Iron Girders and Steel Springs

"Yep," Marshall replied.

Over in the Jacuzzi Vasya thrashed her body against a largely passive Chris. Both grunted their pleasure.

"I never thought there could be a thing as too much sex," Figg said to Marshall. "Those girls might be the death of me. You sure you don't want to take one off my hands for the afternoon?"

"Nah." Marshall shook his head.

"Your loss," Figg said.

Figg's girls, Maruska and her sister, came over and, giggling, took Figg by the arms and led him over to a large inflatable mattress lying on the decking. The middle-aged banker lay down on his back while Maruska straddled his groin and her sister sat on his face. It didn't take long for both sisters to be bouncing up and down in unison, their loud moans rolling over the pristine waters of the loch.

Marshall left his plate and went to look for Kath. The camp was starting to resemble the set of a porno movie. Marshall didn't mind porno's, it was just a little weird to find himself in the middle of one. He felt far more comfortable once he and Kath had walked up through the woods and to the flat rocks overlooking the mirrored surface of the loch.

They talked some more about their pasts. He made her laugh as he told her of some of the more unorthodox jobs a fireman was expected to do.

"These stories all sound like they belong to a big strapping boulder of a laddie." Kath's green eyes were suddenly serious. "What happened, if you don't mind me asking?"

Marshall grimaced. He'd known this question would come, it always did.

"There was an accident," he said. "A warehouse fire. We shouldn't have gone in, the structure wasn't safe, but we'd been told there were some children inside. They'd snuck into the old building to play and were trapped on the second floor.

"The structure wasn't safe. A floor gave out underneath me. I crashed out of a side window and impaled myself on some iron railings below. I thrashed around on those for a while, the fire slowly roasting the left side of my body."

Kath gave a sharp intake of breath.

"The burns were bad but not fatal, and they managed to cut me down before I bled to death. Unfortunately one of the railings had punctured my intestines and spread fecal matter through my body cavity. I was laid up on a hospital bed while peritonitis ate me alive from the inside. I was lucky I was a big strapping lad. There was so much of me the bugs couldn't eat all of it before the doctors finally flushed them out of my system."

Marshall gave Kath a sardonic smile.

"They left behind the slimline version of me you see today. That which doesn't kill you does not always make you stronger."

"The children?"

Marshall looked at the floor. "Dead. Smoke inhalation. Probably long before we even reached the building. Not all sacrifices are heroic. Some are pointless wastes."

"Don't be silly. You couldn't have known. It's the intent that matters. That makes you a hero."

"Or an idiot."

"They're kind of the same."

Kath looked at him with bright green eyes.

"So that's why you won't take that top off. Show me."

"I thought you'd brought me up here to have sex," Marshall said. "It really isn't going to help the mood. I picked up third degree burns all down my left side and had several inches of iron rammed through my guts. It's not a pretty sight."

He put his hands on the bottom of his top, but made no move to lift it.

Kath rolled her eyes. "Look, if I scream or pull a funny face you have permission to toss me into the loch, and you know how much I hate water."

"I'll hold you to that," Marshall said.

He lifted up his hooded top and the T-shirt underneath and rolled both up over his head.

Kath didn't pull a funny face. Neither did she scream or gasp. She also didn't stare at him with pity, for which Marshall was grateful. He hated the pity more than anything.

She leaned forward and traced a finger along the twisted scar tissue running across his abdomen. Her hand glided up the rough surface of his left side and up onto his shoulder, where his flesh resembled wax that had melted and solidified back into a twisted facsimile of the original form.

"You know, some people might see all this as a massive turn on," Kath said.

Marshall raised his eyebrows.

"Really," Kath said.

She looked down at his crotch.

"Now you've shown me the worst of it, there's no excuse to keep those trousers on, unless you have a pathological aversion to showing your naughty bits to members of the opposite sex."

"It's fine," Marshall laughed.

He pulled down his trousers and the underpants beneath. Finally, after two days and nights, Marshall was nude in a nudist camp.

"What now?"

"Now..." Kath started. "You chase me through the heather," she said in a breathless rush as she sprang off the rocks and dived into the waist-high heather.

Laughing, Marshall jumped off and gave chase. He felt as exhilarated as an eager sixteen-year-old as he charged after her, if not quite as mobile. He doubted he'd have caught her in his prime. She was as fast and as agile as a cat.

