Alicia lay shivering atop the bloodstained mattress with Joe lapping the blood off her exposed rib cage. Her blood pressure was plummeting. She was going into shock.
‘You said you wouldn’t hurt me. You promised,’ she gasped as she watched the big predator chew and swallow the last of her once voluptuous bosom. His body shook with an orgasm. Some of his semen landed on her face and she licked it from her lips as it dribbled down her forehead onto her mouth. She still relished the taste of him. She still loved watching him cum. Despite her feelings of betrayal, she loved the fact that it was her flesh that had given him this pleasure. Some twisted part of her still loved him, even though she knew that she would be dead soon if she didn’t get to a hospital. She was losing a ton of blood.
Her voice seemed to snap him out of his rapture. He looked down at the ruin he’d made of his beloved Alicia and his heart crashed to the floor like a stone.
‘I-I … I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to-to … I’m so sorry.’
His eyes filled with tears.
‘I’m dying.’
‘But you can’t. You can’t die!’ Joe’s eyes were wild with fear as he realized that he could see her exposed rib cage. No one could live in that condition.
‘Get me to a hospital.’ Her voice was weak, barely more than a whisper.
‘Okay. Okay. I’ll do it. Hold on. I’ll take care of you.’
Alicia blacked out. Her eyelids slammed shut with the finality of a stage curtain at the end of the final act. Joe scooped her up in the blood-soaked blanket and carried her limp body out to the van. He knew exactly which hospital he would take her to.
Minutes later, Joe pulled up outside the state hospital. He sprinted across the parking lot and into the emergency ward with Alicia cradled in his arms, shivering from the massive loss of blood and fading in and out of consciousness.
‘Help! I need help!’
Two nurses came rushing from behind the desk and an orderly raced down the hall pushing a gurney.
‘What happened to her?’ asked a petite young Asian RN as she rushed to Joe’s side.
‘She was attacked by two pit bulls right outside our apartment. They almost tore her apart.’
‘Get her into surgery! She’s lost a lot of blood.’
‘Is she going to be okay?’ Joe asked, careful to keep his curiously sharpened, bloodstained teeth tucked behind his lips lest he immediately make himself a suspect. Alicia was now lying on the gurney with blood still pumping steadily from the massive wounds in her chest.
The other nurse, a tall formidable-looking black woman with shoulder-length hair extensions and a wandering eye that made her look almost sinister, pressed two handfuls of gauze and a towel to Alicia’s chest in an effort to staunch the flow of blood. Alicia’s eyes rolled up in her head and she began to convulse as she went into hypovolemic shock. Saliva foamed from her lips and sweat bulleted down her face.
‘Oh no! No!’ Joe reached for her and the slight Asian nurse seized his wrist and managed to turn him completely around with almost no effort at all. She then placed an arm on his shoulder in a reassuring embrace as if to conceal the fact that she’d just used a very effective aikido move on him that had almost shattered his wrist.
‘You just wait here. We’ll take care of her. We need to contact the police and you’re going to have to file a report.’
‘Okay, just take care of her,’ Joe replied, a look of genuine concern on his face even as he rubbed his wrist.
Joe backed away as they rushed Alicia down the hall and into surgery. He hadn’t meant for it to happen like this. It wasn’t supposed to be her.
His plan had been to tear into a stranger and to use her or him to gain access to the hospital, but seeing Alicia lying there looking so delicious, he had lost control and grievously injured, perhaps even killed, the one thing in this world he truly loved. He was completely out of control now and even more convinced that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life this way. He was becoming little more than an animal. Even now, with his heart collapsing beneath the weight of his guilt and sorrow over the harm he’d caused Alicia, he was still sizing up every nurse who passed, imagining how the meat of their triceps, the fat of their hips, the muscle and sinew on their thighs and buttocks would taste as he tore it from their quivering bones. Even as he mourned he could feel the monster awakening.
He hoped Damon had done his part and gotten himself admitted to the hospital as well. The only thing left to do now was for Joseph to find him and get him out of the hospital where they could have their heart-to-heart and he could rid himself of the curse and love Alicia as a man was supposed to rather than as the monster he’d been since puberty.
There was only one elevator that went to the third floor. That’s where Damon had told him that most of the in-house patients were treated. It sat at the end of the hall and you had to pass another reception desk to access it. Two overweight nurses sat behind the desk wearing hardened impassive expressions. As soon as the nurses took Alicia away, Joe slipped into the elevator and rode it to the third floor. Joe’s pulse rate increased, his heart drumming against his chest as the elevator ascended.
