Nora doesn’t want to think about that.

The gobbo bleats and babbles at her in a guttural tongue.

“Oh, no, no, nuh-uh,” she says, pressing down harder on its arm and cocking the hammer of the gun. “Don’t play with me, gob. You’re up here wearing your ugly-ass mask which means you speak English well enough to get by. So speak English.”

“You eat dick!” the gob cries out. “You eat it hard.”

She presses down again. The goblin keens through his wet mouth, eyes shut.

“Why?” the gob asks. “Why do this?”

“First, because you got Blue, and ta-da, I need it. Second, because you’re going to send a message to all your gross little fuck-buddies downstairs.” This, a different message than the one she paid Skint to pass along. “I want you to tell them I’m going to wipe them out. Every last one of you nasty mutants.”

“You?” The gob laughs. “You just a girl.”

She puts all her weight on it. The arm-bone beneath gray rubbery flesh cracks. The gobbo howls. “And oh, what a bad girl I am. Daughter of Mookie Pearl, if that name means anything to you.” She sees by the widening bulge of his bulbous eyes that he does. “Now cough up the Blue, freak.”

The gobbos hit him hard, a truck slamming into a guardrail–

The first two are fucked from the get-go. Mookie’s chokes one snot-slick monster with the shoulder strap of his satchel. The other gets stuffed up under his armpit. Then the rest are on him, clambering up his shoulders, wrapping themselves around his legs. Yellow teeth tear at his shirt, his jeans. He sees a flash of green above. Sees one atop the others, holding a weapon made of an old wrench – the end spackled with a Q-tip wad of black gunk, which is in turn riddled with shards of green glass from a beer bottle–

The thing brings the green-glass mace down, but Mookie uses the naked gobbo in his grip as a shield. He holds the thrashing creature up just as the mace crashes down on its head, sticking in the thing’s skull and spraying up a mist of oily goblin blood.

They shriek in his ears. Whooping and cackling.

Fucking gobbos.

They must have formed a hunting pack a while back. Been waiting in the dark. Invisible – down here, that’s an option for them. Can’t play that trick up above. Up top they’ve got to look like somebody, so to the Blind they look like miscreants, vagrants, thugs. Some go the effort to get gussied up in other outfits and play different roles – maître d’, cop, pimp. But most just stay at the fringes, acting like one of the many freaks New York City has to offer. Such simple camouflage.

The question here is: how the hell did they breach this tunnel? The easy answer: They found one of my boltholes. Probably not the one he just used, but he’s got dozens of the hidden doorways around here. Hell, so does Davey. Maybe one of those doorways isn’t so hidden anymore.