Luci

PROLOGUE

In a death row cell in The Florida State Prison a surly mass murderer who mowed down fourteen teenagers and the manager of a packed fast food restaurant flipped through the pages of a popular women's magazine. He paused where the fresh-faced model was selling the perfume, opened the sealed flap to let the fragrance fill his cell, then tore a hole in her pouting red mouth and jacked into it.

On the west side of San Francisco Bay a triple axe murderer on death row in The California State Prison at San Quentin who has spent his last twelve years and two million of the tax payers' money piling appeal on appeal receives in his junk mail a women's magazine. In it is one of those tear open perfume ads with a smidgen of the smell of the latest offering from a prominent perfume maker. He inhales the delightful fragrance deeply lost in the erotic memories it triggers.

Roughly a hundred miles to the east in California's Folsom State Prison a serial killer who froze his victim's livers then thawed them out and fed them to his unknowing friends on holidays is in a holding room in the middle of a discussion with his lawyer who is writing his eighth nuisance appeal trying to stave off the inevitable. The lawyer has delivered his client's mail in which is the latest copy of a popular women's magazine. The prisoner idly leafs through it while making lewd remarks about each female picture. At one advertisement he stops, kisses the model's face then pops open the fly leaf and inhales deeply of the latest fragrance in the perfume line she is hawking.

Half way across the nation in the Joliet Correctional Center a poor Chicago boy who turned himself into a nationally recognized Satanist by sacrificing at least ten runaway children reclines on his bunk massaging himself as he flips the pages in the same popular female magazine. One double truck is an advertisement for the latest exotic fragrance. He tears open the flap and inhales deeply with great satisfaction.

In The Mountain View Unit Women's Prison in Gatesville, Texas, the madwoman who carved up her lesbian wife and two adopted baby daughters and fed them to the disposer is daydreaming on her bunk as she leafs through the latest issue of the same popular women's magazine. She pauses at one of those perfume advertisements, tears open the glued portion and greedily inhales the luscious fragrance released into the air. She lays the spine of the book against her pudenda and masturbates quietly.

Four Days Later

The madwoman in Gatesville, Texas caught what appeared to be a common cold. At first her nose began to run copiously, at which she complained and the unsympathetic guards gave her a box of tissue. Suddenly she complained of being hot. The female guard took her temperature that was 101 so the doctor was informed. It was easier to get the doctor to her than her to the doctor so the doctor made a house call. But by the time he arrived the mad women was acting like one, screaming in pain and coughing mouthfuls of her own blood. Her lungs pulled it in like a giant sponge and as the doctor worked frantically on her she drowned.

Florida suffered through an abnormally early cold spell. After coming back from one of his daily walks the mass murderer came down with the sniffles. He requested a trip to the infirmary where the doctor examined him, noted significant chest congestion and suggested he stay overnight. The mass murderer took the prescribed medicine but declined saying he wanted to sleep in his own bed. The guards returned him and put him to bed where the Doctor's sedative took effect and he went to sleep immediately. He did not answer morning call and was found dead in his bed. Autopsy disclosed substantial degeneration of the lung tissue accompanied by massive hemorrhaging. He had drowned during the night in his own blood.

The Satanist despised medication and refused help when he caught a cold. He vowed the Black Angel would cure him and he plastered himself against the back wall of his cell in his best imitation of Lucifer standing at the gates of Hell. This lasted perhaps twenty minutes until the intense, searing pain he was feeling in his lungs combined with the bloody fleck on his lips made him scream for human help. Humans were unable to stem the bloody flood in his lungs and he succumbed under the Doctor's puzzled eye. Autopsy disclosed he died of drowning in his own blood.

The axe murderer finished up a new brief for his appeal when he noticed he had the sniffles. It was annoying because whenever he lowered his head over his keyboard his nose emptied into the keys. Suddenly a searing pain roiled through his lungs—a pain so devastating he couldn't gasp for breath, let alone cry out. His open mouth sucked air and the air rattled through the free flowing blood coursing through his alveoli. He vomited blood all over his word processor and pitched forward into the mess. When they found him at bed check he had been dead over two hours, drowned in his own blood.

The serial killer was kept in non-contact isolation simply because when he got hungry he tended to consider any warm blooded animal good to eat. He had taken his normal exercise period and read his mail that included a couple of popular women's magazines and had retired under the watchful eye of the guard watching him on the TV monitor. He smoked a gift cigar and lazily contemplated how good the guard's liver would be sautéed with purple onions in a sauce made with fresh churned cow butter. The cigar was a good one and had come in the mail from one of his many admirers. "Funny how many people admired a man who could do the unthinkable," he thought. He got letters all the time asking him how it tasted, some even wanting his recipes for different parts of the body. 'Some of those people were crazy though. They wanted to cut up the parts and burn them on altars. All he wanted was a square meal and he particularly liked fresh liver.' He finished the cigar, stepped to the toilet, dropped it in, relieved himself and flushed the John. As he turned he felt movement in his chest—a definite movement like something maybe as large as a grapefruit had shifted position. Suddenly the pain hit him. A searing, wrenching, burning pain unlike any other he had ever experienced. It drove him onto his knees in the corner by the lavatory. He opened his mouth to scream but the pain sucked the sound back into his throat and buried it in the middle of his chest in a liquid, gurgling groan. He opened his mouth to suck air again and blood gushed from his lungs, flowed down his chin, onto his chest and the floor. He pitched forward into the corner. Fifteen minutes later the guard, following procedure, sounded the alarm that signified he had not seen the prisoner for at least fifteen minutes. They found him next to the john hunched over a pool of blood, dead—drowned in his own blood.