Voracious (2 page)

Bill retrieved his luggage and made his way to long-term parking. He couldn’t wait to see his new baby. He’d just purchased it when he’d been called away to Los Angeles to finalize the deal for the new video game. He’d only driven it two or three times. The reality that he actually owned a goddamn Mercedes was still sinking in.

It took Bill several breathless minutes wandering around the airport parking lot before he spotted his baby, a ninety-four thousand dollar high-gloss, metallic-black, six-cylinder 2013 Mercedes Benz S-class. Bill smiled and unlocked the doors, popped the trunk, and started the engine with his remote. He tossed his Samsonite carry-on and garment bag into the trunk and slipped behind the wheel. Bill turned up the radio and gunned the engine like a teenager with his first car.

The drive to the condo was too brief. Bill hardly had time to open the engine up before he was pulling into the building’s underground parking garage. He turned off his Android phone and tucked it in the glove compartment beneath his registration and insurance papers, and then turned on his iPhone and checked his messages. Lelani didn’t know about the Android phone. That one was for the six-foot blonde Scandinavian woman he’d met at a fashion show in Holland last year. Her name was Suzanna and she was a twenty-three-year-old up-and-coming fashion model, thirteen years younger than Lelani. He had a separate e-mail account just for her and an apartment in Houston where he’d meet her whenever she was in town. By all accounts, Bill was the mutherfucking man. He had everything a man could want times two. He couldn’t wipe the smile from his face as he locked the Mercedes and set the alarm.

Bill smiled at a young couple he’d seen coming in and out of the building several times. The guy was young and cocky. A six-foot, blond-haired, blue-eyed pretty boy who probably lived off his daddy’s trust fund. His bleach-blonde girlfriend looked like the typical club-hopping speed-freak or coke-whore with an IQ lower than her number of sexual partners. Bill winked at her as he walked to the elevator and she smiled and waved, eliciting a stern look along with a sneer complete with puffed-out chest from her boyfriend. Bill held his hands up in surrender and smiled wider as the elevator doors closed. He pushed the button for the penthouse, whistling a tune from an old hip-hop song, something about pimping big and spending cheese.

He always heard hip-hop or heavy metal lyrics in his head when he felt like this. His hubris had its own soundtrack. He had a play list on his iPod full of songs by Jay-Z, Will Smith, Lil Wayne, and Kanye West interspersed with Led Zeppelin, Guns N’ Roses, Motley Crew, and Van Halen for when he needed to pump himself up or when his ego was already on full blast and he wanted to continue stoking the fire. Today, he felt truly gangsta, like the mutherfucking pimp of the year-the white-bread yuppie version at least.

The elevator doors opened, and Bill pulled out his keys and walked across the hall to his front door. He unlocked and opened the door with a flourish. The powerful stench of body odor, rotting food, and fetid blood and meat immediately assailed his nostrils. He recoiled and covered his nose with his forearm. “Jesus! What the fuck? Lelani!”

The instant he spoke her name, a feeling of dread crushed down upon him.

“Lelani?” he whispered, taking a few tentative steps into the condominium, leaving the door open in case he needed to make a hasty retreat, and cueing up 911 on his cell phone. He’d seen too many horror movies and episodes of
Law and Order
to take any chances. It smelled like something had died and then something else had eaten its putrid carcass and regurgitated it.

Lelani wasn’t answering. That just couldn’t be good. Now Bill wished he’d gotten his concealed-weapons permit. He owned two guns, a Glock 9mm and a Desert Eagle .45. Both were in the closet in the master bedroom and hadn’t been fired since the first month he’d owned them.

The apartment was dark. Bill groped for the light switch in a near panic. His imagination was working overtime, and he kept anticipating the touch of a cold, dead hand on his own. Chills raced along his spine before he found the switch and the light chased back the night, but not the dread or the feeling that something wasn’t right. If anything, seeing the chaos of the penthouse-the smears of food on the counters, walls, and floors, the empty food cartons and containers, broken plates, jars, and bottles-increased his anxiety.

Then he saw the blood. A long streak led from the kitchen to the living room. It didn’t appear to be a fatal amount, but Bill had no idea how much blood leaked out of a human body. His finger hovered over the call button on his iPhone as he followed the trail of gore. When he spotted the pile of splintered cat bones, a small, blue collar festooned with rhinestones and affixed with a crown-shaped tag strewn among the remains, a sob choked in Bill’s throat.

“P-Prince Charles?”

