Deficiency by Andrew Neiderman

been to be able to feed on one so healthy, with blood so rich. The memory had stimulated him and had filled him with every kind of natural hunger. Today, he had eaten normally and he now recalled how the thought of bacon and eggs, soft rolls and butter, and steaming hot coffee had made his stomach churn in such anticipation that he had been unable to linger a moment longer in that bed.
    He had also wanted to jog, to feel his muscles expand and his heart pound. And he had wished he had another woman beside him to make love to normally. He would take no more from her than he would give to her.
    "I promise," he had said aloud, as if there had been a skeptical woman beside him.
    Then he had risen from his bed feeling a foot taller as usual and had put on his exercise clothes. When he had first driven into this town, he had noticed the nice park with the jogging track circling it. Faces and names drifted in and out of his memory like leaves carried in the wind. For a moment they were there, and then they were gone and he couldn't recall them no matter how hard he tried or how much he wanted to remember. Yet incidental things, like the park, lingered long enough for him to recall them precisely. Why this would be so, he did not know, but he rarely questioned it. He rarely questioned anything about his life even though he understood he was different from every other human being around him.
    He had stepped out of his new motel room and looked about with interest. Because he had come here so late, he had really seen it for the first time this morning — the scenery, the parking lot, the office, and the pool. He had arrived here in the dark, tired, but fulfilled and eager to pass into a restful sleep. But when he had stepped out and inhaled the clear, cool air, all of his systems went into full gear and he quickly became the wonderful and efficient machine he always knew he was capable of being.
    In the park he had appeared to be just another one of them: rosy cheeks, heart pumping, legs moving in stride, his lungs expanding, his blood moving efficiently through his veins bringing oxygen, taking away waste. Of course, he wasn't really just another one of them. They didn't have his capacities and they couldn't reach his sensual heights.
    Yet, they would never notice any difference simply by looking at him. If they could, they would be frightened away and he would die of starvation, age instantly.
    He didn't know why all this was so and at the moment, he didn't care to think about it. What was important was he knew what things he was supposed to say when he went out on a hunt, and he knew where to go for whatever he wanted; but unlike everyone he met, he had no photographs of family, no relatives to talk to. If they pressed him, he made it up — invented parents and brothers and sisters. Actually, he drew from his victims.
    Lately, much of it was getting jumbled and that worried him a bit. Was he really remembering his own past, or was he dipping into the well of identities he had absorbed in one way or another? One day it occurred to him that he might not exist at all, not in the sense anything else existed. He really had no personal identity. He was a conglomeration, a union of a myriad of DNAs. His body was so infused with the essence of his victims, their corpuscles, their genetics, that maybe he was merely the sum total of his prey. In an ironic sense, they had absorbed him; they had seized and possessed him and not vice versa. He was nothing without them.
    Because of this he resented them in the same way an addict might resent the substance of his addiction. He couldn't deny the need, nor could he stop himself from seeking it, but he despised it at the same time.
    What would he do if he didn't have the need? In what direction would he go? As it was, his periodic hunger controlled and governed his every move. It provided all his ambition for him and created the subjects and natures of his dreams. In his mind there was an overall