To break himself out of the depression that threatened to demolish his morale, and to close a gap in his skill set, Alexander decided that he was going to try his hand at smithing metal.
His spear blade, a Bowie knife of dubious quality, had broken and he had been taught by a massive panther why having some kind of big, long-reaching, melee weapon was a fine idea. He could just walk over to the hardware place and grab a new one, not an issue. This was Maine, you found knives in most gas stations, even if you should never, ever buy them. However, to his thinking, the last representative of humanity should learn forge work and carry an instrument of civilization to beat back the horde.
First though, there was another project that demanded his attention: the goblins had magic.
He hadn’t forgotten the blue hexagonal barrier that the goblin shaman or witch, or whatever the fuck it was had raised. A shield that soaked up two direct hits of high caliber lead moving at about three thousand feet per second. Energy had welled up from around the hobgoblin female and formed the barrier in half a second, from thin air. Which, you know, was bullshit.
So, what he was going to do was to go find the corpse of that shaman and see if he could figure out how in the hell it had made that hard light. His reasoning was simple: If there was a way for some piece of wood and feathers to come together in ways he deemed impossible bullshit to make a shield, there might be a way to use it to make something that would break similar shields.
He was making that up, he had no idea what the rules were, but it was worth looking at. If he could unravel the secret, perhaps he could figure out what caused the Pulse. Or, perhaps, even figure out how to undo it. Above even destroying whatever had caused the happening, finding a way to undo it was a worthy life’s pursuit.
With that in mind, the youth left his refuge and, with utmost caution, returned to the scene where he’d sniped the leaders of the goblin war-band. He found them, just where he’d left them. Unlooted, uneaten, untouched. He set down the bucket of water he’d been carrying, one of a couple of additions to the regular rifle hanging from his body by its sling, and a few items for inspecting the corpses.
Curious. Buzzards should have been all over this. Three days left in the open and not so much as a pecked eye? Foxes, coyotes, ravens, buzzards, all kinds of things should have been interested in this sort of meal, but nothing had disturbed the bodies.
Why? Was it because these things didn’t belong to this world? Were they poisonous? Gods above, below, and in between, was Alexander tired of not knowing anything.
It seemed morbid, but the first thing he needed to do was to investigate the corpses. The last ones had caught him while he was crazy, he’d burned most of them and impaled the two leaders. This time, he was going to open the bodies up and see what made them tick. For one thing, he’d have a better idea if there were better ways to kill them. What he was doing now was working, but there might be ways to do better. Like that moronic remake of War of the Worlds, what if they were poisoned by water or something dumb?
He put one hand on the female hobgoblin’s shoulder and used an exact o-knife to cut away the crude leather coverings. Those got a brief inspection before being discarded as trash, too crude to be anything useful, badly processed leather that stank already.
Onto the corpse. He cleaned the hobgoblin exactly like you would clean a deer, like he’d cleaned the wolves. What he found inside was notable for its familiarity. Muscles, organs, congealed blood, which he had to rinse off the various innards to really be able to examine them, and not much else. Other than that blood being slightly off color, more brownish than human blood, all seemed sort of normal.
The hobgoblin shaman, or whatever, had died to a hit to the heart that had torn right through the organ, destroying the ventricle and the aorta behind it. The internal bleeding and massive shock had dropped the creature, just like it would have a regular human or animal. Nothing magical about that.
Or so he thought. Hands covered in gore to the elbow found, behind the ruins of the heart, the first clue to fuckery being about: a gem, no bigger across than a quarter, a perfect little octahedron sitting behind the heart, inside a fibrous sack that looked like it was made of networks of fine wire mesh attaching to the spinal cord. When he cut open the peri-core-dium, a joke there for all the medical nerds, the little crystal reminded him of amber, but cut with a jeweler’s attention for capturing light with its facets.
That right there, was not normal. No sir, Alexander told himself with certainty, bouncing the tiny thing in his palm, freshly rinsed in the bucket to see what he had.
His shot had been just off center, had missed the…whatever it was. He wondered how hard it was. Would a gunshot destroy the crystal and kill the creature instantly? Was it a vestigial organ, a calcified or mineralized something that lacked function? No way to tell, not without further testing. Destructive testing would have to wait until he’d found more of them, it wouldn’t do to start by breaking something that may be a rare feature of the monsters.
