The Scream

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  And disaster.

  Which was why she was in the car right now, pulling into the northern edge of downtown Harrisburg, knowing damned well where she’d be stopping first and foremost. Just as she knew that she probably shouldn’t have played that tape last night.

  Things were hard enough as they stood, and she already knew what she had to do. She didn’t need to be reminded.

  She just needed to get it over with.

  The Susquehanna Women’s Services clinic was a store-front operation situated in a quaint little red-brick, three-story building on Second Street near the Taylor Bridge. Parking wasn’t too tough—Jesse hooked around the block and found a space for the Suzuki on one of the narrow cross-streets that offered a view of the flat, rocky river beyond. The morning rush hour crowd was bustling in that small-city way—but hell, after New York, just about everything seemed quaint. Even a crowd.

  One of the more pleasant aspects of culture shock. She realized it had been a long time since she’d been in any urban environment whatsoever; even the comparatively low buzz of Harrisburg was a welcome jolt of energy. Maybe she’d even have a little lunch afterward. If she wasn’t too wiped out.

  The clinic was dead ahead.

  She walked up to the lace-curtained door. Took a deep breath.

  Get on with it.

  And stepped inside.

  The place smelled of air-conditioning, pine-fresh disinfectant, and lilac-scented stick-ups. After the fresh air and real smells of the mountain, it was nauseating. She looked around: tile floors, imitation-walnut paneling, the kind of solid pine living room suites regularly proffered in Parade magazine with a free black and white TV thrown in. Lumpy 3-D pictures of cute little puppies and kittens adorned the walls.

  There were two other women in the waiting room, paging nervously through a stack of well-worn magazines. Jesse sighed deeply and stepped up to the receptionist’s window.

  “May I help you?” the receptionist inquired with a voice reeking of purely professional courtesy.

  “Yes, I have an appointment.”

  “Name?”

  “Jessica Malloy.”

  The receptionist checked the logbook, nodding perfunctorily. “You’re early,” she noted, then added, “but that’s okay. Just fill out these forms and bring them back, and someone will see to you shortly.”

  Jesse took the forms over to one of the tacky chairs and sat down. The inner door opened and a nurse emerged, inviting the older of the two already-waiting women to come inside. The remaining one looked all of about nineteen and scared shitless. Jesse looked at her and offered her best pillar-of-strength smile; it was pretty clear that this was her first time.

  “Don’t worry. It really isn’t the end of the world.”

  “Yeah,” the girl whispered nervously. “It just feels like it.”

  Jesse nodded and looked back at her forms. Name. Address. Date of birth. Medical history. Maternal history. Single or Married?

  She’d been through all of this before. She was already projecting through the rest of the process. . . .

  After the forms, the ritual flash of cash. She’d been in too big a hurry yesterday to even ask them how much and had brought two hundred along just to be safe.

  Then came the blood test/urine sample, the tour through the procedure in all its stainless-steel, rubber-tubed glory, the final okay, and onward to the Undressing Room to be outfitted in the latest in bare-assed hospital chic. Another half hour in the inner waiting room, shivering with more old magazines as you waited for your number to come up.

  And eventually . . . sometime later this century by the feel of it . . .

  Next!

  You wake up in the recovery room, feeling dazed and grogged and Roto-Rootered to hell and back. You get up. You get dressed.

  You get the hell out of there.

  Of course, some women seemed to take it all in stride; sit around scarfing the juice and cookies and trading horror stories like veterans at a VFW post. Others broke down for a while, quietly wringing out their inevitable sense of loss and regret.

  Jesse preferred to do her crying later.

  At home.

  Alone.

  Which was why this should work out just fine: everyone would be cleared out when she got back. The drive to Philly would give her plenty of time to shake it off.

  Plenty of time.

  She stood with her forms, crossed the tiny room, and handed them through the window to the receptionist, who perused them expressionlessly. Finally she looked up, smiling that thoroughly professional smile, and said, “Thank you. Someone will see you shortly.”

  Jesse was ready to fork over the cash, but no request was made. The receptionist turned back to her busy busy book.

