Chapter One

PART ONE
Saturday


CHAPTER 1

He ran at night and hid by day, crawling into dark places that were a little too much like his old lair-but then, it was only the familiar that could make you feel really safe.

He thought he could run until he was dead; there was nothing to hold him back. He'd run until his flesh dropped off and the wind and rain polished his bones. The house was far behind. But how far was far enough?

I am . . . I am . . . He ran chanting, trying to remember his rightful name. Never to be called Boy anymore. He held on to that little frayed string of hope that he could change what had been born into him, put a stop
to the twenty-four-hour picture show going on in his head. But maybe that was like hoping he could stop breathing, smelling, eating. Was it possible to change a taste for blood?

He had been running south, through a landscape of old farms, shanties and trailers, startled by the hulks of rusting cars sitting like giant rats in the moonlight, avoiding the lonely lights in bedroom windows, trembling at the sudden howl of an edgy hound. Keeping to the county roads. He was always lonely at night. Daddy had liked the highways. Get the best girlies hitchhiking on them, he had said. Fresh meat.

Now the sun was coming up and he was tired. A sign at a crossroads said hatton 5 mi. delonga 8 mi. He was getting close to towns. Ahead he could smell a swampy area. Nobody would be walking through there. The place had a mean, bad look; the kind of place that knew him. Old cypress trees stood on their knees in murky water, their branches draped with shawls of moss. He felt his way between the tupelos and black gum trees, his brow