Teddy had more or less given up on seeing Elaine or the Administrator again from the moment the portal closed. He spread the news to the guards, who made some effort to pass it along to those outside, that the whole thing was probably over--and he didn't have anything new to sell. It wasn't exactly a kick in the teeth; he hadn't lost anything, he just had to go back out there. And the idea that he had not dirtied his hands was good. He felt a little bit good that Elaine had walked away from the violence that he did to her, unharmed and apparently uncaring.

He knew, though, that his nightmares would be different for weeks if not months. It had been a long time since he stopped dreaming of their hands suddenly moving to grab his, of dead eyes and mouths moving to consume him, of thousands of hands pouring out of their chest to rip him to pieces...

As if summoned by his nightmares, he heard a guard shooting. It wasn't long before there were screams from the crowd, and yells that everyone understood, didn't need to have explained.

"Anomalies inbound!" The guard in the tower shouted at the top of his lungs, mostly at the crowd outside. "Get out of here! Move, move, move!"

Anomalies. What a nice word. Teddy pulled guns off the wall and handed them to every employee that came for one. Just an anomaly. Just a thing that eats flesh and poops out glass, or gold, or flaming tar. Just a thing that turns people into people-shaped mockeries. Just a thing that erases the past and replaces it with garbage.

A thing that ends life. Just an anomaly.

Teddy was the last of his employees to the wall, and the last to drop his gun in shock, because there wasn't only one or two of the static monsters on the horizon; there were a horde. If each of the men on the wall could, for the first time in history, kill each anomaly with one shot from the Administrator-provided weapons, they might have a chance.

"Fuck this shit," said the man next to Teddy, and he was not the first to abandon the wall, but he was certainly the closest.

Teddy hauled the gun up onto his shoulder, balancing the heavy thing as he scampered back down the wall and to the Administrator terminal. Behind him, his employees shouted curses at him, promising him wanton cruelty if he ran, but he paid no heed. Elaine had done this--the Administrators had done this. It wasn't his fault. Everything odd that happened here was their fault.

They could fix it. They had to fix it. Nobody else could.

The terminal didn't have an "emergency" button, and Teddy didn't exactly know whether they were listening from the moment he hit the button, or whether they only came on when the camera turned on, but he was yelling at the thing from the moment the screen changed to a "Please Wait" message. "Damn you and your waiting! Damn you if you don't get here on time! There are dozens of the damn things coming, and we can't stop them alone. We need help! We need better weapons, more hands... anything! This has to be your fault! Help us! Get us out of here!"

The screen remained at "Please Wait" with no sign that anything had changed.

Teddy hesitated. He wanted to run back to the wall, but he had to make sure the message got out. He didn't want to sit and wait while someone died, but they needed backup. He hefted the gun, but he hesitated. If they couldn't hear him, and he left... when they finally turned on the camera they would see nothing. Would they think it was a glitch? Would they ignore it and let everyone die?

Suddenly, the screen changed. Instead of a camera turning on, the words "Please Wait" were simply replaced with "Message Received".

That had to be good enough.

Teddy bolted back to the wall, entirely unsure of his place in this conflict, but his men were already opening fire, and these weapons didn't have a lot of range. He was back on the wall in a flash... only to find that his estimate of "dozens" was looking moment by moment to be an understatement. Either that, or they were merging somehow, because there was a whole field of static that was tearing the world to pieces, and it was difficult to pin down where, if anywhere, the damn thing was going to be weak to weapons fire.

So he did what the rest of his employees did--picked something within range and tried to empty the battery of the self-charging weapon into it. Each energy blast from the weapon opened a hole in the static, but too many of the holes were small--too small, for a massive horde of static like this. Were they really merging? Could anomalies merge? Teddy had always thought they were living, but...

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Two very odd sounds came from behind him, and Teddy turned. The first was as he expected--two suited Administrators with much fancier weapons than they had ever handed out to him piled out of a hole in reality, followed by a third with a back-mounted unit, probably a charger or sensor of some kind. The weapons were a welcome sight; unlike the weapons his boys were using, which easily earned the title "hand cannon" and were kind of hard to aim, these things looked like proper old-school heavy automatic rifles, the kind that were still a little difficult to aim when you had two hands on them and a bipod to steady the front. That was the kind of weapon that would save their asses.

