by Bryan Hall
“Henry, you need immediate surgery and you need psychiatric help before this kills you. Do you understand?”
“You can feel it kicking, under the skin. Come and feel, then you’ll understand.”
He lifted the shirt, a 4XL, the only size that would now fit over the grossly distorted shape of his stomach. The exposed skin was stretched obscenely, almost gray in pallor. It looked as if he were about to burst.
“Touch it,” he demanded.
Dr. Yates turned away. Years of training, years of experience, none of it helped him hide the instinctive disgust he felt.
Henry rolled his shirt back down. “It’s not a tumor,” he said defiantly.
Full Term
ER was quiet on a Wednesday. Always was. There was a dreary calm about the place that would seem impossible during a hectic shift on a Saturday night. The staff needed no encouragement to take advantage of the lull. Rosalitta on the front desk even had time to do her nails. She held up her right hand and wiggled her fingers, admiring her work, the scarlet-painted digits that were her pride and joy. She had lovely hands. If her face had been as pretty as her hands, she would be living it up somewhere far away from this dump. If only.
Henry ruined the moment. He burst through the double doors with his hands clutched across his stomach, his face twisted with agony.
He fell to the floor. The blue jeans that he wore—jeans that he couldn’t button anymore and had to let hang loose around his waist, in the hope they didn’t fall—were blood-soaked. As he fell, he splashed blood across the floor in a pattern that might have been beautiful in another circumstance.
“It’s coming. Help me! Fuck, I need an epidural now!” Henry wheezed at her from the floor.
Rosalitta screamed for assistance.
Delivery
A team of blue-green attired nurses and doctors circled above Henry like uncertain vultures. He couldn’t see their faces. The pain was everything and it tended to block out most of the details.
“Extensive rectal bleeding, his stomach is distended. We need to get him into surgery ASAP.”
Henry reached up a hand, still smeared with his blood. “My baby. You need to free my baby.”
“What baby? What’s he talking about?” A female voice.
“Unless we get him into the theater straight away, it’s not going to matter.”
Then Henry was being wheeled along a corridor. He could see the lights in the ceiling. They kept trying to put something over his face, something that smelled strange and made his thinking fuzzy. He pushed it away.
“It’ll help you relax, help with the pain,” a voice from far away whispered to him.
“No,” Henry said, waving his arms at them. “I want to be awake. I want to see it arrive.”
And he held onto consciousness, despite the pain that was ripping through him.
The lights were brighter, still above his head but steady now. He was no longer moving. He was in the theater.
Henry couldn’t see the blue-green vultures anymore, could only hear their random voices.
“Jesus, what’s inside him? There’s something under the skin, I can see it pushing through.”
“There’s evidence of severe internal hemorrhage. We need to open him up, right now, before he just bleeds out on the table.”
“Why hasn’t this man been anesthetized?”
“He refused all attempts to administer any.”
Henry screamed. The pain was impossible. Unbearable. But didn’t women do this all the time? Wasn’t this what they had to endure? It couldn’t be that bad, that’s what Henry had always thought. They like to tell you what agony childbirth is. But, if it was this bad, none of them would ever go through it more than once, right? But they did. And if they could cope, he certainly could. He remembered the lessons from his short-lived Lamaze class. Remembered what they had taught about controlling the breathing, controlling the pain. He puffed his cheeks—swift, shallow breaths.
“Hold him down. I have to cut!”
There were hands on his shoulders, pushing him down. Then something ice cold on his belly, pressing into the distended flesh. Then the pressure in his skin eased as the scalpel pierced through. There was a long hiss that at first sounded almost like a sigh. Then it deteriorated into a wet, flatulent rasp, accompanied by a vile smell, a smell so bad that it made everyone in the room recoil, covering their mouths despite the masks they already wore. Several of them retched.
“What the hell has the man got inside him?” one of them asked, the senior voice, the one who had to be the surgeon. Henry could see his eyes beneath the gray eyebrows; they were wise but full of revulsion.
