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

by Matthew LeDrew

  Alpha leaned against the wall, a wry grin prying across his lips. “The blue wire!” he yelled, before finally succumbing to his wounds and slamming against the floor. Blood oozed from his lips.

  Black Womb ripped at the slender cable with his hooked claw.

  0:05

  “Did it stop?” he wondered aloud.

  0:04

  “Why didn’t it stop?”

  0:03

  He looked back in horror at Alpha, almost certain he could see the deranged man’s grin, even in death.

  0:02

  Hope Alpha was right about Black Womb being able to survive this...

  0:01

  The radioactive rods in front of Xander exposed themselves, their eerie green glow filling the room. He felt his flesh start to burn as the liquid surrounding his brain boiled within his skull and his teeth rattled, trying to shake themselves free of his gums. He closed his eyes as they started to bubble and crack.

  Behind him Alpha’s body exploded, erupting in blue flame, then green, until eventually there was nothing left to the madman.

  Here goes nothing, he thought to himself, as he felt even the Womb-skin begin to peel back, revealing the tender, weak form of Xander Drew underneath. Reaching out with both hands, he pressed down on the reactor rod.

  All around him, the walls were cracking, steel and wood falling down around him as the building’s foundation became weaker and weaker, getting ready to implode upon itself.

  Outside, police cars were surrounding the building. Suddenly, it began to fall into itself, its centre crumbling away one piece at a time. There was a roar like thunder and a single wave of intense heat as the chunks of falling metal and plaster got larger and larger, crashing onto the floor inside. Long cracks started to spread their way up from the foundation, jumping from one direction to another as if they had a mind of their own.

  “Oh, my God,” one of the officers said in a hushed whisper, as the building started to emit a soft glow.

  With a force that made the earth all around them shake, all sides of the building crumpled inward almost in unison, as if someone had crumpled it up like a ball of paper.

  There were screams and hollers as officers tried desperately to shield themselves from the ensuing dust cloud it spat out in its wake. A few cars in front were hit, causing them to erupt in a blaze of fire.

  Tim stopped his car and got out, shielding his eyes against the heat and dust. When it stopped, the once majestic building was nothing but rubble. He stared at it for a moment. “Damn. Too late.”

  Inside Tim’s car, Cathy fell into Mike’s arms, crying uncontrollably. He put his arms around her, as he looked in hatred at the smouldering pile of rubble. Then his expression changed. He smiled. “Everyone... Look!”

  A board fell over in the debris, revealing a small pocket created by the blast. Xander Drew stepped out of it. He was covered in soot, bleeding from every crevice in his body, torn both physically and mentally, limping, shocked beyond human comprehension and overall looked like grim death. It was Xander, just the same.

  “Xander!” Cathy cried, getting out of the car and running toward him with Mike not far behind. They embraced him, tears of joy streaming down all three faces. They fell to the ground, kneeling on the wet soil, still embraced.

  Xander leaned in and kissed Cathy on the forehead. “It’s alright.”

  Suddenly, there was more movement from the tattered building, a loud crash.

  “I’ll KILL you for this!” Genblade screamed as he burst from the smelting pile of rubble. He pointed his sword at Xander and was about to throw it directly at his head, when...

  -click- -click - click- click -click- -click - click-

  Fifty handguns trained themselves on Genblade at once. Red laser sights dotted along Genblade’s forehead and chest. The killer’s eyes moved through the crowd, searching out Tim White. He found him, found the hatred in the policeman’s eyes. He continued looking through the crowd, and found what he was looking for. Xander got up from the warm embrace that he, Cathy, and Mike had been sharing. He stood straight and rigid, glaring at his back at his enemy. Genblade’s sneer moved slowly into a smile as he mouthed the words:

  ‘It’ll never be over.’

  Xander didn’t flinch.

  Genblade seemed to love it. He released his grip on the double -sided blade. It fell to the ground with a final

  -clink-

  Genblade smiled at Xander once more as he put his hands above his head.

  EPILOGUE

  “Let us pray,” Reverend Robert Gallagher said, overlooking the coffin.

  Xander would have loved for it to be an open casket, to be able to say goodbye to her one last time, but the damage Genblade did was so extensive they had to leave it closed. The emotion of the situation nearly made the Black Womb surface, but he held it in.

  The priest continued, “Lord, we gather to lay to rest your daughter, Sara. We ask that you welcome her into your heavenly kingdom and give repose to her soul. Through Christ, our lord, Amen.”

  I’ve been up all night trying to write... something that could express what I’m feeling. Every time I tried, it kept coming out like a confession instead of a eulogy. But how can I possibly do Sara justice with just a few pages of scribbles soaked with a flood of tears? What can I say to these people to even remotely portray to them what Sara was and how much she meant to me?

  “I’ve asked Alexander Drew, Sara’s long time friend, to say a few words about the young woman we all held such a special place in our hearts for. Mister Drew?”

  It’s vulgar - playing the role of the helpless boy. I caused her death.

  I feel like the worst kind of liar.

