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

by Matthew LeDrew

  Xander looked hurt and confused. He brought his hands up to shrug and Spider took each of them in her own, placing them on her waist. She was warm all over, comfortable. As if he could snuggle into her and sleep safely until he died. Like Sara had felt on the nights they’d sit at her house watching stupid movies until the TV turned white. Spider leaned back into the shadows slightly. When he squinted to see her in the darkness, it was Sara.

  “Hello,” she said softly, her lips moist and good.

  Cathy stirred, her arm reaching over across the bed instinctively. She opened her eyes suddenly when she realized that there was no Mike there. All she saw was the old, ratted Led Zeppelin poster that had hung on that wall for years, for a moment becoming very scared and forgetting where she was. She rose, then realized that she was in Xander’s room. She sighed with relief, her chest still rising and falling with the panic that had overcome her. Slowly, she began to remember.

  “Have a nice sleep?”

  She turned in the direction of the voice, and Al slapped her alongside the face. She went back down onto the bed, the entire mattress shaking from her sudden impact. He climbed on again, straddling the poor girl in her best friend’s house. She screamed, hoping for Mike or anyone to hear her. No one did. Al drew back and slammed his hand across her mouth, her jaw taking a queer shape momentarily, then he drew back to do it again.

  This time when he moved to strike, his hands floating over her thin body as though he owned it, his fist was caught in mid air. He stopped and turned, coming face-to-face with his partner’s stone-cold resolve. “What?” Al asked, but got no response. He chuckled. “I’ll save a bit of skin for you, don’t worry. You went first last time, pig.”

  For what seemed like hours, Bram Raine just stood there, staring at his partner. “We’re taking her back to Phillips, like he told us to,” he said flatly.

  “Aw, come on!” Al laughed. “I’m just having a little fun,” he reached over and grabbed Cathy by the face the way a grandmother might, but with more lethal force. “You like it, don’t you? Don’t youuuu,” he babied her, then pushed her back onto the bed and slammed her shoulders down, slowly caressing her blouse downwards.

  Again, there was a pressure on his shoulder. “We’re takin’ her to Phillips and gettin’ our paycheck.”

  Al grimaced in pain, then relented. “Yeah,” he agreed finally, turning and slapping Cathy once more. “We’ll let him take first crack at the bitch.”

  “Hello.”

  Her voice echoed off of the darkness as if it were solid, bouncing back and assaulting his senses from all around him. Slowly, the darkness began to close in and the blood around him faded into the ground. He turned and looked away from her, staring instead into the deep beyond.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, her voice almost tired. Her voice was always tired when she asked that question, because she knew that he was just in one of his moods. She reached over with her index finger and stroked the side of his cheek. It sent chills throughout him, because it felt so much like her.

  “You’re not her,” he responded dryly, turning to look at her. She was so amazing, her blonde hair wet with sweat and sticking to her head. She sat on him with her fingers all over his neck and face, wearing Spider’s uniform loosely over her perfectly shaped, hourglass like body. She bounced a little, and it made him melt. He shouldn’t have been looking, but he couldn’t help it. Had to treat himself to these last few seconds with her again, for he hadn’t realized the first time around that those were his last moments alive with her.

  She smiled devilishly at him, the way she’d done a million times before. The smile that knew she had control over him and liked it. The smile that had forced him to run ten blocks just to get her a Kit Kat bar more than once over the years. She bit her lips slightly, the white contrasting the perfect ruby red of those slivers of soft flesh. “Of course I am, Xander,” she pleaded, her big blue eyes growing sad all of a sudden. Her face was the shape of a heart, and he wanted to take it in his hands. As if reading his mind, she gripped both his palms and slid them over her body, working their way up to her neck. She leaned in and kissed him lovingly on the lips, her small tongue darting between their two mouths. He heard the faint sound of their teeth clicking together, but did not feel it. She tasted like strawberries, just like she had on the night of her death. With that thought, the kiss slowly broke off. She leaned back up into her sitting position atop him, staring down at him as if she never wanted to take her eyes away.

  Somewhere, he heard a door close. No, slam.

  “I love you, Xander Drew,” she assured him. He tried to speak, but she brought a finger to his lips. “I have always loved you. Ever since we were kids and I used to catch you carving our initials into wood, I knew that you were the one person who could love me. Who I, in turn, could love back. Someone who wouldn’t use me, like so many have been used now.”

  A tear rolled down Xander’s cheek as he remembered the kiss, wanting so much to stay.

  “She looks much tastier than I remembered...” Phillips said, the voice cutting through the darkness.

  Xander looked around, searching for the madman that had shot him. Still, he found only black.

  Sara reached down and held his face, bringing it around to look at her. “I will always love you, now.” She started to cry tears of blood, and they dripped down onto his shirt. Her voice became uneven. “Don’t forget,” she demanded, shaking her head defiantly at him.

  “Let’s have us a taste, then?”

  “No...”

