The badger hole 4

By Strega

It was a dusty two-lane road surrounded by a sagebrush, miles from the nearest town, and that town itself was nothing special. There were a hundred more like it in eastern Oregon, each with a few ranches or farms or maybe a lake nearby.  If you passed by this spot on any other day you'd never give it a second look.  It was just another few miles of chaparral, the occasional arroyo, and maybe an isolated ranch house once in a while.

On this day there was something happening, though.  A sheriff's cruiser sat on the side of the road and a solitary cop stood peering through his mirrored sunglasses as three large vehicles approached. Each was a nondescript RV the size of a city bus, but the matching paint jobs might make you think they belonged to the same company. Only from up close was a small triangular logo visible on the side of each.

There was plenty of shoulder for the RVs to park on and a minute later the last of the dust drifted away on a warm summer breeze as men and women began to emerge from the caravan.  First out was a tall, slender man who wouldn't have looked out of place in a white lab coat. He in fact spent a great deal of time dressed exactly that way, but today he was in blue jeans and flannel shirt, as deliberately nondescript as the Rvs.

"John Barton," he said as he shook the sheriff's hand.  "We spoke on the phone, if you're Matt Hoskins."

"Pleasure," Matt said, and turned to look at the RVs.  "We have the road blocked at each end, as agreed. 'Construction'. I didn't expect such a turn out, though."

A dozen personnel milled around, rolling ATVs from the "toy hauler" hatch at the back of each RV. Each person wore a seemingly normal set of clothes, so the little crowd didn't stand out as a team until you saw the practiced, almost military precision with which they assembled tools and equipment. Cases were loaded into the cargo trays of the ATVs and soon enough a middle-aged woman with sun-bleached blond hair walked up.

"Can we see the site?  I can't wait to get a look," she said without a word of greeting.

"Matt, this is Deborah, our forensic coprologist." The two waited, straight faced, then broke out laughing at the puzzled expression on Matt's face.  It was clearly an old joke between then.

"I'm a poop expert," Deborah said.  "At the Project we have over fifty predators that eat people. I'm the one who goes through the crap and sees what makes it through and what got digested.  So when someone thinks poop used to be a person, I get sent out with the team."

Matt nodded, still confused, and led the two out into the sagebrush.  Two ATVs followed, loaded with technicians and equipment.

"This is quite a turnout for one badger," Matt said as they walked.

"If you're right, this is a very special animal," John said. "It's not unheard of for animals to somehow develop the ability to swallow people whole. We've seen it in big cats, bears, hyenas, dolphins, and others. Studying them helped us make our predators for the Run. But we don't have a single predator who can eat prey substantially larger than it is. If a normal-sized badger is swallowing people we want to see it."

"'We're pretty sure it is," Matt said.  There was no further conversation for several minutes as they followed a trail. Mountain bike tracks and the occasional footprint showed in the sand. "Maybe starting with a car thief."
"I read your e-mail," Deborah said.  "This guy climbed down a badger hole and was swallowed?"

"That's what we think happened, in retrospect," Matt said.  In fact he knew that it had, having seen the bloated badger with a kicking bulge in its middle.  The Project didn't need to know that, or that he'd intentionally fed the badger a tied-up man later. It had seemed a good way to get rid of an untrustworthy business partner at the time.  Only when hikers started to disappear had he wondered if maybe he'd accidentally helped train the thing to eat people.

A flag marked the first site, a shallow depression ten feet wide dug out on one side. A large plastic storage container of the sort people used to organize their garages sat off to one side. Matt popped the top off.

"Water bottle, a shoe, hat, collapsible walking stick," he said, and waved at the items.  "When the latest local went missing we found this depression and thought maybe she fell into a sinkhole.  Couple of my guys dug down until they found first this stuff, then a whole lot of badger poop. When someone poked into that and found a cell phone that apparently went all the way through the badger,  not to mention socks and other undigested clothing, we called you."

"It's not unheard of for badgers to dig out around dead animals and slowly excavate a pit. They bury the animal and then eat it from their tunnels," John said. "Maybe your woman had a heart attack and the badger just scavenged her body."

