"Come on," Death said. "Come on. We just want to pitch in. I love you guys. You changed my life. Let me contribute." Lester snorted. "Cross the road, go straight for two hundred yards, turn left at the house with the Cesar Chavez mural, and I'll meet you there." "You mean go into the --" Death didn't know what it was called. He always tried not to look at it when he came to the ride. That slum across the road. He knew it was somehow connected with the ride, but in the same way that the administrative buildings at Disney were connected with the parks. The big difference was that Disney's extraneous buildings were shielded from view by berms and painted go-away green. The weird town across the road was *right there*. "Yeah, across the road into the shantytown." "OK," Death said. "See you soon." He hung up and patted Lacey's hand. "We're going over there," he said, pointing into the shantytown. "Is it safe?" He shrugged. "I guess so." He loved his chair, loved how tall it made him, loved how it turned him into a half-ton cyborg who could raise up on his rear wheels and rock back and forth like a triffid. Now he felt very vulnerable -- a crippled cyborg whose apparatus cost a small fortune, about to go into a neighborhood full of people who were technically homeless. "Should we drive?" "I think we can make it across," he said. Traffic was light, though the cars that bombed past were doing 90 or more. He started to gather up a few more of his people, but reconsidered. It was a little scary to be going into the town, but he couldn't afford to freak out Lester by showing up with an entourage. The guardrail shielding the town had been bent down and flattened and the chair wheeled over it easily, with hardly a bump. As they crossed this border, they crossed over to another world. There were cooking smells -- barbecue and Cuban spices -- and a little hint of septic tank or compost heap. The buildings didn't make any sense to Death's eye, they curved or sloped or twisted or leaned and seemed to be made of equal parts pre-fab cement and aluminum and scrap lumber, laundry lines, power lines, and graffiti. Death was used to drawing stares, even before he became a cyborg with a beautiful woman beside him, but this was different. There were eyes everywhere. Little kids playing in the street -- hadn't these people heard of stranger danger -- stopped to stare at him with big shoe-button eyes. Faces peered out of windows from the ground on up to the third storey. Voices whispered and called. Lacey gave them her sunniest smile and even waved at the little kids, and Death tried nodding at some of the homeys staring at him from the window of what looked like a little diner.