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 ful y 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 ful y 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 stil so fresh in her mind and the taste of his flesh stil 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 bril iantly 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 swel 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 col ege boy as he grinned into the mirror with his remodeled 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, al that he was, swal owed up in that smile, drowned and washed away by that al 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.
Chapter Thirty-seven
The detectives showed up the next morning and sat in the back of the lecture hal during Professor Locke's lesson. Their presence unnerved him. He felt as if he were the one under investigation. The professor stumbled over his words and lost his train of thought in midsentence on more than one occasion. He knew that he probably looked guilty and wondered if that was why they were here. Had they shifted the focus of their investigation? Did they now think he was somehow involved?
Maybe they thought he was hiding
Joseph Miles somewhere or that he knew where the man was? In fact, he did know where Joseph was, or at least suspected. He was somewhere in
Tacoma, Washington, preparing to break into a state mental hospital and murder a patient. He stil wasn't sure that he wanted to tel the detectives, though. They had been right about one thing. He had fucked up. He should have known how disturbed Joseph was. He should have known how dangerous he was.
Joseph had come to him looking for help and he had failed him. He owed it to the boy to try to find a cure. He owed it to himself and his reputation as a criminal psychologist to stop him.
The lesson ended and Professor Locke turned his back on the class and began erasing the blackboard as they filed out of the room. He heard twin pairs of footsteps heading down the aisle and approaching him. There was no doubt in his mind who the footsteps belonged to.
'Professor?'
'Detectives. What can I do for you today?' Professor Locke kept his back turned as he continued erasing the words of Bertrand Russel from the board. He paused for a second to examine the last quote before scrubbing it away.
Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent al ies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live…
'Do you believe al that stuff, Doc?' Detective Volario asked. He was wearing the same suit he had on his last visit and it didn't look like he'd cleaned or pressed it.
'Al what stuff?' The professor wiped the quote away and final y turned to the two detectives.
'Al that stuff you said in your lecture about religion retarding progress and science rising up to replace it.'
'If I didn't believe it, I'd be a theologist instead of a criminal psychologist. I minored in philosophy as wel. To me it's just another way to study the human condition. When you ask what motivates a man to kil or rape or steal or, more importantly, what would keep a man from doing these things, it isn't very far from asking what it al means. What's the true meaning of life? What sense can be found in al this chaos? You look into the minds of serial sexual predators day in and day out and you have to wonder.'
'Why not hard science? Philosophy always struck me as a halfway point between science and mysticism for those who couldn't make up their minds whether to believe or not to believe,' Detective Montgomery chimed in.
Something about the large black detective's expression instantly put the professor on guard. The man was absolutely intimidating.
