"If he real y did cook and eat that guy in Oregon, then it's probably safe to assume that he's no longer interested in a cure."
Professor Locke hoped that this wasn't the case, but that response seemed to satisfy the two detectives.
"Okay Doc, if you think of anything else we'l be around."
"Around here?"
"Yeah, just in case he shows back up."
"But you just said he was in
Washington?"
"No, you said he was probably going to Washington. Al we have is the very strong suspicion that he was recently in Oregon kil ing a man he may or may not have kidnapped from the Bay Area. They may have just gone on a camping trip and he came right home once he was ful. We've alerted the Washington and
Oregon police departments, and if they catch him then we'l drive up there to claim him. Until then we're staying right here."
The detectives didn't smile when they shook the professor's hand. They whispered to each other and repeatedly glanced back at him over their shoulders as they walked up the aisle and out the back door. Professor Locke suspected that there would be a car in his rearview mirror when he drove home tonight and perhaps a milk truck fil ed with surveil ance equipment and bored undercover cops parked across the street from his house. He hoped that
Joseph wouldn't cal him again until he could figure out how to shake the suspicion off of him.
Professor Locke left the lecture hal and dashed out into the misty steel gray morning. The damp early morning fog crept beneath his clothing and chil ed his skin as he made his way toward the
Sociology Building where Professor
Douglas was just finishing classes.
"Douglas."
"What's up, John?"
"Those detectives were back in my classroom toay.
"What did they want?"
"It looks like Joseph has kil ed again. They found a body in Oregon roasted on a spit. It was a guy from the Bay Area. That black detective said the guy had frequented the same website that
Joseph did and that they had more than likely met each other there. It was a cannibal website."
"Jesus! Roasted alive?"
"Apparently so."
"And do they have anything positively linking Joseph to the crime? Any DNA or forensic evidence?"
"Not that they indicated, but who knows?
They probably wouldn't have told me anyway."
"Did you tel them about your theory?
That you think he's going to Tacoma to confront Damon Trent?"
"No. And I'd like to ask you not to mention it either. "
Professor Douglas's eyebrows rose in surprise. "Oh, and why not?"
"Because I think I can cure him. I've been doing more research on serotonin reuptake inhibitors and I think this wil work."
"Yeah, that's if he real y does have an impulse control disorder. If he's just a sick fucker and it isn't some addictive disease then it won't do a damned thing and you'l be guilty of harboring a fugitive, and possibly aiding and abetting. You might even find yourself an accessory to murder if he kil s again while in your care. And have you thought of the possibility that you might be putting yourself in real physical danger by confronting him? The kid is huge.
How do you think you'd stop him if he decided to add you to his menu?"
"I don't think that wil happen, and just in case, I'l be armed."
"This is starting to sound real sketchy, John. You're going to go out armed with a gun to confront a murder suspect whom you've already aided by deliberately misleading the police? I want no part of this."
"Before you say that, think of what would happen if we were right. What happens if the inhibitors work and we cure him?
Think about offers of tenure from Ivy
League universities. Think about making history. Thousands of dol ars on the lecture circuit. Magazine articles. Think about the Nobel Prize."
"The Nobel Prize? Real y?"
"It's that big. We would go down in history if we could find a cure for the pathology of serial murder. And think of how many lives we'd save. They estimate that more than three hundred people a year are kil ed by serial murderers. That's nothing compared to the thousands that are kil ed every year in this country by drug gangs and street violence, but consider that that's more than the murder rate for the entire country of Great Britain. Consider al those families who have to live with the image of their loved one spending their last minutes on earth being tortured and mutilated by some lunatic stricken with a mental disease that we could have cured. Think about Joseph Miles out there adding to the body count when we may have the power to stop him."
"Okay, John. I'l keep my mouth shut."
"I need more from you than that,
Douglas. I need your help in capturing
Joseph. I can't do it by myself. You've got some vacation time coming up, don't you? Let's go to Washington."
"You're crazy. There's no way I'm going to actively participate in this."
"I need you, Douglas. When was the last time you took a risk and did something daring? No guts, no glory. You lecture about the hero's journey in mythology every day, but you're unwil ing to take that journey yourself? We're not getting any younger. Soon the most heroic thing we'l be able to do is sign a `do not resuscitate' order so that our loved ones don't have to watch us waste away in a hospital bed for months on end. This might be it. Our last chance to make a mark on the world."
"I don't know, John."
"Come on. The Nobel Prize, man! No guts. No glory!"
"Al right, you got me. Where do we start?"
