Prey Drive

by James White, Wrath

  The addiction that tortures me is like the terrific thirst of a vampire combined with the rapacious hunger of a werewolf and I’m convinced the curses are one and the same. That’s why I was judged insane and sentenced to life behind bars instead of put to death, because no one understands this thing inside me and no one will listen! They do not believe this monstrous thing that I am has little choice or freewill involved in it, except for the choice whether or not to indulge it, which, for me, would be like choosing not to drink when my throat is parched or eat when my stomach churns with hunger pains. That is hardly a choice. This thing that has led me to such loathsome crimes is a disease that was passed to me. It does not describe my character. I’m a naturally mild person. I would not willfully harm the tiniest flea were I not compelled to do so by this terrible curse.

  The man I see when I look in the mirror is not the man I once was, not the man I aspired to be. It is not the man who first met Alicia and, I believe, not the man I would have been had I never been accosted by my own homicidal fiend, Damon Trent, or had I not been born of the seed of a malevolent father, a sadistic pederast far worse than Damon Trent. I know how this must sound to you, like I’m avoiding responsibility for my actions, but make no mistake. I know I’m responsible. The lives I took haunt me, even those who were not so innocent. I’m a predator who grieves his prey and my immense remorse is the only proof I have that I’m still human. I mourn Alicia every day. I miss her as you could never imagine. She is the only woman, besides my mother, who ever truly loved me. I loved her too, more than I could ever express. My desire for her brought out the monster within me and I failed us both by letting it overcome me and then her.

  I’m sorry for what I’ve done. Please find it in your heart to forgive me.

  Sincerely,

  Joseph Miles

  Joe folded the letter and placed it in the envelope. He knew the language sounded oddly stiff and formal, antiquated. He couldn’t help it. The longer he remained behind walls of steel and concrete, the more he forgot how real people spoke to one another. All he had for reference were books by Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Dickens. They, along with a host of other grand figures of historic literature, were his only friends now. He thought it was better he sounded like them than like one of his fellow convicts or the coarse prison guards.

  The next time he saw his lawyer, Joe planned to give the letter to him with instructions to mail it to Lana like he’d done with the rest of them. He didn’t want to know where she lived. He didn’t trust himself. If he ever managed to leave this hellhole, he didn’t believe he could resist the urge to pay the woman a visit. The idea that she might resemble his beloved Alicia in any way would be an irresistible temptation. If she wrote him back, her return address would be on the envelope. Joe knew himself well enough to know he’d take it as an invitation. He’d made a promise to himself to destroy the envelope if she ever returned one of his letters. Joe had been writing her a letter a week since he’d been incarcerated. They had all gone unanswered so far.

  Joe placed the envelope on the lone metal shelf bolted to the wall of his cell opposite his bed. Then he wrapped a towel around the shelf, stuck his legs out straight, and began the first of ten sets of twenty pull-ups. The shelf shuddered and buckled under his weight, but it held.

  He’d begun his second-to-last set, biceps and lats burning with lactic acid, when the guard in the control tower called his inmate number. He had a visitor. Joe washed his face and armpits in the sink and quickly rubbed deodorant under his arms. In the super maximum (supermax) security wing of the prison, visitors were received from behind bulletproof glass. Still, Joe wanted to look and smell his best. Hygiene was his only remaining connection to his former life, his life before the monster had taken over.

  ***

  Lionel Ray Miles had been a cruel and vicious man in whom the milk of human kindness had curdled long ago. He was dead inside long before his son had torn off his head. Few people who knew the man were surprised by the manner of his death. Violent men came to violent ends. The little good there was in him he’d passed on to his son, Joseph, but then Lionel Ray corrupted that as well, turning Joseph into a monster. Few who knew the family were surprised by Joseph’s crimes. His mother least of all.

  Agatha Miles was the picture of matronly love and concern as she walked into the visiting room of the state prison’s supermax security wing. Joe hadn’t seen his mother in years. She’d left his father soon after Joe left for college. He always felt the separation had been calculated, like she’d been planning for years to leave his father but hadn’t wanted to break up the family, but then figured it was okay once her son was a man and out on his own.

