A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  “The law lets me do it. The Supreme Court. So don’t blame me. Blame those Supreme Court justices.”

  “That’s politics. We don’t care about politics.”

  “But I believe in a woman’s right to control her own life, to make decisions about her own body!”

  “We don’t care what you believe. Do you think the beliefs of a terrorist matter to the victims of his bombs? Don’t you understand? This is personal!”

  A little girl’s voice said, “I could have been adopted, you know. I would’ve made someone a good kid. But I never had the chance!”

  They all began shouting at once, about never getting Christmas gifts or birthday presents or hugs or tucked in at night or playing with matches or playing catch or playing house or even playing doctor—

  It seemed to go on endlessly. Finally the woman held up her bucket. “All their possibilities ended in here.”

  “Wait a goddamn minute!” he said. He had just discovered a significant flaw in their little show. “Only a few of them ended up in buckets! If you were up on your facts, you’d know that no one uses those old D and C buckets for abortions anymore.” He pointed to the glass trap on the Zarick suction extractor. “This is where the products of conception wind up.”

  The woman stepped forward with her bucket. “They carry this in honor of me. I have the dubious distinction of being your first victim.”

  “You’re not my victims!” he shouted. “The law—”

  She spat in his face. Shocked and humiliated, Cantrell wiped away the saliva with his shirtsleeve and pressed himself back against the table. The rage in her face was utterly terrifying.

  “The law!” she hissed. “Don’t speak of legalities to me! Look at me! I’d be twenty-two now and this is how I’d look if you hadn’t murdered me. Do a little subtraction, Doctor: 1974 was a lot less than twenty-two years ago. I’m Ellen Benedict’s daughter—or at least I would have been if you hadn’t agreed to do that D and C on her when she couldn’t find a way to explain her pregnancy to her impotent husband!”

  Ellen Benedict! God! How did they know about Ellen Benedict? Even he had forgotten about her!

  The woman stepped forward and grabbed his wrist. He was helpless against her strength as she pressed his hand over her left breast. He might have found the softness beneath her sweater exciting under different circumstances, but now it elicited only dread.

  “Feel my heart beating? It was beating when your curette ripped me to pieces. I was only four weeks old. And I’m not the only one here you killed before 1974—I was just your first. So you can’t get off the hook by naming the Supreme Court as an accomplice. And even if we allowed you that cop-out, other things you’ve done since ‘74 are utterly abominable!” She looked around and pointed into the crowd. “There’s one! Come here, honey, and show your bucket to the doctor.”

  A five- or six-year-old boy came forward. He had blond bangs and the biggest, saddest blue eyes the doctor had ever seen. The boy held out his bucket.

  Cantrell covered his face with his hands. “I don’t want to see!”

  Suddenly he felt his hands yanked downward with numbing force and found the woman’s face scant inches from his own.

  “Look, damn you! You’ve seen it before!”

  He looked into the upheld bucket. A fully formed male fetus lay curled in the blood, its blue eyes open, its head turned at an unnatural angle.

  “This is Rachel Walraven’s baby as you last saw him.”

  The Walraven baby! Oh, God, not that one! How could they know?

  “What you see is how he’d look now if you hadn’t broken his neck after the abortion you gave his mother made her uterus dump him out.”

  “He couldn’t have survived!” he shouted. He could hear the hysteria edging into his voice. “He was previable! Too immature to survive! The best neonatal ICU in the world couldn’t have saved him!”

  “Then why’d you break my neck?” the little boy asked.

  Cantrell could only sob—a single harsh sound that seemed to rip itself from the tissues inside his chest and burst free into the air. What could he say? How could he tell them that he had miscalculated the length of gestation and that no one had been more shocked than he at the size of the infant that had dropped into his gloved hands? And then it had opened its eyes and stared at him and my God it seemed to be trying to breathe! He’d done late terminations before where the fetus had squirmed around awhile in the bucket before finally dying, but this one—!