Bill’s bottom lip trembled and his voice cracked with emotion. The bones had been flensed of flesh and gnawed on, cracked open, and the marrow sucked out. Even the skull had been broken open and plundered, the brain pan licked clean. Bill looked back at the open front door. His legs trembled.

“Lelani? Are you here? You okay?”

Bill walked farther into the apartment. His curiosity gradually overcame his caution even as his imagination terrorized him with images of Lelani in varying states of dismemberment, posed in garish, nightmarish positions culled from every slasher movie he’d ever seen.

He rushed into the kitchen to arm himself with one of the Gunter Wilhelm carving knives from the cutlery set on his counter before finishing his search of the apartment. On the kitchen counter he found Lelani, crouched like a cat right next to the seven hundred dollar knife set he’d bought on an impulse, determined to become a master chef after watching a particularly rousing episode of
Hell’s Kitchen
. She looked like hell. Her hair looked like she’d been plugged into a Tesla coil. Her eyes were wild, pupils dilated to the size of nickels, and her face was smeared with blood and tufts of gray fur. More than that, she was drawn and withered, like an old woman. Her eyes were hollow pits, her cheeks sunken in.

“Lelani? Why didn’t you answer me? What the hell did you do to my cat?” Anger grew inside him, masking the fear temporarily but not displacing it. His legs still trembled and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. The persistence of his paranoia only increased his anger.

“Answer me, Lelani! What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you high again?”

Lelani growled and bared canines that were clearly larger than they should have been, longer, sharper, and tipped with red. Bill took a step back. The dozens of vampire movies he’d watched in his lifetime came flooding back. Feeling ridiculous, he dropped his Smartphone, crossed his fingers, and began backing away from her, looking around for something wooden to use as a stake. The table and chairs were made of stainless steel. No luck there.

Lelani slithered down off the countertop on all fours, sniffing the air and licking her lips. Her eyes were blood-red and smoldering with lust, but not the type of lust Bill was accustomed to seeing in the eyes of women. There was nothing sexual in it. Nothing in her eyes showed any awareness of his humanity or personhood. It was worse than the physical objectification he’d often been accused of when he looked at women, reducing them to mere breasts, asses, and pretty faces.

But her stare didn’t reduce him to a collection of body parts. It reduced him to mere meat. It was the way poor kids in the ghetto salivated over McDonald’s cheeseburgers. And Lelani was salivating. Her mouth hung open. Those queer, red-tipped fangs glistened in the light. Thick ropes of saliva, tinged pink with old blood, drooled from each corner of her mouth.

“Lelani? It’s me, Bill. What’s wrong with you?”

She growled at the sound of his voice and scurried across the floor toward him. Bill leaped backward. His back slammed against the open refrigerator door. Whatever was wrong with her had eaten away at her, reducing her to skin and bones. She looked like a fucking Holocaust victim. A hoarse gravely voice, so unlike the dulcet, Marilyn Monroe-esque purr Lelani normally affected, scratched its way out of her larynx.

“Hungry, Bill. I’m so hungry.” Her eyes didn’t meet his when she spoke. Instead they roamed his body from head to toe, sizing him up.

“Okay. Okay. Let me-let me get you something to eat, sweetheart.” Bill put on his best lady-killer smile, but terror leeched all conviction from the expression.

Lelani shook her head. “Noooooo time. Hungry now!” She crooned in a raspy, graveyard howl. Her voice sounded like what you’d imagine a mummy’s voice would sound like after a thousand years in a crypt, but it had been only a few days since he’d seen her last. There was no sane explanation for her radical transformation except …

“You’re a vampire, right? No, it’s okay. I understand. That’s it, isn’t it? Someone bit you? You got bit by a vampire and now you’re one too, right? You need blood, right? I can get you blood. I can get all the blood you want. There’s a whole nightclub on Sixth Street full of kids who’d gladly let you suck their blood. Those wannabes would go fucking nuts over a real-life vampire,” Bill said, nodding vigorously in a failed attempt to solicit Lelani’s assent.

Lelani stalked closer, so close Bill could smell the overwhelming bestial stench of her, a suffocating miasma of sweat, bad breath, and rot. Bill scowled in disgust and covered his face with his forearm. Lelani seized the arm and savagely bit into it, ripping a huge chunk of muscle and tendon down to the bone. The pink flesh of Bill’s forearm stretched like taffy before tearing away from the ulna. Naked bone streaked with red showed through the ragged avulsion.

