Pendington, Jude
JOURNAL ENTRY 07
Antisocial Personality
Disorder

The delivery room seems much more solemn this time around. No spectators and only two doctors. Landis is standing next to me once again, and Belial is pacing the room with an unlit cigar pinched between his jaws, large German-looking military hat on his head.

"What's with the makeup, sir?" I ask hesitantly.

"Makeup?" Belial repeats, sounding confused. "This is ceremonial face paint, you moron."

He points a thumb up at his face. Luminescent shades of aquamarine making circles around his large slit eyes. Stripes of glittering purple down his long snout.

"And the claws?" I ask.

He rotates a wrist and examines his red painted fingertips femininely from both sides.

"Just wanted to look my best," he smiles, pleased with himself.

"What about the hat?" Landis adds.

Belial pinches the brim between his ruby claws and tips the hat at Landis.

"'Cause I'm the captain," he says matter-of-factly.

Across the room the two Ziz doctors are eyeing Landis' wife curiously. She's lying there, panting and sweating, but she seems more focused on Landis than the pain she must be in.

Landis seems oddly detached as well, and not in his usual way. He mostly stares at his feet and appears to be elsewhere.

"Come on, lady!" Belial suddenly shouts, giving the room a startling jolt. "You got this! Birth that thing up good!"

He squats slightly and claps his hands together like a football coach. Zagan and Zepar bounce around at his ankles, chirping incoherently.

"What's all this for?" Belial asks worriedly, pointing to a long tray littered with all kinds of medical tools.

"We're prepared for anything, sir," one of the doctors nods proudly. Belial nods back, face puckering in approval.

"What about the gun?" I ask, nodding to the Magnum holstered around Belial's waist.

"Like they said," he contends. "Ready for anything."

"Jonathan," the woman moans as the doctors begin to strap her into the restraints and stirrups.

Landis turns to look at her and appears surprisingly emotional. I'm not sure what to expect as he walks over to her bedside.

"For you," she wheezes, tears streaming down her sweat-beaded face. "I did all this for you."

"So far so good," one of the doctors perched at her feet announces.

"I came here. I signed up for this... just to be able to tell you I was sorry. And... And..." She twists her face in agony and groans loudly. "I love you, Jonathan. I know there's no reason for you to believe me. I've ruined everything. But I had to tell you. Had to try to tell you how sorry I am. How worthless everything is without you. I had to try and tell you one last time that I love you."

Shockingly, as she finishes this embarrassing speech, Landis reaches down and takes her hand. When he does, her face starts beaming through all the signs of pain, she looks as if she could fly, giant bright smile stretching from ear to ear, fresh tears gushing from her eyes. She starts to bawl, and Landis just stands there holding on to her hand.

Belial looks at me from the other side of the room with a baffled look on his face. I shrug back at him.

"Eight inches!" the doctor shouts.

"Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!" Belial chants, hopping up and down. Zagan and Zepar echo him, running tight circles around his feet.

"Hey! Whoa! Settle down!" Belial shouts at them. "This is no time to nut up."

Suddenly, the doors fly open and a man I've never seen before runs into the room. The man, garbed in a hospital gown, is scanning the room until he sees Landis' wife on the delivery bed. A Ziz flies through the door behind him and calls out:

"I'm sorry, sir! He ran out of the recovery room. Says he knows the applicant." As he's saying this, the man is approaching Landis' wife with a smile on his face. "He's drugged, sir. Not all there."

"Seriously?" Belial yells. "Come on man, get him out of here, no screw-ups this time."

Then I notice the expression on Landis' wife's face. She looks terrified, shaking her head like the man approaching is an ax-wielding maniac. But he's not. He's just some guy.

"Corrine!" The man shouts drunkenly as the Ziz runs after him. "Corrine, it's me! Frank!"

Landis looks behind him to see the man for the first time and turns to ice. He drops his wife's hand and stares into the strange intruder.

"You never said bye when you left the apartment, baby!" Frank shouts.