"No bones," Matt said.  "No skeleton. Two people and at least one dog have disappeared out here that we know of. There may be more. We've found two badger middens, I guess that's the word, and the guy who poked through them said some of the poop is white with what he thinks are digested bones.  When I called and talked to one of your docs -"

"He told you that badgers aren't supposed to be able to digest bones," John said. "Very good, Matt. You're the sort we like to deal with in the field.  You worked it all out before calling is.  Fewer false alarms that way."

Matt adjusted his sunglasses and did his best to look serious.  What he wanted to do was smile.  The growing worry that he'd get outed as the one responsible for this mess, or at least the one who didn't stop it before more people ended up inside a badger, had nagged at him until he finally called the Project.  Now it was out of his hands, or nearly. Only three people had known about the badger. Rhett died in a car accident, and his partner died of a heart attack two months ago. He was the last one who knew how it started and it was time to get it all sorted out he got blamed.

"Well, I'll be glad when you kill the thing, or take it away, or whatever you're going to do," he said.  "If it's really eating people and the town finds out there's going to be a mob out here with torches and pitchforks." Or shovels and shotguns, same thing.

"Mm, yes, that happens," John said distractedly.  The poop doctor was off with two husky shovel-wielding men, going through the badger's stinking detritus.  That wasn't a job Matt would want, but she seemed happy enough.

The tall Project supervisor was watching as two of the big cases carried on ATVs were opened.  Each held a sturdy looking tablet computer and a big block of foam into which nestled dozens of small mechanisms.  As these were extracted and gone over Matt realized they were drones, some the size of his hand and some no larger than horseflies.  Each was checked and set aside, and when a dozen were ready a tech put the tablet on his lab and activated them.  Matt watched with great interest as the drones fanned out across the sagebrush.  Some were so small he lost track of them before they were twenty feet away.

"Those are the smallest drones I've ever seen," Matt commented.

John nodded, watching the tablet with the tech.  "Not commonly available, and not cheap...all right, have one of the fly drones go down each hole you find, good, good."

There was nothing to do for half an hour but watch the occasional drone and distant technicians poking into squirrel and badger holes.  John and the drone tech monopolized the tablet and Matt drifted over to the ATV and the female tech running the second tablet.  There wasn't much to see there either save for blurry infrared camera views of dirt-walled tunnels.

"This place is a maze," the tech commented over her shoulder.  "I didn't think one badger could dig this many burrows. Some of them are hundreds of meters long."

"Maybe it needed space to bury all the evidence," Matt said.

"If it was eating people whole I could see that, yeah," said the tech. "Look, here's the beginnings of a pit trap.  Let's see...yeah, location checks out as right near that trail.  Our badger friend was planning another meal. Must take it days to...ah!  Something here!"

John jumped up from his own tablet and elbowed Matt aside.  There in a blur of infrared false colors was what had to be their badger.  

"Send more drones in," John said to both techs.  "I want a better picture."

Half a dozen horsefly-sized drones later and the false color image resolved into something easier to make out.  The animal seemed to be dozing, though it half-woke and peered around a couple of times as more drones entered its den.  It must be able to hear them buzzing.

"By combining images we can get a decent view without sending in drones with lights...my goodness that is a fat badger," the female tablet tech said.

And it was.  The long fur on the beast's flanks didn't conceal the rolls of fat. Its tubby little legs with their long claws looked barely long enough to lift its belly off the dirt of its den.

"Drones have mapped out the nearby tunnels and found a possible way in," John said. "Carol, have someone go get Roger while we set up for recording."

"That thing's been eating well," Carol, who turned out to be the female drone tech, said before pulling out a compact C3 radio and talking into it.  "Randy, take an ATV back to base camp and get Roger.  Tell him we've found the badger and it may be his chance."

"Chance to do what?" Matt asked, but John just smiled.

The tall Project man was still looking at the tablet.  "That badger has to be sixty, seventy pounds.  Even without all the fat that's a very big badger."

"Care and feedin'," Carol joked.

A little while later an ATV pulled up and a thin, not very healthy looking blond man slid out of the passenger's seat and supported himself with a cane.  "So, this badger," he said without preamble.

