Succulent Prey (23 page)

his victim's souls through their blood the detective declined to comment.

The professor inhaled deeply as he read further reports of Damon Trent's

arraignment and trial and final y his

sentence to a hospital for the criminal y insane in Tacoma, Washington. If Joseph real y believed that there was some

correlation between this attack and his own dementia, then he might be going

back to Washington to confront Trent.

"They got to you too, huh?" Professor Douglas interrupted, standing in the

doorway and smoking his pipe in a

deliberately professorial pose. Locke

winced as if struck and jerked back in

his chair.

"Jesus, man! You scared the shit out of me!"

"Sorry. Those detectives visited you too, I see."

"Yeah."

"They're pretty good at laying the guilt on." Douglas swaggered into the room, stil puffing on his pipe. "So what did you find?"

"It looks like Joseph survived an attack by a serial kil er. You know about his

theory that serial kil ers are the result of a transmittable disease?"

"Yeah. He was asking me about how

vampires and werewolves transmit their

curse and how to cure it. Oh my God! I

told him the only way to cure the

vampire's curse was to kil the head

vampire."

"That's about what I figured he was up to." Locke turned his computer screen toward Professor Douglas as a new

headline flashed on the screen:

Vampire Killer Found Not Guilty by

Reason Of Insanity

"He's going to kil the head vampire."

Thirty-four

Joseph rented a room in an extendedstay motel that had monthly and weekly rates, three miles from the state hospital. Alicia waited in the van, chained to the steering wheel as he walked into the

office to pay the deposit and get the

keys. They had scouted the

neighborhood for the perfect place.

Joseph parked across the street and

watched the flow of traffic in and out of the motel before picking a secluded

room on the first floor of the dilapidated two-story structure for its privacy and isolation. It was far from the office at the end of the parking lot near the trash

Dumpsters. A row of overgrown shrubs

covered the front, blocking the view from the street. It was perfect.

"Yeah, it's not the Four Seasons but you'l have al the privacy you could want. None of your neighbors are terribly interested in having the cops come in here, and

neither am I. Just don't be cookin' meth or makin' any other kind of drugs in there and don't bring any kids in your room.

We don't need that kind of trouble. The hookers are bad enough."

Joe gave the desk clerk his last three

hundred dol ars to rent the room for the week; then he went back to the van to

secure Alicia in her new home.

"We're here."

Alicia looked back at him with wide eyes fil ed with that familiar confusion of lust and fear. Her long curly tresses lay limp and damp with perspiration and road

grime, pasted to her scalp like a bad

toupee. She flinched when Joe reached

over to lift her from the van.

"How can you stil not trust me? After al we've shared together?"

He was right. There was no need to kil

her now that she was an accomplice.

Her teeth marks and saliva would be

found on Frank's corpse along with

Joseph's. In the eyes of the law she

would be just as guilty as he. Stil , that wouldn't stop him from kil ing her just to assuage his psychotic hunger.

She al owed him to toss a blanket over

her and carry her to the door of the motel room, feeling deliciously vulnerable in his massive, sinuous arms. Part of her

wanted to cry out for help but she was

stil confused about her own involvement in Frank's death and her feelings for the superpredator. Before she could make

up her mind as to whether or not to raise the alarm, the door closed behind her

with a resounding slam.

"Do you want me to bring you something to eat?" Joe asked as he tied her to the cheap motel bed.

"Nothing that screams and fights back."

"How about if I kil it first?" Alicia blanched and shuddered, visibly

appal ed.

"That was just a joke."

"Was it?"

"Of course it was, but after the virus has worked deeper inside you, you won't find the prospect of live meat quite so

distasteful."

"It's not going to work deeper because you're going to find the cure, right? You have to now. If there's a virus inside of me then I'l turn into a monster too. You don't want that, do you? I mean, if you continue like this, eventual y you'l be caught. And no matter how good it feels to feed that hunger it'l feel a hundred times worse to be locked away where

it's just going to gnaw at you forever with no way to feed it. That's what prison wil be like when they catch you. Is that what you want? Is that want you want for me?" Her eyes were wide and sad.

Joe wilted beneath her gaze. His

massive shoulders slumped forward and

his head dropped toward his chest in

surrender. "No, of course not. I love you and you're right. I've got to end this now." Joe stood up and walked into the

bathroom. He came back with a towel,

which he wadded up and crammed into

her mouth to gag her. She closed her

eyes and tried not to think about the

dingy rag as it was forced between her

lips.

"I'm going to see Damon."

He turned and walked out of the room,

leaving Alicia alone with her thoughts

and fears.

Alicia fought back tears as she heard

the door slam and Joe's footsteps strike the asphalt. She was alone again,

chained to a bed in a strange room, in a strange town, with no one to count on but herself and the man who'd kidnapped

her.

Her mind kept trying to go back to her

youth, to the taste of her father's semen on her tongue. She fought the memory

away only to have it replaced with the

image of the librarian enjoying

cunnilingus before being cannibalized by Joe and final y the smel of Frank's slowroasted corpse and the succulent taste of his hickory-smoked genitals as they

melted in her mouth and slid luxuriously down into her bel y. She shook her head and screamed into the rag until the

image fled and she was back in the

room.

In order to keep her mind in the present, Alicia began investigating her

surroundings as best she could while stil tied to the bed. She listened to the

sounds of life teeming al around her

from the other grimy little apartments that adjoined her own tacky pisscolored

prison.