The third floor was pandemonium.
Shrieks and cries reverberated as the insane vied for the attention of the nurses and doctors while fighting the voices and phantoms in their own heads. How far am I from winding up in a place like this? Joe wondered.
An obese elderly man took off naked down the hall, drooling like a rabid dog, and tackled a pearshaped middle-aged nurse. From his thighs to his shoulders his entire back was covered in feces as he mounted the wide-bottomed nurse and began thrusting his pelvis furiously against her. The security guards rushed to restrain him and Joe stepped out of the elevator.
Joe strode purposely down the hall, peeking into each room, wincing at the foul cocktail of odors wafting from the mad denizens within. Medicine, disinfectant, vomit, urine, excrement, and blood. More than the smell of the sick, it was the stench of insanity, the noxious perfume of the shattered mind. Joe’s nostrils flared and a growl roiled deep in his throat. He wanted to latch onto it and rip it to shreds, to kill the disease in each of them, just as he sought to murder the disease within himself … to murder Damon Trent.
Some of the doors on this floor were locked, but most of them stood wide open with their occupants unrestrained. He suspected that the patients who had been locked in were those with a history of violence. The average schizophrenic or jolly old child molester had free reign of the place. Joe wondered how many of them just up and walked out.
‘Hey! What are you doing up here? No civilians are allowed on this floor.’ Behind Joe, a small nervous-looking orderly who looked like he was fresh out of high school advanced on him with a mop in his hand, wielding it like he meant to brain him with it. Joe looked around to make sure the security guards were still busy with the naked guy, then across the hall at the maintenance closet the man had just stepped out of.
‘Do you hear me, man? You’ve got to leave this floor before I call security.’ Taking one last look around, Joe charged across the hall and tackled the diminutive orderly, driving him into the maintenance closet. He clamped a hand over the orderly’s mouth and the other around his throat and squeezed until the man’s eyes bulged out of his head.
The man struggled and tried to bite Joe’s hand. Joe bit back, tearing the man’s throat out with jagged teeth that sank all the way down to the cervical vertebrae. When he jerked his head from side to side, ripping through the esophagus and larynx like a shark in a feeding frenzy, he nearly decapitated the man. Joe sat for a moment as the ecstasy of his fresh kill washed through him in staggering waves. Even killing out of necessity brought an immediate sexual thrill.
Joe thought about what Trent had said about losing that lush and delirious sensation if he managed to cure himself, yet still longing for it, seeking one weak substitute after another in an effort to reclaim this feeling. He remembered when he used to stalk the sex clubs before the urges got out of hand and he would see the jaded libertines who had so dulled their senses with excess that it took electric shocks, whips, and blood play just to get them aroused.
He remembered an old guy named Jack who used to hook wires to his nipples and send shocks through himself while being beaten with a two-by-four in order to get an erection. Joe didn’t want to be like that. He knew that for him it wouldn’t be what he needed to do to himself in order to get off that would reach such extremes, but what he needed to do to others. Right now he maimed and occasionally killed, but it was just for the taste of the flesh. He killed to eat. The killing and the pain was just an unfortunate side effect of his appetite. He had no real love for torture and murder. But what would happen if the flesh lost its appeal? Would he then kill just for the sake of killing? Would he cut into his victims just to hear them scream and beg? Would their pain be the only pleasure left to him?
What if this works? What will life be like for me without this … this passion?
Joe stopped in the middle of his preparations, unable to continue further. Blood from the orderly’s ravaged jugular and carotid artery continued to spurt from the hideous throat wound, creating a dark pool around his convulsing corpse. Joe stared in a daze at the fountain of blood as if mesmerized by it. It was beautiful and stirred his appetite anew.
His hunger rose, growling and snarling in the pit of his stomach like some demonic alter ego, but it wasn’t his hunger that stalled him. Despite the power and fury of his ravenous lust, which had grown exponentially in the last few days until it was now the most dominant drive in his body, it was the question that worried him. How do I live without this high? Now, so close to ending the tragedy his life had become, Joe had doubts. Do I really want the curse to end?
The tremendous human predator who had murdered and eaten his third person in less than two weeks was thinking about living without ecstasy, without the narcotic rapture of the flesh. He was afraid he might be making a mistake.