"Here you go," John and Carol said together, and turned both of the tablets toward him.  There were so many fly drones in the badger's den now that quite a clear, real looking image showed on the screen.

"That is a fat badger," Roger said.  

"It's going to get fatter," Carol said, and opened up a small case.  "Swallow this and this," she went on, handing Roger a water bottle and a series of pills.  When she dug out a pressure injector and fired off three shots into Roger's shoulder, rump and thigh Matt's curiosity got the better of him.

"Wireless sensors," Roger said, rubbing his shoulder. "Even the pills.  So that as I am digested they can gather data on the badger's innards."

"As you're what," Matt said, with the horrible certainly that he'd heard what he thought he'd heard.

"Digested," Roger said with a smile, and the tall, thin Project supervisor nodded. When the silence lingered he spoke up.

"Roger here is one of our volunteers," John said, and Roger nodded in turn.  "He's been on the waiting list for a year because he wanted a small predator to swallow him.  We only have two predators his size or smaller and he didn't like the looks of either so he was hoping for a third choice."

"A mink or an owl were my options, and they weren't sure either of them could manage a man my size," Roger said.  "The mink was my last choice, he's savage and untrustworthy and I want to go down in one piece, not torn to shreds.  The owl has a sharp beak and I may be too big for her.  This badger was a godsend."

"But," Matt said, and fumbled for words.  "This can't possibly be legal."

"You should know that it is," John said.  "Assisted suicide was legalized ten years ago.  Half our predator food comes from volunteers now.  Roger here is simply going to commit suicide with the assistance of a badger's digestive system. He would have been inside one of our predators months ago, but he's choosy and I respect that."

"You should have seen it," Roger said.  "The smart ones knew I was on the list and they'd look at me through the armorglass and lick their chops.  Sometimes they'd yawn so I could look down their throats, hoping I would change my mind and go into the pen with them."

Policeman or not there was nothing he could say and they left soon-to-be-badger-fat Roger with  Carol and took the ATVs back to the base camp.  Project techs had set up a portable generator and a field tent and inside were a few tables holding snacks and a dozen chairs facing a huge flat screen TV.

"Drones are in place," reported a tech from the corner near the TV.  "Video is stable."

"Right then," said John as he sat facing the TV.  "Showtime." Most of the other Project personnel filtered in and sat, talking quietly among themselves.  The tech in the corner touched a control and the room went quiet as the big screen flickered to life.

There was a nearly naked Roger, Carol and a tech he didn't know standing in a field.  Whatever drone camera gave the view turned as Carol pointed at the ground and showed a badger burrow wider than a man's body.  

The badger tunnels around here were bigger than they'd been a year ago, Matt knew. As the badger fed it grew fatter and a fatter badger needed wider tunnels.  This had all started when a car thief crawled feet first into a tunnel, got stuck, and was swallowed feet first by a badger that at the time may have only been defending its den.

Now Roger sat, rolled onto his belly and worked himself similarly feet first into the burrow until only his face was visible.  He gave Carol a thumb's up as she set up a camera and the two exchanged a last few words.

"Thanks for everything, Doc," Roger said, and Carol smiled.

"Have fun, Roger.  Enjoy your new fur coat."

"I will, Doc," Roger said, and the inside view of the tunnel showed his feet start to kick theatrically. A side screen, focused on the badger, showed the fat little beast start awake at the noise, and the chosen tunnel was only a few yards from the badger's den.  It sniffed inquisitively, padded up the tunnel, and what should it encounter but a set of naked human feet.  What happened next was predictable.

"Less clothes means fewer possible digestive issues," said a tech who was instantly shushed as every single person in the room watched with rapt attention.  The badger stared at the the kicking feet, waiting until Roger paused to rest, and in the moment the feet were still it reached out its long foreclaws to push them together and yawned.

"Oh, my," murmured Doctor John.  "What a fabulous beast it is." The badger rapidly worked its narrow jaws over the offered feet, a bulge forming in its furry neck as its very eager meal pushed against the pressure of its maw to send naked toes into its gullet.  A visible contraction moved through the now tight fur and the badger's eyes squinted shut as it swallowed, easing the bulge of feet down into its fat little body, and just like that the badger was waddling forward, pushing itself over Roger's calves and engulfing him to the knees in moments.

