Succulent Prey (25 page)

next door.

"Are you kidding me? Are you seriously trying to intimidate me, you pathetic little worm! You attacked children because

you were too weak and cowardly to go

after real prey. I'm a true predator, not some simpering baby-fucker who

couldn't get a real woman to look twice at him. Or a real man for that matter." Joseph began to laugh and he could see

Trent visibly deflate.

"Shut up! Shut the fuck up! Stop

laughing at me! You don't know what I

am! You don't know the power I

possess!" He looked even more like a spoiled child as he exploded into a

tantrum. Tears squeaked out of the

corners of his eyes and his bloated

cheeks reddened with rage.

Joe rose from his chair and leaned

forward until he towered over the fat little pederast whose hands were stil cuffed

in front of him, leaving him al but

helpless. Joe's voice lowered

seductively as his eyes locked in on

Trent's.

"Your power has faded, Damon. You're just like them now. Weak. Helpless. Prey. How long has it been since you last fed?

Let me get you out of here and we can

feed together. Then you can show me

how powerful you are."

Damon licked his lips salaciously at the thought of fresh meat, fresh blood.

"You're trying to trick me. I'm not going anywhere with you. So you can kil me?

Rip me up into little pieces to rid yourself of the curse? Do you real y want to be

like those sheep that bad? What wil your life be like without the hunger? Without the passion? Nothing can replace it, you know. Regular sex wil feel like trying to masturbate in a ful -body cast. Nothing wil ever compare to what you've

experienced. You'l miss it every day of your life until you eventual y kil again. But with the curse gone, the kil ing won't be the same. It won't be as fulfil ing. But you'l keep kil ing because it wil be the closest you can ever come to what you

can experience right now with just one

bite. Only it won't be one bite. Without the curse it wil take the consumption of several victims to even approximate the ecstasy the flesh gives you now and

you'l gladly kil them al and more."

"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.

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.

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