Art by Esme Gonzalez
The pain hit Whiplash like the time she’d caught a knife to the side in a brawl a few years back. Then, she was seventeen, newly minted as an Enforcer in the Shadow Brotherhood, and when the goon with the crown tattooed above his eye slipped his blade between her ribs, she was scared shitless she was going to die. Now, she was twenty-one, clutching the counter in the kitchen to ground herself, and she wished it was a knife.
“Hey, you okay?” Tito asked, looking up from his cutting board full of onions mid-obliteration. Whiplash was supposed to be helping him with dinner, but she hadn’t lifted a finger. The Boss may have benched her when she started to show, but she was an Enforcer, not a fucking housewife. And just because babies were rarer than happiness in this nuked-out hellhole didn’t mean she was gonna throw away everything she’d ever worked for over one.
“I’m fine,” she snarled. The blood was between her legs now. Just a little, but no one who has bled in their pants before forgets the feeling. Another sharp stab of pain almost took her breath away.
Tito wasn’t buying it. She could tell he wasn’t buying it. Her fingernails turned white as she pressed them into the stained and scarred wood of the countertop. She felt like her insides were being clawed out. Like she was a bloated corpse and the daughter she wanted so badly was a starving wolf, ripping open her soft belly to munch on her entrails.
She gagged and brought her hand up to her mouth just in time to stop the hot vomit from passing her lips. She forced it back down. Squirming a bit and already turning away, Tito said, “I’m gonna get Pitbull,” and hurried from the kitchen.
When the two of them came back through the kitchen door, Pitbull took one look at Whiplash and her face crumpled. Her eyes lingered on her friend for a long, sympathetic moment, then she turned to Tito, all business, “Go make sure we get a room.”
Tito disappeared out of the kitchen again. For Whiplash, the sounds of the Brothers gaming in the other room faded behind an ear-splitting ringing before Tito even started to shut them up.
Pitbull hurried over and gathered Whiplash into her arms. Whiplash sagged, starting to shake. For the first time since she was eight years old, she wanted to cry. She locked a whimper behind gritted teeth and let the other woman help her out of the kitchen and down the hall. Blood trickled down her left thigh.
A handful of Brothers were between the women and the stairs, but none of them looked. They were suddenly absorbed in their poker hands, their smokes, the nail-picked rubber coverings on their joysticks. Whiplash didn’t see Rampage among them. She told herself that was for the best.
Nobody had a permanent bedroom in the Lodge, besides the Boss of course. The Brothers slept in the halls, mattresses and dressers lining the upstairs walls of the big old house, everyone allotted their own rectangle of space. But the Lodge had been a real house once, and the bedrooms remained; kitted out and rotated through by Brothers when they needed a little privacy. Pitbull hammered on the door to the best room, kicking Prettyboy into the hall with his dick in his hand.
Once the women were alone, all Whiplash’s bravado went out of her like air from a balloon. Pitbull helped her stagger to the bathroom where she curled on the floor and started to cry silent, fat tears while Pitbull assembled a nest of towels and blankets on the tile.
When the next wave of pain came, worse this time, Whiplash rolled up onto her knees and elbows and shoved her fist into a scream. Her teeth left red dents in her knuckles.
Pitbull reached over to stroke her hair, collecting it nimbly into a clip to keep it out of Whiplash’s already sweaty face. “It’s okay, love,” she whispered, “you don’t have to try to be quiet.”
But she did. She’d fought tooth and nail her entire life to make it to head Enforcer status; standing beside Rampage and only below the Boss himself. And the name of that game was strength. She grabbed a handful of the duvet that Pitbull had brought in and screamed into it until she was dizzy.
“Nobody’s gonna think less of you, Whip,” Pitbull urged. She meant well. She really fucking did. And if it was just screaming, she’d be right. The Shadows respected pain, and if this was a knife, Whiplash could scream. She wished it was a knife.
But it wasn’t a knife. And everybody was treating her enough like glass as it was. She demanded Pitbull get the piece of leather from the suture kit under the counter and she put it in her mouth and bit down hard.
After this set of contractions passed, Pitbull helped her peel off her blood-soaked jeans, stripping her down and wrapping her in the blankets on the floor. Pitbull slipped out and returned with a bottle of water and a soft fluffy robe for Whiplash to wear. Whiplash raised a blonde brow, and Pitbull cracked a weak smile, “Stole it from Snapper.”
The breath of a laugh puffed through Whiplash’s nose before the next wave of cramps set her writhing. The door to the bedroom opened again and Cuervo and Spitfire came in, bearing towels, heating pads, ice packs, and a bucket. Spitfire bent and offered Whiplash a handful of pills. She swallowed them without question.
