Synopsis: The mutilated remains of a teenaged couple and a young female park ranger are discovered in a parking lot of a wilderness area. The park ranger's dash cam on her cruiser recorded her murder in grisly detail, and investigators can't believe what they see....
Advisory: explicit sex and violence
Werewolf Moon
Part 2
by Vorcla
3.
The parking area was alive with emergency vehicles. Ambulances, squad cars, four-wheel drives, even a fire truck, all stood by with blue and red lights blazing beneath the late morning sun. The crime scene had been roped off with bright yellow tape. Technicians with body bags and gurneys waited to take away the corpses after the forensic people finished their preliminary investigation.
Sheriff Jeff Tomlinson, chief of the Winslow Junction Sheriff’s Department, was a seasoned veteran, but this gruesome bloodshed was beyond his experience. He had to look away from the carnage to keep from getting sick. His round baby face was bathed in cold sweat under his mop of brown hair.
Clouds of black flies swarmed over the 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, having lain under the already hot sun for several hours.
Megan Foster – what was left of her - was 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. Her hazel eyes were glazed over with an opaque, milky film. They stared in unseeing horror at the incongruously blue sky.
Tomlinson had met her before. She had been a pretty young woman.
Now her battered face reminded him of raw hamburger.
All that remained of poor little Bethany Jensen's upper body was her mauled head, and a gnawed ribcage and spine. Her buttocks and vagina had also been eaten.
Bobby Martin's gutted corpse was lodged in a tree, and his head lay in the middle of the parking lot. His severed genitals had been found on the blacktop several yards from the car. Tomlinson swallowed hard as he regarded the bloody chasm that had been carved in the boy's body from groin to sternum, and the gaping hole where his manhood should have been. Gazing at that gruesome wound made him feel as if his own testicles were shriveling and trying to crawl up inside his body.
Tomlinson watched as crime scene investigators dispassionately went about their business. Some of them poked and prodded the mutilated bodies, taking samples. Some took pictures. Others were combing every inch of the parking lot and the nearby woods.
“Jesus – what got
at them? A bear?” Tomlinson asked no one in particular.
“Come on, Jeff – 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 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?”
“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 was mopping his brow. Blood from his surgical gloves stained 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 are in the back seat of the Mustang. They must have been fucking when...whatever it was got them.”
He shuddered. “What the hell could have done this?” he asked, echoing the sheriff.
“My God - she was raped."
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.
Brenna Lang was a vision. She was easy to look at, round in all the right places and lean in all the others. A cloud of auburn curls framed startling sea-green eyes in her lovely, heart-shaped face. She wore a red denim shirt opened in front and knotted under her full breasts. Her sleeves were rolled up; her midriff was bare. Cutoff blue jean shorts hugged her smoothly-rounded backside.
Brenna was drop-dead gorgeous - and she knew it. She was also something of a hotshot. She was young - late twenties, probably - and she was trained in all the latest methods and used all of the most advanced equipment. Brenna was very conscientious, and a real go-getter. She was also a little too cocky. Sometimes she was a little too impulsive.
And she rubbed Sam D’Amato the wrong way.
“I’m going to run a sample of this semen through a DNA test when we get back to the lab,” she announced, holding up a swab in a surgically-gloved hand. “I wonder if some psycho 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?”
“I’m not suggesting
anything until I’ve got some evidence! I suggest you do the same.”
“Well, let me see if I can get you some evidence when we get back to the office,” Brenna retorted.
“Over here!” a voice called. “I’ve got something!”
The group rushed over to Ranger Lieutenant Tom Stewart, who was squatting on the grass near one of the parking bumpers. He shook his head.
“It’s a track,” he said. “But look at the
size of it!”
He pointed at the impression in the soft mud.
“Jesus!” Morgan whispered. “It’s a….a wolf track!”
Tomlinson swallowed hard. “A wolf that wears a size sixteen! I take a size 11 medium, and that track’s a good five inches longer than my foot.”
He put his foot next to the gigantic pug mark for comparison. The huge print dwarfed his shoe.
“The tracks lead off into the woods – that way,” Stewart said, pointing. "And this is weird. Look at the spacing. It's bipedal - walking upright on two legs."
Sam D’Amato was sweating even more profusely than before.
“This can’t be real,” he muttered. “It’s a nightmare. That’s it – it’s a nightmare! I’m gonna wake up and none of this will have happened.”
Tomlinson laughed nervously. "A giant wolf walking on two legs? That sounds like a...a
werewolf!"
