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see a thing, he realised with a cold sick certainty, until
they dropped the hammer.
    “MINUTE AND A HALF…” the bullhorn boomed. “SAY, YOU A SPIC, BOY? YOU A
CATHERLICK? TIME FOR A COUPLE OF HAIL MARYS IF YOU
REALLY
FEEL THE NEED FOR
A QUICK RATTLE ON THE ROSARIES!”
    “Where the fuck did
that
come from?” Eddie muttered to himself. There might
or might not have been some Hispanic in his parentage—it was about as
likely as anything else—but he couldn’t see what that had to do with
anything.
    “Destabilisation tactics,” Trix Desoto said. “Like the disco. Keeping us
off-balance for when they come in to take the package.”
    “Package?” Eddie said.
    Trix Desoto indicated the supine form of the unconscious man.
    “THAT’S THE BUNNY!” came the bullhorn. “NICE OF YOU TO GIVE US A GOOD LOOK AT
THE MERCHANDISE!”
    For a second, Eddie was unaware of what the bullhorn guy had meant. He sat
there in a cold sweat, looking at the van’s interior light, trying to work it
out.
    Then he lurched towards it with a curse and shut the light off.
    “CLEVER GUY!” came the bullhorn. “WE GOT NIGHT SIGHTS AND THERMAL-IMAGING
SYSTEMS OUT THE ASS, MAN! YOU JUST LEFT YOURSELF BLIND AND IN THE DARK. THIRTY
SECONDS!”
    If there was one thing, absolutely one thing, that Eddie Kalish was not going
to do it was turn the light back on again.
    Besides, what with the spill-in from the big Kliegs outside, it didn’t make
any real difference. The guy was just trying to find another way to rattle him
and keep him from doing something all resourceful and heroic.
Not that
that
made any difference, either. If the resourceful hero in Eddie
Kalish was waiting to make itself known, it was taking its own sweet time
about it.
    “That’s it, then,” Eddie said. The choices had come down to sitting here and
dying, or even pretending to believe in this “surrender” crap and dying in the
open. “There’s nothing we can do.”
    “Oh there’s something we can do,” said Trix Desoto. “There’s something I can
do.”
    Looking at her in the in the glare of the Kliegs, it finally percolated
through Eddie what had been odd about her since he had made it back to the
van. Gone was the delirious swinging between lucidity and alien-sounding
gibberish.
    Now she seemed entirely and unnaturally sanguine—and not in any sense
relating to the catastrophic blood-loss from the wound in her gut.
    In fact, she was looking pale but strangely healthy. The body in the comedy-nurse uniform seemed somehow bulkier and stronger.
    It might have simply been the light, but Eddie thought he could see weird
muscle-masses moving under the skin. Half-thoughts of vampires, of zombies,
flashed through Eddie’s mind. Walking corpses, monstrous after death.
    “There’s something I can do,” Trix Desoto repeated, eyes a kind of burning
black behind the slatted zebra-striping of light and shadow from the Kliegs.
“And I’m going to do it now.”
     
    In the burning ruins of Las Vitas, the flesh of any number of scavenging
animals hazed instantly into molecular dust—along with the remaining flesh
of that on which they were feeding.
    Is was not as if something were sucking some actual life-force, if that word can be made to mean anything in the first place. It was more as if something were feeding on some product of life-coherence…
     
    Commander Thomas Marlon Drexler, heading up the wet-squad out of NeoGen, was
suffering from a small gap in basic expectations.
    The fact was that, over the years, military-grade command technology had
evolved to the point where with a single and suitably controlled squad of
operatives one could subvert the infrastructure and take command of an entire
city or country.
    Schematic analysis of anything from the power and informational grids to the
plumbing, plus detailed psychologistical profiling of the principle characters
amongst the enemy, ensured that force could be applied to critical targets
with a zero-tolerance of