Author’s Note

This is a post-Roe body horror, because writing is how writers process things. Go figure. About 7,500 words.

CW: Body horror, medical trauma, religious trauma, violence, blood and gore, language.

My Body

	John regained some sense of himself when the lights came on. Pain followed. Raw and sharp. Hot. He moved, and it stabbed him, a white bolt through his abdomen. 
	“John?” 
	The voice pulled him from the depths of that formless dark. He began to feel more of his body, the bed beneath him, the blanket. He heard the beeps and whir of machinery. A hospital?  
	“What…what happened?” he managed to ask. His lips felt clumsy. 
	“A miracle, John,” the voice answered. It was a man’s voice, not one he recognized. 
	“…accident?” he mumbled. 
	“Oh, no, nothing like that.” 
	Images of his vacation began to come back to him, his bus trip across the West with… 
  “Claire!” he gasped, his eyes opening, the light shining in, blurry and bright. “Where’s Claire? Is she—”
	“Easy!” Hands touched him, soothing. “Claire is fine. She’s here.” 
	Then why wasn’t she saying anything? His eyes were closed again. He tried to rise, and the pain doubled him up again. 
	“You have an abdominal suture, John.” The hands grew tighter on him. “Do not try to sit up. You will rupture.”  
	He lay gasping and panting on the bed, the linens damp beneath him, the top sheet down at his waist. 
	“Try to relax, I will help you sit up.” 
	A motor sounded, and the head of the bed began to rise, folding at the middle, sitting him up. It did not hurt like trying to sit up under his own power, but he did feel his abdomen swell. There was a fullness there. Unyielding and strange. 
	His squinting eyes began to take in the room. The more he saw, the less sense any of it made. While the bed was clearly a hospital bed, with its guardrails and buttons, the room was not a hospital room. The walls were plastic sheeting, hung from metal frames, the ceiling high and dark. Industrial. He was in some kind of warehouse. Briefly he wondered about a makeshift hospital, the kind set up in a natural disaster, but it was too quiet. Too dark beyond the plastic. The sounds echoed. A gnawing unease took root in his stomach. What was this place? 
	A man in white scrubs stood above him, surgical mask over his face. When he saw John look up at him, his eyes crinkled with a smile. He clasped his hands together. “Ah, there we are. Awake at last.” His tone was comforting, practiced. If not for the plastic walls and the darkness beyond, it might have had the intended effect. 
	John’s unease grew. “Who are you?” 
	“My name is Doctor Adam,” the man said, touching a gloved hand to his chest. “I performed your operation.” 
	John’s eyes dropped to the blanket, still covering much of his stomach. Part of a bandage peeked out from beneath it. It was stained with blood. 
	The spidery crawl of fear skittered across his neck, slipping over the lining of his stomach. That fullness he had felt—the white bolt of pain—it was there, beneath the bandage. He had been cut open and sewn back up. Why? 
  Even through the fear, his mind tried to rationalize what was happening. He had been hurt somehow. This doctor had saved him. That must be it. That was what happened in real life to normal people when they woke up in a hospital bed. But there were too many questions. Too much glaring wrongness to believe it. He resisted the urge to shrink away from the man who had just admitted to doing…whatever had been done to him. “What operation did I need?” 
	“You have questions, of course. There is no reason you would remember.” Doctor Adam laid a hand on John’s arm. 
	The touch was gentle, no doubt meant to comfort, but John jerked away from it. His hand caught on something, and he saw for the first time that his wrist was bound with a cloth strap to the upper guardrail of the bed. Both hands were, one on each rail. Two more straps at the foot of the bed disappeared under the blankets. His ankles, too.
	Not just cut open, but tied down. Trapped.  
	A claustrophobic, nightmarish panic threatened inside him, reached for control of his mind, set his limbs on fire. He fought it. His breath came hard and fast through his nose. 
	Doctor Adam’s face did not change so much as stilled, concern and compassion draining from it until it was blank. Empty. He glanced down at the restraints. “Ah, yes. An unfortunate necessity, I’m afraid.”  
	Necessity. What reason could there be to restrain him? John’s voice came out small and tight. “Why?” 
	Silence stretched between them. Then Adam seemed to come alive again, eyes crinkling in the mask-hidden smile. His voice was placating and reasonable. “We can’t have you opening those sutures.” 
	He patted John on the shoulder.
	The gesture was so convincing John felt that small and terrified part of him grabbing hold of it, clinging to its warmth like a life raft. He was delusional, reading into things. This man was here to help him. That was what doctors did.   
  But the flesh beneath the bandage hurt more with each waking minute, gnawing away at the reassuring voices. It felt strained, taut. A sizeable lump mounded the blanket to the left of his navel. 
	“Did I have…” He swallowed, still trying to work his way to something that made sense, “…Appendicitis?” 
