Interview With a Killer Mutant 11/30/96 By Gladys Hammonds This story is copyright to me, GladysHammonds, and has NO Marvel characters (for a change) Please send comments to Supersoul@aol.com or Citizeng@ix.netcom.com. Visit my web page at http://members.aol.com/supersoul/xmen.html __________________________________________________ The only time I've ever been to prison was to watch a woman die. I was sure she deserved it. I couldn't think of any killer who deserved it more. I wanted to see her strapped to the chair, electrodes in her temples, head shaved, electric sparks jolting through the air while her body jerked spasmodically as thousands of volts of energy ripped her apart. I wanted to see that face, that killer's face, contorted and frightened. I wanted to see desperation and terror in those eyes. I wanted to see death applied at state decree, not gently and consoling, but a savage, barbaric god, cloaked by civilized necessity, while it did its vicious work. I thought it quite right that she should die, the first known mutant to be sentenced to death. I, John Doe, a non-aggressive, nonviolent, non-combatant scribe, wanted Andrea Miller to die and I wanted to be there to see it when it happened. I am a recorder, a historian if you will. I have no official training, no degree. But I like to take notes and I like to collect stories. I like to be there to document when things happen. I want to be at the side of the third baseman for the crucial play of the World Series, whether he makes the catch of a lifetime and becomes a hometown hero, or fumbles the ball to be hounded into an early grave, I don't care. If I could be present to record when the serial killer slits the throat of his tenth grade victim, or sit in the back of a police car when they subdue an unlucky motorist by beating him to death, then I would be delighted to do so. Mind you, I want no fame for myself, no notoriety, I don't want a byline or a Pulitzer Prize. I only want to see and record. I want to record the stories of the exceptional and the ordinary, the gifted and the benighted. I want to know what happened. I want to see it all, get the facts straight, hear the stories and write it down. I care nothing for the enlightenment of the general public. I record for myself and the fortunate few I trust to share. Those wise enough to learn. Those who need to know. For you, in other words. I went to Reidsville State Prison in Reidsville Georgia to record the last words of the mutant terrorist they called the Baby Killer, and then I would watch her die. I was ushered into a drab waiting room, decorated in the colors of hopelessness, dull gray, dull tan, dull brown. I sat at a square metal table, scratched and battered, on a rickety folding chair, and spread out my tape recorder and my notepad and pencils, and waited. A woman entered and sat before me. A social service type, the kind who populate welfare bureaucracies, high school guidance officers, and juvenile counseling centers. A kind face, still with a spark of energy, not yet burned out from realizing that the wave of desperate, needy clients would not be meaningfully helped by one M.S.W. with a kind heart. "I am here to see Andrea Miller," I said. "I've already gotten permission from the Warden. I hope you're not trying to discourage her from speaking to me." I supposed this woefully dedicated do gooder was the last and only friend that the most hated female mutant in the country could have. "I am Andrea Miller," she said. I jerked to attention, scratching the chair legs across the linoleum, making a sharp ugly howl. "I know why you're here. You wanted to talk to me. Go ahead." She remained as poised as a guidance counselor soothing a failing student. Calm and in control. "I didn't recognize you, somehow." I blurted. "I cut my hair." she said amiably. A haircut, routine grooming for the modern woman. We could have been two friends meeting for lunch, the way she said it. "I have no stress now that the trial's over. I think that makes a big difference. Now that I know for sure they're going to fry me in the morning, I can really relax." I had not thought ahead. I'd prepared questions for this woman, but I had not prepared myself. I'd wanted her dead. Never ocurred to me that she'd want that too. Didn't expect she'd speak so bluntly about it. My surprise must have showed. "You do know it's planned for the morning, don't you. Isn't that why you had to set your interview for today. It's now or never, right?" A thought ocurred to her. "It's not been rescheduled, has it? I'm always the last to know things around here." "No," I gasped. "Your execution has not been rescheduled." "Good," she said. "Very good." She settled back comfortably in her chair. "You've got questions to ask, so ask them. Or did you just come to gape at the Baby Killing Mutant Freak?" The case had dominated the headlines for months, the lead story on the nightly news shows, the focus of special reports, Andrea Miller, the mutant terror of the airwaves. "Tell me, are you guilty?" "Does the state of Georgia put innocent people on Death Row? The convicted are always guilty. Just like the innocent are always freed." A smirk teased her lips. "But did you do it, the killings I mean. Did you actually kill?" They are dead because I'm a mutant. It's something that mutants do - can do - I mean." Odd circumlocution. "That is absolutely not true. Being a mutant does not mean that you kill." "My mutant power causes death. They died because of me." "Deliberately?" I said. "Splitting hairs. Same difference. They're dead because of my power. They're dead because of me. Whether I set out to do it or not, deliberately, consciously, willfully - it makes no difference to the ones that wanted the babies. The ones that felt they were the victims of a crime, rather than the whims of fate. You know, not all expectant parents regret being relieving of a future offspring. Some folks should thank me." Andrea Miller, convicted of not murder, but of seventeen cases of feticide in a thirteen month period. Seventeen pregnant woman victims of involuntary abortion by a mutant. A high powered attorney, pregnant after six years of fertility treatments. A forty six year old grandmother, adding a sixth child to her family. A teenaged immigrant couple from the Honduras, having their second baby. A widow awaiting the birth of a child who would never know his father, a motocross races. A lucky sophomore, gleefully abandoning college as her boyfriend had abandoned her, to live a life of luxury on a trust fund