"I fantasize about biting women's breasts off and eating them."
That shook things up. Everyone stared at Joe with mouths agape as they tried to compose the proper healing response to such a perverse admission. It was the first time Joe had shared with the group and they didn't want to discourage him, if only for the promise of a new fetish to feed on. This beat every one of Frank's rough trade encounters in Polk Street leather bars, except maybe the one where he got fistfucked by that biker with his arm lubed with motor oil. It certainly shamed Mary's confessions about fucking the neighbors' husbands and masturbating with fruit and household appliances, even the time she'd put peanut butter on her clit to get head from her Great Dane.
Joe got up and left before they could respond with their trite little twelve-step slogans, though it would have been curious to know which one they could have whipped out for cannibalism. That was the one addiction none of the books addressed. Joe knew. He had already checked.
Joe jogged the distance from the little storefront church where the SAA meetings were held back to the campus to hit the gym before classes started.
When he walked into the weight room it was already packed. The track team was in there doing their morning strength training. "Muscle equals speed!" he heard Coach Truman yel ing as he built his athletes into physical specimens that looked more like middleweight boxers than sprinters. Joe stared at their elegant bodies in a trance. He'd always had a fetish for large round buttocks and no one had a meatier, more finely formed gluteus maximus than a sprinter. Particularly the African-American ones who seemed to be genetical y gifted with the type of round meaty asses he loved. They al wore those tiny running shorts that exposed the bottom half of their enlarged glutes. Their thighs were finely sculpted and shimmering with a sheen of sweat. It was almost too much for Joe to bear. He watched the women's sumptuous asses bounce by as they walked from one piece of exercise equipment to the next. He felt like a lion lying down with sheep-and he was getting hungry. An erection was straining in his sweatpants and he had no real way to conceal it. It didn't matter how many girls noticed his arousal and giggled or sneered in disgust. It was worth the sight.
Joe began his workout with 500-pound squats, grunting and straining his way through four sets of ten. Then he loaded nearly a thousand pounds onto the leg press for another four sets that left his legs quivering from overexertion. He finished off with hamstring curls and quadricep extensions before hitting the showers.
Even in the locker room the sight of the men's naked flesh was arousing him.
Joe wouldn't have cal ed himself gay.
What he felt when he looked at the male athletes' thick muscular thighs and tight wel sculpted asses, their heaving pectoral muscles, and even their thick cocks dangling limply between their legs, was something far more visceral.
He didn't want to fuck them. He wanted to eat them alive. To rip their supple flesh from their bones, taste the warm blood and meat as it washed over his tongue and down into his bel y.
Joe finished his shower and removed a fresh change of clothes from his backpack. He shrugged quickly into his jeans and T-shirt before running off to class. He could hear the guys whispering at his back as he left the locker room. They al thought he was a pervert. But they knew better than to say it to his face. Joe was not exactly a smal man.
Chapter Five
The tweed-wrapped and bow-tied professor busily scribbled on the huge blackboard at the front of the lecture hal. Flashes of multicolored young flesh whisked by as students hurried to take their seats. Smooth chocolate browns and tans. Creamy whites and yel ows.
Joe tore himself with effort from the entrancing glimpses of bare arms, slender necks, and naked thighs and calves to give attention to the names the professor had scrawled across the board.
Andrei Chikatilo. Ed Gem. Gary
Heidnick. Jeffrey Dahmer.
Heidnick. Jeffrey Dahmer.
"Al of these men are murderers.
Signature kil ers with a very unique signature."
Joe recognized the connection between those four names before the professor even spoke and he immediately perked up, suddenly very interested. They were not just serial kil ers. They were kil ers who had at least partial y cannibalized their victims. Each of them had tasted human flesh. Many on more than one occasion. Some, like Dahmer and
Chikatilo, were famous for it.
"Al of these men murdered, butchered, and ate their victims."
A shudder ran through the lecture hal like a group wave, fol owed by a moan of utter revulsion. Joe smiled. This is what he had come here for. He'd been delighted when he'd seen the course offerings for criminal psychology. It had taken a fight to get into the class due to its overwhelming popularity but as soon as he had read the title of the course"Abnormal Psychology: Serial Kil ers and Why They Do It"-and seen who the professor was, he knew that he had to sign up.
Joe knew many more names he could have added to the professor's list. Ed
Kemper, Albert Fish, Issei Sagawa, even Ted Bundy had engaged in mild cannibalism. It was a common final stage in the evolution of the serial kil er. Some of them just got there sooner than others. Some were caught before it ever advanced to that stage. But Joe's theory was that al serial kil ers, if not apprehended first, would eventual y escalate to cannibalism. It was a progressive disease and he feared that he himself might have been infected.
Professor Locke was one of the leading authorities on forensic and criminal psychiatry. He had worked with the FBI back in the late eighties, developing serial kil er profiles in their Behavioral Sciences Unit. He had authored many books on serial murderers, sex and cannibal kil ers specifical y, before he came to end his days teaching the next crop of psychiatrists and criminologists. He was the reason Joe had come to this school.
"So, why do they do it? Any thoughts?" Joe's hand crept slowly into the air before he'd even ful y decided to raise it.
"Ali! The footbal player. You have a theory?"
"Actual y, I'm not in the athletics program. I'm a psychology student."
The professor peered over the top of his thick bifocals at the enormous young man in the front row, looking him over with new interest. The kid was huge. He was at least six feet five inches tal and nearly 260 pounds, al of it apparently muscle. He would have been a terror on a footbal field.
"Wel, let's hope you are not wasting your talents. Tel us, what do you think makes them do it?"
"I think it's a disease. Not just a mental deficiency but a contagious, transmittable virus."
Everyone in the room began to giggle, including the professor. He held up his hand to silence the other students.
"No, let's hear the boy out. Go ahead." Joe hesitated but couldn't hold himself back.
"I think it's a progressive disease that in its initial stages may manifest as only the need to inflict pain and humiliation but eventual y builds to murder, mutilation, and final y to necrophilia and cannibalism. It may in fact be the very disease that spawned the werewolf and vampire legends. Perhaps it's transmitted through saliva or blood, like with a bite or a scratch just like those legends say. Maybe even through semen or vaginal secretions like AIDS. Perhaps you're most susceptible to the disease during childhood and it has a long incubation period, maybe decades. That could explain why most serial kil ers are in their late twenties and early thirties. And why almost al of the real y violent ones experienced some type of trauma or abuse as children. I think that at some point in their youths they exchanged bodily fluids with another kil er or perhaps just a carrier and they acquired the contagion themselves."