The leaves came down like feather-motion mortar sh.e.l.ls. A breeze-strewn wall of hair obscured half of Murphy's face. He sat frozen, head bent forward, shoulders hunched.

"What do you think?" he mumbled.

Kloud was gawking at the distant piled buildings of Paxton. Dennison drew pensively at the joint. Casper was meticulously tying knots in the stem of a felled leaf.

"They'd never expect it," Dennison concluded finally. "I mean, security-wise they can't be too good."

"We don't got a lot to lose. The idea sits pretty well with me," said Kloud.

Casper nodded his approval.

"Then we all agree," Murphy said. "Good, we could use a war."

He looked off at the neat rows of monuments, at that translucent blue soldier marching into eternity.

The library was a large stone affair, somewhat medieval. A solemn out-of-place structure when compared with the other buildings on K Block. Four men walked up the walkway, which was cluttered with empty beer bottles and dried purple fanult leaves. Murphy pushed open the polished black plastic doors and led them inside.

It was quiet. Two women sat at elevated desks amidst row after row of ma.s.sive bookshelves. There was a study section at the huge room's right extreme.

Murphy, Kloud and Casper stood by a gla.s.s display case filled with stuffed birds while Dennison approached the two librarians' desks. Casper looked over at the study area where three schoolgirls sat with piles of homework at a corner table. One was a slim blond in a short black dress; one was chubby with a stylish bald head; the last was a Choom with thick gla.s.ses and a thick woolly sweater outfit. The girls momentarily ceased their studying to observe the men. Casper noticed the pretty blond was smiling at him, simultaneously spreading her legs apart beneath the table. He also noticed that her crotch was naked of panties and hair.

One librarian was a middle-aged alien woman with a horse-like head and thick gorilla arms. Two acorn eyes blinked at the end of her long wrinkled snout. The other woman was caped and wore a wide-brimmed black hat. She was a mid-thirtyish human with straight blue hair.

"Mag..." Dennison said with a smile.

"h.e.l.lo, Dennison." She had ultra-charm on tap.

The alien woman was engulfed in her work, yet they were careful in their word choices, lest she overhear.

"Do you think you could help me find that book you told me about?" the man asked.

"I can try; come upstairs."

Dennison glanced back at Murphy, who in turn looked sternly at Kloud and Casper, who nodded in reply. Murphy, Dennison, and the librarian went upstairs.

Darkness welcomed them. Morgue-silent rows of dusty hardcovers formed a maze of literature. There was a thickness to the air, possibly from the rotting pages of ancient volumes.

"Place is pretty spooky at night," Dennison noted, glancing down various aisles as Mag led them towards the back of the vast room.

"Sometimes I hear weird things up here."

"Yeah, such as..."

"Such as footsteps when I know n.o.body's up here."

Dennison let a nervous smile flicker on his long face. "Great."

Near-naked fall fingers drummed erratically at a window.

"One time I heard a thump and I came up to find a bible lying on the floor."

"No s.h.i.t?"

"Seriously. Doesn't scare me, though; ghosts can't hurt anybody."

Dennison's friend spoke softly. "I wouldn't say that."

Mag looked back at him and smirked. "Here we are, fellas."

It was a particularly dust-splashed bookcase. Dennison read some of the t.i.tles: Alcot's Guide to Murder, Combat Techniques, Guns of War, Guerrilla Mayhem, The Art of Bayonet Fighting, Tactics of Destruction, Morrison's Book of Home Torture Devices.

Mag reached to one side of the bookshelf and worked some type of mechanism; she pushed the shelf and it swivelled open, revealing a hidden room.

"Holy s.h.i.t, just like in the movies."

"What's a haunted library," asked Mag, "without a secret pa.s.sage?"

Once inside, the shelf was swung back into place and Mag flicked on a light. It was a virtual library of guns. One wall displayed a vast a.s.sortment of long arms; there were tables covered with pistols. A small shelf held piles of ammunition cartons. A true armory.

Murphy studied the walls, nodding his approval.

Mag was pleased by the men's expressions.

"Not bad, huh?"

"Not at all," Murphy answered. He bent over a collection of revolvers.

"You've got some pretty obscure s.h.i.t here, lady," Murphy said, reaching out to stroke steel.

"We've got just about everything. So what did you have in mind? Shotguns? Revolvers? Autos?"

"Military guns. No s.h.i.t guns, no revolvers. Military."

Mag swept an arm across the room. "Look around."

Dennison hefted a 30-shot fully automatic carbine. "A Huston Brain Rainer," he noted.

Murphy quietly chose two forty-fives and two nine-millimeter pistols and put them aside. Mag watched him as he switched his attention to a wall of rifles. She seemed amused by his intense sense of selection.

"What's that vest made of?" Mag asked. She noticed the strange rows of tusks beneath his sheepskin coat.

His manner was sluggish. At times he seemed to be on downers. "Klu-Koza tusks."

"Really?"

"We were in the Klu-Koza war."

"War? That wasn't a war. Not much of one."

Murphy's eyes remained dead, on the outside. His monotone remained stable.

"What do you call it when men run around with guns, killing each other...a tea party?"

She smiled and shrugged her caped shoulders.

"Klu-Koza was a quickie war," Dennison said, turning with a compact machine gun in his hand. "They don't even call it a war; they call it things like confrontation or conflict."

Murphy dismissed the conversation and turned to face the a.s.sembly of guns.

"I'll take these two F.A.R.s"

The fully automatic a.s.sault rifles were accurate, light, and powerful. The particular models he'd chosen were special compact versions with long clips and muzzle-flash reducers.

"Hey, check this one." Dennison held up a bulky pistol-like machine which resembled the vaccine gun they'd been inoculated with back at B.T.

