Succulent Prey Page 11

  Joe knew what she meant. She had been happy until she'd woken up to find herself stil locked in an apartment with a murderer.

  "We're going on a trip."

  "We're going after that child kil er, aren't we?"

  "Yes. We're going to Washington."

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The big muscular col ege kid hadn't been to an SAA meeting in almost a week. And Frank hadn't seen

  SuperPredator online lately either. His ass stil hadn't healed from his last encounter with the gorgeous cannibal.

  Stil, al he could think about was another private moment with the clean-cut muscle-bound man with the hard blue eyes that scurried over every inch of you as he spoke as if sizing you for the kil, eyes that seemed to rip their way inside and invade every inch of you. He wanted him again, but he feared what another session with the SuperPredator might do to him.

  He'd had a hard time explaining his wounds at the emergency ward. Luckily he was such a regular that they had barely listened to a word he said. They just cal ed for a psychiatrist to visit with him while they bandaged up his mutilated ass. Once he'd managed to convince the bored psychiatrist that he wasn't suicidal or delusional, he'd been released with a prescription for painkil ers and a recommendation to seek professional help. Frank had smiled warmly and left. He'd masturbated to the memory of the pain as he drove himself home, nearly crossing the yel ow line into oncoming traffic when he recal ed Joe's reaction as he slurped down the sliver of flesh sawed from Frank's buttocks.

  It had shocked him to see the man ejaculate by merely tasting a smal morsel of his flesh. He'd never felt so loved as he had seeing the pleasure his meat had brought to the big carnivore.

  The hunger that sprang into the man's eyes after the orgasm subsided had been terrifying but extremely erotic. He wanted to give more of himself to Joe, to see the predator's eyes rol up in his head and his body shudder as the ecstasy of blood and meat erupted from him. It had been obvious that the man had wanted more of Frank… much more, perhaps more than Frank could survive. Stil, Frank was wil ing to risk it. He hadn't been able to think of anything else since he'd run in terror from Joe's rundown apartment building.

  Reading the cannibal fantasies on the

  Long Pig site had almost convinced him it was worth losing his life for the experience of being consumed by such a powerful predator, to bind his flesh forever with that beautiful man. Final y, Frank couldn't resist any longer and decided to go visit his SuperPredator again.

  He'd had more than a few whiskey sours when he walked brazenly up to the front door of the rundown building and rang the bel to the apartment where Joe was supposed to live. He couldn't imagine that anyone real y lived in such a place though, especial y not the beautiful wel groomed Clark Kent look-alike. But this was where he'd met him for their little rendezvous just a few nights before. He rang the doorbel a few more times without an answer. Then he pushed on the front door and it swung open easily, revealing the same dusty old lobby where he and Joe had exchanged flesh and blood for sweat and semen. It was empty and looked like it had been that way since before Frank was born.

  "Hel o?" Frank cal ed out softly and heard only his voice echoing through the dank stagnant air. The place smel ed like a damp moldy basement.

  Frank crept cautiously inside and closed the door behind him. The oppressive darkness that swooped in on him, choking al light from the room, panicked him. Without the glare of the streetlights outside it was total blackness. A chil of dread scurried over Frank's flesh, raising goose bumps, as the old building seemed to swal ow him in one great gulp. Frank quickly swung the front door open again to let a little light in. Even with the faint light creeping in from the street, Frank had a difficult time navigating his way to the stairs. There was no way he was going to risk climbing into the building's rickety old elevator and getting stuck inside. From the way this place looked it would be decades before anyone found him.

  He remembered what apartment Joe had told him to ring and began making his way up the stairs toward it. The alcohol coursing through his bloodstream had made him a little braver than normal, along with the fact that he was as much addicted to the adrenaline rush of fear and pain as he was to that of orgasm. Stil, he jumped at every sound as he crept his way up the darkened stairway toward the apartment on the fifth floor.

