“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.
Gunmar shrieked, several of his hands clutching at his own body as if he felt each individual death. He lowered his head and bellowed. Windows in the snack bar and sound booth exploded; I caught a glimpse of Tub shielding his grandma from glass. Memories of that fateful day in 1969 came back to Dad in a burst, and for a moment the mower’s trajectory began to list. Then the radio stations fighting for precedence through the loudspeakers gave way to a single oldies station, and as cosmic luck would have it, it was a song familiar to every Sturges on the field that night.
“I stood on this corner, / Waiting for you to come along, / So my heart could feel satisfi-i-i-ied.…”
The voices were distorted and pierced with bullets of static, but it was Don and Juan, all right, and Dad took their voices to be the song of the gods, bestowing upon him a second chance to be the man he’d always wanted, and so he bore down, hunching over the wheel and gripping it even harder with those gardening gloves. The mower straightened and the green grass turned a putty color with the mulch of massacre.
I rushed through the slippery pools of mashed troll until I arrived at Jack’s side. My shoulder struck his; he looked over and I saw in his eyes the wild look of a kid ready to accept the most dangerous of dares. Blinky was struggling to his feet to our right, but the three of us still looked pretty wretched when compared to Gunmar, who stood shivering above us as if sobbing over the destruction of his infernal litter.
“This may go badly,” Jack said.
“I know.”
“But you did good. I want you to know that.”
“Thanks.”
“Jimbo, too—your dad. If you make it and I don’t, tell him I said that.”
“I will.”
Jack grabbed my neck, the most affectionate of touches he’d ever given.
“How about we make this son of a bitch think twice about messing with a Sturges?”
With that, Jack whooped with a warrior’s mirth and came at Gunmar with both blades whirling. Blinky heard the signal and charged, dragging his dead tentacles behind. The conscious calculations of every fighting technique I’d learned faded away. I could feel all over my skin the prickle of pure instinct, and I dove under the towering figure, rolling beneath knuckles the size of medicine balls, springing to my feet to slice at one of his heels. The tendon snapped like a rubber band and he stamped in such fury that the twenty-yard line cratered into a car-sized hole. Blinky knotted his tentacles around Gunmar’s lowest arms, while Jack used his cutlass to climb up a leg, driving Victor Power to the hilt into Gunmar’s knee.
It was the paragon of coordinated attacks, one we could be proud of when we met together in the soldiers’ heaven of Valhalla. With a single twist of his body, the three of us were tossed aside like bugs. Back we came, limping and bruised, and again we were dispelled, this time sporting an assortment of sprains and cuts. My lungs hurt inside of ribs that I thought might be broken, and when I rose a third time my knee gave way. I fell with my chin in the turf, leaking furious tears, looking on as Jack was backhanded to the ground. Pints of steaming saliva poured over him from Gunmar’s jaws.
My bleary eyes landed on the RoJu set, familiar to me from a glorious alternate life where I’d been poised to receive the applause of the whole town and even get the girl. I gazed at it for a delicious moment, longing for the comfort of the fake stones and artificial drawbridge.
That was where I found Claire Fontaine cradling one of the prop swords in her hands as if it were speaking to her. She turned it right, then left; she brought it up, then down; she began to make circles with it in the air, then figure eights, then patterns too complicated for me to follow. Faster and faster the sword went, and behind the blur of the blade I saw her mouth curl into a smile of sorts, as if she’d realized the purpose of her life at the exact second that it was about to end.
To the disbelief of anyone who saw it, she ran across the field, sliding through troll guts and dodging Dad’s mower, and reared the prop sword like a javelin. She threw it, holding the release pose like someone who’d done it a thousand times rather than once. The sword flew through the air with a whistle and embedded itself in the center of Gunmar’s open mouth.
Gunmar gagged and the waterfall of saliva falling upon Jack went black with blood. Gunmar reeled in a crazy circle, clutching for the sword but having trouble fitting his considerable claws inside of his mouth. Jack dragged himself away, slopping the spit and blood off of his face, and when he saw Claire jogging up to us, he took hold of Doctor X and threw it at her, end over end.
