The fifth vial

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Hold still, now. This won't hurt a bit.

Those were the only words Lonnie Durkin had heard for hours.

This won't hurt a bit.

Vincent always said the same thing just before he stuck the needle into Lonnie's arm and drew blood.

Vincent lied. The needles didn't hurt much, but they did hurt.

"Take me home! Please take me home! Please, please, please."

Lonnie leapt up from his bed, jammed his fingers through the metal wire fencing, and kicked the locked gate. He knew what a nightmare was. His mother had explained bad dreams to him when he was a boy and had begun waking up every night screaming. But he could tell that the cage was no nightmare.

The cage was real.

"Please!"

At that moment, the van swung a turn that threw him hard against the wall, banging his head and his shoulder. He cried out, fell, then crawled back to the bed.

The van was a house on wheels, like the one Uncle Gus and Aunt Diane had. But instead of a cage in the back, theirs had a nice room and a big bed and some closets. Five years ago, for Lonnie's sixteenth birthday, they had taken him to Yellowstone in the van and had let him sleep in that bed at night for the whole trip. The bed in the cage was too small for him, and the mattress was too hard. Beside the bed there was a chair, a pitcher of water in a holder on the wall, and some paper cups. On the chair there was a magazine called MAD, which had lots of weird cartoon drawings, but way too many words for him to read. And finally, there was the clicker for the TV that was attached to the wall outside the cage. That was everything.

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