He hadn’t found anything like it in the wolves, but, then, he hadn’t been looking for it either. He’d dragged the organs out pretty much without looking at them, having no interest in eating heart of the canines. What if they’d also had these gems, what if this were proof that the creatures were alien or, somehow, extra-planar?
Too many questions, on with the dissection!
Twenty minutes later, he sat back on his legs, stretching them out in front of himself, ignoring the wet ground beneath the water-resistant material of the hunting pants. Leaning on his filthy palms, Alexander had to admit that, to all appearances, the creatures were humanoid. Everything in the same general position. They died from gunshot trauma just as near as he could tell. Even the one that he’d crippled, that one must have succumbed not long after he’d fled, its liver was chunks, in addition to the shattered spine just above its pelvis.
Before him, in a tidy row, sat four little amber colored gems. A jeweler would have marveled over their clarity, the precision of their polish, the perfection of the angles of the facets. Alexander wasn’t a jeweler, so he didn’t appreciate the fine details. So far as he could tell, these little doodads were the answer to how the shaman had made magic. The staff was nothing, softwood with feathers, animal bones, a few fox skulls and whatnot lashed to it with leather thongs. But then, why had the female creature raised the staff to summon the barrier? Who knew? Alexander had given the instrument a good looking over, holding it in his hands, and he couldn’t figure out any reason why the monster had needed it. He didn’t break the thing though, there might be secrets yet to ferret out.
Of the big club wielding Hobgoblin, Alexander could determine nothing except that the critter was ripped. Shredded. A rabbit lean, corded muscle, physique that would easily have pounded him to mud with that club. Where the goblins were scrawny and half-starved looking, the Hob was strong. Probably why it was in charge over its smaller brethren, a simple hierarchy of might. Which sort of begged the question, why were there little goblins at all? Unless they all started the size of goblins and some grew much, much larger, for reasons that he didn’t understand. A form of adolescence or multi-phase life cycle, or something like that.
Images of Uruk-hai tearing free of membranous wombs from which they were birthed flitted through his mind. Something like that might be possible.
What part did the gems buried inside the creatures play? He did not know. However, he’d spent as much time with the bodies as was reasonable and he had some forging to do to make sure he could modify stock into simple shapes. The world had ended, it might prove necessary to be able to use bulk supply materials and scavenged metal to construct things.
Back to the Laboratory!
Based on the manuals he had available, he spent the rest of the day on a simple charcoal forge, using a hacksaw, an old gas drum, and some metal shears to shape the main part of the forge. Then he decided to go with a system using a bicycle powered fan to act as a blower, the wheel of the bicycle connected with a belt and pulley pulled out of a lawnmower to operate the fan with a fair degree of power. He could sit and pedal with his legs to operate the large fan blades, which blew air into a smaller eight-inch square vent below where the charcoal lay, drafting heavily into the coal bed.
Alexander did not know what a bellows was and thus made his life harder.
Blissful in his ignorance, he poured a small pile of charcoal into the forge and lit it.
Legs pumping furiously, he soon had an intensely burning coal bed, one that turned the broken knife of his ruined spear red hot within a few minutes. Success!
The proof of concept was nice, a simple forge was operant, now, he just had to, somehow, find an anvil, hammer, tongs, a punch, and those other items that would permit him to make simple implements, or to modify things he could scavenge from the hardware stores to fit his needs.
“No galvanized shit, Alexander, you’ll burn your lungs up.” He reminded himself.
Galvanized metals released toxic gas when they got hot, his dad had warned him about it.
That memory made him sad for a moment, before he went back out to find smithing equipment. None of it was to be located in the hardware stores, blacksmithing was, apparently, too niche a consumer base. The antique store, trader’s mall, odd’n’ends shop, more a warehouse with a paint-job than an actual place of business, had what he was looking for. There, a big old steel anvil, a whole peg board full of hammers and tools, in variety that boggled his mind, and all the little goodies that a competent blacksmith might need. Except that he wasn’t competent. He wasn’t anything.
“How the fuck do I move you?” Alexander asked the anvil, which had to weigh at least three hundred pounds, with its big, curved horn, the punch dyes, and other features of its shaping that had to serve some kind of purpose that he didn’t understand yet.
Several minutes passed while he eyeballed the mass of metal, kicking his booted feet on the concrete before the light of brilliance shone down on him.
