Succulent Prey (10 page)

taste more of her succulent flesh.

Joe curled up on the couch and tried to ignore the whimpering cries coming

from the next room. He didn't know what he would do with her, but whatever it

was, it wouldn't be tonight. It was already nearly sunrise and he had a class at

10:00 A.M. That left him barely four hours of sleep. He didn't want to be late for class. Joe was convinced that

somewhere there was a cure for his

il ness and that with the help of the

professor he would find it. First he had to convince the man that he wasn't a lunatic with some ridiculous implausible theory by finding the proof himself. That meant a trip back to the library.

Joe knew that he was getting close.

Finding the link between the werewolf

and vampire mythology and the serial

kil er phenomenon might lead directly to a cure. If he was right, those old myths not only held the answer to how the

disease was transmitted but also how it could be stopped. He wasn't wil ing to

drive a stake through his own heart and nail himself inside a coffin or chop off his head and fil his mouth with garlic. Those were the last-ditch remedies for those

monsters who had progressed to the

point where they could no longer be

saved. There had to be a less dramatic

solution to the cloying hunger that raked at his mind and spirit, beyond al the

hype and superstition. He had to find the cure soon. Before he kil ed Alicia.

Sunlight ripped the curtain of night,

bleeding morning into the sky just as Joe final y succumbed to sleep. He tossed

and turned fitful y on his couch and

dreamt of the day he'd been kidnapped

from the playground by a budding child

murderer named Damon Trent, who'd no

doubt intended to make him his first

victim. He could stil hear the fat

teenager's tittering, high-pitched voice, like an overexcited young girl's, as he dragged him into his minivan and sped

off down the street with Joe kicking and screaming for his life in the front seat. Joe stil had the faded bite marks and

knife wounds on his ass, chest, neck,

arms, and thighs from where the man

had abused him.

No one knew why the kid had released

him the next morning instead of torturing him to death, as he would with his later victims. Perhaps he had thought Joe

was near death anyway and would die of

exposure before anyone found him.

Perhaps he'd had mercy. He certainly

hadn't shown mercy to his next three

victims. He'd torn them apart. Joe could stil remember the feel of the knife

plunging into his rectum as the man

stabbed him repeatedly, and how he'd

screamed like the world was ending,

convinced that he was dead.

When Joe woke up, drenched in his own

sweat and screaming at the top of his

lungs, the sun was already high in the

sky and his alarm clock was blaring. It was time for class.

Joe dressed and showered before

going back into the bedroom to confront his captive. She looked awful, with blood caked on her breasts and stomach.

She'd urinated on herself sometime

during the night, unable to ask to use the bathroom with the gag in her mouth or

perhaps hoping that she'd make herself

too disgusting to rape. Joe removed the bal gag then lifted her up and carried her into the bathroom where he

scrubbed off al the blood and washed

her tenderly, lovingly, fighting to keep his mind on getting to school on time. He led her to the toilet and watched as she

relieved herself, glaring at him

murderously the entire time. He did his best to avoid her gaze. He knew he

deserved her hatred. When she was

done using the toilet he washed her

again.

Joe carried Alicia over to the bed and

affixed an other chain to a loop in the ceiling, which he then connected to her wrist restraints. The chain was slack

enough to al ow her to move about the

bed but if she tried to get off the bed she would wind up dangling in the air 'til he got home. He explained al of this to her and her eyes began to tear up again.

"I'm sorry," Joe said to her as he kissed her on the cheek. "I just can't help myself. I real y don't want to hurt you. I just don't know how to stop."

He turned to walk out of the door.

"You are beautiful, though. So beautiful." Then he left, locking the bedroom door

behind him. Alicia heard the front door slam and the dead bolt click into place. Then she was alone. Alone in a

madman's apartment with no way to

escape.

Chapter Eleven

Alicia sat in silence for a long moment listening to the sound of her own

breathing, trying to steady her pulse and keep herself from going crazy and

perhaps going into shock. She began to

catalogue her injuries. Aside from the

nauseating ache in her bruised and

bitten breasts where her nipples had

been torn off, she had no major injuries. She had a few other bruises from where

the col ege boy had smacked her

buttocks and pul ed her hair as he

grunted, growled, and thrusted deep into her. Nothing she wasn't used to.

Her wrists were scraped raw from trying Her wrists were scraped raw from trying to wriggle out of the leather restraints last night after she'd been left alone. Joe had cleaned them as best he could with

hydrogen peroxide but stil the skin

ripped and bled as she tried again to

squeeze out of the leather cuffs. Again, nothing she wasn't accustomed to.

Joe had left a bucket by the side of the bed in case she had to use the restroom before he returned. On the nightstand he left a bowl of water. Alicia would have to kneel on al fours and lap it up like a kitten in order to drink from it with her arms stil bound be hind her. She didn't want to think of what she'd have to do in order to use the bucket.

Her shoulders were kil ing her. No matter how she turned on the bed her weight

rested on them unless she turned over

onto her face, which aggravated the

throbbing pain where her nipples had

been, or sat completely upright, which

felt uncomfortable with the bar wedged

between her legs keeping them apart.

Even when she set upright, Alicia's

shoulders stil felt under pressure from being forced backward with her arms

locked behind her.

