Trollhunters (34 page)

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 their 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.

“Dad!” I screamed. “Go, Dad!”

He gave me the briefest of nods before gripping the wheel to jag the mower leftward to catch a couple little Gunmars who’d made it all the way to the sidelines. Seconds later they were
applesauce. The mower hurtled at a speed Dad had never before allowed himself, zooming down the sideline like a kick returner seeing nothing but green, and I realized in a lightheaded flash that he
would get them, all of them, that the baby trolls’ conquering instincts were no match for a man with an awesome lawn mower who knew how to use it.