	“Oh, no,” Doctor Adam said, waving away his concern. “That would be on the other side. Besides, you’re in magnificent health. It’s why you were selected.” 
	The last word sank in like an injection of ice water. “Selected for what?” he whispered. He had not meant to ask it aloud. He did not want to know anymore. He just wanted this to be a dream. To wake up. 
	“You were selected to perform a miracle,” Adam said. His eyes glittered with his hidden smile again, and at once John saw past the veneer of a compassionate bedside manner to the unnerving reverence beneath it. Too sincere, too earnest. Fanatical.
	Fear gripped John like a barbed fist. “What did you do to me?” His eyes shied away from the blanket now. Away from the bandage. From that lump that felt so full, so stretched. 
	He might never have looked, but Doctor Adam drew the covering aside, and John’s eyes moved to the bandage of their own accord. Like looking at a car wreck. A long red bloodstain streaked down toward his pelvis, arching over the swell of raised flesh. As he watched, the swell moved. 
	John screamed. His whole body convulsed, catching every limb on the cloth straps. Pain flared. He cried out again, eyes fixed on his stomach. 
There was something inside him. Something alive. His flesh bowed outward. Some stretching, tearing presence—an alien pressure that strained against his insides, threatening to rip him open. 
	“Get it out!” he screamed. “Get it out of me!” 
	“John! Calm down!”
	But calm was nowhere in sight. John was hauling against the restraints, thrashing and kicking. Pain tore at him, but his fear was worse. “Get it out!” 
	Adam spun to a tower of drawers in the corner and whirled back with a syringe his hand. 
	“No!” John screamed. “Get away!” 
	But there was no stopping him. Doctor Adam shoved John back in the bed and stuck him in the arm. A sharp pinch, then darkness came.

#
	
  “John?” 
	It was a woman’s voice. Claire’s voice. His wife was waking him, probably to tell him the bus was at its next stop. Devil’s Tower, maybe? Thunder Basin? Something in Wyoming, he thought. She would be annoyed he had fallen asleep instead of taking in the countryside, but he would argue that a little sleep was okay on vacation. It was nice to have time to sleep, even with the fear still heavy on him from something not quite remembered. 
  She said his name again. Why did she sound afraid? He was the one waking from a nightmare.
	“What is it?” he asked. “Are we at the next stop?” 
	“Wake up, John.” Her tone was serious. Urgent. 
	John opened his eyes. His mind turned for a moment, taking in the hospital bed and plastic sheeting, letting go of the image of bus seats and tourists he had expected. When it stopped its turning, it dropped him back in the nightmare he had just left. 
	The plastic sheeting, the bed. The pain. 
	“No,” he whimpered. He found Claire beside him. The sight offered little comfort. 
	She was handcuffed to a wheelchair. A tangle of clear IV tubes sprouted from the needles in her body and led away behind her beneath the plastic walls. The tubes were filled with blood. 
	“What—?” He reached for her, but the restraints held him fast. 
	“Perhaps the presence of your wife will keep you…civil?” Doctor Adam asked from the foot of the bed. He looked irritated, even affronted. His mask was gone, revealing a handsome face with delicate features. 
	 John reached as far over the guardrail as he could, and Claire pulled the wheelchair toward him with her feet until she closed her fingers around his. They were cold. Clammy. Like his. 
	“Are you okay?” he asked her. It was an absurd question. Of course she wasn’t. But what else could he say?
	Her eyes flitted to Doctor Adam, and she gave John a tilted yes-and-no nod. He squeezed her hand. Any memory of how they had gotten from their tour bus to this place was still completely lost to him, but Claire was here. She was alive, if not exactly well. That was something. 
	John turned slowly back to Adam. “What is this?” he asked, trying to keep his eyes away from the rolling mass in his stomach. What do you want from us?” 
	“As I was saying before your outburst,” Adam said, shooting John a reproachful glare, “you have been chosen for something truly special. Both of you.” 
	“What does that mean? What did you put inside me?” 
	Adam clasped his hands together, as if announcing a long-awaited gift. “Life!” 
	Images from sci-fi horror flicks raced through John’s head. He felt sick. “What kind of life?” 
	“Perfect, blameless, innocent life,” Adam breathed. “Infinite potential. A blessing from God.” 
	The language was familiar. Too familiar to ignore. But there was no way Adam could mean what John was thinking. “What exactly did you put inside me?” 
	“Not a what at all,” Adam said, shaking his head. “A who.” 
	John’s breath began to race. Claire’s grip tightened on his hand, her eyes fixed in mounting horror on his bandaged abdomen. Her mouth was open, but she seemed at a loss for what to say. 
	Doctor Adam had no such difficulties. “You are the vessel of our salvation, of the seed of our beloved Prophet. You have the honor of bearing a pure life into this world of sin, that we might all be saved.” 
