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.