The urge to kill the obese pervert was almost unbearable. Joe sat staring across at him with a murderous lust pulsating through his veins with every heartbeat. Only this time it was less sensuous, black as death and sin; born of hatred rather than desire. This was the man who’d made him what he was: a monster. It was his fault that he’d nearly killed Alicia. His fault that he’d killed all the others. He was the one who’d cut him, raped him, and scarred him within and without. It was his face that he still saw in his nightmares.
‘Has anyone ever told you that you look like Superman? I mean, not like Christopher Reeve, but I mean the real Superman … from the comic books. You look just like that son of bitch!’ Damon chuckled in amusement.
It took a Herculean effort to keep from taking him right there in the hospital. Joe desperately wanted to see the man bleed. He had no desire to feed on him. This wouldn’t be killing for food. For the first time it would be killing for the pure enjoyment of ending another human being’s sorry existence.
If it weren’t for all the noise the fat bastard would make, squealing like a stricken hog, he would have tried to end it right there and take his chances getting back out of the hospital. It would have been easier to get out without the fat freak in tow anyway, Joe thought. The discovery of his body would even act as a perfect distraction to allow him to slip past the guards. But there was also the possibility that they’d lock the whole place down as soon as the body was discovered and he’d be trapped.
‘Shut the hell up before the nurses hear you. Do they check the patients before they go on break?’
‘Only the terminal ones and the ones who can’t control their bowel movements. There’s a schizophrenic spree killer at the end of the hall that they keep a pretty tight watch on. He’s always going on about ‘The High Score.’ See, the record for the most people killed in a single murder spree is twenty-one. This guy killed about thirteen when he went off on a rampage at a supermarket in Seattle. But he was trying to crack twenty-one, beat the high score. He still wants to do it and he makes no secret of it. Says he’s on a mission from God or some shit. So they watch him very closely. They don’t come in here too often, though.’ Trent snickered in his high-pitched squeaky voice. ‘I think I make them nervous.’ His smile seemed to rip his face in half like a reopened wound.
Despite his masquerade of cool composure it was obvious that Trent could not wait to be free, to feed once more for the first time in over a decade. He seemed to have forgotten that Joe was not just there to set him free but to kill him, to tear the curse out of his flesh and dash it to the wind. He was practically vibrating with anticipation as he sat on the edge of the bed, glancing repeatedly at the clock on the wall like a kid waiting for a turn on his favorite amusement park ride. But Joe was even more excited.
For him it was not just about the cure anymore. Seeing the fat pederast again had reawakened all the old anger and fear. And now he wanted to make Damon feel some of what he had felt as a little kid, locked in a dark basement, being tortured and fed upon by some grotesque monster. He wanted Trent to scream.
‘How much longer?’
‘I’m not sure. It should be any minute now.’
The more Joe thought about it the more he thought it would be better to try to kill Trent right here in the hospital. Getting him out past the guards would be too hard and he’d almost forgotten about the janitor who was still evacuating his body fluids in the maintenance closet. That body would be discovered soon too and then they’d definitely lock the place down and probably start searching rooms. He needed to end this now. The problem was how to do it quietly.
‘I’m going to need to put those restraints back on you.”
“But … but why?’ Fear leapt instantly into Trent’s eyes. Only then did he seem to remember Joe’s true motivations.
‘I had to kill someone to get in here. They might do a room check before they leave for lunch if they find his body. I can always slip under your bed but if they see you without your restraints on they might search the room and find me.’ This explanation seemed to appease Damon, but only slightly.
‘Which one was it? Was it that fat nurse with the red hair and the big hooters? I’d kill for a taste of her. Who’d you get?’ Joe seized Damon’s wrists and began tying him back down to the bed.
‘I killed one of the janitors, I think. He might have been an orderly.’
‘That creepy little skinny guy with the receding hairline and the great big eyes? I hate that guy. He’s always bugging me for stories about how I killed those kids. He says he wants to write a book about me, but I think he just goes into that closet and jacks off over it.’
Once Damon’s wrists and ankles were secure, Joseph walked over to the door and looked up and down the hall. Other ‘resident patients’ were wandering the halls, pestering nurses for more medication and gibbering to themselves. The RNs were all gathered up by the reception desk checking their watches, ignoring the insistent cries of their haunted and tormented patients, and gathering their purses. Several of the guards were there as well. Joe watched as they piled into the elevator and began their descent toward the cafeteria before slipping back into the room and shutting the door behind him.
‘Why are you closing the door? What are you doing? You aren’t going to kill me, are you? You can’t! They’ll catch you. Help!’
Joseph punched Damon hard in the gut, driving the oxygen from his lungs and turning his complexion red and purple.