  Hmmph. she thought. In New York they’d probably be turning me upside-down and shaking me by now. More culture shock. This was Pennsylvania, after all; she figured they just must do things differently here.

  She returned to her seat just as the younger girl was ushered in. And then there was one . . .

  Another fifteen excruciating minutes crawled by. She frittered the time away, looking at back issues of Time and the National Enquirer. She picked up one issue and a card fell out into her lap. Probably a subscription renewal insert or such. She held it up, and was momentarily stunned by the three words emblazoned in bold red strokes on the front.

  Abortion Is Murder.

  Jesse stared at the card hard before balling it up. Bastards. She’d known about antiabortionists’ tactics for a long time, but had never actually gotten kidney-punched by them before.

  This was a favored trick. There were others. She’d known friends who had breached their picket lines, gotten blood thrown on them; friends who’d been assaulted, psychologically and otherwise, by pious, impassioned do-gooders who behaved as though the decision to go through with it were some sort of callous romp. The stupid motherf—

  “Miss Malloy?”

  Jesse looked up; the nurse was standing at the door, waiting. Jesse nodded. The nurse nodded back, unsmiling.

  “Miss Malloy, please, come in.”

  This is it, she told herself. There was nothing else to say.

  Then she stood.

  And she followed.

  “Your record states that this is not your first time.” The corridor was long and low-ceilinged: more tile, more paneling.

  “Yes; there were two others.”

  “Mmm-hmmm.” Make a little check. Turn right. Into a room with a short row of lockers and a short, low bench. Table with a vase of plastic flowers. “Please get into this.” A powder-blue paper smock thrust in her face. One size fits none. An accompanying plastic wristlet, her name typed on it.

  Strange: no briefing, no show-and-tell, no tour through the shiny tools of the trade. Oh, well. They do it different here. She knows you know the paces. She leaves, you stay.

  Pull off T-shirt. Kick off boots. Pull down jeans. Slip out of panties. Belly barely bulges. Good. It’ll flatten right out.

  Into the johnnie. Hate the fuckers: waxen-feeling, stiff. Butt hangs out as you swish swish swish into the next room. Next room itself: dim lit, empty. Pine-fresh scent. More paneling, more magazines. A battered Zenith and a VCR on a stand: odd. Silently playing an “I Dream of Jeannie” rerun off some insipid cable station. Whatever.

  Sit down. Cold: cold plastic bucket seat, too much air-conditioning. Sounds of someone crying softly in another room. Major Healey is watching Jeannie blink Master back to his space capsule. Wait for the blood test, and the fresh urine sample.

  Wait: for your turn.

  Next . . .

  The door opened.

  A tall, softly imposing woman came in. She looked at Jesse and smiled: it was genuine smile, and slightly sad. She was fortyish, dressed in a very nice summer linen suit with a tasteful scarf at her throat and a tasteful gold pin on her lapel. She had Jesse’s file in one hand. She walked up and held out the other.

  “Miss Malloy, I’m Lenore Kleinkind, th
e director of this facility. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m a big admirer of yours.”

  “Thank you.” Jesse felt extremely awkward, stripped naked in the face of fandom. Can we get on with this please? She smiled and shifted in the cold plastic bucket.

  Lenore sat down beside her, hands folding neatly over her file. She stared at Jesse intensely: brow knitted, consternation playing across her features. What’s the deal? Let’s go already. . .

  “Jessica—may I call you Jessica?—we have a problem.” Her face leaned close: a kind face. Intense. Concerned. “Your medical history indicates that you’ve already had two abortions. Is this correct?”

  Jesse nodded. Lenore shook her head.

  “Jessica, frankly we’re very concerned.” Pause. What is she talking about?

  “Jessica, there’s something very important that I think you should be aware of. With two prior pregnancies under your belt, so to speak, another abortion may well risk sending your body mixed signals: in effect, you may be inadvertently training yourself to spontaneously miscarry.”

  Jesse stared at her as if she’d just fallen off the back of a truck. “What the hell are you talking about? That was five years ago.”

