A dark blanket of clouds smothered the sky. Fat droplets of rain beat a steady pulse on the roof of the van as the heavens bled out into the city, drowning the citizenry like rats in a flooding basement. The rain was the second thing about his childhood Joe was able to recall with any clarity. It seemed that it had rained every day of his life right up until he’d left Washington. Now he’d brought the rain back with him.
Work boots, sneakers, patent leather wingtips, pumps, rubber boots, and myriad other shoes of every description splashed through the murky puddles as the last of the nine-to-fivers hurried off to work, now more than half an hour late. Everyone in this town seemed to belong here. There were no tourists. The people blended right in with the architecture, the food, and the drab, depressing weather. They were decorative accents added to give the place more flavor.
Joe navigated silently through the somber streets, his thoughts as chaotic as the weather as he looked from face to face, reading their stories in wrinkles and worry lines. Whenever their eyes landed on him he turned away, afraid that they would read the horror story etched into his own features.
Joe drove west on Bridgeport Way to Steilacoom Boulevard and turned left. Less than ten minutes later he pulled up at Fort Steilacoom, where the state mental hospital sat.
It was an impressive complex of red brick buildings, imposing edifices of concrete and steel, four stories high, with windows barred in wrought iron. It was a prison laid out on a sprawling campus dotted with tall evergreen trees and lush lawns. The buildings were old, though, and a hospital this size was bound to have major security leaks. Joe was already searching for them as he pulled up into the parking lot in front of the main building. The windows were all barred, however, and police cars came and went fairly regularly. Getting Trent out would be tricky.
As expected, Joe passed the clichéd drooling patients lounging on lawn furniture and sipping iced tea, their eyes fixed in a vacant stare. Nurses attended to them with pity and casual disdain, as if they were unaware of the crimes most of them had committed in order to be put there, and the danger they still represented. Even through their vacuous expressions, Joe could sense the hunger still burning inside them only slightly diminished by the antipsychotics and depressants the nurses were dutifully pumping into them. Still, armed prison guards stood close by, just in case one of the inmates had forgotten to take his meds and decided to get a little frisky. Joe continued across the lawn and up to the front of the main building.
Joe wasn’t sure exactly what he was going to say in order to gain admittance into the hospital. He was hoping they wouldn’t recognize his name as one of Damon Trent’s victims. He was also hoping that Trent’s own perverse curiosity would make him eager enough to see his first victim all grown up to go along with whatever lie he came up with. The withered old crone who sat behind the reception desk smiled up at Joe with a mouthful of pearl white dentures as he stepped cautiously into the lobby.
Instinctively his eyes ravaged her, searching for an edible morsel on her hard-worn body, but the meat that sagged from her brittle skeleton had long ago withered and spoiled. She was in no danger of winding up on his menu. Not when there were so many more scrumptious delicacies wandering every street corner and darkened corridor.
‘May I help you, young man?’
‘I’m here to visit one of your patients.’
‘What ward is he in?’
‘Uh, I’m not sure. He was pretty violent at one time. They might have him in isolation.’
‘If he’s in isolation then they won’t allow him to have visitors. What’s his name?’
‘Damon Trent.’
‘Trent? What’s your name, sir?’ The old crone’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.
‘My name is Joseph Miles.’
‘Are you on his visitors list?’
‘I should be. I’m a relative. I’m his cousin. We grew up together.’ Joe smiled wide in an effort to reassure her, but her eyes remained hard and distrustful.
‘Give me a second to check.’
The octogenarian receptionist turned her profile to him and began tapping her spindly arthritic talons on the computer keyboard, calling up Trent’s patient information. As she did so, she cast a glance at the two armed prison guards who stood chatting idly by the elevators. Instantly they stood at attention and began taking notice of the large well groomed young man with the physique of a professional bodybuilder. Despite the smile he kept plastered to his face, they could sense danger from him.
‘Oh, here it is. I’m so sorry, it seems your name is on his visitors list. It was added just two days ago. I’ll still need to see some ID.’
Joe fished into his pocket for his California driver’s license and handed it to her.
‘You say it was added just two days ago?’
‘Yes. Mr. Trent requested the addition himself. Had his lawyer call the head nurse.’
