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

by Matthew LeDrew

  He felt his heart sink again, immediately moving into an embrace that was as much for his benefit as it was for hers. “God, I’m sorry. You are worth it.”

  “I’m worth killing?”

  They both laughed again as he used his thumb to discreetly wipe a teardrop from the corner of his eye. “No.”

  He paused for a moment, scuffing his feet against the tile floor anxiously and causing long black streaks of rubber.

  “There were people killed?”

  She tilted her head to one side, her eyes filling full of sympathy and regret as her hair tumbled out onto her shoulders. She almost didn’t want to actually respond, but knew that he needed for her to. Needed for her to make it real for him. “Yeah.”

  “Dammit,” he spat, pounding his fist against the bed table as he bit down on his lip and turned away from her. He had more words, worse words, but dared not say them now. Not in front of her. “Where’s Mike?” he asked finally, trying to get his mind off the fact she’d just laid on him.

  “He’s five rooms over. He should be waking up soon and they say I’ll be able to see him when he does.”

  “That’s great. Uh, if you don’t mind, what’d I do to him?”

  “You slit his heel, scratched his face up a bit. Thing is, the heel cut was in the exact place as the last one. I’m sorry, Xander, but I only know one person who could do that.”

  He put his head down on her hands. Then raised it again after a moment, blackness whipping at his eyes. When he spoke his voice was filled with knowledge, like a light had just flickered to life inside his head. “I know two.”

  Cathy looked confused, hearing the difference from too to two. “Who’s the other?” He glared at her in anger for a moment, but soon she realized he wasn’t angry at her. His grip tightened around her hand, until she had to pull it away. “Xander?”

  “Adam Genblade,” he said finally between clenched teeth, slapping his knees and jumping to his feet.

  “Xander!” she called after him. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m gonna check on Mike and then I’m going to pay a visit to the penitentiary.”

  “Xander...”

  He walked to the door and opened it, and was immediately bombarded with bright flashes and loud voices. The shock almost made the Womb surge, his pupils expanding rather than dilating, but he kept it under control. Reporters bombarded him with questions, as he tried to force the door closed again. One, wearing a classic looking beige trench coat and a less-traditional black baseball cap, slipped thru and ran over to Cathy.

  “Miss Kennessy!” he shouted from lips that were entirely too big for the rest of his head. “Is it true that this was a gang related attack, as the late Carl Dent suspected?”

  “What?!” she said, obviously floored by the question.

  “Do you think that this is a copycat killer?...”

  “Excuse...”

  “... or that Genblade was innocent of his crimes?”

  “...huh?”

  At the mere mention of Genblade’s name, Xander felt his blood rush to his cheeks. He walked over and grabbed the reporter by the scruff of his jacket. “That’s just about enough, buddy.”

  “Hey,” said the reporter, shrugging Xander off of him. “I’ve got first amendment rights here.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “Xander, this really isn’t...” Cathy started.

  “Thomas Drake. Beach News Daily.” he said, wedging an open palm between he and Xander.

  “Interesting,” Xander nodded sarcastically, pulling Drake toward the door with enough force that his feet beat against the tile.

  Drake slapped Xander’s arms away from him, a haughty look of disgust sneering onto his face. Smirking smugly, he turned back toward Cathy.

  Xander shoved him, hard. He hit the wall, then slipped and fell on his ass, his head knocking back into the stucco. He reached back, pushing the strands of his thinning hair aside and feeling the tiny droplets of blood that were rising to the surface of his dandruff-ridden skin. “Xander, huh? I remember you. You’re that kid Dent thought was behind all the murders. Apparently it all came back to you.”

  Xander smirked. “Good thing Genblade confessed.”

  “Yeah,” he smiled, dragging out each syllable. “Weren’t you even at the crime scene when White arrested him?”

  “I was kidnapped by Genblade.”

  “That’s what they say,” he whispered, leaning in close. “But maybe... just maybe... we aren’t looking at a copycat after all. Maybe we’re looking at the real deal that just never got caught.”

