Blood poured from the young woman's vagina. As Todd began driving the hanger in and out of her with greater and greater force the woman began to jerk back and forth and slam herself against the back of her chair. The blood continued to flow out of her but now some of the blood was chunky. Bloody globs dripped from her snatch and plopped onto the floor. It looked like chili meat, like chunks of carne asada in a red enchilada sauce. Todd's stomach was calm this time as he continued to plunge her vagina with the hanger, removing bits of fetal tissue that looked like beef stew. Even after he had removed the hanger, blood and pulp continued to drip from her vagina onto the floor.
Todd grabbed the big woman with the generous breasts and put the gun to her temple. She was further along than all the other women. She looked as if she was ready to give birth at any second. Todd didn't think he was going to need the hanger for her.
He flipped her bathrobe up over her head revealing her naked ass then bent her over the kitchen sink. He pushed the barrel of the revolver into her right cheek.
"You fucking move. You fucking die. Do you understand?"
He reached into a rack on the side of the sink and pulled out a steak knife. He knelt down and sawed in half the tape securing her ankles together. Then he pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of his messenger bag and slipped them onto his hands. He used what looked like fried chicken grease from a pot that was sitting in the sink to lube up his fingers.
Todd kept the gun pressed into the big woman's cheek as he eased one finger then two then three then his entire hand into her vagina. She screamed and wept and moaned and cursed as Todd pushed his hand deeper inside of her. She bled profusely, as Todd's arm disappeared inside her up to the elbow. Todd pushed his fingers through the woman's cervix until he felt what he thought was the baby's head. He seized it and pulled.
Something squirmed in his hands. The big woman was sweating and screaming and shaking as Todd slowly dragged a nearly fully developed fetus from her womb. Her vagina split and tore as the baby's head emerged in a gush of blood and amniotic fluid that pooled on the floor between her feet. Her legs buckled and she started to fall.
"If you drop, you'll land on your baby and kill it. Then I'll kill you."
The woman straightened her legs and held herself up. Todd grabbed the baby's head with both hands now and jerked hard as if he was trying to decapitate the infant while it was still inside its mother. The baby spilled out of the woman and fell to the floor, still attached to its mother. Todd thought about how he'd killed his own baby. If he could do that to his own child, if his mother could kill his brother in the womb, he couldn't show mercy to anyone else's child. Todd raised his shoe and stomped down on the baby's head, rupturing it like a rotten cantaloupe and squirting blood and brain matter out of its ears. He threw the child's mother to the floor with the umbilical cord still trailing out of her vagina attached to her murdered child. The woman fell beside her child, hitting the floor face first into her child's brain tissue and blood mixed with her own blood and fluids. Todd turned to the rest of the women and picked up the hangar again.
He pulled three more of the mothers-to-be from where they huddled in the corner of the room and pushed them down into the three remaining kitchen chairs, releasing their ankles and securing them instead to the chair legs. He then cut off their sweatpants, pajama pants, and panties. The first one had taken almost twenty minutes but Todd had the hang of it now.
Again and again he knelt between the thighs of the women and thrust the hanger up inside them, through their cervix into the womb, jerking and pulling, tearing and ripping their insides, as he fished around for the fetuses inside of them and tore them out of them piece by piece.
The kitchen floor looked like the floor of a slaughterhouse. It was covered in blood and clumps of flesh and tissue.
There were some parts that were clearly arms or legs or heads or torsos, so small that they resembled broken toys but they had all once been alive and would have been born and grown up to pollute the earth with their wastes and drain it of its resources had Todd not done what had to be done.
