"I was riding my bike when he attacked me. I turned the corner and he was just standing there, grinning at me. I tried to turn the bike around and run. I could tel that he was going to hurt me. Of course, I had no idea how bad. I thought he was
going to beat me up and steal my bike
or something. Then he grabbed me by
the throat. He squeezed so hard that I
couldn't even scream. I couldn't breathe. I felt like I was going to pass out. Then he threw me in the back of his pizza van." Joe took a deep breath and rubbed his
bare arms to warm himself as chil s
raced the length of his spine.
"It's okay. You don't have to continue if it bothers you."
"When we got back to his place, he undressed me. He started punching me.
Then he started stabbing me. He
stabbed me dozens of times, raped and
sodomized me. I remember him licking
my wounds, lapping up the blood like a
kitten licking milk. His eyes were al
glassy and vacant. He kept me down in
that basement for days, feeding on me.
Somewhere along the way I passed out.
Then he put me back in the van and
dumped me back in the park. I was the
lucky one. I was his first victim. He got much more violent with the next ones
before they caught him. Those he kept.
They never got to see the sunlight again. They died down in his basement."
The librarian was crying when Joe
looked up. Joe reached out and brushed
a strand of hair from the librarian's face, cupping her cheek in his hand and
leaning in to peer into her sad eyes. He wiped away her tears with his thumbs.
Something about her sorrow was
reawakening the monster, turning him
on. He could feel the drive roiling like a furnace, burning at the root of him, hard and insistent.
Joe thought about Alicia, stil chained up back at the apartment. He thought about her magnificent ass. The soft sumptuous mound of tender fat and al the things he wanted to do to it, to her. Al the things he would do if he didn't curb his appetite with something else. Something like this librarian.
"I want to kiss you."
The librarian jerked away, shocked by
Joe's forwardness. It was Joe's firm
belief that when most women ran it was
because they wanted to be chased. He
seized her face in his hands again and
pul ed her toward him. Greedily he
sucked and bit at her lower lip as he
kissed her aggressively. She never
struggled or made any attempt to resist him. Rather, her body melted to his touch as if it had been locked stiff with tension released the moment their lips touched. She responded to his kiss with her own, the desperate hungry embrace of a
woman starved for affection, in need of a man's love.
She was out of breath when Joe leaned
back in his chair and picked up his
coffee. He stared at her with those same rapacious eyes that had long intimidated her as he sipped the scalding brown
liquid. Emma trembled with want.
Embarrassed, she reached for her own
coffee, lifting it up and then placing it back on its coaster. She looked back
into Joe's terrible, wantonly sexual eyes and felt another wal crumble. She
closed her eyes and let out a long sigh.
"What do you want, Joseph? What do you want from me?"
The air between them became hot and
thick with a palpable lust. Joe licked his lips. He was recal ing the taste of Alicia's nipples when he'd eaten them and
imagining what it must be like to
consume a woman's entire breast.
"I want to make love to you."
"You just want to fuck me," she sighed, looking down into her lap. Then she
looked back up and her eyes were
furious with lust. "But that's okay. I think I want to fuck you too."
She leaned forward and took his hand.
Together they rose from the table and
walked out into the parking lot.
"You'l be gentle with me, won't you? I haven't been with anyone since my
husband and I divorced five years ago.
You'l take it slow, won't you?"
They were almost to her car. She pul ed out her keys and opened the car door.
"Promise me you'l be gentle with me."
"No," Joe said.
His huge powerful hands clenched tight
around her throat and jerked the librarian up onto her tiptoes. As he closed his
fingers tight around her windpipe she
kicked and scratched, dragging her
manicured nails through the skin on his forearms and punching at his face. She
raked his throat with her fingernails,
breaking off the plastic tips in his flesh before she blacked out. Joe stuffed her into the car and drove her across town to the apartment building on Folsom Street.
Chapter Seventeen
Alicia lay on the semen-and sweatstained bed contemplating her fate, entangled in a confusion of emotions. A few hours ago she had been confident
that she would survive this. She had felt like she was connecting with her captor, like she understood him a little and that perhaps he understood her as wel . Then she'd woken up with his hands locked
around her throat and his eyes vacant
and sad, looking through her at some
tragedy from his past. Yet he was stil
strangling the life from her. She'd struck him repeatedly but he hadn't seemed to
notice. She had nearly passed out
before he final y snapped out of it as if awakening from a dream.
As she gasped for air, Joe had looked at her with a mixture of confusion and
embarrassment. Then he'd turned away
and when he turned back he had the
restraints in his hands. The look on his face had been one of defeat and
resignation. She was now afraid that he would give up on trying to cure himself and would decide that he was too far
gone to be saved. If that was the case, then she was a dead woman. She had to
get him to try. At the very least, she'd have more opportunity to escape once
they were traveling on the road than she had locked in this little room.
The front door opened and Alicia heard
a sound like something heavy being
dragged. Joe stalked into the room
looking excited and agitated. He was not alone. Alicia looked down and saw a
frightened woman, naked and trussed up
in duct tape, at his feet. She was big and fleshy, zaftig like Alicia herself, only older and white, pale as a newborn. The
woman looked up at Alicia, at the chains around her wrists and ankles, the bal
gag, the dried blood caked on her
mutilated breasts, and she began to
scream against the duct tape secured
over her mouth.
Joe turned toward Alicia with a wild
expression on his face and an erection
pressed urgently against the fabric of his pants. He was panting heavily and his
pupils were dilated so wide that very little of his irises were visible. He looked like a speed freak wired out of his skul .
