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

by Matthew LeDrew

  Which made the second man Allan Bishop, a theory that was proven when the slimmer man lumbered out of the shadows. His heels tapped softly against the rotten, moldy floor, hardly making a sound as he descended toward Xander. He seemed to be the source of the scent of cheap drugs, amplified by the fact that his eyes were bloodshot and bugging, seemingly beyond the man’s ability to control them. His pupils darted around aimlessly and his fists were clenched into small balls that moved so fast it was hard to tell if those blurry lines were in fact fingers. His hair was short and wiry, looking like something an army general might have, and was the polar opposite of Raine’s. He had a small mustache which looked like an earwig crawling over his upper lip that he was obviously too proud to shave. However, his face was trim and there didn’t seem to be any fat on his body. He was toned, even if he wasn’t overly muscular. He was breathing hard, making his loose t-shirt wave slightly as his chest heaved. It also made his sweatpants drop about an inch only to rise again the next time he inhaled. “Jesus,” he said, his voice coming in quick bursts of air. His lips barely moved when he spoke, a trait that was typically learned in the harsher prisons. “He’s a friggin’ kid. Just some stupid kid.”

  “Don’t matter,” Raine barked, his voice was low and commanding with a heavy New York accent. That made about as much sense as his Texan belt-buckle, and Xander decided that he was just faking such things as gimmicks to make himself look tough. “Kid’s still got a mouth, hasn’t he? He can still talk. We gotta shut him up.”

  Xander coughed, slowly rising to his feet. It was like watching smoke billow upwards from a blast. He seemed to just keep rising and rising, until he stood at eye-level with both men. “I’m not here to talk,” Xander said quietly, bringing both fists up into a jabbing position. “I’m here to --”

  SMACK!

  The chuck of wood that Raine had swung at Xander from the darkness came around again, this time planting itself into his jaw. He felt splinters make their way into his mouth and gums as his neck twisted and nearly snapped, the muscle tendons in his shoulders straining then breaking. “Guh,” he said simply, forcing his aching skull back around just in time to see the wood get pushed forward again, catching him head-on between the eyes. He fell backward, but Allan caught him before he could hit the ground, the boy’s limp body as heavy as a sack of potatoes in his thin arms.

  Raine chuckled softly as he looked down at Xander, coppery blood that seemed just a bit too orange (but about as far from black as a colour could get) leaking from the boy’s mouth and ears, which were already starting to swell. “Hey, lookit man,” he laughed, pointing at the battered teen. “It’s that Xander Drew freak!”

  Allan careened his head around to look in the bloodied face. “Yeah, so it is. Little punk,” he giggled, and he sounded more than a little nuts. He was probably just high, though. “We should make him wear his ass as a hat,” he laughed again, and that time Raine chuckled too.

  Come on, Xander thought, fighting unconsciousness as more blood dripped from the growing crack in the roof of his mouth down onto his tongue. You can do this, Drew. Just think of... of... but all he could think of was that metallic-tasting liquid that was pooling in all of his facial orifices. Sara! he realized suddenly, and he felt the true Womb twitch a little. Think of Sara. Concentrate on her, he thought, coaxing his ‘other side’ out of its shell. Think of her, lying there in that coffin... he continued, tears welling up from the memories and the pain.

  “Look, he’s crying,” Allan said with mock sympathy. “Poor baby.”

  Julie, lying in an alleyway across from her bedroom window, that smile ruined, trying to find enough shards of clothing to get her home without her perv neighbors catching too much skin... Still, the Womb just fizzed. It was like trying to start a cold engine in the dead of winter. In Antarctica. It just wasn’t happening, a fact that slowly grew in the back of his mind as he watched the red liquid from his nose seep into the soaking-wet plywood flooring.

  I can’t transform, he realized, just as the wood again jabbed at him, catching him square in the left eye and knocking him back, his brain beating around inside his head until it stopped making noise. Stopped thinking.

  Allan kicked him, laughing as the comatose boy’s body tossed and turned under the pressure. Then Raine joined in. As Mike watched from a window in horror, they beat Xander’s chest in until he thought it was going to cave his rib cage onto his lungs. They slammed their heels against his face and his crotch, laughing heartily at the wet snap of flesh being loosened from bone. Then Raine pulled something from his pocket and showed it to Allan. They both smiled and walked out the back door, and left Xander for dead.

  Mike opened the front door and hurried in. He leaned down into Xander’s face, his own wrought with terror. He slapped him on the cheek to wake him, and was horrified when the impact made blood shoot up from his lips like a geyser.

  He grabbed him by the arms and started hauling him out of the house, using all the strength he could muster to command the dead weight.

  It was dark.

  He knew that much, but everything else was more than a little fuzzy. He couldn’t remember anything much outside of ‘pain’ and, of course, ‘it was dark.’ So, all said, he didn’t know very much about what was happening.

  In the distance, there was an odd humming. He recognized the tune, his mother used to sing it to him when he was little. When he was a baby. God, that seemed like such a long time ago now. What must it have been like for her? Little mama Drew holding her baby against her nipple, never thinking that this would be how her son would die. Alone in some dingy burned-out house, blood coming out of every hole in his body, ending up being a waste of time for everyone around him.