I yelled for her to duck—Jack had confused her for an attacking troll! But instead, she plucked the sword out of the air and used its own momentum to pull it back with an ornamental flourish. She stared at us with wide eyes, panting in exhilaration. Jack was grinning, his teeth white beneath the dark smear of his gore-splashed face. Even Blinky paused to braid a few tentacles in exultation.
“Trollhunter,” Jack said.
“Trollhunter!” Blinky cried.
“Claire?” I asked.
She blinked her eyes at me, bewildered but electrified.
“Hello, Mr. Sturges.”
In that moment it all made sense. Claire came from the Scottish Highlands, a hotbed of trolls and trollhunters alike. Her birthday was exactly a year from my own. Her skill with the blade, evidenced upon the theater stage, couldn’t have been the result of a few paid lessons. Her trollhunter blood was true and she’d been drawn to San Bernardino via the same subtle pullings of destiny that had brought me here. It was only because she had become so adept at hiding her dual selves, one side from her parents, one side from her friends, that the trollhunters had failed to detect her paladin nature—and that she had failed to recognize it herself.
Claire knocked the mud from her boots with the sword.
It was the behavior of a girl born to fight.
There came a deafening cough, and the prop sword impaled itself into the twenty-yard line.
Gunmar lorded above us, blood streaming from between his teeth and down a torso that, emptied of babies, flapped with loose flesh. He’d lost control and was flailing about, stamping his feet like an infant, flogging himself front and back with his double-jointed arms, quills extending and flattening with the sound of a hundred falling guillotines. He spread his limbs and swooped down at us, big as a fireworks finale.
Trollhunters are born for this, and to do what you are born for feels like nothing else in the world. Each twirl and slide we made provided the survival buffer of a few essential inches. Every second was both dodge and attack, thrust and parry, and sustained by planning three moves ahead. You couldn’t call the noise from the bleachers cheers, but the hoarse cries were encouragement nonetheless. And you couldn’t call what Dad was doing a victory parade, though he circled in tighter and tighter coils, his golden machine gobbling up every last mini-troll. All of it helped: we fought, our eyes slit, teeth bared, muscles aching, bones singing with the war song of the blade.
Claire was the best of us. Even Jack paused to gape at her fearless climb up Gunmar’s vertebrae and how she dug Doctor X into Gunmar’s armpit and clavicle, trying for the elusive softies that hid beneath protective plating. We were piranha, nipping at his extremities, and he was caught in an extended state of preparing to ruin us, always lifting his arms for the fatal blow, always backpedaling to get the momentum he’d need to stomp us for good. We had him at the goal line; there was little farther to go. Beyond
the goal was a tall chain-link fence and a ravine, but this fight wouldn’t get that far and we knew it.
A swipe of a middle arm caught a tangle of Blinky’s tentacles. He was lifted from the ground and sent like a bowling ball into the opposing team’s vacant bench. In the same instant, Gunmar’s wooden arm, slotted with the fresh kill mark, swung through the air like a massive golf club and shot Jack ten feet away, where he hit the turf and curled into an injured ball. I grimaced and stood firm. It was left to me, on the ground, and Claire, holding onto his back.
Gunmar slapped blindly at Claire and squatted so as to catch me between clawed hands. The flap in his gut that Jack had sliced open dropped to my level and on instinct I clambered into it. Gunmar squealed and began pawing at the invader inside his body. The world around me went black and Gunmar’s interior organs assaulted my head and shoulders as they jounced in their nets of entrails. A sliver of light entered the body cavity as Gunmar stood and I saw it, the gallbladder, the same as any troll’s except larger: an orange thing of leafy texture, the size of a basketball.
I’d had more than enough of threatening basketballs.
