"So why are you?"
"I'm waiting for Charlie," she said simply.
It occurred to me to wonder exactly how many years she had been waiting. Three?Fifteen? Just how long was it possible to hold on? Even in my confused andemotional state, though, I knew better than to ask. Deep inside she must'veknown as well as I did that Charlie wasn't coming. "My name's Cobb," I said."What's yours?"
She hesitated and then, with an odd sidelong look, said, "I'm Charlie's widow.That's all that matters." It was all the name she ever gave, and Charlie's Widowshe was to me from then onward.
I rolled onto my back on the tin ceiling and spread out my arms and legs, aphantom starfish among the bats. A fragment, she had called me, shreds andtatters. No wonder you're so frightened! In all the months since I'd been washedinto this backwater of the power grid, she'd never treated me with anything buta condescension bordering on contempt.
So I went out into the storm after all.
The rain was nothing. It passed right through me. But there were ion-heavy gustsof wind that threatened to knock me off the lines, and the transformer outsidethe Widow's house was burning a fierce actinic blue. It was a gusher of energy,a flare star brought to earth, dazzling. A bolt of lightning un-zipped me,turned me inside out, and restored me before I had a chance to react.
The Corpsegrinder was visible from the Roxy, but between the burning transformerand the creature's metamorphosis, I was within a block of the monster before Iunderstood exactly what it was I was seeing.
It was feeding off the dying transformer, sucking in energy so greedily that itpulsed like a mosquito engorged with blood. Enormous plasma wings warped toeither side, hot blue and transparent. They curved entirely around the Widow's