  “That’s hardly the point, Miss Malloy,” Lenore said flatly, unequivocally. “We’re talking about another life here.”

  “What?”

  Lenore Kleinkind reached into her jacket pocket, producing a small silver remote control. She pointed it at the VCR and punched a button. The VCR whirred dutifully, engaging a tape already cued up.

  “You’re a very influential woman, Jessica. A visible woman. A lot of young women look up to you as a role model.”

  The tape cut in with the sound turned down, showing a pair of anonymous, gloved hands wielding a long rubber hose.

  Jesse’s stomach curled up into a tight little fist.

  On the screen: an anonymous pair of hairless legs, spread wide in the shallow steel troughs.

  On the screen: a jar, filling in hitching gulps with red red goo.

  On the screen: a jumble of red, spongy matter on a white white background, shiny spattered forceps pushing it this way and that.

  “You have a responsibility, Jessica. To your audience.”

  On the screen: tiny tattered arms and legs.

  “To our children.”

  Tiny hands.

  “To your child.”

  Tiny feet.

  Jesse stared blankly, eyes swimming. She refused to look at the video. She felt nauseous. Where are my clothes? Her eyes rolled around, searching for anything to key in on.

  Lenore leaned forward earnestly. Her lapel pin sparkled in the dim light of the room. Jesse saw it clearly, recognized it at once as a symbol of allegiance. Like a cross. Or a swastika.

  Or a pair of tiny, golden feet . . .

  “Where are my clothes?” she hissed.

  “Jessica, please—”

  “Fuck you. Where are my goddamned clothes?”

  Jesse stood bolt upright, the paper smock rustling violently around her. Her ass had goose-pimpled from chill and weirdness. Lenore grabbed her shoulder. Jesse wrenched away.

  “We want to help you!”

  “GET AWAY FROM ME!”

  “Jessica, please! It has a right to live!”

  “Fuck off!”

  “Jesse. I understand—”

  “You understand NOTHING!”

  Jesse pulled away and stormed toward the outer door. The monitor showed a woman crying and clutching her stomach. Jesse grabbed the cart and flung it as hard as she could across the room. It careened sideways for five feet before tipping to dump its load in an explosion of sparks and glass.

  She slammed into the undressing room, yanked open the locker door, and pulled her clothes out in a heap: dressing frantically, sobbing with rage and frustration. If she didn’t get out of there in the next twenty seconds, she was going to kill somebody. It was that simple.

  The nurse heard the commotion and started in from the outer room. Jesse roared and grabbed the vase of fake flowers, heaving it straight at her head. It missed by half an inch, smashing against the door jamb. The nurse fled, screeching, but not before Jesse picked up the glint of gold on her breast.

  It’s like Invasion of The Body Snatchers! she thought hysterically, half expecting to burst into a room full of pod people chewing through their sacs. She fought back the pounding in her temples, the urge to just pass out on the spot. An involuntary cramp racked her, the fist in her belly squeezing tight, too tight. She needed to get out of there, she needed air, she needed her purse, where was her fucking PURSE!

  She spotted it, squashed down onto the bottom of the locker. She leaned over to grab it . . .

  . . . and in the last seconds before she blacked out, she saw the contorted opening of the bag twist: as if the leather had reanimated, becoming skin again.

  Changing.

  Into a gaping, toothless grin . . .

  It only lasted a couple of seconds; a fleeting moment of unguarded oblivion and black black space. But it was enough. Time enough to comb through the chaos, to find the seed. Time enough to plant it deep in the soft folds of her brain. A thought. A tiny cry.

  It has a right to live!

  It has a right . . .

  Jesse awoke with a start. She was slumped awkwardly in the space between the locker door and the wall. Her left leg was entangled in the wreckage of the table that had so recently held the vase.

  Lenore Kleinkind and the ersatz nurse were hovering at a safe distance, like a bomb squad stalking a piece of unexploded ordnance. Visions of lawsuits danced in their heads. When they saw her eyelids fluttering open, they leaned in slightly, looks of vast relief washing over their faces.

