He heaved the wizened body out the back. It hit the slate-grey ground hard and exploded. At that moment a thousand mouths opened on the face of the moon and began to scream. The mountains walked, and out of the mist of blood rose something that defied words and understanding. A swirling blackness that began to rapidly swell until it was a towering twisted figure. Sparkling red glyphs ran through the body. An inchoate howl of rage like a gust of hurricane winds struck the truck. Bruckner fought for control as he downshifted and floored it.

The mouths of the moon became eyes and they wept filling the valley with a heaving sea of decay. The smell of burning rubber joined the other stomach-churning smells as the liquid ate at the tires. The canvas cover was starting to burn. When the acid reached him Franny would burn, too.

Franny flinched as liquid pattered through the holes in the canvas, but it was only water that struck his upturned face. Outside the pus slowly shifted into black water and the mountains transformed into trees trailing beards of moss.

Franny collapsed onto his back and stared at the canvas roof of the truck but all he could see was the shadowed face of the god. The god he had defied and thwarted. It would find him someday and a reckoning exacted. He began to shake.

New sounds broke through the fear that gripped him. Voices and car horns, the sounds of traffic. He managed to sit up. They were on a street circling a tall pillar with the figure of a man on top.

“Where … where?” It was all he could manage.

“Trafalgar Square. I don’t know about you, mate, but I could use a drink.”

Barbara could feel the moment of change, even through the screens and the headphones. The grim, stormy fog melted away, as if being sucked in by some gigantic vacuum. Many of the horrors that had been marching on the Cosmodrome vanished with it: creatures that had emerged from whatever place Horrorshow had tapped. And the rest, those that the fog had changed and twisted and deformed, whose minds had been taken and used … they were returned to what they’d once been. She saw them in the viewscreens: staggering, lost, confused, dropping the weapons they bore as if in disgust and horror, falling to their knees or raising their hands toward the sky as if in thanks.

Barbara sank back in her chair with them. “It’s over,” Ana’s voice whispered in her earphones, and she wanted to answer: No. Now the hard part starts …

But she said nothing. She closed her eyes. The hard part. Waiting to know if I will ever see Klaus again …