Todd stood back and looked at all of it, the blood, the traumatized women bleeding on the floor or still strapped to the chairs. Their vaginas looked like raw bleeding meat, torn and lacerated by the hanger. There were still two more women. Todd picked up the knife he'd dropped into the kitchen sink. He was exhausted, too exhausted to use the hanger. The knife would be much quicker. He grabbed the black woman and laid her down on the kitchen table. He was just about to carve her up with the knife when he remembered the scalpels. The cuts would be much cleaner. If he used the scalpel and stitched her up like he'd done Nicolene, she'd probably survive. Todd reached into the bag and grabbed the last roll of tape. He needed to immobilize her if he was going to perform a Caesarian without the woman dying on the table. Unlike Nicolene, she was not doped up on street pharmaceuticals. This woman had nothing to dull the pain.
Todd wrapped the tape around her thighs and legs. When he was certain she could not move, he made the first incision, cutting through her transverse abdominous and the rectus abdominous and pushing the muscles aside revealing the uterus covered by a transparent layer of tissue. He cut through the uterus and dragged the baby out of her belly. The baby was already dead. He pushed the woman off the table and grabbed the last one, a young Puerto Rican girl. He laid her on the kitchen table in the black woman's blood and reached into his bag for another scalpel.
Chapter Twenty-One
Todd was completely covered in blood. He peeled his clothes off and walked upstairs. There were babies crying in a room down the hall. He had been too late to stop them from being born and he couldn't imagine himself taking the life of a fully developed child. Instead, Todd stepped into the bathroom mid-way down the hall and into the shower to wash the blood and tissue from his skin.
His mind was clouded by images of Stephanie, his mother sitting on the toilet with a hanger in her vagina pierced through the skull of what would have been his younger brother; Nicolene and the two girls down stairs with their guts laid open, and the big woman whose fetus he'd dragged out of her womb with his bare hands. Todd began to scream.
He screamed long and hard and sobbed as if the world had ended. He collapsed into the tub and huddled into a fetal position, still screaming, the shower, now cold, still spraying down on him. When he finally stopped screaming, he heard the front door open and one of the girls run out of the house screaming. Todd leapt up from the shower and ran through the house looking for the old man's room. He needed new clothes. He found some pants and a cardigan, slipped them on, stepped back into his bloody sneakers and sprinted down the stairs.
He didn't have his bike. He didn't have a car and the subway was several blocks away. When he stepped outside, Todd saw the large woman he'd bent over the sink banging on the door of a house across the street. Todd began to run. A car raced up the block and Todd ran as hard and as fast as he could. Still, the vehicle caught up with him and slowed down, keeping pace with his stride.
"Todd!"
He turned and was surprised to see his supervisor, Ms. Santiago, sitting behind the wheel of her Saturn hybrid, waving him toward her car. Todd slowed down, panting hard but looking at her suspiciously.
"Elizabeth? Wh-? Wa-? What? What are you doing? What are you doing here?"
She opened her passenger side door.
"Your ex-girlfriend lived. The cops are looking for you everywhere. Get in. I'll take you to the airport." She held up a plane ticket.
Todd walked over to her car.
"Why are you doing this? You know what I've done?"
Elizabeth Santiago smiled, that same bemused expression she'd had when the cops had come to the job to question him.
"I'm just throwing a starfish back into the ocean."
Todd got into the car. He sat in the passenger seat looking at her, bewildered and surprised.
"Zero Population?"
"Of course. And I've got another surprise for you."
Chapter Twenty-Two
"How soon can I go to the airport? I'm kinda freakin' out just sittin' here."
Todd whispered into the cell phone Elizabeth had given him, nervously looking around the room as if he expected a SWAT team to come crashing through the wall at any moment.
"Your flight doesn't leave until morning. You don't want to just hang around at the airport all night. That might not be safe."
Todd sat on the bed in the dingy airport hotel rocking back and forth and sweating despite the air conditioning. His only comfort was that Elizabeth had booked the room in her name so there would be no trace. But he'd had to show his ID to claim the room and he wasn't sure there wasn't some way to use that to trace him though he figured they'd probably have to call around to every hotel in LA to do it.
