“What the hell?” I demanded, spinning around, trying to get a handle on my new surroundings.
We were in a broad hallway. The floor, the walls, even the ceiling were made of carved pieces of stone and rough wooden beams. Torches—actual flaming torches—lined the walls every couple of yards. Enough that shadows could linger in the space between, dancing in sync with the torches’ flames.
The hallways extended down to what looked like an abrupt fork, splitting into two different directions, each at a ninety-degree angle to the hall we were currently in. The shadows, coupled with the sharp angle, made it impossible to see what was around those corners.
Behind us was a wall of the same stonework. It was mounted with a single torch and inlaid with a large, golden circle. There was no sign of the alley. No asphalt. No cars. Not even the smell of the dumpster.
A shadowy ripple danced through the air before the circle on the wall and Damien stepped through, grinning like a kid who’d busted open a pinata. He spread his arms wide. “Ta-da!”
“What the hell?” I said again, taking a step toward him. “What is this?”
Damien smirked, and brought me up short as he drew the gun he’d had holstered under his coat. It was a Glock 19. They were good guns. Reliable and relatively inexpensive. Dad had one. He’d never pointed it at me.
My body froze. Incongruously, my heart raced. There was something completely disconcerting in the knowledge that my life was in very real danger. All it would take was Damien squeezing his finger just a little too hard and then…what? Death? A hospital stay? If I was lucky, maybe. This was not feeling like a lucky day.
“You’ve got some bigger concerns right now,” Damien said.
“Griffin,” Emilio said.
I looked over, to find him staring down the hallway, pointing at one of the corners where it forked. A little green head, bald with big, pointed ears and a bulbous nose, peaked around the corner. Its tennis ball sized eyes were yellowed around the dark iris. The thing hissed at us, revealing teeth even more yellow than Damien’s. And sharp. I only had a quick glimpse, but there were definitely more points there than in a human mouth.
“What is that?” Emilio asked.
The green creature—I refused to call it a goblin—stepped around the corner. It was naked save for a dirty loincloth, revealing green skin stretched tight over its frame, and it carried a simple wooden club. The creature made me think of the videos of those starving children in Africa. Completely emaciated save for its pot belly. The creature was child-sized too, making it even more disturbing.
It hissed some more, and then barked at something back the way it had come.
“That,” Damien said, shifting the aim of his gun to the creature. “Is a goblin.”
Two more goblins—dang it, now I couldn’t stop thinking of them as goblins, which did not exist and were not real—stepped around the corner. One of them had a short, rusty sword in its hand. A gladius that clearly hadn’t been made with the goblin’s size in mind. They crouched, and started toward us, keeping low, as if unsure whether they were going to scare us off or maybe bolt themselves. None of them seemed to want to be in the lead.
Three more goblins came around the corner. Then two more. We now had eight of the little freaks edging toward us, barking, hissing, and squealing between each other in what I realized was a language. It was creepy as all get out.
Emilio began backing up. I drew my knife and flipped out the blade, knowing it would be useless. There were eight of the things coming at us like something out of an Exorcist knock-off. What the hell was my little three-and-a-half-inch blade going to do? One of them had a freaking sword!
That reminded me. I glanced back at Damien’s backpack and the weapons sticking out of it. A sword and a baseball bat right out of a zombie movie.
“Don’t even think about it,” Damien said, shifting himself in front of the backpack and our best hope of defending ourselves. Apart from relying on him and his gangster-style shooters pose with his gun. The idiot was actually holding the dang thing sideways! What the hell?
“There’s only eight of them,” he said. “I won’t even use up half my ammo. Watch this…”
He aimed at the goblin in the lead. I braced myself for the sound. In these stone walls the noise was going to be a beast.
Damien pulled the trigger and the gun exploded in his hand.
He fell backwards, screaming and clutching his bleeding hand as shrapnel from the firearm flew in every direction.
Most of the goblins ran, sprinting back the way they’d come, barking and squealing—except the one with the rusty sword. No, that creepy little bastard charged us. In games, goblins were cowardly opportunists, easily overpowered or cowed into submission. It figured that we’d encounter the one real goblin—and didn’t that feel weird to think about?—that attacked when scared instead of running away.
“Get the weapons!” I shouted at Emilio, shoving him back toward the wailing Damien.
If we both went for the backpack, we’d get in each other’s way while trying to get one or both of the weapons Damien had packed free. More importantly, there was no way that either of us could get to the backpack and wrestle something free before the screaming little freak was on us. Small as he was, that sword could still run us through.
Stolen story; please report.
Those thoughts weren’t consciously considered so much as they were things that I simply recognized. There was no time for thinking. My decisions were instinctive and near instantaneous as I went forward to meet the goblin head on, screaming my head off.
The others had reached the end of the hall and turned around. I was aware of them charging back toward us. Of Damien rolling on the floor crying about his hand while Emilio ran away from the backpack must have made them feel safe. I sure as hell didn’t. I felt like the world’s biggest idiot.
I was going to be killed by a freaking goblin because genius that I was thought that I could hold him and his sword off with my little pocket knife.
The goblin apparently knew enough about swordplay to come at me thrusting with the point of the weapon instead of trying for a more dramatic chop.
I twisted out of the way, grabbed the goblin’s wrist, and moved my knife. I need to make it very, very clear—I had never used a knife on a person before. I could be quick with them thanks to my time in the kitchen and I absolutely knew the best places to hurt someone with one. Years of gaming and field dressing my kills had taught me a lot. But I had never had a martial arts class. Hell, I hadn’t even been in anything that could really be called a fight. A few scuffles in the hallway at most.