  "Joe! Joe, are you up there?" He was cal ing out mostly for the reassurance of hearing his own voice echo back at him, the one familiar sound in this tomb of squeaking stairs and rats. When he reached the fifth floor he stuck his head out and was assaulted by the odor of urine, fecal matter, and decay. Again he wondered if anyone but a few stray cats, some rats, and perhaps a dog or two, lived in this place. He could see some of the hippies who wandered up and down Haight Street begging for change and reeking of marijuana and patchouli oil living in a place like this, but Joe would have been horribly out of place. Perhaps this was just the place where he took his lovers (To murder and eat? What was that sickening smel?) to fuck.

  Frank nearly ran down the hal to room

  510. He skidded to a stop just outside the room in which his dream lover was supposed to reside, surprised to find the door open.

  "Joe? Are you in there?"

  There was no response except for a loud thump from somewhere deeper inside the dingy sparselyfurnished apartment.

  Frank crept in and surveyed the apartment. It looked like a jail cel. There was only one lamp, a smal eighteeninch television and VCR atop a milk crate, two folding chairs, a table, and the paintings.

  The wal s were lined with acrylic paintings of figures bathed in red. Frank moved closer to them and realized that the figures in the paintings were not just bathed in red. They were bleeding.

  Slowly his eyes began to make sense of the chaos on the canvases. The pink and tans represented human flesh. Meat opened up so that the muscle and sinews showed through the skin. The white was bone. And the red was obviously blood. The paintings looked like people turned inside out. And there were pieces missing from them. Some were missing legs or arms. Some were obviously women without breasts. Some had no heads. Some had heads with no faces. Many were of men or women with their sex organs removed. In the place of each anatomical omission was a ragged hole, bleeding down the canvas.

  Frank heard the loud bump again. It was coming from the bedroom.

  "Joe? Are you okay in there? It's me. Frank."

  Frank pushed open the door, saw the woman who was now handcuffed by her wrists and ankles with duct tape wrapped around her mouth. He looked down at her breasts and could see the

  Band-Aids over her nipples. Whatever had happened, the panic in the woman's eyes told him that it had not been consensual.

  There was a slight trickle of blood from a smal cut on her forehead, presumably from where she had fal en off the bed.

  Her ankle cuffs were stil attached to a chain in the ceiling that would have made it impossible for her to move more than a few feet from the bed. She was flopping around, trying to get to her feet, and when she noticed the diminutive little man standing there her eyes began pleading with him for help. She held her wrists out and shook them at him, imploring him to remove the handcuffs, but he had no key and was beginning to fear for his own safety. The best thing for him to do, he reasoned, would be to get the hel out of there and cal the cops. He started to back out of the room and the woman's pleas became more insistent. She shook her hands violently at him and pounded her feet on the floor. Her eyes began to tear up with frustration as Frank scuttled backward out of the bedroom. The more panicked she became the greater Frank's resolve grew that he was definitely in the wrong place and in danger of getting far worse than he had bargained for if he didn't leave now.

  Frank's eyes darted from the woman to a painting that sat on the floor outside the bedroom. This one was larger than the rest and it was of a voluptuous woman chained up on a bed like this one. Only the woman in the picture had no breasts at al and her chest was opened up like a rose in bloom.


  This was the only painting where the face was rendered clearly. It was almost ultrarealistic, like a snapshot. And it was obviously the woman on the bed. The same wounded eyes. The same dimpled cheeks. Only the woman in the painting was screaming in some twisted marriage of pain, terror, and ecstasy. It was a powerful image. Frank wondered if the woman had seen it. It was what her future would be if Frank didn't come back with help. The smel of death and decay was now omnipresent and seemed to rise like a warning siren, singeing the hair on his nostrils and tel ing him to get out.

  "I'11 get help. I'l be back. I promise," Frank said, speaking both to the woman on the bed and the one in the painting. The present and the probable future.

