Delivery Room

Prologue

“STOP! PLEASE STOP! DON’T TAKE MY BABY!” I screamed at the top of my lungs while my body racked with sobs. Blood was spilled all over the floor, corpses laid across the hallways against the walls like sandbags. It had been a group of people in black ski masks with the eyes cut out. They had broken their way into my room, ending everyone in their path. My newborn snatched from my arms. They had spared me from the bullets but without my son, I wish they hadn’t. My nurses were shot so I was alone, hooked up to an IV, and unable to run after them. I wish I could’ve seen my son, at least. He was taken to be cleaned immediately after birth and then taken from the incubator because he was premature. I never saw him, never looked him in the eyes. 

1

“Where’s 014?” 005 asked. His arm hurt a little from his daily shots. The bunker was empty except for him, 059, and 023. 

“Uh, I think he’s getting a Fixer. So is everyone else. I gotta get one later too, man,” 023 answered. “I’m not looking forward to it, the aftermath hurts too much.” 

“Mine’s tomorrow,” said 059. 

“I’ve never gotten one, why’s that?” 004 sat up on his pad and looked at the older boys. 

“You might get yours today, they usually wait till you're over 2,555 days old, or else you could leave the dimension.”

“But I’m only 2,154 days...do you think they’ll still give me one?”

“Probably not, but you never know for su-,” 023 was cut off by one of the Dreamcatchers. They called 005’s number and he got up and went over to him so the Dreamcatcher could put the cuffs on his hands and feet. He then walked 005 into a different room of the bunker and directed him onto a medical cot. 005’s limbs were then tied down. A shot filled with an unnatural-looking liquid was then injected into his arm. After he had passed out from the shot, a man in a lab coat made an incision down his stomach and performed a double nephrectomy. “He’s no use to us at this age. We’ll make more money with these than the leg. Once I’m done you are to drive him out of the woods and far away, am I clear? He is no longer needed,” the man muttered to one of the Dreamcatchers, who nodded. The kidneys sat in a jar while the man loosely stitched him up and put him in a body bag. The Dreamcatcher took the bag and climbed out of the bunker and into a pickup truck. The car shook violently as it sped over bumps. After about an hour of driving, the truck turned onto an alley and came to a halt. The Dreamcatcher took the bag with 005 in it and tossed it in a dumpster. 005 eventually awoke with a piercing pain in his stomach which now felt emptier than usual. Blood was seeping all over him. He started screaming as loud as he could. A couple passing by heard it and ran into the alley. The fiance jumped into the dumpster and pulled the bag out. They unzipped and saw 005, a deathly skinny boy bleeding like a river. They called an ambulance and tried to calm him down. 005 was extremely confused as he had never been outside. Sun blinded his eyes causing him to frown and wonder was this sudden heat on his face was. “ W-what’s th-hat?” he blurted out in between gasps of pain. 

“The sun?” the woman said. 

“What’s sun?” The ambulance finally came around the corner and took 005 before his question could be answered. They arrived at the hospital in the next minute and were rushed into the ER immediately. The doctor was frantically calling around the hospital if there had been any kidney donors they could use. Police were called because his wound was declared attempted murder. 

“Alright kid, I’m gonna ask you some questions. What’s your name?” a policeman asked him gently, with a notepad.

“005.”

“How old are you?”

“2,154 days.”

“Where did you come from? Who did this to you?” 

“Dreamcatcher.”

“Dreamcatcher? Is that a person?” 005 nodded.

“Who is Dreamcatcher?”

“Dreamcatchers. Not just one. They brought me to get the Fixer and then here, away from the bunker,” 004 said groggily from the pain medication.

“What’s a Fixer?”

“It fixes my bad parts. They take them so that we can have dinner space.”

“What’s dinner space?”

“It’s gray magic. It fixes the monster that growls in our stomach.”

“Gray? What else is gray?”

“I don’t understand, gray is the only thing that’s real. It’s all we can see, I used to be able to see more but Mr. Coat said it was a bad part so he took it away,” 005 said, with a smile.

“You said you came from a bunker, can you describe it?”

“It had rooms and sleeping pads. A ladder climbs all the way up to the ceiling but there’s a lock so I was never able to get out and see the other dimension. All my friends are there too.” The policeman talked into his walkie-talkie and told his other deputies to go to the old war bunker two towns away. 

“Can we run some chemical and DNA tests for this kid, please?” the policeman shouted. Some nurses put 005 in a wheelchair. They ran the tests and the results came back with low levels of cyanide and fluoroantimonic acid poisoning. They had him take charcoal to absorb the poison right in time. If he had come to the ER an hour later, he wouldn’t have survived. The DNA tests also came back. His mother was alive, and the only survivor of the Wellington General Hospital massacre 6 years ago. 

10 police cars raced down the highway and into the woods where the bunker was. They got out and started to walk once the trees got heavier. After 30 minutes of walking, the group came across a large bump in the land. They pushed off the leaves and uncovered the metal bunker, turned the turnstile and lifted the heavy lid. Loud groans and cries came from young boys inside, dealing with the pain from their surgery. The policemen cocked their guns and started going in. Large men in guard uniforms ran towards them but were shot in the leg. The boys yelled at them for hurting the ‘Dreamcatchers’. A man in a lab coat ran out and tried to run holding canopic jars filled with different mutilated body parts but was stopped by having a gun against his head.