Population Zero

Chapter Twenty

There was a woman lying on the living room couch watching television. She barely looked up when Todd entered the room.

"Who was it at the door?"

"Me," Todd answered as he walked up behind her and clamped a hand over her mouth. He zapped her and taped her up before she could make a noise.

An old man who was probably the husband of the woman he'd cracked at the front door, was sitting in the den typing away on a laptop when Todd stormed into the room. The old guy jumped and almost fell out of his chair.

"Jesus! Who the fuck are you?"

"I'm sort of a Pro-Life activist also."

The old guy squinted, trying to see Todd standing in the darkened doorway. He fumbled for his glasses on his cluttered desk.

"What organization are you with?"

Todd stepped further into the room.

"Mass-Murderers for the Preservation of Animal Life."

The old guy found his glasses and slipped them onto his crinkled, liver-spotted scalp.

"Mass-Murderers? Wha-what?"

Todd stepped closer and the old guy flicked on his desktop lamp and turned it up so that it shone directly onto Todd's face.

The old guy looked Todd up and down, noting the bloody hammer still clutched in Todd's hand and the stun gun clasped in his other hand. He reached into his desk and Todd sprinted across the room and cracked him with the hammer before he could pull the. 357 Colt magnum revolver out of his top drawer. The gun tumbled to the floor and so did the old man. Todd tried not to look at the old guy bleeding on the floor as he reached into his bag and retrieved the duct tape.

Though the man looked nothing like either his father or the priest, the old guy was probably twenty years older than his father had been when he'd taken his own life, something about the scene reminded him of the night of his mother's funeral. The night Todd lost both of his parents.

The old man moaned and struggled meekly as Todd taped his arms behind his back and put tape on his eyes and mouth. Todd picked up the gun, checked the barrel, then clicked it back into place and cocked the hammer. He left the room and headed back out into the hallway. There were voices coming from the kitchen. Todd walked into the kitchen and pointed the gun from one face to the other. He was greeted with a chorus of screams. There were several women sitting at the small kitchen table sipping coffee and eating some kind of coffee cakes. They jumped up quickly, knocking over chairs and dropping cups to the floor.

"Shut the fuck up and sit back down. One more sound and I will kill every last one of you."

Todd tossed a roll of tape to a teenage girl wearing a ponytail who was just starting to show. She looked to be about three or four months pregnant. There were four other women, two more that appeared to be in their early teens, a black woman in her thirties and a Filipino woman in her early to mid-twenties. They were all in varying stages of pregnancy.

"Tape their hands behind their backs or I start shooting."

Three more women came rushing into the kitchen and Todd turned the gun toward them. A huge white woman with curlers in her hair, a robe that barely concealed her massive belly and gigantomastic breasts that each appeared to weigh as much as small Thanksgiving turkeys, shrieked like a cat in a microwave when she spotted the gun. Todd cracked the butt of the revolver across her lips. Teeth flew from her mouth against the wall and she staggered backwards almost knocking over the other two women. Todd noted with surprise that the voice he normally heard in his head, the one that was always questioning his actions, telling him that he was going too far, begging him to stop, was silent. Even when the woman dropped slowly to her knees, sobbing and holding her bleeding mouth, Todd felt nothing at all.

"Get over there with the rest of them." He gestured with the gun toward the women sitting at the table and the three new arrivals shuffled over there hugging each other. Todd tossed the other three rolls of tape to the three girls.

"Tape up the rest of them."

He pointed at the teenage girl he'd singled out earlier.

"I'll tape you up myself. You make sure everyone else is bound nice and tight. Don't think you're doing anyone any favors by not taping them up good. I'll be checking everyone's wrists and ankles when you're done. If anyone gets free I'm shooting them dead as an example to everyone else."

"Don't kill us, Mister. We're pregnant. We're all pregnant. This is a shelter for pregnant women."

"I know exactly what this place is." There was no expression on his face at all as he pointed the gun at the girls.

"We don't have any money."

"I don't want any."

"Well, we-we'll do whatever you want. Just don't kill us. Don't hurt us."

"I don't want to fuck you either. Now everybody stop talking. Tape their mouths closed."

The three girls finished taping up the other four girls and then one by one the teenage girl with the ponytail taped them up as well. After she'd put the gags on their mouths she turned to face Todd.

"Please don't hurt me."

"Turn around."

She did as she was told and Todd taped her wrists behind her back like the seven other women.

"Sit in the chair."

"Please, don't."

"I told you. I'm not going to kill you."

She sat down and Todd taped her ankles to the chair legs. He pulled off another strip of tape and placed it over her eyes.

"Are there any more women in the house? Anyone else here I should know about?"

The girl shook her head.

"I don't like surprises. If anyone surprises me you'll all die."

Todd ripped off another piece of tape.

"My name is Mary. I'm having a daughter. Her name is going to be Kelli."

Todd paused. He knew what she was doing. Trying to make herself real to him, to make herself more of a human being. She thought that would make it harder for him to kill her. Todd waited, expecting the sting of conscience to hit him.

"My daughter's name is going to be Kelli. She's my second child. My other daughter is Cindy. She's two years old. Her birthday was last week."

He felt nothing. Killing his own child had taken away the last vestiges of his humanity. Todd put the tape over her mouth. He leaned forward and whispered into Mary's ear.

"You're going to have to give all your love to the child you have now."

He rubbed her belly with the palm of his hand.

"This one ain't going to make it."

Todd reached into his bag and pulled out a scalpel and a wire hanger. He knelt down beside Mary and began cutting off her pajamas. He cut up the inside of her pants leg all the way to her crotch and down the opposite leg.

"This is really going to hurt but it will be worth it. You are going to save so many people and thousands of plants and animals just by not having this child."

After straightening the hanger out until it was just a long thin wire with a hook on the end of it, Todd parted her labia with his thumb and index fingers and began winding the hanger up inside of her. The blood came almost 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.