In the end she caught him—crouching down to hide and then pouncing on him as he blundered by. Together they rolled through the undergrowth and Marshall's nostrils were filled with the fresh scents of new growth. They gambolled like giddy teenagers until Marshall noticed the sun dropping below the horizon.

"Shouldn't we head back?"

Marshall was concerned about navigating the path back through the woods in the dark.

"There's no rush," Kath said. "If you check the picnic hamper you'll see I packed a torch for this very purpose. And some other things..." she added with a wicked smile.

"You plan ahead," Marshall said.

"I did say you weren't leaving until I'd jumped your bones," Kath said, tickling his nose with a sprig of heather. "You might as well surrender to your fate."

"I don't think I have any choice in the matter."

Kath looked up at the sky. A strange expression swam across her face, but it was gone as quickly as it had appeared.

"Oooh. How inconvenient." She stood up. "Excuse me for a moment. I have a call of nature to attend to. I'll be right back." She held up a wagging forefinger. "Don't you be going anywhere."

Marshall had no intention of going anywhere. Smiling, he lay back in the heather and watched as the sun dipped below the horizon. The moon came out—big and full—and bathed the hills in silvery light.

He'd invite Kath back to his room tonight, he decided.

A cry from the woods below jerked him upright. Not Kath. Too deep. More a bellow. One of the Londoners, possibly. Maybe they'd wandered into the woods and—in the gloom—lost their footing and fallen into a hollow.

The cry came again. Pain and fear. A bloodcurdling scream.

Fallen and hurt themselves. Badly.

Marshall felt a sympathetic twitch along the wounds in his abdomen. He knew all too well how easily the human body came apart, and how much it hurt when it did.

He rushed to the basket Kath had left on top of the rocks. She'd said there was a torch in there. Under the ghostly light of the moon, Marshall fumbled around the basket until his hand closed around something long and cylindrical. He found a switch and turned it on. Something glinted at the bottom of the basket. Marshall realised it was the foil wrappers of condoms, maybe ten or more...

Good Lord, Kath, Marshall thought with a smile. What do you think I am?

Using the torch to light the way, Marshall rushed back down the path as fast as he felt safe enough to manage. Reflexively, he went for his phone and then remembered he'd left it in his room. Gàrradh-Sionnach was so remote it was little more than an alarm clock up here anyway.

Isolated, poor communications; this was a bad place to have an accident.

Marshall paused on entering the woods. He tried to pinpoint where the cries had come from.

This direction.

He stepped off the path and onto a carpet of pine needles. He was thankful his nudity hadn't extended to taking his trainers off. Not everyone was made out of iron girders and steel springs.

He made his way over the ground carefully. No sense twisting his ankle over a hidden root while rushing to the rescue.

He nearly did so anyway. His foot went through a thin carpet of discarded pine needles and into a root hollow. He stumbled and placed a hand against the nearest tree trunk to steady himself. His fingers brushed against something wet and sticky.

He brought his hand back and checked his fingers in the light of the torch. Red.

Blood?

He shone his light on the trunk and saw a glistening stain.

Large. Fresh.

Had the man tripped and banged his head against the trunk? The ground was uneven.

Marshall didn't think so. It was a large stain. A man tripping and banging his head could have made it, but he wouldn't have been able to cry out, not twice. He'd have been knocked cold.

Hairs rose up all over Marshall's body. His heart thudded in his chest.

There was a thick tang in the air. Marshall had smelt it before, when it had felt like gallons of blood were pouring out of his punctured body as he'd thrashed on those iron railings like a speared fish, and had hoped never to smell it again.

What had happened here? Was the American unbalanced enough to decide to settle his grievances in a more violent manner? Marshall thought he looked the kind of man that didn't like settling for second place, but surely he wouldn't have gone this far.

Cautiously, Marshall made his way down into a small pine needle-laden clearing. He swung his torch beam from left to right. There were more dark patches—blood spatters—on the carpet of green needles. Marshall's unease grew.

Low sounds disturbed the silence beneath the dark trees. Grackly, crunching sounds; like the sounds a dog might make while chewing on a bone.

Marshall's shoulders lost some tenseness. A dog or dogs must have brought down a wild animal. Probably a deer from the size of it.

