The van stopped again and Alicia could hear Joe step out of the driver’s-side door and shut it behind him. She listened to his shoes crunch the dirt as he walked toward the back of the van. She could still hear the sounds of traffic and when he opened it she could see that they were parked in the breakdown lane along the freeway. Joe climbed into the van and she and Frank both tried to wriggle away from him. Joe’s forehead wrinkled and his eyebrows knitted together. He looked as if it hurt him that they were frightened of him.
‘I know how you feel. I didn’t realize it before, but this looks just like the van that Trent stuffed me into when he kidnapped me. Even in midday it was dark back there. I can only imagine what it must be like at night.’ He could barely look at her. He reached out and removed the gag from Alicia’s mouth. ‘I’m sorry about all this.’
‘Joe, you have to stop this. You need help. Look at what you’ve done to this poor man─and that woman. That woman that you … you ate!’ Alicia shuddered.
‘I’m trying to get help. You have to believe me. If I had a choice I wouldn’t be doing any of this but I have this curse, this disease! It’s driving me crazy! I just don’t know what to do!’ His eyes searched hers as if he would find the answers within them.
‘So you’re just going to give in to it? You’re going to eat him too─and then what about me? Joe, what if there is no miracle cure out there? What if you kill this Damon Trent guy and the hunger doesn’t get any less?’
‘I can’t think about that.’
‘You need to think about it! You need to learn to fight it or you’ll just keep killing until they catch you and lock you away or kill you!’
Joe leaned back against one wall of the van, deep in thought. He reached out and stroked Alicia’s face.
‘You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. You know that?’
‘I don’t believe you and I don’t think it matters.’
Joe reeled back with his eyes wide, visibly stricken by Alicia’s harsh words.
‘Well, if you weren’t so beautiful I would have eaten you already. Believe that!’
Now it was Alicia’s turn to recoil. She stared at the huge man with the superhero face and was surprised to see him grin back at her and wink. Suddenly she began to laugh. The absurdity of a serial killer who’d just eaten one woman and partially cannibalized the man she’d been riding with for the last few hours, joking about her own probable murder, was the most ridiculous thing she could imagine. Even as she laughed the tears flowed without relent. Joe reached out and wiped the tears from Alicia’s eyes as he continued to stare at her like an object of worship. Alicia smiled back even as fresh tears ran down her face.
‘I hope I’m more than just a pretty face to you? That’s not enough to sustain a relationship you know. I mean … you hardly know me,’ she said. Her voice still shook with fear, but she was trying to remain in control.
‘I know that you’ve been hurt too,’ Joe said. ‘I could see it in your eyes from the moment I met you. You’re one of the walking wounded just like me. But you’ve overcome it. You’re a fighter. Even in this situation you’re holding up pretty well. That alone tells me that you’ve been through a lot of pain in your life.’
‘Nothing like this,’ she said.
‘Then like what?’
Alicia went silent.
‘Tell me.’ He took her hands in his and raised them to his lips where he kissed them softly. She began to cry harder now. Her body shook with the force of it. Joe gathered her into his arms and held her.
‘Tell me.’
‘I seduced my father and … he-he killed himself. He shot himself in the head and it was my fault! I’m a fucking whore just like he said I was! I killed my own father!’ Joe didn’t try to pretend to know what she was feeling now or what had motivated her to have sex with her father. He knew that he could never understand what had made her do such a thing any more than she could understand what made him hunger for human meat.
Instead he continued to hug and rock her in his arms.
‘I forgive you,’ he said as he cradled her against his chest. ‘I forgive you.’ Joe cried with her as he held her tight against him. Women were so beautiful when they were sad. Her tears glistened on her cheeks like a string of diamonds as the moonlight beamed through the windshield onto her face. It broke Joe’s heart. He leaned down and kissed her dampened skin, licking the salty tears from her eyelashes.
