It’s a Boy

By: Ian A. Bain

 

    My wife’s screaming. From across the room, I tell her how good of a job she’s doing and that everything will be alright. They won’t administer drugs in case the baby’s one of their own.  I’d be at her side but the guards dressed in black keep me in my chair across the room at gunpoint. They’re like us, the guards, but they live comfortably in exchange for taking orders from them and betraying their own kind. 

    Mechanical arms from behind the delivery chair grab my wife’s arms, pin her down. Two more robot arms position her feet on the stirrups, cut her pants off, and then sit ready to pull out the baby. 

    There’s a 50/50 chance the baby will be human. When they injected me, as they do with all people capable of creating children, they didn't tell me what it would do to my semen. Either it was a placebo, or it was DNA-manipulating nanobots. I don’t really understand the process past that point; they aren’t exactly forthcoming. They use us to breed more of themselves, and also to replenish human stock.

    My wife is pushing now, blood splashing down on the floor. She cries and it takes everything in me not to rush to her side. But I’m no good to her with bullets in my head. I’m crying now too. I tell her how good a job she’s doing and to keep breathing. The robot arms obscure my view as they dig inside her to pull the baby out. As soon as it leaves her body, she relaxes and collapses—deflates—as if all of her lifeforce left her body with the baby. Barely audible, she asks, “What is it?” 

    A robot arm with a needle stabs her and pumps sedatives and hallucinogens into her blood. The viscera-covered arms that delivered the baby put the newborn on my wife’s chest. She cries, wipes the blood from the baby’s face, and smiles at me through her tears. “He’s so beautiful,” she says. “Come hold him.” The guard presses his gun into my neck. She sees her beautiful human baby boy. What I see, what the guards see, is a bloody purple ball with a giant circular mouth and writhing tentacles. 

    My wife gladly presses her baby to her nipple. The giant mouth engulfs her entire breast, latches, and it pumps every ounce of blood from my wife. The guards, who have seen this a million times, shudder. Why won’t you help her?

    I consider rushing the bed, taking the purple abomination and striking it against the wall until it’s nothing but a heap of mangled flesh. But I know there’s no point. They’d just kill me too. The sedatives will at least keep her calm.

    When there’s almost nothing left of her, the guards take me away. They will take me to my new wife, who will be my fourth wife, and then this will happen again and again until I can no longer produce new babies, and then I, too, will be food for my sons.

 

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Ian A. Bain is a writer of dark fiction from the swamps of Ontario where he lives with his wife, undead dog, and ghoulish spawn. Ian’s work has recently appeared in anthologies including Chlorophobia from Ghost Orchid Press and podcasts like The Night’s End Podcast. Ian can be stalked on Instagram at @bainwrites