He'd fought with the front desk clerk over leaving a credit card for incidentals and finally got the man to agree to use the credit card on file, the one in Elizabeth's name. The man had looked suspicious but didn't look like the type to call the cops. But neither did Todd look like the type to pull the fetus out of a woman with his bare hands and stomp it to death.
"I'm in Los Angeles now. No one is going to be looking for me at the airport here. But I feel like a sitting duck in this motel."
"If anyone checks your flight info they'll see that you flew into LA. That would make the airport the last place you'd want to be. Sorry, Todd but you're going to have to sit tight. There are no other flights tonight anyway."
Elizabeth hadn't had time to get him a fake I.D. so he'd had to use his real name to catch the plane, expecting to get ambushed by airport security or the FBI at every turn. He'd nearly feinted going through the security checkpoint.
Elizabeth was right. His name on the plane ticket left a neon trail for anyone with half a brain to follow.
"There has to be a flight somewhere? I'll go anywhere as long as it's out of the country."
"Beggars can't be choosy, Todd. I'm not going to change your destination. Besides, there's a reason that you're going there. You've got more work to do."
"I'm not doing any more abortions." Todd could almost hear Elizabeth smile through the phone.
"Good night, Todd. Get some sleep. You've got a lot of traveling to do in the morning."
She hung up the phone before Todd could reply. Todd considered calling her back before he put the phone down on the nightstand. He stared across the room remembering everything he'd done in the last two days, all the blood, the muffled screams and eyes filled with terror. There was no way he was going to get any sleep tonight.
Todd crawled under the covers fully dressed. He picked up the TV remote and switched on the TV that sat across the room in an entertainment center that looked like an old fashioned armoire. Todd stared at the Shopping Network for what seemed like hours. His mind wasn't registering a thing on the screen. He kept thinking about Stephanie...and Cathy.
The big woman would probably be sitting by Stephanie's bedside comforting her and telling her all about how she was going to make Todd suffer for what he'd done. Stephanie may not have died but she wouldn't exactly be up and walking around either, not after the beating her belly had taken. He only hoped that Cathy would be too worried about Stephanie to leave her bedside. Todd wasn't worried about the police or the FBI. All they could do was arrest him. He didn't want to think about the things Cathy could do to him. He had to get out of here.
Todd had already spent five hours on a plane. Another eight hours waiting around for his next flight would give Cathy a lot of time to track him down. She'd know that he was running and he didn't think she'd be so emotionally distraught over Stephanie that she would let his trail get cold. She'd be right on his ass.
If he didn't get the hell out of there soon he'd be looking down the barrel of Cathy's nine before he could make his connection.
I should have killed her before I left.
Todd looked out the window. It was still dark. He looked back at the TV screen where a B-list celebrity whose name he couldn't remember was trying to sell Teflon cookware endorsed by an A-list chef whose name Todd had never heard of. It seemed like morning would never arrive.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Todd didn't know when he'd fallen asleep but he'd almost overslept. He called down to the front desk and asked for a taxi to the airport. Fifteen minutes later he was sitting in the back of a yellow cab pulling into the airport looking for departing flights.
"I need the international terminals."
"No problem."
They pulled to a halt in front of the airport and Todd slipped the cabdriver a twenty and then sprinted into the airport.
He went to one of the electronic kiosks to print his ticket and then went directly to the security checkpoint. His plane had already started boarding and was scheduled to depart in twenty minutes. If he didn't get there soon he'd miss his flight.
The line was short which meant that the security guards had time to actually do their jobs. A couple of homeland security officers were checking IDs at the front of the line before sending passengers through the metal detectors.
Great. Just what I needed. Todd thought.
Todd checked and then double checked himself for metal objects. He didn't have so much as a set of keys or some loose change. He was still wearing the old man's pants with a pair of flip-flops and a t-shirt he'd bought at the hotel.
He had no baggage and he wondered if that would look suspicious. Who left the country without bags?
Maybe I should buy a suitcase? He thought. But there was no time.
