Voracious (12 page)

Tammy was still hungry when her mother put her to bed. She wore her eye patch just as Dr. Savaresse had instructed her to do and crawled beneath the covers. Her mom and dad kissed her good night. Her mother had just gotten out of the shower, and the smell of her clean skin made Tammy’s mouth water. Her stomach growled. It felt like it was eating itself.

“Can I have a snack before bedtime?”

Her father shook his head. “You’ve been eating all day, sweetie. Enough’s enough. We’ll make you a nice breakfast in the morning. Okay?”

Tammy shook her head. “No! I need to eat now! I’m hungry now!”

Her head whipped sideways and her left cheek sang out in pain. Her father had slapped her across the face. The blow made her new eyes throb, and she hoped he hadn’t damaged them.

“You watch your damned mouth, young lady! You will eat when I say you can eat! Do you understand?”

Her father was a big, barrel-chested man. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with hands like catcher’s mitts. His red hair and beard made him look like a lumberjack in a business suit. Tammy thought he looked like the Greek god Zeus, only with red hair. His voice was deep but powerful. It boomed like thunder when he was agitated or excited.

Tammy began to cry. It wasn’t the pain of her father’s blow but the hunger clawing through her guts that hurt so much more. “I’m hungry, Daddy!”

“You’ll eat in the morning!” He stormed out of the room and slammed the door, dragging Tammy’s mother out with him.

Tammy could still hear them arguing about her in the hallway. It was nothing new. They argued every night, and if Tammy wasn’t the cause of the argument, her name was usually dragged into it at some point.

“Maybe there’s something wrong with her. It might have something to do with the medications she’s on for the pain and the anti-rejection medications. She has lost an awful lot of weight.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that damn kid. The doctor would have told us if there was something wrong. She’d just spoiled.”

“Not by you, she isn’t. You couldn’t even come to the hospital the day your daughter saw for the first time in four years!”

“I had to work! If I wasn’t out there busting my hump, you wouldn’t be able to stay home and spoil her rotten the way you do!”

“I’m going to look up the symptoms of those medications on the Internet. I’m telling you, something’s wrong with her.”

“So, no sex tonight again?”

“You’ve got a hand.”

Tammy tossed and turned, unable to sleep. She’d never been this hungry in her life. She moaned and whined, kicked her covers off, then pulled them back up and wrapped them around herself, and then kicked them off again. She was hot. It felt like she was burning up from the inside. Sweat bulleted down her face, soaking her pajamas and sheets.

Tammy called out to her parents. “Can I get some water?”

“No! You’ll wet the bed!”

Tammy was almost nine. She hadn’t wet the bed in months. She climbed out of bed and began to pace. She could still hear her parents arguing down the hall behind their bedroom door, but she could no longer make out what they were saying. All she had to do was wait until they fell asleep and she could raid the refrigerator. It wouldn’t be long now. They would get tired of hating each other soon.

It was after midnight when Tammy’s parents finally fell asleep. Tammy was starving by then. Her stomach was in knots. Her mouth hurt. Her teeth felt too big, and they kept cutting her lip. The blood tasted so good she started doing it on purpose, biting into her bottom lip just to taste something, anything. Her hands were different too. Her nails had grown. They were dark and ugly, like a witch’s. She was turning into a monster. Everything would be all right as soon as she got something to eat. She could feel it.

Tammy couldn’t wait any longer. She opened her door and crept down the hall on her tiptoes. She raised her eye patch but resisted the urge to turn on the lights. The night was crushing down on her from all sides. She felt like Pinocchio’s Papa Geppetto creeping through the belly of a whale-the way she’d felt when she’d first lost her eyesight. But she knew her way around the house. Four years of blindness had made her accustomed to the night.

Deftly, Tammy avoided the living room couch, the floor lamp, the coffee table, the bookcase with the leather-bound first editions that nobody read, and the china hutch filled with dishware they’d never used. She crept into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. She was salivating profusely, and her stomach was in agony. There was no way to avoid the little light in the fridge. If her parents were really asleep it wouldn’t matter, and if they weren’t, they would hear her anyway.

