Hope drained from the trollhunters as if each of us were being bled.
Even without the plateau, the Hungry One would’ve outsized us all. He sat upon a throne of yellowed bones collected from the 190 kids who died during the Milk Carton Epidemic, and with long icicle teeth he gobbled at the meat that spattered across his face and chest.
The “Black” of his title was metaphorical; his skin glistened a deep, blistered red. With each swallow, his limbs convulsed along several unexpected joints—two elbows to each arm, a scabby, wrinkled knee on each leg, and all of them adept at bending in any direction. His crooked spine elongated and retracted like a periscope, rifling the thick porcupine spikes that ran from the back of his head all the way down his back. Luxuriously he spread the six arms that sprouted from his sinewy chest, each of which was encumbered with seeping tumors, except for the topmost left arm, which, as promised, was a weathered block of wood marked with his numerous kills.
Gunmar’s jaw dropped open to reveal the mangled tongue that he’d been chewing on in resentment for over four decades.
“SSSSSSTURGESSSSSS.”
We turned away from the voice’s warm gust. My pulse thundered to hear my family name so spoken, and when I next looked, Gunmar was using a single claw to tickle the Eye of Malevolence. Gunmar’s left socket had long before sealed over with scar tissue, but the Eye looked perfectly content to sit upon its master’s shoulder like a parrot.
“Hey, Jim,” Tub whispered.
“Yeah.”
“If we couldn’t beat the eyeball, how are we going to beat, you know, all the rest of the parts?”
“See, Tub?” I replied. “That’s the kind of question I could live without.”
“Jim! Up here!”
Never again would I mistake a Scottish accent for an English one. I zeroed in on the source of the cry and found Claire to the right of Gunmar’s throne. Not Claire exactly, but her head. Yes, for a few surreal seconds I believed her severed head was calling to me, which I took to mean that I had just been killed and was in fantasyland. But no, she was alive, though for some reason I could only see her face poking over the edge of the plateau. Behind her I saw the twisting heads of other kids, at least a dozen of them. There was no cage, no other trolls but Gunmar—why weren’t they running?
From behind us came the squeal of unlubricated metal gears. From above, the sputter of a pipe pushing along its last specks of sausage. The Machine was empty and in need of fresh fuel.
ARRRGH!!! patted the boulder lodged in her skull.
“Gunmar! Fight! Now!”
“FIRSSSSSST,” Gunmar rasped past his forked tongue, “MY FRIENDSSSSSS.”
Emerging from beneath the shadow of the plateau was a dizzying gallery of trolls, horrors of doubled jaws and compound eyes and swaying silica. They dragged clubs and bludgeons and chains. The braids of their hair were hardened by dried blood and their bodies had mutated from residing too close to Gunmar: scabs birthed extra eyes, sores sprouted extra fingers, rashes gleamed with newly grown teeth. There were Nullhullers, Ğräçæĵøĭvőd’ñůý, Wormbeards, Yarbloods, Zunnn, and scads of other weak-willed rogues that made up this new generation of Gumm-Gumms. So it was with surprise that I overheard Jack’s mutter of disbelief.
“That’s it? That’s all there is?”
“Underestimate Gumm-Gumms at your own peril,” Blinky warned. “Perhaps the Hungry One has not had sufficient time to amass the number of followers we’d estimated. Let us take this as good news and leave it at that, eh?”
Jack clashed together his swords. “Agreed.”
He unleashed his battle cry and the other trollhunters did the same. In a practiced motion they fanned outward in triangle formation, ARRRGH!!! to the right, bowling over three Gumm-Gumms with a single fist; Blinky to the left, tripping up foes with his whiplike tentacles; and Jack on point, swirling his swords like lassos. Instantly the atmosphere thickened with the whump of pounded muscle, the clash of colliding weaponry, and the invigorating ripping noise of softies being separated from necks.
