Mr. Murder

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 stopped him for good. That and a brain-scrambling shot to the head are the only wounds he fears.
        When he reaches the cashier's window, he pays for the order with some of the money he took from Jack and Frannie in Oklahoma more than twenty-four hours ago. The young woman at the cash register can see his arm as he holds the currency toward her, so he strives to repress the severe tremors that might prick her curiosity. He keeps his face averted, in the night and rain, she can't see his ravaged chest or the agony that contorts his pale features.
        At the pick-up window, his order comes in several white bags, which he piles on the littered seat beside him, successfully averting his face