Prey Drive

by James White, Wrath

  The professor’s eyes widened. “What? How can you tell?”

  “That move he’s doing right now? It’s called a rear-naked choke, or a lion kill. It can render a man unconscious in seconds, but the way he’s doing it, how long he’s holding it, that’s permanent brain injury or death. That leg lock he’s pantomiming now? You can snap all the ligament’s in a man’s knee easily with that. Painful and debilitating, but not deadly, but he’s finishing the move by pretending to tear a chunk out of the man’s hamstring with his teeth. The femoral artery is right there. His opponent would bleed out in seconds. Earlier he did a motion that looked like was pretending to tear off a guy’s balls, and before that he did a head and arm choke that ended with what looked like this guy pretending to rip out his opponent’s throat with his teeth. I take back what I said about wanting to train this dude. I’m glad he’s locked up. From what I can see, he’s right where he belongs.”

  The professor nodded. “Thanks. You’ve been very helpful.”

  “My pleasure. Oh, and one other thing. All those exercises this guy is doing in his little cell? If I was training one of my fighters for the battle of his life, that’s exactly what I would have him doing. I’d watch him real close if I were you.”

  Professor Locke thanked Alex again and then quickly left the gym. The image of Joseph Miles tearing the testicles from some imaginary opponent was stuck in the professor’s mind. He didn’t know how he’d failed to recognize the movement before. After hearing Alex’s narration of Joseph’s murderous training regiment, it had seemed obvious, but the professor didn’t spend all day learning the best methods to destroy another human being. He had an instinctive distrust of those who did. He wondered how many degrees of separation there were between a man like Alex Martin, who’d devoted his life to the fighting arts, and a sociopathic killer like Joseph Miles. If Alex Martin had grown up with parents like Joseph Miles’s homicidal father, would he have wound up the same way? His nature was that of a fighter, a sport that was sadistic by its very nature. The stated goal of the sport of mixed martial arts was to cause the greatest possible pain and injury to your opponent until he gave up or was rendered unconscious. All it would have taken was different nurturing to turn Alex Martin into a killer. The question was, “What would it take to turn Joseph Miles back into a normal human being?”

  Perhaps if Joseph had found an outlet for his aggression as Alex Martin obviously had, he would have been beating the hell out of trained athletes in a cage or a ring in some pugilistic blood sport instead of murdering and mutilating innocent victims.

  Professor Locke couldn’t help but wonder. He’d heard rumor of prison boxing programs, like the one in Angola State Prison, that had resulted in a dramatic decrease in violence between inmates, but he’d never found any reliable statistics to support the theory that pummeling someone senseless in an organized sport was somehow cathartic. It sounded reasonable enough that it would be better than cutting the breasts off women and eating them, but there was no research to suggest the two compulsions were interchangeable.

  The professor drove back to the prison, puzzling over how to “fix” Joseph Miles. The Prozac did not appear to be working anymore. He’d staked his entire reputation on the hope that he could cure him of his homicidal compulsions. So far he’d done little but take some of the edge off the killer’s cannibalistic cravings. If the serotonin wasn’t the issue, then he needed to find a new approach to the problem. He’d heard recent studies where psychologists treated manic depressives and people with obsessive compulsive disorders with ketamine in cases where serotonergic drugs like Prozac failed. There was significant evidence that glutamatergic dysregulation may contribute to the development and progression of these types of disorders. Whereas, since the introduction of Prozac in the seventies, serotonin deficiencies were seen as the main cause of OCD and clinical depression, new research has indicated that glutamate may be more closely linked to the part of the brain that causes everything from depression and anxiety to compulsive gambling. According to recent studies, ketamine, the glutamate receptor antagonist has demonstrated rapid effects when delivered as a single intravenous dose.

  If ketamine works on housewives who can’t stop smoking and shopping, there’s no reason to think it won’t work on a man who can’t stop killing. Despite the difference in moral extremes, the basic underlying pathology is the same. Joseph Miles’s cannibalistic compulsion could be viewed as little more than an eating disorder, not dissimilar to a man who habitually binges on donuts. The professor smiled. He liked that analogy. It had just the right tone of clinical aloofness. He imagined how that quote would read in a peer-reviewed journal. It would be shocking and controversial. He would be applauded by some and condemned by others for his unflinching scientific objectivity. That analogy might be the line that made him famous.

