Wendlyn waved away at the stinking smoke, laughing along like a naked blond cheerleader from hell. Rena next bore the flame down on the center of Larry’s flabby chest, straddling him as he bucked horselike in agony better left undescribed. The flame burned down down down, disintegrating flesh and bone alike, opening up a great black smoking pit in which Larry’s heart cooked, then broiled, then collapsed to ash.
So much for Larry.
“Yeah,” Wendlyn remarked, grinning down through the odiferous smoke. “I think that was hot enough for him.”
Wendlyn sauntered nude to the garage, to fetch a dropcloth.
Her big orbicular breasts bounced quite nicely with each step, and her big smile made no secret of her satisfaction. Chalk up another one for womanhood, she thought. One more greedy, lustful, pussy-hungry woman-exploiter for the deep six.
Back in the bedroom, though, she froze.
“What the… fuck?”
The bed lay empty. At first she thought Rena must already have unlocked the corpse, but a closer glance invalidated this suspicion. Each set of handcuffs remained secured to the bed’s brass rails, yet each set was clearly missing its counterpart. In other words, the cuffs had been broken…
And above the lingering smoky stench of fried human flesh, Wendlyn smelled something deeper, more pungent. Like fresh sewage enlaced with something else…
Then she glanced to the left—
Glanced down—
And screamed.
Out of the room’s shadow, Rena lay sprawled in the corner, glassy-eyed in death. Some heinously sharp instrument had lain open her abdomen, and from this gaping insult most of her lower g.i. tract had been yanked out. Shiny pink intestines formed squiggles on the floor, like queer garlands. Kidneys, spleen, and pancreas glistened. Worse, though, was that Rena’s adorable, pointy little breasts were… gone. Bitten off. And the same too for that silk-smooth hairless pubis: gnawed out from betwixt the askew legs.
Beady eyes glinted. From the shadow, the huge angular head lowered as similarly huge jaws spread, baring white teeth the size of masonry nails. Rena’s face was then eaten off the skull as a child might eat the icing off a cupcake.
A cascade of warm amber pee flowed freely down Wendlyn’s plush legs. Her mouth froze open. She couldn’t move. Then the voice croaked, but it was no human voice at all—just a ragged, unearthly suboctave, a succession of rasps, rattling like phlegm.
The voice said this: “You picked the wrong guy to fuck with tonight, baby.”
By now Larry had transformed to near completeness, and this ancient and mystical metamorphosis had fully repaired Rena’s earlier handiwork with the blowtorch. Three lone facts stood before Wendlyn now which, despite their impossibility, she could not deny. One, Larry was alive. Two, he was pissed off. And, three, he was a werewolf.
Wendlyn gulped.
Correction. He was a big werewolf, and in more ways than one. No reckoning would save her now, nor would any defensive action, and certainly no plea. Despite her understandable horror, however, and the paresis from which she could not release herself, the cogent agreement sparkled in her mind. Yes. Yes, you’re right. We definitely picked the wrong guy to fuck with tonight.
So much for counter-exploitation.
The creature rose, the vulpine face grinned. Well-hung as a man, Larry was even bigger as a lycantrope, the evidence of which now bloomed in obviousness, the doglike sheath sliding back showing glinting, shiny pink. Poor Wendlyn easily acknowledged the deduction: Now that Larry had eaten, he was ready to get down to some serious exploitation of his own.
EVER NAT
Gray had seen the girl hitching down the Route several nights in a row. Pure-bred redneck, he could tell, but… Christ, she’s cute. Faded cut-offs, halter-top, sleek bare legs flashing in his headlights as she trod the road’s gravel edge. He’d read in the county section that prostitutes were known to hitch on the Route….
Gray worked in the city: 125k a year now, assistant programming director for UniCorp. Not bad for 40. And switching him to 4-to-12s dropped another ten percent in his pocket as a night differential. The adjustment came easy: fewer people in the office, fewer distractions and ringing phones—more time to work. Gray had no wife anymore and had never really cared about a social life; the way he saw it, work was the only way to make anything of himself. And I have, he thought now. His car, in part, was proof. An onyx-black Callaway Twin Turbo Corvette: sixty grand. A $15,000 VTL/Apogee stereo at home. And home wasn’t shabby either, a three-bedroom luxury condo, waterfront. The good things in life—that’s what he worked for….
But at times like this, during these incalculable drives, he got to wondering. What else is there? Good question after two marriages and two divorces, plus the handful of nickel-dime relationships in between. Women always wanted something, at least it seemed to him. Like I owe them a life in exchange for sex once a week. He’d had it up with the whole ball of wax. I don’t need a woman in my life, he considered, comfortable behind the padded wheel. All I need is me…
But was that really true?
There were other needs.
Four-to-12s had one more perk: no rush hour. Gray left the city at midnight, then took the Route to the interstate. With no traffic, he’d be back to his condo in less than a half hour. State Route 154 was a long winding flood emergency route through the dense woodland of south county. It was a pretty drive, scenic—especially at night, especially during the summer. The low moon followed him through the trees. Crickets and peepers issued their steady, pulsating cacophony, and the stars glimmered like luminous spillage in the sky.
And here she was again. The girl he’d seen hitchhiking several nights in a row. The girl, and that rising need.
Yes, he’d read in the paper that prostitutes often walked the Route, but not like the hookers in the city—they were all drug-addicts, scary in their empty-eyed stares and sleazy getups. These Route girls, he’d heard, were just poor rubes—white trash, for the most part—looking to make a few bucks to take back to their broken farms. And this one here?
Just last night he’d passed her, hadn’t he? She’d been walking just past the bend, and when Gray spotted her, something in his soul seized up. That trampy, hick beauty glared back in the swoosh of halogen highbeams; a freeze-frame locked in his head.
Oh, man…
All slim curves and fine lines. Frayed cutoffs satcheled sleek, spread hips. Pert breasts, large for a girl of her delicate frame, swayed braless in the faded orange halter, and between that and her beltline, Gray lost his breath at the image of her tight, sloping abdomen and the tiny slit of bellybutton. Her face seemed to beam bright as the halogens: big brown eyes; a small, robust mouth; a peaches-and-cream complexion.
Hair the color of mature straw danced at her shoulders.
And all these details, yes, he’d managed to assess in the split-second glimpse as his Corvette rounded the bend. But one more detail nicked at him, more persistent than the others, and the detail was this: Her tanned arm extended, her thumb out.