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  He tore out a huge chunk of flesh from Luscious’s forearm, swallowed it without chewing, and then seized his arm again. Luscious let go of Joe, but Joe didn’t let go of him. That taste of flesh had sent the monster into a frenzy. His hardened cock pulsated between his legs, tingling on the brink of orgasm, hungry for more flesh.

  “Ahhhhh! Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh! You bit me! You fucking bit me! Let go! Let me tha-fuck GOOOooo! Heeeeeelllllp! HEEEEEELLLLLP! Guards! GUARDS!”

  Joe jerked his head again and tore another huge avulsion in the big rapist’s forearm. He took a punch to the temple from Luscious’s free hand, causing him to release his lock on the man’s arm as he staggered backward. The room wobbled and tilted and Joe almost collapsed. His balance quickly returned as Luscious charged again. This time the big rapist had his head down, his bleeding arm cradled in one hand, as he dove forward in a clumsy football tackle. Joe shot his legs out to avoid having them yanked out from under him and landing with Luscious on top of him. Joe had little doubt the man was still dangerous, even when injured. He sprawled on top of the large black man, driving him face-first into the floor. This time he was able to scramble around to take Luscious’s back, but instead of choking him, he bit into the side of his neck, chewing through Luscious’s carotid artery, tearing off and swallowing piece after piece of the man’s neck as his would-be-rapist struggled beneath him, trying to escape Joe’s savage onslaught.

  Joe heard footsteps hurrying down the long tier. The guards were coming. Joe wasn’t done yet. It had been so long since he’d tasted human flesh. He wanted to savor the moment, to make the most of it. He rolled Luscious onto his back. The big rapist was already trembling and hyperventilating in shock. This was the first time he’d been able to clearly see the man’s face and Joe was surprised to see a handsome man wearing garish prison cosmetics, red Koolaid on his lips for lipstick and purple eye-shadow applied with a wet, purple Skittle. He had long eyelashes, high cheekbones, and full, bow-shaped lips. He was a transvestite and a beautiful one at that, though his muscular physique was anything but feminine. Joe yanked open the man’s legs just as he heard the guard’s voices outside the door.

  “Open cell six! Open cell six! Back away from that convict, Joe! Get away from him! Put your hands on the wall!”

  Joe ignored their commands. He lowered his head between the big transvestite’s thighs and seized Luscious’s cock and testicles in his jaws. He bit deep and pulled, stretching the foreskin and the wrinkled sack of Luscious’s testes. Joe jerked his head violently, tearing the delicate flesh of Luscious’s genitals as the man screamed in anguish. They tore free from the man’s body—penis, testicles, and all—with a wet, sticky, ripping sound. Luscious’s screams reached an octave that would have made a castrati tenor envious. The cell door opened and Joe put his hands behind his head, kneeling in Luscious’s blood as he continued to chew. The familiar euphoria flooded over him as meat and blood filled his belly. Luscious’s testes exploded in Joe’s mouth as he chewed, bathing his taste buds with the succulent flavor of semen and blood. Joe let out a long growling moan as an orgasm ripped through him. The monster erupted, shooting a long stream of warm, white liquid onto Luscious’s thighs and belly, mixing his seed with the rapist’s blood.

  “I told you to back away from the damn prisoner!” one of the SORT team guards yelled as he charged in behind a riot shield, swinging a baton at Joe’s head. There were five other guards dressed similarly behind him.

  The odds were against Joe. He ducked the first swing and then brought his arms up to defend his head from subsequent blows. But there were just too many of them, and punches, kicks, and baton strikes rained down on Joe in an avalanche of pulverizing pain. They wouldn’t stop until Joe was unconscious. He knew that from experience. So Joe allowed himself to slump to the floor, going limp and pretending to have lost consciousness while still keeping his hands over his head to protect himself from the more life-threatening strikes. One of the guards straddled him and wrenched his arms away from his head. A few punches were landed to his face even after the officers thought he was unconscious, along with a kick from one of the officers standing above him. Joe didn’t mind the punches and kicks; a baton to the head was far more likely to cause permanent brain damage.

  Finally, Joe was handcuffed, very nearly hogtied, bent backward with his wrists cuffed to his ankles. One of the officers spit on him and the others laughed. They left him like that for more than an hour before they finally came back and took him to an isolation cell. Joe knew he wasn’t being punished for ripping off the big transvestite’s testicles. The guards had enjoyed every minute of the fight. He was being punished for defying them and not stopping when they told him to, and for that he would spend the weekend immobilized in a cell even smaller than his normal cage and his stay in supermax would be extended.

  Three

  Strapped to a concrete bed, the overhead lights glaring down on him, a televangelist whipping his flock into a frenzy on the TV, Joe retreated into his head. He relived the salacious ecstasy of consuming human flesh again after months of abstinence. It had been glorious! Fighting for it, battling another predator for the prize, had somehow made it sweeter. And the blood! That sweet nectar of life. Its taste had been absolutely intoxicating, but it hadn’t sated his hunger. It had only increased it, enflamed Joe’s desire for murder and mayhem. He was like a caged wolf and the sheep were his captors.

