Feral Read Free Page B

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