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

by Matthew LeDrew

  Genblade smiled, his shoulders moving up and down in a snicker rendered soundless by the glass. It was unendingly creepy. He stared at Xander through the glass with those pale blue eyes, sizing him up. Smirking, he picked up the white stained phone alongside his cubicle and put it to his ear.

  For a moment, it occurred to Xander that he could just turn, leave, and not look back. Forcing control, he picked up the phone and clenched it against the side of his face.

  “How ya been, buddy?” Genblade said in a shrill, condescendingly cruel voice. “Long time no see.”

  At the sound of his voice Xander was there again. He was nailed to the stainless steel walls of Alpha Quadrant, blood pouring out of his veins into a drain in the center of the floor. He could smell the coppery tang as it overtook him. He could feel Genblade driving knives through his wrists, legs and stomach.

  “So,” Genblade said, taking pleasure in the pained look on Xander’s face, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  Xander stared silently into the glass, squinting in contempt. He clamped the phone tight until he heard the plastic crack.

  Genblade heard the snap on the other end of the line and smiled. “So, how’s the family? Mike... Cathy... Sara?”

  Xander furrowed his brow even more, his eyes barely visible as he stared down the person who had haunted his memories for weeks now.

  “Oh, wait, that’s right,” Genblade chuckled, pantomiming slapping himself on the forehead. “You’re down to a threesome now. Sorry.”

  “You won’t get to me like that, Genblade,” Xander drawled, finally speaking.

  “Sure. Why your pupils getting so bulgy, then? Light bothering you?”

  Xander turned away for a moment, swallowing hard to force the Womb away. He could control it, at least for now. After a second he looked back, his eyes returned to normal. “What can you tell me about the Black Womb?”

  Genblade tilted his head to one side, grinning slightly as he tried to figure out why his sparring partner was here. After a moment his eyes became wide and his smile grew. “I don’t know anything you don’t already know. We done?”

  Xander rolled his eyes, then leaned in close to the glass. He forced a cruel grin onto his face and whispered into the phone. “The itsy bitsy Spider went up the water spout...”

  Now Genblade clutched the phone, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “You never did answer my question,” he said after a second’s pause, changing the topic with only the slightest trace of frustration. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Some weird shit happened last night,” he answered finally, leaning back against his chair and doing his best to appear casual. “The cops say we’re looking at a copycat killer, but I wasn’t as sure. Came to make sure the man I put behind bars was still there.”

  Genblade harked out an honest laugh, slapping himself against the knee and making his chains rattle. “Ha! I wish I were out. Man, that’d be a good time.” He leaned in close to the glass just as Xander had a moment ago. “First I’d go up to good-old Coral Beach Square and paint the town red with your blood. Really see how good that healing power of yours is. Then I’d finally off that loser friend of yours. And Cathy... well, it’d be fun, lemme tell ya. I am a widower now, after all. I think she could provide hours of comfort... days even.”

  Xander felt hot blood rush to his face even as he tried to block out the visuals Genblade was making for him. “So you had absolutely nothing to do with last night?”

  “Sorry, pal,” he remarked slyly. “Wish I could tell you different.”

  “Thanks,” Xander snapped sarcastically, rolling his eyes.

  “Hey,” Genblade cut in, his tone deadly serious for the first time since the call began. “Don’t take that tone here. You think you’re better than me because I’m a killer? That’s rich, from you.”

  “Not the same.”

  “Everyone’s a killer, kid. Every person on this planet, their first act of life is to out swim ten thousand other sperm, all for a fucking woman. Just living means you’ve already killed thousands. So don’t act like you’re better than me.”

  Xander looked as though he were about to respond, then stopped, unable to think of anything to say that would combat Genblade’s warped logic. Frowning, he took the phone away from his ear and started to place it on the receiver.

  “Hey!” Genblade screamed, his voice ringing out over the line. “Don’t worry about me, buddy! I’ll be out of here in no time!”

  Eyes wide with shock, Xander slowly brought the phone back to his face. “What do you mean? They can’t let you out.”

