FRIDAY

 

IT WAS A LONG and restless night, ending at first light. The Angel had slept fitfully, and was stiff, sore, and hungry when she awoke.

The fog glowed phosphorescent green, eerily energized by its unknown source, but it was shot through with other colors as well. Brief bursts of colors, acinetic white like a burst of fireworks, arterial red like a burst of blood from a severed jugular, pops of green like the lures of the fish who live so deep under the sea that the phosphorescence they themselves generate are the only light they ever see. Once during the night she’d awoken to what she thought was a rumble of thunder and saw a long, sinuous beast, a snake or maybe an eel, with fantastic mouth feelers twitching before its wide-opened jaws, swimming through the night, its lolling tongue lifting a human-sized and -shaped object. She thought she heard a feeble but terrified scream but she was tired and her eyes still smarted from the touch of the fog on the previous day and after she’d blinked both the shape and its perhaps imagined victim were gone.

“Hey, guys,” a feeble voice came from the back, “I gotta pee.”

“Well, go pee,” the Angel managed.

“Can you give me a hand?” Bugsy asked. “I’m kind of tired. Really tired.”

“I’m not?” the Angel said, but she got out of the SUV and went around to the back door and half helped, half dragged Bugsy from the vehicle.

“Why am I so tired?” Bugsy complained. “I didn’t lose that many wasps.”

He leaned on the Angel as they shuffled a few feet away.

“You can’t afford to lose what little muscle you’ve got.” Her face screwed up “You better not be peeing on my leg—”

“Sorry,” Bugsy mumbled.

“It’s this place,” the Angel said quietly, looking around at the desolation. “It’s sucking the life out of everything. Zip up.”

“I gotta have something to eat,” Bugsy croaked.

“I’ve got some food in my duffel,” the Angel said. “Let’s hunt up Tinker.”

“Maybe we better get out of here. I mean, look at us, just three of us, here, and some Kazakhs—”

Tinker came striding from down the road and heard Bugsy. “Guess again.”

“The Kazakhs are gone?” Bugsy repeated numbly.

“That’s what I said, hoon.” Tinker didn’t look pleased. “I was up all night—couldn’t sleep if I tried.” The Angel thought he looked more haggard, more worried, and angrier than yesterday. “I didn’t hear them bugger off last night, but I heard … things moving around us in the buildings.”

“What kind of things?”

“Who the hell knows, sonny boy,” Tinker suddenly yelled. “Awful, horrible, slimy, choking, killing things. And they’re coming after us!”

“What about the others?” the Angel said quietly.

“The others?” They both turned to look at her.

“Bubbles, Earth Witch, Lohengrin, the rest … the ones who already went in.”

Tinker bit his lip.

“How’s the communications with Babel?”

“Not good,” Tinker said. “There’s plenty of interference. Static. Weird whistling sounds. Voices, almost, like someone else on the line…”

“Let’s give it a shot,” the Angel said. “Call Babel.”

Tinker nodded and got on the radio, but it was worse than he’d said. All they could hear was a steady stream of sharp, staccato static with momentary instants of lucidity that produced a stray word or short phrase. Some words were not in Babel’s voice; some were not even in English or any earthly language.

The occasional burst of insane laughter added a frission that crawled up the Angel’s spine like a spider with icy feet.

“SSS​SSS​SSS​SSS​SSS​SSS​com​eSS​SSS​SSS​SSL​ohe​hen​SSS​SSS​SSS​SSS​SSS​.fg​hta​gnm​wal​wlt​SSS​SSS​SSS​SSS​HAH​AHA​HAS​SSS​SSS​SSS​ple​ase​SSS​SSS​SSS​SSS​wrc​kgg​ugg​hh…”

Tinker shut the radio down with a savage, jerky motion.

“It won’t get better,” he muttered.

“It won’t,” the Angel agreed quietly. She knew what she had to do. She didn’t want to do it. She knew, in her heart, that Billy would never want her to go alone and unsupported back into that hell but she knew sure as hellfire and damnation that he, himself, would be the first one in. “I got out once. I can do it again.”

She went around the back of the SUV and took out her duffel bag. She dumped all its contents on the ground. She divided her food and water into two piles, one twice the size of the other.

“You don’t have to do this,” Tinker said as Bugsy shuffled forward, eyeing the cache of food.

The Angel shook her head. “We all came on this journey together. You remain loyal to those you come with. Billy taught me that simple fact. If we can’t stand for each other, how can we stand against the Adversary?”

“The Adversary?”

“The Foe. The Enemy. The Devil.”

“There ain’t no Devil.”

“There assuredly is. I have seen him and I have battled him many times in his many forms. I have known him for many years, as have we all. In our own ways we rage against the Night. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.”

Tinker nodded.

“Keep trying to raise Babel to let them know what kind of hell this place has become. But for God’s sake—get out if things get too dicey.”

“Don’t worry about us,” Tinker said.

She remembered the spider pack from the day before. “Here’s something important to tell HQ if you can get through. Tell them that I’ve seen things in Talas that I saw when Billy, John Fortune, and I had taken our ride with the Highwayman. Can you remember that?”

Tinker nodded. The Angel glanced at Bugsy, who was eyeing the stack of food on the ground. “Bugsy?”

“Yeah. Got it.” He snagged a package from the bigger pile and Tinker reached down and smacked him in the head.

“Hey!”

“Don’t eat it all,” the Angel warned. “You don’t know how long that’ll have to last.”

The Angel packed the smaller portion of supplies into her belt pockets. It didn’t take long, because there wasn’t very much. She stood and hooked her last full water canteen on the belt next to the food. Food was one thing, but there had to be potable water somewhere out there in Talas. After all, millions of people inhabited the city only a couple of days previously.

“Take care, mate,” Tinker said.

She smiled, said her prayer, and her wings came upon her. She smiled her good-bye and rose slowly and majestically into the air and was gone, as if borne away on a gentle wind.

After they arrived at the UN, Agent Ray herded Mollie to an office with a view of lower Manhattan from many stories up. The window faced south; the East River flowed to her left. A misty night, but she could make out the spotlights on Jetboy’s Tomb in the far distance. The shingle on the office door read BARBARA BADEN.

Baden and Ray stepped out for a moment, so Mollie tried to rack out on Baden’s leather sofa while they went to round up whomever it was they wanted Mollie to meet. Nice couch, but the anxiety had her curled into such a tight fetal ball that her back and neck ached like somebody had tried to use her vertebrae for a xylophone.

Somebody’s executive assistant (“I’m Juliet, but call me Ink.”) poked her head in to ask Mollie if she needed anything. Nobody seemed to care or notice it was the middle of the night. Working at the UN must suck if it meant keeping such hours.

“I’d lick a spider for a decent cup of coffee.”

She expected it to come in a paper cup, like from a vending machine. But she got an actual ceramic mug. It even had a logo: THE UNITED NATIONS COMMITTEE ON EXTRAORDINARY INTERVENTIONS.

Two things went through her head at the same time. One: The Committee has its own coffee mugs? That seems a little douchey. Two: Shit, shit, shit. Crapsticks. Shit.

She should have realized the Committee would be involved. This was a problem. Noel Matthews had been working for, or maybe with, the Committee when he recruited her to help steal the Nshombos’ gold. Were people still angry about how that went down? Crap.

The coffee wasn’t terrible. Before she finished it, Agent Ray and Baden returned with a short man. The slightly tubby guy introduced himself as J. C. Jayewardene.

Baden said, “Thank you, Ms. Steunenberg, for agreeing to meet with the Secretary-General and me on such short notice. We appreciate it.”

Mollie’s mouth went dry. Bad enough that Ray had come all the way to Idaho just to put Mollie in a room with the de facto leader of the Committee. But the goddamned Secretary-General of the goddamned United Nations? Didn’t he have diplomats and world leaders to harass? For somebody like him to make time for a stupid hick from potato country, she figured the situation had to be pretty fucking grim.

Was it ever.

Because, while the sun rose and Ray stood in the corner with his arms crossed, Baden and Jayewardene sat down and proceeded to tell Mollie the worst story she’d ever heard. Worst not because it was unbelievable—oh, she believed it all right, because only something absolutely terrible could explain what happened in Talas and in the barn—but because it was so fucking hopeless. The end of the world and supernatural evil and aces going batshit like the baby eaters in Talas … Jesus. Mollie and her family had nearly killed each other after just a few minutes. How long had that team been stuck over there?

Compared to this, Mollie’s role rounding up jokers for the fight club was positively heroic. Sure, she’d been forced into it, and a lot of those people had died, but at least it had helped to keep the unstoppable world-consuming evil at bay, though she hadn’t known it at the time.

Nothing the UN guys said made her the least bit interested in participating or helping. Helping meant voluntarily getting exposed again to that … that … whatever it was. Horrorshow. Hellraiser. Those were the names they used. She’d rather kill herself before she experienced that again. She’d kill her loved ones, too, if she had loved ones, before the malignant madness had a chance to take them. And not in a psycho face-eating pitchfork-murdering sort of way. Gently. To save them from something worse.

Despite having received the full download from Baba Yaga, Agent Ray and the others still thought there was a way to fight this. What an idiot. They couldn’t understand. Not really. They hadn’t been inside it. Hadn’t embraced the madness as it took them. Hadn’t welcomed the veil of scarlet rage as it settled over their minds.

She stood and crossed to the window again. The view of Jetboy’s Tomb seemed fitting. A monument to failure. He at least had had a fighting chance. But against Horrorshow, nobody stood a fucking chance.

She tried to make them see. Pointing at the logo on her mug, she said, “Your team is dead.”

So fierce was the look flashing across Ray’s face that Mollie took a step back. He trembled as though tensing for a physical fight. “You don’t know that! You don’t know my wife! She could … Nobody knows what’s going on over there.”

“I know!” Mollie shouted. “I know. I’ve been inside it, okay? A rage-slave to mindless supernatural evil. You don’t know what it’s like! You have NO MOTHERFUCKING IDEA.” People in the outer office turned to stare. She ignored them. “You can’t imagine it. There’s no fighting it. I don’t care who you are. My dad and brothers put each other in the hospital in just a few seconds. At least two of them will never have normal lives, assuming they survive their injuries. Taking a crowbar to the face half a dozen times will do that to a person. And they’re just nats, all of them! Chew on that for a moment. You’re talking about trying to rescue aces who’ve been inside it for hours.”

Baden said, gently, “We have to try to save them.”

“And you’re the only person for the job,” said Jayewardene. He had a very gentle manner, quite welcome in contrast to Ray. “So will you please help us? You could save many lives.”

“I understand,” Baden said, “you have a rather, ahh, colorful record.” (Agent Ray snorted. “That’s one word for it.”) She ignored him, continuing, “In return for your help, we could arrange to wipe the slate clean.”

Wow. They really were desperate. But that meant Mollie had bargaining power. Leverage. Good. She could salvage something good out of this nightmare. Because she didn’t give a runny shit about her “record”—she wanted something else, and these guys had the power to make it happen. So if they wanted her help so badly, they’d have to earn it.

Mollie said, “Here’s my condition. I want to talk to Baba Yaga first.”

That shut them up. After a moment’s bewildered silence, Ray said, “A little while ago you looked ready to drop one in your pants when you thought she was at your farm.”

She glared at him. “You said you needed my help. I’ve listened to your story, but now it’s my turn. And I won’t lift a fucking finger until you put me in a room with Baba Yaga.” And maybe not even then. Not if it means returning to the psychopath cannibal hellhole. “But if that vodka-marinated cunt even thinks of hocking a loogie at me—”

“She won’t,” said Baden. “We’re all on the same side here, okay?”

“Okay,” Mollie said, not fully convinced. “Fine. Let’s go and see that withered old bitch. Where is she?”

In a hospital, it turned out. (Good.) Ray recited an address in Jokertown. Mollie thought for a moment, did some arithmetic with cross streets. She had dozens of portal sites in New York, and she’d memorized locations at various hospitals and medical clinics after Ffodor had harped on her about it, but the Jokertown Clinic wasn’t one of them.

Hospitals … She never could have gotten Dad and the boys to the doctors in time if not for Ffodor’s advice, she realized. She shook her head so hard it wrenched her neck. Yet still the regrets clung to her like cobwebs.

To keep from crying again, she said, “I can’t get us there in one shot. My closest site is about five blocks from there.”

Ray looked impressed. “That’s actually pretty close.” Mollie didn’t like the way his eyebrows hitched together, as though he were thinking through a puzzle. “How many sites do you have memorized in New York?”

“A lot.”

The SCARE agent was a lot sharper than he looked. He said, “Wow. Rounding up all those jokers must have been hard work. I feel for you.”

When Michelle woke, she was alone.

The fog curled around her like an obscene lover. It was misting again, but the cold had changed to a suffocating heat, just like the jungle in the PPA. She got up. It was difficult. The punch from Ana’s dirt wall had given her a surge of fat. It wasn’t as much as she’d handled before, but she hurt now. Really hurt. And that frightened her.

Looking around, she saw she was in the jungle. In the distance, she could hear Monster roaring. The last time she’d encountered him, she’d battled him to a standstill, but now she wouldn’t be able to. Not when something as minor as Earth Witch’s wall had thrown her for such a loop. She took a step and groaned.

No, no, no, she thought, a cold shiver running down her spine. This can’t be happening. How will I protect Adesina? Screw that freak. I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for that creature. She should have left her in that charnel pit with the rest of those monstrosities.

Nonononononono. I love Adesina. Michelle clung to the thought, but it only flickered in her mind for a moment.

And as she thought of it, the ground in front of her opened. Ana. That bitch. But she didn’t see Earth Witch. Rotting things began crawling out of the hole. They were covered in the festering syrup of the charnel pit. The stench made her gag. Around her the jungle began closing in. Pushing her closer to the pit.

Across the pit, she saw Mummy.

“I just killed you!” she screamed. “I’ve killed you twice!”

Michelle held her hands, palms up, in front of her. A barrage of lemon-sized bubbles flowed from them. They hit and blew chunks of Mummy into the air. It didn’t matter. The chunks reassembled and she grew larger.

“No,” Michelle moaned. Terror surged through her. “No, you’re dead.”

Mummy began walking toward her. The creatures crawling from the pit stopped crawling out, allowing her to walk over them. They lifted their slimy tentacles and she stepped across them, moving inexorably toward Michelle.

Run, Michelle thought. Run.

Jayewardene had messaged her that morning. Need you. Great Hall ASAP. Barbara grabbed Ink and took the elevator from their offices down to the main floors.

