She gasped. She could have dropped from a heart attack right then and there and she would have been grateful. He wasn’t excited yet, his penis so ruined with scabbed flesh that it looked like a dog turd that had been sitting in the yard for a day.
Lindsay shook. She whimpered. Shock began seeping in, numbing her body and causing her consciousness to drift away.
“Oh yeah,” Dr. Scabs cooed. “I want to see fear in your eyes. I want to hear your cries of agony, your whimpers of despair.”
Lindsay had been afraid when she had to be saved with the Jaws of Life after a bad car wreck several years ago, afraid of the dark as a child, but this was a new kind of fear, deep and incomprehensible.
As he became erect, the scabs—all of which had fused together to form a sort of cast around his penis—cracked apart, dripping blood onto the floor. Dr. Scabs cringed at the pain, but the maniacal grin never faltered. His breathing escalated as his eyes fluttered in his head. He took great pleasure in this most absurd infliction of pain.
When he was ready he said to Lindsay, “Now you come over here and give the doctor some medicine.”
Even in her semi-catatonic state Lindsay shook her head from side to side, damned if she was going to give this sick fuck a blowjob. Scabs stepped closer as Lindsay retreated.
“Would you rather have this,” said Dr. Scabs, holding up the syringe. “You’ll get an injection one way or the other. Which will it be, sweetheart?”
Backed against a wall, Lindsay had nowhere to go. Handlebar stood to one side of her so she couldn’t get away.
“Hold her,” said Dr. Scabs.
Handlebar grabbed Lindsay as she flailed and screamed. On her knees, he pinned her legs with his and pulled her arms behind her back in a sort of chokehold without actually choking her.
Dr. Scabs slapped her again, which startled Lindsay, causing her to stop her flailing and look at him wide-eyed, mouth agape, just as Dr. Scabs had planned. He thrust his festering erection into her mouth and tipped his head back, eyes closed.
Lindsay’s swiveling head mimicked the task at hand, to Dr. Scabs’ delight. He moaned with pleasure as she gagged out cries of horror and repulsion. Handlebar held her tight and smiled a black tooth grin.
Everything horrible that Lindsay had ever thought of or seen in her entire life couldn’t have prepared her for this torturous act. All the horrible stories she saw on the news, the ‘what’s grosser than gross’ jokes she’d heard as a school girl—falling into a septic tank head first with your mouth open!—the most vile and violent horror films her ex had enjoyed watching, none of it compared to this.
The sounds in the room, the taste of blood and pus in her mouth, the smell of soot, sweat, and nastiness; it all swirled together in her tumultuous mind like every color in the spectrum until the blend turned black.
Lindsay’s jaws clamped tight. Dr. Scabs screamed, pulling out of her grip with such animation that her clenched teeth pulled the scabby sheath off leaving Dr. Scabs with something flaccid and red between his legs.
When Handlebar saw what she did to Dr. Scabs, his eyes bugged out of his head and he loosened his grip. Lindsay leaped out of Handlebar’s arms. He reached for her, but she used the heel of her foot to kick him in the face. Fueled by meth, he was up quickly, emitting a bizarre caw like some exotic bird. He grabbed Lindsay by the neck and slammed her to the floor.
Just as her swooning head was drifting into darkness, she saw Dr. Scabs rise above her, one hand gripping his burning groin, the other holding the syringe. He was still smiling, which greatly disturbed Lindsay. He slammed the needle into her arm and depressed the plunger. She felt her appendage tingle and burn.
Blackness enfolded Lindsay as she passed out of consciousness.
~
Lindsay woke into a world of pain.
Her body felt old, feeble and throbbing with infection. The slightest movement, such as opening her eyes, sent bolts of pain into her brain.
The ache in her arm served as a reminder of where she was and what had been done to her. Shifting the arm in question, pain assaulted her so strongly that she wouldn’t have been surprised if her arm fell off. The point of injection was swollen and red. It looked like a tiny volcano made of welted flesh, erupting with pus rather than lava. The rest of her arm was sickly thin and lined with purple and black veins that gently throbbed with her pulse. Her legs, similar to her arms, felt so frail that she was frightened they wouldn’t hold her weight.