  Shocking though it may be, the professor thought the characterization of Joseph’s murderous pathology as an eating disorder was perhaps the most accurate. The MRI tests he’d been performing on Joseph confirmed the same elevated concentrations of glutamate and related compounds demonstrated in the caudate nucleus and orbitofrontal cortex of OCD patients compared to normal controls. The professor knew of the dramatic results reported in studies of eating disorders being treated with low intravenous doses of ketamine. Eating disorders are a compulsive behavior disease, a disorder characterized by frequent recall of body dysmorphic thoughts. Whatever was driving Joseph to cannibalize other human beings was likely spawned by violent memories from his past, most probably his assault at the hands of Damon Trent. Evidence suggests that memory is a neocortical neuronal network. Excitation of this network involves the hippocampus where new memories are stored before being transferred to the frontal lobe of the brain, with recall occurring by re-excitement of this same network. There was every indication that excitement of the hippocampus by glutamate-NMDA receptors can be blocked by ketamine.

  The Professor ran the numbers in his head as he steered his car to the side of the road and pulled out a pad to figure out the exact dosage he would need. In the eating disorder trials, he recalled them using infusions of 20 mg per hour of ketamine for 10 hours with 20 mg twice daily of nalmefene (Revex) as opioid antagonists to prevent the patient from losing consciousness. He would have to look up the studies to confirm the dosage, but if that was correct, then that’s where he would start with Joseph Miles.

  For the first time in weeks, Professor Locke felt hopeful that he could cure his former student. But then what? Joseph would remain behind bars for what amounted to a disease that was beyond his control. It was cruel and inhumane. If his crimes were the result of a disease, and it could be proven that he has been cured, then it would be wrong to keep him imprisoned.

  But what if it didn’t work? What if Joseph’s compulsion was too strong? What if he no longer wanted to be cured? The professor remembered a conversation he’d had with his now infamous student during class:

  “Is it possible that it’s an evolutionary mutation?”

  The professor had paused along with the entire class. Even then, before the discovery of Joseph’s first murder, everyone could tell there was something not quite right about the big psychology student.

  “A what?” he’d asked. At the time, the professor thought Joseph had just been trying to get a rise out of him. The idea that the gigantic sophomore had been talking about himself had been nothing but a grim and cynical suspicion.

  “An evolutionary mutation, part of natural selection. Man is the only creature on Earth without a natural predator, except other men. Perhaps, as our population explodes, Mother Nature has felt the need to select certain individuals to act as population control. Perhaps giving them drives and instincts other humans don’t have, which genetically predisposes them to mass murder—to cull the herd, so to speak… Perhaps nature is just seeking a remedy for the plague. Isn’t it possible that murderers are a natural antivirus?”

  Then, as now, the thought had awakened all the
professor’s fears about the efficacy of his profession. If there are mental disorders that can never be cured, then what purpose does psychiatry serve? If this was true, then his chosen profession amounted to the selling of snake oil. He was no better than the televangelists who filled the airwaves every Sunday selling false hope and lies. And if Joseph’s particular condition was incurable, then the professor’s hopes for a Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough in the treatment of signature sex murderers would be dashed to the wind and there would be no safe recourse but to lock Joseph Miles away forever.

  Professor Locke thought hard as he steered onto the freeway and into the flow of traffic, heading back to the prison at seventy-five miles an hour. If Joseph was correct, and serial murderers were an evolutionary mutation, there still had to be a way to channel those violent impulses into something less destructive to society. He again thought of Alex Martin and again wondered if the violent world of cage-fighting might be a way to productively channel those impulses. He recalled the tape of Joseph Miles practicing his “killing moves” and tried to imagine such wanton violence in an organized sport. He shuddered and dismissed the idea. Even if it was cathartic and actually did help curb the craving for violence, there was no way the American people would go for convicted serial killers battling it out in a cage. The moral majority would be outraged. The professor smiled. But the ratings would be atmospheric. Talk about reality TV. He’d heard the rumors of inmates being forced to fight one another. Joseph had even been involved in a near-fatal altercation resulting in grievous injury to another inmate that sounded suspiciously like one of the so-called “cockfights.” Before he wasted time considering the alternatives if he failed, he needed to set up the ketamine experiment … and pray.

