by J. Bryan
They’d been forcing her to continue the tests against her will for weeks. She wished they would just shoot her, but they were far too interested in the baby growing inside her. It had a been a very hard pregnancy, being pushed around by guards, examined by doctors in gas masks, never seeing Sebastian or anyone else who cared about her. She tried to keep her sadness buried deep inside where no one could see it.
She felt deathly ill as she watched the blisters and sores spread out across the man’s body, rupturing him open. He coughed up a mixture of stomach acid and blood, and some other sticky black fluid drooled from his nostrils.
In less than two minutes, he was dead, half his flesh eaten away, his bones swollen out of shape.
Juliana swayed on her feet, feeling dizzy. A deep cramp seized her insides, and she thought she would vomit everywhere. The cramp turned more painful, tight enough to choke off her breathing, and then it released. Her thighs felt hot and damp. She looked down to see a small wet spot on the front of her gray dress. It grew larger as the wet heat spread down her legs, and drops fell from under to her dress to land on the concrete floor between her ratty prison slippers. The drops were bright red.
“The baby,” Juliana whispered. Her legs crumpled under her, but the guards held her up with their poles. “Please help the baby.”
The steel door opened, and three medical staff in gas masks ran into the room. With the guards’ help, they loaded her onto a stretcher, strapped her down, and removed the leather straps from her wrists and neck.
She felt increasingly dizzy as they rolled her down the wide corridor between the labs. They brought her to the clinic area in the northwest quadrant of the base, and into a surgery room.
Juliana felt her stomach heave, and then a tremendous pressure built inside her. A rush of blood and water spilled out from her, fanning out across the bed, and then something else, a solid mass.
The nurses cut away her dress. Juliana watched as they reached between her legs and pulled it out of her. Her baby, a girl.
The baby was curled up, dripping gore, and not moving. Her skin had a gray pallor.
“Is she all right?” Juliana whispered. “Is she...”
Nobody spoke to her. They deposited the cold, unmoving baby into a steel pan, then dumped the placenta on top. They sealed it with a lid and carried it away, and she never saw it again.
A pained wail emerged from deep inside of her, through her clenched teeth, startling the guards, nurses, and doctors around her. She’d lost the baby, and it was gone forever.
Every imaginable kind of pain overwhelmed her, and then she blacked out under the bright lights.
Chapter Forty-Four
Jenny lay in the hospital bed in her cube with her hands cuffed to the bed rails, with the entire lower half of her body missing, as far as she could feel. The epidural had kicked in, and she felt a little panicked, knowing she wouldn’t be much good if she had to run or fight. A nurse in a hazardous material suit rigged up a green surgical curtain to shield most of her lower body from her sight.
“Don’t bother,” Jenny whispered. “Whatever you’re gonna do, I’ve seen worse.”
They put up the curtain anyway, ignoring her. Jenny looked out through the clear wall. Ward stood just outside, smoking a cigar, accompanied by several researchers.
“Seth,” Jenny whispered to Dr. Parker. “He’s supposed to be here...I told you.”
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Parker said, her voice fuzzy and mechanical through the tiny speaker on her hazmat suit. “They decided it was too much of a security risk.”
Jenny looked at Ward again. “Seth needs to be here.”
“I’m sure Dr. Parker can manage just fine without him,” Ward replied, blowing smoke.
“We had a deal,” Jenny said.
“To be honest, Seth isn’t that interested in you anymore,” Ward told her. “He’s been shacked up with your pal Mariella for a few months now. They’ve been having a good old time together.” He winked.
Jenny didn’t believe him. She pushed back any memories of Sebastian and Mia’s relationship in their last life. She was already surrounded by enemies at this most vulnerable moment in her entire life. She had plenty to worry about without letting Ward get under her skin.
Nobody spoke much while they made their preparations. Jenny could feel the thick tension weighing down the room. The doctor and the two nurses were clearly afraid of coming into contact with her flesh and blood, even in their hazmat suits. The two guards flanking the airlock door kept their hands on their stunners, as if Jenny were going to lash out while her womb was cut open in the middle of a cesarean delivery.
