Editor’s Note: Freeline Media welcomes original works by authors around the globe. Here, we present the short story “Motherhood’s End” by author Joseph Aisenberg.
Motherhood’s End
Having a second baby was more trouble than it was worth. Like everybody says, Martha thought, if it was men making them, the human race would die out.
Why had she agreed to a vacation? Well, George said they needed it. As a couple. They’d been fighting a lot lately. Plus with a sister coming in three and a half months, her six year old son Stan was sure to feel jealous when it got here. Therefore, something fun while the family was still in its current format seemed a good idea.
But all this driving, driving, driving, made Martha’s bloated body feel uncomfortable. Cramped, achy, hungry, thirsty, the whole thing. When George stopped at roadside places, chain ones — no mom-and-pop anythings were acceptable to Martha — she would lose interest almost at once in whatever eats George got her. After a while, he was letting off fumes of resentment behind the wheel, looking redder than usual, offering stupid male advice he would never have taken himself. He said she should squat on her knees in the front seat and practice breathing exercises! Right. Nor would he just have made himself eat whatever was offered. Why do men say such dumb stuff? She was fuming herself by that point, but said maybe she’d eat later.
He went on driving, seeming redder and balder. And fat-necked.
Meanwhile, Stan kept squeaking up from the back seat, asking not when they were going to get wherever it was they were headed, but if he’d missed the destination altogether. He wondered if they were going home now. “Everything looks the same here,” he said gazing out the windows, “only backwards.”
He said it so many times Martha told him pretty harshly, Be quiet. The rear view mirror showed his quivering lip, while he stared resentfully. George, she knew, was itching to say, “Lighten up, Mart. It’s just your hormones raging. We’re supposed to be having fun, remember?” If he’d said that she would have stabbed him with her nail file and called a lawyer right then to initiate divorce proceedings.
But really, everything outside the city did look kind of the same, going either backwards or forwards, roads, heat ripples, signs for Next Exits, rest stops, motels. Why didn’t flyover America have any self respect?
Then came the traffic jam.
The car was stopped an hour plus, waiting to get moving again. George, who now was cussing nonstop, was even more annoying than the stalled traffic. Finally, he got so sick of the waiting he extricated them from the line, nudged his way between bleating cars, got them off the highway and turned back for the nearest exit. After which he had Google Maps plot him another course by back roads, hoping to circle around what the radio said was an accident involving three trucks (oil, potato chips, fast food), and continue on to “The Beach.”
George drove progressively thinning roads until they were plodding a plain asphalt strip cut between squares of hay or alfalfa farmland, and empty-looking houses off in the green distance. Google got scrambled, claiming turns were coming up which never arrived; called streets by different names. George wanted to return to the highway, but Martha insisted they continue forward. She couldn’t bear sitting in that jammed traffic again after all this. Eventually, she had George stop so she could pee. Stan peed also. George did some more fuming in the car.
“Are you and daddy mad at each other?” Stan asked when he zipped up.
“We’re fine. You’re just irritating daddy with that stuff about having missed The Beach.”
Back in the car. With his soft white skin and fluffy, reddish brown hair, Stan always looked so serious when trying to figure his parents out. Martha felt a little guilty for what she’d said. The boy had no idea what was coming, just wanted what he wanted. Still, George deserved being made the bad guy here.
The Drive Resumes; A New Child
Drive resumed. After miles of silence they happened on a child. About the same age as Stan, a little taller; he walked the left side of the country road. Martha convinced him to get in the car and let them take him home, to the small town he assured them was not far ahead. When they got there it was late afternoon. The town was small, but not as small as some. The Main Street was inexplicably free of traffic, like during Covid, Martha thought. The whole place seemed abandoned.
“You sure this is right, honey?” Martha asked the boy, seated between her and George.
Stan irked in back, said, “Don’t call him ‘honey’.”
The boy insisted this was the place. He gave childish directions to his house. By now George and Martha’s phones had lost coverage, so no one could be called. Brick storefronts from yesteryear passed by; a convenience mart, strip mall and dead traffic lights gave way to neighborhoods where nothing stirred. They pulled up in front of a house. Its lawn was overgrown. The siding, once green, was cracked, faded—looked like an empty shell.
