No time to worry about that now.

Mookie tosses the ruined creature in his hand – it splats limp against the curve of the concrete pipe-wall. The one under his arm is starting to bite at his side; he feels teeth sink into the meat encasing his ribs, and he snarls, pressing down with his bicep and squeezing arm to body hard enough that he hears the thing’s spine snap like a piece of celery.

Pop. Drop. Splurch.

A pair of gobbos tries to dart past him. But Mookie pivots – a slow turn, as his body is weighed down by shrieking gobbos clinging to him like wolves trying to bring down a charging moose – and reaches out, grabs one by the heel. He drops, using the momentum of his fall to fling the one into the other. They bowl into one another, a tangle of limbs, a clatter of bludgeoning weapons.

Now Mookie is on his back. A gobbo grabs his ear. Tries to rip it off. Another takes a shiv made out of a sharpened toothbrush, starts stitching it in and out of his forearm – punch punch punch, blood welling up red and hot. Hands in his mouth. A lashing tubule tongue trying to force its way past his lips. One is pulling at his boot.

But the Blazes run through him full-bore now: a bullet spinning down a rifled barrel, a sweep of fire across a gas-soaked floor. And with the Blazes comes more than just sight. It brings with it high-test clarity and a double-dose of extra strength.

Even off the stuff Mookie’s no weak-kneed Girl Scout – he’s all grizzly, no Care Bear. But on the Blue Blazes, he’s like if an M1 Abrams tank made mad monkey-love with an eight hundred pound silverback gorilla and had a baby, all black fur and olive iron, all guns and treads and swinging fists.

He grabs the stabber gobbo, cranks its shiv-arm upward, smashes its head down on its own weapon – the end of the toothbrush popping up through a rotten eggshell head. The ear-grabber gibbers and wails, and Mookie slams his head sideways into the monster, bowling the goblin backward. Oily gob fingers are still in his mouth; he bites down. The blood is bitter, cloying, tastes like infection – it’s not the first time he’s tasted their blood. Won’t be the last. And as the gobbo opens its mouth to scream in pain, Mookie spits the fingers into the former owner’s wailing mouth. Ptoo.

He kicks out with a hard boot. Bones crack, yellow teeth clatter.

He grabs the tongue – a female’s tongue, probably hoping to plant eggs somewhere moist and warm, because once those eggs attach they release toxins into your bloodstream that’ll make you slow and stupid – and winds it around the gobbo’s neck like a weedwacker string. Then he pulls taught.

Gray face goes blue. Cheeks bulging. Black capillaries bursting in ugly goldfish eyes.

Then, for a moment–