“Black Womb lives.”
Spider looked onward at the Black Womb in awe. She smiled, licking her lips. “Now I think I see what he sees in you.”
She jumped at him. This time, he was the one to jump over her swing.
Her face twisted angrily as he jumped so high that he landed on a stack of crates. Doing a flip off of them, he propelled himself toward Spider and kicked her in the face.
She sprawled backward, slipped on the formaldehyde that had spilled on the floor, then turned and looked at him with hatred burning in her slanted eyes.
He was crouching across the hall, staring at her. He slowly reached over and grabbed a large chunk of wood from the shattered crate.
As Spider got up, he tackled her, sending them both flying through wood and glass. He raised the wooden stake high above his head, prepared to bring it down onto Spider. She caught it between her hands an inch in front of her face. Pushing the wood backward abruptly, she smacked Black Womb in the face with it. He took a step backward, then regained himself. He looked at her, her face a mess of small cuts and her ponytail now ragged. She wiped a spot of blood from the side of her face, then smeared it onto her blade.
She got up and swiftly threw the blade at Black Womb, who tried to jump out of the way, but was too slow.
The blade sliced through the corner of his side and his face distorted from pain. Claws protruded from each fingertip and he started whipping at the air around Spider wildly with them. She jumped high into the air, coming down onto his shoulders. He got up and turned to her, then picked up her sword and prepared to lunge at her when a burst of blue electricity ripped through his spinal column. He slammed to the floor and Genblade loomed over him, continuously stinging at him with his taser.
“That’s enough playing around, Spider. The master requests an audience with our dear old friend, 08276 here.”
They both laughed. Spider walked up to Genblade, kissing him passionately on the lips. She put her arms around him, then quickly snatched the taser away.
“But I want to play,” she said with a pouting child’s voice. She dug the taser into Xander’s back and turned it on. His eyes lit up with blue.
Her smile widened.
“Okay,” Tim sighed, shuffling through a pile of papers. “We have about five hundred references to something called the Black Womb in all of these files, but the first two hundred and fifty contradict the last two hundred and fifty.”
He buried his head in his arms and tossed his glasses onto the table in front of him.
“Alright, but there is one continued reference,” Cathy noted, staring down at her own stack of papers.
“There is?” Mike said, leaning over her shoulder, giving her a little kiss on the cheek.
“What?” Tim asked, getting up from his chair.
“A date,” she said thoughtfully. “March 7th... fifteen years ago.”
They all looked puzzled for a moment.
“Hey,” Mike said, his eyes brightening. “That’d be around the time Xander was born.”
“Quick,” Tim said, walking over to her. “What document was that from?”
“Um... something called Alpha Quadrant up near the Canadian border,” she replied.
“And about six miles from where the orphanage was,” Mike murmured, stroking his top lip with his index finger.
“Alright then,” Tim smirked, heading for the door.
Floating. He felt like he was floating. That was the first thing that Xander thought when he woke up. Every inch of his body ached. He tried to move, but pain shot up and down his spine, making him wish that he were dead. He struggled to open his eyes and when he did the light shone at him, bright and burning.
“Hi, lover,” came Spider’s voice, her evil cackle echoing through the stone walls.
The light was lowered and he could see Spider and Genblade looming over him, smiling. There was someone else too...
“AAAARRRGHH!” he shouted, as pain shot through his body.
“A reminder,” Genblade said coldly. “Don’t try and escape. Those electrical currents will eventually kill you.” His teeth showed as his smile grew. They were pointed, each one sharpened to a razor’s edge.
Xander’s body went limp. He was covered in a thin layer of blood again, his head splitting from repeated blows. He could feel blood pumping out of his ears and down the side of his neck.
Spider reached out and took some of it onto her finger.
“Fear is so much more interesting an emotion than hope, isn’t it, Adam?” she said as she put the bloodied finger into her mouth. “Tastier too.”
Xander felt like throwing up. The mixture of a blood filled stomach and what she had just done causing him to have to fight back the urging of his gut.
“You look just like your mother, my child,” came a voice from the darkness. It was the exact same voice that had come over the intercom before. Thick, raspy, and nearly hushed to the point of a whisper. “She fought us too, you know. But from her, we learned. Taking people from the outside leaves them with a sense of resistance. They long for the relationships, friends and lovers that the outside world brings. After your mother’s death, we decided to scrap all those projects and start anew.”
Xander squinted his eyes, trying to penetrate the darkness. “Who are you?”
He laughed, then let out a wracking cough. It chilled Xander to the bone. “Soon son, soon. Now, as I was saying, we learned a lot from your mother’s escape. When we won
