A pair of owls hooted a call-and-response to each other back in the pines. The shadows were lengthening; it was getting dark up here, and the denizens of the night were taking over.
Jace Morgan gripped his shotgun tightly, nervously glancing around the forest. He’d been coming up here since he’d been a little kid; he knew every rock, every tree in these woods, as if they were part of his backyard.
Now, however, he felt as if he were marooned on a deadly alien planet.
Somewhere out there lurked a murderous beast that had savagely killed six people in less than twenty four hours.
“Colonel Morgan? We’re about finished here.”
Morgan nearly heaved a sigh of relief. He turned to face the plump young woman who was leading the gruesome task of gathering up the gory, scattered remains of Brianna Lang’s dismembered body. Julie Hinton’s dark hair was plastered to her head, and her glasses were fogged from the humidity. Her surgical gloves and green lab smock were drenched with blood. The anguished expression of grief on her face was heart wrenching. Morgan could understand. This wasn’t just the corpse of a Jane Doe; this was their friend.
Spotlights raked the bloodstained mud at the edge of the lake, and Julie nodded.
“I think we’ve got it all,” she said. “I just didn’t….”
Her voice broke.
“I just didn’t want to leave anything for the scavengers,” she finished.
Two technicians lugged the bloodstained body bag containing Brianna’s pitiful remains away from the edge of the water. Morgan realized he had been in a combat crouch. He relaxed and straightened up.
Steve Dante lay heavily sedated on a stretcher. He appeared to be almost catatonic. His eyes were open, unblinking, staring at the purple sky. Behind him, Sam D’Amato sat on a stump. He was devastated, exhausted; tears streamed down his face. His team was spread thin. Half his people were mopping up at the sheriff’s house, and the rest were up here.
And they had lost one of their own.
“I never t-told Brianna what a good…. job she did, Jace,” he managed, his lower lip trembling. “She was the best. Never told her. She was young and ambitious, and I guess I felt threatened by her. Now….. I c-can’t… tell her…”
Morgan gripped D’Amato’s shoulder. “Sam — why don’t you head on home? You’ve had enough for one day.”
The ranger commander flagged down a paramedic. “Can you get him a sedative, too?” he asked, indicating the weeping D’Amato. The EMT nodded. He pulled a syringe from his bag as he knelt down next to the forensic chief and quickly injected him. Then he helped D’Amato to his feet.
“C’mon, Sam,” the paramedic said, glancing apprehensively around the clearing. “Everybody’s leaving. This place gives me the creeps.”
Morgan stepped aside as Dante was carried out, and he watched as D’Amato shuffled by, leaning heavily on the EMT. “Never told her….” he muttered.
One by one the rangers and deputies filed out, bringing up the rear of the procession. Acting Sheriff Clay Palmer fell in step alongside Morgan.
“No keepin’ a lid on this now, Jace,” Palmer drawled.
“Wasn’t trying to,” Morgan returned. “I was hoping we’d be able to kill the son of a bitch and be done with it. Christ, Clay, what the hell is it? It’s almost like it can think!”
“Mebbe it can.”
Morgan stopped and spun Palmer around. “C’mon, Clay — don’t tell me you believe this werewolf bullshit too?”
Palmer’s eyes narrowed. “I’m open to suggestions. Why kill the sheriff? Why kill Brianna? Both of them were investigating the killings. I think it wanted to kill them; I can’t believe the murders were random. Susie — now she was random. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Morgan sighed. “Clay, I want to believe that this thing is just an animal — some kind of mutant, probably, but just a very wily animal. Now I’m not so sure.”
“What was it Shakespeare said — ‘There are stranger things in heaven and on Earth, Horatio, then were ever dreamed of in your philosophy?'”
“I didn’t know you were into Shakespeare, Clay.”
Palmer chuckled. “That was my cousin, Charlie Shakespeare, who said that. I’m just sayin’ we shouldn’t necessarily rule out any explanation, no matter how far fetched.”
Morgan drew in a breath. “I don’t know…”
Suddenly there was a crashing in the brush off to their right. Morgan and Palmer whirled around, bringing their shotguns to bear as a large, tawny shape charged from the undergrowth.
The deer froze on the trail, staring at the two men. Then it bounded away, back in the direction from which it had come.
Neither man said a word for several minutes. Then Palmer let out an explosive breath.
“This is gettin’ to me,” he murmured. “I almost iced Bambi.”
“This place is never gonna be the same for me again,” Morgan grated. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They hurried to catch up to the others, grateful for the security they felt in numbers.
*****
It was getting dark, but there was still time – time to get what she wanted.
Judy Rifkin moaned with pleasure. The sound was muffled by the thick cock that filled her mouth and slid halfway down her throat. Chad Brecker was everything she’d hoped for and more. He had a perfect body and was hung like a horse.