  “Promise me you won’t forget,” she whispered, leaning in again slowly.

  “I promise,” he said softly, yet somehow each lover heard the other’s hushed words above Cathy’s screaming.

  Sara leaned in and kissed him, and her features melted and tucked away to become Spider. The blood tears Sara had been shedding had been pressing onto each of Xander’s cheeks, and the Asian assassin broke off the kiss and looked at him. “Don’t forget. Pain is your power.”

  He opened his eyes and could hear the struggle just outside the closet door. Heard Cathy’s body being thrust around as though it were a rag doll. He reached up to his cheeks and felt Sara’s blood was still there somehow. As his vision slowly adjusted to the low light and Cathy’s screams got louder, he looked upon himself and realized that he was covered in blood. Black blood that was oozing over his entire body from the duel gunshot wounds in his torso.

  “Black Womb lives.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT:

  POWER

  “Black Womb lives.”

  All three men stopped what they were doing instantly, their hands frozen in mid-air on or around Cathy Kennessy’s body. Al had been clutching her by the shoulder and had began to shake so violently that pain shot in and out of the muscle from where she’d hurt it fighting off Phillips earlier. He hadn’t turned around yet and already she could feel goosebumps traveling over his body and into hers at merely the sound of that rough, scratchy voice. It didn’t even sound like speech that could come from human lips. The closest approximation he could think of was someone vomiting out words one syllable at a time, rather than simply speaking them.

  Raine was the first to really regain his motor function and turn around, his hand dropping from where it had been next to Cathy’s head, clutching her dark hair and getting ready to yank as hard as he could. For the briefest of moments when he faced the closet, he lost all sensation in his body. It took a moment for even basic bodily functions to restore themselves and let him blink and draw a small gasp. In that short interim he had lost control of his urethra and hot yellow liquid now dribbled down his leg. He barely even noticed. He tried hard to swallow but found that he couldn’t get any saliva going no matter how hard he tried.

  Phillips had barely even noticed. He stopped an instant or two after the other two, only because they had. He was still smiling so wide all his gums were visible and gripping the hot flesh of her left breast in his pale, thin fingers again. They f
elt cold against her flesh, like skeleton bones. He was about to bark something at them when something told him not too. There was a still in the air that hadn’t been there before. Shouldn’t have been there, really. With Julie and Greer there had been enough electricity in the air to light a city block, an excitement that had overwhelmed and enchanted him instantly. It was the carnal knowledge that his ancestors had known and he never could. Raising an eyebrow and keeping a wary eye on Cathy, he raised his head to follow the gaze of his two underlings.

  It was black. Completely ink black, something Phillips knew was next to impossible in nature. It was so thin that its ribs almost stuck out of its scaly hide and every breath it took was accompanied by its chest heaving under huge muscles. Though its skin looked hard it also looked thin, as though its lungs and heart were just out of sight but their vibrations present as they rippled through its flesh with every beat. There was another spot creating shockwaves as well, in its lower right side. It beat out of sync with the others, as if its function wasn’t tied to the rest.

  Dark navy veins popped out of its arms and legs, its biceps and triceps seeming to grow and expand with every throb of its heart. Even as they watched, its knee snapped itself forward of its own power, sending a spurt of ebony blood onto the carpet as it seemed to make itself double jointed.

  Its hands hung open-palmed at its sides, dangling and ready to strike at any moment, like a cowboy in a western shootout movie. The fingers were distorted and angular. At the tip of each finger was a talon, each one a few inches long and the clear, pale yellow of enamel. They came to points so sharp they could barely be seen, with each middle finger claw slightly longer than the rest. The index of its left hand dripped a dark substance that looked like Jell-O mixed with printing ink. Only after it landed on the floor with a plop was it identifiable as a chunk of flesh.

  Its head looked normal until it opened its mouth again, its bottom lip lowering almost to its collarbone when it did. A joint in the back of its mouth snapped just as its knee had, as if it had to make room for all the teeth in its head. Dual rows of serrated teeth lined sore and bloodied gums. Each one was at least an inch long with the same yellow tinge that the claws had had, only they were dotted with slithering tendrils of blood as well. The meat of its mouth was coral red and seemed to glow when compared to the rest of it. Between the teeth and the colour, neither man present could keep their eyes off of it. A forked, saliva covered tongue darted in and out before it closed its mouth again, like a reptile tasting the air for familiar scents. Which made sense, as it appeared to have no nostrils, just a hump on its face where the nose should have been.

  Now the only colour on its face came from its eyes. Small slits that curved upwards on the outside and downward inside, like a letter S on its side. They glowed the greenish-blue of the sea with a little red in the corners at first, but that faded away in an instant as it narrowed the triangular eyes to needlepoints, staring down the men in front of it with a pupil-less glare.