  She took a seat behind the glass partition, fiddling with the leather-bound Bible in her lap and looking far older than Joe remembered. Her hair was almost completely gray and a web of wrinkles fanned out from the corners of each eye. There were hard lines around her mouth and she seemed to have lost a lot of weight. She was no longer the plump, rosy-cheeked woman with the perpetually sunny disposition he recalled from his youth, smiling at him through tears on the day she said goodbye. She looked pale and thin. Her skin looked as if it had been draped over a skeleton. Every movement she made, however slight, seemed capable of injuring her, fracturing her brittle bones.

  She raised the telephone receiver from its cradle and even that seemed like a strain. Joe had left her alone without a husband or a lover to take care of her and the effect had been catastrophic. She seemed mere seconds from the grave. She reached out for Joe and her fingers encountered the glass partition and remained there, pressed hard against the barrier. Joe placed his hand against the glass, dwarfing his mom’s birdlike digits with his massive fingers. He kept his hand there, willing his atoms to pass through the barrier to merge with hers. Whether he succeeded, he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t feel her, couldn’t smell her. He imagined her spirit a smoky charcoal gray, the embers of a fire long ago snuffed out, with dim, infrequent flashes of electric blue appearing here and there like lightning through a storm cloud that eventually dissipates without once losing its bolts from the heavens. He imagined that if he could smell her, her scent would not be the scent of electricity, blood, and the nectar of fruit that he smelled wafting maddeningly from the skin of the young people at his former college. It would be the scent of something dead and turned to dust.

  His mother removed her hand and Joe eventually did the same, sighing over his failure to connect with her.

  “My poor Joey. I should have taken you away from that man. I loved him though. I know you can’t understand that, but I loved your father.”

  Joseph Miles never once mourned his father’s death. Seeing his mother weep over her murdered husband was disconcerting.

  “He was a killer, Mom. He murdered children.”

  “And you murdered him and those other people. Should I turn my back on you, Joey?”

  “Maybe you should, Mom.”

  His mother shook her head, and for a moment he could see the strength she’d once had. “Your father was sick. He had a weakness inside him, an illness like the one you have. You don’t know all the things he went through as a child. I don’t even know all of it, but what Damon Trent did to you, terrible as it was, was nothing compared to what your father went through. We tried to protect you, Joey. We never wanted you to turn out like him. He never wanted that. If it wasn’t for that Damon Trent …” She shook her head and wiped a tear from her eye with a handkerchief.

  Joe’s thoughts paused, stuck on what his mother had just confessed.

  “You knew what Dad was? You knew?”

  “I suspected. I knew he had a mean streak and I was sure he’d killed people before. I just never knew it was children. I thought maybe he’d killed guys in bar fights or maybe even evening ladies. That’s why I left him. I thought he might have been buying whores and hurting them. Men do that sometimes. I never knew it was children.”

  Joe stared at his mo
ther, seeing her through different eyes. Men do that sometimes. She made killing prostitutes seem as natural to man as leaving the toilet seat up. Maybe she wasn’t the innocent, clueless victim he’d made her out to be. Maybe she wasn’t exactly a saint herself.

  How far did the corruption in his bloodline go? Joseph wondered.

  “He was proud that you went off to college. You know that? He was always talkin’ about his big college boy. We thought you were going to do great things. He called me when he saw on the news that a woman was murdered at your school. I didn’t even know he knew how to find me. He knew it was you who did it. I don’t know how he knew, but he did.”

  Joe smiled weakly and shook his head. Looking at his mother, hearing how she’d known or at least suspected what his father had been up to all those years—yet had done nothing—had continued to love him, Joe realized he’d never had a chance. He’d been cursed from the womb. Furthermore, he wondered if perhaps he’d been following the wrong bloodline. Perhaps the curse had not begun with his father but with his mother. He chased the thought from his mind, not liking the conclusion it inevitably led to or the actions that conclusion would necessitate.

  “I love you, Mom. Goodbye.”

  Joe stood to his full, hulking, six feet, six inches and summoned the guard. He never looked back once as he left the visitation room, even knowing he probably wouldn’t see her again until her funeral.

  “Goodbye.”