The room became very quiet.
“Jenny, we’re making the first incision,” Dr. Parker said.
“Okay,” Jenny whispered. Everything in the world fell away except her absolute terror at what was about to happen. She looked toward the wall of her cube again, some part of her half-expecting to see Seth, but there was only Ward and his hateful sneer, flanked by guards, scientists, and a nurse watching the row of monitors.
Jenny watched the women working on her, barely able to see their faces behind their biohazard masks, clear shields that reflected the bright lights above. She couldn’t help thinking of alien abduction stories from the History Channel, people waking up under bright lights to find strange extraterrestrials performing unknown operations on them. That experience, hallucinated or not, was probably about as emotionally cold and inhuman as this surgery.
She had no way of seeing what the doctor was doing beyond the screen, and she didn’t dare speak or ask questions that could distract them. The medical staff didn’t speak to her at all. Jenny might as well have been a farm animal getting a veterinary visit. A cow, maybe, because her body felt so swollen and heavy.
She waited and waited, listening to the electronic beeps echoing her pounding heart.
“Uh-oh,” the doctor whispered.
“Uh-oh? What’s uh-oh?” Jenny asked, imagining the scalpel stabbing the little baby through the foot, or the arm, or the head.
“Please be quiet,” the nurse closest to Jenny said, scowling at her.
“Clamp,” Dr. Parker said, ignoring Jenny altogether.
Jenny heard her heart beep even faster. She was sweating, barely able to think, her head swirling with nightmares and the memories of countless bloody miscarriages and heart-ripping stillbirths.
An eternity seemed to pass, then another, then another.
“Breech,” Dr. Parker said quietly.
Jenny didn’t dare ask another question of the semi-hostile medical staff, but she remembered that a breech meant the baby was positioned backwards, and it was considered not good. Her sweat felt like ice, and her heart beat even faster.
She had no idea what was happening beyond the green sheet of plastic. She could distantly feel movement and pressure, but couldn’t tell what any of it meant, and the doctor and nurses weren’t talking.
After another thousand eternities, Dr. Parker stepped back, holding what Jenny first saw as a strange, dark sea creature, wet and dripping in the doctor’s gloves. It took a moment to resolve into the shape of a baby. A gray, unmoving baby.
She felt a grieved sob building inside her chest. It had happened again, just like all the other times, despite their precautions and the help of modern science. Seth should have been there. If Seth were there, he could have helped. Maybe he could still help.
“Seth!” Jenny shouted. “Get Seth! Now!”
“Afraid not.” Ward chuckled over his cigar.
Jenny shot him a look of pure hate. She was going to kill him, she realized. She would hunt him down in every incarnation, killing him again and again, maybe for all of eternity. She would never forgive, never stop wanting to punish him.
The doctor massaged the baby, and as if by magic, the baby’s gray skin gradually grew pink and warm. The baby’s mouth opened, and she let out a powerful scream. Hello, world.
Jenny gasped, then whispered, “Hi, b
aby girl.” Tears filled up her eyes. Her arms tried to reach for the tiny girl, but of course Jenny’s wrists were still handcuffed.
I can never touch her, Jenny reminded herself. Never. The word “never” seemed painfully cold and heavy enough to crush her. Never.
Jenny gaped as they clamped and cut the cord and cleaned the baby, then weighed and measured her. The baby was tiny, as Jenny must have been when she was born, her eyes clenched shut as she howled and cried. Jenny winced as they stuck her foot for a blood sample.
“It’s okay, baby,” Jenny said. “You’re okay.”
Hearing Jenny speak up, the baby stopped crying for a moment and opened her tiny, crystal-blue newborn eyes. She looked in Jenny’s direction, and Jenny’s heart both melted and fell to pieces. This was her, the little one who’d been stirring in her stomach for so many months. A complete little person with little ears and feet.
