Skelly shakes the Bowie knife free of goblin blood, then runs back toward Daisypusher.

Choom.

Mookie sidesteps the shot – or thinks he does. Something tears into the meat of his bicep just as a pair of gobbos rush him. He bashes one in the face with the flat of the cleaver, and swipes the blade left to slice the other’s head in half at a hard diagonal just as something pushes up out of the hole in his arm–

He knows what it is. He feels it squirming.

As soon as the cankerpede pops its glistening black mandibles out of the wound, Mookie grabs it and turns its head like a key in a lock, twisting the head right off the body. He pulls the rest of the foot-long worm from the wound – spppplup – trying not to scream as each of the little razor-footed legs tears the edges of the exit hole – and flings it against the stone.

Up ahead, the gobbo with the gun is frantically trying to reload.

Mookie doesn’t like that idea. He bellows and stomps forward. The gobbo tries to backpedal and evade but he grabs its hand, pulls the writhing rag-clot of cankerpede ammo from the depths of the gun, and crams it forward, hard into the gobbo’s mouth.

Then he slams the gobbo’s jaw shut, just to make sure.

It doesn’t take long that the gobbo starts thrashing like he’s on fire – and his gray, greasy flesh starts undulating like a blanket laid overtop a bunch of breeding snakes.

The cankerpedes are doing their work.

Mookie grabs the blunderbuss, breaks it over the gobbo’s head for good measure.

By now, the battlefield is looking thinned out. Good. A gobbo flees toward the gates, a half-rotting cat clinging to his rubbery head like a skullcap.

Mookie turns to find Skelly.

But he doesn’t see her.

Then, somewhere, he hears her scream.

Back among the ramshackle houses of Daisypusher, Skelly stalks the street with her big-ass blade pointed forward. Some of the huddled dead point the way, back toward Burnsy’s house, back toward the craggy pocket end of this old corpse-town. “There!” a dead child in a dirty pair of footy pajamas cries. “Back there!”

For a moment she thinks she’ll take a moment. Put the ol’ roller skates on. The ground here is smoother, more sculpted – not too craggy, only a few lips of rock and stone. It’ll allow her to move fast. Do her kick-ass roller-derby thing.

But then she thinks: no time to lace up. Just move, move, move.

So that’s what she does. She moves.

Into Burnsy’s place – a trio of gobs root around the place, throwing jars that pop, soul-cages that clang and roll. One of them holds up the wooden box with the phial of amber sap inside and it jabbers in triumph–