“Okay, okay, don’t waste all your energy on them,” Emma said, wobbling to her feet. Then a rotten head of cabbage bounced off her shoulder and fell splat to the ground.
She lost it.
“All right, someone’s gonna get their face melted!” she yelled, waving a flaming hand at the squatters.
During Addison’s speech, a group had been muttering in a conspiratorial huddle, and now they came forward holding blunt weapons. A sawed branch. A length of pipe. The scene was turning ugly fast.
“We’re tired of you,” a bruised man said in a lazy drawl. “We’re puttin’ you in the river.”
“I’d like to see that,” Emma said.
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “I think we should go.”
There were six of them, three of us, and we were in rough shape: Addison was limping, Emma had blood running down her face, and thanks to my injured shoulder I could hardly lift my right arm. Meanwhile, the men were spreading apart and closing in. They meant to drive us into the chasm.
Emma looked back at the bridge and then at me. “Come on. I know you can get us across. One more try.”
“I can’t, Em. I can’t. I’m not messing around.”
And I wasn’t. I didn’t have it in me to control that hollow—not yet, at least—and I knew it.
“If the boy says he can’t do it, I’m not inclined to disbelieve him,” Addison said. “We must find another way out of this.”
Emma huffed. “Like what?” She looked at Addison. “Can you run?” She looked at me. “Can you fight?”
The answer to both was no. I took her point: our options were winnowing fast.
“At times like this,” Addison said imperiously, “my kind don’t fight. We orate!” Facing the men, he called out in a booming voice, “Fellow peculiars, be reasonable! Allow me a few words!”
They paid him no attention. As they continued closing off our escape routes, we backed toward the bridge, Emma crafting the largest fireball she could muster while Addison yammered about how the animals of the forest live in harmony, so why can’t we? “Consider the simple hedgehog, and his neighbor, the opossum … do they waste their energy trying to throw one another into chasms when they face a common enemy, the winter? No!”
“He’s gone completely crackers,” Emma said. “Shut your gob and bite one of them!”
I looked around for something to fight with. The only hard objects within reach were the heads. I picked one up by the last wisps of its hair.
“Is there another way across?” I shouted into its face. “Quick, or I’m throwing you into the river!”
“Go to Hell!” it spat, then snapped at me with its teeth.
I flung it at the men—awkwardly, with my left arm. It fell short. I rooted around for another head, picked it up, and repeated my question.
“Sure there is,” the head sneered. “In the back of a prizzo van! Though if I were you I’d take my chances with the bridge hollow …”
“What’s a prizzo van? Tell me or I’ll fling you, too!”
“You’re about to get hit by one,” it replied, and then three gunshots rang out in the distance—bam, bam, bam, slow and measured, like a warning. Immediately the men who’d been coming at us stopped, and everyone turned to look down the road.
Half drawn through a cloud of swirling ash, something large and boxy was rumbling toward us. Then came the growl of a big engine downshifting, and out of the black appeared a truck. It was a modern machine of military issue, all rivets and reinforcements and tires half a man high. The back was a windowless cube, and two flak-jacketed, machine-gun-armed wights stood guard along its running boards.
The moment it appeared, the squatters went into a kind of frenzy, laughing and gasping for joy, waving their arms and clasping their hands like marooned shipwreck survivors flagging down a passing plane—and just like that, we were forgotten. A golden opportunity had smacked into us, and we weren’t about to waste it. I tossed aside the head, scooped Addison into the crook of my left arm, and scrambled out of the road after Emma. We could’ve kept going—cut away from Smoking Street and retreated to some safer quarter of Devil’s Acre—but here, finally, was our enemy in the flesh, and whatever was happening or about to happen was clearly of importance. We stopped not far off the roadside, barely hidden behind a knot of charred trees, and watched.
The truck slowed and the crowd swarmed it, groveling and begging—for vials, for suulie and ambro and just a taste, just a little, please sir, disgusting in their worship of these butchers, pawing at the soldiers’ clothes and shoes and getting steel-toed kicks in return. I thought surely the wights would start shooting, or gun the engine and crush those foolish enough to stand between them and the bridge. Instead the truck stopped and the wights began to shout instructions. Form a line, right over here, keep orderly or you’ll get nothing! The crowd fell into formation like destitutes in a bread line, cowed and fidgeting in anticipation of what they were about to receive.
Without warning, Addison began to struggle to be set down. I asked him what was the matter, but he only whimpered and struggled harder, a desperate look on his face like he’d just caught a major scent trail. Emma pinched him and he snapped out of it long enough to say, “It’s her, it’s her—it’s Miss Wren,” and I realized that prizzo van was short for prison van, and that the cargo in the back of the wights’ enormous vehicle was almost certainly human.