Succulent Prey Read online

  "It-it's true then? There is a cure? This is some kind of disease?"

  "What do you think? Can't you feel the changes?"

  "I think that you're going to stay in here for the rest of your life unless you let me help you."

  11 It's better than winding up on your dinner plate." Damon sat back on his bed, grinning like a baby with a mouth ful of his own feces.

  Joe wanted to lunge across the room and crack open the pederast's rib cage. He wanted to tear out the man's heart and consume it. But Damon was right.

  Any violent actions in this place would quickly lead to his own death or incarceration. Stil, he had to find a way to get the man alone so that he could end his pathetic little life and sever the bloodline that linked them both to the curse. He decided to cal Trent's bluff. He stood up as if he was about to leave.

  "I'l think of you the next time I feed. I'l imagine you slowly starving to death in here, eating meat loaf, creamed corn, and Jel -O."

  Joe signaled for the guard.

  "Wait! Wait a minute. What did you have in mind?"

  Joe turned back around and waved the guard off as he took his seat again.

  "Tel me what you know about this place. What's the best way to get you out of here?"

  "Get me a gun and I can free myself."

  "And then use it on me? Uh-uh, not gonna happen."

  "Okay. Then how about a knife? I could probably take out that big bastard with a knife if I took him by surprise."

  "Let me think about it."

  "Nothing else to think about. There's no way they'd let you out of here with me."

  "If you had to go to the hospital for an emergency, where would they take you?"

  "Right here. This is a ful y functioning medical hospital as wel as an insane asylum."

  "And what's security like in the medical wards?"

  "Penetrable." Trent smiled. Joe wanted to peel his face off and leave him smiling forever.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  With the threat of death temporarily less imminent, Alicia had time to deconstruct herself. To tear herself apart piece by piece. She looked down at her body and began to catalogue her flaws, something she had not done since this ordeal began. From the moment she'd set foot into Joe's apartment, seemingly a lifetime ago, she had felt terrified, helpless, revolted, angry, aroused, ecstatic, and confused, but not for a moment had she felt unattractive. A man was ready to kil her because she was so sexy. What greater affirmation of her beauty did she need? It was her sex appeal that had first brought her to the notice of Joseph Miles and it was her sex appeal that was leading her to whatever fate awaited at the end of this journey.

  Stil, with the naked 100-watt bulb glaring down at her from the ceiling, the various bulges and blemishes seemed to glow as if lit by a spotlight. And with no one's eyes to see herself through but her own, her hypercritical nature rose to the fore and she began dismantling herself.

  Alicia wished Joe had been thoughtful enough to turn off the lights before he left. She'd gone more than seventy-two hours without once thinking that she was too fat, without worrying about the rol s at her hips or the stretch marks or cel ulite. Now al she could see in herself were flaws.

  She looked down at her oversized breasts, which had flattened out and fal en to either side of her rib cage, tucked beneath her armpits like pale, fleshy, water wings, and wondered why anyone would want to touch the hideous things. They were not round and perky like the silicone queens and faint stretch marks ran through them from the missing nipples nearly to her col arbone. They were so light and thin that no one else would have noticed them, but she did.

  She looked at the thick black mole beneath her left breast, wishing that Joe had had the empathy to bite that off instead of her nipples.

  Sighing and scowling in disgust, she ran her judgment like a sharp scalpel over her bel y; the lightning bolt-shaped stretch marks radiating up from her hairy pubic mound where her skin had yielded to the fat cel s multiplying like cancer beneath it. Her bloated stomach jiggled with each sob as self-hate overcame her. She wanted Joe to hurry back. She needed him to tel her how beautiful she was. She needed him to look at her with those voracious eyes ful of lust and appetite that seemed to gather her entire body into them and cradle her in their unwavering gaze. She wept herself to sleep praying for the return of her murderous kidnapper.

  It was past dark when he returned. The door opened and slammed behind him.

  Alicia moaned softly in her sleep and tugged on her restraints before lying stil once more. Joe slipped into the bathroom and clicked on the lights.

  Alicia winced and whimpered as the mortifying sound of metal on bone clawed its way into her deep, dreamless sleep, stirring up terrible butcher-shop fantasies.

  Images of car crashes, autopsies, bondage, and blood play swirled through Alicia's mind in a kaleidoscopic orgy of meat and steel. She tried to resist the urge to look, not wanting to abandon the safety of sleep, not wanting to see any more horrors this day. But the scraping sound went on and on, slowly wrestling her up from her deep slumber to that hazy twilight just before waking. Here the sound inspired more dreams. Dreams of Frank being carved up and served to her. She saw herself taking a knife and sawing through his tibia, removing his foot and lifting it to her mouth. She bit into it and the taste was wonderful.

  Revolted, she forced herself ful y awake. Alicia opened her eyes and looked to her left where the scraping sound continued, echoing from the tiny bathroom. She looked inside and could see Joe's face reflected in the vanity mirror. He was deep in concentration.

