Voracious

by Wrath James White

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “Then we’re fucked. The media will be all over us if she goes rabid like Lelani did, if they aren’t already. After that, it’s only a matter of time before the FDA comes beating on our door. They’ll be lawsuits. Maybe even criminal charges.”

  Dr. Ebersol paced frantically, running his hands through his long, blond hair and rubbing the bald spot on top of his head.

  “Not if we can get to them before the virus takes effect. I just injected her yesterday.”

  “Get us booked on the next flight back to the states. I need to get to Austin and you’d better get your ass to LA and see that kid.”

  6

  Jamie and Elaine could not remember when they weren’t famous or weren’t in love. They’d met on a children’s TV show in the nineties. They were eleven and twelve years old when they fell in love. When the show ended, they both launched successful careers as pop singers, quickly becoming two of the biggest teen stars in the country. Their wedding was a national event. But age and the indulgences of wealth had taken their toll, and the media had not been kind.

  A year ago, Elaine gave birth to their first child. Six months ago, she’d tried to make a comeback with a multimillion-dollar video and an appearance on a popular singing competition, but all anyone could talk about were her thick thighs, her paunch, and her “muffin top” bulging out over the top of her skin-tight jeans. Jamie had gained weight too, sympathy weight as he called it, and after seeing what his wife had gone through, he’d delayed his own reemergence into the spotlight. In truth, he’d become a recluse, hiding behind the walls of their multimillion-dollar estate. Rumors circulated that he’d put on hundreds of pounds and become some kind of obese shut-in. His agent urged him to show himself and dispel the rumors, but he was afraid. Then one day, his agent told him about the Aphrodite Aesthetic Reconstruction Clinic, and he’d made an appointment for him and his wife. The results were miraculous.

  The two of them stood naked, admiring their new bodies. The treatment had been an amazing success. They looked as lean as they did when they’d scored their first top forty hit in 1995. Jamie even had a six pack. Jamie’s trademark, ankle-length mane of raven-black hair had shocks of gray running through it now, but otherwise, he looked like a teenager again. And he was still losing weight. They both were.

  Earlier that day, they’d made their first public appearance together since the birth of their new son. They had gone to the beach, and the paparazzi had followed like a pack of jackals, eager for shots of her bulging tummy or the coveted photo of Jamie’s Hollywood physique turned Southern-fried fat. What they’d gotten instead were photos of the couple looking remarkably svelte, even a bit underweight. The couple had flaunted their new bodies in tiny bathing suits. She had worn a bikini so small it might as well have been made of dental floss.

  “I’d have worn a Speedo, but that might have been a little too much,” Jamie said.

  “I think that would have been damn sexy,” Elaine replied, kissing him on the neck with lips greasy with chicken fat.

  They’d left the beach earlier than expected, both suddenly, urgently hungry. They went to a nearby restaurant and ordered small meals, appropriate for two megastars trying to maintain their celebrity waistlines. It hadn’t touched their appetites, but the paparazzi was watching. They’d raced home, desperate for food.

  “What the fuck is going on? I’m so hungry!”

  Once home, they’d attacked their extensive pantry with maniacal fervor, eating everything they could get their hands on, shoving food into their mouths nonstop until the hunger finally abated.

  “What’s wrong with us?” Elaine asked.

  “We’re fine. It must just be some kind of side effect. The doctor said we could eat whatever we wanted. We probably just didn’t eat enough at the restaurant.”

  Elaine smiled wanly, unconvinced.

  They carried Gabriel, their one-year-old son, up to his room and put him to bed. He’d been sitting in the pantry crying while they ignored him and ate and ate and ate. They felt guilty, but they were exhausted now. They laid him down with a warm bottle of breast milk. Then they retired to their room.

  Jamie stripped off his board shorts and walked over to the mirror where Elaine joined him, sliding out of her bikini.

  “It’s amazing though, isn’t it? We look like teenagers again.”

  “Except for the wrinkles,” Elaine added, running her fingertips over the fine lines at the corner of his eye.

