Voracious (10 page)

Dr. Ebersol paused. His hand hovered over the elevator call button. What if he couldn’t stop Lelani? What if he became her next victim?

“I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve got my own problems over here.”

“What’s going on? Have you seen Lelani? Has she-you know-changed?”

“I don’t know. I just got here. The police are on their way. I think Lelani killed a few people. I don’t know. The building looks evacuated, almost. I think I saw her attack someone up there,” Ebersol said.

He was hoping the young doctor would tell him what he should do and felt foolish for having such a ridiculous thought. Trevor Adams was no one’s savior. He was just a selfish prick who happened to be a genius. As a human being, however, he was an emotional imbecile. That Ebersol was grasping for answers from the same reckless asshole who’d caused all this was a sure sign of his increasing desperation and fear. The reality was, he was on his own here. He took a deep breath and then pushed the elevator button.

“What are you going to do?” Trevor asked. “I mean, what should I do?”

“You need to get that girl sedated and get her to a hospital until we can get her back to the clinic. I’m going up to find Lelani. Keep trying to reach Sarai.”

“Oh, uh, okay. I will. Just be careful. Okay? Star-when I saw her attack that guy from the mental hospital-she had claws, man.”

“She had what?”

“She had these thick black claws. I think she might have fangs too. She’s metamorphosed into some kind of rabid animal. She’s taken on some of the physical characteristics of the shrew-claws, red fangs. I think she may even have some kind of neurotoxin in her saliva.”

“Have you examined her yet?”

“Uh, um, well, she’s still asleep on the front porch. I haven’t gone anywhere near her yet. I’m telling you, she slashed one guy’s face to ribbons and ripped the other guy apart. I-I’m not going anywhere near her until I get some help.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I called animal control,” Trevor answered.

“Who?”

Ebersol was sure he’d heard wrong. The elevator was quickly descending. He could feel his heart rate increase at the thought of ascending into the building. He pressed the button several more times, trying to get the elevator there quickly before the Austin PD invaded the building.

“Animal control. They’ll have a tranquilizer guns. I told them there was some kind of large animal out here attacking people. It was a half-truth.”

“They’re going to call the police the minute they get there if they haven’t called them already. You know that, don’t you?”

“What else could I do?”

The elevator arrived. When the doors opened, Dr. Ebersol screamed.

Inside the elevator was a slaughterhouse. Blood painted the walls and pooled on the floor an inch thick. What Ebersol could only assume was the woman he’d seen in the window lay in pieces. Her ribcage was completely exposed. Behind it, her heart fibrillated rapidly, the last vestiges of electrochemical activity still trying to restore her heartbeat. But one look at the ruin Lelani had done to the woman’s body made it clear that whatever spark of life remained within her flesh would soon be lost to the ether.

Her breasts were completely gone. One of her arms had been wrenched from its socket, and her throat had been savagely mauled. She’d been nearly decapitated. Her head hung precariously from a few masticated tendons.

But that wasn’t the worst of the damage. The woman had been gutted. Her torso had been ripped open, and her steaming intestines lay strewn around the elevator. Most of her internal organs were missing, and there was no question in his mind where they had gone.

Lelani stood above the corpse covered in gore from head to toe. Her hair was drenched with blood. Scraps of flesh clung to her face and clothes. She was chewing something. Dr. Ebersol looked down at the pinkish-brown, triangle-shaped organ she held in her hand, trailing two large arteries, and felt bile rise and scald the back of his throat. It was a piece of liver, a human liver. The hand that held it bared little resemblance to a human appendage. From the tips of each finger, knife-like claws as long and thick as the fingers themselves protruded. Blood and saliva drooled from her long crimson canines.

Ebersol’s legs shook. He felt lightheaded. This was so much more horrible than anything he could have imagined. “Lelani? It’s me. It’s Dr. Ebersol. It’s David.”

Lelani’s eyes were bloodshot. She looked at him, and for a moment, he saw nothing but hunger in her eyes. Not a hint of recognition. Not a hint of intelligence at all. She brought the bloody organ meat to her mouth and scarfed it down, still staring at Ebersol. He felt his stomach roll and threaten to revolt as he watched her chew the organ she’d ripped from the corpse behind her. The elevator doors began to close and then her eyebrows creased. She tilted her head slightly. She stopped the doors with one lethal-looking hand.