  Xander got up from his seat in the second row and started toward the pulpit, a piece of paper shaking uncontrollably in his hands. He walked over to Reverend Gallagher, who put an assuring hand on his shoulder before stepping aside. The simple empathetic contact sent shivers throughout his body. Deep down inside him, the womb organ twitched once, as if to shake back.

  “Hello,” he started, “this may take a while.” He cleared his throat, staring out into the crowd. It was filled with friends, family, classmates, relatives... “Ahem. Um... Sara was...”

  He stopped.

  “Sara was...”

  He looked up from his paper, tears streaming down his face. No. There are no words. He walked over to the coffin and placed his hand upon its white surface. It felt cold and inhuman, but he still felt her in it. As if she were connected to it in some way. “I’ll miss you.”

  There are no words.

  Then he left the church with tears in his eyes.

  As soon as Xander stepped through the door into the cool night air, the Womb overpowered him, black ooze flowing over him.

  I’ll never live it down. Sara’s death can never be justified. But this I know: I’m going to spend the rest of my life making up for it.

  A few blocks away, a mugger clubbed a young girl over the head, smiling as he rolled up his sleeves, revealing a red letter ‘T’ tattooed on his right arm. “...come ‘ere, sweet thing...”

  Genblade plead guilty to all the murders, even the ones that I committed. I guess his sense of honor realized that I beat him and that I should get something for it.

  “... no.... please, stop.”

  I’ll never stop, Sara. I’ll keep my promise, protect the innocent from the scum. All the scum. Be it big like Alpha or small like Grendel. They’re all guilty.

  “... please... just stop.”

  If you’re innocent...

  “...stop...”

  You’re hurt...

  “...please...”

  Or you’re scared...

  A black figure dropped from the sky and kicked the mugger in the face, sending him sprawling to the ground.

  I’ll be there.

  BOOK TWO: TRANSFORMATIONS IN PAIN

  INTERLUDE:

  SHE RAN

  She turned the corner quickly, scraping her shoul
der against the brick.

  Her breath came in quick, labored pants as her feet slammed against the pavement one after the other, displacing mounds of gravel and mud as she went. It had rained the night before, and the asphalt was slick and wet beneath the soles of her feet. Fighting to maintain her balance, she turned around to see how far she had gone. Her auburn hair caught on her eyelashes as it whipped around her head, making it hard to see.

  They were still back there. She couldn’t see them now, but she could hear them. Could hear their puffs of breath and their own footfalls, as well as the steady stream of curses that one of them kept up in constant supply between bouts of a hacking smoker’s cough. The other one was stronger, his legs pumping like pistons. The sounds of his heels slamming against the street were louder than the other one. He was closer, but it was hard to tell exactly how close because he remained deathly silent as he advanced upon her.

  It had started about three blocks back. Every time she had stopped, they had stopped. Every time she sped up, they sped up. She hadn’t been sure what to think at first, then she’d seen the knife sticking out of one of their belts, only partially obscured by his red-and-gold sport jacket. Her eyes had lit up and felt twice their normal size. For a moment it had been all she could do to stare at it, glimmering against the faded denim.

  She turned away fast, pushing some hair out of her face to try and hide the fear in her eyes and make her exit seem casual. Whether or not they had been fooled they still followed, keeping roughly ten meters between themselves and the girl at all times.

  She turned down Laird Street, the way she always did on her way home from school, then dropped her knapsack and broke into a run. When her two pursuers turned the corner a few seconds behind her they found that their ten meter buffer had become closer to thirty, and took off running after her.

  Her chest heaved fire now, her stomach clenching in continuous bursts of agony as she cursed the potato chips she’d had for lunch. She could feel their jagged little edges digging into the lining of her gut, tearing at her from the inside out as her abdomen contracted with each step she forced out of her body.

  She’d spent the latter part of her last semester skipping Phys Ed class in favor of hanging out with the boys in the smoking section or text-messaging her cousin. Anything to not have to be covered in sweat for the rest of the day, in a school where the air conditioners seemed to be mostly for decoration.

  As a stitch developed in her lower left side and her legs began to feel numb and rubbery, she began to wish that she had been a little more health conscious.

  She felt blood trickle down her arm from where she’d scraped it. She bit her lip as she pumped her arms and focused all her attention on the street corner just one building length away from her. After that, she would be on her street. Not long after that, she’d be home. She’d be safe.

  She heard a loud curse close behind her, but dared not turn around to see. It was the one word she’d never say herself, even in the worst of situations, and just the sound of it curdled in her ears until it was almost all she could hear.

  She tried not to think about it as she closed her eyes tight and poured on the steam, willing her legs to pump harder and faster than they ever had before. She didn’t know what they wanted with her, but she knew she didn’t want to find out anytime soon. She heard something in her knee pop like when her Biology teacher cracked his knuckles. Fresh pain shot up her leg and into her spine, burying in deep and making a home there.

  When she opened her eyes again, she was almost at the curb. She could see her next-door neighbor’s house, dissected by the wall she was about to pass. The windows were dark and the blinds were closed tight, their usually inviting porch now looking cold and desolate. Someone had taken all of the flowers inside and she realized, strangely, that they were on vacation. She didn’t know why that occurred to her at that moment, only that it did.

