~~~
This was the best hunt ever! Okay, the waiting sucked, but as gremlin upon gremlin showed up, Jake’s excitement grew. He imagined turning the valve on his propane torch and flaming every last one of them. Because even though they could be shot or knifed, their vital organs were too small and difficult to get to, plus they healed too fast for normal weapons to slow them down much, so the optimal way to put them down for good was fire.
“Change in plan.” Henry pulled a couple of sticks of dynamite from the duffel bag.
Or that could work.
The explosion would be cool, but not nearly as fun as hand-frying the suckers. “We’re just going to lob one of those in there?”
One of Henry’s eyebrows quirked. Obviously Jake hadn’t kept the displeasure out of his tone very well. After the confrontation with Gregor and then Cael's confession, Jake itched to torch something the good old-fashioned way.
“This is a last resort.” Henry shook his head, frowning. The old man was worried. “There were more of the critters than I expected and we need to get every last one of them. You boys understand? Every last one.”
Cael shuffled up beside Jake. “Yessir,” they said together.
“We’ll go inside the cave as originally planned…” Henry passed a small headlamp to Jake and strapped the other one to his own forehead. Cael frowned, disappointment evident that he didn’t get one of the two headlamps. Jake shrugged, winking at the kid. Cael looked away in annoyance.
The boys followed their father down the slope like obedient pups made to heel. The entrance to the cave lay low and long at the bottom of the ravine and slope, a slash barely as high as their knees. It’d be a tight squeeze crawling in and Jake only hoped the interior opened up. Fighting gremlins while belly-crawling on his stomach just wasn’t appealing.
They set the explosives at each end of the entrance, and then trailed the fuse lines several yards out.
Crouched down at the cave, Henry pulled the small propane torches from the duffel, passing one to each of his sons and keeping the third for himself. Cael let out a barely audible huff, staring at the much thinner propane bottle he had been assigned. Jake was completely attuned to his dad, ready to obey every order because this is when it mattered. His adrenaline was kicking in, tracker instincts adjusting into a calm focus.
Their dad zipped up the bag. “Jake, you follow me. Cael, you have the rear and charge of the supplies.”
“Yessir,” they answered again in unison just before Henry rolled onto his stomach and wriggled inside lengthwise much like he would scoot under a barely opened garage door.
They waited until they heard their dad’s muffled “clear” and then Jake scrambled in after him. He did not like the closed in feeling of the rock around him, but fortunately the entrance was only a couple yards in when the ceiling sloped upward, high enough that while standing they had several feet of clearance above their heads.
The headlamp beams scissored across the walls as Jake and Henry looked around. The cavern was more like a tunnel, close walls that stretched out into a darkness ahead that their lights couldn’t penetrate. There wasn’t a gremlin in sight, but the air reeked of them, a putrid mix of rotting meat and wet animal. Rank, like pulling back the layers of a decaying swamp is rank.
At the scrape sounding behind them, Jake turned and dragged the duffel that Cael was pushing ahead of him from the low entrance. Squatting down, Jake watched the kid’s hands emerge first, one fist tight around his slender propane bottle while he elbow-crawled his way through. Jake smiled, waiting for Cael’s face to screw up as the odor assaulted him. Yep, there it was. Classic bleh-face, nose scrunched up. That never got old.
“You mind?” Cael squinted, lightly smacking Jake away to get the headlamp beam out of his eyes. Jake looked to the side, removing the direct light from his brother. He knew better than to limit someone’s ability to adjust to a darker environment on a hunt. The headlamps were a new addition to Jake's personal gear and he’d have to get used to them.
“All right, boys,” Henry spoke quietly. “Stay sharp. Jake, you torch anything on the left. I’ll take the right. And Cael, you take anything that gets past us.”
“Yeah,” Jake teased. “Just don’t aim your baby flame-thrower in our direction.” Didn’t matter because no gremlin was getting past him.
“Afraid your fart gases will ignite and flame up your—“
“Cael!” It amazed Jake how his dad’s whisper could still sound like a shout. Cael shut up, but looked far from repentant. Jake pressed his lips together to keep from laughing. He had to admit that was a good one. Cael looked over and must have noticed Jake’s mouth curling because his own tugged up in a pleased grin.
