Pendington, Jude
JOURNAL ENTRY 07
Antisocial Personality
Disorder

We've got a whole circus of yahoos piled into the delivery room. Four Ziz doctors crowd around Mary-Kate Olsen as she wails in labor pains, her feet up in iron stirrups. A few feet away Belial is cheering her on, Zagan and Zepar mewling at his feet. Even further back are six or seven women looking on anxiously, smiling and cocking their heads like what they're seeing is cute. The room is vast and accommodates the crowd, but I can't help but wonder why so many are in here.

"Why are so many in here?" I ask Landis, who's standing beside me.

"So many what?" he asks, yawning.

"Doctors for one. Does it really take four of them?"

"How should I know? You ever seen anything remotely similar to this happen in your life?"

I scowl at him for a moment. He doesn't notice.

"And what's up with the broads?" I whisper, nodding my head at the gawkers across the room.

"Possible applicants. Belial wants to create a buzz among the women within the center. They see the famous lady go through with it then they start lining up."

"What?" I grunt. "Does he want every woman here in the Nephilim project?"

"Yes," Landis answers plainly. "That's the idea." He lifts a candy bar from his pocket and takes a bite.

The Olsen girl keeps complaining about the pain and one of the Ziz doctors, surgical mask stretched over his long snout, plunges a long syringe into her arm.

"Careful." Belial protests. "Don't make the first one come out retarded."

Her face is bloated and beaded with sweat. She grits her perfectly bleached and capped teeth.

"I'm dying!" she shouts, cloudy black pupils smeared across the whites of her eyes from when they burst. "I'm going to explode!"

"You're not going to explode," Belial scoffs. Then, leaning to one of the doctors, he whispers, "She's not going to explode, is she?"

"We're prepared to remove the stitches, sir," the doctor announces.

"Knock yourself out," Belial says, gesturing excitedly with his hands to hurry the process along.

"It's so beautiful," One of the beaming women says from across the room.

The doctors buckle Olsen's wrists into a set of restraints and strap her ankles into the stirrups. She starts to cry. They lift her hospital gown, exposing her genitals and revealing a series of thick black stitches sealing up her vulva.

"Oh puke," Landis groans, turning away. "Her junk looks like a football."

"You should have seen it before the stitches," I insist. "It's no wonder their eyeballs explode."

One doctor sets to work at clipping the stitches. Another wipes the sweat from Olsen's head as she pants feverishly and begins to bite her lip so intensely that a thin rivulet of blood comes trailing down her chin.

"Dying," she manages to strain out. "I'm going to die."

"Don't be so dramatic," Belial says, fiddling his fingers as the doctors remove the stitches.

I take a step forward and can see the still-red scar tissue trailing from each side of her torn birth canal. The orifice dilates and constricts. One of the doctors reaches down.

"Ten inches," the doctor shouts over his shoulder. "Uh... Give or take, I guess."

"Just push the thing out," Belial shouts, startling Olsen out of her torturous clenched expression. She stares at him drowsily for a minute, then tightens her face, biting her lip again and producing several new trails of blood. For a moment, the room is mostly silent outside of Olsen's laborious straining. Then, suddenly, she screams so intensely that everyone in the room jumps backward.

A moment passes and I take a cautious step toward the ordeal. Rising on my toes I can see a shape appearing at the opening between her legs. The scar tissue begins to split open on both sides, sending streams of blood down over the shape and pooling on the delivery table with the discharging embryonic fluid.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Belial says solemnly. "For the first time in thousands of years. The Giant. The ones that cause others to fall."

The opening dilates to impossible dimensions and a swampy, green lump begins to emerge from the orifice, uncoiling like a snake from an egg. Mary-Kate Olsen gives one final shriek and falls silent, lending good repute to her predictive capabilities. The slimy shape slowly lifts itself on thin, wobbling hind legs like a newborn fawn. The cloudy red mucus stretches away from the top of the shape where the head must be, dripping to its feet in ropey gobs.