She handed him a visitor’s pass and directed him through the metal detector and over to the elevators. ‘Trent’s room is downstairs. Wait a second and I’ll have one of our orderlies escort you.’
Joe was stunned. Two days ago he had first left San Francisco. Somehow Damon had known and was expecting him.
The two corrections officers continued to watch him as he shuffled nervously from foot to foot, waiting for an orderly to come and lead him downstairs. Joe kept his eyes straight ahead. He was used to being stared at, but the thick animal musk of testosterone wafting from the two guards was maddening. They were challenging him and his alpha-male instincts wanted to take up the challenge. He was already calculating the number of strikes it would take to bring them down before they could draw their weapons. The elevator doors slid open and a short, fat, black orderly stepped out and ushered him inside.
‘You here to see Damon Trent, right? Step on in.’
He held the elevator door open for Joe, smiling like an idiot. Joe smiled back at him, bristling inside.
Joe stepped inside, casting a furious glance back over his shoulder at the two officers. His lip curled into a snarl as his eyes locked with theirs. They started forward to confront him, unsure of why or what they would do. The doors closed, severing the fierce tension and leaving Joe to focus on the man waiting for him in the basement. He would have felt much better confronting Damon with a stomach full of meat from a fresh kill, warm blood drenching his skin like war paint. The two toy cops upstairs would have made the perfect prey. Their deaths would have made him feel stronger, better prepared for the coming madness. The orderly would have turned his stomach. He looked too greasy.
‘So what do you want to see Trent for? You a fan or a relative?’
‘I’m his cousin.’
‘Yeah. Uh-huh.’ The man continued to stare at Joe suspiciously. Joe wondered how many people snuck into this place to talk to the many serial killers housed here out of some perverse hero worship or to get interviews for newspapers. He wondered how many had come to see Damon Trent. Still, there was more behind the fat orderly’s stare. The man acted as if he knew something. The doors slid open and they stepped out into a dimly lit hall.
‘Here we are. He’s right down this hallway.’
A row of fluorescent lights flickered eerily in the empty hallway that led to Trent’s room, casting swift shadows that chased each other across the institutional green walls. Joseph stepped out of the elevator and his nostrils flared with the aroma of insanity and disease, urine, feces, blood, sweat, and medication. Moans and screams, giggles and mad cackles seemed to come at him from all directions. He could hear someone shouting at the top of his lungs to tell Jesus he was here while someone else laughed uncontrollably in response and still another person hurled a foul stream of invectives at him. Joe felt his anxiety increasing, as the walls of the madhouse seemed to close in on him.
This is where I’ll wind up if I don’t cure this thing, he thought.
‘So why did you decide to come visit yooour … cousin after all this time?’
‘None of your fucking business,’ Joe replied, tiring of the little man and his innuendoes. They stopped outside two large double doors that were locked with a keypad. A sign on the door read:
SEXUAL OFFENDER MAXIMUM
SECURITY WARD
To the left of the doors an enormous black guard sat behind a desk reading a magazine.
‘Yeah, fuck you too. Empty your pockets. We’ve got to make sure you ain’t got no drugs or weapons on you.’
The guard rose up from behind the desk and began patting Joe down without so much as an introduction.
The huge black corrections officer was even larger than Joe. He stood nearly six foot eight and had to be over three hundred pounds. Hard, blueblack muscle rippled beneath his uniform, which seemed to be struggling to contain his Herculean mass. His head was shaved as if to accentuate the scars on it, no doubt the result of street fights. Joe didn’t want to imagine what it would take to bring down a man that size. Even without the Glock .40 on the guard’s waist and the Monadnock PR24 baton dangling from his hip, he would have been a handful. He was an inmate’s worst nightmare. The star of many a prison rape nightmare. His biceps looked like small hams. He had obviously made good use of the workout equipment the patients were probably too heavily medicated to appreciate. He slid his hands from Joe’s shoulders down to his ankles and then up between his thighs, even grabbing at his crotch. Joe passively submitted to the rough and invasive search before being allowed into the patient’s ward. The guard turned all of Joe’s pockets inside out, withdrew his wallet and keys, and placed them in a manila envelope. Then he sauntered back over to his desk and hit a button that unlocked the doors.
