Chapter 59 - Field Museum Exhibit Exchange

The goblins were so busy with their own fight, they didn’t even see the threat until we were right on top of them. As my skeletons marched forward, moving in two columns of tight ranks between the stranded cars, one of the green-skinned creatures finally became aware of our advance. I was watching for it, saw the moment where the goblin recognized our threat, and turned to alert its fellows.

Before it could, I dropped a Drain Life on the creature and it dropped like a pile of bricks. One down, whole lot more to go.

My archers unleashed their arrows next, firing over the heads of the front ranks. Arrows pin-cushioned goblins who thought they’d been behind cover—and they were, from the rat-people arrows. Just not from ours. Several more goblins went down before they even knew where the attacks were coming from.

Then they turned on us with a vengeance, screaming and shrieking as they rushed our line.

The goblins slammed into a wall of aircraft aluminum shields, each interlocked with the ones next to it and backed by a tier two skeleton warrior. Those warriors were strong, and the shields didn’t move. My personal shield was a good-size round, which made it flexible and easy to manipulate. But the ones I’d acquired for the skeletons were large, Roman-style things. It was stupidly hard to get around them when they were locked against each other.

I gave my undead a mental command, and as one they hinged their shields out, giving them enough room to stab with their spears. More goblins fell.

We were forced into two columns by the nature of the path. Because of all the cars, there was no easy way to just push our entire force through as a single unit, so I’d split us into two roughly equal teams. Each one had front ranks of shield and spear skeletons, with bow and arrow goblin zombies behind. That row was followed by a human—me for one side, Kara for the other—and a couple of tier one undead as a rear guard.

We churned through the enemy ranks like hot knives through butter. I grinned, loving this. These creatures had hurt enough people, and watching them fall so easily was a balm to my heart. I dropped a Drain on a goblin that had hidden under a car and was coming at Kara, nailing it before it could even get close to her. She saw and flashed me a quick salute in thanks.

But mostly, I just kept my troops moving forward in a steady pattern of block, open shields, stab, march, repeat. It wasn’t as quick as I might have liked, and I worried about getting bogged down in the mess of monsters, but we were able to keep moving. That was the key here, I figured, because there were still a lot more goblins than I had undead. If they got their act together and came at us from all directions, we’d be screwed.

Shock and awe was a term I’d read about in history books, not seen in reality. Until now, anyway.

An arrow whistled past my head and I ducked, raising my shield instinctively. But it hadn’t been aimed at me. The arrow stabbed into a goblin that had crept up on me from behind, using cars for cover so it avoided detection almost until it was too late. The creature had a wicked knife in its hand, and I didn’t want to think what they would have done to me, if it had gotten close enough to stab. It was dead now, though. I tapped it and got a clear crystal for my trouble.

Then I stood and looked around for the source of the arrow, finally spotting a rat-man archer atop the strip mall to my left. It shook its bow, almost like a wave, so I raised my shield high and shook it in reply. I wasn’t sure what to make of that… This was the first time since the Event that some monster had acted in a way that made me hope we could learn to cooperate or something. If these rat-beings were able to understand that the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ then maybe that could blossom into true alliance?

And if it was true for them, what other creatures might it be possible for? The bird-people? Perhaps even the goblins? Others? It was information I needed to get back to the Guard, because right now they were operating under the assumption all of these non-human things were monsters. Now I had to wonder if that was really true.

I didn’t let the question stop me from plowing my troops through the heart of the goblin horde, though. We kept dropping them like a harvesting combine in autumn. I was having to step over a lot of dead goblins, and thankfully I had the time and space to tap them each for stones. I wasn’t able to see what they all were, but I could worry about that later. For the time being I just stashed the loot in pockets.

A sheet of arrows slammed into the ranks of the goblins directly ahead of us, fired by the ratfolk. It was obvious they were avoiding firing at us, focusing their fire on the goblins who’d abandoned their cover to engage us, and those arrows were devastatingly effective. Half a dozen goblins formed up to stop us, only to be wiped out a moment later by a volley of fire.

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I tapped each as we kept moving, pushing forward.

Finally, the goblins had enough. A horn sounded from the hotel to my right, and the remaining green-skins took off like a shot, fleeing from the battle, running north as fast as their short legs could carry them. I dropped another with a Drain spell, just for good measure, but for the most part I let them go, even ordering my archers to hold their fire. They were recovering arrows as we walked, but not all of them, and we really couldn’t afford to run out.

With the goblins gone, there were no more barriers to our advance. I ordered the undead to step up the pace, quickly moving past the battleground. I glanced back, looking at the rat-people again. I drew my sword, held it up high above my head, and waved it in a circle, hoping they might see it.