The boy said this was his home, but no one answered George’s vigorous knocks. Since the door wasn’t locked, everyone went in. Furniture covered in dust. The pale boy shrugged when asked what could have happened. Rooms upon rooms. A kitchen, the bath. Martha separated from George and was followed by Stan as she went upstairs. The boy they’d picked up hung back. Children’s rooms with ambiguous messes. Here was a big one Martha assumed must be the master bedroom. Sweeping rust stains covered the walls and bed sheets. More stains smeared the wood floor. Several hand prints were on the wall.
Realizing it was dried blood and not rust, Martha became frightened. She tugged Stan from the room. She screamed for George. He didn’t come though. After a few minutes, she wove through the complex of rooms and halls to the stairs. At bottom, the boy they’d picked up slouched against a wall, near a window.
“Where’s George?” Martha asked several times, rushing down the stairs.
The boy shrugged. He seemed actually annoyed.
Outside the sunlight was slanting toward evening. Martha called for George again and again. No answer. She got in the car, intending to drive around looking for him.
But the car wouldn’t start.
This couldn’t be happening, Martha told herself.
Searching for George; Strange Houses
Hours passed as Martha and the children began a block-by-block search for George, calling out to him over and over. He never emerged from bushes though, or from between houses or down any street. Nothing. Just nothing. Eventually Martha stopped going into houses, because so many retained the obvious remnants of horrible slaughter. Eventually, it got dark. Martha and the children were hungry, so they entered one of the anonymous homes looking for food. No signs of struggle, thankfully. Plus the kitchen had a lot of canned stuff and dried milk. The water worked too. They found candles and matches and ate by flickering light. Martha then made the kids help her arrange a fort out of the living room furniture. Getting a knife, she corralled them into the thing, hoping it might offer some protection.
“It’s all right, boys,” Martha said. “Everything’s going to be all right by morning.”
“I know,” Stan said dully. “I guess we’re not going to the beach then.”
The strange boy who had gotten them into this laughed. It was unsettling.
Martha was surprised the kids fell asleep so quickly; surprised how much she resented Stan’s falling so easily asleep. It was like he didn’t care. She felt the baby inside her kick then. Felt achy, sick, frightened, though finally she nodded off looking at a candle burning between her and the kids.
“What are you doing here?” the man hissed, waking Martha and the children.
Martha cried out with fear. The kids rubbed their eyes and stared at the man, gazing down at them over the wall over the couch and furniture fort. He reached in and pinched out the candle.
“You want them to find us? Come on.”
They gathered together the canned goods in the kitchen and implements. The man said he was always losing silverware. After many assurances Martha and the kids were from out of town, he led them through dark streets to his hiding place. His name was Nate. He told Martha that George was likely dead. In a whispering gush, he claimed responsibility for what was happening. A nearby factory downriver, he said, had been polluting the water. It created a sickly sludge mutant he’d discovered washed up on the river’s banks several months ago. He gestured the river’s direction. The children said nothing, merely walked holding one another’s hands. Martha didn’t like it. Nate continued, saying he’d brought the sludge ball back to his house and tried to nurse it back to health. This had required attaching it to his dog Charlie, to leech off him.
“I knew it was wrong,” he said, “but Charlie didn’t seem to mind much. He kinda loved it. But then it grew big, red, and strange.” Afraid, Nate had finally cut the horrible-smelling glob off Charlie, who died. Nate tried to flush it, but it caught in the pipes, causing the toilet to back up. Eventually Nate had had to yank the toilet out and snake that shitty sludge through. Afterward, the bathroom was brown-spattered and “stank strange,” but Nate assumed it was all over.
Nate soon learned it was only the beginning.
At first, he’d noticed less people around, doing stuff, like there was another “pandemic,” he said. “Then stores closed, cars were abandoned on the side of the street. You’d hear screams in the night until at last all that was left was them damn kids.”
Nate shooed Martha and the children into a large house. On the second story, he directed them up a folding trap door ladder into an attic. After pulling the creaky ladder closed behind them they oriented themselves within his filthy living space. It consisted of empty bottles, blankets, socks and two reeking buckets.
