It was like being hit in the gut. She’d done the unspeakable. And not just what had happened to Aero. She’d killed wantonly. And she wasn’t even sure how many people she’d killed—or if they had even been people anymore. There were some she could remember, but she suspected—no, she knew—that there had been more. Given her power, there had to be so many more.

And Mummy. She’d killed Aero thinking he was Mummy. There had been multiple versions of Mummy, and she’d killed all of them. Or was it part of her madness that she’d imagined doing that?

It seemed as if space and time were being warped. Her memory was slippery and confused. How else to explain the primordial things she’d seen crawling through the city streets? The way normal people were being changed into other vile things? How else could she explain the self-mutilations and suicides, and the glee with which so much of the carnage had taken place?

And she had been part of it all. She’d killed Aero. She’d killed those women in the forest. Killed the man in the catacombs. (Oh, he deserved to die, part of her whispered. They all did.)

She shook her head. She wasn’t out of the fog yet. Remnants of it lingered.

And whatever was causing the fog and the madness, she wasn’t sure the Committee could fight it. She wasn’t sure anything on earth could.

The hours dragged on. Mollie fed Joey orange juice through a straw to keep the semi-comatose woman hydrated while her zombies roamed an alien nightmarescape searching for survivors of the Committee A-team.

Mollie hated that she had to hold a portal to Talas open for so long. Even a minuscule one, even periodically closing it until the seepage of supernatural evil abated. She managed not to piss herself. It felt like an accomplishment.

But worse than the fallow time while Joey’s toe tags stumbled across nothing interesting were the times when she perked up and announced, “I think I have something.”

Because then Mollie had to open a larger portal to Talas, so that they could take a quick peek inside and investigate with eyes that weren’t, well, putrifying. Sometimes she had to make the portal large enough so that hazmat guys could use the magnifying scopes on their rifles to scan the view through the hole in space. After the first time a crab-like thing hopped through the portal, scuttling into Baikonur on legs covered in eyeballs covered in mouths, the SCARE agents and their Russian counterparts made a point of keeping their weapons trained on each portal.

They were good shots. But the tranquilizer darts weren’t terribly effective against the abomination; it didn’t stop moving until they put several high-caliber rounds into it.