Prey Drive (6 page)

There were four more guards in the room now, SORT officers in riot gear, the penitentiary version of SWAT. They looked eager for a fight, like fighting dogs tugging at their leashes. Joseph knew he couldn’t take them. Those guys were trained to be quick and efficient. When Joseph killed, it was messy, sloppy, crimes of passion. He would stand no chance against them. Still, he continued his act. It may not help him this day, but one day Joseph knew that letting them think he was helpless would give him the element of surprise, and that might be all he needed.

Joseph stumbled along as he was led over to the PET scan and laid on his back. He was given a pillow and a blanket, and then what looked like virtual reality goggles were placed over his eyes.

“I’m going to be showing you some pictures,” the professor explained. “I don’t want you to say anything. I just want you to look at each picture while I take a scan of your brain. Do you understand?”

Joseph nodded.

“It’ll just take the scanner a few minutes to warm up.”

The professor pressed a button and the big machine began making a series of loud hums and clicks. A few minutes later, the professor pressed another button next to the platform upon which Joseph lay and it slid inside the big machine. Joseph felt his shoulders roll inward as he slid into the long cylindrical machine. It was almost too small for him and the walls of the machine pressed tight against his sides. In moments, pictures began to flash in front of him.

At first the images were simple. A baby smiling, a kitten playing with a toy, a puppy, a fireman, then a woman with large breasts in a bikini, then a naked woman, then a dead woman who’d been eviscerated, breasts cut off, abdomen cut open, then a piece of bloody meat, then a woman in red lingerie, then a woman’s headless torso, and then a woman bound and gagged, and on and on. Joseph watched with interest. He was just as intrigued to discover what aroused him, what repulsed him, and what elicited no response at all. He was learning more and more about himself, but he knew none of this would cure him.

The image of a voluptuous woman with breasts like beach balls flashed on to the screen and Joseph thought immediately of Alicia. He missed her, but her memory never brought him sadness. Quite the opposite. Remembering the beautiful zaftig Spanish woman who’d traveled with him to Seattle in search of a cure for his curse, the woman he’d eaten alive over the course of several hours and then completely consumed in a matter of days, always aroused him, and now was no exception. He reached into his loose-fitting, prison-issued pants and began to stroke his hardening penis, mindless of the officers and the professor watching him.

More images of large naked women and dismembered corpses flashed before his eyes. Joseph jerked and tugged on his turgid flesh, licking his palm and rubbing the swollen head of his cock, feeling the orgasm build slowly within him. Then the images changed.

The next photo was of the librarian, his first victim. It was a picture of her at a party wearing a low cut dress. The next photo was of charred bones on an autopsy table. He could only guess that they were the librarian’s remains. The next photo was of Frank, the masochistic homosexual Joseph kidnapped and dragged with him halfway to Tacoma to use as a snack. It was a crime scene photo of Frank’s body, still smoldering, still on the spit where Joseph had left him after devouring his meatiest parts. Joseph continued to masturbate, aroused by the memories the photos were allowing him to relive.

Next was a picture of the transvestite prostitute and her pimp Joe had murdered at that rundown motel in Washington. After that came an image of the orderly he’d murdered to gain access to Damon Trent. This one did nothing for him. That had been a crime of necessity, passionless. Then Damon Trent’s corpse flashed on to the screen and he felt a surge of white-hot rage sear through his mind. His teeth clenched and his muscles tightened. He was surprised by how much hatred he still had for the man. Even knowing the fat pedophile hadn’t been the one who’d made him into a monster, he still hated the man for what he’d done to him.

Next came another crime scene photo. This one was of Joe’s father, a stake through his heart, mouth filled with garlic and Bible pages. Joe’s anger came roaring back. If Damon hadn’t been responsible for the disease that had made Joe a murderous cannibal, then it was congenital, inherited from his father. Before Joe’s anger reached its limit, a new image flashed before his eyes. He gasped. His erection swelled anew and a warm smile softened his features. It was a picture of Alicia.