Head woozy, Lindsay eyed her surroundings. Odors assaulted her, so heavy that she could taste the ambiance of the room. It smelled of body odor and burning plastic, decay and human waste. Blinking her eyes, she focused on something that was making obnoxious grunting and gurgling sounds.
As things came into focus, fragments of recent memory hit Lindsay’s mind like darts, disjointed, yet sticking very clearly. She was supposed to be at Chloe’s house drinking away the memory of her ex.
Her eyes weren’t adjusting. They seemed to have some sort of film that she couldn’t blink away. The sounds were sickening, and they came from the fuzzy blobs across the room.
“She’s waking up,” said a voice like shards of glass.
Lindsay shivered, frantically blinking her eyes. More memories hit the dartboard of her mind: Dr. Scabs, the man in the alley with a slit throat, the smell of soot. Panic seized her.
She remembered talk of the hags.
“She’s changing...fast,” said another in a slurred voice.
“Good,” said a third.
Lifting her arm was like wading through sludge. For a moment, Lindsay thought she had been tied down, but then her limp hand clumsily met her face and she realized that it was more like paralysis. She tried to rub her eyes of the film that clouded her vision, numb fingers thumping her numb face as if she were severely disabled. Laughter bubbled from the blobs across the room.
Clenching and unclenching her hands, Lindsay began to work through the numbness into the pain the rest of her body felt. Rubbing the gelatinous muck from her eyes, things started to become clear. She then realized how wrong everything felt. As she took in deep, strained breaths, it felt as if there were a million tiny holes in her lungs. At the sight of her arms and legs she could have fainted, but as her body permutated, so did her mind.
The disjointed laughter died down into mumbling and slurs as if the severely inebriated were conducting a conversation.
Lindsay’s head glided up from the rank thing she was devolving into to see just what was laughing and taunting her from across the room. Her eyes widened. They seemed amused by her shocked reaction to their presence.
They sat in absurd thrones made of rebar and metal refuse intricately welded together. The hags were monstrous, skinny things that only resembled humans due to the structure of their bodies. They were naked and sitting spread eagled, which was just about the most repulsive thing Lindsay had ever seen, considering the state of their genitalia, which looked like dried sea anemones with thick, rope-like hair. They had severely elongated faces covered in pimples and deep pockmarks. One of them had a stomach that was bloated and fit to burst. Groaning and sighing, they stared at Lindsay with red glossy eyes.
“Come here, slave,” the pregnant hag demanded.
One of the other hags grabbed an absurd looking glass pipe from a table near her throne. It was then that Lindsay noticed the mouth on her neck as it opened and drooled from a toothless maw sheathed in cracked lips. She placed the pipe to her neck-mouth, took a lighter, and produced a flame to the black underbelly of the glass. She made a wheezing sound as her chest expanded and the meth smoke was pulled into her lungs. She pulled the pipe from her strange mouth and held in the smoke for what seemed like minutes before exhaling from both of her mouths and several orifices on her face around her eyes, and where a nose should have been.
“Slave,” said the pregnant hag, “you come over here now. I’m hungry.”
Lindsay attempted to stand, but her body was malformed and foreign.
Her legs buckled and she hit the floor face first to the pleasure of the hags who laughed until they choked and coughed.
Lindsay gurgled out an attempt to speak. She felt her swollen uvula catching in her throat. Even her mouth felt different, and every movement brought forth the pain of her transformation.
She tried speaking again and again until she found her voice, though it was nothing she had ever heard before. It was as if she was speaking through someone else’s mouth.
“Why?” was all she could ask of them.
“Because I’m hungry!” screamed the pregnant hag.
Another hag spoke up. “You are our slave and you’ll...do...what we say.” Her words were slurred and distant, sometimes with lengthy pauses, not from lack of breath, but something more akin to toxicity. “Meredith’s pregs...and she’s hungry...and you’d better get her what she wants.”