Matt had seen this before from a different angle and knew the fat little badger would soon swallow the blond man whole unless he started to resist.  This time the prey wasn't tied up or pinned in a tight tunnel, but had room to reach down and push the badger's jaws away. If he had even locked his knees the little animal would have gotten perhaps to his crotch and then had to stop, the feet pressing against the bottom of its stomach preventing further progress,

But Roger did no such thing.  If anything he bent his legs a little too eagerly, making the pointed muzzle lurch as the bulge of knees swelled out of the pale fur of the badger's neck.  It was a determined little beast, though, and it gripped the man's thighs between its claws as it worked its jaws methodically up his legs. Already the beast's fat belly showed a moving bulge as Roger's feet reached the stomach.

Roger groaned and dug his fingers into the soil of the tunnel entrance, pushing his thighs eagerly into the advancing maw. The badger panted, little inky eyes bright and jaws creaking as it yawned ever wider to swallow its meal. The double bulge of thighs stretched its neckfur taut but it scrabbled at the floor of the tunnel, getting enough purchase to push itself forward until the curve of the man's rump bumped into its jaws. There was a scrape of fang on skin and a wet slither as Roger's underwear-clad butt squeezed into the badger's maw.

Roger was eagerly waiting for that to happen and pushed himself in.  His erection bulged out of his underwear and he groaned again as he rubbed against the badger's fangs. There was an audible pop as the beast's jaws stretched still wider and with a sudden lurch the white underwear were gone and Roger was thrusting, fucking the badger's throat even as a great contraction of its swallowing muscles squeezed the bulge of rump down toward its stomach.

"Look how fast it's going!", a tech said, and another replied "It's already eaten its whole weight in prey and it's still going!"

Matt had other thoughts.  Carol and the tech were only a few feet from the burrow mouth and there was plenty of time to save Roger. Even by himself the man could possibly have escaped. The badger was strong and hungry but it was only half his size and if Roger had reached down to push it away he might hold it until it tired, then slid himself back out.

Instead Roger shuddered, visibly climaxing in its throat, and then let go of the soil he'd gripped. He slid his hands down next to his sides and into the badger's stretched cheeks. Maybe it thought he was trying to save himself, or maybe it didn't care why he did it, but it quickly moved its long-clawed forepaws to trap his hands to his sides and worked its narrow muzzle up the hollow of his spine. With a strong tug and a gulp it took his arms almost to the elbows and with that Roger's ability to resist was essentially ended. Slowly now the badger worked its way over him, stretched like a form fitting fur coat around its meal.  A visible ripple moved down through its distended neckfur as his elbows were swallowed.  It had him now and Roger knew it.  Assuming it could fit him into its stomach - and it could - this was only going to end one way.

"Down I go," he said conversationally to Carol, who was watching from just a few feet away.  "Thanks for everything, doc."

Bit by bit the badger worked its jaws over Roger's upper body, its little muzzle humorously tiny compared to its meal. When the thin black line of its lips finally crested the shoulders the natural tendency of its maw to return to its usual size caused Roger to slide suddenly into its gullet as though he were sinking into furry quicksand. The man's smiling face was visible for a bit longer as the little beast struggled to get its jaws around his skull but its muzzle soon cast a shadow on his forehead and with a last stretch it pushed its nose forward until his face settled into its cheeks.  Little clawed paws gripped his cheeks to force him in and with a grunt of effort it squeezed its muzzle shut and swallowed repeatedly, forcing the massive bulge of man first out of its cheeks and then, laboriously, down through its tight-stretched neckfur. First the vast bulge of shoulders slipped downward, then the bulge of Roger's skull.  Muscles tensed beneath its gray and cream fur before a final gulp and the badger relaxed, panting, its fat little body distended around a grotesque bulge of curled-up man twice its own size.

"Look at that! Look at it!" John jumped to his feet.  "Twice its size and it gulped him down!"

Senior though the Project man was the others shushed him, for the badger was still moving.  Its short little legs were unable to reach the ground past the great bulge of Roger but by digging its claws into the walls of the burrow it gradually pulled itself back down the slope to its den.  When it was settled, well fed and able to do little but lie there and digest its meal, it squeezed its belly with its forepaws and let out a remarkably loud and somehow smug-sounding belch.

