Why had she ever thought some jerk who hires you to do a thing like this and pays cash was anything but what he looked like, which was a damn snake? Dr. Turner, the serpent.

Sergeant Walker sat waiting for the next contraction. Turner hovered now, simpering.

“I need a cesarean.”

“It’s going to be all right.”

“I demand an emergency room.”

She could smell her blood and hear it dripping, a lot of it.

Sergeant Walker—Sarge, as he liked to be called—offered her some Dr Pepper. She spat it out. What were they doing with sodas in a birthing room?

“It’s supposed to be ice cubes,” she managed to rasp, “not this crap.”

“Now, you need it, you need the strength,” Walker said in his drawling voice. He called himself an Alabama boy. Yeah, probably another damn lie. Maybe he wasn’t even military and maybe this wasn’t even a government place. Except she knew different, because even though it only went up two stories, she’d seen that the basement also went down into the fault-ridden depths under the city. Insane, who would go down into a death trap like that? If an earthquake came, you’d be buried alive.

Oh, here it came again, and, God, it hurt, GOD GOD GOD!

What in hell was in her, a damn giant?

Sarge tried again with the soda. “He needs it, too,” he said, his voice now wheedling. “The baby needs his strength, too, Martha.”

“It’s a Dr Pepper for chrissakes!” This damn place—it had a rep in the neighborhood. Scary. No sign on it. Just a hard-tile lobby and an elevator that took its own sweet time, then these offices, linoleum, steel desks, picture of Reagan on the wall to make it all look official, which was total BS.

Oh, God, it was worse this time, a great, steel wave of agony that started in the depth of her guts and spread with the speed of a flash fire all the way into her throat and even into her eyes, her scalp, the ripping agony, spasmodic, causing her to arch her back, causing the sergeant to shout again, “Push, Martha, push!”

“Damn you, get it out!” Turner screamed. “Get my baby out!”

“We’re killing her!”

A sudden, agonizing lurch, a feeling that she was being shoved backward, then it was as if the world itself had drained out of her.

“Push, damn you,” Turner screamed, his claws clutching, his eyes swarming with fear.

She could not push, not anymore. She was like a dead fish, that was it, a dead salmon lying flat on the butcher block, ready for the gutting.

Oh my God, my God, this is death, this total inability to move. I’m young and I’m pretty and I want boys and I want life. I want life!