  Christ! he remembered thinking, what if the damn thing lets out a cry? He’d get sued by the patient and be the laughing stock of the staff. Poor Ed Cantrell—can’t tell the difference between an abortion and a delivery! He’d look like a jerk!

  So he did the only thing he could do. He gave its neck a sharp twist as he lowered it into the bucket. The neck didn’t even crack when he broke it.

  “Why have you come to me?” he said.

  “Answer us first,” a child’s voice said. “Why do you do it? You don’t need the money. Why do you kill us?”

  “I told you! I believe in every woman’s right to—”

  They began to boo him, drowning him out. Then the boos changed to a chant: “Why? Why? Why? Why?”

  “Stop that! Listen to me! I told you why!”

  But still they chanted, sounding like a crowd at a football game: “Why? Why? Why? Why?”

  Finally he could stand no more. He raised his fists and screamed. “All right! Because I can! Is that what you want to hear? I do it because I caw!”

  The room was suddenly dead silent.

  The answer startled him. He had never asked himself why before. “Because I can,” he said softly.

  “Yes,” the woman said with equal softness. “The ultimate power.”

  He suddenly felt very old, very tired. “What do you want of me?”

  No one answered.

  “Why have you come?”

  They all spoke as one: “Because today, this Halloween, this night . . . we can.”

  “And we don’t want this place to open,” the woman said.

  So that was it. They wanted to kill the women’s center before it got started—abort it, so to speak. He almost smiled at the pun. He looked at their faces, their staring eyes. They mean business, he thought. And he knew they wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  Well, this was no time to stand on principle. Promise them anything, and then get the hell out of here to safety.

  “Okay,” he said, in what he hoped was a meek voice. “You’ve convinced me. I’ll turn this into a general medical center. No abortions. Just family practice for the community.”

  They watched him silently. Finally a voice said, “He’s lying.”

  The woman nodded. “I know.” She turned to the children. “Do it,” she said.

  Pure chaos erupted as the children went wild. They were like a berserk mob, surging in all directions. But silent. So silent.

  Cantrell felt himself shoved aside as the children tore into the procedure table and the Zarick extractor. The table was ripped from the floor and all its upholstery shredded. Its sections were torn free and hurled against the walls with such force that they punctured through the plasterboard.

  The rage in the children’s eyes seemed to leak out into the room, filling it, thickening the air like an onrushing storm, making his skin ripple with fear at its ferocity.

  As he saw the Zarick start to topple, he forced himself forward to try to save it but was casually slammed against the wall with stunning force. In a semi-daze, he watched the Zarick raised into the air; he ducked flying glass as it was slammed onto the floor, not just once, but over and over until it was nothing more than a twisted wreck of wire, plastic hose, and ruptured circuitry.

  And from down the hall he could hear similar carnage in the other procedure rooms. Finally the noise stopped and the room was packed with children again.

  He began to weep. He hated himself for it, but he couldn’t help it. He just broke down
and cried in front of them. He was frightened. And all the money, all the plans . . . destroyed.

  He pulled himself together and stood up straight. He would rebuild. All this destruction was covered by insurance. He would blame it on vandalism, collect his money, and have the place brand-new inside of a month. These vicious little bastards weren’t going to stop him.

  But he couldn’t let them know that.

  “Get out, all of you,” he said softly. “You’ve had your fun. You’ve ruined me. Now leave me alone.”

  “We’ll leave you alone,” said the woman who would have been Ellen Benedict’s child. “But not yet.”

  Suddenly they began to empty their buckets on him, hurling the contents at him in a continuous wave, turning the air red with flying blood and tissue, engulfing him from all sides, choking him, clogging his mouth and nostrils.

  And then they reached for him . . .

  Erica knocked on the front door of the center for the third time and still got no answer.

  Now where can he be? she thought as she walked around to the private entrance. She tried the door and found it unlocked. She pushed in but stopped on the threshold.

  The waiting room was lit and looked normal enough.