He scanned the crowd looking for anyone who looked out of place, anyone who might be giving him too much scrutiny. Everyone looked normal. Just the normal tourists and business men. He was the only one who looked the least bit odd.
He saw a tall woman with a blonde crew-cut and broad shoulders. His heart beat raced.
Oh shit. Is that Cathy?
He squinted across the crowded airport trying to get a good look at the woman but she was too far away. The woman ducked into the women's bathroom before Todd could get a better look at her. Todd began to perspire again. He started hyperventilating. His vision narrowed until it felt like he was looking at everything through a keyhole. His hearing became muffled like he was underwater. He felt sick and he looked guilty as hell. Todd knew that he had to pull it together. The line was moving quickly and pretty soon he'd be face to face with the security officer. He was almost up to the front of the line.
They're going to think I'm smuggling drugs.
Todd imagined himself being pulled out of line and submitted to a cavity check by brutal men with rubber gloves. He shivered at the thought. He swallowed deeply, took a deep breath and closed his eyes, trying to calm himself. He looked back over his shoulder to see if the woman with the crew-cut was out of the bathroom yet but he didn't see her.
Then it was his turn to go through the metal detector.
"ID."
The Homeland Security officer was a middle aged Latino man with pockmarked skin and a thick neck. Todd nervously held out his ID and his plane ticket. The officer looked at the ID and then back up at Todd then back down at the ID.
When he looked at Todd the second time Todd was almost certain the man was going to pull him out of line and arrest him.
"Have a nice day, sir."
Todd sighed and forced a smile. He kicked off his shoes, removed his belt and walked through the metal detector just as the woman with the crew-cut left the women's room. She was too far away for Todd to see her clearly but he was almost certain that it was Cathy. Somehow, she had found him. Todd rushed to the terminal. If he was lucky, he would just barely make his flight. Then it wouldn't matter if that was Cathy or not. He'd be long gone. Then he remembered his plane ticket. It was in his own name just like the one that had brought him to Los Angeles. Anyone smart enough to trace him to LA would also be smart enough to find his connecting flight.
Oh well, there's nothing I can do about that now
.
His plane was still boarding when Todd arrived at the terminal. He stepped into line behind an elderly black couple and shuffled down the runway sweating and jittering the entire time as if he were going through withdrawals. He shifted nervously from foot to foot and kept looking behind him. Yesterday he had been prepared to die or go to prison but now, with freedom so close, he was petrified that he'd be apprehended or killed before he could get away.
As Todd boarded the airplane he continued to examine the other passengers. He watched as they crammed their bags into the overhead compartments and wriggled and jostled their way into their seats wondering which one of them was really a cop and why it was taking them so long to arrest him. He expected a sky-marshal to handcuff him and pull him off the plane at any moment or for Cathy to suddenly burst onto the plane with guns blazing. He didn't relax until the plane's wheels left the tarmac and it began its ascent. He'd been in the sky for less than twenty minutes when exhaustion finally overcame him. Todd leaned his head against the window and stared out at the clouds. Soon he was fast asleep. He didn't awake until the wheels touched down ten hours later and the fasten seatbelt sign went off.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Todd exited the plane still reeling from his adventure. He had never expected to still be alive and free. His plan had been to get to as many women as he could before the cops caught up with him and then to kill himself. But he hadn't counted on Ms. Santiago's help. All the years he'd worked with her and he'd never known that they were members of the same environmentalist group. She told him that she'd only figured it out after she'd read a post on the Zero Population message board asking if it was okay to talk a woman into having an abortion and then the very next day Todd had been accused of doing that very thing. Since then she'd been following him. She'd seen what he did to Nicolene.
"I still don't understand why you're helping me though? Talking a woman into having an abortion is one thing but what I've done..." Todd's expression went blank and he'd stared off into the distance. Elizabeth dismissed his concerns with a wave of her hand as if he were merely being childish.
Population Zero Page 10