Those cries had sounded so humanlike.

Scotland didn't have any wolves, did it? No accidental escapees?

The noises stopped. On Marshall's left, just outside the cone of light thrown out by his torch, a dark shape rose up out of the undergrowth. Marshall saw two yellow eyes, glowing in the darkness like gold coins. He would have thought them the eyes of a cat, but they were too large, too far apart. The shape growled—a low, deep rumble.

In his haste to move backwards Marshall tripped over an exposed root and fell heavily against the base of a tree. He managed to keep hold of the torch and revealed in the light was...

...revealed in the light was...

Oh God, what was it?

The beast was tall—maybe six and a half feet—and stood upright like a man. Initially Marshall even thought it was a man, a wild man wearing the pelts of wolves.

It had the head of a wolf.

Not a mask, not the lifeless head of a pelt, but an actual breathing, growling head of a wolf. A real wolf. No special effect was this good. The creature bared long canines. Its snout and teeth were stained red with blood.

It was a werewolf. An actual, real-life, honest-to-goodness werewolf.

He was about to be killed by a werewolf. In Scotland.

A female werewolf, he realised with shock. Her front was largely free of fur. It/She had a pair of large round breasts surrounded by short, downy grey fur. Good enough for Page 3, was Marshall's detached thought. Below her breasts there was another, circular, patch of naked skin around her navel. Below that her sex was highlighted with a triangle of thick, greyish-blonde fur. Perversely, the folds of her vagina glistened in the torchlight as if she was aroused or had recently had sex.

As a firefighter, Marshall had rushed into many dangerous situations with scarcely a second thought, but he'd never experienced fear like this before. It was primal and ancient. It felt like a cold hand had erupted from the hard wood behind him and grasped the lower regions of his brain in a clammy fist.

The monster roared as it stepped into the clearing.

A hissing ball of orange fur fell out of the night sky and landed in the centre of the clearing. Spitting and growling, it positioned itself between Marshall and the werewolf. It looked like a cat, albeit a very large one. Its back was arched and its fur stood up as if it had been electrocuted.

It also looked strangely familiar, as did the werewolf.

The werewolf growled—low and menacing. The cat, or the thing that resembled a cat, hissed and raised a claw-tipped paw. Even with all the hairs of its tail sticking out like a brush, the cat was maybe only half the size of the monster. Still, it refused to be cowed.

The wolf growled—roared—again.

The cat hissed back. It waved its paw in warning. Marshall saw the muscles flex in the cat's back legs—legs that looked almost human—as it shifted position, preparing to pounce. Fangs bared and painted silver by the moonlight, the two beasts faced each and attempted to stare the other down. Marshall was nothing more than a helpless observer.

This shouldn't be a contest. The size difference was too great. The wolf was enormous, big enough to swat the other away with ease, but the cat refused to acknowledge the gulf in mass and made up for it in fury. Hissing and spitting, it kept its body between the wolf and Marshall, a claw-tipped paw held out before it like a fencing sword.

It shouldn't be a contest, but it was the wolf that backed down. It glanced down to the floor and—just like that—the stand-off was resolved. The werewolf dropped down on all fours and padded off into the darkness between the trees, leaving the clearing—and Marshall—to the wildcat.

The remaining beast turned to face its 'spoils' and Marshall looked on a face that belonged to neither cat nor human and was instead a strange blend of the two. Like the wolf, the cat was naked and possessed a pair of small pink breasts on a front largely free of the ginger fur covering the rest of her body. Somewhere beneath the whiskers, furs and fangs Marshall thought he saw Kath. He didn't think she saw him.

The cat smiled.

Wait, maybe she did—

The cat pounced.

Marshall screamed as a bundle of ginger fur and claws crashed into him. Her claws were on top of him. Her weight was on top of him. Her teeth were at his throat. Marshall cried out in terror.

"Oh shut up, you big Jessie."

The voice was unmistakable, right down to the broad Scottish accent. The cat, Kath, nipped him playfully on the ear.

Marshall stopped yelling and thrashing around. He was lying on his back in a clearing covered with pine needles. He looked up and saw...Kath?...astride him.

It was Kath. Behind the whiskers, the fur, the glowing green eyes; it was her. Her body was covered in soft downy fur. A fluffy ginger tail swished behind her. Beyond her, high above in the clear night sky, Marshall saw the bright silver disk of a full moon.

