Van Helsing did not deign to reply. He moved toward Sheba, feeling terror, determination, and an odd longing mixed together. Sheba stood before a large whitewashed tomb, its marble front panel removed and cast aside. This was where she’d taken up residence after leaving behind her human dwelling place. There was a vile stench emanating from the tomb. Nevertheless, Van Helsing summoned his courage and stepped nearer.

He heard small rustling noises, and behind Sheba he saw movement. It had to be Musa Ali’s sister, still alive, but bound and made captive by this loathsome creature. “Thanks be to all the angels that we are yet in time,” he said.

Sheba did not cry out or utter any verbal challenges; it was as if she’d lost the power of speech. Instead, she made harsh, guttural, animal noises deep in her throat.

“Unbind the child and let her go free,” Van Helsing demanded.

Once again Sheba bared her perilous fangs and hissed at them, not like a snake, but like a great feral cat. Then she rushed forward more swiftly than even Van Helsing had anticipated and leaped on him, reaching for his unprotected throat with her clawed fingers and savaging him with her demon teeth.

Bill hurried to Van Helsing’s defense. “Not again,” he said. “Not another one.”

“What?” Van Helsing asked.

“Another, what you call, an abomination. Yeah. Bloodthirsty, too. Bad luck always comes in threes, you know. So the third one is going to be a real showstopper.”

Bill attacked first, clouting the hideous thing with all the strength he had. The blow had little effect. Bill lurched backward, shaking his injured hand. His enemy was very tall, towering over him in a confident slouch. Despite his mental and physical handicaps, Bill was a better boxer than his opponent; he had a quicker punch, and his bob-and-weave was deft by comparison. Again and again Bill struck, but for all the pain he was causing himself, and for the complete lack of results he was achieving against his foe, Bill might as well have been beating up the brick wall.

Meanwhile, Van Helsing had as much as he could handle with Sheba. She fought like a cornered beast, ripping and tearing and biting at him. He ordered her again to release the young girl. Then he tried to reason with Sheba. Finally, he resorted to threats. Nothing worked. She was no longer human, no longer susceptible to his powers of persuasion.

He was covered with his own blood when he finally managed to throw Sheba to the ground. He’d put a foot behind one of hers, then shoved her shoulder heavily. She toppled backward, shrieking in incoherent rage. Van Helsing wasted no time congratulating himself. He reached for one of the sharpened stakes and a loose brick.

Sheba glared up at him, her lips drawn back in an animal growl. She was completely in the power of the vampire now, no longer human in any respect, yet there was also a frightened pleading in her eyes — or so Van Helsing chose to believe. Audran saw it, too.

“She’s as moddy-driven as Van Helsing,” Audran thought. “He’s a self-righteous, demented maniac, as murderous as she is. Maybe she deserves some compassion.” With an exhausting effort of will, Audran and Van Helsing reached up and popped the moddy out.

“Jeez,” I muttered, dropping the plastic moddy to the ground. It was a great relief again to be rid of Van Helsing’s monomania. Meanwhile, I had little time to think. I was still trying to control the enraged Sheba, who struggled and bucked in my grasp.

Bill had evidently vanquished his enemy. “That’s right, pal,” he said, reaching for one of the fire-hardened stakes. “You hold her and I’ll ostracize her.”

The first thing I did, while I ignored Bill, was to pop out Sheba’s vampire moddy. The transformation was immediate and dramatic. The knowledge of what she’d done while under its influence flooded in, horrifying her. “I just couldn’t take it out,” she gasped between loud sobs. “Other moddies I can take or leave alone, but this one was different. I couldn’t control myself.”

“Some irresponsible programmer wrote that into the moddy,” I said. I tried to speak in a soothing voice. I no longer feared or hated Sheba; I felt only immense sadness. She just collapsed in tears as if she hadn’t heard me.

“Hey,” Bill said proudly, “you notice that I took care of my guy all right?”

“Bill,” I explained wearily, “you were savagely going ten rounds with a date palm.”

He stared at me. “A date palm? Well, hell, who knows what afrit was inside it when it hit me. Maybe we should get somebody up here to exorcise that tree.”

“It didn’t hit you, Bill. I saw the whole thing from the beginning.”

Bill scratched uneasily with one foot in the black soil. “Anyway, I think I killed it. Now I’m sorry, if it’s only a date palm.”

I gave him a reassuring smile, although I didn’t really feel like it. “Don’t worry, Bill. I’m sure it’s only stunned.”

He brightened considerably. “That’s easy for you to say,” he said.

I smashed both the Dracula and Van Helsing moddies with the brick. Who can say how much good that did, because the next homicidal blazebrain still had plenty of murderous moddies to choose from, at Laila’s store or any of the other modshops in the Budayeen. I let out a deep sigh. I’d worry about those killers when the time came.

I helped Sheba to her feet. She was still hysterical, but now she clung to me for comfort. Her violent sobbing subsided. I saw that her vampire’s elongated canine teeth were fake, a bodily modification that Sheba had paid for at one of the Budayeen store-front surgical clinics. I reached up slowly and gently pulled the fangs free.

I knew Sheba had an addictive personality — there was a lot of that going around the Budayeen these days — and although she wouldn’t wear the vampire moddy again, she was more than likely going to become something just as dangerous to herself and to other people in the near future.

Still, I thought, I could hope that the sudden awareness of what she’d done would get her to seek help. There was nothing more that I could do for her now. The rest was up to Sheba herself.

In the same way, my own future would be shaped in part by the moddies I bought and wore. Hell, I’d just come very close to killing a seriously troubled young woman while I was under the influence of the Van Helsing moddy. I was certainly in no position to judge her.

That gave me an awful lot to think about, but I could put that off until later, or tomorrow, or some other time. Right then I turned my attention to Musa Ali’s little sister. I untied her and satisfied myself that although she was exhausted and terrified, she was otherwise unharmed. Bill bent down and picked her up in his arms. He always got along well with children.

As the Budayeen characters began to arrive at the cemetery, drawn by the shouting and racket of our small battle with the Undead, I took Sheba’s arm and led her out of the graveyard, back down the Street to her long-unused apartment. As of that moment, all she had was hope.

A number of people asked George why he never mentioned anything that was going on in the rest of the world during When Gravity Fails. This would be a little like having Jane Austen mention the Napoleonic Wars during Pride and Prejudice — which she never does — or Raymond Chandler take a break during The Big Sleep to discuss the conquest of Poland by Nazi Germany.

The Budayeen is the only world its inhabitants care about.

Even as personality-transfer technology was assimilated by prostitutes and pomographers, so it has been incorporated into modem warfare. Like the denizens of the Budayeen, the hero of this tale doesn’t know much of what’s going on in the rest of the world, and doesn’t care. All he knows is where he is, and what he has to do for the rest of the day. With the amount of lies — propaganda and electronic — going around, it’s all he CAN know, and sometimes not even that.