“P-Prince Charles?”
Bill’s bottom lip trembled and his voice cracked with emotion. The bones had been flensed of flesh and gnawed on, cracked open, and the marrow sucked out. Even the skull had been broken open and plundered, the brain pan licked clean. Bill looked back at the open front door. His legs trembled.
“Lelani? Are you here? You okay?”
Bill walked farther into the apartment. His curiosity gradually overcame his caution even as his imagination terrorized him with images of Lelani in varying states of dismemberment, posed in garish, nightmarish positions culled from every slasher movie he’d ever seen.
He rushed into the kitchen to arm himself with one of the Gunter Wilhelm carving knives from the cutlery set on his counter before finishing his search of the apartment. On the kitchen counter he found Lelani, crouched like a cat right next to the seven hundred dollar knife set he’d bought on an impulse, determined to become a master chef after watching a particularly rousing episode of Hell’s Kitchen. She looked like hell. Her hair looked like she’d been plugged into a Tesla coil. Her eyes were wild, pupils dilated to the size of nickels, and her face was smeared with blood and tufts of gray fur. More than that, she was drawn and withered, like an old woman. Her eyes were hollow pits, her cheeks sunken in.
“Lelani? Why didn’t you answer me? What the hell did you do to my cat?” Anger grew inside him, masking the fear temporarily but not displacing it. His legs still trembled and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. The persistence of his paranoia only increased his anger.
“Answer me, Lelani! What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you high again?”
Lelani growled and bared canines that were clearly larger than they should have been, longer, sharper, and tipped with red. Bill took a step back. The dozens of vampire movies he’d watched in his lifetime came flooding back. Feeling ridiculous, he dropped his Smartphone, crossed his fingers, and began backing away from her, looking around for something wooden to use as a stake. The table and chairs were made of stainless steel. No luck there.
Lelani slithered down off the countertop on all fours, sniffing the air and licking her lips. Her eyes were blood-red and smoldering with lust, but not the type of lust Bill was accustomed to seeing in the eyes of women. There was nothing sexual in it. Nothing in her eyes showed any awareness of his humanity or personhood. It was worse than the physical objectification he’d often been accused of when he looked at women, reducing them to mere breasts, asses, and pretty faces.
But her stare didn’t reduce him to a collection of body parts. It reduced him to mere meat. It was the way poor kids in the ghetto salivated over McDonald’s cheeseburgers. And Lelani was salivating. Her mouth hung open. Those queer, red-tipped fangs glistened in the light. Thick ropes of saliva, tinged pink with old blood, drooled from each corner of her mouth.
“Lelani? It’s me, Bill. What’s wrong with you?”
She growled at the sound of his voice and scurried across the floor toward him. Bill leaped backward. His back slammed against the open refrigerator door. Whatever was wrong with her had eaten away at her, reducing her to skin and bones. She looked like a fucking Holocaust victim. A hoarse gravely voice, so unlike the dulcet, Marilyn Monroe-esque purr Lelani normally affected, scratched its way out of her larynx.
“Hungry, Bill. I’m so hungry.” Her eyes didn’t meet his when she spoke. Instead they roamed his body from head to toe, sizing him up.
“Okay. Okay. Let me-let me get you something to eat, sweetheart.” Bill put on his best lady-killer smile, but terror leeched all conviction from the expression.
Lelani shook her head. “Noooooo time. Hungry now!” She crooned in a raspy, graveyard howl. Her voice sounded like what you’d imagine a mummy’s voice would sound like after a thousand years in a crypt, but it had been only a few days since he’d seen her last. There was no sane explanation for her radical transformation except …
“You’re a vampire, right? No, it’s okay. I understand. That’s it, isn’t it? Someone bit you? You got bit by a vampire and now you’re one too, right? You need blood, right? I can get you blood. I can get all the blood you want. There’s a whole nightclub on Sixth Street full of kids who’d gladly let you suck their blood. Those wannabes would go fucking nuts over a real-life vampire,” Bill said, nodding vigorously in a failed attempt to solicit Lelani’s assent.
