Feral (3 page)

A second later the face was gone.

Shannon rolled onto her knees and rose.
 
Around her the shadows jumped, shifted, melted together like living pools of ink.
 
Some vanished just as she caught sight of them, only to reappear in the periphery of her vision.
 
Every swing, teeter-totter, and hanging length of rope was in motion.
 
The rope bridges above and around her bounced and swung violently.

The noise of laughter grew and grew, again mixed with that distant music.

Shannon stood, her fists pressed to her ears, an attempt to block out the noise.
 
It didn't help.
 
She searched for the opening in the playground wall, the arched entrance she had come in through, found it, and bolted.
 
She glanced back as she ran and saw something following, a long serpentine shadow.
 
It picked up speed and size as it absorbed the smaller shadows in its path.

Now Shannon could hear screams as well as the laughter, and realized they were her own.

C'mon back, lady . . . we wanna play
!

Something flew past her, sailing only inches from her right ear.
 
It might have been a brick, but she couldn't tell for sure in the dark.

Nany-nany
poo-poo
, stick your face in doo-doo
.

Something grabbed her upper arm as she ran; it felt like tiny fingers, incredibly strong and with long fingernails that dug into her flesh like the teeth of an iron trap.
 
She went into a rough sideways spin, stumbling over her feet and landing hard on her ass.
 
The invisible thing lost its grip on her as she fell.
 
She tried to rise again; the exit was only feet away.
 
The great shadow serpent, more like a shadow river now, was rushing ever faster.

She scrambled and was grabbed again, this time the tiny iron trap hand closing around her ankle.

“Damnit, let go!” she screamed, and kicked at the invisible hand until it released her.

Ouch . . . fuckin' spoilsport
.

She blundered to her feet, and was knocked down as something large and solid struck her between the shoulder blades.
 
She made a choked ‘
Oof
' sound and landed face first.

Get her
!

She turned over onto her back in time to see the monstrous shadow stretch out wide and rear up like a cobra.
 
It came down on her legs, and they disappeared from the thighs down.
 
All sensation below her waist ceased.

She dug fruitlessly into the wood chips and dirt with the heels of her hands as it started to suck her in.

Catch the Bogey
!

Kill the Bogey
!

Cram a stick up its ass
!

Then there was a scream, a sound of such honest terror that Shannon thought her heart might stop.

Then it was over.
 
All was silent; all was still.

The shadow thing was gone and she had her legs back.

She turned to the exit and saw a girl, a girl who reminded her so much of Alicia it hurt, staring past her slack faced.
 
The girl didn't look anything like her missing daughter; it was the clothes.
 
Faded Arizona blue jeans, pink canvas high-top shoes, pink t-shirt, and the small heart-shaped gold locket that hung around her neck; the one with the picture of Thomas, Alicia, and herself inside it.
 
The last time she had seen Alicia, she had been wearing those clothes.
 
Then the girl began to sag, her eyes rolling up to the whites, and she collapsed before the arched entrance.

S
ometimes the scariest things are also funny; not funny like Larry The Cable Guy is funny, but funny in the same sadistic way that The Three Stooges are.
 
Like the shock on the face of a woman who has been discovered in the most personal and embarrassing of positions, or the look on the face of a man who has just been caught by his wife with his pants around his ankles and his cock in another woman's mouth.

Jared Cruse managed to stay faithful to his wife for four years, a fact that inspired an amount of awe in his friends considering his habitually wandering eyes and his pre-marital habit of straying.
 
That a dog like Jared Cruse could stay faithful to any one woman for four consecutive years was something worth noting.
 
Watching him try to resist the urge of his supercharged libido whenever he caught the slightest whiff of estrogen was downright hilarious, or so his friends told him.

What wasn't funny was the thoughtlessness with which he finally broke his marriage vows, and how his wife, Anna, knew almost instantly that something was wrong.
 
The dense cloud of denial that she lived in for the last several months of their marriage was not funny either; it was sad.

The circumstances of his first indiscretion and the person with which it happened were funny, like the X-rated version of a tacky sitcom.
 
It was his station's dispatch, and ironically, one of Anna's best friends.

It was an unexpected liaison, but one he had fantasized about before.
 
He'd first met her, Lillian, the week of his wedding.
 
She was Anna's maid of honor, and he had been admiring her as discreetly as he knew how ever since.
 
It was obvious that he was attracted to her; there were those long and lusty sideways glances when he thought no one was looking.
 
There was his inability to look her directly in the eye whenever they spoke.
 
He had fantasies too; nasty things that sometimes left him unable to think straight.
 
They say that the average man spends eight hours out of the day thinking about sex, and not with their wives, Jared assumed, so he never felt guilty about his fantasies, but he did guard them.
 
Lillian and he had carried on like friends; he had even helped her get the dispatch job when it opened up.

He never suspected that Lillian had ever once felt the same attraction toward him, at least not until he found himself alone with her one afternoon in the station's deserted evidence room.

Their
Thing
, as people called it, was sudden and explosive, and when it was over he spent the next two weeks hiding the friction burns and scratches from his wife.

