Arrival

When Todd woke up things were already happening. He kept his eyes at narrow slits and watched it all unfold for a little while. In addition to the nurse (Kristen, was it?) he remembered from their arrival hours before, there were at least four others. All of them to-and-fro-ing, checking the beeping, flashing instruments that surrounded his wife’s bed and offering perfunctory encouragement.

You’re doin’ fine, hon.

Almost time to push, hon.

Epidural on the way, hon.

When he heard that he almost closed his eyes again. The prospect of answering to an enraged, in-pain Susan did not thrill and delight. He would wait. Hide behind his eye lids until the man arrived with the drugs. He felt himself drifting back to the comforting oblivion of a much needed rest. He’d been dreaming of the desert.

Your husband’s awake honey, I see his eyes moving under there.

Yeah, he’s been awake for the past ten - auuuughh - minutes. TODD!

He faked it:

Uh…Huh…wh-what?

Can you wake up? Time for me to have a fuckin’ baby!

***

By the time the drugs arrived it was almost time to push. The doctor , a quick little man with a weird scar across his nose, had already been in, checking and rooting around his wife’s swollen birth-anatomy and introducing himself to the couple without looking up, or breaking from his fidgeting.

I’m Doctor Morse. You guys can call me Jamie. And WHOA! What is THAT!

Todd and Susan both snapped to and all three nurses in the room stopped. Looked, but Dr. Morse was already smiling.

Always works that one, huh? I got you good, huh? Todd? You guys were freaking out! Am I right? ‘my right? Awright.

Nobody said anything but the nurses were flashing “oh you joker” faces and getting on with their work. Todd realized the joke, but felt he was being fucked with and still felt like punching the Doctor in the face. The Doctor looked like he wanted to crawl up into Susan to get away. Another doctor, this one toting what looked to be an airline drinks-dolly, rescued him. Morse making a big circus to distract from his failed attempt at mirth.

There you are! Good! Here’s Jerry with the epidural now. Hurts a bit right now, no?

(nod) (grunt) Uhh huh…(grunt)

Alright then, I leave you in his hands, and when I come back in about (he made an exaggerated look at a phantom wrist watch) half past my sleeve!

He looked around in mock pride then confusion:

Nothin? Huh? Wow…Tough crowd.

He wandered off.

It was almost eleven o’clock. They’d been there almost nine hours. Contractions had started an hour before that, so they’d been at it for almost a half a day. Their first, four years ago, had taken only five hours from hospital drive to placental expulsion. Todd noted all this as he mock stretched and yawned. Nobody was paying attention though, cause the epidural-guy was explaining how awesome the narcotics he brought would make his wife feel. Todd listened with jealousy. Hospitals, he believed, should drug both mother and father. The experience warranted intoxication enough for two.

His wife swooned a little as an anesthetizing flood of painkiller doused her blood/brain barrier. She said:

I forgot how good that feels.

The epidural guy said nothing, displaying a confident smirk.

***

Ok, where are we?

The Doc was back, there were little flecks of blood and fluid on his white coat, and his brow was glistening. At least one baby had come into the world while he’d been away. He moved to a spot between Todd’s wife’s legs, spread wide and suspended in stirrups. He reached and put a finger into the open birth canal and said.

Wow. It’s not a whole lot more than before. Nurse, can I see you for a minute?

They walked outside. Todd caught little snatches of what they were saying out there. He caught the word “section” and heard the nurse say: “two more hours then”. He stroked his wife’s head and she looked up at him with contented epidural eyes.

I love you, honey. Please don’t leave me in here.

Never baby.

He said it and moved off to the window to check the view. Just when he did that his wife cried out.

Ooo! I think I need to push!!!

He ran back to her and assumed his cheer-leading position at the foot of the bed. Something was happening, because now it looked as if the whole bundle she’d been carrying had moved down a foot and had come to a stop just above her pelvic brim. Her vulva was all swollen and it looked like a little grey head was starting to show itself.

Push honey. Time to push now.

The Doctor came sliding in, two nurses followed close. Now it was a party. Five strangers gazing into his wife with great anticipation and concern. The doctor instructs the nurses, sending them running to get mysterious implements with weird medical names. He turned back to Todd’s wife, running fingers in and out of places people didn’t usually touch. He motioned Todd to come closer, told him:

OK, see here…

He made circular finger motion around his wife’s (now very swollen) lower abdomen.

She’s been riding low now for a few hours, and usually we like to see more movement than we’ve seen so far. We’ll give it a little while longer, maybe forty five minutes, but then we’re going to have to start talking about a c-section. For now though, let’s try to get a bit of pushing from her see if we can move it down…

It was right at that moment, that Todd noticed the bee. The bee, it was plainly a bee, yellow, and black striped and as big as a walnut, was crawling up toward them on his wife’s thigh. Todd had watched it come ducking out, making itself flat against his unborn child’s forehead and his wife vaginal wall.
The doctor didn’t see the second, and Todd now saw a much larger bee crawl out of Susan. He took a few wild swipes at the first and stumbled as the bee dodged him and broke for the door. He was just regaining his balance, turning his gaze back towards Susan when the second bee landed on the Morse’s nose. Todd said:

Whoa! Doc, it’s on your…

FUCK!!! AUGGGGGGH!