Lelani stalked closer, so close Bill could smell the overwhelming bestial stench of her, a suffocating miasma of sweat, bad breath, and rot. Bill scowled in disgust and covered his face with his forearm. Lelani seized the arm and savagely bit into it, ripping a huge chunk of muscle and tendon down to the bone. The pink flesh of Bill’s forearm stretched like taffy before tearing away from the ulna. Naked bone streaked with red showed through the ragged avulsion.
Bill screamed, a shrill, high-pitched cry. With his free hand, he made a fist and punched Lelani as hard as he could. She staggered backward, and Bill kicked her in the chest, putting his hips into it as if he was kicking down a door, sending Lelani sprawling across the garbage-strewn floor.
She lay there, still chewing the hunk of meat she’d ripped from Bill’s arm. Then she swallowed the raw flesh, licked blood and skin from her lips, and wiped her face with her own forearm. She smiled joyously, like a kid eating an ice cream cone, revealing those bizarre fangs that were now stained with Bill’s blood. Bill turned and ran.
He hurtled Lelani’s prone form and charged for the door, screaming, “Heeeeelp! Help! HEEEEEEELP!”
He didn’t make it far. The bite on his forearm had transferred a powerful neurotoxin into his bloodstream. His thundering heartbeat quickly spread the venom throughout his body, causing painful cramps in his muscles. He fell to the ground, doubled over in agony. It felt as if every muscle in his body had a Charlie horse. He tried to crawl the rest of the way out of the room. Tiny hands clamped down on his ankles like vices. Bill had never realized before how small Lelani’s hands were. With strength he never knew she possessed, Lelani dragged him back into the apartment and slammed the door.
Her beady bloodshot eyes fixed on his legs. Without hesitation, Lelani seized his thigh in both hands and sank her canines deep into the muscle.
“No! Get off me! Get the fuck off me!”
Bill punched at her, but his arms felt weak. Whatever had caused the painful muscle spasms had also robbed him of his strength.
Lelani’s jaws locked tight on his thigh, and she chewed on him like a wolf gnawing at a deer. She jerked her head sideways in a sudden violent motion, jerking the muscle free, peeling it away from the bone with a wet, sticky, ripping sound that made Bill think of peeling a mango. The pain was nauseating. His stomach rolled and threatened to revolt as waves of anguish singed his senses.
As he helplessly watched, she wrenched the muscle from its moorings and swallowed the bleeding meat in huge gulps. The room swam and everything turned gray, swirling like an amusement park ride before darkness overtook him.
***
Bill regained consciousness in blinding, white-hot agony. He looked down at his leg and saw bone. The area from his thigh down had been completely stripped of muscle, fat, and sinew.
”Oh my God! You ate my fucking leg! HEEEEEELLLP! My fucking leg! Somebody help me!”
Beside him, Lelani lay in a puddle of Bill’s blood. Her face was a fright-mask of gore. She stirred at the sound of his voice, lifting herself to a sitting position and sniffing the air, looking around with her beady, blood-shot eyes. Her gaze fell on Bill’s remaining leg, and something like a smile-but less jovial, more carnivorous-crossed her face. Her lips, teeth, and tongue were stained a ghastly wine color, coated with blood and bits of flesh. She chewed some leftover piece of gristle, fat, or tendon from Bill’s cannibalized limb. Ropes of bloody drool spilled from the corners of her mouth onto the floor. She wiped her lips with her forearm again and sniffed the air once more, again catching Bill’s scent. Her eyes closed and her smile widened. She looked like she’d ju
st taken a hit of some really good shit and was pausing to savor the rush. When she opened her eyes and locked them once again on Bill, they were aflame with a ravenous, predatory lust.
Bill screamed and tried to crawl away from her as she rushed over to him and seized his remaining leg.
“No! Oh, God, no! Don’t! Please stop! Heeeelp! Oh God, noooooooo!”
With ferocious savagery, using only her teeth and fingernails, Lelani ripped large chunks of meat from Bill’s remaining leg. He punched and struck at her with his diminished strength but was unable to dislodge her from his leg. He was so weak; he felt like he was swimming through tar. The aftereffects of her apparently venomous saliva, hypovolemic shock, and the excruciating pain and horror of being eaten alive threatened to render him unconscious again. He fought as hard to hold onto consciousness as he did to get Lelani off him. Both were losing battles.