She pulled away from him and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She looked up at her captor expecting to see that homicidal lust she’d come to know all too well, but instead she saw a shocking paternal tenderness. His eyes reflected her own sadness back at her as if her pain had wounded him. It was a depth of compassion she would have never expected in such a beautiful monster.
‘I forgive you too,’ she said and surprised herself by meaning it. She knew what Stockholm syndrome was.
She’d heard of victims who’d begun to identify with their kidnappers, even falling in love with them, and knew that this was exactly what she was doing, but she didn’t care. She was falling in love with a cannibal, a kidnapper, and a killer and it was the most loved she’d ever felt. Whether the look in his eyes was love, lust, or just hunger, no one had ever looked at her that way before, with such passion and desire. No one had ever needed her like that. She leaned forward and kissed him and once again they made love as Frank lay in the back of the van moaning in agony.
‘I’ll try to fight it. I’ll try for you,’ Joe whispered in Alicia’s ear as he lay atop her, inside her, with his erection slowly diminishing after their combined orgasm. He crawled back up into the front seat and drove off without putting her gag back on, though he did handcuff her again.
They talked all the way to Seattle as if they were little more than a couple out for a drive in the country.
‘Do you still think this is just some kind of disease you have? You still think that you can cure yourself by killing this guy?’
‘I’m actually getting more and more convinced by the moment.’
He pointed up at the sky, at the big luminescent face of the full moon hovering just at the end of the road.
‘Ever since that moon rose, the hunger has been almost unbearable, just like the werewolf legends. I can feel changes inside me. My canines seem to be getting sharper and longer.’
He looked up into the rearview mirror and bared his teeth. Alicia looked at his teeth in the reflection and shrugged her shoulders.
‘You may not notice it, but I can feel them growing. ‘
He turned to her and stuck out his tongue. There was a small red gash on the tip.
‘I cut my tongue on my own teeth. They don’t fit the same in my mouth as they did just last night. And look at my jaw. It’s like the muscles are getting bigger, stronger. I feel like I could crush bones with my mouth now. Like soon I won’t even need a knife. I’ll be able to rip a person apart with my teeth alone.’
‘You’re starting to scare me again, Joe.’
‘Nothing’s changed between us. I promise not to hurt you again.’
‘But what about him? Are you going to kill him?’
‘I don’t know if I can stop myself. It’s a long drive to Seattle and I don’t even have the desire for regular food anymore. I can smell his blood. It’s so rich. I wish you could experience it the way I do. The taste. The smell. It’s like I can experience his entire life through his flesh. I can absorb it all . All his joys and agonies, his passions and sorrows. It’s all there in that smell. It’s maddening. I feel like I can smell his thoughts. You know, when I ate that librarian, it was like I absorbed her. Like she became a part of me. Everything she was assimilated with my flesh. I can still feel her inside, in my blood. That’s how I know that killing Damon Trent will cure me.’
‘Why? I don’t understand.’
‘Because I know that he can feel me inside of him too. Because I can still feel him inside of me.’
Frank stirred in the back of the van. He was regaining consciousness again.
‘Eating Frank is different,’ Joe said, glancing back at him. Half of the man’s buttocks were gone, as were most of his genitalia. The rest of him was mostly skin and bones and hard muscle. None of the tender meat that Joe hungered for. There wasn’t a whole lot on him left to eat. He looked back over at Alicia and tried not to think about how wonderful she would taste.
‘There’s no fear in him. I mean, his fear is different, more sensual. He enjoys it. He can feel the communion, us joining together as one. He wants it. I can feel it. He wants to become a part of me. I wish you could feel it too. The way he does. I wish you could see how beautiful it could be.’ His eyes crawled over Alicia’s voluptuous hips and thighs and lingered on her big heavy breasts. The monster stiffened in his pants and Joe’s eyes glazed over, sparkling with hunger as his jaw creaked open and he instinctively licked the tips of his canines before dragging his tongue across his lips.
Alicia shuddered and turned away from his ravenous gaze.
‘Joe, when you talk like that it doesn’t sound like you want to be cured.’
