Robert Walker - Extreme Instinct

She felt her foot slip and go under the scalding water, and instinctively she went to her knees to gain a foothold before the hot spring behind her, but she feared losing control as she clawed to stay on solid ground, fighting madly to regain her balance, just as he rushed her, kicking out at her, still laughing maniacally.

She dodged his first blow by rolling to one side. Screaming his victory, in hot pursuit and sure of victory, he charged, but Jessica brought up a board from below the boardwalk-left there for years, for this moment, for her to grab hold of-and she brought it against his charging temple. Both the board and Dorphmann fell into the pool, him up to his thighs, screaming with the pain of it, dropping to his waist in his frenzied fight to return to solid ground; the board was seared to boiling like a large hot dog, and then it sank below the superheated water.

He attacked with renewed vigor, although his legs and lower trunk must be tearing at him, burned as they were, smoke coming off his clothing. Unarmed, not wearing a second gun as was her usual habit, because she'd earlier insisted J. T. take it, she attacked him with a molten rock that had solidified here.

This creature was trying to send her to Hell via the hot springs beside them. The rock hit him solidly at the already fried kneecap, sending him dazed, reeling back, struggling anew for his footing, his lower extremities still seething and sending up a small cloud of smoke. Feydor Dorphmann now screamed in frustrated anger as well as pain.

"Get thee behind me, Satan!" she shouted the familiar biblical epitaph just as he lost his battle with equilibrium and his footing. He toppled for the second time into the hottest of the hot springs here.

She struggled now to get a hand out to him, to help him save himself, searching frantically for something at hand to assist, but there was nothing, no trees or branches nearby.

She tried desperately to pull him out, but he appeared rigid, as if rigor mortis had prematurely set in, his eyes still alive, still staring back at her. But he remained unable to move, dead in the water-shock and rapid dehydration, she guessed. He was next pulled under by the heavy, hot saliva of Hell, and she somewhat gratefully watched him go, thinking him the most grateful of the grateful dead now…

Taking a deep breath and regretting it, for she'd filled her lungs with the sulfur fumes free-floating here, Jessica fell back against the earth at the edge of Hell, and relaxed her guard now, panting, catching her breath. Her breathing was just returning to normal when suddenly the scalding waters beside her erupted and Dorphmann's hand reached from Hell to take hold of her, his body surging upward, taking hold of her ankle, desperately attempting to drag her down with him, using his body weight against her.

Jessica kicked wildly out at him again and again, ramming her heels into him until both her shoes fell away and turned to searing, inert balls of boiling gruel before her eyes as Dorphmann continued to struggle to bring her into Hellsmouth with him.

His face emerged in a mask of madness and sloughing skin, portions of his face peeling away with the weight of the superheated waters that had infiltrated every pore and the spaces between his cells, turning him into a gelatinous creature.

Jessica pulled away and his palms came away with her while his bone remained with him.

She pulled farther and farther away, gasping and crying as she did so, frightened beyond all reason, seeing him rise now in some superhuman way from Satan's belly until he crawled on all fours from the pool, flopping onto the ground beside her, still desperately trying to pull her back in and down with him, a look of deepest pleading on his seared features, his white-red boiled skin falling away, tumbling with his eyebrows from his brow, his eyes now two red, unseeing oranges.

He was blind, his eyes having been boiled away. His skin sloughed off in a pasty, gelatinous material, exposing bone in places; what seemed an entire foot slipped off and, like a mackerel, slithered back into the nearby, bubbling pool, claimed by it.

It was too late for medical assistance for Dorphmann. He died in a blinding, searing, white-hot liquid heat that had become a part of him. Jessica kicked out again and again to release the frozen, solidified hold on her ankle, and when the monster's hand came off, the rest of him slid down into the pool. There, his clothing and skin finally consumed by Hellsmouth, the flesh became fishy and it wobbled and flopped from his every bone, his face a mask of pain so intense that a frozen rictus smile would forever remain.

He's dead… He's got to be dead now, she assured herself. Dead of dehydration and the burns suffered over one hundred percent of his evil body and brain. Only silicified bone and teeth would remain, if anything of him at all could be salvaged from Hellsmouth.

He still blindly reached out to her again and moaned in a sepulchral voice, "I didn't want to do it. He made me do it… Now he's got me…"

Jessica passed out as the dead man slipped away from her, back into the cauldron.

When she opened her eyes, Jessica found a crowd of onlookers staring and shouting at the scene, some calling for medical assistance.

Jessica found that her own burns frightened some of the onlookers. Dirt and tears stained her face. Her blouse ripped, her skirt torn, her shoes missing, she was lifted onto the boardwalk by Rideout and some of Fronval's rangers. Rangers with salves and clean gauze bandages began to wrap both her ankles and her hands where she had been scalded either by Hellsmouth's waters or Dorphmann's touch. She heard the words "second-degree burns" and "third-degree burns," but she felt no pain.

From the other side of the crowd, she heard J. T.'s voice and that of Eriq Santiva, each calling out her name, terrified of what they would find when the crowd parted around her. The cavalry had arrived just a bit late, but all the same, she was pleased to know that J. T. and Eriq were nearby.

J. T. fell to his knees over her, his hands feeling for any broken bones, his questions coming at her in rapid succession. "Are you hurt? Where does it hurt? How bad are the burns? Get those bandages around her wrists, hands, ankles before any infection can set in."

Santiva, equally concerned, now held her head in his lap, looking down over Jessica, asking if she were all right.

"I'm fine. A few aches and pains, but I'll survive. For some reason, I don't feel the burns."

"That's because you're in shock!" J. T. shouted at her, chastising her. "You fool, you bloody fool. You might've gotten yourself killed. You might be at the bottom of that searing hot pool right now."

Neil Gallagher now knelt over her, shaking his head. "I have to agree with Dr. Thorpe on that score, Coran. And Dorphmann, the Phantom? What's happened to him? Has he escaped into the park? Shouldn't we be launching a manhunt, Santiva?" he asked.

Jessica realized only now that no one besides her had actually seen the horror of Feydor Dorphmann's end, that no one else had witnessed the death. She imagined Karl Repasi's smug and debunking attitude now: With no body, who was to say if Dorphmann had actually been killed here or not? She was the only person alive to see him removed from this world. If nothing of Dorphmann were ever retrieved from Hellsmouth, there would always remain an element of doubt on the part of others. She alone would know the truth, that the monster had been relegated to another, more scorching environment.

Jessica's mouth had gaped open with her thoughts.

"Well, Dr. Coran?" pushed Gallagher.

"Let her be," snapped Thorpe.

Jessica said, "Someone here must've seen what happened to Dorphmann!"

"He's resting comfortably in Hellsmouth," pronounced Corey Rideout over Santiva's and Gallagher's considerable shoulders. "Isn't that right, Dr. Coran?"