Page 377 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 1

Audrey gave him another incredulous look. “It’s a Roger Corman film!” she exclaimed. “He can pad it! Didn’t you see King Dinosaur? Forty minutes of that film was rock climbing for God’s sake!”

Morgan took an ominous step towards her. “You seem to be having difficulty grasping this one, little, simple concept: I am in charge. You do what I tell you, when I tell you. You killed the villain,” he waved one hand back at the dead spider, “and that means we’re going to have to start all over again from the very beginning! That’s two more days that we’re stuck in this stupid, pointless existence!”

Still shaking, Audrey snapped around and started walking back up the incline to the sunny mouth of the cave.

“Where are you going?” he demanded.

“Back to town,” she snarled back over one shoulder. “Maybe I can find a real man there. Preferably one with a backbone!”

“What?” he said stiffly.

“You heard me!”

The last threads of what few good-natured tendencies he’d been clinging to snapped. “That’s it. I’ve had enough.”

Heedless of the danger brewing behind her, Audrey said, “Good! I’ve had enough of you too!” She marched out of the shadows and back into the sunlight. Pulling stray wisps of gossamer spider silks from her hair and clothes, she was too busy muttering hateful comments that questioned his legitimacy as well as his human parentage to notice when he unbuckled his belt and yanked it free of his pants.

She caught a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye and turned to see him stalking up out of the shadows after her, his head lowered and an ominous look in his eyes. Her gaze dropped to the long loop of leather clutched tightly in his right hand. The dangerous hand. The one that meant business.

Audrey never thought twice. She ran for her life with Morgan fast at her heels.

Chapter Five

Audrey sat in the crashed truck, the radiator still hissing steam, smoking still billowing from the engine to dance in front of the single remaining headlight. She sat with her arms folded across her chest and glared out at the darkened forest, the trees before her sporadically brightening into clear focus as the flashing police lights from behind her illuminated all.

Morgan had his forehead pressed to the glass of the locked driver’s side door while he glared at her through the window from out beneath a very heavy and angry brow. “You can’t stay in there forever.”

The hell she couldn’t.

This was the thirty-third time in a row that they’d had to reenact this particular scene. So far, she’d refused to crash the truck sixteen times, tried to drive back to town before the scene changed and started the movie all over again eight times. She ran over spiders twice, and even ran over Morgan once, kind of halfway sort of by accident. Each time the scene re-set, so did time as well. Audrey’s body was telling her they’d spent hours out here, methodically messing up one lousy five-minute sequence after another, and Morgan had spanked her twice. Once with the belt, and again with his hand seven scene attempts later. Her butt hurt like the blazes, but she still wasn’t ready to cooperate.

One look at Morgan’s face told her quite plainly that if he ever got her out of the truck, she’d wind up wishing she’d been born without a butt. As if she wasn’t already wishing that!

Sitting on the hard leather of the truck’s seat, all Audrey could feel was the hot, dull pulsing hurt blazing through her buttocks. “Get out of the truck,” Morgan drawled.

“Get bent,” she snapped back and didn’t move.

“I am willing to forgive you everything that you’ve done so far, even your attempt to make me like a splattered bug on the grill. But if you don’t get out of the god damn truck right now, I am going to rip this door off its hinges and strangle you with my bare hands.”

She gave him a withering look, but didn’t budge.

“I’m serious,” he warned.

“Go to hell,” Audrey said back.

“Why must you make everything so difficult?” Morgan snapped, exasperated. “What part about ‘follow the script so we can go home’ do you find objectionable?”

“I did follow the script! I killed the spider!”

“You weren’t supposed to kill it. We were supposed to start a cave in!”

“What does it matter when it dies, so long as it dies?”

Morgan threw back his head with a muted roar of frustration, then looked at her again. “We are going to kill it, Audrey, but it has to be done a certain way at a certain time, or we don’t get out of here.”

“That thing,” Audrey whipped halfway around, on the worn leather seating, wincing at the reawakening hurt of that movement, and pointed back up at the road, “is going to start killing people unless we kill it in the cave.”

Morgan placed his hands on the window. “Sweetheart…darling…babygirl…” he said, painstakingly calm and patient and even kind. “The movie is called The Spider Feeds! It is not called The Spider Skips Gaily Through A Field Of Tulips. When you have a title like that, you almost have to expect a few expendable movie characters to be killed and messily devoured.”

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