The other noise was, he would later find out, a small sonic boom. All he knew was that as he was turning, a figure was falling from the sky, rapidly transitioning from god-only-knows-how-fast to stopped-on-a-dime right next to the portal. Her skin, underneath the wispy gray clothes, glowed with a pattern of blue light, a pattern Teddy was becoming all too familiar with. In one hand, she carried a cannon three times as long as she was tall and as thick as her shoulders were broad; exactly when it appeared was hard to know, but it was certainly only in the last few seconds. Teddy thought there might have been a pistol grip somewhere around the middle.

"Nice gun," she commented dryly. "Is that some kind of heavy laser? I was always more a fan of plasma myself."

"You need--"

"I'll figure it out." She snagged one of the guns, one-handed, out of the Administrator's hands, and tossed it up into the air, where she... another Elaine caught it. Two more Elaines suddenly appeared on the ramparts, dressed in much more military-looking uniforms, with big tubes on their shoulders that were clearly launchers for something large. When she spoke, four voices in four different places all shouted at very high volume. "Get down!"

Everyone got down.

The sounds that came from the shoulder-mounted weapons suggested a measured release of propellant, or something similar, but there was no sound of detonation. That told Teddy that she was using some kind of conventional weapon--that the ordinance she fired was converted into different forms of matter before it detonated. He had seen the footage of similar attempts; it hadn't been done in an age, but someone always thought they were smarter than the rest of the world put together.

"Hm," said the nearest Elaine, and then the two on the wall vanished. Teddy looked around for her, but the nearest Elaine now was balancing that fifteen-plus-foot machine over her shoulder as she hovered in midair over the ramparts. As she pushed buttons or flipped switches or something, various sections of that long tube started to rotate, each the opposite direction from the adjacent ones. Whole sections of the tube suddenly detached and started to float outward in jigsaw-like pieces that maintained orientation but were now too distant from one another to stay in contact, leaving gaps where there was no obvious structure holding the thing together.

"I'm only going to say this once," the insane cannon-wielding archon said, again at full volume, and Teddy could hear other copies further away saying the same. "The light that this thing emits will make anyone who sees it go blind. Don't just close your eyes, turn around or get behind cover. Do not look. Firing in 5... 4... 3... 2..." The hum intensified, becoming more and more threatening, as if to underscore her warning.

Teddy turned around and got behind cover, and covered his head with both hands. As close as he was to the weapon when it fired, he felt his skin burn, the kind of burn he rarely felt even after a week without protection from the sun as he wandered through the broken lands. It felt like nothing he had ever been exposed to.

The burst only lasted a few seconds, but Teddy felt each of those seconds pass individually. He kept expecting everything to be over. He thought it would last a quarter second, then a half second, then one second, then one and a half, maybe, then two, then three. Every time his mind realized it was still going, it anticipated an end, but time and time again, it didn't. It was right about the time that his mind rebelled against the idea that it would ever stop, rebelled against the idea that he was still sane... somewhere around six seconds later, that the burst stopped.

"Well, that worked," said a voice that must have been Elaine's, but Teddy wasn't so sure for a long moment. "Made a mess of the landscape, though. Guess I'll try the gun for the few left around the edges." There was a pause. "You guys can look, now. But, uh, don't stare. It's still pretty bright."

Teddy remained pressed down on the floor for a moment, not because he wanted to be, but because he couldn't muster the strength to lift himself up. When he did, he found that outside his compound, on the side that faced the wastes, was what might optimistically be termed a "sea of fire": an impossibly wide area in which everything that had ever been recognizable was gone, and things that should never have caught on fire--dirt, sand, asphault, concrete, boulders, everything--was part of the same flaming mess. Everything was on fire, so uniformly that it was impossible to tell where one thing ended and the next began.

Except for one thing, one person, if you dared call her that. A ways away, calmly, Elaine Many was hovering near the edges of the fire, shooting at static monsters that had escaped her canned apocalypse. "Oh," Teddy thought he heard her say over the roar of the fire, "this is much more efficient. It wouldn't have put a dent in the horde, I think, but for hunting these things one by one, it's pretty good."

One of Teddy's employees came up to ask a question--most likely something along the lines of "What the hell are we going to do, boss?"--but could only manage to catch Teddy as he fainted, keeping him from tumbling off the edges of the ramparts back into the compound.

Teddy's nightmares were changing again, and this one would stick with him for the rest of his life.