“You’ll be okay,” Jenny said again, hoping that was true. She looked around to see if anyone else felt the same awe she did, but the medical staff seemed in a hurry to finish up and get out. The doctor was already stitching her up.
“Name?” asked the nurse who stood by the monitors outside her cube, who now held a digital tablet.
“Name?” Jenny asked, confused.
“The child’s name,” the nurse said, impatient. “For the records.”
“Oh.” Jenny’s mind was a blank. This was the kind of thing she should have spent months thinking about and talking over with Seth. Instead, she’d spent her entire pregnancy worrying whether the baby would live, and whether Jenny and the baby would ever escape this place, and whether she would ever see Seth again.
“What will you call her?” Ward asked. “I’m curious myself.”
Jenny scowled at him. “Miriam,” she said. It had been her mother’s name.
“Last name?” the nurse asked. “Morton?”
Jenny thought about it. “Barrett.”
“Middle name?”
She was at a loss. “Use Morton, I guess.” Jenny watched them lay the baby in an incubator, which looked like a scaled-down version of Jenny’s own cubic cell. “Can I...see her?” Jenny asked the nurse.
“You can’t get too close,” Dr. Parker said. “We don’t know whether she has any immunity to your touch. From what you’ve told us, it’s doubtful. Do you understand what that means?”
“How can we find out?” Jenny asked. “I don’t want to test it by touching her...”
“I’ll see how your blood samples interact, and we’ll go from there.” Dr. Parker nodded at the nurse, who wheeled the incubator toward the airlock door. The tiny baby, now named Miriam, squalled and reached a little hand back toward her mother.
“Where are you taking her?” Jenny asked, trying to sit up, even though the doctor was still stitching her. “Don’t take her away!”
“It’s for her own safety,” Dr. Parker said. “You should know that better than anyone.”
“But so soon?”
“They’re very vulnerable to disease at this stage. Their immune system hasn’t developed.”
Jenny nodded—she might hate everyone around her, but she knew Dr. Parker was right about that. “You’ll be okay,” Jenny said, feeling her throat close up. She said it again and again, as if repeating it would make it true, while the nurse wheeled the incubator away to the steel door set in the concrete wall of the laboratory. Jenny could hear the baby cry all the way out the door.
“When do I see her again?” Jenny asked.
“We’ll see,” Dr. Parker replied, not looking at her.
“Can they please bring her back? Just for a minute?” Jenny asked, but the doctor only shook her head. Jenny pulled at her restraints again. The lower half of her body was still numb and had just been through surgery, and everyone around her wore biohazard gear. She didn’t have a chance of fighting her way out.
Any remaining strength vanished from Jenny’s body. Her head flopped back on the bed, and she closed her eyes and let herself cry and cry, ignoring the final flurry of activity around her, ignoring whatever taunting words Ward said over the intercom. Eventually, everyone was finally gone, all the surgical equipment removed from her cell, and the lights were mercifully dimmed. Jenny lay in the dark, sobbing and aching and already missing the baby with all her soul, until the combination of painkillers and exhaustion finally overwhelmed her and dragged her down into darkness. She felt like she was drowning.
* * *
Juliana gradually awoke to the dim, fuzzy world around her. She felt a light, constant breeze, and then slowly realized she was moving.
She was strapped the gurney, her dress still soaked in blood. She’d only been out for a few minutes. The Nazi doctors had been extremely stingy with the pain medicine.
Now she rolled down a familiar concrete corridor, attended by two nurses, who wore surgical masks, caps, and gloves, and two S.S. officers in gas masks who were more concerned about flirting with the young blond nurses than watching the small, blood-soaked form of Juliana. She was firmly strapped to the gurney, and they clearly believed she was unconscious and badly weakened. They were only half right. Juliana quickly closed her eyes again and remained limp on the gurney.
They rolled on past Juliana’s cell, toward the end of the corridor. They must have been taking her to the showers, Juliana reasoned, to wash off all the blood and gore before depositing her back in the cell for the night.
She heard the squeal of the bathroom door opening, felt the bump as they crossed the threshold to the shower room, which was just another concrete-slab room with a few nozzles in one wall.
