"It's routed!" Ben shouted, his fingers flying across a hastily exposed panel beneath the driver's seat. He had ripped the cover off, exposing a chaotic nest of wires. "I've bypassed the standard broadcast protocols and slaved the external speakers to Dr. Thorne's sensor array. Power is... unstable. When I hit this switch, the main amplifier is going to redline in about ten seconds and then slag itself. We get one shot."
"One shot is all we need," Leo said, his voice a low, steady anchor in the cacophony. The psychic pressure on the Badger's hull was immense now, a physical weight that made the armored plates creak and groan. The chorus of low moans from the Husks outside had become a single, vibrating drone that rattled their teeth. Maria gripped the steering controls, her body tensed, ready for the moment the path cleared. Grunt stood behind her, his sledgehammer held in a two-handed grip, no longer a weapon of attack, but a tool to brace himself against the mental storm.
Leo knelt in front of Lily. The little girl, blessedly, seemed oblivious, humming softly to herself as she colored, her small bubble of psychic tranquility the only truly sane place in the world. Sarah held a hand on her daughter's shoulder, her face a pale, determined mask.
"Dr. Thorne, is the signal isolated?" Leo asked.
"As much as it can be," Thorne replied, his eyes glued to his monitors. His fear was completely gone, replaced by the sheer, ecstatic thrill of discovery. "I've filtered the null-field frequency from Specimen 734—ah, from Lily—and am feeding a stabilized, replicated version of it to Ben's rig. It's a pure waveform of... of conceptual order. An equation that proves chaos is a logical fallacy. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."
"Ben, on my mark," Leo commanded. He looked around the cramped, red-lit interior of the Badger, meeting the eyes of each of his companions. "Brace yourselves. When the wave hits, it's going to clear the way. Maria, the second you see a path, you drive. Don't slow down, don't stop, just go. Get us out of the kill zone."
Maria just nodded, her knuckles white.
Leo took one final look out the viewport. The sea of Husks was dense, a writhing, pressing mob of puppets clawing mindlessly at the hull. They were the source of the noise, the living speakers broadcasting the Night-Stalker's dread.
"Now, Ben," Leo said. "Hit it."
Ben slammed a large, repurposed circuit breaker. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then, a high-pitched whine began to emanate from the Badger's external speakers. It climbed in frequency, moving rapidly beyond the range of human hearing. There was no sound. There was only... pressure.
A wave of absolute, profound silence erupted from the Badger.
It was not the absence of noise. It was an active, aggressive, conceptual quiet, a broadcast of pure null that slammed into the Night-Stalker's psychic frequency.
The effect on the Husks was instantaneous and catastrophic.
The glowing purple light in their eye sockets didn't just flicker; it shattered like broken glass. The psychic tether that connected them to their master, the constant stream of fear and direction, was hit by the ultimate denial-of-service attack. The chaotic frequency of terror was cancelled out by the perfect, orderly waveform of Lily's tranquility.
Their collective moan cut off abruptly. They stopped clawing at the hull. Their bodies, no longer supported by a supernatural will, went completely limp. One by one, then a dozen at a time, then by the score, the Husks simply collapsed where they stood, falling into boneless, lifeless piles. They didn't die; they were simply switched off. Their strings had been cut, all at once.
Within five seconds, the street that had been a writhing sea of puppets was now just a street, littered with the still, grey forms of empty human shells.
"It's working!" Rick breathed, staring out the window in disbelief.
"Amplifier is at one hundred and fifty percent capacity!" Ben yelled over the whine of his overloaded rig. "She's gonna blow!"
"Maria, GO!" Leo roared.
The word was barely out of his mouth before Maria slammed her foot on the accelerator. The Badger's heavy-duty engine roared to life. With a lurch that threw them all back, the armored vehicle plowed forward, its massive wheels crushing the silent, limp forms of the fallen Husks without ceremony. They weren't people anymore. They were just obstacles.
As they charged down the street, away from the ominous marble library, a final, tremendous CRACK sounded from inside the Badger. A puff of black smoke erupted from Ben's jury-rigged panel. Every speaker on the outside of the vehicle fell silent.
"Comms are fried," Ben announced, coughing, but with a triumphant grin on his face. "But it held long enough."
They careened around a corner, leaving the field of puppets behind. The crushing psychic pressure vanished, its absence leaving them all feeling light-headed and dizzy.
Far behind them, inside the darkest sanctum of the municipal library, a creature made of shadow and spite recoiled. Its intricate web of control, spanning twelve square blocks and animating hundreds of puppets, had been shattered. It felt as if a thousand of its own limbs had been severed simultaneously. It shrieked, a silent, furious sound that warped the reality in its immediate vicinity, turning books to ash and stone to dust. It had been wounded, not by a weapon, but by an idea. An idea of quiet that was stronger than its idea of fear.
And it knew, with a hateful certainty, the source of that quiet. It now had a single, overriding priority. The girl was not just a meal to be re-acquired. She was a threat to be eradicated.
Inside the speeding Badger, the mood was one of shaky, breathless victory. Grunt sat slumped against the wall, staring at his own hands, then at Leo, his face a complex mask of emotions. The janitor had just defeated an army without throwing a punch. The concept was still struggling to find purchase in his Berserker's mind.
Thorne, however, was already back at his console, furiously trying to save the data from the event. "The waveform! The purity of the signal decay! The resonance cascade!" he muttered to himself, utterly lost in his work.
Leo walked to the front of the vehicle and looked at the road ahead. They had survived. They had fought a ghost story and won.
He looked at the small tactical map on the console. A single red icon was blinking on it, updated from The Foundry's servers. It was Grunt's objective: the military checkpoint where the Vultures had last reported in. They were almost there. He knew their part of the mission wasn't over. The Husks had been the library's defense system. Now they had to deal with whatever had taken out the first team.