The plan they hatched seemed complicated, but oddly doable in the short-term.
Brandy worked three 12-hour days a week, with three days off. She would call McEvans on her first day off for the week and tell him she had trapped 'Shirley'. Brandy would then make an excuse about why she couldn't bring 'Shirley' to Animal Sphere herself, but instead would send the alligator with a couple of friends.
The manmade alligator swamp at Animal Sphere was big enough, and deep enough, that 'Shirley' could feasibly disappear throughout the day while Brandy was working. She would stash several changes of clothes in her employee locker, take showers on the premises, and basically live there for a week. When the time was up, she would tell McEvans it was time to ship 'Shirley' back home on another one of her days off.
“Is this really going to be worth it?” Marianne asked her, hoping that Brandy might chicken-out last minute.
“Yes! I need to impress my boss,” Brandy said.
“This is going way above and beyond professional.”
“You've already committed, so you have to back me up on this now,” Brandy told her.
A few days later, Brandy made the call, and McEvans was ecstatic. His favorite alligator was on her way back to him.
When Marianne and Jenny pulled up in Ray's pickup truck – which they had borrowed under false pretenses for a fictional errand – McEvans met them for the first time. Both women sized him up, and they both immediately realized why Brandy was so involved with her job.
After Brandy was unloaded, McEvans mounted her back – wrestler style – and fixed her jaws closed with his bare hands. Pulling her head up and back toward him, he kissed 'Shirley' smack on the lips – or where lips should be, if alligators actually had them.
Jenny raised her eyebrows.
“That man's got it bad for her,” she muttered to Marianne. “It's a little weird for a man to be making out with an alligator, don't you think?”
“He's notmaking out with her,” Marianne said. “He just gave her a little peck, that's all.”
But Marianne did see, for the first time, that something beyond the norm was going on here.
Apparently the poor man can't help himself,Marianne thought. Brandy always had been able to attract a fair share of gator shifters, but this was the first time Marianne saw a regular human so smitten with her.
Brandy had an immediate task when she was released into the gator pit. This first part would be to let the Cliburns know she was there.
They wouldn't make a move on her during the day. And, now, she could get out at night. Already they had seen her from afar as she worked, but they were smart not to attack her as a human. And previously they had all concluded that if someone got killed or even just seriously injured, that meant they would shift back into human form, leaving inconvenient evidence of a very HUMAN murder.
The Cliburns had let Brandy know they planned to escape eventually and would corner her on their home turf. Brandy wasn't about to let that happen.
But, if Brandy was to take care of business at Animal Sphere, that meant Brandy would have to break protocol and not just kill – but EAT both Hugh and Bobby Cliburn, even though they weren't her immediate kin.
Chapter 16
When Brandy made her first human appearance after 'Shirley' had returned, McEvans grabbed her and gave her a bear hug. He smelled really good to her on a primal level – a mix of swamp water and sweat. He had been swimming with 'Shirley' all that morning, and he hadn't showered yet.
“I have something for you,” Brandy said, pulling back from the hug. She felt lightheaded both from this morning's swim and from the hug. The 'something' she handed him was her introductory proposal for redesigning Animal Sphere's manmade swamp to look like the real thing.
McEvans took the binder she handed him and beckoned for her to follow him back to his office. He skimmed it front to back, then he went back to the first page and started reading it slowly.
“You know, I've wanted to to this before – but the permitting gets tricky,” he said. “And what you're presenting here is more sophisticated than what I had previously considered.”
Brandy felt a wave of disappointment. He was turning her down.
“Sketch it out for me,” McEvans said, surprising her. He pushed some paper and a pencil at her.
“You just said the permitting would be impossible.”
“I didn't say it was impossible,” he said. “I said permitting istricky. Quite frankly, I didn't move forward with the plan at the time because we got caught up in red tape, and I didn't have the patience to deal with it. I was filming two documentaries and had a heavy travel schedule.”
Brandy took the paper and pencil and began sketching out what she envisioned in her head. She could feel McEvans studying her while she drew.
What hereallynoticed was the fact that Brandy had a very elegant profile, with eyelashes thick and long enough that they could swat a fly. That sounded dorky, even in his head, but it's what he thought. He also could see a hint of cheekbone set in away that indicated Native American heritage, and that, too, had its own elegance.
“Okay, here's what I've got,” Brandy said. “I'm not an artist, though, so you will have to use your imagination.”
Brandy essentially had scratched out what would be a section of imitation-Everglade taking up two whole city-blocks. Animal Sphere had the land, so that wouldn't be a problem.
From what McEvans could see, her design of a slice of the Glades was perfect. There was a little bit of cypress swamp in the layout, along with a bit of a mangrove forest. It would be a mini-watershed right here at the theme park.
She also had marked up a behind-the-scenes area with improved alligator corrals, for when McEvans and the staff would need to pull any of the reptiles out of the public eye. In Brandy's vision, there still would be a bridge, but also a glass-bottom boat that could go out on the water and a small cafe below water level that offered a clear-glass, aquarium-style view of the gators swimming below the waterline.