“Whatever I did here,” Nate told Martha with a sob, “it made the kids go nuts and kill all the grownups. Excepting me. I seen what was happening right away and went into hiding. All cause I flushed that thing down the toilet!”
Made no sense to Martha. Neither did the circumstances. “But why did you stay?” she asked as Nate lit a lantern not suitable for indoor use (the attic’s small round window he’d blacked out) and arranged a pallet for her and the children.
“Tried to get out, but them weirdo kids is everywhere. Almost got caught several times. If it was just one or two you could beat these monsters, but there’s too many. So I settled here and go out on raids for food, hoping whatever’s going on eventually ends.”
Martha thought he was crazy. She was afraid of him, but she was even more scared to leave here in the dark. She looked at the boy who’d brought them to this town, who had claimed he lived here, and said nothing to Nate. She couldn’t chance his hurting the child.
“I guess with you in your condition and these ones I’ll have to figure us a way out,” Nate said sadly. He lay down in the far corner of the attic. “And I guess it’s gotta be tomorrow.”
Waiting for morning; the trailer park
Martha cried in the darkness, touched her belly and mourned George. She worried about what this was doing to Stan; thought she’d never sleep again. But emotional exhaustion sent her off again.
What felt like a snap later she was pulled back to consciousness. Giggles behind several flashlights directed at her face. Blinded, she cried, “Who’s there?” More giggles. Suddenly tiny hands grabbed her. In the shifting flashlight illumination, she caught sight of the face of the boy who’d brought them here. He smiled horribly. Hands pulling, dragging. She screamed in terror, screamed for Stan. Hands clamped her mouth and she was dragged roughly over the attic floor, lodging a splinter in her knee, down through the attic’s trap door into blue windowed light. Morning. She was frightened of what might have happened to Stan. Please please let him be all right! she begged reality. Please!
The large crowd of dirty children forced Martha to her feet, down to the house’s first floor. There she saw Stan among them, helping, and knew he did so willingly.
Martha was dragged by the end of a rope through shock as much as the town, to the trailer park. If she slowed or zigged or zagged, the children would yank the rope hard so she’d jerk forward. She almost fell several times. A few of the grotesque children followed behind, laughing and kicking her to move faster.
The shock hadn’t started with the sight of Stan though, but when she’d been made to watch the children beat and kick poor Nate. They’d made Martha watch her own son do these terrible things with them. And then a mass of hands pushed Nate’s head down while he begged for mercy. One toddler gleefully tore hunks of his hair out. The oldest among them, a plump dull-eyed girl with light brown locks came forward, bearing a pistol much too big for her, and calmly fired it into Nate’s head. A section exploded, coating her arm and part of her face with bloody bits. She laughed as she wiped her face off with her hand and licked its palm.
After that, everything was Martha being dragged through empty streets, like Major Molineux she thought oddly, past dead houses whose cracked windows stared with an indifferent blandness worse than anything overtly sinister.
Then the trailer park. Deep-throated chugs and constant humming sounds arrived before the clustered sight of rectangular buildings. Once past the park’s entrance, she saw children wandering and playing frolicsome games. The chugging came from several generators; the humming derived from all kinds, sizes and colors of deep freeze units. Quantities of blood had dribbled down the freezer’s fronts like tongues. Martha was brought to a halt.
And that was when she noticed, through her shock, which really was horror normalized, that among the children behind her one rode a bicycle. Had a flatbed trailer attached, carrying on it a heap. That heap caused Martha’s stomach to heave, her baby to kick. It was poor brainless Nate. She thought about trying to make a run for it, even with her rope, but she had no idea where she should run to even if she were free.
The boy on the bicycle asked another child wearing a police cap, who had a gun belt sagging from his hips, if there was room anywhere.
“A lot in a couple of ‘em on the other side of the park. That him?”
“Yup,” the boy on the bicycle said. “Finally popped that stupid fuck.”
“Childs and Defreo walkied that they killed the other one.”
“Come on!” a ghastly girl shouted at Martha, jerking her toward an empty patch of grass, where she saw a green painted hatch sticking out of the ground.