  Joe was naked again. The guards had shackled him and almost beat him to death trying to get the transvestite’s masticated penis out of Joe’s mouth before he could swallow it. They had been unsuccessful and they were punishing Joe for their failure. They had hogtied him, chained his handcuffs to his ankle cuffs, and then dragged him into this room and strapped him to a cold concrete slab. Then they left him there. Alone. Naked in the dark. Joe wondered if they would throw another inmate in with him now that he was helpless. He would not have been at all surprised.

  As he lay immobilized, Joe had time to analyze his predicament. He’d become exactly what he’d feared becoming since the moment his violent urges began. He was an animal, a ravenous beast, and now he had been chained and caged. Somewhere, out there, was the one responsible for the monster that had blossomed inside him. Joe remained convinced that the disease taking over his mind, warping his personality, had been passed on to him, transmitted through blood, semen, or saliva. But after murdering the child killer who’d abducted him when he was a boy and then killing his own father with no result, Joe was forced to consider the possibility that his transformation was a genetic flaw passed onto him from his murderous father, an immutable part of his essence.

  In jail, he learned that the police had found the deteriorated and decomposed remains of more than thirty boys on his father’s property. He knew his dad was the one who’d made Damon Trent the murderous pederast that he’d become. Maybe his father’s killing genes, his psychotic spirit, had been passed on to Joe.

  Maybe there’s no cure for what I am and this cage is the best place for me, Joseph wondered. But something inside him revolted at that idea. He was reminded of Quasimodo, limping through the darkened halls of Notre Dame shouting, “I’m a man!”

  “I’m a man,” Joseph whispered. “I’m not a monster. I’m a man.”

  But he wasn’t so certain.

  Four

  One week later …

  Professor John Locke walked the long, sterile white hall accompanied by a prison guard who looked like he’d been weaned on a cocktail of testosterone and human growth hormone. The corrections officer had the size and stature of an NFL lineman and the professor suspected the hyper-muscular guard once held those very aspirations. The man probably still played for a league on weekends. He wore weightlifting gloves on his stubby fingers and there were sweat stains in the armpits of his uniform, as if he’d just worked out in it. The officer walked bowlegged, like a gunslinger. His face held a perpetual frown that appeared to be a deliberate affectation, a warning to others to stay away.


  “So you really think you can cure this guy?” the guard asked.

  “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” Professor Locke responded.

  The officer shook his head.

  Professor John Locke was the polar opposite of the corrections officer who accompanied him. He was tall and slender with gray hair cut short and neat. Since his association with the serial murderer Joseph Miles had begun, he’d lost more than twenty pounds and still found it difficult to eat more than the occasional salad or fruit cocktail. He was now a vegan due to circumstances rather than design. He now found it impossible to stomach meat. The professor had wrinkles at the corners of his mouth and eyes and hard lines in his forehead from years of worry. His teeth appeared too small for his mouth and his lips were almost nonexistent. His mouth was little more than a thin gash in his face, just above his square chin. He wore a plain brown suit and thin, wire-framed glasses that were appropriately professorial.

  “Why bother fixing this freak? He’s already killed folks. He should be on death row right now by all rights.”

  The professor shook his head and sighed heavily. This type of attitude was what had retarded the study of the sociopathic disorder that led to signature sex crimes for decades. Finding live subjects to study who were this far advanced was difficult. What they didn’t know about serial murderers could fill volumes, entire libraries.

  “You’ll have to take my word for it that he’s of far more value to society alive than dead. Alive we can study him and use him to find a cure for his disorder.”

  “Fuck curing these bastards. There ain’t no cure for crazy. There ain’t no remedy for evil.”

  The professor nodded. There was no sense arguing with the officer. Nothing in his demeanor indicated he could be swayed. His disposition was unusually dour, unusual even for this place, as if he could find nothing to enjoy in his chosen occupation. The professor could understand. He didn’t know how anyone but a psychologist like himself could enjoy spending his days surrounded by murderous psychopaths. Even he often found it taxing despite his intellectual curiosity and his thirst for recognition and fame.

  Most of the COs on this end of Seattle’s supermax prison were large, burly types who looked as hardened and dangerous as the convicts they guarded. The criminals they housed in this cellblock were completely insane, guilty of crimes that confounded all rational explanation. This was where they kept the “mental cases,” the most violent and deranged inmates. A large percentage of them should have been in mental hospitals. Instead, they got their antipsychotics and antidepressants prescribed by prison doctors and administered by prison guards who were less than sympathetic.

  In this cell block, there was a guy who locked families in their houses before he torched them, watching as they burned alive in their own homes; a guy who chopped the arms and legs off prostitutes and kept their torsos in his basement; a child molester who dissolved his victims alive in acid once he’d had his way with them; a guy who kidnapped old women and forced them to eat his feces—and then there was Joseph Miles. Joe kidnapped, raped, murdered, and cannibalized—and not always in that order—more than half a dozen victims. All the convicts were crazy, but the violent nature of their crimes had ensured they would never win an insanity plea. No judge wanted to let guys who raped, murdered, and mutilated go to a mental hospital. The public outrage would have been immense. Americans wanted them locked up or put down permanently like you would a rabid animal. So they brought them to supermax prisons where they were locked down for twenty-three hours a day and given no rehabilitation. What did it matter? None of them were ever going to be released.