  His eyes drifted away from hers, trying to avoid her silent pleas, and as they swept the rest of the apartment he suddenly recognized himself in one of the paintings. This one was even worse than the rest. It was painted in mostly whites and reds. Bones and blood. Almost al the flesh had been completely re moved. Only the face remained, the eyes staring heavenward as if in rapture, the mouth slack as if in the aftermath of orgasm. Frank's legs trembled and threatened to buckle.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Joe had just left to get gas in the van when he spotted Frank in his rearview mirror, crossing Folsom Street, heading for the front door of his apartment building. He was instantly enraged by the intrusion. He had given the little man a chance to walk away from this yet here he had come, sticking his nose back into Joe's business, begging to be murdered. He had heard of deer that would bare their throats to the wolf when they became old or sick, seeming to long for the predator's jaws at their jugular to end the misery of their lives. Long pigs apparently had the same fatal instincts.

  Circling the block rather than risking a dangerous U-turn in the middle of

  Folsom Street, Joe felt his adrenaline pulse and his heart rate quicken. The monster was awakening. By the time he made it back to the front of his building Frank was nowhere to be found and the front door was wide open. Joe punched the dashboard so hard that it cracked.

  "Shit!" he roared as he pul ed the van to a halt and dashed out onto the sidewalk and into the building.

  The lobby was empty. Frank must have taken the stairs up to the top floor, looking for him. Joe punched the button for the elevator and waited impatiently for it to descend. His mind went over different scenarios for Frank's destruction and disposal. Joe smiled when he noticed that he had gotten an erection. Perhaps this would be just what he needed to tide him over for the long trip to Seattle. Another fresh kil to snack on. He stepped into the elevator and rode it to the top floor, pacing impatiently, anxious for the kil . The doors whooshed open and Joe stepped out into the hal way, in time to see Frank backing slowly out of his apartment with a trembling hand clutching his mouth and the other thrust out in front of him as if to ward off an attack. Yet the one thing in that building in any condition to attack him wasn't in the apartment but in the hal way behind him.

  Joe charged him, sprinting down the hal at ful speed with his head low and his arms outstretched as if preparing for a footbal tackle. The last thought Frank had before impact was just how much the big col ege kid real y did look like Superman, especial y when he was flying like that.

  Joe leapt forward and struck the little man in the solar plexus with his shoulder, knocking the wind out of him and driving him straight through the door across the hal, which turned to kindling under the tremendous impact. As soon as Frank felt the squishy wetness beneath him, he knew what that horrible putrid smel had been. It hadn't been a dog or a cat after al, rather what the cats and dogs had been feeding on.

  Frank screamed as he looked down to see his arm sunk up to the elbow in the flayed and ruptured chest of a female corpse. Her eyes stared at him, frozen wide in terror. Her lips and much of her cheeks had been eaten away, as had most of the flesh on her torso, arms, and thighs. The scant flesh that remained was mottled with purple and blue spots and bloated where it had not been torn open. Frank looked from the feral felines and diseased vermin scurrying away in the dark to the handsome and enraged giant storming through the open door toward him. He was unsure which of the animals had eaten the most of the dead woman's corpse. Fortunately, he had little time to consider it before a fist col ided with his jaw and he slipped into darkness.

  Joe looked down at the little man who lay draped unconscious over his most recent meal and tried to consider what to do with him. He was stil fat off Emma's flesh and though he was powerful y aroused by the thought of fresh meat, he knew that his hunger would be tenfold by the time he reached Seattle. Perhaps if he could somehow keep Frank's body fresh he'd have something to snack on along the way to give Alicia a better chance of surviving the trip. Joe considered for a moment how much easier it was becoming to make these kinds of decisions. He was rapidly becoming a monster, a calculating kil er. Stil, he reasoned, as long as he kept

  Alicia alive, as long as he could resist the temptation to devour her luscious body, then the transformation was not yet complete. He was stil human, at least partial y.

  He already had one hostage so it made no difference to him if he had to increase that number to two. If he kept Frank alive then he wouldn't have to worry about his meat spoiling and the rats and other scavengers getting to him the way they'd gotten to the librarian. Most of her meat had been wasted. He'd managed to save a little of her buttocks and organs in his little hotel-sized refrigerator before the rest of her had become cat food.

