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Chris

By Strega

Chris woke up, blinked a few times, and smiled at the ceiling. Today was the day.

On the table next to the bed was his checklist. It was all in code, of course, appearing to be nothing more than a shopping list. He hardly needed it; months of planning meant he knew every step by heart.

He spent ten minutes composing a final message on his computer. He had disconnected the Internet line from the PC the night before, so he could safely leave it here, to be found after his death. His cell phone was not only off, but the battery was in his pocket. He'd put it back in and send a single message before the killing started.

Right then, time to get going. He chose a random shirt to go with his Levis. He would appear just as he would any normal morning to anyone who might see him leaving his apartment. Only he knew that he would not return.

He paused with his hand on the doorknob. Had he forgotten anything? Check the list; no, there really was not much to do until he retrieved the weapons from the storage facility. Keeping his apartment free of evidence was part of the plan, lest some visitor see something incriminating and spoil things.

He did need to pee, though. He stuck his keys back in his pocket as he stepped into the little apartment bathroom.

And tripped. Something grabbed his thigh in a tight and painful grip as he fell forward, and had only the briefest glimpse of the enormous snake coiling around him before his forehead slammed into the ceramic bowl of the toilet.

The great snake, thick as a big man's thigh, had two loops around the man's chest and was squeezing hard before it realized there was no resistance. Fangs unlatched from Chris's leg as the big Burmese python decided to see what was happening.

The man's head was bloody, and there was no sign of consciousness. Through its coils it still felt labored breathing and a faint heartbeat, but Chris was clearly subdued enough for its purposes. Its long jaws opened, slipped over the limply dangling head, and it began to feed.

*****

"Damn. I had high hopes for Kaa. With his teeth, being swallowed alive is no picnic."

The man next to him in the control room shrugged. "Is it ever a picnic? It doesn't matter who eats you, it still ends the same way."

On wraparound monitors they watched the python work its jaws over Chris's shoulders. Though it was well over twenty feet long, a record-shattering specimen for its species, a normal Burmese its size would have the greatest difficulty swallowing a man whole due to the breadth of the shoulders. Kaa was not, however, quite normal. Delicate genetic tweaking had given her a disproportionately large head, and she'd swallowed enough people -- both dead ones in training, and violently resisting ones in real hunts -- that she knew to slide her nose up over one shoulder and her chin beneath the other. The shoulders were awkward broad for even her jaws, but not too tall for them. She simply yawned more broadly and in they went.

The swallowing process was facilitated by dozens of inward-pointing, needle-sharp fangs that dug in and released as she pushed first one corner of her jaws forward, then another. A conscious man would have screamed and struggled, but this method of feeding meant Kaa always had a firm grip with at least half of her fangs even as other portions of her jaws reached foreward to pull in the next inch. Even a strong man could not both fight off the snake's coils and keep the jaws from advancing; stronger men than Chris had tried and failed. Her many teeth would have made the slow process unendurably painful, even without the knowledge that he was on his way to a snake's stomach...if he were awake.

"At least the cleanup will be easy. Get Kaa to slither out of there, wipe up the blood, get rid of the note...a ten minute reset."

"And there are enough snake fanciers out there that even a boring meal like this will sell some DVDs. Not as many as we'd sell if he were struggling, though."

"You take the good with the bad, Scott." Bit by bit Kaa was swallowing Chris, but she was a slow eater. It'd be an hour at least before they would send in the cleanup crew. They'd find Kaa curled up around the long bulge Chris would become, and the python was as well trained as a genetically tweaked snake could be. It knew that a heated enclosure awaited it if it followed its handlers and electric shocks awaited it it did not. If history was any guide the snake would be back in her enclosure in less than two hours, coiled around the hot rocks and peacefully digesting her meal.

"All right then. Who's next? Mrs. Wagner, right?"

*****

Chris smiled at the ceiling, then rolled over and checked the time on his clock alarm. 7:12. He hadn't bothered to set the alarm; it didn't really matter when he got to the school, as long as it was before classes ended.

He checked his list, but there wasn't much to do before he left the apartment. He took a minute to pee, then grabbed his USC baseball cap. Dressed as he'd been a hundred times before, but for the last time, he headed down the stairs to the parking lot. There was no one in sight, not even the cleaning lady who usually showed up around this time. He'd considered killing a few people before he left the apartments, especially the upstairs neighbor who always played music too loud and stomped on the ceiling, but that required keeping weapons in the complex and it might give away the game too soon.

He whistled tunelessly as he walked to his car. A tall cinder block wall enclosed the apartment building and he walked with stucco on one side and wall on the other. Daydreaming about what was to come, it wasn't until he was about to enter the parking lot that he realized something was blocking his path.

It a more sylvan environment he might mistake it for a dried-out bush or a big pile of dead grass, but plopped down on a concrete walkway it did not belong; its color was close enough to the ground's, but not its texture. He stopped a dozen feet away and stared at it, and suddenly it was staring back. Deep-set eyes opened and a growl so deep he felt it in his chest rumbled out as the weirdly long-furred bear stood up.

Somehow he did not freeze, though he'd never seen a bear save on television or through the bars at the zoo. Chris's feet flung gravel at it as he spun around and pelted back the way he came. He heard it grunt and then the slap of paws as it came after him.

Before he knew it he was back at the entryway and fumbling for his keys, but some instinct made him throw himself to the side an instant before the bear smashed into and through the door. Chunks of wood came spitting back out of the doorway as the beast turned back toward him. Between its forepaws was the fragment of door that contained the lock, and in the lock was the key, right next to his car keys.

He couldn't outrun it, and he had no car. Chris had never tried to climb that cinder block wall, but now seemed a really good time to try. In fact, running right up the wall seemed a tremendous idea. Propelled by adrenaline he had thought to save for later that day he did exactly that, running two steps up the wall and springing upward to grab the top.

