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 abortifacient 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 Pit-Yakker by
BRIAN LUMLEY