Lelani didn’t stop at his legs. Bill called out to every god he’d ever heard of, praying for Jesus or Krishna or Buddha or Allah to take him away from this horror as she progressed up his thighs, ripping away his khaki shorts and tearing off his penis in one quick violent motion. Bill screamed again, and now his prayers changed from pleas for salvation and rescue to desperate entreaties for a quick death or at least unconsciousness so he wouldn’t feel what was to come. She chewed sloppily, dropping bits of Bill’s sexual organ onto the floor and then scooping them up and cramming the bloody scraps of cock-flesh back into her mouth and gulping them down. Blood, urine, and semen spattering the floor, leaked from the hideous gash where his sex had been. That’s when Bill finally lost consciousness.
He dreamt of cruising Sixth Street for low-mileage club sluts behind the wheel of his new Mercedes on a Saturday night, waving to the gaggles of drunken, giggling, Sixth Street skanks staggering out of the bars in tight-fitting miniskirts and baby T-shirts sans brassiere, nipples jabbing their way through the thin cotton fabric, tight, flat stomachs peeking out seductively from beneath their shirts. He saw himself offering them a ride in his ninety thousand dollar bitch-magnet and ending the evening getting head in a parking lot.
He reawakened to the reality of the bleeding wound where his cock had been and screamed himself unconscious again. He woke two more times. Each time there was more of him missing until he’d lost so much blood that his heart sputtered and stopped.
***
Lelani continued to feast, glutting herself on her lecherous fiancée. In death, he satisfied her far more than he ever had in life. Finally, his commitment to her was total, absolute. No other woman would ever come between them again. They were now united forever-or at least until her next bowel movement.
3
The kids were crying and screaming and yelling and begging and just being the fucking brats their mother had raised them to be by failing to raise them at all. Kitty, Kelly, and little Nathan Gingred Jr. had been relegated to a succession of nannies for as long as he could remember. Lillian (Mrs. Nathan Gingred) spent her time at cocktail parties, the yoga studio, Pilates studio, some charity function or another, or shopping, always shopping. Her only contribution to child-raising was buying the kids whatever their spoiled little hearts desired and hiring a new nanny whenever the old one got fed up and quit. When she wasn’t around, they bugged him for shit, and Nathan could not take that right now. The last thing he needed was to hear them whine about going out for ice cream or hamburgers or to some store to buy some stupid toy or go to some ridiculous amusement park or buy some mindless videogame. He just didn’t need that shit. The baby crying was bad enough without the twins adding to the cacophony with their pealing cries for attention.
“Daddyyyyyyyyy! We’re booooooored!”
“We want some ice creeeeeeeam!”
“We’re huuuUUUNGRYYYYYY!”
What the fuck do they know about being hungry? Nathan felt like he’d just emerged from a month-long trek across the Mojave desert. He’d just eaten an hour ago, but it felt like he’d been on a hunger strike for weeks. He just couldn’t seem to get enough food. He’d had his personal chef on ‘round-the-clock duty since he’d come back from the clinic, since he’d gotten the treatment. He’d ordered all his favorite foods-twice-and then he’d begun organizing anything and everything in the pantry. The pantry was the size of a studio apartment, and he’d emptied it in three days. Now he had to wait while Philippe replenished it. The man had been gone for more than two hours, and Nathan was growing increasingly impatient and irritable and downright fucking mean.
“Shut the fuck up!” It wasn’t the first time he’d yelled at his kids. He’d even taken a hand to them more than once. He didn’t buy all that touchy-feely liberal bullshit about not beating your kids when they got out of line. If he didn’t work so much and had more time to spend with his kids, he’d have gotten them in line by now. Damn straight. Let those fucking hippies raise their kids to be disrespectful little fuckers if they wanted to. His kids went to church and had learned to fear the Lord, and more importantly, they had learned to fear Daddy. But his failed campaign for the presidency had kept him away from the house, on and off, for more than a year. In that time, he’d lost control of the household somehow and his kids had turned into little assholes.