Jayewardene motioned to Barbara from the podium stage where he sat in the main hall. She could hear the representative from Uzbekistan declaiming in Russian from the lectern set below the podium. “… great state of Uzbekistan and our neighbor in Kyrgyzstan have little choice. If Kazakhstan cannot control this threat, we must deal with it ourselves before it reaches our border. Surely the member nations and the Security Council can understand this…”

“Stay here,” Barbara told Ink, then slid past the guard at the foot of the steps and climbed up until she stood behind Jayewardene. She could see the curved rows of representatives and their staff, rising in tiers before her—most of the seats filled, which she gathered was unusual. She crouched down next to him; from his headphone, she could hear the whisper of the translator’s voice. “After him, Kyrgyzstan is speaking. They’re both saying the same thing: if the infection is centered in the city of Talas, then Talas must be destroyed. They’re making the case for taking action.”

“We can’t let that happen. If what Baba Yaga has said is true, that would allow the door to swing open entirely.”

“I agree. But the mood is in their favor. They intend to ask for a resolution to be allowed to protect their borders.”

“You’d let them bomb Talas?”

“It’s not something I can allow or disallow, Ms. Baden; it’s that I think they will have the votes. Russia will vote in favor, and will drag all their allies to vote with them. Everyone is watching the chaos spreading and worrying about how far it will go. If Kazakhstan’s next-door neighbors are willing to be the first to act, they won’t condemn them for trying. Even the United States and its allies might feel the same way.” Jayewardene stared at her blandly. “Russia will call for a vote, if no one else. Probably soon. Unless I have reason to delay the vote.” He continued to look at her.

She nodded and rose, walking back down toward Ink. Jayewardene turned back to the papers before him as the representative from Uzbekistan continued to rail and argue his case. “Well?” Ink asked her.

“I have just one thing to say, then we’ll go back to our office,” Barbara said. “And that’s this: Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!” With that, she released her wild card power, letting it spread over the entire hall.

For a moment, nothing happened. The Uzbekistan representative was still talking, but now the words echoing through the chamber were nonsense: “Ghar thurka jallaci indum…” he intoned, then closed his mouth, looking puzzled. “Harek ilkad?” he said. Around the hall, representatives were tapping at their earphones, or taking them off to speak to the people around them. The uproar started softly, then grew into a roar. People were standing around the hall, gesticulating and shouting, as if sheer volume could accomplish understanding. At the podium, Jayewardene was hammering his gavel, the sound reverberating. Representatives began to leave the hall, still shouting nonsense.

There was nothing but chaos in front of Barbara. “I think it’s time for us to go now,” Barbara said to Ink, who was staring at the confusion with wide eyes.

“Bababadal—what, Mizz B?” Ink asked Barbara as they left the UN hall through one of the back exits. The sound of shouted gibberish still echoed in the hallways. “God, that makes me sound like them,” she added.

“Finnigan’s Wake,” Barbara answered. “It’s supposed to be the word God thundered out after the Fall of Man. At least that’s what my English professor back in Tel Aviv claimed. It seemed apropos, somehow.”

“And you memorized it?”

“It was college. You wouldn’t believe how many drinks I cadged being able to recite that.”

Ink nodded. “I guess,” she said. She inclined her head toward the continuing clamor. “Will that help, you think?”

“It’ll give us some hours at least, and gives Jayewardene an excuse to be slow reconvening the session. Maybe he can even hold them off until tomorrow. In the meantime, we can decide what we have to do.”

“You’ll get Klaus and the others back, Mizz B,” Ink said. “I know you will.”

Barbara managed a weary smile at that. “Thanks. I hope you’re right. Let’s get back to the office. We have a lot of work to do. I need you to get on the phone to the White House…”

The leaves of the shrubs and trees smacked her in the face. Creepers grabbed at her feet and tripped her. It didn’t matter. Michelle kept going. Every time she looked back, she could see Mummy behind her.

Occasionally, she’d let a bubble fly, but all it did was blow off a chunk of Mummy, which was then reabsorbed and made her larger. After a couple of futile bubbles, Michelle gave up and ran as fast as she could now that she’d lost a chunk of her weight. She was still fat, though.

Sweat, dank and smelling of fear, rolled off her. Her thighs chafed as she ran. Fuck, she thought, hating her fat for the first time. It was slowing her down.

She stopped abruptly and turned. This time she didn’t aim at Mummy, but at the jungle floor in front of Mummy. Michelle blew up a chunk of earth, making a huge hole. Mummy didn’t have time to stop, and she tumbled into it. Then Michelle let another round of bubbles go as dense and heavy as she could make them, and they piled into the pit on top of Mummy.

Michelle was significantly lighter now. “Get out of that, you bitch,” she panted. Then she ran.

She ran blindly until her sides ached and her legs burned. A mindless terror possessed her. The jungle wasn’t just a jungle anymore. It was changing, turning to some nightmarish landscape. Sometimes she slipped in bloody pools, landing hard on her hands and knees.

She saw a small boy hanging from a tree, pinned there by an enormous knife through his chest. A few yards later, she came across a woman in a filthy and torn flowered dress, systematically cutting off pieces of herself. She’d taken most of her left thigh and was working her way through her bicep.

“Want to help?” she asked, holding the knife out to Michelle. It dripped crimson blood. Michelle stopped and reached for the blade. Sounds like fun, she thought. Knives aren’t my thing, but I could help.

Then Michelle heard something behind her. She made an impulsive choice. She let a bubble go, and it caught the cutting woman in the chest. A scarlet flower of blood bloomed there. Then, despite her fear of Mummy, Michelle laughed hysterically. She’d solved the whole help-me-with-the-knife problem.

She began running again. Grotesque scenes of self-mutilation went past as she ran. A man was peeling the skin off his body. The bluish muscles gleamed in the low light. He looked up at her quizzically, but immediately went back to his work. She heard him letting out little shrieks. Pain or hysteria—she couldn’t tell.

She came upon two women holding a third down. They were scalping her. They bared their yellow teeth at Michelle, but she let three bubbles fly and neatly ripped all their heads off. No point in saving someone who might as well be dead. Nor two who deserve to be.

Now her lungs were nothing but pain and fire. Each breath was like breathing in a hot poker. And then, abruptly, the jungle vanished altogether.

Michelle found herself once again on the devastated streets of Talas. The miasma blurred her surroundings until she couldn’t see beyond a few feet. Unspeakable things moved just far enough ahead that she couldn’t quite make out what they were, and she hoped never to see them clearly.

A thudding invaded her mind again. It was like a section of timpani had taken up residence in her head and was playing the entire catalog of Joker Plague turned up to eleven.

She grabbed her head. The pounding wouldn’t stop. It was so loud it made her want to vomit. And she did.

“Hello, Michelle.”

She looked up. In front of her was Earth Witch. But it wasn’t Ana. It was some shape-changer who was wearing an Ana meat-suit.

Michelle frowned and narrowed her eyes. “You’re not Ana,” she said. Bubbles were already forming in her hands. She let them fly. Or she would have if the earth hadn’t opened up and swallowed her whole.

The clinic smelled like antiseptic. As soon as the odor hit her nose Mollie realized it had been hours since she’d checked with the hospital in Idaho. Were Jim and Troy out of surgery yet? Were Mick and Brent recovering? Had they found the rest of Dad’s ear? They probably thought she’d abandoned them again and that she didn’t even care. They all thought so little of her.

Ffodor had been different.

Billy Ray flashed his SCARE badge as they passed the nurses’ station outside the isolation ward.

Mollie said, “You really get off on that, don’t you? Seriously, it’s like a sexual compulsion or something.”

He didn’t respond. Instead, he took her by the elbow and directed her down one corridor and around a corner. Mollie’s step faltered a bit when she saw the no-neck crew flanking the door to Baba Yaga’s room. She didn’t recognize their faces or tattoos, but she certainly recognized the type. Typical. Even here, halfway around the world, Baba Yaga managed to scrounge up a troop of fine upstanding citizens to attend her every kneecap-shattering whim. The goons let them pass with a nod after glancing at Ray’s badge. (“Wank, wank, wank,” Mollie whispered.)

Baba Yaga lay unmoving, as expressive as an ice sculpture in her hospital bed. And—holy shit!—one of her arms ended at the elbow. Somebody had done a real number on the hag. Good. But there was color in her cheeks and the machines connected to her emitted a steady series of beeps. Mollie felt conflicted about that. She wanted the old woman to die, though not before Mollie had a chance to apply her leverage.

Baba Yaga wasn’t alone, Mollie realized. She noticed the man sitting next to the hospital bed and flinched.

“Shit,” she said.

Franny looked up from his phone. “Surprised to see me?”

She’d last seen him several days ago, when he was embroiled in a firefight in the Talas casino. She’d taken advantage of the distraction to pick the lock on his cuffs and open a doorway to Paris.

Mollie tried to toss a bored shrug, but it came off a little shaky. So did her raspy voice. “Nah. I figured you’d be fine once you didn’t have to drag me everywhere.”

“Oh, well, when you put it that way, thanks so much for that. You’re just a forward-thinking humanitarian.”

“I don’t see why you’re bitching,” she said. “It obviously turned out okay.”

Franny stood, cleared his throat. Baba Yaga cracked one eye open. Mollie took a step back and bumped into Ray. So much for the tough front.

“Ah,” said the witch. “The little thief returns.”

“Cram it up your vodka-pickled twat, you bitch.”

“Guttersnipe.”

Ray muttered, “Oh, for crying out loud.”

“Hey! How dare you—”

“How dare I? How dare you!”

Baba Yaga’s jaw muscles twitched, as though she were conjuring up a big gob of saliva. Franny yanked Mollie aside and planted himself with arms raised between her and the woman in the hospital bed. Baba Yaga turned away and swallowed rather than letting spit fly at the detective.

Interesting. What was that all about? It was usually spit-first-and-ask-questions-never with her. She’d thought Ray had been kidding when he claimed Franny and Baba Yaga were tight. They must have had one hell of a trip back from Talas if he’d earned her respect. Insofar as she respected anyone.

“Ladies! Truce, okay? We’re all on the same side.”

Mollie crossed her arms. Baba Yaga poked the tip of her tongue into one cheek, bulging it. A moment passed while they glared at one another.

The Russian woman broke the silence. “The situation has been explained to you.” It wasn’t a question, but Mollie nodded. The other woman studied her face through narrowed eyes. Mollie wanted to squirm under the scrutiny. She looked away. Still staring at Mollie, Baba Yaga said, “She has been touched by it. I see she carries the taint of one who has been exposed to Horrorshow. It’s in her eyes. It leaves a mark. Nobody is quite the same after that.”

“Yeah. I’ve seen it.” Mollie hugged herself.

“Aha. Was it when you returned to rob my casino?”

Mollie glared at Billy Ray. “You asshole.”

He screwed his deformed face into something that approximated indignation. “Why do you assume I told her? We’re not idiots, you know. And you do have a record of predictable behavior. The Committee and Interpol have been taking an interest in you for quite a while. You’re real popular with the NYPD now, too.”

“It’s true,” said Franny. “You’re what we call a repeat offender.”

“You don’t have anything on me.”

Billy Ray said, “Only about thirty counts of kidnapping.”

“Well la-de-dah. You’ll never make it stick. I mean, hey, the world’s gonna end in a few days, right? So good fucking luck pressing those charges.”

The SCARE agent massaged his forehead. He turned to Franny. “Where on earth did you find this kid? Because she is a piece of work.”

“Tell me about it.”

Baba Yaga raised her voice to cut through the muttering and bickering. “These men think you can help. But they say you demanded an audience with me.” She flinched, slightly, as if she’d tried to make a gesture. “So here we are. Have you come to apologize?”

Apologize? To her? Had everyone gone crazy? Maybe Mollie was still stuck inside the evil insanity bubble and only thought she’d escaped it. “No fucking way. I owe you nothing, you evil hag.”

“Mollie.” Franny tapped his wristwatch. “We are sort of on the clock here, okay? So if you could speed it along a little bit.”

“Fine.” A doorway to Idaho opened in the middle of the hospital room. Perhaps because she was too angry to remember to be afraid, this portal didn’t resist her quite as much as the others had over the past day. A cold wind ruffled her hair and set the wires of Baba Yaga’s monitors to swaying. A whiff of manure permeated the room. Baba Yaga twisted her mouth in a moue of distaste.

“Hey, wait—” Mollie stepped into the barn, grabbed the Louis XIV chair, and popped back to the hospital before Franny could finish his sentence. “—a second.”

Billy Ray blinked at the chair. “What. The hell. Is that?”

“This is my condition for helping you. You don’t like it, you can go to hell.”

But Franny knew. She could see it in his eyes. He looked genuinely sad for her. She didn’t like it. “Was this somebody you cared about?”

“He is somebody I care about.” Mollie lugged the chair to the side of Baba Yaga’s hospital bed. “Change him back.”

The Russian woman blinked at her. “This is your condition? You thought I would do this and then you would do your part?”

The goddamned tears had come back. Everything turned blurry. “Change him back. Make him a person again!”

The hag shook her wrinkly head.

“Change him back RIGHT FUCKING NOW!”

Franny tried to interject. “Mollie—”

“I can’t,” said the Russian woman.

“You will. Turn Ffodor back right fucking now or I swear to God I will dump your leathery old ass into the Pacific Ocean a thousand miles from the middle of nowhere.”

“Mollie.” Franny took her arm. He tried to pull her aside but she wasn’t about to let go of Ffodor. “She didn’t say she wouldn’t. She said she can’t.”

Mollie rounded on him. “Of course she can. She has to.” She wept openly now. “You have to turn him back.”

“I can’t.”

Billy Ray said, “I think she’s telling you it’s one-way, kid.”

No. No. No.

Mollie lifted the heavy chair, shook it at Baba Yaga. Sorrow made her strong. “You have to turn him back so that I can apologize to him.”

Baba Yaga closed her eyes. Shook her head.

“Ffodor has to hear it.” Somewhere a dam burst, a dam she’d built a long time ago, and now a rushing cataract swept away the last of her self-control. She convulsed, struggling to speak through the wracking sobs. “He has … to hear … my apology. Make him a human again … so he can hear it and … forgive me … and I can stop … I can stop feeling like this. It hurts so much…” She fell to her knees, blinded by tears. Her nose was running and her upper lip tasted like snot.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please turn Ffodor back so I can tell him I’m sorry. The world is ending and I can’t die without his forgiveness.”

Baba Yaga stated, in a voice like a mausoleum door slamming shut: “Your Ffodor is dead.”

