Who gave you a gun?''The army.''Why?''That's what the army does, Simon.

He realised he was in a chair. The world was white and blurry in half his vision, and it took him a few moments to realise a sheet of paper was stuck to his face.

He felt like a baked bean in a can, soaring through the air on a downward turn of a parabolic arc...

Are you a house-wife, Mrs Silvers?' he asked. 'What would you recommend for getting burger relish out of a white shirt?'The seething woman cranked the venom-level of her gaze up to eleven, and Raven smiled pleasantly back.

His desire for this to be a joke was quickly replaced by a desire for whiskey.

Max?' he asked.'Yeah?''...What are you doing?''Shooting people.

For a moment, Simon's sympathetic nervous system forgot he was arachnophobic. The sight of those spindly legs rising, like an ink drawing popping out of paper into three-dimensional space, should have caused a surge of adrenaline, a yelp of panic, and at least three feet of involuntary back-peddling.

The unfortunate 8075 hadn't survived his assault, splintering apart, fragments of its casing skittering across the bench. The battery within had split along its plane, revealing something as out-of-place as a missile in a bathtub.

He had no problem with flies or bugs or beetles, even creepy ones like earwigs and cockroaches...Six legs were fine, but eight were alien and unnatural.'The same number of legs as four fully-grown serial killers!