“Tom?” Carol asked. “Tom, yes. I won’t mince words. If you take five more minutes, good people will be dead at the end of this. If you take fifteen, a lot of people and a lot of property will suffer for the delay. We’ll fight defensively, protect what we can, and limit the damage, but we can’t and won’t take decisive action until we get the go-ahead.”

Bubbles rose to the surface of the gray ‘oatmeal’. They popped as they swelled to a certain size, and left either toothy cavities or eyes where they’d been.

“Because if we take action and someone gets hurt, your boss or someone close to him will start accusing us of violating promises and being barbaric. We’ll answer with video evidence—Erring Right has cameras, we’re recording every step of this. Full accountability, and that goes both ways, Tom.”

Crystal’s mom, floating a bit above her, looked down, at the same time Crystal looked up.

The man’s stomach tore open, the gray stuff spilling out, foaming, and gushing from the intestines and organs that had torn apart. Blood and the red edges of torn flesh and internals mingled with the gray oatmeal.

Teeth began to protrude from the edges of the wound, the portion of the midsection that was nearly torn in half becoming a mouth. Intestines joined with the gray oatmeal to form a tongue, with flesh like an elephant’s skin.

It felt wrong, standing back and letting this happen.

“Someone just died, one of the aggressors,” Carol spoke into the phone, her tone dispassionate. “More are about to.”

It felt wrong, but the people had ‘died’ the instant they’d been afflicted. There was no cure.

“I’m not trying to force your hand in a moment of crisis,” Carol said. “We reached out weeks ago about whether you would be open to intervention. There are records of this. There are records of this present moment, both on camera and recorded sound…”

Crystal dove as the man lurched, stubby, overthick legs stomping, one arm serving as a third leg to give him balance, his mouth yawning open and the tongue extending. Her mother was right above her.

“Don’t attack!” one of the other Erring Right members called out.

Crystal rolled her eye a little, and reached out to press a forcefield into existence. She likened it to drawing a line in the air with her finger, but the line was real and three-dimensional, and her ‘finger’ wasn’t. It got a little more wobbly in terms of raw durability as it got further from her, but she didn’t need much. A sheet of translucent red to bar his way.

He crashed into and through it, but his momentum was broken.

Her mother swooped down and projected something denser. Less translucent, and dark at the edges.

That darkness hadn’t been there before. Before her mother died.