The baby head started to coo as its suddenly helpless, living meal was drawn tantalizingly closer.
Dean smelled the mutie’s huge, and hugely soiled, underpants as Baldoona grabbed his right hand by the wrist and raised to its adult head. The jaws opened wide, exposing short, wear-blunted fangs and a mossy, vaguely reptilian tongue. Dean tried to draw back his hand, but the scalie increased the pressure on his neck, and his arm went dead in the creature’s grasp.
In the near distance, over the sounds of the shooting, Dean heard the engine of a big wag starting up, then getting louder and louder as it rumbled his way. Something hot and wet slithered between and around his fingers. The scalie was licking him. Dean cringed, anticipating the horrible pain to follow.
But Baldoona didn’t start crunching on his fingers. The scalie’s grip suddenly slackened on Dean’s neck. Below him, Leeloo had regained consciousness, and was trying to claw her way out from under the weight of the mutie’s thigh. It snagged Leeloo’s slender shoulder, dragged her back under its leg and sat on her.
“Get out of here!” Baldoona’s adult head bawled. “This is mine! All mine!” Dean turned his head and glimpsed a huge beige shape poised, as still as a statue, not five feet away.
The mountain lion, uncaged.
Its stare was locked on the scalie, and the stare was having its desired effect.
Dean saw that Baldoona was paralyzed. Both heads knew it couldn’t run and hope to escape from the lion. Both heads knew it couldn’t fight the lion and win. But neither head wanted to give up the food it had captured. The monster’s four eyes glittered with fear. With gluttony. With anger.
Given its show stopping bigtop act, the scalie had had considerable practice in eating live prey against the clock.
In a flash it made up its minds.
But before it chomp down on either of its captives, the lion sprang. A beige blur rushed past Dean. Its front paws landed high on the scalie’s sagging chest, knocking the air from its lungs and bowling it over onto its back. Dean was slammed to the ground but rolled free as Baldoona lurched up to defend itself from the attack of the giant cat.
Defense was futile, comical even, and certainly brief.
As big as the scalie was, as quick as it was, it was no match for this adversary. Baldoona lunged for the lion’s horned throat, and its fingers closed on air. Dean blinked in amazement. The big cat was standing behind the scalie, whose hands were clenched together, strangling nothing. With a single blow of its paw, the lion sent Baldoona crashing onto its hands and knees.
Dean had witnessed mountain lion kills before, but always at a distance, through the telescopic sight on his father’s longblaster. Dog style was the position lions preferred for chilling man or beast.
It offered access to the prey’s throat. In this case, it had a choice of throats.
Dean had no idea how big the lion’s mouth was until it opened wide. It was so big that it could wedge the scalie’s adult neck between its back teeth. As the lion squeezed down its jaws, cutting off air and blood and shrill cries of terror, the adult head turned a deep plum purple, eyes bulging out of their sockets, quasireptilian tongue protruding obscenely. The baby head, stabbed by the cat’s stiff whiskers, began squealing, not unlike the live pig it had so recently consumed.
The lion didn’t use its prodigious fangs on Baldoona. It used its back molars and started sawing, grinding away with them, twisting its thousand pounds of muscle and bone, digging into the dirt with its claws for added leverage, this while the scalie frantically bucked and jerked.
Dean grabbed Leeloo by the arm and pulled her away from the struggle. As they stood, Jak appeared from between the trailers, his Colt Python raised in a two-handed grip. The albino lowered the .357 blaster at once; it wasn’t needed.
The power of the big cat’s bite was in those back teeth, where the muscles of its jaws and neck could apply the most pressure. The vertebrae of the adult head’s neck made a crunching sound as they shattered, and Baldoona’s body went rigid, as if touched by a high voltage wire. A thick spurt of blood escaped from the corner of the cat’s mouth. The lion then turned its head slightly and with slitted eyes kept chewing, angling the points of its molars to shear the sinew and gristle that was all that was holding the head to the body. The severed adult head of Baldoona dropped to the dirt between its feet.