  The guard took Joseph Miles back to his cell. Joe waited until he heard their footsteps echo down the hall before he allowed himself to weep.

  Two

  It was dark. The air was moist with Joseph’s sweat, and every surface within reach was hard and cold, metal and concrete. He breathed in his own musky funk and breathed it out in a steaming cloud of halitosis. The guards had taken away his toothbrush and he hadn’t showered since they’d placed him completely naked in solitary confinement in a “strip cell.” His “crime” had been refusing to leave his cell for a shower. That had been enough.

  The idea of solitary confinement was ridiculous in supermax because every day was solitary. He was locked up twenty-three hours a day. The only thing they’d taken away by throwing him into solitary was his hour-a-day trip to the exercise yard and his thrice weekly showers.

  Joe held his hand up in front of him and couldn’t see his fingers. In addition to his own rank, animal scent, the room smelled of urine with the slight hint of old blood. It roared in Joe’s nostrils and singed his nose hairs, causing his eyes to water. This was the first time in days Joe could remember the lights being off. The guards had made a habit of leaving them on all day and night. It was another form of subtle torture, the screws trying to mindfuck him. He hugged himself and rubbed down the goose bumps on his arms and shoulders. The temperature was just a few degrees above freezing.

  He heard footsteps approach his cell door. There were several of them, at least three people. The door opened and one of the guards shined a light in on him. Joe winced. He sat naked on the floor, holding up a hand to shield his eyes from the light. He’d worked out to the point of exhaustion and now knelt in a pool of his own sweat. Bringing himself to the point of absolute physical fatigue was the only way he could force himself to sleep surrounded by the screams and shouts of the damned.

  “Look at this crazy son of a bitch. He looks like a wet dog. Damn, it stinks in here!” one of the guards said.

  There were two corrections officers standing in the doorway, shining a flashlight in on him. Between them stood a large shadow. A man easily as big as Joe himself if not bigger.

  “You got a visitor, Joe. A new cellmate.”

  There was mirth in the guard’s voice. Joe knew what he was up to. It wasn’t his first rodeo.

  “There’s already someone in there!” The voice was high-pitched, feminine, with a slight lisp. As Joe’s vision adjusted to the sudden intrusion of light, he could make out more of the man’s features. He was naked, like Joseph. His cock was massive and hung almost to mid-thigh. The man was heavily muscled, black, with long braided hair that hung down past his shoulders. He couldn’t make out the man’s face, but he could tell by his posture that he wasn’t happy. The officers removed the visitor’s handcuffs and leg shackles.

  “This is the only strip-cell available. You two are going to have to double-up.”

  The guard’s voice was familiar. Joseph could picture the fat corrections officer’s ruddy jowls and bloated belly, his crew-cut, so short he was almost bald, and the long scar on his scalp that ran down to his forehead, a reminder of when he’d been attacked by an inmate who’d made a shiv from a sharpened toothbrush. He worked in the control booth at night and was responsible for everything from locking and unlocking the cells to turning on and off the lights to what TV programs they got to watch.

  “You two go ahead and get cozy. We’ll be back for one of you in the morning.”

  There was no mistaking the guard’s intentions. In supermax they called it “cockfighting.” The guards would take two convicts with a history of unprovoked violence, strip them down, and put them in the same cell. It was done to get rid of problem inmates, as a form of discipline, and for simple amusement. He’d even heard that the guards bet on the fights. It wasn’t Joseph’s first experience with cockfighting. As one of the prison’s more high-profile and dangerous offenders, he’d seen the worst the institution had to offer. Most of the corrections officers hated and feared him, so they routinely did things to try to break him, such as leaving the lights on twenty-four hours a day for weeks at a time, leaving the TV on, the volume up, tuned to a televangelist station for hours or even days, and putting him in the occasional cockfight. He wondered what his new cellmate had done to warrant the CO’s ire.

