Succulent Prey (14 page)

"I was riding my bike when he attacked me. I turned the corner and he was just standing there, grinning at me. I tried to turn the bike around and run. I could tel that he was going to hurt me. Of course, I had no idea how bad. I thought he was

going to beat me up and steal my bike

or something. Then he grabbed me by

the throat. He squeezed so hard that I

couldn't even scream. I couldn't breathe. I felt like I was going to pass out. Then he threw me in the back of his pizza van." Joe took a deep breath and rubbed his

bare arms to warm himself as chil s

raced the length of his spine.

"It's okay. You don't have to continue if it bothers you."

"When we got back to his place, he undressed me. He started punching me.

Then he started stabbing me. He

stabbed me dozens of times, raped and

sodomized me. I remember him licking

my wounds, lapping up the blood like a

kitten licking milk. His eyes were al

glassy and vacant. He kept me down in

that basement for days, feeding on me.

Somewhere along the way I passed out.

Then he put me back in the van and

dumped me back in the park. I was the

lucky one. I was his first victim. He got much more violent with the next ones

before they caught him. Those he kept.

They never got to see the sunlight again. They died down in his basement."

The librarian was crying when Joe

looked up. Joe reached out and brushed

a strand of hair from the librarian's face, cupping her cheek in his hand and

leaning in to peer into her sad eyes. He wiped away her tears with his thumbs.

Something about her sorrow was

reawakening the monster, turning him

on. He could feel the drive roiling like a furnace, burning at the root of him, hard and insistent.

Joe thought about Alicia, stil chained up back at the apartment. He thought about her magnificent ass. The soft sumptuous mound of tender fat and al the things he wanted to do to it, to her. Al the things he would do if he didn't curb his appetite with something else. Something like this librarian.

"I want to kiss you."

The librarian jerked away, shocked by

Joe's forwardness. It was Joe's firm

belief that when most women ran it was

because they wanted to be chased. He

seized her face in his hands again and

pul ed her toward him. Greedily he

sucked and bit at her lower lip as he

kissed her aggressively. She never

struggled or made any attempt to resist him. Rather, her body melted to his touch as if it had been locked stiff with tension released the moment their lips touched. She responded to his kiss with her own, the desperate hungry embrace of a

woman starved for affection, in need of a man's love.

She was out of breath when Joe leaned

back in his chair and picked up his

coffee. He stared at her with those same rapacious eyes that had long intimidated her as he sipped the scalding brown

liquid. Emma trembled with want.

Embarrassed, she reached for her own

coffee, lifting it up and then placing it back on its coaster. She looked back

into Joe's terrible, wantonly sexual eyes and felt another wal crumble. She

closed her eyes and let out a long sigh.

"What do you want, Joseph? What do you want from me?"

The air between them became hot and

thick with a palpable lust. Joe licked his lips. He was recal ing the taste of Alicia's nipples when he'd eaten them and

imagining what it must be like to

consume a woman's entire breast.

"I want to make love to you."

"You just want to fuck me," she sighed, looking down into her lap. Then she

looked back up and her eyes were

furious with lust. "But that's okay. I think I want to fuck you too."

She leaned forward and took his hand.

Together they rose from the table and

walked out into the parking lot.

"You'l be gentle with me, won't you? I haven't been with anyone since my

husband and I divorced five years ago.

You'l take it slow, won't you?"

They were almost to her car. She pul ed out her keys and opened the car door.

"Promise me you'l be gentle with me."

"No," Joe said.

His huge powerful hands clenched tight

around her throat and jerked the librarian up onto her tiptoes. As he closed his

fingers tight around her windpipe she

kicked and scratched, dragging her

manicured nails through the skin on his forearms and punching at his face. She

raked his throat with her fingernails,

breaking off the plastic tips in his flesh before she blacked out. Joe stuffed her into the car and drove her across town to the apartment building on Folsom Street.

Chapter Seventeen

Alicia lay on the semen-and sweatstained bed contemplating her fate, entangled in a confusion of emotions. A few hours ago she had been confident

that she would survive this. She had felt like she was connecting with her captor, like she understood him a little and that perhaps he understood her as wel . Then she'd woken up with his hands locked

around her throat and his eyes vacant

and sad, looking through her at some

tragedy from his past. Yet he was stil

strangling the life from her. She'd struck him repeatedly but he hadn't seemed to

notice. She had nearly passed out

before he final y snapped out of it as if awakening from a dream.

As she gasped for air, Joe had looked at her with a mixture of confusion and

embarrassment. Then he'd turned away

and when he turned back he had the

restraints in his hands. The look on his face had been one of defeat and

resignation. She was now afraid that he would give up on trying to cure himself and would decide that he was too far

gone to be saved. If that was the case, then she was a dead woman. She had to

get him to try. At the very least, she'd have more opportunity to escape once

they were traveling on the road than she had locked in this little room.

The front door opened and Alicia heard

a sound like something heavy being

dragged. Joe stalked into the room

looking excited and agitated. He was not alone. Alicia looked down and saw a

frightened woman, naked and trussed up

in duct tape, at his feet. She was big and fleshy, zaftig like Alicia herself, only older and white, pale as a newborn. The

woman looked up at Alicia, at the chains around her wrists and ankles, the bal

gag, the dried blood caked on her

mutilated breasts, and she began to

scream against the duct tape secured

over her mouth.

Joe turned toward Alicia with a wild

expression on his face and an erection

pressed urgently against the fabric of his pants. He was panting heavily and his

pupils were dilated so wide that very little of his irises were visible. He looked like a speed freak wired out of his skul .