  It seemed to focus on Raine’s hand, still clutching a large tuft of Cathy’s hair between his plump fingers. He let go as soon as he realized this, but the creature’s gaze seemed fixated on him now, its claws twitching with anticipation. A growl emanated from deep within the beast, its lip curling in tune with it. It sounded like a kettle full of water boiling, that deep hatred bubbling up from inside it as it stood poised to extend upon them at any given moment.

  Cathy lay on the floor in the centre of them. There was a gash traveling along the right edge of her jaw that was bleeding down onto her neck, along with a red spotty patch of skin on her forehead and shoulder from where Al and Bram had dragged her across the carpet. Her clothes were ripped and torn, but other than that were still on her. Her eyes had still been closed tight shut, but now started to open as she looked up in the direction that the snarling voice had come from.

  A smile spread across her lips. You’re fucked now, she thought to herself, as the last of her assailants’ hands left her body.

  Phillips turned back toward his record player, eyeing the gun that lay upon it, loaded with four bullets still.

  Slowly, it crouched down onto all fours until its claws danced along the floor, tearing up tiny shards of fabric as it did. Raine raised his eyebrow quizzically, regarding its actions with fascination even as perspiration began to bead and dot his brow.

  All at once its legs extended again, catapulting the creature forward almost too fast for Raine to see. Its arms rose high above its head and its feet bent up to shoulder level, each big toe sprouting a claw of its own that was easily twice as long as the ones on its fingers. Raine let out a high pitched wail as the monstrosity landed against his chest like that, its arm coming down hard and plunging themselves into the doughy flesh of his back. Blood forced its way out from between each nail, drawing long red lines down his back and making it look striped as the blood seeped out into his shirt. There was an audible hiss as each of the middle claws punctured a lung, as Bram suddenly found it very hard to gather the air to power his screams.

  Phillips and Al each dove to either side away from the creature. Phillips scrambled toward his record player, while Al started backing up toward the door, afraid to turn and run or do anything that would take his eyes off of the creature for even an instant.

  Raine stopped screaming, his eyes growing so wide he thought his eyeballs might fall out as he stared into the creature’s aqua eyes. He could tell now that they were scaled too. Made up of millions of little octagons that glimmered against the light from the street, like the eyes of an insect. They seemed to look directly into his soul with their unblinking, remorseless stare. Then, for a brief instant, he thought he saw something else in the demonic stare. For a moment, he could have sworn he saw a glimmer of happiness. Then the long claws at the end of each foot dug into each of the pectoral muscles on either side of his chest. His eyes bulged further still and his mouth drew into an o-shape as the creature continued to stare at him. All at once, it brought its hands up and kicked its legs down, opening up Raine’s chest and back wide with one smooth motion. It kept kicking over and over again, sending shards of skin flying and spattering blood in all directions. Raine found his breath again and began to scream anew, the creature digging its teeth into the trapezius muscle at the left of his neck, the skin having already peeled away under the force of its claws. As it dug its yellowed teeth into the muscle, the milky protective sack punctured and tore itself off, the muscle pulling free of its tendons and snapping from the bone like a rubber band, sending more dark crimson sloshing against the wall, smattering over a painting of Kansas and turning the Sunflower on it a dark orange. By this time Raine was bellowing out words that didn’t even make sense together, the pain having driven him nearly out of his mind as it overloaded his brain’s ability to process it.

  -BANG-

  The sound rang out like thunder as the creature’s neck seemed to explode, sending black tendrils flying in all directions. A few feet away, Cathy’s eyes went wide as she turned in shock to see Phillips, again standing next to his record collection, holding his smouldering pistol in his quivering hands.

  The creature’s body slammed against the floor next to where Raine lay, the claws on its feet retracting almost instantly. It lay there for a moment and all was still.

  With the gun still aimed at it, Phillips took another step closer. Still, the demon did not budge.

  Al took a step forward as well. He took off his hat and scratched his head, sending large flakes of dandruff down onto his shoulders. He stood on his toes to see the creature’s face, now devoid of any colour at all. It was simply a blank black tablet, with no features to speak of except for the lump where its nose should have been. “What the fuck was that?” he asked finally, his voice squeaking in a way it hadn’t done since he was thirteen.

  Suddenly, its eyes snapped open again and it rose up quickly, the blackness flowing around the wound on its neck until it was no longer visible where it had been. Its green eyes we
re like headlights for a moment, then dulled as it got to its feet again.

  “Argh-guh!” Phillips yelled, his lower lip trembling in fear as he shot again. This time the splash of black liquid came as the bullet seared its shoulder muscle. The small piece of lead passed right through and the creature did not even seem to register that something had happened this time.

  Phillips shot twice more as the creature loomed ever closer, its hands clenched into fists that dug the claws into his own palms, sending tiny bits of blood onto the carpet before the wounds got a chance to heal. Each shot connected with the centre of its chest and went ignored, the pale flesh of Xander Drew visible through each hole for a moment before the darkness slithered in to cover it up, like the rush of water after a stone is thrown into it.