“It’s a concrete floor in a big tin roofed warehouse, doofus, you just bring the forge here!” He chastised.
There was, like no fire hazard in this place, he could use the flea market like a workshop.
So, after dragging his forge set up onto a pallet dolly and hauling it over without much effort, he poured charcoal, lit the mass of blackened softwood chunks, and got to pedaling.
While the coals burned down to a yellow-white mass, he read up on knife making. Bar stock? Check. Charcoal forge? Check. Hammer, tongs, and anvil? Check check check. By the time the coals were ready to heat steel he was reasonably certain he had what he needed. Time to make himself a nice big knife.
Sunset fell on an exhausted young man, forearms throbbing with the effort of holding a five-pound hammer and tongs with a two feet length of inch thick bar stock for hours. The result of his labors was…not fantastic. The stock had been drawn out substantially, wasn’t even close to straight, and had a profile that make him think that maybe he was going to have a future in making super low tooth count saw blades.
“It’s shit, Alexander,” He confessed to himself, “It’s actual shit. It makes what I throw in my saltpeter bed look less like shit in comparison.”
Can’t win them all, he supposed. With that failure sitting heavy in his heart, he went to the haven of his laboratory and went to bed.
Day two of his efforts went a little better. For one, he found a diagram for a straightening jig that he could make to put on the big vises he discovered he needed to have on hand yesterday. Holding the piece with tongs, all day, was exhausting.
The ruined bar stock from the previous effort he used to practice shaping the metal, to use a neat little metal wedge to pound a primary bevel onto the stock, rather than trying to eyeball it. He punched a few holes, to make sure he could make places to rivet a handle, pommel, and guard into place. He tried, not so successfully, to draw the stock out even more, while keeping it relatively straight and unbent. Lastly, he beat and folded steel, working it into layers, practicing that oft warned difficult art of forge welding. Heat, wire brush the scale clear, fold, and hammer, fast and hard strokes to force the metal together while it was still hot, trying to avoid scale inclusion or cold shuts.
He took lunch when his coals burned down too far to put a good heat on the stock and left everything laying, walking out with only his rifle, wearing only a light t-shirt, because working the forge was hot and the sting of metal sparks short lived compared to roasting himself over the flame and heated metal.
His ears still rang with the sharp, high pings of metal on metal, hammer strikes that echoed off of the high roofed warehouse ceiling. The mangled bar stock he’d worked was not now, or ever would be, anything useful. That didn’t stop him from being grateful to it though, he’d learned a great many things regarding the shaping of metal from that piece. The next one would be a knife, he was certain.
When he opened the door, there was a massive goblin, too big to be even a Hobgoblin standing in the middle of main street, just a stone’s throw away. It was all of ten feel tall. Where the big male Hob had carried a dense wooden club with bone spikes set into it, this one carried something like the badly forged attempt at a knife he’d made earlier that day. It had been headed toward him; no doubt attracted by the hammering. It’s yellow, blood shot eyes locked with his. The weapon lifted high over the beast’s head, and it roared at him, shark toothed maw opened wide with the booming howl shaking him to his core.
Alexander ran.
Back through the door he’d come through he ran, fleeing at top speed, he sprinted through the warehouse.
A crashing bang, and he turned his head to see the ruined metal door, cloven like thin tin, kicked from its hinges by the awful strength of the Ogre in a loin cloth. A not big enough loin cloth.
“Intrusive thoughts, Alexander, run your ass off!” He yelled.
Skirting stalls in the large, relatively open space of the picker’s market, he fled, the crash of obstacles being obliterated behind him telling him he wasn’t really gaining much ground.
He came to a side access, and jerked it open, running parallel to the wall, boots crunching too loud in his ears on pavement. His heart hammered.
Alexander thumbed the safety off the rifle, turned, knelt in a crouching ready, lifting the rifle scope to his eye and saw the thick, blunt metal of the Ogre’s sword/axe, thing, punch through the door he’d kicked shut behind him.
Another stab easily ripped a jagged hole through the metal. When the blade was withdrawn, large, scarred hands reached through the holes, gripping the door, and ripping it, and the frame, out of the wall, two by four boards screeching and cracking in protest as they were demolished.
