Blood fountained across the T-shirts. It spewed from the severed shoulder like something in a Monty Python skit, except nobody was laughing. Instead, the other shoppers joined in the screaming. Several ran for the door.

Motherfuckers. Mollie stationed a new portal to intercept one of the stampeding shoppers, its twin inside another. An instant later viscera geysered across the display window as two bodies tried and failed to occupy the same space all at once. The wet explosion sounded like the world’s wettest fart. Teeth, vertebrae, and shattered ribs clattered against the walls, floor, and ceiling like so much hail. It was annoying as hell.

A tinny voice hollered, “Hello? Hello? Mollie, are you there?”

Mollie still held the phone to her ear. Irritated, she stepped from Half Moon Bay back to the Committee offices at the United Nations. Ink started, broke off in mid-sentence when Mollie emerged from empty space to stand next to her desk.

Mollie hung up. “I’m busy. What?”

Ink’s face twisted in a scowl. She covered her nose. “Oh, my God! What happened to you?”

“Nothing happened to me. I’m fine,” said Mollie. But then she caught a whiff of something nasty. She frowned. The residual shit smell of ruptured viscera had followed Mollie from California. And now the draft from the AC felt especially cold against her skin, as though she were damp. She looked down and realized she was drenched in blood. What the hell? A second ago she was swiping a handful of cash from—

Oh, Jesus. Oh, God, ohGodohGodohGodwhathaveIdone?

The phone fell from her nerveless fingers. It bounced under Ink’s desk.

“I … I … I need help. I’m not myself anymore. Even when I’m here, I’m not myself. The evil, it’s touched me too many times…” Mollie crumpled to the floor. Rolled into a fetal ball. “I think I just murdered three people. Oh, God, somebody help him.”

Ink practically vaulted her desk. She crouched beside Mollie, cradled her head. “Help who?”

Mollie tried to open a doorway to California. She couldn’t. “The rage, it took me again. I didn’t mean it,” she sobbed. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

Ink stood and slapped a button on her phone. “I need paramedics here, now! Administrator Baden’s office!”

“No, no, not here,” said Mollie. She tasted strangers’ blood, and worse, when the tears trickled into her mouth. “Help him instead. Please! You have to help him.”

“Who?”

“There’s a man with a severed arm bleeding out in a T-shirt shop in Half Moon Bay. He’s going to die. He needs help. His arm … I don’t know where I left it. And the others.” She tried to talk but somebody was wailing and sobbing with her voice and she could only speak in little gasps. “The others … oh, God, the others … I … I don’t know how I did that … Somebody help them!”