Voracious (3 page)

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.

In addition to all the food in the pantry, Nathan had drank all the breast milk Lillian pumped before taking off for Manhattan. There was nothing for Junior to eat until Philippe came back. Nathan plopped a pacifier in the baby’s mouth. A few desperate sucks and a brief moment of silence and then Nathan laid his son back in his crib, and the boy spit out his pacifier and began wailing again. Nathan clamped his hands over his ears. His head felt like it had been struck with an axe, and the hunger was so much worse now. He shoved the pacifier back in Junior’s mouth. He sucked it twice and spit it out again. Nathan repeated the motion two more times, pacifier in, pacifier out, before giving up and clamping a hand over Junior’s mouth to silence him.

“Shut. Up.”

His hand covered the boy’s entire face, mouth, nose, and eyes. It wasn’t long before the boy fell silent. Nathan panicked. He lifted his son to his face to be sure he was still breathing. He listened for a heartbeat. It was there, steady and strong. The boy had merely passed out from lack of oxygen, but he would be fine. Nathan smelled him. He smelled so much better now that his diaper had been changed, like baby powder and that fresh, doughy, new-baby smell that reminded Nathan of fresh-baked bread. Nathan’s mouth began to water-and then he bit Junior’s arm.

He did it without thinking, sucking his son’s chubby little arm into his mouth and biting down. The boy woke up screaming, and Nathan clamped a hand over the boy’s face again. This time he held it there long after the boy had fallen silent again. He removed his hand and put his ear to Junior’s chest. He could no longer hear his son’s heartbeat. All Nathan was aware of was that wonderful new-baby smell and that soft, supple, new-baby skin, and that tender, succulent, new-baby meat that seemed to melt in his mouth with each bite. It was like eating an apple, a juicy living apple with dimples and eyes just like Nathan’s.

4 

On a soundstage in Studio City, preparations were underway for another evening of live entertainment. It was the most popular show on television. Young vocalists lined up outside the studio for hours, hoping for their shot at instant stardom. The three celebrity hosts were Lionel Douglas, a young record producer from London who’d been responsible for some of the biggest musical acts of the nineties; Diane Taylor, an overmedicated pop vocalist from the late-eighties/ early nineties; and Samuel “Big Easy” Saldeine, one of the hottest and most sought-after music producers in the business.

Big Easy had made millions producing top-forty hits for some of the biggest names in the music industry. He’d been the man behind the scenes for pop and R&B divas, hip-hop moguls, and rock superstars. Now he was center stage, and all eyes were about to be on him and his two co-hosts. That’s why he’d gone to the Aphrodite Aesthetic Reconstruction Clinic for their latest miracle weight-loss cure. He’d lost more than ninety pounds since the treatment and was now down to a svelte one hundred eighty pounds at six-foot-four-and he was starving. He’d been eating without relent since the treatment. His dressing room was littered with the remains of fruit and cold-cut trays, the carcasses of turkeys, chickens, and various fish, along with bones from random cow and hog parts.

“Hey! Big Easy! You ready for this?” asked the annoyingly ebullient producer/ director with the dyed blond quaff and gloriously white capped-teeth.

“Let’s just get this shit started. I’m fucking starving!” he growled. Ever since the treatment, since the hunger had come on like the apocalypse, his temper had grown shorter. He’d yelled at waiters, argued with room service, threatened the pizza delivery man, and almost made one of the caterers cry this morning when she’d run out of meat. It wasn’t lost on him that all the incidents had involved food.

“Really? I heard catering just sent a full stuffed turkey to your dressing room a couple hours ago. You didn’t eat?” the producer asked.

“Yeah, I ate it. Now I’m hungry again. What the fuck does it matter to you? Just get this shit going so I can get to dinner!”

The producer raised an eyebrow and snickered. “A whole turkey? And that wasn’t dinner?”

Big Easy lost his trademark even temper. He rose from his chair and stormed over to the producer, seconds before the show was supposed to go live. His co-hosts had just taken their places on stage and were staring at him like he’d lost his mind. He wasn’t sure he hadn’t. All he could think about was eating, and anything that came between him and his next meal was his mortal enemy. Right now, that was the hyperactive producer with the Colgate smile.

“What are you doing? We’re live in thirty seconds!”

“Are you calling me greedy? Is that it? I’ve got a thyroid problem. I’m not fucking greedy! You think I’m fuckin’ fat, you snotty sonofabitch!”

The producer raised his hands and took a few steps back, smiling and chuckling, still seemingly unconcerned with the angry, six-foot-four-inch man charging toward him.

“Whoa! Whoa! We’re cool, man. We’re cool. You are trippin’, Easy.” He shook his head and snickered again. That was what finally pushed Big Easy over the edge. He balled up his fists.

“Are you laughing at me, motherfucka?”

“I’m just sayin’, you’re talkin’ like you still weigh three hundred pounds. Have you looked at yourself lately? Whatever you’re doing, exercise, meth, crack, that shit is workin’. So lighten the hell up, dude. Don’t go all ghetto on me now. We’ve got ten seconds to air.”

“Don’t tell me to fuckin’ lighten up, motherfucka! You wanna see ghetto? I’ll show your bitch-ass ghetto!”