	John’s head swam. This wasn’t happening. No one with the skills and training to place a human fetus inside a person would be insane enough to actually do it. “Get it out of me!” he gasped. He wasn’t sure he believed it was a child, but he knew something was in there. Something that shouldn’t be. “Please!” 
	Adam looked stricken at the thought. “That’s impossible. The child would die. He needs you.”
	“Then you shouldn’t have put it inside me!”
	“Him!” Adam hissed. His voice was cold, his eyes venomous. “This is a life you are talking about. A human life, one unsullied by the sin of this world. Entrusted to you. What kind of man just throws away a child in his care?”
	“One who never agreed to care for one!” High laughter bubbled out of some disconnected part of John. He couldn’t stop it. “You put it there! You can’t just expect this of me!”  
	Adam shook his head like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He turned back to the stack of drawers and drew out John’s wallet. He produced the driver’s license and read aloud, like some movie-lawyer reciting a particularly damning piece of evidence, “John Eric Larson, from Cottage Grove, Minnesota—organ donor.” He looked up from the license, his expression victorious. 
	John waited for more. Genuine confusion clouded his already overwrought mind. “What is that supposed to mean?” 
	“It means,” Adam said slowly, as if speaking to a particularly dull child, “that you have knowingly agreed to provide your organs to a life in need, should that need arise. It has. Our Prophet’s son has need of you.”
	The absurdity of it left John dumbstruck. His mouth worked, but nothing came out.  
	“Please!” Claire broke in. She turned her wheelchair toward Adam. “Please. Just let us go. We won’t tell anyone what you’ve done or what we’ve seen here. We’ll just go home. We’ll deal with this and you’ll never hear from us again. Please.”  
	A kind of bubble burst from around John’s mind. The fear in her voice—on her face—broke through the absurdity and the pain. Reality hit him like a slap. What was he doing? This wasn’t a hospital. He wasn’t a patient. He was a hostage. They both were. Some unstable man with medical training had kidnapped them to perform horrific experiments. And here he was, debating his captor like he might take legal action. In all likelihood, he would die here. Soon. 
	John nodded, suddenly cold. “Right, we won’t tell anyone, we promise.” 
	Adam ignored him. “Deal with this?” His disgusted gaze turned to Claire. “Such a casual phrase for killing a defenseless baby, isn’t it? There is no sin more heinous.”  
	Claire’s face went slack. She looked like someone who had picked up a rope and realized, too late, that it was a snake. Her body was tense, her eyes wild and strained. Despite what had been done to John, it seemed Claire had been through more. Seen more. John took in the IVs coming out of her, the blood moving through them, and the mechanical whirring beyond the plastic sheeting where they disappeared. 
	“Where do those tubes go?” John asked. He didn’t want to ask it—every question so far had yielded a terrifying answer—but maybe it would distract Adam long enough to find a way out of here.
	Doctor Adam glared at Claire for a moment longer, then turned back to John. “It wears on the mortal flesh to be a conduit for God.”
	Then Adam turned on his heel and left without another word. His footsteps echoed away in the empty space beyond the plastic walls. A door slammed somewhere in the distance, and John and Claire were alone in the relative silence of chirping medical equipment. 
	“Claire, wh—?” 
	Her hand snapped up against the handcuffs, stopping him with a raised finger. 
	He had never seen her so frightened. Her skin was pallid and drawn, her grip on his hand desperate, but weak. How much blood had she lost?
	“We’re not alone,” she whispered, almost too low for him to hear. 
  She jerked her head along the path of the tubes. The sheeting there was translucent, and John could just make out the shape of another hospital bed on the other side.
  As he watched, a form on the bed moved, sat up. John heard a groan of effort, and the white shape of a man reached an arm off to the side. At once, a second figure moved from the corner of the room and helped the man to his feet. He reached out his other arm to a piece of equipment beside the bed and began to wheel it along beside him, walking arm-in-arm with the second man to a slit in the sheeting. The tubes coming out of Claire’s flesh began to move, and the whirring sound grew louder. 
  A man in his seventies pushed through the plastic flaps. In stark contrast to their present circumstances, he was remarkably plain, a man in a hospital gown with salt-and-pepper hair and a soft, forgettable face. He looked like a suburban every-man, a next-door neighbor type, harmless and bland. Except for his eyes.   They were a piercing blue that seemed to see straight into John, seemed to learn everything about him in the time it took to throw a glance his way. 
  Propping him up was a wide, muscular man in military gear—some kind of body armor and a military-style rifle hanging across his chest. His face was anything but soft. He had a full unkempt beard that looked incongruous beneath a short, neat haircut. His gaze was as dispassionate as it was intense, eyes flitting about the room. Gathering. Assessing. 
