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She doesn’t say anything. I go back to my rope feeling like the biggest idiot in Heaven, Hell, or Earth. Alice isn’t dying and I’m not being dragged away anywhere, but it feels a lot like I lost her all over again. It’s confusing and I don’t like it.

We pull the flatbed for another slow, tedious, agonizing day and a half through mud, streams of shit, waterfalls of blood, and over a road paved with bones. People collapse and have to be tossed on the flatbed, making it even heavier. Others run batshit into the wilderness. A couple of people die in gang fights.

I don’t see Alice again the whole time.

At the end of the second day, and with everybody at the breaking point, it rains. I don’t know if it’s water. I’m just grateful it isn’t any bodily secretions. Except, of course, the road turns to a swamp and the flatbed bogs down. The angels come up front and pull while us puny types push from the back. It doesn’t help. Neither does getting them to push and the rest of us to pull. The Magistrate meets with Vehuel, some of the mechanics, and other people who seem to have a fucking clue and they come up with a plan. A really bad one.

We need to get something under the wheels for them to grip and the only things around are the skeleton trees. A contingent of the Magistrate’s goons and conscripts drags their asses up a hill and starts chopping down the forest. They have to clear a whole hillside to get enough wood for the twin flatbeds’ wheels. It takes hours to get the wood into place because a lot of the first batch sinks with the wheels and a second crew has to cut up the opposite hill. Eventually, we get enough wood, but we get something more, too.

At first it looks like a landslide down the bare, muddy hill, but it’s too slow and too regular. It doesn’t rush down toward us as much as it skitters. Vehuel and Johel manifest their Gladiuses to light the hillside.

I’m only here because I’m dead. I didn’t sign up for this shit.

It turns out what’s coming down the hill isn’t an it at all. It’s a they. About a million of them. Each about the size of my hand. The beetle colony must have nested under the trees and took exception to a bunch of strangers stealing their homes.

The insect mass is a solid carpet of writhing legs and ripping jaws. Turns out that not only are these particular beetles ill-mannered, they’re also carnivorous.

They hit the part of the havoc still coming down the hillside first, swarming over them until they’ve disappeared under the beetles’ bodies. By the time the insects move down to the road, anyone who was alive a couple of minutes earlier is stripped to the bones and blips away. The havoc panics. Most of them rush up the opposite hillside, but a handful of souls and Hellions freeze in place or get bogged down in the mud. The first wave of beetles covers them while others swarm around their bodies headed farther onto the road. Even the angels look lost. They’re used to fighting other angels, not chasing roaches when the lights come on.

People scatter, but there’s nowhere to scatter to. The bugs are everywhere. Muffled screams under piles of beetles as souls and Hellions try to claw their way out. Flashes of bones as bodies are stripped of their flesh. People scramble onto the flatbed, but the little bastards are going to swarm that soon, too.

No way I’m going out as bug food and neither is Alice.

I can’t think of anything else to do, so I bark some Hellion hoodoo at the front of the beetle wave. They explode into flames. The fire burns from the vanguard of the insects, spreading out across the hillside. Beetle bodies smoke and explode like monster popcorn, tossing their guts into the air.

The rain keeps falling. The angels look at me and I look right back at them.

“Great plan. Nice fucking road.”

When we finally get the flatbed moving again, the rain changes. People scream as tiny objects from the sky slash their skin. Some people hide under the skeleton trees, but most of the havoc dive under the flatbed as a razor storm cascades from the skies. The weird part is that it sounds nice. Like a million little bells tinkling overhead.

A few minutes into the deluge, Alice runs over and slides under the flatbed next to me.

“Are you all right?” she says.

“I’m fine. Do you know what’s going on?”

“Unfortunately yes. It’s the war. Things are getting worse. Do you know what celestial spheres are?”

“Yeah. They’re big glass globes that hold the light Mr. Muninn uses to make stars.”

If she’s impressed by my knowledge, she doesn’t show it. “Not anymore. That’s them breaking into a million little pieces.”

“You’re losing, aren’t you? The ones loyal to Mr. Muninn.”

“We weren’t supposed to say anything. Please don’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t. But are you okay?”

“Y

eah. I guess.”

“Just stay here. It can’t last forever.”

Turns out I’m not as good a swami as Cherry. The glass falls through the night and the next day. The good news is that it does stop, and when it does, the rain stops, too. We shovel as much glass as we can from around the wheels and push the flatbed free. The Magistrate stands up front with the angels. His map was torn to shreds in the glass-fall. Good. Disgusted, he throws it onto the side of the road. I think everyone is expecting one of his Holy Roller pep talks, but the only thing he says is, “Let us get moving.”

Not exactly Dale Carnegie material.