‘You can pick up this stuff on the way out,’ he said, kicking his feet back up on the desk and going back to reading the sports magazine. The orderly pushed open the double doors and they entered the asylum. Joe could hear his own breaths and heartbeat as if amplified through a speaker.
The Sexual Offender Maximum Security Ward was nothing like the prison Joe had been expecting. All the doors stood open except a few where the patients had no doubt been confined for transgressions against whatever rules regulated life here. The rest wandered the halls gibbering to themselves or gleefully relaying their crimes to other inmates, comparing atrocities in breathless whispers, their lusts undisguised, eyes aflame with passion like old men reliving lost youth. Some sat hollow-eyed in chairs or on floors, perhaps staring backward at the childhood abuses that had first broken them and led them to destroy others.
‘Most of these freaks here are child molesters and serial rapists. We don’t get that many killers here. The state likes to see the killers go to death row. It makes the citizenry feel safer, you know what I’m sayin’? They don’t like the idea that a killer might someday walk up out of this place because some fool doctor declares him sane, only to cut somebody else up. If they’re locked up for life or taking that lethal injection then no one has to worry about that. Me, I’d worry more about the child molesters they’re letting out of this place every day. There’s no curing them. They all wind up right back here again and those are the guys that create the killers. Most every killer that’s ever been in here was raped as a child.’
Joe remained silent.
‘Yeah, your cousin is kind of a celebrity around here. He’s the most famous killer we’ve got.’
Joe was relieved when they finally stopped in front of one locked door and the orderly pointed at it and grinned.
‘Well, here he is.’
Adrenaline spurted into his bloodstream and quickened his pulse as he approached the bulletproof window, and stared in at the pudgy little man sitting on the single bed in a dingy straitjacket. The guard opened the door and ushered him inside. Joe hesitated, noticeably shaken.
‘You’ve got fifteen minutes. I’ll be right outside this door, watching. If you need help or want to leave early, just wave. Do not touch the patient. If you attempt to pass anything to the patient you will be removed and arrested.’
‘Thanks.’ Joe hadn’t taken his eyes off Damon once. He shuffled inside the musty, claustrophobic little room and it was like stepping through a time machine. All the old emotions came flooding down upon him in one great avalanche that pounded the air from his lungs and weakened his knees. All the fear, the pain, the confusion, and then the murderous rage. The rage grew and grew until it obliterated all else and dragged the abused child this demon had violated back to the surface. Joe flexed his muscles and rolled his massive shoulders as if to remind himself that he was no longer a child. He was a man now … a very large and formidable man. A superpredator. The guard closed and locked the door behind him and Joe winced.
Damon Trent hadn’t changed much since the last time Joe had seen him, grinning at him from across the courtroom at his murder trial more than a decade ago.
Then, he had still seemed like some misguided delinquent. Everyone except Joe had found it difficult reconciling the awkward fat kid with the murders he was accused of, but the evidence had been irrefutable. Damon was found ‘not guilty by reason of mental defect’ of six counts of first-degree murder after less than an hour of deliberation, then sentenced to this maximum security mental facility when state psychiatrists agreed that he suffered from psychotic delusions that impaired his ability to distinguish right from wrong. The years spent locked in his six-foot-by-six-foot cell, staring at the antique white walls, baring his soul to a procession of disinterested shrinks, ingesting antipsychotics with his morning orange juice, didn’t seem to have altered him much, but instead had settled and hardened his features. What was once baby fat was now elephantine rolls that smothered his neck and torso in layers of superfluous flesh.
His face was likewise round and pudgy and erupting with the same acne that had been there at the age of nineteen. His oily hair was still long and feathered back like the heavy-metal geek he’d been in high school. Nicotine-stained teeth gave his smile a monstrous gargoyle aspect. Still, he looked far too out of shape to be dangerous, like an oversized toddler. But Joe knew better. Shivers crawled under his skin as Damon’s piggish little eyes gleamed out at him with a terrible cunning, following Joe as he entered the room and took a seat opposite him. The sadistic pederast’s thick cheeks pulled back into a cherubic dimpled smile, hideous for its ironic resemblance to his chosen prey: young children. When he spoke, his voice squeaked as if he were still in the hormonal chaos of puberty.
‘Welcome back.’
‘Fuck you, Damon.’
‘Okay. So if you aren’t a fan then what brings you here?’
