Habeas Corpus: Black Womb (Black Womb Collection Book 1)

by Matthew LeDrew

He furrowed his brow.

  “Maybe...” he thought out loud, pulling the file on the Jacobies forward. “I’m playing this the wrong way. Stop looking for what they all have in common... and look at the one that doesn’t have anything in common...”

  He opened the file. There was nothing there. There was the autopsy, but that was it. No birth record, no death certificate, no fingerprints, no dental or medical records... nothing.

  “What the hell....” he mumbled, pushing through page after page of blank documents until he found one with something written on it. It was a copy of Salvadore Jacobies’ record of employment, of which there was only one position for which he had reference.

  “What the fuck is Engen?”

  “Coral Beach Precinct Morgue. Tuesday, the 26th. Harry Ford, mortician for this evening.”

  The words were once an attempt at levity and humor. Now, as they were delivered with a sad voice muffled by sobs, they just served to add to the weight of the situation.

  “Come on, Harry,” Lance said to his partner through tear filled eyes. “We’ve got a job to do.”

  Lance’s wife had always asked how he could do this job. How he could dissect the bodies of his fellow human beings, even if it was in the pursuit of whatever killed them. He had always replied that there were worse jobs out there. That police and firemen often had to deal with gore and danger on the job. That stunt artists in movie crews lost partners on the job in grotesque ways all of the time. But right now he could not think of a single job worse than his as he stared at the thirty freezer drawers, each one containing the body of a child under the age of twenty. He fought back tears. “Come on.”

  He pulled a white mask over his face and asked Harry for a scalpel, then pulled back the blanket covering the chest of the first patient and began to cut into the chest cavity.

  “Where could he be?” Cathy said to Mike.

  They were in Xander’s room, which was a total mess as usual. Cathy sat on his bed, where she often had before while Xander downloaded music for her. She’d always thought of this space as warm and inviting. Now it was just cold and empty without his presence.

  Mike paced about, looking for anything that might lead him to Xander’s whereabouts.

  Xander’s mother had let them go up, but had refused to go herself. She hadn’t been able to since she heard the news of his disappearance. His shirts littered the floor around his bed and his pants were strung across a chair at his desk. The drawers had been taken out of his dresser and thrown onto the floor. The room had been ransacked almost beyond recognition.

  “Who would do this?”

  Mike was repeatedly flicking the power switch of Xander’s computer on and off, with no result.

  Did this happen to the computer before, or did whoever broke in do it? he thought to himself. “Uh, I don’t know. But I can take a guess.”

  “The killer,” she said softly, a shiver running down her spine.

  “He must have been looking for something. If he wasn’t, he probably would have killed Mr. and Mrs. Drew,” Mike continued. “The question is: did he find it?”

  “I don’t know. But we’ve got to figure it out good and fast before that cop jumps to any more conclusions.”

  “Well,” Mike muttered as he pushed aside an old bookcase. “If I know Xander, if he had something important to hide, he’d put it here.” He stepped aside, revealing the ventilation duct to her. He pulled the grate off of it and reached in. His hand came out, first clutching a bundle of adult magazines.

  Cathy rolled her eyes in disgust.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s not it,” he chuckled.

  “Duh. Unless our sicko is a major, um, sicko.”

  Mike reached in again, this time coming out with a little disk marked: ENGEN.

  “What is it?” she asked, snatching it away.

  “Dunno,” he replied, snatching it back. He held it up to his eye. “But I’m sure as hell gonna find out.”

  Nothing.

  And more nothing.

  It seemed as though no matter what Tim did, there was nothing linking the Jacobies to existence. It was as if they had simply appeared dead in that house, out of thin air.

  There was no record of them in any state, or even any country for that matter, that he could think to search. It was like they were phantom bodies.

  This is it, he thought to himself, hunched over his laptop computer. This is what I need; this is what’s different. One of these things is not like the other and this is definitely it. If only I could figure out what ‘it’ was.

