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

Page 52

by Matthew LeDrew


  Genblade’s face went white and seemed to drag downward, as if held down by some invisible weight.

  “Well, if there’s nothing else, I’m going to get ready for court.”

  Still, Genblade said nothing, his eyes as small as peas.

  Natasha swallowed hard, her mouth parched and sore. “Good day then, Mr. Genblade,” she said, hanging up the phone and turning away. She glanced over her shoulder when she got close to the door to see if he was watching her, but he was still sitting blank-eyed with the phone up to his ear. She shook her head and walked away.

  “Time to go, Genblade,” a tall guard said from his place against the wall a few minutes later.

  Genblade still did not move, his face almost the same shade as the walls around him.

  “Genblade, I said it’s time to go,” he repeated in a frustrated tone, laying a heavy hand on the inmate’s shoulder.

  He woke up three days later in a hospital bed with half his jaw missing and a hole in his neck that he would have to breathe through for the rest of his life.

  Xander sat at the edge of his stairs, gazing at the doorway in the dark. Only thirty minutes ago the room had been brightly lit just from outside, but now there was just the slow orange ebb of dusk fading into complete darkness.

  His knee bounced a little as he waited, the sound of it tapping against the rail matching the sound of his heart, beat for beat. He took a deep breath through the fingers that were cupped together tightly over his mouth, then exhaled slowly, listening to the whistling whine as air passed between them.

  He heard the scuffing and shuffling of feet outside, followed quickly by a low, deep voice talking to a louder, feminine one. Both were mumbled when heard through the wooden door. He briefly remembered a dream he had once while he was sick as a child, sitting in the dark while voices came at him. It agitated him enough that he finally got up and walked to the door. He placed his hand on the knob, forced his best fake-smile onto his lips, then opened the door with one quick painless motion.

  Mike shot a raised eyebrow at him, his fist hanging in mid-air and about to knock on the door.

  Smirking, Xander raised his fist the same way. “Exist extensively, and flourish,” he said in a deep, monotone voice.

  “What?”

  “Thought that was just how your people greeted one another,” he mumbled, stepping aside to let Mike and Cathy in.

  Mike stepped inside cautiously, never once really taking his eyes off of Xander as he took off his sneakers.

  Cathy stepped in quickly behind him, slipping off her shoes with two quick motions and then giving Xander a kiss on the cheek. “How are you?” she asked, her head leaning to one side sympathetically.

  “Exactly when did that become such a loaded question?” he chuckled in response. “I remember when you used to ask me that during a movie or something... now it’s like the end of the world every time you do.”

  Mike snorted.

  Cathy pinched him in the ribs, hard, then shot him a look. “No reason,” she replied, but it sounded more like an order than a response.

  “Cool. Well, ah, I’ve got a few movies rented and some popcorn. Dad bought some poker chips last week that haven’t been deflowered, so we could do that --”

  “I don’t know how to play poker,” Cathy cut in as she hung up her coat.

  “You know how, you just always lose,” Mike retorted, rolling his eyes.

  “That would be the definition of not knowing how to play.”

  “-- I was also thinking we could order a pizza later. Kay’s delivers all night, right?”

  Cathy paused, frowning from Xander to Mike and then back again. “Sweety --”

  “Hey, if you don’t like pizza either, that’s your own damage. You can have the garlic fingers.”

  “Xander,” she started again, fighting to keep her voice neutral. “Why are we here?”

  The smile ran away from his face then, his eyes cast downward almost instantly. He watched his foot kick the mat back and forth for a second, then turned back to them. “I like to think I don’t need your help, but I do,” he said so low that it was almost silent.

  “Help with what, exactly?” Mike asked, taking a look around the house.

  He sighed. “It’s like I was saying to Cathy earlier. I need to get a lid on this whole situation. Need to get some of my humanity back, stop the Womb from doing whatever it does. I know it’s not a permanent solution, but right now I’m just not going to sleep tonight. Was kind of hoping you guys might be able to help me with that.”