  Then again, it wasn’t that surprising.

  “Oh, stop whining!” came a voice from out in the darkness. It was thick and raspy, and it spoke with an ill demeanor. The person speaking didn’t want Xander to stop complaining. He wanted him to keep going so that they’d have an excuse to beat him down more than he already was.

  Xander groaned, rolled over onto his gut and took a look around, struggling to prop himself up. Blood gushed from his lip, black and oozing, dripping into the darkness where he lost sight of it. “Where am I?” he called out, the echo of each word returning to him before he had even finished it. He barely recognized his own voice; it was like he was underwater.

  The person humming stopped long enough to chuckle-- more like a cackle, really. It seemed like a contradiction to their... no, her voice. It was so evil now, laughing at him as he stared out into the world blindly. It had been so gentle only a moment ago. Soft and warm on the breeze, wrapping around him like a blanket. The humming had started again now, and it reminded him of lying on his back on a grassy knoll not far from his house, with Sara only a few feet away. Looking up at the sky and picking shapes out of the clouds. The way the wind used to whistle in the hollow tree branches. Birds in their nests, chirping as they fed worms to the eager mouths of their young. It reminded him of... springtime.

  Suddenly, he knew. The blackness was all too familiar now, and he fought to get up. He managed to scramble to his feet, draw his sliced hands into aching fists and get up the energy to glare into the darkness as best he could.

  SLAP!

  His feet were knocked out from under him and he fell backwards, beating his head off of the shadows. He felt his brain rock in its casing and his teeth crammed shut onto his tongue for a second. He coughed, laying there on his back and looking around for the person that did it. “Am I... dead?” he asked, gulping back spit.

  “No,” came the humming, springtime voice. A face became visible in the darkness, pale and chalky at first. Dark circles around the eyes and jet black hair matted in front of her face gave her the brief approximation of an albino skeleton. Or of a ghost. It floated, as if bodiless, up into a height that meant it was standing and then slowly started coming toward him. As it got closer, its features became more and more defined, until Eve Spider s
tepped out in front of him. There was an odd glow around her. An ambience that was welcomed, the first light he’d seen since coming to this dreadful place. “But I am. You killed me, remember?” she teased, her fingers dancing around the stab wound in her silken robes sexually. She rubbed her gut, tracing the lines of it with her index finger, then bringing it up to her mouth. “It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt anymore... only sometimes. When I sleep.” She smiled at him, and it was surprisingly warm. Her slanted eastern eyes held a tint of mischievousness and glee to them, but there was kindness there too. You had to look deep, but it was definitely there. “Get up,” she laughed, and it was no longer that of an evil mastermind. It was that of a friend laughing at someone who’d just tripped over their own feet, and he felt the strange urge to laugh with her.

  He repressed it.

  “What am I doing here?” Xander asked, sitting up and rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I have to get back to Coral Beach. Mike needs my help, he can’t fight those assholes alone,” he pleaded with her, as if she were somehow holding him here.

  “I know, sweetie,” she chided gently, reaching out and stroking the side of his face. “That’s what I said too, when I first got here. But for me, it was a one-way ticket.” She smirked. “There wasn’t even an in-flight movie.” She dug her nails into the side of his face, raking them across his cheeks.

  Xander coiled back, rushing to his feet. He brought a hand up to his ripped flesh, but found there was none. No marks, not even a scar. Just a chubby little cheek with not enough facial hair on it. “What the hell are you talking about? Where am I?” he demanded, pointing a finger at her. “Tell me, now!”

  “Yeah, that’ll work,” came a second voice, the one who’d told him to stop whining a moment ago. Only this time Xander recognized it. All of the colour drained from his face and the blood coming out of him ran cold as ice. His lower lip quivered. He did not want to turn around to face the man behind him. “‘Tell me... now!’” The voice chuckled again. “You sound real intimidating. I almost soiled myself, really. You didn’t sound at all like some scared little teenager wishing he could go home, watch Adam Sandler movies and try to look down his girlfriend’s bra.” Again, laughter.

  The lights came on, finally, and he was there again. “Home sweet home,” he mumbled under his breath, trying to mask his fear at the solid metal room they were in the centre of, with a drain for blood directly beneath his feet in the middle of the semi-circle. His remark did not sound fearless, as his voice quivered past the point of comprehension.

  They were back at Engen.

  He heard the second speaker’s lips open again, the tongue snapping against those sharp, jagged teeth as he prepared to speak. “This is absolutely pathetic,” Genblade spat, and Xander felt tiny driblets of saliva splatter against the back of his neck. “You might as well let me kill you now, and do yourself a favor.”

  “Oh, but you mustn’t do that, dear Adam,” Spider said, humming that song again and speaking to the tune. “Ruin all the fun, it would. All the daisies would die and the sun would go all pink.” She spread her legs slightly, looking past Xander to Genblade, a hint of seduction in her face. “Take away from all the other good things that are pink, I say.”

  Xander’s brow furrowed as Genblade bumped past him, nearly knocking him over as he made his way over to his wife. His hand slid up her leg and he kissed her passionately, their tongues darting in and out of the space between their mouths. It made Xander wish that the lights were out again. They wished it, too.