Dust billowed up from the warriors, and Tub and I used it to scurry around the periphery of the dome. We couldn’t see three feet in front of us, but used our feet to gauge drop-offs and our hands to push aside brambles of metal. Against the backs of our necks spattered the gore to which I’d grown accustomed: cold slivers of troll skin, hot jets of arterial blood, the sticky mesh of softie tissue. The cries of captured kids grew louder as we neared, a sound that battled against the entranced moan of the Gumm-Gumms:
“Killaheed. Killaheed. Killaheed.”
The bare face of the plateau split the befilthed air like a ship emerging from fog.
“We’re here,” I sighed.
“Great,” Tub said.
Then a lone creature materialized from the smog. Across its chin was a cross-shaped scar. It was the nasty little troll that had weaseled away from me beneath the tire pile at Keavy’s Junk Emporium. With its unrivaled sense of smell, this rust troll had tracked me through the dust and smoke and viscera. It snapped its towering body like a bullwhip and hissed a mist of venomous oil from its crude slash of a mouth.
“Correction,” Tub said. “Not great. This is not great.”
“I got this skinny bastard,” I growled. “Stand back.”
Never before had I drawn Claireblade and Cat #6 with such operatic flair. I believe I saw the rust troll flinch before the tiny gems of its eyes hardened and it writhed sideways. It came fast to my left, but I parried Cat #6 with Jack’s favorite move, Fling the Poop, and when the troll accordioned and sprung to my right, Claireblade enacted another of Jack’s patented salvos, the Blue Jean Surprise. But the troll was wily, dodging the swords and whipping gashes through both legs of my jeans. I cried out in pain and came at the rust troll with both swords swirling.
I had the Ğräçæĵøĭvőd’ñůý against the side of the plateau, and yet my blades rang off the stone with enough force to shake my entire skeleton. The damned thing danced around each strike, mocking me with its coughing laughter. Giving into brute instincts, I clubbed madly, forgetting the rabbit and python in favor of the bull. It was a rookie mistake. The rust troll bit me on one wrist, then the other, and in a flash I’d been disarmed, firelight flashing off my blades where they had stabbed themselves into nearby dirt.
The troll lassoed my waist and flung me against the plateau. My forehead hit rock and I slumped to the ground. The thing’s mouth unzippered and venomous tar dripped down the cycling rows of chainsaw teeth. It darted up my legs, light as an insect, and leaned in to deliver the killing bite.
A sharp silver point popped out from between the rust troll’s eyes and then twisted, grinding whatever brain the troll had into shavings. The edge of a scalpel then burst through its open mouth, knocking out several of its triangular teeth. Then I heard a high-pitched whine and watched in disbelief as a tiny circular saw cut through the lower third of the troll’s body, splitting the gallbladder, which voided a gush of blue ooze. The troll went stiff for several seconds and then released its reservoirs of inky poison through all of its pores, forever wasted as it sopped into the dirt. The troll fell limp as a leaf.
Tub stood victorious, his hip sack open, gripping in both fists the most disturbing weapons I’d ever seen, hand-fitted tools forged of pitiless steel and callous chrome. He switched off the whirring handsaw and grinned.
“Dr. Papadopoulos,” Tub said, brandishing the dental devices with pride.
“You stole them?” I asked.
Tub shrugged. “Thought maybe it was my turn to cause a little pain.”
Together we hurried around the edge of the plateau until the screams of the abducted kids were directly above us. Now that the Machine was empty, it could be a matter of minutes before Gunmar made a meal of one of them. I stared up at the sheer face, wondering how we’d scale such an impossible wall.
Tub grabbed my shoulder.
“Good news, bad news time.”
“Good news,” I said.
“And make it real good.”
“I found a way up.”
“That is good. Very good. How bad could the bad news be?”
Tub winced, turned aside, and pointed.
Two thick black cables trailed up the side of the plateau and over the top.
“God, no,” I said. “Anything but ropes.”
“We can do this, Jim.”
“We couldn’t do this in regular old gym! Much less a troll inferno!”
Tub stuffed Papadopoulos’s instruments into his pack and zipped it shut. His grin was as cocky as a globe-trotting swashbuckler’s.
