The silence outside the Badger was replaced by a low, collective moan that seemed to come from every direction at once. The Husks, as the System instantly designated them, began to move. They shuffled forward, their movements jerky and uncoordinated, a tide of grey, withered bodies animated by the Night-Stalker's distant will. They weren't fast, but they were relentless.
"What are they doing?" Rick asked, his voice a panicked whisper. "They're not even trying to get in."
"They don't have to," Thorne said, his initial glee replaced by a grim fascination as he stared at his monitors. "They're resonating. The Mnemonic Zone's fear-aerosol... they're acting as amplifiers. The psychic pressure outside is skyrocketing!"
Leo could feel it. The oppressive, soul-deep dread he had felt in the library stairwell was returning, magnified a hundredfold. It pressed in on the Badger's hull, a tangible force that made the armored plates groan. The Husks weren't attacking the vehicle; they were attacking the minds of everyone inside it.
Ben Carter slumped in his seat, his face pale with sweat. "I... I can't breathe... the walls are..."
"Stay with us, Ben!" Maria barked, shaking him, but her own hands were trembling.
Even Grunt was affected. The Berserker had his eyes squeezed shut, his massive hands clamped over his ears as if to block out a sound no one could hear. "Get them out of my head..." he growled, a bead of sweat tracing a path through the grime on his face.
This was the Night-Stalker's true power. Not direct combat, but an overwhelming wave of psychic contamination designed to paralyze and incapacitate.
Only two people seemed unaffected.
Leo felt the fear, the crushing despair, but his mind, already scoured and hardened, treated it like an invasive substance. It was a mess to be dealt with, a contamination to be weathered.
And then there was Lily.
The little girl, still standing by the sensor array, was completely serene. Her "null field," visible on Thorne's monitor as a clean, steady wave, was pushing back against the psychic static. A small bubble of perfect, quiet sanity existed around her. But it was only a small bubble. The tide of fear was too great.
Sarah, though her face was pale, was also holding on, her medical training and fierce protective instinct for Lily creating a mental firewall. "Leo, we have to go!" she yelled, pulling Lily away from the console. "We have to get out of the resonance field!"
"We can't!" Maria shot back from the driver's seat, her knuckles white on the controls. "They're surrounding us! If I try to drive through them, they'll..."
She didn't need to finish. The Husks were beginning to claw at the Badger now, their dry, papery fingers scraping against the hull. One of them pressed its face against the viewport, its empty, glowing purple sockets staring directly at Maria. She flinched back with a curse.
They were trapped. Not by a physical barrier, but by a rising sea of pure terror.
"There's too many of them!" Grunt roared, finally snapping out of his stupor. He grabbed his sledgehammer. "I'm going out there! I'll smash them to dust!"
"No, you won't!" Leo shouted, his voice cutting through the panic with sharp authority. "You'll just get swarmed, and what happens when it gets you? What does a Berserker look like when it's puppeteered by a fear-god? Don't be their weapon!"
The thought seemed to physically stun Grunt. He froze, the image of his own immense strength turned against his allies a more terrifying prospect than any monster.
Leo's mind was racing. He couldn't leave the vehicle. The psychic assault was too strong. He couldn't [Scrub Clean] the entire street. But the Husks were amplifiers, a distributed network for the Mnemonic Zone. They were all connected. A connected system could be disrupted.
He remembered the Fungal Shaman and how severing its connection to the Archon had crippled it.
"Thorne!" Leo barked. "Your sensors! The psychic field—does it have a carrier frequency? A single point of control?"
Thorne, his face beaded with sweat but his academic curiosity winning out over his fear, furiously typed at his console. "Yes! It's remarkable! They all resonate at the exact same frequency, all tethered back to the primary source in the library. A perfect hive mind! The control is absolute!"
"Good," Leo said. He looked at Ben, who was now curled in his seat, muttering to himself. He needed his technician. "Ben! I need you!"
"Can't... everything's... folding..." Ben whimpered.
Leo moved to him and grabbed the front of his jumpsuit, hauling him upright. "Ben, listen to me," he said, his voice low and intense. He focused his will, pushing a sliver of his own orderly, clean sanity into the engineer. "[Scrub Clean]." A tiny pulse of blue energy, visible only to Leo, washed over Ben's face. The effect wasn't total, but the fog in Ben's eyes cleared slightly.
"Leo?" Ben blinked.
"I need the Badger's comms system," Leo said quickly. "The external broadcast speakers. Can you reroute them, amplify a signal from an external source, and broadcast it?"
"I... I think so," Ben said, his technician's mind latching onto the problem, the familiar logic a life raft in the sea of fear. "What signal do you want to broadcast?"
Leo looked over at Dr. Thorne's humming, sparking sensor array, at the clear, perfect sine wave on the monitor—the frequency of Lily's null field.
"That one," Leo said. "I want you to broadcast that."
A slow, mad grin spread across Thorne's face as he understood. "Oh. Oh, you beautiful, magnificent madman. You want to fight a psychic broadcast with a counter-broadcast! You want to use the child's 'silence' as a weapon!"
"Ben, can you do it?" Leo pressed.
"Yes," Ben said, his fear replaced by a feverish excitement. "I can bypass the safeties, create a feedback loop through the main amplifier... It'll probably fry the entire comms system, but I can do it! It'll take me a minute!"
"You have thirty seconds," Leo said, turning to face the rest of the rattled group.
Grunt was staring at Leo with a new, wild expression—not contempt, but grudging awe. Maria was grinning, her bravado restored. Sarah held Lily close, her eyes filled with a terrifying hope.
Leo faced the viewport, at the sea of glowing purple eyes and the rising tide of fear. He had found a new way to clean a mess. He was about to fight a ghost story with a radio broadcast. And the ammunition was a seven-year-old girl's quiet soul.