"This is for you, Alicia!" The handsome young man knelt down and peered into
the Spanish girl's horrified eyes. He
wiped her curly raven black hair out of her face and stared at her for a long
moment in that peculiar way he had that made her feel like something on a
dessert tray.
"The hunger is just so strong. I was afraid I'd kil you tonight if I didn't do something. So I'm going to use her to
get me by until we can find the cure
together."
Alicia didn't want to know what he meant by "using her" but she could guess. And what she guessed brought tears to her
eyes and made her stomach flip. She
wanted to try to talk him out of it but he hadn't removed the gag from her mouth
and she suspected that was deliberate.
He undid the chain that secured her to
the wal and dragged her into the
bathroom.
"I don't think you want to see this," he said as he closed the bathroom door.
The door latch didn't catch and the door creaked open just a crack. Alicia wished that it hadn't because she couldn't
prevent herself from looking, no matter how terrified she was.
She watched as Joe removed al of his
clothing. Once again she marveled at
how finely sculpted his body was. He
walked out of the room and came back
with a long skinny knife, a fil eting knife. The woman began to squirm as Joe
knelt down over her with the blade.
He cut the tape from around the
librarian's ankles and knelt down
between her thighs. Alicia felt a twinge of jealousy as she watched him lick and
suck at the woman's fat pussy. The
woman ceased her struggles. Her legs
spread wider and her hips thrust forward to meet his tongue. Suddenly, her body
began to buck and convulse with what
could only have been an orgasm. Then
her flesh began to run red.
Alicia could hear the savage snarls and the hideous sounds of ripping flesh as
Joe tore at her delicate flower, tearing into her labia with his teeth and
devouring huge chunks of the tender
flesh. He seized both her thighs, one in each arm, as she began to kick and
struggle. The tape fel away from her
face and her screams came pealing
through the room.
Joe lifted his head for a moment and
Alicia could see the rapturous
expression on his gore-streaked face as he chewed the bits of vagina he'd torn
from the librarian. The woman was stil
screaming when Joe crawled up her
body and began biting at her breasts.
He was not nearly as tender with her as he had been with Alicia. He bit deep into the meat of her breasts, tearing off her nipples and devouring the tremendous
mammaries in huge gulps of sweet
sal ow fat streaked with red. He used the knife, sawing away her breasts to get
more of the woman's tender flesh off her chest and into his gul et. The woman's
anguished cries were more terrible than anything Alicia had ever heard.
Alicia turned away when she saw Joe
amputate the woman's entire left breast, exposing the gleaming white bone of her rib cage. He brought the quivering
mound of flesh up to his lips and
voraciously consumed it. Blood washed
over his fingers and down his arm,
pouring from his mouth with each bite
and dripping off his chin and down his
neck. He licked the blood from his lips between bites like sweet nectar, like he was eating a mango or a papaya and
not human flesh.
The woman's screams were subsiding,
becoming moans and whimpers. She
was in shock and dying from the
massive loss of blood and the traumatic damage done to her. Alicia turned back
to look as Joe turned the woman over.
Where her vagina had been was now
just a ragged hole ringed in torn and
lacerated bits of flesh. Her breasts were completely gone down to the ribs. Bits of meat lay puddled on the floor amongst
the pools of blood. The woman landed
on her bel y with a wet sticky swap! that caused her rotund ass to jiggle. Alicia knew what was about to happen next.
Joe took more time and care here. This
most luscious piece of meat, the most
prized delicacy, he would not squander. This was to be savored. He be gan
slicing the thick fatty meat of her ass in thin cuts and sliding the tender slivers of meat into his mouth. This lasted for
nearly five minutes before he could no
longer restrain himself and dove
headfirst into her ass, ripping into it just as he had done her breasts. To Alicia it seemed to go on al night.
When the sun rose, Joe lay in a pool of coagulating blood draped across the
vandalized corpse of Emma Purcel like
a bloated tick, fat off her blood and flesh. He'd completely consumed her breasts,
most of her ass, chewed away her
vagina and even cut her open and eaten
her ovaries, liver, and kidneys. His
crowning act of barbarity had been to
saw through her sternum, crack open her rib cage, and cannibalize her heart.
Drunk off blood and heavy with
halfdigested meat, he rose drowsily from the floor and turned toward the locked
bathroom door. Only it wasn't locked.
In the two-inch gap between door and
door frame, Joe spotted two almond
eyes wide with shock. He started toward the door and heard Alicia scurry away
toward the back of the bathroom. She
was terrified.
Joe passed his reflection in the mirror and saw the ghastly, loathsome thing that stood naked in his bedroom, a ghoulish
grotesquerie caked in dried blood and
gore from head to toe. He smiled and
the hideous abomination smiled back at
him with teeth blackened with old blood and raw flesh. No wonder Alicia was
afraid of him. He no longer bore any
semblance to a human. He had
transformed the previous night, become
whatever detestable monster the virus
within him was morphing him into. But
what had he become? A vampire? He
looked at the blood that covered half the room and drenched his own skin and
doubted a vampire would have been so
wasteful. Joe stared down at the
remains of the librarian. He'd never
heard of a vampire doing that to its
victim. Serial kil ers do that ... and
werewolves.
Joe walked into the next room and into
the kitchen. He used dish detergent and a sponge to wash the blood from his
face, hair, and body. When he was done
he mopped the already splintered and
warped hardwood floor. He emptied the
contents of the bucket and refil ed it with more water and PineSol, added some