“Some kind of implant?”
“If it is, I can’t see what possible purpose—”
He stopped midsentence. They all stopped.
Henry raised his head as far as he could, his chin digging into his chest. He could see the white skin of his stomach, the red slit where it had been opened, a thin-lipped smile in the flesh smeared with the lipstick of his blood. The medics were backing away from the operating table, backing away from Henry.
The mouth opened wider. Was torn open. The “child” crawled its way out, slithered from the wound and across the deflated stomach on a cushion of Henry’s gore, carrying itself on stunted growths that could not possibly be limbs. The lumpen, misshapen ball that could not possibly be a head pressed into Alan’s chest, too heavy for the body to raise in its own.
Henry reached out and picked it up. It keened, a sound like something nature had cursed. But he soothed it, stroked it gently in his arms. And it started to mewl like a kitten from something that could not possibly be a mouth, a gaping void in the center of what could not possibly be a face.
One of the medics shrieked.
Henry held the shivering, twitching tumor up to them, so they could all see how beautiful it was.
“It’s a boy,” he said, with all the pride of a new father.
THE LITTLE THINGS
BY CHRISTIAN A. LARSEN
Glenn leaned on his vanity with both hands after wiping an arc through the steam from his shower. He wasn’t tired, even in the morning—not anymore. He was leaning on the vanity so he could take a closer look at his face. It felt fine. He felt fine. Better than fine. Glenn felt almost superhuman, a far cry from the fifty-two-year-old who, just three months ago, sat in his doctor’s office hearing that he had stage IV pancreatic cancer. But here he was, no chemo, no radiation, and for the first time in years, as randy as a college kid. There weren’t any side effects. An experimental treatment, and no side effects. It seemed almost too good to be true.
But there was the smudge.
It looked like soot, except it was a faint green, a faint green turned almost to black, and Glenn had never seen soot quite that color. Besides, he hadn’t cleaned the fireplace in forever. It was definitely not soot.
Rolling his thumb over the spot like he was fingerprinting himself, he found that it did not change color, though it did seem to smudge a little more, spreading in every direction almost imperceptibly. Glenn looked at his thumb to see if it had come off.
It had not.
“One hell of a motherfucking bruise,” he whispered. If his breath gathered on the mirror, he couldn’t tell. The shower steam had filled the room. It was like standing in a cloud, and, like the skin he was standing in, it felt great. Whatever the smudge was, it couldn’t be all that bad. He stepped into the shower and let the water course through his hair. He continued to thank his lucky stars that he still had all his hair. Not too many fifty-something cancer survivors could say half as much, and the gray, well, the gray just gave him character.
The truth was, he had more to feel lucky about than a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. He should be dead, or close to it, and Dr. Murtagh’s therapy, treatment, cure—whatever you wanted to call it—was the only reason he was standing in the shower, with the hot water running between his toes. The nails looked particularly long this morning. When was
the last time I cut them? thought Glenn, reaching for the shampoo.
Dr. Murtagh said that Glenn had anywhere between three and nine months to live. “With aggressive treatment,” said the doctor, tenting his fingers in a practiced and yet somehow cavalier way, “Of course, you might be one of the lucky ones. Going the traditional route, you stand about a six-percent chance to surviving beyond five years or so, but that all depends on how far along you are.”
How far along I am, thought Glenn in the office and again in the shower. The smug sonofabitch made it sound like I got myself pregnant.
But the smug sonofabitch wasn’t finished. Dr. Murtagh had something lined up for Glenn that was straight out of a pulp novel, a cure so radical it couldn’t be true, or wouldn’t work at all, and it didn’t involve chemicals or radiation, which Glenn thought was probably worse than dying young. Murtagh’s cure involved tiny robots, nanobots, the doctor had called them, and all Glenn would need was to take a shot in his arm, like a vaccine. Murtagh was so high on the idea, he had called it a vaccine for life. That seemed like a lot to promise, but Glenn was willing to buy into it. At that moment, he was willing to buy into anything that promised him long life and happiness.