  “Sure can. Pretty soon I’ll never have to see this place again. Ain’tcha heard? I’ve been given the death penalty for ‘my’ crimes,” he spat harshly, his voice thick with sarcasm as he hung up the line.

  The glass door slammed shut behind Xander, its dull thud echoing around his head as he stepped out into the fall air. The sun shone directly onto his face as a cool breeze ripped at him. He barely noticed either. His eyes were wide and unblinking as he started to walk down the gravel trail to the main drag, feeling each step resonate through his body like a shockwave. Everything felt harder, sharper... more real than it had before he’d gone in. For the first few feet he was completely devoid of any thought at all, his brain refusing to do anything else until it processed what it had just heard.

  Genblade is going to die, he thought as soon as he was able to. He was almost in the parking lot now and already his legs ached from the movement. Just the act of filing the information away had exhausted him, body and soul.

  “Genblade - - is going to die,” he said aloud, shifting the emphasis of the sentence around to try and force it to make sense. It didn’t work well.

  He spun around suddenly on the asphalt of the lot, slamming his fist down on the hood of a nearby car before even he knew what he was doing. The white metal hood of the police cruiser compacted in under the weight of his fist. He stared at it for a moment, his eyes singeing with fury, before he finally blinked and let sanity return to his face. Looking around to make sure nobody had seen him, he turned and walked quickly toward Laird Street.

  Goddamn it, he cursed inwardly, his train of thought finally beginning to chug down the tracks again. God fucking damn it!

  His hand still throbbed violently and he ground his teeth together to steel against the pain.

  Genblade was the one thing I still have to cling to in all this mess. As long as he’s alive I can say that I didn’t kill him back at Engen. That I still had some small touch of humanity, whatever that meant. He paused, gazing down at his open-palmed hand. Slits slowly appeared on the tips of each finger, dribbling blood trails as dark talons poked their way out. I can say that I’m not a monster.

  Now that’s changed, he thought bitterly, shoving his hand back into his pocket. If Genblade’s killed for my crimes, then I may as well have done the deed myself. It’ll be another death on my hands.

  I can’t have that.

  The worst part is Genblade probably doesn’t even deserve the death penalty. Locked away forever, maybe, but not death. I should probably be the one getting the chair. I’m the one with the double-digit death count.

  He paused and waited for a large truck to pass, then started walking down Laird Street. Genblade’s words still rang in his ears as if they’d just been spoken, no matter how hard he tried to block them out. Fuck. Much as I hate to say it, I need Genblade. Alive. With everything that’s happened in the past few weeks, he may well be the only person who understands what’s happening to me. He may be all I have left. God help me, that sick son-of-a-bitch is all I have left.

  He stopped again as he saw a red dress that looked like the one Sara had worn to the prom. It captivated his attention momentarily, until he forced himself to look away.

  The only question now is: what am I going to do about it?

  Don Smith got up from his desk and hurried over to the city room photocopier. He put a sheet on it and pressed o
n. Several sheets spat out of the already failing machine before it made a loud, grinding noise. Don looked at the old control panel. It said toner low. But then, it always said that. He re-opened the top and took his sheet out. He’d just take it down to his editor manually. The sheet read ‘WHO IS THE CORAL BEACH MURDERER?’ and was followed by a long article showing police suspects from the original massacre that were still alive today, quotes from various psychiatrists around the city that specialized in the criminal mind, and other tidbits of information. Don thought this was it. His provocative analysis of the criminal psyche and their motives would win him the editor’s attention.

  If not a Pulitzer.

  He marched across the office and approached Tom Drake’s desk. He always dreaded this. Drake always looked at him, his smile wide and fake. He’d ask, “How’s everything buddy? About to uncover that big story?” - as if he was a little kid on his mother’s old typewriter. He slowly turned his head to look in the office, preparing himself for Drake’s grossly sarcastic attitude. He turned to face him, preparing a fake smile to rival even his. The cubical was empty. If Don knew Drake (and he wished that he didn’t), at this time of day he was always either in his cubical... or in the editor’s office giving a pitch.