They continued to meet secretly, in hotels, at her home, and at his home when Anna was away on business, for almost a year, and some people thought it was funny that they weren't caught earlier considering how sloppy they had become.

What wasn't funny was how Anna had finally broken down and confronted them.

She had fired a single shot outside the hotel room, destroying the locked doorknob, and kicked the door in.
 
She stood outside, the windy autumn afternoon framing her like a bad Van Gogh, screaming, crying, laughing hysterically.
 
She was shouting something at them, but her words were impossible to decipher.
 
She held Jared's personal revolver in her right hand; his service pistol was hidden under his jacket on the nightstand.
 
She gripped the gun loosely, let it sway crazily from side to side, sighting in first on Jared, then Lillian, then on Jared again.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his pants pooled around the tops of his bare feet.
 
Lillian knelt before him, still fully dressed, her face buried in his crotch.
 
The gunshot had startled her, and she had bitten down, not hard enough to bite it off, but she did draw blood.
 
She spit his withering cock out with a gurgled scream, her lips wet and red.
 
In her horror she had transformed from beauty to beast.

Jared had enough time to raise a hand in protest, then four more shots drowned out Anna's shrieks.
 
A pillow to his left exploded in a cloud of old gray feathers.
 
Glass shattered behind him.

Lillian screamed again and scurried around the other side of the bed on her hands and knees.
 
Tufts of brown shag carpet flew up behind her as a slug tore into the floor with an ugly
crack
.

There was an explosive pain in his shoulder, like a red-hot poker pushed through flesh, and he was staring at the ceiling, screaming in pain.

Anna screamed the whole time, words having given way to nonsense.

Behind the bed Lillian had gone silent; Jared hadn't known if she was hiding or dying.

Another shot flew harmlessly into the ceiling, showering him with plaster.

Then Anna was gone.

Without so much as a sidelong glance to see if her lover still lived, Lillian rushed from the room, her hysterical sobs fading almost instantly in the growing chatter from the parking lot.

Jared had risen slowly and managed to get his pants back up before the first wave of rubberneckers arrived.
 
Then he lay back down, ignoring the drone of questions, exclamations, and suppositions.
 
Holding his left hand firmly over the leaking hole in his shoulder, he had waited for the paramedics.
 
Inside his pants, his dick throbbed like a rotting tooth.

He waited for what seemed an unbelievable length of time, all the while thinking the same thought over and over again:
crazy bitch shot me with my own gun
.
 
By the time help finally arrived, his mantra had changed to:
I fucking deserved it.

T
hat afternoon, post surgery and still half stoned from the morphine, he lay in the hospital remembering the time he had played truth or dare with his cousin and her friends.
 
He was eight years old, and they in their early and pre-teens.
 
His cousin, Terry, was spending the summer with them at Normal Hills and had been stuck with baby-sitting duty that day.

About halfway through the game he had singled out the oldest and best developed of the group, challenging her with the most embarrassing question he could think of.
 
The alternative dare was almost as embarrassing; she would have to remove her training bra and lift her shirt over her head for exactly five seconds—enough time for all of them to get a really good look at her tits.
 
The question, just as he had hoped, had been too much, and instead of ducking out of the game, as he had feared, she took the dare.

Red-faced with embarrassment she unhooked the bra and hoisted her faded Doors T-shirt.
 
A few of the girls there, the ones who were jealous, Jared supposed, thought it was funny as hell.
 
Shannon, who had refused to play the game, did not.
 
To Jared it was serious business, and he tuned out the laughter as he studied the gentle curves and soft brown peaks of her breasts.

He spent the rest of the game terrified they would pull some equally embarrassing trick on him, but they didn't.
 
Even if they had, it would have been worth it.

Even back then, before he had sprouted his first pubic hair, he had been fascinated with sex.

Jared knew he was a bad person, and worse yet he was also a cop, which made him a bad cop.
 
He wasn't the sort of cop who would entrap young
hotties
and give them a choice between sex and jail, but he had entertained the idea a few times with some amusement.

A bad person, a bad cop, and a bad husband.

When his superior arrived that afternoon to question him, the lies came easily enough, just as they always had when he needed to get himself out of trouble.
 
This time it wasn't his own ass he was saving.

Exactly what the hell happened back there, Cruse
?
 
Who did this to you
?
 
They were simple questions, simple and direct as the bull-faced man who asked them.
 
Jared's answers were also simple, as the best lies often are.

Don't know
, he said.
 
Just some bitch I met outside the liquor store
.
 
When I pick up a hump I don't bother checking identification
.

Who shot me
?
 
Fucked if I know
.
 
A jealous bull dyke maybe
.
 
Your guess is as good as mine
.

Maybe Sergeant Winter had seen right through that lie.
 
Cops spent a good deal of their time being lied to and jerked around by John Q. Public, and usually developed a good nose for bullshit.
 
Either way it didn't matter.
 
Winter never investigated the incident, a drawn-out investigation would have embarrassed the entire department, and Jared was terminated.

At least he didn't have to worry about being a bad cop anymore.