  “Just lie still, dear,” Lenore said, speaking in slow, loud syllables. “The ambulance will be here in a moment.” She smiled and stepped, eggshell-light, a little closer.

  Jesse looked at them with an unveiled disgust. Their compassion was self-serving and as two-dimensional as the puppies on the waiting room walls.

  She sat up and saw her purse lying where she’d dropped it: harmless, inert. The Pocket Planner was sticking out, half on the floor. Jesse scooped it all up, grabbed her boots, and pushed past the mock-nurse, who whooofed air like a ten-cent squeeze toy.

  “Miss Malloy! Jessica! Please!”

  Jesse walked faster, shaking her head. The opaque glass of the waiting room door was two steps away. One step.

  “Jessica!”

  Jesse burst through the door, scaring the hell out of the women that were waiting. Two of them were teenagers; one looked to be Jesse’s age. “This place is a lie,” she spat. “They don’t do abortions here, they trick you and try to talk you out of them!”

  They all stared at her, dumbstruck. One of the younger ones’ eyes opened wide with recognition.

  “Did you hear what I just SAID? This place lies to you!”

  The door opened again; Lenore Kleinkind stood there, huffing and puffing. “No,” she said. “This place gives you the truth.”

  “You wouldn’t know the truth if it smacked you in the face!” Jesse shrieked.

  Then she was out the door, running, the sunlight blinding as it burned into her eyes, and the eyes of the world upon her. . .

  * * *

  FOURTEEN

  “. . . and the next day’s headline read, ‘ARTIE CHOKES THREE FOR A DOLLAR AT SAFEWAY’!”

  Hempstead beamed, all too pleased with his lame joke. Everyone else in the cockpit groaned: Jake pausing over his lapload of papers to shake his head remorsefully; Junior, the road manager, smiling against his better judgment; Bob and Bob making loud retching noises in the back.

  Even Jim cracked a grin, though the bulk of the joke failed to make it past the muffled throb of the rotors and the garbled barks of static-tinged information blaring through his headset. Didn’t matter. He’d heard it before. In fact, he’d probably heard all of Hempstead’s jokes at some point or another and was probably destin
ed to hear them all again. And again.

  Still, he enjoyed it. And everyone else seemed to as well.

  With one possible exception.

  “Yo, Space Shot,” Hempstead said, nudging Pete. “Whassamattah? You seem less than your usual bundle of joyous self today.” Pete remained oblivious, staring, nose semismushed into the window glass, out at the rolling terrain. The outskirts of Philly were looming on the horizon. The mountain lay far behind.

  The concert was dead ahead.

  And Pete was elsewhere entirely.

  “Yo! Earth to Pee Wee!” Hempstead nudged him again, harder. “Earth to Pee Wee!”

  “Wha . . . oh. Sorry.” Pete shrugged and sniffled, looking chagrined, and his attention drifted right back to the window. “I’m just a little out of it, that’s all.”

  “You don’t look ‘out of it,’” Hempstead offered. “You look dead.”

  “Lay off him,” Bob One said. “He’s emotionally distraught.”

  “Yeah, I’ll say,” Bob Two interjected. “Somebody was up late last night, fighting tooth and nail with somebody who is noticeably absent.”

  “That’s none of your business,” Pete muttered. The words scraped out like a line drawn in playground dust. “I was up working on a new tune, is all.”

  “Ye-e-eah,” Hempstead said expansively, chiding him. “It’s called ‘Gotta Hose Up My Nose.’ Been hearin’ a lot of it lately.”

  “Piss on you,” Pete tossed back a little too quickly, as though the customary acid-tinged pregig banter were anything but expected. Everybody knew it was S.O.P. It was practically tradition, a way of pumping up for the ego-rush of being scrutinized by thousands of people, when every tick and twitch of your personality could either work for or against you. It usually did the trick.

  Usually.

  Not today. Jesse wasn’t here, and Jake might as well not be, and Pete’s dourness was a little out of character. The balance was thrown off; in some vaguely perceptible way, the delicate sense of fraternity was disrupted.

  And that was not good.