Intensity

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