Free Scary Holiday Tales to Make You Scream by Various Page B

knees, my legs no longer able to support me. The air is thick and cloying, almost claustrophobic, but somehow, despite my failing body, comfortable and inviting. I only want to sleep. I only want to hear those voices chattering through my neural net once more before I commit myself to… to what, I couldn't even guess.
    On my knees I crawl to the source of the strange lights. Twelve objects, each set beneath a lamp of its own, each tilted towards the ceiling, receptacles of some sort-I lean forward and peer into the closest one.
    Wrapped in a filthy synth-fab blanket is a sleeping infant. Twelve cradles span the room. Twelve babies. But like no babies I could ever have imagined in my wildest nightmares-they are like nothing I'd ever seen or heard described in any neural news session or lesson.
    The first infant is more tubes and wires than baby- a misshapen clump of muscle and exposed organs held together by electric wire and intravenous tubing. Its heart throbs in an open cavity, its lungs rise and fall with bloody, rhythmic, tidal regularity. Morbidly curious, it is all that I can do to turn away-I have never seen anything like it.
    And in the next cradle-an infant with no arms or legs, just a bulbous head and under-sized torso. And there's a pinhead over there, pointed head no larger than my clenched fist.
    "Please do not disturb them," a monotone, electronic voice snaps me from my inspection of the children, "Please do not touch my sugarplums."
    I whirl around.
    Standing behind me on tractor-tread wheels is a large mechanical woman. The color of dark tarnished brass, with a microphone-mouth and green-glass eyes, her boxy figure towers over me, segmented arms beckoning me to move away from the cradles. Multitudes of dexterous, spaghetti-thin fingers worry together with click-clacking intensity at the ends of her hands.
    "Please," she implores through unmoving lips, "Do not harm the little ones. Do not hurt my sugarplums."
    "What is this?" I ask. The bile again rises in my throat, and I'm unable to keep it down. Gagging, I dribble foul black ooze over my beard and down the front of my red army of salvation uniform.
    "Please step away from the children," the mechanical woman pleads, then in a softer tone, "Here, let me help you." With a much gentler grip that I would have imagined, she lifts me into her arms and places me on a cot in the far corner of the room, near the window away from the babies. "You are sick," she says, matter-of-factly.
    I nod. I try to speak, but another fit of heaving seizes me. A long belch followed by another spurt of bile sprays the woman, but she seems not to notice.
    "Here," she pours a tall glass of ice water and places it into my hand. "Drink this."
    "Who are you?" I ask, "What is this place?"
    "This is the Rebirth Center," she answers. "I am MA-368. You may call me Ma." Her electronic voice betrays a compassionate warmth. In a comforting tone she orders me to finish the water and to lie back and try to sleep. "You are exhausted," she says, "Your body needs to rest."
    "But the babies," I ask, "What's wrong with them?"
    Ma's voice becomes firm. "Why, there is nothing wrong with them," she says in a tone that leaves no room for argument. "They are exactly as god and nature and the city and their parents have made them."
    "But what is this place," I ask. "This Rebirth Center?" Already my eyes are growing heavy and the soft cot seems to suck me down into it. My mind begins to wander and drift, and I can imagine Ma smiling as she speaks.
    "This is where the unwanted babies are born," she explains, "This is where the ugly ducklings and the sickly ones and the damaged children are born and where they stay until they-"
    "Stay?" I mumble as I'm drifting off.
    "The ones who are born in such a way that no human eye should ever have to look upon them, stay here. My little sugarplums. They stay here until they are well enough, and then they leave." I thought of Dexter, skulking in the shadows and living a