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

by Matthew LeDrew

  She leaned in to kiss him again, but they were interrupted by a sound behind them. Cathy jumped into Mike’s arms and he laughed at her.

  “What?” he asked, holding her lightly by the shoulders.

  “I- I thought I heard a sound,” she stammered.

  He laughed at her again. “You could not be more cliché if you tried. You really think there’s some crazed killer on the...”

  Shink.

  This time he heard it too. The sound of metal scraping on metal. They both stood perfectly still, neither making a sound.

  Shink.

  Again. Closer this time. It was coming from across the street, around the corner that they had just come from.

  “Come on,” he said, taking her by the arm and they broke into a fast walk down the street toward her house. They rounded the next corner and stopped for a moment to listen. They could hear it.

  Shink. Shink. Shink.

  Metal scraping across the pavement, getting closer and closer to them. They broke into an all out run as they passed under a street lamp next to a gas station. Cathy stopped for a minute and banged on the windows as she went. “Help us!” she screamed to arouse the curiosity of anyone who might be inside, but there was no response.

  Mike stopped a few feet past her, turning around when he heard the noise she was making, the expression on his face turning from unadulterated fear to pity for just a moment.

  She stared into the tinted windows of the station, only the night lights on to let her see that everyone had left, every business had closed early. Everyone in this town had been spooked by Jamie Dawkins’ death. So the two were alone. Her lower lip shook as her eyes searched frantically amongst the dimly lit potato chip and cigarette displays for any sign of movement, desperation beginning to pump through her fragile body as fast as adrenaline.

  Shink.

  Mike jogged back toward her, taking her firmly but gently around her upper arm. “Come on. We don’t have time,” he said, his voice the only part of him showing his exhaustion.

  She looked around the gas bar again, her hair whipping around her head, when the sound came again.

  Shink.

  It was so close she thought she had felt the blade graze the goosebumps on the back of her neck. She started to run with Mike again without even looking where he was leading her, taking off away from the abandoned station and back onto the street toward her home.

  Mike turned around momentarily, looking into the gaping darkness through the thick fog. He heard the sound again, followed by a sight. The gleam of a long, curved piece of metal shining in his eyes. He turned back toward the front, the voice of his junior high gym coach ringing in his ears, telling him to keep his eyes facing forward. You run faster when you’re facing forward.

  Cathy didn’t get far before she buckled over in pain. They’d been walking for hours, and now all this running had produced a spasmodic ache in the muscles of her stomach, sending shots of agony down her legs and upwards into her chest. She tried to get up, but her body automatically cried out in rebellion sending her back down to her knees. Mike looked back again.

  Nothing.

  He helped her to her feet and listened for a moment. Then, from the darkness, something slashed at her.

  “Ah!” she cried, as she felt the heat of pain rip up and down her thigh. Something had tried to cut through her hamstring. She quickly propped herself onto Mike’s shoulder and then began to run, but Mike knew it was hopeless. She was hopping around on one foot, and he wouldn’t be able to take her added weight for too much longer.

  When he looked over his shoulder again, he saw it. A tall, dark figure steadily making its way toward them. It wasn’t running, and yet it was making progress on them. With a single thought of horrible brilliance, a light went on in Mike’s head and he realized that they both wouldn’t make it. He stopped when they passed the next corner, a shocked look on his pasty white face.

  The guy was close; they both knew it. Cathy’s house was only about a block away, but they wouldn’t make it. They both knew it.

  “Why are you stopping?” she asked, wide eyed with astonishment and pain, tears already streaming down her face.

  Holding her arms with both hands, he pulled her in and kissed her, then pushed her in the direction of her house. “Go.”

  She started to cry fresh tears, but turned and ran toward her home.

  Mike turned around to face their attacker. Suddenly, he felt a sharp pain in his right side as a long, double-edged sword plunged into him. He screamed as the attacker twisted the blade slightly before ripping it out again. Mike felt his blood flow freely from the wound. He turned. He wanted to know. Had to know who this mysterious figure was before he died.

  But there was no one there. He was alone.

  He turned and ran for Cathy’s home. The pumping of his legs increased the blood flow, and as her house came into sight, he started to feel light headed. He stopped for a moment on a bench to catch his breath. He put his hand on his side and pressed, shooting pain all through his torso. He looked down at his hand, soaked in blood, looking black in the darkness of the night street. Closing his eyes, he let his head rest a minute. Then he remembered what they tried to tell you on those medical shows that he and Xander loved so much. When you got a wound like this, you don’t close your eyes. There’s a good chance that you’ll never wake up again.

  So he clenched his teeth and got up.

  He fell immediately to the sidewalk, skidding his knees against the concrete. He vomited onto the gray stone, but then realized that it was blood, its coppery taste filling his mouth and throat. Mike had always hated the taste of his own blood, and now he was drowning in it. He wrapped his hands around his sides, trying desperately to stop the stream of red fluid coming from them.

  CHAPTER THREE:

  INJECTED

  “Mike? Dear God, Mike?” came a voice from ahead. The sound was muffled by the throbbing pain in his skull. It sounded like someone talking while underwater.

