A crack of gunfire sounds. Mo looks round sharply as Howe grabs her shoulder. "Down!" he snaps, and she ducks as he raises his MP5 and squints through its night sights. The gunfire is coming from a chapel, half-concealed by trees and the silent army of walking corpses. There are more shots, followed by shouts and a scream, cut off short. "Shooters on the building roofline," Howe reports: "Four, no, five bodies. Defenses at ground level, barricades, I can't see anyone manning them. The crowd's thickest there. Defenders have—no, wait."

Cold flesh, bodies that do not show on infrared, have formed an abhuman pyramid to one side of the chapel. The survivors on the roof are shooting, but not at the OCCULUS truck: they have problems that are closer to hand. As one corpse disintegrates another takes its place, and the defenders have fewer banishment rounds than Brookwood has open graves. "Doc, can you do anything about them?" Howe asks. "Because I don't think we're going to get in there without—"

Mo raises her bow, strikes a shivering note from the burning strings. Howe winces and moves aside. "Give me some elbow room," she says flatly. Then she touches the strings lightly, coaxing an eerie, familiar leitmotif from her instrument. "Put this out through the PA circuit," she mutters, grimly determined.

Down below, Barnes grimaces tensely and twists input dials on the truck's external public address systems. The growing wild resonance of die Walkurenritt floods from the big speakers mounted to either side of the cab; the driver looks sidelong at his CO, then floors the accelerator in low gear, adding the roar of the big diesel (and the crunch of unburied bones) to the music. Barnes announces to the back of the truck: "All right, gentlemen, this is going to be an opposed entry and they know we're coming. Wards, up! Arms, up! Party time in sixty seconds!"

The risen dead are fleeing, for the most part, out of the way of the truck as it roars and bucks across the path. It's the music that does it; Mo stands atop the roof, utterly engrossed in tracking the melody. Richard Wagner, it was said, hated violinists: blood drips from her fingertips as the eerie extradimensional resonances of her interpretation of one of his most famous works drags the sound of an entire string section—and a brassy resonance echoing from the metal flanks of the truck—into being.

The truck crunches across skeletal remnants that lie in rows around the chapel, silent and unmoving. A few bodies, less damaged than the rest, lie near a minivan; others are clustered near the door to the building, which is ajar. A few less emaciated figures lie among the skeletonized forms: of these, most bear the signs of gunshot wounds.