“No. He needs to know I’m sorry.” Mollie slumped lower on the linoleum floor. Wrapped her arms around the chair legs. Laid her head on the cushion. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Oh, God, I’m so sorry. This is my fault. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

Snot dribbled from her nose, dripped on the cushion. That made her cry even harder. He deserved so much better. And then she realized she was having a complete breakdown in front of Baba Yaga, whom she hated more than anybody, and that humiliation made her cry harder still. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry Ffodor. Ffodor please forgive me.” She dissolved into a sniffling, sobbing wreck.

“Well,” said Billy Ray. “This has been a fun visit.”

Franny held her while she cried herself out. It took a long time.

She felt small and fragile as he held her shaking body. When they’d all headed off to be big damn heroes in Talas she’d been a rather zaftig armful but the events of the past days had stripped all that away. Even the tough-girl act was gone. She wailed like a lost child and despite everything she had done—to the jokers, to him—Franny felt pity.

“Mollie. He knows. He knows,” he said softly. That made her cry all the harder.

He wondered who this Ffodor had been. Boyfriend, lover? Clearly a partner in crime. He had obviously been the object lesson that convinced Mollie to work for Baba Yaga.

Baba Yaga had gone back to making phone calls. Billy Ray was muttering into his cell phone. All of them oblivious to the devastated girl huddled on the floor. Anger stirred in Franny’s breast, but he accepted the reality. Against a threat that could destroy the world this one suffering girl meant nothing.

Her sobs began to subside. Franny stood with a grunt of pain, went into the bathroom, and grabbed a handful of tissues. As he passed Ray, the man grabbed his arm, and hissed into his ear.

“You know what we need. Get it done.”

Franny gave a sharp nod, tore free from the older man, and returned to Mollie. She accepted the tissues and mopped her face.

“Come on,” Franny said gently. “Let’s get out of here.”

Michelle was suffocating.

That cunt had buried her alive. There was a limited amount of time before she ran out of breath. The last breath she had.

Blindly, she began a barrage of bubbles. They hurt as they exploded, but she didn’t have time to think about that. About what that meant. She hoped like hell she was bubbling through to the surface.

She couldn’t hold her breath anymore. It released and instead of a mouthful of air she drew in a mouthful of dirt and started choking. With the one last blast of the power she had left in her now skinny body, she punched through something and her lungs filled with stale air. She began coughing out sandy dirt. It felt as if she were suspended by her lower body, but that couldn’t be right.

Then she fell.

She slammed into something hard. Rock, maybe, or concrete. It didn’t matter because she couldn’t see a damn thing anyway. She was in total darkness. Darkness so heavy it was like a weight on her eyes.

Not the dark, she thought. Anything but the dark.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, something said very softly, Move.

She got to her feet, then reached out. Her hands touched nothing. She took a step to her left, and her foot splashed into water. It almost sent her off balance and tumbling, but she recovered.

Where am I? she wondered frantically. And then she remembered hazily from that other place before Talas—that place that must be a dream—that there were catacombs under the city. She’d forgotten about them.

GodOhGodOhGod don’t let me be stuck in the dark. Because she remembered what she had forgotten. No, never forgotten, just shoved away far and deep. They’d locked her in the closet. And left her there for hours at a time. No light reached inside. And things were in there with her. Things that only lived in the deepest, darkest blackness. She may have been a child, but she knew that much.

“Shut up,” she whispered. She hit herself in the face. “Shut up. Shut shutupshutupshutup.”

And then things began slithering.

Fear and a sick rage combined in her. She didn’t have much fat, but she could kill whatever it was in the dark. Can you? Can you kill what you can’t see?

Whatever it was, she would make it bleed. And that made her smile.

Move, the voice said.

Michelle cocked her head the way a dog might at a confusing command.

Move.

Something scuttled in the dark. There was a whisper of air as it brushed past her. She shrieked and let a tiny bubble escape. It burst against a wall, and for a brief moment there was a tiny flash of light. What she saw was an eyeless creature. Its body was the shade of necrotic flesh. It had long, vicious claws, a dent where its nose should be, and razor-sharp teeth.

Can’t hurt me. Can’t hurt me. Yes, yes it can. No. No! NO!

The fear was like a live thing inhabiting her chest. It was sucking the air from her lungs and it felt as if a stone had settled on her chest.

Move, the voice said again.

She took a large step to her right; this time her fingers touched a wall. It was rough and the edges bit into her fingers. That was good. It hurt a little, but it gave her a minuscule amount of fat. Little bubbles, she thought hysterically. Little bubbles are all I got.

She took a tentative step forward. Then another. She giggled as she realized she could be stuck down here forever—or until she died of starvation. At least there was water. Foul-smelling, stagnant water. No doubt with some kind of blind fish living there. Or maybe something worse. Something with teeth and claws and malice.

The pounding in her head was still there. The buzzing was back, along with those chanting, humming voices that had never quite gone away. They made her furious, and she hit herself in the face again and again. Sadly, it didn’t add any fat.

Stupid, she thought. So stupid to come here. Fucking Jayewardene. If she ever got out of here, she would kill him. But slowly. She might not even use her bubbles. There were so many more painful ways to kill someone.

It was Jayewardene’s fault she was in here. His and that fucking Adesina. A faint whisper inside her said, Adesina. I love her. And then the thought was crushed by her fear and rage.

Move.

Down in the hospital commissary, Franny bought her a cup of burnt coffee and a slice of cheesecake. Mollie took one bite of the latter and pushed the plate aside. The cheesecake tasted like ass.

“Want to talk about it?”

“No.”

She concentrated on stirring her coffee. Stirred half a shaker’s worth of sugar into it. The commissary only had skim milk so the coffee had that disgusting not-quite-black-why-even-bother color and taste. She’d been with Ffodor the first time she’d had coffee with heavy cream in it, which had ruined her for anything less ever since. Krémes kávé, he’d called it. The memory of his weird Hungarian vowels tugged at the corners of her mouth. She licked her lips. Tasted salt from her tears.

“What happened?”

“I told you I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay. I’ll talk about it. I think I can piece it together. Months ago you guys decided to rob Baba Yaga’s casino—”

“It was my idea. Ffodor wasn’t crazy about it at first. I’m not talking about this.”

“—but it went wrong. And she caught you. How am I doing so far?”

“Wow. You could make a kickass detective someday. Oh, wait, there aren’t any more somedays.”

Franny continued in the same level tone of voice. “So what happened then?”

Mollie set her cup down so hard that coffee slopped across the table. “You want me to say it? Fine. I abandoned him. I left Ffodor behind. She caught us and I ran away.”

“Can’t say I’m surprised,” he said. Sipped his own coffee. Grimaced. “Where’d you learn to pick the lock on a pair of police-issue handcuffs, anyway? That’s supposed to be almost impossible.”

“Ff—” Her voice hitched. “Ffodor taught me.”

“You two must have been a hell of a team.”

“He was good to me, you know? He was the only person who didn’t treat me like a disappointment, like my parents do, and not like I was just somebody to be tolerated and used, like Berman did. He cared about me. Taught me stuff.”

“He saw your potential.” Franny gave up on the coffee. Jesus Christ. It had to suck if a cop wouldn’t drink it. “There’s a lot of it. But you keep channeling it in unfortunate directions.”

“If that’s a fancy way of calling me an asshole, I already know it.” She sighed. “Escaping. That’s my power. I can run away from anything, so I run away from everything.”

“Well, nobody can run from this. Not forever. Not even you. Not unless we find a way to fix it.”

“Well, then I’d say we’re all fucked.”

“Not necessarily.”

She looked up from the mess on the table. “You guys have a plan?”

Mollie looked up at him and there was a flare of hope in her green eyes. Fuck no, they don’t have a plan! is what Franny wanted to scream at the girl.

“Get it done.” Ray’s cold command. Franny didn’t want to die in horror and madness, twisted and deformed like the people inside that spreading zone of darkness. Mollie was a Hail Mary pass, but he’d take any chance no matter how remote.

And there was only one way to accomplish that. He was going to lie to her and manipulate her and use her the way everybody had used and lied and manipulated her. He would be deformed, but it would be hidden from everyone except him. This deformity would twist his soul.

In that moment he hated himself.

“Nope. Not yet. And I’m sorry I can’t do anything about your friend. He’s past the point of being able to forgive you. You can’t help him, either. But you can still redeem yourself. If you help us you’ll be helping so many more people than you’ve hurt. Me included.” Franny sighed, shook his head. For a moment, he looked much much older, as though a tremendous weight had aged him. He spoke like a man confessing to his priest: “I’m the one who caused all this … by blundering in there. Maybe you can help make it right.”

Mollie squinted at him. He was always such a Boy Scout. But when she examined his eyes, she saw a shadow scudding behind them. The mark that Baba Yaga had mentioned. He worked hard to hide it.

“You’ve seen it, too, haven’t you?”

He nodded. “But not from the inside. Not like you have. But it was touch and go getting out of Talas. I saw people do … very bad things to each other.”

Mollie hugged herself. Don’t think about the baby don’t think about the baby and pitchforks and intestines just don’t don’t don’t think …

“Franny, I…” Ah, screw it. “I’m sorry I left you behind. I didn’t know it was going to be like that.”

He dipped his head, a gentle nod. “I appreciate the apology. Not, you know, a lot, since you did strand me in a foreign country without my passport in the middle of a mob gunfight. But I guess it’s something.”

Mollie took a deep breath. Held it. Exhaled. Tried to calm herself. It didn’t work. Tried to find something to hold on to, something that would keep the fear at bay. But she came up empty. She started to tremble. Her shivering rocked the table and sent rivulets of spilled coffee under the paper napkin dispenser.

Though she already knew the answer, and it filled her with terror, she asked, “This help you’re trying to wheedle out of me. It means opening doorways into the evil insanity zone, doesn’t it?”

“Probably.”

The pressure in her bladder suddenly surged. For a moment it felt like she was going to wet her pants. But she’d already humiliated herself in front of Franny enough for one day. Gritting her teeth, she said, “Oh, joy. I can’t wait.”

Franny pulled out his phone. “I’ll let Billy Ray know you’re on board.”

Marcus, Vasel, the Handsmith, and a joker named Bulat had gone ahead of the caravan to plan. They stood over a map laid out on the road, the edges of it pinned with stones to keep it from blowing away in the dry morning breeze. Before them, a crossroads. One track of parched pavement bisected a smaller dirt road, running over a flat stretch of scrubland that stretched all the way to the horizon in both directions. The dirt road was a continuation of the one they’d followed here. It meandered into a stand of hills and veered out of sight.

Vasel jabbed at the map with a finger and said something in Russian. The Handsmith and Bulat exchanged wary glances. Bulat, one of the village elders, was a thin man with a weatherworn face, black mustache, and hair. He wore a long Kazakh jacket and a hat that to Marcus looked like some variation on a sailor’s cap. Glanced at in the right moment, he looked like a nat. But that’s only if you didn’t notice the small, lizard-like head that moved under the thin membrane of his skin. The head appeared and disappeared. It shifted from cheek to cheek, down the neck to his chest, up to protrude from his temple. It snapped flies out of the air whenever they got close enough.

Bulat said something that the Handsmith grunted agreement with. Vasel let flow with a string of words. The two men suffered his rant in silence, heads down. Clearly frustrated with them, Vasel turned to Marcus. Gruffly, he spoke English. “This way. To the A-2. Then M-32. Is the best way.”

“To the highway?” Marcus asked. “You saw what it was like coming out of Talas. We get on the highway, going slow, most of us jokers and all the crazy shit that’s been going on … That’s asking for trouble.”

Vasel scoffed. “Trouble I can handle. This snail’s pace I cannot. We can’t keep moving like this.” He gestured down the road they’d traveled on, disgust in the flick of his fingers.

“I should never have agreed to this,” Vasel said. “These jokers…”

“Don’t forget why you agreed,” Marcus said. “And anyway, they saved Olena, and they took us in more than once. You claim to love your daughter; if so, you owe every person in that village.”

“Person? I hardly see a person among them.” As the procession of jokers neared them, Vasel leaned in to Marcus and said, “And fuck you, black mamba. I know more about my daughter than you ever will. She is my blood. Don’t forget it.”

Olena’s truck inched up to them, leading the weary group of travelers. They’d kept moving all through the night, many walking, others catching what sleep they could in the jolting vehicles. With the truck idling, Olena opened the door and half swung out of it. She looked between the two men a moment, one eyebrow crooked. She’d been up all night as well. Marcus knew she must be exhausted, but she made a point of not showing it. “So, which way?”

Fifteen minutes later, with the whole group caught up and with vehicles and carts, people and animals, clogging the intersection, the answer came to them. It rolled in from the far horizon in the form of two Kazakh troop transports. The vehicles came on hard and fast, and didn’t slow until the last minute. The grid of the first truck pressed dangerously close to Vasel, who stood waiting for them. The driver of the first truck leaned on the horn and shouted out the window at the same time. Through the ripples of hot air billowing off the engine, Marcus saw a host of soldiers stand up in the back of the truck, all of them armed with machine guns. He muttered, “Shit.”

Out of the corner of his mouth, Vasel said, “I smell no shit. Just opportunity.”

The officer climbed down from the truck, gesticulating angrily, shouting in Kazakh and clearly telling them to move out of the way. Vasel listened for a time, face incongruously calm, as if the man was making polite small talk instead of ranting at him with a host of young, armed thugs at his back. His coin was in hand again. He placed it between his front teeth and bit down, lightly, on it. When the man paused, Vasel pulled the coin away and said something in Russian. The officer switched to that language and started up again.

Marcus had never felt more mono-lingually American. If he ever got out of this, he’d learn a second language, or three or four.

“They are going to the A-2,” Olena translated, “rushing to get to Talas.”

“My daughter is correct,” Vasel said. “Very good of them, don’t you think? Noble of them. They are going to save the day. So many noble soldiers. How many do you think there are?”

“What?”

“How many? Count them with me.” Vasel palmed his coin in his left hand. The fingers of his right, held above it, tapped on his thumb. A coin appeared and dropped to clink against the others. “As many of them as we have walkers, I think.” Another coin dropped. Clinked. And then another.

The officer shouted something, a single clipped word that brought all the soldiers’ rifles up, aimed at point randomly at the jokers.

“Vasel,” Marcus said. He moved closer, speaking low. “Come on. Let these dudes pass. Slow and steady, you know? We’ll make it.”

“Slow and steady,” Vasel said. He dropped another coin into a hand that, to Marcus’s surprise, was overflowing with coins. There were so many there now that it seemed incredible none slipped off. “The only thing I do slow and steady is fuck. Other things, I do fast and furious, like the movies, you know? Don’t blink; you’ll miss the moment.”

