“Hold on a second,” said Mollie.
She hadn’t really thought it through until now—it seemed like nobody had—but now that she was paying attention to the plan for dealing with this part of the crisis, she realized it was stupidly overcomplicated. Babel’s people, the second-string Committee aces, were trying to dismantle and move the weapons before the shitstorm hit. This over the objections of the Russians, whom Babel and Jayewardene were trying to placate.
That was stupid. They needed to work faster. Better to act now and beg forgiveness later, and so on and so forth.
She said this to Babel. And then she continued, “My point is, you’re doing this the hard way. Just move them out of the danger zone. Plunk them somewhere far away from Horrorshow’s encroachment. Then take all the time you need to disable them. Or, hell, I don’t know, hold them in reserve in case you need them later.”
“We can’t just waltz into a sovereign country to steal a bunch of nuclear missiles and spaceplane bombers.”
“You can’t. But maybe I can.”
“Oh, no. No, no, no.” Babel shook her head. “Not a chance. That would be an act of war.”
“Listen up, Super Bureaucrat. It’s becoming obvious to me that you still don’t understand what a shitstorm it’ll be when Horrorshow engulfs the site. Nobody’s going to give a shit about international law when they’re all too busy feasting on each other’s intestines.”
“We’re working in a grey area, legally, as it is. Taking another country’s nuclear assets is not grey.”
“Oh, yeah,” muttered Mollie. “We sure as hell don’t want to offend the psychopath bloodrage crowd. Better to let them keep their nukes.” She shook her head, felt a stick pop under her bandages, and winced. “If you’re worried about getting caught by the international community,” she said, “I know all about dumping loot, too. I’m not an amateur thief, you know. I could open portals under the missiles and twin them to portals over the ocean. Or, I dunno, Nevada. I could dump the missiles and the bombers in the middle of nowhere. No fuss, no muss, no need to toss people into the meat grinder. And it’s not like the cops could barge in and catch you red-handed with a pile of Kazakh nukes stashed under your bed like so many unopened Blu-ray players and crates of Swarovski crystal.”
“That is a rather specific analogy,” said Babel. She sighed. “Anyway, no. We looked at this, okay? If the missiles go on alert, they automatically get pumped full of fuel.” She slapped at a sheaf of papers on her desk, some sort of technical report from the look of it. “The fuel is very, very nasty. Grandchildren-with-flippers nasty. And the airframes on those old missiles are paper thin. If you start throwing the missiles around they’re prone to rupture. Then we have a much bigger problem. Even if the leaking fuel doesn’t explode outright, which it could very well—leaving us with nuclear warheads basted in burning rocket fuel—the chemicals would poison everyone and everything in the area. We’re talking a ten-thousand-square-mile dead zone in the middle of the ocean. And that’s not even accounting for the nuclear material in the warheads. Let’s try to leave a planet to enjoy after we’ve vanquished our current problems, okay?”
Sneer at me, you fucking cunt?
A snow globe paperweight on the desk blinked through a small transdimensional rift to plummet from the ceiling over Babel’s head. It clocked her square on the crown hard enough to make her cry out and stagger. The glass bounced from Babel’s head and shattered on the floor. It happened so quickly that the snow globe water was seeping into the carpet before Mollie even consciously realized she was angry. She clapped a hand over her mouth, too late to stifle her gasp. “Oh, God.”
The dig at her criminal history had upset her, and she’d instinctively, reflexively retaliated with violence. She’d never done anything like that before. Never. Not while in her proper state of mind. She’d thrown punches and taken punches from her asshole brothers, but that was just family stuff. She wasn’t a violent person. She wasn’t.
A rivulet of blood trickled through Babel’s hair to dribble down her forehead. Leaning against her desk, she felt the tickle and touched her scalp. She winced. Her fingertips came away stippled with blood. The confusion on her face became a frown when her gaze fell upon the shattered snow globe. She looked at her desk (pristine, unbroken, blameless), then the acoustical tiles over her head (ditto), then Mollie (shamefaced and humiliated).