  Jamie smiled. “Those just make us look wiser.”

  “Let’s go lie down. I’m so tired.”

  They moved to the bed, but Jamie felt a stronger urge draw him, stronger than his need for sleep. He ran a hand over her naked backside and felt his manhood swell. He pressed his tumescent flesh against the cleft of Elaine’s buttocks.

  “Is that what I think it is? You can’t be serious.”

  Elaine turned around, smiling devilishly and hugging her naked body to her husband, crushing his erection against her stomach. She reached between them and took his hard organ in hand, stroking it gently.

  “We’ve been so busy, we haven’t taken our new bodies for a test-drive yet. Let’s make love. We can sleep after.”

  They kissed. It was a desperate, passionate kiss. Their tongues were at war between their joined lips. He sucked the air from her lungs as he crushed her body to his. Together they fell to the bed, lips, tongues, and writhing limbs intertwined like two clumsy teenagers racing toward ecstasy for the first time. He entered her from behind, grinding her face into the pillow as he thrust deep inside her.

  Elaine’s body looked even slimmer now than it had just moments ago, as if she was losing weight minute by minute. He could see her ribcage through her back. Her vertebrae bulged through her skin, looking reptilian, like the bony plates on a dinosaur’s back. He withdrew and rolled her over onto her back before entering her again in the missionary position. From the front, her weight loss was even more dramatic. Her breasts had shriveled like prunes. The nipples looked like two withered raisins. He could see every bone in her chest. Worse, he could feel himself getting hungry again.

  They switched positions again. This time, Elaine was on top. Her skeletal face looked down at him, eyes gleaming with hunger and madness. He didn’t remember her looking this emaciated earlier. It was as if their lovemaking was somehow accelerating her metabolism. Perhaps it was just because she was so small, only five foot four, and had weighed only 116 pounds when she’d weighed herself this morning. There had been so little nutrients left for her body to consume. Now it was apparently cannibalizing her muscle tissue.

  Elaine smiled down at him. Her teeth looked all wrong, long and sharp and red. When she bit him, Jamie hardly noticed. He had already bitten off one of her breasts and was chewing it and swallowing it when she tore out his throat.

  7

  “Mom! I’m hungry! I need something to eat!”

  There were locks on the pantry door, the refrigerator, and even the cupboard where the coffee, tea, and spices were kept. Star Mourning tugged at the refrigerator door with all her might, muscles straining, sweat and tears bulleting down her face.

  “I’m starving!”

  “Don’t be silly. You just ate. You’re just being greedy. How do you expect to lose weight if you keep eating everything?”

  “But I am losing weight! Look at me!” Star was about five foot five and had weighed more than two hundred fifty pounds before her parents took her to the Aphrodite Aesthetic Reconstruction Clinic. On the drive to the airport, her mom had described some of the services they performed at the clinic: lap-band surgery, liposuction, wiring your jaw shut, feeding you through IV tubes, extreme exercise and diet programs, and plastic surgery. To Star, it had sounded like a house of horrors.

  She was terrified and had cried during the entire drive to the airport. On the plane to Cancun, Star wept silently and refused to eat. Then, when they arrived at the clinic after a half-hour taxi ride and twe
nty minutes on a ferry, they sat with Dr. Sarai Mahendru, a tall, slender, Persian woman with long black hair, a perfect nose, big perky breasts she had obviously not been born with, and cat-like, multifaceted almond eyes.

  “We have a new procedure one of our doctors has just developed that may be of interest to you. It’s expensive, but it’s permanent and only requires a single treatment.”

  “What’s the treatment?” Star asked.

  “If it works, we’ll take it,” her mother interrupted. Star cast a disapproving look at her mother, who crushed it in her own baleful gaze.

  “The treatment involves gene modification. Basically, we alter your genes so they tell your body to stop producing fat cells.”

  “And how do you do that?”

  “Recombinant DNA. We inject the new DNA directly into your bloodstream via a genetic retrovirus.”

  “A virus? I don’t want a virus! No way!”