  Fourteen

  Six officers came for Joe in the middle of the night. Three he recognized and three he’d never seen before. There was a nervous excitement in the air. Fear. Anxiety. Joe could smell it wafting from all six like cheap perfume.

  “Let’s go, Miles. We need to search your cell. We’re putting you in a strip cell while we search it.”

  Joe didn’t protest, didn’t declare his innocence of whatever contraband they thought he’d smuggled inside and hidden away. There was a strong likelihood that it was all a ruse anyway. It didn’t take six officers to transport one prisoner.

  They brought him to the large concrete room with the chin-up bar that was referred to as the exercise yard. It looked different at night. Even smaller than it did in the day. It looked even more diminutive now because it was already occupied. A large Latino man covered in tattoos from fingertips to forehead stood in the center of the room, glaring at them as Joe was led inside. The man was heavily muscled and had scars on his face, neck, chest, and arms from fights, knife and bullet wounds, and surgeries. The wounds were interspersed with tattoos of guns, low-riders, tombstones, crucifixes, of large-breasted women in high heels, fishnets, and mini-skirts or micro shorts right beside a portrait of the Virgin Mary with hands clasped in prayer, all telling the story of the man’s life. It was the story of most of the inmates in here. Sex, drugs, crime, and the dream of redemption in some illusory afterlife where a lifetime of atrocities would be forgiven. He, like most of the really hardcore Latino gangbangers in supermax, had already given up on this life and now placed all his hopes on heaven and was anxious to get there and bask in the light of Jesus and Mary.

  Joe was willing to do his part to arrange an introduction.

  The man’s head was shaved and one of his eyes had a splash of red in the corner of it where the capillaries had ruptured. An old jagged scar ripped down from his forehead over the eyelid. He looked like a fighting dog—and that’s exactly what he was. He began to stretch, watching the guards remove Joe’s restraints, and then he stalked forward, staring at Joe like he was dessert.

  “Settle down, Armondo. We don’t want no trouble out of you just yet. We brought you a new playmate for the night,” Belton said with a wide grin.

  The big Latin thug Officer Belton had referred to as “Armondo” backed away with his hands raised. His eyes were pinned on Joe, looking him over from head to toe. Joe knew the look. He was looking for weaknesses, deciding where to strike first and where to strike last to end the fight.

  The door to the exercise room had barely shut before Armondo advanced. “I’m putting my money on Miles,” Joe heard one of the guards say. The officers were all still in the room, fanned out in a semicircle, forming a loose ring. Joe dropped down on all fours like a dog and bared his serrated teeth. Armondo paused. The look in his eyes wasn’t one of fear but of surprise, momentary confusion, and then caution, rethinking his approach. The hesitation was all Joe needed. He sprang from his crouch with his jaws wide. The hunger was fully upon him and the monster was in a fury. Saliva dripped from his jagged canines. Armondo’s eyes widened in surprise but he stood his ground.

  Armondo stood in a boxer’s stance and danced backward out of the way of Joe’s attack. Joe landed beside him. His teeth snapped the air inches from Armondo’s face. Behind him, Joe heard the guards whoop with excitement.

  “Get that son of a bitch!” someone yelled, but Joe couldn’t tell which one of them the guard was cheering on.

  A fist caught Joe in the eye and a flashbulb went off in his head. He staggered backward. He felt his eye swelling. He looked up at his opponent and a knee caught him in the chin and dropped him onto his back. His jaw throbbed. The big Mexican jumped on top of Joe, straddling his chest, and began raining down punches. Joe bit the man’s thigh through his prison-issue cotton pants. His teeth sank deep in the muscle and Joe immediately tasted blood, an explosion of it, spurting into his mouth. Joe had to swallow hard to keep from drowning in it. He’d hit the femoral artery. He continued to bite down, chewing a large avulsion in Armondo’s vastus muscle, ripping through the orange fabric of his pants and leaving a bleeding hole that gushed blood.