“Oh, God, oh, my God,” Mollie mumbled through the fingers still draped over her mouth. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I’m not like this. I swear I’m not. I’m not a violent person. I’m a good person.” She started to cry again. It hurt the zombie-bruises on her throat. “I’m not evil. I’m not violent.”
Well. She didn’t used to be. But now … now the madness had taken her twice. The propensity for supernatural rage, the drive to visit profound violence on those around her, had worked its tendrils so deeply into her that perhaps she’d never be free of them ever again. Horrorshow’s influence had left a mark on her, warped her psyche. She’d spent too much time in the abyss. Looking at the shards of snow globe misted with Babel’s blood, Mollie realized—it felt like a kick in the gut—that she’d never again walk in the light, not fully, after thinking, feeling, and doing the things she had. She wasn’t the same woman she’d been a week ago.
The tears blurred her vision and made it impossible to unpack the calculating expression on Babel’s face. The Committee woman appeared to come to a decision. She shrugged.
“It’s okay,” she said, unconvincingly. “We’re all on edge right now.”
Mollie sniffled. “Oh, God … I’m never going to be normal again, am I?”
Babel opened her arms. It was the most calculated invitation to a hug Mollie had ever witnessed. It was like getting embraced by a robot. And about as warm. But at least the Committee woman was trying.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “You’ll be okay. We’ll get you all the help you need. I swear it. We have resources. After this is over, I’ll see to it that the entire weight of the United Nations is thrown behind anything you or your family need.”
“Give them to the family of the guy I squashed with a Winnebago. And Joey. She’s the one I mutilated.”
“Yeah, well, I probably deserved it,” said a new voice.
Mollie clamped harder onto Babel. Pressed her face to the other woman’s shoulder. Her bandages rasped against Babel’s lapel. She didn’t want to turn around. Didn’t want to see what she’d done to Joey.
The zombie wrangler said, “My memory is sort of fuzzy, but I do remember thinking some wickedly fucked-up shit. I’ve never been that angry in my life. And I admit that’s saying something.”
Babel broke off the hug. She stepped away from Mollie. But Mollie kept her head down and her back to Joey.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry for what I did to you. I wasn’t myself. I’d never … I’m not…”
When did her entire life become nothing but a litany of apologies? How did it get this way? When did she stop being a woman with an actual life, and instead became a woman with an insoluble burden of contrition?
“Enough with the motherfucking waterworks,” Joey said. “We’ll buy a few bottles and get epically shit-faced together and scream and carry on and cry our eyes out when this is over. But that’s for later. Right now let’s do this fuckin’ thing and get Michelle home.”
Mollie wiped her nose on her sleeve. After a few steadying breaths, she turned around.
Joey looked ghastly: a huge sapphire-blue gel bandage wobbled over her eye, where her eyebrow used to be. She caught Mollie staring.
“Don’t flatter yourself. I gave as good as I got. You look like five miles of bad fuckin’ road, sister.”
Mollie changed the subject. “What’s this about Michelle?”
Joey rolled her eyes. To Babel, she said, “Jesus H. Christ. You haven’t even told her yet?”
“We were distracted by another matter before you entered.”
?
??Told me what?” Mollie asked.
“They found her,” said Joey, bouncing on her toes with so much excitement she practically levitated. “They found Michelle.”
Yeah, they’d found Michelle Pond all right. At least, Mollie took their word for it when they showed her the satellite photos of the gaunt woman limping down the highway. She didn’t look like a supermodel, though. If Mollie looked like five miles of bad road, the woman in the grainy image looked like fifty miles of even worse road.
There was, of course, a problem.
The image projected on Babel’s wall was now a split screen. Michelle on the left, the map of Kazakhstan with the superimposed “shadow zone” on the right. A bright green dot had appeared on the map: Michelle’s location.
Right on the hairy edge of the evil insanity zone.
And she was on foot. Moving too slowly to outrun the bubble. It would overrun her, if it hadn’t already.
Mollie shook her head and waved her arms as if trying to flag down a passing airplane. “If either of you think I’m going to create another portal to the kingdom of the psychopath cannibals, you can fuck yourselves with a chain saw.”
“Spread your legs, sweetheart. Because if you try to refuse,” said Joey, “we won’t be the only ones getting a Black and Decker crammed up her twat.”
