The elevator juddered to a halt with a deep metallic groan - a wounded animal choking on its final breath. The gurney bucked beneath the pregnant woman, straps tightening against her trembling body. The two nurses exchanged a look that was almost a confession: if they stay trapped here, if she doesn’t reach the operating room in time…then whatever the hell is inside her will finish its work alone.

 

As if summoned by their fear, her swollen belly stretched further, the skin straining to a translucent sheen - like flesh pressed against the inside of a jar. Shapes pressed outward beneath it: soft, crimson mounds pulsing and writhing, as though a colony of living organs had remembered they once belonged elsewhere.

 

“Come on - move!” one nurse shouted, hammering at the panel with frantic, sweating fingers.

 

The elevator ignored her.

 

“What… what’s happening to me?” the woman gasped, her voice warped, as though something deep inside her throat had begun to speak along with her.

 

Her water burst - not like a release, but like a rupture. Boiling fluid spilled across the steel floor, steaming, viscous, slick as blood that had forgotten its purpose. The nurses slid on it, limbs flailing; one struck her knee against the gurney frame and screamed through clenched teeth. The other shrieked, but the walls devoured the sound, swallowing it into a thick, humming silence.

 

The woman arched on the stretcher, her spine bending into an inhuman curve, her body dancing to a rhythm that did not belong to pain, but to birth as violence.

 

“Help! We’re trapped in here!” The nurses pounded on the doors until their knuckles throbbed.

 

Then the lights died.

 

Darkness wrapped around them - dense, intimate, like something that wanted to be worn. Their breath rasped in it, frantic, animal. They twisted blindly, their bodies reduced to heat, fear, and the sound of blood moving inside them.

 

Five heavy seconds passed - each one a lifetime.

 

The emergency lights flickered on. Red light filled the elevator like diluted slaughterhouse air - damp, obscene, sacred. “Don’t worry,” one nurse whispered, voice trembling. “Nothing’s going to happen.”

 

But the words broke as they left her lips.

 

The emergency call button pulsed like a weak heart - glowing, unanswered - as if the building itself had decided they were already beyond help.

 

A low vibration crept through the floor. Something beneath the elevator breathed.

 

“Where…where are you from?” the nurse asked, clinging to the ritual of conversation, as though words could tether the woman to the world of the living.

 

“The Appalachians,” the woman rasped, as though the mountains still lived in her lungs. “Is my baby…going to be…alright?”

 

Her question dissolved into a wet, tearing sound.

 

Blood surged from between her legs - thick, dark, hungry - flooding the sheets, licking its way across the metal floor. The smell grew rich and metallic, almost sweet. Something emerged through the red - a tiny claw - not infantile, but ancient and desiccated, its long curled nails piercing vein and muscle with delicate curiosity.

 

It did not come out. It opened her from the inside.

 

The thing within her worked with deliberate artistry, rending tissue, splitting womb, reshaping flesh in its frantic urge to be born into a world that had never asked for it.

 

One nurse’s eyes rolled back; she collapsed, boneless, her head striking the floor with a soft, resigned thud. The other remained upright only because terror froze her in place - mouth wide, breath rattling, the red light painting her face like an altar mask.

 

The claw paused. Then turned toward her. Something else followed - more limbs, slick, glistening - not crawling, but learning the body it had stolen its passage from. The thing tilted its newborn head, as if listening to the elevator’s breathing - to the metallic blood-pulse of the world.

 

It moved toward her slowly. Tenderly. As if it knew that every horror deserves an audience. And that this birth was not meant to be witnessed - but participated in.

​

Name: Nenad Mitrovich
Nationality: Serbian

Nenad Mitrovich is a published author of five novels, all written in Serbian and released on the Serbian market. His short story “Line 54(4)” won the annual literary contest of the Mirko Petrović Library in Negotin, Serbia, in 2022. The short story “The Right to Die” won the Miodrag Borisavljević Annual Competition (Serbia) in 2024.

His fiction has been published internationally, including:
– “Belgrade Butcher”, Dark Harbor Magazine (USA), 2025
– “Samsara – The House of Pain”, Gothic Gazette / Pulp Cult Magazine, Withered Love issue, 2025
– “Gospel of Ashes”, Laughing Man House, Smitten Land – Issue 3 (theme: Televangelism Horror), 2025
– “An Advertisement”, Horrific Scribblings Magazine, October 2025
– “The Stain”, Hellbound Books – Anthology of Pandemic Horror, December 2025

Website: www.nenadmitrovic.rs
Email: office@nenadmitrovic.rs