supplied by a great uncle. A battered wife, already mother of four. Married 8, separated 3, unmarried but with permanent significant others 2, one careless single clubhopper, 1 surrogate mother, 1 rebellious teen, happily breaking her mother's heart. All pregnant. All having their babies willingly. All violated by her. "How exactly did you do it?" Mutant powers covered a lot of ground. There had been a panic until it was established by the prosecution that proximity was needed for it to happen. "Did you touch them?" "I didn't need to. I have a certain range. It's not large, forty or fifty yards or so. Walls don't matter. I have no impact on men, if you're worried." At my puzzlement, she said. "Some men figure if I can destroy babies in the womb, I might also toy with their sperm count. I can't do that, you see. At least not as far as I know." I wasn't worried at the time she said it, but I thought about it later. What might her powers have evolve into if she had been given the right chance, the right training? A wicked thought. "How did you know they were pregnant? How did you select them?" "There's a corner where I catch the bus outside of a medical clinic. It's not a ob/gyn practice, but woman go there for sonograms when they can't get appointments elsewhere. It's convenient for women who work downtown. "And it was convenient for you, too." "Yes, I didn't have to go out of my way." "And if the bus had stopped elsewhere, you and I wouldn't be here tonight, awaiting your death." "That's about right." I was being sarcastic. I had not expected her to agree. "This is not what you expected to hear, is it?" I was silent. "You were expecting the savage degenerate bitch of the papers. Well, they're right, not about my personality, but about what I did. What does it matter if you're savage or sane, if you do the crime you should do the time. I am a savage degenerate bitch. I just can't seem to feel like one." "So you regret what you did." " I don't even feel what I did was a crime. Technically, I understand violating someone else's body is wrong. But I don't feel bad about it." "But you don't object to your own punishment." "When they flip the switch, maybe I'll feel bad then. You don't feel bad when you step on an ant, you don't feel bad when you squash a cockroach, you don't feel bad when you kill a rat in a trap. No one grieves for a cancerous tumor killed by radiation, or for fat cells killed by liposuction, or a leg amputated due to gangrene. If it's in the way, you just get rid of it." "These pregnancies weren't in your way." "I didn't want them to have what I wasn't going to have." Andrea Miller, diagnosed as a mutant at the age of fourteen, was forbidden to reproduce, since the imposition of the Mutant Reproductive Freedom Act of 1996. The deceptively named act freed mutants from the burden of reproducing, under punishment, ironically enough, of forced abortion. "If you wanted to use that kind of power, you could have done so legitimately, easily." "'I did, informally of course. But it wasn't quite as much fun. See it started with a stray thought. I zapped a co-worker of mine." I was startled. "There was no co-worker on the official list of victims." "Well, she was going to leave her husband anyway. It made things much easier for her. Even when I was all over the papers and TV, she didn't come forward and complain, to add her name to the victim's list. Married someone else right after her divorce, I heard." "After that it was just a careless, thoughtless whim. One that I didn't give up." "You mean at first you didn't know what you were doing?" "I knew what I was doing, but no one was complaining, not to me at least.When I saw that lawyer woman on TV threatening to sue the sonogram place after she heard of the first seven victims and she was screaming about her crusade, I realized my whims were really affecting people. That was the first real independent confirmation. Then I had to get serious." "You mean you felt sorry, and wanted to stop, and couldn't?" "I mean I tried to find another base of operations. But it was too much trouble to go elsewhere. I drifted back to the bus stop. Then the immigrant lady remembered how I looked at her and that motocross widow. They finally put it together. So I gave myself up." She had gone to the police after they had distributed her photograph for questioning. They did not consider her a suspect at the time. They were looking for a computer hacker in a van who liked to spy on cell phone calls. They thought he might be applying dangerous technology, and hoped the woman at the bus stop might have noticed him. "I gave myself up - you know the rest." At first the police thought she was a crank. Then she added victims eighteen and nineteen to the list, a police dispatch operator who didn't know yet know she was expecting, and a graduate psychology intern researching police stress. "It was not for you to choose or to decide. Did you think that these women would not make good mothers?" "That's not it." "Then, why?" "The babies were the ones to choose. I found the ones who feared being born. The ones who knew they'd find hostility. You'd be surprised what those developing minds are aware of." "I found them and gave them what they wanted. Women choose if they want to have them, why shouldn't babies choose if they want to be born. I was depressed, so were they. I gave them what they wanted; I made things better for them, and then I felt better." "Why do you want to die now?" She sighed. "They won't let me do it anymore. Even for the women who want it. I won't ever get that high again. It's a special high, killling babies." I looked at her. I wanted her to die more than ever then. I wanted her to die just the way I'd dreamed, tormented, suffering, brutalized. The baby killer, the avenging angel of death with the face and manner of a welfare worker. The kindly sociopath with a social worker's heart. She didn't die in the death chamber of course. She got a stay of execution when a pro-choice, anti-death penalty group sued on her behalf. Their rationale was twisted, but it served its purpose and saved her life. Andrea Miller did not die in the electric chair for multiple involuntary feticide, for it was proved that her acts served a necessary social good. Her sentence was reduced to sixteen months, she was promised a state sponsored job at her chosen vocation, but she served only nine, and hung herself the day after her release. The rationale for her reprieve was found through DNA testing. The babies were going to be born as mutants.