  The gowned man was half-guiding, half-leaning on a machine connected to every tube coming out of Claire. Red-filled rubber tubing terminated in the machine, a four-foot tower of lights and spinning wheels and digital displays. Black opaque tubes led out the other side of its casing and into the gowned man’s arm. 
  “Welcome,” the man said once he was fully in the room. “And bless you. Could you bring me a chair, Captain? I will be fine on my own for a moment.”
The man in body armor—the Captain, it seemed—cast a warning glance at John and Claire, then disappeared back into the adjoining room. He returned a moment later with a vinyl-seated wooden chair and set it down behind the gowned man. 
  “Thank you, David.” Then, to John and Claire: “I am Isaiah. This is my flock.” He sat, accepting the help of Captain David. “I wanted to express my gratitude for your sacrifice.” 
  John and Claire said nothing. At the sight of the Captain, flashes of armed men storming the bus began to bloom in John’s memory. Something had blocked the highway—John and Claire were too far from the front to see what. The driver had taken a detour, some dirt road leading off into the high desert landscape. Then pickup trucks had driven up alongside them and forced them to stop. 
  Isaiah waited a moment longer for their response, then shrugged and continued on. “Without you, my child would have died. Without you,” he turned to Claire, “I would be dead, too.” He cast a disapproving look at his own body. “This crude flesh is nothing compared to the spirit within, I assure you. A woman is a better vessel for a child, no doubt, but you were my only blood match, so…” He smiled and shrugged. “Here we are. To each our roles.”  
  “What are you going to do with us?” John asked. “You don’t have to hurt us or…” He licked his lips, not wanting to plant any ideas in Isaiah’s head. “We don’t know where this place is or who you are. If you let us go—”
  “Go?” Isaiah asked, confused. “How could you go? You are carrying my child. You are sustaining my life. How could you go anywhere?” 
  “If…” John stammered, trying to find an answer that would satisfy this man. “If you let us go…”
  “I would die,” Isaiah finished for him. “My child would die.” His tone was flat, final. “You speak of leaving like walking through a door. It is more complicated. You are needed here.” 
  As if to underscore his point, the thing inside John shifted. Pain bolted through him, and a red wall filled his vision. Her heard himself groan somewhere beyond the thunderous agony in his ears. 
  “Ha!” Isaiah cried. “My child is strong! A fighter!” 
  “He’s going to kill me,” John said through gritted teeth. “You know that, don’t you?”  
  “Hardly!” Isaiah said. “Few have died birthing my children.” 
  Even through the pain, John heard the layers of implication. He felt suddenly ill, stomach turning over. How many people had Isaiah put through this? How many were still alive? “Few? How many is few?” 
  Isaiah waved away his concern. “Nothing beautiful comes without risk, John. But you will be fine. Trust in God, and you will be safe.”  
  But the obvious truth, that Isaiah did not care for John’s wellbeing at all, was heavy in his voice. 
  John looked at Claire. She was sagging in the wheelchair, leaning on its arms. Her grip on his hand was even weaker than it had been. How much blood had she lost? How much more could she lose?  
  “Please,” John said. “Please. Just let Claire go. I’ll stay. I’ll…uh, support…this child for as long as you want. You don’t need her.” 
  “I do need her, actually. Have you not been listening?” Isaiah tapped the machine beside him and leaned forward, trying to catch Claire’s gaze. “Take heart, my dear! This is an honor. How many people can say that they have helped sustain a true Prophet of God? Your blood will keep me alive, to continue doing God’s work here on Earth.” 
  “Look at her,” John urged. “This is wrong. You know it’s wrong. Please.”
  “Wrong?” Isaiah’s brow creased, as if in genuine confusion. Perhaps it was genuine. Somehow. “How is it wrong? I will die without her.”
  “You are draining her life. She’s dying. Please. Stop this.”
  “You see?” Isaiah said, turning his face up to the Captain. “The typical selfishness of sin. No sense of sacrifice or responsibility for those in need. I can see we will get nowhere this way. Come, David. I grow tired. Take me back to my bed.” 
  “Wait!” John said. “Wait—”
  “Enough! I will not argue over the value of my life with a man who would so blithely throw it away. A man who cannot see the inherent worth in a defenseless baby.” 
  Isaiah stood to go, looking stronger than when he had come in. He waved away David’s hands and rolled the machine into the adjoining room on his own and got back into bed. David followed. 
  “Claire!” John whispered, squeezing her hand. It had gone limp. She was slumped over the armrest of the wheelchair, her head resting on the guardrail of his bed. “Oh my God, Claire! Can you hear me?” 
  She murmured a wordless moan and raised her head. Her eyes were squinted, as if he had woken her from a deep sleep. “Wha…?”  