  Stil, he'd found Emma's cold flesh unsatisfying. He hadn't yet progressed to the point where he could get the same joy out of carrion. He preferred his meat alive and kicking. He'd try to preserve Frank, eating only smal rations of his flesh for as long as he could keep him alive.

  He dragged the smal man's body across the hal, removed al of Frank's clothes, and began wrapping him in duct tape. It disturbed him to see Alicia staring at him as he trussed up the little man so he picked her up and placed her back on the bed facedown. Then he dragged Frank's limp body into the bathroom and slammed the door shut behind him.

  Frank didn't awaken until Joe dumped him into the shower and turned the water on ful blast. The little man's eyes darted in every direction, seeking a point of reference and an avenue of retreat. He gagged as water rushed into his nose and squeezed his eyes shut as it flooded them. When he felt the hand slide between his legs and lather up his genitals he opened them again.

  The huge man was leaning over him and washing him as if he were an invalid.

  Frank started to protest but then realized that there was a gag over his mouth.

  Next he noticed the silver tape cinching his ankles and wrists together. His cock sprang to life as the huge hands stroked it with a fistful of suds even as his asshole clenched tight in fear. When he saw the hunger that leapt into

  SuperPredator's eyes, he tried unsuccessful y to wil his throbbing organ to wilt.

  Joe began to stroke the man's cock more aggressively. He held it under the shower and washed al the soap away as the little man's thick penis swel ed to an impressive length and girth. It was beautiful. Joe wanted to taste it right now. To grind it up with his blunt little teeth and swal ow it. He was mesmerized, watching the impressive organ swel even larger as the little man struggled in vain to free himself, obviously aware of the purpose for which he was now being prepared.

  Frank felt a bizarre combination of fear, elation, and deep sexual enjoyment as he considered his predicament. Naked, bound and gagged, being jacked off by a gorgeous muscular young man who was apparently a cannibal and murderer who had already tasted of his flesh and enjoyed it. The giant was staring at

  Frank's cock with undisguised hunger and Frank tried hard not to think about what it would feel like when he inevitably bit it off. Then the cannibal lowered his head between Frank's legs and Frank felt the man's tongue slide the length of his cock. Frank felt the orgasm rip through him as the big man licked and sucked on his cock as if he were tasting him rather than trying to br
ing pleasure. Frank's semen doused the big man's handsome face.

  The powerful y built cannibal paused to look up at Frank with cum dribbling down his nose onto his lips. He licked the man's seed from his lips and smiled in a way that seemed to be more a baring of teeth than an expression of joy, then knelt back down between the little man's thighs.

  At the last second Joe changed his mind about biting off the man's cock and instead knelt down and took a soft, wrinkled, hairy testicle into his mouth and bit through his scrotum. The little man screamed as Joe sawed through his nut sack with his teeth, ripping away the skin and sucking the smal round testicle into his mouth, severing it from his body with one bite. Frank was unconscious when

  Joe dragged him back into the bedroom chewing on one of his rubbery testes, which tasted to him like calamari. Joe was disappointed to see Alicia crying when he entered the room with the little man in tow. Her eyes zeroed in on

  Frank's hideously wounded, bleeding crotch.

  "Don't worry. He's stil alive." Joe wiped semen and blood from his chin then sucked the cocktail from his fingertips. Alicia felt her stomach turn.

  Joe swal owed hard. He smiled and

  Alicia watched the big predator's tongue probe his bloodstained teeth for bits of flesh as his grin widened. She started to retch and Joe leaned over and removed the gag from her mouth just before she regurgitated into the bucket on the side of the bed.

  Part II

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Detectives Montgomery and Volario stared down at the smoldering skeleton the firefighters had dragged out of the inferno and tossed on the sidewalk.

  There was little flesh left on the carbonized bones and half of what remained had been charred to a cinder.

  They were both grimacing as the smel of burnt hair and barbecued meat roared in their nostrils.