  Don ran through the rest of his cubical, waving his paper high above his head like a flag as he went. He got to the editor’s office at the end of the hall. He opened the door only a crack when he heard it.

  “...and then he threw me out of her hospital room! I’m sure I’m close, John! We’ve got a solid lead here.”

  Don’s head hung. Drake had beaten him to the punch once again. He opened the door regardless. “Sir!” he said, trying his best to inspire enthusiasm in his employer. “I’ve got a list of possible suspects and professionally credited motives to the murders!”

  John Tyler looked up from his desk, snatching the paper from Don’s hands and read through it. “This is great, Don!”

  “Really, sir?” Don repeated, astonished.

  “Yeah. This’ll make a great add-on to Drake’s story. It even supports his theory. Good work, Smith!”

  “Yeah, good work,” Drake mimicked, closing the door in Don’s stunned face. When the door was closed, he turned to John and rolled his eyes. “You may have broken this story wide open,” he laughed, grabbing the paper and tossing it to one side.

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  HOSPITAL FOOD

  Mike Harris had always hated hospital food.

  It came in lumps or squares and it never tasted exactly like it was supposed to. The food had a texture and a taste like styrofoam, as though it had been partially dehydrated. The worst part was, most of the time he didn’t even get what he wanted. If he circled meal ‘A’, they’d give him meal ‘B’. Once or twice he’d tried to cheat this jinx by ordering meal B... It had been the one and only time they had actually given him what had been circled. As revolting as the meal in front of him was, at the moment it didn’t matter.

  Cathy Kennessy lifted the grey plastic cover off of her desert dish, revealing a lime green substance. “You know what’s really interesting about hospital Jell-O?” she asked as she chewed on her chicken, which was probably the only thing on her dinner plate that didn’t taste like chicken, including the Jell-O itself.

  “This is Jell-O?” Mike replied, poking at the green jiggling food. “Dear God.”

  “Yes, it is. The weird thing is, you’re never really sure which fruit is inside it. Unless its banana, which I think is quite universal.” She lifted her dish and brought the green cubes up to eye-level, poking them to make them jiggle about like blubber. The more she stared at it, the more convinced she became that these were not bananas. It looked more like a malformed cross between pineapple and peaches. It may have been kiwi.

  “Yeah, I think maybe it’s peach. But that isn’t the point,” he said, finishing off the last of his mashed potatoes.

  “What is it then?” she asked in response, tilting her head back and dropping a cube past her ruby lips.

  “How is that Jell-O? I thought for sure frozen applesauce, but Jell-O? ...”

  “Hush,” she said, picking up a cube of Jell-O between her thumb and forefinger. “Taste.”

  He opened his mouth and she carefully placed it onto his tongue. He swished it around in his mouth for a moment before finally swallowing with a gulp. “Uh-huh,” he said, nodding his head once.

  “What?” she asked, grinning. “It’s definitely peach.”

  They both laughed and she pinched at his sides playfully. He winced, laughing through the slight nipping pain.

  She leaned in quickly and kissed him.

  He kissed her back, laughing.

  The Factory was dead that night, vacant of the usual chaotic and constant spin of teenagers coming and going. There were still sights and sounds in every corner and against every wall, but they all tended to drone into white noise and go unnoticed.

  Without the buzz of life, it seemed a much more depressing place than Xander remembered. When he, Mike and Cathy would stay up until 3am playing video games and talk about what they’d done all day. Now they only served to remind him of what he was and what he had done to them and everyone else around him.

  “Lord, you’re depressing,” Sara said, walking over to him with an orange tray loaded down with a large plate of fries. To some, fries were just a snack food, but to her they were a full-course meal. They were loaded down with cheese, bacon bits, green onion, onion and sour cream. The sight of it made Xander urge every time she took a bite, washing it down with a large slurp of watered-down cola. “What the hell do I have to do to get you out of this funk?”