Marcus didn’t miss it, though it happened fast and furious, as the gangster promised. One of the soldiers fired, probably by accident, a nervous pull on the trigger that would’ve put a chunk of steaming lead into Timur. Vasel snapped a coin from his right hand. It moved so fast Marcus didn’t see it, not until it and the bullet from the soldier’s machine gun dropped dead in front of Timur, right before his large feet. The next instant Vasel flung his handful of coins. Some of them caught other bullets from the sudden barrage that followed the first shot. The rest flew like an angry swarm of hornets. They sliced through the soldiers, right through them, liquifying them and then curving into another and another. Bodies dropped. Machine guns shot uselessly into the air as they fell. A chaotic couple of seconds. When it ended, the transports carried only steaming piles of liquified humanity, the clothes they’d worn, and the weapons and gear they’d carried.

Into the stunned silence that followed, Vasel piped, “Like I said, opportunity.”

Barbara stood at the front of the conference room, pointing at the map projected on the wall. Ink and Secretary-General Jayewardene were physically present in the room, as well as Snow Blind, Toad Man, and Wilma Mankiller—the B-team of the Committee, she thought unfairly. How can you even think of sending them, when Klaus, Michelle, Ana, and all the others failed.

The room had been swept for bugs; the blinds had been carefully drawn shut so that no one passing in the hallway could see what was being shown on the screen.

“Here’s the Baikonur Cosmodrome,” Barbara said, using a laser pointer to show the buildings outlined on the satellite map. Jayewardene peered at his laptop, where the photograph also appeared. “And here is our best estimate of the current edge of the Talas disturbance.” The laser pointer skimmed the edge of a black arc to the bottom of the picture. She nodded to Ink, at her laptop, and two dotted lines appeared on the screen, both following the curve of the arc. The second and farthest of the arcs touched the buildings of Baikonur. “As you can see from this, at its current rate of movement, the disturbance will have reached the complex within thirty-six hours and overrun it in forty, at which point…” Barbara shrugged to Jayewardene. “Control of the nuclear missiles and material, as well as the airports, launchpads, and all military equipment there, will be lost. We don’t know who might take them or what they might do with them.”

Jayewardene nodded. “And what are you proposing, Ms. Baden?” the Secretary-General asked. “The Committee has already lost several aces trying to control the crisis at Talas. That was a failure—and I’m very sorry that Klaus is one of those currently missing.”

He’s not dead. He can’t be. “It was a failure,” Barbara admitted. “And no one is taking that loss harder than myself.” That is more true than I want to admit. “But we can’t afford the loss of the Cosmodrome on top of Talas.”

“I’ve spoken directly to President Putin,” Jayewardene said. “He assured me that the troops already on the base are doing everything they can to remove critical equipment from the Cosmodrome and render the site harmless. A full Russian brigade is also on the way to help. He believes the Cosmodrome will be secure before the disturbance reaches them.”

“I’ve also taken the liberty of speaking directly to President Putin,” Barbara answered. “He gave me much the same story. I’ve also reached out to President van Rennsaeler in Washington, and with the intelligence she allowed me to see, I’m afraid I find President Putin’s claims difficult to believe. At the request of Prime Minister Karimov, President Putin sent a good portion of the Russian division based at the Cosmodrome to Talas when this all started a few days ago. He sent yet more as the crisis escalated. All those troops have effectively been neutralized. The soldiers the Russians have left there are demoralized and frightened, have heard rumors of Talas, and are too few to keep control of the compound or to move away more than a fraction of the nuclear material and weapons stored there. I believe—and understand that I am very reluctant to say this, Mr. Secretary-General, but it’s what the NSA chatter has indicated—that President Putin intends to use the nuclear missiles at the Cosmodrome to take out Talas.”

Just saying the words made Barbara pause. And if that happens, there is no hope for Klaus, and if that Russian woman is right, no hope for anyone at all. “I don’t need to remind everyone what Baba Yaga has told us: if Tolenka dies, then the beast inside him will fully emerge, and what we’re looking at now will be only a mere taste of what’s to come.”

“And you believe her?” said Jayewardene.

“I do,” Barbara answered. “She had no reason to lie to me. My staff has verified most of the information she gave us, and Officer Black has backed up the rest. Putin has no intention of neutralizing the Cosmodrome; he intends to use it, and within the next thirty-six hours. We have no time to waste. His brigade, from the satellite photos we’ve seen, are still mobilizing in Russia; the transports are still on the ground, and are going to stay there because President Putin already knows he’ll lose those as well. We don’t have sufficient UN troops to put between the Russians and the Cosmodrome.” Barbara saw Jayewardene nod at that. “But a Committee team might be able to stop them. The decision, Mr. Secretary-General, is yours, but we need authorization from the UN now.”

Barbara waited, listening to the hum of the projector and feeling its warmth on her face. “I agree with you, Ms. Baden, if reluctantly,” Jayewardene said finally. He stood. “You will have that approval within the hour, Ms. Baden. I will secure it now. I hope you are right. I hope that for all our sakes.”

With that, Jayewardene gave everyone a brief nod of acknowledgment and left the room.

“That went well, Mizz B,” Juliet said. “I think.”

“Should we get ready, Ms. Baden?” Toad Man asked, looking at the others.

“Yes!” Barbara said, then realized how loudly she’d spoken. They were all staring at her. She closed her eyes, taking a long breath. “Yes,” she said again, feigning a calm she didn’t feel. Barbara turned to Juliet. “Get Ray on the phone for me. We need his help.”

The Angel found flying slow and painful. She wobbled and wandered like a stoned butterfly and although she tried to maintain a straight flight path, she constantly found herself fluttering off course and expending vital energy.

Below her Talas was a devastated hellscape smothered in sickly green mist. Vague forms moved on the ground below her and she frequently heard muffled screams and cries and gunshots and explosions, but could make no sense of anything. She knew that she had to fly lower, despite the danger that entailed.

Familiar terrain, and a line of unmoving vehicles spotted below her, forced her hand. She swooped down low, recognizing the line of vehicles they’d driven into the city the night before. A quick reconnaissance showed her that they were silent and still. Nothing moved around them except for the tendrils of fog. Gingerly, she alighted on the lead tank.

She looked around the eerily silent cityscape; she cupped her hands and raised them to her mouth.

“Lohengrin!” she shouted. “Lohengrin!”

Her cries echoed back creepily and from somewhere, maybe everywhere, came maniacal shrieking laughter, inhuman in scale and volume, that devolved into insane tittering. Screams came from off in the thick mist. They almost sounded human, but bubbled away as if choked off by gobbets of flowing blood. She would have gone toward them, but she couldn’t tell where they originated. Some things, she thought, were playing with her.

She tried again, though she realized that it was hopeless. “Omweer! Earth Witch!”

From behind her came the sound of cracking concrete and collapsing buildings. She whirled, staring. Someone had answered her call, after all.

Earth Witch stood atop a hill of naked dirt, fifty or sixty feet away. Her clothes were caked with it. It was smeared all over her horribly immobile face except for the two runnels down her cheeks cleansed by the tears that streamed constantly from her staring eyes.

“Ana!” the Angel screamed.

The young woman’s arms were outstretched beseechingly and her lips moved constantly, but the Angel could not hear what she said, if anything. The Angel rose into the air with a single beat of her wings, but even as she moved, so did Ana.

The street below her rippled, the concrete cracked and parted like the Red Sea, and a fountain of dirt ran up to join the hill that the ace stood on. The dirt rippled, moved, like sand dunes blown at fantastic speed by an unseen wind. Her head turned, maintaining eye contact with the Angel as she fled down the street, surfing her wave of earth.

The Angel clenched her jaw and took out after her, willing all her strength into the task of keeping up with the fleeing ace. But the young woman was moving at an impossible speed as she zigzagged down the streets, and the Angel soon realized that she was losing the race. The ache from her injured shoulder spread throughout her body but she continued her pursuit until the Angel turned a final corner and the girl was no longer in sight. Nor could she hear the sounds of breaking concrete. She looked around, realizing that she was in a different part of the city.

She was no longer on the edges of Talas, but had come into the city center. The buildings were denser and taller, though more broken than those on the outskirts. Her nose twitched and she caught her breath at the stench of death that was everywhere. Hovering above the street, she was afraid to touch down because there were bodies everywhere, but to the Angel’s horror, most seemed to be moving, twitching, and twisting unnaturally, as if trying to find a more comfortable position among the piles of sharply angular and hard debris that had become their final resting places. Their ragged clothing rippled, but there was no breeze.

Revulsion then threatened to overcome her as she realized that all the corpses were teaming with vermin of all sizes and descriptions. Their action had paused at the Angel’s arrival in the vicinity, but as if seeing that she posed no immediate threat, they returned to their feeding.

There were beetles the size of roaches to that of small dogs, most with pinchers that ripped and tore into the heat-ripened flesh, ropy creatures limbless like snakes or with uncountable legs that burrowed into and out of the corpses like maggots in cheese, ant-like beings with curiously bulging foreheads and all-too-inquisitive eyes that often stopped and stared at the Angel ruminatively as they fed with small, clacking sounds of their mandibles, and the slimy, slug-like creatures that made no sound at all as they sucked out the eyes of the dead.

The Angel’s stomach heaved, but there was nothing in it to vomit, not even bile.

She looked on in horror for a moment longer, and then the bigger scavengers came slinking and crawling and rolling out of the nooks and crannies to which they’d fled at the Angel’s approach. She was too aghast at the furred and scaled and leather-skinned, at the sight of the things, to move, but when the humans joined them and fought them over the remains of the bloated, rotting corpses, she turned her head and arrowed up into the sky.

Michelle walked slowly forward, dragging her fingers along the wall to her right. She didn’t know how long she walked or for how far. Time had ceased to move in any normal way. Her combat boots made scraping noises no matter how softly she tried to step. They echoed in the unnatural quiet. But there were other things down here with her as well. Every so often she heard something. Horrible gurgling noises. A choked-off cry. The sound of skin being torn and bones being crushed.

Sometimes she’d let a tiny bubble fly in the direction of the noise, and usually it would hit a wall. For a quick flash, she’d see something. The image would burn into her eyes from the shock of light in so much darkness.

In one flash, a man crouched naked, his distended genitals scraping the floor as he sucked the spinal fluid from a baby’s neck. Michelle dry-heaved. And then she wanted to kill him, but she couldn’t afford the fat. Fuck it. She let a bullet-sized bubble go. She heard the lucky hit. There was a satisfying thud as his body hit the floor.

She wondered if baby marrow was tasty. It’d been a long time since she’d had anything to eat. And then she began retching again. NoNoNoNoNoNONONONO …

Move.

She staggered forward. She tripped over the corpse of the baby-eater and kicked him into the water. Her foot stepped on something soft and squishy. The baby. She kicked it into the water as well. There was a splash. It was next to her, and she pushed herself back against the wall. She felt the brush of air as whatever it was came out of the water. In her gut, she knew it was eating what she’d just kicked into the canal.

Quickly, she started moving. Once again, she had no idea how far she’d walked. Or for how long.

Finally, she came to the end of the wall. She put one hand out, keeping the other on the corner. Nothing was there. A tiny bubble flew from her fingertips. It hit something, and she saw in the flashbulb moment where she was.

Arching above her like a cathedral ceiling was the roof of the catacombs. Corridors came off this center room like spokes on a wheel. Her legs suddenly gave out, and she sat down hard on the walkway.

She was going to die, all alone in the dark.

Move.

Fuck you, she thought. For a moment, she had the urge to scream it out loud, but the fear of whatever might be down here with her was too great.

I’m the Amazing Bubbles. Nothing can hurt me. But that wasn’t true, was it? In this nightmare, this hellhole, this unspeakable place, there were plenty of things that could hurt her. Bullets. Ana’s wall of dirt. Mummy.

A spike of fear shot through her. And panic set in. A terrifying fear. She’d felt it with the rage before.

And then she heard the shuffling behind her. How far away it was she didn’t know. But she knew the sound. She’d know that sound for the rest of her life. The thing in the dark. She knew what it was. And it was coming for her.

The Committee officers were much more crowded than when Mollie had departed a few hours earlier. Babel hadn’t wasted anytime assembling her B-team.

“Whoa!”

Mollie, Franny, and Billy Ray emerged from folded space quite close to a petite woman slouching in the corner. Streaks of her hair were dyed brilliant red, almost crimson. She was even shorter than Mollie, but so thin she made Mollie feel like a blubbery sow. Great.

The other woman staggered back, but caught her balance after a step or two. “Neat trick. Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m your ride.” Mollie sniffed, wrinkled her nose. Looking down, she noticed the German shepherd at the woman’s side. She frowned. It growled, staring at her with one milky eye and another that appeared to have something wriggling in it.

“Problem?”

“Your dog. It looks…” Like it’s suffering from an acute case of roadkill.

“Yeah, well, what’d you fuckin’ expect? She’s been dead awhile.”

“Aha,” said Mollie, trying not to use her nose. “I take it you’re Joey.” So far she matched the description.

“That’s Hoodoo Mama to you, cocksucker.”

Yep. Totally matched the description. Oh, joy.

Joey looked her up and down. Squinted. “Weren’t you on American Hero a few years ago?”

Oh, Jesus Christ. “Don’t remind me.” Mollie sighed. “On the show I was called Tesseract.”

Joey yawned, crossed her arms, and resumed scowling while she watched the assembled aces mill around. Franny and Billy Ray had gone off to find Babel, so Mollie decided to hang back and watch the swelling crowd.

She saw Agent Moon, the mastiff that had come to the farm with Billy Ray. There was a guy who looked entirely normal, relating in a Gomer Pyle accent some asinine anecdote about his uncle Raymond back in Florida. The woman sitting next to him and politely chatting in a silky French accent had dyed her hair a brilliant magenta; if she’d stood next to Joey, the two could’ve blinded anybody foolish enough to look at their hair. A pair of large translucent black wings sprouted from the back of a guy dressed like a cowboy, with a bead necklace hanging around the collar of his unbuttoned red-and-white checked shirt. He was talking with a tall woman who looked strong enough to wrestle a bear; her jet-black braids were so lustrous that Mollie reached up and touched her own hair. Damn.

More Committee members arrived. The milling crowd spilled out of the atrium and into adjoining offices. Mollie wondered how many of these poor sons of bitches realized they were the expendable second-stringers, recruited for a pointless suicide mission to try to rescue the A-listers who by now were, at best, gibbering cannibals.