Babel cleared her throat. “This photo is less than two hours old,” she said, in a tone that should have caused the snow globe water in the carpet to ice over. “We know where she is. This won’t be a blind expedition, like the search for survivors. That worked for Ana, but you were lucky to find her. No luck here.” She tapped the screen. “We know where she was two hours ago. She’s moving slowly. She knows she needs to get away from the shadow zone, so we even know what direction she’s moving. This road is a straight shot, her best bet. She’s still on it.”
She drew her finger across the map, suggesting the road from the other image. “You could open a sequence of small scouting portals, starting here”—she tapped the abandoned truck at the edge of the road in the photo of Michelle—“for just a few seconds, then jumping down the road a hundred yards at a time. Once you find her you could drop her back to us.”
Mollie said, “You’re assuming she’s acting rationally. How do you know she hasn’t already gone completely bugfuck?”
“She’s stronger than that,” Joey said. She made the pronouncement so simply, so directly, it brooked no argument. A statement of fact and nothing less.
Mollie wondered what it would be like if somebody believed in her so resolutely. Wondered what it would be like to deserve such simple, unshakeable faith in her character.
Babel saw her wavering. “You could save another life,” she said. “This would be a major win for us.”
Mollie chewed her lip.
“Please,” said Joey.
I never learn. I never ever fucking learn.
Billy Ray met them in the warehouse.
He looked Mollie over. Took his time about it. Every shameful detail of her recent history played across his stupid face. It was even more mashed-up than usual. He was thinking about their fight. The way his gaze flicked from Mollie to Joey’s bandages and back confirmed it.
It made her feel naked and ashamed all over again. Ashamed of what she did to him. Ashamed that he tried to beat her senseless, ashamed that she deserved it. She felt the heat rising on her face as she blushed.
He kept staring.
“Hey, G-man. You plan to keep eye-banging me all day, or what?”
He clenched his fists. But he said, “How are you feeling?”
“Like a zombie mutt took a chunk out of me, somebody used my face for a punching bag, somebody else tried to tear it half off, and then another zombie choked the shit out of me like something out of undead bondage porn.”
“Yeah. I guess it’s been one of those days.”
He was hard to read, the SCARE agent.
She turned to Joey. “Let’s do this before I lose my nerve.”
The SCARE guys, or maybe their Russian counterparts, had more or less reassembled the rings of cables and equipment that had been destroyed or displaced during the chaos in the warehouse. Mollie could feel their eyes on her as she and Joey returned to the epicenter, the innermost ring of lights. They were all watching her, wondering how quickly she’d lose her shit this time, and how bad it would get before they took her down.
Babel denied it, of course, but Mollie was absolutely certain that this time some of the hazmat guys weren’t packing tranquilizer guns. They’d have rifles trained on her. Real rifles, the kind that could shoot through a church. Maybe right now a Spetsnaz sniper was centering crosshairs on her temple.
Maybe that’s why Mollie agreed to this. Maybe she wanted to go crazy one last time, just so that they’d put her down like a rabid dog.
Mollie stared at the photo of Michelle limping down the road until she could close her eyes and still see every detail of the barren fields, the dusty pavement, the abandoned truck with the tattered canopy. Imagined the smell of thin soil blowing on the arid wind, the flapping of the truck’s canopy, the whisper of a breeze through the scrub. She held that image in her head as she looked at the center of the ring of lights. A fist-sized hole appeared in midair.
In her imagination, the smell of arid soil became the smell of viscera; the whistling of the wind became the keening of a thousand voices raised in howling madness and the skittering of squamous abominations across a landscape of shattered bone—
Mollie swallowed a scream. It wrenched the bruises on her throat. The doorway disappeared.
She shook her head and ran her hands through her hair, trying to hide the fact that she was hyperventilating and pretending she didn’t care that everybody was staring at her.
“Just making sure that spot would work,” she said. “Looks good.” It might have been the most unconvincing lie she’d ever uttered. This time she concentrated on not thinking about Horrorshow, not thinking about a baby impaled on a wrought-iron fence, absolutely not thinking about the taste of Joey’s eyebrow.