  Cathy tisked, stepping forward to give him another hug. “Of course, that’s... of course.”

  “I was worried you’d say no. You have every right.”

  “Of course we’ll help. That’s what family’s for.”

  “That’s it?” Mike laughed, placing his hand on Xander’s shoulder and smiling. “That’s the big deal for tonight? I didn’t make that big a deal when I beat the crap out of you earlier.”

  “That’s later,” Xander smiled, nodding as he and Cathy started toward the kitchen.

  Mike paused a moment, then walked in behind them.

  There were two party-sized bags of chips laid against one another on the kitchen table, the dip between them both like a man squat down inside a tee-pee. There was a two-litre bottle of Cherry Cola there as well, which made Cathy smile.

  “You’re a doll,” she said, fighting back a yawn. “But I think we should start with the coffee. Been a long couple of days.”

  Xander nodded, flipping a switch on the side of the auto-perk.

  “There enough coffee for two cups?” Mike chimed in, sitting down at the table across from Cathy.

  “There’s enough for ten thousand,” Xander said, shooting him a sly look. “Let it never be said that I don’t know how to pull an all-nighter.”

  Mike smiled. “Remember the last one?”

  Laughter rumbled out of Xander’s mouth and he slapped his knee, almost tipping over the mugs he’d laid out.

  “What?” Cathy asked, looking from one to the other and shrugging. “What am I missing?”

  Mike kept laughing.

  “What is it?” she demanded again, pinching him on the arm.

  “Ow. Okay, it was back in grade seven. We were all gone camping, the lot of us, and there was this bet to see--”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Xander interjected, smiling and waving both hands out in front of him like an air-traffic controller for his friend to stop. “You’re telling it wrong.”

  “You just don’t like where the story goes.”

  “No, you always fuck up the story. You always fuck up every story,” he drawled, coming over and sitting between them. “It was in grade eight.”

  “Grade seven.”

  “It was the summer between grades seven and eight.”

  Mike stopped, doing some quick Math in his head. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

  “Anyway, that little guy from Canada was down to visit. Keenan. Calla’s cousin.”

  “Right,” Cathy smiled nodding. “Little guy, freckles, used to hit on Julie a lot?”

  “Yea. Anyway, he was down from Canada for a few weeks and we were really making the best of it. You know, every day it wouldn’t just be one fun thing... it’d be ten. Go swimming out in the cove, playing street hockey, staying up late, having barbeques... everything we could think to do.”

  “It takes you so long to tell this story,” Mike sighed, leaning back on his chair.

  Xander shot him a look as the auto-perk clicked off and he got up to get the coffee. “It takes a long time to tell it.”

  “It wouldn’t take this long to go back in time and experience it.”

  “I’m building mood.”

  Mike crumpled his brow. “Who are you?”

  Xander shook his head, walking back with a cup each for Mike and Cathy and then going back for his own. “Anyway, Keenan and the whole gang were around that summer. So this one night we decide to go camping, only our parents won’t le
t us go out into the forest alone.”

  “So, what?” Cathy stopped him, laughing. “Don’t tell me you just camped out on the front lawn or something.”

  “No, that’d be lame. We went up to the park and camped there.”

  “What park?”

  “Remember off of Laird there used to be this big outdoor wooden basketball court with a wire fence all the way around and one part gated off for when people wanted to watch?”

  “Oh, yeah. I loved that place.”

  “Up there. We set up our tents in the place where people were supposed to watch games.”

  “Hilarious,” Cathy snickered, rolling her eyes as she took a sip of her coffee.

  “No, see the funny part was Keenan,” Mike said, leaning forward and motioning off to one side as if he were actually pointing to Keenan in his mind’s eye. “That kid was just the most annoying little pervert I have ever met. I think he was touching himself before the rest of us even realized there was a difference between guys and girls.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. So he makes up this rule that nobody can go to sleep.”

  “I think there was some kind of reason... I just can’t think of it,” Xander interjected.

  Mike waved him aside. “He made up this rule. So Xander, being the braintrust that he is, decides to make a rule that the first person to fall asleep gets punched by every other guy there.”