Two things happened at the same moment. First, his forearms locked up in cramps from a powerful electric shock (an electric fence run along the top of the wall? Why hadn't the landlord warned the tenants?) The second thing was a bear paw smashing into his dangling feet. It might have helped him up over the wall were it not for the electricity-induced cramps, as it was he lost his grip as his legs were thrust sideways.

Chris spun in the air, one hand scraping painfully across the blocks, and fell toward the bear. It was ready and waiting, and the last thing he was was a broad pink fang-studded maw as he plummeted headfirst into its gullet.

There was a wet thump, a scrape of fangs over his shoulders, and suddenly his face was surrounded by wet, slippery flesh. Something was wrapped around him all the way to the waist, pinning his arms to his sides, and sharp points jabbed him in the groin and rump. So abrupt was the transition and so hopped up was he on adrenaline that it wasn't until the bear flipped his legs upward with a paw that he realized what was happening.

A rippling contraction in the surrounding muscles gripped him and pulled him deeper into the fleshy chute. He had fallen headfirst into its mouth, and like something from a cartoon the bear had just yawned and let him slide in. Gravity had thrust him halfway into its throat, and was still pushing him deeper; the bear had stepped its forepaws up onto the wall when it opened its mouth to meet him and was more than halfway through the process of swallowing him whole.

"This can't be happening," he said, and the words were reduced to a mere mumble by the slick throat stretched around his face. The bear thrust its muzzle upward once more, gobbling up his knees. His own weight was pushing him down its throat, and as his face emerged into the sweltering heat and stink of its stomach he barely even struggled. With just a few last kicks, which struck the cinder blocks without effect, the bear consumed the last of him. Fang-studded jaws closed tight around his sneakers, a broad strong tongue gave his toes a push, and with a final gulp he slid down the bear's throat.

"Impossible," he mumbled as he came to rest in the beast's gut. He felt the swelling he made sway and shift as the bear dropped back down to all fours. He could not know that his least word, muffled though it might be, was caught on microphone and recorded. All he knew was that flesh and bone and clothes, from shirt to shoes, he had been sent down a hungry bear's throat. He pushed and kicked with all the force he could muster even as digestive enzymes burned his exposed flesh, but there was no room and no leverage. He didn't even force a grunt of discomfort out of the beast before it released all the air that'd gone down with him in one long, satisfied belch.

*****

"That's more like it," Scott said, and fistbumped Dave's knuckles. On the wraparound screens Grizz burped, coughed, and spat out a sneaker. The big bear's color-changing, ghillie-suit-like fur hadn't worked well in this urban environment, but that hadn't saved Chris from a trip through a modified ursine digestive system.

A four-rotor drone buzzed into view on the screen, blinking a light at the bear, and Grizz stood back up and ambled after it. Though they did not trust such a big, strong predator near even armed handlers, Grizz was well trained and much smarter than he looked. If he had not been conditioned to eat people he could easily have been a pet bear, or as much of a pet as a bear could ever be.

"Good choice, Mrs. Wagner," Dave said, and the third occupant of the room nodded.

"He was still alive, until...?" She said, and Scott grinned.

He still is alive, ma'am." Dave pointed to a heart monitor in the lower corner of one screen. "While he was asleep we dosed him with an experimental chemical that reduces his need for oxygen. Eventually it'll be a useful product, but the aftereffects it has at the moment make drowning, or whatever, look like a better option. The good news is that it only takes effect if administered intravenously, so we can give it to someone who is about to be eaten without worrying about the predator."

As the bear climbed into a waiting van, the back of which was a reenforced cage, its drooping belly twitched again. "We estimate that he'll last fifteen to thirty minutes before either the heat, a heart attack, or the stomach juices do him in. Not needing to breathe won't save you when a bear is digesting you. We can't use it on on the Run, because having someone make it to the exit and then drop dead would look bad. Under these circumstances, though...." Dave's voice trailed off as the the cage doors shut via some hidden mechanism. "Suffocating is too good for him."

"Once we recover Chris's cell phone - or rather, once we recover the recorder we substituted for it - we will send you a copy of the whole thing, audio and all. We just need to wait for the phone to reappear, as it were."

That brought a faint smile out of the grieving woman, and she nodded gratefully as a staffer led her out.

For half an hour there was little to do besides watch the cleanup crew replace the door, paint over scrapes in the asphalt and wash off some minor bloodstains here and there. Chris had gotten a bit beaten up before becoming bear chow. To pass the time the two cycled through the cameras and checked various video and audio feeds to ensure they and their associated recording systems were working. Technically they didn't need to run through the checklist at the moment, since they'd done it an hour ago and none of the cameras or mikes had been damaged, but you didn't keep your job at the Project by being lazy. In extreme cases, shoddy work could lead to you having a firsthand encounter with a predator's digestive system instead of merely seeing it happen to others.

Eventually the cleanup crew was done. A new "phone" and keys indistinguishable from the ones now inside Kaa and Grizz was placed in the same spot on the bedside table as the first two, the recordings of various TV shows were rewound in case Chris turned on the TV, though he had not done that so far. Luckily Chris had shown no inclination to use his phone or access the Internet before setting out on his bloody task, which saved everyone a great deal of work.

Replacements for Chris's Levis and the shirt he wore to his doom were placed in his closet and dresser, respectively. Amusingly, copies of the same shirt was currently inside both the bear and the snake; since cotton is indigestible to most preds, the clothing would eventually reappear minus their owner. Since prey fed to the Run predators normally wore clothing chosen for its digestibility, this was a rare instinct of it being recoverable -- probably in hacked-up "hairball" form, though in Kaa's case it might well go all the way through.