Out of the corner of his eye Matt saw a tech hand a folded bill to another. Someone lost a bet.  Other things were happening around him and a dozen conversations sprang up but he couldn't take his eyes off the screen.  Something inside the badger was moving.  Roger was still alive.

John saw his focus and nodded.  "He asked for a dose of an  experimental drug we're working on.  It can keep you alive without air for a time but it's not a healthy thing to take. Enough it will cause organ failure. That's not a problem here so he got his dose. He should metabolize most of it by the time the badger gets a good start on digesting him. None of our preds have experienced any issues with prey dosed on it."

"He asked for that?" He couldn't look away from the horrifying movement beneath the badger's long-furred hide. Roger, soon to be badger fat and badger shit, was still moving in there.   There was a rhythmic quality to the moments that had to be the man masturbating again.  Matt shook his head.

"You can't explain fetishes," John said.  "I wouldn't care to die in a predator's stomach but he's wanted that his entire adult life. And he was, well, he didn't expect to live long anyway.  Health issues."

The badger on the screen let out another great burp and settled down, seemingly asleep.  It must know there was someone outside its burrow but it was underground, safe in its den and well fed.  Gradually the movements beneath its fur stilled. Whatever drug they gave Roger to let him survive without air had limits and the hot, caustic environment he now occupied eventually took its toll. He was badger food now, plain and simple, a grotesque swelling beneath the fur that would soften and shrink as the badger's digestive juices consumed him.

"Are you going to dig the thing out now?"

"Oh, by no means," the Project supervisor said.  "We can't possibly disturb it. We'll monitor it until it is hungry enough to hunt again.  There is no end of data to be gathered from such a marvelous little beast. Just its digestive process alone, if it really proves able to process a whole man, warrants years of study."

"Years?  You can't just let it scuttle around wherever it wants.  It's been eating people! It digs traps and eats people who fall in!"

"Now now," John soothed.  "Remember who we are.  Keeping track of and controlling dangerous beasts is what we do for a living.  Badgers do not have large territories and most of the land around this one's burrow network is either state owned or disused ranch land.  We'll lease it from the state and owners, put a caretaker in place and make sure the badger is well fed so it doesn't wander. Eventually we may want to take it into captivity but for now, it will stay here."

"You'd better keep track of it," Matt said.  "It's disused ranch land because a very nice lady and her dog went for a walk one day and ended up inside the thing."

"Yes, a remarkable thing, that.  A whole German Shepherd and a woman in one meal. If only we'd been here to see it."

[i]You people are horrible,[/i] Matt thought but did not say.  At least it was out of his hands now.  No one was left to blame him for the whole mess.  The other two witnesses were dead and the one man they'd intentionally fed to the thing existed now only as badger fat and fertilizer.

He left the Project team to pick through dried badger poop and dig out indigestibles from the residue of the little beast's several meals and went back to work.  

Over the next few weeks he noted as he drove by the newly spruced up house the Project caretakers moved into, the sudden appearance of signs warning that bubonic plague had been detected in local rodents and that hiking or biking the area was strictly forbidden, a few new fences and the occasional drone flown by the retired couple living in the house.  He met them at the diner, Gary and Donna, supposedly a retired aerospace worker and his social worker wife.  He very much doubted that any of those details were true but they were friendly and harmless enough.

Roger presumably made his way through the badger without issue, at least the fourth person to do so.  Matt had been there for three of those meals but no one knew that. Or so he thought. 

Then one night he turned in after a long shift and woke up in the a dark, unfamiliar place. Matt tried to sit up and found he could hardly move a muscle. He wasn't restrained, but he barely had the strength to lift his arms.

"Don't worry," said an voice nearby, and with a great effort he managed to turn his head to see a shadowy figure sitting on a chair nearby.  "It's just muscle relaxant.  It'll wear off in about an hour."

"I hope you know what you're doing," Matt mumbled.  It took effort even to talk. "Kidnapping a police officer is a pretty big deal."

