He ate with his face pointed down. He was hungry, but he could survive without eating for a long time. He could survive without liquids for a long time too although the average person would become dehydrated and die fairly quickly. The same with lack of sleep. You don’t sleep for two weeks, you hallucinate and then you die, your brain and other organs all going wacky on you before they shut down and the lights go out forever.
Yet it was all physiological. It was all about slowing things down, lessening the internal burn. Like animals hibernating, everything went from flat-out to glacial. Humans could learn a lot from animals about survival, because animals could do it far better than humans.
And I’m not a human anymore. I’m a fucking wild animal. Maybe the most dangerous of all, because I’ve got a human brain to go along with the “wild” part.
He finished his meal, sat back, and rubbed the spot on his head.
He took a sip of coffee and then his face screwed up. The pain came and went without warning.
He let out a tortured breath. It was the one pain that he could not ignore. The wound on his arm didn’t bother him. He had never even felt the bite of the knife.
But the pain in his head was different. It was special, apparently. They had never fully explained that one. It was his brain after all. The most important organ he had. It was what made him him. Or not him, in Rogers’s case.
He paid the bill and walked back to his car. He drove to another part of the small town, parked, and settled down for the night.
As the hours passed and the darkness deepened, Rogers lay there and stared at the ceiling of the car. It was stained and faded and generally worn out.
He was stained, faded, and should have been worn out. But his energy level had never been higher.
It was only during his last year in prison that certain parts of his mind had become fully accessible to him. And that was why he had marshaled all of his strength and determination and sat in front of the parole board and said all the right things. His remorse. His learning from his mistakes. His wanting to lead a good, productive life going forward. He was being sincere—well, mostly. He had learned from his mistakes. He did want to be productive going forward. He had even forced some tears.
But he felt no remorse, because he was incapable of the emotion.
He had only one goal now. And it lay, he hoped, about five hundred miles from here.
He was going back to the beginning to get to the end.
But the remnants in his head? That previously inaccessible spot? He focused on that.
The man was young, not yet twenty. Good-natured. Trusting.
That had been his mistake. The trusting part.
It was the same old story: a strange man in a strange land. No friends, no allies, no one to turn to for help.
He had come to this place for a better life, as had millions of others.
He had not found a better life. He had found a very different man at the end of the day living inside his body. He knew this and yet could not fully control it. To change himself back to what he was. He had tried. Over the last year when he had finally punched through that wall, he had desperately tried to uncurl the fist. To banish from his mind the desire to maim, wound, or more often kill.
But he had made a little progress.
The punk back at the construction site was fortunate that Rogers had somehow managed to walk away with sarcastic words instead of a lethal jab.
It had been a little thing, certainly.
But it had felt empowering nonetheless.
That was why he had smiled.
I can exercise some control. I don’t have to strike every time. I can walk away.
In prison, after his encounter with the men who wanted to force their will on him, Rogers had been placed in a cell by himself. Better that he be completely alone, for none of the guards wanted to have to intervene in another fight involving Paul Rogers.
Thus there was no one to antagonize him. No one to bring out the monster that lurked just under his skin.
But as Rogers closed his eyes for the night, his thoughts held on that young man just recently arrived in this country with another name and a far different ambition for his life. A nice young man. A young man with a future, one would say.
Now that man was long gone.
The monster was all that was left.
And the monster had one more thing to do.
Chapter
6
PULLER SAT IN the chair and stared over at his father, who was still sleeping.
Colonel Shorr and Agent Hull had been gone for a while.
The VA hospital they were in was quiet, all activity ratcheting down as everyone tucked in for the night. Puller had come back here and sat down and stared at his father because he couldn’t think of what else to do.
When his father had first come here his moments of lucidity had been fairly frequent. Not enough to allow him to live by himself. He might have burned his house down by putting a metal can of soup in the microwave or using the gas stove to heat his kitchen.
He remembered that he had woken the next morning and his mother was not there. He remembered the MPs coming to the house. Then his father charging into the officers’ quarters where they lived at Fort Monroe, bellowing at and bullying all those within striking distance.
And his father had lied to the police?
He stared over at the sleeping man.
Why would he have done that?
Because he had actually murdered his wife and Puller’s mother?