Chương 39: Creative Problem Solving

The Twisted Old Fashion was one of the larger bars in the Strip District. The entire wall facing the street was roll-up garage doors that they raised on hot summer days. Right now, it was September, and the rain was falling too hard for that. The sound of drops beating against the doors was especially loud. When I came in, Happy Hour had only just begun, so the bar was still pretty empty. I picked a seat that had a good view of a television as well as the door.

How did McDouglas know Brennan Kielar frequented this place? Maybe the CDM had secret dossiers on crawlers with that kind of information, but that seemed unlikely. I heard him on the phone, so perhaps he called in a favor with someone who did have access. That begged all sorts of other questions, like who did he know that could pull up credit card or GPS data on a citizen without a warrant or other authorization? And McDouglas was privy to the Unsung Heroes.

There was a chance that it was general knowledge for manager-level crawlers, but I doubted he would have taken the leak so seriously if most of the CDM knew about it. At a minimum, McDouglas had friends in high places. Was he from one of those high places himself? Whatever the explanation, he was a good friend to have. If this went well, I might recover my standing with Enforcer Chapman. Even she would have to be appreciative of a break in the case. But that was getting ahead of myself.

First, Brennan had to actually show up, and then I had to suddenly become a smooth operator who could flip a mark. I'd seen the movies. I knew what kind of suave charisma this situation required, and I knew that I had none of it. Maybe he would never show up, and I could go back to McDouglas with an "I tried my best" explanation and put this silly idea behind me. Or I could- Brennan walked in. He was on his phone and didn't seem to look at anyone else in the bar on his way to his seat.

With a nod from the bartender, his phone never leaving his ear, he looked up at a generic sports talk show and watched football highlights flash by. He spoke occasionally but seemed mostly disinterested in anything but the television. A few sips into his beer, he hung up the phone. Now or never, right? Or it could be now or later. Later was also a possibility. I could wait another ten minutes. Or come back tomorrow. Next week could work too.

I took one step forward for every potential excuse and soon arrived at the bar.

"Hey man," I began, "Did I see you at a C gate the other day? It was a run with Martin Kielar."

"Oh, hi. Yeah."

"This protester business is a shit show, right?" Brennan nodded.

"I hope it calms down soon," I said.

"Must be extra annoying for you. You didn't do anything, and people are hounding you the moment you come out the door."

"It's been a lot."

"How'd the run go, by the way? I wanted to ask, but we get in trouble for bothering crawlers."

"Pretty standard goblin gate," he replied.

"Nothing out of the ordinary."

"Standard can be good. Predictable." I kept my attention on the television and pretended to care about football.

"Ever think about working for the CDM?" I asked after a pause.

"Huh?"

"The CDM. None of my business, but you didn't look like you were having a lot of fun the other day. I took a look at your file, and you're a hell of a crawler. We get more people from the big guilds and teams than you'd think."

"Oh. No… I never thought about that."

"It's not a bad gig," I said.

"I like knowing I'm making a difference, you know?" I stood.

"Anyway, next one's on me." I dropped a ten-dollar bill on the bar top and then slid a business card to Brennan.

"If you ever want a change of pace, give me a call. Have a good one." And I left. That was what McDouglas said to do, but it didn't feel particularly impactful. I trusted that he knew better than I did, though. The seed was planted. Now to see if it sprouted into something useful.

The driveway up to the next Site of Concern, an old rural high school, was blocked by abandoned cars. Megan guessed these used to be on the surrounding roads and were dumped here out of convenience. Someone might need to drive through the town, but no one would have any reason to visit the high school. Except for Megan and me. We had to park at an alternate entrance to campus, cross the football field, and then finally enter the high school.

Hiking with gear had become second nature for us, and it was actually one of the shorter walks we had had on our hunts. With the goalposts and bleachers still in place, the shape of the stadium grounds was easy to distinguish, but the rest of it had surrendered to nature some time ago. A few young trees grew in the middle of what used to be the football field, and the grass was up to our chests.

The parking lot between the stadium and the school was piled with all manner of junk, from cars to old billboards to miscellaneous construction debris. Instead of venturing inside right away, we walked the outside perimeter of the school, looking for signs of monsters. Most of the property butted against old houses, but the back was bordered by a park with a number of wooded trails. Goblins seemed to appreciate the park.

The cracked asphalt that ran between the school and the park were dotted with tiny muddy footprints. We found a similar but less obvious goblin trail on the opposite side of the building. Having at least two ways in and out made sense for goblins, so that wasn't a surprising find. It did, however, make us extra sure that we were heading into a goblin nest. When we returned to where we had begun the perimeter search, we ducked through the broken glass of an old exterior door and into what was the school's office.