  Her skin looked dry. Thin. Her veins had shrunk back into her, barely visible, even where the IV needles were emptying her. How much more of this could she take? 
  He strained his mind against the drugs that had twice rendered him unconscious and tried to think of a way out of this. 
  It didn’t look good. He couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t get his wife out of that wheelchair, couldn’t do anything without the mercenary seeing it. 
  His head swam. This was insane. There was a human fetus inside him, put there by some mad fucking scientist—an ectopic pregnancy that could never produce a healthy infant. Even if it survived, it would grow, and it would kill him, just like Claire’s would have. Her brief pregnancy four years ago had resulted in the complete removal of her uterus and ovaries. It had been devastating, and now it was happening again. In a way. 
  A low scratching sound brought him back to reality. Claire’s eyes were open. She was staring down at the guardrail, intense, focused. With each scratch, the cloth strap holding John’s right hand jerked. The scratching turned to a soft click, and John understood. She was working at the knot tying the strap to the guardrail with her fingernail. 
  A faint hope bloomed in John’s chest for the first time since waking in this awful place. 
  Claire shook her head and reached a hand through the gap in the guardrail. He took it, but she shooed him away, setting to work on the knot at his wrist. 
  Ah. 
  John held his breath, watching his wife dig her nails into the knot he had thrashed into a rock-hard ball. She tugged, nails clicking as they skipped over the looped cloth. John glanced up through the plastic sheeting. No movement on the other side.  
  The next click sounded different. Softer. Claire’s eyes met John’s, and they looked down to find the knot loosened, Claire’s finger wriggling into it, prying at it, tearing it apart. His hand slipped free. 
  John’s breath caught. He froze, eyeing the partition, watching for any sign that Isaiah or David had heard. Nothing. He let out the breath, long and slow, drawing his right hand protectively to his chest. The wrist was bruised and raw, but it was his again. 
  At once the other bonds became intolerable. He dug at the knot on his left wrist, and in moments it, too, was free. But when he reached for his ankles, that fullness in his abdomen stopped him. Pain tore through his stomach, and he collapsed back on the bad, sweating and gasping, gritting his teeth against a scream. 
  It was worse than before. Whatever they had given him to dull the pain was wearing off fast, and as his mind cleared, his incision burned hotter. Worse than the pain, though, was the sudden realization that Doctor Adam was bound to return to give him another dose. 
  They would be found, half-free, and would never have this opportunity again. All because he couldn’t reach his feet.   
  Claire began to roll her wheelchair, inch by inch, toward the foot of the bed. Rubber tubing whispered along the floor, rustling the plastic sheeting. 
  She stopped. 
  They both sat, frozen and listening. 
  Claire moved again. The tubing caught on a fold in the plastic wall, letting out a low crackling sound. Claire stopped. Her eyes went wide, and John was sure she had noticed something in the other room, some sign that she had been spotted. But she did not turn that way. Instead, she began to roll her way back toward the head of the bed. 
  She saw his what are you doing look and answered it with a meaningful glance down at the wheelchair. John leaned gingerly over the guardrail and followed her finger down to the base of the armrests. The brass nub of a spring-pin gleamed against the black metal. 
  The armrests were removable. 
  John snaked his arm through the guardrail and motioned for Claire to pull upward as he pinched the spring-pin. The armrest rose a quarter of an inch and stopped, the back end still attached. He found the release on the back post and the armrest lifted away. Claire set it gently in her lap, careful not to rattle her handcuff chains, and undid the other side herself. 
  She could get up. She could run. A soft, warm swell of hope rose in John’s stomach. 
  It didn’t last. 
  There is a man with a gun in the other room, and you think you’re going to get out of here because you and Claire got your arms free? You can barely move, and she is nearly dead from blood loss.
  But what was he supposed to do? Give up? Lie back and watch Claire die? Let this twisted doctor grow a fetus inside him, waiting for it to rip him apart? No. 
There seemed to be no quit in Claire either. She rolled herself to the foot of the bed, controlling the tubes with her freed hand to avoid the sheeting, and untied his right foot. Then she reached across the bed and untied the left. 
  The tubing lifted as she moved, raising the sheeting from the floor. Soft crackles rose in the air with it. John’s skin went cold at the sound. Maybe the machine whirring next to Isaiah’s head would be enough to keep him from hearing it. But what if he saw it? Felt it? John watched the recumbent form in the bed. He could see the tubing wiggle on the other side of the wall, a treacherous snake writhing with news of their attempts at escape. It swayed, whispered softly against the plastic. Then it settled back down to the floor. Claire hid his feet with the blanket and pushed herself back to his side. 
  All the while, the other room was quiet and still. John let a minute pass before he let himself breathe normally again. 
  “What now?” he whispered. Claire seemed to have all the good ideas, no sense leaving that well untapped. 
