Driven by some ancient, embedded survival instinct, the rabbit began lunging against the walls and roof of wire. After a few moments, Satterfield threaded a hand through the opening, managing to corner the creature and extract it from the cage. He cradled it against his chest as it panted, its small heart fluttering as fast as a hummingbird’s.
Once the rabbit had stopped quaking, he lowered it into the cage again, both hands gripping tightly as it began to squirm and struggle. The snake had not moved, and when Satterfield released the rabbit—this time setting it practically against the divider—the triangular head darted forward, striking the mesh with enough force to make the cage shudder. Again the rabbit began battering itself against the corner and top of the cage, as the snake’s head, too, lashed against the screen with primitive force and ruthless frustration. After a few moments Satterfield retrieved the rabbit once more. He’d had a rat die swiftly of fright in just such circumstances on a prior occasion, and he did not want a repeat of that premature disappointment.
By the time Satterfield had performed the ritual half a dozen times—insertion and extraction, insertion and extraction—the rabbit’s quaking was constant, even when it was cradled against his chest; any time Satterfield made the slightest movement toward the cage, the creature began to struggle. Satterfield experimented, extending the rabbit toward the cage and then pulling it away several times without actually putting it inside. The creature was now crazed with terror, all sense of safety having been systematically destroyed. Its breathing was ragged and shallow, and the flicker of the heartbeat felt weaker now, less regular against Satterfield’s palm. The rabbit was clearly approaching exhaustion.
Satterfield, too, was reaching a turning point: He could feel the faint but familiar beginnings of boredom setting in. Leaning down again, he set the shivering rabbit in the cage, and this time he latched the door above it. Then, gripping the protruding handle of the divider screen, he slid the panel upward through the narrow slit, removing it from the cage and setting it aside. All the while, he kept his gaze fixed on the two animals.
The snake’s head swayed slightly toward the rabbit, almost imperceptibly, as if it expected the wire screen to materialize out of thin air. When it did not—when the snake’s reptilian brain sensed that no obstacles blocked the path to its prey—it drew its body into a muscular S, the raised head remaining motionless as the body drew up behind it. It held that serpentine shape for only a moment, then, in the blink of an eye, it straightened and shot forward, its jaws gaping and its fangs snapping down from the roof of the mouth.
Two seconds after the bite, the rabbit was convulsing; ten seconds later, the convulsions gave way to small twitches; another half minute and it lay motionless, its eyes already going glassy in death.
By the time the snake stretched its jaws around the rabbit’s head and began choking down the dead animal—its girth as big as the snake’s—Satterfield had already walked away. The feeding was utterly uninteresting to him, and even the death itself had been only mildly entertaining. No, it was the prelude to death—the surges and spikes of terror he’d learned to orchestrate: that was what he found addicting. Exciting. Arousing, even.
CHAPTER 3
Brockton
PEERING OUT THE GRIMY windows of my office on the second floor of Stadium Hall, gazing through the thicket of steel girders and concrete ramps, I glimpsed the emerald waters of the Tennessee River spooling past downtown Knoxville and the university. Most of the hundred-yard distance between the stadium and the river was covered in asphalt—parking lots and the four lanes of Neyland Drive—and the pavement shimmered in the late-summer afternoon, creating the illusion that the river itself might begin to boil at any moment. The Anthropology Annex, where I needed to go, was a small, freestanding building fifty sweltering yards away.
When I opened the door and stepped outside, exchanging the stadium’s cool, dark corridors for the sun-soaked outdoors, I felt as if I’d entered a blast furnace. Behind me, bricks radiated the pent-up heat like an oven; ahead, the asphalt lay like a sea of lava, and as I swam across through the heat and humidity, my clothes grew wet with sweat, my shirt plastering itself to my back.