Joe slipped down into a dank mire of self-pity and fear. He imagined a life of boredom. The passionless existence of the mediocre. He thought of husbands and wives fucking once a month in short ten-minute bursts, rushing toward orgasm in their eagerness to be done with the chore. He thought of chemically castrated rapists staring in impotent rage at their former prey, lamenting the loss of their rabid libidos, hating their victims for their inability to arouse and eventually seeking to avenge themselves by washing in their blood. These seemed like his only options: wasting away, a sedentary erosion, or trying to recapture his current rapturous highs through ever increasing acts of violent sadism. Then he remembered the look in that librarian’s eyes when he locked his teeth onto her labia and began to devour her sex and the look on Alicia’s face as he indulged his violent perversions on her breasts. He had no choice. He could not lurk in the shadows forever preying on the very beings he loved.
Joe felt tears well up as he recalled the look of terror and betrayal that had so recently scarred Alicia’s lovely features when he’d once again let his appetite overwhelm him and he’d attacked her as she lay helpless in bed. The tears flowed freely, dripping into the pool of blood at his feet. He imagined Alicia in surgery, fighting for her life. He tried to imagine life without her and found that more cold and unappealing than he’d imagined life without his hunger. He hardly knew her, yet still he could feel that she was the one. The one he was meant to be with.
The only thing that could make him strong enough to resist the curse.
She probably hated him now. If she survived she’d never love him again. He was certain of it, but still it didn’t matter. He didn’t believe that love conquered all but he knew that he would do whatever it took to win her heart. And that if he didn’t break this curse he would never know any happiness but that of the flesh. Love would forever be an impossibility. There was no way he could continue on like this. It was either break the curse now or wait until he started to sprout fur and a tail and was locked up in a freak show somewhere. Even if he wasn’t actually turning into a werewolf or a vampire he was becoming a monster. He was not human in any recognizable sense of the word. Whatever was happening to him, he could feel himself changing more and more with each kill. He looked down at the orderly’s broken body and at his own blood-soaked palms. His lifeline was a river of red. He could feel the hunger gaining momentum, gaining ever increasing control. Reason was slowly becoming little more than a tool of his appetite.
There was nothing left to decide. If he didn’t destroy Trent now and reclaim his humanity he would wind up as some mindless puppet motivated only by hunger and lust. Joe went back to work on the orderly. The man’s body had ceased its spasms and lay still. His facial features had flattened and deflated as his life force had spilled out, relaxing into an expression that was more idiotic than serene. Blood continued to flow from his carcass but with his heart now at rest it steadily dripped, rather than the vivid eruptions of red previously spraying from his wounds.
Joe tried to remove the man’s hospital scrubs for a disguise, but the amount of blood pouring from the corpse had been so tremendous that they were soaked almost immediately. Even if he had managed to salvage them, Joe was easily twice the orderly’s size in both height and weight. There was no way that the clothes would have fit. Instead, Joe rolled up the man’s clothes and stuffed them under the door to prevent the growing pool of blood from pouring out into the hall and alerting others to the location of his kill. Then he looked around for something else to disguise himself with.
He located a soiled lab coat and a couple of green hospital pants stuffed in a corner. The pants were too small but the lab coat was a good fit. He slipped it on and stepped into the hall, trying to position the orderly’s clothes so that they would still form a dam to hold back the growing tide of blood. He had only minutes to locate Trent and get him out of there.
Out in the hallway the security guards had gone back to their posts and the naked fat man was once more back in his room. Joe was now far enough down the hall to be out of the guards’ sight. He continued looking into the rooms as he strode down the hallway with his back to the guards. He was careful not to seem too obvious. Midway down the hall he located Trent’s room. The door was open but Trent had been strapped to the bed with leather restraints that held him fast to the bed rails.
‘Well, glad you could make it.’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Joe sneered. The fat child killer lay on the hospital bed with a TV remote in his hand and his thick vulgar lips smeared with what Joe hoped was chocolate pudding.
‘What did you do to your teeth? They look wonderful! Very sexy. And I see you’ve had a snack recently. Tell me about it, would you? It’s been so long.’
‘We don’t have time. I need to get you out of here.’
‘We’ve got a little time. The guards and nurses will be taking lunch soon. They go in shifts. Half of them stay behind while the first shift goes downstairs to the cafeteria or down the street to that Mexican place on the corner. That’s the best time for you to try to sneak me out. That way if they try to stop us they’ll be less of them for you to contend with.’
‘You mean us,’ don’t you?’
‘I’m a lover, not a fighter.’ The fat pedophile leered at Joe and licked his tongue across his fat lips. Joe finished unbuckling his restraints and snatched him out of the bed by his throat.
‘Don’t test me, fat boy. Now hurry up and get dressed.’
‘I told you there’s no hurry. Look at your watch. We’ve got another hour before lunchtime. You might as well get comfortable.’
