“What?” Mike yelled again, thrusting his arms out to either side of him. “You can’t kill me here? Excuse me! I didn’t know that your priorities were so damn high!” He drew back and nailed the Womb in the face, shattering the knuckle of his middle finger as he did.
It stared back at him, unmoving, its head ducked down a little now as it looked up at Mike with large eyes.
“Why us? Why me, why Cathy? Why Sara? What could we have possibly done to you, you piece of crap?” he screamed, his words barely making sense anymore. He lashed out again despite the throbbing sensation in his hand, this time getting the creature in one of its massive eyes.
“Lac!” it snarled, snapping at him as it brought one hand up in a motion so fast it made a long, black blur in the air behind it as it went. It struck Mike in the side, stretching the stitches there and sending him tumbling to the ground again, his head beating off a rock. When he opened his eyes again, the Womb was standing over him, looming back and forth as its clawed fingers twitched over and over again, preparing to strike.
It stopped moving at all then, but for the narrowing of its eyes again. When they were almost too slender to be seen, it stopped moving them as well, staying as still as a statue as it watched Mike leak salt water, blood, and mucus from his mouth.
The blackness covering the creature lost consistency, splashing down to the ground as Xander fell as well, his clothes soaked through and through. The stench of blood, sweat, and BO that came with the sudden loss of the tar-like skin was like pennies that had been rubbed with friend chicken.
Xander gasped at the air as his lungs started to work again, churning to force all the darkness out of them before he drowned.
Mike stared at him, squinting, before slowly bringing himself up to a sitting position. He groaned as his bones cracked, his hands shaking violently as adrenaline wore off and he started to feel what he had done to his hand. He didn’t realize he was breathing hard until he noticed he was doing it at the same pace Xander was.
“So what... did that accomplish?” Xander said after a moment, still gasping for breath. He put his head between his knees and hacked up black blood and saliva, spitting it out in a long, dangling wad as he massaged the back of his own head.
“Not what I hoped,” Mike said, getting up off the ground and dusting himself off before extending his hand to his friend. “Felt better than punching a wall, though.”
Xander raised an eyebrow as he took his hand, pulling himself to his feet.
“I do have one thing we didn’t have before I did that,” he added, waving a finger as if he were displaying his saving point.
“What’s that?”
“More questions.”
CHAPTER SIX:
HUMANITY
Tommy slammed his hands against the sink, feeling a hot pain course through his palms as he did. His lips curled up in a snarl as he stared at his own reflection with large, dark rings around his eyes.
Sud looked over his shoulder from where he stood at the urinal, frowning as he zipped up and walked over. His mouth hung open as though he had something to say, though he just continued to stare blankly at Tommy’s reflection.
“That fuckin’ little bastard thinks he can treat me like that,” Tommy growled, wetting his hand under the faucet and then splashing it up onto his face. “Little fucker.”
Sud nodded once, then grunted a single-syllable agreement.
“Doesn’t know who I am. Doesn’t know what I’m capable of. Isn’t even worth the air he breathes, little frigging psycho,” he mumbled, standing back up and wiping water away as it dribbled from his chin. “Dude belongs in a god-damned mental institution, I’m tellin’ ya.”
“Like on The Secret of NIMH,” chuckled Sud.
“Huh?” Tommy said, raising one of his pointed eyebrows.
“The National Institute of Mental Health. You know, with the talking mice and that wacky crow that liked shiny things...”
“Shut up,” Tommy dismissed, glaring at him.
“I like shiny things.”
“Man, shut up!” Tommy said, angry now. He punched the wall of the washroom, then irked in pain as he realized that he had done so with the hand Xander had nearly broken. He let out a small yelp before grunting his frustration. “Fuck. Who does that fucker think he is? That little nerd loses his bitch lover and suddenly he’s some cool shit?” He shook his head, his eyes growing small and thoughtful. After a moment, he started to wave his finger in front of him as though a light had gone on in his head, then turned back to Sud. “We gotta teach him a lesson, man. He cannot get away with this shit. There’s that memorial service thing coming up soon... and I think I got just the right idea for what to do.”
Cathy slurped on her cherry cola, her small red lips pursed around it tightly.
Xander stared at those lips without really even noticing them, his eyes looking sunken and far away, as though he were lost somewhere within his own head.
They sat at a table in the Factory that they’d long ago claimed as their table. Neither of them owned it separately, and they only sat in it when the both of them were there. Three seats from top and four from left, the spot where all the noise in the building seemed to collide together and cancel each other out, created a kind of soundless vacuum. Once, when the four of them had come in and other people had been sitting there, Roxanne had actually