  The only thing he had to go on was the name Engen, which he could only assume was a business, but there were no records of it. Anywhere. Ever. It was like it too simply existed on that one slip of paper and nowhere else.

  He let out a heaving sigh and felt the uncontrollable urge to pick up smoking again, something he hadn’t done since he was a kid. His parents had told him that those things would kill him. Obviously they hadn’t grown up in Coral Beach, or they’d have realized that the cigarettes would just have to wait in line for the chance.

  He closed his eyes tight, realizing suddenly that he hadn’t slept since Carl was killed.

  When he opened them, he was looking directly at Carl’s desk across the room, next to the window.

  His brow crumpled as he looked up, something sparking in his mind and then fading again.

  “Now what was that thought I just had...” he asked, almost begging his mind to let it return. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, staring at Carl’s desk. “What are you trying to tell me, old friend?”

  He sighed.

  His fingers started to dance over the keyboard, as if they had a mind of their own. He went onto the national adoption agency and typed in both of the Jacobies.

  No less than fifty hits came up with children they had adopted going back forty years or more, in almost every state and a few in Canada.

  “Curiouser and curiouser...” he mumbled, scrolling down through the list.

  Coral Beach High School Library.

  They could feel the eyes on them. Somewhere in the back of their minds, they could sense it.

  However, Mike and Cathy couldn’t really care less right now, as they popped the disk marked ENGEN into the school’s computer.

  There was a little internet browser file labeled engen.com. Mike looked at it for a second, then brought the cursor up to it and clicked. Instantly, the browser popped up and began dialing in the name engen.com. When it did come up, the site was blank.

  “This is what was so important?” Cathy wondered out loud.

  “No. They’ve fixed it so that nobody will find out what was on that site,” he said, then pulled the disk out of the computer and looked at it. “Whoever they are.”

  “Thirty-nine bodies done, one to go,” Lance said aloud, with a miniature sigh of relief.

  “Yeah, sigh now,” Harry muttered, pointing a finger at the list of corpses. “But our murderer friend has changed his M. O. No organs were missing from any of these victims. Tim White’s not gonna like hearing that this may have actually been a copycat killer.”

  “You’re wrong. This last victim,” he pointed to number forty on the sheet. “She was ravaged. She had her ovaries and the rest of her reproductive system taken.”

  Harry looked down through his sheets. “Sara Johnson. What’s so special about her?”

  “Tim?” the secretary said as she poked her head through his doorway.

  Tim removed his reading glasses. “Yes, Felicia?”

  “Those two children you saw earlier are here again. They say that they have some new evidence...”

  “By all means, send them in,” he smiled, turning off his computer screen.

  Mike and Cathy walked in. Mike looked stern. He didn’t like White. At all. He threw the disk onto his desk. “Have you ever been to engen.com, Mr. White?”

  New entry. We have waited nearly twenty years, but our boy has finally returned to us. Restarting te
st for the darkness. Black Womb is home...

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  ENGEN

  “AAARRRGHHH!” Xander screamed in pain, arching his back and pulling against the safety harnesses placed all around his body.

  He could feel what they were doing, could feel them inside of him. If he turned the right way at the right time, he might even catch a glimpse of one of the doctors or the shadow of a guard. It barely registered with him. He was in too much pain to really register anything else. He screamed again, feeling a pinch deep inside his body. Why are they doing this to me? was all he could think. He had done nothing wrong. He hadn’t hurt anybody, or anything. The last thing he remembered was actually trying to help someone. His friend, Cathy...

  He screamed again. This time, finally, he got a reaction.

  “Doctor?” the female shouted from somewhere above. She sounded muddled and dulled at first, as though she were under water, then came into clarity and was so loud that it was all he could hear. His vision was blurred and there were a lot of bright lights in his face, every so often something moving between him and them. “Can’t we do something? He’s in pain for god’s sake!”

