Gunmar drew himself to full height, yawning with the volume of an air horn and striking with his quills one of the overhead banks of lights. It detonated, sparks rained down, and the Eye of Malevolence chased each one like a puppy.
Way too late, somebody screamed.
Linebackers, wide receivers, coaches, and water boys alike backed themselves into the grandstand before climbing over the railing. Mrs. Leach and her cadre of underqualified understudies hid behind the painted castle sets stacked near the end zone. Sergeant Gulager, fixed in his traditional spot near the ambulances, stared blankly as if he’d been expecting disaster all night but not at this scale. With their noses to the air, the Gumm-Gumms stormed through a thicket of scattering cheerleaders, grabbed hold of railings with tentacles and paws and pincers, and tossed their slimy, scaled, or leathery bodies into groups of families, young couples, and kids who’d shown up just for the junk food.
The crowd split down the middle and surged toward either exit, but paused upon hearing the piercing cries coming from the field.
Scattered across the gridiron were the town’s seventeen missing children, shielding their eyes from the lights with grubby hands and searching through the chaos for their families.
The people stopped fleeing.
They did this under threat of death from terrifying creatures beyond their imaginations. Most of these people didn’t have a missing child in their immediate family, but almost all of them knew someone who did. Though hardly to the scale of the Milk Carton Epidemic, the Internet Epidemic was in full swing: social networking sites had been blanketed by posts from parents attaching photos of their missing kids and giving the details on the last reported sighting, and these posts had been faithfully reposted by friends.
Now there were the missing children, right there on the field.
They’d all heard the sound bites from Sergeant Gulager on local TV, about how the community’s best chance of defeating this crisis was by pulling together. And so they did. With backpacks, seat cushions, and bare fists they faced the Gumm-Gumms, and within seconds the bleachers were a sea of flailing limbs of both human and troll variety. Football players from both teams got into the act, ramming helmets into troll stomachs and absorbing savage attacks through shoulder pads.
It was an inspiring, though hopeless, display. In just one minute, blood-red slashes appeared across dozens of defending arms, and the frightened and confused humans turned to the most desperate of maneuvers, scurrying through the gaps in the bleachers and curling into fetal balls, while the trolls continued to rip and slobber and swipe.
Gulager ran down the side of the bleachers with his sidearm raised—but what could he shoot at? Every Gumm-Gumm was locked in close combat. Gulager tripped on a pair of discarded Steve Smackers and went tumbling. He got to his feet, picking up the noisemakers to toss them aside, and then paused, weighing them in either hand. He perked up his head, searched about wildly, and sprinted to where the drama club were cowering within their plywood castle. Gulager accosted Mrs. Leach, who nodded and pulled out the microphone that would have been used to amplify RoJu.
Gulager’s voice boomed through the stadium speakers.
Not once did he stutter.
“USE THE SMACKERS! PICK THEM UP! THEY’RE EVERYWHERE! YOU CAN DO IT! FIGHT BACK! FIGHT BACK!”
No ordinary voice could command the attention of a populace so overwhelmed with fright. But Sergeant Gulager had been the man whom San Bernardino had depended on through trials of every sort, and that kind of trust ran deep. Parents and teens and elderly alike reached for the nearest Steve Smacker and delivered their best roundhouse blow to the closest troll. The Gumm-Gumms were flummoxed; the plastic blasts were so much more rhythmic than anything heard in the underworld, and the bright colors were blinding to those who lived among dim shades of brown and black. The crack of the Smackers, what to me had been the most irritating noise in existence, became something else altogether: the sound of hope.
“Jim! Jim!”
Tub and Claire were waving at me. According to the sideline markers, they were precisely thirty-six yards away, close enough that I could read their hysterical gestures at the space above me. Before I could look, darkness fell across me like a heavy quilt. I wrenched my neck and saw the descending form of Gunmar the Black. The ability to react left me and I stood with swords dangling. He fell upon me, trapping me in a six-armed cage. His lips pulled back as if blistering away from his face, and from between his foot-long teeth slithered the tattered remnants of his tongue.
“MORE SSSSSSTURGESSSSSSESSSSSS.”
His spittle rolled down my cheeks like molten lead.