Suddenly Martha started screaming hysterically for Stan. Again and Again. The other children laughed. She looked over her shoulder frantically, hoping, needing to see him seeing her. He emerged from between two dingy trailers and waved.
She was sobbing uncontrollably as they pushed her down the hatch into a mildew-smelling storm shelter. The door above closed, locked. A caged bulb on the ceiling showed a round cement room as appetizing as Nate’s attic, including a couple disgusting buckets.
Two women were already there, bedraggled, eerily calm. One was far more pregnant than Martha.
The other woman was pregnant too. Twelve weeks along.
“Why the hell do they want our babies?” Martha asked.
“I told you,” the most pregnant woman said. “You wouldn’t believe me even if I tried to explain it.”
The other woman stood from the floor with a grunt, flipped her filthy hair. “You’re about to find out though,” she said, sounding almost amused.
“That bad, huh?” Martha said looking at them.
The most pregnant woman cried and turned her face to the concrete wall.
Martha learned that the women had been in this storm shelter so long they’d lost all sense of time. The routine never changed, they said. Were fed twice a day. Every so often their buckets would be removed and cleaned. Occasionally they were taken out and hosed down for a bath. Then there were the times they were taken to The Trailer.
“What happens there?” Martha asked.
The women stared silent.
Arriving at The Trailer; meeting Mother
She was taken to the trailer her third day of captivity.
The children came armed with knives and guns. They urged the women out of the storm shelter into early evening light. The breeze felt reassuring, as did that clear-skied twilight. That ended abruptly when the women were taken to the center of the park, The Trailer. It was actually two trailers jammed together. One side of each had had a wall removed, but because the trailers’ halves weren’t of the same make, the seam where the units met didn’t quite align. Inside, wall dividers had been ripped out, leaving a strangely open space dotted with remnants of kitchens and bathrooms. The windows had been removed as well; huge holes gaped in the ceiling. Two moldy mattresses, sheet-less, had been shoved together in the middle of things. On top lay a writhing creature, bloated, naked and vaguely humanoid with numerous sagging, black-nippled breasts. Between these, along its swollen limbs, it had plump boils and clearish, fluid-filled sacs. Its long, fox-red hair had long ago fused together with grease and blood clots. The face, if you could call anything so lumpy a face, appeared to have several eyes, though Martha felt sure the two reptilian orbs staring lidless at she and the other women fulfilled all actual eye-functions. Its pink-painted lips hung open in a lewd grin, pulled back over broken yellow teeth.
“Come and drink children,” it said in a deep raspy voice sounding more mannish than feminine. “Mother is ready.”
Children had filled the trailer. They pressed around and behind Martha and the others. Several floated toward the monster on the mattress, bent down over it and began loudly to suckle from its wobbly breasts — including Stan, despite Martha’s yelling at him. One set of children after another came forward to partake. Their eyes changed, whites went pink; the irises turned black. Something almost post coital about their attitudes of luxuriant bliss afterward, thought Martha.
Once the feeding finished, Mother said, “Bring her to me.”
Several children, including Stan, dragged the most pregnant woman forward to the mattress. She screamed as Mother fondled her belly with a bumpy, long-nailed hand. “This will do,” Mother said. The children then forced the pregnant woman’s head low enough so Mother had access to her scalp. While the pregnant woman screamed and screamed, Mother slammed a spike into her head. The woman jerked violently, let off a few final twitches. More children emerged and pulled the dead woman’s clothes off and caressed her nude pregnant belly, which Mother sliced open with a long sharp nail. The fetus was removed from the scarlet slit-like wound and somehow plunged into one of the clearish sacs on Mother’s torso, where it was completely absorbed for further gestation.
Martha gasped in horror. A little girl next to Martha giggled. “I know,” she said. “I think the woman looks funny too.”
After this children swarmed the dead woman. They cut her and tugged at her until she came apart like a plucked turkey. Legs and arms cracked off the torso. Blood went everywhere; multi-colored guts did as well. Soon what remained couldn’t be recognized as human. A whimsical party broke out between the children while Martha and the other pregnant woman were made to do chores: that is, start scrubbing on hands and knees. Buckets and towels were given them, but they couldn’t get much up while blood splashed and bits of flesh plopped. Delighted children took hold of the dead woman’s intestines and formed a jaunty ring with them. They started singing “Hotel California,” of all things. Organs were tossed around, hit the floor and burst. The youngest children picked up anonymous hunks and gnawed them, though mostly it was Mother who fed.