  “It’s completely safe. The virus is just used to spread the new DNA through your system. It’s a transport system. It’s completely harmless,” the doctor said, smiling wide. Her teeth were perfectly straight and brilliantly white. Star suspected they were all either caps or dental implants. Most likely a combination of the two. The woman probably bleached her asshole and likely had had cosmetic surgery on her vagina so the labia were neat and trimmed and tucked perfectly inside her Brazilian-waxed clam. Star giggled and shook her head at the absurdity of the beauty-obsessed woman.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw her mother’s tanned complexion redden, her jaws tighten, and her nostrils flare.

  “Enough! No more argument. The doctor says it works. You’re getting it. Or do you want to stay fat forever?”

  Star looked away from her mother, wiping a tear from her eye. She lowered her head and fell silent.

  Alexis Mourning was an intimidating woman even to those she had not given birth to. She was more than an actress, she was a film icon who had starred in some of the most awarded and celebrated Hollywood productions of the last two decades. She was also stunningly beautiful. At forty-five, with the lithe, toned physique of a teenaged ballerina, she was the envy of women half her age. She had no wrinkles, no age spots or blemishes, and not an ounce of excess adipose tissue. Even the few wisps of gray in her raven-black hair made her look somehow more elegant, and she was universally praised for not coloring it. Her eyes were the type of blue poets wrote sonnets about, and her lips were perfectly bee-stung. What few outside the immediate family knew was that almost none of it was real. She starved herself, worked out like a madwoman, and regurgitated whatever extra calories she allowed herself to indulge in. When that didn’t work, she rushed off to the plastic surgeon for some liposuction or spent an extended weekend being fed through IV tubes.

  Her breasts were silicone bags molded by the skilled surgeons at the Aphrodite Clinic to have just the right amount of bounce and sag. It was enough to fool the most keen observer into believing they were real, but the greatest work of art was her face.

  Alexis Mourning’s ageless, wrinkle-free face was a tapestry of strategically placed surgical scars. Most were hidden along her hairline; the other faint, trace scars were masked behind a layer of custom designer makeup engineered to flawlessly match her natural complexion. Her pouty lips were filled with fat sucked out of her stomach and ass. Even her long, lustrous hair was full of extensions and expensive hair products. She was every bit as obsessed with beauty as Dr. Mahendru. They were mirror images of each other.

  Star knew her mother was repulsed by her obesity. Star could see the disgust on her mother’s face every time she looked at her and in every sarcastic word she uttered about her appearance. Her so-called “words of encouragement” were just mean-spirited jabs that hurt and sent Star scurrying to the candy store in defiance. She hadn’t taken her daughter to a movie premiere or a public event in years, not since the baby fat had multiplied.

  Without consulting a doctor or a health specialist of any sort, her mother diagnosed Star with Prader-Willi Syndrome at the age of four, mistaking a normal healthy appetite for a condition characterized by an inability to efficiently convert fat into energy, leading to intense hunger pangs and a constant, insatiable urge to eat. Her solution was to starve her young daughter, putting locks on the refrigerator and pantry and restricting her to 750 calories a day. Star rebelled, hoarding food in her room and binging on junk food at school. Each time she was caught with candy and pastries stuffed under her mattress, in her mother’s mind it reconfirmed her diagnosis. Her daughter was sick. She couldn’t stop eating. Her hideous corpulence was ample evidence.

  Now, as Star’s body consumed itself and she shed pounds by the hour, gnawing hunger pains turning her guts inside out, her cries for food seemed to her anorexic mother like another symptom of her disease.

  “Mom, please! I’m dying! I’m so hungry!”

  “You’re not dying. You’re becoming beautiful! The treatment is working! Look at you! You’re almost skinny!”