  She looked around, then nodded to the plastic flap Doctor Adam had walked through. “We just…walk out?” Her lips twisted in a sardonic smile, and she shrugged. 
  John was about to protest, then wondered whether he should. They were both free. She could remove her needles and leave the tubes on the floor. It might take a while for Isaiah to notice there wasn’t new blood coming into his machine. If they were quiet enough to avoid catching David’s attention, maybe they could just sneak out. 
  Claire saw John considering it. She raised an eyebrow. “Can you stand?” she asked. “Can you walk?”
  “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “Can you?”
  “I don’t know.” 
  A lot of unknowns in this plan. Even so, to do nothing was worse. “Let’s try.” 
  He found the guardrail release lever and lowered the rail gently down and out of the way. 
  Claire’s hand slipped into his. He turned to her, and she gave him an encouraging smile. She looked so tired. So afraid. He had to get her out of here. 
  “I love you,” he whispered, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. It hurt, but the feather-light touch of the floor against his feet felt like pure freedom. 
He braced himself on his hands and scooted forward. More pain. More weight on his own legs. 
  An alarm blared, jolting him upright. His legs gave out and he fell back onto the bed. The sound seemed to come from everywhere, piercing and shrill, inescapable. He turned to see a light flashing on the right guardrail, the image of a stick figure lying in bed shining an angry red. He also saw Captain David storming into the room. 
  The man looked like judgment. Grim and terrible. 
  “Wait!” John groaned. 
  David drew a pistol from his belt holster and pointed it casually at John’s face. With his other hand, the mercenary flipped open the plastic casing on the rail at the foot of the bed and pushed a button. The siren stopped.
  “Bed alarm,” David said. “Keeps confused patients from wandering off.” He pushed another button and closed the casing. “You do realize that we only need to keep you alive, right? Not unharmed. Not whole. Just alive.” He tapped the gun against his chin, considering John. “A man can live without his legs, for example.” He tilted the gun as if weighing it, then tapped his chin again. “Do you think I have enough bullets to shoot one of yours off?”
  A wave of nausea swept through John. “Please,” he said, tears blurring his vision. Something moved in the corner of his eye. Small, slow, unimportant. All he could think about was hot bullets cutting through his legs. Of spending his last days in mutilated agony before this sick experiment finally killed him. A shape rose up beside David. Claire.
  The mercenary didn’t see her. He was staring down at John, lost in what he was planning to do. His lips twisted in a sadistic smile. 
  When he opened his mouth to speak again, Claire swung the arms of the wheelchair into his face. Metal struck metal. The gun went off with a deafening bang. Red and pink mist burst from David’s head, and he dropped limp onto the bed, his considerable bulk setting off the bed alarm once more. 
  “David!” Isaiah shouted from the other room. “David what happened?”
John could barely hear him. His ears rang from the gunshot, made all the worse by the siren from the bed. He hauled himself to his feet, all too aware of the foreign, living weight shifting in his abdomen. 
  Get the gun! his mind screamed. Get the gun! 
  He scrambled around the foot of the bed, searching the floor. Bits of bone, blood drops like rain. No gun. 
  “Under him!” Claire screamed over the alarm. She had fallen back into the wheelchair, too weak to stay up, pointing at David’s body where it lay slumped over the foot of the bed.
  John thought he heard something behind him, something like a door slamming, but it was quiet, distant. He grabbed David’s vest and pulled. 
Agony greeted the move. Ripping. Terrible. He sank to his knees.
  Pounding footsteps broke through the white-hot screaming in his mind. Someone was coming. 
  John forced his eyes to open and found he was still clinging to David’s vest. A knife sat on the belt beneath it. He drew it out of the sheath and turned just as   Doctor Adam pushed through the flaps of plastic sheeting. 
  Adam skidded to a stop, eyes widening at the scene before him. 
  “David!” Isaiah shouted. He stumbled into the room. “No! What have you done?” 
  John pointed the knife at Doctor Adam. “You’re going to let us out of here!” he gasped. 
  But Adam was already calm, his handsome face still, impassive. “I can’t do that,” he said, raising his hands. “There are more like David in this compound. They’re on their way.” 
  Isaiah stepped toward John and Claire. 
  “Hey!” John shouted, turning the knife on him. 
  Isaiah stopped, but he, too, had calmed. “There’s no way out of this, John.” 
Adam began backing away, toward the tower of drawers. 
  “Stop!” John gasped, trying to rise. The thing inside him moved, and he nearly dropped the knife. 
  “Nowhere to go, John,” Adam said. He opened one of the drawers and drew out a scalpel. He put it in his other hand and rummaged around until he found another syringe. “Get back in bed. You need your rest.” 
  “Fuck you.” John slid a hand under David’s body, his fingers curling around the handle of the gun. He tried to pull it out, but it was stuck under the hard, armored vest and two hundred pounds of mercenary. 
