Intensity

Surrendering to tears would be so easy, satisfying. These were selfish tears of defeat; they would not only purge the heart of grief but also wash out the need to care about anyone, anything. Blessed relief could be hers if she simply admitted that the long struggle to understand wasn't worth the pain of experience. Her sobbing would bring the motor home to a sudden halt, and the driver would come back to find her huddled at the step well. He would club her, drag her into the bedroom, rape her beside the body of her friend; there would be terror beyond anything that she had ever known before, but it would be brief. And this time it would be final. He would free her forever from the need to ask why, from the torment of repeatedly falling through the fragile floor of hope into this too familiar desolation.

For a long time, maybe even since the stormy night of her eighth birthday and the frenzied palmetto beetle, she'd known that being a victim was often a choice people made. As a child, she hadn't been able to put this insight into words, and she hadn't known why so many people chose suffering; when older, she had recognized their self-hatred, masochism, weakness.

Not all or even most suffering is at the hands of fate; it befalls us at our invitation.

She'd always chosen not to be victimized, to resist and fight back, to hold on to hope and dignity and faith in the future. But victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring: Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity.

Now she trembled on an emotional high wire, not sure whether she would be able to keep her balance or would allow herself to fail and fall.

The motor home slowed again. They were angling to the right. Slowing. Maybe pulling off the highway and stopping.

She tried the door. She knew that it was locked, but she quietly worked the lever-action handle anyway, because she wasn't capable, after all, of simply giving up.

As they climbed a slight incline, their speed continued to drop.

Wincing at the pain in her calves and thighs as she moved, yet relieved to be off her butt, she rose just far enough to look across the dining nook.

The back of the killer's head was the most hateful thing that Chyna had ever seen, and it aroused fresh anger in her. The brain beneath that curve of bone hummed with vicious fantasies. It was infuriating that he should be alive and Laura dead. That he should be sitting here so smug, so content with all his memories of blood, recalling the pleas for mercy that must be like music to him. That he should ever see a sunset again and take pleasure from it, or taste a peach, or smell a flower. To Chyna, the back of this man's skull seemed like the smooth chitinous helmet of an insect, and she believed that if she ever touched him, he would be as cold as a squirming beetle under her hand.

Beyond the driver, beyond the windshield, at the top of the low rise toward which they were headed, a structure appeared, indistinct and unidentifiable. A few tall sodium-vapor arc lamps cast a sour, sulfurous light.

She squatted below the back of the dining nook again.

She picked up the knife.

They had reached the top of the rise. They were on level ground once more. Steadily slowing.

Turning around, facing away from the exit, she eased into the step well. Left foot on the lower step, right foot on the higher. Back pressed to the locked door, crouching in shadows beyond the reach of the nook lamp, she was ready to launch herself up and at him if he came back through the motor home and gave her a chance.

With a final sigh of air brakes, the vehicle stopped.

Wherever they were, people might be nearby. People who could help her.

But if she screamed, would those outside be near enough to hear?

Even it they heard, they would never reach her in time. The killer would get to her first, gun in hand.

Besides, maybe this was a roadside rest area: nothing more than a parking lot, some picnic tables, a poster warning about the dangers of campfires, and rest rooms. He might have taken a break to use the public facilities or the john in the trailer. At this dead hour, after three o'clock in the morning, they were likely to be the only vehicle on site, in which case she could scream until she was hoarse, and no one would come to her assistance.

The engine cut off.

Quiet. No vibrations in the floor.

Now that the motor home was still, Chyna was shaking. No longer depressed. Stomach muscles fluttering. Scared again. Because she wanted to live.

She would have preferred that he go outside and give her a chance to escape, but she expected him to use the trailer facilities instead of the public rest room. He would come right past her. If she couldn't escape, then she was hot to finish this.

Crazily, she wondered if what came out of him when he was cut would be blood-or the stuff that oozed from a fat beetle when it was crushed.

She expected to hear the bastard moving, heavy footfalls and the hollow spong when he stepped on a weak seam in the floor, but there was silence. Maybe he was taking a moment to stretch his arms, roll his achy shoulders, massage the back of his bull neck, and shrug off the weariness of travel.

Or perhaps he had glimpsed her in the rearview mirror, her face moon-bright in the light from the dining-table lamp. He could ease out of his seat and creep toward her, avoiding all the creaks in the floor because he knew where they were. Slide into the dining nook. Lean over the back of the booth. Shoot her point-blank where she crouched in the step well. Shoot her in the face.

Chyna looked up and to her left, across the back of the booth. Too low to see the lamp hanging over the center of the table, she saw only the glow of it. She wondered if the angle of his approach would give her a warning or if he would just be a sudden silhouette popping up from the booth as he opened fire on her.

4

Intensity.

He believes in living with intensity.

Sitting at the steering wheel, he closes his eyes and massages the back of his neck.

He isn't trying to get rid of the pain. It came on its own, and it will leave him naturally in time. He never takes Tylenol and other crap like that.

What he's trying to do is enjoy the pain as fully as possible. With his fingertips he finds an especially sore spot just to the left of the third cervical vertebra, and he presses on it until the pain causes faint sprays of twinkly white and gray lights in the blackness behind his eyelids, like distant fireworks in a world without color.

Very nice.

Pain is merely a part of life. By embracing it, one can find surprising satisfaction in suffering. More important, getting in touch with his own pain makes it easier for him to take pleasure in the pain of others.

Two vertebrae farther down, he locates an even more sensitive point of inflamed tendon or muscle, a wonderful little button buried in the flesh which, when pressed, causes pain to shoot all the way across his shoulder and down his trapezius. At first he works the spot with a lover's tender touch, groaning softly, then he attacks it vigorously until the sweet agony makes him suck air between his clenched teeth.

Intensity.

He does not expect to live forever. His time in this body is finite and precious-and therefore must not be wasted.

He does not believe in reincarnation or in any of the standard promises of an afterlife that are sold by the world's great religions-although at times he senses that he is approaching a revelation of tremendous importance. He is willing to contemplate the possibility that the immortal soul exists, and that his own spirit may one day be exalted. But if he is to undergo an apotheosis, it will be brought about by his own bold actions, not by divine grace; if he, in fact, becomes a god, the transformation will occur because he has already chosen to live like a god-without fear, without remorse, without limits, with all his senses fiercely sharpened.

Anyone can smell a rose and enjoy the scent. But he has long been training himself to