Chris's sneaker was the first thing the cleanup crew collected, and management had high hopes that it and the various other bits of recovered apparel would fetch a good price at auction. It was getting on toward Christmas, after all, and the staff could use a good holiday party, not to mention bonuses. One senior manager had argued for a "This shirt has been through a bear" (or snake, or whatever) logo on the shirt, in ink that the digestive juices would make visible, but he'd been outvoted. There were enough ways things could go wrong as it were.

Eighty-two minutes after the most recent iteration of Chris woke and forty-seven after his heart monitor flatlined, Scott touched a button to summon the next client Moments later a thin, angry-looking man entered, escorted by a staffer.

"Mr. Miller, isn't it? Welcome to the control room." Dave stood and extended his hand, but the thin man just stared at the screen.

Dave calmly sat back down. The events that led these people here were so traumatic that rudeness was a predictable result.

"Let's see who is available, Mr. Miller. Kaa and Grizz are not, of course...." Scott's fingers danced on the keyboard, and a grid of images appeared. Over thirty creatures were shown, some "creatures" in only the loosest sense, as several plants, a blob, a pack of rats and a school of piranha were on the roster.

Miller hesitated. "What I really want is something to remember this by. And not a piece of clothing recovered afterward. Do all your predators digest the bones, or do some of them survive?"

"Not all of them, sir." Scott touched a control and most of the boxes on the grid went blank. The matrix resized to show just a few predators even as the removed creatures reappeared on a side screen, next to a rather lumpy python and a smug-looking bear with a fat belly.

There weren't many choices yet, and most of those were aquatic. Sooner or later someone was going to pick one of those, and plans were in place to arrange for Chris to meet them, but the staffers were still happy when Mr. Miller pointed at a land predator. Or, more accurately, an air predator.

"Excellent," Dave said. "Priscilla hasn't had a good meal in a while. Goats and rabbits and the occasional dogs are nice, but nothing matches a nice wiggly human, eh?"

Scott touched that square on the grid and a tone sounded from a speaker. Wide-set eyes snapped open and the sleeping predator blinked wide awake. She knew what that sound meant: it meant she would be let out to hunt.

*****

Chris spent a good five minutes writing out his message. Quoting Invictus was tempting, but that had been done. In the end he produced little more than an "I hate you all" journal. He might be amused to know that his other selves had typed out almost identical diatribes. The four so far collected were, barring typos, the same save for a slight variation in sentence structure.

He took a moment to relieve himself, though he was sure no amount of preparation will keep his underwear clean when the police filled him full of lead. He was hungry, too, but he'd grab a McMuffin on the way to the storage facility. He also considered, and once again rejected setting booby traps in his apartment for the police. He'd never yet heard of that working, and it might give him away somehow.

He paused in the hallway, his hand a foot from the knob. There was something different. Eventually he shrugged. The doorknob was so shiny it jumped out at him, but it had been a bit loose lately. Maybe the landlord has replaced it after he got home yesterday.

*****

"Cleanup crew, when are you in there next, compare the new and old doorknobs. Make sure they are the same," Dave said.

"You got it, Control," said a voice from the speaker.

*****

Chris was just shy of his car when something, he could not say what, once again made him pause. There was a sense of...being watched? Whatever it was, the hackles stood up on his neck and he stood there for a moment, jangling the keys in his hand out of habit. He glanced around, but nothing seemed out of place. No mugger sneaking up on him, no one peeking from a window. Nothing.

He shrugged and picked the car key out of the ones on the ring, and at that instant he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. It was just a shadow sliding across the parking lot, much too big to be a bird. He glanced upward, expecting to see a small plane passing over the apartments, and instead saw an indefinable blurry...something...an instant before terrifyingly strong talons grabbed him by the shoulders.

He yelled and went over backward, not so much from the force of it but due to sheer surprise. The shadow covered him now, and the blur filled almost his whole range of sight. He could still see the apartment building wall, but it was strangely distorted and rippled as though seen through thick glass.

Then the colors began to bleed away and he saw the creature that gripped him: an owl. But not just any owl! Standing on the ground it was as least as tall as he was, with a wingspread twice that, and though the hollow-boned bird must weigh less than he did it was terrifically strong. Somehow its feathers mimicked the colors of whatever was behind it, making it nearly invisible, but it still cast a shadow. Were it not for that it would have caught him entirely unaware with its utterly silent approach.

Chris yelled and kicked out, his foot slamming into the door of his car as the giant owl struggled to keep him pinned. It balanced with sweeps of his soft-feathered wings without releasing the tight grip it had on his upper arms. A sharp black beak clacked as it pushed him down with its powerful legs, and it was only his greater mass that allowed him to nearly escape its grasp.

Nearly, though, was not enough. After a minute of struggle that scattered blue-gray feathers across the parking lot and left deep scratches in his back where its sharp talons raked it had enough. Now fully visible wings spread wide and flapped, lifting them both from the ground in a cloud of dust and feathers. It managed to flap twice more before the effort of lifting more than twice its usual mass overcame it and it let him go.

He landed on his back a few feet from his car. It was only a drop of six or eight feet but he did not land well, and it was a miracle he didn't crack his head open on the asphalt. As it was he bounced back to a seated position; For a brief moment he was too stunned to keep track of the owl, and that was all the time it needed.

He recovered just in time to see the wide-open beak coming down from above, and before he could even flinch the owl landed with its feet on either side of his legs and a sudden thrust of its beak engulfed his head. A cruelly hooked talon wrapped around his body, keeping him upright as the beak thrust downward again, and the last hints of light evaporated as his head, neck and shoulders slipped into silky-smooth and slippery-wet owl gullet.