Face.

Fuckin’ motherFUCKER stung….Aughhhh!

The Doctor was pawing and dabbing at his nose but every time he touched the area he shouted and winced in pain. There were at least three more bees around but Todd couldn’t stop looking at the Doc. The scar across his nose, his entire face really, was swelling out like somebody was pumping air into it. Within scant seconds Morse’s entire face was blistering out and flushing an irritated, angry pink hue. The Doctor was looking cross eyed down his nose, but then jerked his head in the direction of his patient and let out a terrified shriek:

Horrrrry Shiughhh Looooohh…

He pointed and Todd looked back at his wife. There were bees trooping and glopping out of her like ground beef spurting from a grinder. Her cervix was yawning open as if an invisible speculum were forcing it, but Todd saw only bees. They were dropping in great gouts onto the floor and then shaking off the jet-lag, clouding into the air. His wife, doped almost to unconsciousness, couldn’t feel the creatures buzzing off her, but she saw them soon enough, flying around in the room. Then she saw Dr. Morse, curled up on the ground at the foot of her bed, groaning as more bees touched down. She saw him twitching as new stings shocked his body. Todd fell to assist the Doc, but when he got down on the floor he had a front row seat for the bee-flood, and he was held, enthralled, for precious seconds. He saw Susan's baby bump, which he had really hoped contained a son, rolling and roiling around her lower abdomen as she birthed her noisy brood. They were pouring out in a steady, thick stream now. Not even waiting to touch ground before buzzing their hateful wings into motion and attacking whatever they found.

And they found plenty. Each of the nurses had fallen, and they swatted and rolled in desperate futility. Todd saw that one of them, the one “Kristen,” who’d received them not eight hours ago, had a carpet of bees now enwrapping her head like a ski-mask. He heard her crying and moaning under the wild insects, writhing helplessly beneath them. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He’d have probably stayed there until help came if a gigantic, almost totally black, bee hadn’t landed on his hand and stung him. The pain was instant and total. He was on the ground before he knew that he’d fallen, and his whole arm felt like it was being burned in a fire. He screamed and a high-pitched, almost womanly scronk came out. He felt his hand blowing up and looked down in time to see the swelling burst and what looked to be a gallon of opaque, yellowish fluid come dripping down his arm and onto the floor. He looked up and saw that the bees were still puking out of his wife’s crotch. An awful black paste that separated and took flight upon hitting the hysterical air. Todd felt another burst of white hot pain on his shoulder and another on his lower leg. He was passing out.

The stings along his arm had all started to fill and puff out, and they stung like white-hot needles. He felt new bursts of searing pain on the back of both legs. He sat down, involuntary spasms of agony racked him and he looked about in confusion. He saw the bees, some as big as baseballs, come shooting from his wife and aggressively attach directly to whatever exposed flesh was left in the room. He saw the arms of two nurses full to exploding with vile fluid. He saw the doctor fall for the last time, and when he hit the floor the outsized blister that had been his cheek popped and ran, the fluid from inside him mixing with crushed bees and blood on the floor. He heard screams and moans from outside of the room. The bees had taken the floor.


The screams of the nurses were fading off and becoming something else. He saw a soft whit light and he felt himself falling to sleep. That’s when he heard his wife's bee-muffled scream and willed his eyes open one more time. The bees were like a thick fog in the room now. He could hear their stereo buzzing and saw them in a thick buzzing mass toward the ceiling, getting lower and lower. He tried to gaze through the cloud to see his wife. He pulled at the bed rail by her still stirrup-ed legs to try and stand up. He yanked hard and found himself in the bee-cloud. He couldn’t see Susan, but he saw a pile of bees four feet high on the bed
and saw her twitching legs poking from the squirming, droning mound. The bees quickly carpeted them. It was the last thing he saw before he toppled over. The bees were still pouring full-blast out of his wife though, and if Todd had stayed awake just a few seconds more, he’d have seen her abdomen torn open from the inside, and the two sides of her separate on almost a perfect midline that cracked and ripped all the way to her throat. The undulating mass of bees now exposed inside her took to the sky hungry for flesh to subsume. The cloud of bees in the room mobilized. Filling, one by one, the other twenty-nine birthing rooms in the small, one-floor natal wing of South Kingston Memorial. Destroying any and every living thing they found. Before his eyes closed for the last time, Todd saw a torrent-column of bees the width and breadth of the doorway go freight-training out of the room. His ears, failing and full of bees, could hear only the loudest of the screaming over the horrible, deafening buzz.

Within minutes, the entire natal wing of South County Memorial was overcome. Within twenty, the bees had all settled down, lighting on any surface available to witness a birth of another sort.

A grey thing came sliding from the table where Todd’s wife had lay and began to make its way out room. It took a few minutes to claim what it needed from the five long-dead bodies around the table, and then began to move, a bit faster now, toward the open door and the hallway beyond.