  Xander laughed, trying to hide his nervousness. “Then why would Genblade admit guilt?” His eyes kept darting to the floor, instinctively avoiding Drake’s.

  “Because Dent was right. It is a gang, and you’re the leader. Genblade said what he said to protect your ass,” he said it in a way that was half mocking, half serious, and Xander wasn’t sure exactly how he meant it. His was annoying and had a high-pitched voice, and reminded him of Mr. McGee from The Incredible Hulk.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” he said, grabbing Drake by the shirt collar again and throwing him out the door. Xander heard him utter a swear as all of the cameras again snapped away.

  “Hey Mike,” Xander said, entering through the window, having decided it was the best way to avoid the media vultures outside. As bleak as Cathy’s room had been, Mike’s was worse. There was no color, only a few glow-in-the-dark stars tacked on the ceiling by some previous tenant, and even their arrangement seemed somehow depressing.

  Mike stayed tight lipped and looked away.

  “I’m sorry. You know I didn’t try it.”

  “But,” Mike interrupted. “It had to come from somewhere, didn’t it? You had to have had some hidden desire to hurt me, or Cathy, right?”

  “No, it doesn’t work like...”

  “How can we be sure?” he interrupted, his voice angry and wet. “Or how can Cathy and I even be sure that if it was true that you’d tell us?”

  “Mike, I...”

  He tried to continue, but it was like his mind wouldn’t create words. Mike opened his mouth to interject, but no sound came from there either. After a moment, they both sighed in unison.

  “Fuck,” Xander said after a few minutes of awkward silence, rubbing the bridge of his nose and willing his tear ducts not to fill.

  “Look,” Mike sighed, flapping down his hand as though he were literally laying down the grudge he’d been carrying for almost a month. “I know that you - -”

  “Stop,” Xander said in his cold, blunt voice, raising a hand to punctuate his words. “I don’t deserve forgiveness. Not from you.”

  Mike frowned, shooting him a look. “Wasn’t going to. It’s just frustrating to know what’s doing this and not be able to do anything about it. It’s like trying to hit a target that vanishes every time your finger touches the trigger.”

  “Tell me about it,” he nodded, collapsing into the chair next to him as his mind ventured back to think of his father’s revolver, still laying on his bedroom floor amidst the charred carpet.

  There was a long silence.

  “So what’s the plan?” Mike asked after a minute or two.

  “I’m going to make sure Genblade had nothing to do with this.”

  “And if he did?”

  Xander paused, looking down at the floor. When he turned back and met his friends’ gaze his eyes were so cold and full of hate that it was no longer hard for him to see the connection between him and the Black Womb. “If he did I’m going to undo the mistake I made back at Engen when I didn’t rip his heart out.”

  Thomas Drake gripped the leather steering wheel of his bright red Porsche until the joints of his fingers ached, his trimmed nails leaving eight tiny half-moon indentations in the Suede. This car was the only thing his ex-wife had let him keep when they’d gotten a divorce and the only thing he had wanted to keep. She’d told him that he’d bought the car to make up for h
is penis and now she didn’t have any use for either, something that rang in his ears every time he slid the key into the ignition, making it harder to enjoy the fall rides with the windows down that he used to crave to-and-from assignments. Right now the memory only served to agitate him further than he already was, his loose cheeks turning a bright, livid red.

  He glared at the entrance to the hospital as the other journalists slowly started to trickle out, some alone and some getting into their cars in pairs, breaking his gaze only once to glance at the fuzzy white die that hung from his rearview mirror. Some of them were laughing, the smiles on their faces big enough to see all their teeth as they slapped each other heartily, one howling so hard that he looked like he was having trouble catching his breath.

  At our most paranoid and vulnerable moments we think that everyone’s talking about us. From his vantage point at the other side of the parking lot, Drake could not hear what his colleagues were saying, but he could guess. When someone got even a little bit of an edge on the competition in any field, it immediately made you a target for every half-assed remark or jeer people thought of, even if there wasn’t a good reason for them.