Morgan shot him a withering glance. "A
werewolf? That's even more conjectural than a mastiff - no offense, Miss Lang."
"None taken, Colonel," Brenna said. “Could it be a fake?”
“Somebody wearing boots or something?” Morgan mused, “Could be, I guess – but these
look real, anyway.”
“Hey, everybody – I’ve got the dash cam fixed!”
Steve Dante was the forensics department’s techno-geek. He was a wizard with anything mechanical. Dante resembled a tall, skinny mulberry bush with a curly black beard and Coke-bottle glasses. Brenna Lang gazed fondly at him. When asked, she would claim that they were just friends. Judging by Dante's goofy, moon-eyed grin, however, he slavishly adored her - much to Sam D’Amato’s chagrin.
“Stevie – can you hook up the dash cam to my laptop?” asked the object of Dante’s affection. “We’ll be able to see things a lot better on my screen.”
“Sure – piece of cake, Bren. This is one of the new ones with a USB port.”
He hooked up a cable to her laptop and set the computer on the passenger seat of the Explorer. He wound the dash cam back to the beginning of its last sequence and hit “play.”
Fifteen minutes later they stared at the horrifying image frozen on the screen, numb and sickened by what they had seen. They were all decidedly green around the gills. Sam D’Amato had gone into the bushes to throw up. He staggered back to rejoin the group, his face chalky.
“My…..God!” Brenna quavered. “It…it raped her….then it tore her apart and ate her!”
“It’s got to be some sick motherfucker in a Halloween costume!” D’Amato bleated, trying to convince himself. “It’s
got to be!”
He turned to Morgan. “Jace!” he whispered, pointing at the screen. “Jace! Tell me that can’t be real!”
Morgan stared at the image of the beast, at the unholy face that was some kind of obscene cross between a man and a demonhound from hell. Its eyes glowed red, like burning coals, and blood dripped from razor-sharp fangs. Icy sweat trickled down his back as he remembered Megan Foster’s piercing, agonized shrieks as the mutant creature raped and slaughtered her.
He would hear those screams for the rest of his life.
“Jace!”
“That’s no Halloween costume, Sam. Whatever that son of a bitch is, it’s
real.”
“Everything was fully functional,” Brenna said. “The fangs and claws………” She shuddered. “They were real. The penis was fully functional, sheathed like a…..like a… wolf’s. Did you see how
big it was?"
Brenna closed her eyes, wondering what horror Megan experienced in those last, agony-filled moments of her life. The violation of her body by that massive, obscene organ….
She thought of Megan's beautiful baby son Brandon and a tear tracked down her soft cheek.
Sam D’Amato lurched away and ran to the edge of the woods, where he promptly vomited again. Jace Morgan charged after him. He spun the forensics chief around and grabbed him by the shirt front.
“Jesus Christ, man, get hold of yourself! What the hell’s the
matter with you? You’ve seen mutilated bodies before!”
D’Amato wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He was trembling.
“It’s not the bodies, Jace, and you know it.”
He pointed to the image of the beast on Brenna’s laptop. “I
defy you to tell me that you weren’t absolutely scared shitless when you watched that thing tear Megan apart. Did you see it? It
enjoyed raping her! It
enjoyed slashing her to pieces and eating her! It’s supposed to be an animal of some kind. Animals don’t rape young women, and animals don’t enjoy killing! It’s a killing machine, and it’s out there somewhere. What the hell is it?”
Morgan closed his eyes.
“I…I don’t know, Sam. I have no idea. Looks like some kind of a mutation, that's for sure.”
“It’s a werewolf.”
Morgan whirled on Tomlinson and glared daggers at him. The sheriff shrugged.
“If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. This thing looks like a werewolf, walks like a werewolf, and howls like a werewolf. I’d call it a werewolf. What would
you call it?”
“Oh, sweet Jesus!” D’Amato cried.
Morgan shook him by the shoulders. “You’re in charge of the forensic investigation! Take charge of it – or turn it over to Brenna!”
Sam D’Amato pushed Morgan's hands off his shoulders. He looked like someone awakening from a nightmare. He nodded, and set his jaw resolutely.
“Bag the bodies and get ‘em down to the lab,” he said in a shaky voice. “Hopefully the autopsies will give us something we can work with.”
Jace Morgan held up a hand. “Nobody breathes a word about this to anybody, not even your families,” he said. “For now it’s classified as an animal attack – nothing more. It's going to be hard enough explaining
that - much less some superstitious claptrap about a
werewolf!"