Tammy groped around the refrigerator. Her eyesight was still fuzzy, and she was accustomed to relying more on her other senses. She grabbed a doggie bag her parents brought home from a restaurant they’d gone to while she was still in the hospital, and she sniffed it. There was a piece of lamb with mint jelly, wasabi mashed potatoes, and green beans and baby carrots. She tipped the bag up and dumped its contents into her mouth. She quickly chewed it up and reached back into the fridge, feeling around until her fingers landed on her mother’s Greek yogurt. She ripped off the lid and scooped it out with her fingers. She’d eaten half the cup when she heard the heavy footsteps behind her.

Someone grabbed her from behind and jerked her to the floor. “What the fuck are you doing out of bed?”

The cup of yogurt splattered across the floor. Tammy lifted her eye patch and stared down at the milky curds smeared across the tiles. Her stomach growled, and then she growled as well. Without thinking, she bit the hand that held her down, gouging her teeth deep into the skin and crunching down on her father’s thick phalanges. A finger came off in her mouth and she chewed it absentmindedly as her father began to scream.

A blow struck the side of her head, and everything went fuzzy and dark and stayed that way. One of her new corneas had detached. It didn’t matter; she could hear her father’s cries, smell the sweaty, pissy stench of his fear. He was curled into a ball, moaning, whimpering, and crying out in pain. Tammy still had his finger in her mouth, crunching it up with jaws grown enormously powerful overnight. It didn’t taste bad. In fact, to her, it tasted as delicious as the lamb had moments ago.

Her father’s thrashing began to subside as the neurotoxin in Tammy’s saliva hit his nervous system, causing his muscles to seize. He grunted a few times, quivering and convulsing but unable to move. And Tammy was still hungry.

“Bill? Bill?”

Tammy’s mother ran down the hall in a cloud of perfume, panic, and hairspray. Tammy didn’t want to hurt her mother, but she didn’t want to relinquish her new meal either, and she’d defend it if she had to.

“Oh, my God! What are you doing?” Her mother ran over to her and tried to pry Tammy off her father’s chest. Tammy had eaten his trapezius muscle, chewed her way from the base of his neck down to his shoulder blade. The plate-shaped bone was clean of flesh. It glistened in the light of the open refrigerator door.

Tammy’s mother screamed and violently shook her. “What did you do? What did you do? Why?”

Her father trembled beneath her as he bled out from the ragged hole in his back and neck, going into shock.

Tammy shrugged. “I told you I was hungry, Mommy.” She continued her meal as her mother fainted, smacking her head on the granite countertop on the way to the floor. She would never awaken from the blow. In a few hours, Tammy would begin eating her mother as well. When they were both gone, the obese pederast next door was next. He’d touched her butt once and tried to shove her hand down his pants. Then he’d masturbated in front of her, thinking she wouldn’t know it was him because she couldn’t see. But she had known it was him, even though he didn’t say a word. She could smell his sweaty bacon and cheese scent and hear his labored, congested breathing, lungs suffocating beneath layers of blubbery fat. She licked her lips, thinking of all the delicious calories in that corpulent mountain of useless meat and tissue.

23 

Dr. Sarai Mahendru waited in the limousine at Cancun International Airport outside the private aviation terminal. In moments, her two most valuable doctors were due to arrive from their ordeal. Ever since she’d received their frantic back-to-back messages, she’d been obsessing over their dilemma. Two of the fourteen patients they’d treated in the last week had descended into madness and cannibalism. Her staff was now in the process of contacting the other twelve. One of them had died in an automobile accident, which presented a host of other issues. He’d been an organ donor and his organs and tissue had now gone out to more than eighteen people and could go to as many as thirty more. If those organs and tissue contained Dr. Trevor Adam’s retrovirus, there was no telling how many people were now infected. She needed help fixing this, and it had to be someone she trusted.

She’d called an old acquaintance from her days at Harvard Medical School, Professor Ryan Vivaan. He’d been a graduate student like her when she’d first made his acquaintance back in ‘98. Now he worked for India’s Ministry of Science and Technology in their genetic research facility. Before she’d discovered Dr. Trevor Adams, she’d been courting Professor Vivaan to join the clinic. He’d refused, citing ethical concerns. Convincing him to help rescue the clinic from the consequences of the very same ethical concerns he’d worried about had not been easy.