Juliana summoned up the demon plague within her, growing boils, cysts, and bloody pustules all over her body. With years of practice in her carnival act, she’d developed great control over how and where the plague appeared on her skin. She made sure that every inch of herself looked as repulsive and malignant as possible, raw swollen skin leaking diseased fluids—except for her face, which she kept pristine.
She heard the four people around her make disgusted sounds. The nurses begged the S.S. men to unstrap Juliana and lay on her on the floor for them, but the men snorted and refused, though they wore thick leather gloves. They made the nurses agree to drink with them later, and then they loosened Juliana’s straps.
Juliana’s eyes opened. The guards stood at the head of the gurney, on either side of her, while the nurses were at her feet. She’d had months to study the gas masks, to imagine the fastest way to grab the strap and loosen it from their necks.
One of the guards saw her eyes open, and he pointed and shouted. Now Juliana let the ugliest, most repugnant combination of dripping boils, festering sores, and leprous ulcers erupt all over her face. A nurse screamed, and everyone made sounds of disgust. While her face distracted them for a few seconds, she reached up with both hands, ripped loose their straps, and touched her plague-filled fingertips to their throats. She imagined a dense, angry cloud of tiny black flies chewing through their skin.
Blood dripped out from their loosened masks, splattered Juliana’s fingers. One guard collapsed, and the other pulled away from her, only to stagger back into a concrete wall and slide down, leaving a streak of dark blood above him.
The nurses screamed and ran. Juliana’s first instinct was to let them go, but then she realized they would only go alert all the guards. She wouldn’t have enough time to escape.
She filled her lungs with the dank air of the prison showers and breathed out a long stream of dark spores toward the nurse’s retreating backs. They made it to the doorway before the plague caught up with them, eating through their hair and scalp and bone. The both stumbled and fell to the floor, their heads bursting open like rotten pumpkins, leaving puddles of infected bones and brains.
Juliana eased her way off the gurney and landed unsteadily on her feet. Her balance was poor, and her body already felt strained to the breaking point...but there was something else rising inside her, dark, ancient, and cold. Something eag
er for righteous killing. Something that delighted in death.
She knelt by the guards, ignoring the gore that dripped from their bug-eyed masks. One of them had a thick ring of keys, which he’d probably borrowed from the cellblock guards at the desk outside the corridor so they could put Juliana back into her cell. She took the keys, along with the two Luger pistols from the dead guards’ holsters.
Juliana stepped her bare feet over the decaying spill from the nurses’ ruptured heads. She stalked up the corridor, opening the door panels to look into each cell. Most were empty. She felt renewed anger when she saw the fading red stains on Evelina’s floor and wall. The girl had been gentle and quiet, her voice through the vent providing Juliana’s only companionship for weeks of pregnancy. They had simply decided that her race was now too much of an inconvenience, and so they’d killed her. Juliana hoped she would see Alise on the way out, so she could leave her pretty face contorted, swollen, and lifeless.
Sebastian was the only other prisoner remaining on the hall. He took in a sharp breath when she opened his door, wearing her blood-soaked gray dress. He ran to embrace her, and the plague sores on her skin faded slowly.
“Juliana! What happened? Are you hurt?” Sebastian asked.
“The baby’s gone,” Juliana said. Her voice was flat, without a spark of emotion. All that remained inside her was a cold, endless darkness. “Our baby. Now we’re leaving. You take these, I don’t need them.” She held out the two pistols.
“Our baby?” Sebastian held her tight, his voice full of grief. She felt nothing. “Oh, God, no...Alise only told me a few weeks ago.”
“There are at least two guards at the desk outside,” Juliana said. “If they’re wearing their gas masks, you shoot them. If not, I’ll kill them. It’ll be quieter.”
“We’re leaving right now?”
“Anyone who gets in our way dies.”
He gave her a look of shock, tinged with a little fear. She stepped out of his cell and began walking up the corridor towards the heavy door at the end, keys in her hand.
