The hair on their heads stood stiff, curled, and wrapped around their faces with makeup giving them the appearance of china dolls. The ladies held sheet cake and punch. The sheen of their painted nails radiated power and money. Some had daughters that beamed beside the older women, many in bright red and blue, slender and fashionable, like they were ready to board a yacht. Others leaned into their friends as if whispering a scandalous secret. They looked at their cell phones and muttered that their connection was terrible. If one didn’t know anymore, one might guess it was a college reunion for a sorority house.
A few men, physicians who collaborated with the WSUC to tailor the program, stood in freshly pressed lab coats and waited intently in front of the fireplace at the left side of the grand vestibule. Nurses and assistants stood behind a glass partition looking anxiously at the WSUC. The staff waited to march into the celebration with clear plastic carts holding Caucasian skin pouches that resembled giant pieces of transparent pasta with fetal skeletal figures dancing inside.
The WSUC members groused about the heat and swatted flies away. Some were looking up at the table with the cake and refreshments and sneered when they noticed several flies hovering then landing on the cake.
A tall woman with gaudy earrings excused herself from the gaggle of cake eaters, proceeded through the congested corridor, opened the glass doors, and approached the nursing station directly behind reception. “For what we’re paying to keep my mother-in-law here, I shouldn’t expect to see flies inside the premises. You people should know they’re flying diseases.”
“We’ll be on that ma’am once the residents have gone to bed tonight. We can’t do it during the day.”
“Just make sure it’s done. I don’t want to see any when I return.”
At the end of the North wing where the residents lived, in the recreation room, Delwin, a residential aid, quietly sat as jet-black hair covered his eyes. Some residents shouted, calling out for loved ones who’d died. He never understood why he always got shoved off to the game room full of tattered and musty games. Delwin knew game days made the residents smile. This was important. They could socialize and win candy bars. He would tell his superiors that the residents needed new board games, but his input was always ignored. The husky gals that did the rounds, making sure everyone’s bed was clean and dry, rolled their eyes at Delwin.
Let’s hear it for the master of Tiddlywinks, Chutes and Ladders, Jenga. water refills! Boy, what an easy job! Well, fuck them! Fuck every one of them! And fuck those people who are changing my job. I didn’t apply here to work with stolen fetuses, Delwin thought. WSUC usurped this place. Everyone who worked there knew this, but they were cowards.
At least I found her, the one who taught me that I can fool them all and shut down this stupidity, this insanity.
Looking at the end of the table, he studied Severina, the woman he’d consoled as she shared stories with him of escaping Nazi Germany by a thread. She’d spent months reading books that he’d snuck into her after she’d learned what would be happening today. Today she chose to end her suffering. This, she’d told him, would be more dignified than rotting away.
Back in the lobby, a white coat walked over to the microphone and chirped. Beads of sweat stuck to his forehead.
“Let’s get started, shall we?”
The WSUC quieted, but buzzing flies still flew around their stiff hair.
“Thank you, wow.” He paused and grinned at them with big teeth. “It took a long time to get here, as we all know, but here we are, showing our strength and love. Love for the unborn has been overlooked far too long.”
“Amen,” WSUC members shouted and clapped their hands.
“With this exciting new program, all children can come into the world feeling loved and wanted. Sadly, we know many women simply weren’t meant to raise children. They must answer to God, but what of the children they leave behind? Why should a child be left behind and be raised in a godless adoption home run by the state? As people committed to loving God, we know they are born with pureness, purpose, and innocence.”
“Also, the elderly population feels loneliness and lack of purpose. The day has finally come, after years of research and study, to bring the unborn and the elderly together. The residents will feed them while still in their pods, they will witness their births, and they will all help raise them. Adoption homes and children’s shelters will become obsolete. In troubled times, they will have a constant feeling of communal love. Until the children find adoptive parents, children can look into the eyes of their elders and learn God’s love, and the elderly will feel nothing but love and warmth until their souls leave us for a greater place. Now we’re going to bring the soon-to-be-born into the room.”
The parade of squeaky wheeled carts moved through the center of the room. Sara, the nursing home administrator, had told her staff that no cartoonish, juvenile scrubs would be worn from this day forward. All of them would wear traditional white uniforms and polished shoes. Some of the women in the audience bit their lips as the procession continued. The nursing staff hunched over their carts, their smiles forced, their eyes down at the floor. After these fetal and geriatric philanthropists worked so hard and donated so much to make this a reality, the staff needed to be better players, better actors. This, after all, would be a miracle.
Once all those in the parade got to the front of the lobby, Severina sprinted up the hall from her room. A thin, pale woman with purple veins protruding from her neck, she crashed into the clear partition dividing the lobby from the care center. The glass reverberated with a gong. Blood spread over the glass from her broken nose. The pupils of her eyes widened like a ravenous dog about to attack its prey.
As she backed away from the glass, shaking words rattled through her synthetic teeth, filling the air with a fetid decay. “You will all pay for the gross violations you’ve made! You’re monsters draped in bogus degrees and expensive clothing. You’ll all pay for what you’ve done!”
Her dentures slid out of her mouth followed by a yellow flow of mucous and drool. She collapsed. She lay on the floor, melting into a puddle of flesh and red thickness oozing over the tile.
“Grab some towels and disinfectant, we need to contain this, now!” Sara, the charge nurse, shouted over the intercom to her staff.
The caregivers, screaming and mouths agape, ran away from their carts in the lobby and back through the glass doors. They crashed into each other by the doorway in front of the supply room. Two burly orderlies shoved through the hysterical staff and wriggled their way into the supply room.
“Back off and calm down! We’ve got this. Stand back and let us get what we need.”
The two donned latex gloves and grabbed containers, mops, and chemicals.
