Jack bawled and ran at Gunmar, looking like a little boy handling a couple of toy swords. I wanted to follow, to be the trollhunter Jack believed that I could be, but my fighter’s heart flagged upon seeing the hundreds of baby Gunmars continuing their march, as impervious to the jumbotron static as their daddy was. Their confidence, and size, grew as they closed in on all those yummy tubes of fresh meat packed into shirts, pants, jackets, and hats. Their numbers were irrefutable and they would devour the townspeople as would a plague of locusts.

The decision tore me in half. Help these innocent people about to be eaten? Or come to the aid of Uncle Jack, the closest thing I had to family?

Or so I believed before I heard a familiar noise.

It came from the opposite end zone, a rumble that I felt in my ribs before hearing it with my ears. The pitch rose in intensity until it became the drone of a thousand bees. In the tumult of the moment, the denizens of Harry G. Bleeker Memorial Field seemed not to notice, but I knew that telltale tremor. I had felt it in parks and gardens all across San Bernardino, as well as in the front yard of my own house, where the various pieces of the machine were cleaned, sharpened, and tested upon our poor, over-trimmed lawn.

Dad rode onto the field of play on his golden industrial mower, the oversize back tires powering the eight-wheeled mowing deck, so wide that it took up nearly one-fourth the width of the field in a single swath. All of the dull technical details that he’d pounded into me now became the vital statistics of survival. The seven-gauge steel. The sixteen-inch discharge chute. The six-inch-deep cut. Dad came tearing up the sideline suited differently than his brother Jack but in armor all the same: hair net, allergy mask, goggles, work gloves, steel-toed safety boots, and grass-stained work shirt—Excalibur Calculator Pocket firmly inserted and both sleeves, if you can believe it, buttoned.

For a second I thought the invasion had driven my father over the brink, and that it was a mark of his madness that he’d chosen this moment to give the field a trim. Then I heard the yelp of the first baby Gunmar as it was sucked beneath the mower, the whir of blades as its diced corpse went flying from the chute. A half-dozen more of the beasts stopped their crawling and stared at the oncoming death machine, immobilized by a strange new sensation called fear. The feeling was brief. They went in as hungry carnivores and came out as pulp.

“Dad!” I screamed. “Go, Dad!”