Prey Drive Read Free Page A

enough to know he’d take it as an invitation. He’d made a promise to himself to destroy the envelope if she ever returned one of his letters. Joe had been writing her a letter a week since he’d been incarcerated. They had all gone unanswered so far.
    Joe placed the envelope on the lone metal shelf bolted to the wall of his cell opposite his bed. Then he wrapped a towel around the shelf, stuck his legs out straight, and began the first of ten sets of twenty pull-ups. The shelf shuddered and buckled under his weight, but it held.
    He’d begun his second-to-last set, biceps and lats burning with lactic acid, when the guard in the control tower called his inmate number. He had a visitor. Joe washed his face and armpits in the sink and quickly rubbed deodorant under his arms. In the super maximum (supermax) security wing of the prison, visitors were received from behind bulletproof glass. Still, Joe wanted to look and smell his best. Hygiene was his only remaining connection to his former life, his life before the monster had taken over.
     
    *** 
     
    Lionel Ray Miles had been a cruel and vicious man in whom the milk of human kindness had curdled long ago. He was dead inside long before his son had torn off his head. Few people who knew the man were surprised by the manner of his death. Violent men came to violent ends. The little good there was in him he’d passed on to his son, Joseph, but then Lionel Ray corrupted that as well, turning Joseph into a monster. Few who knew the family were surprised by Joseph’s crimes. His mother least of all.
    Agatha Miles was the picture of matronly love and concern as she walked into the visiting room of the state prison’s supermax security wing. Joe hadn’t seen his mother in years. She’d left his father soon after Joe left for college. He always felt the separation had been calculated, like she’d been planning for years to leave his father but hadn’t wanted to break up the family, but then figured it was okay once her son was a man and out on his own.
    She took a seat behind the glass partition, fiddling with the leather-bound Bible in her lap and looking far older than Joe remembered. Her hair was almost completely gray and a web of wrinkles fanned out from the corners of each eye. There were hard lines around her mouth and she seemed to have lost a lot of weight. She was no longer the plump, rosy-cheeked woman with the perpetually sunny disposition he recalled from his youth, smiling at him through tears on the day she said goodbye. She looked pale and thin. Her skin looked as if it had been draped over a skeleton. Every movement she made, however slight, seemed capable of injuring her, fracturing her brittle bones.
    She raised the telephone receiver from its cradle and even that seemed like a strain. Joe had left her alone without a husband or a lover to take care of her and the effect had been catastrophic. She seemed mere seconds from the grave. She reached out for Joe and her fingers encountered the glass partition and remained there, pressed hard against the barrier. Joe placed his hand against the glass, dwarfing his mom’s birdlike digits with his massive fingers. He kept his hand there, willing his atoms to pass through the barrier to merge with hers. Whether he succeeded, he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t feel her, couldn’t smell her. He imagined her spirit a smoky charcoal gray, the embers of a fire long ago snuffed out, with dim, infrequent flashes of electric blue appearing here and there like lightning through a storm cloud that eventually dissipates without once losing its bolts from the heavens. He imagined that if he could smell her, her scent would not be the scent of electricity, blood, and the nectar of fruit that he smelled wafting maddeningly from the skin of the young people at his former college. It would be the scent of something dead and turned to dust.
    His mother removed her hand and Joe eventually did the same, sighing over his failure to