  “Ahhhh! Puto loco! You fucking bit me!”

  Obviously the guards hadn’t properly prepared the man for who he was facing. Armondo punched Joe several more times, breaking his nose and further swelling his eye, and then he tried to scramble away but Joe pursued. He grabbed Armondo’s ankle and pulled, dragging him back within reach of Joe’s blood-drenched canines. Blood lust raged within him. Joe could barely think. He was all fury and appetite as he bit down on Armondo’s calf. Joe received several kicks that sent lightning bolts of agony through his already shattered nose. He held up an arm to defend himself from the kicks as he ripped and tore at the big convict’s soleus muscle until he’d torn it away from the tibia. Hobbled, Armondo continued to fight. He spun around and began punching Joe again. The man’s pain tolerance was off the charts, no doubt boosted by the methamphetamines wafting from his sweat glands.

  Joe tackled the man and scrambled up onto his chest. He leaned down and clamped his teeth onto Armondo’s face, biting through skin and cartilage, removing the Mexican’s nose with a large, stomach-churning crunch!

  “Holy shit!”

  “That’s enough! Stop! Stop!”

  “The fight’s over! It’s over!”

  Joe could hear the COs yelling at him, but he could barely understand what they were saying. The monster was roaring in his ears. It swelled in his pants like a third limb. Joe heard Armondo scream as Joe chewed up the man’s nose and swallowed it then leaned down and attacked his face again as the guards tried to pull him away and Armondo continued punching him and screaming. Joe bit off one of Armondo’s eyelids and punctured his eyeball with one of his teeth. He’d bitten through Armondo’s lips and part of his left cheek before the guards successfully pulled Joe away.

  “My face! He ate my face!”

  Joe had made a ruin of the big convict. Armondo’s left eyelid was gone and the ruptured eyeball drooled down his teardrop-tattooed cheek like a dead jellyfish. Where Armondo’s nose had been was now a ragged mucus and blood-filled hole. Each breath bubbled with red-tinged snot. A flap of the convict’s right cheek hun
g loose where Joe’s teeth had torn it away from his face, revealing Armondo’s teeth and gums and the pink muscle of his jaw. His face was now fixed in a perpetual grin. It looked less like a living human face with flesh missing and more like a skull with flecks of skin still clinging to it.

  Joe roared like a lion as three of the officers wrestled him out of the room, forgetting about his restraints in their eagerness to get him back into his cell. Joe’s mouth looked like a slaughterhouse, with meat and blood staining his jagged teeth. The front of his pants was tented, a tremendous erection straining against the fabric. There was a dark stain forming on the orange fabric. There was no doubt what it was. Joe had ejaculated while tearing Armondo’s face off. The expression on Officer Belton’s face was one of abject horror. Joe smiled and brought his hand to his face, wiping away the blood and viscera before bringing the gore-soaked fingers to his lips, licking the blood and gristle from each digit.

  “I want more,” he said. “The monster is still hungry.”

  One of the officers seized Joe’s arm and jerked it behind his back while another officer slapped handcuffs on his wrists. Joe locked eyes with Belton, who turned away and dropped his head.

  “That’s the last time, Belton! How the hell are we supposed to explain this?” one of the officers said, jabbing a finger at the large black officer. Veins were popping out all over his face.

  “Yeah, that’s the last time.”

  Fifteen

  Selene was just getting home from another modeling job at the university when she steered her Vespa over to the bank of mailboxes on the corner, three houses up from the home she rented with her roommates Linda and Paul. It was springtime, and the fog had not yet started its languorous march through the streets. Selene’s neighbors were either just getting home or stuck in traffic somewhere. The street was quiet and the air smelled fresh and verdant, like fresh-cut grass and flowers in bloom, like she was standing in the middle of a forest rather than a little cul-de-sac in Hayes Valley.