Gunmar’s wooden arm received a solid blow—Jack’s long-sword. The blade got stuck halfway in but succeeded in pushing the arm out from under the gargantuan monster. Gunmar’s titanic torso slammed to the turf but I was already rolling out of the way, passing beneath his empty eye socket before emerging back into floodlights. Jack grunted, yanking his sword from the wood and tumbling backward with the effort. Gunmar transitioned to a squat and examined the new notch on the wooden arm.
“YESSSSSS. MUSSSSST HAVE NEW KILL.”
ARRRGH!!! struck Gunmar at a full gallop, ramming her horns into his ropy chest. Gunmar choked in surprise, staggered back a few steps, found his footing, and then used those same horns to lift his attacker into the air and slam her to the field. ARRRGH!!!’s brawny body sounded like a pitiful bag of bones. Gunmar reached down to choke her but she came alive just in time, taking the hands by the wrists and diverting them. But there were three more hands where those came from, and each of them fought for the privilege of strangulation.
Tentacles fastened around Gunmar. It was Blinky, with what looked like every one of his hundred limbs. Gunmar fell back from ARRRGH!!!. For a moment it looked as though Blinky might force the larger troll to the turf. But the spines along Gunmar’s back sprung outward like a regiment of bayonets and I heard the excruciating sounds of several of Blinky’s tentacles being torn in half.
Still, the fighting historian clung to the villain long enough for ARRRGH!!! to struggle to her feet and mount another head-on attack. Gunmar released a boom of laughter and began operating his double-jointed limbs to fight both enemies at once. It was an awesome display of power: six arms fought a trollhunter on each side with bewildering speed while the spine telescoped and retracted to dodge fists, twice causing ARRRGH!!! to sock Blinky in the head.
“Lummox!” Blinky spat. “The Hungry One! Not me!”
ARRRGH!!!, as if in apology, leapt and caught Gunmar’s head between two crushing paws. Gunmar’s tongue whipped across her face, leaving pink stripes of acid burn, then he opened his cavernous mouth to bite off some of her face. But one of his teeth struck down upon ARRRGH!!!’s new metal braces and snapped in two. Gunmar wailed—his first sign of pain. ARRRGH!!! clawed at Gunmar’s remaining eye in hopes of blinding him for good, while Blinky slithered his tentacles into new formations, grabbing hold of individual quills and pulling Gunmar backward.
Jack looked at me through his goggles and held up a fist. I nodded and withdrew my swords, and with the screams of the crowd as our battle hymn, we charged. Gunmar’s lowest arm lashed out as if it had eyes of its own, and though Jack ducked beneath it, I was not as quick and had to meet it with Claireblade. The top half of a yellowed claw, as big as a skateboard, was severed and embedded in the field. The damaged red hand curled its fingers into a fist and hurled itself at me like a boulder. I dodged to the left and swung downward with Cat #6, cutting the thumb all the way to the bone.
The fingers went rigid, striking me hard enough to knock the wind out of me. I landed spread-eagle upon the turf, and as I gasped for air I saw Jack rise to a crouch directly beneath Gunmar. Dodging the troll’s shambling legs, he unsheathed Doctor X and held it with both fists below Gunmar’s stomach. My heartbeat quickened. If Jack’s aim was true, it could be an injury that changed everything.
Everything did change, but not for the better.
Jack drove his blade into the right side of Gunmar’s gut and then dragged it left, opening a huge gash. Gunmar howled and twisted with such force that both ARRRGH!!! and Blinky were thrown aside. A hard spray of scarlet blood and yellow liquid blasted Jack, but that was expected, and he wiped it from his goggles with the back of his glove.
What was not expected were the dozens—no, hundreds—of tiny trolls that fell from the opened cavity. The first few thumped off Jack’s helmet, wiggling and mewling, and Jack just stood there, shocked stupid. But as they continued to pour, Jack backed away, picking the parasites off his armor and flinging them to the ground in disgust. In seconds, the little trolls were everywhere, writhing in the grass, blinking tiny new eyes at the strange world around them.
“The rest of the Gumm-Gumms,” Jack rasped. “This is where they were hiding!”
I looked down at a trio orienting themselves at my feet. Each was the size of a baseball and an exact copy of Gunmar: glistening red body, six little arms, a cape of quills flexing experimentally along its back. Worse, each of the beasties appeared to grow larger with each breath, as if the smell of so much human meat were enough to fortify their young bodies.
