“Check it again,” Hillary rumbled.

“One hundred and nineteen,” Huma said, waving the laser thermometer over her forehead.

“Good, good,” she said, “The virus is working! Give me another.”

“My love…” Huma began, concern fighting with the Botox to wrinkle her brow.

“Another!” Hillary roared, slapping the murky liquid in the tank.

Huma pulled on heavy gloves and pulled a squeaking bat from the small cage.

“Is it still fresh?” Hillary asked.

“Direct from Wuhan, beloved,” Huma murmured.

“Dunk it first,” Hillary order. Huma dipped the head of the bat into a small beaker of pangolin blood and brought it to Hillary.

“In,” Hillary grunted. “In. Now. Hungry.”

Huma dropped the wriggling bat into Hillary’s open mouth and she closed it on most of its small furry body. One wing unfurled from her lips and beat against her cheek until she bit down. Hillary crunched on the bat’s small bones for a long minute, sighs and grunts of pleasure coming from all over.

Hillary stiffened as if in seizure and the fluid in the tank began to bubble furiously.

“YES!” Hillary screamed, thrashing in the tank. “IT BEGINS!”

“Hillary!” Huma cried. She backed to the far wall of the gloom-shrouded basement, her hands over her mouth in horror.

Grunts and screams from the tank, high-speed gibbering, the dull thump thump thump of cows at slaughter, alien tongues chanting obscenities, the acrid scent of boiling Diet Cherry Dr. Pepper and bile. And then, and then…

“Hillary?” Huma asked in the sudden silence. “Beloved?”

The tank cracked once, and then again, finally collapsing into shards as a wave of unspeakable filth burst out of it.

“Hillary?” Huma asked again as a fog of Diet Cherry Dr. Pepper rose from the rough stone floor of the basement.

“I am reborn,” came a voice.

Hillary stood there, nude, human in form. The various pustules and gills were gone, as were the backup vaginas that had littered her thighs and torso for so long. The great patch of squamous skin covering her arms and shoulders was now pink and primate.

Huma walked around her as Hillary squealed and reveled in her human body. She touched her back cautiously where the dorsal frill had once quivered.

“All this from the virus?” Huma asked.

“It cost me millions from the Foundation, but the Chinese bioweapon labs delivered,” Hillary said, doing a deep knee bend and expelling old blood and small knots of bone from her lone vagina.

Huma reached out to caress Hillary’s unarmored breasts.

“There’s no time for that,” Hillary snapped. “I need updates.”

“Sanders won New Hampshire,” Huma said quietly.

“And the rest?” Hillary asked as she began wiping off her skin with towels.

“Buttigieg in second, Klobuchar in third, Warren and Biden fourth and fifth.”

“Old Joe in fifth? Ha! It is time for me to act. We must keep Bernie from the nomination,” Hillary said.

She began to choose something to wear from her normal clothes for the first time in years, clothes free of the straps and buttresses and scaffolding that beat her body into a roughly human shape. “And with Liz doing so poorly, we’ll have to find someone to ally with.”

“Klobuchar?” Huma asked, using a floor squee to guild the rebirthing fluid to the floor drains.

“Amy is a hotdish halfwit. Maybe good for VP. But I need someone with heat on them, someone I can control.”

“Buttigieg is surging,” Huma said. “A win in Iowa, a strong second in New Hampshire.”

“Yes. The young feculent. I’ll have to seduce him.”

“He is, uh…” Huma began.

“I know, I know,” Hillary said, “But I did have the Chinese leave me one gift of the Old Ones.”

Hillary squatted and grunted.

“Hnnn!” she groaned. “HhhhNNNNNNN!”

“Beloved!” Huma cried, alarmed.

“Oh!” Hillary screamed. “Oh! Oh! UGNH!” She let out a guttural howl.

With a tearing sound and gush of blood, the pseudopenis pushed out from between her legs. Long and thick and red and covered in pulsing veins.

“How?” Hillary panted. “How can he resist?”