Damon’s eyes went wide and his tongue shot out of his mouth. Joseph waited until Damon stopped coughing and caught his breath before leaning in and clamping a hand over his mouth.
‘If you scream again the next punch will break your sternum and puncture your lungs. You’ll die slowly as your lungs collapse and fill up with blood, drowning you. Do you understand?’
Damon nodded. Joe withdrew a scalpel he’d stolen from the maintenance closet and placed it to the fat man’s chest. Then he began to cut.
‘Please. Please don’t kill me. I didn’t mean to hurt you.
‘I don’t care anymore. I only care about getting the cure.’
‘Killing me won’t cure you.’
‘It’s worth a try.’
He sliced a long line down the unctuous pervert’s chest, cutting so deep that he could feel the blade bounce over the fat man’s rib cage. Damon’s pallid flesh opened up, revealing thick yellow globs of adipose tissue smothering the ruby red muscle fibers surrounding his ribs. Damon cried out despite the warning.
‘Arrrrgh! Stop! Stop!!! Help!’ Joe smashed an elbow down into Damon’s solar plexus, shattering his xiphoid process and rupturing his lungs. Damon wheezed and choked, gagging as the blood filling his thoracic cavity and crushed his lungs. Blood bubbled up from between the pervert’s lips as he struggled to breathe.
‘This won’t cure you. I didn’t make you what you are,’ Damon wheezed in an exhausted whisper.
‘I would have been normal, just like any other person, if you hadn’t passed this disease on to me!’ Joe struggled to keep his voice down as his entire body vibrated with rage. His cold blue eyes were livid with half a lifetime of shame and anger.
Damon began to laugh. A hideous gurgling sound issued from his lungs and blood sprayed from his lips as he wheezed and cackled.
‘You were made long before I came along. Why do you think I picked you as my first? You were made by the same person who made me years before. The disease was already in your blood. Just like the legends say, you have to kill the original vampire, and I wasn’t the first one. I was just a victim, like you. I was made into a monster.’
‘By who?’
Damon’s voice was growing fainter as he continued to try to breathe through his collapsing lungs.
‘Haven’t you guessed it already? There is no curse. It’s all in the genes.’
‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’
‘You figure it out. You know. Deep down, you know. You’ve known all along.’
Joe leapt onto the mattress, straddling the child killer’s bloated stomach, and plunged the scalpel deep into the wound he’d made in Damon’s chest. In a near frenzy, Joe began ripping the obese pederast apart. He cut chunks of flesh out of the man’s torso, slicing deep into his fat and muscle and then digging his fingers down into the meat and jerking it free with both hands. Pulling off his pectoral muscles with a wet sticky riiiiiip!
He stripped the meat from the man’s arms and legs, wrenching loose his flabby biceps and triceps from his humerus and tossing them to the floor, tearing his huge fat enclustered vastus muscles and hamstrings from his femur as Damon tried to force a scream up through his blood-clogged larynx.
Damon passed out from the pain, blood loss, and shock of seeing his body so recklessly unmade, yet Joe continued to rip into him with the scalpel and his own bare hands until large hunks of warm wet meat lay all over the floor around the bed.
The room was now a gruesome abattoir.
The sterile white walls and ceiling ran red with Damon’s depleted life. The mattress upon which his savaged carcass lay was a blood-drenched sponge that squished beneath their weight, leaking more blood down onto the tiled floor. Joe’s anger began to ebb. He stared down at the ruin he’d made of the corpulent pederast and felt muscles uncontracting and relaxing for the first time all over his body, as if he’d been flexing for years and hadn’t been aware of it. Joe let out a long sigh and it felt as if he’d been holding his breath for a decade. He stabbed the scalpel down through the pederast’s rib cage, impaling his heart, and then climbed off the bed, continuing to stare at the corpse as it voided its body fluids.
The floor was littered with flesh. Blood poured from the mattress in long sheets, covering the linoleum in a shimmering blanket of burgundy-wine red. Joe had never seen so much blood come from a single person. It was as if all the blood the child killer had sucked from his victims’ wounds had still been in him and had only now been freed. He imagined the souls of all the children Damon had consumed pouring out of his bloated corpse on that endless river of dark plasma.
Joe stared intently at Damon’s face as the pederast’s life fled his mutilated carcass, hoping to see some sign that the curse was over. He half expected the man’s body to collapse into ash like the vampires in the movies, but instead the fat freak simply expired. Joe studied the man’s features for a while longer, recalling the long hours he’d spent cringing in a damp basement as that pudgy face leered at him from behind a mask of Joe’s own blood. He didn’t know for sure if the curse had left him, but he had no desire at all to feast on Damon Trent’s fat vulgar corpse. He walked out of the room, quietly shutting the door behind him.
