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and kill spiders on my own. I can balance a checkbook and check the oil in my car. I can support myself. Then again, maybe not. How am I going to support myself?
    She threw her flight bag on the bed and pulled out the white bakery bag full of money and emptied it on the bed. She counted the bills in one stack, then counted the stacks. There were thirty-five stacks of twenty one-hundred dollar bills. Minus the five hundred she had spent on the hotel: almost seventy thousand dollars. She felt a sudden and deep-seated urge to go shopping.
    Whoever had attacked her had known she would need money. It hadn't been an accident that she had turned. And it probably hadn't been an accident that he had left her hand in the sunlight to burn. How else would she have known to go to ground before sunup? But if he wanted to help her, wanted her to survive, why didn't he just tell her what she was supposed to do?
    She gathered up the money and was stuffing it back in the flight bag when the phone rang. She looked at it, watched the orange light strobing in rhythm to the bell. No one knew where she was. It must be the front desk. After four rings she picked up.
    Before she could say hello, a gravelly calm male voice said, "By the way, you're not immortal. You can still be killed."
    There was a click and Jody hung up the phone.
    He said, be killed , not you can still die. Be killed .
    She grabbed her bag and ran out into the night.

Chapter 6 – The Animals
    The daytime people called them the Animals. The store manager had come into work one morning to find one of them hanging, half-naked, from the giant red S of the Safeway sign and the rest of them drunk on the roof, pelting him with Campfire marshmallows. The manager yelled at them and called them Animals. They cheered and toasted him by spraying beer on each other.
    There were seven of them now that their leader was gone. They wandered into the store around eleven and the manager informed them that they were getting a new crew chief: "This guy will whip you into shape – he's done it all, his application was four pages long."
    Midnight found the Animals sitting on the registers at the front of the store, sharing worries over a case of Reddi Wip.
    "Screw this hotshot from back East," said Simon McQueen, the oldest. "I'll throw my fifty cases an hour like always, and if he wants more, he can do it himself." Simon sucked a hit of nitrous oxide from the whipped cream can and croaked, "He won't last longer'n a fart on a hot skillet."
    Simon was twenty-seven, muscular and as wiry-tense as a banjo string. He was pockmarked and sharp-featured, with a great mane of brown hair that he kept out of his face with a bandanna and a black Stetson, and he fancied himself a cowboy and a poet. He had never been within six-gun range of a horse or a book.
    Jeff Murray, a has-been high school basketball star, pulled a can of whipped cream from the open case and said, "Why didn't they just promote one of us when Eddie left?"
    "Because they don't know their ass from a hot rock," Simon said. "Can up," he added quickly.
    "They probably did what they thought best," said Clint, a myopic, first trimester born-again Christian, who, having recently been forgiven for ten years of drug abuse, was eager to forgive others.
    "Can up," Simon repeated to Jeff, who had upended the whipped cream can and was pushing the nozzle. Jeff inhaled a powerful stream of whipped cream that filled his mouth and throat, shot from his nostrils, and sent him into a blue-faced choking fit.
    Drew, the crew's pot supplier and therefore medical officer, dealt Jeff a vicious blow in the solar plexus, causing the ex-power forward to expel a glob of whipped cream approximately the size of a small child. Jeff fell to the floor gasping. The glob landed safely on register 6.
    "Works as good as the Heimlich maneuver" – Drew grinned – "without the unwanted intimacy."
    "I told him to hold the can up," Simon said.
    There was a tap on the glass at the