  “So... how many people were there?” Cathy asked, a broad smile slowly going as she realized where this was going.

  “Oh, me, Xander, him, Derek, Jamie, Grendel, Randy, Tommy, Sud, Trevor, Sheldon... everyone. Whole gang.”

  “Wow. So, he’d get like... ten punches.”

  “Not just punches, Charlie Horses. You’d want to cut off your own leg to get rid of the pain after the tenth one. So that’s all well and good, but around six a.m. everyone’s starting to doze off... except Keenan.”

  “Think he was still on Canada time or something,” Xander added, squinting.

  “Whatever. Every time I started to doze, he’d come over and clock me in the jaw and then just run away!” Mike laughed, making his fingers scamper away as he did. “Just like that! The fucking monkey would just sneak up, slam me in the face and then run around the court!”

  Xander tapped Cathy, his eyes wet with tears. “He’d always catch him and hit him once or twice in the arm and be like ‘you better not do that again’... then five minutes later, it would happen all over again.”

  “Where were Trevor and Randy for that part?”

  “They went fishing, I think. Said it was best in the morning, we called them crazy, they came back with thirty or so fish.”

  “Right.” Mike nodded, pointing at Xander. He could only remain serious a moment before starting to laugh. “God, was that the night we played twenty-ones?”

  Xander smiled.

  “Forget I asked,” Mike said quickly, raising both hands for Xander to stop.

  “Why?” Cathy smiled, looking from one to the other. “What else happened?”

  Xander turned to her, still smiling. “He didn’t beat me at a single game that night. Nothing.”

  Cathy raised an eyebrow to Mike, who had turned away from the both of them.

  “We were playing twenty-ones and I was on a streak. He had, like, one basket.”

  “Two,” he chirped in a low voice.

  “That one doesn’t count and you know why, don’t make me say it.” He waited for Mike’s retort.

  There was none.

  “Anyway,” he continued, leaning in closer to Cathy as if the exclude Mike from comment. “I was up fifteen from him, and that never happens, so he and the guys started trying to come up with ways to distract me whenever it was my turn to shoot.”

  Her eyes bulged slightly. “Like what?”

  “We mooned him,” Mike said, his hands over his eyes.

  “You started making dirty jokes.” Xander added, listing off things on his fingers.

  “We farted on you.”

  “None of it fazed me,” Xander said triumphantly.

  “What was it that eventually got to you?” Cathy asked, taking a sip of her coffee.

  Xander answered, trying to choke back a laugh. “He kept telling me to picture Sara nude. I didn’t get another shot in all day.”

  They all laughed, then it died down for a moment and they all took a sip of their drinks, almost simultaneously.

  Cathy smirked. “Does anyone remember that stuff you guys used for non-alcoholic shots one night when we were playing pass the ace?”

  “Wake up juice!” Mike and Xander both shouted simultaneously. They both burst into laughter.

  Mike swished his tongue around in his mouth. “Man, that stuff was sour.”

  “Not that Keenan would ever say so,” Xander scoffed. “After every shot: ‘That’s not sour’... meanwhile, his lips were sucked back far enough to taste his own tonsils.”

  “I remember Grendel got out of the game before his lips even touched the stuff,” Cathy sneered at the mention of that name.

  Xander kept his eye on the fridge in the corner, tossing each of them a sly look. “Remember ... how to make it?”

  Mike grinned.

  “Got a pen?” Cathy giggled, grabbing a sheet of paper from under the fruit basket.

  Xander handed her one as he rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to remember. “Pure lemon juice, one bottle,” he said finally.

  Mike piped up. “The water solution of dissolved sour candies.”

  “Sour kool-aid mix. Seven varieties,” Cathy nodded, scrunching her nose as she wrote.

  “That was your idea back in the day,” Xander said accusingly. “We hated you for it then and we’ll hate you for it now. Pepsi. One litre.”

  “Milk, I think,” Mike added tentatively.

  “Old milk, actually,” she corrected as she jotted it down.

