An Explorer — a Park Ranger’s vehicle. The big 4-wheel drive rolled to a stop next to the Mustang. The ranger got out. She was a beautiful young brunette who filled out her uniform quite nicely. She frowned at the sight of the Mustang.
The beast’s cock hardened again at the sight of the lissome female. He gathered his legs, ready to pounce….
Lieutenant Megan Foster of the Winslow Junction State Wilderness Area Park Rangers shook her head.
Bobby Martin’s Mustang. It was probably the most well-known car in the small town of Winslow Junction.
‘Looks like Bobby got lucky tonight,’ she thought.
Megan wanted desperately to go home, but she had six more hours left on her shift. Her breasts were sore and swollen and felt as if they would burst; she was full of milk. She hadn’t had time to pump them before she left for work.
She hoped Brandon, her infant son, was plenty hungry tonight!
“Kids!” she muttered. “Probably out in the woods screwing! Serve ’em right if a grizzly came along.”
She cleared her throat.
“Bobby! This is Lieutenant Megan Foster with the park rangers. It’s illegal to get some nookie in a State Wilderness Area. You and your little girlfriend better come out of the woods now with your clothes intact. If you do, we’ll forget all about this and you can drive out. Besides, it can be dangerous in these woods at night.”
Then her flashlight played over the sea of blood in the back seat of the Mustang and she gasped.
She saw Bobby’s severed head lying face up in the parking lot, and she went white.
“Ohmigod! Ohmigod! Ohmigod!”
Something was dripping steadily on the rim of her Smokey Bear hat.
Rain? No, it was red.
Blood!
She gazed around wildly, her head whipping from side to side. She caught a glimpse of Bobby’s corpse hanging in the tree, and then her frantic gaze fell on Bethany’s pitiful, eviscerated remains, which looked like a deer that had been run over by a dozen tractor-trailer trucks.
She gagged and retched.
She wiped her streaming eyes, hyperventilating, and reached for her shoulder radio with trembling fingers.
With an elemental roar, the werewolf leaped from the brush and landed at her feet. Megan shrieked in abject terror and wet her pants. Her radio went flying, and she clawed for her pistol.
As she pointed the weapon at the werewolf, he lashed out and tore off her arm at the shoulder. The severed limb flew into the woods, trailing a stream of crimson, and six foot jets of blood spurted from the stump.
Megan Foster screamed mindlessly. She staggered backwards, stumbling to the Explorer. Somehow, despite her agony, she managed to open the driver’s side door. She sank back against the seat. Deep shock was clawing at her consciousness.
She was bleeding to death! She had to get help.
As she awkwardly fumbled across her body with her left arm for the car radio’s microphone, the werewolf plunged a powerful fist through the windshield. He grabbed the screaming young woman by her throat and viciously yanked her out of the vehicle through the windshield in a shower of broken glass. He slammed her down on the hood. Shards of glass were buried in her bloody face, scalp, and neck. There were slivers imbedded in her eyes. Her blood was everywhere.
As Megan lay on the hood, moaning in agony, deadly talons slashed and tore until they had ripped away the last scraps of her bloody, sodden ranger’s uniform and undergarments, leaving her naked and covered with gory claw marks.
The werewolf gripped her ankles, spread her legs wide and, without preamble, plunged his huge organ into the dying woman, forcibly opening her womb. Megan jerked and screamed as he violated her. She piteously begged for mercy.
After punishing her for several long minutes, the werewolf arched his back and climaxed with a howl.
The werewolf gazed down at his dying prey.
Megan Foster was trembling, cold and clammy and fading in and out of consciousness as the last of her lifeblood drained away. Her bloody breasts were swollen, and milk dribbled from her nipples. The livid pink scar of a recent Caesarean section stitched across her belly.
A new mama.
Her eyes flickered open. She saw the beast glaring at her with glowing red eyes.
“P… p.. please…” she sobbed. “Get… me to a h-hospital. My…. baby b-boy’s… only five m-months old. He… needs… me…”
The werewolf bared his fangs in a feral grin.
Then slowly, sadistically, he traced the Caesarean scar with a long, sharp claw, slicing Megan open and gutting her as she shrieked. With a vicious tug, he yanked her intestines from her belly. He lowered his muzzle and cropped her huge left breast from her body and gobbled it down.
Megan’s pitiful cry ended in a gurgling death rattle. Even though she was already dead, the beast tore out her throat for good measure.
Then, for the second time that night, a howl of triumph echoed through the thick woodlands of Winslow Junction State Forest, announcing another kill.
The beast turned his attention to the fresh carcass, eating ravenously. Blood streamed over the hood of the Explorer in glistening red torrents.
And somewhere in the nearby town, a man and his baby son would wait in vain for the return of a young mother.
3.
Sheriff Quint Tomlinson, chief of the Winslow Junction Sheriff’s Department, was a seasoned veteran, but this gruesome bloodshed was beyond his ken. He had to look away to keep from getting sick. His round, baby face was bathed in sweat under his mop of brown hair — and not from the heat.
Clouds of black flies swarmed over her mangled remains of the three victims in the pulloff. Overhead, an ever-increasing flock of vultures wheeled and circled. The corpses were bloated and stinking pretty badly, having lain under the hot morning sun for several hours.