“All those times I fell in gym class? I was faking it to piss off Coach.”
“Really?”
Tub’s grin straightened.
“No. But it sounded good, didn’t it? Let’s pretend that it’s true and climb these bastards.”
He clapped me on the neck and jogged over to the cables. By the time I got there he had two handfuls and was bracing his feet against the rock as if rappelling. I kicked aside a stack of human bones and grabbed the other one, scrambling up several feet before a familiar dread seized me. My blistering palms began to slide down the hot cable, and my spine began to twist, the final signal that I was a goner.
My left foot slipped from the rock and I experienced the vertigo of a plummet. It was a familiar feeling followed by automatic bracing for pain. But it didn’t happen—a strong hand caught me by the lower back and held on just long enough for me to wedge my foot back in place and find new grips on the cable. I looked over to find that it was Tub who had saved me while holding aloft his entire weight with just one hand.
“Not this time,” he panted. “This time we make it.”
It was all I needed to hear. I put my chin to my chest and ascended: two feet, three feet, four feet. Tub’s foot hit an unfortunate crag and he began to spin, but I kicked off from the wall and was able to steady his rope with my left hand. There was no time for thanks. Our sneakered toes found notches. Our muscles held true. Most important, our willpower didn’t flag. For a time, the clamor around us wasn’t screaming kids or dying trolls or even the laughing of gym class rivals, but instead the cheers of believers who rooted for us to make it all the way to the top, which we did.
We gasped into the dirt until our eyes found each other and our faces split into miserable, hysterical grins. It was the frenzied calls of the kids that compelled us to push our bodies to sitting positions. Gunmar the Black was fifty feet away, towering above us on his bone throne, his red skin crawling across his body as if it had its own intelligence.
Tub and I crawled on hands and knees toward the kids. Claire’s dirty, exhausted face was the first I saw, and I pressed a finger to my mouth to keep her from crying out my name. She bit her lip and nodded. As soon as Tub and I crested a small rising, it became clear why we could see only her head.
Each kid had been buried in the dirt up to her or his neck. It was bad enough that they’d been paralyzed this way rather than kept inside of a cage, but the real hell of their situation became clearer as I got closer. Their mouths were crusted with unidentifiable slop, evidence that Gunmar had been fattening them with tasty stuffing before making sausage of them in the Machine. These children and teens hadn’t been buried, they’d been planted so that the rich dirt and underworld clay could properly season their bodies for the troll palate.
There was nothing to do but dig with our bare hands. Claire was the last one planted and therefore the easiest to remove, and within thirty seconds I’d scooped away enough dirt for her to wiggle herself free. She pressed her filthy face against mine in a quick hug before scrabbling over to the next kid and tearing at the ground to release him. Tub and I set to freeing a little girl I recognized despite the lack of purple glasses. I whispered to her that it was going to be okay. My fingertips bled against rock as I dug.
The more kids we released, the more diggers we had, and within ten minutes we were cowering behind a hill alongside seventeen begrimed others. The murk of the battleground below had cleared enough for me to see the tireless advance of the trollhunters. Perhaps due to their brainwashed state, the Gumm-Gumms were not the best of fighters—ferocious, yes, but undisciplined in the face of a coherent attack. And, as Jack had said, there just weren’t anywhere near enough of them—only two dozen remained. It was time for ARRRGH!!! to make her move.
Pressing both blood-matted paws to the dirt, she took a swinging, simian leap, launching her body through the smoke and landing in front of the throne. Brimstone swirled around her like demonic insects as she rose to full height—less than half that of Gunmar. She swiped to the left with a paw, destroying the Machine’s final length of pipe, just to show the Hungry One that she meant business.
Gunmar’s humungous jaw grinded and the stake-sized teeth fought for placement. His single eye blazed as he rose from his throne. Six sausage-stained arms, including the wooden one, spread open as if preparing to greet his attacker with an embrace. The Eye of Malevolence leapt from Gunmar’s shoulder and scuttled in gleeful circles through its master’s boiling drool.