  Behind her, one of the footsteps stopped and was replaced by very loud breathing and panting. Without even turning around, she could see the thinner of her two pursuers hunched over with his hands against his knees. He was trying to catch his breath, sweat getting caught in his short brown hair. The other set of footsteps just got louder and faster, as if he had only been moving at that speed so that his friend could keep up. If they were any indication, he’d be on her in seconds.

  She turned the corner, ready to dart across the road and into her driveway faster than she ever had before, hoping that there were no cars coming. Instead her nose crashed into something hard and she fell backward. Her backbone slammed against the pavement. She felt her entire body quake with the sudden impact, aching from the base of her skull right down to her ankles.

  The man she had bumped into also fell to the ground and looked to have skidded out his elbow in the process.

  Stunned, she wasn’t fully aware of the passage of time until she felt two massive hands clamp down on her shoulders like vice grips. They brought her to her feet.

  “Get the car,” the man behind her said with a high-pitched voice. It was not the man that was holding her -- he was the one that had lost his breath. By the sounds of things, he still had yet to regain it.

  The lanky man in front of her smirked as he rose to his feet. Then turned and looked over his shoulder at the row of houses behind him.

  “No!” she screamed as the man who held her pulled her close. He forced her to walk with him toward the nearby alley. She tried to hit and kick at her capture, but it seemed to have as much effect as hitting solid stone. She continued to scream even after they dragged her away. Eventually the screaming stopped, long before her terror was over.

  It occurred to her that nothing would ever be the same again. Someone had told her once that every time that happens in life, it was like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly. A transition and transformation into something different.

  This time, she thought, it was a transformation... in pain.

  CHAPTER ONE:

  CONFESSION

  He awoke on the floor, his body shaking with shock as all his senses seemed to scream at him at once. At first he wasn’t quite sure where he was, something that happened so often lately that he was almost getting used to not being used to anything he saw anymore.

  Everything around him was red and his eyes stung terribly, like he’d gotten twigs in them as he always did as a child while running through the forest behind his house. He didn’t understand why at first. He blinked several times. When the dark crimson didn’t fade, he started to become afraid. Sweat dotted his brow and tears welled up behind his eyes, making them hurt even more. He reached up with his right index finger to stop the salt water from spilling onto his cheeks and was surprised to see that red goop, not unlike the type he used in his Creepy Crawlers oven as a child, had come off on his finger. It hung there for a moment, dangling and dripping a viscous fluid before he realized what it was.

  It was blood.

  A congealed layer of blood covering his entire body, naked beneath the covers. Now that that much was gone and he could see, his room and everything in it was clear to him again and he knew where he was. He saw his television propped up in the corner – the remote on top of it meaning his father had been upstairs watching the game again at some point yesterday afternoon. He saw his computer, which was the top of the line with all the best video capabilities and nothing to put those capabilities to good use since the screen had been blown out a week before. He was convinced that the air around it still stunk of carbon monoxide and charred plastic.

  He wiggled his toes along his thick, matted carpet that reeked of a thousand odors absorbed into its fabrics, mostly from Kraft dinners and other delicacies that his mother had begged him not to eat upstairs. And he saw his window: his window that looked out upon --

  He stopped, steeling himself against that direction. Angered and frustrated, he turned toward his padlock-covered door and started tearing at his face to get the congealed blood off of it. He unwrapped it in a continuous
strand around his body, like his father unwrapping a meal covered in shrink-wrap. He tried to think of those meals now; badly breaded fried chicken. Steak and mashed potatoes. Or something. Or anything. Anything to get his mind off that window and what lay behind it.

  Because Alexander ‘Xander’ Drew could pretend that he was a normal fifteen year old kid, just like any other person living in Coral Beach, Maine. He could fool himself into believing that he didn’t know where he was when he woke up (and did so every day) because in truth he wanted to wake up to anything but these four walls again for the 5,567th day in a row. He could even make believe that the layer of blood that he was now tucking away was normal for him, and that it didn’t really matter. He could convince himself of all these things... but for all his strengths, he could not bring himself to look out his bedroom window.

  Past the moldy-green curtains, past the tall evergreen that his father had planted between his house and hers in an attempt to keep them from spying on one another late at night, that they’d climbed instead and where he told her he loved her. Past the high picket fence that he’d hopped over and past the shit-coloured shingles on one side of her house, opposite the off-white that reflected the new morning light on every other side. That was where he didn’t want to look.

  That was Sara Johnson’s bedroom window.

  Sara Johnson. The angel of light that had filled even the darkest corners of his soul with hope. That was how he had described her back when she was alive and when he thought he had a soul. When he thought he was alive and mortal. Before he had killed her. Ten days ago, two men had ripped his world apart from one end to the other: Abner Jenkins and Adam Genblade, otherwise known as Alpha and Genblade. Two people that looked as though they’d been born out of Shelly or Stevenson’s minds, with their garishly filed smiles and eyes that pumped hatred into you like fuel into a tank. Then again, he couldn’t say much anymore. His own face, his real face, was something much worse.