Chris's eyes went wide, then blinked as mucus from the throat walls squished into them. What in the world was the owl doing? He had a sharp beak-point dug into his breastbone, but he could feel the bird struggling just to stand up with him dangling from its mouth. It was strong, but it must be fragile, and he ought to be able to kick it into submission before it could hurt him much. It could have, and probably should have bitten his head off instead a "biting" him like this. Heck, its talons had hurt him more than this!

The owl barely managed to lift him from the asphalt, its muscles straining with the effort, and with a great heave it tossed him upward. As he hovered at the height of the toss it jerked its beak forward. There was a painful scrape along his back and belly as the beak-tips scraped along, but the owl had its jaws as wide open as they would go and with that one great toss-and-gulp he was in the throat to his elbows.

Suddenly its aim became all too clear and Chris began to kick and struggle with all his might. He recognized the bird, ironically now that all he could see was the squelching darkness of its esophagus. Priscilla the owl from the Sunday Night Run TV specials, one of the Project's man-eating predators. She usually fed on women, or at least the smallest contestant it could catch, as it took the relatively small owl a tremendous effort to get even a small adult down her throat.

But though he was rather larger than her usual fare, the owl was hungry enough and determined enough to try to consign him to the same fate. Another straining heave of her body, another snap of her beak, and he was in her to the waist. Tight flesh slipped past on all sides until his slicked-back hair preceded the the rest of him into Priscilla's stomach.

She had a crop, he remembered vaguely. He didn't know if smaller owls did, but the announcers on the Run had been quite clear. A muscular enlargement of her gullet held part of her prey, allowing her to swallow much larger meals than would seem possible. She also had a remarkably expandable stomach. Between the crop and stomach her insides could accommodate a great deal of food in one meal, and with his arms now fully pinned to his sides by her beak and throat she proceeded to show him just how much of him she could accommodate.

Even half swallowed he put up a terrific struggle, and the owl staggered to and fro, flapping its wings for balance as his protruding legs licked. Each time it bolted another few inches of him in his head and torso were squeezed that much more tightly into the muscular gut, bulging out her chest and making the feathers stand out in all directions. Eventually, despite the discomfort his frantically kicking legs caused her, she managed to stuff them down her throat after the rest. His knees dropped into the chute of her throat and with a last few tosses of her head the owl finished her meal.

Or almost, anyway. Priscilla stretched and strained even as nearly swallowed and exhausted Chris struggled his last. There was an equality of dissatisfaction, one might say; in her slimy innards, Chris was in the bird's stomach to the small of his back, and he wasn't at all happy about the digestive juices eating into his skin. For her part the owl was stuffed so full she had to flap periodically from time to time to keep from falling over, and she wasn't keen on the pair of legs hanging from her beak. Despite her best efforts there just wasn't any more room inside her, and white socks and blue sneakers stuck out no matter what she did.

She had never been in this situation before, since there was always at least one person small enough to entirely swallow among the Run's contestants and the Project had never fed her anything this large in the off season training. The discomfort was considerable and the owl seemed ready to cough her meal back up. It didn't help that unlike her other meals, this one seemed to determined to keep kicking and wriggling rather than helpfully suffocating a minute or two after being bolted down.

But though she was visibly uncomfortable and wheezed each breathe in through a too-full throat, she wasn't the one with her head down a predator's throat. The man half in her stomach had to weaken eventually, and she seemed to realize this. It was taking longer than it usually did, but experience told her that every time she swallowed prey, a while later she coughed up just the bones, hair, and other indigestibles. Stubbonly she refused to cough up her meal; if she waited long enough, enough of him would dissolve for her to finally swallow those blasted feet.

So Priscilla squatted down, gorged and bulging and broody, and prepared to wait Chris out.

*****

"Pay up," Dave said, and held out his hand.

"Not a chance," Scott shot back. "I told you Priscilla couldn't swallow someone that size, and look." He pointed at the screen. "I see feet."

Sure enough, on the screen the feet kicked obligingly. The very unhappy-looking owl blinked and made another effort to bolt them down, but they stayed right where they were.

"Those feet are going in eventually. It's just a question of how long it'll take. Six, eight hours from now, Priscilla is going to hack up a pellet and those shoes will be in it." The owl's stomach acids were remarkably quick when it came to flesh, at the cost of being good at digesting little else. It had been hard enough to grow a predatory bird her size without altering her digestive chemistry the way they had with most of the other predators. So far the techs down in Bio had only managed to make one other bird capable of swallowing a human, and Pouchy the pelican suffered from the same issues Priscilla did: it was a terrific struggle for her to gulp down anything as heavy as an adult human. Fortunately, both birds were more than willing to put in the effort, and the neatly de-fleshed bones they hacked back up were among the best-selling Run souveniers.

"Swallow means swallow whole," Dave said in his best reasonable voice. "And she swallowed him whole."

Mr. Miller, who was watching the kicking feet on the screen with a broad grin plastered across his face, finally spoke up. "I think you should pay the man, Dave. Look at all the effort that poor owl exerted to get her meal. I think you should give her the credit she is due."

"Fine," the tech sighed. "I guess I am outvoted."

They watched the screen until Chris's heart monitor finally flatlined. That took only seventeen minutes past the point where he was just a pair of sneakers hanging from Priscilla's jaws, which was rather quicker than expected. Even with unusually potent stomach acids eating into him he should have lasted longer.

"Probably the heat," Dave opined. "Priscilla's body temperature is what, a hundred and four? Without being able to sweat, what with being wrapped in stomach, heat stroke can kill you fast."

On the screen the owl stretched and strained, and finally one of the shoes disappeared into her gullet. The other remained outside for at least a little while longer. About that time the cleanup crew appeared and she hopped obediently into her rolling cage. Even if she were prone to stubbornness, all she wanted right now was to quietly digest her meal.