That was when Martha thought of the deep freezers humming away outside, what they were for. Nate had told her the kids probably killed George, but not that they might have saved his corpse to feed Mother. As well as her and the other pregnant women? What, she wondered, had those slimy meat and potato meals really been made from? This threw up a most inappropriate quip. “I always did think George had good taste.”
She began to laugh and laugh and laugh. Fell against a blood-spattered wall, where she went right on laughing. Laughed even as children yelled at her to keep working and hit her and punched her and pulled her hair. Which only made her laugh harder.
As Martha was no good to work, they returned her to the storm shelter along with the other woman, who held and rocked her on the concrete floor. She talked to Martha as if she were her child. “It’s okay sweetie,” she said. “We’ll get out. They’ll screw up at some point. Kids are dumb.”
Martha wanted very much to have lost her mind, but unfortunately was only able to dodge the thing for a chunk of sleep. Soon enough she was once more caged in it, lying on the concrete floor in a puddle of sticky fluid.
A bloody end; a surprise visitor
Blood.
Lots of it.
She opened her eyes.
It was coming from the woman, her cellmate. Martha discovered she’d managed to slip a knife out of that blood orgy, cut her wrists and stabbed her abdomen. She was not yet dead though.
“Now my baby is free,” she told Martha weakly.
Martha stood against the wall opposite, holding the woman’s knife, feeling duty bound to let her go. While waiting, Martha contemplated suicide herself. She couldn’t, though: the knife was too small and the pain she’d have to inflict too great — not to mention all that eternal blackness. She tossed the knife on the dead woman’s chest and started banging the hatch door for help. None came. Martha was left marooned in all that blood a couple days without food, water. Turned out she and the woman were being punished for refusing to do their chores during the festivities.
That’s what her child-guards said when they finally came back, bearing plates of pinkish meat. Furious at finding one of their prisoners dead, they turned on Martha, calling her a fat ugly cheater. “I hate you!” one of the girls said viciously to Martha.
Martha was brought to The Trailer, to Mother. At one end several girls forced two boys to play Tea Party, drinking blood from orange cups. Hoses used to rinse the place still hung from a window and one of the ceiling-holes. Martha heard a train off in the distance somewhere, which seemed totally insane. How could life be going on normally?
Mother was apparently angry at the loss to its community. Mother cried, wailed, lolling mournfully on its mattress. Then the bloated thing lifted itself up and crab-crawled across the seamed floor, which still had remnants of blood.
“We’ll take yours now,” Mother said gazing up from the floor before Martha.
Martha refused to cry or beg for help as children surrounded her and forced her head down close to Mother’s pink-painted mouth. She’d accepted death, was ready for it; the spike probably wouldn’t hurt, she thought. Not much.
Before the blow came there was a loud ruckus, a shrill scream. Down one of the ceiling-holes, came a man bearing a knife. He stabbed Mother right off. Mother and the children shrieked. Mother skittered away from Martha whose knees gave out, tumbling her to the floor. Sewage-smelling blood spewed forth. The man rushed after Mother and stabbed more. Its sacs and pustules burst, freeing the fetus it had stolen, now a baby. It squirted across the trailer floor.
The children, including Stan, were disoriented. Still they went at the man, trying to subdue his stabbing arm. At which point Martha saw it was George. Her husband! He wasn’t dead, but busy saving her. I didn’t eat him, didn’t eat him, she thought stupidly as George fought off children. While he was distracted by this sniveling swarm, Mother took a chance to stretch its head up and bite George’s forearm with broken yellow teeth. George cried out. His fingers opened, losing him his well-slimed knife. But his pain turned to pure rage. He grabbed a small child, flipped it over. Taking it by the ankles he used the child to bat away the mass of blubbering children attacking him, and then to bludgeon Mother itself. The child’s neck snapped as George slammed it down on Mother again and again, Mother’s body erupted, collapsed; its face became a runny mess right before it gave off a final feeble gurgle, and rolled over dead, flattened like a bug.
