by Jack Ketcham
Her apprehension resolved itself into something infinitely worse the week before Halloween when she went up into the attic looking for a replacement bag for the vacuum cleaner. And saw what they'd stored there.
***
"When this is over I want to find another," he said.
They were lying in bed back to back. She guessed he couldn't sleep.
She knew what he meant and she didn't like it one bit. The baby was supposed to be the glue. The baby was supposed to be sufficient. How long did he think this was going to go on? With how many? "Jesus, Stephen. With a baby in the house?"
He snorted. "The baby won't know."
"What about us? What about our lives? What about our friends? The baby's got to have friends and so do we."
"The baby isn't going to need any friends the first year or two. I want somebody younger this time, Kath. She's too fucking old. She doesn't do it for me. She's fucking disgusting."
He was serious for god's sake. She thought back to Shawna, the first one. She'd been younger all right. Sixteen.
Buried in back a few feet away from McCann.
He'd been playing with electricity. They hadn't known she had a bad heart.
How many?
"Stephen, I want my life back. I want to have Gail over. I want to go out to dinner and a movie sometimes. I mean, is that a lot to ask?"
"I'm talking about a year or two. Once the baby's older I'll… settle down."
Sure. Sure you will.
"We'll take it easy for a while. But right now, you know. I've got needs!"
Like his needs were the most ordinary, matter-of-fact thing in the world.
"Stephen…"
"Look. You want it to be you again? Is that what you want?"
She did not.
But she didn't want this either.
"We're going to get caught. You know that. We try again, we're gonna get caught."
"That's paranoid. We just have to be careful, that's all. Like always."
She turned to him.
"Do you realize how close we came? With McCann? What if Elsie or somebody else had seen us and not just him? We're lucky we didn't get caught right there."
"Unlucky, Kath. McCann was a one-in-a-million shot for chrissake. Besides, we won't be taking her in front of some crowd at an abortion clinic. We'll be taking her off the street. Any street. It'll be completely anonymous. Just like Shawna was."
She couldn't believe he was saying this.
"Listen to yourself. Don't you get it? You fucking killed Shawna!" He turned and got up on one elbow and pointed his finger at her inches from her face. Jabbing at her.
"Don't talk to me like that, Kath. You hear me? Not ever."
He stared at her a long moment and then rolled over again.
"I'm your husband. You married me better or worse. You'll do as I say."
***
He was sick of her. Sick of her whining and sick of her sloppy body and sloppy habits. He wondered what the hell kind of mother she was going to make. He thought that maybe he'd been wrong about this all along. Right from the start. That maybe a kid was going to be one great big pain in the ass, period.
He was even more sick of Sara Foster. Her body repulsed him. The swollen blue-veined breasts, the stretch marks, the varicose veins in the backs of her knees. Even her hair had lost its sheen. And the belly itself - the thing itself. She was living with a parasite inside her body for god's sake. How could a woman do that? He wouldn't tell Kath this but experience was the best teacher and he'd privately decided that the Movement was all wrong. It wasn't a kid in there, not yet. Once it was born it would be, sure. But for now it was nothing more than a tiny parasite feeding off her and depending on her for everything from its oxygen and food to dumping its piss and shit.
The whole damn thing was gross.
He couldn't kill her, hell, he couldn't even play with her now the way he'd played with her before, it was ashes with her body being what it was and ashes in the face of what he really wanted to do because he couldn 't wait to kill her. It was the only thing left he hadn't done to the bitch when you came right down to it and he knew he'd come then which he hadn't lately, hadn't really come.
They'd cut and pull and tear it out of her and that'd be the end of the miserable fucking life of Sara Foster.
That in mind, he slept.
FIFTEEN
"Kath. Please. What is this?"
There in the attic.
A stainless steel cart on wheels. Sponges. Sterile pads, gauze pads. Scalpels and forceps. A box of disposable syringes. Packages of sterile drapes. An IV drip. The question was rhetorical. The need to ask it, frightening.
She knew damn well what it was.
This wasn't her first delivery.
"You're planning to do it here? In the house? You can't be."
"Of course we are." She laughed. "What did you think, we're bringing you to the hospital? You'd have the cops on us in seconds."
"No I wouldn't."
Kath patted her shoulder. "Don't shit a shitter, Sara. Now come on back downstairs. Don't worry about that stuff."
"I wouldn't say anything. I swear!"
"Right. Come on or I'm telling Stephen."
She was losing her mind. She had to be. This couldn't be happening.
"Wait. All right. Wait. These things here. What are they?"
"Clamps."
They were huge.
"And this?"
"A spreader."
"My god. What for?"
She shrugged. "We might have to… you know, a cesarean section. You use them to hold back the organs… stomach, whatever. The spreader's for the ribs."
"Jesus christ, Kath!"
"You got to be prepared, right? You might have complications."
"I'm not going to have any complications!"
Kath headed for the stairs. Sara reached out and grabbed her arm. Something she had never dared to do before. But she couldn't let it go at this.
