Alicia lay on the semen and sweat stained 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 well. 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 still strangling the life from her. She’d struck him repeatedly but he hadn’t seemed to notice. She had nearly passed out before he finally 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 ball 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 skull.
‘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 kill 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 wall 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 all of his clothing. Once again she marvelled at how finely sculpted his body was. He walked out of the room and came back with a long skinny knife, a filleting 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 fell 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 still 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 sallow 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 gullet. 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 belly 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 began 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 all 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 killers 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 refilled it with more water and Pine Sol, added some bleach, then dragged the bucket into the bedroom. He thought it would be wise to clean up a little before trying to drag Alicia out of the bathroom. He didn’t know how much she had seen through that little crack in the door, but he could at least spare her the further trauma of seeing the aftermath of his passions.
Emma Purcel’s mauled and masticated remains disappeared into a plastic bedsheet and a cheap area rug. She was then dragged into the next apartment where her corpse would sit and decompose until Joe could figure out what to do with it. All evidence of her death in that dingy little bedroom was scrubbed with ammonia and washed down the sink. When Joseph turned toward the master bath door, the room looked even cleaner than it had before he killed Emma. The acrid pungency of ammonia and bleach had completely masked the smell of fetid blood.
The beautiful Spanish girl with the full red lips, the caramel skin, the luxurious mane of curly black hair, thick meaty hips and thighs, full breasts, and fat perfectly rounded ass, sat in the bathtub shivering. She rocked back and forth moaning quietly.
‘Alicia?’
At the sound of his voice she began to scramble like a trapped animal, trying to claw her way through the shower tiles.
Her wrists were still bound but somehow she had gotten her arms from behind her back to the front. Her shoulders were turning blue and Joe suspected that she had dislocated them. Cautiously he approached his traumatized victim. He reached out and carefully removed the ball gag from her mouth.
‘Alicia … I’m sorry that you saw that. I didn’t mean for you to─‘
‘You ate her! You ate that woman! She was screaming and you just kept biting her!’ She began to tremble convulsively as the image of this gorgeous man that she’d once been so excited about sleeping with, cracking open that woman’s rib cage and ripping her heart out as if he were shucking an oyster from its shell flashed through her mind. She recalled his face, covered in an oily red mask of blood and tissue, his eyes wild with an unfathomable bloodlust. This man who she’d almost forgiven for chaining her up and biting off her nipples, who she’d begun to fantasize about curing of his psychotic dementia and living happily ever after with.
‘Alicia, I’m trying so hard not to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you, but the hunger was getting so strong. I-I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to control myself. I had to do something!’
Alicia curled up into the fetal position at the bottom of the tub and began to cry. Joe reached in and lifted her from the tub. He brought her back over to the bed and chained her up again.
Joe scrambled some eggs and made bacon and toast but Alicia would not eat it so he left it by the side of the bed along with fresh water. He emptied the bucket that sat alongside the bed and replaced it, just in case she needed to use it while he was gone.
‘I have to go. I’ll be back later.’ It was far too early for class so Joe walked across campus to the gym, getting there just as the wrestling team was finishing up their weight training and the football players were starting to pile in. Joe was bigger and stronger than most of the players on the team. He knew they thought he was crazy for not playing, but he had more important things to do than run up and down a field chasing a weather-beaten pigskin.
Ignoring the loud laughing and joking from the players, Joe began stacking weight onto the bar. He loaded 225 pounds onto the weight bench to begin his warm-up and then proceeded to do two sets of fifteen reps with it. He ended by bench-pressing 405 pounds, doing nearly five hundred on the decline press and 365 on the incline. He then did some curls with 180 pounds and finished with five hundred stomach crunches.
With every grueling set of exercises Joe’s mind went inexorably back to Trent. He couldn’t get that damned pedophile out of his mind. He had to find him and kill him and that meant he needed to get a car, preferably a van so that he could transport Alicia without having to lock her in a trunk. He had the librarian’s wedding and engagement rings and about forty dollars from her purse. The engagement ring was a huge solitaire, at least three carats. Her last husband had probably purchased it for four or five grand. Joe thought he might be able to get seven or eight hundred for it at a pawnshop but more than likely he’d have to settle for five or six hundred, an eighth of its value. That meant some very cheap transportation. If he went to a used car lot it would probably be enough for a down payment.
Joe grabbed a forty-five-pound weight and placed it on his chest as he groaned and strained his way through another fifty crunches. When he stood, his abdominal muscles were wound up tight and starting to cramp. He stretched backward as far as he could to loosen them up before he went to hit the showers. By the time he had undressed and stepped into the shower it was empty. Everyone had hurried to finish washing before he stepped in. He made them nervous. Joe knew that as soon as someone found the librarian’s body he’d be the first suspect.
He doubted that anyone had seen him going in and out of the abandoned apartment building. The building was located in a commercial area that closed up at night and he never went there during the day. There were nothing but derelicts and drug addicts down there at night after all the businesses closed and they would not be inclined to speak to the police. That’s why he had chosen it. He didn’t have to worry about nosy neighbors. Still, everyone knew he stayed at the library late almost every night and he was sure Emma had told others about the type of stuff he read. Besides that, he just hadn’t done a very good job at concealing his sexual peculiarities.
No one knew for sure just what his malfunction was, but the general consensus was that the huge psychology student definitely wasn’t quite right. His sexual deviancy shone like a beacon whenever he stepped into a room. In many cases it had worked for him, attracting women looking for a new thrill, but now he was sure it would work against him once they found Emma’s half-eaten corpse in the apartment next door to the one he was squatting in.
Everyone would point the finger at him. Before he left for his trip, he would meticulously wipe down everything in the little apartment and then burn the whole thing to the ground. Everything would be okay. By the time the cops sifted enough evidence from the ashes to connect him to the crime he would be long gone.
Joe started to whistle as he made his way across campus to his psychology class.