George dropped the limp child, his weapon. Martha recognized it as the boy who’d brought them to this town. And she was glad he of death, cried happy tears over it.
Moments after Mother expired, all the children around them went wild, screaming, gasping. One by one each began to vomit and ooze blood and drop where they stood, and to die in heaps of fear and confusion.
For whatever reason Stan didn’t die, though he threw up over and over, crying in his mother’s arms. The baby that had been expelled from the monster also lived. Martha hypothesized that it and Stan had survived the creature’s death because they hadn’t been poisoned by its monster milk for as long as the others.
George, whose arm grew swollen from Mother’s nasty bite, said “Could be.” Then he told her what had happened to him. “The boy who brought us to the town lured me away from the house while you and Stan were upstairs. Two armed kids took me there. Broke the car too. I killed them after making them radio I was dead that first day. Well I couldn’t risk time going for help, so I somehow narrowed down where you and Stan were myself. I was so afraid,” he admitted crying, which Martha didn’t want to hear. “I lost the boys’ weapons, missed tons of chances to save you. Finally I got hold of a knife and I … just did it. Now here we are.”
The baby stopped breathing before morning light and had to be dumped in a bush; Stan became feverish. By 10 a.m. he was so sick George had to carry him until they reached a road with traffic. A man in a pickup gave them a lift in spite of, or because of, what a fright they looked. When told the town the family had come from, the man misunderstood.
“Oh,you don’t hardly want to go there,” he warned. “People never go there that don’t usually get lost. There are a bunch of weird kids that show up in the surrounding towns to buy things. No one knows where they actually come from. That place, I say. No sir, don’t go there.”
“We WON’T!” Martha screamed.
The loss of the baby and the encounter with the pickup driver convinced them never to tell anyone anything because, well, who would have believed them? And there was a lot of stuff they didn’t want to talk about, think about. Stan eventually got better, seemed to forget all, though after his stay in the hospital Martha’s maternal feelings for him never fully recovered. She remained suspicious of Stan, partly hated him; began looking forward to having a spanking new daughter more than ever.
After Elizabeth came, things normalized. The slaughter and cannibalism Martha insisted had just been one of life’s blips. It hung around though, whispering that her ordinary upper middle-class life was really an insane dream. George became a lot nicer at least, softer. He was attentive to her as he’d never been during Stan’s infancy. Now George made sure to get up for the baby at night even when she wanted to do it. She knew she shouldn’t complain about such a gift, but it annoyed her. Especially when George decided to start working from home.
One afternoon shortly after that, Martha determined to confront George about his muscling in on her territory. She left the magazine early and dashed home, planning to tell him all this had to stop. No one seemed to be there. “Hey George!” she called. Nothing. She checked the kitchen, George’s bathroom. Was he out with the baby? She checked her bathroom. As she neared the door she heard muffled voices inside, an odd babble. Opening the door quietly, she saw George sprawled in her salmon-colored tub. He wore a thick coat of pink lipstick. His shirt was off. Along his torso she saw several sagging breasts. She and George hadn’t fooled around since the town and these hideous growths were a disgusting shock. George had baby Elizabeth attached to one of them. Stan was there too, loudly feeding off his father alongside a twelve-year-old neighbor boy.
“Eat,” George encouraged them. “Suck, feed.”
Stan unlatched his dripping mouth from one of those terrible breasts. “You taste good,” he said. “I like you better than I ever liked mommy.”
“Oh sweetheart,” George said smiling through garish lipstick. “She only gave birth to you. I’m your real mother.”
Martha was about to scream. At that moment though, she heard the patter of feet coming up behind her, and a childish giggle.
Joseph Aisenberg is an Oklahoma-based writer, film critic and historian. His noted works include the critical film analysis Brian De Palma’s Carrie: Studies in The Horror Film, which was nominated for The Bram Stoker Award, horror’s premier literary award. Aisenberg is also a regular contributor to film magazine Bright Lights Film Journal, has provided commentary tracks for Shout Factory’s 4K/BluRay steelbook special edition of Carrie, and is also the author of numerous other stories and novels. Freeline Media happily welcomes his contributions here.
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