The projectiles stuck to his skin and clothing and burst sideways, 
flinging out yards and yards of weightless filmy stuff that stuck to itself and 
shrank. One struck him in the back of the head, and a swath of the stuff 
whipped around his face and encased it. It was about as thick as a soap bubble, 
and so he could see through it pretty well—it had peeled one of his 
eyelids back so he couldn't help but see—and everything now had that 
gorgeous rainbow tinge characteristic of soap bubbles. The entire 
shrink-wrapping process consumed maybe half a second, and then Bud, mummified 
in plastic, toppled over face-forward. One of the Ashantis was good enough to 
catch him. They laid him down on the street and rolled him over on his back. 
Someone poked the blade of a pocketknife through the film over Bud's mouth so 
that he could breathe again.