Alicia tried to scream again. She

thrashed, kicking and bucking on the

bed, hoping someone would come to

her rescue, but she didn't hear a single sound coming from any of the other

apartments. Either the wal s were

soundproof or there were no other

neighbors. She thought about what the

rest of the building had looked like, the smel of garbage and urine, the cracked drywal and deteriorating paint, the fact that she had not seen any evidence of

anyone else on her way to his apartment. The lobby had been dark when she'd

come stumbling in late last night and

there had been no sounds of televisions or radios or children crying, lovers

quarrel ing. It had seemed completely

empty to her, but she'd paid no attention to it, attributing it to the lateness of the hour. She'd been too busy concentrating on getting some of that young gorgeous

col ege athlete's cock to think about how shitty his apartment building was. Now

that she knew that her gorgeous athlete was a kidnapper and a cannibal, she

wondered if perhaps she'd been lured

into an abandoned building. The gang

she used to hang out with had once

converted an entire vacant department

store into one big crack house and

shooting gal ery. Maybe she was in a

condemned apartment building that he

was just squatting in?

Giving up on screaming, Alicia began

once again trying to work her way free of the restraints. The pain in her wrists

competed with the pain she imagined if

the cannibal returned to finish his meal. She began to jerk and pul furiously at the cuffs, only succeeding in cutting the leather deeper into her already abraded skin.

"Oh God! I'm going to die here!" She began to cry again and forced herself to stop. That wasn't going to help anything. It would only get in the way of her

thinking. She had to come up with a

plan.

Maybe she could talk him into releasing her from the cuffs when he returned? He did seem to be remorseful. He even

seemed to real y like her. Maybe he

wouldn't kil her after al ? Then she

remembered the look on his face when

he bit into her breast. He hadn't looked himself. He hadn't looked human at al . The thing that she'd seen gnawing into

her nipples had been al appetite and

lust. Maybe he had two personalities?

One that was caring and gentle, the one who'd washed her wounds and cleaned

her up this morning and apologized for

hurting her before leaving, and one that was vicious and dangerous, the one

who'd lost control. Somehow she had to

talk one of them into letting her go.

Chapter Twelve

Joe walked to the campus in a daze. He

imagined that the fog rol ing through the street was emanating from him. He felt

protected by it. As long as the fog

remained to cloak his thoughts he didn't have to face what he'd become in the

last twenty-four hours. He didn't have to think about the pain in that Spanish girl's beautiful eyes when he'd bitten into her breast. It wasn't just the physical pain that had caused that wounded look. It

was the pain of betrayal. She'd thought she'd found the perfect man in him.

He'd seen the look before. Even before

he'd started having the uncontrol able

he'd started having the uncontrol able

urge to eat human flesh there had been

his maniacal sex drive. Women would be

amazed at his stamina when he would

make love to them al night and then

further amazed when he would cal them

the next night for a repeat performance. It would go on for weeks with him seeing them every minute of every day for

marathon sex sessions. Then, he'd

suddenly lose interest and disappear

without a word. Usual y after meeting

another woman. Or when his col ection

of women grew too vast for him to keep

track of and he would simply forget

about some of them as he met new

ones. None of them would ever suspect

that there were others.

No way he can make love to me for three or four hours straight and stil have

anything left for anyone else, they would think.

But Joe was a sex addict. His bedroom

was like a revolving door. He knew

exactly how long each woman was good

for, when they needed to leave for work, or pick their kids up from day care, or would just be too exhausted or chafed

for another round. When he wasn't

having sex he was hunting for new sex

partners. Then he'd started having the

urges and everything began to change.

He'd experimented with S&M before,

even extreme bondage and blood play. It was more pleasure than he'd expected

to derive from whipping a man's naked

ass with a cat-o'-nine-tails or sticking needles through a woman's labia or

burning a woman's nipples with a candle flame or the powerful orgasm he'd had

when he'd strangled unconscious a kid

he'd met on campus while fucking him in the ass with a dildo. The kid dropped out of school the next day and had never

returned.

Joe's enjoyment of these things had

been completely unexpected. The fact

that he'd wanted to take it further was even more unexpected.

He'd been circumcising a man at an

S&M sex club. The man had approached him with this huge uncircumcised cock in hand. He had big blue puppydog eyes

that looked wounded but trusting. His

body was lithe and delicate like a young girl's, in stark contrast to the hardened flesh straining between his thighs. He

had a castration fantasy. So Joe had

agreed to circumcise him. He had just

sliced off half his foreskin when he'd

suddenly had the urge to bite the man's penis off. He imagined chewing it up and swal owing it, what the tender flesh would taste like going down his throat. He

plopped the man's foreskin into his

mouth and began to chew it. The man's

eyes had widened in amazement and a

tremor of excitement had gone through

the crowd of onlookers, many of whom

were masturbating as they watched

them play.

The rush of pleasure that went through

Joe's body al the way down to his

manhood was overwhelming as he

consumed the morsel. Then he'd

lowered his head down between the

man's thighs, baring his teeth, preparing to devour that luscious nine inches of

rigid flesh, to bite the man's penis clean off. Joe could sense the man's

excitement and terror rising as they

combined into a rapture that vibrated

through him like a bass drum. Joe's

mouth enveloped his cock and the man

moaned as the pain from where the

razor had done its work mingled with the pleasure of that rough slippery tongue

probing the wound. . . . ... . ... . . . .. As the man watched his throbbing hard

cock disappear between Joe's lips and

push its way down his throat, he let out a sigh of soul deep ecstasy. Joe's teeth bit into the base of his cock and the man

shuddered on the edge of orgasm. He

began to convulse with a screaming

climax as he felt Joe's teeth bite deeper and begin to tug, trying to tear his cock right off of him. He ejaculated down