Right to Life

    

    

    When Sara Foster is kidnapped in front of an abortion clinic in broad daylight, taken off a busy Manhattan street by a pair of total strangers - Stephen and Katherine Teach - she is three months pregnant with her married lover's child.

    Her abductors seem to know that. They also seem to know where she lives, where she teaches, where she was born, who her lover is - even where her father plays golf on the weekends. They tell her about a mysterious worldwide Organization devoted to white slavery and what happens to those slaves who try to run away. What happens to their families and those they love.

    That's what Sara is now. Their slave.

    They show her what happens if she tries to disobey.

    She sleeps in a coffin-like box in the basement.

    She's fed according to their whim. Abused according to their whim.

    They involve her in a brutal murder.

    That's just the beginning. Because Stephen and Katherine Teach have terrible plans for Sara.

    And her baby.

    Like his novels JOYRIDE, STRANGLEHOLD, THE GIRL NEXT DOOR and COVER, RIGHT TO LIFE is a descent into madness and human evil which is all the more harrowing because it's based on fact. Sara's ordeal really happened to somebody just like you and me and it's one that is vividly rendered. So consider yourself warned. This is disturbing, graphic writing.

    Not for the timid.

    Like life.

    

    

    "… a twisted captivity tale… think Patty Hearst meets a virulent strain of Right to Lifers."

    
-Edward Bryant,
Locus

    

    

    Scaning & primary formating:
pagesofdeath.

    Secondary formating & proofing:
pua.

    

    

    
"… endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights… unong these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…"

    
-Thomas Jefferson

  

    
"God finds you naked and he leaves you dying. What happens in between is up to you."

    
-Robin Hitchcock and the Egyptians

    

    

    

    
New York City

    
June 8, 1998

    
10:20 a.m.

    They drove to the clinic in silence.

    The night before they'd said it all. Now there was nothing left to say.

    It just remained to do it. Get it over with.

    Morning rush hour traffic had ended over an hour ago and traffic was fairly light. The streets of the Upper West Side seemed strangely still and dreamlike, the blue-green Toyota van in front of them drifting from stoplight to stoplight like a guide taking them from nowhere to some other nowhere while they followed to no determinate end.

    
Running on empty,
Greg thought.
Both of us.

    The silence turned him back in time to their bed last night in her apartment, making love through a haze of tears which came and went with the gentle anguished regularity of waves at low tide, their very heartbeats muted, the two of them drawn more closely together than they had ever imagined or wished possible in the grim sad knowledge that pleasure now was also pain and would remain so for a very long time. Her tears cooling on his cheek and mingling with his own, the musky smell of tears and then the feel of them falling to his chest as she sailed astride him like a ship on a windless sea and when it was finished, the long dark night embracing in warm attempted sleep.

    Then stillness too through the loud morning rituals of water, razor and toothbrush, both he and Sara alone now in these things as they would ever be. Then coffee drunk in silence at the table, Greg reaching out to take her hand a moment across the polished pine to feel the warmth of her again, to bind them for a moment before walking out through the door into the cool bright morning air. To the morning errands of New Yorkers along 91st and West End Avenue, the cars and cabs and delivery trucks. And then down to the car parked deep in the cooler echoing basement garage next door, Greg driving them across to Broadway and then downtown. Bringing them forward along the wheel of time to this awful empty place. This quiet, this exhausted drift of feeling.

    "Are you all right?" he said finally.

    She nodded.

    The clinic wasn't far. 68th and Broadway, only five blocks away. One of only three of them left open on the entire West Side from the Village to the Bronx.

    "It's a girl," she said.

    And it was that, he thought and not his question that truly broke the silence.

    "How can you tell?"

    "I just know. I remember the way Daniel felt, even at this stage. This feels… different."

    He was aware of something thick and heavy inside him again. He'd heard the story many times in the six years he'd known her. Her perceptions of the thing varying slightly over time and distance and depth of understanding. Daniel, her son, dead in a frozen lake in upstate New York at the age of six. Even his body lost to her beneath the ice and never found.

    If there was ever a woman he would have wished to have a child with, to have raised his child, especially a girl-child, it was this one.

    His hands were sweating on the wheel.

    Because of course it was impossible.

    "Why don't you drop me off in front," she said. "Find a place to park. I'll go in and register. Less time waiting."

    "Are you sure?"

    "The front will be fine."

    "What about those people with their goddamn picket lines. They'll probably be out again."

    "They don't bother me. Except to piss me off. They'll let me by, don't worry."

    He supposed that - no, she was not about to be intimidated. Last week going in for her examination there had been seven of them on the sidewalk by the entrance to the Jamaica Savings Bank, the building which housed the clinic and held its tenuous lease, seven men and women standing behind blue police barricades, carrying cardboard signs saying HE'S A CHILD, NOT A CHOICE and ABORTION IS LEGALIZED GENOCIDE and waving pamphlets and holding out tiny plastic twelve-week foetuses cupped in the palms of their hands.

