“You’re wrong. This last victim,” he pointed to number forty on the sheet. “She was ravaged. She had her ovaries and the rest of her reproductive system taken.”
Harry looked down through his sheets. “Sara Johnson. What’s so special about her?”
“Tim?” the secretary said as she poked her head through his doorway.
Tim removed his reading glasses. “Yes, Felicia?”
“Those two children you saw earlier are here again. They say that they have some new evidence...”
“By all means, send them in,” he smiled, turning off his computer screen.
Mike and Cathy walked in. Mike looked stern. He didn’t like White. At all. He threw the disk onto his desk. “Have you ever been to engen.com, Mr. White?”
New entry. We have waited nearly twenty years, but our boy has finally returned to us. Restarting test for the darkness. Black Womb is home...
CHAPTER SEVEN:
ENGEN
“AAARRRGHHH!” Xander screamed in pain, arching his back and pulling against the safety harnesses placed all around his body.
He could feel what they were doing, could feel them inside of him. If he turned the right way at the right time, he might even catch a glimpse of one of the doctors or the shadow of a guard. It barely registered with him. He was in too much pain to really register anything else. He screamed again, feeling a pinch deep inside his body. Why are they doing this to me? was all he could think. He had done nothing wrong. He hadn’t hurt anybody, or anything. The last thing he remembered was actually trying to help someone. His friend, Cathy...
He screamed again. This time, finally, he got a reaction.
“Doctor?” the female shouted from somewhere above. She sounded muddled and dulled at first, as though she were under water, then came into clarity and was so loud that it was all he could hear. His vision was blurred and there were a lot of bright lights in his face, every so often something moving between him and them. “Can’t we do something? He’s in pain for god’s sake!”
“No!” a male voice exclaimed. “Now, I don’t like it any more then you do, but we can’t put him to sleep because it’ll dull his reactions. We can’t administer an aesthetic to him because that’ll affect...”
“Carry on,” came a harsh voice from over an intercom. There was an audible click as it turned on and off.
“Right away, sir. Nurse, do something about his screaming.”
A shadow fell in front of the light. The nurse bent over him, wrapping thick cloth around his mouth. He mumbled against it for a moment, then tried to scream again as the doctor went back in. They’d been at it for hours. The worst part was remembering every detail. He had been strapped down to this steel bed, his arms and legs stretched outward. He remembered the doctor telling him that everything would be all right, then asking the nurse for a scalpel. He cut right across Xander’s stomach, pulling the skin away and holding it there with metal clamps. He was routinely given drugs to prevent him from blanking out from pain. He could feel the blood slowly pumping out of him, only to be replaced by even more. He felt the doctor pushing organs from side to side, looking for something. His arms and legs had been cut to stop him from struggling against the restraints. He did anyway. That pain was of little consequence in comparison. He turned his head and watched the blood trickle down the side of the table, the metallic buckles on his stirrups glistened in the intense light coming from above. He fought against the straps once more, then gave off a long sigh and gave up.
Suddenly, the doctor pinched something that made his whole body convulse without control. Xander clenched his teeth until the intense pain ceased. He was watching the doctor pull something long and yellow from him when the nurse came over and shone a miniature flashlight into his eyes. She whispered something to him. He was too out of it from anguish to actually hear the words, but the woman’s calm tone soothed him. Until the doctor went back to work.
“Nurse, get away from there,” the doctor said sternly. “Sponge.”
An assistant handed the doctor the requested sponge, which was used to wipe some splattered blood from his brow. The assistant then faded back in the darkness that surrounded the operating table.
New entry. Tests continue. The patient has exhibited the same resistance that his mother used to employ. This slows the testing process and inevitably causes the subject great pain. A most unfortunate waste of time.
Xander cried out in torment once again. The noise was ear splitting, and would have chilled normal men to the marrow. The doctor never so much as flinched. He cut away the last part of the rib cage, his eyes getting wide. “Dear sweet mother of god...” he uttered.
“What?” the nurse reacted in fear. She looked over the doctor’s shoulder and saw what had frightened this cold, hard, emotionless man so much.
Blackness. Where Xander’s appendix should have been, there was instead a cancerous blackness. It didn’t look to be attached to the appendix organ at all, but more like... replacing it. The doctor regained his composure. He had been briefed about all of this, but had never actually expected to find it. Never in his life would he have thought such a thing could exist.
The blackness convulsed in synch with Xander’s pulse, as if it acted as a secondary heart of some kind. It had gray spots which were lumpy, unlike the jet black areas which appeared to be smooth and almost silky.
