Category: Excerpts

We landed on a curving stretch of blacktop a few miles away. Ravines dove away from the roadside on both sides.
Drops that seemed to go down and down farther than anything in the whole world.
I shook my head. “Why are we here?”
Bhuto looked up at the sky. “This is the only place we could be, Sean. We must reach your father.”
”Oh.” I thought for a second. “You do realize that’s the most pointless, circular answer I’ve ever heard, right? And just for the record, I went to a liberal arts college.”

During the 1930’s, topsoil had lain in ditches through my family’s home county. Part of the process of rebuilding America’s Breadbasket had been planting strips of trees through a country that was not meant for them. The topsoil of the plains was meant to be held down by grass, but grass wasn’t profitable, so instead we had wind-breaks called shelterbelts.
There’s a particular trick to walking through area thick with both trees and tall, tangled, prarie grass undergrowth, especially when you’re carring something heavy that can blow your face off — my feet seemed to remember the way of it even though my legs protested — I was thirty-two and had been a city-boy for twelve years. My progress would have involved more cursing except for the presence of Brock and Bhuto, neither of whom seemed to be having any trouble at all. I clamped my mouth tight and kept moving.
When we got to the edge of the trees farthest from the farm, Bhuto extended his hand to me for the second time, doing the same for Brock. I looked askance.
”Explanations come shortly, Sean, but we need to move quickly now, when we are not marked by others. I can assist with that,” Brock said.
I almost refused, until I saw that Brock looked just as unhappy about this development as I did. Misery loves company, or at least someone else to gloat over. I took the ogre’s hand.
I’m not sure what I was expecting… a puff of smoke, a swirling of my perceptions, maybe. When we just shot off the ground and into the sky without a word or gesture, I couldn’t help but shout.

Twenty minutes later, I was ready for whatever they were going to tell me and they were looking a doubtful.
“I don’t think those’ll work where we’re going.” Brock gestured with some distaste at the gun over my left shoulder.
I raised and eyebrow. “You ever shot a gun, Brock?”
The dwarf glared at me, finally shaking his head.
”Then how the hell would you know?”
He shrugged. I ignored him. The gun I’d chosen, an open-sight .300 cal Savage, was a family heirloom that my great-grandfather had bought the year of its making. My grandfather, who’d taught me to use my first gun when I was six, had an Alaskan grizzly pelt in his guest bedroom that this gun had taken. The stock was solid hardwood with a stainless steel shoulder plate; the barrel was three and a half feet of blued steel.
Frankly, if the thing didn’t fire ‘where we were going’, I’d could do worse than just hitting things with it.
Bhuto seemed to have a different sort of problem with my other choice. “Do you not have a more… formidable hand-weapon, Sean?”
I readjusted my grib on my old ‘herding stick’, which I’d found in a barrel of similar tools in the machine shed. I’d cut it from an ash tree when I was thirteen and had used the four-foot club whenever I had to push one of our bulls into a new pasture on foot.
I could have explained, but I didn’t really feel as though it was my turn.
I motioned towards the trees behind the house. “Let’s just go.”

“So…” I said, sitting on the back of a tractor in the machine shed and watching my ‘guests’, “your a dwarf from the nordic wastelands who’s been fighting your ancestral enemy–”
“Dirt-eaters,” the one called Brock growled helpfully.
“Whatever.” I turned to his montrous companion. “And you…” I’d somehow managed to miss that Brock’s companion was wearing full fifteen-century samurai armor, but in my defense the thing was nine feet tall and did have a damned horn sticking out of it’s forehead. “You’re some kind of genderless ogre wizard –”
“Magi,” it corrected.
“– Magi who’s been working with that,” I jerked my thumb at Brokk, “for how long?”
The creature made a dismissive gesture and stepped forward. “The duration of my partnership with Brock is not relevant, Sean. What is relevant at the moment is our partnership with you, one which can save your father. Also, please call me Bhuto.”