Slowly, Landis turns back to his wife and looks at her with empty eyes that seem like they could somehow set her on fire.

"One mistake," the woman whimpers, face becoming increasingly desperate. "Just one mistake, Jonathan... Please..."

For an instant, there is something that someone might call empathy flashing in Landis' eyes, and I begin to suspect he might lift her hand again.

"One mistake?" the intuder shouts in protest as he's struggling with the Ziz to keep from being dragged out of the room. "I hit that tail so many times I lost count. Don't act like you didn't love it." He looks to the Ziz restraining him defensively. "Had me going over there every night for weeks to tap that, and she's going to call me one mistake?"

"Ten inches dilation!" the doctor bellows.

Landis' wife looks crushed and broken. She seems too far gone to plead with him anymore, and the pain is finally beginning to seize her. She fights it back, clinching her fists until rills of blood drip from them.

"Jonathan..." she gasps. "Jonathan, please... please..."

Landis' face has gone pale. He looks down absently and then, in one fluid movement, he quickly turns to the tray lined with implements, lifts a large medical drill and places the bit between his wife's eyes. He squeezes the trigger, and the drill growls as it crackles and chews noisily through her forehead and skull. Her eyes roll back and she makes a breathy, choking noise in her throat as her head vibrates under the pressure of the spinning drill.

Landis, still showing no emotion whatsoever, places his other hand on the back of the drill for added pressure. Fragments of bone and an endless spray of blood come blasting from her head as he continues to bore through it.

"Are you kidding me?" Belial moans. "Doc, deliver that thing!"

"I'm trying!" The doctor shouts. "She was supposed to push."

The drill works its way through the resistant plating of the skull and hits the brain where it twists in freely and the boney crumbling sounds are replaced with a sticky chew. Gobs of pink brain matter like bubble gum twist their way up the drill bit.

Landis finally releases the trigger and lets go of the drill, which drops while still fastened inside his wife's forehead, yanking her skull downward until gravity finally works the drill free and it crashes to the ground. His wife goes on gurgling, lifting her arms aimlessly as if to touch something before writhing in her death throes.

The doctor is probing at the birth canal when a torrent of thick, gluey blood floods from the opening, covering his hands and wrists.

"Aw, crap," he grunts. "Open her up." He barks at the other doctor. "Let's get this thing out of her before we lose another one."

Landis wipes the mess from his blazer and steps away from the delivery bed. I notice a new sense of respect for him as he goes, his ruthlessness. In the doorway, the Ziz who has been dumbfounded by the entire spectacle is holding the intruder to keep him from collapsing.

"Dude, check this out," the intruder says to Landis as he passes, lifting his gown to reveal a mess of tubing and stitches between his legs. I lean over, squinting at the man's crotch, and can see that he's been surgically altered into a hermaphrodite with the extended phallus buried in the synthetic vagina.

"I ain't a slave to no woman, bro," the intruder says to Landis, lifting his hand for a high five. "Now I don't even need one. I can take care of myself. Know what I'm saying, bro? Don't leave me hanging!" He stands there grinning with his gown hoisted up over his tangled mess of a groin. Landis immediately bends his knee and lifts his foot as high as he can off the ground before driving the sole of his loafer into the intruder's recovering privates. The shoe meets his area with an awful meat-packing sound and pulls away tangled in some kind of elastic, tearing flesh. The altered male organ dangles and tumbles to the ground where it's covered by a waterfall of blood flowing freely from the opening.

"Dude!" the intruder screams before losing consciousness. The Ziz, somehow not used to this kind of thing, drags the lifeless body through the doors. Landis follows behind them leaving red footprints as he goes.

I approach the hospital bed where there's a steady spattering noise as the blood pooling under the woman's head and rear is spilling over on to the floor. One of the doctors is daintily moving the scalpel through the air above her stomach with everyone watching intently.

"What on earth are you doing?" Belial suddenly shouts.

