Lois Doesn't Want To See Her Bred

The reporter's face scrunched up, symptom of the sudden deep revulsion she felt. Her uterus felt as though it curled up protectively on itself like a millipede, and Lois found herself leaning against the couch, one hand over her stomach at the sudden cramp.

Angelica Blaze was there with another bottle of that Fertile Valley spring water. Lois took it gratefully, slugging it down. There was a chalky aftertaste to the water, dissolved minerals. The reporter hoped it would help settle her stomach.

"When was your last period?" Blaze asked, appropriate of almost nothing.

"A week...maybe ten days ago," Lois said.

"And you're fairly regular?" She pressed. The dark-haired woman sat down on the bench, right next to Lois. The reporter inched away from her, until her left butt-cheek nearly fell in the "boob hole" in the couch.

"Sometimes I'm a little early, sometimes I'm a little late," Lois said dryly. She held the empty bottle in her hands, not sure what to do with it. "I don't really feel like a broken typewriter unless it's been five or six weeks."

The head nodded, dark eyes on Lois.

"But the idea of pregnancy upsets you?" she said.

"I...I guess," Lois wasn't sure why she was talking about this. Normally she would never discuss these things, not with someone she had just met. She knew that she should turn the conversation back to the missing women, but something inside of her just kept talking. "I liked horror movies when I was young, you know? Alien, Rosemary's Baby...but nothing was quite as gross as the sex education films they showed us. That whole 'scare straight' thing. They showed us this teenage pregnancy video...and I started looking for more. There was a whole stock of them in the school library..."

"You watched them," Angelica said. The room seemed to grow brighter without the lights actually changing. Lois pointedly didn't look toward the screen, she just looked at Blaze, those big dark eyes.

"Yes." The reporter's mouth was suddenly dry. "May I have another water?"

Blaze reached behind her and handed Lois another bottle. So cold that sweat was beading the sides. Still sealed, Lois checked as she broke the little plastic tabs. For the first time, she saw the image of the pregnant woman on the back of the label. That made sense, with a name like "Fertile Valley," but it raised ominous images in Lois Lane's mind.

"Yes, I watched them. Some of them went back to the sixties. Lots of fake bellies, balloons and pillows under dresses, but some of them had real images of pregnant young women...you could see the fetus move, press against the skin. I would have nightmares, flashbacks to Alien, little parasites and devil kids growing inside me."

Lois shuddered again, although the room was really quite warm. Too warm. She could feel herself sweating through her clothes.

A good thing I'm hydrating, Lois thought as she took another swig of the cold water. The chalky taste wasn't bad at all once you got used to it. She could almost feel her uterus relax, the clamp relaxing. Like the middle of her cycle, when periods were the farthest thing from her mind.

"You must have been in puberty then," Angelica said. "Did any of these nightmares turn...erotic?"