  Mike looked up. Even his vision had begun to get hazy, but he could plainly see Cathy’s dad coming toward him. He was a hard man to mistake for anyone else. David Kennessy was portly and kind of shaped like a pear, with saggy jowls that shook whenever he spoke. His eyes always looked kind and often concerned, as they did right now as he looked down at the open wound on Mike’s side.

  Mike only grunted in response.

  “Oh, fuck,” he said as he picked Mike up and put his arm around his shoulder. “Let’s get you into the warm, son.”

  The walk back to the house was both slow and rushed at the same time. With every agonizing step they took, David could feel the boy in his arms tremble. He could see the blood as it continued to soak through his shirt at an alarming rate, faster than he would have thought possible.

  He’d never seen that much blood before, not in real life.

  There was a sound behind them and David pressed forward, glaring back between them with eyes filled with fear. Mike kept up the new pace for only a moment, then let out a long grunt and slowed down. David obliged. It was like trying to run a three-legged race when the prize is your life and your partner was a toddler.

  “M’sorry,” Mike hummed painfully.

  “It’s okay,” David said, patting him on the chest.

  It wasn’t.

  They made their way to the house without incident, David opening the door with a firm kick. The latch had never been good, and opened with even the slightest force.

  Cathy and her mother, Karen, were still on the couch crying. There were first-aid bandages in place on Cathy’s calf, and Karen had just hung up the phone with the hospital. When she heard the door open, she got up and yelled: “David? Dear god, did you find him?”

  Then she saw him. She gasped at the sight of the boy she loved like her own son with his clothes and hands drenched in blood. She hurried Cathy upstairs despite her screams and cries of protest.

  They laid Mike onto the couch, placing pillows under his neck
and head to prop them up. David wrapped some makeshift bandages tightly around his torso to stop the bleeding, and placed blankets on him to keep him warm. They could hear the ambulance’s siren in the distance.

  Cathy gave up fighting her mother and went into her room, slamming the door behind her so hard it rattled pictures all over the house. There was only a second’s worth of silent pause before they heard her scream.

  All eyes in the room went wider than ever, a difficult feat considering the situation.

  David looked from his wife to Mike and then back again before he rushed up the stairs, leaving Mike momentarily to see what was wrong. Karen followed.

  He reached his daughter’s room and opened the door. He found his daughter curled into a ball on the floor next to her double bed, crying and holding her legs tightly against her body. She peered over her knees with panic stricken eyes, unable to pry her gaze off the foreign object in her room.

  There was a long, double-edged sword sticking out of her floor. It had golden lining and a rubber handle in the middle, and was perfectly clean. No blood was on it.

  David ran to the window and looked out. There was nothing there except the ambulance pulling up, its flashing red lights making eerie shadows on the street. He turned to his wife and daughter. “Did he hurt you?”

  “There was nobody h-here. Just the... the thing,” Cathy stammered hysterically.

  David turned and looked at the blade, put in so little time ago that it was still wobbling like a tuning fork.

  “How could someone have sunk that in without anyone hearing?” he breathed to himself.

  He ran back downstairs, leaving his wife and child in the room. He thanked God that his younger daughter was staying at a friend’s house.

  He greeted the paramedics quickly and led them into the living room, where Mike was drifting in and out of consciousness. One of the younger medics lifted up the blanket and looked at the wound as they hefted him onto the stretcher.

  “Fuck,” he mumbled so that only he could hear. “Gutted like a friggin’ fish.”

  They rushed him into the ambulance and began work right away, giving him morphine for the pain as they tried urgently to staunch the blood flow. Cathy got into the van with him. She had wounds to treat as well. She started to bawl as she saw the blank look in her boyfriend’s eyes, which were faded and rolled back into his skull. The doctors began to stitch up the wound before they even arrived at the hospital. They rushed him into emergency as Cathy went into a smaller doctor’s office. It was the first time she wondered if she would ever see him again. And for a while, the only sound she could hear was her own heart breaking.

  Xander woke up the next morning and stretched, scratching his sides. He heard the familiar crack of his bones and the creak of his bed as he got up, his skin still sticky and clammy from the warm night’s sleep. He went over to his computer, whose alarm clock program was beeping the “time to wake up” song it played every day at seven. He jiggled the mouse to get rid of the saver, then clicked the off button on the beeping clock.

  He hauled on a new shirt and jeans and opened his door. He stopped dead in his tracks, staring at the door, his lower lip quivering just a little.

  His door had been locked last night. Now it wasn’t.

  He looked around his room quickly for anything out of the ordinary and saw nothing. Just stacks of Popular Science magazines and clothes scattered all over the floor, along with a pile of CDs he’d been meaning to give back to Sara for some time. Taking a long, slow pan of the room to make sure, he decided that it had to be nothing. Maybe the lock had slipped, as it had sometimes in the past. No big deal.

  He walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. He turned sharply to see his mother crying and his father sitting at the table.

  Xander’s father was old and scrawny, wearing a flannel shirt and suspenders he refused to admit were out of style. His shoulders were slumped forward and his face sagged more than usual as he clenched his wife’s hand tightly around her fingers.