Michelle came with him to the counseling session, mostly because Dr. Murtagh wanted to pitch her, too. He didn’t say as much, but the cancer didn’t dim Glenn’s perception. As convinced as Dr. Murtagh was that he could cure Glenn, there were outside chances and ravenous lawyers, so the documents had their signatures and their witnesses. And then, all that was left was the injection of a serum filled with microscopic robots—something he had joked was akin to injecting himself with a load of semen. Michelle laughed, but Dr. Murtagh didn’t. Fifteen minutes later, Glenn was walking in the parking lot with a cotton ball taped to the inside of his elbow with a bandage.
Coursing through his bloodstream, the nanobots were already mapping, taking data, and attacking cancerous cells and viruses. Of the ones that had taken damage during the injection, or from Glenn’s own failed immune system, half had been repaired, and the other half—more than the other half, really—would be replaced within the first seventy-two hours, faster than they could clear up Glenn’s diarrhea, fatigue, and abdominal pain, even though he felt better almost right away.
The fall wind tossed her hair and Michelle kissed him like everything was new again. “I love you, Glenn. No matter what.’
No matter what, she had said.
No matter what turned into a quick second adolescence, without the thinning hair of a midlife crisis, or the shoulder acne of steroid abuse. He simply felt—great. Better than he had since his mid-twenties, and hornier than all get out. He was a little embarrassed to tell Dr. Murtagh that his microrobots were better than an army of little blue pills, especially since while he was telling him, he had to shift around his own erection, the way he had done in history class in high school when he sat next to that cheerleader who dressed like she was a working girl.
He had given it to Michelle so hard and often, it was actually starting to scare him, like an addiction. Nymphomania, she had called it, but she was wrong. In men, it was satyriasis. But her saying so made him hold off some, and then he rediscovered the weights in their basement, and a long list of chores and home improvements the fatigue of age had kept him from, and that wasn’t enough even then to knock him out. He realized that he was sleeping less than three hours a night, and sometimes hardly at all. It shocked him to realize that he really hadn’t noticed all along.
And that was all before the tumor had even disappeared.
Dr. Murtagh cautioned Glenn not to talk about the treatment. This news had to be rolled out right, tightly controlled, with the medical journals getting the first bite at the apple and not the Enquirer. Only Glenn, Michelle, and a few friends and family even knew he had cancer in the first place. Who was he going to tell?
Steam clouded in front of him. It had to be really hot to billow around him like it was, and he thought about checking the water heater in the basement and maybe dialing it back a notch, but it didn’t feel hot. It didn’t feel anything. He didn’t feel anything except good, and it reminded him a little of some of the recreational herbage he enjoyed in college without the lung burn and belching smoke. There was a vague sense of nausea, just nibbling at the edges, but it felt like it was in someone else’s stomach.
Glenn looked at his hands. They looked disconnected in the steam. Like the hands of fate? he thought, dredging up an old album title or quote from a book from his high school days or something. They were darker than he remembered them, but not tan. As a matter of fact, they looked positively gray against the white tile of the shower stall. Like golem hands. Clay, cold and gray. He reached for the towel bar where he hung his washcloth to try and steady himself, but it was too late. The nerves in his legs had turned to mist themselves, and he didn’t even hear the crashing sound he made when he hit the porcelain and sent the shower door off its rails.
“Glenn?” asked Michelle from the kitchen downstairs. She had been drinking coffee at the kitchen table and reading the e-mails on her phone. She sipped at her coffee again, not tasting it at all, trying to remind herself that everything sounded bigger through a wall or floor. Wasn’t that the way it was in their first apartment, when the religious couple tried to have them evicted for knocking boots? Yes. Yes it was. But she knew the analogy rang hollow. As hollow as the sound she heard coming from the bathroom. “Glenn?”
