"Look,” he said, “they’re making the bus float!”

“Shit,” Jules hissed.

Her brother was right.

Looking carefully, Pel could see the bus was now levitating a couple inches above the street, and Pel’s eyes widened like Rayph’s had when those couple of inches suddenly grew to a couple feet.

“It’s the Lassedite,” Rayph said. “He’s doing it.”

Pel had to keep her arms from trembling.

The Norms easily pushed the massive hunk of metal out of the way while it was being suspended by Verune’s magic. When Verune released his power’s grip—lowering his hand—the bus fell to the sidewalk, crushing a bench, two parked cars, and a rotting tree beneath its weight.

Pel flinched as black ooze burst out from one of the cars.

“Shit!” Jules gasped. “There were people in there!”

The Norms suddenly shouted, though their distorted voices made it hard to understand what they were saying.

Jules yelled “What’s h—”

“—Mom!” Rayph shouted. “Look out!”

Pel’s blood ran cold.

Feral figures were running out of the bus’s doors, at the middle and at either end. Others wriggled out through open windows, like maggots. They screamed and snarled, twitching as they moved.

Verune spoke up in a loud, clear voice. “Simon! Steyphan!”

The two Norms flicked their arms at the oncoming zombies, as if they’d tossed frisbees. An invisible wall of force pushed the horde away, sweeping their frenzied bodies across the boulevard. The zombies shrieked. A second wall joined the second, closing in on the zombies from the other side. The two walls moved closer and closer together, gathering the zombies in a rising pile of gnashing teeth and flailing limbs. The closer the walls got, the higher the pile rose higher.

“Wait a moment,” Verune said, raising his clawed hand.

The walls froze in place, leaving the zombies piled in the middle of the street like a block of mimes.

Steyphan and Simon turned to face the Lassedite, who turned to address the entire convoy.

“Mark this moment, my children,” he said. “Behold the Divine Beast’s gifts! We alone have the power to prevail over this evil.”

“Holy shit,” Jules said.

“They weren’t kidding,” Rayph added.

As much as Pel wanted to deny it, she couldn’t. However horrifying the Norms were, what she’d just seen was a bonafide miracle. The zombies didn’t stand a chance against them.

“Maybe they really can keep us safe,” she said, wondering aloud, while Jules looked on with worry.

“Your Holiness?” Simon asked. The mustard-yellow norm expectantly cocked his head toward the Lassedite.

Looking over his shoulder, Verune nodded. “Proceed.”

The zombies splattered into dark slurry as the gap between invisible walls closed. For an instant, a vertical plane of ooze stood over the street, held in place by the forcefields. Then the two Norms dismissed their power, and the corpses rained down onto the street and the nearby Norms in a thick, gloppy paste, advancing the transformations of those it touched. Some of the newcomers rushed to feed on the purée, but Verune told them to contain themselves.

“Leave it here, for other Changelings,” he said. “They need the sustenance. Let it stand as a display of our power.”

And then, the convoy continued. Trails of puréed zombie gunked up wheels as the first wave of the vans crossed the gruesome morass.

As Pel drove the Pirouette across the ooze, Rayph pointed out one last detail.

Something was happening to the street itself.

It was steaming.

The piles of ooze were eating away at it.

Moments later, car horns starting honking up ahead.

— — —

All through the drive, Pel had wanted nothing more than to peel away from it, but now, it seemed that being in the middle of the group had saved their skins. The wave of vehicles that had driven over the ooze had lost their tires, and then some. The black gunk reacted with the air, congealing and drying into the caustic green spores that corroded their way through everything they touched. Pel had lucked out: the Norms cleared the stuff off the street, sweeping it to either side with their powers.

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Unfortunately, the corroded vehicles were simply unsalvageable. The demons and demon-worshippers inside them had had to rush out to avoid the glop when the vehicles dropped, wheelless, to the ground. The acid didn’t hesitate to eat through the underside of the vans’ chassis. By the time it stopped, the vans were so degraded that they looked like they were half-trapped in the road.

The cult quickly distributed the disabled vehicles’ passengers among the other transports, though some of them simply chose to walk alongside the Norms. All in all, it took about ten nerve-wracking minutes before the convoy was finally ready to proceed.

“This is going to complicate things,” Pel said.

“What is?” Jules asked.

Pel shook her head. “I was hoping we’d be able to run over the zombies. But it looks like that won’t be an option, not if their fluids will melt through the car.”

“Why would we need to run them over?” Rayph asked.

“Because we’d be driving on our own. We’d have to if we were trying to find someplace safe on our own.”

“Shit,” Jules cursed.

Pel didn’t bother chastising her for the language.

As the they neared the point where the street intersected the Imperial Promenade, however a fence came into view. Spanning the street from end to end, the fence was made from a dark, slender metal—barely more than a wireframe construction. It had a gate in the middle, as well as crude watchtower structures on the sides, on which there stood several soldiers, armed to the teeth. Another, identical barrier stood a short distance beyond the first, turning the area in between into a makeshift checkpoint. Several military vehicles sat inside, creating a blockade with their presence, and backing it up with the barrels of guns.

