Werewolf Moon

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.

Jace Morgan leaned over Sam's shoulder and peered at the screen. The legends under the two slides read, "Homo Sapiens" and "Canis Lupus Lupus." Morgan couldn't speak for several long seconds, and when he finally did, his voice sounded strangled.

"Sam -- you sayin' whatever did this was part Human and part wolf?"

"I'm not saying anything!" D'Amato exploded. "Assuming it's working correctly, the computer is saying that Miss Lang's sample has characteristics of both Human and wolf semen."

"Yeah -- part Human and part wolf!" Morgan gritted.

Tomlinson laughed nervously.

"That sounds like a werewolf!"

"Bullshit!" D'Amato roared. "That's more conjectural than Brianna's mastiff! Hell, why not blame it on Bigfoot?""

Brianna Lang, meanwhile, had pricked her finger and smeared a droplet of blood on a slide.

"What're you doing?" Moran queried.

"Introducing a control sample."

She focused her microscope and fed the image to her computer. Almost immediately, the laptop identified the slide as a human blood sample.

"Damn!" Brianna said softly. "I was hoping we had an equipment glitch. Still, we should feed this into our computers back at the office to make sure."

"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.

"My God!" 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.

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."

"Could it be a fake?" Brianna asked.

"Somebody wearing boots or something?" Morgan mused, "Could be, I guess -- but these look real."

"Hey, you guys -- 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.

And he adored Brianna Lang, 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, Bree. 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 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!" Brianna quavered. "It...it raped her....then it tore her apart and ate her!"

"It's got to be some sick psycho in a Halloween costume!" D'Amato bleated, near hysteria. "It's got to be!"

He turned to Morgan, a note of desperate pleading in his voice.

"Jace!" he whimpered, pointing at the screen. "Jace! Please 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 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 creature raped and slaughtered her.

He would hear those screams for the rest of his life.

"Jace!"

"That's no Halloween costume, Sam," Morgan drawled. "Whatever that son of a bitch is, it's real."

"Everything was fully functional," Brianna said. "The fangs and claws........."

She shuddered.

"They were real. The penis was fully functional, sheathed like a.....like a... wolf's. It looked like it was a foot and a half long."

Brianna closed her eyes, wondering what Megan experienced in those last, painful moments of her life. The violation of her body by that obscene organ....

Sam D'Amato lurched away and ran to the edge of the woods, where he promptly vomited.

With a snarl, Jace Morgan charged after him. He spun D'Amato around and grabbed him by the shirt front.

"Jesus Christ, man, get hold of yourself!" Morgan raged. "You're the chief of forensics! What the Hell's the matter with you? You've seen mauled bodies before!"

D'Amato wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He was trembling in terror.

"It's not the bodies, Jace, and you know it." He pointed to the image of the beast on Brianna'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 death 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, a monster, and it's around here loose somewhere. What the Hell is it?"

Morgan closed his eyes.

"I...I don't know, Sam."

"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. I'd call it a werewolf." He paused. "There was a full moon last night, too."

"Oh, sweet Jesus!" D'Amato cried.

Morgan backhanded him across the face.

"You're in charge of the forensics investigation!" he hissed. "Take charge of it -- or turn it over to Brianna!"

Sam D'Amato held his hand against his red, stinging cheek. 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."

Morgan held up a hand.

"Nobody breathes a word about this," he said. "For now it's classified as an animal attack -- nothing more. We're going to close the park. It's off limits to everyone -- including all of you -- until we track down this....thing."

"But we've still got a lot to do here!" Brianna protested. "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, Brianna turned to Steve Dante.

"I work until five," she said. "The Parker's Woods trail comes up out of town and passes within 30 yards of here; I won't need a car. I'm hiking back up here to continue the investigation. Want to come along?"

Dante shook his head, a mournful expression on his face.

"God, I'd love to, Bree. 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 want to be out of here long before dark."

"Jesus, Bree, Sam'll have a cow if he finds out."

"He won't find out -- right, Stevie?"

"I won't tell him," Dante answered. "Just be careful!"

"Always am." She kissed him on the cheek. "Come on, we've got work to do back at the lab."

They got in her 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 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 Quint Tomlinson's expression didn't change, the ranger colonel's smile faded.