Sloppy Seconds

Alive

Johnny was a cannibal with an insatiable appetite for human flesh… and he just happened to work at an abortion clinic.

Each night, he clawed his way through the red bio-waste bags, feeding on bits of ground and shredded meat from the piles of mangled fetal corpses; bloody hamburger spit out by the vacuum used to extract the unwanted parasites from their mothers. Their tiny pureed forms looked like chunks of dough covered in cranberries, or squashed cherries suspended in Ragu — like a watermelon pushed through a meat grinder. He gobbled it up in fistfuls, making a slurping and smacking sound as he greedily sucked down the stringy ropes of premature flesh that drooled from his goatee in bloody gobs, like a fat kid in a pie-eating contest.

Occasionally, he performed back-alley abortions for the local crackwhores using a wire hanger and a pair of tongs to remove fetuses, piece by piece from the diseased vaginas of their mothers — as late as eight or nine months into their pregnancies, when their bellies had gotten too big even for the perverted johns who liked their whores ready to drop. The babies came out in chunks that looked like red marshmallow melted over a campfire. Sometimes he wouldn't even wait until their mothers weren't looking before he plopped the chewy morsels into his mouth. If they would let him, he'd suck the afterbirth right out of their syphilitic cunts and chew it up in front of them. It was his greatest joy in the world.

Most nights, however, he contented himself with garbage.

The rubbery meat and stringy, sallow fat tissue tasted like veal or raw calamari as he slurped umbilical chords out of the strawberry pulp of afterbirth and amniotic goo like strips of overcooked linguine. He bit through skulls that burst in his mouth like over-ripe fruit and sucked out the jelly-like gray matter. He didn't mind the maggots swimming in the stew of flesh and blood any more than he did the other undulating vermin. He slurped them up as eagerly as he did the various limbs and organs floating in that pulp of blood pudding.

But today, there was something else in there… something moving. He could hear it chewing its way from the bottom of the bio-waste bag even as he ate his way from the top. Something in there was alive. Johnny scooped aside the diminutive body parts until he located one still writhing with the spark of life. It was little more than half a fetus; a torso and a head. Yet it was alive.

It growled and gnashed its teeth at Johnny as he stared in amazement and prepared to pop the mewling creature into his mouth. That's when Johnny noticed the entire bag was moving. Hands, feet, heads, disembodied organs, all undulating with life. He could even feel the half-digested remains he'd devoured crawling within him. He felt tiny teeth, feet, hands, fingers, toes, and parts he shuddered to describe scratching and biting their way back up his esophagus, struggling to be free. They were wriggling in the back of his throat.

He regurgitated coagulating blood and partially digested meat again and again, trying to rid himself of them. But he'd eaten so much. Pounds and pounds of undead fetuses that were now hideously alive.

Alive inside of him.

"In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children" the Lord commanded.

"Damn kids." A great roiling began in his loins. He doubled over with a nauseating agony that twisted in his guts like razors. A spray of fecal matter crawling with living abortions erupted from his asshole and slid down his pants legs. He watched a fingerless hand attached to the shoulders, neck, and head of some mongoloid Down Syndrome baby wave to him as the toothless face grinned up from the puddle of liquid excrement.

"I wouldn't give two shits for a damn kid." He crushed the thing with his boot, enjoying the satisfying pop of its malformed head as it ruptured against his heel like a balloon filled with Jell-O. But he did give a shit, and it would be his last as the rest of his resurrected dinner scampered out of his rectum, dragging along his entire intestinal track.

And just as the Old Testament had prophesized two millennia ago, Johnny screamed in agony and sorrow as he brought forth children.