"Listen. Listen to me. Who told you to get all this? A doctor?"
"No doctor."
"You're not even going to get me a doctor? The Organization can't spare a doctor!"
"We don't need a doctor. I'm a nurse, remember? Look, we've got everything here. Anesthetics, whatever. Anything you're going to need. Don't get all upset about it for chrissake. Midwives deliver babies all the time."
"Midwives don't perform surgery, Kath!"
"Well, neither will we. Not unless we have to."
She looked away, up to the high naked wooden beams of the ceiling.
And in that moment Sara simply didn't believe her.
She felt herself flush and the contents of her stomach rise.
My god, she thought. I've been such a fool. Such a terrible fool. I never saw it.
I never saw it coming.
There weren't even any stirrups. They'd never even considered normal delivery.
This was what they were planning - had been all along. She was their little experiment. The baby would be the fruit of that experiment.
But Sara was as expendable as one of these throw-away syringes here. In fact she had to be expendable. They couldn't keep her captive here forever for god's sake, not even the Organization could isolate her that much. Sooner or later somebody would come around to visit. Sooner or later somebody from the outside was going to know.
Certainty washed over her. Washed her clean.
They were going to kill her.
The birthing was how.
The Organization be damned. It was time to see what she could do about that.
She was well into her seventh month.
It was time to see right now.
***
Should have locked the damn door, she thought. Fucking stupid not to. It was sloppy.
Stephen would be pissed. But it was Stephen's fault too.
There was nothing to do but try to repair the damages.
They sat at the dining room table over some hot herbal tea. Grandma
's Tummy Mint. Celestial Seasonings. She supposed it was meant to be nice and reassuring. It wasn't. Outside the window the day was gray and still and dark. In a couple of weeks kids would be out trick-or-treating. She wondered if any of them would bother to come out this way.
It was Saturday. Around four. Stephen was still working in the garage. She could hear the whine of his circular saw.
She sat and listened and drank her tea and petted the cat curled up in what passed for her lap nowadays.
"Look," Kath was saying. "In the old days they only used cesarean when the mother was dying. Now the whole thing is to save the mother and the baby. What you do is, you make an incision through the skin and the wall of the abdomen. Most of the time there isn't even much of a scar. Then you open up the wall of the uterus. The incision can be transverse vertical or low vertical, transverse usually because there's less bleeding and it heals better. Then you deliver the baby and we suture you up again and that's that. I mean this is all just in case. Only if there's a problem. But it's really very simple. You don't have to worry, I know what I'm doing. I've assisted on hundreds of these."
And on how many murders? she thought.
And she realized now that she was listening to a very good and convincing liar. There was only that single slip in the attic. Otherwise Kath was practically flawless. Which called into question again all these tales all these months about the Organization.
She decided she was going to proceed as though there were none.
Another weight lifted. It was astonishing. Just like that.
The Organization was suddenly… gone. Frozen out of her. Trapped in the glacier of her resolve.
She was going to live.
Where in the world did I find this calm? she thought.
She was suddenly calm as the cat was.
She decided it was in the knowing that she'd found it. In the certainty. What had trapped her up to now was lack of certainty. Not knowing on a daily - even momentary - basis what they would or wouldn't do to her. These people if you could even dignify them with the word people had played on that uncertainty like a harp. Headbox or no headbox? Beating or no beating? Upstairs in the light or downstairs in the dark? They'd kept her off balance for months now.
Was this balance? Yes it was.
Balance was knowing and knowing was calm.
Take them one by one, she thought. And no time like the present.
Do I have it in me? Yes I do.
As certainly as I have this little girl inside me.
Greg's little girl and mine.
It was the first she'd thought of him for ages. That was balance too.
"Kath? Do you think I could have a little more tea?"
She shrugged. "Sure. You know where it is."
She lifted the cat gently off her lap and put her down on the floor thinking yes I do, I know where everything is, you bitch and walked past Kath to the kitchen and ran water from the sink into the mug and put the mug into the microwave and turned it on and then opened the bottom cabinet door and took out the twelve-inch stainless steel frying pan they hardly ever used, the pan looking new as they day they'd bought it, new as the stainless steel cart upstairs and gripped it in both her hands and walked over to Kath who was hunched over her mug, who had the mug to her lips sipping Tummy Mint tea and brought the pan down as hard as she could on the crown of her head, the pan ringing like a bell, the sound true and pure and brave, Kath's face driven down into the ceramic mug and the mug to the table, the mug shattering between table, teeth, flesh and bone and flooding the surface with a liquid the color of autumn leaves.
Not a sound out of Kath as she brought the pan up and hit her again, the pan musical once more against the side of her head which suddenly sprouted glistening drops of red forming a rough half-circle across her forehead at the hairline.
She examined the base of the pan. The base was flecked with blood and a stray brown hair or two. Despite the rapid heartbeat she felt steady and powerful.
"You dead yet? Should I hit you again?"
She had the urge to giggle.
