation and that no one had been more shocked than he at the size of the infant that had dropped into his gloved hands? And then it had opened its eyes and stared at him and my God it seemed to be trying to breathe! He'd done late terminations before where the fetus had squirmed around awhile in the bucket before finally dying, but this one -- !

  Christ! he remembered thinking, what if the damn thing lets out a cry? He'd get sued by the patient and be the laughing stock of the staff. Poor Ed Cantrell -- can't tell the difference between an abortion and a delivery! He'd look like a jerk!

  So he did the only thing he could do. He gave its neck a sharp twist as he lowered it into the bucket. The neck didn't even crack when he broke it.

  "Why have you come to me?" he said.

  "Answer us first," a child's voice said. "Why do you do it? You don't need the money. Why do you kill us?"

  "I told you! I believe in every woman's right to -- "

  They began to boo him, drowning him out. Then the boos changed to a chant: "Why? Why? Why? Why?"

  "Stop that! Listen to me! I told you why!"

  But still they chanted, sounding like a crowd at a football game: "Why? Why? Why? Why?"

  Finally he could stand no more. He raised his fists and screamed. "All right! Because I can! Is that what you want to hear? I do it because I caw!"

  The room was suddenly dead silent.

  The answer startled him. He had never asked himself why before. "Because I can," he said softly.

  "Yes," the woman said with equal softness. "The ultimate power."

  He suddenly felt very old, very tired. "What do you want of me?"

  No one answered.

  "Why have you come?"

  They all spoke as one: "Because today, this Halloween, this night... we can."

  "And we don't want this place to open," the woman said.

  So that was it. They wanted to kill the women's center before it got started -- abort it, so to speak. He almost smiled at the pun. He looked at their faces, their staring eyes. They mean business, he thought. And he knew they wouldn't take no for an answer.

  Well, this was no time to stand on principle. Promise them anything, and then get the hell out of here to safety.

  "Okay," he said, in what he hoped was a meek voice. "You've convinced me. I'll turn this into a general medical center. No abortions. Just family practice for the community."

  They watched him silently. Finally a voice said, "He's lying."

  The woman nodded. "I know." She turned to the children. "Do it," she said.

  Pure chaos erupted as the children went wild. They were like a berserk mob, surging in all directions. But silent. So silent.

  Cantrell felt himself shoved aside as the children tore into the procedure table and the Zarick extractor. The table was ripped from the floor and all its upholstery shredded. Its sections were torn free and hurled against the walls with such force that they punctured through the plasterboard.

  The rage in the children's eyes seemed to leak out into the room, filling it, thickening the air like an onrushing storm, making his skin ripple with fear at its ferocity.

  As he saw the Zarick start to topple, he forced himself forward to try to save it but was casually slammed against the wall with stunning force. In a semi-daze, he watched the Zarick raised into the air; he ducked flying glass as it was slammed onto the floor, not just once, but over and over until it was nothing more than a twisted wreck of wire, plastic hose, and ruptured circuitry.

  And from down the hall he could hear similar carnage in the other procedure rooms. Finally the noise stopped and the room was packed with children again.

  He began to weep. He hated himself for it, but he couldn't help it. He just broke down and cried in front of them. He was frightened. And all the money, all the plans... destroyed.

  He pulled himself together and stood up straight. He would rebuild. All this destruction was covered by insurance. He would blame it on vandalism, collect his money, and have the place brand-new inside of a month. These vicious little bastards weren't going to stop him.

  But he couldn't let them know that.

  "Get out, all of you," he said softly. "You've had your fun. You've ruined me. Now leave me alone."

  "We'll leave you alone," said the woman who would have been Ellen Benedict's child. "But not yet."

  Suddenly they began to empty their buckets on him, hurling the contents at him in a continuous wave, turning the air red with flying blood and tissue, engulfing him from all sides, choking him, clogging his mouth and nostrils.

  And then they reached for him...

  Erica knocked on the front door of the center for the third time and still got no answer.

  Now where can he be? she thought as she walked around to the private entrance. She tried the door and found it unlocked. She pushed in but stopped on the threshold.

  The waiting room was lit and looked normal enough.

  "Ed?" she called, but he didn't answer. Odd. His car was out front. She was supposed to meet him here at five. She had taken a cab from the house -- after all, she didn't want Ginger dropping her off here; there would be too many questions.

  This was beginning to make her uneasy.

  She glanced down the hallway. It was dark and quiet.

  Almost quiet.

  She heard tiny little scraping noises, tiny movements, so soft that she would have missed them if there had been any other sound in the building. The sounds seemed to come from the first procedure room. She stepped up to the door and listened to the dark. Yes, they were definitely coming from in there.

  She flipped on the light... and felt her knees buckle.

  The room was red -- the walls, the ceiling, the remnants of the shattered fixtures, all dripping with red. The clots and the coppery odor that saturated the air left no doubt in Erica's reeling mind that she was looking at blood. But on the floor -- the blood-puddled linoleum was littered with countless shiny, silvery buckets. The little rustling sounds were coming from them. She saw something that looked like hair in a nearby bucket and took a staggering step over to see what was inside.

  It was Edward's head, floating in a pool of blood, his eyes wide and mad, looking at her. She wanted to scream but the air clogged in her throat as she saw Ed's lips begin to move. They were forming words but there was no sound, for there were no lungs to push air through his larynx. Yet still his lips kept moving in what seemed to be silent pleas. But pleas for what?

  And then he opened his mouth wide and screamed -- silently.

  Lysing Towards Bethlehem

  F.Paul Wilson

  By most definitions of alive, I am not.
/>   I have no ability to respond to my environment. I cannot absorb nutrients from that environment and convert them to energy and mass. For what purpose? I have no organs or even organelles to feed. I am not mobile and I cannot self-reproduce.

  But I am an integral part of the biosphere. I am organic. I consist of a single strand of nucleic acid wrapped in a snug protein coat. That is all. I am a model of efficiency. No part of me exists without a specific purpose.

  I am, in a word, elegant.

  The Maker fashioned me to be so. He designed my nucleic acid core and my protein coat with special characteristics, for a specific purpose. And then He placed me in this pressurized vial.

  The Maker seems to know all, but does He know that when I am massed like this, when uncounted millions of my polyhedron units are packed facet to facet to facet, I become aware? So strange to be so many and yet be...one.

  But why am I here? Am I a mere toy, or did the Maker fashion me for a purpose? I may never know. The Maker is a god, and as a god, He has not deigned to share His plan for me. My destiny is written, but it is not for me to read.

  I am, in a word, property.

  And suddenly I am free, swirling and tumbling from the container into space, my millions and millions of units scattering in the heated breeze. Scattering... but awareness holds. It was not the proximity. Is it the sheer weight of my numbers? Or is it my special nature? No matter—it is wonderful.

  The breeze carries me. I have no means of locomotion, so I must go with it. I am at its mercy. But this is not a free, open wind; this is contained within a steel conduit. Strands of dust adhering to the steel walls snare bits of me, but the bulk of my biomass flows on unimpeded.

  Where to? For what purpose? If only I knew.

  My smooth flow is hindered by a grille. It causes turbulence, whirling me about as the air strains through the slit openings. An instant in a softly whistling gale and then I am free again, eddying into a cooler space, a vast, empty, limitless space.

  No...not limitless. I sense walls far to each side, seemingly as far as the galactic rim. And a ceiling above, merely as far as the moon. But below...far, far below...a warm throbbing mass of life, churning, curling, mixing, respiring.