End of the Line

Warning: Violence, gore, and graphic pregnancy scenes.

Her heels slip and catch, catch and slip. She keeps pulling them back and pushing them forward in frantic strokes across the mosaic tile, breaths short and ragged. Sweat runs down her brow and stings her eyes. Worst of all, she is alone.

Today of all days, she needs him here with her. She clenches her hands and releases them over and over, barely holding herself up on her elbows. Her face and rounded stomach glisten in the flickering lamp lights ahead of her, her back a fire of light from the open doorway behind her.

Clench. Release.

Catch. Slip.

The raw skin of her left heel breaks, leaving a dull red smear like a brush stroke across the floor. She doesn’t notice. She can’t smell the thick incense or the smoke of the torch lanterns, only aware of their presence because of how they choke the air, making her breaths feel heavier, full of ashes.

Her eyes watch the movement of her stomach, the taut skin a pearl’s sheen in the light, but the surface elastic, stretching and quivering.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she can still hear the twitches of the Shamaans. Her fingers are still stained grey, and when she goes to touch her bloated belly, they leave streaks across its surface like a claw mark. She thinks of Michael, his slate eyes and the Shamaans at their door, and pincers like steel blades. The image of a flaming sword fills her mind, and her long lost faith briefly flickers, then dies as she remembers the futility of her prayers before this moment. No matter how hard she had clung to faith, it didn’t save her husband. It didn’t save their children. And it wouldn’t save her.

Her heel breaks open more, and blood lets into the cracks and spaces between the mosaic tiles, filling their outlines with red. Lines of crimson liquid appear, glistening between the dull greys and shiny blacks of shattered stone. That’s when she notices it, as she sees it travel like small capillaries. Tributaries. She thinks of her parents, her aunts, uncles, grandparents, and great grandparents. She thinks of ancestors she never met, never saw or learned of, and how her bloodline leads to this moment. This dam, a dam that would never break. For all of their effort to live on, their line will end in a drought. She is all that is left, and she won’t be left for long.

She knows from the countless others that Shamaan births are particularly hard and painful. They often leave their victims dead or near it. Even if the birth didn’t kill you, the mutilation of the act bore any woman infertile. Only one harvest could be allowed by each crop before they were rendered unable to bear fruit.

And that’s what we are to them, she thinks. Fruit. Meat. A tool for their harvest.

But no, not quite fruit. They don’t eat us. They have no need. At first, they barely seemed interested in us. But she had watched as they slowly infiltrated humanity, growing over us like a deadly, insidious mold. It was an infestation. And now, it is time for the end, the earth a ball of black fungus and fuzz.

The wriggling behind her waist grows, her stomach undulating in frantic, spastic rhythms. Then it buzzes like an angry wasp, vibrating her body until she feels it rattling her teeth. The cramps overtake her abdomen as she spreads her legs wider, breath hitching. She blubbers and whimpers, not from the pain yet, but from the fear of the pain to come. The buzzing crescendoes, and she knows there is still one dam that will break.

Finally, the pain starts.

It isn’t like birth. Not a childbirth. She has been through childbirth, and this is no child. The whole of her belly shakes and buzzes like a hornet’s nest, but the pain focuses like a searing cattle brand above her navel. The burning turns to piercing, and she lets out a clipped yelp. Her eyes cannot move away from her distended body. She watches until she sees it.

A thin line like a needle. It rises from her upper stomach as if she’s being given acupuncture from inside. The needle is so thin and so sharp her skin never moves, never pulls. Two, three, four inches. Her eyes grow wide and she looks up and away, too terrified to see what will happen next. She has never seen a Shamaan birth, but she has seen the aftermath, and she can’t bear to think of herself like the other surrogates. When she can’t take not knowing anymore, she fearfully looks back down to find it gone. Retreated back inside.

She watches until on her right side, lower, it emerges again, faster, moving side to side, and in a moment of anger, she swipes at it with her hand. She hates this thing, this parasite using her. It bends slightly before stiffening, and her hand comes back sliced clean and deep, diagonally across her palm. The buzz within her becomes angrier, vindictive, and the needle appendage begins stabbing her, in and out, all over her stomach and waist. She screams and sobs, instantly regretful. The fiery fury she briefly felt snuffs out in a watery wave of fear. The pinprick holes across her body begin to ooze a thick, black liquid. The smell is metallic, but not iron. It is alien and new. She shudders in aversion to her own body, to the vessel it has become. It has betrayed her to become the tool of devils.

She falls back as she brings her other hand up to join the first, gripping her cut palm as it pours blood, rivers growing across the mosaic medallion like some altar for sacrifice soaking the blood of an offering. Behind her pubis, she feels the jerks and hits of a prisoner throwing itself against the cage of its prison.Her hands tremble violently as she grasps at herself, the feeling inside like a spider’s egg sac bursting, thousands of small wriggling, scuttling legs on the inside of her skin, rushing across her.

The dam breaks.

She doesn’t register her own shrieks, or the clawing of her own hands against her body. She doesn’t register the stinger that continues to stab out of her and cut her arms and wrists as she grabs and gropes desperately. All she sees is the burst of black bile that comes forth from her along with the buzzing that has escaped her insides and filled the room like a cicada’s call. The sound is violent and hypnotic. It disorients her first, then her eardrums burst with the frequency. First her left. Then her right, simple as balloons on beds of nails. But she doesn’t need to hear it because she can feel it all around her, inside her.

A dark head rises just above the convex meniscus of her skin, peering over her like a black snake on the horizon. She feels every insectile leg as it wriggles out of her, the hard shell of its exoskeleton shredding her skin into what looks like glistening ribbons covered in crude oil. Before she can think of her children, or Michael, or who’s left, her eyes go dull. Her last memory will be of this thing, this unChild, rising like a leviathan from a black sea. The Shamaan child grips her body with its front legs and dislodges its back forceps, scuttling over her body and toward the warmth of the sunlight beyond the temple door. Its eyes are blind, but it can feel for the first time the shining rays, and smell the humid flora of the forests beyond.

On the medallion of the floor, the red rivers meet a growing puddle of black blood like estuaries giving way to a dark sea ever growing.