Lindsay could have cried, could have cracked up, could have taken a shard of glass and slit her throat, only she didn’t know what she was anymore. Even her brain was different, and though she could remember the events that brought her here, the conversation she had with Jared when he told her that she was a bitch and too possessive, her wanting so badly to slam the phone like when she was a teenager but unable to slam a cell phone. She remembered everything from the Minnie Mouse piñata at her fourth birthday to her first kiss, and yet there was something so terribly wrong with her mind.
She stood on wobbly legs and approached the hags. At a somewhat comfortable distance she stood as if awaiting an order. Her whole equilibrium was off. It felt as if at any moment she would fall to the ground like a house of cards in the breeze.
“I’m hungry,” grunted the pregnant hag.
“Wha—” Lindsay choked on a syllable that sounded foreign and terrible from her mouth. “What do you want?”
“Get Scabs. He’s got food. You’re fuckin’ useless!”
Lindsay was confused. How the hell was she supposed to find Dr. Scabs?
After a moment of silence, the pregnant hag screamed, “SCABS! WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?”
A door opened. Dr. Scabs walked into the room, though he didn’t appear to have a sense of urgency. He was quite jovial and sauntered with a gait of confidence Lindsay didn’t understand considering what she’d done to him.
“Teach this bitch how to give us food!” one of the hags screamed.
“You need a refill, huh?” said Dr. Scabs.
“The pregnant hag’s eyes deepened in her oblong face. She held out her long, gnarled arms. There was movement within the arms. Like their necks, their arms had tiny mouths that opened and closed as if trying to bite at something.
Scabs looked at Lindsay. “You,” he said. “You have a responsibility now, you know. You are now property of the hags. All of them.”
Lindsay looked to the three misshapen beings that sat in the odd thrones. “Them?”
“Yes, Beth, Carrie, and Meredith. But also all the others. There are hags all over El Cajon. They come through here from time to time, traveling on moonless nights. You will do what they ask. You will get them what they want, and if you’re lucky enough, you will become one of them...if they allow you that honor.”
“Honor? This is Hell.”
Scabs laughed. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, honey pie? No. This is the underground in El Cajon.”
“What?”
“The drug trade, baby. This is it.”
“But, don’t drugs come from Mexico?”
“Fuck Mexico! That’s the cheap shit. I have developed the best meth in the world, and the hags...you could almost call them the godmothers of El Cajon, the result of a toxic batch of dope that, uh—” he scratched at a large, unruly scab on his cheek “—altered their DNA. I created them, but they’ve mutated into a species all their own, strong but helplessly addicted. They pull the strings, and we’re crushing the competition.”
Lindsay looked at them again. They were alien and wasted, gurgling and grunting, sighing and twitching, picking things off their abused flesh. How they could run a drug trade much less a hotdog stand was beyond Lindsay.
There was a sickening noise from the throne of hags as the pregnant one stood from her perch. She lifted herself off of what looked like a metal turkey baster or some kind of oversized needle protruding upward from her seat, connected to a small keg beneath the chair. All of the hag’s chairs were similarly equipped.
“Are those...?”
Lindsay’s pain had reduced to a dull ache. She would tell herself that she had to get out of there, had to find a door that would lead her to the alley, but her want to escape was equaled with an uncanny sense of question and wonder. Learning about the underground of El Cajon, her mind sunk deeper into that pool of wonder until the natural instinct to flee was stifled.
“Enough bullshit,” said the pregnant hag, now standing. There was something dripping from between her legs that looked like a pale shade of blood. “I’m fucking hungry! Give me my fix before I rip your head off and shit down your throat, you fucking bitch!”
“She needs some of my special dope,” said Scabs. “There’s some in the freezer. The blue crystal. Use a spoon and melt down several grams. You don’t need a syringe. The Hags have developed mouths all over their bodies where the liquid dope can be administered. Only then will Meredith be pleased. The kegs provide them with a steady suppository of lightweight dope, but she has a hunger on her. Gotta feed the baby and all.”
The feeling that she was out of place traveled further and further from Lindsay’s mind. Something twisted, causing her to feel a sense of understanding and compassion for the pregnant hag. Her memories were on the fade, replaced with a whole new heinous perception.