The room had a long counter and five or six desks behind that. The office in the back was probably for the principal. Like the door, the glass in all the windows had been broken out and boarded over. Some of those boards were gone, and over the years wind filled this place with leaves. Exiting the office brought us into the school's main hallway. A gymnasium was immediately across from the office, and then the rest of the straight stretch was all lockers and classrooms.

We relied on our headlamps, as there was no sunlight whatsoever in this part of the building. Stray cats must have liked it in here too. The stench of cat piss was potent, but it wasn't the ammonia of a meth lab. How strange that I could tell the difference now, I thought. This school's colors were blue and gold, and their mascot looked like a Revolutionary War soldier. I always thought mascots should be tough-looking or intentionally absurd.

If a man in a tricorn hat with buckles on shoes tried to get me to do the wave, I wouldn't be able to take it seriously. Megan and I looked into the gymnasium through the small windows in the doors. Though the view wasn't total, we didn't see anything immediately worth investigating. Thus far, we had managed to remain relatively quiet. Pushing down the metal bar on these heavy doors was likely to be loud. That style of door wasn't quiet when it was in tip-top shape. Covering it with rust would only make it worse.

So, we left it undisturbed. Moving toward the classrooms, we passed a stairwell and then went single-file to squeeze between stacks of desks and old books lining both sides of the hallway. A thick dust covered them, and the jumble of junk made me think this was a good place for a goblin trap. We didn't see any active traps, thankfully, but we did step over a piece of broken string, which could have been an old tripwire. It was harmless now, though. This story is posted elsewhere by the author.

Help them out by reading the authentic version. Megan raised her hand to stop us and then pointed to the ground. A dark pool of blood sat in the middle of the hallway. Something had been dragged away from it, leaving wide red brushstrokes in its wake. I assumed that was from the body of whatever the blood used to belong to. Kneeling, Megan touched the dark red smear. She held up her fingers to show me the blood was sticky, meaning it was relatively fresh.

Blood wasn't the most reassuring thing to find on a hunt like this one, but goblins were carnivores. They might have killed a deer or a stray farm animal and brought it back to the nest for dinner. The blood could also be from a person, in theory, but I convinced myself that couldn't be the case. Not way out here. We followed the trail of blood with our headlamps. As we did, the smell of rot and waste grew stronger. The goblins must live on this side of the high school.

A second stairwell was at the end of the hallway, and beyond that looked like kitchens and old machine shop classrooms. This corner of the school was especially cramped with desks and shelves and lockers, so we moved even more carefully. We still didn't see any traps, and I found it odd we hadn't encountered a goblin yet. This school wasn't massive, but it wasn't small either.

Three stories tall, a gymnasium, machine shops, a library–The goblins had plenty of space to work with, but we passed several points that would have been good for traps or ambushes without incident. We rounded a corner and found the goblins. Seven goblin corpses were strewn up and down the hall in various states of dismemberment. Their entrails spilled across the floor, and their blood flavored the smell of sewage with an intense iron.

Megan and I froze, and I wish we had made the mental connection even a moment more quickly. If we had, what happened next might have gone a little bit better. If you're not accustomed to wild monsters, this might not be as obvious to you: Anything that could kill multiple goblins had to be stronger and more dangerous than multiple goblins. This blood, like the first pool we found, was still relatively fresh, meaning that said thing could be nearby. A shadow shifted.

I grabbed the back of Megan's collar and yanked her toward me. A pencil-gray humanoid flew across the hallway and smashed into the drywall on the other side, spilling a stack of old English textbooks. It was taller than me by at least a foot, and its body was knotted with bare muscle. When it pushed itself out of the wall, I saw that its arms nearly reached the ground when it stood upright. Its black eyes, slitted like those of a snake, locked onto us as it bared its teeth.

They looked like a mouthful of carpenter's nails. A troll. Anticipating that we would encounter a troll someday led to lengthy discussions where Megan and I analyzed strategy and tactics, dissecting every possible scenario and option that might be available to us. Because we took that time, we both knew the plan and didn't hesitate to put it into action. We ran. As we bolted back down the hallway, heading toward the offices where we entered, Megan was behind me.

She tipped and toppled desks as she went to slow the troll chasing us. It galloped on its hands, covering in one bound what took us four steps, but crashing headfirst into furniture delayed it somewhat. We reached the first stairwell we passed on our way in. Just ahead was the office and the gymnasium. Then we could get outside. In the open, my archery could give us the advantage. We might not kill it, but frustrating it into a retreat seemed plausible.

A second troll emerged from the darkness and stalked toward us, blocking our exit. Megan slammed into my back. As she scrambled to recover, she saw the second troll.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck!" she yelled. Her hand grabbed my wrist, and she dragged me up the stairs. The exit to the second floor of classrooms was blocked with heavy faculty desks, so we kept going up. We burst onto the third floor, ran down the hall, and slid into an open classroom door. With our backs against the wall, we fought to quiet our breathing as we listened for signs of our pursuers. This was bad. Options. We needed options. Megan's constitution was higher than mine.