The Ogre stepped out into the fading daylight and Alexander Gerifalte shot it in the knee, the two hundred grain slug blasting the front of the joint, rusty blood spattering the sides of the building.
The monster howled again, this time in pain, its hands going to the limb, massive cleaver dropped. It didn’t fall.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Alexander worked the bolt and shot it in the neck, cursing, he’d been sighted on its collar bone, aiming for the head, but his scope was still zeroed at two hundred yards and this monster was less than fifty away, his windage was off. A great hand slapped at the wound like he would slap at a mosquito bite. Fuck.
Rearing up, the Ogre reached down and grabbed the sword-thing with surprising agility and threw it at him about the time he squeezed off a round into its upper thorax.
Death flew at him faster than a diving hawk, whirling metal humming loud in the cold air.
He flopped down to the ground, rifle jammed up in his chest painfully and heard the sword pass overhead, heard it clanging across pavement. The youth rolled, freeing the gun from under him and pulled it up, readying prone, knowing that the adversary would be coming. Instinct told him the Ogre wasn’t crippled, slowed, maybe, but it wanted to chew his head off and he had to hit it again.
Instincts were correct, his scope was full of the lumbering hulk’s mass. He put a fourth bullet into the monster’s gut, abandoned the rifle, running again.
The pained howl was just behind him, ten feet, no more. Adrenaline pumping, fear induced flight had him legging it faster than he’d ever run in his life. Heavy thuds of bare flesh harder than bull hide, thudded behind him as the chase continued.
He turned the corner to the peddler’s mall and jerked the pistol, a forty-five ACP with over pressured jacketed hollow points free, assuming a Weaver stance, legs planted, two hands on the gun, both eyes open, and waiting for the bastard to come around and catch the best chance he’d get to put it down.
A huge hand flew around the corner of the building and the injured creature used the building, which made distressing metal sounds when it did, to help it change direction. In full view, pistol lined up with the angry Ogre face, Alexander put seven into the monster’s head.
After the panther soaked up fifteen nine-millimeter and still managed to savage him, he wanted his sidearm to have a hell of a lot more murder potential.
The Ogre took the first two in the cheek and lower eye socket, not understanding what was happening that caused it to feel such pain. Three more hammer blows to its upper head, one smashing its nose the other two thudding into its forehead rattled its consciousness. A last round smashed it dead center to the forehead.
It fell to its knees dazed, unseeing. It didn’t see the tiny vermin that hurt it drop a spent magazine and replace it.
Alexander shot the kneeling beast seven more times in the top of its skull. The hulking creature’s struggles ceased, it flopped down to the ground, twitching.
He panted, shaking now, and leaned back against the flea market’s sheet metal walls, looking around the once familiar neighborhood for more threats. There were none. Big Daddy over there had come alone or left his crew of little fuckers behind. Maybe he ate them.
A relieved sigh escaped him when nothing else tried to eat, murder, skin, or otherwise bring him harm.
These goblin fucks had to go; Alexander resolved. This was the third time, no, four, counting the scavengers when he was insane. Each time, there had been an escalation, of some kind. They were clearly on the offense, sending this fucking juggernaut after him. Well, it had taken a lot more doing than the other ones but he’d put the plus sized asshole down. And, now, he was going to go over there and carve the sonofabitch apart and see if they were all made the same way.
Twilight, fading close to true dark, found him holding a freshly retrieved gem just slightly smaller than his fist. Amber, but, this time, radiating a deeper orange, damned near neon orange, like a sodium vapor lamp. The shape was different too, closer to a teardrop. The last surviving Gerifalte didn’t know the rules guiding this difference but he knew he was looking at something special, something that reflected a true watershed difference between the enemies he’d fought and whatever this Ogre thing was.
Slowly, Alexander was coming around to the idea that he was dealing with a type of organism that had tiers or phases of its life cycle. Somehow, the little ones grew into the bigger ones, and, he had a gut feeling, some of those bigger ones turned into this biggest one. One thing was for absolute certain, if they got any more humongous, he wouldn’t be able to take them down with just a gun.
His autopsy had revealed, to his horror, that the creature’s anatomy was much more resistant towards the firearm’s than he’d suspected. The knee was fairly mangled, but that was because the heavy bullet had ricocheted off the bones and jacked up the ligaments as it did. A through shot wouldn’t have stopped the monster. Wouldn’t much have slowed it. A similar tale for the chest and neck shots. Even a long action magnum, more than adequate for large game, had failed to produce the sort of trauma that he would have expected. It was almost like the Ogre’s flesh soaked up the kinetic energy of the bullet, sponging off the damage.