  Adam saw it. He lunged for John. 
  “No!” Isaiah screamed. 
  Adam stopped. His obedience was immediate, without question, but his mind seemed to need a moment longer to take in the why of it. His eyes widened.  
  John had turned the knife on himself. The tip was pressed against his bandage, firmly enough that new blood was seeping out over the blade. 
  “I told you,” John said. “You’re going to let us out of here.”  
  “John…” Adam said. “Be reasonable.” 
  “Do as he says!” Isaiah shouted. “Let them go!”
  Adam looked taken aback. He cast a beseeching look at his Prophet. “But, Father Isaiah—”
  “No! That is my son in there! Unborn and pure!”
  John pulled at the gun again, and Adam took another step toward him. 
  “Adam!” Isaiah shouted, furious at Adam’s insubordination. “No!”
  “If he gets that gun he is going to kill both of us, Father!” 
  “Better us than my boy! He is our future!”
  John could see doubt creeping over Adam’s face. “Where are your convictions now, Adam?” 
  He pulled the gun free. 
  Adam came for him, and Isaiah lunged for Adam. They collided, crashing into  John and falling on top of him. John felt the knife pierce his flesh, driven deep into the thing they had sewn inside him. Isaiah was screaming, grabbing at Adam’s clothes. 
  The gun went off. Adam stiffened. 
  “No, no, no!” Isaiah cried. He pushed Adam off of John and stared down at the knife. It had been driven to the hilt, skewering the lump of flesh beneath the bandage. 
  Adam groaned, hands pressed tight to his stomach. Blood flowed freely between his fingers.
  “Murderer!” Isaiah screamed. “You fucking devil!” He grabbed for the gun. 
  John was too weak to stop him. He could feel the blade inside him, all the way through him. The pain was enormous, a mountain of agony, crushing him. He might as well have been a child for all the fight he could put up. The gun slipped in his grasp.  
  Something clanged against Isaiah’s head, whipping it around. His grip faltered with a cry. 
  John’s eyes rolled up to find Claire standing over them, teeth bared, face drawn with strain. She swung the arms of the wheelchair into Isaiah’s head again, knocking him off of John, screaming and battering him over and over. Hollow cracks sounded in the small room, each blow denting the old man’s skull, his arms, his ribs. He stopped struggling, stopped crying out. Stopped moving at all. She bore down on him, beating his lifeless body until she couldn’t raise the armrests again. Then she collapsed. 
  “Claire!” John gasped. “Claire, we have to go.” 
  She gulped in huge breaths, her eyes glazed over. He wasn’t sure she heard him at all. 
  Somehow, John found the strength to stand. It was a terrible process, the knife punishing every movement. Only Adam’s threat of more mercenary types could keep him moving. At last, he was on his feet. He held onto the bed, panting and sweating. 
  It was then that he noticed the radio at Adam’s belt. He pointed the gun at the doctor. “Call them off,” he said. 
  Adam winced up at him from his place on the floor. “What?”
  “Tell them David shot me in the leg,” John growled. “For fun. Or because I snored. Tell them Isaiah is pissed and he wants some peace and quiet. He’s not to be disturbed. Tell them.” 
  “If I do, will you let me live?” 
  “I just want to leave,” John said. “I just want to get my wife out of here.” 
  “Promise me,” Adam said. 
  “I promise if you fuck it up I’ll shoot you in the leg as many times as I can before they get here. I’ll see if I can shoot it off.” David’s words coming out of his mouth. He didn’t mind.
  Adam stared up into his face, and John could tell by the way the doctor’s expression turned hopeless and fearful that he believed it. He pulled the radio from his belt with a cry and gathered himself before relaying the message. He did just as John directed. When he finished, John took the radio and tossed it through one of the flap doors. Then he shot Adam in the thigh. Adam screamed. Before the echo resolved in the big empty space, John shot his other thigh. More screams. Adam writhed and moaned on the floor. 
  John felt nothing at all. 
  He hauled Claire to her feet, and they hobbled together through the flaps and out onto a nearly empty factory floor. Metal shelves spanned the length of one wall. Jar upon jar lined the shelves, and as they walked their way toward the exit sign glowing in far corner, the contents became terribly clear. 
Fetuses hung suspended in the jars, ranging from the size of a peanut to that of a man’s fist. Dozens. Hundreds. 
  “Oh my god,” Claire whispered. 
  “Don’t look,” John said, trying not to think about where the eggs had come from, how they had been fertilized. “Just keep moving. We’re almost out.” 
  They pushed through the door into blinding daylight. Fresh, cool air touched John’s skin. When his eyes adjusted, he found a cracked and disused parking lot leading to an even worse looking road. It disappeared over a sandy hill littered with trash and Wyoming desert scrub. Four pickup trucks sat in the parking lot. So did the tour bus. Reddish brown spattered the windows on the inside. 