  The CO led Professor Locke past dozens of locked steel doors. Screams and shouts echoed down the hallway. Curses, prayers, catcalls, ranting gibberish, sobbing, pleas for rescue and salvation, and baleful stares followed them as they passed cell after cell. The sounds of madness and desperation. The familiar smells of blood, feces, and urine accompanied the cacophony. The psychologist wondered how anyone could smell that malefic stench and not realize they were amongst the insane. To him, this was the smell of a shattered mind. He’d smelled it at every mental institution he’d ever visited, even beneath the overpowering odor of bleach and ammonia. There was no masking it.

  Every other cell they passed contained someone screaming biblical rhetoric, political conspiracies, or about aliens or demons infecting their minds. Professor Locke considered it a travesty of justice that any of these men had ever been declared legally sane, though he suspected that more than a few of them had gone mad during their incarceration. That too was not uncommon.

  They stopped in front of one of the only quiet cells on that tier. The CO gestured toward the narrow window in the door, and the professor peered beyond the locked steel hatch into the cell beyond. Joseph Miles lay face down on the floor, pushing himself up and down on his knuckles, pistoning out pushups with machine-like repetitiveness. His face was tensed in concentration, teeth clenched, forehead furrowed, sweat dripping from his brow. The muscles in his shoulders and triceps bulged as if ready to burst through the skin. Veins and pulsing capillaries roped their way down his arms like night crawlers. He looked every bit as dangerous as he had the day they brought him in. His muscles were not as large as they had been. Since he’d been transferred to supermax following the episode with the model, he’d had no access to exercise equipment, but he’d obviously been improvising. His body was leaner now, harder, like something chiseled from the steel and concrete walls that surrounded him.

  Joseph stared straight ahead as he continued a seemingly endless set of pushups. He stared through the steel door, through the professor and the guard, not appearing to even notice their presence. The professor shuddered. Joseph looked crazier now than ever. He’d thought they’d been making progress in the treatment of Joseph’s disorder, but he couldn’t help but question that. The man sweating and straining on the other side of that door looked anything but peaceful and well-adjusted. He looked like he was preparing for war.

  “How long has he been doing that?”

  The guard shrugged. “A half hour. Maybe longer. He was doing squats for about half an hour before that and before that he was doing crunches and before that some kind of pull-ups with a sheet tied to that metal shelf on the wall. He’ll keep going for hours.”

  The professor nodded, narrowing his eyes and stroking the whiskers on his chin, trying his best to hide his unease. “And this has been going on for how long?” he asked.

  “Ever since they transferred him here from the state mental hospital four years ago.”

  Ever since that lunatic whore from his art class cut her nipple off and fed it to him, the professor thought.

  Professor Locke looked into the small windowless cell. There was a lidless stainless-steel toilet with a sink attached, a stool bolted to the floor, built in metal shelves, a cot bolted to the wall with a sheet and a pillow on it, and a TV with no controls. Other than that, the only furnishings or decorations the room contained were several paintings Joe had created using dissolved candy for watercolors and nearly a dozen shoeboxes tied with twine. The boxes were filled with fan mail. The corrections officers intercepted most of his mail and edited the ones they could. The ones that couldn’t be edited into anything suitable for an inmate with his mental abnormalities were destroyed. For every letter they delivered to Joseph, they destroyed five. Most of the letters were from men and women declaring their love for him, asking Joseph to marry them, impregnate them, and even to eat them alive. Professor Locke had built his career studying the peculiar pathologies of deranged killers. Still, even he was shocked by how much our culture not only bred and nurtured these monsters but celebrated them. If he thought too long about how deranged the world was, he would wind up in one of those cells himself.

  “I’m not taking him out of there by myself. I need to call another guard,” the big CO said, displaying genuine fear. Not for the first time, Professor Locke wondered if his own fearlessness in regard
to Joseph Miles was due to his objective observations of the man’s behavior and his overall clinical detachment, or just plain foolishness.

  Five

  Supermax was hell, even for a super-predator. Joe paused for a moment, dripping with sweat. Every muscle in his body burned with lactic acid. He studied each muscle as it contracted and relaxed. He knew he’d lost quite a bit of muscle mass, but he felt somehow deadlier with his leaner, harder physique. Like a large feline predator, a jungle cat. The stronger he felt, the more testosterone built up in his body, the stronger the urge to fuck and kill grew. Only the daily dosages of serotonin inhibitors kept him from total madness.

  The sensation of his own body was his only comfort. If he could not have contact with other human beings, he would lose himself in the carnal physicality of his own flesh. He licked the sweat from his arms and remembered the sweaty, meaty taste of a woman’s breasts after love making. He bit into his forearm and tasted the blood trickle onto his taste buds, setting them aflame with memories of those he’d consumed.