"My! It is ripe tonight," Phoenicia said to me as we were rolling out of the garage. She lit up one of her fat, tapered Belicos cigars to cut the stench.

"Yeah." I nodded and tried not to pinch my nose. I didn't ask for a smoke. She had been on the truck for years, and I didn't want her telling the gang I was too green to hang. It was only my second time out, and with dusk coming on the stink was already rising from the steamy, Messenger district streets. People around there are rich enough to have food to throw away, but most can't afford an autofab to digest their trash and turn it into more food, snappy shoes or whatever.

We get plenty of brownie points working a lousy job like sanitation, but we earn it. That evening was just after a big game at the arena, and two conventions were in town. The trash was thick in the streets, but the zombies were worse. I mean, I understand, you can't make it to more than one party some night, so you pop into a copy salon and buy a full body duplicate. Four hours later, the thing's grown. You send it to the other party and merge memories later, sure. Maybe you get a little drunk and loose one now and then, but you can't just forget about them and leave them to wander. These things rot, you know. They don't last more than about seventy-two hours, and it isn't pretty when they start falling apart.

"There's one." Phoenicia pointed to a shambling figure crossing the next intersection, over by the Roosevelt Street bridge. She swerved right across two lanes of traffic, cutting off some cabby who let us know about it. She pulled up alongside the thing and it was easy to tell this one was a zombie. I won't give you the details. She rolled down the window and put two through the brain without even blinking. Then she pulled over and let me do the pickup. The temporary bodies they use for replicas have yellowish stuff like blood, but there's not much of it, and I was able to clean it up easy. Phoenicia must have liked the way I did the job because she said, "You get the next one," when I got back in the truck.

"I haven't used a gun before," I said. "Anything I should know?"

"Yeah. It kicks, so aim way low and fire twice." She handed me her pistol. It was an old nine millimeter automatic that fired lead shot. "Hollow point, with a light charge," she said, "so we don't shoot through and have to pay to replace some citizen."

I felt its weight and looked it over until I found the safety and was sure it was set. I didn't want to off myself right there in the cab and have to be restored. I would have lost two weeks growing a new, permanent body, and how green would that have been on the second time out? We drove for another fifteen minutes or so before we spotted the next zombies. There were two, one was about as bad as that first one, and the other was pretty fresh, but you could tell it was a zombie from the way it just stood staring at the sky. It still had some reflexes because it looked at us when we pulled over. I remember his eyes were a pale sort of brown. Phoenicia rolled down the window while I slipped the safety and blasted him: One. Two, like she had shown me.

There was blood, red blood. "No," was about all I could say.

"Don't worry." Phoenicia said, "Just get the zombie we pulled over for, and I'll call it in."

"But I killed a real one." I was cold all over. That had been surprise in those eyes, fear.

"Oh, the restore is coming out of your pay, don't get me wrong, boy." She handed me a cigar. "But believe me, this happens all the time."

She lit my cigar, and I started to relax a little. "I thought I was out for sure."

She just laughed. "You'll have to screw-up worse than that to get off this truck."

Like I said, we earn our points. I was cleaning that mess up for an hour. These days, I don't go around staring at skyscrapers like some sort of tourist, not that I ever did. I was never that green.