  Claire and John shared a horrified look, then made their way to the nearest pickup as quickly as they could manage. 
  The doors were unlocked, the keys unguarded in the sun visor. “Fucking Wyoming,” John muttered as he hauled himself into the driver’s seat. Claire did the same on the other side. 
  The truck started without so much as a cough of protest, and John drove up the road, not knowing where he was going but knowing he wanted to get as far away as possible. That was all that mattered. 
  “Was that real?” Claire asked. She was staring down at her hands, wrists bleeding from where the cuffs had bitten into her. They were still there, still attached to the wheelchair armrests. 
  Still, despite all that evidence, John understood what she was asking. “Yes,” he said. The knife in his stomach was his own reminder. It seemed the blade hadn’t hit anything major, the thing they had forced inside him taking the brunt of it. He began to shake. It was over. The thing was dead, and all he felt was relief.  
  They drove across a cattle gate, past a sign too sun-bleached to read, and turned onto a dirt road. He chose a direction at random. What else was he to do? 
They drove in silence for a while, following turn after turn, until the dirt road turned to gravel, then to pavement. John saw a sign for a state highway when the world began to darken. 
  “John?” Claire asked. 
  Her voice was distant. Quiet. The tires hit the rumble strip on the side of the road, and he jolted upright, turning the wheel. He overcorrected, swerving into the other lane. 
  “John!”
  He turned the wheel again, and then the world itself was turning. Glass flew, thunder rumbled. Then nothing. 
  John woke to a flashlight in his face, the multi-colored lights of an ambulance flashing above him. It was dark. Everything hurt.
  “Claire,” he croaked. 
  “Can you tell me your name, sir?” the man holding the flashlight asked. 
  “John.” 
  “Okay, John, we’re gonna get you out of there. You’re going to be all right.” 
The EMTs pulled him carefully from the truck onto a spine board, strapping him down tight. “You could have damage to your spine,” one of them said. “It’s important that you don’t move.” 
  “Where’s Claire?” John asked. 
  “The woman you were with was injured, too. We’re getting her onto a spine board now.” 
  The cold of the night was seeping into him. Someone wrapped him in a blanket and slid him onto a gurney, then up into an ambulance. They left him there. After what seemed like an eternity, they wheeled Claire up beside him. Her head was strapped down to keep her neck still, but she rolled her eyes toward him. 
  “I’m sorry,” John whispered. How could he have let this happen? He should have noticed he wasn’t well enough to keep driving. If he had only stopped…
  “There will be plenty of time for apologies later, John,” the EMT said, climbing up after Claire and shutting the doors behind him. He slapped the wall and shouted, “Let’s move out!” 
  The ambulance crossed the lanes and started up the road. 
  “How far to the hospital?” John asked. 
  “Oh, the nearest hospital is at least a hundred miles, and the nearest serious trauma center is a lot further. Denver or Salt Lake. But don’t worry, we’ll get you where you need to go.” 
  “Is she going to be all right?” John flicked his eyes to Claire. 
  “I don’t think so, John.” The EMT put a hand on John’s shoulder and gave him a pitying look. “I’m afraid killing our Savior is not something my people can overlook.”  
  John did not fully register what the man had said for a long moment. Then a feeling like ice cold water seeped over every inch of him. “What?” 
  “Men like Prophet Isaiah don’t come along very often, John. There’s something special about them, something in the blood. But you saw the babies. We can make a new Prophet.”
  John strained against the straps of the spine board, reaching for the waistband where he had put the gun. 
  “Looking for this?” the EMT asked. He raised David’s pistol for a moment, then pressed it to Claire’s temple and pulled the trigger. 
The gun roared. Claire’s hair lifted, and blood sprayed against the wall. The ambulance swerved and veered as John screamed. 
  “What the fuck?” someone shouted from the front seat. “Warn me next time, Jeb!”
   Jeb rolled his eyes and gave John a look like do you see what I have to put up with? “Okay, Paul, I’m going to fire two more times.” He looked down at John. “Doctor Adam sends his regards.” He put a bullet in each of John’s thighs. 
  Pain rocked John out of himself. Filled him. It seemed to go on forever, but eventually, even that forever ended. The pain dulled to the point of consciousness, and Jeb patted him on the shoulder again. 
  “Don’t worry, John. It’s not over. You’re going to help us again, and you’re going to get it right this time. We’re going to have a new Prophet. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll have another. And another. No matter what it takes, we will make a world fit for God.” 
  He sighed with a smile, like a man utterly content. “Plenty of time, John. Plenty of time for miracles.” 

Paul R Monarch
Written in Minnesota
January 2023-December 2023