“Shut up! You would too if you got messages like that!”
“Messages?” Xander raised his eyebrows. “What messages?”
“Shut up!” Sara said. “You’re always trying to scare me!”
“Usually yeah, but not this time, no.”
They both stepped over to the computer and looked at the messages. “Are you telling me that isn’t you?”
“Come on, you know my tag is Captain America. Besides, how could I have messaged this and gotten to your house in that amount of time? This is probably just some freak trying to scare you. It’s just a cool coincidence that I came at the same time.”
She nodded, acknowledging the impossibility of him sending those messages. She glanced down at the plastic bag in his hand, then looked up at him with a grin, her eyes both expectant and more than a little flirtatious. She did know him so well. “Movies?”
“Yup. One chick-flick, one for me, and a comedy for both.”
“Should last us all night. What do you plan on doing in that amount of time?”
He smiled, blushing despite all his attempts not to. “I got Sweet November for you, Apocalypse Now for me, and Big Daddy for the required comedy.”
“Let’s pop ‘em in,” she laughed, as the two headed downstairs.
Nurse Riley was on duty early Thursday morning. It was only six o’clock and still quite dark out as she checked through all of the rooms to make sure everything was all right with the patients. She reached room 205 and looked down her charts. Harris, Mike. She glanced up at the unplugged security camera, sighed, then plugged it back in.
“Kids,” she muttered.
She walked into the room and checked his vital signs.
“Well, you’re doing better,” she said. She looked at the charts from last night and compared them with the new signs. Her eyes went wide with shock.
“Oh! Way better!” She stepped out of the room for a moment. “Dr. Marx! Come take a look at this!”
A few hours later, Nurse Riley stripped the bandages off Mike as Cathy and both their parents stood and watched.
“...I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything like this,” Dr. Marx attempted to explain, stuttering once. “He’s almost made a complete recovery. I’m recommending him off the wheelchair and onto crutches immediately.”
Marx was a stocky little man that looked like a cartoon mole, his lab coat hanging lopsided over a growing hunch on his back. Large rimmed glasses perched precariously on the edge of his nose and he adjusted them nervously as he spoke.
“That’s great,” Mike’s father said, smiling at his son. He placed a hand on Mike’s shoulder, as if to take his son’s strength as a compliment to his own. “But how did this happen?”
“We’re... uncertain, but we think that... actually, we have no idea what to think... but something, very strange, is going on here... ... yes,” he said, looking over the reports as if to give validity to his response.
Cathy raised an eyebrow toward the older man. “Are all those technical terms why they pay you the big bucks?” she asked sarcastically, cuddling up close to Mike for the first time in days without fear of harming him.
“Yes... well...” Dr. Marx stammered again, attempting to explain again and then deciding it best not to even attempt to do so.
“Besides, who cares?” Cathy said, leaning over and kissing her boyfriend. “He’s back with us, isn’t that what matters?”
Mike smiled at her, touching her hair and pushing it back behind her ear.
She did have a way of putting things into perspective.
When Sara got up that morning, she threw the covers off herself playfully. She hopped out of bed with her nighty on (which was actually an oversized tee-shirt that had once belonged to Xander, featuring the Transformers symbol) then stepped into her walk-in closet to change into some clothes she didn’t mind the world seeing.
She came out wearing a sleeveless shirt that read 0% Angel across the chest and some slightly worn jeans that rode low in the front. She brushed a hand through her hair and made a small, disgusted grunt at how tangled it had become, then walked over to her dresser to get some socks, stopping to smile at the panda bear Xander had won for her at a fair. She gave it a little kiss, then walked over to the window to let the sun in.
Squish.
She looked down.
“Fuck,” she said to herself, rising up her foot.
On the floor was a large muddy footprint. Xander must have left it there when he came over last night. I’d better clean it up, or mom and dad might think I had a boy over.
She laughed at her own little joke, then walked into the bathroom and grabbed a handful of paper towels. Getting down on her hands and knees, she began cleaning up the glob of foot-shaped mud. She brushed her hair back as she looked out the window over at Xander’s bedroom.
She saw a little light go on, meaning his computer’s alarm clock had just gone off. She smiled as she imagined him getting up and going through a similar ritual as she just had, wondering just how alike it actually was.
She finished cleaning the last of the mud and went to put the towels into the toilet for easy disposal. She dropped them in and was about to flush when she caught something out of the corner of her eye. She looked at the towels floating there for the first time since she had started cleaning. They were... red. She inhaled through her nose, and was immediately filled with the undeniable scent of copper.
The footprint had been made in blood.
She let out a little yelp as she realized what that implied.
“Sara?” her mother called out from downstairs. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine, Mom!” she lied, running her hands over her head again and again, unsure of what to do.
“Come down for breakfast soon.”
“Uh-huh!”
She stared at the red liquid on the paper towel for a moment. The blood was already seeping off of the paper into swirly rings around the top of the water, spinning around and making the entire bowl look dark red.