"Last night," Kath said. Her voice was a little hoarser, had more of an edge, but was still recognisably hers. "I said I'd jump your bones."

She rubbed her body against Marshall. Despite the strangeness of the circumstances he felt a little erotic shiver run through his body.

"You're...um...different," Marshall said.

This couldn't be real. He had to be in the middle of a strange, vivid dream.

Kath shrugged. "That time of the month."

She hugged him tightly. Her warm—furry—body squirmed against his. He felt her whiskers brush against his face as she rubbed her cheek against his. The whole time she purred like a...well...cat.

Marshall was startled as he felt a paw cup his balls and give them a naughty little squeeze. She pressed a palm against his crotch and rubbed his penis.

"Tsk, stupid big-titted Russian bitch," Kath said. "She's gone and near scared it all the way back inside you. We'll have to sort that out."

She shifted position on top of him, turning around until she was sitting on his chest. Her tail—thick and fluffy—swished across his face. She giggled as she used it to tickle Marshall's nose. There was a strong, musky scent in the air. Marshall couldn't identify it, but it had an arousing effect on him. His blood quickened through his veins. In defiance of all the weirdness happening around him, he felt his dick start to harden.

"Better," Kath purred.

She helped his hard-on along by rubbing it with a paw and waving her ass in front of his face. In between tail swishes Marshall glimpsed the naked folds of her vagina between her legs. The clamshell folds were inviting and surrounded by downy ginger fur. The musky odour thickened and Marshall's quickening heart pumped more blood to his crotch.

Kath bobbed down and took his erection between her lips.

Whoa. Her tongue was rough. He felt it pull against his foreskin as she licked up his shaft. The sensation was strange, but also weirdly kinky. Kath wrapped her lips around him and sucked. Marshall's hips, responding to a more primal part of his brain, twitched.

Kath released his penis and gave a satisfied purr. She pushed her ass up Marshall's body until her pussy was right in his face. The musky odour was overpowering. Her tail curled around his head like a fluffy boa. Playfully, she batted at his erection like it was a mouse. She bobbed down and gave his glans another lick with her tongue.

Kath turned back and smiled. "I've been waiting all weekend to do this."

She shifted position, moving around to face him. Her green eyes shone with feral delight as she straddled him. She steered his erection between her legs, pressed her hips down and—just like that—Marshall was inside her.

Girlfriends—and sex—had been in short supply since his accident. He'd nearly forgotten how good this could feel. Kath was tighter than the other girls he remembered sleeping with.

And a lot more energetic.

She put paws on his shoulders and braced against him as she bounced up and down. She hadn't been joking when she'd said she was made of steel springs. On and on she bounced up and down on him, sending pulses of pleasure running through Marshall as his dick slid in and out of her tight, moist sheath.

Kath panted and yowled as she rode him under the silvery moon. Marshall thought her claws might have sunk into the meat of his shoulder at one point, but his attention was focused on other matters. His body was waking up. Long dormant urges were coming up to the surface. He started to thrust his hips back against her. He bared his own teeth as he bounced her wiry body up and down on him. The velvet folds of her vagina rode up almost past the helmet of his cock with each bounce, before coming back down to engulf his whole length in a warm, silken tunnel.

Kath bared her teeth back at him. Her canines were long and formed formidable, pointed fangs. She shifted her paws to his biceps and pinned him to the pine-needle-carpeted ground as she thrust her hips up and down. Marshall's teeth snapped back and he met her hips with powerful thrusts of his own.

"I knew there was still some wildness left in you," Kath growled. "It needed waking up, that's all."

She rolled and pulled Marshall on top of her. Something—alive, vital—was roaring inside him. He felt it padding through his bones and springing through long-neglected muscles. He thrust into her, driving his hard cock into the soft burrow of her sex. Kath writhed and squirmed beneath him. Her head thrashed as she yowled. A furry leg hooked around his buttocks as she pushed her hips back at him.

He'd missed this—adrenaline, risk, vigour, life! The exhilaration roared through him and reminded him of his younger self, a man he'd thought had been left behind—skewered—on the railings outside a burning warehouse. It all came back—the energy, the fearlessness, the sheer delight in living for the moment.

Too long behind a desk. Too long drowning in the pitying stares of others.