This time when her body clenched she grunted through her teeth, sweat popping out on her brow. Pitbull wiped her face with a damp rag and Cuervo clasped her hand. Spitfire bent to open her robe and massage her stomach with the heels of his palms, and she let him. Spit had seen them all in their worst moments, and he wouldn’t say a word.
Later, when a break in the contractions left her panting and queasy, Cuervo fed her ice cubes and Pitbull asked gently, “Do you want me to get Ram?”
“No!” Whiplash snarled, lurching towards her on pure reflex.
Anyone else would have flinched. But Pitbull just waited for Whiplash to resettle herself in the sweat-soaked blankets and groan her way through another contraction before she said gently, “Don’t you think he deserves to know?”
“I think he deserves to rot in hell,” Whiplash hissed through her teeth as the blood and liquid gushed down her pale white thighs.
The other Brothers shared a glance, but they didn’t push. Nobody wanted to be on Rampage’s bad side. The other head Enforcer, his was the kinda name that made even Brothers shit themselves. But so was Whiplash’s, and it was her blood on the floor, not Ram’s. So instead of going to get him, they stayed.
They stayed as Whiplash paced back and forth across the bathroom, dripping blood and threatening to bite the head off of anyone who suggested she should lay back down.
They stayed as she writhed and cried and bit down so hard on the piece of leather Pitbull gave her that you probably could have identified her dentals off it.
They stayed as the warped and mangled thing that could have—should have—been her daughter came into the world, as violent and broken as the family that would have been hers.
Cuervo took the body away to clean the blood off of her and Pitbull rubbed Whiplash’s neck, and Spitfire made sure that nothing had gone wrong besides everything. When he’d satisfied himself that Whiplash would live to terrorize the people of Denton for another day, he quietly excused himself. There was nothing more he could do.
“I wanna see her,” Whiplash said. She felt weak and shaky, but her voice was strong.
Across the bathroom, by the shower, Cuervo looked over her shoulder. Her tight-coiled hair was frizzing around her face, and there was a smear of blood under one of her cat-sharp eyes. “Are you sure?” she asked. She wasn’t a squeamish woman, but there was a greyness to her bronze skin under the bug-filled halogen. “It’s… She’s…”
“I wanna see her,” Whiplash insisted. She already felt sick. It was like she knew what she would see before Cuervo even brought the little bundle over.
Cuervo and Pitbull looked at each other over the mound of foul laundry they’d piled in the center of the bathroom, but then Cuervo walked over, picking her way through the mess. She was holding the bundle strangely, like she wanted to treat it lovingly, but she didn’t want it too close to her. Like someone might hold a kitten with mange, or a bad-smelling grandmother. She cradled it easily in her hands, wrapped in one of the few towels they had that wasn’t too badly stained by years of bleach and blood and vomit.
When Whiplash unwrapped the towel, she sucked in her breath.
She was so impossibly small.
Her head was almost bigger than her body, her face so perfectly formed. And she was beautiful—so beautiful. Her skin was smooth and marble-pale where it stretched delicately over the curves of her skull, soft blue shadows settling where her eyes would have grown.
Whiplash hadn’t seen a baby before, not even one like this. Living in a place where the poison dust of nuclear war filled every lung and settled into every bone, even the chance at one was seen as a community miracle. No matter who you were.
When Whiplash had realized she was pregnant, even though she knew the threat it posed to her position, she’d been so overjoyed. She’d spent months lounging about the Lodge, letting the other Brothers take all the heavy work and bring her treats, laying her hands on her slowly swelling belly and imagining meeting the person who was growing there. Even the fact it could only be Rampage’s hadn’t bothered her then. But now it fucking did.
If everyone in the Brotherhood was a piece of shit, Rampage was the whole muckheap. His knuckles were always bleeding from being cut on somebody’s teeth, and his nose was always bleeding from the shit he snorted. He was reckless and impulsive, barrelling through life like a bull in a sea of waving red. Worse than that, he was rotten through and through.
Whiplash had created this perfect little girl with this perfect little face. She grew her in her own body. Nurtured her with her own nutrients, protected her with her own sacrifices. She’d turned the other cheek to every condescending look from the Brothers, resisted her restlessness every time the Enforcers went out, and turned up her nose at every substance she was supposed to. She’d done absolutely everything to make her body a home for this creature, this little person growing inside her.
All Rampage had had to do was contribute something halfway decent. All he’d had to do was be the half that didn’t kill her before she had a chance to live. And he’d failed.
Rampage with his rotten soul and his rotten body and his rotten fucking jizz that apparently couldn’t produce anything better than the shitbird it came out of.
Because, under her beautiful, perfectly forming little face, Whiplash’s daughter was impossible. Not something she could have saved by managing her nicotine a little bit better, or sitting out that last brawl when her period was two days late and she didn’t think a thing of it. Not a person slipped through her grasp, but a wretched mess of twisted pieces that could have never fit together into something alive.