It hadn’t died from the internal damage caused by the rifle at all, the wound channels were pitifully small. What it had died from, was the lucky handgun bullet that skipped off its lower orbital bone up into its brain, where it had fragmented, the pieces ripping through grey matter of the monster. Of the seven direct hits on the top of its skull, which had fractured the bone like a sledge hammer on concrete, two had gotten through to finish the destruction of the Ogre’s brain.
It was a good thing he hadn’t known how damned near impervious the creature was to gunfire beforehand, or his hands would have shaken too much from pants shitting terror to aim well enough to kill it.
Fourteen bullets as hot as you could get, right to the noggin, and it took all of that to kill the bastard.
“What in the name of all the gods above, below, and between are you, you fucking monster?” Alexander asked the dead thing.
The opened corpse he left lying, not that he could have moved the massive thing, and he retreated with quiet steps out from the gloom of his deserted town to his haven. Victory felt hollow, Alexander knew that two of those things, or even just a handful of the little ones to distract or back stab him and he’d have never survived.
Thoughts spun wildly, a combination of determination and despair, interchanging.
Next time, because there would be a next time, he knew it to his toenails, there would be more. An instinct, something from the reptilian calculator in the base of his brain, told him that the next time he saw yellow bulbous eyes, grey-green warty skin, and loincloths, it was going to be everything and the kitchen sink they could throw at him.
Sleep claimed his consciousness, and his last thoughts before succumbing to the exhaustion of the forge and defeating the Ogre was: “When you don’t know the rules to the game, it’s time to stack the deck.”
image [https://imgur.com/3D1kmaW.png]
Ten days later, armored by multiple layers of clothes against a fairly bitter November wind, Alexander Gerifalte lay on the roof of the big old Courthouse, its crenelated architecture providing him cover. From the wind and from the goblins below.
They had come. Just like he’d known that they would.
Following the Ogre attack, Alexander spent the next three days getting ready. Firstly, detection. No more surprises. He strung fishing wire across streets, with decorative bells from the Knick knacks shop hung. They would alert him when, and from what direction that the monsters came.
Next, decoys. Figuring that the monsters had always come close to sunset, he knew roughly when they would arrive from wherever they hid until they invaded. He put scarecrows up around town, placed them in the windows of some of the burned-out houses, put them along the sidewalks, put them on corners of alleys, anywhere he thought that might confuse their scouts or trigger the big ones to come charging.
It turned out that the monsters didn’t rot. They didn’t get eaten by birds. It turned out that, on the third sunrise that brought its healing light, they evaporated. Turned to ash, and that ash rose up into the air, vanishing into smoke, which itself disappeared, leaving no sign the goblin things ever existed. Magic. Even their weapons faded to nothingness. What didn’t, however, was the little gems he’d extracted. Those, and only those, remained trapped in whatever simulacrum of reality Alexander currently occupied.
Not being real anymore had stopped bothering him.
In a way, it gave him hope. Maybe, just maybe, he was in a parallel reality that, to him, made it appear that all the people he’d known were stone, but who were actually just in a separate facet of existence, separated by some barrier. Maybe, he could find a way to undo the Pulse and cross back over and he would come back to find that everything was fine, everyone was alive, and time had stopped in that world. A fairy tale. But one that helped, when he found those lowest moments where the void called “Just end it all and find out”.
Whatever. The goblins were back, and that was what mattered right now. From his vantage, he saw what some premonition had told him he would see:in vanguard for three dozen goblin warriors, an ogre, flanked by four of the shaman women Hobgoblins, with a particularly muscular pair of male Hobs out in front to serve as honor guard for the ogre.
This ogre wasn’t wearing a loin cloth.
Instead, it wore ugly, pitted metal plates badly sewn into leather to form a kind of ragged half plate armor. In its hand it gripped a gigantic axe, half moon blade sharpened, the handle nearly as long as Alexander stood tall. That axe could cut a pine tree down in one whack. Atop the beast’s head, he saw a hint of culture: a polished bone crown, ivory points standing a foot over top its twelve-foot height.