“This is like Alligator Nirvana,” McEvans told her.
“I was thinking about calling it Wooley Swamp,” Brandy told him. “You know – like that song by the Charlie Daniels Band.”
McEvans chuckled at that.
“What are you doing for the next two years of your life?” he asked.
“Why?”
“Because that's the least amount of time it's going to take to pull this off,” he told her.
“Well,” Brandy said. “I don't plan on going anywhere.”
“Good,” McEvans said. “I will have some folks cost this out realistically, and then we'll have to get an update on applicable zoning and environmental laws. I'm not sure what we're in for here yet, but we can at least get this to Stage 1. Don't be disappointed, though, if we start hitting speed bumps real fast. Pulling something off like this never is easy, although it would sure as hell be worth it in the end.”
Brandy glowed inside. She had impressed him for real!
“I need to add something here,” McEvans said, while sketching something on her draft.
When Brandy took a look, she saw that McEvans had marked a spot for 'Shirley' to have her own private corral.
That would be a little tricky, since eventually 'Shirley' was planning on disappearing for good for awhile, after she finished her current visit.
Brandy realized that with McEvans in such a good mood right now, she had another opportunity.
“Jake, do you remember those alligators that went after Shirley? Two of them are still around, right?”
A cloud crossed McEvan's face.
“Yes, they're still here.”
“We need to keep them away from her,” Brandy told him. “I've seen them stalking her occasionally. I think we should keep them separate from each other, too. I think they're a bad influence on each other.”
McEvans considered what she said. It sounded reasonable, and Brandy had more than proven to him that she understood reptiles.
“Go ahead and take care of it,” he said.
Brandy felt relief. She could finally take care of this nasty business with the Cliburns.
Chapter 17
The day after McEvans gave the green light to Brandy's proposal, he started feeling truly off-kilter.
Shirley had been back at Animal Sphere for about three days, so he had been in a pretty good mood. But the headaches he had been having started getting worse. They always seemed to occur when he thought about having the 'Talk' with Rachel, and he would always think the better of it and put the whole thing off – yet again.
He also started feeling like he was walking around in a fog. Usually he would snap out of it when he would see Brandy – but then when he would actually start talking to her, it would get worse. He thought about going to the doctor for a checkup – something clearly was wrong – but then he would put that off, too.
McEvans hid how he was feeling from both Rachel and Brandy. Rachel remained her patient, understanding self, although their sex life had been on hold for the most part for a few weeks now – since right around the time he first trapped 'Shirley'. It wasn't for a lack of Rachel trying, but for some reason McEvans just wasn't in the mood much anymore. This was very unlike him.
Rachel did manage to pull out the stops, however, one night right after McEvans had told her that he and Brandy had found Shirley again. That particular night had been pretty amazing, but the headaches and the fogginess started the very next morning. So, he hadn't been in the mood since.
Brandy, for her part, started noticing that McEvans wasn't looking so good. Well, actually, McEvans alwayslooked good, but he didn't lookvery well. When she asked him if he was okay, he always brushed her off, and so she stopped asking. He was getting sloppy with the alligators, though, making stupid mistakes – not handling them quite right. He got nipped a couple of times – nothing serious – but it seemed to Brandy that he was behaving like a man who wasn't getting enough sleep.
That would be fine, maybe, if he just worked a desk job – but this was not okay given the fact that his job posed the potential for physical danger on a daily basis. So she watched his back without being obvious about it when they were in the gator pit. And when she shifted into 'Shirley,' she stayed close to him as well, letting the other alligators know that she was marking her territory around him, at all times.
His mood, however, did make it easy for her to track down Hugh and Bobby Cliburn and separate them without interference.
The first Cliburn brother she would deal with would be Bobby.
One night after McEvans thought Brandy had left to go home, she stripped down in the employee locker room and snuck into the gator pit wearing nothing but an oversized towel. She hung the towel on a hook on one of the fences and shifted. She wanted to swim a few laps in the swamp before facing the task at hand.
Bobby already had seen 'Shirley' around, and when Brandy had him separated from Hugh, both brothers knew the inevitable was coming. Bobby and Hugh had shifted into human form several times on the sly – at night and only for a couple of hours at a time – over the past few weeks they were stuck at Animal Sphere. Bobby frequently needed to take a breather from being a reptile. But then he also started feeling the pangs of meth-withdrawl. The pangs were non-existent for him as an alligator, but as a human he needed a fix. So now Bobby was stuck so that if he shifted back to being human, this was a recipe for sheer misery for a meth addict without an easy supply.
Hugh and Bobby both already had smoked most of the pot that Jesse unintentionally had smuggled into Animal Sphere in his belly. Hugh managed to retrieve it upon Jesse's demise. That helped Bobby some, but not by much. And since they'd been separated, Hugh had sole access to whatever pot remained.
Thus, Bobby already was in pretty rough shape when Brandy finally cornered him. He was weak, and he was even somewhat apathetic.