Her guts were a coiled jumble of deep pink, like worms rushing to feed on her tiny corpse. They weren’t on the inside but hanging freely, already starting to dry out and harden. Her arms curled under her chin like she was sleeping, but her legs were nonexistent; stumps terminating under the mess of intestines.
Whiplash felt like she was gonna be sick, and forced it down with the brutal efficiency of long practice. Cuervo hovered nervously above her, watching her reaction. Pitbull looked tactfully away.
For one, two, three long breaths Whiplash looked at her daughter and let herself feel the horror—the unfairness—of all of it.
One breath to grieve the pathetic little creature who would never open her eyes to see the sun, or feel the exhilaration of a punch well landed, or crack open a beer around a bonfire with her friends.
One breath to mourn the life she had imagined for herself while that little soul was growing inside her; a nice quiet house in Denton with a bed that wasn’t a pallet on the floor, and a sense of purpose that didn’t come with a black crow stamped on the hilt of a switchblade.
One breath to accept that, now that everyone knew her body could do this, she would have to fight twice as hard for the things she’d had before, and that if there was ever a choice between her and Rampage for a job, the Boss would pick Ram every time.
Then she set the little bundle down and gently folded the corners of the towel over the tiny body. She stood up, waving off Pitbull’s attempts to help. Her legs trembled, but they held her. No matter what else happened in this world, she’d always been able to count on that.
“Get rid of it,” she said to Cuervo.
Cuervo swallowed, her lean throat bobbing as she looked at the bundle on the floor. “Uh…” Her voice was hoarse, and she cleared it. “What did you want me to do with her?”
“I don’t care,” Whiplash said, even though she did. She wanted to ask that someone find her a coffee can. That’s what Brothers were always buried in—ever since the grim days of the Revolution, when that was all they’d had to hold the ashes. It was a tradition, a badge of honor to remind everyone that the Brotherhood had been noble, once. Part of something bigger than petty crime and shaking down poor saps for protection money. Even though they joked it away, said, “live in a bottle, die in a can”, they were all proud of it, deep down.
Whiplash wanted to ask Cuervo to get a good one and make sure it was clean and bury the baby in the side yard with the rest of the Brotherhood. Because she would have been a Brother, if she’d grown up. But she didn’t ask for any of that. Instead she walked to the shower and got in like she didn’t give a shit.
She let the water pummel her until it ran clear and tepid down the drain. She felt like she should be crying, but nothing came. She was spent, wrung out, empty. Her skin felt loose on her body and she pinched her belly and rolled her flesh between her fingers like she’d never seen it before.
When she got out, Pitbull had cleaned the bathroom. Everything was picked up, the blood wiped away and the floor looking shinier than it had in all the years Whiplash had lived in the Lodge. The bundle was gone like it had never come into this world at all.
Dripping water on the filthy carpet, Whiplash hobbled gingerly to the bed. Something she didn’t want to think about dripped down her legs. She felt fucking wretched.
Pitbull lifted the covers for her and then curled around her, like Whiplash wasn’t broken and disgusting. Her body was firm and reassuring against Whiplash’s back. Her arms were the only thing keeping Whiplash from flying apart into a million pieces.
After a very long time, Pitbull said into Whiplash’s neck, “You know that even if you don’t tell him, he’s gonna find out.”
Whiplash knew. Respect and discretion would get her further than most, but there were some secrets that couldn’t stay under wraps long, and this was one of them.
She wished desperately that she’d never made it far enough for her body to betray what was going on inside of it. She wished she’d slept with more people in the time when it would have mattered, so that even if the baby had been Rampage’s neither of them would have known. Mostly she wished she was still pregnant and that her daughter was alive.
“Fuck him,” she said. But there wasn’t any feeling in it. There wasn’t any feeling in her. She’d bled it all out on the bathroom floor.
Pitbull held her close and snuggled into her neck and didn’t tell her she was being cruel, even though they both knew she was.
Whiplash felt a sob run through her, soundless and unbidden. Just one. She would not break. Not like this.
“I just hate him so much,” she finally breathed into the dead-silent room. It wasn’t a secret—she and Rampage had hated each other since she was eight and he was ten and they both realized that the Boss wasn’t the kind of man with enough love to go around. But here, rasped past a throat rough from choking back screams, it felt like a confession.
Pitbull didn’t say anything to this, not at first. Pitbull was Whiplash’s best friend, but she’d never subscribed to the idea that loving Whiplash meant she had to hate everyone Whiplash did. Which was probably good, because Whiplash hated most people.