“Ryan? This is Sarai Mahendru. Do you have a moment?”

Though Sarai’s father was Indian, she had never learned the language, a fact that annoyed her father not nearly as much as it seemed to annoy Professor Vivaan. She could hear him let out a heavy sigh from the other end of the phone. Breathing heavy and rolling his eyes, as if the totality of life were one massive inconvenience was one of his more endearing character traits.

“I am very busy, Sarai. What can I do for you? Is this about risking my reputation by injecting fat, lazy, unhealthy Americans with DNA to make them look like they would if they ate properly and exercised?”

Sarai sighed. “Ryan, this is serious. I need your help. We have made some … mistakes. You were right.”

There was a long pause.

“Ryan?”

“I’m trying to decide if I should hang up before I get drawn into whatever madness you’ve created over there.”

“I’ll pay you twice your annual salary for one month of your time.”

“Two weeks, and I can back out at any time.”

“Okay, but I need you on a plane today.”

“Why so urgent?”

“I’ll explain everything when you get here.”

“Is this as bad as it sounds?”

“It’s worse. Much worse.” Sarai hung up.

Minutes later, the clinic’s private Gulfstream G-550 touched down. She felt a flutter in her stomach. Usually, the G-550 was reserved for their very wealthiest clients, though many of them preferred to use their own jets. Today it carried something terrifying, something Sarai could scarcely imagine.

It had been more than a decade since Sarai borrowed the hundred million from her family and various banks to convert the old Spanish hotel into a world-class medical resort. Then she was one of the world’s leading plastic surgeons. Now she was a bureaucrat who spent more time behind a computer than using a scalpel. After opening this place, she’d discovered that her greatest gift was her ability to recognize talent. Sarai lured Dr. David Ebersol to the clinic from his posh Beverly Hills facility by offering him a tenth of the profits in addition to his considerable salary, and with him, she’d gotten all his famous and affluent clients. Once they experienced recovering from surgery in a beachfront resort with a butler service, five-star meals prepared by their own personal chef, and served on fine china with real silverware, personal massages, in-room pool and Jacuzzi, word of mouth did the rest. It wasn’t long before the Aphrodite Aesthetic Reconstruction Clinic was bringing in hundreds of millions a year. Now it was all in jeopardy.

Sarai watched as two gurneys were carried off the plane, followed by the two doctors. She took a deep breath and stepped out of the limo. Two ambulances were parked on the runway. Sarai waved them over. The EMTs rushed to take charge of the two high-profile patients. Dr. Ebersol walked down the runway behind the gurney carrying Lelani. His expression was stoic, but Sarai had known him long enough to recognize the pain and anger roiling inside him. Only now did it occur to her that the man was in love with Lelani.

Trevor Adams stumbled down the runway in a loping, intoxicated swagger, wearing an expression of depression and defeat that made Sarai want to slap him sober. There was no time for anyone to check out, least of all the one responsible for the mess in the first place, though Sarai took her share of responsibility.

It had been her idea to recruit a geneticist. Sarai had seen it as the next logical step in the evolution of cosmetic medicine. And she knew the reputation of young Dr. Adams when she’d recruited him. His recklessness and willingness to break laws had been as big a selling point as his considerable genius. In hindsight, that had been a careless mistake on her part. She had to live with that mistake now.

She had pushed him to produce a new treatment they could market exclusively, and he had done precisely that. What he created was amazing. Sarai had been so impressed, she’d begun advertising it before animal trials were complete. The clinic booked the first twenty reservations for the new treatment before the first human trials had even begun. The new treatment had promised to make them all millions. Sarai watched as the results of her impetuousness was wheeled down the runway to the ambulance.

The woman was practically a corpse. There was no meat on her at all, just bones, thinly veiled in skin. Muscle and adipose tissue had been burned away by a metabolism that was clearly out of control. The girl’s bird-like chest rose and fell rapidly as she panted in a fitful narcotic-induced slumber. The girl’s heart pounded against her fragile ribcage. That the girl was still alive was a marvel. Her body was eating itself. It had devoured every ounce of subcutaneous tissue and was now cannibalizing her organs. There was little doubt in Sarai’s mind that the girl was dying.