“David?”

“Yes. Yes, it’s me.”

“I’m so hungry. I’m so hungry, David.”

“I know. I know. I’m here to help you. I brought you some food. But we have to get you out of here. Understand? The police are coming. They want to lock you up. You have to come with me.”

Ebersol held up the bucket of chicken and wondered if it would be enough. He should have bought a lot more. Her appetite was a lot more than he’d expected. She snatched the bucket of chicken from his hands and began cramming one piece at a time into her mouth.

Going to the rental car was definitely out of the question. The street was slowly filling with police cars. They would be surrounding the building soon, trapping them inside then they’d come in after them.

“Where’s the parking garage? Can we get out that way?”

Lelani nodded between bites and then pointed below them. The garage was in the basement. That meant a ride in the elevator. There was no other way. Dr. Ebersol looked around the elevator at the shredded piles of flesh and blood-spattered walls. He steeled his nerves, stepped inside, and blood immediately drenched his Gucci loafers. He kept his eye on how much chicken was left in the bucket, hoping it would last until he could get her out of the building. Six of the twenty pieces were already gone. Lelani had shoved them into her mouth whole and was eating them, bones and all.

“Hurry up! Hurry up!” Ebersol said, punching the down button on the elevator. There were drugs in his car he could use to put her under. Until then, he just had to trust her not to eat him.

18 

The front door opened, and Alexis Mourning stepped out with a hypodermic needle. She knelt and quickly injected it into her daughter’s arm as the young girl lay sleeping, covered in blood and surrounded by masticated meat. Trevor hesitantly approached.

“Dr. Adams?”

“I got here as quickly as I could. I saw what happened.”

“What did you do to my little girl? She’s lost her mind!”

“What did you inject her with just now?”

“Ketamine. Dr. Linder brought it with him to sedate her in case she got violent. I can’t believe she tore his assistant apart like that. She ate him! Did you see that?”

Trevor nodded. He had seen it all. He was struggling now to keep from going into shock. He and Alexis stared at the corpse. This all seemed so impossible.

“Is that guy okay in there?”

Alexis shook her head.

“He’s in bad shape. I think Star punctured his eye and his face.”

“Will he live?”

Alexis nodded.

“I think so. He called the police. They’ll be here soon. They’re going to take my little girl to jail.”

“Listen to me, Alexis. I can fix this. I need to get her back to the clinic. Do you understand? That’s the only place I can help her. How much ketamine did he bring with him?”

She held up a bottle that contained 500ccs of ketamine. To keep Star unconscious the entire flight, he’d need to dose her with 10 mg an hour. It was enough to do the trick.

“We can take my private jet,” Alexis offered. “I’ll call ahead.”

“Good. That’s perfect. I’ll get her in the car.”

“Dr. Adams? Can I ask you something?” Alexis asked, pausing with the phone in her hand, a worried look on her face.

“Yes, Alexis? We don’t have much time. The police will be here any minute.”

“I just wanted to ask, after you get her back to the clinic and you cure her, will she still be skinny? I mean, she won’t get fat again, will she?”

Dr. Adams’s mouth hung open in astonishment. He didn’t know how to respond.

On the way to the airport, they passed billboard after billboard along the side of the freeway. There were ads for rum featuring a buxom, scantily clad woman with a dress size smaller than her shoe size. Another ad, for a tropical vacation getaway, showed a woman in a bikini looking out over the ocean as the sun set. The woman had hips narrower than those of a ten-year-old boy. They passed storefronts with mannequins in the window that were all a perfect size three. Even as they hit the off-ramp leading to the airport, billboards for nightclubs, automobiles, even an advertisement for a new housing development all featured women no bigger than the store mannequins.