He scowled pointedly at Tomlinson, but the sheriff ignored him. "We've got to get out of here
now!" Morgan continued. "That thing will probably lay low until it's dark again, but I can't take that chance. I'm going to close the park. It’s off limits to everyone – including all of you – until we track down this….thing and kill it.”
“But we’ve still got a lot to do here!” Brenna protested. “We haven't even followed the tracks. Can’t we….”
Morgan shook his head.
“Too dangerous. Off limits for
everybody. We know what we’re looking for; we can pick up the pieces later. Let the rangers and the sheriff’s department handle it.”
As the bodies were loaded onto the ambulances, Brenna turned to Steve Dante.
“I get off at five,” she said. “The Parker’s Woods trail comes up out of town near the lab and passes within 30 yards of here; I won’t need a car."
She set her jaw stubbornly. "I’m hiking back up here; I'm not finished poking around. We haven't gone looking nearly deep enough into these woods around this pulloff. Want to come along, Stevie?”
Dante shook his head, a mournful expression on his face. “God, I’d love to, Bren. Alone in the woods – with
you? That’s a dream come true! But I’m pulling a double shift. I don’t get off until ten.”
“Can’t wait for you, babe!” she said. “I have to be out of here
long before dark.”
She shivered. "The last thing I want to do is run into that....whatever it is."
“Jesus, Bren, Sam’ll have a cow if he finds out.”
“He won’t find out – right, Stevie?”
“I won’t tell him.” Dante hesitated. “Do you really think that's a good idea? If this thing's running around the woods...."
“I'll be careful.” She kissed him on the cheek. “I always am. Wolves are pretty much nocturnal, if I'm not mistaken. Even if this thing
is some kind of mutant wolf, it probably will lay low until dark. Come on, we’ve got work to do back at the lab.”
"Wish I had my bike," Dante said. "I could cut down the trail and be back there in half the time it'll take by car."
"Yeah - but don't ever expect me to climb up behind you ," Brenna said. "I
hate those things!"
He chuckled. "Your loss, babe!"
They got in Brenna's car and followed the ambulances out of the park.
As he watched the caravan leave the pulloff area, Tomlinson shook his head.
“So what’s the official line, Jace? We tell people there’s a rogue bear or what? Might cause a panic.”
Morgan chuckled. “And telling them there’s a werewolf on the loose
won’t?”
“I see your point.” He frowned. “I’ll put the whole department on emergency duty – every able-bodied man and woman.”
“I’ll do the same with the rangers,” Morgan said. “We’ve got to get the park cleared out and blocked off. And we’re going to need guns – lots of guns. High-powered rifles, the works. We might need to bring in some contract hunters to augment our forces.”
“Might want to get a load of silver bullets, too,” Tomlinson added.
Morgan laughed. When Jeff Tomlinson’s expression didn’t change, the ranger colonel’s smile faded. “You’re not joking. You're really serious about this werewolf shit, aren't you?”
“Yep. I'm dead serious. I’m going into town to Castellini’s Gun Shop and have George make up a couple of cases for me ASAP. After what I saw on Brianna's laptop, I’m not taking any chances.”
He got into his squad car and drove off. Morgan watched him go and shook his head.
“Everybody’s going nuts,” he murmured. “Fill that thing full of enough lead, it’ll go down. Silver bullets!”
He slid behind the wheel of his own squad car and pulled out of the parking area, hoping they could find the beast and put a quick end to this bloody nightmare.
As he drove away, he wondered how he was going to break the news to the kids' parents - and how he was going to tell Pete Foster what happened to his wife....
*****
On the crest of a ridge a quarter mile away, Derek Talbot lowered his binoculars as the ranger’s car pulled away. He had heard every word of the conversations in the parking lot, as if he were standing right there with them. The sheriff would bear watching. Regular bullets wouldn't faze him, but silver bullets
could kill him. It would be a good idea to take the lawman down, and soon.
His cock stiffened as he thought of the pretty forensic investigator..
'So scrumptious little Brenna Lang is going to hike up here all by herself this afternoon,' he thought. 'Maybe I can give her a first-hand look at what she's hunting for – satisfy her curiosity! Of course, what's that old saying - curiosity killed the cat?'
He stood up and stretched, and headed back down the hiking trail that led to his hotel. He was looking forward to a quick shower and some breakfast. He would spend the afternoon lounging by the pool and working on his tan.
Then, about 5 o'clock, it would be time to take a little hike on the Parker's Woods trail..........
TO BE CONTINUED
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