Bill screamed, a shrill, high-pitched cry. With his free hand, he made a fist and punched Lelani as hard as he could. She staggered backward, and Bill kicked her in the chest, putting his hips into it as if he was kicking down a door, sending Lelani sprawling across the garbage-strewn floor.

She lay there, still chewing the hunk of meat she’d ripped from Bill’s arm. Then she swallowed the raw flesh, licked blood and skin from her lips, and wiped her face with her own forearm. She smiled joyously, like a kid eating an ice cream cone, revealing those bizarre fangs that were now stained with Bill’s blood. Bill turned and ran.

He hurtled Lelani’s prone form and charged for the door, screaming, “Heeeeelp!
Help!
HEEEEEEELP!”

He didn’t make it far. The bite on his forearm had transferred a powerful neurotoxin into his bloodstream. His thundering heartbeat quickly spread the venom throughout his body, causing painful cramps in his muscles. He fell to the ground, doubled over in agony. It felt as if every muscle in his body had a Charlie horse. He tried to crawl the rest of the way out of the room. Tiny hands clamped down on his ankles like vices. Bill had never realized before how small Lelani’s hands were. With strength he never knew she possessed, Lelani dragged him back into the apartment and slammed the door.

Her beady bloodshot eyes fixed on his legs. Without hesitation, Lelani seized his thigh in both hands and sank her canines deep into the muscle.

“No! Get off me! Get the fuck off me!”

Bill punched at her, but his arms felt weak. Whatever had caused the painful muscle spasms had also robbed him of his strength.

Lelani’s jaws locked tight on his thigh, and she chewed on him like a wolf gnawing at a deer. She jerked her head sideways in a sudden violent motion, jerking the muscle free, peeling it away from the bone with a wet, sticky, ripping sound that made Bill think of peeling a mango. The pain was nauseating. His stomach rolled and threatened to revolt as waves of anguish singed his senses.

As he helplessly watched, she wrenched the muscle from its moorings and swallowed the bleeding meat in huge gulps. The room swam and everything turned gray, swirling like an amusement park ride before darkness overtook him.

***

Bill regained consciousness in blinding, white-hot agony. He looked down at his leg and saw bone. The area from his thigh down had been completely stripped of muscle, fat, and sinew.

”
Oh my God! You ate my fucking leg!
HEEEEEELLLP!
My fucking leg! Somebody help me!
”

Beside him, Lelani lay in a puddle of Bill’s blood. Her face was a fright-mask of gore. She stirred at the sound of his voice, lifting herself to a sitting position and sniffing the air, looking around with her beady, blood-shot eyes. Her gaze fell on Bill’s remaining leg, and something like a smile-but less jovial, more carnivorous-crossed her face. Her lips, teeth, and tongue were stained a ghastly wine color, coated with blood and bits of flesh. She chewed some leftover piece of gristle, fat, or tendon from Bill’s cannibalized limb. Ropes of bloody drool spilled from the corners of her mouth onto the floor. She wiped her lips with her forearm again and sniffed the air once more, again catching Bill’s scent. Her eyes closed and her smile widened. She looked like she’d just taken a hit of some really good shit and was pausing to savor the rush. When she opened her eyes and locked them once again on Bill, they were aflame with a ravenous, predatory lust.

Bill screamed and tried to crawl away from her as she rushed over to him and seized his remaining leg.

“No! Oh, God, no! Don’t! Please stop! Heeeelp! Oh God, noooooooo!”

With ferocious savagery, using only her teeth and fingernails, Lelani ripped large chunks of meat from Bill’s remaining leg. He punched and struck at her with his diminished strength but was unable to dislodge her from his leg. He was so weak; he felt like he was swimming through tar. The aftereffects of her apparently venomous saliva, hypovolemic shock, and the excruciating pain and horror of being eaten alive threatened to render him unconscious again. He fought as hard to hold onto consciousness as he did to get Lelani off him. Both were losing battles.

Lelani didn’t stop at his legs. Bill called out to every god he’d ever heard of, praying for Jesus or Krishna or Buddha or Allah to take him away from this horror as she progressed up his thighs, ripping away his khaki shorts and tearing off his penis in one quick violent motion. Bill screamed again, and now his prayers changed from pleas for salvation and rescue to desperate entreaties for a quick death or at least unconsciousness so he wouldn’t feel what was to come. She chewed sloppily, dropping bits of Bill’s sexual organ onto the floor and then scooping them up and cramming the bloody scraps of cock-flesh back into her mouth and gulping them down. Blood, urine, and semen spattering the floor, leaked from the hideous gash where his sex had been. That’s when Bill finally lost consciousness.