And he knew how to eat pussy better than any boy she had ever been with.
Judy squealed as his tongue found a particularly sensitive spot. Chad raised his head and grinned, wiping her pussy juices off his face with the back of a hand.
“Girls with hairy cunts turn me on!” he exclaimed.
She smiled around the shaft of his huge penis. Judy was a “natural” girl; she didn’t believe in shaving, and her thick black tangle of pubic hair grew halfway up to her navel and strayed over her inner thighs.
She released his cock, and he moaned in frustration.
“Fuck my big tits!” Judy hissed. “I want you to come all over my tits!”
Chad was only too happy to oblige. He slid his wet, glistening cock into the valley between her huge mounds of flesh. He moved like a wild man, sliding over her soft, warm skin.
When he was about to finish, her mouth darted up and took him in suddenly. He came; she swallowed some, then pulled out his cock and pumped it, spraying semen all over her face, hair, and breasts.
Judy’s nerves were on fire. She sucked him voraciously, and he was hard again in no time. She still smiled, though, as he turned her on her stomach, and she raised up on all fours. He easily slid into her wet, dripping cunt and began to pump furiously.
Judy was beside herself with lust. He was going forever! God, he had staying power!
Chad pulled out suddenly. He pushed her face-first into the beach towel, expecting protests or cries. He got neither.
“That’s it baby; now you’re cooking! Take me up the ass… go all the way in one shot! Shove it all the way up my shithole!”
It quickly became obvious to Chad that Judy had done anal on more than one occasion. In fact, her cunt was tighter than her asshole. Still, the sensation was pleasurable, and before long he came all over her fleshy ass cheeks.
Judy stood up shakily and kissed him.
“We’d better get back before we’re missed,” she whispered. “I’ll never hear the end of it. Let me find my bikini.”
She walked a few steps forward and stepped into something cold, wet and slimy.
“Shit!” she growled. “What the hell was that?”
She glanced down; there was just enough light in the glade to see by.
The horribly mutilated and partially dismembered, naked body of a young girl lay in a pool of blood in the weeds. Her guts were strewn everywhere, and her left breast had nearly been bitten off.
Judy had stepped into the gory wound that had once been her stomach.
It was Janice…
Judy screamed at the top of her lungs; when she tried to pull her foot out of Janice’s stomach cavity, she tripped and fell on top of her dead friend.
She scrambled to her feet, coated with blood and gore and semen, and ran down the trail toward the hotel, shrieking mindlessly.
*****
Derek Talbot crouched on a thick limb of an oak tree, obscured by a curtain of leaves. It was a forty foot drop into the outdoor bath house of the Hotel Royale’s swimming pool — a piece of cake for a werewolf, even in human form. It was an easy — but attention-getting — jump to the ground.
It wasn’t every day a naked man dropped from a tree limb and landed on his feet.
Talbot shifted over, leaned his back against the trunk and yawned. He had to rest. The afternoon’s activities had taken a lot out of him. He’d made the bitch Brianna Lang pay for shooting him, but he was paying for it now. He would need to sleep, and soon.
If he could ever get back to his room.
He was contemplating what his next move should be when piercing screams rang out from the darkening forest behind the pool area.
“Ohmigod! It’s Janice — she’s dead! Something tore her apart!”
The raven-haired ‘Bikini Bimbo’ — Judy? – was running down the trail from the woods, naked as the day she was born. She was covered with blood – not her own – and there was semen all over her face, breasts, and stomach. A blond Adonis of a lifeguard followed after her, still shrugging into his swim trunks. His thick penis was glazed with a slimy mixture of jism and cunt juice.
All eyes were on Judy and her provocatively-bouncing naked breasts.
“I tripped over her!” Judy shrieked. “She’s dead!”
“Thank you, Judy,” Talbot breathed. He dropped to the ground and landed easily on the balls of his feet. No one was in the bath house now, so he showered and grabbed a towel, which he wrapped around his waist. He casually left the bath house, which was now unattended, and headed for the elevator that would take him to the second floor of the hotel. Everyone had run up into the forest; his preternaturally keen hearing picked up the sound of a woman screaming, and then retching. A man’s voice, edged with hysteria, shouted, “Jesus – what could have done that to her? Somebody call the cops!”
Talbot rode the elevator to his floor. He was exhausted now, the adrenaline rush of his hunting and killing having deserted him. He punched the keypad code to get into his room, and he pulled on a pair of briefs, running shorts and a tee shirt before he collapsed on the bed. He winced. His chest felt as though a herd of horses had trampled over him where he had been shot, and it hurt to breathe. He realized he was still healing.
Soon the full moon would rise, and he would be forced to hunt again. He would need to sleep now to withstand the rigors of the Change when that time came.
His heavy-lidded eyes drooped shut, and, within minutes, he was snoring lightly.