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. Hover
ing 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 s
tars 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.”