"I don't know!" The doctor screams back in protest. "This wasn't in any of the books we have!"

"Just cut it open. Get the specimen out!"

"Yeah..." the doctor whimpers. "Yeah, but it's gross!"

"Give it to me," I interrupt, snatching the scalpel from the doctor. "I have no pity."

"No pity?" the doctor repeats, puzzled.

I step over the body of Landis' butchered wife and sink the scalpel into her distended stomach. Puling the blade through the flesh sloppily, I make a meandering incision all the way to her pelvis and attempt to pry the opening apart.

"You're not doing it right," one of the doctors mumbles over my shoulder. "I don't think that's right."

"Oh, shut up," I retort, peeling the membranous walls of the uterus apart and revealing a dark shape coiled within the womb. The three of us lean speculatively over the table, eyeing the wet form, looking for signs of life.

"Poke it," Belial suggests.

"Poke it?" I ask. "With what? With the scalpel? You got a broomstick lying around, Grandma?"

"Well, touch it. Do something. Is it alive?"

"I don't know," I murmur. I turn to the tray and find some kind of probing utensil and slowly inch toward the shape nesting in the open stomach.

"Careful!" one of the doctors gasps, jarring my concentration.

"Just shut up! Everybody shut up!" I demand, raising my hands as if to calm a crowd. "Let me concentrate."

I proceed gradually with the probe until I'm just centimeters from the shape, which now looks like a black knot of hose and bone.

With a meek tap, the probe contacts the specimen, which then leaps into the air with a terrible squawk and spills across the floor like a ball of mucus. After rolling several feet, it slows and stops and we're all staring at it silently, not moving a muscle, when it unfolds itself into a vertical shape and begins to shake away the amniotic glop.

A bipedal, bird-like shape becomes visible as well as a binocular-shaped head atop a wobbling twig of a neck. Two large, solid black eyes with no pupils glisten between fleshy gatherings of tissue like some kind of orifice. It wobbles on legs cocked with the knees folding inward and long reptilian feet. For a moment the arms seem like featherless chicken wings before the hands spread like fans, revealing long, joint-less, tendril-like digits that coil and uncoil like air bladders. The head twitches and stretches upward, squealing from a humanoid mandible of a jaw filled with rows of tiny teeth like spearheads.

"God, that's ugly," I observe.

Belial steps over to the creature and kneels over it, cocking his head admiringly.

"God isn't here today," He grins, lifting the captain's hat from his head and holding it to his heart reverently. "I am." He rises proudly and puts his hands on his hips.

"How about this, boys!" he trumpets. "Hasn't changed a bit in thousands of years!" He looks at the specimen triumphantly. "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days." He purrs. "And also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown."

"If you say so," I shrug, not taking my eyes off the thing.

"Oh yeah," he reiterates. "I say so."

"What about all this?" one of the doctors asks, motioning with his head to the slaughtered remains of Corrine Landis.

"What about it?" Belial asks. "Dump it out."

The creature takes a few disoriented steps before toppling over and mewling angrily.

"Baby's first steps," Belial points out emotionlessly.

"Okay," I say. "We got one. Now what?"

"Now!" Belial bellows cheerfully. "Get that chick from Saved By The Bell and tell her she's a mommy!"

"O-kay," I say, quizzical arch in my voice. "Do I tell her it's a boy or a girl?"

"Beats me," Belial says flatly. "Tell her it's something."

"It's something alright," one of the doctors bellows in agreement.

"You know," Belial observes, pulling the magnum from his holster and placing it on the medical tray. "He could have just shot her. My guys are real tired of cleaning up these messes."

"I suppose so," I agree, eyeing the bloody catastrophe several feet away. "In his defense, sir, there would still have been a mess."

"I suppose," Belial sighs. "There always is, isn't there?"

"Sure seems like it," I say as I think the same thing.

The thing kicks around on the floor, struggling to find its way back to its feet. I stare down at its murky black eyes, and it just stares right back at me.