  Intently filing his teeth into sharp points. For a long moment Alicia just sat there, transfixed by his transformation. When she'd first met him at the sex club in San Francisco, Joseph Miles had looked clean-cut and conservative, the type of boy you took to family dinners and office parties to impress your friends and relatives. Now, just days later he looked like some type of psychotic modern primitive. Feral lust sparkled in his eyes like a drug addict fiending for that next hit. His face was unshaven. His pupils were dilated and his chest heaved with his quickening breaths. The hunger was obviously ful y upon him. Now Alicia wished she had not talked him out of taking along some of Frank's meat for the rest of the trip as a snack. But the prospect had just seemed too horrible at the time, with her own guilt at participating in Frank's death stil so fresh in her mind and the taste of his flesh stil swimming on her tongue.

  Alicia closed her eyes and prayed that she was not his next intended meal, while part of her longed to be consumed by him. She winced at his touch as he bent down to remove the gag from her mouth. Her eyes flew open and she nearly screamed as she found herself face-to-face with her cannibal lover. His eyes were intense, sparkling bril iantly with that dangerous psychotic lust that both excited and mortified her.

  "What are you doing?"

  "I need to feed again."

  He turned away from her and walked back into the bathroom, where he picked up the metal file again.

  "But-but we just ate F-Frank?"

  "It wasn't enough. Not enough to face Damon again. I need more food. More power."

  "But who?"

  Joe could see the fear in Alicia's eyes as he continued to sharpen his canines, filing them into tiny arrowhead-shaped fangs.

  "I want you, Alicia. I want you so badly." He stared at her large breasts and thick thighs and Alicia saw the erection swel in his pants as the monster awakened.

  She sucked in a quick breath as fear raised the hackles on her neck and arms and desire renewed the flow of moisture between her thighs.

  She wanted to beg for her life. She wanted to scream and fight. But she was so weary. Alicia stared up at the big col ege boy as he grinned into the mirror with his remodeled smile. The jagged shards of ivory looked almost reptilian. Joe's gums were bleeding down his chin in long ropes of crimson saliva. There was very little humanity in the expression. Alicia shivered. Her entire body trembled with want. Her muscles locked in mortal terror.
/>   Slowly Joseph turned toward her without bothering to wipe the bloody drool from the corners of his mouth. His hunger accompanied him like a separate entity that had taken up residence within his body and now shared it with the rest of his mind. A demon lurked behind his retinas, eager to unseat reason from its dominant position in his consciousness, leaving only a wanton bestial thing. She could see the monster within him now, mirrored in his flesh and in his ghastly smile. It was the same feral rictus she'd seen on his face after he'd consumed the librarian's breasts, the same snarling leer he'd displayed after biting through Frank's testicles. That smile was his hunger's true face and the sharpened canines gave it even more demonic ferocity. It was now the physical manifestation of his increasingly violent appetite and it was coming for her. Alicia cringed and tried to wriggle away as that horrible maw widened, obliterating everything else in the room, even the rest of Joe's features. It was only inches from her bedside where she lay bound helpless to the mattress. His face, his body, al that he was, swal owed up in that smile, drowned and washed away by that al consuming hunger she could not understand.

  When she felt his fingertips glide over her flesh it was like an electric shock going through her nervous system. She had never known such exquisite, sensuous terror. Her body convulsed beneath his touch as if his very proximity could bring her to orgasm or death.

  Joe's fingers slid down her stomach and between her thighs into the slippery wet warmth of her and soon she was quivering on the edge of climax. She watched the predator's mouth descend toward her chest and swooned as her flesh ruptured between his teeth. Joe bit down on her tremendous mammary and began to chew through it, sawing deep through the fatty tissue and into the muscle beneath. Alicia screamed even as she reached orgasm, watching her breast tear free from her chest.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  The detectives showed up the next morning and sat in the back of the lecture hal during Professor Locke's lesson. Their presence unnerved him. He felt as if he were the one under investigation. The professor stumbled over his words and lost his train of thought in midsentence on more than one occasion. He knew that he probably looked guilty and wondered if that was why they were here. Had they shifted the focus of their investigation? Did they now think he was somehow involved?

  Maybe they thought he was hiding

  Joseph Miles somewhere or that he knew where the man was? In fact, he did know where Joseph was, or at least suspected. He was somewhere in

  Tacoma, Washington, preparing to break into a state mental hospital and murder a patient. He stil wasn't sure that he wanted to tel the detectives, though. They had been right about one thing. He had fucked up. He should have known how disturbed Joseph was. He should have known how dangerous he was.

  Joseph had come to him looking for help and he had failed him. He owed it to the boy to try to find a cure. He owed it to himself and his reputation as a criminal psychologist to stop him.

  The lesson ended and Professor Locke turned his back on the class and began erasing the blackboard as they filed out of the room. He heard twin pairs of footsteps heading down the aisle and approaching him. There was no doubt in his mind who the footsteps belonged to.

  "Professor?"

  "Detectives. What can I do for you today?" Professor Locke kept his back turned as he continued erasing the words of Bertrand Russel from the board. He paused for a second to examine the last quote before scrubbing it away.

  Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent al ies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live…

  "Do you believe al that stuff, Doc?" Detective Volario asked. He was wearing the same suit he had on his last visit and it didn't look like he'd cleaned or pressed it.