Gunmar shook his torso so that a few more babies fell to the field, and he grinned down like a proud papa. Perhaps that was what he’d been learning those forty-five years in the dark: how to replicate himself and safely carry an army of voracious carnivores into the human world. Emptied, he roared and leapt back into battle with ARRRGH!!!, Blinky, and a very dazed Jack Sturges.
Pain blazed up my leg. One of the baby Gunmars had bitten through my shoe, right into my toe, and I kicked my leg to dislodge it. But the tiny troll held fast, its arms flapping as if enjoying the ride. At last I stomped my foot back onto the forty-yard line, took up Claireblade, and drove it downward. The little red creature dodged right and the point embedded in the turf. I tried again, and this time it dodged left. Finally I reared back and booted it. The onside kick went bouncing across the grass, while blood from my bitten toe began soaking the leather of my shoe.
I scanned the football field and saw hundreds of these fiends, stretching their toothy mouths in newborn yawns and shaking off mucus as a dog shakes off the rain. They were teetering toward the bleachers, learning to walk on their way to their first meal. Several kids rescued from Gunmar’s lair were doing their part, stomping these babies to death with their shoes—a courageous effort, though not nearly enough. Even if we had twice the trollhunters, we were outnumbered. Despair overwhelmed me and I looked to the sidelines for some sort of help.
Instead I saw Professor Lempke near the end zone, breathless from having just run from the museum. The fastidious fellow had become an agglomeration of sores. His face and arms were an irritated pink crusted over with dried pus. Like a toddler at a birthday party, he jumped up and down, giggling and clapping his hands. With each clap, wet strings of sickness extended between palms. The entire brutal scenario of battle had him overjoyed, but what held his particular attention at that moment was the kid he hated most in the world: Tobias “Tubby” D.
Tub stood in front of his baffled grandma, fending off the Eye of Malevolence with Dr. Papadopoulos’s soon-to-be-award-winning tools. The Eye swung its stem and knocked the instruments from Tub’s hands as rapidly as he could extract them from his fanny pack. Tub might have been a goner if Grandma hadn’t stepped up and clobbered the eye with what looked like the heaviest purse in human history. The Eye rolled about as if drunk before crashing into a stack of home-team water bottles.
Tub took his grandma by the hand and ran toward the bleachers. The Steve Smackers had allowed the crowd to fend off the Gumm-Gumms for a laudable amount of time, but it couldn’t last, and Tub had proven that night to be a formidable fighter.
But he did not enter the fray. Instead he kept running, hand-in-hand with Grandma, around the side of the grandstand until they disappeared from sight. My energy halved. Now I, too, knew how it felt to be left behind. I directed my despairing eyes past the countless baby trolls and their snapping young jaws and over to the mammoth beast that was casually tossing aside Jack and Blinky to focus upon ARRRGH!!!. Tub was not a genuine trollhunter—I tried to remind myself of this hard and true fact—and yet his abandonment felt as monumental as if one of us had fallen.
Seconds later, a familiar freckled face popped up in the scorekeeper’s booth, followed by an elderly woman with magenta hair who looked like she was in the midst of a record-breaking streak of complaints. Gone were the headphone-wearing announcers and tech staff. This left Tub to pore over some sort of control panel, waving his finger above what I imagined were a thousand confusing buttons. Then, in a moment of divine inspiration, he discovered a huge, perspiring cup of soda on the counter and held it above the electronics. He looked up and I swear he caught my eye. His braces glinted in a wicked smile before he poured the soda onto the control system for which the school had paid so much money.
The jumbotron went wild. I squinted as the screen flared to dazzling life, cascading the stadium with light as it shuttled through a lunatic montage of cartoon animations—kicked field goals and gyrating mascots and a series of inane chants—D-FENSE! GO, BATTLE BEASTS, GO! MAKE SOME NOOOISE! As soda infiltrated the deepest layers of internal wiring, pixels scattered and the words and images fizzled to give way to a single element:
Fuzzy, flickering, beautiful static.