“But we’re booooored and we’re huuuuuuungry! You ate everything!”
“One more word and I’m coming out there with the belt!” Nathan called from his study. The kids were playing right outside his door. Thirteen bedrooms, a twenty-foot by thirty-foot playroom filled with every toy known to man, a media room with theater seating for twenty and a screen the size of a small Cineplex stocked with hundreds of DVDs, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and six acres of rolling green landscape to play in, yet they chose to camp out right outside his fucking door. Jesus Christ!
From the nursery, little Nathaniel Jr. was doing his best Aretha Franklin impersonation, crying out at the top of his infant lungs. The nanny was off today, and his wife was at a charity function in Manhattan, which left Nathan to deal with it. He pushed himself away from his massive oak desk, noting with no small amount of satisfaction how close he was able to sit by the desk now that his belly was gone.
“I’m coming, damnit!” He stormed over to the locked study door. He turned the latch and swung it open. The twins were waiting for him. Identical pigtails and pinched, agonized expressions greeted him. They had their arms crossed and were looking at him expectantly, as if he was late for an appointment.
“Are we going, Daddy?”
“We’re not going anywhere. I’m going to change your brother.” He pushed past his two daughters and headed for the stairs.
“Mommy said for you to take us to Tally’s for lunch.”
“Mommy isn’t here.”
“We called her and she said you’d take us,” the twins crooned in unison as they followed their irritated father up the staircase.
Nathan whirled on them, snarling ferociously. “And I said Mommy isn’t here and we’re not going anywhere! Philippe will be back with the food any minute.”
Truth be told, the idea of going out for a hot meal sounded perfect right now. Except Tally’s was one of the most popular restaurants in New Jersey and was always packed, and the drive to the boardwalk was nearly ten miles. It would take them half an hour to get ready, another twenty minutes to drive there, and then at least another twenty minutes before the first miniscule appetizers were brought out, which would do nothing but tease Nathan’s voracious appetite. It could be as long as two hours from the house to a hot entree. Philippe, on the other hand, could be back any minute with a van full of groceries, and he could whip up something quick for them to eat while they waited for the main course.
“We want Tally’s!”
“I said no!” Nathan struck both of them with one sweep of his hand, slapping one jaw and then the next and sending them both stumbling backward down the stairs with stunned expressions on their faces. He didn’t even look back as he stomped up the stairs to Junior’s room.
“I’m
telling Mommy!” he heard behind him. It took a heroic effort for Nathan not to run back down the stairs and beat both his daughters within an inch of their lives.
Upstairs, the baby was going into hysterics. Junior’s screams had become increasingly histrionic. It sounded like he was being tortured. He was just spoiled and impatient like the rest of Nathan’s kids. And why the fuck do I have to deal with them? Why isn’t Lillian here? Why isn’t the goddamn nanny dealing with this bullshit? Nathan’s patience imploded. It was like a star collapsing in on itself and forming a black hole. And that black hole was right in the pit of Nathan’s stomach. He was so hungry he could barely see straight, and Junior’s cries were like knife blades lancing through his skull. At that moment, he completely understood mothers who drowned their babies.
His blood pressure was boiling when Nathan slammed open the door to the nursery and spotted the shrieking, crying, urine-soaked thing in the Eddie Bauer designer crib. Nathan was rougher than he meant to be when he snatched the hysterical little creature from the hand-loomed, six hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets . He dropped little Nathaniel onto the changing table, eliciting even louder shrieks. Nathan grit his teeth and balled up his fists. Every muscle contracted with the effort to control his increasing tension and frustration, to quell the feral rage building up inside him. His stomach rumbled, and he nearly swooned from both the hunger and the splitting migraine he had as a result of it, made worse by the shrieking thing with the diaper that seemed to hold half the child’s weight in urine. Nathan pulled off the diaper, tossed it into the Diaper Genie, wiped Junior down with scented wipes, powdered his bottom, and slipped on a fresh diaper. He did it expertly, as if he’d done it every day of his life. The twins had made him deft at all things baby, and even though he didn’t spend half as much time with Junior as he had with them, he hadn’t lost the knack. But the kid was still screaming.
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