The Scientist, Fetustein, and the Locusts: Yet Another Short Story About the End Times

"And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree, but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads. And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five month: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man." -- The Book of Revelation

Wa Jie didn’t care what was happening to the earth. She didn’t care that her daughter had disappeared, that her husband had left her for his silly Christians, that her parents had nearly starved to death, surviving only because they found the decomposing bodies of their neighbors and ate them. She was a scientist. She had a problem to solve, and she’d almost solved it. In another era, her work would be condemned as evil, just as the Nazis’ was. But that was another era. Thankfully. Now things were different. People expected comfort. Pain, sadness, simple inconvenience – the world could not tolerate those anymore. Especially since the chaos, since the famine, earthquakes, and most of the world’s water turning to blood. So they – most of them, anyway – left her in peace to perform her experiments, experiments with unfathomable potential to finally prove that humans evolved from monkeys.

She took the bucket of fresh fetuses and emptied it into the vat. It was funny how things changed, how they evolved. As a young scientist, she was constantly having to explain herself. No, she would tell them, her work was not immoral. Fetuses were not life; they could not feel pain, etc., etc. Plus fetuses could rid the world of disease, of suffering. Many people listened; they understood at least one thing – the experiments could benefit them. She never bothered to explain that she wasn’t interested in saving the world from pain and suffering, that she cared about only one thing: the monkey-man connection.

She lowered the mixer into the vat of fetuses. But the Christians… They never listened. That stupid book of theirs… Oh, how it angered her. Impeding progress in the name of blind faith!!! She had diagrams; she had facts, had figures – all testable and tested by renowned scientists who couldn’t possibly be wrong. What did Christians have? The Bible? Because of that silly book it had been almost impossible to find the fresh fetuses she needed for her work. She combed the poor houses and hung around high schools to find poor lost souls willing to let her take their babies. And boy would she take them. She’d rip them right out, sometimes with bolt cutters, sometimes with coat hangers. She could have made it painless; but she was angry. She needed more fresh meat, and she was tired of having to argue. The government should have just given the fetuses to her.

She turned the mixer on and watched the fetuses spin into something that looked not unlike the remnants of a nose bleed from God. Those were tough times, but, yes, it was funny how things changed, how they evolved. After the “Rapture” – the disappearance the Christians attributed to God, but she knew was due to a rupture in the space-time continuum – and the subsequent tectonic and climatic chaos, she couldn’t keep the pregnant women away. The condemnation of the Christians certainly got louder, but the idea of having to bring up screaming, bratty children during the “end times” brought hordes of women to her back-alley lab to relieve them of responsibility.

She turned the mixer off and stared into the vat. Suddenly, it started to bubble and froth. This is not what her calculations led her to believe would happen! And then the baby mixture began to take form. She couldn’t tell, at first, what it was turning into, but gradually it began to take the form of a gigantic fetus. It looked kind of like Frankenstein, so in her head she dubbed it Fetustein. Waaaaaa! Waaaaa! Wiiiiiiitttttttccccchhhhhhh! it screamed at her. Then the fetus-mix baby -- Fetustein -- began to chant: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come! And with the chant, she heard a loud buzzing approaching from outside the building.

Suddenly, the windows of her lab burst forth, and large, fierce looking bugs flew into her lab. As they approached her and she could see them more clearly, she noticed they were not really bugs at all, for while they had the shape of locusts, they had the faces of men and hair like a woman’s; and on their heads sat crowns like gold, while breast plates of iron covered their breasts, and tails like scorpions stabbed upward from their rear. And God! – the sound of their wings was like the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.

She turned to run, but before she could even take a step, Fetustein grabbed her. Eat me! it screamed, and then stuck its entire hand into her mouth, nearly choking her until she was able to catch a breath or two from her nose. At first, the only sensation she was aware of was the overwhelming taste of chicken; but then she felt a strange tingling in her brain that eventually turned into a powerful feeling of goodness and love that both made her want to embrace it and vomit at the same time. The sensation, though, suddenly ceased, only to be replaced by a voice in her head: Wa Jie! Your work is nothing more than witchcraft! Man was made in my image, not a monkeys! Or do you think I am nothing more than a monkey?

This could all be explained by science, Wa Jie was sure. Perhaps the precise mixture of fetuses combined with her delicate touch at the mixing vat produced some type of quantum phenomenon, opening up a different dimension where fierce locust creatures and fetus-mix babies had evolved over billions of years. The baby must have drugged her with some type of hallucinogen to produce the effect of God telepathically communicating with her. God, she was a genius, even in the face of such fear and suffering. But then something happened to make her forget her brilliance: the locust creatures attacked. Each sting brought about the torment of a thousand scorpion stings, and she screamed in agony. Even as the creatures and Fetustein suddenly disappeared, her pain would not go away, leaving her writhing on the ground. God, God, how long was this going to last? But even though she asked the question, somewhere deep down within herself, she already knew the answer: 5 months.

The End