soaked before them, her eyes determined.
Sorrento suggested, “Why don't you radio for everyone aboard the cutter to form a search party, Mr. Konrath? By time they get here, it will be daybreak.”
“ I'd do that but I lost my radio someplace out here, and the only other one is back with LaPlante's body.”
Sorrento then turned to Jessica, but she was gone, moving swiftly along the bank and out of sight.
“ Damn that impetuous woman,” said Sorrento, before going after her.
Kenyon had felt terror rip through him as the alligator plunged below the surface, turned topsy-turvy, spinning and going for the bottom while holding on to Mrs. Swantor, a little of her coat still extended from its jaws. Kenyon's own ability to hold on became a question of losing either the gun or his bone cutter, something he couldn't allow. So he'd lost the gun in the struggle. In the end, it had been a futile attempt when the alligator dove into the depths, dragging Mrs. Swantor with it.
He imagined her brain deep inside its gullet on its way to the stomach, and awaiting digestion.
He cursed those chasing him; he'd had to give up the fight when they appeared. He had swum away, trying to keep the bone cutter from taking on any more water than it already had.
He tried to catch his breath as he swam, hearing the authorities in the distance. He quietly made for the bank, disorientated and wondering where he was in relation to the house and the boat dock.
Then he saw the gator coming for him, weakened but coming on, its eyes filled with an eternity, its mouth still filled with small parts of Mrs. Swantor's raincoat.
Horrified now, Kenyon hurled the bone cutter ahead of him, hoping it would make shore, and then he swam faster and noisier in the same direction. The creature was right on his heels, snapping and trying to grab hold of Kenyon.
Kenyon had weakened it considerably with the damage he'd done the monster's head, yet it came on like a demonic force. Kenyon now pulled himself to land, and tugging at the exposed roots of trees, he threw himself onshore, tearing at the earth and pulling himself as far from the bank as he could. When he looked back, he saw the thing had somehow climbed ashore as well.
“ Fuck, the damn thing's fixated on you, Phillip,” Grant reasoned. “Something in it has to have Phillip-to feed on Phillip's cosmic mind.”
But Grant didn't want to die, not like this. He clawed his way farther along, mustered his strength and got to his feet. He ran.
Having heard Kenyon's struggle from the water and the thrashing alligator, Jessica positioned herself as close to the battle as possible. She had grabbed a vine in the underbrush where she saw Kenyon attempting to escape the alligator, and she pulled the sturdy vine taut just as Kenyon raced toward her, unaware of her presence. Jessica had waited for the exact moment to rip at the hanging vine that cut across Kenyon's path. The vine stiffened at an angle, cutting him viciously across the face.
This sent him down on his back, a bruise across his forehead like one of the lines he'd so often drawn on his prey.
Seeing Kenyon immobilized, the alligator now took one last, powerful leap, and with its front feet firmly set, its bottom jaw scooped beneath Kenyon's skull and the massive upper jaw awaited its lower counterpart. The consequent crack, snap and pop through bone sounded like small gunfire at a distance, muffled as it was by the monster's closed jaws. The massive teeth met directly at Kenyon's forehead. Again the monster chomped, and Jessica heard the subsequent sound of crackling bone until she imagined the man's brain was spiked. She wondered if he were yet alive in this position.
Grant Kenyon, the man she had chased halfway across the continent now, writhed, his body stiffening and his every fiber feeling the pain, not unlike the pain that he had inflicted on his victims. He was still very much alive. As the gator thrashed, so did Kenyon's body.
Finally, Jessica listened to the horrible sound of bubbles and air escaping Kenyon in a long, painful agony of last rites.
She held out her firearm, preparing to put an end to it, but she questioned such an action. Kenyon had shown not the slightest mercy to his many victims, victims he presumed to rob of their souls while they suffered a live torment.
Her gun pointed at Kenyon, she saw that his body was still now, dead at last.
“ Now, you son of a bitch, you've got a taste of nature's bone cutter,” Jessica shouted, her eyes firmly held by the sight, when a final spasm of the man's body made the alligator chomp-swallow on him once again.
The beast then tried to pull Kenyon's dead weight back toward the water, tugging at its prey, and shaking its tail to move in reverse.
“ Jessica! We can't let that gator get away!” shouted Mike Sorrento from behind her. “We've got to recover both bodies, Kenyon's and Mrs. Swantor if we can.”
Jessica fully agreed. She both wanted to recover Mrs. Swantor's body from the bowels of the beast, and to hold on to Kenyon's body, so that no one could ever question whether the Skull-digger was killed this day or not. She wanted no ambiguity remaining.
Since she didn't want to lose the alligator a second time, Jessica aimed and fired into its brain. A second shot from Sorrento rang out, hitting the beast as well. Right as it made the riverbank, the creature expired like a balloon losing air, dead of wounds earlier inflicted by Kenyon and now their combined gunfire.
She turned to Sorrento, his gun smoking. How long had he been there? How much of her behavior he had witnessed, she did not know.
The rains had softened and the sky along with it, a hint of daybreak showing through in the east.
Mike Sorrento stepped before her, and he stared at the scene: All but Kenyon's head extended from the alligator's mouth, his brain crushed inside the monstrous jaws. “Makes for a fitting metaphor for the man's life.”
“ Going to make one hell of a forensic photo, too,” she replied, standing over the scene.
“ Yeah… yeah, one hell of a shot. Good of you to put Kenyon out of his misery.”
“ I shot the gator, not Kenyon.”
“ No, I shot the gator,” he disagreed.
“ Then we both shot the thing.”
“ How long did Kenyon suffer?”
“ All of his life, I'd say.”
They stared for a moment at one another, each keeping silent. Jessica again wondered how much Mike Sorrento had seen, and how much his remarks were meant to elicit from her. In the distance, they heard Konrath calling out, trying to locate their position. I don't want anyone thinking we just sat here and let the alligator do our job for us,” she said.
“ I can't imagine anyone thinking that, Dr. Coran.”
“ I stopped him with a vine strung across his path. The moment he fell, the gator grabbed him. There was no pulling him to safety.”
“ I know… and you didn't have time to react. I saw the whole thing,” he concurred. “And if it becomes necessary, Jessica, I'll back you up.”
It wasn't lost on her that this was the first time he'd called her Jessica. Now that they shared a secret, he presumed them closer, she imagined.
Konrath came through the underbrush and stared at the scene. “Jesus,” he said. “Terrible way to go.”
“ No more so than his victims,” Sorrento replied.
Jessica knew that even dead, the gator's digestive juices would only continue to eat away at Lara Swantor's flesh. “Look around for that brain saw. It's got to be around here someplace.”
The two men did so, and Sorrento complained, “It's likely in the water, six feet under.”
“ No, here it is!” shouted Konrath holding it up.
“ Let me have it.” Jessica examined the machine and expertly started it. “Good, it's still functioning.”
“ What're you going to do?” asked Sorrento.
“ I'm getting what's left of that woman out of that beast, OK? Now, first thing we need to do is pry open the gator's mouth and get Kenyon's weight off. Then I want you two to help me roll that damned beast on its back. I'm going to cut it open.”