A cheer went up from the south side of the road, strange, animal voices calling out wordlessly into the night. Spears banged against shields, and hands beat on barriers, all of them making noise. I wasn’t wholly sure if they were celebrating the win or trying to scare us off, but again I had the sense of intelligence behind their actions. They understood that we’d helped them. Whether that meant future cooperation was possible or not, I didn’t know. But it left me hopeful.

Once we were clear of the fighting zone, our two units reformed into one and Kara slipped over to stand beside me again. “That was wild! What a fight. I took down two of them myself.”

“I got a few, too,” I replied with a smile.

“Your undead got more than a few,” she shot back. “I looted a bunch of crystals. We can split them up later?”

“You looted them, you should get them; if you hadn’t looted them, some other person or monster might have.”

“Your undead killed most of them,” Kara replied. “I’d feel better about giving you some of these.”

I shrugged, accepting what she’d said. Personally, I wasn’t too worried about it. It was growing increasingly obvious that my strike force here was a powerhouse, and so long as I was careful about it, I was confident I could get all the stones I needed. Sharing and making her stronger wasn’t hurting me. It was helping us both.

“We’re almost there,” I said. “Hopefully Alfred and his people are still in the same spot.”

“Yeah, I hope so,” Kara replied. But she was peering ahead into the darkness. Jeffords Hall was still far enough away that it was invisible to me, at night. Her NightVision, though…

“You see something?”

“Hard to tell, still,” Kara said. “But I think I’m seeing smoke rolling up from the building. It’s still standing; it’s not burned down or anything. But it doesn’t look great.”

Crap, that wasn’t good. I’d been worried the goblin pyromancer would be able to lob fireballs into the building, setting it on fire from the lower levels upward, and burning Alfred’s merry band to death. If the building was smoking...?

“We’ll know soon,” I replied as we turned onto Beaumont Avenue, and from there into a parking lot. We were almost there.

Once we were close enough, we got a good feel for the story of what had happened.

Jeffords Hall was abandoned. That much was immediately obvious. The place was badly burned, almost gutted by flames. Alfred had taken my warnings seriously enough. The huge glass windows on the lower two levels, which had all been shattered and left open, were boarded over. He’d found big sheets of plywood somewhere and nailed them over the open space, giving at least minimal protection.

But the goblins had ripped the plywood off the bottom level. Goblin bodies were everywhere around the base of the building, so the defenders had taken a ton of foes down during the fighting, but it hadn’t been enough. Once the boards were out of the way, the goblins busted into the ground floor and presumably set some sort of fire down there. I couldn’t tell if it had been magical or mundane, but however they started the blaze, it had done a number on the building.

There was no easy way to get to the top floor to see if there were any survivors up there, but no one answered our shouts upward, either. I was pretty sure the place had been abandoned. Hopefully that, anyway. The alternative was shit.

“What now?” Kara asked.

“We need to look around, see if they went elsewhere,” I said. “We probably ought to try to go up there and find out if they left a message or something, but I don’t know how to scale that mess. It might be easier just to move north, onto campus, and see if we can find them in the other buildings.”

“Sounds good to me,” she replied. “If we do a quick sweep and can’t find them, maybe we can swing back and try to climb up there.”

We moved around the south side of the building, then back north toward the university greenhouse. There was a lot of evidence of activity here; marks in the dirt showed where something heavy had been dragged from the greenhouse toward Jeffords, and I quickly figured out that was where they’d gotten the plywood, because a big stack of boards was still there, unused.

A flyer on the greenhouse door caught my eye—something I’d forgotten about entirely until just then. The Field Museum, in Chicago, had done an exchange with UVM that year—allowing a special display of a number of relics and other cool historic crap. It wasn’t something I’d paid much attention to before. I was a medical school student, not an anthropology or paleontology major. But now, I made a mental note of where the collection was being housed—the Marsh Life Sciences building—because I had what felt like a really good idea.

Wasn’t sure if it would work. But if it did? This was gonna be epic.

“What do you have there?” Kara asked, glancing at the flyer I’d yanked from the door. I showed her the picture on the piece of paper, grinning ear to ear. “Oh. Ohhhhh! Oh, shit!”

“Yeah. Not sure if it’s going to work, but I figure it’s worth a shot.”

“Hell yeah!” Kara replied, smiling as broadly as I was now. “Let’s move that way, and see if we can find our friends on the way.”

We set off across campus, watching for any signs of survivors. If we could, we’d save them. If we couldn’t, then I was god-damned sure I was going to find a way to avenge them.