"An Implode-Injector," Mag said.

"We used 'em on the grapes," Murphy said, taking the heavy thing from his friend. "We'll take this too."

Demons, warlocks, vampires...elfin drug magicians, shadowy specters of ill repute; the Canberra Mall served a feast of fiends.

Sequin-stamped clowns slick with shadow grease-paint waited for throats to slit. Sly teenage succubi swirled around on oily ogre rides while others gelled at some stands to spend money.

Carnival nightmare, smells, colors. Thickness and sickness. Vomit streamed down chipped paint while balloons bobbed like polished ectoplasmic teardrops.

The weekend crowd was thick. Fallen ice cream cones creaked beneath the slow motion stampede of feet. Mad music box tunes sprang from the large bulb-dyed merry-go-round where screams of joy and horror became inseparable.

The three vets moved through the crowd like a dense cloud. Murphy towered over the s.p.u.n.ky Choom teenyboppers, who bounced off his body like insignificant waves futilely challenging some great ship. He blinked down on them with tolerance.

"There," Kloud's voice called in the orgy of noise. Murphy followed his extended finger.

Casper sat on a majestic plastic dragon going up and down on the merry-go-round.

He spotted them on his next revolution; they were standing at the ticket stand. Apparently they had decided to join him.

The great canopy-topped disk slowed to a standstill. Some riders climbed on, others off; armed guards monitored who did what, "ticket enforcing." Murphy led Dennison and Kloud to where Casper sat waving a roll of tickets at one of the gunmen.

"Hey Casper, havin' fun?" Kloud asked sarcastically, plopping onto a stiff black stallion, its glossy chest impaled on a metal pole.

Casper, the most intelligent of the four, tossed Kloud a chilled smile.

Murphy reached out his hand, leaning like a lazy lion against a bullet-chipped white horse. Casper handed him an elastic-bound tube of papers.

"Good man."

Casper wore his mustard-colored cloth jacket with a marksmanship medal pinned to one lapel. His eyes of intense scrutiny hid behind tinted disks.

"Good," Murphy commented, examining the floor plan as the horse he leaned on began moving upwards and the disk began to turn.

"Giddyup," Kloud said with mock enthusiasm.

"Hey," Dennison said from his chariot. "Hey, Kloud, I think this is where Casper must go every Sunday. He likes watchin' all the kiddies. Ten-year-olds are his style."

"No, Casper's a church man. He's hopin' he'll live to be a hundred so he can spend a day prayin' for each guy he's killed. Right, Casper?"

Casper turned his head with a deliberate lack of speed.

Instantly Kloud and Dennison refrained.

Murphy's apartment was cell-like in its size. There was a couch, a folding director's chair, a vid-tank, and a stereo. A large flag was nailed across the ceiling; the boar face emblem of Tusk Company stared down.

"We'll go in two teams." Murphy held a stumpy hand-rolled iodine cigarette between thumb and forefinger as he spoke. "Me and Kloud, Casper and Dennison. I'm A Team; we'll go in after Five and take the front. I don't want any guns used until we've taken out the two guards outside..."

He paused to puff on the joint; his deep, sluggish voice strained as he continued, holding the smoke in his lungs. "So...B Team won't move 'til the s.h.i.t hits the fan. Once it does, just blow the back door in."

Murphy let streams of blue leak from his nostrils; they swam in the darkness like Ouija board serpents.

"Team A will take this route." He traced his finger across Casper's floor plan. "Team B will go this way."

The sun was nearly set. Its final rays slid through the blinds and glazed their weapons. Murphy fed bullets into the extra clips of his a.s.sault rifle. Peripherally he saw orange paper bats twirling toward the street. Crunchy leaves scurried like crustaceans in the twilight-flavored breeze.

The tight chamber echoed the crisp sounds of heavy magazines being shoved into their respective slots. Dennison tucked his new .9 mm auto-pistol into his waistband so that his dark brown coat obscured it. He stuffed his pockets with extra a.s.sault rifle clips.

Kloud jammed a seven-shot clip into his .45, which was then placed in his old belt holster. He put his compact black machine-gun into an overnight bag. The menacing little weapon was chunky, short, barely two feet long. A banana magazine extended from its tubular belly. He wore his leather jacket, a red T-shirt, camouflage pants and issue boots.

Casper inspected his weapons with surgeon intensity. He had the other .45 semi-auto, which had seven shots in the clip, one in the chamber. He clicked the hammer back halfway, then flicked on the safety. He, like Kloud, had a compact banana-fed fully automatic small arm. He placed it in a grocery bag. Beneath his tan coat he wore a bulky plastic vest to ward off enemy projectiles. He hid his receding hairline beneath his old Tusk Company helmet.

Murphy stabbed the fourteen-shot auto-pistol into his waistline, then wrapped his lightweight fully automatic rifle in a bath towel. He'd fashioned a holster that nestled against the lining of his sheepskin coat, to accommodate the heavy and bulky Injection-Imploder. A long-bladed bayonet hung against one thigh. The Captain had wrapped his belly with strips of cloth, so that if an enemy cut or blew his guts open, they wouldn't slide out. He, like Casper, wore a war-weathered green helmet.

Each man stood erect, weapons weighing heavily as Murphy looked them over.

"All set?" he asked.

No one needed to answer.

The Post was dream-like. Sickish phosph.o.r.escent green mixed with cigarette mist and supercharged heartbeats. The gla.s.ses of beer felt like air in tense hands, the chatter of library war stories was a blurred slow-motion insect buzz. Murphy's beer tasted like blood.

"When we raided c.u.mala Island-" the old vet's words were chilled dreams in Kloud's ears. A highway roared in his skull.

"When that cannon backfired I just-"