Joey saw her watching the crowd. She pointed to the couple on the couch. “That’s Toad. He’s okay, he gets it. That’s Simone with him. She thinks her shit smells like a fresh-baked croissant just because she’s French Canadian. Big fucking deal, you know? We speak French in New Orleans, too, but we don’t act like the sun shines out our asses. That guy with the devil horns and red tights is Mephistopheles. Don’t get alone in an elevator with him; they call him Randy Devil for a reason. That motherfucker tries anything with me I’ll rip his dick off, though. The woman with the braids is Wilma—”

“It’s, um, it’s okay. Thanks. I appreciate it. But I don’t need introductions.”

Mollie could learn their names if they made it out. Then again, in a few days, nobody’s name would matter. The only identity anybody had would be the howl of madness echoing among the uncaring stars and the click of teeth on bone as they devoured themselves.

Besides. She couldn’t look them in the eyes. Not when she knew she was probably sending them to their deaths.

Joey squinted at her. “Oh. I get it. No point learning our names, huh?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No. But your face sure as fucking did.”

Mollie tried to change the subject. “I take it you’re on the Committee. You must work with these guys.”

“Hell no. I’ve been eavesdropping on these retarded cocksuckers for the past hour.” She reached down, absently, to scratch her zombie dog behind its ears. It made a sound somewhere between a happy yelp and the outgassing of a dead barn cat on a hot summer day. Mollie held her breath. “I’ve never been good enough for the motherfuckin’ Committee, but now all of a sudden they need a touch of the old bayou voodoo and suddenly, hey, holy shit, what do you know? All of a sudden I am good enough.” She snorted. “Fuckin’ knob-gobblers.”

Joey asked, “So how come you don’t go by ‘Tesseract’ anymore? It’s a fuckin’ badass name.”

It’d been a long damn time since anybody had called her that. That had been her name on American Hero. (Come to think of it, maybe one good thing would come of the Horrorshow Apocalypse. She took vindictive comfort knowing the no-talent ass-clown who got her kicked out of the competition, Jake Butler, the “Laureate,” would die screaming when a horde of spider-eyeballs sucked his brains out through his asshole.)

A few nearby members of the suicide squad looked at her more closely. “Ohhhhhh, yeah,” said the toad guy. “I sure thought you looked kinda familiar.”

“Because when I do,” Mollie said, “that happens.”

The cocktail party hubbub trailed off into ripples of senseless gibberish amid a sea of confused faces. Baden’s voice cut through the nonsense, clear as a bell. “Mollie? Is Mollie still here?”

Oh. I get it. She looked at Joey and said, “I guess that’s why they call her Babel.”

Joey scowled at her. “Gkjj ybq ppjp xif aza bxb?”

Mollie sighed. She raised her hand and waved. “Yeah. Back here.”

Baden wended through the crowd with Billy Ray in tow. Mollie wondered where Franny had gone. Baden said, “We’re ready for you.”

A twinge of panic softened Mollie’s knees, as though they were soft candle wax. “Don’t you want to wait for others to show up?”

“We can’t wait any longer. This is the team we have.”

Mollie followed Baden to a conference room, Billy Ray and Joey in tow. She felt as though she were walking to her own execution. It seemed a miracle her legs could even hold her up. But she made it to the conference room, where a pair of laptops had been plugged into the telepresence setup. An immense flat-screen monitor on the wall at the far end of a long table showed a split-screen image; the left half looked like either a satellite photo or high-altitude aerial photo; the right half, the grainier of the pair, had been zoomed in on a particular stretch of tarmac.

“So that’s balalaika, huh? Big fucking deal,” said Joey.

“Baikonur. A ‘balalaika’ is a Slavic musical instrument, like a triangular guitar,” said Babel.

“What-fucking-ever.”

The close-up showed a shaded corner where two warehouses met: the B-team’s landing site. The wider view showed a sprawling concrete complex stippled with warehouses (the landing site helpfully circled in red), hangars, subterranean silos, spaceplanes, even a tank or two. Beyond these, in the bottom left corner of the image, a portion of what appeared to be a perimeter fence and a multicolored mass. Mollie’s stomach did a flip when she realized it was a crowd comprising thousands of people.

It seemed pretty clear the people were pressed up against the fence, trying to get in. But were they fleeing the madness, or carrying it with them?

Now that she looked more closely, she realized there had already been skirmishes and fighting among the refugees. There were bodies strewn at the edges of the crowd.

 … don’t think about the barn, don’t think about the barn, don’t …

With trembling hands, Mollie poured herself a glass of ice water from a decanter on the conference table. When it no longer felt like her throat was plugged with ash, she asked, “How recent are these photos?”

“Six hours,” Baden said.

“You don’t have anything more recent?”

The Committee woman tensed. “Is that a problem?”

“No. No, I can do it. It’s just … are you sure this place hasn’t been absorbed yet? By the, you know…”

“Trust us. It’s safe. We wouldn’t use it for a staging ground otherwise. The whole point is to get in and out before it gets engulfed.”

“Be smart, be safe, be quick,” Mollie whispered. Hidden under the conference table, her knees shook.

“What?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. Just remembering something a friend used to tell me.”

Taking a seat at the conference table, she gazed at the video screen. She squinted from the effort to absorb every detail of the image: the angles of the shadows, the color of the concrete, the rust spots on the hangar roofs, the faded Cyrillic lettering on the runways …

Baden said, “Will these images work?”

Mollie cleared her throat, twice. The bruises on her neck did their best to squeeze every last burr and rasp from her voice. “Well, they’re grainy, but they’ll do. In a pinch I’ve used some pretty blurry webcams.”

But that was before she’d been to Talas … where people shoved broken bottles into their own eyes … and lobbed babies onto iron finials … and gnawed each other’s faces …

Her concentration dissipated like a burst balloon.

The Angel desperately needed rest and sustenance. Luckily she spotted a flat-roofed building that looked to be in decent shape where she wouldn’t be too deep within the fog’s clutches. She made a graceless landing and came up against a small cupola that covered a staircase leading down into the building’s depths.

Her wings vanished and she felt as if a great weight had been removed from her back and shoulders. She stretched gingerly and wished Billy were present with his powerful hands and awesome massage skills. His touch would be quite welcome now, she thought, even the slightest caress of his hand against her cheek.

“You always were a defiant child,” a familiar voice said.

The Angel straightened as real fear knifed through her body, fear she hadn’t felt in many years.

“Willful,” it said. “Deceitful. Plotting. Conniving. Evil little brat.”

She knew that voice. She knew it well. She turned and faced her mother.

She hadn’t changed since her death. Not a bit. Her face was crisscrossed with still-bleeding wounds with remnants of windshield glass still embedded in the score of gashes, including the long, deep tear in her throat. The coroner had thought that that was the wound that had taken her life, but he wasn’t sure if she’d bled out because of the broken windshield that’d sliced her throat or the impact of the steering wheel that had crushed her chest or maybe the collision of her flying body against the tree that had broken her back as the car hit it. The vehicle had left behind no brake marks on asphalt or turf as she’d plowed off the county road while going ninety miles an hour in a drunken stupor.

The words ran in an uncontrollable rush through the Angel’s mind. She could only watch in helpless horror as her mother approached her. It was a miracle that she could stand upright let alone walk, if you could call her halting, shambling gait “walking.” How, the Angel wondered, was she functioning at all, with quarts of blood soaking her tattered clothing and running down and dripping off her ruined body, leaving a thick trail behind. Much of it came off her face and head—she’d been half scalped by a sharp shard of the windshield that’d ripped half of the hair from her skull and left it exposing the bone underneath.

“You should feel quite at home here,” her mother said, shambling to a stop before her. “You’re an unnatural thing, like everything here. Born a bastard. Turned into a twisted genetic wreck by that unholy virus brought to this world to act as righteous vengeance against the unworthy—”

“It made me a hero—” the Angel dared to say, but her voice was that of the little girl she’d been before her mother had put the knife to her.

“It made you a freak,” her mother shrieked. “You were always a little liar, an unbeliever, though I tried so hard to bring you to God. It turned you into a glutton, always stuffing your face, on top of your whoring after boys—”

“I never—”

“I saw you kissing him!”

“Once—” the Angel said through her tears “—just the one time—”

“You wanted them all!”

The Angel slipped to her knees, able only to shake her head in denial. “I wanted someone to love,” she whispered.

Her mother sneered. “Well, you found him. Another twisted freak, like you. And look at you now, in your slutty suit, crying and broken—”

“Angel…” The voice came from behind her, low and tentative, seeking. “Angel…”

It came again.

The Angel twisted her neck, gazing behind her and saw an old woman dressed in a black cloak, tall but leaning on a cane. The woman looked at her and the Angel was startled to see that she no longer had eyes, just empty black pits where they once were, the cheeks below them rimmed with faint red stains like the remnants of strange makeup.

“It’s you,” the old woman said breathlessly. “I can see you in my mind. My dreams have come true. I told you so. I told you all.”

For the first time, through the thickening fog, the Angel noticed that there were people behind her. Or people-like things, anyway. One little boy stood behind her, peering around her and clinging to the speaker’s cloak. He had little horns like a faun and hairy legs like a goat.

“In a dream I saw you, Angel of the Alleyways. We have suffered hard and sought you long, we beseech you to succor us in the hour of our need.”

The Angel swiped at the snot running down her face with the back of her leather gauntlet.

Her mother laughed wildly. “What are these disgusting creatures?” she asked. “We would never allow such grotesque monsters into Mississippi State.” She shook her head in despair, the flap of semidetached scalp dropping down to cover one eye. “I always knew that you’d end up in hell,” she said.

Slowly the Angel rose to her feet. Her head turned back and she looked at her mother.

“Shut up, you drunken bitch,” she said in a low, hard voice.

Her mother didn’t seem impressed. “So you break another commandment,” she said. “Will you break them all before you’re done?”

“Shut up!”

Unbidden, the sword was in her hand. She took a step forward, a fierce scowl on her face and a fierce joy racing through her body. She swung her blade with an angry, wordless cry and it cut through her mother’s neck right where the sliver of windshield glass had sliced. The head jumped away from the neck and the Angel watched it fly in a lazy arc. Interestingly, no blood splattered from either junction of the cut, but thick, green fog slowly roiled out in languid swirls.

When the head hit the roof it vanished in a puff of green smoke while the Angel watched as her mother collapsed into herself like a punctured balloon and neatly vanished.

“Madonna of the Blade!” the old woman cried. “Please come to our aid!”

The Angel turned to her. “Show me what you need!” she commanded.

The old woman turned without a sound. There were clicking and slithering and tittering noises as those behind her limped and slithered and flowed down the stairs under the cupola. The Angel followed them, for the first time realizing that the sword had come to her without her prayer. She thought about it momentarily, then dismissed it from her mind.

“Thanks to everyone for coming on short notice.”

“Cut the fucking bullshit,” Joey Hebert said. “All I care about is pulling Michelle outta Talas. You just gotta get me fucking there so I’m close enough to use my children. I can goddamn do the rest.”

Barbara shook her head. “We’ll get to that. Right now, I want to make sure that everyone’s aware of the entire situation.” Joey pushed off the wall, coming closer. The smell of rotting meat was coming off the zombie dog beside her. Barbara leaned back in her chair, as far away from Joey as she could get. “Joey, there are more people than Michelle in Talas that we have to worry about. What about them, the rest of the team?” Klaus, especially, she thought, but bit back his name. “Yes, I want Michelle back as much as you do, but we also need the others—all of them, if they can be found.”

Joey was already shaking her head. Billy Ray watched the confrontation with an amused look on his face. “Fuck ’em,” she said. “If those assholes are with Michelle and I can get ’em, fucking fine. If they’re not…” She gave a shrug of tattooed shoulders.

Barbara could sense the desperation in the woman’s voice, in her stance, in the way her face twisted with those last words. The disgust she usually felt around Hoodoo Mama dissolved, and she realized in that moment that Joey was grieving for Michelle in the same way that Barbara grieved for Klaus, that the emotions racking Joey were the same that were assaulting her every moment for the last few days.

The difference was Joey might actually be able to do something about Michelle, and maybe the others. Not me. That’s not a power I have, not my gift. And Klaus knew it.

Barbara raised her hand. “We all want Michelle back,” she said. “And any of the others you can find while you’re there. We need them.”

“You’ll fucking get me to Talas, then?” Joey said. “When’s the goddamn plane leave? I’m ready now.”

“There’s no plane. There’s a better way.” Barbara glanced at Mollie, who visibly shrank back against the plush cushions behind her. There was no sign of cohesiveness to this potential team. Barbara had to stop herself from shaking her head at the realization. “I don’t know how much each of you know at this point,” she began. “So forgive me if I start telling you things you already know—others here may not be aware of it.”

Even to her own ears, that sounded too flat and too rigid, not like Klaus, who would have been all flaming emotion and passion. “This is what I’ve learned from Officer Black and Baba Yaga,” she continued. “All that’s holding back whatever entity is trying to cross into our world from this place is the person she knew as Tolenka or Hellraiser, now in the hospital that’s the center of the disturbance. The man is dying. Will die, and soon. And when he does, Baba Yaga claims there’s nothing to stop the thing inside him from crossing over fully. That’s the situation that we’re facing.”

“Then we take out this fucking Hellraiser guy,” Joey said. “Pretty goddamn simple.”

“No!” That was Franny. “You don’t understand. Kill him, and it’s over. That horror steps on through then. Killing him isn’t the answer.”

“How about grabbing the guy and tossing him in one of those rockets at the Cosmodrome?” Ray asked. “Putin would gladly cooperate with that. We throw the bastard into orbit, or put him on the moon, or hell, drop him into the sun. Either way, he’d be far, far away from us—and do you think this thing can survive the sun?”

“That occurred to me also, Director,” Barbara answered. “If we can’t kill Tolenka, then maybe we can put him somewhere far enough away that it won’t matter. But we don’t know what this thing can survive. It might just put the sun inside the same darkness that’s around Talas and Kazakhstan now, and that takes care of all life everywhere in the whole damn solar system. We may make things worse.”

Ray snorted a laugh through his nose.

“The Russians want this ended. Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan want to bomb Talas to rubble,” Barbara continued. “Putin is willing to drop a nuke. President van Rennsaeler might even agree with that. Worse, the Cosmodrome is within hours of being overrun by whatever started in Talas—at which point we don’t know who or what will have control of the material and weaponry there.”

“You’re saying we’re screwed,” Ray said.

Barbara glared at him. “No. I’m saying that I have a plan. Maybe not much of one, but unless one of you has something better…”

Move.

