by Scott Savino
And was that sweat? Was she fear-sweating?
“I’m going to be honest with you,” she said, passing the wand to one of her lab-coated friends. “It looks like there are some complications here, and for the safety of … mama,” her lips pulled up further into a smile that looked mechanical and weird, “we’re going to need to perform an early Cesarean. Perfectly routine,” she added, waving her hands between us and failing to not glance at Kaia’s gently roiling baby bump. “Catching the … complication this early means there’s a good chance of survival.”
“Is it routine to birth a baby at five months?” I asked, genuinely uncertain. It didn’t seem like routine. Even if the doctor hadn’t looked like she was on the verge of fleeing the room in quiet panic.
“It is a little early,” she admitted, “but with today’s tools there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be a complete success.”
Something niggled at the back of my mind, telling me the doctor wasn’t being straight with us, but whatever she was dancing around I couldn’t see it. I just knew the doctor didn’t usually speak that way (did she?) and I couldn’t shake the feeling something awful was hidden on that ultrasound screen.
“It’s okay,” Kaia said, giving my hand a frail squeeze. I nodded, but nothing about our situation made me feel better about either pregnancy or childbirth. If anything, it provided my fears terrifying cement.
Was it even neurosis anymore if reality made something worse than anxiety could dream up?
Another twenty minutes passed with the doctor assuring us of the safety of Cesareans and the routine of it all when an EMT entered the room followed by a gliding platform of slick steel, blue padding, and bright plastic accents. He offered us an oblivious smile sprinkled with genuine warmth. It felt wrong, though. Out of place. The vestige of a world that didn’t know the bitter bite of fear-bile clawing at the back of its throat. It was an intrusion and the EMT seemed sense it. Whether the atmosphere was palpable or he was an expert at reading faces, the way he moved between us, helping Kaia onto the … wheelie bed? The stretcher?—it suggested he realized he was an outsider in a very strange situation and he did his best not to make it worse.
“We’ve already called ahead,” the doctor said, waving the EMT ahead of us as we left the room. “But we need to get Kaia to a hospital, because we’re not really … equipped for this procedure.”
There. She did it again. Hiding something behind carefully chosen words. But I nodded like I understood, and I suppose some vague part of me did. Really what I understood was that we had no alternative and all the panic and paranoia shrieking through my body needed to take a backseat while the people I had to trust took care of my wife and our baby.
In the hall, the staff made room for us to pass, watching and whispering as we made our way to the elevator. They had no clue what was happening (not that I had much idea, either), but offered nods and sympathetic smiles to help us on our way.
Inside the elevator, clustered around Kaia and the stretcher, I fretted, still clinging to her fragile hand; the doctor smiled, tapping an anxious toe; and the EMT pressed the button for the roof.
Wait, what?
My stomach tumbled as the elevator rose, a new and previously unknown level of anxiety sending jagged agents of fear coursing through me at the unexpected deviation.
Wasn’t the ambulance on the ground level? Didn’t we need the ground to drive on? Why would we be headed up?
I didn’t have long to wonder as the elevator slowed to a stop.
There was an agonizing pause before the doors parted and a concussive gale blasted its way inside, bringing daylight and the smell of the city with it. I blinked, briefly blinded and overwhelmed by it all as hair and clothing whipped around us, but as my vision cleared I saw it. There, in the center of the roof: an active helicopter, its blades stirring up a storm.
Medevac. This one I knew, because TV.
I glanced to Kaia and swallowed around a painful lump. What in the god-awful hell had been on that ultrasound that would require a medical evacuation?
Turns out, I had plenty of time to dwell on the possibilities. The ride was as uneventful and long as it was loud. Much longer than I thought it should have been given I could have driven to two different hospitals in half the time it took us to land. But eventually we did land, and a whole medical team was there to greet us.
There were no more smiles here, though. Here it was all business. Here a gang of doctors conferred with our doctor and the nurses conferred with the EMT, taking Kaia’s vitals as they hooked her up to mobile monitors before whisking her away into the warm glow of another massive elevator.
Except for a pair of armed guards who silently ushered me along behind the chaos, no one acknowledged me.
We passed through a labyrinth of sterile halls, past rooms with numbers I didn’t see, to another elevator that took us down even further. Past rooms with symbols instead of numbers, none of which I knew. We stopped before a pair of steel doors at the end of a long hall. Kaia and her team disappeared between them and I caught a glimpse of more steel surrounded by thick plastic sheeting before the doors closed with a soft beep and red light burned in the corner.
