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Chelsea stood there, motionless save for the white flag still twitching in her little hand. Guns flew out of the building’s broken windows and clattered on the sidewalk. Two came from the ground floor, just one from the second. Was that all Ogden had left? Three gunmen?

More silence.

“Where’s Col o nel Ogden?” Dew asked.

“He will come out now, with my mommy,” Chelsea said. “She’s hurt, she needs help.”

Perry heard Nails’s bellowing voice. “Squad One, move up!”

Soldiers of Whiskey Company stepped out from cover and moved forward, forming a wide half circle around Chelsea.

She turned and walked back through the door. Perry started to follow her inside, but Dew’s hand on his chest stopped him again. She slipped inside, out of sight. Only a few seconds of tense waiting later, a man walked out. Ogden. He reached back and pulled something through the door. Something big, like a two-legged hippo. Gray. Wearing . . . pants?

Wait.

The man wasn’t pulling that thing.

That thing . . . was walking.

Margaret watched an obscenity walk out of the building.

“What the f.u.c.k?” Clarence said. “What is that?”

It was a woman. A woman horribly bloated to insane proportions. Her arms were swollen to the point where the skin stretched out thin and semitransparent like a balloon, or like the casing of a sausage sizzling away on a grill. Her stomach distended like a cartoon-character. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s looked ma.s.sive, misshapen, like beach b.a.l.l.s. Her face was puffed up to the point that her eyes were nothing more than stretched, squinting slits. The woman couldn’t see—that’s why Ogden led her forward.

“Stay where you are!” Dew screamed. “Ogden, stop or we shoot!”

Guns rattled as soldiers took aim. Ogden stopped. So did the woman. With a smooth, confident motion, Ogden reached into his pocket, drew out a grenade and pulled the pin. He jammed the grenade into the woman’s bloated folds.

Dew fired. Ogden’s head jerked to the side, and he dropped, lifeless.

Next came two long seconds, a pregnant pause. Margaret and the soldiers stared at the obscenely bloated woman standing next to Colonel Charlie Ogden’s fallen body.

Someone started firing.

A dozen M4s suddenly erupted, bullets punching into the monstrosity that had once been the beautiful Candice Jewell. Each bullet kicked out a gray jet like the spray of a miniature fire extinguisher. She stumbled back a step, arms comically pinwheeling as she fought for balance.

And then the grenade went off.

A bang, no flash. A cloud of gray peppered with red, fleshy shrapnel.

The cloud expanded, billowing past Dew and the men who had surrounded Chelsea. It thinned as it spread, a translucent sphere growing more and more transparent. The soldiers turned to run, but the cloud engulfed them before they made it three steps. It blew past them, seemingly hungry for the next man in line, and the next.