The Final Cut

Round 2 of Flash Fiction Contest
Prompts: Genre-Horror; Location-Abandoned Apartment Building; Object: Pepper Spray
48 hours to create an original story under 1000 words.

The Final Cut

Bringing a baby into the world is messy business.

I only did it because I needed the money. The other guys, well, they needed money too, but they were greedy SOBs. For me, it meant keeping my fingers intact. Fingers that Perroni’s thugs promised would be chopped off, one for each day I was late repaying my debt. If I was going to be a vascular surgeon, I needed my hands. My gargantuan student loads could wait; the Perroni brothers couldn’t. Carlos and Vick didn’t care that I had 90 days in Gamblers Anonymous and hadn’t played the ponies or visited my bookie in over three months. When my GA sponsor told me to clean up “the financial wreckage of my past,” I don’t think he meant by illegally harvesting organs.

But accountability comes with a price. I could wield a scalpel better than most seasoned MDs and certainly good enough to remove organs from desperate folks willing to give up a kidney for $10,000 a pop, which we sold for five times that much, easy.  The other two yahoos, Jack and Dan, were still in med school and failing miserably. How they sold the stuff on the black market was not my business. My job was to cut ’em up, sew ’em up, and get ’em out alive.

When Dan spilled how much dough we could rake in for each procedure, I jumped. A handful of surgeries and I’d be free and clear. I told him I required a sterile environment and enough propranolo to knock out an elephant. And that was just for me. So they bought a hospital-grade generator, trucked in water by hand, and conjured up an operating room straight out of M*A*S*H in an abandoned apartment building near Holy Trinity, a teaching hospital in south Philly. Dan gave me a pager to let me know when it was show time.

The night I got my last page was cold as it was dark. I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor and knocked twice at apartment 414. I counted to five and gave the door three sharp raps. Inside the small apartment, Jack was prepping the donor’s arm for an IV. I usually avoided looking at them until they were under. There was nothing in those hopeless eyes I wanted to see.

“What’s this one’s story?” I asked Dan, whose head was buried behind a laptop. 

“Female, 28, wants to sell her kidney…” Dan hesitated. “And that’s not all.”

I craned my neck around. On the operating table was an average-looking blonde covered with a plastic sheet, her face eclipsed by a belly as big as Vesuvius and about as close to erupting.

“No fucking way,” I said. “No C-sections.” Besides, there was something about her that gave me the creeps.

“Nothing’s gonna go wrong. Look, she’s a needle chaser who wouldn’t be able to care for a kid anyway,” Dan argued. “We’d be doing her a favor. Plus, the payoff is huge—$50 grand each, plus an extra $10,000 if the baby is white.” With fifty thou I could pay off my debt and quit this gig.

“I need to examine her,” I said. I rounded the table and, for the first time in five operations, looked square in the donor’s face. A rush of icy air enveloped me. I shivered and looked down. “Who opened the goddamn window?” I barked.

“Buddy, there are no windows in here,” Dan countered. I took a deep breath and brought my eyes up. I recognized her in an instant. She had gone to a couple of meetings and shared some crap about the apocalypse and some badass named Beelzebub. We figured she was either bat-shit crazy or a Jesus freak whacked out on crystal.

She met my gaze and her eyes sparked, but not with recognition or fear, something else. It was hunger, and not the kind a homeless guy has when he’s about to dig into a free meal. It was primitive and eternal. I involuntarily took a few steps back, the hair on my neck standing at full attention.

The room spun. I held onto the instrument tray to steady myself. “She’s not healthy enough for this procedure,” I lied. But the waver in my voice gave me away.

“Sure she is,” Jack said and slipped the needle into her vein. Her eyes rolled back as the halothane hit her brain. “And you are going to perform the surgery.” He reached into his backpack and pulled out a handgun and a canister of pepper spray.

“Jack, take it easy,” Dan urged.

A guttural moan rose from the table. A thin bluish-pink tongue snaked in and out of her mouth, even though she was pumped with enough dope to stun a rodeo bull.

“This is so wrong,” I said, seized by a nameless terror. “I’m outta here.” Before I could reach the door, Jack blasted me with pepper spray. The capsaicin burned as it coated my face and lungs. I instinctively fought the air with my hands.

Jack grabbed his gun and cocked it. “Tie him up,” he ordered, tossing Dan a rope. Dan reluctantly secured me to a wooden chair.

“It’s gonna happen, with him or without him,” Jack spat, nodding my direction. “People are expecting a baby and, by god, we’re going to produce one.”

Overhead, the lights buzzed and flickered. In my haze, I saw a dark shape hover over the sedated woman.

“Dooon’t!” I slurred.

 “Okay, here we go,” Jack whispered. With a swift motion he drew the scalpel from navel to pubic bone. As he parted the abdominal muscle, an unearthly howl bubbled up from the amniotic sac. “Holy mother of God!” Jack shrieked. “What the hell ….”

Those were Jack’s final words, but his tortured screams raged for several minutes as jagged, razor-sharp teeth separated flesh from bone. After a time, the sucking, slurping, and crunching were replaced by the soft coo of a satiated newborn.