  She was a little younger and usually hid her years much better. Today her hair wasn’t curled and Xander noticed she was only wearing one earring. The makeup on her round face was smeared by tears and tissues, and when she looked at Xander he could see her eyes were bloodshot.

  Xander’s eyes widened in shock. “What’s going on?” He almost didn’t need to ask. It was as if he knew before the words even escaped his mother’s lips. The image of what he knew had happened came to his brain. He could practically hear her saying the words in her head.

  “Xander, son, you should sit down,” his mother coaxed, motioning toward an empty chair at the table.

  “No. No way. Just fucking tell me,” he said slowly but defiantly, hating it when people started bad news with sit down. It just made it worse by drawing it out.

  “Sit,” his father said in a stern voice, frowning in disapproval of his son’s choice in language.

  Xander took a step toward the chair without even realizing it, almost as a reflex, his father glaring at him as he did.

  “Alex, sweetie, were you with Mike and Cathy last night?” his mother asked, her voice unwavering even through her tears.

  “I... what?” Xander asked, getting confused as his head spun a mile a minute.

  “Son, Michael and Cathy were attacked last night,” his father said bluntly, placing an open palm on the table as if he were laying out the facts.

  Xander could feel the words cut through him like a dagger. He ran into the porch and hauled on his shoes, unlocked the front door and ran out.

  His mother started to get up and go after him, but his father touched her on the arm quickly, shaking his head.

  He hopped across the threshold they had passed over only last night. He ran to Sara’s doorway and started banging on her door.

  She opened it, still wearing her nightgown, her eyes red and puffy.

  Without a word, he took her into his arms and cried.

  Carl Dent slammed a fist down on the folder in front of him, this one marked Harris/Kennessy. “Fuck!” he yelled, getting the attention of the entire wing. Nobody dared to say anything to him, as the entirety of his balding head turned red with livid anger.

  He ran a hand through his remaining hair, clenching his teeth as he opened both this and the Dawkins file.

  “What am I missing?” he mumbled to himself, waiting for something to jump out at him. A tattoo, a locale, anything besides the manner in which the people were attacked.

  Suddenly, his phone rang.

  He glared at it, willing it to stop on its own.

  Which of course, it did not.

  Cursing again, he picked it up and put it to his ear. “Dent,” he grumbled, scraping his teeth together.

  “Yes, this is Don Smith. I’m a reporter with Beach News Daily...” said the polite yet exhausted voice on the other end of the line.

  Dent rolled his eyes, throwing his free hand up in the air. He hated reporters, always had. More than anything, he hated the way they introduced themselves, putting emphasis of their job title, the newspaper, and even their name. It was as if they were trying to make themselves sound so much more important than they really were. “Yes?” he sighed reluctantly.

  “... I was wondering if you had any information regarding the attack?”

  “All information associated with Jamie Dawkins that we are willing to disclose at this time has been released in a press release to all media outlets. I would suggest you get off the phone with me and check your fax machine. Besides, I only deal with Tom Drake. He’s the only decent reporter at that rag.”

  There was an audible silence on the line as Don took a deep sigh, composing himself before speaking again. “I wasn’t talking about that attack. I meant the attack last night. On Mike Harris and Cathy Kennessy?”

  Dent raised an eyebrow. “And how do you know shit about that?”

  “My son told me. He goes to their school. They all seem to know...”

  Dent narrowed his e
yes. “Then why don’t you go ask them?” he hissed, slamming the phone down onto its receiver as hard as he could.

  He immediately grabbed the file on Mike and Cathy and threw on his jacket, cursing as he walked toward the door.

  “Bout time I stopped sitting on the sidelines anyway...” he mumbled, slamming the door behind him.

  Xander and Sara both took that Wednesday off school to go visit Mike and Cathy in the hospital. Cathy was as good as new. The blade had only breached the skin.

  Mike was a different story. The killer’s blade had punctured the right side of his abdomen and gone in several inches. The flesh there had required fifty-two stitches and ten staples to stay closed. The blade had missed the major organs, although the attending physician still was not sure how. It had ruptured one organ however, nearly slicing it half and resulting in its immediate removal from Mike’s body.

  “Your appendix?” Sara repeated, fighting to control her laughter. “Some people have to pay to get that useless ball of flesh removed, and you’re all whiny cause some creep did it for free?”

  Mike laughed weakly at that, feeling his stitches stretch. He knew she was joking. “Ha. Yeah, guess it is kinda funny when you look at it like that. If you’re a twisted freak like you are.”

  Cathy did one of her famous fake laughs, then gave Mike a kiss on the cheek.

  “The doctors even say if I rest up, I’ll be out of here in time for Grendel’s party,” Mike added happily, squeezing his girlfriend’s hand tightly and giving her a happy smile.

  “Great. Perfect,” Xander joked cheerfully. “But I think Cathy’s going to be disappointed. She was looking forward to some alone time with ol’ Gren.”

  Both Sara and Cathy laughed at that. Mike did not.

  Xander coughed awkwardly. “Well, if you feel up to it later, I think I spotted an arcade down near the waiting room. Maybe they’ve got --”

  “Nope,” Mike cut him off. “Sorry buddy, our game isn’t there.”