Cael hefted the duffel over his shoulder and they started out. Another light clicked on. Jake looked back to see Cael had brought out his flashlight.
It looked like the tunnel split up ahead, which was bad luck all around because if they took the wrong fork and the majority of the gremlins were in the other one, they could get behind them and box them in, but as they got closer they found it wasn’t two tunnels, but a section of wall that had caved in, leaving a thick stalactite-looking pillar standing in the middle of the tunnel.
“Looks like tonsils in someone’s throat,” Jake quipped.
“I think you mean uvula,” Cael said. “And it doesn’t look like that at all.”
“Because it looks like a tonsil.”
“How would you even know what—eeew.” Jake’s and Henry’s beams of light snapped toward the direction of Cael’s exclamation. Since he had the only flashlight, he’d kept his beam more on the floor while theirs had been directed higher. His light played over bones, a long thick skull, cracked femur bones that had teeth marks gnawed into them. They’d known gremlins would eat just about anything, and apparently that included each other.
“That’s just gross.” Jake moved closer to examine the funky looking skeleton while Cael’s flashlight beam moved away.
“Dad, stop!” Cael shouted. The warning tone had Jake swiveling around to see his father frozen mid-step, Cael’s flashlight revealing the drop below Henry’s raised boot.
Carefully Henry moved back from the edge he’d almost tumbled over. Jake and Cael raced to his side, all three lights angled downward. It wasn’t exactly a sheer drop since the walls were bumpy with small ledges and protrusions, but their combined lights didn’t reach bottom either. Jake toed one of the little rocks that littered the sandy floor over the edge. They stood silent, waiting for the echo that never came.
“Damn. That’s ah…deep,” Jake stated the obvious. Looking down into the dark hole, a sick feeling washed over him.
Henry reached across Jake to squeeze Cael’s shoulder. When the kid looked at him, Henry nodded his approval. It was as close to a thank you as their dad ever got.
Jake angled his light across the chasm. It was pretty far to the other side with only a slight protruding lip against the bottom of one side of the wall. While he thought he could balance it no problem, he wasn’t sure he was up to watching his dad and brother try to do the same. He also wondered how the fat-footed gremlins had managed it. They did have fairly muscled legs.
“Dad, how far do you think these golem-things can jump?”
Hands on his hips, studying the hole, Henry shook his head. “I’d say at least that far ‘cause there’s no other way they could have gone. Okay, we’re going to need to—” Henry was cut off as one of the beasties dropped on him, taking him to the ground.
“Dad!” Reflexively, Jake looked up. His light played over several gremlins crawling along the ceiling. Holy crap, the things could move across the rock like lizards!
A blast of fire sprayed over the ceiling—Cael’s torch—a moment before Jake’s joined his. Squealing, one, two, four creatures burst into little fireballs and fell to the ground. Another streaked by, falling into the hole like a meteor. Man! These suckers didn’t just burn, they full on erupted. “Dad
!”
“I’m okay.”
Jake twisted to see his dad on the ground at the exact moment he kicked the creature off him and Cael’s flame arced toward the beastie. Except the flame sputtered and died as Cael’s propane ran out and the gremlin launched itself at the kid.
“Cael!” Two jets of flame converged as both Jake and Henry eliminated the threat to their youngest family member.
Until another dropped onto him. Jake called out to his brother at the same time Cael screamed a warning to him and something smacked against Jake’s back. He felt the burn of teeth clamp into his shoulder, heard both his dad and brother shouting for him.
Suddenly Cael was behind him, slamming the butt of his propane bottle over and over into the ugly that seemed stuck to Jake’s back, while Jake twisted, turned, fingers scrabbling to get the thing off him. All at once, it came loose, pulling Jake off balance and fighting to stay on his feet, as his dad’s horrified scream reverberated around the walls. “Caaaaaaaaaaaeeel!”
Jake spun, expecting to come face to face with Cael who was behind him. Except he wasn’t. He met only empty air. Jake looked down and his world dropped away.
He stood mere inches from the hole.
Five