“Okay, the rest of you form a line and get supplies in case we need some backup.”
The oozing remains burped and slowly spread in front of the nurses’ station while some employees jumped on top of the work area. Pandemonium rose as more climbed up shrieking at the spreading mass. The stampede pushed some forward, fumbling and falling over keyboards and monitors.
The two white coats rushed through the doors from the lobby and tip-toed over the mass of bloody skin riddled with age spots to reach the nurses’ station. One shouted amidst the chaos at Sara.
“You told me anyone that could make things difficult would be taken care of, what happened?”
“She was in the game room playing bingo with Delwin. Anyone that might have acted up was there. We have no legal right to restrain them,” the nurse said.
The orderlies, armed with supplies darted over the spreading skin and slippery blood. The skin underfoot ripped making the sound like raw chicken trimmed of fat. Blood flowed from the ruptured skin. A few of the stronger stomached caregivers lacking needed supplies sat on the floor in front of the station and leveraged themselves to withhold the mass with blue gloved hands as the mess oozed toward them. Their determination deteriorated as they pushed their upper bodies against enveloping elastic goo. They shrieked while their mouths and noses were swallowed by the blob.
The leadership of the WSUC stood behind the partition witnessing the carnage. They puked and cried.
The president banged the glass and screamed “The front door is locked. Somebody open it so we can get out with the children!”
Her demands were unheard and ignored by the surviving staff who continued to either evade or confront the thickening layer of hungry skin as it blipped and farted its way outward. Those fighting pushed back with ice chippers, mops, and brooms with gritted teeth to push it back from flowing down the three wings where the residents lived.
The growing, flowing skin paused for a moment. Some of the orderlies cheered at their success. The creeping mess of wrinkled skin backed up. The counter holding the remaining health team crashed from the excessive weight, leaving more victims exposed to the wave of the thick pink mesh of mutilated gums backed up and folding over them. The mutated flesh rose, stretching with flailing arms as its victims labored standing up. Vague outlines of faces struggled to breathe, bubbles formed under the mass emitting flatulent sounds along the edges spreading out toward each wing. Within moments of being smothered, fresh, limp corpses rotated in the pink raw mass.
The few staff remaining puked and cried along the edges of the rancid growth. The white-coated men stepped backward with beads of sweat dripping down their bald heads. As they turned to go back out to the lobby, the WSUC crowded up against the shut doors.
Their president shouted and steamed up the glass. “We didn’t pay you to stand there like cowards. Help us get the unborn to safety!”
The WSUC joined hands, repeating The Lord’s Prayer like a broken record.
One of the lab coats yelled at the orderlies. “Unlock these doors, you incompetent buffoons! I can have the authorities put you away for this.”
His demand came too late. All the staff that remained were covered in wrinkled skin flailing at the front of each patient wing at The Men of Christ of Science.
As they looked with mouths agape, their skin crept back again and crawled up and inside the legs of their pants.
The president with the beehive hairdo broke from prayer. “Ladies, we must save the children. Go quickly to the fire exit!”
A member cried out from the crowd. “We’ve never picked up the pouches before. Do we have gloves or towels?”
“It’s too late for that! Pick them up and take them to the Emergency Room at Maryville,” the president shouted back.
“Today was the hatching, you idiot! What do we do if they hatch in the women’s cars?” A board member protested.
“That’s not going to happen because none of you are going anywhere.” Delwin stood with his back against the doors leading outside smirking in his combat boots and folded his arms over his white uniform. No one noticed him before the pandemonium broke out. “All the doors are made of steel and double bolted. The resident, my beloved friend who crashed against the glass was a plotted distraction we worked on for weeks so I could lock all the doors. I waited outside for all of this to unfold. She sacrificed herself to stay out of this inhumane study you all thought would make you famous. You’re right, today is the hatching. In a few moments, the little darlings will be all yours. Now, for the moment of glory.”
The WSUC glared through him. Delwin unlocked the main exit, jumped outside, and bolted it shut again. He peered through the front window and laughed as the glass partition between the grand lobby and the nurse's station shattered and poured out a curdled mixture of torn appendages, eyeballs, and swirling blood. The WSUC stormed up to the front window where he stood pounding on the shatter-proof glass that pushed them over budget by millions of dollars.
Delwin stood on the other side laughing as the blob of Severina squished faces so hard that facial pores smeared oil over with glass.
The hatching was successful! Small, elvish faces with razor teeth and necks like vines floated intermeshed with the blob, wrapping themselves around the WSUC.
One of the hive minds held her fists up and yelled, “Open the door, you fucking waif!”
Delwin enjoyed the early afternoon sun while orange leaves fluttered to the ground. He pointed. He snickered.
His verbal abuser had her mouth up to the glass in a perfect O-shape. Her nose slowly slid upward as it looked like it crowned her torn, mushy head as her jawbones cracked open. The insides of her mouth, her tongue, and her throat were engorged and vibrating against the glass.
Thin elongated fingers of the unborn with tiny blue fingernails intertwined themselves around the broken jawed mass of flesh and broken teeth. All of the WSUC exploded and swirled against windows inside the lobby. The high definition sound of a giant sucking through a straw and gulping on gristle made the once insignificant orderly proud. It was the sound of millions of possums eating garbage left out for pickup. But, it wasn’t possums. The transparent and stretched little cheeks looked like little amniotic sacs. They grinned and smacked their lips. Their eager eyes twinkled as the giant hair from the other ladies pressed against the window dampened like pasta for them to consume and pull the skin off the faces of the hive minds.
Delwin’s dream came true.
Fuck those people, they expect me to work more, change diapers for both old-timers and infants for little to no raise. Come, my babies. There is much more to consume.
He looked beyond the new addition and could see the residents smiling and waving from their rooms. They hated the WSUC.