  Spider’s silks were draped over her body just the way they’d been the day they met. The day she died. She wore them loose and they blew hauntingly in the breeze, just enough so that he couldn’t get a glimpse of anything. He found himself staring at her, until he saw a scar on her right thigh. A surgical scar. The spot where Alpha had put Sara’s ovaries into her.

  They stopped kissing, and Genblade glowered at him. “Is this your dream, or mine?” he hissed wickedly.

  “Beats me,” Xander replied honestly, shrugging one shoulder.

  Genblade whipped out the Spider-Sword as though it were an extension of his own body, its smooth metal gleaming against the fluorescent lights. The two gems that made up its handle sparkled like a thousand eyes, making up the head and body of a spider and giving the blade its name. ”That’s the best idea you’ve ever had,” he snarled menacingly.

  Spider brought a hand up to his chest, stopping him as she stroked the area over his heart. “There now,” she said helpfully, giving her lover a little pat. “Can’t kill him yet,” she hummed a gleeful tone. “That’ll spoil the surprise.” She broke away from him, but still held his hands tightly. For a moment they looked like two normal people out for a walk in the park. “The birds will chirp on that day,” she started to sing the song, and her voice was odd. Still Asian, but now it had a British accent as well. “‘Your vows you’ve broken, like my heart...Oh, why did you so enrapture me... Now I remain in a world apart... But my heart remains in captivity!’” Then she broke off into her normal voice again, still singing the words to her own song. “The Cheshire Cat and the White Rabbit, all lined up together... all six of them lined up in a row. And the bad man... and the right switch... and we’ll all be home for supper before you know it!”

  Xander raised an eyebrow at her, stepping back slightly. “You... realize you don’t make any sense, right?”

  “Sorry, scar tissue,” she smiled, nodding apologetically. She waved a hand over her face, and for a moment it became bruised and beaten in, full of holes. Like she’d been in... an explosion. And her robes... they were filled with blood, coming from the hole he’d put into the right of her abdomen.

  Xander felt a pang of sympathy when he saw that. His lower lip quivered as he reached out, touching the stab wound tenderly and getting some of the blood on his fingertips. “Will you be alright?”

  She smiled. “It’s alright. It fades, it all fades,” she assured him, reached out and stroking her fingers through his matted hair. “Just like the pain.”

  He looked down at the ground, and suddenly he didn’t feel in danger anymore. He felt like... like he was in his mother’s arms. “I want the pain to stop.”

  “Pain...”Genblade cursed, as he stroked his blade alone in the corner.

  Spider turned and hushed him, then went back to Xander. “The pain is the key. It’s only begun, but you have to use it. You have to see it. It can help you, if you let it. Like today.”

  Xander shook his head defiantly, cursing. “I didn’t need pain today. I needed power. My power.”

  She shook her head in dismay, looking deep into him. “Pain is your power,” she told him with some amount of regret, then leaned in and kissed him, softly, on the lips.

  His eyes snapped open and he lunged upwards in bed, gasping for breath. He reached up to pull the layer of blood from his face, but found that there was none there. He closed his eyes, the bright light assaulting his pupils and forcing them to dilate beyond the realm of human comprehension. His teeth hurt, but he didn’t quite understand why until he reached up and found that his jaw was still dislocated. He snapped it back into place with a quick twist, and felt the soft tickle in the back of his neck indicate that his healing factor had, in fact, finally kicked back in to repair it. Every bone in Xander’s body ached, and he welcomed the feeling of coolness that came when she dabbed a cold, damp cloth onto his forehead.

  She was humming something, and for a moment he thought he was with Spider again, trapped in Engen. That maybe all this had been the dream and that he’d never really left that horrible place. He opened his eyelids again slowly and saw the face of Cathy Kennessy staring down at him, her beautiful features encompassing his vision. Her long black hair tickled the sides of his face as she leaned in and looked into his eyes... then snapped her fingers twice to see if he was alive.

  “Cathy?” he groaned wearily, bringing a hand up to the bridge of his nose and rubbing it rhythmically. She said something in return
, and he felt her warm candy-scented breath on his face, but the words weren’t audible. They came out as a low hum, sounding very much like one of the teachers on Charlie Brown. He furrowed his brow in utter confusion. “What?” he called out, even his voice sounding far away and underwater.

  Holding his throat, he sat up. He felt an immense pressure deep inside each of his ears, and then a pop so loud he was sure someone had fired off a gun next to his head. “Ow,” he said more clearly, bringing a finger to one of the lobes and caressing the tender cartilage gingerly. He hissed in pain when he did, an electric surge coursing throughout his face. When he brought his hand back, there was condensed black blood dripping from his fingers onto his sheets.

  “You okay?” Cathy asked, taking the damp cloth that she held in one hand to both his ears, dabbing them gently.

  “Yes,” he replied sarcastically. “I always bleed from the ears when I’m okay.”

  Her eyes looked down, scanning the sheets as more drops of blood started to fall and it became obvious that her efforts were futile. “You should lay back down,” she said, stroking the cloth along his sweat laden face.