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 hal, 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 hal, 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 smel 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 kil 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 wideopen 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 jol y 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 al owed on this floor.' Behind Joe, a smal 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 stil busy with the naked guy, then across the hal 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 cal security.' Taking one last look around, Joe charged across the hal 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 al 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 kil washed through him in staggering waves. Even kil ing out of necessity brought an immediate sexual thril.
Joe thought about what Trent had said about losing that lush and delirious sensation if he managed to cure himself, yet stil 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 dul ed 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 occasional y kil ed, but it was just for the taste of the flesh. He kil ed to eat. The kil ing 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 kil just for the sake of kil ing? 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 wil 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 stal ed him. Despite the power and fury of his ravenous lust, which had grown exponential y 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 real y 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 chemical y 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 eventual y 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 wel up as he recal ed 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 stil 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 stil it didn't matter. He didn't believe that love conquered al 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 actual y 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 kil. 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 everincreasing 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 stil. His facial features had flattened and deflated as his life force had spil ed 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 rol ed up the man's clothes and stuffed them under the door to prevent the growing pool of blood from pouring out into the hal and alerting others to the location of his kil. 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 smal but the lab coat was a good fit. He slipped it on and stepped into the hal, trying to position the orderly's clothes so that they would stil form a dam to hold back the growing tide of blood. He had only minutes to locate Trent and get
