It's Alive! Read Online Free PDF

around the room. In the middle of it, rising above the massacre on the silver steel bed sheathed in white, lay Lenore, her legs still in the stirrups. She was quiet and still.
    “Lenore, Lenore—” Frank choked and stumbled toward her, coughing. He slipped in the blood and fell over her, clutching her, hugging her. “Lenore—”
    Her eyes opened slowly. “My baby? My baby?”
    “My god, Lenore, what happened? What happened, Lenore?”
    “Where’s my baby?”
    An intern, propped in a corner like a torn rag doll, groaned softly. His eyes opened, then closed. He raised a hand to his ripped throat, then dropped it.
    Other doctors and nurses now raced into the room, stopping short just inside the door when they met the scene. Then they began scrambling over the bodies. The intern in the corner gasped and gurgled. A doctor bent over him.
    “Alive . . . gone . . .” The intern raised his eyes to the ceiling, to the skylight, then fell over on his side, his head thumping onto the floor, his eyes still staring.
    The doctor bending over him looked up into the skylight. A small hole had been broken through it, the jagged edges of glass tinged with blood.
    “Everyone’s dead,” whimpered a nurse, who sank to her hands and knees.
    “Where’s my baby . . .” Lenore murmured.
    “WHERE’S OUR BABY?” Frank screamed. He reached out this way and that, clutching at the doctors and nurses who were slipping and falling in the gore to check the bodies for life. “WHERE THE HELL’S OUR BABY?”
    Two sets of arms clamped him from the rear. He struggled insanely, but they pulled him away from Lenore and pinned him against the wall.
    A doctor hunched over Lenore, examining her quickly. He turned to Frank, his face expressionless, his voice icily calm. “Your wife’s going to be all right. She’s not hurt. She’s all right.”
    “The baby—she had the baby, didn’t she?”
    “Yes. Of course. The umbilical cord has been severed.” Then, low, to one of the interns: “But not surgically. More like it’s been chewed through!” He nodded to the two interns who held Frank. “Better get him out of here.”
    A nurse keeled over in a faint, and an intern toppled onto her, both becoming sick on the floor.
    Frank wrestled with the arms that held him to the wall. “Where’s the baby, for chrissake! What the hell—in God’s name—Jesus Christ, somebody—”
    The doctor motioned toward the door. “Get him outta here, dammit!”
    Frank planted his elbows against the wall and clenched his fists as he strained against the grip of the interns. “You gotta tell me—”
    “You better come with us,” one of them said. “I’ll get you a sedative. You can lie down. Your wife’s okay. Easy now—”
    “TAKE YOUR HANDS OFF ME!” Frank lurched forward and yanked one intern around, sending him slithering to his knees. “YOU GOTTA TELL ME WHERE MY CHILD IS! GODDAM YOU! SOMEBODY’S GOTTA—”
    A third intern grabbed his free arm and twisted it behind him. Frank snapped his head back in pain. They steered Frank out of the room. Tears rolled down Frank’s face as he stumbled along with them, but no more words came. He twisted his head back to see the doctor in the delivery room staring up at the hole in the skylight.

    The first siren howled in the night, then another, and another, as from different points police cars converged on the small hospital.
    Frank felt numb. He was lying on a bed somewhere in the hospital. Horrifying images swept past his closed eyes. The place was alive with strange sounds: feet running, beds being rolled along; voices, some calm, some crying, some pleading, some directing. “. . . Over here, officer, this one . . . Oh my god . . . It looks like it climbed up . . . Please, nurse, just do as I say . . . The skylight . . . I count five, including . . . She seems okay . . . Couldn’t have been more than two minutes . . . Nobody said anything, except that intern there . . . Maybe the wife will be able to