#vitelline

***

Randy was perversely happy when he saw the blonde girl's–Sarah Lee? Jenny Jane? No, it was Heidi Lou–belly resting against the slack fabric of her gray cardigan. She had stopped covering herself in thick wool blouses and dresses, and no longer cared that her bastard pregnancy was out in the open. Now as he took her wrist and led her up the steps to his apartment, she was wearing a modest white button-up shirt and knit cardigan, over a pair of jeans that had at one time ridden high on her hips, but now dipped low below her swollen belly.

She'd all done away with her swishy seductive lace dresses, and dressed like a proper woman now. But Randy still might make her wear those dresses in the bedroom. Yeah, even when her belly got too big from the kids and she started wearing those dowdy sloppy dresses old housewives like his mother wore. But he'd still make her wear lace when he had her bent over his bed and fucking her with her swollen stomach hanging beneath them and that little lace dress hiked up above her waist. That lace dress would always remind him of that fated day when he pinned her to the floor and fucked all his rage into her, and fucked every last remnant of superciliousness out of her. It would always remind him of her blue eyes staring blearily up at him, with her legs spread and his hatred leaking out of her.

It had taken a while to get to this point, but Randall was a patient man. A few times each week–"dates" he liked to call them to her face as she dissolved into sobs. Often it was under the bushes near his newest job site, with his hands pinning her arms to the ground as he hammered her from behind and muffled her screams with his arm.

Sometimes it was at night when he threatened his way into her bedroom, climbed into her window in the sea of faceless moonlit suburban houses, and forced her to run her soft fingers across his hard body as they laid beside each other and his prick jutted into her abdomen. He loved the way he could force her to take his length of cock in her trembling hands and guide it to her terrified clenching pussy.

Once or twice, he'd even snuck her into his rented room while his roommates were raucously partying next door. He'd fucked her against the wall then, warning her that each sound she made would lure them over to take their turn with her. He adored the way she tightened up inside with fear. She really was the perfect woman. He thought of his mother, that fucking fishwife with her dull, shiny hair tied up with a scarf and folds gathering on her waist, always nagging his father to throw his beer bottles away. Heidi was a real wife and mother, someone you could show off to your golf club, someone who kept a tiny waist and pert tits even after she'd birthed five kids.

After a month or two, the hatred he'd pumped into her had made a little tyke swell in that flat belly. Randy had been doing her from behind in his apartment bed when he noticed it. One of his arms had been scrabbling for her breasts and the other looking for purchase on her hips as the girl instinctively tried to buck him off from behind. His hand had gripped onto her stomach for a second to steady himself, and the small pooch below her navel fit perfectly into his palm. That was when he realized.

Randy stood still then, trapping her squirming body between his strong, tense legs with one hand sealed over her womb like a knight's iron greave. He was frozen as a statue, then started to fuck into her harder and harder. The thought that there was a baby inside her excited him immensely–a tiny thing that was half of her and him, the living proof of his final domination over her. A little Randall Puchalski junior that he could teach to fix cars and teach to ride a bike– something that his own father had never bothered with–and that he could send off to school with the brand new fire engine red lunchbox that he had always wanted. A kid he could teach to be a man, who could scrape the serial numbers off a gun and sweet-talk a woman and lie with a smile.

Randall fucked himself deeper and deeper into her twitching canal, his heart thudding spasmodically between her shoulderbones. He came longer and harder than he ever had before, so hard he gasped as every bit of energy sapped out of him into her womb–even if it was fruitless to release his seed in her now. When Heidi Lou rolled over sobbing on his moldy mattress, face flushed and hair messy, he batted away her flailing, pushing arms and pressed the side of his greasy black head into her tummy. He could detect only the slightest curve of her midriff as she laid flat on her back, but it was enough. 

You start moving around soon and kicking, son. You're gonna be a tough little guy. You'll give your Mom no end of trouble when you're inside her, just like your Dad.

"Heidi," he told her dispassionately, "you've got a bun in the oven."

The girl wept and wailed and went into hysterics about that, but a few punches to the face–not the belly–quieted her down immediately.

Heidi Lou sat with one arm around her folded leg, the other on her bruising face, staring blankly at the floor as Randall pulled his weathered jeans above his limp cock. "Go tell your parents about it. Right now. Get out of this apartment and march right into your daddy's law office–or wherever that rich cocksucker works–and tell him some dirty trainhopping tramp knocked you up."

"I don't–I can't–"

He slapped her open-palmed, feeling merciful enough not to punch her this time. Her face was constantly puffy with bruises, and he wondered how she kept explaining it away to her parents. Soon, she wouldn't even have to.

"Can't what?" Randy taunted. "Are you gonna flit around like the airheaded cunt you are and pretend everything is hunky dory until you're ready to pop? Denial is a river in Egypt. 'Oh, muddah and faddah, it was just a one-night stand'–but you don't have those. You're a GOOD girl. 'It was just my old boyfriend'–except you don't have a boyfriend either, because you're a GOOD girl. You only have me."

That sent her into another full-blown sobbing fit, and Heidi Lou wailed as she grasped and tore the sides of her ragged red hair. He helped her along by gripping the back of her scalp and yanking her face to meet his.

The black coins of his irises met her disintegrating, disbelieving blue eyes.