  The cell door slammed and locked. Joseph rose to his feet. He could feel the monster rising, stiffening, lengthening, the bloodlust swelling within him, tingling at the root of him. As usual his killing instinct was nearly indistinguishable from sexual passion. It was like a separate being living inside him, a parasite that was always hungry, always demanding to be fed. Ever since he’d been locked up, his thoughts and fantasies had become increasingly animalistic, reduced to the most base impulses; fuck, eat, kill—and not usually in that order. The terrible hunger he’d been living with for months had now become a persistent, maddening ache. The guards were going to get a show this time. They were going to get more than they ever bargained for.

  The big man with the high-pitched voice and the long braids shambled forward in the dark. “Where are you? We don’t have to fight, you know? Just because those fucking assholes stuck us in here hoping we’d kill each other doesn’t mean we have to.”

  Joe was silent, listening to the man’s heavy, nervous breathing, letting his eyes readjust to the darkness. The man smelled like sweat, semen, and perfume. The scent was maddening. Joe’s stomach growled.

  “What’s your name? Who are you?” the stranger asked.

  Joe walked closer to the man until he was standing just out of reach. “Joseph. Joseph Miles.”

  He heard the man’s breath quicken. Good, Joseph thought. He knows who I am. Knows what I can do.

  “J-Joseph Miles? The … the serial killer? The guy who eats people?” the large black man whispered. There was panic in the stranger’s voice now. His high-pitched squeal was little more than a hoarse squeak.

  “Yes.” Joe stepped closer and the man retreated. Now Joe could smell blood and feces on the man in addition to the sweat and semen. He knew that unique combination of smells very well. It reminded him of his first night with Alicia. It was the scent of violent sex.

  “You stay away from me, motherfucker! I swear, I’ll whoop your ass and rape you! I like white boys. If I lose, I just get my ass kicked, but if you lose, you get your ass taken! I promise you that!”

  A prison rapist. That explained why the guards had brought him. They wanted Joe to teach the guy a lesson. Joe stepped even closer.

  The big rapist retreat
ed further until his back was against the door he’d come through. Joe’s erection was a spear stabbing the air in front of him. The monster was hungry. It was time to feed.

  “If you lose, your ass will get eaten,” Joe warned, “and not the way you like it eaten. The way I like it.”

  The man turned and began banging on the cell door. “Let me out of here, motherfuckers! You sick bastards! You locked me in here with a fucking psycho! Let me out!”

  Joe was right on top of the man now.

  The guy turned and punched the air, inches from Joseph’s nose. “Get back! Get away from me!”

  “No.” Joe charged forward. He kicked the rapist in the stomach, expecting the blow to knock the wind out of him and double him over, allowing Joe to slip behind him and put him in a rear choke. But the guy was strong. He took the kick well. The blow drove him back but didn’t seem to have hurt him. Suddenly the lights came on, blinding Joe. It was another trick the guards liked to pull. Leave them in absolute darkness for hours at a time and then suddenly turn on the lights in the middle of a fight. It kept things interesting for them.

  A punch landed on Joe’s jaw, and then another and another. Flashes of light went off in his head and everything began to fade, becoming gray and foggy. He knew he was about to pass out. Then Joe felt the man’s thick arms encircle his throat and begin to squeeze. Obviously, the rapist had the same fight plan Joe had.

  “My name’s Luscious , you sick sonuvabitch. You feel that? It’s going right up your tight little ass as soon as I put you to sleep. I warned you, didn’t I? I told you what I would do if you fucked with me!”

  Joe could feel Luscious's (pronounced Loo-shuss) enormous cock stiffening against the crack of his ass, parting his butt cheeks and probing at his anus. Joe grabbed one of Luscious’s arms with both hands, the one locked around Joe’s throat, and pulled down on it, giving himself room to breathe. He tucked his chin down between Luscious’s forearm and his own throat to create more space and keep the big man from choking him unconscious. With one hand, he reached over and grabbed one of the big rapist’s fingers, the middle finger, and jerked it back, snapping it. Luscious howled in pain. He let out a high-pitched shriek like a scream queen in a horror movie. At the same time, Joe bit into Luscious’s forearm with teeth he’d filed into sharp points. He bit deep and jerked his head back and forth like a shark in the midst of a feeding frenzy, ripping through muscle and sinew, feeling the splash of warm blood as it flooded his mouth. The monster swelled, lengthened, throbbed. The taste of blood had awakened all the old desires.