An evil grimace found its way across Alexander’s face.
“They sent King Goblin.” He whispered, almost giddy with joy and anticipation.
Nothing more could he have asked. Not for the little surprise he had waiting for the ugly hominids advancing steadily down the wide single main street through his ruined town.
Bells had alerted him to the encroachment half an hour beforehand. They came from the northern side of town, a note he made mentally as he sprinted from the Laboratory to ready his welcoming party. Bare hands twisted cold metal wires, together, the copper folding around itself easily, in spite of the temperature. Insulated wire was going to pay dividends. So would the barrels of diesel fuel siphoned from trunk gas tanks.
As he watched, the Royal procession advanced down the streets of his city like they owned it. A goblin scout spotted one of his scarecrows in a burned-out building. A screeching hyena warble sent a dozen of them scattering to encircle the ruins of the home. One of the Shaman females pointed its staff and, incredibly, a ball of fire blossomed at the tip of the fetish covered staff, before launching in a high arc to hit the window into which the decoy had been propped up, as if glancing out from behind stained and charred curtains.
Red orange flame blossomed in a gout of flame, rising up almost viscous, dainty compared to the energy unleashed, and the timbers went up, burning brightly. His dummy was gone, burned away to cinders and kindling in a flash of heat.
An impressive display of…firepower. Alexander couldn’t help himself; the joke was there. What kind of parallel reality ghost would he be if he didn’t make excruciating puns from time to time?
The encirclement ended, the goblin warriors returning to their positions, and the King Goblin led on. Another decoy was spotted, the King and his court stopped, small goblin warriors encircled, and, again, a female Shaman, a different one this time, sent fire toward the corner of the building. So. They had a standard set of tactics. Alexander slipped that piece of information into his growing catalog of knowledge on the humanoid monsters.
While he watched, the process repeated three more times, each time a different staff was raised to fling fire toward a decoy. All except one, and Alexander had a feeling that one was holding back as a reserve to raise one of those barriers. He’d attacked from long range, each time. The ones that survived from his ambush, when he’d had to retreat from battle thanks to the panther attack, must have carried word that they were attacked from a distance, and that a barrier had delayed the attacks.
Pure conjecture, maybe giving the nasty monsters too much credit for their smarts, but Alexander wasn’t going to be relying on his enemies being stupid to beat them. Well, only a little stupid. He was really banking on them not realizing that the big “X” painted on the road had significance. Or that the boxes with wires running between them were anything more than trash.
Watch. Wait. Keep still.
Alexander made his play when the Ogre-Hobgoblin vanguard cross over the painted target. A Bic lighter flicked, brought to life a tiny flame and he lit the wick to the firebomb he held in his hand. And then the next five, until he had enough to guarantee his plan.
Up he jumped and sailed the bottle high, then the other four, gasoline mixed with Styrofoam to make a sludgy, clinging type of incendiary approximating napalm, directly at the Ogre King, all five bottles in the air before he was spotted.
The reserve Shaman raised her staff, yammering guttural syllables and that blue honeycomb shield burst the bottles, flinging a shower of burning goop into the air. Several goblins got a coating and howled, the sticky substance doing what napalm did best: burn like hell and spread when you tried to get it off in panic.
Alexander didn’t have to wait for the next bit, the diesel fuel barrels he’d kicked over had been well placed, and some of the flaming material hit them and caught, spreading a ring of flame around the square holding the “X”. When that racing flame burned through the wooden shims holding up barrels of unspilled fuel, they toppled, dumping their contents into the streets. In the intensity of the diesel those wooden supports lasted only a few seconds before losing their integrity.
King Goblin roared a challenge about the time the entire square filled up with heavy black diesel smoke, roiling flames burning hot as it consumed the goblins in the fire trap.
He didn’t wait to see if the shield magic would break, Alexander hefted the semi-automatic rifle he’d lifted from the police station and he opened fire into the center of the pyroclasm.
Thirty small caliber bullets tore into the shield, breaking it after ten hits, and a small whirlwind of fire formed when the barrier vanished, cold air being displaced by the hot. Alexander didn’t stop shooting, aiming for where the Shamans had been, even though he couldn’t see through the smoke.
