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Buzz's gun barrel, felt the pain in his legs and back from landing with his shins across the edge of the
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ditch, felt the cold water seep into his robe, and heard the cat thrash and scream above them.
Then the naked body of Sven Strom stalked past him to stand between him and Buzz's weapon.
"You shouldna left me, Pa," Strom whined to Buzz in a high nasal voice, the same voice with which
Strom had pleaded not to be frozen after all, just before Meru put him on hold.
Clenching his teeth against the pain in his legs, and staring up through blurring eyes, Meru saw Strom
grab Buzz's neck.
Strom seemed oblivious to the gun barrel jammed into his stomach, and before the first round thudded
into his body, he bore Buzz to the ground. Buzz hadn't moved since Strom spoke, and to Meru's
surprise, did not fire immediately. Strom swept the gun from the smaller man's grasp just as the shot rang
out, but the shot went wild.
Inez Murdock's face, for some reason, was suddenly floating above him."Oh, my God! Come on, Meru,
don't justlie there. Can't you see there's something wrong with Strom?"
"Inez, help me," he cried.
But his words were lost as Strom hollered into Buzz's face. "Shouldna left me, Pa. My meat will spoil.
Never waste food. We stick together. But you got to come to these top-dwellers in spite of all the food I
made you. Youkilt me to come here."
As Strom spoke he squeezed Buzz's neck and pounded his head against the floor for emphasis. Buzz
kneed him in the stomach, but although the knee connected, it had no effect. He tried to bring an elbow
up, but the air was being squeezed out of him. His voice wheezed out,"Eeeeevv. . ." but the big man
kept squeezing and pounding until the body under him went limp.
For a moment Strom sat back on his haunches staring at the body in front of him as if neither Inez nor
Meru had any substance, then the big man fumbled with Buzz's belt, finding the utility knife the man Eve
had known as Father always carried. Calmly, Strom stripped away the clothing from Buzz's corpse and
began dressing the body out.
Buzz's soul escaped his body as his killer's hands relaxed on his broken flaccid neck. Damn. Who'd
have thought Evie had it in her to follow him like that, hijack some big joker's body and kill her own pa?
No respect for her elders and betters, that girl.
One thing for damn sure, though, was that he had better find himself another body soon. A likely
candidate was that cat. He thought maybe he'd only winged it. He'd get himself another human body
ultimately, of course, but he thought he could do a lot with the cat's teeth, claws, and agility.
He did enjoy the ease with which he smoked out of the cave, leaving Evie's new male body carving up
her pa's mortal remains while some hysterical woman screamed at her. Buzz saw the woman snatch up
the gun he'd dropped. Ol' Meru was hollering instructions that both Evie and the woman ignored. 'Kill
both of 'em, bitch, I don't give a shit,' Buzz thought as he slipped straight through the crystal lens and out
of the cave, 'just so I have a chance to get into the kittycat's body first.'
He found the cat okay. It was lying across the lap of the black girl, Chime, who was just sitting up there
cross-legged on top of the ridge with nothing around her but the wind and the mountaintops. The cat was
bleeding all over her thighs. The only other thing up there was a couple of spiderweb-looking
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contraptions-ghost traps, the Tibetans had called them-busted and tangled and spotted with blood on the
ground where the cat must have thrashed against them getting out of the hole.
At first he thought, 'Why isn't that girl fussing over that damned beast? She's that kind.'
The cat opened its golden eyes, bared its fangs and hissed at him. He wasn't about to evict that
particular feline spirit from that particular body so he could occupy the premises any time soon, he saw.
However, the girl, still sitting there oblivious to bothhis own ghostly presence and the spitting, hissing cat,
was definitely out to lunch. The part of her that Buzz didn't need was conveniently missing, while her
nubile young body sat there just waiting for him to fill it up.
The broken collection of threads and sticks on the ground had been placed there to protect her, he saw,
but thanks to the cat's struggles getting out of the cave, the ghost traps were useless against him. The cat
snarled and swiped at him, but since Buzz no longer had a hide to be lacerated, the cat couldn't touch
him.
Laughing all the way, Buzz jumped into the girl and made himself at home. His first bodily act, he
thought, would be to wring the damned cat's neck, but before he had quite gotten control of the girl's
slender brown hands, the animal streaked away, leaving long burning lacerations on Buzz's smooth new
thighs.
Meru, paying no attention to what Inez was bent on doing, said loudly, slowly, and very carefully. "Inez,
go into the Hall of Souls and find an empty bottle and cap and hold it up to the dead man's mouth."
But Inez, shivering with disgust as she watched the soulless monster Strom had become gut the body of
the man he had just murdered, instead scooped up the gun and shot Strom until he let the knife fall from
his hands and fell across his victim. It wasn't as if poor Sven was really still alive-Sven would never have
done such a revolting thing. She hadn't killedSven. No, clearly something had gone wrong with the
thawing process and something evil and alien had taken over Strom's body. She'd just . . . stopped
him-it-like the heroine in one of the early twentieth century zombie movies.
As she stood looking down at the bodies, Meru whimpered, "Oh, very well, have it your way. Bringtwo
bottles and caps."
Chime Cincinnati surveyed the barren wasteland in front of her, the parched earth, the bomb-pocked
mountains, the once lush valleys now filled with the ash of great forests, fused rock. The smooth road that
China had built to Lhasa long ago was buckled and fissured by earthquakes, washed away by spring
floods. She visited the shores of the sacred lakes and found two dry, one full of faintly glowing material
the consistency of paste.
She had added the ghosts of a few guerrilla fighters, former nomads trapped in their most recent
incarnations by the circumstances of their deaths. She found one deep bunker full of barely-living
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