"So, what can we save for you, Mr. Miller? And no, you can't have the whole skeleton."

Their client thought for a moment. "Well, the skull is the obvious bit. So I can set it on my mantle and remember what happened to him."

"You got it," Scott said as Miller was led out.

An hour after Chris died, the parking lot and car were exactly as he had last seem them, complete with dusty fingerprints around the driver's side door handle. One of the techs used a bodywork tool to suck out the dent Chris's kick had made in the side of his car, every feather had been recovered, and by a stroke of good luck his car keys were found under the vehicle. That was one less thing to replace or recover when it emerged from some predator orifice or other.

Unfortunately the next session lasted all of two minutes, if you didn't count digestion. The client asked for Toothless, one of the oldest predators in the Run creature stable. Age did not mean the raccoon was patient or kind, though. Toothless was their second largest terrestrial predator, behind only Trantor the elephant. Being fat and lazy and without a fang in his head, as his name suggested, didn't make him safe to be around.

When they released Toothess outside the apartment, the control staff learned to their dismay that the enormous predator had watched to see where the handlers looked before his cage was open. Toothless, fourteen feet tall standing on his hindpaws and four tons of very fat raccoon, was tall enough to put his paw right through the second floor window and pluck Chris out of bed. He did exactly that.

"Taser, Taser, Taser!" Scott yelled, but it was already too late. By the time Dave flipped the cover up on the Taser control and jammed his thumb on the red button Toothless had shaken the glass off sleepy, startled Chris and stuffed the man into his jaws. Dave sighed and stopped, his thumb a millimeter from the button, because he knew that even an electric shock wouldn't be enough to keep the determined raccoon from swallowing. On the screen Toothless's muzzle bobbed and that was it for Chris #4.

All they could do was watch #4's heart monitor until the don't-need-to-breathe and no-shock drugs were overwhelmed by weight of raccoon fat and the determined efforts of Toothless's digestive system. Worst of all, Toothless actually seemed to be grinning at the camera as he climbed back into his pen.

"That won't play well on video."

"They don't all have to be elaborate. It was never going to last long anyway. The only way we'd get any drama out of one guy in an enclosed area with Toothless is if Tooth had to eat the guy car and all."

"Could he do that?"

"He might try."

Cleanup was replacing the window and clothes. Three different recorders-disguised-as-phones were now on their way through three different digestive tracts. If there was one good thing about Chris #4's abrupt end, was that audio sampling indicated a whole lot of screaming and struggling inside the raccoon before the inevitable gurgling end. There was a certain clientele that snapped up that sort of recording.

"I guess there is one positive to someone being snapped up and swallowed before they wear themselves out struggling," Scott muttered. "Shame we couldn't put a camera in there."

"Next," Dave said, and a middle-aged woman with graying red hair was led in.

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Harris," he said. "I'm Dave. Do you need a minute, or shall I show you what predators are available? Several have already done runs today."

"Right to the point," the woman said. "Call me Anne."

Scott swiveled his chair around to face the two. "Almost everyone who goes in there," he pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the screen, "Volunteers for it. Death row inmates trying for a pardon, that sort of thing. Chris is different. You do have the option to spare him, and that will mean one less death. A little less suffering.

"We're doing this for a reason, though, and with the cooperation of the justice system. An example is being made. Maybe this one, finally, will convince people that some sins are unforgivable and will be harshly punished." He shrugged. "Probably not, but there is a certain catharsis to seeing it happen to him."

"Fair enough," Mrs. Harris said. "Is Bearkiller available?"

"Yes, Mrs. Harris, he is available." Dave touched a key, and the grid appeared again. Four of the squares were blacked out compared the two last time, and four creatures instead of two were in the sidebar of unavailable predators.

Among the felines, canids, the aquatics, reptiles, bears, and others, he touched the square showing the dark brown bearlike beast with a tawny stripe down its side and across its forehead and cheeks. It looked up as a tone sounded in its pen, and its grin was not one the staff would want to see in person.

*****

Before he got out of bed Chris turned on the TV for a few minutes, but it was just the usual morning tripe. Stock markets, a few traffic problems, celebrity crap. It would be different tonight, he knew, but he wouldn't live to see it.

He chose a shirt at random to go with his Levis. In the control room Scott cursed; after four consecutive choices of the same Green Day shirt, he'd bet ten bucks that this Chris would pick one as well.

Keys firmly in hand, Chris exited the building. The doorknob was properly tarnished and did not warrant a second glance, and the window replacement had been performed so skilfully that he hadn't noticed the change.

He was half a dozen steps from the parking lot when an animal came around the corner in front of him. Chris took one look and turned to run; it wasn't as big as the bear, not that he remembered that encounter, but it was much too big and much too nasty looking to be some stray dog. In fact he did think it was a bear. Close enough; wolverines are called skunk bears by some for a reason, and one three feet high at the shoulder resembles an actual bear that much more.

He heard the scrabble of claws behind him as the thing took off after him and knew there was no time to open the door. Instead he ran past it and turned into the narrower path that led behind the apartments.

*****

"He's playing with him," Scott said as they watched the big wolverine lope after Chris, and Dave nodded.

"There's no competition. He doesn't need to worry about Renaud or some other predator stealing his toy if he's too slow. It will end the same way, but he can have some fun."

"Fun is in the eye of the beholder," Mrs. Harris said.

"It will be in the stomach of the beholder soon enough," Scott said as Bearkiller gained on his prey.

*****

Chris went over the gate without slowing or even attempting to work the finicky bolt lock. It would never occur to him to hurl himself over a six-foot wooden gate under normal circumstances, but one glance over his shoulder at the feral grin and two-inch claws of the "bear" and he practically flew over. Unfortunately, so did Bearkiller. The wolverine went up and over the gate, claws leaving deep gouges in the cedar, and when he sprang from the top onto the grass he actually ended up in front of Chris, who had landed much less gracefully.