"About that," said a second voice, and Matt squinted as the second person flicked the light switch.  Now he recognized the "nice retiree couple" who worked as Project caretakers overseeing the badger.

"What's going on," he said.

"As a matter of policy," said Donna, "When we investigate a situation like this we always poke into the backgrounds of those involved.  Whether they were eaten or saw an incident or just reported something they heard.  It didn't take much effort to find that you've been doing a bit of under the counter work.  Drug dealing, right?"

"I don't know what you are talking about," Matt said, falling back on the tried and true Deny Everything Defense.

"Of course you don't.  Did you know that your friend Rhett kept notes and even some recordings of the things you did together?  He had a safety deposit box full of interesting stuff."

A chill ran down Matt's spine as she opened a folder and read.   "It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen.  Matt led me to this badger burrow. We'd tied up the drug runner and when we threw him in the badger appeared and over the course of several minutes it swallowed him alive. Headfirst and whole down a badger's throat, that's no way to go, but Matt was right, it was a perfect way to dispose of  him. No one's ever going to find a body because there isn't one now.  I only wish I'd been able to film it, but its best not to have a record of these things.  The badger had its meal and the drug dealer we're working with knows that if he sends us a runner carrying cut drugs, the runner doesn't come back. Not knowing what happened to the man will only make him worry more.  How did we make him disappear so thoroughly?  The last thing he'll suspect is the runner ended up inside a badger, but I heard the little beast burp.  It happened."

She set the folder down with a slap. "Seems he wanted a record of it after all in case you decided he should end up inside a badger too."

"Tomorrow," Gary said, "Your car will be left at the Spokane airport and your bank accounts, which even to the most cursory inspection had a lot of money for a man living on a cop salary, will be discovered to be drained of funds.  A few other clues will be left to let the local police know they had a bad egg in their midst. You're about to end up on the wanted list, Matt."

"So you're going to let me go," Matt said, and struggled to lift an arm.  He succeeded only in shifting it.

"If you'd gotten in touch with us when you found out about the badger, at least two innocent people would still be alive," Gary said.  He picked up a remote and turned on a big flat screen TV that hung on the wall. There was the badger again, fat and sleepy, to all appearances in a brightly lit burrow but most likely just another false-light view created by dozens of drone cameras.

"He's gotten quite used to us, and to the drones," the man said.  "And he knows that when he hears the ATV approaching it means dinner's in the offing."

"Now wait a minute," Matt said, but the couple just smiled as they carried him into the garage and dumped him into the cargo tray of the four-wheeler. It was one of the battery powered models and there was little to hear but the whine of the electric motor and the swish of sagebrush against the sides. To his surprise there was someone waiting when they reached their destination.

"Good evening, Matt," said Deborah the poop expert.  "I'm here early.  Mostly we'll be interacting later." She smiled brightly.

"You can't do this. I'm a cop!" But the Project people just checked the camera feeds and slid him feet first into the badger's burrow. No sooner did they get him situated in the cold earthen tunnel than there was the scrabble of claws behind him. A tickle of whiskers followed as the badger sniffed his naked feet. All he had on was a pair of underwear. They'd stripped him before he woke, to make things easier on the horrible little thing's digestive tract.

"When we sell the pay per view of this, we'll digitally alter your face," Deborah said. "Your friends and relatives will think you're a crooked cop on the run. No one will know what really happened."

"I'll know," Matt said, and he went wide-eyed as a long-clawed paw pushed his feet together. He tried to push them apart again but he was too weak. By the time he got his legs to so much as twitch as fangs scraped over his feet and a push of tongue slid his toes into a wet chute of badgery gullet. His shock was doubled when Deborah pulled out a pressure injector and fired something into his shoulder. He was all too sure he knew what it was. They had to test their drugs somehow, after all.

"Isn't he a fat little thing," the Project poop doctor said as she put the injector away.  She sounded genuinely fond of the beast.  "He's about to get fatter."

Matt opened his mouth to scream as the first gulp pushed his feet down the badger's throat, and Deborah reached out and stuck a square of tape neatly over his mouth.

"Don't worry," she said as the fat badger waddled its way up the tunnel, swallowing his legs an inch at a time.  "We make our own tape.  It's digestible."