Voracious by Wrath James White Read Free Book Online

performed at the clinic: lap-band surgery, liposuction, wiring your jaw shut, feeding you through IV tubes, extreme exercise and diet programs, and plastic surgery. To Star, it had sounded like a house of horrors.
    She was terrified and had cried during the entire drive to the airport. On the plane to Cancun, Star wept silently and refused to eat. Then, when they arrived at the clinic after a half-hour taxi ride and twenty minutes on a ferry, they sat with Dr. Sarai Mahendru, a tall, slender, Persian woman with long black hair, a perfect nose, big perky breasts she had obviously not been born with, and cat-like, multifaceted almond eyes.
    “We have a new procedure one of our doctors has just developed that may be of interest to you. It’s expensive, but it’s permanent and only requires a single treatment.”
    “What’s the treatment?” Star asked.
    “If it works, we’ll take it,” her mother interrupted. Star cast a disapproving look at her mother, who crushed it in her own baleful gaze.
    “The treatment involves gene modification. Basically, we alter your genes so they tell your body to stop producing fat cells.”
    “And how do you do that?”
    “Recombinant DNA. We inject the new DNA directly into your bloodstream via a genetic retrovirus.”
    “A virus? I don’t want a virus! No way!”
    “It’s completely safe. The virus is just used to spread the new DNA through your system. It’s a transport system. It’s completely harmless,” the doctor said, smiling wide. Her teeth were perfectly straight and brilliantly white. Star suspected they were all either caps or dental implants. Most likely a combination of the two. The woman probably bleached her asshole and likely had had cosmetic surgery on her vagina so the labia were neat and trimmed and tucked perfectly inside her Brazilian-waxed clam. Star giggled and shook her head at the absurdity of the beauty-obsessed woman.
    From the corner of her eye, she saw her mother’s tanned complexion redden, her jaws tighten, and her nostrils flare.
    “Enough! No more argument. The doctor says it works. You’re getting it. Or do you want to stay fat forever?”
    Star looked away from her mother, wiping a tear from her eye. She lowered her head and fell silent.
    Alexis Mourning was an intimidating woman even to those she had not given birth to. She was more than an actress, she was a film icon who had starred in some of the most awarded and celebrated Hollywood productions of the last two decades. She was also stunningly beautiful. At forty-five, with the lithe, toned physique of a teenaged ballerina, she was the envy of women half her age. She had no wrinkles, no age spots or blemishes, and not an ounce of excess adipose tissue. Even the few wisps of gray in her raven-black hair made her look somehow more elegant, and she was universally praised for not coloring it. Her eyes were the type of blue poets wrote sonnets about, and her lips were perfectly bee-stung. What few outside the immediate family knew was that almost none of it was real. She starved herself, worked out like a madwoman, and regurgitated whatever extra calories she allowed herself to indulge in. When that didn’t work, she rushed off to the plastic surgeon for some liposuction or spent an extended weekend being fed through IV tubes.
    Her breasts were silicone bags molded by the skilled surgeons at the Aphrodite Clinic to have just the right amount of bounce and sag. It was enough to fool the most keen observer into believing they were real, but the greatest work of art was her face.
    Alexis Mourning’s ageless, wrinkle-free face was a tapestry of strategically placed surgical scars. Most were hidden along her hairline; the other faint, trace scars were masked behind a layer of custom designer makeup engineered to flawlessly match her natural complexion. Her pouty lips were filled with fat sucked out of her stomach and ass. Even her long, lustrous hair was full of extensions and expensive hair