Cornered against the gate he did the only thing he could think of. Luckily the bolt worked on the first try and he was back in the narrow path between the cinder block wall and the building. He didn't run, though, because he thought he knew exactly what would happen next, and he was right.

The "bear" ran up the back side of the gate again, but this time it stopped with its muzzle and front claws on his side for a quick look. Chris instantly slammed the gate back open and pinned the thing between the wall and the gate.

What he would do from there he did not know, but it was all he could think of. Could he somehow crush the thing to death, trapped there between wall and gate? Not with a flimsy wooden gate to work with, it turned out. Bearkiller snarled, irritated at being pushed around, and thrust his paws against the gate so hard that the thing game apart into a mess of cedar shards and 2x4s.

Chris staggered back and grabbed the first weapon that came to hand, which turned out to be one of the shorter 2x4s from the gate. He swung it down on the bear with all his might and was astonished when the thing stepped nimbly to the side and batted the board right out of his hands. The other paw reached out with playful force and suddenly he was on his back, ears ringing. He didn't remember the hit, but he was aware enough to roll out of the way as the beast pounced claws-first towards him.

*****

"Still playing," Dave said. Bearkiller, like many other Project predators, was every bit as intelligent as a man and knew how to defend himself against melee weapons.

"That love tap he gave Chris would have killed if he were serious," Scott said to Mrs. Harris. "Claws or blunt force, either way the guy would be dead if Bearkiller wanted."

On the screen they saw Chris roll to his feet and lunge for a hoe leaning against the apartment wall. He was inches away when Bearkiller swept his legs out from under him with a violent swipe of a paw. This time the wolverine didn't let the man get up, but pinned Chris to the ground with a forepaw as he tore out the seat of his Levis with a quick nip and tug of his fangs.

"Ouch," Scott said, and Dave winced in sympathy too. "Playtime is just beginning, boys and...boys."

*****

Chris hit the ground with such force it drove the breath from his lungs, and the heavy paw suddenly on his lower back didn't help. He managed to slam an elbow into the thing's ear before it had him fully pinned, but all that did was move the bear's head to the side an inch or two. It retaliated with a hard cuff that made him see stars again, then its teeth were in his collar and thick forelegs hemmed him in from either side. He couldn't roll free or squirm forward even without those legs; just the grip on his collar all but paralyzed him.

The forelegs were there for a reason, but he didn't grasp it until he felt the thing step one hindpaw up next to his thigh. When the other followed on the other side he suddenly realized he had seen the posture before. It was stepping forward over him to --

Chris screamed as something hot and much too thick rammed into him from behind. Pinned or not, nape-bit or not, he struggled in earnest now, but the four-hundred-pound wolverine trapped him to the dirt and began to hump with cruel enthusiasm. By the third thrust it had well and truly found his target and Chris suddenly felt sorry to the actresses in his porn collection. Anal sex sometimes hurt, it turned out. It could hurt a great deal indeed.

*****

"Beauty is in the rectum of the beholder, it seems," Dave said.

"To be fair, it has been a while since Bearkiller had a conjugal visit." Most of the Project's predators were male and most had female counterparts, but not all of them got along at all well with their intended mates. Typically the sexes were kept separated unless a breeding was to be attempted. A rare few, like Otto the otter, were gentle and trustworthy enough to have lovers among the Project staff, but Bearkiller was neither gentle nor trustworthy.

What they could see of Bearkiller's endowment suggested that sex of any kind with the wolverine would be a very bad idea. Long, thick, and worst of all stiffened by an internal bone, the wolverine's cock was covered in blood almost instantly upon entering the unfortunate man.

"God, he must be a foot long," said Mrs. Harris, not sounding at all sorry for the man being raped.

"Eleven point eight inches," Dave said in the tone of one who had recited that particular statistic enough times for it to be engraved into his synapses. "Two point four five inches thick. That is a little thinner but somewhat longer than two Coke cans laid end to end. Bearkiller prefers women, but it's any port in a storm if he's horny enough."

"Or angry enough," Scott replied.

"What has he got to be angry about? He gets to eat and rape people for a living on TV," said Mrs. Harris.

"Not as often as he likes," Scott said. "He used to...well, it's a long story and if I told you all of it I'd have to feed you to him."

Mrs. Harris laughed, not realizing that Scott was serious. There were things the Project would kill to keep secret, even in these days of broadcast deathmatches like the Sunday Night Run.

The man on the screen kept screaming and struggling, but that just made the wolverine fuck him harder. If anything, Chris's efforts hastened his demise.

*****

Finally, after minutes of straining and struggle, he managed to turn himself over so he was belly to belly with the beast. He recognized it now; were he a greater fan of the Run TV show he'd have known Bearkiller the wolverine on sight. One didn't expect to run into a television star in one's back yard, though, and the beast's fur seemed darker colored in person than it had on TV.

His every effort hadn't dislodged the powerfully muscled wolverine whose erection still thrust agonizingly into his ass, though it had had to pull out briefly when he rolled over. Unfortunately it had hammered its cock right back in once his leg was out of the way, but turned more or less over he could at least fight. Tormented and terrified, Chris began to punch and elbow Bearkiller without considering that a single swipe of a clawed paw or snap of those steely jaws could kill him. There comes a time when one must fight or die, and this was it.

His efforts seemed to entertain the wolverine more than hurt it. Though he bloodied his knuckles on its thick cheekbones the blows hardly moved the massive head, and the heavy musculature of its neck and chest soaked up his punches. A bigger, stronger man might have made an impression...but probably not. Hide as tough as fine leather lay over hard muscle and thick bone. Pound for pound the beast was much stronger than a man, and it outweighed him more than two to one. Even as he pummeled it with punches he knew the only reason he was still alive was that raping him amused the thing more than killing him.

