Joseph was drenched head to toe in Damon’s blood. The lab coat he’d appropriated now looked like a butcher’s smock. It was plastered to his skin, the blood already beginning to coagulate.
Joe had to peel himself out of it, as if he were removing the skin from a particularly wet and juicy piece of tropical fruit. Blood-soaked meat always reminded Joe of mangoes and ripe peaches, when you opened it up and it flooded your mouth with its sweet nectar. Joe thought once more about Alicia as he dropped the lab coat to the floor. She had been the sweetest fruit of all. He had to find a way in to see her. But they wouldn’t let him anywhere near her saturated in blood, especially once the two corpses were located.
The polo shirt Joe had been wearing underneath the lab coat had already been red, but now the darker, truer red from Damon’s arteries stood out clearly against it and even more so against his blue jeans. Somehow he had to get a fresh lab jacket or something to cover his clothing.
Joe walked into the bathroom and stared into the mirror. Even though he had not fed, his face was covered in blood from where Damon’s severed veins and arteries had sprayed him as he worked the meat free from his bones. The eyes that stared out at him from that grisly crimson mask were feral, the eyes of some ravenous beast. Joe ran water into his cupped palms and splashed it over his face again and again. He lathered his arms, face, and hair with liquid hand soap and washed it away until his handsome Clark Kent face reemerged from that gory fright mask.
He took a deep breath and watched as all his features settled down, the beast within him slipping away, leaving him alone in the bathroom of a hospital room with a child murderer’s eviscerated corpse bleeding out on the mattress and his own clothes still dripping with blood.
‘I’ve got to get the hell out of here.’ He slipped out of the bathroom and out of Damon’s room, casting one last look at his mutilated corpse before shutting the door behind him.
‘Rot in hell, you son of a bitch.’ Before anyone could notice his grisly hulking form tracking blood across the immaculate hallway, Joe slipped into another room directly across from where Damon’s corpse lay bleeding out onto the floor in great bucket-loads. He was lucky to find an obese elderly woman lying catatonic in her hospital bed. With considerable effort, straining beneath the weight of rolls of billowy fat, Joe rolled her over so that he could remove her hospital-issue dressing gown.
Suppurating bedsores had leaked their pus onto the mattress, forming a gooey adhesive that stuck her loose, moldy flesh to the even moldier bed. There was a wet, sticky, ripping sound when Joe peeled her off the bedspread, leaving bits of her flesh still clinging to it. The back of the dressing gown was caked with pus and gore and stained with urine and feces. Joe peeled it off of her. In this filthy gown he would fit right in. Joe faked a lumbering stagger as he made his way down the hall. There was an emaciated teenager with tufts of hair missing and black scabs all over his scalp where the hair had been yanked out by the roots. He staggered down the hall in a similar fashion just ahead, and Joe caught up to the disoriented youth and linked arms with him. Together they made their way up the hall toward the reception desk.
The kid smelled as bad as the dressing gown Joe was wearing and his eyes were dull and flat as if his mind had long ago fled and his body was merely following a preprogrammed ritual back and forth through the antiseptic hall ways. The only indication that he was at all aware of Joe’s presence at his side were the occasional giggles, his left hand firmly planted on Joe’s rock-hard buttocks, and the erection growing beneath his gown.
The guard was no longer in front of the elevator. The nurse was not at her station either. Joe heard a radio squawk and an excited voice shouting breathlessly.
‘We’ve got a 187 on the third floor! Officer needs assistance!’
Joe stumbled down the hall and looked down the adjoining hallway where he had left the janitor’s body. He could see that the blood had seeped out into the hallway, which had no doubt alerted someone that there might be something amiss in the closet. The door was open and two corrections officers were kneeling in the blood, leaning over the body as if there were anything they could do for him now. Three nurses, including the one from the front desk, stood around gasping in horror and chatting in excited whispers as they peered in at the janitor’s corpse, unable to resist their own morbid curiosity.
The guard was looking up and down the hall, searching for something out of the ordinary. A suspect. Joe clutched the haggard teen tighter as they continued past. The guard had luckily looked right past him, assuming he was just another patient. As soon as they reached the other side of the hall and were out of sight of the guards and nurses, Joe let go of his teenaged camouflage and sprinted for the elevator. He pressed the down button and the door opened right away. The hallway was still empty when Joe slipped quickly inside the elevator. The mauled and murdered janitor was apparently too fascinating for the guards to tear themselves away. Joe tried to catch his breath as he rode the elevator back down to the first floor.
Adrenaline dumped into his bloodstream, lighting his nerves on fire. His muscles were bulging through his clothes as if he were about to burst out of them like the Incredible Hulk. He looked completely insane. If the doors opened right now, anyone with half a brain would know he was a killer. He had to calm down.
The elevator descended to the first floor and Joe closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He let it out slow and willed his muscles to relax. He let the satisfaction of finally avenging the loss of his childhood seep into his body.
When the doors opened he was the picture of serenity.
Hospital guards and policemen were running everywhere. Joe slipped unnoticed from the elevator. By taking Damon’s advice and waiting until half the hospital staff was on lunch break, the big musclebound predator had found just the right amount of wiggle room to get in and out of the hospital’s detention wing unnoticed. Now he had to do something even harder. He had to get out of there with Alicia.
Alicia was still in Emergency following her surgery. Her chart showed her listed in critical condition. Joe slipped into her room and knelt down beside her bed. Her chest was covered in bandages. There was a morphine drip feeding into a pulsating vein behind the elbow on her left arm.
‘My God. What have I done to you?’ There was no way he could take her out of the hospital in this condition without causing her further pain or death. He would have to leave her.
‘I’ll be back for you. Don’t worry. I won’t leave you like this.’
Joe thought he saw a smile creep across her face at the sound of his voice.
He removed his bloody smock and walked out the front door of the hospital as police officers began to swarm the place. He stalked across the parking lot and slipped behind the wheel of his van. Minutes later he was back at the motel listening to the prostitute next door get her head banged against the wall by her latest trick.
