storm, he becomes so achingly ravenous that he begins to shake with
deprivation. They are not mere tremors of need but wracking shudders
that clack his teeth together. His twitching hands beat a palsied
tattoo upon the steering wheel, and he is barely able to hold it firmly
enough to control the vehicle. Fits of dry wheezing convulse him, hot
flashes alternate with chills, and the sweat gushing from him is colder
than the rain that still soaks his hair and clothes.
His extraordinary metabolism gives him great strength, keeps his energy
level high, frees him from the need to sleep every night, allows him to
heal with miraculous rapidity, and is in general a cornucopia of
physical blessings, but it also makes demands on him. Even on a normal
day, he has an appetite formidable enough for two lumberjacks. When he
denies himself sleep, when he is injured, or when any other unusual
demands are made on his system, mere hunger soon becomes a ravenous
craving, and craving escalates almost at once into a dire need for
sustenance that drives all other thoughts from his mind and forces him
into the rapacious consumption of whatever he can find.
Although the interior of the Honda is adrift in empty food
containers–wrappers and packages and bags of every description-there is
no hid San Bernardino Mountains into the lowlands of Orange County, he
feverishly consumed every crumb that remained. Now there are only dried
smears of chocolate and mustard, thin films of glistening oil, grease,
sprinkles of salt, none of it sufficiently fortifying to compensate for
the energy needed to rummage for it in the darkness and lick it up.
By the time he locates a fast-food restaurant with a drive-in window, at
the center of his gut is an icy void into which he seems to be
dissolving, growing hollower and hollower, colder and colder, as if his
body is consuming itself to repair itself, catabolizing two cells for
every one it creates. He almost bites his own hand in a frantic and
despairing attempt to relieve the grueling pangs of starvation. He
imagines tearing out chunks of his own flesh with his teeth and greedily
swallowing, sucking down his own hot blood, anything to moderate his
suffering–anything, no matter how repulsive it might be.
But he restrains himself because, in the madness of his inhuman hunger,
he is half convinced no flesh remains on his bones. He feels utterly
hollow, more fragile than the thinnest spun-glass Christmas ornament,
and believes he might dissolve into thousands of lifeless fragments the
moment his teeth puncture his brittle skin and thereby shatter the
illusion of substance.
The restaurant is a McDonald’s outlet. The tinny speaker of the
intercom at the ordering post has been exposed to enough years of summer
sun and winter chill that the greeting of the unseen clerk is quavery
and static-riddled. Confident that his own strained and shaky voice
won’t sound unusual, the killer orders enough food to satisfy the staff
of a small office, six cheeseburgers, Big Macs, fries, a couple of fish
sandwiches, two chocolate milkshakes–and large Cokes because his racing
metabolism, if not fueled, leads as swiftly to dehydration as He is in a
long line of cars, and progression toward the pick-up window is
aggravatingly slow. He has no choice but to wait, for with his
blood-soaked clothes and bullet-torn shirt, he can’t walk into a
restaurant or convenience store and get what he needs unless he is
willing to draw a lot of attention to himself.
In fact, though blood vessels have been repaired, the two bullet wounds
in his chest remain largely unhealed due to the shortage of fuel for
anabolic processes. Those sucking holes, into which he can insert his
thickest finger to a disturbing depth, would cause more comment than his
bloody shirt.
One of the slugs passed completely through him, out his back to the left
of his spine. He knows the exit wound is larger than either of the
holes in his chest. He feels the ragged lips of it spreading apart when
he leans back against the car seat.
He is fortunate that neither round pierced his heart. That might have