After Brandy finished her swim and was all warmed up, she got out of the water and shifted back into human form. This she needed to do in order to unlock the gate to Bobby's coral. Dripping with swamp water, she walked fearlessly among the alligators on the sandy manmade 'beach' by the water. No other alligator dared to even snap at her ankles. Instinctively, they all accepted her as an Alpha Female whether she was in shifted form or not.
Bobby sat naked and shaky in his corral. He was in human form, scratching at himself in the moonlight. He was starting to go through an increasingly ugly bout of the shakes. Brandy immediately knew what was happening to him, because she had seen her brother go through this the last time he tried to get clean.
As she stood over this pathetic criminal, Brandy felt no pity. But she didn't want to fight him like this – in human form.
“I know what you're here to do,” Bobby said to her, his voice low and unsteady. “Just make it quick.”
“At least you can go out like a man,” Brandy told him. “You need to shift before we do this.”
“Okay – just give me a minute,” Bobby said. “I don't feel like I'm ready to die when I'm a gator. But this whole place is starting to feel claustrophobic. I just need to rest here for a moment.”
He was trying to buy time. But Brandy didn't have time. There were a few moves she could make that would force him to shift – that was part of the curse – but she'd rather that he do it of his own free will.
“What are the chances you have a cigarette?” Bobby asked her.
Brandy remained silent.
“I guess not, then,” he said. He remained slumped in the dirt, and then he just let out this sorry, passive chuckle. “How about this instead – I think maybe we can work something out. Your brother owed us about $5,000 when he died. Normally, we'd come collect that from you – but if you leave us alone and call it even with Jesse – we'll forgive the debt.”
He was smarmy and cocky to the end.
Brandy didn't even waste a moment being insulted by the offer. She simply couldn't let the Cliburns live. So she grabbed Bobby's right hand and bend his thumb inward. She crushed his hand with her own, jamming Bobby's thumb into his palm, squeezing and twisting the second joint.
“Fuck – are you serious?!!” Bobby cried out, now in sudden and serious agony.
Brandy was attempting to use pain compliance on him. She wasn't doing any actual damage, but if she hit the right trigger point, it would feel so excruciating that his involuntary reflex would be to shift in order to defend himself or simply try to get away.
This move wasn't working like she hoped, so she tried something different. Bobby was too weak to stop her, although he was screaming now like a little girl. She had to make this work without any further delay, because she didn't want his yelling to attract a security guard. Still tackling the same hand, Brandy bent all of Bobby's fingers backward at once, and then spread his fingers at the split between his middle and ring finger. She pulled so hard she could here a knuckle crack.
Bobby howled out a stream of obscenities, and then suddenly out came an infrasound bellow. That meant the second trigger point had worked.
Brandy broke away at lightening speed and shifted herself just in time to meet Bobby face-to-face, reptile-to-reptile in the dirt at the ground level.
He never stood a chance.
She immediately grabbed him with her jaws and dragged him into to the water. It took her several minutes to knock Bobby unconscious, and then Brandy finished him off, chunk by chunk.
She locked on to a choice part of his anatomy with her teeth, then swerve into a death roll to snap off a limb or a piece of his tail, which she proceeded to swallow whole. Bit-by-bit, she whittled him down to a scaly nub. By the time was finished, just enough of Bobby was left for a single fried gator bite at Sons-of-Guns Bar & Grill.
After shifting back into human form, she took a shower and cleaned herself up. Brandy needed to stop off at a 24-hour drugstore on the drive back home. In the parking lot, she downed a half-bottle of Pepto-Bismol to try and settle her stomach.
Chapter 18
; Brandy was running out of time before she had to finish the job of getting rid of Hugh Cliburn. 'Shirley' needed to be taken back to the swamp since her week was up, and the deadline that Brandy and McEvans had agreed upon was fast approaching.
She always knew where Hugh was at night from the faint whiff of marijuana smoke that trailed off from one corner of the manmade swamp, but she'd had indigestion for a few days now. She needed to recover from the incident with Bobby before she had a second meal of Cliburntartare. So she had been eating yogurt every day and taking acidophilus supplements, hoping to increase the healthy bacteria in her intestinal tract.
Brandy decided that after a show she might actually have her chance. Once the audience was gone, and McEvans left the gator pit, she could make it happen fast before she had to report to him before she left for the evening. It was brazen and risky, but she couldn’t put this off any longer.
So on one evening, McEvans was supposed to have been gone from the gator pit, but he had noticed another weak spot in the fence and was examining it when he heard some thrashing in the water behind him.
Unbeknownst to him, Brandy had shifted and already had Hugh Cliburn at her mercy underwater.
Or so she thought.
McEvans looked around instinctively for 'Shirley', but didn't see her.
“Shirley!” he called out. It was a given now that she would come whenever he called.
She was still nowhere to be seen.
“Shirley!” he called out again. “Where the hell are you?!”
This was no way to talk to a lady, he knew, but he was getting nervous.
The thrashing now sounded more serious, and then suddenly he could see 'Shirley' and another alligator (Hugh) rolling around at the water's surface. Suddenly, the fog he had been walking around for the past two weeks momentarily lifted, and he had a moment of clarity.
Big Gator: A BBW shape shifter paranormal romance Page 8