That changed when his fist connected with one of its eyes. Small and deep set, they were still vulnerable, and the blow reddened its eye and made it snarl in pain. The wolverine went from amused to enraged in an instant, and claws dug into his back as it pulled him close. Chris tried to hold those fanged jaws at arm's length, but he might as well have tried to support a collapsing building. The good news was that it didn't crush his skull or tear out his throat with one snap. The bad news was that it took in his entire head with a sudden yawn-and-bite, gathered its tongue beneath his chin, and swallowed him to the shoulders in one gulp.

*****

"And here we go, boys and girls. It was always going to end this way, and in goes Chris #5 for a personal tour of a giant wolverine's alimentary canal," said Dave.

"Always happy to educate people on the intricacies of the musteline digestive system is our Bearkiller," said Scott in the practiced tones of someone who had tried out four times for an announcer's spot on the Run.

"You two need to get out more," said Anne.

*****

There comes a time when a man must fight or die, and Chris had fought..and was about to die. Victory was not guaranteed, after all, and with a wolverine's jaws wrapped around his shoulders and his head slipping closer to its rumbling belly every second victory seemed very far away indeed. Already his upper arms were pinned to his chest by the thing's jaws, and though he tried to kick it had plenty of experience overcoming that defense. In a sense he was trying to fight a six-limbed creature with only two; its forepaws helped stuff him into the greedy jaws, which themselves were a sort of limb that held him still and sucked him deeper with each gulp. Further down it placed its hindpaws cunningly, forcing his legs up and to the sides so he couldn't get any leverage to kick. Furthest down was the sixth limb, for even as it ate him the beast's cock kept thrusting.

Bearkiller was too big, too strong, and worst of all too experienced to easily overcome. Chris wasn't the first to try to hold back those jaws, or even the fiftieth. The beast engineered a position where, arms now trapped and legs helpless, the mere painful force of its thrusts were pushing him down its throat. More and more the wolverine's muzzle curled own between its forelegs as it simultaneous swallowed him and raped him. The space inside the beast was so claustrophobic, tight throat surrounded by stretched muscle and disjointed bone, that even Chris had trouble expanding his chest to breathe. How the wolverine managed to inhale with its gullet full of human he couldn't imagine.

Eventually Bearkiller was curled beneath himself as far as he could manage. With his chin wedged against his belly there was simply no way to swallow any more of Chris without pulling his cock out, but the stubborn and horny beast was having none of that. Instead he rocked back and forth in place, managing to thrust perhaps an inch in and withdraw just as little. With almost the entire length of his shaft stuffed into Chris's abused colon it was enough.

With his elastic jaws and overwhelming strength he could have bolted Chris down in under a minute. If he were fully aroused and concentrating just on sex he could have thrust to completion in ten. Trying to do both at once slowed both halves of the effort down, but he'd been raping Chris for a lot longer than he had been eating him. The wolverine's haunches shuddered as the rocking motion finally pushed him over the edge; at least one part of the game, however delayed, was finished.

*****

Dave pointed his pen at the screen. "See the fur on his flanks twitch? That's an uncontrollable muscular reaction designed -- to use the term loosely -- to force him to the limit in a female. He just came."

"His dick is actually in his throat at the moment," Scott added. "It's just that Chris #5 is wrapped around it. Pretty soon his own spooge will be in his stomach."

"You two seem to know an awful lot about wolverine sex," Anne said. On the screen Bearkiller took a step back. Dismounting from his unwilling lover had the benefit of straightening both his neck and his intended meal, and by pushing Chris's legs against the ground he swallowed more of the man with one quick push than he had in ten minutes of combined rape and feeding.

There was a glimpse of thick purple cock as the wolverine readied himself for the last few gulps. Not purple, Anne corrected herself. It was black and a sheen of blood. Painful as the rape has looked, there wasn't really that much of the red stuff. Were that his only problem, Chris would survive. Unfortunately that was the least of his problems.

"Bearkiller is the only predator we've got at the moment that will rape humans. Oh, Zane will try sometimes and Renaud has his "Swallow me or I swallow you" game, but only the wolvie will jump on someone like that and succeed. He is the topic of much discussion here at the Project, because sex sells. We have tried and tried to train a bear or wolf or cat or anything with a penis to rape. But even Renaud, who routinely coerces blowjobs out of contestants, would rather do that than mount them." Dave shrugged. "Naturally we know everything there is to know about Bearkiller's sex life. I could tell you to the microliter the average amount he ejaculates, for example."

"Well, there goes another lover down his throat," said Anne, who had seen enough episodes of the Run to know that nothing shy of intervention by the staff would save Chris #5 from a short trip through a wolverine's digestive tract.

*****

His head was in the wolverine stomach now, a stinking, burning place that seemed much too small to contain his entire body. Contain it the stomach would, though, for with each toss of its head the beast swallowed a few more inches of him. Ribs popped and creaked and muscles groaned as the animal's body cavity expanded to let him through. Below that tight cage of bone was the looser flesh of the abdomen, but even that stretched taut as his shoulders emerged into the gut. A great contraction of the swallowing muscles helped ease him even deeper; the thing's jaws were around his thighs now, and every broad or awkward part of him was already past the jaws and down the throat. It was just a question now of fitting the entirety of him into the waiting stomach, for there was simply no way to resist the animal's appetite now.

Another gulp and his rump followed his torso into the wolverine's belly. Digestive enzymes stung his skin wherever it was exposed, especially his face which they had worked on the longest. Now his torn pants and ravaged anus were in direct contact with the stomach juices, and Chris, face pressed against folds of wet stomach flesh, whimpered. Here was a ready access point for the acids, a point that would be digested before any other. In a day or so it would not matter, as his entire body would be reduced to droppings, calories, and whatever of him the beast's body kept to replenish itself, but it was his poor bloody ass that would precede the rest into oblivion.