I took the gallbladder with both hands but was seconds too late. Gunmar plucked me from his insides like a tapeworm and flung me to the ground as if I weighed no more than Jim Sturges Jr. 2: The Decoy. I laid there beneath the towering monster, unable to move, almost unable to see Claire struggling across Gunmar’s shoulder, mere feet from the vulnerable softies. I tried to shout encouragement but I was out of sounds. She looked so small up there, but so sure of herself, too, and when she stood on her feet, balanced on the shoulder of the worst of all living things, her front hand holding the sabre, her back hand outstretched for balance, that was the real moment I fell in love.
It was easy to forget how Gunmar’s spine could retract at will. He compacted himself down to half his height and Claire stumbled, dropping Doctor X and sliding through the quills before landing hard on her knees in the end zone. She grabbed them in pain. Gritting her teeth, she looked from between Gunmar’s legs and found me staring back, and though both of us were unable to move, we held each other’s gaze in case each of us was the last thing the other saw.
Dad’s mower stopped in the distance with a defeated cough.
Gunmar the Black had waited forty-five years, but here it was at last: the final demolishing of the trollhunters, no more difficult than a little kid’s squashing worms on the playground. Afterward, he and his kind would infest the surface of the earth, gorging themselves on the meat of man and growing fat and surly in the way of the Old World. He lifted a foot over the nearest trollhunter—me—aiming so that when my runny guts squirted out they would bleed into those of the hundreds of his slaughtered offspring.
The foot never fell.
Leaping from the cratered pit of the end zone, ARRRGH!!! wrapped her arms around Gunmar’s neck. A crooked segment of goal post had been driven into her skull and branched out like strange yellow antlers fighting for space alongside her horns. Instantly Gunmar shot upward to his full height; ARRRGH!!! did not let go. Gunmar shook his torso with all of his might; ARRRGH!!! did not let go. Gunmar beat backward with fists connected to hellishly jointed arms; ARRRGH!!! did not let go. Gunmar extended his quills and I saw a dozen of them sink into black fur and emerge bloody from the other side of ARRRGH!!!’s body. Still, stabbed through a dozen times, she did not let go.
Gunmar thrashed like a hog on the killing floor and lifted two fists over his shoulders to grab ARRRGH!!! by the head. But something was different. Gunmar sensed it and a quick exploration with his fingers revealed that the boulder, the one he’d implanted in his rival’s skull decades before, had been knocked free by the fragment of goal post. Before he could register what this meant, ARRRGH!!! removed her right arm from around Gunmar’s neck and in that fist was clutched the boulder, that forty-five-year-old symbol of good luck.
Her voice had reclaimed a tone that was intelligent and true.
“My name is Johannah M. ARRRGH!!!,” she said, “and I told you I’d get you.”
The boulder soared downward and cracked Gunmar’s cranium in half. The noise was like the rending of the planet, and it felt like that, too, when he collapsed to both knees. ARRRGH!!!’s grip weakened, the boulder dropped into the grass, and her lacerated body slipped from the quills. She crumpled to the turf, a limp pile of blood-soaked fur.
Gunmar’s body swayed and his six arms tried to push his skull back together to cover the exposed brain. His manifold hands, though, became confused and tussled with one another before giving up. Then the mighty lord of the Gumm-Gumms, the Hungry One, He Who Sups of Blood, the Untangler of Entrails, Gunmar the Black wavered in place for a long moment before dropping to his back with all the ceremony of a chopped tree.
Jack left it to me to do what decades before he’d failed to do: deliver the killing blow.
Claire helped me over to the still convulsing body, and Blinky boosted me onto a thigh. Once there I found it simple enough to traverse the landscape: the tarn of blood gathered at midsection, the ravaged gut, the hills and valleys of the ribcage. I took a seat on the boiling red skin over his heart and felt myself lifted up and down with each uneven hiccup of his pulse.
Weariness, not victory or relief, engulfed me. I placed the tip of Claireblade over the throbbing patch of skin and felt a newfound sympathy for Jack. Defeated, the troll beneath me felt not as evil as he did obsessed, led by an inescapable hunger that consumed his every atom. I listened to the reedy breaths struggling up his throat and watched the shredded tongue loll from the corner of his mouth. His single eye stared upward into the night sky, while the Eye of Malevolence nuzzled the empty socket.
