Succulent Prey by Wrath James White

by Wrath James White

  "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<
br />
  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

  Joseph Miles somewhere or that he

  knew where the man was? In fact, he did know where Joseph was, or at least

  suspected. He was somewhere in

  Tacoma, Washington, preparing to

  break into a state mental hospital and

  murder a patient. He stil wasn't sure that he wanted to tel the detectives, though. They had been right about one thing. He had fucked up. He should have known

  how disturbed Joseph was. He should

  have known how dangerous he was.

  Joseph had come to him looking for help and he had failed him. He owed it to the boy to try to find a cure. He owed it to himself and his reputation as a criminal psychologist to stop him.

  The lesson ended and Professor Locke

  turned his back on the class and began

  erasing the blackboard as they filed out of the room. He heard twin pairs of

  footsteps heading down the aisle and

  approaching him. There was no doubt in

  his mind who the footsteps belonged to.

  "Professor?"

  "Detectives. What can I do for you today?" Professor Locke kept his back turned as he continued erasing the

  words of Bertrand Russel from the

  board. He paused for a second to

  examine the last quote before scrubbing it away.

  Science can teach us, and I think our

  own hearts can teach us, no longer to

  look around for imaginary supports, no

  longer to invent al ies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here

  below to make this world a fit place to live ...

  "Do you believe al that stuff, Doc?" Detective Volario asked. He was

  wearing the same suit he had on his last visit and it didn't look like he'd cleaned or pressed it.

  "Al what stuff?" The professor wiped the quote away and final y turned to the two detectives.

  "Al that stuff you said in your lecture about religion retarding progress and

  science rising up to replace it."

  "If I didn't believe it, I'd be a theologist instead of a criminal psychologist. I

  minored in philosophy as wel . To me it's just another way to study the human

  condition. When you ask what motivates

  a man to kil or rape or steal or, more importantly, what would keep a man from doing these things, it isn't very far from asking what it al means. What's the true meaning of life? What sense can be

  found in al this chaos? You look into the minds of serial sexual predators day in and day out and you have to wonder."

  "Why not hard science? Philosophy

  always struck me as a halfway point

  between science and mysticism for

  those who couldn't make up their minds

  whether to believe or not to believe," Detective Montgomery chimed in.

  Something about the large black

  detective's expression instantly put the professor on guard. The man was

  absolutely intimidating.

  "Al the sciences began as philosophy. Once a philosophical theory is proven it becomes the property of science. But

  without philosophical speculation,

  astronomy, psychology, biology, physics, and even quantum theory would never

  exist. Someday the search for the

  meaning of life wil leave the realm of philosophy as wel and become a

  science and when it does I'l go with it. Now I know you two didn't come al this way to discuss my atheism."

  "I entered al the information I had on Joseph Miles and his unique kil ing

  signature into the national VICAP

  computer and I got a hit today. A young man from right here in the Bay Area was found in a park in Oregon, roasted on a spit and partial y cannibalized. We went to his apartment on a hunch that he

  might somehow be connected with Miles

  and we found links on his computer to a cannibal-sex message board. We found

  the same link on the computer shared by Joseph Miles and his roommate. It's a

  pretty safe bet that Miles is the one who ate him. Your boy is out of control. Why do you think he'd be going to Oregon?" Because it's on the way to Washington,

  where the man he believes passed this

  curse on to him lives. "I have no idea," Locke said.

  "Wel , we have an idea. You'l have to tel me if you think this one is apodictic." Detective Volario stepped closer to the professor as if he were about to grab

  him and shake him. The professor took

  an involuntary step back. "We think he's going home. He grew up in Seattle. We

  think he's headed back there. What we

  don't know is why. He no longer has any family there. His parents moved to the

  Bay Area when he was twelve. They live

  right over in Hayward. I doubt he'd stil have any friends there. That was almost ten years ago and none of his phone

  records indicate that he's kept in touch with anyone from that state. So why do

  you think he'd run there, Doc? "

  Professor Locke thought hard before

  ans
wering. They'd come for his

  professional opinion both as a forensic psychiatrist and criminal psychologist

  and as someone familiar with the

  suspect. If he feigned ignorance they'd immediately suspect him of covering

  something up. If he told them everything, then Joseph would be arrested and put

  to death, his reputation as a

  criminologist would be forever tarnished and he'd never get a chance to test his cure.

  The professor had his own reasons for

  wanting to cure Joseph. If he were able to treat the young man's murderous

  addiction with serotonin inhibitors it

  would be a major breakthrough in the

  treatment of sexual predators, a

  breakthrough that could inject new life into his career. The rule of the

  blackboard jungle was publish or perish and he hadn't published anything

  groundbreaking in years. A paper on the treatment of serial kil ers with

  medication would put him on top of the

  heap, and if he could both prove that the serial kil er phenomenon was caused by

  viral transmission and document a cure

  for it, he'd be almost assured a Nobel

  Prize. Too many possibilities to put it al in the hands of two ignorant cops. But he had to think of a suitable lie.

  He's going to kil that man in order to break the curse, Professor Locke

  thought.

  They were obviously offtrack. They hadn't yet discovered the connection between

  Miles and Damon Trent, the serial child kil er. So they wouldn't be looking for Joseph in Tacoma, where Trent was

  locked up. They natural y assumed he

  was on his way back to the city he was

  born in. Al the professor had to do was reinforce that belief to keep them on the wrong track.

  "There are many reasons why he might be headed back to Seattle. There's the

  possibility that his delusions are actual y centered around a particular childhood

  fantasy, a person that he was attracted to who he perhaps fantasized about eating. During puberty he could have easily

  gotten his sexual urges confused with his hunger response. Perhaps it was a

  babysitter who wore a particular

  fragrance that reminded him of food and triggered a Pavlovian response. Maybe

  a waitress at a restaurant his family

  frequented. It could even have been the cashier at the local donut shop."

  "Then he would be going back there ..."

  "To live out that fantasy, yes. He would be going back to eat her."