She could probably manage jumping out of a third-floor window. I might be able to, but I would be ashamed to have Megan carry me to safety if getting out of this meant breaking one of my ankles. We could try and get to the other stairwell from this floor, but we lost sight of the trolls. If they were even a little bit intelligent, they would know we were cornered up here and close off both of our potential exits. Megan pulled out her flares. I admired the gumption, but this was two trolls.

Winning against one at our level was optimistic. Winning against two just wasn't possible, and not with flares we had to press into a troll to use. They would tear us to shreds before we put fire to flesh. I looked around. We were in a biology or chemistry lab. There were fume hoods, emergency showers, workbenches, cabinets… Options, options, options. We needed options. The gas taps.

Sean said that it was surprisingly common for someone to not properly shut off the gas or to leave an enormous amount of it in the pipes after the line was closed. Slams and scratches echoed down the hall. The trolls were coming. I crawled over to one of the benches. Kneeling, I spun the valve on the gas tap. I smelled gas. This room was big, though. One gas tap wasn't enough. All of the gas taps at once weren't enough either, for that matter. Think. Think. The trolls had slowed their approach.

They were moving slowly, searching for us room by room. I could hear their husky, wet breathing as they moved. They would be on us soon. Scanning the room, I spotted my solution.

"Stay with me!" I hissed to Megan as I snatched the flare out of her hand. We crawled across the room, toward a second door. Instead of leading into the hallway, this door connected to a traditional classroom. I guessed that lectures happened on one side while any hands-on lessons took place in the lab we were in now. I pushed Megan through that second door. Before following her, I grabbed an exposed pipe on the wall, the one labeled with a shiny metal tag as the emergency gas shutoff for the whole lab, and yanked.

It took me three pulls, but the pipe gave way. Gas flowed freely into the lab. I joined Megan in the second room and held the door open a crack. I put the flare on the floor, pulled the ignition string under the small gap at the bottom, and let the door nearly shut. Megan's helmet was on, but her stiff posture suggested she was horrified by the steps I was taking.

"Helloooo," I said through the crack in the door, adopting the inflection of a jovial British nanny. To this day, I can't tell you why I did that. I was scared out of my mind, and that's the first thing that came to my mind.

"Hellooooooo," I repeated and slammed the door shut. Scrapes and stomps entered the lab and moved toward the door. I tapped on my side. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. A chair squeaked as it skidded across the floor. I had no way of knowing where in the room the trolls were with any sort of certainty, but I knew for sure I didn't want them any closer to me than the noise I just heard.

"Take cover!" I yelled at Megan. Then I pulled the flare. The fire on the other side of the door sucked up all the air in one deep whoosh, and a small force bounced off the door, like an extremely minor shockwave. Screaming trolls sounded like howling dogs if they smoked four packs a day for twenty years. Their bodies crashed and slammed about the room as fire enveloped them whole. After only a few seconds of that sweet music, something clicked over my head.

Then a deluge of stagnant black water burst from the sprinklers.

"We have to kill them!" Megan yelled as she jumped to her feet. There was enough water on the floor already that she splashed with every movement. She charged back into the lab. Both trolls were still partially on fire, but it was clear the sprinklers bought them a reprieve. I drew my sword and joined Megan in frantically hacking the nearest troll with everything we had. I struck another flare.

"Get the other one!" I called as I jammed it into the neck of the downed troll. It still thrashed like a hooked fish, so I lit another and jammed it an open wound on the side of its skull. Behind me, glass shattered.

"Dorion! It's running!" The second troll had hurled itself through the window. It landed on the pavement on its side, splatting limply with its back and head still alight. I drew my bow and fired as many arrows into the troll as I could while it was still. Its back and thighs were riddled with them, and then I felt the string of my bow disappear.

"My bow's broken," I said to Megan. She glanced around, grumbled, and then gave herself a battle cry. Megan jumped out the same window as the troll. I heard grunts and the sloppy slaps of open wounds and blood. When I got to the window and looked down, the troll lay facedown with Megan straddling its back. She lit one flare and jammed it into the troll's neck. She lit another and stabbed it through the troll's face. Then she rolled off the side and lay on her back, staring up at the sky.

"Megan! Megan!" She held up a thumb and groaned, "I'm good. Knocked the wind out of myself."

"You're sure?"

"Please make sure yours is dead." That was a good idea.

"It's definitely dead!" I called back.

"Is yours?" Without standing, Megan kicked the troll next to her.

"Yeah. Mine's dead. What do you say I wait here and you come down to me?" I laughed.

"Yeah. On my way."