Incubators

I was a nurse fresh out of my program and eager to start working.

After applying to many different hospitals I was accepted by a prestigious private hospital specializing in obstetrics and prenatal care. The hospital was famous for its surrogacy programs and had global reputation of delivering the healthiest and genetically superior babies.

I was of course excited and couldn’t wait to see my new hospitals and meet my new coworkers.

I arrived at the famous ‘Blessed Wing Hospital’ at 9am sharp. I was greeted by several upbeat and cheery nurses and doctors, and my attending was just as wonderful. It didn’t take long for me to make friends and fit right in with the routine. I was of course restricted from full access to the hospital seeing as I was new and needed to earn my privileges.

The only thing that struck me as odd was the fact that I never saw any patients coming into the hospital or leaving. What I did see were many happy couples arriving to adopt their newborns. I never saw the surrogates, before or even after delivery.

My job was to tend to the many newborns and ensure that each baby was taken home by their proper parents.

It was a very fulfilling job to work with such small, innocent bundles of life. Each baby was perfectly healthy and no two babies looked alike. It was as if each baby had been custom designed before birth.

I only had one problem with working in the hospital. When I was outside the nursery and waiting room I could hear loud, painful screams of the women in labor. The doctors and nurses did their best to ease the delivering women but the screams continued. Stranger still the screams seemed less like screams of pain and more like screams of terror. I had learned to tune of the screams and focus on the miracle that followed, that is until I head one woman scream something I will never forget: “Why do you keep doing this to me? Please, I want to leave!”

After a few months of working I felt confident enough to start asking about the oddly absent patients. My questions were met with silence and stern looks from both the doctors and the nurses. Finally my attending pulled me aside and told me to stop asking questions and just do my job. There was nothing to worry about.

The screams of pain and terror continued to ring out through the hallways of the hospital. I found solace in the nursery where I could tend to the newborns, but the screams would always follow me as I walked through the halls.

My first year passed with no incident and I was no longer on restricted access. I could freely roam throughout the entire hospital, but there was no reason for me to wander beyond the nursery or doctor’s lounge.

My curiosity, however, got the better of me. Shortly after my 1 year anniversary I was wandering the halls when I heard the screaming of another woman in labor. But what caught my attention was this was the same woman I heard pleading with the doctors shortly after I started working. She was delivering a second baby in less than two years, this was very risky and as a professional surrogate she would know better than to do this. Again I heard her screaming in fear and begging the doctor’s to let her go. I didn’t understand. Let her go? Was she being hospitalized against her will?

I waited two more weeks before I finally had the nerve to check out the back rooms of the hospital. I was on the night shift and with little activity it was easy for me to slip by unnoticed. I found myself walking down a long hallway with signs pointing in the direction of the numerous delivery rooms as well as a second doctor’s lounge.

It was then I heard a woman cry out in pain. I had come to recognize that cry of pain as a woman deep in labor. The odd thing is her cry came from behind a door labeled ‘Incubators’.

I didn’t see anyone else in the maternity wing or exiting the delivery rooms so I went into room to check on her. I wish I hadn’t.

When I opened the door what I saw sent a wave of nausea that I can still taste to this day.

The large room had two dozen beds, each bed holding a woman in different stages of pregnancies. The women were all young and of various races, and each woman had both of their arms and both of their legs amputated.

The women were helpless and alone. Tubes and I.V.’s containing nutrients and fluids snaked across the women’s mutilated bodies as the only means to keep them alive.

One blonde woman, her belly absolutely massive in comparison to her mangled body, spotted me and begged me to help her.

“Please! You have to get us out of here!”

I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even move. I just stared at them with my hand over my mouth.

“Please!” She cried out again. “They won’t let us leave! They keep using us, using our bodies!”

I backed away from the sight, toward the door.

The woman cried out to me, tears in her eyes. “We can’t move! We can’t escape, please, you have to help us!”

Fear set in and I bolted from the room. I returned to the nursery of the hospital and stared with fascination at the innocent newborns that laid before me. This couldn’t be the result of such a horrific experiment, could it?

My shift came to an end I couldn’t get out of the hospital fast enough. As soon as I pulled into my front driveway I threw up on the grass and began weeping for the poor women I had abandoned.

I didn’t sleep that night. I kept hearing the cries of pain and the pleading for their freedom.

Two days later I returned to the hospital and began my shift. I walked into the nursery and my eye was immediately drawn to a newborn with blonde hair. The same hair of the woman who had begged for my help.

And I knew what I saw was true.

I lied to my attending and said I was going home early because I was feeling ill. As soon as I was in the safety of my home I called the police and told them what I had seen.

The police arrived at the hospital and found the same gruesome sight that I had found.

The women were taken to a new hospital and my hospital had been shut down. I breathed a sigh of relief and waited for the story to break on the news. But no story aired. There was no mention of the human incubators that had been freed from the hospital.

In fact, there was no record of the women arriving at the new hospital for proper care…