There comes a moment when Skelly thinks: it’s all over. Mookie steps forward, spinning a cleaver that looks too heavy for her even to pick up, and then they slam into him like a collective fist. Then he’s gone. Gone underneath a carpet of goblins. She catches a flash of bald scalp, a glimpse of a fist–

Her own Bowie knife at the ready, she resists every urge inside her body crying for her to run, flee, hide, don’t step over the edge, don’t jump into the chasm, and instead bolts toward the fray. A gobbo does a gymnastic tumble in front of her, springing up like a Jack-in-the-Box except this toy is armed with a chair-leg studded with fragments of chipped glass.

The gobbo screams. Leaps for her. She cries out, leans back, swipes–

Gobbo body hits ground. Gobbo head hits a half-second after, rolling away.

Mookie is already shaking off the gobbo tide the way a dog shakes water from his coat. One gobbo, cleaved in twain. Another kicked so hard his head crumples like a rotten pumpkin. He throws one to the ground, stomps on it. Tosses another in the air and cuts it in half at the waist. Dark blood spurts. Covers him.

Some of it’s his, too. Red blood. Human blood. A gash over his ear. A bite on his hand.

She steps up. Without meaning to, they form a system. He throws them off, she sticks them in the belly, or hacks them across the back, or caps them like she’s cutting the top off a pineapple. All this in a kind of slow motion, pockets of the battlefield revealed–

Mother Cougar pointing at the onrushing horde, her finger like a gun. Zombie-cats are her ammunition, screeching and leaping for the monsters, tearing with teeth, clawing at eyes.

Burnsy jumping like a maniac, up and over the heads of gobbos, bashing skulls with his tire iron. Cackling. And screaming.

Another burst of the blunderbuss: another corpse down. This time it’s the one-eyed trucker, the fabric of his shirt and jeans rippling as a tide of venomous cankerpedes pours out. Bodies are dragged, kicking and thrashing, toward the gates. Abducted. For grim goblin purpose.

Skelly turns. Lops the arm off a fleeing gobbo. A corkscrew shiv clatters on the stone.

It’s then she hears the screams coming from behind them. Back toward town.

The gobbos are there, too. Not possible, she thinks. They haven’t broken the line. And the town is carved out of the stone – it butts up against hard rock.

It seems the monsters have found a way.

She yells to Mookie, tries to warn him–

But he’s gone. Charging forward. Toward the blunderbuss gobbo.

She can handle this. She knows she can. She’s a bad-ass chick. A deadly doll. She’s a souped-up hot rod with a stacked rack. She’s one coo-coo crazy cooze, daddy-o.