  “Ed?” she called, but he didn’t answer. Odd. His car was out front. She was supposed to meet him here at five. She had taken a cab from the house—after all, she didn’t want Ginger dropping her off here; there would be too many questions.

  This was beginning to make her uneasy.

  She glanced down the hallway. It was dark and quiet.

  Almost quiet.

  She heard tiny little scraping noises, tiny movements, so soft that she would have missed them if there had been any other sound in the building. The sounds seemed to come from the first procedure room. She stepped up to the door and listened to the dark. Yes, they were definitely coming from in there.

  She flipped on the light . . . and felt her knees buckle.

  The room was red—the walls, the ceiling, the remnants of the shattered fixtures, all dripping with red. The clots and the coppery odor that saturated the air left no doubt in Erica’s reeling mind that she was looking at blood. But on the floor—the blood-puddled linoleum was littered with countless shiny, silvery buckets. The little rustling sounds were coming from them. She saw something that looked like hair in a nearby bucket and took a staggering step over to see what was inside.

  It was Edward’s head, floating in a pool of blood, his eyes wide and mad, looking at her. She wanted to scream but the air clogged in her throat as she saw Ed’s lips begin to move. They were forming words but there was no sound, for there were no lungs to push air through his larynx. Yet still his lips kept moving in what seemed to be silent pleas. But pleas for what?

  And then he opened his mouth wide and screamed—silently.

  THE TENTH TOE

  (or: The Beginning of My End)

  By Doc Holiday

  (as transcribed by F. Paul Wilson)

  I was not always this weak, wheezing, crumbling sack of bones you see before you, a man whose days can be numbered on the fingers of one hand. Nor was I always the hard-drinking gambler and shootist you read of in the penny dreadfuls. I started out a much more genteel man, a professional man, even a bit of a milquetoast.

  I attended medical school but did not succeed there, so I became a matriculant at a nearby dental school, from which I managed to graduate. I was then a professional man, and proud of it. But I remained flawed—cursed with a larcenous heart. No amount of schooling, be it of the medical, dental, or (I dare say) divinity sort, can extract that stubborn worm. You are born with it, and you die with it, if not from it.

  I am dying from it. It was that young professional man with the larcenous heart who led me to notoriety, and to this premature death from consumption.

  Allow me to explain . . .

  The first inkling I had of the curse was in the spring of 1878 while I was examining Mrs. Duluth.

  Mrs. Duluths husband owned the Dodge City General Store and it was obvious (at least to me) that food was not in short supply on her supper table. She was fat. Truthfully, I have been in outhouses smaller than this woman. Everything about her was fat. Her face was fat and round like a huge honeydew melon. Her lips were thick and fat. Even her nose and ears were fat.

  “Will this hurt?” she said as she lay back, overflowing my relatively new reclining dental chair. I hoped she wouldn’t break its lift mechanism.

  “Not a bit,” I told her. “After all, this is 1878, not the Dark Ages. We are now blessed with the modern methods of painless dentistry.”

  “What do you plan to do?”

  “I’m going to administer some sulfuric ether,” I heard myself say. “And when you’re unconscious, I’m going to rob you.”

  I saw her eyes widen and she must have seen mine do the same. I hadn’t meant to say that. True, I had been thinking it, but I’d had no intention of verbalizing it.

  “What . . . what did you say, Dr. Holliday?”

  “I said I’m going to rob you. Just a little. I’ll go through your purse and take some of your money. Not all of it. Just enough to make this exercise worth my while.”

  “I really don’t think that’s very funny, Doctor,” she said.

  I gulped and steadied myself with an effort. “Neither do I, Mrs. Duluth.” And I meant it. What was coming over me? Why was I saying these things? “A joke. A dentist’s joke. Sorry.”

  “I should hope so.” She seemed somewhat mollified. “Now, about this tooth—”

  “Who cares about that tooth. I’m interested in the third molar there with the big gold filling. I’m going to pop that beauty out and replace it with some garbage metal that looks like gold.”