Michelle was paralyzed. There were multiple ways she could go, and she didn’t know if any of them was the way out. She gritted her teeth with anger and frustration. The only reason she was here was because of Adesina. That brat had been nothing but a burden since Michelle had brought her home. A faint voice inside her cried out against the thought, then was eclipsed by her anger.

And now she was stuck in the dark, with Mummy coming for her. The shuffling was closer.

There was a blink of light two passages down. It couldn’t have really happened. It was some sort of hallucination. But all she had to do was cross the water to get to it. The water that had God only knew what in it.

The shuffling was getting closer.

She could feel how thin she was now. Her hands ran over her body. Ribs stuck out, her hip bones were sharp. About the only things with any fat were her breasts, which had never been large anyway. But large enough, maybe.

The flash again.

She strained to see it. The blobby remnant of the light floated in her vision.

Move.

Fuck you. I can’t move. I’m stuck.

But she stood up and let another tiny bubble fly. Each one was one less that she could use to fight the shuffling thing coming after her. Mummy.

Shut up. She can’t be down here. It has to be something worse.

There is nothing worse and you know it.

The bubble hit the floor on the other side of the water. The canal was about two and a half meters across. But she’d have to go into the water to cross it. And that made her shudder.

She decided to try to jump across. She might be able to make it. It seemed so reasonable.

She jumped.

In the dark, she miscalculated—not that she could have made it across anyway—and ended up slamming stomach-first into the opposite wall of the canal. She got a little fat from it, but it hurt like hell. Her hands slid off the wet stones edging the wall and she sank into the foul water.

It was deeper than she’d thought. She kicked hard and hoped she was moving toward the surface—when something grabbed her leg. She screamed, and noxious water rushed into her mouth. Whatever it was, it started pulling her down. She kicked and yanked, but the thing wouldn’t let go. In desperation, she put her hand on the tentacle wrapped around her leg and let a bubble go.

There was a small explosion. It burned like fire, but the thing released her leg. Michelle kicked away and burst through the surface. She flailed around to find the edge, found it, then dragged herself onto the walkway.

She lay there panting, and then she heard the shuffle again. It was closer now. She began shivering—from the wet or the sound, she wasn’t sure.

Move.

The only voice she could hear over the roar of everything else in her head.

Now it sounded like Adesina.

Only not like her. It was close, but the voice was deeper than her daughter’s. And she’d failed Adesina. She hadn’t stopped anything. Only ended up here shivering in the dark, with Mummy coming for her.

Move.

Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

Michelle was shaking all over now. She had no fat on her to keep her warm. But what was really making her shake was what was coming down the hall toward her.

Mom, move!

She wanted to cry. Adesina’s voice. The only reason she was here was to keep her from dying. And now she was trapped in the dark with Mummy. And she’d failed utterly.

Then she did cry.

Hot, bitter tears rolled down her cheeks. Shaking and crying, she hit herself in the face again and again and again.

The faint light flashed once more. She scrambled to her feet and ran toward it. Her shoulder slammed into a wall, and she wondered whether she was in the right place or if she’d lost track of where she was.

The shuffling was closer. She could almost hear Mummy’s wheezing.

There was a faint glow coming from the tunnel. Michelle ran toward the light.

It wasn’t the most pleasant work, but they cleared the soldiers’ remains from the transports, claimed the vehicles, and turned—as Vasel wished—toward the highway. For a time after connecting with the A-2, the going was easy. The road was wide and flat enough for the trucks to open up and for the miles to scroll by beneath them. The transports led the way, with the best of the village vehicles close behind them. Gone were the wagons and animal-drawn carts. They roared past the foot traffic on the edges of the road, and wove around slower vehicles, many of them piled high with people and supplies. Clearly, they weren’t the only ones trying to put Talas far behind them.

Marcus rode in the bed of the lead transport. Sitting upright on his coils, he took in the barren landscape the road cut through, the dry air hot on his face. He had to admit that they were making better time, and the villagers were getting some much needed rest. Still, they were riding in stolen property that had been attained through murder. That didn’t sit right with him.

He was one of many in the transport. They were jammed in tight enough that many of the jokers pressed against Marcus’s coils. Nurassyl leaned back against him, his big eyes closed as he slept. A playmate of the boy’s, Sezim, had actually climbed onto a curve of Marcus’s tail and slept there, holding a stuffed rabbit cradled in her three small arms. Before Marcus would have felt embarrassed having so many people touching his deformity. In this case, it felt almost comforting. None of the jokers seemed to think he was deformed at all, and the press of bodies reminded him of something, some long-buried memory that he didn’t try to dig up.

As they approached the city of Shymkent, the highway became increasingly choked with traffic. Vasel pressed forward, shoving his way through with vicious blasts of the horn. For a time that worked, too. People parted to let the big military vehicles through. But as they rolled past and they got sight of the joker passengers the other travelers’ deference turned to indignation. They glared. Shouted. Gesticulated.

“Shit,” Marcus whispered. “This could get bad.”

It did. With the M-32—the road that would take them north to Baikonur—in sight in the distance, they came to a dead stop. The whole distance to the turnoff was jammed, vehicles stuck bumper to bumper. Vasel leaned on the horn, but it was hopeless. The cars in front of them couldn’t have moved out of the way even if they’d wanted to.

Olena climbed out of the second truck and squirmed through the crowd. Stepping up on to the sideboard, she peeked her head over the side of Marcus’s transport. “What is it?”

Squinting into the distance, Marcus said, “I think there’s a blockade at the M-32. Soldiers, looks like. This is bad. Even if we get up to them how are we going to explain Kazakh military transports being full of jokers?”

“They’ll never let us through,” Olena agreed. “That’s not our only problem, though.”

There were murmurs coming from the vehicles around them. Whispered conversations. A few shouts. People, obviously, were noticing the jokers. They didn’t look happy to see them.

Vasel’s door opened. He jumped down to the road, stretched his back, took in the gathering crowd.

Marcus called down to him, “See? I told you the highway would screw us.”

“We are not screwed,” the ace said. He jerked his head to indicate the vehicles clogging the road in front of them. “They are.” The coin appeared, this time spinning on its edge on the tip of Vasel’s finger.

“No,” Marcus said. “Vasel, what are you going to do? Kill everyone between here and Baikonur?”

The gangster shrugged. “Whatever it takes.” He turned and began to walk forward.

Marcus lifted the little girl and set her next to Nurassyl. As carefully as he could so as not to hurt anyone, he flowed up and over the rim of the transport, grabbing the map through the open window of the cab of the truck in the process. He slithered around Vasel so quickly the man had to draw up. As he unfolded the map and scanned it, Marcus said, “There’s been enough death already. There’s a better way. Here. We backtrack on A-2. Connect to this smaller road. We passed it already and there wasn’t a roadblock. It heads north and connects to the M-32 farther up.”

Vasel considered the route he’d drawn, coin still spinning effortlessly on his finger. “That will take longer.”

“But it’ll save lives. You start flipping coins here, who knows what’ll happen.”

Marcus motioned at the crowd continuing to congeal around them. They were pointing now, a few of them trying to climb up to peer into the transports. Timur fended them off on one side. The Handsmith and Bulat tried to calm them on the other. Olena spoke rapid Russian to another group, arguing with beautiful passion.

“Why do you care about these people?” Vasel asked. “Do you know what they are saying? That you are contagious. That you are an evil to be destroyed. They would wipe you jokers from the earth without a moment’s thought.”

“I guess that makes me better than them,” Marcus answered.

Someone from the crowd threw a glass bottle that shattered on the truck’s railing, causing the jokers to cringe away from the shards of glass. “Come on,” Marcus said, “before things get out of hand. Let’s go back to go forward, and nobody gets killed.”

After a moment’s more consideration, Vasel palmed his coin. “Okay. One last time we do it your way, if you can get us turned around.”

“I can.” Marcus shot back toward the trucks, just in time to confront a group of young men converging on the Handsmith and Bulat with clubs and lengths of pipe in hand. Marcus rose tall and writhed toward them, throwing his coils out in front of him to drive them back. One of them brought a wrench down on his tail. Marcus snapped forward and clocked him so hard the man’s legs went to jelly and he fell. He hadn’t meant to do that, but adrenaline was coursing through him now. They were all getting too close, looking too beastly and angry. He shouted that they weren’t to blame. They were refugees just like anybody else. The commotion just grew, though.

He raced around to the other side of the truck to find Timur fighting a guy wielding a shovel. He took his legs out from under him with his tail. A second later the air was filled with thrown objects. Bottles and rocks pelted them. “Olena,” he called, “tell them we’re going to turn around. Tell them to just let us go!”

As she tried to do that, Marcus did what he had to. His tongue punched a man brandishing a pistol. He picked up another guy and hurled him into a group of approaching men. When one guy got up onto the side of the truck and lifted a pipe above the screaming joker women and children, Marcus careened around toward him. Before he knew that he was going to do it, he slung his tongue out, wrapped it around the guy’s neck, and yanked him back off the truck. He was unconscious by the time he hit the ground. He’d never used his tongue quite like that before, but he didn’t have time to pause and applaud himself.

Through pure hard work and force, constant motion and all the menace he could muster, Marcus managed to back the crowd enough so that the caravan could pull off the highway and swing around.

When Vasel finally pulled up beside him on the other side of the highway, Marcus answered the unasked question on the ace’s face. “I said I didn’t want anyone dead. That doesn’t make a pacifist.” He curved up into the truck bed, careful not to squash anyone as he did so. “Everybody all right?” he asked. Despite his English, they seemed to understand him. They made room, welcomed him, and, he thought, thanked him.

The Angel was astonished to discover that the building was actually a giant department store. The first level they went through was devoted to home furnishings—beds, couches, tables, sofas, chairs, tables. You name it, it was there. Most were in use, with people lying, sitting, crouching fearfully on them. They were the helpless, the sick, the wounded, the starving, and the dead. Other items were occupied by other beings, some at least partly human, but changed, horribly, in a parody of a wild card outbreak. The Angel had seen it all before. It was Jokertown writ small. They had too many heads or appendages or not enough. They had warty, leathery, bloody, oozy skin covered by fur, feathers, scales, or slime.

But it was the others, the utterly alien with little of humanity about them, that disturbed her. The things with hooves and tentacle-covered bodies, the sifting masses of protoplasm that had mouths all over them, the hideous creatures with rubbery-looking skin, sweeping bat-like wings, and blank faces devoid of features that looked as if they’d been carved out of blocks of ebony. They disturbed her the most. They had the scent of alien realms on them, and somehow the Angel knew that they’d never been human. They had come to earth, and they did not belong here.

Yet as she passed by them, led by the black-draped crone, they all turned to her. Even the featureless creatures of blackness turned their blank faces toward her, and a great murmur arose, a susurrus of awed voices whispered through the despoiled furniture showroom.

“What is this?” she asked the blinded crone, who looked at her with blank sockets that seemed as if they could still see.

“These are your people, my Angel. They have been awaiting your coming.”

“How did they—did you—know about me?”

“I told them that I had seen you in my dream, perhaps my vision—I often can’t tell now when I’m awake or sleeping. The dark and the light are all the same to me. But I saw you, Angel of the Alleyways, and I saw you protect us and rule over all.”

“Rule?” the Angel asked, tasting the word, feeling it sweet on her tongue.

“Yes, my Lady,” the crone said.

She nodded. “What do my people need most?” she asked. Her own stomach rumbled emptily. The Angel ignored it, as well as the wave of weariness and unease that washed over her. “Food?” she asked.

The crone nodded eagerly. “Yes, my Angel. There is a stock of it yet—but we can’t break into it.”

“Take me to it,” the Angel said. She liked the tone of command in her voice. With her mother now truly and finally banished there was no one to rule over her, to order her about. She followed the crone down another flight of stairs.

The second floor had been devoted to clothing, but it had been so thoroughly looted that nothing remained but scraps and rags and occasional corpses lying in pools of blood or ichor, depending. She stepped around them daintily. Disturbingly, some looked as if they’d been partially devoured. She made a note in her mind to outlaw cannibalism among her people. Perhaps it was understandable during a time of emergency, but generally it was not a healthy practice. She wrinkled her nose. The bodies were starting to smell offensively. She’d have to detail someone to drag them out of the building, which, she was thinking, could serve adequately as her temporary headquarters. Later she could inspect the city and find something more suitable.

The Angel reached the ground floor, the crone behind her. She finally understood why a crowd had gathered here. The first floor had been a grocery store.

There were still maybe a hundred entities—most of them passably human—in the room. Most were aimlessly wandering up and down the looted, trash-filled aisles, some of them scouring the floor for crumbs and scraps of the bounty that had once graced the now-emptied metal shelving. Once or twice she noticed someone pouncing on a forgotten box of breakfast cereal or a can of beets in an obscure or hidden nook and someone else pouncing on the unlucky finder until a fighting, yelling scrum of hungry bodies had gathered. Casualties usually resulted.

She moved out into the room. Some noticed her and their random pacing through the devastated store ceased as they stood and watched her. She ignored them, moving to the store’s front and looking out the glass windows.

Great gouges had been torn into what had been the parking lot, the asphalt dug up in huge cracked chunks and tossed about heedlessly. The city’s underbelly had been exposed, the pipes running through culverts in the packed dirt beneath parking lot and city streets. Great trenches had been dug through that dirt, which had been flung and heaped against adjacent buildings. Some were almost entirely buried. The Angel idly wondered if this was more of Earth Witch’s work, or the result of some barely glimpsed leviathan’s anger or whimsy.

It hardly mattered. What mattered was the result of the colossal excavation. The Angel licked cracked lips. Thirst made as many demands on her body as hunger, and out there pipes extruded from broken culverts and from one, clear, clean water geysered up and fell back to the ground forming a muddy pool at the bottom of the excavation.

And around the pool a pack of the hunting spiders like those she’d encountered earlier stood and drank, as well as less savory things.

We need that water, the Angel thought.

“Who’s this?” a voice behind her demanded in a childish tremulo. “Is this the savior you promised us?”

“It is,” the Angel heard the old woman say in proud tones, and she turned to face the speaker and saw the last thing in the world, mad as it was, that she expected to see.

It was no child, nor was it human. At least, most of it wasn’t. It was as high as she was tall, and much bigger around. It was more like a pile of protoplasm than a slug, but it had characteristics of both. Its flesh was translucent and you could see blurred things moving inside it as if caught in a slow-moving stream or perhaps more accurately, some kind of circulatory or digestive system. It, the Angel saw, had not lacked for food. Besides the human parts tumbling slowly around its body the Angel saw parts of some of its fellow alien entities. Obviously the thing was an undiscriminating eater.