Next door she heard a persistent

knocking as someone tried desperately

to awaken her sleeping neighbor.

Through the adjoining wal Alicia heard the door open, a few mumbled

greetings, then silence. Minutes after the man had entered there began a chorus

of grunts and moans and the bang and

squeak of the overused bed. It was over almost as soon as it began.

Moments later the neighbor's door

opened again and the same footsteps

stalked off across the parking lot,

fol owed soon by the sound of tears and curses. This would be repeated three

more times before the day was ful y

born.

Trying to drown out the sounds from the room next door, Alicia stared up at the ceiling to watch a cockroach scamper

across what must have been an

immense distance for something so

smal , only to find itself ensnared in a dusty cobweb in the corner above her

bed. Seconds later a miniscule spider, a third of the size of the cockroach,

crawled out across the web and began

to further entangle its larger prey in a silken cocoon. Soon the spider had

latched onto the cockroach, sucking it

dry. Life was rough al over. Alicia turned away.

She began counting the water and

cigarette stains yel owing the antique

white wal s. She imagined she could see faces screaming out from the various

blotches and streaks. Her stomach

growled, reminding her of her last meal and almost causing her to regurgitate.

She felt the bile scald her throat as she swal owed hard to keep Frank's remains

down. She went back to staring at the

wal s, trying not to think.

This room was a wreck. It wore its

history like a battered old soldier, each sin and vice leaving another scar on its aging facade. Alicia could see every

poorly textured drywal patch where

someone had shoved their fist or

someone else's head through the

Sheetrock. She could see where some

disinterested handyman had made a

cursory attempt at painting over blood

splatter. The brownish red streaks had

resurfaced through the paint as if

something were buried within the wal

and stil bleeding. The bul et holes that were simply spackled and repainted.

As little care as had been taken in

repairing the dump, even less had been

taken in its original construction. She could count each and every stud in the

wal where they were bowed or

misaligned. The ceiling's lid line dove as much as two inches on one side making

the room appear to be leaning. The

caulking was uneven and the lead-based

paint was peeling, curling up and flaking away like a bad sunburn.

Alicia closed her eyes and tried to sleep while the neighbor's bed renewed its

squeak and bump, headboard gouging

the drywal as it slammed repeatedly

against the wal in rhythm with the

sounds of ecstasy and despair. She

heard someone cry out with a faked

orgasm that sounded to her like a wail of torment. Then the door slammed again

and Alicia drifted off, listening to her neighbor's anguished, wracking sobs.

T irty-five

A dark blanket of clouds smothered the

sky. Fat droplets of rain beat a steady pulse on the roof of the van as the

heavens bled out into the city, drowning the citizenry like rats in a flooding

basement. The rain was the second

thing about his childhood Joe was able

to recal with any clarity. It seemed that it had rained every day of his life right up until he'd left Washington. Now he'd

brought the rain back with him.

Work boots, sneakers, patent leather

wingtips, pumps, rubber boots, and

myriad other shoes of every description splashed through the murky puddles as

splashed through the murky puddles as

the last of the nine-to-fivers hurried off to work, now more than half an hour late.

Everyone in this town seemed to belong

here. There were no tourists. The people blended right in with the architecture, the food, and the drab, depressing weather. They were decorative accents added to

give the place more flavor.

Joe navigated silently through the

somber streets, his thoughts as chaotic as the weather as he looked from face to face, reading their stories in wrinkles and worry lines. Whenever their eyes

landed on him he turned away, afraid that they would read the horror story etched into his own features.

Joe drove west on Bridgeport Way to

Steilacoom Boulevard and turned left.

Less than ten minutes later he pul ed up at Fort Steilacoom, where the state

mental hospital sat.

It was an impressive complex of red

brick buildings, imposing edifices of

concrete and steel, four stories high, with windows barred in wrought iron. It was a prison laid out on a sprawling campus

dotted with tal evergreen trees and lush lawns. The buildings were old, though,

and a hospital this size was bound to

have major security leaks. Joe was

already searching for them as he pul ed up into the parking lot in front of the main building. The windows were al barred,

however, and police cars came and went

fairly regularly. Getting Trent out would be tricky.

As expected, Joe passed the cliched

drooling patients lounging on lawn

furniture and sipping iced tea, their eyes fixed in a vacant stare. Nurses attended to them with pity and casual disdain, as if they were unaware of the crimes most of them had committed in order to be put there, and the danger they stil

represented. Even through their vacuous expressions, Joe could sense the

hunger stil burning inside them only

slightly diminished by the antipsychotics and depressants the nurses were

dutiful y pumping into them. Stil , armed prison guards stood close by, just in

case one of the inmates had forgotten to take his meds and decided to get a little frisky. Joe continued across the lawn and up to the front of the main building.

Joe wasn't sure exactly what he was

going to say in order to gain admittance into the hospital. He was hoping they

wouldn't recognize his name as one of

Damon Trent's victims. He was also

hoping that Trent's own perverse

curiosity would make him eager enough

to see his first victim al grown up to go along with whatever lie he came up with. The withered old crone who sat behind

the reception desk smiled up at Joe with a mouthful of pearl white dentures as he stepped cautiously into the lobby.

Instinctively his eyes ravaged her,

searching for an edible morsel on her

hard-worn body, but the meat that

sagged from her brittle skeleton had

long ago withered and spoiled. She was

in no danger of winding up on his menu. Not when there were so many more

scrumptious delicacies wandering every