Robert Walker - Extreme Instinct

She needed to face her own devils and hopefully come away a better, more enabled person and not the shattered creature that Feydor Dorphmann had become.

She leaned a little toward the pool and spit into it. "Damn you!" she shouted into the pool. "Damn you, Dorphmann, and all your kind!"

A large, gaseous bubble arose in response, sending a flume of sulfuric acid skyward and near Jessica's face.

"Tit for tat, heh?" she asked the natural formation, which seemed to mock her.

Overhead she heard the wild, free cry of an eagle, and she looked upward to see it disappear into the sun. Still leaning on her crutches, she felt one of them give way as it slid off the boardwalk, almost sending her over the side. She regained her balance, gasping and kneeling before the fiery pool.

She felt weak, helpless before the enormity of the evil she felt dwelling here, spouting its venom into the atmosphere. She had only destroyed a man who'd been touched by this evil via birth, the brain, the DNA perhaps. She hadn't begun to destroy the evil itself. She knew it would return with a vengeance, a vengeance directed at her, again and again.

"Pardon me, miss," came a voice to her left, "but suicide is no answer to anything."

She'd gone to her knees, attempting to retrieve the lost crutch. She looked up at an elderly man in jogging fatigues offering her a hand.

"No, you misunderstand," she told him. "I… I just dropped my crutch." Her hands, wrists, and feet had healed well, as she'd been told by the Mammoth doctors, but the bandages made her look like the leftover result of a previous suicide attempt. It was not surprising that the old man thought so, too.

"Of course," the man replied, "how clumsy of me to suggest-"

"Could you reach my crutch?"

The man obliged, actually stepping off the boardwalk to retrieve the crutch. "Be careful," she pleaded.

"There's something odd here," he said.

"What's that?"

"Something down here, below the walkway."

Jessica leaned in and stared below the walk to see a discarded black case, Dorphmann's case, the case he'd been carrying that night. Why had no one else found it?

"Can you reach it?" Jessica asked the stranger.

He used the crutch to lift the case handle and inch it from below the walk, under which all manner of strange green growth flourished atop the lunarlike surface of the silicified earth here. In a moment, both crutch and briefcase clattered noisily onto the boardwalk. "What's in it?" asked the curious jogger now.

Jessica itched to open the case. It had to be Dorphmann's legacy. Who else might have left it at this exact spot?

''Quickly, open it,'' said the stranger as he climbed back onto the boardwalk.

Her fingers held over the clasps. Maybe there is a reason why I'm here, she thought, conversing with herself. Why the killer brought me to this place, and perhaps I just found it.

"Open it up!" insisted the man, a gleaming curiosity filling his green eyes, his white beard showing his agitation as it bobbed.

Dorphmann was no fool. He had led her from the start, as if she had a ring in her nose and he a rope. If he put the case here for her to discover after his death…

The old man grabbed the case, saying, "It's mine. I found it. Whatever's inside belongs to me."

"Damn it, mister, it's evidence in a crime that occurred here. I'll have to confiscate the case, sir. And I don't want it opened until it can be checked out by a bomb squad."

"Bomb squad, fiddle-faddle. That's ridiculous. A crime scene, out here?'' He threw out his arms, one with the case dangling from it, to indicate where they were, and he laughed.

"Careful with that thing, please! I'm the FBI woman who stopped Feydor Dorphmann at this very spot. Surely you've heard the story if you're staying at the lodge?"

"No, I've heard no such thing." He was clutching the case close to him now. His eyes and his body language told her that he didn't believe a word she'd said. He began examining the case, ignoring her. She'd come out in a pullover and jeans, and she'd left her gun and credentials in her room.

"Be careful with that thing. It's full of explosive materials. Butane, gasoline, who knows what else? Dorphmann may've rigged it to go off in the event-"

But the man had begun to step away from her, backing off, and Jessica had grabbed up her two crutches, trying to keep pace, imploring him the whole time when he cut her off.

"If you're FBI, I'm the King of Wales."

"But I am!"

"Where's your badge, then? Your gun? Show me some proof."

"I'm on vacation. I left all that in my room, but, but-"

He turned and jogged off with the case, going toward the lodge. Jessica futilely tried to keep pace. She saw him disappear into a sulfur cloud and turn a corner along the boardwalk ahead.

"Please!" she shouted when suddenly she heard and saw evidence of a fireball explosion ahead of her. The old man now came running mindlessly, wildly back at her, engulfed in flames, his hands outstretched, his head and entire body captured in its own holocaust, his screams like those of Dorphmann before him. Jessica realized that his cotton jogging suit continued to fuel the blaze that the briefcase-triggered bomb had begun. She saw that his left hand was completely gone, his right dangling by a thread of tissue.

A few feet before her now, Jessica attempted to tackle him, bring him down, and do what she could to smother the flames, knowing she had little hope of doing so. She could easily find her own clothing on fire. But just as she threw herself at the flaming figure, he went soaring off the boardwalk and into the spongy, moving earth alongside Hellsmouth pool.

Jessica knew that but for the grace of God, the writhing figure on the edge of the hot pool might well be her. Now the blazing, tortured man rolled into the now inviting, enticing pool in a vain attempt to end the pain of fire. Once more, she was witness to the searing, blistering tongue of Satan as it licked up the flaming figure of the man who'd only stopped in an attempt to help out Jessica Coran.

It was as if Satan, bent on destroying her, like a bad shot, managed to hit everyone around her instead.

The wails and flames and shouts brought other joggers and walkers along the boardwalk racing toward the scene as Jessica cautiously climbed down from the boardwalk, discarding one crutch, using the second as a futile lifeline to the stranger who'd first befriended her and then suspected her of lying. The man miraculously found the crutch and the strength to hold on by wrapping an arm through it, his hands being useless. By now, others along the boardwalk, alerted to the incident, were beside Jessica, and they helped heave the dying man crawling from the pit.

There was little left to save.

His feet slipped away from him like melted paint from a canvas, leaving only bone. Jessica knew that it was a matter of how long he'd suffer at this point. He had third-and fourth-degree burns over a hundred percent of his body, the jogging suit gone, the skin tattered, peeling away like soggy mattress pieces, sodden and useless.

All around her, Jessica heard park personnel and rangers yelling in a bucket-line fashion all the way back to the lodge that someone had fallen into Hellsmouth, that air transport to Mammoth or Bozeman was immediately needed.

A sudden last breath expired from the man in a cloud of heat, and then he, too, expired, a blessing, an end to what must be absolute hell, she thought.

Jessica now called up to the closest ranger and shouted, "Forget the rush. There's no hope for this man. He's gone. See if anyone recognizes his features, so we can identify him, notify any kin."

"That was a brave thing you did, Dr. Coran, pulling him back in like that," said one young ranger. "I never seen anything so gutsy before in my life."