Agents Watts, Lane, McGee, MacMillian, Morrisson, Kate Hennisson, and Cheryl Banning began their trek through the gray, featureless waste. There was no way to tell how much time passed as they walked. They saw strange and meaningless things. The rusted wreckage of a B-17 flying fortress embedded in the still-fresh corpse of a gigantic, squid-like creature, half-buried in the dust. Thousands of glass jars, each containing a single, excised tumor, arranged in a perfect square, one mile on each side.
Eventually they came to a ridge, and beyond it a series of interconnecting ravines. Down in the ravines, they came upon a naked, weeping woman, who turned out to be a lamprey-mouthed spectre, with several more waiting in ambush. As soon as the Agents had put down the spectres, they found themselves surrounded by a group of men brandishing spears and wearing battered and dusty Roman centurion armor. The leader, advanced threateningly, weilding a gladius forged of some black, moaning metal and shouting something in ancient Latin.
The situation was defused when a man dressed in the uniform of a British soldier circa 1917 climbed down from the next ridge over and ordered the centurions to stand down. He introduced himself as Gabriel Macalister, commander of the Company of Bitter Indenture, Legion of the Grim, in service to the Smiling Lord. He apologized for the centurion leader's behavior. "Claudus has been around a long time, much longer than me, and he's seen more than his share of doppelgangers. Makes him a bit paranoid." He asked the Agents if they were "the reinforcements." The Agents said yes, and Macalister took them back to his camp.
Macalister introduced the rest of his soldiers, which included the centurions, a handful of what appeared to be 18th-century French-Canadian fur trappers, and Fritz, a WWII Nazi tank commander permanently fused with the broken hulk of his tank, who had converted to Judaism after conversations with the ghosts of Holocaust victims many years ago. They had fortified a ridge only a couple of miles away from the ruins of the Iron City. As far as Macalister knew, they were the last soldiers left alive after the First Deluge. According to Macalister, the spectres had come up from under the Iron City and destroyed everything — literally everything in the Underworld, pulling every structure to pieces and then grinding the pieces into dust. The Agents tried to impress upon him that a Second Deluge was now happening in the living world, but Macalister seemed to have difficulty even understanding the concept of a "living world" — this wasteland was all there was for him, now. "If you can find a purpose here," he explained, "you stick to it. And our purpose is to defend this little patch of dust. These boys, if they didn't have that, they'd just fade away."
He told them that he could tell they weren't really reinforcements. He had never heard of Grandmother or "the Gate Between Life and Death." He would not have his men abandon their posts, and he would not leave his men.
However, that did not mean he could not help them. Much of the Iron City, he explained, had been buried in the First Deluge. Armies of spectres now crawled over the ruins, possibly searching for something. "Excavating, perhaps," Macalister supposed. The Agents would never make it into the ruins out in the open, but if the spectres could be distracted, perhaps the Agents could make it to one of the entrances to the underground, where they could hide. If the Gate Between Life and Death still existed anywhere, it would have to be somewhere beneath the ruins of the City.
Macalister sent the trappers out to scout the spectres' current disposition. When the time was right, the Agents would make their way around the perimeter of the City. Then Macalister's men would attract the spectres' attention, and while they were distracted, the Agents could move into the ruiins and search for an entry point.
However, all did not go as planned. The spectres spotted the scouts and began advancing on Macalister's position too early, before the Agents could get away to a safe position. "Don't go now," warned Macalister, "they'll spot you and swarm you instantly. Your only chance is to hold until they're almost on top of us, then try to break through while my boys give them hell."
Then the ground began to tremble. The centurion leader, Claudus, came running back to camp shouting "Centimani! Centimani!" Fritz, looking through field glasses, shouted, "Die Hunderthander!" Macalister grimly picked up his Lee-Enfield and said, "Well, it looks like we got their attention, at least. They've sent one of their war machines after us."
The "war machine" was an enormous, spindle-legged creature, as large as an ocean oil derrick, something like a gigantic spider crab with the house-sized head of a screaming human infant. As it got closer, they realized that it was not a single organism at all, but a conglomeration of thousands of ghosts, chained and pinioned to some sort of endoskeleton, all of them flexing and pulling in unison to move the creature's limbs. Even the head was composed of hundreds of ghosts bound and contorted together, all screaming in terrible harmony. Swarming under and between its feet were hundreds of spectres of every variety, filling the ravines and pouring over the ridges.
Macalister's centurions attacked. Fritz wheeled his tank's turrent around and fired a vitality-powered shell that splashed harmlessly off the flank of the spectre war machine. The Agents, meanwhile, made their run for it. MacMillian morphosed wings and flew between the creature's legs. Lane used Pandemonium to catapult himself over the front line of spectres, but then got swarmed when he landed. Cheryl Banning pulled him out, but then was overrun and devoured herself. Morrisson attempted to fly past, but was swatted out of the sky by one of the creature's legs. He morphosed into a swarm of sucking insects and attempted to siphon vitality from the beast, but ended up with a massive infusion of spite.
In the end the Agents broke through. Looking back, they saw Macalister's position overrun with spectres. Fritz was crushed underneath one of the war machine's feet. Macalister himself was nowhere to be seen. They last spotted Claudus, the centurion leader, clinging to the massive creature's face, getting ready to stab it with his black sword.
There was nothing they could do for their benefactors. They came to a giant, jagged spar of black metal jutting up from the earth, with a split at the bottom that admitted entrance underground. One by one, they entered the darkness.