ARRRGH!!! unleashed a roar so tornadic it generated a storm of dirt. Behind the corkscrews of grit, the trollhunter widened her stance and stomped closer to Gunmar. Rocks rained from the walls and the Machine squealed in protest. The storied foes were within striking distance—the legend of snarled black fur, the myth of all-devouring appetite. Inconceivable muscles flexed; rancid breath poured from open throats; the pestilent air was charged with the electricity of the anticipated first blow.
And then the Killaheed Bridge was completed.
We knew it the instant it happened. The world around us went pure white for an unknowable number of seconds and every sound was silenced: the clacking of the Machine, the whining of the children, the chanting of the Gumm-Gumms. We became weightless, as if yanked into the sky by parachutes, and there was the usual slight elastic sting of passing through a dimensional doorway, except that instead of walking forward we were soaring without direction. When color drained back in, soft like the lifting of eyelids, what I saw was not the soot and shadow of the underworld but the startling green and white of a manicured field beneath floodlights. Sound came back to me just as gently, the twittering of referee whistles, the dull collision of protective gear, the collective gasp of a huge crowd of people, and a single hissing voice that overwhelmed it all:
“IT ISSSSSS FINISSSSSSHED.”
So this is the story. With two minutes left to go in the biggest game of the season, at the culmination of the Festival of the Fallen Leaves, after a week of missing children that had citizens desperate to cheer for anything, the Saint B. Battle Beasts were up by six points thanks to the superhuman heroics of Steve Jorgensen-Warner, though the team was down several key players and struggling to stave off a comeback by the Connersville Colts, who were at midfield and driving. Not one person at Harry G. Bleeker Memorial Field rested on her or his butt; they danced upon the feet of the saved, clapping their Steve Smackers with such furor that the environs became a deafening world of madness—so mad, in fact, that it took the townspeople a good minute to register the white blast that shot throughout the neighborhood and the scattering of grotesque monsters that were deposited upon the turf.
The second-down-and-six play, a sweep to the right with number thirty-three of the Colts getting the pitch, dwindled to a halt as the halfback came up against not the expected Saint B. cornerback but instead a yellow troll wearing a vest and swinging a barbed mace. The halfback stopped, thought for a second, and offered up the ball. The troll, discombobulated but also hungry, took the ball and crunched it between its boulder teeth.
The abruptly cut-off sentence of the announcer reverberated through the speakers—he was unequipped with the vocabulary to describe such an unusual play. The jumbotron operator finished a full-color animation but lacked the wherewithal to begin the next, and the pixels faded out until the screen was as empty as a blackboard.
The silence was not absol
ute. Popcorn continued to pop in the snack bar and sloppy make-out sessions continued beneath the far end of the bleachers. But soon even these noises ceased and the human beings of San Bernardino met for the first time the trolls of San Bernardino. Pieces of hot dog fell half-chewed from gaping mouths. Children carried upon shoulders were dropped. Trombones, tubas, and other instruments gave a last blurt before falling from the hands of band members.
I stood from where I had materialized at the forty-yard line and gazed over the rows of blank faces. In the distance I saw a final lightning flash coming from the Historical Society Museum. The completed Killaheed had pushed Gunmar the Black through the barrier of worlds and brought the Gumm-Gumms and trollhunters along with him. I had to wonder, though, if Professor Lempke had aligned the head stone a bit off-center, seeing as how we’d emerged just down the street.
Gunmar crouched on all his limbs like a triceratops, his head swinging mistrustfully from side to side. Caught beneath the bright white lights, he looked more unreal than ever, a gnarled gargoyle set down amid an orderly world. In other areas of the field, Jack, Blinky, and ARRRGH!!! rose to their feet, shaking off lightheadedness.
Football players of both offensive and defensive inclination began to backpedal to the sidelines. To the Gumm-Gumms it must have looked like the slide of delicious food off of a tilted plate. Almost instantly the air went rotten with the stink of salivating mouths, and the Gumm-Gumms began creeping across the treacherously even terrain toward the bleachers, tails whipping, claws extended, jaws dropped in anticipation.