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 …