  Being tossed out of a hospital room by a teenage boy was a good reason.

  He could still hear them chuckling as he had gotten to his feet, and the way that sound had grown by the time he had gotten to the end of the hall. He could feel Xander’s thin, steely fingers wrapped around his collar before shoving him into the door. Could see a wide-eyed insanity that scared him lying just beyond the anger he’d been expecting to see in the boy’s bluish-green eyes. He grimaced when he remembered the tiny smear of blood that had been on his fingers when he’d touched the back of his head. The stain from where he’d wiped it was still a dark crimson line on the leg of his pants.

  Fuck! he cursed inwardly, gritting his teeth as he slammed his palm against the wheel. The horn sounded briefly from the sudden impact, but nobody seemed to notice. He let out a sigh, then slammed the wheel at least thirty more times. “Fuck!” he said out loud, forcing himself to re-grip the wheel before he did damage to it. He let out a long breath, his cheeks shaking back and forth violently as his fat lower lip made a sputtering sound like a small motor revving.

  He leaned his head forward until his forehead rested between his two hands against the wheel, taking another deep breath as some of the scarlet started to drain from his cheeks. That God-damned kid, he thought, reminding himself of one of the over-the-top villains from Scooby Doo. The image of himself in a large Halloween mask being confronted by four hippies and their dog brought a smile to his face and helped him relax a little. One quote from Kennessy would have made this story soar. Would have made it jerk at the heartstrings of every teenage girl and little old lady from here to Timbuktu. She’s the perfect little victim. Sticking a knife through Miss America wouldn’t get as many results; it’s perfect. ‘Crazed killer tried to take a slice out of American Sweetie-Pie’. It’s the thing Pulitzer was made for. The type of thing that movie studios would bend-over backwards to take off your hands. Without her input, it doesn’t have that same tug. Like the kid on the milk carton. Everyone feels bad for the kid whose picture’s on the milk carton. But if they just told you about the missing kid, people wouldn’t even read it. You need their picture, their words... something to make the idiots reading it think they know this person. That it could have been someone they know. Their daughter, their sister, their...

  He pictures Xander’s stubborn gaze again as he slammed Drake into the wall. It interrupted all other thought and made him jolt back off of the wheel as though he’d just awoken from some nightmare. Wincing, he reached around and felt the back of his head again. It was still moist, the hair around the bump pointed and hard like it had been gelled. A stinging sensation throbbed through his skull as his fingers connected with something damp and when he brought his hand back around, there was more blood on it. Less than the first time, but it was still there.

  He stared at it for a minute, looking too watery to be the blood he was used to seeing in the movies, before wiping it into his pants. Squinting, he tried to think of another angle to go from now that his story lacked a quote from Kennessy.

  Once again, Xander’s blue eyes flashed over his memory like a strobe light. How the boy’s lips had curled when he’d forced him into the wall. He was so full of hate, even though he hadn’t done anything that bad. It was like that hate was always there, just waiting to come out.

  A slow smile started to spread over Drake’s face, as a new story started to fall into place inside his mind. Bracing himself against the wheel, he took a quick glance around and then slammed his head back against the seat, hissing as sharp pain pinched at him and his ears started to ring. He bit his lip to muffle the grunts, then slammed his head back again against the firm leather. And again. And again. He did it eight more times before stopping, when he couldn’t take the constant throbbing anymore and his brain felt like mush.

  Again he brought his hand to the back of his head and when he brought it back there was more blood then there had been even when the wound was fresh. He thought he even felt a tiny trickle tickling its way down his spine. Smiling, he wiped the blood away again then started the car and pulled out of the parking lot.

  After all, he couldn’t go back to his editor with nothing.