  (What was I saying?)

  “That is quite enough!” she said, rolling out of the chair. She straightened her enormous gingham dress and headed for the door.

  “Mrs. Duluth! Wait! I—”

  “Never mind! I’ll find myself another dentist! One I can trust. Like that new fellow across the street!”

  As she went down the steps, she slapped at my shingle, knocking it off one of its hooks. It swung and twisted at a crazy angle until I stepped out and rehung it.

  JOHN HENRY HOLLIDAY, DDS Painless Dentistry

  I loved that sign. It was making me rich. I could have made a good living just from the usual drilling, filling, and pulling of my patients’ teeth, but that was not enough for my larcenous heart. I had to be rich. And I was getting rich quickly from the gold I was mining—literally—from my patients’ teeth. I’d found an excellent gold-like compound that I substituted for the real thing while they were out cold in the chair. It was nowhere near as good as gold, but no one had caught on yet. I had another couple of years before the replacement fillings started to fall apart.

  Of course, my practice wouldn’t last a couple of years if I treated all my patients like Mrs. Duluth. Luckily the waiting room had been empty. I closed the door behind her and stood there thinking. I admit I was somewhat shaken. What was wrong with me? I hadn’t meant to say any of those things.

  A short while later the widow Porter arrived with her daughter, Bonnie, who had a toothache.

  Bonnie was sixteen and extremely buxom for her age. Her bosom was apparently growing at such a rate that the bodice of her dress could not keep pace. She was fairly bursting from it. The tortured seams appeared ready to split. From the way she carried herself, proudly erect with her bust thrust out at the world, I assumed that she was well aware of (and reveled in) the male gender’s reaction to her proportions.

  Bonnie had a cavity in her second lower left molar. As I leaned over her to examine the tooth more closely, she arched her back so that her breasts brushed against my arm. I straightened and looked at her. She stared back and smiled boldly. This was one of the most brazen young females I’d ever met! I was becoming (I hesitate to say it) aroused.

  Teenaged girls were never my style. They tend to fall in love
, which can be most inconvenient. But for a young thing of Bonnie’s proportions, I realized that I might make an exception.

  “She’ll need a filling,” I told her mother.

  “Oh, dear!” the widow Porter said. “You mean you’ll have to use the drill?”

  “The drill?” Bonnie said, the simper suddenly gone out of her. “The drill?”

  “Yes.” I lifted the instrument from its hook and pumped the pedal to show her how the bit spun.

  Her expression was horrified. “You’re going to put that in my mouth?”

  “Yes. But I’d really—”

  I could feel my tongue starting to run off without me, but I refused to let it get away this time. I bit down to hold it in place but it broke free.

  “—like to put something else in your mouth, if you know what I mean.”

  Not again! I seemed utterly helpless against this!

  “Really?” Bonnie said, smiling again and thrusting her breasts out even further. “Like what?”

  I wanted to shove my fist down my throat. Bonnie’s mother, I could see, was thinking along similar lines.

  The widow Porter shot to her feet and thrust her face to within an inch of mine.

  “What did you say?”

  I tried to pacify her.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Porter. Perhaps you misunderstood me. Sometimes I don’t make myself clear.”

  She backed off a little. Good. She was listening—even better. I knew I could smooth this over if my mouth would only let me. Just as her face began to soften, I felt my lips begin to move. I could do nothing but listen.

  “What I really meant to say was that I’d like to drill her with a special tool I keep buttoned in my pants. As a matter of fact, I’d like to use it on both of you.”

  “Scoundrel!” she cried, and swung her heavy purse at me, missing my face by a fraction of an inch. “Bounder!”

  She grabbed Bonnie by the hand and yanked her from the room. The girl flashed me a smile and a lascivious wink on the way out.

  Sweating and gasping, I slumped against the door. I had lost control of my voice! Every thought that flashed into my brain was going straight out my mouth! What was wrong with me?