  He nodded in thanks.

  “And finally, vanilla extract,” Xander smiled, rubbing his hands together as he snatched the list from Cathy and skipped to the fridge, peering in.

  “How much do we have?” Cathy called after a minute.

  “Only one type of kool-aid,” he fake frowned.

  “I’m going to check myself.”

  “Fine. There are two. Witch. Also, any limit on how old the milk can be?”

  Mike and Cathy both exchanged looks. “No?” Mike asked, leaning forward.

  “Good, cause I think this one’s so old it’s actually meat now,” he shrugged as he began pouring the contents of the list into the blender. When he was done he set it to liquefy for a moment, the chunky liquid becoming a blur as it mixed together into a weird shade of brown. “Lord, it’s more disgusting looking than I remember.”

  “Hold on,” Cathy chirped, getting up and walking over. She grabbed the rest of the pot of coffee and poured it in on top of the mixture, then turned and smiled at them both. “Now it’s wake-up juice.”

  Xander laughed, grabbing three glasses and pouring equal amounts into each until the blender was empty. He brought them over to the table and lay one in front of each of them, and for a long moment they just stared at it.

  It bubbled and fizzed from the cola mixed with kool-aid, threatening to overflow from its glass at any point in time but always stopping shy of actually doing so. The coffee had turned it a deep brown that neither of them had seen before in nature, only as siding on houses or as colours in paintings. It made sounds as the different parts reacted with each other, as if each different type of liquid were fighting for control of the glass, and the coffee made it steam. It looked like something that had just come out of a witches brew or a mad scientists lair, even though it smelled like fruit-punch soda.

  Xander made a small clicking sound with his tongue. “Ladies first,” he said casually, glancing at Cathy.

  She gave him a look, then took a deep breath and downed the whole glass so fast that she couldn’t have even tasted it. She stood for a minute, her eyes tearing from th
e bitterness of it, then she knelt down of one knee and started gaging, gasping for air.

  She held her right hand to her throat as Mike and Xander started laughing.

  She punched Mike in the shoulder and he fell to the floor in mock pain, laughing even harder. “So you drink it!” Cathy shouted, beginning to laugh herself.

  Xander and Mike looked at each other. With a grin, they clinked their glasses together in a toast and simultaneously said: “Bottom’s Up!” They both chugged the drinks as fast as they could, and when they stopped, they both slammed their glasses onto the counter. They stared at one another, trying to see which one would give first. Both of their eyes began to well up, and Mike kept licking his lips, trying to scrape the taste off of his tongue. Finally, Mike broke down gagging, and as soon as the competition was over, Xander did as well. Cathy burst into laughter.

  Mike and Xander both got to their feet laughing over one another. Xander went straight for the fridge and downed a bottle of orange juice, Mike and Cathy were not far behind.

  They went back into the living room and sat down, still gasping. Cathy laid down on Mike and they both looked very tired. Xander glanced at his watch. It was now close to midnight. “I think it’s time for one of you to take your shift,” he said, licking his tongue across his teeth. “Who’s first?”

  Cathy spoke up immediately. “I’d like to stay up first, thank you very much,” she stated bluntly. Giving Mike a little kiss, she said, “Time for bed now, hon.”

  Mike gave her a look, but started up into the guest bedroom.

  Cathy turned and leaned back as far as she could on her chair, watching as Mike slowly scaled the steep stairwell leading up to the spare bedroom. They’d all slept in that room at one point or another since they were kids. She and her sister had called it home for a week once while her parents went on a second honeymoon. She vaguely recalled Trina getting sick during that week and bathing most of the walls in puke.

  Xander raised an eyebrow as he watched her almost stumble from her chair, downing the remainder of his coffee and then getting up to get a fresh cup. “Enjoying the view?”

  “Hmm?” she hummed, turning around with a sleepy, dazed look in her eyes. After a moment she snapped out of it and blushed, but did not respond. “So what do you wanna do now? It’s been a while since I beat you in canasta, but I think I still know how.”

 

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