Even in this shameful state, I recognized momentum as the only thing we had going for us. I raced from the dresser. The teddy bear bounced along behind me, tangled up in kite string caught around my foot. Tub was throwing open the bedroom door, the bow slung across his back, the hockey stick and arrow in either fist, and a few delirious seconds later we were charging down the hall with weapons raised. Distantly I realized that Dad would not be waking up to join us. From his bedroom came that awful noise again: Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp.

We hesitated at the edge of the kitchen. The lights were off but sounds poured out: the clanging of tin, the crinkling of plastic, the rustle of paper, the crude slamming of ceramic to Formica. Substances, some hard, some soft, were dropping to the linoleum floor in irregular patterns. Blurting between each noise were inhuman snorts.

“Tub,” I hissed. “What do we do?”

He bared his shiny steel teeth and lowered his hockey mask.

“We do not. Negotiate. With terrorists.”

He lifted the brand-new hockey stick and bounded into the kitchen. With the tangled nanny cam trailing after me, I secured my baseball helmet and followed, rearing back with a bat that had waited all its life to swing.

18.

The first thing I noticed was that the ceiling fan was shoved into the corner, smashed to pieces. All in all, it was an odd thing to notice first, given that there were two enormous trolls contorted inside my humble little kitchen. I hated to admit that I was on a first-name basis with terrifying monsters of any sort, but these two I knew all too well. Blinky’s eight eyes were weaving in and out of the cabinets, down the sink drain, through the nooks of the dishwasher. ARRRGH!!! was grasping, and inadvertently crushing, various human-sized items upon the counter. The beast growled and its hunched back scraped against the dangling guts of the ceiling fan.

For some reason, the microwave was on, the plate inside empty and spinning.

With my free hand I gripped the back of Tub’s shirt.

“What…what are they…doing?” I managed.

Tub’s voice gurgled back with feeble horror.

“Sandwiches, Jim. They’re making sandwiches.”

Two of Blinky’s tentacles took turns diving into a jar of peanut butter, emerging each time with a beige glob that he smeared across an array of white bread scattered across the counter. Far too much force was used, and the bread tore into puffs that flew about the kitchen like scraps from a wood chipper. Some of it made its way into the gash of Blinky’s mouth, and through his scaled skin I could see the chunks as they made their way down two separate throats before landing in one of several quivering stomachs.