The Kill Society (Sandman Slim)(82)

“Leave her out of this.”

“Of course. I did not mean to offend. But I am curious: How do Frederickson and Billy feel about being your lackeys once you have secured your kingship? Or do you plan on killing them, too?”

“Enough!” he shouts. “We’ll have the sword or your head, or maybe we’ll have both. How does that sound to everybody?”

That idea gets a nice rise out of Johnny’s glee club.

The Magistrate says, “Wanuri. Would you mind killing Johnny and his confederates if they move toward the angels?”

“With pleasure,” she says.

Johnny shakes his head.

“They’re bluffing. I helped to move supplies from the trucks to the ship. There was barely any ammo left. Miss boong and her tribe have a lot of guns, but I know for a fact that half of them are empty.”

Yeah. That’s what I was afraid of.

I look hard at Wanuri. Her eyes glance nervously left and right. Johnny is right. She’s bluffing. There’s no way to stop what’s going to happen. Maybe six angels really can hold off this many psychos, but a lot of people I kind of like are going to get hurt. I wonder how many people I can take with the amber knife before they take me down. I also have the na’at, the Colt, and the butcher knife. Dying again isn’t what I hoped for today, but I should be able to take a fair number of Johnny’s idiots with me to Tartarus.

Alice comes and stands beside me.

“Don’t worry. I’ll protect you,” she says.

“That’s my line.”

“Yeah? How’s that Gladius of yours coming?”

“Sure. Kick me when I’m down.”

I look around. Traven has gone to stand with Wanuri’s group. Cherry, however, is still missing.

Alice shouts, “Vehuel!”

I turn and see something I’ve never seen before. An all-out brawl among angels. Johel and a dark-haired female are on top of Vehuel, trying to wrestle the sword away from her. The sixth angel is already dead.

Oh, fuck. They’re rebels.

Me and Alice run over. While Johel and Vehuel continue to fight, the dark-haired woman gets up and manifests her Gladius. Alice never stops running. She manifests hers and the two of them slam into each other in a thunderclap of noise and light. I head over to help, but they both extend their wings and flap into the air. Not much good I can do there. So I do the only thing I can think of: I jump on Johel’s back and get an arm around his throat. He lets go of Vehuel and does a quick flip, throwing himself on top of me. With all that armor on, he knocks the wind out of me just long enough to jump to his feet and manifest his Gladius. He’s fast, but so am I. He brings it down hard and the ground sizzles around it when he misses. No way this is going to be a fair fight without my Gladius. So I do the only logical thing.

I cheat.

With one hand I pull out the na’at, and with the other hand, I reach into my coat. Extending the na’at to its full length, I flick it at Johel like a whip. The Gladius slices through it like a blowtorch through Rocky Road. Too bad. I’m sorry to see the na’at go, but using it did give me enough time to get out the amber knife. He sees a blade in my hand, but just laughs at the skinny thing. Then he charges me.

I throw the knife.

At first I can’t be sure anything happened. But then Johel starts pulling at his chest, trying to get his armor off. His Gladius goes out and he falls on his back, breathing hard. I guess Samael was right. The knife does go through angel armor. Good to know. I run to get the knife back, but it’s not there. I roll him over and there’s blood on his back. The knife went all the way through him and embedded itself in a nearby tree, which is also extremely dead. I run and grab the knife, scanning the sky overhead for Alice.

She and the dark-haired angel are still fighting. Vehuel struggles to her feet, leaking pearly angel blood. When I get to her, she shoves the Light Killer into my arms saying, “Guard it.” Then she leaps into the air and disappears.

This leaves me in a slightly awkward position. While Johnny and his clown show weren’t about to jump into an angel rumble, they’re not nearly as reluctant to come after me.

“Little help here,” I shout.

“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.