Wrath White - Succulent Prey

The wal s were lined with acrylic paintings of figures bathed in red. Frank moved closer to them and realized that the figures in the paintings were not just bathed in red. They were bleeding.

Slowly his eyes began to make sense of the chaos on the canvases. The pink and tans represented human flesh. Meat opened up so that the muscle and sinews showed through the skin. The white was bone. And the red was obviously blood. The paintings looked like people turned inside out. And there were pieces missing from them. Some were missing legs or arms. Some were obviously women without breasts. Some had no heads. Some had heads with no faces. Many were of men or women with their sex organs removed. In the place of each anatomical omission was a ragged hole, bleeding down the canvas.

Frank heard the loud bump again. It was coming from the bedroom.

"Joe? Are you okay in there? It's me. Frank."

Frank pushed open the door, saw the woman who was now handcuffed by her wrists and ankles with duct tape wrapped around her mouth. He looked down at her breasts and could see the

Band-Aids over her nipples. Whatever had happened, the panic in the woman's eyes told him that it had not been consensual.

There was a slight trickle of blood from a smal cut on her forehead, presumably from where she had fal en off the bed.

Her ankle cuffs were stil attached to a chain in the ceiling that would have made it impossible for her to move more than a few feet from the bed. She was flopping around, trying to get to her feet, and when she noticed the diminutive little man standing there her eyes began pleading with him for help. She held her wrists out and shook them at him, imploring him to remove the handcuffs, but he had no key and was beginning to fear for his own safety. The best thing for him to do, he reasoned, would be to get the hel out of there and cal the cops. He started to back out of the room and the woman's pleas became more insistent. She shook her hands violently at him and pounded her feet on the floor. Her eyes began to tear up with frustration as Frank scuttled backward out of the bedroom. The more panicked she became the greater Frank's resolve grew that he was definitely in the wrong place and in danger of getting far worse than he had bargained for if he didn't leave now.

Frank's eyes darted from the woman to a painting that sat on the floor outside the bedroom. This one was larger than the rest and it was of a voluptuous woman chained up on a bed like this one. Only the woman in the picture had no breasts at al and her chest was opened up like a rose in bloom.

This was the only painting where the face was rendered clearly. It was almost ultrarealistic, like a snapshot. And it was obviously the woman on the bed. The same wounded eyes. The same dimpled cheeks. Only the woman in the painting was screaming in some twisted marriage of pain, terror, and ecstasy. It was a powerful image. Frank wondered if the woman had seen it. It was what her future would be if Frank didn't come back with help. The smel of death and decay was now omnipresent and seemed to rise like a warning siren, singeing the hair on his nostrils and tel ing him to get out.

"I'11 get help. I'l be back. I promise," Frank said, speaking both to the woman on the bed and the one in the painting. The present and the probable future.

His eyes drifted away from hers, trying to avoid her silent pleas, and as they swept the rest of the apartment he suddenly recognized himself in one of the paintings. This one was even worse than the rest. It was painted in mostly whites and reds. Bones and blood. Almost al the flesh had been completely re moved. Only the face remained, the eyes staring heavenward as if in rapture, the mouth slack as if in the aftermath of orgasm. Frank's legs trembled and threatened to buckle.

Joe had just left to get gas in the van when he spotted Frank in his rearview mirror, crossing Folsom Street, heading for the front door of his apartment building. He was instantly enraged by the intrusion. He had given the little man a chance to walk away from this yet here he had come, sticking his nose back into Joe's business, begging to be murdered. He had heard of deer that would bare their throats to the wolf when they became old or sick, seeming to long for the predator's jaws at their jugular to end the misery of their lives. Long pigs apparently had the same fatal instincts.

Circling the block rather than risking a dangerous U-turn in the middle of

Folsom Street, Joe felt his adrenaline pulse and his heart rate quicken. The monster was awakening. By the time he made it back to the front of his building Frank was nowhere to be found and the front door was wide open. Joe punched the dashboard so hard that it cracked.

"Shit!" he roared as he pul ed the van to a halt and dashed out onto the sidewalk and into the building.

The lobby was empty. Frank must have taken the stairs up to the top floor, looking for him. Joe punched the button for the elevator and waited impatiently for it to descend. His mind went over different scenarios for Frank's destruction and disposal. Joe smiled when he noticed that he had gotten an erection. Perhaps this would be just what he needed to tide him over for the long trip to Seattle. Another fresh kil to snack on. He stepped into the elevator and rode it to the top floor, pacing impatiently, anxious for the kil . The doors whooshed open and Joe stepped out into the hal way, in time to see Frank backing slowly out of his apartment with a trembling hand clutching his mouth and the other thrust out in front of him as if to ward off an attack. Yet the one thing in that building in any condition to attack him wasn't in the apartment but in the hal way behind him.

Joe charged him, sprinting down the hal at ful speed with his head low and his arms outstretched as if preparing for a footbal tackle. The last thought Frank had before impact was just how much the big col ege kid real y did look like Superman, especial y when he was flying like that.

Joe leapt forward and struck the little man in the solar plexus with his shoulder, knocking the wind out of him and driving him straight through the door across the hal, which turned to kindling under the tremendous impact. As soon as Frank felt the squishy wetness beneath him, he knew what that horrible putrid smel had been. It hadn't been a dog or a cat after al, rather what the cats and dogs had been feeding on.

Frank screamed as he looked down to see his arm sunk up to the elbow in the flayed and ruptured chest of a female corpse. Her eyes stared at him, frozen wide in terror. Her lips and much of her cheeks had been eaten away, as had most of the flesh on her torso, arms, and thighs. The scant flesh that remained was mottled with purple and blue spots and bloated where it had not been torn open. Frank looked from the feral felines and diseased vermin scurrying away in the dark to the handsome and enraged giant storming through the open door toward him. He was unsure which of the animals had eaten the most of the dead woman's corpse. Fortunately, he had little time to consider it before a fist col ided with his jaw and he slipped into darkness.

Joe looked down at the little man who lay draped unconscious over his most recent meal and tried to consider what to do with him. He was stil fat off Emma's flesh and though he was powerful y aroused by the thought of fresh meat, he knew that his hunger would be tenfold by the time he reached Seattle. Perhaps if he could somehow keep Frank's body fresh he'd have something to snack on along the way to give Alicia a better chance of surviving the trip. Joe considered for a moment how much easier it was becoming to make these kinds of decisions. He was rapidly becoming a monster, a calculating kil er. Stil, he reasoned, as long as he kept