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When Elvira Met Bettie Chapter 32
🕑 Added 2023-09-07 18:00:01 +0000 UTCA warning growl seeped from the brute like some deadly gas escaping from its container. Gordon tossed another stone; closer. Kron crouched, its haunches stock-still with iron-hard muscles ready to explode into motion. Would it run away… or charge?
Gordon hoped it would charge. He hoped it would come right up to him and give him a nice, clean shot. He’d show the damned, woman-stealing freak its place in the animal kingdom.
Kron sprang, eating up the distance between it and Gordon in a run that saw its massive fists pummeling the ground as much as they propelled it forward. The bellowing roar of the brute reverberated through the swamp.
Gordon misfired. His gun jerked with a loud report that still seemed paltry next to the cry of the beast upon him. He didn’t see if he hit; he only saw that Kron kept up his run, hurdling towards Gordon like a runaway train—one that couldn’t be avoided by getting off the track.
Gordon realized his destiny with a terrified gasp. He had no time to call out. Kron smashed into him, a brawny shoulder catching Gordon in the breadbasket and carrying him backwards. A tree trunk broke his flight. Gordon was pinned between the unmoving bole and all the unrelenting force of Kron still surging forward.
His ribs broke like twigs—vulnerable organs were ground together in a split-second, crushed into a meaty paste forced upward by the impact that had pulverized them. Gordon’s lips parted, as if to loose the sound of the pain he was in, but all that came out was the tangled contents of his chest cavity.
Gordon vomited out an unspooling length of undifferentiated tissue as he died, watching his own intestines leak out of him. He felt the urge to vomit, but it was only his barely intact throat trying to purge itself of the obstruction once known as his internal organs.
Kron backed away, unfeeling of what he had done, but repelled by the debris that was left of Gordon’s body. The swaggering Hollywood titan now most resembled a zit that had been popped—legs and shoulders folding together around the ruin of his midsection.
The man-beast had little time to enjoy his victory. The deep-throated bark of Danny’s rifle dropped Kron. Unlike Gordon, Danny had taken careful aim. His bullet ended up in the creature’s brain.
The pilot ran to Gordon’s body, but it took scant seconds for him to slow down. He had no desire to draw closer to the detritus Gordon had become and there was no pretending the power broker had survived his ordeal.
“God!” Danny spat, feeling sick to his stomach and even nauseated at his own sickness—seeing what Gordon had vomited up. He didn’t imagine that if he was sick, he would throw up the thick, juicy morass that had once been in Gordon’s crushed torso… but the idea was appalling.
He went to where Bettie lay, so immersed and covered in the muddy earth that she could’ve been a part of it. Her milky white skin almost lost in its corruption. He dropped to his knees next to her. Slowly, Bettie came to herself. She felt out his leg and clung to it.
“That… that sounded like Gordon’s voice. Is he…?” she moaned, afraid to let any thought of his fate pry its way into her mind.
It had all been so fast—and she’d come so hard—that there still seemed to be no time to comprehend it. Even now, with everything settling into place, it was all happening so fast.
“Yes, Bettie. He’s gone.”
“K-Kron?”
“The… animal?” Danny asked, even now not knowing what to call it.
“Yes,” Bettie said, with a twitch of a nod.
“It’s dead. I shot it.”
“Both of them,” she said breathlessly, her grief stopping up her throat. “Both of them… ohh Gaawwd!”
But whatever emotion she was trying to voice, it was precluded. A plane flew low, dipping down to skate the treetops, its droning engines seeming to announce its presence. It flew out of sight and the sound of it Dopplered as it made a tight turn, engine drone growing once more as it came back for another pass.
Danny stood up and waved his arms, hoping they could see him. He thought of trying to get Bettie to do the same, but as covered in muck as she was, there was no point. No one up there could tell any difference between her and the marshy ground.