His weapon clicked; the bolt thrown open on an empty magazine. Alexander thumbed it, dropped the empty mag and slid a fresh one in. Then he resumed firing into the town square. Another magazine empty. A clatter of plastic and metal on the stone roof of the courthouse, another metallic clack as the bolt was thrown forward on a fresh thirty rounds. Alexander was laughing maniacally while he emptied the gun again.
Step two complete, he threw himself down and retreated from the roof of the courthouse. He slid down the ladder that accessed the roof for maintenance like a firefighter down a fire house rail. Next to the ladder was a bicycle cobbled with a system of gears and belts to a hamster wheel which had been set into a poured concrete slab, wires connected to either side of it.
The last Gerifalte hopped onto the seat and pedaled like a maniac, thus providing the torque to spin the hamster wheel at incredible frequency, magnets duck taped to the wheel’s surface spinning in the high gear rapidly enough to generate a current in the coiled wire inside the wheel.
Induced current hurtled through his network of copper wires, run through the wood boxes full of scrap metal, at the center of which a central coffee can of Tannerite from the local funstore, safe from the burning flames all around, served as the heart of Step Three.
Triggering arcs detonated half a dozen shrapnel bombs in the square simultaneously, sending ragged metal hurtling through anything standing nearby.
Alexander sprinted across the street from the courthouse, out of sight from the square where he’d arranged his welcome party.
He ran along a per-determined route, up a side street, into a two-story house with a window facing a convenient vantage, to the ten plastic jugs of premixed chemicals arrayed there. He uncapped each, holding his breath, and slung them out into the flaming street. Instantly, the flames took on a new role. They reacted the contents of the containers, combusting them to form horrifically toxic fumes that now filled the square. Fumes which Alexander, after fully comprehending what he was reading from his father’s stash of now questionable literature, wanted nothing to do with.
Upwind he ran, not bothering to look back at the results of his work. Time would tell. For now, he was moving toward the source of his problems. The goblins had approached from the north side of town, and it was the north side of town to which the young man was headed.
If any of the little monsters had survived his trap they would be headed home, returning to carry word of what he’d done to them. They were going to show him the way back to their nest. This part he didn’t have hashed out as well as the square, but he had spent days thinking of contingencies, of nothing other than plotting the end of the goblins. Alexander was starting to get the feeling that, maybe, he wasn’t a very nice person, because the ideas he came up with were, frequently, unbelievably cruel.
“They started it.” He panted, coming up on a dumpster that was keeping one of his scattered weapon caches free from the weather.
Alexander rearmed and headed to the road out of town. He had been living a good life. Hard working, goal oriented, law abiding, disciplined. He had the love of two doting parents who had poured themselves into making of him a good and decent person who would find success no matter what path he trod. He was going to soar the skies. Now, though, now he was here doing all of this.
Two goblin soldiers, badly burned, limping, one with a ragged stump for an arm, were making for the outskirts. He watched them from the cover of the gas station that was the last port of call for many a trucker headed Upta. Not much but wilderness for a good many miles from here. The thing about hick towns like this, full up with good old boys and people who loved to live on the edge of civilization, they had all kinds of fun toys stashed.
Alexander loaded a bolt into the crossbow. He’d figured out one of his problems. Guns, you see, made too much goddamn noise. They drew attention. A crossbow, with nasty looking razor bladed bolts, would reach out and touch something, not from as far away, granted, but far enough. And it would do it quietly.
Fear was in the bulbous eyes of the little monsters as they scurried. They didn’t take the road out though, surprising him by turning up the hill, like they were headed to the long-neglected path that led to an old…silver mine.
“Alexander, you are retarded. You are cultivating brain eating pond scum instead of synapses. How did this never occur to you?” He condemned himself.
Up the hill the survivors of his flame trap hoofed it, making as much speed as their damaged bodies could manage. Behind them, Alexander Gerifalte shadowed, crossbow at the ready to take the monsters down in relative silence. Sunset was close now, he had to make some choices.
Let the creatures show him exactly where they had come from, and risk being caught in the open come full dark, or, kill them here and now and return in the morning to discover the source of his goblin problem.
The young man decided on a bold course of action: to follow the creatures and know for certain. He suffered from a lack of information. Constantly was he running up against the simple fact that he didn’t know what rules guided this unreal world. He’d seen magic performed directly now. He’d felt the touch of some otherworldly force that threatened to break his mind. Now, he was going to get some goddamned answers, dark or no dark.