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 kill 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.
Still, 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 rolls at her hips or the stretch marks or cellulite. Now all she could see in herself were flaws.
She looked down at her oversized breasts, which had flattened out and fallen 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 collarbone. 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 belly; the lightning bolt-shaped stretch marks radiating up from her hairy pubic mound where her skin had yielded to the fat cells 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 tell her how beautiful she was. She needed him to look at her with those voracious eyes full 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 still 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 fully 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 fully 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 still so fresh in her mind and the taste of his flesh still 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 brilliantly 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 swell 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 college boy as he grinned into the mirror with his remodelled 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 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, all that he was, swallowed up in that smile, drowned and washed away by that all 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.
