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 bad 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.
  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 01%M 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 religionsalthough 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