My hand moved with the knife as if I had been using it on living, breathing enemies for years. Three quick pops. A stab to each eye and then to the windpipe, then I was using my momentum to swing the goblin, whose wrist I was still holding, into his oncoming fellows.
I felt the blood splatter over my hand, understood just how to shift my fingers to keep my grip from slipping. The knife had no guard. Stabbing without losing your grip and sliding your fingers or palm down the blade is hard. I understood that wasn’t going to happen to me the same way I knew that when I rode a bicycle I wasn’t going to fall over.
Two goblins tripped over the rusty-sword goblin, who thrashed about on the ground, bleeding and screaming and generally making a horrific distraction. I should have been terrified. A moment ago, I had been. Suddenly there was no time for fear, no space for it in my head. There’s a place in my head I go to when I’m focused, usually on a hunt or when I’m cooking. I fell into that same headspace like it was an old habit.
I kept going forward, dodged a swing of a club, and slashed another goblin’s throat. I twisted, then thrust in low, catching another in the diaphragm. The wounded goblins gurgled and staggered as they bled out and suffocated. That’s another reason why knives aren’t great weapons. They kill slowly. Even when hunting, it’s better to usually finish wounded game off by snapping its neck with your hands or simply shooting it again than to use a knife. Far more merciful.
I’d fatally wounded three of the goblins, but they weren’t dead yet. That was okay. They were creating great distractions for their fellows.
I managed to grab another goblin and ram my knife into the side of its neck, then shoved it away. It slipped on its ally’s blood and fell to the floor. Another of its allies trampled right over it and came in swinging with its club.
I couldn’t get out of the way in time. I raised my offhand and tried to deflect, taking as much of the blow on my forearm as I could. My arm exploded in pain. My fingers in that hand went numb. I shoved the pain away and moved. The goblin’s wild attack had left it open and I drove my blade three times into its little torso, once in the diaphragm and twice in the bloated gut.
It was actually a little hard aiming so low with their short builds. I had to, though. I couldn’t risk my blade skittering off a rib instead of sinking into something vulnerable. I grabbed the freshly wounded goblin and spun it into another one, then got in a lucky thrust, stabbing one right in the back of the neck, severing the brainstem. That one simply collapsed. No weeping, no screaming, just suddenly dead.
Pain burst across my back. One of them had gotten behind me and landed a hard strike with its club. I was lucky, so lucky, that the goblins only had these stupid clubs. Lucky that they were so small and weak. Lucky that none of them had yet thought to pick up the rusty sword that had been dropped.
I slashed at the one that had hit me and scored a cut across its arm. It tripped over one of its thrashing, blood soaked companions on the ground. I closed and drove my knife up through the soft part of its jaw. The blade wasn’t long enough to reach the brain and the goblin thrashed about and for a moment, made me think of those Kermit the frog memes that. His club thwacked feebly against me as I grabbed hold of him, drew my knife out and stabbed him twice in the neck.
I spun around just in time to block another incoming club with his dying body. How many were left? How many had I killed or wounded? Several of the ones I’d hurt were actually getting back up. Some were dragging themselves away.
Exhaustion hit me. It was light a freight train simply slammed into my muscles and left them flattened out inside of me and tied down with weights. I was absolutely drenched in sweat. I couldn’t have been fighting for more than a few seconds. A minute tops. It felt like hours.
My left arm throbbed, the bones tingling all the way down into my fingers. My back hurt. I was going to have some serious bruises. Good thing the little bastard who’d gotten me hadn’t managed to do anything to my spine.
Sweat soaked into my cap and down into the stubble on my face. Distantly I realized that I already needed to shave again. My hands shook as I brought them up, knife at the ready.
One of the goblins picked up the rusty gladius.
I swore.
My curse word was lost to Emilio’s screaming as he leapt into the remaining goblins, coming down in an overhead slash with Damien’s katana.
The goblin that had picked up the sword fell apart in two wet pieces. Blood spilled everywhere.
The katana came up, flinging blood as Emilio screamed ad went after another goblin. This time in a horizontal chop that took the goblin’s head clean off.
“Yeah!” I shouted. “Get ‘em!”
Another goblin leapt at him and he swung around to swing at it. The goblin struck at the oncoming blade with its club. It struck the flat of the blade and changed its trajectory. Instead of hitting the little monster in the torso, it caught him right in the head.
The sword passed partway through and then got stuck, wedged in the skull. The goblin was very definitely dead, but the sword was lodged. Emilio kicked the body free, ripping the katana out, only to hold up a blade that was bent at an angle to the side.
He stared at it, as if the sword had somehow betrayed him by bending.
A goblin came at him from behind. I leapt forward, slashed its throat, and slammed it to the ground.
There were no more goblins standing. The ones on the ground gurgled, whimpered, and died as they bled out or suffocated.
Silence didn’t fall though. Our labored breathing was incredibly loud. So was Damien’s whining back where we’d appeared in this stone hallway.
I marched over to him, wiping the blood from my knife on my jeans as I went. I stopped to stand over him and glared down. I might have felt bad for him, the way he was clutching his bleeding hand and crying, but he’d just been pointing that gun at me a moment ago. Worse, he’d clearly known about this place and come prepared. He’d literally shoved me and Emilio into a life and death fight with absolutely no warning after luring us here with the promise of information about my brother. My sympathy for his wound was just as gone as my tolerance for his bullshit.
“Start talking,” I said. “Now.”