Free Apollyon: The Destroyer Is Unleashed by Tim Lahaye, Jerry B. Jenkins

become one of us before she dies.”
    “Of course. I’m sorry.”
    “Let’s concentrate on the patient. As soon as you’re ready, I want you to paint her with Betadine from sternum to thighs, and I mean paint. Use a liter if you have to. You don’t have time to be precise, so just don’t miss a thing. And have a fetal monitor on her by the time I get in there. If that baby is alive, I may try to take it C-section. You’ll have to handle anesthesia.”
    “I have no experience―”
    “I’ll walk you through it, Leah. How about we rise to the occasion?”
    “I’m going to lose my job.”
    “Humph,” the doctor said. “I hope that’s the worst thing that happens to you. You see the people in this room? I lost mine the other day. So did Captain Steele. Ken lost his home.”
    “I know him. He was a patient here.”
    “Really?” He followed her into the operating theater.
    “And how about the patient?” she asked, quickly applying the fetal monitor.
    “Hattie too. We’re all in the same boat. Prep her.”
    Ken and Rayford moved closer to the door. Floyd checked the fetal monitor and shook his head. He hooked her to other various monitors. “Actually, her respiration is not bad,” he said. “BP’s low. Pulse high. Go figure.”
    “That’s weird, Doctor.”
    “She’s been poisoned.”
    “With what?”
    “I wish I knew.”
    “Doctor, did you call her Hattie?”
    He nodded.
    “She’s not who I think she is, is she?”
    “I’m afraid so,” he said, moving into position. “You ever hear of another Hattie?”
    “Not in this century. Does her, um, boyfriend know what’s going on, or should we plan a trip to a gulag somewhere when he finds out?”
    “He did this to her, Leah. When you got the mark you became his archenemy, so now you’re on the front lines, that’s all.”
    “That’s all?”
    Rayford watched, praying for Hattie as Floyd positioned the glaring overhead light. “Dilated. Seven or eight centimeters.”
    “No section then,” Leah said.
    “The baby’s gone,” he said. “I need an IV line, Ringer’s lactate solution, forty units of oxytocin per liter.”
    “Incomplete abortion?”
    “See how fast it all comes back to you, Leah? Normally she would deliver in an hour or two, but as far along as she is, this will be quick.”
    Rayford was impressed with Leah’s speed and efficiency.
    Hattie came to. “I’m dying!” she wailed.
    “You’re miscarrying, Hattie,” Doctor Charles said. “I’m sorry. Work with me. We’re worried about you now.”
    “It hurts!”
    “Soon you won’t feel a thing, but you’re going to have to push when I tell you.”
    Within minutes, Hattie was wracked with powerful contractions. What, Rayford wondered, might the offspring of the Antichrist look like?
    The dead baby was so underdeveloped and small that it slipped quickly from Hattie’s body. Floyd wrapped it and pieces of the placenta, then handed the bundle to Leah. “Pathology?” she asked.
    Floyd stared at her. “No,” he whispered firmly. “Do you have an incinerator?”
    “Now I cannot do that. No. I have to put my foot down.”
    “What?” Hattie called out. “What? Did I have it?”
    Leah stood with the tiny bundle in her hands. Floyd moved to the head of the operating table. “Hattie, you expelled a very premature, very deformed fetus.”
    “Don’t call it that! Boy or girl?”
    “Indeterminate.”
    “Can I see it?”
    “Hattie, I’m sorry. It does not look like a baby. I don’t advise it.”
    “But I want―”
    Floyd pulled off his gloves and laid a hand gently on her cheek. “I have grown very fond of you, Hattie. You know that, don’t you?” She nodded, tears rolling. “I’m begging you to trust me, as one who cares for you.” She looked at him wonderingly. “Please,” he said. “I believe as you do that this was conceived as a living soul, but it was not viable and did not survive. It has not grown normally. Will you trust me to dispose of