When she did finally speak, Whiplash expected her to say something gently chastising; to try to get Whiplash to understand that Ram hadn’t wanted this, either. That, even though their daughter had been conceived drunkenly in a mutually regretted hate-fuck, he’d done all he could to love her since he found out she existed. To the extent he could love anyone.
But instead Pitbull said, “You know you could still leave. If you wanted to.”
Whiplash was so shocked she felt like she’d been kicked in the guts again. She scrambled up, wincing, and stared wide-eyed at the other woman. “What the fuck?” she demanded. “Why would you even say that to me?”
Pitbull was unfazed. She propped herself on an elbow and looked at Whiplash levelly. “You know the Boss would let you retire. He wouldn’t like it, but he’d let you. You could move out. Get a nice place downtown. Try again.” She chewed her bottom lip before adding, “I’d go with you, when I could.”
Whiplash shook her head, still unable to believe what she was hearing, “Pitbull, you know how hard I’ve worked for this, you…”
“I know you work harder than anyone in this place,” Pitbull interrupted. “And I know that you still come in behind him, every time, no matter how bad he fucks up. And you always will.”
Her words stung, not because they were out of line, but because they were true. Brought into the Shadows two years earlier than her, when he was just six years old, Rampage had always been the Boss’s favorite. The Boss said he loved Whiplash, too, but he was a gotdamn liar.
“That doesn’t mean I should give up and let him have it,” Whiplash retorted. She sank back into the pillows, grimacing and trying to rearrange herself in a way that made her body stop thinking about the fact she’d been turned inside out.
“It’s not about him. Either of them. It’s about you. And me.” Pitbull ran a light finger over the skin of Whiplash’s arm, making her shudder. “You have a ticket out. We don’t have to be here. We don’t have to live like this.”
She gestured at the room around them, devoid of anything that would mark it as one person’s and not a shared resource. The wall was grey-brown around the lightswitch from so many years of unwashed hands pawing for it. There was a rusty stain on the floor big enough for three people to stand in if they were dumb enough to want to. And Whiplash knew Pitbull didn’t just mean the room, but the whole Lodge, the whole life they’d built around themselves. All just as crowded and as filthy and as stained with bad memories as this room.
If you swore your oath to the Shadow Brotherhood—cut your palm and took a new name—it wasn’t something you could back out of. You could retire at thirty, if you lived that long, or you could break your oath and hope you made it out of the country before they found you, but that was about it. Unless you could have a baby. Then you were free to go.
“I don’t want to go,” Whiplash said, and she meant it. Even after everything. Even knowing what was still to come. She jutted her chin. “This is my home. My family. This is the life I want.”
If Whiplash didn’t know Pitbull better, she would have thought this hurt her. For just an instant, something like heartbreak passed through her dark brown eyes. But then her wide mouth split into the toothy grin that was her namesake, and she reached over to tousle Whiplash’s blonde hair, just because she knew Whiplash hated it.
“Good. I just wanted to make sure.” Her voice was light as a lie, and her fingers lingered a moment too long.
Whiplash remembered the dream she’d had when she first learned she was pregnant, where she wore bright colors instead of a mandated black jacket, and maybe planted flowers in the side yard instead of headstones. She’d been terrified, thinking about it, but excited, too. Like a curtain that had been pulled shut her whole life had suddenly slid open. It was so brief, but the glow of it was blinding.
Whiplash sat up in bed and lit herself a cigarette. It felt good to have it in her fingers after months of getting her nicotine from a patch on her arm. “It’s not ideal, but it’s safer for the baby than quitting cold turkey,” the doctor had said.
Smoke spewed from Whiplash’s thin, sharp mouth when she spoke. “I’m a Shadow, Pitbull. Through and through. I’m not gonna let an overdue period change that.” She spat the words so they didn’t sting her mouth on the way out, and Pitbull crumpled inward a little bit. Whiplash knew she was hurting her, but she couldn’t seem to stop. “I know it’s a fucking circus, but it’s my fucking circus, yeah? And damn it, I’m gonna run this shit one day if I have to shoot Rampage through the skull myself and pry it from his cold, dead hands.”
Before Pitbull could say anything, there was a knock on the door. It was polite, but somehow not tentative. A knock that didn’t hammer, didn’t demand to be heard, but made no apology for being there. The women exchanged a glance, Whiplash nodding her permission before Pitbull slipped out of bed to get the door.
It was Rampage. He wasn’t crying, but his knuckles were bleeding, which for him was the same thing.
He had brought her a coffee can.
Madeline White is a queer farmer, artist, and New Yorker, who knows a dystopia when she sees one and wants to be the first to write about it. Her work has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including Honeyguide Magazine (Issue 8), Flash Fiction Online (June 2025 issue), and What if We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire’s Yacht by Not A Pipe Publishing. When she’s not writing, you can find her hanging out with her horse or exploring the country in her box truck “RV”.
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