I blinked my heavy eyes at the crowd of people. They were quiet aside from the sounds of seventeen tearful reunions. There were no pictures being taken: as I’d learn later, all of the electronics in a three-block radius were fried the instant Gunmar went down. Most of the faces I didn’t know, but all of them seemed certain of one thing: this monster that had taken their children must be destroyed. The task felt beyond my capabilities and I looked elsewhere for help. I found Ms. Pinkton, who was shaking her head as if apologizing for even considering giving me less than 88 percent. I found Sergeant Gulager, too, his rumpled hairpiece and thick mustache splattered with softie effluvium. He gave me the smallest of nods.
Jack and Claire leaned on their swords and waited. I spotted Tub, returning to the sidelines with his arm around his grandma’s shoulders, and the look he gave me was absent of judgment: this was the burden of being asked to lead. Only Blinky paid my decision no mind. He sat with his tentacles wrapped around ARRRGH!!!, whispering into the fur the kind of complicated, arcane ceremonial recitations known only to brilliant scholars sending off great warriors into the next realm of unknowable adventure.
I remembered what Jack had asked me once.
It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it? To be dragged under?
It took only a few slices to carve out Gunmar’s heart; the leathery, tubed organ skipped around in an attempt to dodge my blade. After that was done, I broke through the crustaceous skin of the softies and turned them to gelatin. Then I ducked into the stomach cavity and removed the gallbladder, tossing it to the turf for later burning.
Surviving Gumm-Gumms watched from the bleachers, their spell of slavery broken, watching their once-master’s vivisection as if uncertain about how they’d arrived in this peculiar place overrun with humans. They rolled horned heads and fluttered bony wings, decidedly uncomfortable as they looked around for the nearest bridge.
I slid off Gunmar’s hip and was caught by Claire and Jack. Dad was there, too, and brought me in to his chest. His shirt smelled like grass, like home, and when I smiled I felt the stiff edges of that stupid old calculator pocket. No, not stupid. Brilliant. He’d worn that thing for thirty years and it had yet to show a single indication of wear or tear. That pocket was a work of genius.
I looked up at Dad, thinking I might apo
logize, but was rendered speechless. The stress lines of his forehead had shallowed and the worry lines of his cheeks were all but gone. His smile seemed to open parts of him that had long been locked, just as I knew the steel shutters and locked doors would open for good once we returned home. He patted me on the face, the odd gesture of one unaccustomed to tenderness, and so I patted his cheek in return. The last scabs of the schmoof were gone.
“Nice mowing,” I managed.
He took off his glasses to wipe his face. He noticed the dangling Band-Aid and threw the whole thing onto the turf.
“I’ve had lots of practice.”
With our arms around each other’s shoulders, we hobbled across the field toward Blinky, whose tentacles were smoothing each blood-snarled whorl of black fur. Tub was already there, sprawled across the hide of his dead friend, his face buried in her masses of hair, one hand dangling over the goal-post antlers.
Blinky’s voice was hoarse with emotion.
“An entire volume of my history shall be devoted to this warrior. No, no—such rudimentary canonization would be insufficient. Her memorial shall be a comprehensive history all of her own. Yes, a biographical work of dedicatory power so encyclopedic in its recountings of heroism that even the dimmest of illiterates will believe they might reach out and stroke luck from her boulder. My measly life has but another several hundred years left before it ends. Yet I cannot imagine a better way to run out my golden years.”
Jack put his hand on the nearest tentacle.
“We need to get her underground,” Jack said. “Before the sun—”
“No.”
The refusal was muffled because it came from a mouth lost in folds of fur. Tub raised his head to reveal a face ruddy with tears. He shook his head with such determination that his bouffant rocked like a bush in high wind. He stood, his ninja-wear smeared with Gumm-Gumm slime, his lime-green fanny pack empty of Papadopoulos’s savage inventions, yet with a confidence that looked good on a kid who just a week before was giving up daily fivers. He spoke softly into Blinky’s ear—or his best guess of where one might be located.