The last billboard they passed as they turned into the airport parking lot was for a plastic surgery clinic. Not one of the exclusive Beverly Hills clinics he’d always dreamed of working in before being recruited by the Aphrodite Aesthetic Reconstruction Clinic. This was one of those chain operations that did boob jobs for four thousand dollars a pop. The woman on the poster looked like a Barbie doll. She had an impossibly small, Photoshopped waist and breasts so large they threatened to snap that twenty-inch waist in half from the sheer force of gravity. It was an impossible aesthetic ideal and one that he had promoted, his entire industry had promoted. He turned away and saw hotel ads featuring happy couples, all slender and fit, not a single indication of America’s obesity epidemic. It was all an illusion, and people were dying for it.

“Where’s your plane?”

“It’s over there, but we have to go through customs.”

“Not yet we don’t. We’re not taking your plane to Cancun. We’re flying to Florida. We’ll switch planes there and fly in on the clinic’s private airplane. It’ll be less suspicious having an unconscious girl strapped to a gurney with tubes sticking out of her if we’re flying to a medical facility. Besides, there’s medical equipment on the clinic’s jet we can use to keep her stabilized.”

Trevor rolled up her sleeves and gave her another shot, easing the needle into one of the throbbing blue veins that now crisscrossed her emaciated body like worms crawling under her skin. She barely stirred.

“Let’s go.”

19 

Ever since his kidney transplant, Jeffrey felt like a new man. After more than a year on the transplant list, he’d almost given up hope, and then some rich bastard gets annihilated by a police car and Jeffrey gets a new lease on life. It was funny how karma worked sometimes.

Jeffrey had lost a ton of weight in the last few days. He looked absolutely fabulous. He wasn’t just skinny, he was “gay skinny,” which was just a couple pounds shy of “prison-camp skinny.” He posed in the mirror, wearing a pair of skinny jeans and a tight, gray, fashionably vintage v-neck T-shirt. His life would be perfect if it wasn’t for his insane hunger.

Tonight, he was going to Club X to pick up some “man pussy,” as he liked to call it. Jeffrey didn’t think of himself as gay or bisexual. He hated labels. Jeffrey just liked to fuck, and his tastes varied from day to day. Fucking a guy one day and a woman the next was no different to him then dating a tall chick and then dating a short chick. He just wasn’t into limiting his sexual choices. He knew how that infuriated gays and straights alike, but Jeffrey didn’t give a fuck. Cock or pussy, it just didn’t matter when his dick was hard, but tonight, he definitely wanted some ass. There was no way he was going to let his new svelte physique go to waste.

He stopped at a drive-thru taco place on the way and ordered a burrito. He had been eating every hour or so, since the surgery. His appetite was out of control, but for some reason it didn’t seem to be affecting his weight at all. He chalked it up to the anti-rejection medication. It must have been reacting with his HIV meds somehow. At least he didn’t need weed anymore to give him an appetite. That shit was expensive, and anyone who said it wasn’t addictive was a goddamn liar. As fierce as the munchies were, though, they weren’t shit compared to what he felt now. He was absolutely voracious. For once, his appetite for food almost matched his appetite for sex. Almost.

It had only been six days since the surgery, and the doctor said he wasn’t supposed to do anything vigorous for four to six weeks, but there was no way Jeffrey was going to go without sex for a month. That just wasn’t happening. He still felt tired, and there was a little pain in his side from the surgery, but the meds were awesome. The worst part was having to take a cab everywhere, but that was the one piece of advice the doctor gave him that he did heed. No driving for six to eight weeks. He needed to find him a boyfriend or some lonely MILF to drive him around. He couldn’t afford taxis every night on unemployment.

The taxi driver was a Muslim guy in a turban who looked like he’d stepped right out of a Bollywood feature. He wasn’t bad looking. He had almond-shaped eyes and dark tan skin, bow-shaped lips that were almost womanly. He was a little prettier than the manly men Jeffrey preferred, and the guy made him nervous. He kept glancing back at Jeffrey and smiling, trying to make awkward conversation. Jeffrey knew these Muslim guys hated gays. They hung them in Saudi Arabia, he’d heard. But this was America, so fuck him.

“You going to that club on Fourth Street? Harry’s?”

“No, that place is for fags. I’m going to The Cocktail, where all the refined homosexuals hang out,” Jeffrey answered snidely, and then turned to stare out the window at the skyline as they crawled through traffic on I-35. He was trying to offend the man enough to shut him the fuck up, but it wasn’t working. The guy just persisted with his stupid questions.