Fangs scraped over his calves, then his shoes, and finally the fanged jaws closed around his toes. It was almost over. Bulging oddly already at various points the wolverine stretched out his muzzle and swallowed. A double lump moved through his neckfur as his toes were swallowed, and down inside the beast Chris slipped and slithered as the throat muscles pushed the last bits of him into the beast's stomach. The wolverine's taut bellyfur stretched and strained to accommodate close to half his weight in one lumpy package.

Wrapped in tough pelt and muscle, forced into a fetal position, exhausted and too confined by the stomach to even struggle effectively, Chris at last relaxed. There came a time to fight or die, and he had fought. When Bearkiller belched up the last bubble of air and there was nothing to inhale but stomach acid it was almost a relief.

*****

Anne watched the heart monitor flatline moments after the wolverine burped. It happened just as Bearkiller yawned to reset his snakelike jaws, and it made her blink.

"Didn't you say something about making it so he didn't need to breathe, so he'd last longer in there?"

Dave waggled his hand in a "so-so" gesture. "There are things that can kill quickly besides suffocation. He was pretty beaten up, and raped too. Heart failure, maybe. Not shock, we shot him full of no-shock, but exhaustion can outright kill you and that trick Bearkiller does where he swallows and rapes at the same time is really hard on the prey. We should have a better idea once Chris 5's phone is recovered. All the short range telemetry goes into that."

"Will it survive the digestive process?"

"A lot of work went into those recorders. Unless a pred crushes them between its teeth they should survive just fine whether they get hacked back up or do the full tour. Personally, I have a case of beer bet that at least one fails."

On the screen the feral brute stood up, stretched, and pushed its lumpy belly against the ground for a moment. That squeezed out another belch and a fart, which the outside microphones recorded as lovingly as they did all the other action. Apparently satisfied that his toy was situated for easiest digestion, Bearkiller waddled past the shattered gate and toward the parking lot, where his mobile pen was being deployed.

"Believe it or not, people enter raffles for the chance to sleep with him, and other preds too. Some of them even survive the experience when their lover is in a good mood. I think last time we had eight people here for groupie night and two survived, though to be fair one of the casualties deliberately fed herself to Otto." Dave touched a switch. "Cleanup, you're going to need to rebuild the back gate, and make sure you rake over any pawprints back there."

On a side screen a wide view appeared, and for the first time Anne saw the apartment building from a distance. Cordoned off, guarded by dozens of men, and surrounded by temporary staff and predator housing. The inevitable protestors were visible to one side.

"It was a lot simpler to use the actual complex instead of building our own," Scott said as he followed her gaze. "We have it for a week, though we'll probably be done before that, and for now we're putting up the other tenants in a nice hotel. You might think they wouldn't want to go back after all that's happening there, but maybe the fact that fans of the show will pay good money to visit the site has some impact on their decision. It certainly influenced the landlord's."

Bearkiller waddled back into his pen, drooping belly dragging the ground, and the view was replaced by the grid of available predators once again. There was little to see now but the staff performing routine checks and the cleanup crew at work, so she went along with the guide when he touched her elbow.

Two hallways and an elevator later Anne emerged into a clean white room bustling with activity. Like the control room this one was lined with giant viewscreens, but the staff here kept their eyes scrupulously on their work. Much of that work centered on the glass tube in the middle of the room, a tube that contained a man.

Anne walked up and examined him. Padded cuffs and straps restrained him, wires were clipped to sensors all over his body, and tubes entered him in a dozen places. Periodically a pair of droppers dripped fluid into his eyes, which were held unblinkingly open by clamps.

She turned to see what he was seeing. It was the cleanup crew, the grid of predators, and on a third screen, a new sleeping Chris being deposited in his bed by technicians. A columns of smaller screens showed Bearkiller curled up around the bulge in his middle, already sleep, and below him the other predators who had eaten Chris today. Zane was gnawing on a bloody femur.

"Only seventeen more to go, Chris," she said, and the bound man's frantic eyes flicked down to fix on her. "Seventeen more deaths to atone for, seventeen more predators to feed. I bet you thought when you shot up my son's school that they could only kill you once. Well, you were wrong."

The man in the tube couldn't speak, throat full as it was of tubes, but his eyes pled for release from this torment. Her guide watched, ready to intervene if she tried anything. She just put her hand on the glass and smiled up at Chris.

"They say they can't make you feel what the other you's, your clones, are feeling. That's too bad. They also say the clones would only live a day or two anyway. It takes all the technology they have to make them at all, and they fall over dead from cellular breakdown. Digestion is just a shortcut to that, isn't it?"

Chris's eyes flicked back to the screen, where a great-maned lion was stirring in his pen. "Ah, good, they finally got Caesar back in the rotation," her guide said. "Nice lion. Very friendly. Used to live up in Alaska with his keeper. Not so nice when he's eating you, of course."

Anne turned back to the man in the tube. "Worry not, dear. Seventeen more, and that will be one death for every person you killed. That's enough, we think. We voted, we relatives and survivors. Seventeen more of you for you to watch die, waking up thinking it's that same morning and going to their deaths over and over."

Her fingernails dragged along the glass, and his eyes followed. "And then it will be your turn. We haven't voted on which predator will get to eat you yet, but we've already agreed it will be one that will swallow you whole. They're testing out some new drugs on your clones, too. By the time it's your turn they tell me you'll be conscious until the gastric juices dissolve your brain."

Her guide touched her elbow, and Anne Harris turned away from the tube. "See you soon. Chris. See you soon."