  "Al what stuff?" The professor wiped the quote away and final y turned to the two detectives.

  "Al that stuff you said in your lecture about religion retarding progress and science rising up to replace it."

  "If I didn't believe it, I'd be a theologist instead of a criminal psychologist. I minored in philosophy as wel. To me it's just another way to study the human condition. When you ask what motivates a man to kil or rape or steal or, more importantly, what would keep a man from doing these things, it isn't very far from asking what it al means. What's the true meaning of life? What sense can be found in al this chaos? You look into the minds of serial sexual predators day in and day out and you have to wonder."

  "Why not hard science? Philosophy always struck me as a halfway point between science and mysticism for those who couldn't make up their minds whether to believe or not to believe," Detective Montgomery chimed in.

  Something about the large black detective's expression instantly put the professor on guard. The man was absolutely intimidating.

  "Al the sciences began as philosophy. Once a philosophical theory is proven it becomes the property of science. But without philosophical speculation, astronomy, psychology, biology, physics, and even quantum theory would never exist. Someday the search for the meaning of life wil leave the realm of philosophy as wel and become a science and when it does I'l go with it. Now I know you two didn't come al this way to discuss my atheism."

  "I entered al the information I had on Joseph Miles and his unique kil ing signature into the national VICAP computer and I got a hit today. A young man from right here in the Bay Area was found in a park in Oregon, roasted on a spit and partial y cannibalized. We went to his apartment on a hunch that he might somehow be connected with Miles and we found links on his computer to a cannibal-sex message board. We found the same link on the computer shared by Joseph Miles and his roommate. It's a pretty safe bet that Miles is the one who ate him. Your boy is out of control. Why do you think he'd be going to Oregon?" Because it's on the way to Washington, where the man he believes passed this curse on to him lives. "I have no idea," Locke said.

  "Wel, we have an idea. You'l have to tel me if you think this one is apodictic." Detective Volario stepped closer to the professor as if he were about to grab him and shake him. The professor took an involuntary step back. "We think he's going home. He grew up in Seattle. We think he's headed back there. What we don't know is why. He no longer has any family there. His parents moved to the

  Bay Area when he was twelve. They live right over in Hayward. I doubt he'd stil have any friends there. That was almost ten years ago and none of his phone records indicate that he's kept in touch with anyone from that state. So why do you think he'd run there, Doc? "

  Professor Locke thought hard before answering. They'd come for his professional opinion both as a forensic psychiatrist and criminal psychologist and as someone familiar with the suspect. If he feigned ignorance they'd immediately suspect him of covering something up. If he told them everything, then Joseph would be arrested and put to death, his reputation as a criminologist would be forever tarnished and he'd never get a chance to test his cure.

  The professor had his own reasons for wanting to cure Joseph. If he were able to treat the young man's murderous addiction with serotonin inhibitors it would be a major breakthrough in the treatment of sexual predators, a breakthrough that could inject new life into his career. The rule of the blackboard jungle was publish or perish and he hadn't published anything groundbreaking in years. A paper on the treatment of serial kil ers with medication would put him on top of the heap, and if he could both prove that the serial kil er phenomenon was caused by viral transmission and document a cure for it, he'd be almost assured a Nobel

  Prize. Too many possibilities to put it al in the hands of two ignorant cops. But he had to think of a suitable lie.

  He's going to kil that man in order to break the curse, Professor Locke thought.

  They were obviously offtrack. They hadn't yet discovered the connection between

  Miles and Damon Trent, the serial child kil er. So they wouldn't be looking for Joseph in Tacoma, where Trent was
locked up. They natural y assumed he was on his way back to the city he was born in. Al the professor had to do was reinforce that belief to keep them on the wrong track.

  "There are many reasons why he might be headed back to Seattle. There's the possibility that his delusions are actual y centered around a particular childhood fantasy, a person that he was attracted to who he perhaps fantasized about eating. During puberty he could have easily gotten his sexual urges confused with his hunger response. Perhaps it was a babysitter who wore a particular fragrance that reminded him of food and triggered a Pavlovian response. Maybe a waitress at a restaurant his family frequented. It could even have been the cashier at the local donut shop."

  "Then he would be going back there…"

  "To live out that fantasy, yes. He would be going back to eat her."

  "Okay, that's one theory. Why else might he be going back?" Montgomery asked.

  "He may also have suffered a schizophrenic break and could be regressing back toward childhood. He might be fleeing back to a time when things were safer and simpler. Back to a place where he felt safe. This behavior isn't unusual for signature kil ers. If I were you I'd warn whoever now lives in the house he grew up in. If he gets there and doesn't find his mommy and daddy like he's expecting, things may turn violent."

  "We've already contacted the family and we have the house under surveil ance," Detective Volario responded.

  "Wel, I'm afraid that's probably al you can do."

  "What about his virus theory? Could he be going to Seattle to search for a cure?

  Maybe there's a clinic or something there he'd go to?" asked Detective Montgomery. His eyes were narrowed, as if he suspected the professor of hiding something.