immediately.
Mommy bled too. Mommy bled because we couldn't afford another child. Mommy bled because the child wasn't Daddy's.
Todd remembered that tiny head with the wire hanger poked through the eye socket being dragged out of his mother's hairy snatch. He shoved the hanger in deeper and the girl jerked and bucked screaming against the tape over her mouth. Rocking back and forth against the chair back and almost toppling the chair onto the floor.
'This is the best way. This is how my mommy did it. But if you don't stay still and let me get this parasite out of you, I'm going to have to cut it right out of your uterus.'
The girl's legs shook. Her body trembled. But she didn't try to knock the chair over again.
Blood poured from the young woman's vagina. As Todd began driving the hanger in and out of her with greater and greater force the woman began to jerk back and forth and slam herself against the back of her chair. The blood continued to flow out of her but now some of the blood was chunky. Bloody globs dripped from her snatch and plopped onto the floor. It looked like chili meat, like chunks of carne asada in a red enchilada sauce. Todd's stomach was calm this time as he continued to plunge her vagina with the hanger, removing bits of fetal tissue that looked like beef stew. Even after he had removed the hanger, blood and pulp continued to drip from her vagina onto the floor.
Todd grabbed the big woman with the generous breasts and put the gun to her temple. She was further along than all the other women. She looked as if she was ready to give birth at any second. Todd didn't think he was going to need the hanger for her.
He flipped her bathrobe up over her head revealing her naked ass then bent her over the kitchen sink. He pushed the barrel of the revolver into her right cheek.
'You fucking move. You fucking die. Do you understand?'
He reached into a rack on the side of the sink and pulled out a steak knife. He knelt down and sawed in half the tape securing her ankles together. Then he pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of his messenger bag and slipped them onto his hands. He used what looked like fried chicken grease from a pot that was sitting in the sink to lube up his fingers.
Todd kept the gun pressed into the big woman's cheek as he eased one finger then two then three then his entire hand into her vagina. She screamed and wept and moaned and cursed as Todd pushed his hand deeper inside of her. She bled profusely, as Todd's arm disappeared inside her up to the elbow. Todd pushed his fingers through the woman's cervix until he felt what he thought was the baby's head. He seized it and pulled.
Something squirmed in his hands. The big woman was sweating and screaming and shaking as Todd slowly dragged a nearly fully developed fetus from her womb. Her vagina split and tore as the baby's head emerged in a gush of blood and amniotic fluid that pooled on the floor between her feet. Her legs buckled and she started to fall.
'If you drop, you'll land on your baby and kill it. Then I'll kill you.'
The woman straightened her legs and held herself up. Todd grabbed the baby's head with both hands now and jerked hard as if he was trying to decapitate the infant while it was still inside its mother. The baby spilled out of the woman and fell to the floor, still attached to its mother. Todd thought about how he'd killed his own baby. If he could do that to his own child, if his mother could kill his brother in the womb, he couldn't show mercy to anyone else's child. Todd raised his shoe and stomped down on the baby's head, rupturing it like a rotten cantaloupe and squirting blood and brain matter out of its ears. He threw the child's mother to the floor with the umbilical cord still trailing out of her vagina attached to her murdered child. The woman fell beside her child, hitting the floor face first into her child's brain tissue and blood mixed with her own blood and fluids. Todd turned to the rest of the women and picked up the hangar again.
He pulled three more of the mothers-to-be from where they huddled in the corner of the room and pushed them down into the three remaining kitchen chairs, releasing their ankles and securing them instead to the chair legs. He then cut off their sweatpants, pajama pants, and panties. The first one had taken almost twenty minutes but Todd had the hang of it now.
Again and again he knelt between the thighs of the women and thrust the hanger up inside them, through their cervix into the womb, jerking and pulling, tearing and ripping their insides, as he fished around for the fetuses inside of them and tore them out of them piece by piece.
The kitchen floor looked like the floor of a slaughterhouse. It was covered in blood and clumps of flesh and tissue.
There were some parts that were clearly arms or legs or heads or torsos, so small that they resembled broken toys but they had all once been alive and would have been born and grown up to pollute the earth with their wastes and drain it of its resources had Todd not done what had to be done.
Todd stood back and looked at all of it, the blood, the traumatized women bleeding on the floor or still strapped to the chairs. Their vaginas looked like raw bleeding meat, torn and lacerated by the hanger. There were still two more women. Todd picked up the knife he'd dropped into the kitchen sink. He was exhausted, too exhausted to use the hanger. The knife would be much quicker. He grabbed the black woman and laid her down on the kitchen table. He was just about to carve her up with the knife when he remembered the scalpels. The cuts would be much cleaner. If he used the scalpel and stitched her up like he'd done Nicolene, she'd probably survive. Todd reached into the bag and grabbed the last roll of tape. He needed to immobilize her if he was going to perform a Caesarian without the woman dying on the table. Unlike Nicolene, she was not doped up on street pharmaceuticals. This woman had nothing to dull the pain.
Todd wrapped the tape around her thighs and legs. When he was certain she could not move, he made the first incision, cutting through her transverse abdominous and the rectus abdominous and pushing the muscles aside revealing the uterus covered by a transparent layer of tissue. He cut through the uterus and dragged the baby out of her belly. The baby was already dead. He pushed the woman off the table and grabbed the last one, a young Puerto Rican girl. He laid her on the kitchen table in the black woman's blood and reached into his bag for another scalpel.
Chapter Twenty-One
Todd was completely covered in blood. He peeled his clothes off and walked upstairs. There were babies crying in a room down the hall. He had been too late to stop them from being born and he couldn't imagine himself taking the life of a fully developed child. Instead, Todd stepped into the bathroom mid-way down the hall and into the shower to wash the blood and tissue from his skin.
His mind was clouded by images of Stephanie, his mother sitting on the toilet with a hanger in her vagina pierced through the skull of what would have been his younger brother; Nicolene and the two girls down stairs with their guts laid open, and the big woman whose fetus he'd dragged out of her womb with his bare hands. Todd began to scream.
He screamed long and hard and sobbed as if the world had ended. He collapsed into the tub and huddled into a fetal position, still screaming, the shower, now cold, still spraying down on him. When he finally stopped screaming, he heard the front door open and one of the girls run out of the house screaming. Todd leapt up from the shower and ran through the house looking for the old man's room. He needed new clothes. He found some pants and a cardigan, slipped them on, stepped back into his bloody sneakers and sprinted down the stairs.
He didn't have his bike. He didn't have a car and the subway was several blocks away. When he stepped outside, Todd saw the large woman he'd bent over the sink banging on the door of a house across the street. Todd began to run. A car raced up the block and Todd ran as hard and as fast as he could. Still, the vehicle caught up with him and slowed down, keeping pace with his stride.
'Todd!'
He turned and was surprised to see his supervisor, Ms. Santiago, sitting behind the wheel of her Saturn hybrid, waving him toward her car. Todd slowed down, panting hard but looking at her suspiciously.
'Elizabeth? Wh-? Wa-? What? What are you doing? What are you doing here?'
She opened her passenger side door.
'Your ex-girlfriend lived. The cops are looking for you everywhere. Get in. I'll take you to the airport.' She