No. She'd done it right so far and Kath hadn't made a sound. Only the pan had made a sound and that one was delightful - the tolling of her freedom-bell. She could still hear Stephen's saw whining in the garage but he might stop at any time. Don't push it, she thought. You still have him to deal with.
Or do you?
Car keys, she thought. Fucking car keys. In her purse.
Where the fuck was her purse?
The purse was on the couch in the living room.
The cat peered out at her from the hall as she crossed the living room and put the pan down on the couch and rifled through the purse. She felt the baby kick inside. The baby was urging her on.
Yes! Got 'em!
The keys jingled in her hand. Smaller bells of freedom.
The saw outside stopped.
She picked up the pan. The pain had stained the couch. She hadn't meant to do that but hadn't thought of it either. She walked quickly through the living room past Kath at the dining room table to the kitchen and looked out the window to the garage. He wasn't there. He wasn't cutting across the lawn and walking toward the house. She couldn't see him anywhere.
What she could see though was that the keys were useless. Kath's station wagon was the one sitting there in front of the garage which meant that Stephen's pickup would be directly in back of it. That meant she needed Stephen's keys, not Kath's. Stephen would have them in his pocket. And now she realized that she'd been wrong before, she didn't know where everything in the house was because she didn't know where they kept the goddamn spares.
They weren't in the kitchen. She'd spent a lot of time in there and would've noticed them. The bedroom? The end-table drawers in the living room?
The basement?
She wasn't going into the basement. Not ever again.
Goddammit! There wasn't time! There just wasn't time to go through every damn drawer in the house. The sawing had stopped. God only knew what he was doing. He was probably finishing up out there. He could walk in on her at any second.
The pan felt puny in her hand.
She needed more.
She needed to get out of there but first she needed more because she wasn't going to go strolling out like the first time only to get caught again.
The shotgun, the pistol. Where would they be?
The bedroom. She wasn't allowed in the bedroom and though the door was never locked she never thought to disobey and go there.
She'd damn well disobey now. She had no idea how to shoot a pistol unless you counted what you saw in the movies and what he'd shown her in the basement and even less idea how to load and fire a shotgun but she was counting on the pistol to be the simpler of the two and that probably it would be the easier of the two to find, that most people would want a pistol in the nightstand drawer by the bed in case of intruders.
She went to the phone on the kitchen wall and punched in 911 and let the receiver dangle. Maybe the police would trace the call here and maybe they wouldn't but she didn't have time to talk.
Why hadn't she done this months ago? 911. Such a simple thing.
Greg. Mom and dad. The Organization.
The fucking Organization!
There isn't any.
The cat followed her down the hall.
There were two night tables in the bedroom and she didn't know who slept where or which side would be Stephen's side so she went to the nearest. In the drawer there were a dirty jumble of pads and pencils, cough drops, matches, an address book, a Vicks inhaler, an open package of Kleenex, a tin of aspirin. No gun. She walked around the bed to the other side and opened the drawer and there it was, the pearl handle and the gleaming polished silver and now at the sight of it she remembered what Stephen had done that day exactly. As though she'd memorized it without knowing, stored it away for just this very moment. Her finger went to the cylinder latch and she checked the chamber. The gun was loaded, not even the first chamb
er empty. She didn't have to search for cartridges. She threw the cylinder back into place and threw the safety, left the frying pan where it was on the bed and walked out into the hall.
All you need to do is get his keys, she thought. Put the key in the ignition and drive away. And that's the end of it. The end of all of this. You have the gun. He can't stop you. He can't hurt you at all anymore.
Just get the keys.
But when she got to the living room and turned and saw him coming through the back door, slamming the door, pausing at the landing at the top of the cellar stairs, saw the old claw hammer in his hand, saw him take in the sight of Kath slumped across the table and saw his face darken with that now-familiar blush of rage it was not the keys she wanted, not anymore.
She felt her own face twist tight into a snarl and the sudden wild pounding of her heart and she raised the gun and fired twice, the gun jumping in her hands and woodchips flying off the doorjamb and as he crouched and stepped back toward the door she fired again lower this time, the bullet slamming him back against the door and bright arterial blood spurting off his thigh and he was shouting no no no no which she could barely hear above the high roar in her ears, his face gone sickly, cowardly white as she stepped forward and forward again with the gun held out in front of her and realized she was roaring too, a sound the like of which she'd never heard before twice in his presence she'd made these strange and awful sounds, the first against the X-frame and as she closed in tighter watched him try to make himself small in the corner, shrinking away, down to his goddamn proper size, trying to crouch in the corner - the snake - and she took one more step uil she was sure she'd get it absolutely perfectly right this time, obeying the tidal pull of her own perfect instincts in this single perfect moment and shot him in the chest and shot and shot again.
Watched him slide to the floor.
Watched him smear his filthy death across the walls.
Watched urine soak his pants and puddle up beneath him.
Saw the open mouth and the open eyes and the bright blood flowing. And felt the baby kick.
SIXTEEN
New York City