    One of them, a surprisingly handsome fortyish man, shoved his own little specimen at Sara's face and Sara turned on Greg's arm and said
you stupid shit
and walked on by past the three policemen lounging at the door who were guarding these creeps on his and her tax dollars
thank you very much
, and into the building.

    Then this other one, this ordinary-looking woman about the same age as the man, who followed them to the elevator and up and sat there with a magazine across from them in the waiting room staring until Sara's name was called and then got up and left. A more subtle form of harassment. Were they even allowed to do that? They'd never said a word to her though he'd wanted to. And she'd evidently known what he was thinking.
To hell with her
, she'd whispered,
she's not worth the effort
.

    She could deal with them.

    Still he'd feel better if he was with her.

    "What's another minute or two?" he said. "Let me just park this thing and we'll go in together."

    She shook her head. "Please, Greg. I want to get this over with as soon as possible. You know?"

    "Okay. Sure. I understand."

    But he didn't. Not really. How could he? For all the talk last night it was impossible to gauge how she felt at just this moment. Not now in the light of day, far beyond the familiar comfort of home and bed and the comfort of lying in his arms and even the comfort of tears. He wanted to know suddenly, needed to know, that she didn't hate him, didn't blame him fundamentally - though twice last night she'd said she didn't and he'd believed her. But now it was different. He wanted to know she forgave him. For everything. For his marriage. For his son. Even for his sex. For being born a man so that he didn't have to carry - couldn't possibly carry - the full weight of this. He'd have done it in a minute if it were possible.

    Her diaphragm had failed them. It happened sometimes. They were adults and they knew that. It was her diaphragm. It didn't matter. He'd never felt so guilty in his life.

    
Do no harm
, his mother had told him when he was a boy. The physician's rule. Her personal golden rule. And here he was, doing harm to the woman he loved.

    Still more harm.

    He could see it in the distance on the corner of 68th Street a block and a half away, an undistinguished grey highrise that was probably built back during the mid-sixties, the bank on the first floor and offices above. Across Broadway a Food Emporium and the huge Sony movie complex. And yes, there were the long blue sawhorses and the two cops standing at the door and people crying signs walking back and forth along the curb.

    "Pull up behind them," she said. "I don't feel like getting out right in the middle of that."

    He glided to a stop. She opened the door.

    He put his hand on her arm and stopped her and then he didn't know what to say. He just sat there moving his hand slowly over the warm smooth flesh of her arm and then she smiled a little. He saw the worry and sleeplessness that ambushed her just behind the smile. The eyes couldn't lie to him. They never had.

    "I'll just be a minute," he said. "I can probably find something on 67th or over on Amsterdam."

    "I'll be fine."

    She got out and shut the door and he watched her walk away toward the dozen or so people ahead of her moving in circles curbside at the oilier end of the block and then he pulled out slowly past her and she glanced at him but didn't smile this time, only hitched her purse up on her shoulder. He passed the stem-faced, holier-than-thou types milling across the sidewalk like flies on a carcass and then he turned the corner.

    

    

    
Go on,
she thought.
You have to do this. You've got no choice. He's got a wife and he's got a son. You knew that going into this and in your heart you never did believe he was going to leave them. Not until his son was grown. Despite what you wanted to believe and despite what he said he wished to do.
Greg was faithful as hell in his own peculiar way. It was part of what she loved about him.

    In a way it was a shame just how good they were together. In a way it was almost cruelty. If only it had been just an affair. If there hadn't been love, caring, tenderness, sharing. All of it, the whole ball of wax.

    
You had it all,
she thought. And couldn't really have anything.

    She realized she'd been thinking about them in the past tense.

    Now why was that?

    She glanced at him through the window as he drove on by. It was impossible to smile for him again though she knew he needed it. She knew how he was feeling. But a single smile was all she had in her today and she'd spent that currency in the car.

    The sound and feel of her heels on the sidewalk seemed to jolt straight through her. The cold hard streets of New York City. She realized she was trembling. A young hispanic delivery boy on a bicycle shot past her. Going the wrong way, against traffic, and on the sidewalk no less. She shot him a disgusted angry glance that he was moving too fast to see.

    Her hands were cold. Her face was flushed. Already she dreaded the picketers moving ahead of her a few yards away. Despite what she'd said to him.

    Because this was no examination. This was the real thing.

    A life was going to end here.

    For a moment she was angry with both of them. Sara and Greg, playing at love.

    
No,
she thought.
Give the devil his due.

    They weren't playing.

    And that was the saddest part of all. Because it wasn't fair. Years and years alone after Daniel's death and her shattered marriage and finally someone comes along who's got everything Sam never had and more. Kindness. Consideration. Sobriety. And he loves her. Not just wants her or wants to fuck her but loves her and she loves the man back with a power she finds quite astonishing. And then having to learn all over again that love protected nothing. Love was as necessary to people in the long run as food and shelter but love was also a cruel joke, a trick, both at once, two sides of the same coin. And you never knew when the coin would be turning. Because if it didn't wind up this way, wind up stranding you between love and necessity, even if it did work out between you, then one of you was going to die before the other and leave you all alone again. Love was also about the death of love.