There was a long pause. I finally found something to say.
“You are directly the fuck out of your mind, aren’t you?”
The larger shadow snorted in amusement. It sounded like a prize bull huffing to scare off predators.
“You father’s missing, yes?”
“My dad, yeah. What do you know about it?”
“We know who did it.”
“Call the cops.” I thought about it. “Or should you just turn yourselves in?”
The air actually got chilly. “You think we did it?”
I shrugged at the open night, wondering if they could even see it.
“You think we’re… dirt-eaters?” There was movement I caught only a bare second before the speaker was holding me by the shirt and pressing me against the side of the house. I looked down into a face a good foot and a half lower than mine, covered in random smears of grease that ran thickly into his hair and beard. The knotted tree-branch of the arm that held me was covered in grease as well, or tatoos, or both. His eyes were bright in the moonlight and I could hear his teeth grind.
“Brock.” The shadow that still stood in the trees spoke softly, but his voice still seemed to vibrate in the ground. “He did not mean anything by it. Let him go. You’re choking him.”
The voice was right; I couldn’t breath, but not because of the hand on my chest — the stench of sweat and oiled hair surrounded the short bastard in a miasma that made my eyes water.
“Take…” I managed to choke out.
“Whazzat?” He growled in my face. His breath was a whole new color in the bouquet surrounding him.
I shoved sideways on his arm as hard as I could, using whatever leverage advantage that my height gave me, and staggered away from him. “Take a damn bath, you putrid son of a bitch.”
Another pause, this one broken by a deep chuckle from the trees that his partner on the deck eventually joined in on. I was glad the bedrooms were on the other end of the house.
I glared while the chuckling died down. “Yeah, I’m hilarious, I’m sure. What the hell are you?”
“Allies, if perhaps not friends.” The shadow took a step out of the trees that carried it into the moonlight and nearly to the edge of the deck.
It held a spear in its left hand and stood at least nine feet tall, but mostly I was focused on the curving horn in the middle of its forehead.

“…it wasn’t your imagination. The plains are thick with goblins, especially along those dark gullys and river bottoms where no man has travelled in a thousand years. The natives learned to avoid the areas and the white settlers soon after. There are goblins and ogres all along there. No trolls though, no trolls…”
— transcipt of a raving madman in Watertown, SD
I don’t know how long I sat on the deck. The moon wasn’t bright, and the lights were off in the house by the time I finally took notice of my surroundings again. I pushed myself to my feet and massaged the small of my, which was complaining about sixteen hours in a car. I hadn’t slept since the night before last.
Somewhere during this musing, I realized I wasn’t alone. I’m not sure what gave me the hint, but when I turned the direction my intuition pointed, there was a shadow where there shouldn’t have been in the treeline next to the house.
“Who’s there?” I said, glancing around the deck for some sort of weapon. Nothing. Would have been nice if there’d been a big meat fork next to the grill at least.
The voice that spoke was gutteral in a way that made me realize I’d never truly understood the word. “We’re not your enemy, Sean.” The large not-supposed-to-be shadow split into two: one shorter than me and one… still much larger. The shorter one spoke again. “We’re after the same things that took your father.”
“Things?”
“Dirt-eaters.” He sounded hungry when he said it. He sounded like he was smiling.

They’d rearranged the ropes so that they had easy access.
That was necessary; the needles weren’t very long, after all.
He’d tried keeping track of how many they’d driven into him but he lost count when they moved past his arms and shoulders and into the area between his collarbone and neck. It had all been very quiet, though; the things seemed to be very serious about what they were going and aside from sucking his breath in past his teeth, he wasn’t making any noise.
Damned if he’d make any noise.
Eventually the sky was dark and they were done with the needles. He couldn’t look down properly but he didn’t think they’d missed too many places. He looked up to see the taller thing standing in front of him. Its eyes were glinting sharply and its lips were pulled back just about to its rear molars in a rictus grin.
“Good. Ver’ good,” it murmured almost to itself, then turned away. “MUD!”
The hell?
He had time to puzzle it over. Several of the scrawnier creatures shuffled forward and began to wrestle the foul-smelling cauldron off the fire, dragging it through the dirt towards him.
When they started packing the hot, stinking mess onto his body, using the pins as a sort of anchor to prevent it all from sliding off, Steven still didn’t make a sound.
But it was much harder this time.

It was starting to get dark.
It was starting to get dark and there was still nothing that made sense in any of this.
Everything is so strange. Yeah.
My family were not the sort of people who ended up interviewed on alien abductions in the Daily Sun, next to a picture of Elvis filling up his car in Tupulo, Missouri; yet here I was, sitting on the back deck mulling over… what?
Muddy, barefoot footprints all around the back door. Drag marks out to the shelterbelt behind the house that vanish with no trail. Smears on the windows that look like finger marks but that don’t have any prints. This is the kind of crap I used to think up.
Mom slid open the patio door and stepped into the gloom. “You want anything to eat, bud?”
I shook my head. “Why’d you call me out here, Mom? I mean, I’m glad to be here and help you out, but what…” I let it go and shook my head again, slouching back into the deck chair. It was quiet for several minutes except for the sound of absent-minded bug swatting.
“I thought–” she started, then stopped. “I thought you might be… that you might know something.”
“About this?”
“Something that might help.”
I didn’t say anything to that. Eventually, she went back inside.