Megan Foster — what was left of her, anyway – sprawled spread-legged on the hood of the battered Explorer. Someone had retrieved her severed arm — still gripping her pistol — and had laid it near her head. Her breasts were gone, as was most of her stomach.
Tomlinson had met her before. She had been a pretty young woman.
Now her smashed face reminded him of raw hamburger.
And poor little Bethany Jensen. All that remained of her upper body was her slashed head, and a gnawed ribcage and spine.
Her buttocks and vagina had also been eaten.
Not to mention Bobby Martin. His decapitated corpse was lodged in a tree, and his head lay in the middle of the parking lot.
Tomlinson watched as forensics people dispassionately went about their business. Some of them poked and prodded the mutilated bodies, taking samples. Others were sweeping every inch of the parking lot and the nearby woods.
“Jesus God in Heaven — what got at them? A bear?” Tomlinson asked no one in particular.
“Come on, Quint — you know damned well no bear did this.”
Tomlinson turned to face his old friend Colonel Jace Morgan, chief of the Winslow Junction Wilderness Area Rangers. Morgan’s rangers called him a “poor man’s Clint Eastwood.” The resemblance was uncanny. Right now, his lean, weathered face was taut with grief and barely repressed rage. He squinted at Megan’s mangled remains.
“Then you tell me, Jace — if a bear didn’t do this, then what in Hell did?” Tomlinson demanded.
“I don’t know,” Morgan drawled softly. “This is like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
“That’s not very encouraging, gentlemen,” a beefy, middle-aged man said, mopping his brow. Blood from his surgical gloves soaked into his kerchief.
Sam D’Amato was the Chief of Forensics with the Winslow Junction Sheriff’s Department. He could have been a Roman Emperor in a sword-and-sandals movie from the ’50’s. He was short, chubby, with a florid face and a thatch of receding gray ringlets that looked as if they had been airlifted onto his head.
All he needed to complete the ensemble was a toga and a laurel wreath.
“This is ugly,” D’Amato muttered. “Ugly, ugly, ugly. The kids’ clothes were in the back seat of the Mustang. They must have been screwing when… it got them.”
He shuddered.
“What the Hell could have done this?” he asked, echoing the sheriff.
“God — there’re about two liters of semen inside her!”
The young woman who had been examining Megan Foster’s remains stood up, wrinkling her nose.
Tomlinson couldn’t help staring appreciatively, grateful for the opportunity to forget the gory tableau for a moment.
Brianna Lang was a vision. She was easy to look at, and round in all the right places. A cloud of auburn curls framed startling sea-green eyes in her lovely face. She wore a red denim shirt with rolled-up sleeves knotted under her full breasts. Her midriff was bare. Cutoff blue jean shorts hugged her smoothly-rounded backside.
She could easily have been a model.
But Brianna wasn’t a model; she was a forensics investigator. At twenty-two, she was fresh out of college, trained in all the latest methods, using all the most advanced equipment. She was very conscientious, a real go-getter.
And she rubbed Sam D’Amato the wrong way.
“I’m going to run a sample and feed it into my laptop,” she announced, holding up a syringe. “I wonder if some sicko did this and then sicced a mastiff on her — or, even worse, did it after the mastiff tore her up?”
“Little Miss CSI: New York,” Sam muttered under his breath. He raised his voice. “You’re jumping to conclusions again, Miss Lang!”
“Surely you’re not suggesting the animal that mauled her also sexually assaulted her, Mr. D’Amato?” she asked.
“I’m not suggesting anything until I’ve got some evidence,” Sam growled. “I suggest you do the same.”
“Well, let me see if I can get you some evidence,” Brianna retorted.
She had a high-powered microscope and a laptop set up in her car. She put a droplet of the semen on a slide, focused on it, and gasped aloud.
“My…. God!” she murmured. “What the Hell is this?” Curious despite himself, Sam hurried over to her car. Brianna got up to let him use the scope.
“Look at that, Mr. D’Amato!” she exclaimed. “It’s got to be some kind of mutation.”
“Great Christ!” Sam sputtered. He blinked, and looked again. “I’ve never seen anything like that!”
He turned to Brianna.
“Get that fed into your computer, Brianna,” he said. “See if you can match it up with…. well, anything!”
“Okay — would somebody like to enlighten us laymen?” Morgan asked in irritation.
The two forensics people ignored him as Brianna patched in a cable from the microscope to her laptop.
“Sam!”
Exasperated, Sam D’Amato glanced over his shoulder. “This jism is…..”
His voice trailed off.
“I dunno what it is. It looks like Human semen, but it’s….. not. I don’t know — like she said, maybe a mutation.”
“What in Hell does that mean?” Quint Tomlinson exploded. “You sound like you’re talking about an alien — or a monster or something.”
Sam looked down. “Maybe I am,” he whispered. “Or something. I don’t know exactly what I’m talking about just yet, Quint.”
Brianna’s computer hummed for a long time, the microscope’s image of the semen sample glowing on the screen. Finally a dialog box opened up.
“Unable to find a match,” she said, frustrated. She typed in a new command.
‘Find closest matches.’
Her laptop whirred and chuckled again. Finally the screen displayed images of two slide samples next to the one Brianna had taken from Megan Foster’s vagina.
“Ohmigod,” she whispered.
“This is not what I wanted to see,” D’Amato muttered.