Trollhunters (33 page)

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 absolute. 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.

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.