Finally, a set of eyes becomes visible under the coat of translucent snot. They open and close slowly and out of synch. As the rest of the head rises from the muck, everyone is staring slack-jawed at the face, which has some humanoid characteristics in shape but mostly looks like nothing any of us have ever seen before.

Footsteps from across the room suddenly shake me from the surreality. Turning around, I can see one of the woman spectators has taken several strides toward the new creature. She lifts a large Magnum pistol in front of her and points it at the newborn.

"You stole my baby," she says, on the verge of tears. "Now I'm stealing yours."

Before anyone can process the statement, there is a thunderous report from the Magnum's barrel and the mysterious new animal explodes into a million dark flecks of splatter all over the room.

"Oh, come on!" Landis yells, looking angrily at the muck covering his candy bar. "This was the last one in the vending machine!"

Belial frowns at the enormous mess on the delivery table. He probes the remains with his finger speculatively.

"Yeah. This one is messed up." He sighs. "Why'd you have to do that, lady? I was excited about this."

The woman with the gun, breaking down completely now, sobbing, lifts the pistol to her cheek.

"This," she shouts emphatically, "is what's in it for me!" and pulls the trigger.

I have to shield my face as the wet chunks go soaring all over the room. The other female bystanders run screaming out the door, and Landis shouts "Gross!" as he throws his candy bar down and adds, "Are these things always going to end like this? 'Cause I can wear a raincoat next time!"

I look over the arm I've used to shield myself and see the body collapsed in a heap against the wall. Where the woman's face used to be, there are only the two eyes staring out over a half-moon shape of stringy red pulp, littered with fragments of teeth. It looks like a brain with the eyes still attached floating over a smoldering stump of a throat. Zagan and Zepar quickly scurry over to the woman's body where Zepar lifts her shirt, revealing a large, violent-looking scar across her belly.

"I knew she looked familiar!" He chirps. "What a small world!"

Zagan giggles in agreement. "Eggs!" he snickers.

Only then do I recognize the woman, remembering her face all over the TV months ago.

"I told you that would come back to get us!" Belial scolds, and the two fall silent.

For a moment the body lays motionless, coppery smell of blood and mechanical smell of oil and gunpowder filling the room. Then, without warning, the woman begins to thrash around violently.

"What's that?" I ask, stepping closer to her. "Nerves?"

She lifts her hands to the tragic remains of her face and begins to plunge her fingers into the meaty mess above her throat. Prying two fingers into the wound, she stretches the exposed tissue apart, revealing a small windpipe, which greedily and noisily sucks in oxygen.

"Oh," Belial says, nodding. "I get it. She couldn't breathe. Guess she wants to live now."

"How is she still alive at all?" Landis asks, frowning as he wipes layers of gore from his shirt.

"Didn't hit the brain." Belial points out, tapping a finger on the dome of her skull. "Just blew her face off." He looks at me and smiles. "Hey, literally blew her face off!" He laughs.

The woman's eerily remaining eyes slowly drift up to look at Belial as he taps her head.

"Peek-a-boo!" Belial shouts.

The small noodle of a windpipe whistles loudly and then makes sputtering fart noises as the blood begins to pool up around it.

"Should we... what? Take her into recovery?" Landis asks.

"Nah," Belial says and lifts the Magnum from the floor beside her. The woman's eyes drift slowly toward him as he steals her gun. "Just... You know... Get someone to clean this up later." He lifts a sterile medical cloth and tosses it over the ruins of the woman's head.

The labored sounds of her breathing are muffled under the towel, but I can hear them slowing gradually.

"And... The project?" one of the doctors asks.

"That's why we start with groups, Doc," Belial points out. "We've got two more survivors ready to pop and another batch right behind them. Minor setbacks."

"Yeah, well... This minor setback is going to need a pressure washer," Landis complains, and Belial cracks up laughing, wiping the mess coating the gun on another towel.

"Come on, guys," he says to Landis and me. "Let's go get something to eat. I'm starving."