  “No!” a male voice exclaimed. “Now, I don’t like it any more then you do, but we can’t put him to sleep because it’ll dull his reactions. We can’t administer an aesthetic to him because that’ll affect...”

  “Carry on,” came a harsh voice from over an intercom. There was an audible click as it turned on and off.

  “Right away, sir. Nurse, do something about his screaming.”

  A shadow fell in front of the light. The nurse bent over him, wrapping thick cloth around his mouth. He mumbled against it for a moment, then tried to scream again as the doctor went back in. They’d been at it for hours. The worst part was remembering every detail. He had been strapped down to this steel bed, his arms and legs stretched outward. He remembered the doctor telling him that everything would be all right, then asking the nurse for a scalpel. He cut right across Xander’s stomach, pulling the skin away and holding it there with metal clamps. He was routinely given drugs to prevent him from blanking out from pain. He could feel the blood slowly pumping out of him, only to be replaced by even more. He felt the doctor pushing organs from side to side, looking for something. His arms and legs had been cut to stop him from struggling against the restraints. He did anyway. That pain was of little consequence in comparison. He turned his head and watched the blood trickle down the side of the table, the metallic buckles on his stirrups glistened in the intense light coming from above. He fought against the straps once more, then gave off a long sigh and gave up.

  Suddenly, the doctor pinched something that made his whole body convulse without control. Xander clenched his teeth until the intense pain ceased. He was watching the doctor pull something long and yellow from him when the nurse came over and shone a miniature flashlight into his eyes. She whispered something to him. He was too out of it from anguish to actually hear the words, but the woman’s calm tone soothed him. Until the doctor went back to work.

  “Nurse, get away from there,” the doctor said sternly. “Sponge.”

  An assistant handed the doctor the requested sponge, which was used to wipe some splattered blood from his brow. The assistant then faded back in the darkness that surrounded the operating table.

  New entry. Tests continue. The patient has exhibited the same resistance that his mother used to employ. This slows the testing process and inevitably causes the subject great pain. A most unfortunate waste of time.

  Xander cried out in torment once again. The noise was ear splitting, and would have chilled normal men to the marrow. The doctor never so much as flinched. He cut away the last part of the rib cage, his eyes getting wide. “Dear sweet mother of god...” he uttered.

  “What?” the nurse reacted in fear. She looked over the doctor’s shoulder and saw what had frightened this cold, hard, emotionless man so much.

  Blackness. Where Xander’s appendix should have been, there was instead a cancerous blackness. It didn’t look to be attached to the appendix organ at all, but more like... replacing it. The doctor regained his composure. He had been briefed about all of this, but had never actually expected to find it. Never in his life would he have thought such a thing could exist.

  The blackness convulsed in synch with Xander’s pulse, as if it acted as a secondary heart of some kind. It had gray spots which were lumpy, unlike the jet black areas which appeared to be smooth and almost silky. Valves protruded from the blackness to other areas of the body.

  It’s spreading, thought the doctor.

  Acting fast, he pushed the darkness aside with a gloved hand to reveal: more blackness. It had touched many major organs. The heart had tiny speckles on it. The liver was a sickly gray on one corner. One lung had been completely enveloped, while the other remained untouched. It seemed that it had even dissolved some of the bone structure of the rib cage, feeding off the marrow. Not only that, but the thing seemed to be beating faster now. The doctor could see where darkness was being pumped through his body at a faster rate.

  “It’s spreading faster,” the doctor said, sounding extremely worried. “We’ll have to amputate.”

  “NO!” came the voice over the loudspeaker again. “I will not allow it!”

  “Too bad! We’ve waited almost twenty years for the subject to return, and I’m not going to lose him again now!”

  The doctor raised the scalpel.

  All this time, Xander had been screaming like a banshee. Now, seemingly for no reason, he just... stopped.