Seconds passed that felt more like minutes. She kept time with the sound of the blood knocking in her ears. The moments were long, but they were only moments. And after what was really only half a minute or so, just a second or two before Michelle leapt to her feet to check on what she assumed was Glenn in extreme distress, she heard Glenn’s footsteps upstairs, though the floor, and like the crash, louder than they should be. They also sounded tired. Slow. But the thing that made her worry was that the water was still running. If he was okay, he would have shut off the water.
“Glenn?” she asked again, this time starting down the hall toward the stairway with an unfeigned sense of urgency. “Honey, are you alright?”
Glenn was standing at the top of the stairs, backlit by the hall light. He looked unsteady, wobbling from foot to foot while water dripped from his tousled hair down his skin and onto the carpet. Water and something else. She caught a glint of red.
“Oh, God, Glenn, you’re bleeding,” she screeched, sprinting up the stairs faster than she thought a woman suffering hot flashes could. “Let me help you!”
Glenn stepped backward, behind the light instead of in front of it, and had Michelle not been running to fast, what she saw would have stopped her in her tracks. A piece of shower door stuck out of his belly like a rhino horn and it bounced up and down like a livid erection, dripping with blood instead of semen. But that wasn’t what horrified her. As she caromed toward him, she saw the look in his eyes—or the hint of death, because he wasn’t precisely looking at her. He was facing her, but one iris seemed as big as a silver dollar, and the other one a pinhole. Neither was moving or reacting to the light, but Glenn reacted to her, raising his golem arms, covered with nightmarish black and green bruises. His fingers raked at her back and he embraced her, plunging the shard of glass into her abdomen like the erection it mimicked.
Michelle gasped, her face making a perfect “O” of astonishment, knowing that she was seriously hurt, but not feeling it. Not yet. But Glenn didn’t feel it, either. There was no knowing on his face—no gnashing of teeth or grimacing ... he didn’t even grunt when he pulled her close. She felt herself beginning to faint, a long, slow descent like going down a slide in damp clothes, but she had time to think one last ridiculous thought before unconsciousness washed over her, a thought generated by the dead-eyed gaze and gray skin of her husband.
So this is how the zombie apocalypse begins.
She awoke in a hospital room, in a bed with the head cranked to a pleasant angle. The covers were tucked so tightly, she felt
like the orderlies had made the bed with her still on it, but the blankets were maddeningly thin, and when she tried to draw her arms and legs into herself to ward off the cold, she found that she couldn’t. She was handcuffed to the rail—and footcuffed, if there were such a thing. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever heard of such a thing, and then chased that thought around for much too long before she even questioned why.
And when she did question why, more questions started piling through the door with it, so that all of them were asked (or half-asked) but none were answered. Where was Glenn? Was he okay? Dead, maybe? How was he walking around with a shard of shower door sticking out of his belly like a dorsal fin, and why was he gray? It wasn’t the cancer. Michelle wasn’t a doctor, but she knew cancer didn’t do that. Glenn had looked like a zombie, but people in zombie movies were always sick before they turned. Sick or bleeding. Had falling through the shower door done that? Of course not.
The door to the room opened. It wasn’t a regular hospital door, heavy, hollow-core wood with a stainless handle. It was a metal door that sealed, with a safety glass window crisscrossed with wire. Michelle couldn’t see, but she guessed—correctly, as it later turned out—there was another door that sealed just behind it. And then she realized there was no window in the room, just a wall of curtains with no light coming from behind it. She found that fact somewhat more interesting than the man in the hazard suit approaching her, with a ridiculous grin on his face behind the glass visor. It looked like the grin of a corpse. A corpse trying to hide what it felt like to be in hell.
“Dr. Murtagh,” she said. She sighed for reasons she didn’t understand. “How are you?”
“I think the question is, how are you?” he countered. His voice sounded distant and tinny, like he had the world’s worst cold.
“Aside from the handcuffs and what I presume to be at least half a dozen stitches in my stomach, I feel pretty good.” Michelle thought that understating it was the way to go with the good doctor, who it seemed use information like a bludgeon. She actually felt great!