  Star turned and looked at herself in one of the full-length mirrors her mother had hung on the back of every door in the house as a punishment, to remind her of what a fat cow she had allowed herself to become. Only now, the girl who looked back at her was not fat at all. There were still a few bulges here and there. Her hips were still wide and her thighs were thicker than they should have been, but far from the elephantine pillars they had been just yesterday. The rolls of fat under her chin had reduced from two to one. Her FUPA (fat upper-pussy area) as her mother called it, a large roll of gelatinous flesh that bulged out from just below her navel and hung down over vagina, had completely disappeared. She was losing weight, a dramatic, terrifying amount of weight in so short a time. She must have dropped seventy pounds in the thirty-six hours since she’d had the treatment.

  “Something’s wrong, Mom. I’m losing too much weight.”

  Her mother waved her off with a flick of the wrist, a chuckle, and an exasperated roll of her eyes.

  “Don’t be silly, Star. You can never lose too much weight. As Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, said, ‘A woman can’t be too skinny or too rich.’ If you’re hungry, here’s a rice cake.” She pulled out a pack of rice cakes she’d stashed in her oversized Prada handbag and reached inside to grab one of the crisp, Styrofoam-textured discs from the package.

  Snarling, Star launched herself across the room, leaping like some sort of overweight housecat attacking a bag of catnip, and snatched the entire package from her mother’s hands. She crashed against the kitchen wall in a heap, knocking over the table in the kitchen nook, denting the drywall, and smashing one of the kitchen chairs. She began mindlessly shoveling handfuls of rice cakes into her mouth.

  “Jesus! What’s gotten into you? That’s disgusting! I said you could have one. You give those back, young lady! You’re eating like an animal!”

  Star watched her mother reach for her food, and a sudden, overwhelming rage surged through her. Her lips peeled away from her teeth, and a snarl rumbled up from her throat. She lashed out so suddenly and savagely, her mother barely had time to react before Star’s curiously elongated canines clamped down on her hand.

  8

  “She bit me! I feel terrible. Cramps. I can’t move,” Alexis groaned.

  “Where is she now?”

  “I pushed her inside her room and locked it from the outside. She can’t get out.”

  Trevor had a moment to wonder why her daughter’s room locked from the outside.

  “I can’t move!”

  “It’s from the bite. I think she may have some kind of neurotoxin in her saliva. The effect should pass soon. Has she had anything to eat?”

  “No. She keeps trying to get to the food, but I won’t let her. She’s trying to undo all the work you did!”

  “Listen, Mrs. Mourning. Something went wrong with the procedure. You have to feed her, and I mean a lot. Do you understand? She needs a lot of food or your daughter will die.”

  There was a long pa
use.

  “Do you hear me, Mrs. Mourning?”

  “I-I can’t do that.”

  “You have to. Your daughter is losing weight too rapidly. She’s starving to death. You have to feed her.”

  “But she’ll get fat again. You should see how she looks. She’s lost so much weight. She looks gorgeous! The procedure worked, Doctor!”

  The flight attendant was heading toward Trevor, staring at the phone in his hand. He had only a few seconds before she would tell him to turn off his phone.

  “I’ll be there in about four and a half hours. If you don’t feed her, she’ll be dead by then. She needs to eat every two hours.”

  “Every two hours! I’m not doing that! You’re trying to make my little baby fat again!”

  The flight attendant was standing directly above him now. “Sir, you have to turn off your phone. We’re getting ready for takeoff.”

  “I’m a doctor. I have a patient on the phone. It’s a critical life-or-death situation. Please, please indulge me for just a few more minutes, okay?”

  “I’m sorry, but you have to hang up.”

  “One minute? Come on, be cool, okay? I’ll be off in one minute. A little girl is going to die if I can’t make her mother understand what she needs to do.”

  The desperation in his voice made the flight attendant pause. She looked out into the main coach cabin. Trevor turned to look and saw a steely eyed man wearing a dusty brown leather jacket over a white T-shirt and jeans.

  The man undid his seatbelt and started getting out of his seat.

  Air marshal. Fuck.

  “Please?”

  She waved the man off, and he returned to his seat. His hard eyes were still fixed on Trevor.

  “You’ve got one minute,” the flight attendant whispered, wagging a finger at him in stern warning.

  “Thank you. Thanks so much.”

  Trevor cupped his hand over the cell phone.