***
Izzy heard the rifle shot. Thinking of the bear, he sprang to his feet and ran down the slope to the meadow. Then he heard the distant, yet all-powerful hum of an airplane engine. It dragged his attention even from the sound of gunfire. He ran up the ridge and started off the three signal fires. As soon as the flame caught, he was descending the ridge once more.
***
With Danny busy trying to draw the attention of the search plane, Bettie had room to further rediscover herself. She became aware of the strong, animalistic smell holding to her body. A strange, lingering, nostalgic sort of indignity flooded her body—if she could be said to feel anything so deeply, in her numb state.
Staggering, her body spent and her mind weary, she made her own slow passage to the stream, where she washed herself off. She douched as best she could as well, watching the white flow out of her body with an unreadable expression—a spike in the weird mix of fond and foul emotions that had held her since she’d been both pleasured and saved from that pleasure.
The search plane hummed overhead again. This time it waggled its wings in acknowledgment of them. Danny cried out happily enough for Bettie to hear him from the water.
“He sees us! He sees us!”
That’s nice, was all Bettie could think. Soon they could leave this place, with everything was so murky. Nothing set. Everything up for grabs. Life was cheap. Virtue was cheap. Pleasure was all.
Soon she’d be back where people were civilized.
Danny brought her a towel. He wrapped it around her and ushered her out of the water, saying something about her catching a chill. But how could that be, when she still felt a heat at her core—soothing and liquid—in total counterpoint to just how hot that part of herself could be.
Next, Danny presented her with clothes to put on: “We’ll be out of here before the sun sets.”
He was solemn, but it was a mask he was putting on over a smile. He was happier that they would be rescued than he was sad Gordon had died. And that Kron was dead, he didn’t mind at all.
“Poor Gordon… if he’d only managed to stay alive a little longer…”
“Maybe it’s better this way,” Danny remarked.
Bettie looked curiously at his face. Still stoic. But now she didn’t know what it hid.
“He wasn’t… wasn’t a very good… person,” Danny said, in fits and starts, like he was stopping himself and then going on again. “Maybe it’s for the best… that he’s dealt with… before there’s no dealing with him.”
“If you say so,” Bettie said, like it didn’t matter at all. She wasn’t sure that it did. “Danny… did you see that animal before now?”
“No. I’ve never seen anything like it, not until I came on it and Gordon… like that. Why?”
“I was just curious. I don’t suppose anyone’s ever seen a thing like that. Such a human animal…”
Danny snorted. “Not like any human I ever met.”
Bettie smiled ruefully. An expression her lips just made, without any consideration for how it’d look to Danny. “You haven’t met the men I have. To you, they’re men. To me, they’re beasts.”
“And that… thing?”
“Kron,” Bettie said, finding she liked the sound of its name. “I don’t know what it was. No. I do. He was a man. Not like you or Gordon or Izzy. A real man…”
Her smile grew even as it disappeared from her face. It was a secret smile—a secret she shared only with a corpse. A secret that would die with her as it had died with Kron.
“I’m sorry for what Gordon did to you. At least you can say… he didn’t get away with it.”
“No… no one ever gets away with it…”
Izzy was there now. He came up to them with a big smile on his face. He looks like I ought to look, Bettie thought. He feels like I do feel… part of me…
“They found us! Isn’t it wonderful!”
Danny soured him with the look on his face. “It’s not all good news. There was an animal. It got Gordon.”
“An animal? What do you mean—“
“I shot it.” Danny pointed. “You can see for yourself if you like.”
Izzy went up the slope, Danny following with him. Figuring he owed it to the man to see him through this odd, turbulent brush with death—after how he’d had knowledge of the guy’s wife, he supposed it was the least he could do.
Izzy stopped with a repulsed cry when he spotted Gordon’s body. “My God! God in Heaven! What could’ve done that?”
“Don’t you see it?” Danny asked, wondering how anyone could possibly miss the mountainous carcass his well-placed gunshot had left.
But when he crested the ridge beside Izzy, there was nothing to see but the slowly spreading pool of blood marking Gordon’s resting place.