  “Genblade, you got a visitor,” the guard said in a gruff voice, one hand resting nervously on the revolver strapped to his side. Behind him, four other guards stood at attention against the wall. Beads of sweat rolled down their foreheads into their eyes and made them itch, but they did not move. Did not twitch. Didn’t do anything except watch Genblade.

  When he’d first arrived a few weeks ago, he’d tried to escape. Genblade had pulled a guard’s head through the bars of his cell and twisted it off. Then he’d kept the head in the cell with him and used it for a toilet for two hours until the guards shot him full of drugs in order to retrieve it while he was in an unconscious stupor.

  After that, the warden had moved Genblade to a special needs cell and had requested extra guards. Billing finally approved it from the fall budget. Now he was under constant supervision by five full-time guards twenty-four hours a day.

  His room had been padded until recently, everything having been stripped from it so that nothing could be used as a weapon. His bathroom was a hole in the center of his floor that dropped eight feet before becoming pipes. His bed was a spring-less mattress that had been bolted to the floor from the underside. He was fed from outside the cage by a bowl welded to a ten foot long pole.

  For a moment Genblade did not move, just stared blankly at the wall of his cell as he almost always did.

  The guard frowned, shuffling his feet and getting ready to join the others against the wall when Genblade did not respond.

  Finally, he acknowledged that the guard had spoken, turning his head toward him. The motion was slow and unnatural, turning just a little further than any normal person should have been able to. His eyes were wild and crazy. “A visitor? For li’l ol’ me?” he exclaimed in a mock-southern accent. He smiled wide and sinister, showing all of his teeth. It chilled all the guards to the marrow, each one of them sharpened to needlepoint. “Well, I wonder who it could be?”

  Xander heard the stuttered rapping of his nails against the desk he sat behind, gnawing at the inside of his cheek as he stared into the glare of the plate glass. On some level he was aware of the sound his nails were making, but could not have stopped it if he had tried. In fact, he had all but lost motor control in his right hand from the elbow down.

  His eyes were locked on the vault-like steel door that stood a few feet beyond the other side of the glass. It stuck out like a postulant sore against the cracked plaster and chipped paint that dotted the walls around it.

  Shunk. Genblade stabbed Xander in the arm. The creature’s head raised, fully awake for the first time in several moments and really listening now, wanting to scream but unable to make the right sound
.

  Shunk. He stabbed it through the other arm.

  Shunk. He stabbed it through both feet, pinning them to each other and the wall.

  “... Nobody, I repeat, nobody escapes death.”

  Genblade stepped back and admired his work. Black Womb stood there, his body pinned into a cross position.

  Xander’s mind reeled. He couldn’t focus on anything, his vision was blurry, and black around the edges. He felt the healing factor cut out. He lifted his head to face his attacker.

  “A crucifixion,” Genblade sneered, stroking his chin as he admired his work. “It’d almost be poetic, if it wasn’t so damn funny.”

  Xander winced, slamming his open palm flat against the table to stop it from shaking.

  As if on cue, something heavy slid to one side inside the door, then it began to creek open. It seemed to move unbelievably slow, as though he’d stepped out of reality and into some pivotal scene within a movie. He wasn’t sure if it was actually happening that way or if it was all in his head, but either way it gave him chills.

  Genblade stepped out of the bright light that illuminated from beyond the door, shimmering off the shoulders of his prison jumpsuit as he was led to his chair on the other side of the glass from Xander. Chains bound his hands and feet close together, an extra one holding both sets together so that he could not raise his hands over his head to strike.

  At the sight of his twisted smile, pointed nose and wild blue eyes, Xander’s skin set on edge as though it were ready to leap from the chair and flee at any given moment, with or without the rest of his body in tow. Deep in his right side, the mass of grey flesh and black ooze that made up the Womb organ surged and convulsed until it felt like it had jumped up into his throat. It sent hormones and testosterone shooting throughout his system, screaming at him to smash through the inch-thick glass and rip Genblade’s head from his shoulders. Despite his urge to end it now, he swallowed it back.