Wrath White - Succulent Prey

Perhaps they would give him a nice padded cel, drug him, and give him group therapy sessions with other cannibals and murderers. Maybe they would give him private sessions with a psychiatrist who would listen to tales about his childhood. About how he'd creep down the hal at night to watch his mother and father fuck through the keyhole in the door. How his father would strangle her until her face turned blue just before he came, growling like a wolf.

How he'd once seen his father cut a stray dog to pieces or how he'd been kidnapped and molested by a young child kil er when he was eight. Maybe they would cure him. Maybe they would give him shock treatments or chemical castration or a lobotomy. Maybe they would declare him legal y sane and he would go to prison after al and get raped or murdered himself by some big angry convicts.

Joe shuddered. He did not want to risk turning himself in. He did not relish the prospect of ending his days wrapped in a straitjacket and locked in a padded room, drooling on himself in a near catatonic stupor from a cocktail of antipsychotics. Besides that, he didn't want to release Alicia. He wanted to taste more of her succulent flesh.

Joe curled up on the couch and tried to ignore the whimpering cries coming from the next room. He didn't know what he would do with her, but whatever it was, it wouldn't be tonight. It was already nearly sunrise and he had a class at

10:00 A.M. That left him barely four hours of sleep. He didn't want to be late for class. Joe was convinced that somewhere there was a cure for his il ness and that with the help of the professor he would find it. First he had to convince the man that he wasn't a lunatic with some ridiculous implausible theory by finding the proof himself. That meant a trip back to the library.

Joe knew that he was getting close.

Finding the link between the werewolf and vampire mythology and the serial kil er phenomenon might lead directly to a cure. If he was right, those old myths not only held the answer to how the disease was transmitted but also how it could be stopped. He wasn't wil ing to drive a stake through his own heart and nail himself inside a coffin or chop off his head and fil his mouth with garlic. Those were the last-ditch remedies for those monsters who had progressed to the point where they could no longer be saved. There had to be a less dramatic solution to the cloying hunger that raked at his mind and spirit, beyond al the hype and superstition. He had to find the cure soon. Before he kil ed Alicia.

Sunlight ripped the curtain of night, bleeding morning into the sky just as Joe final y succumbed to sleep. He tossed and turned fitful y on his couch and dreamt of the day he'd been kidnapped from the playground by a budding child murderer named Damon Trent, who'd no doubt intended to make him his first victim. He could stil hear the fat teenager's tittering, high-pitched voice, like an overexcited young girl's, as he dragged him into his minivan and sped off down the street with Joe kicking and screaming for his life in the front seat. Joe stil had the faded bite marks and knife wounds on his ass, chest, neck, arms, and thighs from where the man had abused him.

No one knew why the kid had released him the next morning instead of torturing him to death, as he would with his later victims. Perhaps he had thought Joe was near death anyway and would die of exposure before anyone found him.

Perhaps he'd had mercy. He certainly hadn't shown mercy to his next three victims. He'd torn them apart. Joe could stil remember the feel of the knife plunging into his rectum as the man stabbed him repeatedly, and how he'd screamed like the world was ending, convinced that he was dead.

When Joe woke up, drenched in his own sweat and screaming at the top of his lungs, the sun was already high in the sky and his alarm clock was blaring. It was time for class.

Joe dressed and showered before going back into the bedroom to confront his captive. She looked awful, with blood caked on her breasts and stomach.

She'd urinated on herself sometime during the night, unable to ask to use the bathroom with the gag in her mouth or perhaps hoping that she'd make herself too disgusting to rape. Joe removed the bal gag then lifted her up and carried her into the bathroom where he scrubbed off al the blood and washed her tenderly, lovingly, fighting to keep his mind on getting to school on time. He led her to the toilet and watched as she relieved herself, glaring at him murderously the entire time. He did his best to avoid her gaze. He knew he deserved her hatred. When she was done using the toilet he washed her again.

Joe carried Alicia over to the bed and affixed an other chain to a loop in the ceiling, which he then connected to her wrist restraints. The chain was slack enough to al ow her to move about the bed but if she tried to get off the bed she would wind up dangling in the air 'til he got home. He explained al of this to her and her eyes began to tear up again.

"I'm sorry," Joe said to her as he kissed her on the cheek. "I just can't help myself. I real y don't want to hurt you. I just don't know how to stop."

He turned to walk out of the door.

"You are beautiful, though. So beautiful." Then he left, locking the bedroom door behind him. Alicia heard the front door slam and the dead bolt click into place. Then she was alone. Alone in a madman's apartment with no way to escape.

Alicia sat in silence for a long moment listening to the sound of her own breathing, trying to steady her pulse and keep herself from going crazy and perhaps going into shock. She began to catalogue her injuries. Aside from the nauseating ache in her bruised and bitten breasts where her nipples had been torn off, she had no major injuries. She had a few other bruises from where the col ege boy had smacked her buttocks and pul ed her hair as he grunted, growled, and thrusted deep into her. Nothing she wasn't used to.

Her wrists were scraped raw from trying Her wrists were scraped raw from trying to wriggle out of the leather restraints last night after she'd been left alone. Joe had cleaned them as best he could with hydrogen peroxide but stil the skin ripped and bled as she tried again to squeeze out of the leather cuffs. Again, nothing she wasn't accustomed to.

Joe had left a bucket by the side of the bed in case she had to use the restroom before he returned. On the nightstand he left a bowl of water. Alicia would have to kneel on al fours and lap it up like a kitten in order to drink from it with her arms stil bound be hind her. She didn't want to think of what she'd have to do in order to use the bucket.

Her shoulders were kil ing her. No matter how she turned on the bed her weight rested on them unless she turned over onto her face, which aggravated the throbbing pain where her nipples had been, or sat completely upright, which felt uncomfortable with the bar wedged between her legs keeping them apart.

Even when she set upright, Alicia's shoulders stil felt under pressure from being forced backward with her arms locked behind her.

Alicia tried to scream again. She thrashed, kicking and bucking on the bed, hoping someone would come to her rescue, but she didn't hear a single sound coming from any of the other apartments. Either the wal s were soundproof or there were no other neighbors. She thought about what the rest of the building had looked like, the smel of garbage and urine, the cracked drywal and deteriorating paint, the fact that she had not seen any evidence of anyone else on her way to his apartment. The lobby had been dark when she'd come stumbling in late last night and there had been no sounds of televisions or radios or children crying, lovers quarrel ing. It had seemed completely empty to her, but she'd paid no attention to it, attributing it to the lateness of the hour. She'd been too busy concentrating on getting some of that young gorgeous col ege athlete's cock to think about how shitty his apartment building was. Now that she knew that her gorgeous athlete was a kidnapper and a cannibal, she wondered if perhaps she'd been lured into an abandoned building. The gang she used to hang out with had once converted an entire vacant department store into one big crack house and shooting gal ery. Maybe she was in a condemned apartment building that he was just squatting in?