The photo had been taken long ago, before Joseph had ever met her. She was wearing a black lace negligee, cut low to reveal her massive cleavage. Her breasts were almost falling out of it and Joe thought he could make out one of her nipples peeking from the top of the garment. Her hair had been straightened and her long black locks spilled out over her shoulders and down her chest, framing her breasts. Her bow-shaped lips, painted dark red, were pursed as if she were preparing to blow a kiss. Her makeup was dark, almost sinister. She looked every bit the sultry vixen he’d followed around the sex club, desperate to meet. He began stroking himself again as he took in Alicia’s long thick legs and voluptuous hips and remembered how they’d felt and how they’d tasted.

Then the next photo flashed onto the screen. It was a picture of Alicia taken the day she’d been admitted to the hospital, after Joseph had eaten her breasts down to the ribcage, unable to control himself. Next came a photo taken at Alicia’s home. It was of her skeleton, picked clean, not an ounce of flesh remaining. Joseph stared at it and stroked himself more vigorously, tugging at his hardened flesh, remembering every moment of his last days with Alicia, how she’d begged him to eat every morsel of her flesh. She said she’d wanted to be part of him forever. He closed his eyes and recalled Alicia’s drowsy smile just before she succumbed to the drugs and the blood loss and the trauma of being slowly cannibalized. Her eyes had looked so peaceful. So beautiful. Joe wished she was here with him now … so he could fuck and eat her all over again. 

Seven 

“Hey! He’s jacking off in there! That sick fuck! Pull him out of there!” the CO said. He was in the booth with the professor and the SORT guys behind lead-lined glass to protect them from the sterilizing radiation from the PET scan.

“No! The experiment is not finished,” the professor answered.

“He’s getting off on this shit! What kind of experiment is it? Are you showing this sicko porn movies?” the CO asked.

“In a sense.”

“What? You trying to see what turns this twisted fucker on?”

“Yes, in a way, that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

The large corrections officer’s jaw dropped and his eyes bulged like they were ready to pop. “Y- you’re doing what? Does the warden know about this shit?”

The professor sighed. “Officer?”

“Belton.”

“Officer Belton, do you have any idea how much it costs to house a federal inmate?”

The burly corrections officer shook his head.

“It costs between twenty-seven and thirty-five thousand dollars a year. Now, do you know how much I’m paying the state of Washington for access to Joseph Miles? We have received hundreds of thousands in grant money and most of that is going directly to you guys. I’m paying your salary right now as we speak and if I don’t get what I want I’ll use all my influence to have Joseph transferred to another facility where the officers are more accommodating. My grant money will leave with me. It would then be your duty to explain my departure to the warden.”

The professor never raised his voice. His tone remained calm and non-threatening, but there was no doubt that he had just issued a very pointed threat.

“You win, Doc. You and your psycho can have your little peepshow. But I’m telling the warden about it.”

“Be my guest, Officer Belton.”

Inside the big computerized tomography scanner, Joe smiled.

Eight 

Back in his cell, Joe watched a guard slide mail through the slot in his door. It was a small stack of ten letters. There were fewer and fewer letters every day as Joe’s name faded from the headlines. At one time he’d received fifty or sixty letters a day from the curious. Most he never answered. Joe felt uncomfortable being a celebrity and found the idea of gaining fans by eating the woman he loved more perverse than the act itself. There were a few he answered, like Selene, the nude model who’d visited him in jail and fed him her nipple; a few “long pigs” he’d recognized from the now defunct long pig message board—long pig being the slang for human flesh (Joe often wondered what made these people tick … what made someone volunteer to be someone else’s dinner?); and several doctors, scientists, and professors—including Professor Theodore Acker, a psychologist from one of the big Ivy League colleges in Boston who was a rival of Dr. Locke—who were interested in his theories about what turned people into serial killers. There was even a celebrity sushi chef in San Francisco who sent him new recipes for the preparation of human flesh for consumption. The recipes all sounded delicious and inspired many fantasies. As the months passed, however, the communiqués dwindled. Now only his most hardcore fans wrote to him.

