Joseph rented a room in an extended stay motel that had monthly and weekly rates, three miles from the state hospital. Alicia waited in the van, chained to the steering wheel as he walked into the office to pay the deposit and get the keys. They had scouted the neighborhood for the perfect place.
Joseph parked across the street and watched the flow of traffic in and out of the motel before picking a secluded room on the first floor of the dilapidated two-story structure for its privacy and isolation. It was far from the office at the end of the parking lot near the trash Dumpsters. A row of overgrown shrubs covered the front, blocking the view from the street. It was perfect.
‘Yeah, it’s not the Four Seasons but you’ll have all the privacy you could want. None of your neighbors are terribly interested in having the cops come in here, and neither am I. Just don’t be cookin’ meth or makin’ any other kind of drugs in there and don’t bring any kids in your room. We don’t need that kind of trouble. The hookers are bad enough.’
Joe gave the desk clerk his last three hundred dollars to rent the room for the week; then he went back to the van to secure Alicia in her new home.
‘We’re here.’
Alicia looked back at him with wide eyes filled with that familiar confusion of lust and fear. Her long curly tresses lay limp and damp with perspiration and road grime, pasted to her scalp like a bad toupee. She flinched when Joe reached over to lift her from the van.
‘How can you still not trust me? After all we’ve shared together?’
He was right. There was no need to kill her now that she was an accomplice. Her teeth marks and saliva would be found on Frank’s corpse along with Joseph’s. In the eyes of the law she would be just as guilty as he. Still, that wouldn’t stop him from killing her just to assuage his psychotic hunger.
She allowed him to toss a blanket over her and carry her to the door of the motel room, feeling deliciously vulnerable in his massive, sinuous arms. Part of her wanted to cry out for help but she was still confused about her own involvement in Frank’s death and her feelings for the superpredator. Before she could make up her mind as to whether or not to raise the alarm, the door closed behind her with a resounding slam.
‘Do you want me to bring you something to eat?’ Joe asked as he tied her to the cheap motel bed.
‘Nothing that screams and fights back.’
‘How about if I kill it first?’ Alicia blanched and shuddered, visibly appalled.
‘That was just a joke.’
‘Was it?’
‘Of course it was, but after the virus has worked deeper inside you, you won’t find the prospect of live meat quite so distasteful.’
‘It’s not going to work deeper because you’re going to find the cure, right? You have to now. If there’s a virus inside of me then I’ll turn into a monster too. You don’t want that, do you? I mean, if you continue like this, eventually you’ll be caught. And no matter how good it feels to feed that hunger it’ll feel a hundred times worse to be locked away where it’s just going to gnaw at you forever with no way to feed it. That’s what prison will be like when they catch you. Is that what you want? Is that want you want for me?’ Her eyes were wide and sad.
Joe wilted beneath her gaze. His massive shoulders slumped forward and his head dropped toward his chest in surrender. ‘No, of course not. I love you and you’re right. I’ve got to end this now.’ Joe stood up and walked into the bathroom. He came back with a towel, which he wadded up and crammed into her mouth to gag her. She closed her eyes and tried not to think about the dingy rag as it was forced between her lips.
‘I’m going to see Damon.’
He turned and walked out of the room, leaving Alicia alone with her thoughts and fears.
Alicia fought back tears as she heard the door slam and Joe’s footsteps strike the asphalt. She was alone again, chained to a bed in a strange room, in a strange town, with no one to count on but herself and the man who’d kidnapped her.
Her mind kept trying to go back to her youth, to the taste of her father’s semen on her tongue. She fought the memory away only to have it replaced with the image of the librarian enjoying cunnilingus before being cannibalized by Joe and finally the smell of Frank’s slow roasted corpse and the succulent taste of his hickory-smoked genitals as they melted in her mouth and slid luxuriously down into her belly. She shook her head and screamed into the rag until the image fled and she was back in the room.
In order to keep her mind in the present, Alicia began investigating her surroundings as best she could while still tied to the bed. She listened to the sounds of life teeming all around her from the other grimy little apartments that adjoined her own tacky piss colored prison. Next door she heard a persistent knocking as someone tried desperately to awaken her sleeping neighbor.
Through the adjoining wall Alicia heard the door open, a few mumbled greetings, then silence. Minutes after the man had entered there began a chorus of grunts and moans and the bang and squeak of the overused bed. It was over almost as soon as it began.
Moments later the neighbor’s door opened again and the same footsteps stalked off across the parking lot, followed soon by the sound of tears and curses. This would be repeated three more times before the day was fully born.
Trying to drown out the sounds from the room next door, Alicia stared up at the ceiling to watch a cockroach scamper across what must have been an immense distance for something so small, only to find itself ensnared in a dusty cobweb in the corner above her bed. Seconds later a miniscule spider, a third of the size of the cockroach, crawled out across the web and began to further entangle its larger prey in a silken cocoon. Soon the spider had latched onto the cockroach, sucking it dry. Life was rough all over. Alicia turned away.
She began counting the water and cigarette stains yellowing the antique white walls. She imagined she could see faces screaming out from the various blotches and streaks. Her stomach growled, reminding her of her last meal and almost causing her to regurgitate.
She felt the bile scald her throat as she swallowed hard to keep Frank’s remains down. She went back to staring at the walls, trying not to think.
This room was a wreck. It wore its history like a battered old soldier, each sin and vice leaving another scar on its aging facade. Alicia could see every poorly textured drywall patch where someone had shoved their fist or someone else’s head through the Sheetrock. She could see where some disinterested handyman had made a cursory attempt at painting over blood splatter. The brownish red streaks had resurfaced through the paint as if something were buried within the wall and still bleeding. The bullet holes that were simply spackled and repainted.
As little care as had been taken in repairing the dump, even less had been taken in its original construction. She could count each and every stud in the wall where they were bowed or misaligned. The ceiling’s lid line dove as much as two inches on one side making the room appear to be leaning. The caulking was uneven and the lead-based paint was peeling, curling up and flaking away like a bad sunburn.
Alicia closed her eyes and tried to sleep while the neighbor’s bed renewed its squeak and bump, headboard gouging the drywall as it slammed repeatedly against the wall in rhythm with the sounds of ecstasy and despair. She heard someone cry out with a faked orgasm that sounded to her like a wail of torment. Then the door slammed again and Alicia drifted off, listening to her neighbor’s anguished, wracking sobs.
