Wrath White - Succulent Prey

Alicia, he was stil sizing up every nurse who passed, imagining how the meat of their triceps, the fat of their hips, the muscle and sinew on their thighs and buttocks would taste as he tore it from their quivering bones. Even as he mourned he could feel the monster awakening.

He hoped Damon had done his part and gotten himself admitted to the hospital as wel. The only thing left to do now was for Joseph to find him and get him out of the hospital where they could have their heart-to-heart and he could rid himself of the curse and love Alicia as a man was supposed to rather than as the monster he'd been since puberty.

There was only one elevator that went to the third floor. That's where Damon had told him that most of the in-house patients were treated. It sat at the end of the hal and you had to pass another reception desk to access it. Two overweight nurses sat behind the desk wearing hardened impassive expressions. As soon as the nurses took 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.