To The Maternity Ward

Lois pulled the pregnant Maria to the right. If the missing women were here, she would expect them to be at some stage of pregnancy. Ergo, maternity ward. The logic was unassailable.

It's not that I want to check out the accommodations, the reporter told herself. Or see other pregnant women. I mean, I'm excited about being pregnant, but I'm not excited by...by pregnant women...

She glanced down at Maria's bulging belly, so much bigger than her own. The bouncing breasts, uncontained by any bra. Lois had never considered herself bisexual, but there was a bit of moisture in her nethers now...and she couldn't tell if that was a result of the events of the night or something she would have felt naturally at any time.

She put a hand to the gentle swell of her own stomach. Was it weird to feel sexy, thinking about your own pregnant self? Lois wasn't sure. She did know, however, that if and when they got out of here, she was going to have to do a lot of deep thinking and personal introspection...preferably involving a full-length mirror and some kind of flexible sex toy.

They passed through a set of double doors into a single large, spacious room. There were six beds, four of them occupied. Large flat-screen monitors hung over each bed, and a variety of medical equipment seemed to be built into each bed, far more advanced than anything Lois had seen before.

Jenny Dunlap, Mara de la Cruz, Tonya Wong, and Diana Reynolds were dressed in hospital gowns, pulled up to expose their bellies, which had small leads taped to them. The women wore pink plastic headphones and stared up rapturously at glowing pink screens. Bags of pink fluid dripped down long plastic IV lines into their arms, and Lois caught the hint of catheter bags hanging off the side of the beds.

The smallest of them, Jenny Dunlap, looked five months pregnant, her belly barely sticking out four inches in a smooth dome; the biggest, Tonya Wong, looked past ready to deliver, her belly grossly distorted, ugly red stretch marks down the side, the taut abdomen resting on her lap. That should have been impossible; they had only been missing two weeks. Yet as Lois rubbed her own distended abdomen, she knew that nothing was quite impossible in this place.

Lois and Maria wandered, arm and arm, down the row. The mechanical hospital beds whined as hidden motors shifted, moving the women almost constantly. Probably a feature to prevent bed sores, Lois reckoned.

"This is creepy," Maria whispered. "They're just...staring."

The reporter nodded. She wasn't sure what she had been expecting, but it was obvious that these women were entirely blissed-out, hypnotized or...worse.

They reached the end of the row, the two empty beds. The reporter picked up the chart at the end, saw the name that was supposed to occupy it...and gasped.