Every Gumm-Gumm in the bleachers stopped what they were doing and turned to face the largest TV they’d ever seen. Their misshapen jaws went slack and drool began to drop. Gunmar, unaffected by the static, roared his disapproval, but his minions could not hear. They leaned toward the screen, intoxicated. The humans remained curled into frightened balls, unwilling to make a move. It was Sergeant Gulager, of course, who led the way, stepping up to the nearest troll, waving his gun in front of the glassy, unresponsive eyes, and then, at his leisure, firing a bullet right through the softies.
The crowd woke up, began to cheer themselves on, and then, in short order, overwhelmed the hypnotized Gumm-Gumms, pouring over the trolls like ants and pinning their comatose bodies to the bleachers. Tub moved like a maestro in the sound booth, drizzling a little more soda here and dumping a lot more there to keep the static at its most lush and frisky. At some point he tripped the audio, and the warble of a dozen different radio stations blared from the speakers in total sonic confusion. I could see Tub fiddling with knobs, but matters were far out of his control.
“Jim! Wake up!”
It was Jack, hollering at such volume that his voice broke into adolescent splinters. He had removed his mask and his pale, sweaty face showed none of the relief I felt. Behind him I saw why: Blinky was rolling around on the turf, whimpering in a register of pain I’d never before heard, a half-dozen destroyed tentacles spewing thick violet liquid. ARRRGH!!!, meanwhile, was backed into a light pole, her hackles raised in bedraggled defense, her black fur shining with blood.
With a blasting laugh, Gunmar used all six arms to lift ARRRGH!!! high over his head. The lights atop the pole released glass shards that stabbed into the flesh of both trolls. ARRRGH!!! wrenched about but was as helpless as I’d ever seen her. Gunmar reared back and threw her huge body twenty yards through the air, a missile of horns and teeth and fur, and into the end zone, where she collided with the goal posts at such speed that they crumpled into tangles of steel. Several feet of dirt and turf billowed upward from the impact.
There was no movement from the fallen trollhunter.
Dirt and grass eddied in the air of the end zone.
“NO!!!” Jack shrieked.
Gunmar’s single eye jerked about like a lizard held by the tail.
“YESSSSSS…COME TO ME, SSSSSSTURGESSSSSS.…”
Jack bawled and ran at Gunmar, looking like a little boy handling a couple of toy swords. I wanted to follow, to be the trollhunter Jack believed that I could be, but my fighter’s heart flagged upon seeing the hundreds of baby Gunmars continuing th
eir march, as impervious to the jumbotron static as their daddy was. Their confidence, and size, grew as they closed in on all those yummy tubes of fresh meat packed into shirts, pants, jackets, and hats. Their numbers were irrefutable and they would devour the townspeople as would a plague of locusts.
The decision tore me in half. Help these innocent people about to be eaten? Or come to the aid of Uncle Jack, the closest thing I had to family?
Or so I believed before I heard a familiar noise.
It came from the opposite end zone, a rumble that I felt in my ribs before hearing it with my ears. The pitch rose in intensity until it became the drone of a thousand bees. In the tumult of the moment, the denizens of Harry G. Bleeker Memorial Field seemed not to notice, but I knew that telltale tremor. I had felt it in parks and gardens all across San Bernardino, as well as in the front yard of my own house, where the various pieces of the machine were cleaned, sharpened, and tested upon our poor, over-trimmed lawn.
Dad rode onto the field of play on his golden industrial mower, the oversize back tires powering the eight-wheeled mowing deck, so wide that it took up nearly one-fourth the width of the field in a single swath. All of the dull technical details that he’d pounded into me now became the vital statistics of survival. The seven-gauge steel. The sixteen-inch discharge chute. The six-inch-deep cut. Dad came tearing up the sideline suited differently than his brother Jack but in armor all the same: hair net, allergy mask, goggles, work gloves, steel-toed safety boots, and grass-stained work shirt—Excalibur Calculator Pocket firmly inserted and both sleeves, if you can believe it, buttoned.
For a second I thought the invasion had driven my father over the brink, and that it was a mark of his madness that he’d chosen this moment to give the field a trim. Then I heard the yelp of the first baby Gunmar as it was sucked beneath the mower, the whir of blades as its diced corpse went flying from the chute. A half-dozen more of the beasts stopped their crawling and stared at the oncoming death machine, immobilized by a strange new sensation called fear. The feeling was brief. They went in as hungry carnivores and came out as pulp.