The childish voice piped up again from one of the score of mouths haphazardly located around its eight feet of girth. “It looks a tasty tidbit to me,” the creature said. Its voice made the Angel queasy and angry at the same time as she realized what it must have devoured to obtain it. “Why should I let it lord over me?” it inquired brightly.

“The question is,” the Angel replied in a hard voice, “why should I allow such an abomination as you to live?”

She reached for it with empty hands.

It reacted suddenly, with frightening speed, rearing up on a stumpy base and stretching out two enormous tentacles, as to embrace and engulf her. The Angel realized that it was big enough to do so, but she didn’t pause. Ignoring the tearing pain in her shoulder as best she could she suddenly gripped the sword in her hands.

The flames leapt from the blade. The creature tried to shrink away, but the Angel stepped within striking distance. Her blade had no problems cutting through the thing’s rubbery flesh like it was Jell-O.

The tentacles thumped to the floor and thrashed around, leaking an abominably smelling ichor. She changed her grip on the pommel and rammed the blade like a spear into the creature’s chest. It screamed horrifically in its childish tremulo and the Angel slashed left and right, the blade engaged to the hilt. The thing’s flesh startled to sizzle.

The Angel panted in her killing frenzy. She didn’t even think of a mercy blow, if she could figure out where to place one in the undifferentiated mass of the entity, but just kept whisking the blade around her opponent’s interior, as if she were stirring some nauseous soup, and it kept burning from the inside.

It stank so badly that she would have vomited if there had been anything in her stomach to bring up. She could hear the onlookers’ cries of disgust mingled with calls of encouragement. Apparently it had not been a popular figure. She wondered how many of their companions had fallen to its oozing embrace over the last few days, whose child had provided the voice and the knowledge of English to the predatory entity.

It started to shrivel up into itself and the piteous cries it emitted turned to wordless moans that grew softer and softer. Finally, it was a blackened lump of stinking protoplasm and it collapsed entirely into a greasy mass on the floor. When she pulled her sword away, it was still burning with a cleansing flame. She thrust her blade into the air and released a cry of triumph that was answered by the onlookers.

The old woman stepped forward. “Bow,” she cried in a ringing voice, “bow to Our Madonna of the Blade! Our Savior who will lead us from this wilderness to a land of peace and plenty! On your knees, all of you!”

One, then another, then two or three more followed the shouted order and the Angel felt her heart leap as everyone fell to their knees before her. She could hear their murmured prayers and supplications, and it was good.

“Where is this food you spoke of?” she asked the crone.

“The back of the store,” the old woman said. “In the storage lockers. The meat freezers, mainly. The walls are strong and we haven’t been able to break into them—”

“I will,” the Angel vowed.

Her people looked up, sudden hope on starving faces. She nodded, smiling, then thrust her arms out for silence. She was gratified to see that they obeyed almost immediately. The rapturous look in their eyes and on their faces was like nectar to her parched throat.

“This sword,” she said, holding it high, “will break down any barrier!”

They might not have understood her words, but there was no mistaking the meaning of her gestures. They cheered.

“And then we will feast!”

Ensnared by the strength of her emotions, they cheered louder and crowded around her, but left an open corridor that allowed the Angel to be led to the storage locker that was built into the wall in the rear of the store. The only entrance to it was a massive iron double door held tightly shut by a thick chain looped tightly around both handles, secured by a large padlock.

The Angel laughed. She gestured dramatically and the crowd around her edged back, giving her more room. She demanded her sword to come to her, but for the first time ever it failed to appear.

Anger shot through the Angel like a tongue of fire and she cried aloud. She shook a clenched fist and somewhere, somehow, her soul or her mind touched something that was, she knew, watching her, weighing her, and, she realized, finding her worthy. A heavy weight came into her grasp, but it was not the blade that she had used all through her existence as an ace.

It was heavier, cruder, and somehow it tugged at her brain, seemingly whispering to it indecipherable but somehow insidious thoughts. It was all black, blacker than night with a dull sheen that threatened to draw you into its substance if you stared at it for too long, with sharp but jagged edges. The pommel was entwisted with thorns and barbed wire, holding her hands tightly within its grasp. The Angel was quite thankful for her leather gauntlets.

Awed gasps and whispers sounded from around her as she experimentally cut the air with it, testing its balance, and the leading edge of it coming perilously close to a man in the tattered remnants of a Kazakh army uniform. The Angel found herself twisting her wrist ever so slightly and the edge of the blade lightly passed across the skin of his throat. He stood there staring for a moment and then a fine bloody mist jetted from his severed jugular vein, whistling a high-pitched tune in the sudden silence.

He stood until he bled out, then he collapsed like a marionette with its strings severed. Again, gasps of awe broke out from the onlookers. A few applauded. The Angel, staring almost incomprehendingly at him, roused herself, laughed, turned, and severed the chain holding the door shut.

Eager hands reached out and stripped the chain from the handles and pulled the doors open. The meat locker was packed, but not for long.

Michelle could still hear the shuffling, and it was still coming closer.

But the drumming in her head had diminished a little. And the buzzing was almost gone. Those horrible voices remained and they had been the worst of it. And she began to realize what she’d done.

A wave of dizziness swept over her.

Aero. She’d killed Aero. And for no reason other than … no, she hadn’t killed Aero. She’d killed Mummy.

No, Mom, you didn’t.

Shame. Shame such as she’d never experienced in her life came crashing down. And guilt.

Oh, fuck that. She’d had to kill Mummy.

Move.

There was more light in the tunnel now and she saw Adesina. Maybe this has all been a horrible dream. I’m going to wake up and …

Aero appeared and snapped Adesina’s neck. Her tiny neck. It snapped like a dry twig. And Michelle screamed. She didn’t know how long she screamed. It felt like it went on and on and on.

Aero vanished before she could bubble him, and in his place Joey appeared. She smiled at Michelle, but it wasn’t a smile Michelle had ever seen on Joey’s face before.

“I can raise her up, Bubbles,” Joey said. “I’ll bring her back for you.” And as she spoke, Adesina got up from the floor. Her head hung to one side and she tried to fly, but couldn’t control her wings properly.

Mom. The voice came from Adesina, but it was wrong. It was so close.

Mom, that’s not me. It’s nothing. Move.

Michelle stared at zombie Adesina. She took a step toward her daughter, but whatever it was didn’t step toward her. And Joey still had that hideous grin on her face.

Even though she was gaunt, she still had enough for this.

A small bubble flew from her hand and gathered speed. It was as heavy and hard as Michelle had ever made. It sped up and smashed into Joey’s left eye. Joey collapsed like a rag doll. Adesina fell to the ground, too.

Michelle walked forward and stepped over them, not bothering to look down. Now she knew something new and horrible about herself. She could walk over the corpses of people she loved and not turn a hair.

That’s not you.

I think we have plenty of evidence to the contrary. Her mind was clearing as she followed the voice, and what she’d done began to come back in dribs and drabs. Her mind shied away from what had happened in Talas. What she’d done. What she’d done. What she’d done.

Michelle couldn’t think of anything else to do now except press on. Occasionally, she would hit herself in the face, and she didn’t know why. It hurt.

The tunnel began to slope upward.

We’re almost there.

Who are you?

I’m your daughter.

She’s dead. She died back there in the tunnel.

That’s not me. I came for you. I’d never leave you, Mom.

I left you.

You had to. And now you have to move. It’s coming for all of us. You have to save me now. I love you, Mom.

I love you, too.

Baikonur sat on a massive plain, a flat, featureless expanse. Marcus stared, trying to make sense of the geometric confusion of the place: rectangular wedges, domes white under the morning light, silos and towers that jutted up toward the sky. All of it like a scene from a Mars movie. But Mars was a lifeless planet. Not so Baikonur.

“Look at this place,” Marcus said, to himself more than anyone else. “It’s a fucking tent city.”

For an isolated compound strewn across a barren landscape, the plain outside the compound’s walls hummed with an incredible amount of activity. A whole army gathered protectively before the main gate and along the wall: khaki-clad soldiers by the thousands, trucks and jeeps galore. They weren’t the same as the Kazakh soldiers they’d encountered before. They were white guys, grim-faced and bristling with weaponry. Russians, Olena told him. There were tanks spaced at intervals, all of them facing outward toward some coming, but as yet invisible, threat. To Marcus it felt like those silent barrels were aimed at him and the people he cared for.

Kept apart from the army but separated by a narrow zone patrolled by soldiers, the throng of refugees gathered. Tens of thousands of them. Men and women and children who must’ve rushed here for the protection—real or symbolic—of the old Soviet order. It was a makeshift array of tents and lean-tos. Numerous fires sent pillars of smoke rising straight up into a clear, windless sky.

The caravan nosed as far into the refugee encampment as they could, coming to rest pressed up against people too fatigued to clear the way. They disembarked. Marcus and Olena did the best they could to get the various vehicles arrayed in a protective ring around the villagers. They posted sentries to keep watch, got their own fire going, and helped any who needed it onto the blankets to rest. Marcus lifted Nurassyl down from a flatbed, feeling the soft, moist texture of his skin. The boy’s large eyes stared into his. Despite the strangeness of the touch, the smile on Marcus’s face was genuine. God, he wanted the best for this kid. He lifted Sezim down as well. He snatched up her stuffed rabbit when she dropped it, dusted it off, and gave it back to her.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said to both children. “We’re safe here.”

Once the children were settled and Aliya began sharing out portions of biscuits between them, Marcus asked Olena, “Where’s your father?”

“He’s gone to where the power is.” She pointed toward the compound.

“Does he know people here?”

“Of course he does. If it’s nuclear, corrupt … If there’s power to be had … My father has a connection to it. Marcus, I think we should not have come here.”

“It was a crazy ride, wasn’t it? But at least we’re all here together.” Marcus, studying the wall behind the cordon of soldiers, said, “We get in there and find someplace out of the way. A room or something where we can lock the door and sit this out.”

“They won’t let us in,” Olena said. “My father, yes. Me, yes, if I would go. But a village of jokers? No. They are here to protect Baikonur, not us. Anyway, that’s not the point. I was so desperate to get away from Talas I didn’t think why my father wanted to come here. Now I’m worried he wants to do something horrible. Marcus, this is Baikonur. Do you know what that means?” Marcus’s expression must’ve indicated that he didn’t. “There are enough nuclear weapons in there to destroy the planet. All of it, Marcus. All of us. I think we’ve come to a bad place.”

Babel set up her staging area inside one of the immense warehouses adjacent to their arrival spot from New York. It seemed a reasonable base of operations: a large contained space they could control … assuming the evil insanity zone didn’t engulf it, and assuming the massive and constantly growing crowd of refugees didn’t force their way inside the facility. Half of it looked like something from Raiders of the Lost Ark; aisle upon aisle of crates and shelves, stretching into the fluorescent-lit distance. The shelves reached a good twenty or thirty feet high in places; Mollie pictured cherry pickers and forklifts on steroids. The crates sported stenciled Cyrillic labels; for all Mollie knew, they might have contained anything from baby food to plutonium. Keenly aware that Ffodor could read Russian and could have explained what this warehouse was for, Mollie swallowed the tightness in her throat and concentrated on where the real work would happen.

In the far corner, Babel and Billy Ray liaised with a Russian officer. Decked out in pixilated tan-grey urban camouflage, he looked like his daily regimen included broken glass for breakfast and afternoon bear-wrestling for light cardio. Mollie wondered how hard it was to coordinate a three-way between the Committee, SCARE, and the Russian army.

Many of the SCARE guys and Russian troops wore hazmat suits. Mollie didn’t know what to make of that. Would she get a suit? Did it even matter? Some cheesy Andromeda Strain suit wasn’t going to do squat against a tidal wave of supernatural evil.

Joey sauntered up, zombie mutt—and its odor of putrefaction—in tow. Mollie changed her mind about the utility of a hazmat suit. At least some of them had built-in gas masks and rebreathers.

Thick black cable bundles threaded the site. Some were electrical, she assumed, because they connected to giant arc lights on stands, like the kind of thing they’d used on American Hero when filming on location. The lights were arranged in concentric rings. Massive overkill: the interior of the warehouse was almost painfully bright. But there were other cables, too, with unknown purposes. There were at least a dozen cameras, too, and gadgets Mollie couldn’t identify. They weren’t fucking around.

Just then, one of the Andromeda Strain guys came jogging up to the two of them. “Mollie Steunenberg?”

“Yeah.”

The man graced her with a curt nod from within his suit. “Agent Vigil, SCARE.” He spoke crisply and quickly, his diction as precise as his buzz cut. “The equipment’s in place, so we’re ready to begin when you are.”

He looked at her, expectantly.

“Um, okay. So what happens now?”

“Agent Ray made it clear that you had the most experience with a crisis of this nature.”

“What nature would that be, exactly?”

“Agent Ray chose not to divulge that information to me, miss.” He continued to look at her as though he were the world’s most obedient dog. As though she was about to leap into action and take charge. As if she knew what the fuck she was doing. As if she wasn’t about to piss her pants.

Joey looked at Mollie, then the SCARE guy, then back at Mollie. Joey said, “Ohhhkay. Thanks for the sitrep, agent jarhead. I gotta say, you two are instilling me with heaps of fucking confidence right now.”

Mollie said, “From your end, how does this work? What do you need?”

“You do what you do. Make a door to Talas. I’ll round up the largest crew of toe tags I can manage.”

Toe tags? Oh: zombies. Cute.

“Well. No shortage of bodies. So I guess that’s useful, huh?” Mollie tried for a halfhearted laugh, a little gallows humor, but it turned into a sob that clamped her throat like a vise. Christ, it hurt. She ran the back of her hand across her eyes. When she could talk again without croaking like a frog, she said, “Once your, uh, guys are on the other side, do you need me to hold the portal open? Or can you control them without it?”

Joey looked at the SCARE agent. “How far are we from Talas?”

“Approximately five hundred miles, ma’am.”

She frowned. Whistled. “That’s not next door. I’ve never tried anything so remote. Getting anything useful from even a single toe tag over that distance … The headache would probably kill me, or give me a fuckin’ stroke.” Joey shook her head. “I’ll need a shortcut if my shamblers are gonna do anything useful in Talas.”

That was not what Mollie’d hoped to hear. She started trembling again.

“Are you absolutely positive? Maybe you could try it without the shortcut first.”

Joey rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’m fucking positive. It’s not like my goddamned card turned just this morning, you know.”

“If I have to keep a portal open to Talas, that bubble of supernatural psychosis will leak through. It happens fast.” Mollie hugged herself.

