"Back us up to the door," Barnes tells the driver. Switching to the common channel: "All right, we're going in. Standard entry protocol for mass possession. Scary and Howe, over to you. Dr. O'Brien, time to get down off the roof. You can follow with me once we've cleared the way. See if we can figure out what we're looking at."

The soldiers pile out of the back of the truck, wearing bright yellow HAZMAT suits, MP5s at the ready. The bodies are packed in so tightly around the steps to the chapel that they dash across rib cages and cloak-swathed torsos on the way to the open door.

There's a snap of gunfire from up top: two of the soldiers drop to their knees and reply with a burst of aimed fire. A black-clad figure tumbles from the roofline. One of the soldiers throws something up and over the eaves; the others take cover as the fragmentation grenade explodes.

"What's up there?" Mo tries to ask, shouting in Barnes's ear.

"Bad guys." Barnes grins hungrily. "Ah." He taps the earpiece screwed into his left ear: "Follow me." The gunfire from the defenders on the roof has stopped as he steps out of the back of the truck and walks towards the chapel entrance. Mo follows him, her violin raised. They're halfway across the ten-meter gap when a silhouette lurches clear of the side of the building and throws itself towards the major. Barnes raises his HK-5 and plants a neat three-round group in the middle of the assailant's torso; by the time Mo's bow makes contact with an eerily blue-glowing string, the fluorescence in the back of the revenant's eye sockets has begun to fade. "Bloody fans, always waiting outside the dressing room ..." Barnes cocks his head on one side, listening. "Dr. O'Brien? This way, now."

They're inside in seconds, and one of the soldiers pulls the tall oak door shut behind them. The chapel hall is full of bodies, the long-dead and the fresh draped across one another in promiscuous embrace. Some of the recent bodies are naked: in the soldier's infrared vision they still glow with body heat.

"Look sharp, some of them made it to the door," Howe comments over the open channel. A couple of bodies still clutch bulky assault shotguns with drum magazines: one, wearing a distinctly more professional camouflage rig than the rest, is holding a Russian AKS-74 rifle. None of them, however, are moving. The feeders have eaten their fill and moved on.

"Trapdoor over here, sir!" One of the troops waves, pointing at a raised door.

"Secure it," says Howe. "Tidily, our boy might still be down there." He doesn't say what everyone fears: the next living soul they find in this city of the dead will be the first.