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Electraglide in an avalanche. This one had a swivel mount so it could be pulled out and fired on
     the move. Now was as good as any for a try. Stone pulled his leg up and out of the way and unhitched the firing tube. There
     was no time for careful calculation, but he quickly tilted it up directly toward the center of the sky armada. There was time
     for only one shot, he had to stop to reload—and that didn’t seem too likely.
    Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.
The words tore through his mind like an advertising ditty. Only these suckers didn’t have whites in their eyes—besides, they
     were already too close; Stone could see the crooked beaks snapping in the air, the cold predatory eyes beaming in on him,
     preparing to make contact the hard way. He lifted his leg back so he was riding at a peculiar angle and pulled the trigger.
     The whole bike shook with a roar as the missile shot out the tube, and a blue flame exhaust, the heat of which Stone could
     feel like a blast furnace, shot past him on the side of the seat.
    But it was the missile end that was the thing to look out for. And the vultures didn’t have a chance. The 89mm shell set to
     detonate at the lightest contact ripped through the first few ranks of the garbage birds about a hundred yards away and went
     in a good two hundred feet before it found something hard enough to go off of. And it went with an immense explosion which
     Stone wasn’t quite prepared for, nearly knocking the bike over on its side. The force of the blast tore out in every direction
     into the vultures, absolutely ripping them to shreds. It was like a chicken butchering factory run by anarchists, for the
     vultures were sliced up into all sorts of odd configurations, few of them marketable. Wings, beaks, claws all went shooting
     off in every direction as the whole sky filled with feathers and a mist of blood that colored the high clouds scarlet.
    Stone withstood the initial shock blast and pulled his goggles down as he tore on straight ahead and into the mess. The blood
     mist was dropping now and the feathers too so that there was a storm of them. He could hardly see and had to slow down to
     almost nothing before he at last emerged on the other side and was clear of the falling storm of fluffy red soaked feathers.
    There were no more of them waiting for him. It didn’t make him feel great to see so much bloodshed, so many butchered vultures.
     But what went around came around, and these buzzards had learned the hard way. Stone drove on just as other flocks of them
     began circling again. But this time their attention was zeroed in on their dead brethren below. It made the other isolated
     bits of carrion as much as there was like a mere snack compared to the acres of pulverized and homogenized bird flesh. Within
     minutes of his departure from the killing ground Stone could see the new cloud forming above the serve-yourself vulture meat
     market like some vast swirling asteroid belt of brown bodies. And as he drove over a rise and didn’t look back again, the
     blood flock dropped down like a curtain descending.

CHAPTER
Five

    A young woman stood naked on a pedestal. The pedestal, electronically controlled, was revolving as greedy eyes took in the nubile
     lithe form, untouched, un-scarred and untwisted by life, unlike those faces that stared at it.
    “Beautiful, so beautiful,” the Dwarf said from his wheelchair as he tried to rise up on his stumps to his full height like
     a bird trying to present its plumage. Only he didn’t have any plumage to present.
    “Yes,” other voices spoke from around the stainless steel floor. They stared hard at her perfect beauty contrasting so starkly
     with their own physical abnormalities. The dozen people in the room, the Dwarf’s personal staff, were also freaks—three men
     who were badly burned, other dwarfs, a man with no flesh, only pulsing muscle visible to all the world. These were the Dwarf’s
     own, the ones