 … don’t think about pitchforks don’t think about pitchforks don’t think about Daddy’s missing ear don’t think don’t don’t don’t …

“Well we don’t have a lot of fucking choice, do we?”

“Are you even listening to me? You have no idea what you’re getting into.”

Agent Vigil stepped forward. To Joey, he said, “Miss. How large would the opening have to be in order to enable you to do what you need?”

She shrugged. “Not that big. I just need a connection, is all.”

“Would a pinhole suffice?”

“Beats me. Maybe.”

He turned to Mollie. “Miss. Could you do that? Make a portal that small?” She nodded. “Would that be acceptable to you?”

The portal from the family barn to the casino had been large enough for people, tools, slot machines, and loot. And the psychosis had taken over quickly. But maybe, just maybe, if the hole was small enough, Horrorshow’s sphere of influence would seep through more slowly …

She goaded herself to answer before she lost her nerve. “Yes. I can do that,” she said, in a warbly voice that undermined any pretense of confidence. “Where will you guys be?”

He pointed to a mobile command center parked on the far side of the warehouse, a hundred yards away. It looked like an armor-plated Winnebago, and utterly out of place outside a casino parking lot. The roof bristled with dishes and antennae. “We’ll monitor the situation from there as long as the feeds hold.”

Mollie noticed that most of the cables strung around the site ran in thick bundles back to the command center. She shook her head.

“Your electronics are gonna start to fail the minute I do my thing.”

Vigil nodded. “Yes, ma’am. We’ve been briefed on that. The technical perimeter is our early warning sentry. We’ll track the advance of the effect as the electronics fail. We’ll stay outside the trouble zone and pull the plug when it threatens to expand beyond our control.”

Clever. They’d actually thought this through. They’d actually listened to what she told Franny, Ray, and Babel, took her seriously, and come up with a strategy. Mollie didn’t know how to process that. It actually felt … nice. Still, there was a problem.

Her voice trembled. Breathe. Take it easy. Just breathe. “How will you pull the plug if I go off the reservation?”

“With this,” he said. The lieutenant shrugged, unlimbering the rifle slung over his shoulder. It was almost half as big as Joey. “We have shooters stationed around the perimeter.”

Joey took a step back. “Jesus Christ taking a runny shit on a camel! What the fuck? What the actual fuck?” She grabbed Mollie by the arm and tried to pull her away. It was actually kind of touching. “C’mon. Fuck these motherfuckers.”

Mollie said, “Relax. It’s just a tranquilizer gun.” She paused. “Um, it is, right? You’re just gonna trank me and not blow my brains out, right?”

The corner of Vigil’s mouth twitched. The guy was wound so tight that this was probably the equivalent of a knee-slapping gut-buster on him. “No, ma’am. My orders are to knock you out, nothing more. You’ll have a nice nap. Not even a hangover.”

Mollie nodded. “Okay. But you should be ready to pull the plug even before the danger bubble gets too large.” She glanced at Joey. “We might … I might…” She blinked, wiped her eyes, trying to clear away the nightmare images from the street in Talas and her own family’s barn. “Look. If I start acting weird, don’t hesitate to dose me.”

Vigil gave her his crisp little nod. “Understood.” Then he cocked his head, pressing a gloved hand to the side of his suited head; a little antenna ran along his jaw. After a few moments of muttering to the other jarheads, he said, “We’re ready to begin.”

Mollie and Joey passed through several concentric rings of cables, lights, and electronics until they reached the center. Mollie turned, examining the windows. Each had a hazmat guy with a rifle like the one Vigil had brandished. Surprisingly, the hazmat suits made it difficult to distinguish the SCARE guys from the Russian soldiers. Big difference, though, between a Fed desk jockey who used firearms once a year during an annual requalification on the shooting range, and a battle-hardened Spetsnaz killer who slept with his rifle. Mollie wondered who’d be taking the shot at her, if it came to that.

Vigil, stationed by the vehicle, gave her a thumbs-up.

“Okay,” said Joey. “Gimme a minute.”

Her gaze went a little distant, as though she was deep in concentration. Moments later, the dull murmuring of the crowd beyond the fence swelled into a white-noise hiss, as if storm-driven waves pounded rocky cliffs. Then came a flurry of shouts from inside the Cosmodrome perimeter. Past the command unit where Vigil stood, something shambled into the warehouse. And then Mollie understood. Joey was animating some of the freshly dead from around the premises.

Dead men and women filed toward them like the world’s slowest, least enthusiastic conga line. The nat corpses among them had a chalky pallor broken with blackish-purple spots where blood had pooled; there were a few jokers among the recently dead, too. One toe tag shambled across the warehouse on feet like giant lobster claws. Eventually Joey managed to corral about a dozen corpses to the innermost ring of lights and cables where she and Mollie stood.

None of the dead were as ripe as Joey’s dog, but the cumulative odor of death churned her stomach. She swallowed gorge. God, how did Joey stand it?

Joey snapped out of her glassy concentration, though she still looked fairly distracted when she said to Mollie, “Okay. Let’s get this fuckin’ show on the road.”

Mollie slammed open a portal to the casino before she could think about what she was doing. Before she had time to chicken out. It was about the size of a pantry door, centered near where the slot machines had been. The space underlying the Talas side of the portal felt strange. Ripply, or jiggly. Almost organic. Mollie shuddered.

Wisps of oily, luminescent mist wafted through the hole in space. It smelled like rotting meat, and echoed with screams and non-Euclidean scuttling. Compared to the oppressive death-stink of the evil insanity zone, the diesel-fuel-and-zombies’ odor of the warehouse was like a rose bouquet and twice as welcome. The casino had become a foggy hellscape, as if the deepest subconscious nightmares of Hieronymus Bosch, M. C. Escher, and H. R. Giger dropped a metric shit-ton of acid and then fucked each other blind in an amphetamine-fueled three-way. She couldn’t recognize anything, much less tell if she’d hit the mark.

Mollie closed the portal. “Hold on a second. Let me try again. I can save you some time if I can get a portal on a street outside the casino.” She pictured the streetscape as seen from Baba Yaga’s window, just outside the casino, where she’d glimpsed the big snake guy.

The warped geometry inside Horrorshow’s sphere of influence made it almost impossible for Mollie to know if she’d successfully moved the portal. It could’ve been fifty yards, half an inch, or a light-year for all the difference it made. But she did manage to get it open again.

“Okay. Hurry.”

Joey closed her eyes. She fell quiet again. The zombies shambled forward at what, for them, seemed a bit of a hurry. But it wasn’t fast enough. They weren’t going to Talas faster than the evil was seeping through.

“Come on, come on,” said Mollie. “Hurry.”

“Keep your panties on,” said Joey, through gritted teeth.

The first ring of lights dimmed, flickered. Why wasn’t Joey hurrying? Didn’t she realize this was important? Didn’t she know what Mollie was putting on the line for her? Ungrateful little bitch. Mollie curled her fists. She ought to—

Joey slapped her across the face so hard it snapped her head aside. The portal disappeared; the lights came back to full strength. Mollie blinked away tears. Her ears rang. She rubbed her stinging cheek. It felt hot.

“Ouch! Jesus.” Joey had walloped her but good.

Mollie shuddered. She’d started to slip away far too quickly that time.

“You were mumbling to yourself,” Joey mumbled. “Didn’t like the … sound … of it.” She still had a faraway look in her eyes, as if eavesdropping on a conversation just at the edge of audibility. She frowned. When she spoke, the words came out slurred and distracted, as if she’d been to the dentist and shot full of novocaine. “I … uh … I can barely keep ahold of the toe tags.”

Mollie shook her head, tried to dispel the ringing in her ears. “Okay. Here.”

She concentrated on re-creating the portals she’d made a moment ago, but far smaller. Smaller than a horsefly, smaller than her pinky nail, smaller than a pinprick. The first hole in space came out the size of a basketball. She slammed it shut, tried again. The next was closer to the size of a plum.

Joey squinted. She leaned forward. Mollie flinched. The doorway blinked shut about a hairbreadth from the tip of Joey’s nose. The woman rounded on her, ready to unleash abuse, but whatever she saw on Mollie’s face defused her temper. “Fine. Fuck it. Let’s keep going. Just try not to give me a nose job.”

Mollie kept working to make the smallest portal she could. But she closed the new ones almost as rapidly as they opened—they were still too large.

“Fucking hell, I’m getting whiplash here,” said Joey. “It’s like the z’s are right in the room with me one second and then in a different country the next. Slow your roll before you give me fucking epilepsy.”

But Mollie couldn’t help it. Abject terror made it difficult to concentrate. But after half a dozen tries she managed to create a portal no larger than a pinhole. If she hadn’t made it with her own mind, and thus knew where to look, she might not have known it was there. She pointed it out to Joey.

“How’s that?”

The smaller woman relaxed visibly. She still spoke as if carrying on two conversations at once. “Okay. That’s much better. Still … hard … keeping track of them all, but they’re not so … far away now.”

Mollie watched the lights. They hadn’t begun to flicker. Yet.

There was a stone staircase leading up. Michelle climbed it. At the top was yet another set of stairs. They spiraled up out of sight.

They stopped at a metal door. She reached out and turned the knob. It can’t be this easy. The door opened. Afternoon light poured through, blinding her. She put her arm up to cover her eyes.

When she could see, she discovered she was in a courtyard surrounded by a fancy metal fence. She looked around and saw a sign in Cyrillic. No help there.

There was still some mist here, but much thinner. She let herself out the gate. There was still something in her head, but for the most part, she knew what was real. and that was bad.

How many people had she killed? She didn’t know. At some point she’d just killed because it felt so good. And it was so easy. And she knew she’d killed Aero. The way she’d killed him was terrible. And what she had done to his body afterward had been done with joy.

Her hands began to shake. There was a time when she knew who she was and what she was capable of, but now she had no idea. What kind of person could kill a kind person like Aero with such abandon?

She was as skinny as she’d even been in her life. There was carnage all around her. Dead bodies lay everywhere. There were cars and trucks abandoned in the road as if their drivers had suddenly just decided to stop for no reason. Some had corpses at the wheel, some just had blood on them drying in the sun.

She looked into the cars, hoping to find one with the keys still in the ignition. And a lot of them did, but none of them would start.

Shit.

She started walking. She had to find someone she could tell what was happening in Talas. But she wasn’t sure it mattered. She was pretty sure that whatever was in there was beyond the Committee’s—or anyone’s—ability to stop.

She kept walking. There was nothing else to do.

The Angel leaned back with a sigh, licking grease from her fingers contentedly. Her stomach was comfortably distended, and she felt a sleepy lassitude washing over her. For the first time in days she felt full and well fed. They had finished off all the meat. Of course, she had all she wanted, while she watched in some amusement as some of her weaker followers fought over the scraps of what was left. Tomorrow they would have to search for food again, but tomorrow was tomorrow and they’d worry about it when it was upon them.

Outside, night had fallen. The bloated greenish moon illumined the shadowy things that still slunk around the water pool. At the start of the feast the Angel had ordered her people to gather what utensils they could—there were still plenty of pots and pans on the household section—and she boldly opened a door leading outside, willed her new blade to her, and stood guard while her people gathered enough water for their needs.

Nothing had dared to attack them. The Angel had smiled scornfully. Even they recognized her power. Soon perhaps, they would willingly join her clan. For now it was enough to have their fear.

She was tired. She was sore. The thought of sleep was upon her, but she suddenly noticed a strange, somehow familiar figure stagger to the edge of the pool, fall down, and stick his face in the water, drinking thirstily.

Things moved in the darkness around him, as the Angel watched with interest.

One of the hunting spiders leapt high, but the figure at the pool suddenly rose to one knee and with a flourish of his arm pointed at the thing. Thunder peeled in the otherwise still night and a lightning bolt leapt from his hand, incinerating the spider in midair.

The man suddenly stood and like a virtuoso directing an unseen orchestra, he gestured right and left, twisting and bowing his entire body in contortions that would have been ridiculous if the end result weren’t lightning bolts, punctuated by the occasional clap of thunder, streaming outward, picking off attackers with amazing accuracy and efficiency.

A name suddenly came to the Angel. Doktor Omweer.

She stood, her people watching, and strode to the door. The attacking spider pack had either been entirely destroyed or discouraged by the time she reached the banks of the pool and Omweer stood on his toes, his arms thrust into the sky, his back dramatically bent backward like a bow.

He heard her approaching step and whirled to face her. His full head of grey hair thrust wildly in every direction, his face was smeared with dirt and what looked to be caked blood. One lens was missing from his eyeglasses that lay crookedly upon his face and his eyes, the Angel saw, were mad. Stark, crazy mad.

“What is,” he asked almost conversationally, “the difference between the rational and irrational?”

The Angel edged a small step to her right. To her left was the open pool. To her right, the broken ground from which it was torn.

“I don’t know,” she replied, in a cunningly rational voice.

“The question is, which one are you?” Omweer replied. “There exists, irrational numbers a and b such that a to the power of b is rational.”

“Of course,” the Angel said.

“The square root of two is irrational, yet two is rational.” He approached her carefully. “Consider the number q which equals the square root of two to the power of the square root of two. Either it is rational or irrational.”

Omweer, she saw, was not going to take a chance. His right hand twitched at the wrist, giving her time to dive behind a pile of dirt that proved thick enough to protect her as his lightning bolt flashed outward, exploding it into a pillar of dust.

“If q is rational,” Omweer screamed, “then the theorem is true, with a and b both being the square root of two!”

The Angel leapt, taking to the sky as her wings appeared. Her wings beat twice as she gained height, then she suddenly turned and swerved as Omweer tried to track her flight path.

“If q is irrational,” he shouted to the sky, “then the theorem is true, with a being the square root of two to the power of the square root of two and b being the square root of two, since—”

She dodged a right-handed then a left-handed thrown bolt, though the latter singed the feathers of her left wing that were tightly clenched to her body as she barely rolled in a tight circle and willed the sword into her hand. Then they collided, the sword striking Omweer in the chest, and they tumbled together to the ground. She lay on his chest as her sword ripped through his body and the tip came out of his back.

“—the square root of two to the power of the square root of two to the power of the square root of two, in parentheses, equals two.”

He looked at her as if that were the most important thing in the world, but she had no idea what he was saying. He was completely mad. But he was also dead and no longer a threat to her or her new position.

The Angel went back into the devastated store and hands reached out to touch her as she passed. She wore a grim smile on her face and her beauty was terrible to behold. She had never felt like this before, like an adored queen, like a beloved sovereign. True, her following was small, but she would call more to her side and they would answer.

She drank in their adulation like a fine wine, and it was good.

She Who Must Be Obeyed had come into her kingdom.