She quickly flushed the paper towel down the toilet, then walked silently back into her room. She looked out her window again and saw Xander at the computer. Suddenly, there was a loud -BEEP- behind her. She went over to check her instant message.
~CapTainaMeriCa~.
That was Xander. She couldn’t talk to him right now. She clicked ignore, and began to think of other ways that Xander could have gotten blood on his shoe as she walked down the stairs to get breakfast.
The list was short.
“Ignore?” Xander read to himself as the little caption appeared on his screen. “Why would she ignore my message?”
He took a monster bite of the sausage that he was having for breakfast, then dipped the remaining morsel into a bit of mustard and popped it into his mouth, giving the screen a frustrated glare before closing it out.
He brought the mouse up to the left-hand corner of the screen and clicked on his bookmarks, scrolling down until he found engen.com.
He clicked on the little icon that represented engen.com and once again the animated symbol went through its cycle, only this time it ended with ‘Stiff Upper Lip’ by AC/DC. He quickly scrolled down the page and found the gtg icon and clicked on it. The dos password prompt overtook his screen again, the tiny cursor blinking next to the wordsPASSWORD PLEASE.
Wracking his brain and rubbing his eyes, which had crow’s feet from watching TV all night with Sara, he typed inSoul.
Password rejected.
Sighing, he typed in:Engen, and thenEngen User.
Again,password rejected.
Groaning, he looked over on his desk and saw a newspaper. In it were the photographs of the alley where Jamie’s body had been found, along with a story by Tom Drake and a one-column sidebar written by Don Smith. On the wall of the alley were those words again: ‘Black Womb’. He glanced back at the computer, furrowing his forehead. It had the right number of characters.
Thepassword pleaseoption came up on his
screen again, and he typed in the letters:b - l - a - c - k - w - o - m - b and hit enter.
Immediately his screen became filled with image after image, windows popping up and then shutting themselves down before he could really see them. The screen began to flicker and he thought he was going to have a seizure. He strained his eyes against the brightness, trying to see at least some of the information before him. There was a headshot I.D. photo of a man with spiked hair and a devilish grin. Another showed an Asian woman with clear skin and tiny lips. A third showed what he thought was the street outside the Factory.
The more he watched the flickering images, the more pain began to build in his abdomen and at the base of his skull. Growling under his breath, he reopened the family photos folder and double clicked an image of a safe.
The images stopped flashing by, staying on the screen as the computer locked itself up. Not even the mouse would move.
“It worked,” he said in astonishment, glancing over the page. “This shit looks... government.”
He looked over the frozen window, seeing files on Jamie, Mike, even Cathy. Then he saw one that was marked classified. To him, that was an open invitation. He began to read down through this new information.
black womb, the. A project started through joint commission of governments to try to expand on the possibilities of genetic memory in stem-cell research. The end result would take decades, but would have eventually given way to a new age in foreign policy and sending men overseas. It would have been a super soldier. Although all tests failed to some degree, there was substantial increase in the field. The government project is currently owned by Owen McMasters, the lead research developer of the project, despite
The computer made a little noise. A caption came up that said ‘location being tracked’.
“Fuck,” Xander cursed, trying to regain control of the mouse and close out the program. The pointer stayed there no matter how much he jiggled it, as if it were paralyzed. Grunting angrily through gritted teeth, he held down the ‘control’ and ‘alt’ buttons on the keyboard then tapped ‘delete’ frantically.
At first nothing happened, the icon in the bottom right still spinning around and telling him he was being tracked.
Finally, the task manager popped up in the centre of the screen. He let out a sigh of relief as he ended all the programs one by one.
‘Location being tracked’ still dominated the bottom right of the screen.
Cursing again, he deleted the engen.com bookmark off of his desktop then pushed in on the computer’s power button and held it until it was off.
He stared at the black screen for a long moment, resting his head against his hand as he leaned on his desk. He scooped up the last taste of mustard onto his finger and put it into his mouth.
“What the hell was that?” he asked himself, not surprised when he got no response.
Grendel flicked his pencil up at the ceiling, causing it to stick into the tile.
He wasn’t interested in this biology lecture, not that he ever was. He was thinking about his party. With any luck, Mike wouldn’t be able to make it. And even if he could, Sud, Tommy and Derek would take care of him. Either way, he’d finally get his crack at Cathy tomorrow night.
Tomorrow night.
It seemed so immediate and so far away all at the same time.
After Mike, the only problem would be that freak, Xander, and Sara. But they were easy enough to deal with. This weekend, he and Cathy would have his parents’ house all to themselves...
“Julian!” Professor Miles slapped his hand down on Grendel’s desk. His Boston accent was muddled by years in rural Maine but still very condescending and better-than-thou. A hail of pencils slipped from their places on the ceiling, crashing down onto Grendel’s head. “Julian, you have not paid attention all class, your feet are on the desk... By god, you don’t even have the right book!”
“But that’s the book I’ve been using since the beginning of the year,” Grendel objected, motioning toward it with both open palms.