“Where’s the freezer?” asked Lindsay.
Meredith screeched as she lunged toward Lindsay with one of her lanky arms outstretched, but before she could wrangle Lindsay’s neck, she craned forward and collapsed on the floor grasping her swollen belly.
“A hag’s childbirth can be a nasty experience,” said Scabs. “You’d better get her anything she asks or she’ll rip you apart.”
Meredith cried and screamed and flailed on the ground. Her belly quivered and shifted as the baby pushed at the womb with uncanny strength.
The other two hags, Beth and Carrie, rose from their thrones, groaning as they pulled themselves off of their drug spikes. They rushed to their fallen comrade, worry in their strange eyes, asses dripping a pink solution of blood and liquid dope.
There was nothing they could do but watch as the baby was delivered, or rather as it delivered itself. Through sobs and cries Meredith demanded that Lindsay retrieve the dope.
Just as Lindsay was going to search the room for the drugs, Meredith threw her head back and yelled so loud her throat went hoarse. Beth and Carrie grabbed Meredith’s legs and pulled them apart, the only thing they could do to assist her monstrous labor. Just then a small arm with tiny razor-like nails ripped through her vagina in a wash of blood. The hand opened and closed as if searching for something to grab onto that would allow it to pull itself out of the womb. There was a bump on her greasy, mottled belly that erupted like a giant zit from which the other hand emerged, frantically ripping and tearing its mother’s belly into shreds.
Meredith hemorrhaged. Blood poured from her belly and vagina. The arms drew themselves back inside her as the baby decided the best method of birth was the crude cesarean section. Its head popped through the bloody tissue that was Mother’s belly, eyes closed tight from the blaring light, head oblong and deformed.
Lindsay gasped. The reality that she once knew—what was being drawn away from her as Dr. Scabs’ injection changed her—flooded back, overwhelming her mind with repulsion at the thing that clumsily climbed from the dying hag’s womb, the antithesis of a beautiful child birth.
As much as she wanted to stop herself, she’d temporarily lost control as she lifted her sickly foot and kicked the baby in its crooked face. The baby was strong, and kicking it was lik
e kicking a brick. Though her foot ached, Lindsay kicked again with everything she had. In slow motion the awkward face flung upward contorting further, the force of the kick throwing the entire little body from the bloody stomach of its mother, launching it several feet away where it lay lifeless.
The two remaining hags hissed, but Lindsay was already in retreat. She pushed past Dr. Scabs who seemed to be in a state of shock, appalled at her reaction. Not knowing where she was or what she would confront, Lindsay reached the first door she saw and opened it into the room that stunk of soot and body odor. She slammed the door behind her and ran for the next exit in the room hoping it would lead to the alley.
She recognized Beard in a small crowd of dope fiends near the door. Dope fiends were like dogs—they could smell fear. Lindsay wasn’t herself, but she had no way of telling just how different she really looked. The junkies stared, their eyes wide from the meth and this new amazement that just walked into their smoky domain like some mangled plaything.
Lindsay passed them, their red bullfrog eyes following in silence. She reached the door without so much as a warning or threat.
This frightened her.
She could only imagine what she looked like to have shocked such degenerates. Pausing with her hand on the door handle, she looked at her arm. Now lanky and slender like bones wrapped in taut flesh, they appeared to be elongated. The roadmap of veins throbbed irregularly. With waves of adrenalin, pain assailed her once again.
Lindsay opened the door and walked outside. The air was cool and stunk of garbage and urine, but for just a moment it was sweet and lovely. The door closed behind her quite loudly. Five steps into the alley, and it opened again.
Lindsay yelped. It was Dr. Scabs in a full run. The hags waited at the door, illuminated under the brilliance of the yellow street lamp, even more horrendous than they’d appeared in the dim interior.
Taking the alley, Lindsay headed toward Chloe’s apartment building. It wasn’t far off. She took an access road from the alley to the parallel street where the entrance to the apartment building was. Dr. Scabs was on her heels.
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