All of which is of more interest to the Dead Man than me. I did my five years in the Marines and survived. I don't want to remember. The Dead Man does. Glory Mooncalled is his hobby.

Whatever, I didn't sleep well and I was less cheerful than usual when I got up, which is saying something. On my best mornings I'm human only by charity. Morning is the lousiest time of day. The lower the sun in the east, the lousier that time is.

The racket in the street started about the time I got my feet on the floor.

A woman screamed. She was frightened. Nothing galvanizes me so quickly. I was down at the door with a small arsenal before I started thinking. Somebody was pounding on that door now, yelling my name and begging to be let in. I peeped through the peephole. One ounce of brain was working. I saw a woman's face. Terrified. I fumbled at bolts, yanked the door open.

A naked woman stumbled inside. I gawked for half a minute before my brain started chugging. Then I checked the street. I saw nothing till a thing slightly larger than a spider monkey, built along similar lines but hairless and red, with batlike wings instead of arms and with a spadelike point at the end of its tail, crashed and flopped around, squealing. A city ratman ambled over. The moment it stopped moving, he shoveled it into his wheeled trash bin. The creature's kin didn't protest or claim the body. The morCartha are indifferent to their dead.

So now they were doing it in the daytime, too. If you could call it daytime Just because it was light out. Personally, I don't believe daytime really starts till the sun is straight overhead.

I slammed the door, spun around. The woman had collapsed. What I saw in that bad light was enough to make my hair stand up and get split ends.

Not a stitch on her, like I said, but she had the body to wear that kind of outfit. She clutched a raggedly wrapped package in her left hand. I couldn't pry it loose.