"I don't think your mom and pop are too big on bastards, especially when it comes out of their perfect golden child. So I think it would be better if you told them now you've found a man to shack up with. I don't give a shit how you explain it to them. Tell them I helped you look for your dog and we got busy in the bushes. Tell them you met me at the mechanic's and we did it in the back seat. Tell them I raped you on the floor of your house. I don't care. You're going to walk down the aisle anyway."

"I'll get rid of it," Heidi Lou hissed in a sudden display of defiance.

Her words made Randy freeze still. Heidi Lou's eyes had hardened into chips of ice, and she drew her legs back and tucked them under her to lean forward on her wrists and look him in the eye. "I'll get an abortion. It's gonna be legal soon anyway, with that woman's case making its way through the Supreme Court. I'm not going to have your disgusting child. You can shove your filthy cock as many times into me as you want, but I'll never birth whatever degenerated thing you force into me. I'll do whatever it takes to rip it out of me–it will be like squashing a tadpole underneath my heel, do you hear me?" He had never heard such hardness and cruelty in her voice before, and it shocked him into an uncomfortable silence.

Back in Chicago when his parents still dragged him to St. Stanislaus Church, he remembered the priest telling him something very clearly. Father Janek with the mole on his cheek, and his whispery voice that made the hair on his arms stand up, making him shift and fidget in the pews until his mother whispered he would be sorry when they got home. It was just after the little M's died, when he had approached the priest to ask if his little siblings were in heaven.

“Randall, I am sorry,” said the stern little man. “When babies die before they have a chance to receive God's eternal light, they cannot come to heaven, or know the light of God's love. You see, they have not been freed from original sin--they haven't been baptized. So they… they live in limbo. It's not a good place, or a bad place. They're not hurt–God would never do that to a baby–they just… exist.”

That stunned Randall and haunted him for weeks afterward, listening to his mother sobbing over his little brother and sister that had died before they were born. Their rooms had been right beside each other, and Randall had stayed awake for hours listening to his mother crying and praying. Why did little Mark and Mary go to limbo? He had wondered as his brother snored beside him. They're just little babies. Why can't they go to heaven?

Randy thought about a piece of him, a part of his body, his blood. He thought of his frown and lips and cheeks, floating forever in purgatory and crying alone into a vast dark space. Something that belonged to him; something that was she was predestined to carry inside her womb as a woman should. But this woman was spitting bile, denying her natural place in life and threatening to send his child–that part of him– to a thankless, godless place forever.

Randy didn't like that. He didn't like that at all.

He reached down beside his mattress, into the pocket of his green army jacket, and took out a rusted revolver. He leveled it against Heidi's sobbing crinkled forehead.

In a quiet voice, he said, "If you get the scrape, I'll fucking kill you for it. I'll put a bullet into your empty blond head and you'll go to hell for it. You'd go to hell for killing your baby."

"If I go to hell," Heidi said quietly, "Then I'll meet you there. And you'll never meet your child there either."

His words sent him into an internal spasm. He remembered the streets of Chicago, the Rican kid gurgling on his blood, the dago's face puffed and purple until it looked like a Halloween mask as he dealt the finishing blow to his neck with his boot, the lady at the shop who screamed as he pulled the trigger in the midst of a robbery, and the old black man crumpling facedown on the street when he took too long to get his wallet out, his blood spreading in a pool over the concrete. He thought of his baby torn so soon from Heidi's womb, those genes that were his, that belonged to him. Never being able to hold it in his arms.

This was his last chance, and he had no other choice.

In a roundabout way, Randall's cold, self-centered mind realized that this was his only chance at salvation and a normal life. Cheating and crime were second nature to him, and he would never take an honest way if there weren't a quicker and more illegal one. Ironically, that was the reason it made so much sense to him to do what he realized he would have to do. Becoming a hard-working man, contributing to his community and living an honest Christian life would ensure his survival. Fire and brimstone lit up in his mind again, like he was back in St. Stanislaus Church with Father Janek.

Neither did she.

He lovingly rubbed the barrel of the gun against her blond head. "Are you sure, honey? You sure you want to die? I've killed a lot of people. You would be just another tally on the board. Imagine… a little blond woman found in a flophouse with a hole in her head leaking blood over the floor and a cunt full of cum. What would such a good girl be doing there? Obviously she'd come to sample some working class dick and paid the price for it. The Sherriff would seal your file, especially if he knew your daddy. Everyone would quietly brush your life under the rug. Aunt Heidi? She died before you were born. My daughter? She died unexpectedly. You would be a black mark on your whole family."

Randy pressed the barrel harder into her crying face. "Would you rather die than have my kid?"

In a fraction of a second, he jerked the gun to the side and fired once. A bullet buried itself in the thin plywood an inch beside her head.

Heidi stopped crying abruptly, her high-pitched sobs ceasing with an eerie finality. She looked into his eyes with a dead understanding–the same look she had given him on the floor of her kitchen that one fateful day. She said nothing, but he knew her decision had been made.

He cupped her face between his calloused hands and kissed her gently on her pursing, twisting lips. His tongue slipped between her wet lips to lave softly at the inside of her spasming mouth. He tasted the salt of her tears, and it made blood pump through his dick.