  Xander smiled at the memory just as he had at the time, a sly grin twitching at the left side of his face. “I can think of a few things,” he whispered aloud, leering playfully at the vacant seat across from him.

  She tossed a cheese-spattered fry at him and he moved quickly to dodge the gooey projectile, letting it sail into someone else’s table. “Jerk,” she said simply as she continued her meal, a spiteful look on her face.

  His grin widened.

  “Seriously though, whatever’s wrong, do you really think that sitting here with me moping about it is going to fix anything?” she asked, staring at him knowingly from beneath her blonde bangs.

  “Might,” he said aloud again, keeping his voice low. He could almost see her in his minds eye now. Could smell the rotten mess that she called food. “I’m scared. Scared to move, scared to think... feel like no matter what I do’ll be the wrong answer.”

  “Probably true,” she nodded, frowning at him.

  He shot her a quizzical look, but did not respond.

  “But that’s a good thing. I mean, if every answer is going to end up bad anyway, it takes the pressure off. You can just do what you feel. Sure you’ll get beat down, but no more than you would if you didn’t do what you feel... gotta take your satisfactions somewhere, y’know.”

  He nodded, stroking his chin with his thumb and index finger as he did. No matter how he thought about it, Genblade was just as much a link to his sanity as Mike and Cathy were. He had made the choice not to kill him, despite what he had done to Sara. I chose to let him live. That’s not something I can back away from now. He thought, the memory of Sara still playing out before him as she lifted her head up to get all of the cheese literally melting off the fry she was holding. “Thanks,” he said finally, his smile more genuine now.

  “No problem. If I can patch up Grendel and Peterson, I can- -”

  “Hey, Drew,” came a voice from behind Xander, just as a heavy hand fell onto his shoulder.

  He jumped in his chair, almost falling off it as he lost the memory and snapped back to reality, his mind momentarily fizzed by the jolt in perception. All at once the sounds of The Factory that he’d been sifting out into white noise came crashing back, like an avalanche of commotion. He turned around bitterly, his face drawled up in a scowl. “What?” he snapped at the person behind him, standing up
as he did so.

  Derek raised his hands in the air and backed up a pace, his thin eyebrows shooting upwards and his mouth curling into a letter O. “Sorry, man. Didn’t mean to interrupt your teatime there.”

  Xander stopped, closed his eyes, then sighed. Slowly, he let a smile perk back onto his lips. “Sorry. M’in a mood, it’s a thing. Not your fault.”

  Derek grinned, his shocked expression mellowing down to his usual stoic eyes and comedic grin. “What’s got your panties in a bunch? I thought I heard Mike and Cat were gonna be okay?”

  He nodded slowly, the smell of the poutine that hadn’t even really existed still fresh in his nostrils. “Yeah,” he said finally, forcing a smile. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Probably nothing.”

  Derek’s grin grew so wide that it didn’t seem natural, as though someone had sliced it onto his face. “Good,” he said, slapping his hand down onto the man’s shoulder again and giving it a friendly squeeze. “Saw you comin’ in here from across the street,” he said, jutting his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of his house. “Couldn’t figure why you were comin’ over all by your lonesome. Thought you might wanna get some food or something?”

  His smile was contagious, and after a moment Xander didn’t have to fake his own anymore. “Sure,” he said, chuckling as he motioned to Roxanne that he wanted to place an order. “Let’s get a couple of fries with everything. On me.”

  “Thought you hated those,” Derek shrugged as the two of them walked towards the counter.

  “They grow on you.”

  Two-hundred and forty-eight dollars.

  That was the take-home amount that Clarence Fisher drew every week for thirty-eight hours work as a security guard at Coral Beach Penitentiary. Thirty-eight hours, not forty. If he worked just two hours more a week, he would be eligible for medical benefits, insurance and be guaranteed a raise once every six months. Even though two hours didn’t sound like much to him, it apparently made all the difference to the people that signed his paychecks because he’d never managed to get any more than an extra hour out of them. If he complained too much, he often found his hours slightly reduced for the next week and had learned to just leave well enough alone.