  Curious, the nurse walked over to again check the boy’s eyes. She immediately dropped her little flashlight. Placing her hand over her mouth, she screamed. “His... his eyes!”

  The doctor rushed over. Xander’s pupils seemed to have completely taken over his eye, as they were now entirely blackened in, taking on a glossy appearance.

  “It’s spread to the optical nerves,” he announced, going back to the blackness. He raised his scalpel once more and drove it into the dark substance.

  Or at least, he attempted to.

  The darkness resisted, acting sort of rubbery, bobbing whenever the doctor poked at it. Finally, he decided to cut the valves surrounding it and take it out whole. He cut a small slit in the top valve. Dark liquid spewed out onto his scalpel and hand, pulling on him. He screamed. It burned at him, scalding the flesh. The darkness was still being pumped onto him. It was sticky like tar and it seemed that the more the doctor pulled away, the more it held. The nurses and assistants crowded around. Two strong looking guards took the doctor around the waist and began to pull. With a loud snap, the doctor finally got his hand back. The flesh had been stripped away, revealing bundles of nerves, and muscle. He cried out in agony, falling to the floor and passing out. All eyes were on Xander, when something amazing happened.

  From the slits made in his wrists and near his ankles, black liquid began to bubble and squirt. It first covered his hands and feet, then slowly it moved its way up his skin like waves move on a shore. Xander began to expel the substance from his mouth and within moments he was vomiting it upward, allowing it to flow back down onto him. As it did, his muscles seemed to grow exponentially, expanding as the substance touched it. His skin gained a smooth, yet scaly and shiny texture, like cohesive gel. He screamed, but all that came was the gurgle of the liquid. The experience was obviously painful. The gaps closed at his chest. He was now completely covered in the black liquid.

  Three red slits formed on his face, opening to reveal two triangular bright red eyes and a glowing red mouth. Slowly, turquoise liquid filled the red of his eyes until that was all there was, making them look like pools of swamp water. The creature that was once Xander Drew broke the bonds which restrained it and stood up, much to the horror of the onlookers. It then said something in a deep, scratchy voice:

  “Black Womb lives.”

  The creature leaped onto them, grabbing the doctor by the throat and squeezing. B
lood ran from the neck down the monster’s arms, but it hardly even noticed. Its eyes shone brightly in the dimly lit area surrounding the examination table. The Black Womb looked down onto it with disgust, throwing the doctor atop it. Tools and instruments flew everywhere and the scalpel which had been previously used against Xander Drew now made its final mark, digging into the chest of the doctor.

  Black Womb turned its head to the assistants and nurses, who were clambering toward the exits. When it turned, its face turned first. Its face turned and then its head, something that paralyzed the nurse with fear.

  There was a man outside of the door, engulfed in the shadows of the coat he wore. Only the bottom half of his face was visible, and was drawn upward in a smile. He looked down and turned something, then held up a key for the assistants to see. They began to scream angrily at the dark-suited man.

  He laughed.

  The creature looked at the men and women as they beat on the shiny metal door with panicked fists, swearing and uttering threats to the dark-suited man. Then they stopped and turned to Black Womb, who had not moved an inch after killing the doctor. It crouched on the steel floor, staring at the people. One by one, they all turned and locked into its eyes. Those eyes reminded one woman of a cat’s eyes as it watched its prey, following them wherever they went.

  It began to stand up now, as silent as a breeze, every movement without effort. As it did, it opened its mouth, revealing two rows of thick, jagged teeth. It held its hand up to the light and a look of concentration came over its face. Suddenly, four black talons unsheathed, one from each of its fingers. It crouched again, ready to pounce on the people who now stood perfectly still. A long, slender forked tongue protruded from its mouth and licked its lips before retreating. Without warning the beast pounced upward onto a wall, only long enough to kick off of it, propelling itself into an assistant. It drew back its arm, which now appeared long and elastic, pointing its clawed fingers at the man’s face.