The hole in space reopened; it looked down on a wet road lined with telephone poles. It was raining on the other side. Joey trotted toward the portal, zombies in tow.
—Coppery warmth flowing over her tongue as she lapped at Joey’s severed finger … the rubbery texture of human flesh between her teeth … eyebrow bristles raking her lips—
The doorway snapped shut again.
“Hey!” said Joey. “What gives?”
Mollie tried to lie but the pebble in her throat had become a boulder. She ran the back of her hand across her eyes. Somebody laid a hand on her shoulder, but she knocked it away.
“I’m fine,” she croaked, though obviously she was anything but. “Stop distracting me. It’s hard to do this from satellite photos.”
That was a lie, of course. She’d used satellite photos to get everybody to Baikonur.
It used to be a snap. It’s also how they first arrived at Baba Yaga’s casino when scouting for the theft: Google Earth had made it trivial to get on the roof—
Oh, shit.
Remembering that was a mistake. It reminded her of Ffodor, and what a horribly ungrateful bitch she’d been to him—before and after the Russian hag killed him—and then Mollie couldn’t see anything.
“I just need a minute,” she cried. And ran blindly from the warehouse.
Heat shimmered up from the road. Michelle was pretty sure wherever direction she was heading, she was going the wrong way to get back to any kind of civilization.
In the distance, she saw figures heading toward her. The closer she got, the more they looked like something from inside Talas. Corpses, she realized. Walking dead.
“Oh, God,” she moaned. She’d never gotten away from Batshit Crazy Town after all. This was just another fucking nightmare. She tried to bubble, but nothing happened. She was all out of fat.
So this was it. She wouldn’t see Adesina or Joey again. She was stuck. Trapped here
with whatever new monstrosity had come for her.
They came for her, and she kicked and bit and flailed. Her strength was giving out, and the dead things were on her now.
And then she heard Joey say, “Stop fighting, you dizzy bitch! Can’t you see I’m fucking saving you?”
Ten minutes later, after another wave of tears diluted the terror and guilt to the point where she could focus, Mollie managed to open a stable portal over a rainy road somewhere in Kazakhstan. After the toe tags shambled through, followed by Joey herself, Mollie decided it was better to keep herself distracted. So she sat in a far corner of the Cosmodrome warehouse—far enough from everybody else for the distance to say leave-me-the-fuck-alone—and called a farmhouse in Idaho.
The phone rang. And rang. And rang. Eventually, the answering machine picked up. Her folks never made the transition to voice mail like the rest of the 21st century, so they still had one of those machines with the little cassette tape in it. Embarrassing.
A tinny approximation of Mom’s voice came down the line. “Howdy. You’ve reached the Steunenberg farm. If you’re hearing this then we’re all working hard and can’t come to the phone.” Or laid up in the hospital with crowbar and pitchfork wounds, thought Mollie. “Please leave a message with your name, number, and the time you called—” (Mollie rolled her eyes. “For the millionth time, just get voice-mail service, for Christ’s sake.”) “—and we’ll call you back just as soon as we wash the good earth from beneath our fingernails.”
Beep.
“Uh, hi. Momma? It’s me. Mollie. Is anybody there? Can you pick up, please?” She waited exactly as long as it would take for somebody to cross the porch pantry, mud room, and dining room to reach the kitchen phone. Nobody did. She sighed. “I’m, um, I’m in New York right now. I was just calling to see how everybody is doing. Are Jim and Troy out of the ICU now? What about Daddy and Brent? What are the doctors saying? When can they all come home?” She hadn’t thought about why that seemed so important, but upon reflection it was obvious. “I just, uh, I think maybe we, well, you all, you should all be together. There’s, uh, there’s some stuff going on…” No point explaining how the psychotic rage that briefly engulfed them was soon to sweep over the entire planet like a tsunami of madness. They’d find out for themselves in a few days. But they could be an actual family for at least a little while. “And it’s just, you know, we should stick together. As a family.” Jesus Christ, she sounded lame. Fuck it. “I want to come home, too. I really really want a place I can call home again. I miss you all so much and I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Momma, and Daddy, and to all the boys, if you’re listening. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that I caused you all such suffer—”