“Engen.com. Huh.”
“What is it?” Mike demanded. They had been waiting for a background check on the web site for several hours, and the exhaustion had long since started to fray at him. It was all he could do not to think about the events of the previous night. “What have you found?”
“Nothing,” Tim answered, turning his screen a little. “It’s just someone’s home page. Aside from the animation, it’s a poorly done home page. There’s nothing unusual here.”
Mike sighed, then turned the computer screen so that he could see. The Engen symbol danced around the window to the tune of Minority by Green Day. He examined it carefully, and after a second, he noticed something in the corner. “What’s that?”
“What?” Cathy and Tim said simultaneously, each shifting a little in their seats.
“That spider symbol in the corner,” he said, even as he clicked on it. Automatically, a single message came up onto the screen: Black Womb Lives.
“That’s it? That’s what you have to tell me?” Tim growled, as much at the web site as at Mike.
“Black Womb. That was written on the wall where Jamie...” Mike stopped, looking at the floor. “Where the first murder took place.”
Tim frowned reluctantly. “There could be something, I guess. But it doesn’t give us any leads.”
Cathy sighed, turning his laptop toward her so that she could finally get a look, mouthing the words ‘Black Womb lives’ to herself over and over again.
“We’ve got nothing,” Mike agreed, clenching his fist and almost punching the wall, stopping himself right before he did so.
“Like I said,” Tim agreed, motioning in his direction.
Cathy frowned. “You said... the Jacobies adopted kids... right?”
“Yes,” Tim answered, rubbing the bridge of his nose while he mentally calculated the hours he had gone without sleep.
She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Then... is there any way to find out where these kids are now? Or where they were adopted from?”
Mike and Tim exchanged a look.
Tim leaned forward and opened up a web browser, typing in his user ID quickly. After only a moment of looking, he responded to her query. “I can’t find out who they adopted... there’s just no record... but they were all adopted from the same place. A little convent upstate.”
“That’s where Xander was adopted from,” Mike said, leaning in and squinting at the screen. “And me.”
Cathy rolled that around in her head for a minute. “Who are Xander’s birth parents?”
Again, Tim typed for a moment. “No record.”
“How does that happen? Is it just, like, a drop the baby on the doorstep kinda deal?”
Tim’s eyes went large as he realized what she was getting at. “Yes. It would be something just like that, actually.”
“So... what’s to stop us from going to that place and just looking for a big building with Engen stamped across it?” Mike said, giving a nod to his girl.
Tim paused, taking a long look at each of them, trying to gauge how serious they actually were. He got up and grabbed his coat.
“Interesting. Most interesting indeed,” the man on the intercom said, as he observed Xander getting shocked by the electrified bars of his cell. He brought an oxygen mask to his face and sucked back air, steadying his voice before he pressed the intercom’s ‘On’ switch so that Xander could hear him.
“Welcome home, Subject 08276,” he said in an overly dramatic voice. “You probably don’t remember, but this cell was once the home of you and your dear mother.”
“My mother?” Xander gasped, smoke rising up from his back.
There was a slight pause on the intercom. Suddenly, the rough voice returned. “Welcome home, 08276. Welcome home, Black Womb.”
The intercom switched off, leaving Xander with more questions than answers. He rose up and looked down at himself, taking note of several red stains on the paper gown he was clothed in. He looked around his cell. It was exceedingly simplistic in its nature, with three concrete walls that obviously held wiring for the electrical steel bars that covered his exit. The floor and ceiling were both metal. The room itself was only about five meters cubed, with no furniture or plumbing.
He stared at the bars.
He stared at them until they went from being solid lines dissecting his vision to watery, unfocussed slashes. There was an ache building in the centre of his chest the more he looked at them. They filled him with an anxiety that dispelled all rational thought, until for a moment all he could think was: the bars.
He sniffed back hard and forced his eyes to refocus. Slowly, thought returned to him.
But the anxiety remained, no matter how much he tried to bury it.
Electrified bars needed to be hollow to have wiring inside of them and to better conduct electricity, he recalled. So the only real problem was getting past the electricity. Xander frowned.
“Genius, man. Genius,” he mumbled to himself.
Still, he searched his brain for something, anything he could use. Finding nothing, he walked over to the bars. Touching one lightly with his index finger, he pulled it away immediately as the electricity coursed through his fingertips. He touched another bar with the same result, then pulled back and stroked his chin.
He poked at the bar at the top, near the ceiling. There was still a shock, but it wasn’t as potent. If there was a place to short it out, it’d be there. There was still the problem of what to do with this knowledge. He sat down on the metal floor.
“Ow!” he yelped, jumping to his feet. Something had poked at him. He examined the floor and found nothing, then reached around to his back and smiled.
Safety pins.
He pulled the top one out of the back