I was escorted into a room to the right and a loud mechanical clack issued as the door closed behind us.
It was dark in there, but I didn’t need a light. The wall separating me from Kaia was filled with an enormous window and the operating room beyond cast light back into the observation room. Through a network of thin metal wires reinforcing the glass, I watched the medical team tend to various machines as they transferred Kaia to the surgical bed, checking in with each other for final prep and looking as frantic and well organized as a colony of ants.
Two men in hazmat suits stood to either side of the room, their somber hands resting on imposing black guns slung low against their hips from straps hooked over their shoulders.
I didn’t know much about Cesareans, but I knew armed guards in hazmat suits were not routine additions.
The Doctor entered. I supposed he was the lead, as he came in late wearing a face shield and a … Kevlar vest?
I moved closer to the glass. One of my guards shifted, enough to be noticed.
“Why is he wearing a vest,” I asked.
The guards were silent. Impassive.
“Why are you here?”
Silence again.
“Why do they need guns and hazmat suits for a C-section?” I couldn’t stop the shrillness from entering my voice as panic drove me to keep asking questions.
They gave me nothing.
I wanted to hit them for being so stoic, but before I could give in to my anger, movement caught my eye.
“Wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait. She’s not out,” I said as my attention returned to the operating room. Kaia writhed in obvious pain on the surgery bed and the doctor motioned nurses to hold her down.
I pounded on the glass, screaming, “She’s not out! You didn’t put her out!”
The doctor glanced up at me and made a curt gesture. One of the guards moved in and slid an arm between me and the glass, shepherding me back.
“Please remain calm.”
“Remain—are you fucking serious!? They’re going to cut open my wife while she’s awake! Kaia!” I turned back to the glass in time to see blood.
Too much blood.
Time slowed to one eternal breath as one of the nurses stumbled back from Kaia, a fountain of glistening red throbbing from his open neck.
I watched him bleed. I watched his face twist with shock and confusion as he tried to understand what had happened. I watched him stumble back as his legs and balance weakened, one hand finally rising toward the wound. Then he was falling and the air was filled with glinting steel tools as he crashed into a surgical tray.
And then he was gone.
I didn’t understand.
Time snapped back as a scream rang out and a streak of red shot across the room. One hazmat guard went down in a shuddering yellow mass.
A bloody fissure wept where his chest should have been.
The medical team scattered.
Shots ripped through doctors and nurses like tissue paper. The remaining guard backed away as the red streak sprang from one destroyed body to another, aiming for the bright yellow target.
The guards with me leapt to intervene, but by the time they’d bypassed the locks on both doors, no one was left standing.
I heard the shots as they entered, but never saw them from my place behind the glass.
Silence fell slowly with my ears ringing in the wake of all the chaos. It had all happened so fast. My eyes shifted from one bloody lump to the next, my brain sliding away from the reality of what I’d just witnessed.
Kaia, though. Kaia remained on the surgical bed, the operating lights showcasing her, putting her on display in the middle of the abattoir; a golden goddess from the waist up.
I backed away from the glass and looked toward the door. I wanted to be with Kaia.
Light peeked around the edge. The guards must have left it open in their haste.
I shuffled to the hall, numb and still unable to process what I’d seen. I found the steel doors wide open, the still-warm bodies of my former guards slumped to either side as if awaiting my entrance.
Between them, the body of our “child”.
Eight long, skeletal legs—two with wicked scythes attached—accompanied a spiny tail trailing from the meaty center of it. I couldn’t discern anything that might have been a face, but it was obviously covered in human skin. Golden tan like Kaia’s where I could see it through the blood and bullet holes.
It reminded me of a scorpion.
I didn’t understand the urge that guided me. Some dim part of me knew too much scrutiny would break whatever fragile threads were still holding me together, so I didn’t question it, either. I merely sank to my knees and gently gathered it up, folding its many boney legs into its body so I could cradle it more easily.
I sat alone with it among the dead, rocking back and forth for lord knows how long. Several minutes? An hour? Until I realized I could hear something in the silence.
Breathing.
Labored. Shallow.
I searched briefly and found only Kaia, her chest rising and falling, but barely.
I didn’t have a medical degree, but I knew there was no way to come back from what Kaia had suffered. No amount of medical help, no matter how quickly administered, could fix what had been so thoroughly destroyed.