Chapter Thirty-eight
Alicia lay shivering atop the bloodstained mattress with Joe lapping the blood off her exposed rib cage. Her blood pressure was plummeting. She was going into shock.
"You said you wouldn't hurt me. You promised," she gasped as she watched the big predator chew and swal ow the last of her once voluptuous bosom. His body shook with an orgasm. Some of his semen landed on her face and she licked it from her lips as it dribbled down her forehead onto her mouth. She stil relished the taste of him. She stil loved watching him cum. Despite her feelings watching him cum. Despite her feelings of betrayal, she loved the fact that it was her flesh that had given him this pleasure. Some twisted part of her stil loved him, even though she knew that she would be dead soon if she didn't get to a hospital. She was losing a ton of blood.
Her voice seemed to snap him out of his rapture. He looked down at the ruin he'd made of his beloved Alicia and his heart crashed to the floor like a stone.
"I-I… I didn't mean to. I didn't want to-to… I'm so sorry."
His eyes fil ed with tears.
"I'm dying."
"But you can't. You can't die!" Joe's eyes were wild with fear as he realized that he could see her exposed rib cage. No one could live in that condition.
"Get me to a hospital." Her voice was weak, barely more than a whisper.
"Okay. Okay. I'l do it. Hold on. I'l take care of you."
Alicia blacked out. Her eyelids slammed shut with the finality of a stage curtain at the end of the final act. Joe scooped her up in the blood-soaked blanket and carried her limp body out to the van. He knew exactly which hospital he would take her to.
Minutes later, Joe pul ed up outside the state hospital. He sprinted across the parking lot and into the emergency ward with Alicia cradled in his arms, shivering from the massive loss of blood and fading in and out of consciousness.
"Help! I need help!"
Two nurses came rushing from behind the desk and an orderly raced down the hal pushing a gurney.
"What happened to her?" asked a petite young Asian RN as she rushed to Joe's side.
"She was attacked by two pit bul s right outside our apartment. They almost tore her apart."
"Get her into surgery! She's lost a lot of blood."
"Is she going to be okay?" Joe asked, careful to keep his curiously sharpened, bloodstained teeth tucked behind his lips lest he immediate
ly make himself a suspect. Alicia was now lying on the gurney with blood stil pumping steadily from the massive wounds in her chest.
The other nurse, a tal formidable-looking black woman with shoulder-length hair extensions and a wandering eye that made her look almost sinister, pressed two handfuls of gauze and a towel to
Alicia's chest in an effort to staunch the flow of blood. Alicia's eyes rol ed up in her head and she began to convulse as she went into hypovolemic shock. Saliva foamed from her lips and sweat bul eted down her face.
"Oh no! No!" Joe reached for her and the slight Asian nurse seized his wrist and managed to turn him completely around with almost no effort at al. She then placed an arm on his shoulder in a reassuring embrace as if to conceal the fact that she'd just used a very effective aikido move on him that had almost shattered his wrist.
"You just wait here. We'l take care of her. We need to contact the police and you're going to have to file a report."
"Okay, just take care of her," Joe replied, a look of genuine concern on his face even as he rubbed his wrist.
Joe backed away as they rushed Alicia down the hal and into surgery. He hadn't meant for it to happen like this. It wasn't supposed to be her.
His plan had been to tear into a stranger and to use her or him to gain access to the hospital, but seeing Alicia lying there looking so delicious, he had lost control and grievously injured, perhaps even kil ed, the one thing in this world he truly loved. He was completely out of control now and even more convinced that he didn't want to spend the rest of his life this way. He was becoming little more than an animal. Even now, with his heart col apsing beneath the weight of his guilt and sorrow over the harm he'd caused
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.
She probably hated him now. If she survived she'd never love him again. He was certain of it, but stil it didn't matter. He didn't believe that love conquered al but he knew that he would do whatever it took to win her heart. And that if he didn't break this curse he would never know any happiness but that of the flesh. Love would forever be an impossibility. There was no way he could continue on like this. It was either break the curse now or wait until he started to sprout fur and a tail and was locked up in a freak show somewhere. Even if he wasn't actual y turning into a werewolf or a vampire he was becoming a monster. He was not human in any recognizable sense of the word. Whatever was happening to him, he could feel himself changing more and more with each kil. He looked down at the orderly's broken body and at his own blood-soaked palms. His lifeline was a river of red. He could feel the hunger gaining momentum, gaining everincreasing control. Reason was slowly becoming little more than a tool of his appetite.
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