“I’ll tell you what, Jennifer. You behave yourself, follow orders, and don’t cause trouble, we might set up a spot for her right here outside your cell. You won’t be able to touch her—we can’t have her dying, can we?—but you’ll be able to watch.”
Jenny nodded. Her baby did need protection from her. The thought broke what remained of her heart.
“Is that all?” Ward asked, and she nodded again. “Good. We’ll plan to start your tests after you give birth. You won’t have that baby to hide behind much longer, Jennifer.” He glanced at her huge belly. “You’re making the right choice here.”
Jenny frowned, and soon he walked away, leaving her alone with her thoughts and the growing baby kicking and turning inside her, eager to be born.
* * *
Juliana stood in the laboratory looking down at the young man on the stretcher, bound by straps and gagged, straining helplessly to pull free, looking up at her with fear in his eyes. She couldn’t move from where she stood. A leather collar and cuffs bound her neck and wrists, each mounted on the end of a long pole, and three guards in gas masks stood behind her as puppeteers, controlling her movements.
“No!” Juliana shouted, and the middle guard jabbed his pole into the back of her neck, making her stumble forward. The other two pushed and turned their poles until Juliana’s hands landed on the man’s bare chest. He convulsed, dark lesions opening all over his abdomen. “Stop it!” Juliana screamed, but they ignored her as always.
They’d been forcing her to continue the tests against her will for weeks. She wished they would just shoot her, but they were far too interested in the baby growing inside her. It had a been a very hard pregnancy, being pushed around by guards, examined by doctors in gas masks, never seeing Sebastian or anyone else who cared about her. She tried to keep her sadness buried deep inside where no one could see it.
She felt deathly ill as she watched the blisters and sores spread out across the man’s body, rupturing him open. He coughed up a mixture of stomach acid and blood, and some other sticky black fluid drooled from his nostrils.
In less than two minutes, he was dead, half his flesh eaten away, his bones swollen out of shape.
Juliana swayed on her feet, feeling dizzy. A deep cramp seized her insides, and she thought she would vomit everywhere. The cramp turned more painful, tight enough to choke off her breathing, and then it released. Her thighs felt hot and damp. She looked down to see a small wet spot on the front of her gray dress. It grew larger as the wet heat spread down her legs, and drops fell from under to her dress to land on the concrete floor between her ratty prison slippers. The drops were bright red.
“The baby,” Juliana whispered. Her legs crumpled under her, but the guards held her up with their poles. “Please help the baby.”
The steel door opened, and three medical staff in gas masks ran into the room. With the guards’ help, they loaded her onto a stretcher, strapped her down, and removed the leather straps from her wrists and neck.
She felt increasingly dizzy as they rolled her down the wide corridor between the labs. They brought her to the clinic area in the northwest quadrant of the base, and into a surgery room.
Juliana felt her stomach heave, and then a tremendous pressure built inside her. A rush of blood and water spilled out from her, fanning out across the bed, and then something else, a solid mass.
The nurses cut away her dress. Juliana watched as they reached between her legs and pulled it out of her. Her baby, a girl.
The baby was curled up, dripping gore, and not moving. Her skin had a gray pallor.
“Is she all right?” Juliana whispered. “Is she...”
Nobody spoke to her. They deposited the cold, unmoving baby into a steel pan, then dumped the placenta on top. They sealed it with a lid and carried it away, and she never saw it again.
A pained wail emerged from deep inside of her, through her clenched teeth, startling the guards, nurses, and doctors around her. She’d lost the baby, and it was gone forever.
Every imaginable kind of pain overwhelmed her, and then she blacked out under the bright lights.
Chapter Forty-Four
Jenny lay in the hospital bed in her cube with her hands cuffed to the bed rails, with the entire lower half of her body missing, as far as she could feel. The epidural had kicked in, and she felt a little panicked, knowing she wouldn’t be much good if she had to run or fight. A nurse in a hazardous material suit rigged up a green surgical curtain to shield most of her lower body from her sight.
“Don’t bother,” Jenny whispered. “Whatever you’re gonna do, I’ve seen worse.”