There was a letter from Selene in the stack. He smelled it. She’d sprayed it with perfume, but she’d also saturated it in her vaginal fluids and speckled it with her blood. It was a way to send Joe a message the guards could not understand or censor:
I’m yours. Take me.
He shuffled it to the bottom of the pile, saving it for later, wanting to savor it. He opened the next letter. It was from his younger cousin, Dirk. Dirk was one of those kids who was obsessed with serial killers, horror movies, and Goth music. The kid had been delighted to discover a famous serial killer in his own family, unlike the rest of Joe’s family who’d promptly disowned him. Dirk was now Joe’s only link to the rest of his family. Recently, Joe had been inquiring about his grandparents.

Yo, Cuz,

I asked my dad about Grandpa and you wouldn’t believe the crazy shit he told me. Your dad was adopted! From what they told me, Grandpa’s brother, Mike, went to prison for (get this shit) attempted murder! He tried to murder his own damn wife. She took off after the trial and Grandpa took you in. Your dad was Mike’s kid. Your dad and my dad had different moms and dads. They don’t know what happened to your real grandfather, this Mike dude. He never came back after he was released. Ain’t that a trip, Cuz?

Anyway, I just thought you’d like to know. I know everyone else in the family is kind of trippin’ about you killing your dad, but I understand. That fool was evil! All those kids he killed. He had it coming. Don’t worry, Cuz. I’m behind you 100 percent. You just let me know what I can do to help.

By the way, I’m saving up the cash for a bus ticket to come see you again. As soon as I get a car I’ll be coming up every weekend.

Talk to you soon, Cuz!

Luv,

Dirk

Joe smiled. The first time Dirk came to see him, Joe had given the kid a message for Selene, something he couldn’t put in a letter, something he didn’t want the guards to read. He was happy to hear the message had been passed along. He couldn’t wait to read Selene’s letter now, but he knew the guards were watching. They were always watching. Instead, he took the letter and rubbed it beneath his nose. He’d never made love to Selene in real life, but he did so now in his fantasies.

He reached into his pants and freed the monster. It was already hardening. It only took a few strokes to bring it to full mast. If the guards were watching him now, they would get a nice show.

In Joe’s mind Selene was in his bed, in his old apartment in downtown San Francisco. She was naked and she’d put on several pounds. Her hips, thighs, ass, and breasts were round and full. She cupped her breasts in her hands and lifted one up to her mouth, licking the nipple and then biting and sucking it as Joe stood above her, removing his clothes. She let one hand slide down between her thighs and began flicking her middle finger rapidly across her clitoris, which had swollen to the size of a grape. She rolled over onto her stomach and the most voluptuous ass Joe had ever seen wobbled into view. It was perfectly round, perched high on her back, and it was familiar. It was Alicia’s ass on Selene’s body. He lay on top of her and began kissing Selene’s neck, shoulders, all the way down her spine to the voluptuous cream-colored mounds of her buttocks.

Joe rubbed his cheek across the two corpulent globes of muscle and adipose tissue, delighting in the way the smooth flesh jiggled against his skin. He kissed and sucked each cheek and then flicked his tongue across the crack. Selene quivered and moaned. Joe kissed them again. He bit down hard on one of her buttocks, drawing blood, and then sucked it until it bruised. Selene screamed. It sounded like ecstasy. Joe licked the cleft between her buttocks, which sent another shiver through her, and then he wriggled his tongue deep into her clenched anus.

He could feel her tense and then begin to shake and thrash. Her body went wild as he fucked her tight ass with his tongue and then with a cock the length and girth of an infant’s arm. He bit down on the back of Selene’s neck like a mating lion as he thrust deep inside her, slow and easy at first and then with increasing force and urgency, racing toward orgasm. Joe ejaculated silently— alone—in his cell. His seed shot up onto his stomach and chest. He still gripped Selene’s letter in his hand, unopened. As he lay panting on the bed with his back pressed against the hard concrete wall, he marveled at the fact that he was able to reach orgasm without a single violent thought. Perhaps the professor’s treatments were working after all.

He picked up a few sheets of loose leaf from a stack on the floor by his bed and used them to wipe the semen from his hard, striated abdominal muscles and then placed each sheet on the floor to dry. He would use those to write her back.