The tired old teacher rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “That... that actually doesn’t shock me. I must be getting used to this.” He took off his glasses and wiped them in his shirt, chuckling softly. “Dear lord, that is a scary thought, isn’t it?”
“Can I use the bathroom?” Grendel asked.
Miles looked up, eyes wide in astonishment. “What?”
“Well, as Mr. Calendar once said ‘better I am in the halls than in here bothering the students who want to learn.’”
“You are excused, Mr. Grendel.”
Grendel hopped out from his desk and out the door as fast as he could, before Miles had a chance to change his mind.
He strutted up and down the halls of Coral Beach High as he’d often done before. The pale green lockers and tan walls were all very familiar to him, some even sparking fond memories. There was a spot between a row of lockers and the girl’s rest room where he’d carved the anarchy symbol with a protractor late last year. It had been the only constructive use he had gotten out of the tool that semester. One of the lockers on his right still had a dent in it from where he had punched it after Greer had broken up with him.
He stopped at one classroom and looked into it.
There she was.
Cathy Kennessy, in all her grace and style. Her long hair shimmering in the morning light, her lips so juicy he could practically taste them... and he was convinced he could smell her specific aroma from where he stood.
She intoxicated him.
She spotted him outside, and smiled at him.
“Come out!” he mouthed silently, motioning toward himself with both hands.
She shook her head no, giggling.
“Come on!” he pretended to plead, bending down as if he were about to get onto his knees.
She relented, raising her hand.
“Yes, Miss Kennessy?” Mr. Calender said, pointing to Cathy.
“May I be excused? I kinda need to go to the little girls’ room.”
Calender smiled, motioning toward the door. “Go right ahead.”
Cathy smiled, scooping up her book bag and heading for the door as the class resumed its discussion. She joined Grendel and the two of them began walking down the hall away from the classroom together.
“So, how’s Mike?” Grendel asked Cathy in mock concern. Although he was looking at her, he was not even attempting to make eye contact with her as he asked.
“Fine. In fact, he’ll be out this evening, so we’ll both be at your party,” she smiled, relishing in the news.
“Cool,” he said, trying to sound overly enthusiastic about Mike’s presence. Looks like I’ll be going with Plan ‘B’ then, he thought to himself. “So what about Xander, is he...”
“Yup. In fact, I’ve been thinking about trying to fix him and Sara up,” she said in a hushed tone, as if there were someone around to hear it.
“That’d be great. We should talk about that at the party.”
“Sure,” she said before she gave him a little hug and walked back to class. He watched her walk away intently, paying close attention to the slight swivel of her hips.
Tomorrow.
3:15.
Xander Drew got home from school and walked into his room. He went over to his computer, as usual, and jiggled the mouse.
Nothing.
“Oh yeah,” he remembered, slapping himself in the forehead. “I had to turn it off.”
He pressed the on button.
Still, nothing.
“What the hell?” he almost shouted.
He grabbed a screwdriver and opened up the tower, looking inside. The CPU was completely fried, melted to the rest of the machinery so bad that he wouldn’t even be able to pry it off. It would take him weeks to replace, and that was if money was good.
“Damn,” he sighed, tossing the screwdriver down and taking a chip out of the floor.
4:30.
“Frig!” Mike screamed at
the little computerized character named Quartz on the screen as he let out a full force eye beam on his character, Ragna-Rock. Ragna went down easily, but then Diamond, the tag-team partner in this match, came out and started to lay it into Quartz. Diamond was the only female character in the game, and sparkled just like her namesake on the screen. She did a kiss attack, using her powers to sap Quartz’s energy. It always reminded him of the effect that Cathy’s kisses had on him, making him smile just that little bit more. Then, just as Mike was about to finish off Quartz ‘HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER!’ flashed across the screen in bright gold letters. He turned to see who had placed the money into the game, and smiled when he did. “Jerk. Why’d you do that?”
“Ah, you would’ve lost anyway,” Xander replied, with Cathy and Sara behind him. “After the kiss attack, Diamond is really vulnerable to Quartz’s punches and kicks.”
Mike sighed. “How true. But I can still beat you.”
“Right,” Xander replied sarcastically, then took the opposing control stick and selected Granite and Obsidian to battle Mike’s Diamond and Ragna-Rock. “I thought these guys didn’t have any decent fighting games?”
“Came in yesterday,” Mike answered absentmindedly, his tongue sticking out as he concentrated on the game.
Cathy and Sara took that as their cue that there would be no more attention paid to them for at least five minutes, both of them walking across the room.
“Boys will be boys,” Cathy muttered to herself, sitting down on the racecar ride. The comedic cartoon announcer was taunting them from within the screen, telling them to ‘race against ten other competitors for the world cup’. It was already beginning to get annoying.
“Yeah, but did you hear?”
“Hear what?”
“That secret service guy got killed last night, along with some old couple.”
“No way,” Cathy said, her eyes widening.
Habeas Corpus: Black Womb (Black Womb Collection Book 1) Page 8