SMACK!
The chuck of wood that Raine had swung at Xander from the darkness came around again, this time planting itself into his jaw. He felt splinters make their way into his mouth and gums as his neck twisted and nearly snapped, the muscle tendons in his shoulders straining then breaking. “Guh,” he said simply, forcing his aching skull back around just in time to see the wood get pushed forward again, catching him head-on between the eyes. He fell backward, but Allan caught him before he could hit the ground, the boy’s limp body as heavy as a sack of potatoes in his thin arms.
Raine chuckled softly as he looked down at Xander, coppery blood that seemed just a bit too orange (but about as far from black as a colour could get) leaking from the boy’s mouth and ears, which were already starting to swell. “Hey, lookit man,” he laughed, pointing at the battered teen. “It’s that Xander Drew freak!”
Allan careened his head around to look in the bloodied face. “Yeah, so it is. Little punk,” he giggled, and he sounded more than a little nuts. He was probably just high, though. “We should make him wear his ass as a hat,” he laughed again, and that time Raine chuckled too.
Come on, Xander thought, fighting unconsciousness as more blood dripped from the growing crack in the roof of his mouth down onto his tongue. You can do this, Drew. Just think of... of... but all he could think of was that metallic-tasting liquid that was pooling in all of his facial orifices. Sara! he realized suddenly, and he felt the true Womb twitch a little. Think of Sara. Concentrate on her, he thought, coaxing his ‘other side’ out of its shell. Think of her, lying there in that coffin... he continued, tears welling up from the memories and the pain.
“Look, he’s crying,” Allan said with mock sympathy. “Poor baby.”
Julie, lying in an alleyway across from her bedroom window, that smile ruined, trying to find enough shards of clothing to get her home without her perv neighbors catching too much skin... Still, the Womb just fizzed. It was like trying to start a cold engine in the dead of winter. In Antarctica. It just wasn’t happening, a fact that slowly grew in the back of his mind as he watched the red liquid from his nose seep into the soaking-wet plywood flooring.
I can’t transform, he realized, just as the wood again jabbed at him, catching him square in the left eye and knocking him back, his brain beating around inside his head until it stopped making noise. Stopped thinking.
Allan kicked him, laughing as the comatose boy’s body tossed and turned under the pressure. Then Raine joined in. As Mike watched from a window in horror, they beat Xander’s chest in until he thought it was going to cave his rib cage onto his lungs. They slammed their heels against his face and his crotch, laughing heartily at the wet snap of flesh being loosened from bone. Then Raine pulled something from his pocket and showed it to Allan. They both smiled and walked out the back door, and left Xander for dead.
Mike opened the front door and hurried in. He leaned down into Xander’s face, his own wrought with terror. He slapped him on the cheek to wake him, and was horrified when the impact made blood shoot up from his lips like a geyser.
He grabbed him by the arms and started hauling him out of the house, using all the strength he could muster to command the dead weight.
It was dark.
He knew that much, but everything else was more than a little fuzzy. He couldn’t remember anything much outside of ‘pain’ and, of course, ‘it was dark.’ So, all said, he didn’t know very much about what was happening.
In the distance, there was an odd humming. He recognized the tune, his mother used to sing it to him when he was little. When he was a baby. God, that seemed like such a long time ago now. What must it have been like for her? Little mama Drew holding her baby against her nipple, never thinking that this would be how her son would die. Alone in some dingy burned-out house, blood coming out of every hole in his body, ending up being a waste of time for everyone around him.
Then again, it wasn’t that surprising.
“Oh, stop whining!” came a voice from out in the darkness. It was thick and raspy, and it spoke with an ill demeanor. The person speaking didn’t want Xander to stop complaining. He wanted him to keep going so that they’d have an excuse to beat him down more than he already was.
Xander groaned, rolled over onto his gut and took a look around, struggling to prop himself up. Blood gushed from his lip, black and oozing, dripping into the darkness where he lost sight of it. “Where am I?” he called out, the echo of each word returning to him before he had even finished it. He barely recognized his own voice; it was like he was underwater.
The person humming stopped long enough to chuckle-- more like a cackle, really. It seemed like a contradiction to their... no, her voice. It was so evil now, laughing at him as he stared out into the world blindly. It had been so gentle only a moment ago. Soft and warm on the breeze, wrapping around him like a blanket. The humming had started again now, and it reminded him of lying on his back on a grassy knoll not far from his house, with Sara only a few feet away. Looking up at the sky and picking shapes out of the clouds. The way the wind used to whistle in
