Excerpt: "Professor Weasely the Invincible"

Professor Harold J. Weasely's mouth involuntarily twisted into a crooked smile as he blithely sauntered into the depths of the Death Zone.

The Death Zone was what hardened Los Angeles cops had nicknamed the eight bleak blocks of urban wasteland that lay spread out before the slightly built professor: rusted wrecks of rotting vehicles accenting weed-spotted alleys between blackened hulks of abandoned buildings.

In this barren jungle stalked the worst of the worst.

As Weasely, a forty-one year old physicist, picked his way across the broken and crumbling concrete, the East Los Angeles night clung heavily about him, gloomy and foreboding. Distant ululating sirens split the underlying rumble of the city far to the west. A greasy mist oozed tentatively over the uncivilized streets and across the cracked, abandoned sidewalks blending with the murky shadows that clung to the dirty avenues and unlit tenements.

The professor heard approaching footsteps echoing off the empty brick buildings ahead of him. Heavy boots stomped on the pitted asphalt creating a hollow clopping.

Scuffling. Suppressed coughs. Dark shadows moving against the darker blackness of the night.

Weasely smiled and marched boldly ahead, lips pursed, whistling the Rolling Stones classic, Satisfaction.

Three puerile punks approached him. They represented a mini-rainbow coalition of the streets-muggers foraging for human prey.

Morales Hernandez, a skinny, swarthy predator, stared at Weasely as if the seemingly defenseless man was a piece of raw meat waiting for a skewer. Morales actually licked his lips in anticipation of the offering. His tongue flicked between crooked teeth and out across his mouth like a snake's, wetting his thin, bloodless lips. He casually held a wicked-looking switchblade in one twitching fist.

Dee Tee Jackson slapped a heavy lead pipe repetitiously into the palm of his scarred hand, his eyes never leaving Weasley's approaching face. The steady thwacking of the metal pipe slapped out a staccato beat. Jackson's face and sinewy bare torso were crisscrossed with crude tribal tattoos. His forehead sported a blood-red rendition of a laughing skull with bulging eyes etched above his own glaring eyes that held as much warmth as the county morgue.

Bruno Kosenko, a thuggish Eastern European gorilla, flexed his meaty arms and clenched fists as big as hams. His glazed eyes squinted dully as he approached Weasley. Kosenko's thick, fleshy

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