There was a crowd of civilians beyond the checkpoint, all of them deathly ill. Yet they were dead-set on breaking through. They swelled against their confinement.

“You can’t keep us here!”

“Let freedom ring!”

“Atheist scum!”

It was a sea of death and rage, and it was boiling. Despondent faces and reaching limbs were scattered among it—people begging for help, or even just the chance to flee. But they ebbed in and out of the wrathful tide. One moment, a tear-stricken face pressed up against the fence; the next, a bristled, greasy mustache, over the dark depths of a mouth wide and bellowing, spouting fear and hate.

Both groups—the protestors, and the military—were so focused on one another that it took several seconds before any of them noticed Verune and his convoy. The instant they did, nearly all of them feel silent, and those that hadn’t now sang a very different tune.

“Holy shit!”

“Monsters! Monsters!”

Pel turned to the kids. “Get down!” she hissed. “Now!”

She had just bent down when the soldiers opened fire on the convoy. Pel braced herself, expecting blasting bullets and shattered glass and screams and blood, but they never came.

“Mom…”

It was Jules who had broken the silence, with her shaking voice.

Pel raised her head to see her daughter daring to peek over the dashboard. She and Rayph joined Jules a moment later.

“Whoa…” Rayph muttered.

Hundreds of metal particles floated over the street in a loosely knit sheet that glinted in the sunlight.

“Those are the bullets…” Pel whispered.

The bullets quivered in place, as if they were about to explode with motion.

Though most of the soldiers had stopped firing, a couple continued to shoot before they. Their bullets shared the same fate as their predecessors: stuck, in the Verune’s barrier, as if the air was molasses.

And all Verune had done was simply raise his hand.

Some of the protestors turned tail and ran.

“Fuck…” Jules muttered.

Pel turned to her daughter, to see her gaze lifted skyward. Looking up, she saw it: an aerostat rising off the roof of one the nearby buildings. It was military-grade, with artillery visible on its underbelly.

It approached the convoy from behind.

Verune raised his other hand. Instantly, the aerostat trembled in place. Its engines groaned, struggling to break free. With a shudder, the aircraft drifted toward the wall of bullets, shaking more and more intensely as its pilot fought against Verune’s invisible grip.

Then Verune turned one of his hands around and let his arms fall to his sides. His hold on the aerostat and the bullets immediately vanished. The bullets rocketed backward, toward their astonished shooters; the aerostat hurtled forward and downward, its pent-up speed let loose all at once.

The bullets hit the soldiers and the fencing and the fleeing, screaming crowd beyond it. The fencing tore like lace as the aerostat plowed through it. The aircraft smacked into the street and the sidewalk, and then slammed into cars parked by an abandoned storefront. Steel and chrome clashed and screeched; glass shattered, people screamed. Car horns brayed. Alarms cried.

The aerostat exploded a second later, blasting through the shop open and sending the nearby cars rolling onto their sides. The leaping flames spread to everything that would burn. Unearthly shrieks filled the air as the fungal growths within the building and along its caught fire and burst, spreading the inferno at impossible speed.

Then came the torrent.

Zombies rushed out of the burning building. They stumbled out from the entrance on the ground floor and leapt from windows or balconies. They streamed over and in between the vehicles, their deformed bodies twitching like mad, snarling and terrible.

What soldiers survived turned their semi-automatic rifles at the horde. More windows shattered as waves of zombies fell, but the turn of the tide was short-lived. As the zombies dispersed across the street, the fungus took control of the soldiers and of the fleeing civilians. Their bodies stumbled and twitched as they lost control of themselves and joined the army of darkness—and unlike Trenton’s soldiers, this army had no fear of death. It attacked soldiers and civilians indiscriminately.

But Verune was not deterred. “We strike as one!” he yelled.

And his Norms responded. With sweeps of their arms, they swung invisible mallets the remains of the blockade of vehicles. The blasts sent the vehicles tumbling down the boulevard, destroying everything in their path: the watchtowers and the rest of the fencing, the infected trees, and abandoned vehicles. Metal chassis groaned and shrieked as the cars bounced off buildings and into other vehicles. One troop transport smashed into a ground floor café. A bus hurtled down the street as if it was a stick that had been thrown. Bodies launched skyward, as if by a great wind. They landed far, far in the distance, splattering on the floor or the sides of buildings, breaking through the branches of the corrupted coral trees.

The way ahead was clear.

“Onward!” Verune called.

To Pel, it might as well have been an act of God. A miracle. Her grip on the steering wheel was stiff enough to crush her fingers to dust.

As the convoy resumed its path, a young Norm stepped out from one of the alleyways. Save for his clawed fingers and tail, he still looked mostly human.

He fell to his knees. “Holy shit…”

The other Norms moved to engage him, but Verune stepped forward and reached out to him.

“The Last Church welcomes you, brother,” he said. “We march for the melted palace. I would be honored if you joined us.”