C. LaSart - Ad Nauseam - 13 Tales of Extreme Horror

Alice’s palms were sweating and her mind raced, wondering what the testing would reveal. She lay back on the table and closed her eyes as the doctor spread a thick jelly on her stomach, pressing a round instrument against her and squinting at the image on the screen of the mobile ultrasound machine. He shook his head and grunted, going over the same spot multiple times. When he had wiped her belly and helped her back into a seated position, he looked at her sadly, obviously unhappy with the news he was about to give her.

“Is it alive?” she asked, her blunt and emotionless manner taking the doctor by surprise.

“There is a heartbeat, but it seems irregular. There were also, some… abnormalities… structural abnormalities that I’m concerned about. I feel that it would be in your best interest to proceed with genetic testing and amniocentesis at this point.”

Alice was silent for a moment before nodding curtly. “I understand your concerns doctor. You have given me a lot to think about. I will need a day or two to decide what I want to do.”

Leaving the doctor with a promise to call within the next day, Alice drove home and sat on her couch, a carton of spoiled milk on the table before her. She imagined herself undergoing the testing. The long needle puncturing her womb to draw forth a black, viscous fluid. As if it could read her mind, the baby kicked. She rubbed her belly, soothing it unconsciously. The baby responded to her gentle touch, ceasing its restless motion.

Alice felt a pang of unexpected affection for the creature. She didn’t know what it would be, but despite its paternity, it was hers. She began to feel a begrudging respect for the little creature that refused to be destroyed. As her mind started to go, that respect turned into affection.

Fearful of what the tests might show, Alice called the doctor’s office the next day and said she would be seeking treatment from a different obstetrician. It was a lie. She now knew that she would deal with whatever lay ahead, alone. Taken by surprise by the developing love she felt for the baby, she would let no one stop her from seeing this through to the end.

Alice threw herself back on the bed, cords of tendons sticking out on her neck while her clawing hands tangled in the bed sheets. Greasy sweat coated her body and bloody milk dribbled from her nipples as she choked back screams, terrified one of the neighbors would hear her and call the cops.

She dug her heals into the mattress. Her legs opened wide, pushing with all she was worth. She was going on pure instinct now, an animal reacting to the pain of birth. The agony was overwhelming and became her whole world as she struggled to expel the infant, fearing she would split right down the middle and bleed to death on her own bed. This excruciatingly long process sapped her strength.

Hearing her own flesh tear, Alice wailed, all thoughts of her neighbors calling the police pushed from her mind under the pressure of the unbearable pain. Unable to restrain herself, she pushed with every ounce of strength left, expelling the creature, the product of her dead lover’s foul seed, onto the sodden, soiled bedding. She let her head fall back against the headboard and wept with relief, not bothering to tend to the newborn until she heard it’s growling cries. She felt the sheets pull as the beast began to make its way toward her, and what must be claws pricked her gory thigh.

She leaned forward to collect her baby, but the gnarled umbilical cord hung, still attached, trailing up to disappear into her ruined vagina. Alice tugged to free it, and a burning pain flared inside her, as the stubborn placenta refused to be dislodged. Unable to get the scissors from the vanity drawer, she instead held the sinewy purple tether up to the thing’s mouth, allowing it to gnaw through the cord with its tiny, sharp teeth. Careful to avoid the biting mouth, she tenderly brushed his cheek, dislodging a maggot that had stuck there from the slime of the birth.

It was a boy.

“Hey, Papa? Will you tell us the story about when you were in prison again?” The boy rested his elbows on his knees, his eyes sparkling with mischief.

“Now, Bud, I wasn’t in prison. I just worked there.”

“Yeah, Papa. Tell us the story about when you and Nana worked at the prison.” The girl set down the fashion magazine she had been flipping through and smiled. “It’s my favorite.”

“I don’t know. Your mama doesn’t like it when I tell that story.”

“Mama’s not here,” the boy stated sensibly.

“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. We won’t tell.” The girl chimed in.

Papa leaned back in his chair and regarded his grandchildren with a look of playful consideration, bushy brows drawn together in thought and his lined face full of mock severity.

He knew he would tell them the story, but it was part of the game to draw it out a bit. It was tradition that the kids spent the last week of summer vacation with their grandparents ever since they started going to school, but he knew at ten and fourteen, they wouldn’t want to hang out with their old grandfolks much longer.

“I suppose we have just enough time while Nana makes dinner. I could tell it one more time. So you want to hear about how me and Nana met and fell in love?” He teased, smiling when his grandson groaned.

“No, Papa. Tell us about Fatty!”

“It’s Frankie.” The girl corrected her younger brother, earning a grimace that included both crossed eyes and a protruding tongue.

“That’s right, sweetheart. It was Frankie.” He grinned at his granddaughter before winking at her brother. “But he was a fatty.”

Papa made a show of leaning back in his chair, one hand rubbing his gray-whiskered chin as he looked off into space and composed his thoughts. When it looked as though both children were ready to pounce upon the old man, fidgeting in their eagerness, he began the story.

“Frankie Hanson was as much a prisoner of his own body as he was of the State. A victim of his own insatiable appetite and a doting widow for a mother, he hadn’t walked in over five years by the time he came to live at the state institution for the criminally insane. Now that’s just a fancy name for a prison for crazy people, but we also took in the ones that had what they would call “special needs” these days. Frankie wasn’t the first bedridden inmate I had ever dealt with. But at over seven hundred pounds (we weren’t really sure because he had to be weighed on a shipping scale and we didn’t have one of those) he was certainly the most memorable. Rumor has it that at the time of the murder he weighed around eight hundred, but he’d been on a special diet for several weeks before we got him, and he’d lost some weight. All I know is, he is still the biggest human being I’ve ever met.

“As I recall, it was quite a spectacle the day they brought Frankie in. I remember everyone who was able seemed to find a reason to be outside when the flatbed bearing the enormous, fleshy bulk of the new prisoner backed up to the doors of the loading dock. Before then, the dock’s only purpose had been to receive machinery and food for the kitchen, but it was the only door on the facility that was big enough to bring Frankie in.

“It was late summer, so the weather was nice enough for Frankie to ride exposed to the air, and exposed he was. There weren’t clothes big enough to fit him. Though his lower body was swaddled in massive sheets, he was otherwise naked, and I noticed that carloads of gawkers had followed him to the perimeter fence where they were prevented from coming closer.

“He sat upon a mattress that in turn sat on an extra-large shipping pallet like the kind they used in factories back then. I guess they still use them now, for all I know. It doesn’t matter, anyways. An industrial forklift lifted his heavy ass off the truck and in through the doors, but after that, we were on our own.