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“Don’t do it, Johnny,” says Wanuri, leveling her rifle at him.
He says, “Do you even have any bullets, you slit?”
“One way to find out fast.”
He makes a quick, unconvincing feint in her direction and she backs up a step.
Fuck.
“That’s what I thought,” he says, laughing, then calls back to his people. “Get him.”
This is where things get weird. Again. Remember how I was kind of disappointed about how there weren’t any traps or tricks by Maleephas’s tree? Funny thing. It turns out there was something, only it was very old and probably a bit rusty and it took a while to get cranking.
Because all around us, the skeleton trees begin to come apart. Branches unwrapping from around each other. Trunks splitting apart and moving on their own. The pieces start to connect for me. Whatever happened to all the hapless fallen angels when the town came apart? Funny thing. They never left. They are the trees.
All around us, trees come undone and naked bodies—dry skin stretched over brittle bones like hundred-year-old roadkill—lumber down the hills in our direction.
Up and down the line, Johnny’s troops begin to scream. You see, Wanuri’s bunch ran up the side of the road close the buildings, while Johnny’s kept to the side of the road that ran along the base of the hills. Like the beetle attack earlier, the shambling tree zombies overwhelm Johnny’s line with sheer numbers. To give them credit, Johnny’s troops go down fighting. Barbora takes down three with her pipe before she’s dog-piled and disappears. Billy almost makes it out of the fight with two zombies on his back and one on his front. Frederickson . . . well, they go for his scalped head like it’s a bargain buffet on a Sunday after church. He vanishes, one arm flailing like he’s trying to hail a cab.
I grab Daja and we take off running for Wanuri’s group.
She and everybody else with a loaded weapon fires into the hobbling piles of gristle. They take down a lot, but Henoch must have been a pretty big town. There are plenty more behind them. I run down to her with the sword in my arms.
“Come on!” I shout.
“Where?”
“To the gun. We can make it work now.”
I don’t have to tell any of them twice. We sprint back to the crossroads like the freaked-out bunnies we are. I want to say that we all make it, but things don’t work out like that. A lot of people get taken down along the way. Most of the dog pack I know is in front of me. So is Traven. I look up, hoping to catch a glimpse of Alice, but all I can see are flashes of light when Gladiuses smash into each other. I turn away. I don’t want to know what happens until it’s over. I know if the wrong angel comes down I can kill it. That’s all I need to know.
“Where’s the Magistrate?” yells Daja. The idiot stops for a second and I have to grab her and drag her behind me. I want to tell her that wherever he is, he’s fine. He’s a goddamn angel. And no sooner do I think it than the prick appears from the crowd, running alongside Daja like they’re out for a jog in the park.
When we get to the gun, me and the Magistrate leap up onto the flatbeds and run to the rear. Daja, Wanuri, and some of the others climb up behind us, but are too slow to keep up.
When we get to the rear of the gun, I pull open the breech and look at the Magistrate.
“How do we use it?”
“I do not know,” he says. “The stories never specified how the weapon worked.”
Of course not. Vehuel would know, but she’s occupied at the moment.
“Look around,” I say. “It has to fit somewhere.”
By now, Traven and the rest of the dog pack have caught up.
“Look around for where the sword might go in,” I tell them.
A moment later, Traven says, “Here. This might be it.”
He points to an indentation in the breech. There’s a slot where it looks like something could slide in.
“Try it,” says the Magistrate.
I bend down, and when I hold the sword out straight, it fits perfectly into place.
Big smiles all around, but they don’t last long. The tree fuckers are shuffling down the hills and the crossroads.