But, I rose and carefully moved to Kaia’s side, my shoes slipping where the blood was thickest, but never enough to throw me.
“Let me see her,” Kaia gasped, extending a trembling red hand toward us.
I could see the thrill of possibility and the joy of starting a family written on Kaia’s face again. Saw a ghost of the elation we’d felt when we’d been told the in vitro treatment had been a success.
But the blood loss had been severe, her memory incomplete. She didn’t seem to remember the trauma, the violence of the birth, the horror show the ultrasound must have revealed just hours before, or the chaos that had followed. She probably couldn’t see she was just one of many shattered bodies scattered around the room. Or maybe she didn’t care. All she seemed to care about was that the baby was out, and she didn’t have any more time.
“Please,” Kaia wheezed, a wet, rattling sound proving the depth of the damage.
I hesitated, uncertain I should be handing over the limp body of the thing we had once believed would be our child, but my wife’s distress only grew the longer it took me to respond, so I relented.
I was gentle, almost tender in passing the mangled remains of our offspring to my wife’s failing embrace.
“Taylor,” Kaia breathed, shifting its crumpled limbs in a futile attempt to make it more comfortable.
I watched her fuss with the body as the light slowly dimmed from her eyes. Tears welled, and it didn’t seem to matter how many limbs she shifted; whatever Kaia saw, it was still our baby and her love for it was pure.
Then Kaia reached for me, her feeble hand grasping blindly until I found it and held fast. She guided our hands to the lifeless husk between us.
Kaia smiled. That warm, infectious smile that always told me everything would be all right.
“You have each other now,” she managed around a handful of staccato breaths.
This was it. Our last moment together.
I gently squeezed her rapidly cooling fingers as the tears fell freely, but I kept them from my voice. “Yeah,” I said. “Taylor and me. We’ll be just fine.”
“I love you, angel,” Kaia whispered.
“I love you, too, baby.” I swallowed the sob fighting to become a scream.
And then I watched as Kaia’s smile slowly faded, strength and life and breath finally leaving her.
I had lied. Of course I had. I wouldn’t be “just fine” without her. I wouldn’t ever be fine again, but Kaia didn’t need to know that. Or the fact that our child, our Taylor, had been a Cronenbergian nightmare, killed within minutes of its birth.
She needed to know we’d be fine, that we’d survive together without her. And with no time left for anything but love, I refused to deny her that tiny slice of peace.
Curios and More
FELIX FLYNN
MORNING HAD BROKEN COLD AND apathetic in the city when Alex brought it up. They had been perched on the front stoop of the run-down apartment building they lived in as Gabe lit up a cigarette he’d pulled from a pack his momma would never miss.
“Still sounds like fairytale trash,” he’d said dismissively, scuffing a shoe on the concrete steps as a couple had walked past them. The man had slipped an arm around his lady’s waist to pull her close. She’d clutched the strap of her purse. They’d both pointedly avoided eye contact.
Gabe had frowned, blowing out a stream of smoke in their direction.
“I dunno,” Alex had said. “Cherice said her cousin Tanya went looking for this place. It got Tanya the hell out of here.” Alex had rubbed the back of his neck, brow creasing, lips pulling down. “We’re about to graduate. We could get out too. Not get stuck here like our families did, ya know? You could …” Alex had stopped short, dropped his hands to brace them on the steps and look to the sky. “Cherice said you just gotta focus on what you’re looking for and it should appear.”
Gabe had grunted in reply and that had been the end of it. Or so he’d thought. Until they’d gotten out of school and Alex hadn’t headed for home. He’d taken them further downtown, started winding them through alleys with his jaw set. There was a mix of determination and worry in his gaze that Gabe recognized. It was the same look Alex always wore when they were facing down a challenge Alex didn’t plan on backing down from. Only this time it seemed different. More dogged. It reminded Gabe of the pit bull the guy in 4B owned, how sometimes he’d see it on the stoop next to its owner tearing intently at a piece of rawhide.
Together, the two boys wound their way through slim, tilted back alleys, their ratty sneakers slapping moist pavement as they were cast in cold shade from the high buildings blocking out the sun around them. The city was busy, but they hadn’t seen another person for a while and even the blaring cacophony of traffic and horns and yelling were dulled as if being heard through a cotton filter. The only sounds that were clear were their footsteps and the occasional hiss from old steam pipes.
Minutes stretched on to an hour and Alex’s concentrated expression waned to disappointment. It was like watching a kid find out Santa wasn’t real.