"This is for you, Alicia!" The handsome young man knelt down and peered into

the Spanish girl's horrified eyes. He

wiped her curly raven black hair out of her face and stared at her for a long

moment in that peculiar way he had that made her feel like something on a

dessert tray.

"The hunger is just so strong. I was afraid I'd kil you tonight if I didn't do something. So I'm going to use her to

get me by until we can find the cure

together."

Alicia didn't want to know what he meant by "using her" but she could guess. And what she guessed brought tears to her

eyes and made her stomach flip. She

wanted to try to talk him out of it but he hadn't removed the gag from her mouth

and she suspected that was deliberate.

He undid the chain that secured her to

the wal and dragged her into the

bathroom.

"I don't think you want to see this," he said as he closed the bathroom door.

The door latch didn't catch and the door creaked open just a crack. Alicia wished that it hadn't because she couldn't

prevent herself from looking, no matter how terrified she was.

She watched as Joe removed al of his

clothing. Once again she marveled at

how finely sculpted his body was. He

walked out of the room and came back

with a long skinny knife, a fil eting knife. The woman began to squirm as Joe

knelt down over her with the blade.

He cut the tape from around the

librarian's ankles and knelt down

between her thighs. Alicia felt a twinge of jealousy as she watched him lick and

suck at the woman's fat pussy. The

woman ceased her struggles. Her legs

spread wider and her hips thrust forward to meet his tongue. Suddenly, her body

began to buck and convulse with what

could only have been an orgasm. Then

her flesh began to run red.

Alicia could hear the savage snarls and the hideous sounds of ripping flesh as

Joe tore at her delicate flower, tearing into her labia with his teeth and

devouring huge chunks of the tender

flesh. He seized both her thighs, one in each arm, as she began to kick and

struggle. The tape fel away from her

face and her screams came pealing

through the room.

Joe lifted his head for a moment and

Alicia could see the rapturous

expression on his gore-streaked face as he chewed the bits of vagina he'd torn

from the librarian. The woman was stil

screaming when Joe crawled up her

body and began biting at her breasts.

He was not nearly as tender with her as he had been with Alicia. He bit deep into the meat of her breasts, tearing off her nipples and devouring the tremendous

mammaries in huge gulps of sweet

sal ow fat streaked with red. He used the knife, sawing away her breasts to get

more of the woman's tender flesh off her chest and into his gul et. The woman's

anguished cries were more terrible than anything Alicia had ever heard.

Alicia turned away when she saw Joe

amputate the woman's entire left breast, exposing the gleaming white bone of her rib cage. He brought the quivering

mound of flesh up to his lips and

voraciously consumed it. Blood washed

over his fingers and down his arm,

pouring from his mouth with each bite

and dripping off his chin and down his

neck. He licked the blood from his lips between bites like sweet nectar, like he was eating a mango or a papaya and

not human flesh.

The woman's screams were subsiding,

becoming moans and whimpers. She

was in shock and dying from the

massive loss of blood and the traumatic damage done to her. Alicia turned back

to look as Joe turned the woman over.

Where her vagina had been was now

just a ragged hole ringed in torn and

lacerated bits of flesh. Her breasts were completely gone down to the ribs. Bits of meat lay puddled on the floor amongst

the pools of blood. The woman landed

on her bel y with a wet sticky swap! that caused her rotund ass to jiggle. Alicia knew what was about to happen next.

Joe took more time and care here. This

most luscious piece of meat, the most

prized delicacy, he would not squander. This was to be savored. He be gan

slicing the thick fatty meat of her ass in thin cuts and sliding the tender slivers of meat into his mouth. This lasted for

nearly five minutes before he could no

longer restrain himself and dove

headfirst into her ass, ripping into it just as he had done her breasts. To Alicia it seemed to go on al night.

When the sun rose, Joe lay in a pool of coagulating blood draped across the

vandalized corpse of Emma Purcel like

a bloated tick, fat off her blood and flesh. He'd completely consumed her breasts,

most of her ass, chewed away her

vagina and even cut her open and eaten

her ovaries, liver, and kidneys. His

crowning act of barbarity had been to

saw through her sternum, crack open her rib cage, and cannibalize her heart.

Drunk off blood and heavy with

halfdigested meat, he rose drowsily from the floor and turned toward the locked

bathroom door. Only it wasn't locked.

In the two-inch gap between door and

door frame, Joe spotted two almond

eyes wide with shock. He started toward the door and heard Alicia scurry away

toward the back of the bathroom. She

was terrified.

Joe passed his reflection in the mirror and saw the ghastly, loathsome thing that stood naked in his bedroom, a ghoulish

grotesquerie caked in dried blood and

gore from head to toe. He smiled and

the hideous abomination smiled back at

him with teeth blackened with old blood and raw flesh. No wonder Alicia was

afraid of him. He no longer bore any

semblance to a human. He had

transformed the previous night, become

whatever detestable monster the virus

within him was morphing him into. But

what had he become? A vampire? He

looked at the blood that covered half the room and drenched his own skin and

doubted a vampire would have been so

wasteful. Joe stared down at the

remains of the librarian. He'd never

heard of a vampire doing that to its

victim. Serial kil ers do that ... and

werewolves.

Joe walked into the next room and into

the kitchen. He used dish detergent and a sponge to wash the blood from his

face, hair, and body. When he was done

he mopped the already splintered and

warped hardwood floor. He emptied the

contents of the bucket and refil ed it with more water and PineSol, added some