‘You know who I am and you obviously know why I’m here.’
‘To kill me? How do you intend to do that with me locked up in here? That is, without trading places with me? I assure you, this is no place for a predator.’ Damon winked at him.
Joe’s eyes widened.
‘How do I know? How do I know what you’ve become? What you’ve done? The lives you’ve taken? How did I know that you were coming here? Because I’m inside of you, little Joseph . . .’ He patted his stomach and licked his lips. ‘… and you are inside of me.’
‘And that’s why I have to kill you.’
‘So kill me! The COs here are rather overzealous, though. Especially that big black son of a bitch. He nearly broke my arm once trying to wrestle me into a straitjacket. He doesn’t know his own strength. If he didn’t snap your neck like a twig, the other guards would shoot you dead the minute they saw your hands on my throat.’ Trent’s dark beady eyes narrowed as his smile widened. He watched the veins in Joe’s forearms protrude, his biceps bulge, wound with tension.
‘My, you’ve grown! You’re quite a big boy now. Not really my taste but I might be inclined to make an exception.’ Trent continued to tease, feeling safe with so many guards standing just beyond the next door.
‘Are you kidding me? Are you seriously trying to intimidate me, you pathetic little worm! You attacked children because you were too weak and cowardly to go after real prey. I’m a true predator, not some simpering baby-fucker who couldn’t get a real woman to look twice at him. Or a real man for that matter.’ Joseph began to laugh and he could see Trent visibly deflate.
‘Shut up! Shut the fuck up! Stop laughing at me! You don’t know what I am! You don’t know the power I possess!’ He looked even more like a spoiled child as he exploded into a tantrum. Tears squeaked out of the corners of his eyes and his bloated cheeks reddened with rage.
Joe rose from his chair and leaned forward until he towered over the fat little pederast whose hands were still cuffed in front of him, leaving him all but helpless. Joe’s voice lowered seductively as his eyes locked in on Trent’s.
‘Your power has faded, Damon. You’re just like them now. Weak. Helpless. Prey. How long has it been since you last fed? Let me get you out of here and we can feed together. Then you can show me how powerful you are.’
Damon licked his lips salaciously at the thought of fresh meat, fresh blood.
‘You’re trying to trick me. I’m not going anywhere with you. So you can kill me? Rip me up into little pieces to rid yourself of the curse? Do you really want to be like those sheep that bad? What will your life be like without the hunger? Without the passion? Nothing can replace it, you know. Regular sex will feel like trying to masturbate in a full-body cast. Nothing will ever compare to what you’ve experienced. You’ll miss it every day of your life until you eventually kill again. But with the curse gone, the killing won’t be the same. It won’t be as fulfilling. But you’ll keep killing because it will be the closest you can ever come to what you can experience right now with just one bite. Only it won’t be one bite. Without the curse it will take the consumption of several victims to even approximate the ecstasy the flesh gives you now and you’ll gladly kill them all and more.’
‘It-it’s true then? There is a cure? This is some kind of disease?’
‘What do you think? Can’t you feel the changes?’
‘I think that you’re going to stay in here for the rest of your life unless you let me help you.’
“It’s better than winding up on your dinner plate.’ Damon sat back on his bed, grinning like a baby with a mouth full of his own feces. Joe wanted to lunge across the room and crack open the pederast’s rib cage. He wanted to tear out the man’s heart and consume it. But Damon was right. Any violent actions in this place would quickly lead to his own death or incarceration. Still, he had to find a way to get the man alone so that he could end his pathetic little life and sever the bloodline that linked them both to the curse. He decided to call Trent’s bluff. He stood up as if he was about to leave.
‘I’ll think of you the next time I feed. I’ll imagine you slowly starving to death in here, eating meat loaf, creamed corn, and Jell-O.’
Joe signaled for the guard.
‘Wait! Wait a minute. What did you have in mind?’
Joe turned back around and waved the guard off as he took his seat again.
‘Tell me what you know about this place. What’s the best way to get you out of here?’
‘Get me a gun and I can free myself.’
‘And then use it on me? Uh-uh, not gonna happen.’
‘Okay. Then how about a knife? I could probably take out that big bastard with a knife if I took him by surprise.’
‘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 fully functioning medical hospital as well 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.
