American Eldritch, Chapter 9

I tried my best to mimic the bird call Dane taught me. I had just wanted to shout his name, but he cautioned against making too much of a ruckus in case the girl was in a less benign form of trouble than simply being lost or having a broken leg. The tracks in front of me made me glad for Dane’s caution.

Dane trotted up and I gestured wordlessly at my discovery. “Satan’s cock-flavored hooch,” Dane swore. I noted it down for future use.

“Please tell me I’m wrong and that these ain’t goblin tracks,” I pleaded quietly.

“It’d make a liar outta me,” he said, grabbing his hat and throwing it to the ground.

“What the hell are goblins doin’ this south of the mountains?” I asked, not expecting an answer.

“Haven’t seen goblin sign in these parts for over a decade,” Dane said, followed by more inventive swearing.

We shared a bleak look before he turned and began to flag down the Sheriff and the men we had gathered during our search. Among them was Ulysses, and I dreaded what my discovery would do to the man's state of mind.

One of the first acts of the reformed United States government after it rose from the ashes in DC a hundred years ago was to enact the “Goblin Free America” Act. It basically put a half-dollar reward on the little bastards in an attempt to eradicate them. I’m not a big student of history, but Mrs. Daugherty had done her best to educate me—what I recalled is that program after program was issued to try to handle the “goblin problem,” yet none were completely successful. There’d be lulls in their numbers and raids for a few years, but they’d crop up again like a bad case of lice.

I’d run into a few bands, no more than a dozen at a time. Usually, a few shots into a crowd of them was enough to scatter the little monsters, but in my experience that just made them come back with bigger numbers. When found, you had to kill them all.

When Mrs. Daugherty first told me about the program, I was shocked by her approval of it. She was the kindest, warmest person I’ve ever met. If she found a spider in the house she caught it in a cup and put it outside. Thus, my surprise at her endorsement of wholesale genocide of an arguably intelligent race.

I remembered her pained expression as I expressed these thoughts to her. “You haven’t seen the aftermath of one of their raids,” she had said, quietly. I remember her putting down the shirt she was mending so she could focus on me. I put down my pencil in the middle of the book I had been reading to listen to her.

“Every attempt to communicate with them, barter with them, or even just chase them away ends in the loss of human life,” she said, her big brown eyes wide with intensity. “It took humanity fifty years to figure out that the sight of their green skin means one of us has to die. I hope you never meet one, but if you do—kill it. If you can’t, you run. You run until you find someone who can kill them. Letting them live is tantamount to smoking in a dynamite magazine.”

Dane returned with the Sheriff and the men, breaking me out of my memories. I indicated the tracks I found, which cut across Tilly’s. The Sheriff didn’t swear as Dane had, but he growled so deeply in his chest I was expecting the ground to rumble around him like a steam engine was passing. I watched Ulysses’ expression, and though it didn’t change, his shoulders dropped and he seemed to age several years.

The Sheriff turned and pointed at one of the men I didn’t know. “Clint, you’re unarmed. Run back to town and let them know goblins are in the area. Tell them I want a posse formed and to send a runner to Johnstown to let them know. Bill, go with him and keep him safe, and bring back our rifles and shotguns. All of them.”

Once again Bill nodded and executed his orders without a word. Was the guy mute?

The Sheriff gave a pointed look at one of his other deputies, who grabbed Ulysses and took him aside. The Sheriff lowered his voice and brought Dale and I, into a circle with him. “How likely is it that girl is still alive?” He asked. “No bullshit, Dale.”

Dale made a pensive noise. “We’ll know in a bit when we continue north. These tracks cross hers, so they aren’t following her yet. Goblins hunt more by scent and sound,” he dragged his eyes up and met the Sheriffs. “You know how they are with kids, though.”

The Sheriff saw my confusion. “They prefer to eat kids,” he clarified.

My knuckles popped suddenly. I hadn’t realized I had been clenching my fists. I shook them out. “What are we waitin’ for, then? Let’s go.”

The Sheriff held me up with a raised hand. “Look at how the earth is churned up,” he said. “There are a lot of them, maybe a hundred. I don’t know that we have a hundred bullets between us.”

I counted the men with us. Counting myself, we had gathered ten men. There were more searching for the girl, but they were spread out east and west. Only the Sheriff, his three deputies, and I had extra ammo for our guns visible on our belts. I had five reloads in my belt, which amounted to over thirty-six bullets just to myself, but I understood the Sheriff’s hesitation. A pistol against goblins was only good for six shots, and by the time you reloaded, they were on you.

And that was only if you landed your shots. I’m a fantastic shot, and I say that with no humility. I can put two holes into a flipped quarter. Most of my modest earnings went to buying ammo so I could keep my skills sharp.

The Sheriff had the air of a man who, when firing a gun, hit what he was aiming at. Looking at him, I figured “What’s the use of a bullet if you can’t hit what you’re aimin’ at?” was his motto. Hell, that’s my motto, now.

So I wasn’t worried about the Sheriff if it came to a fight. The rest of the men, however? The deputies might be worth two or three a piece, but townsmen I couldn’t rely on. The majority had pistols stuck into their waistband and had the presence of men who weren’t used to violence. That wasn’t a bad thing… unless you were faced with goblins.

Goblins had some crude cunning, but their real danger was their willingness to die to cause harm. You could startle them into fleeing, but once they got their blood up and decided a fight was happening, they only stopped when dead or everything else was. Luckily, they didn’t seem to have the higher thought processes one needed for planning, or they’d save bullets for when they needed them. Whenever they got their hands on a gun, they used it for everything as soon as possible.

“So what’s the plan?” I asked, barely keeping my anger from boiling over. I wasn’t angry at the Sheriff, just the situation. But the Sheriff was here, so he was getting the brunt of it.

“We’ll keep following the girl's tracks,” the Sheriff said. “Hopefully the goblins haven’t sniffed her out. We need more information.”

Dale nodded and went to retrieve his hat. I drew my pistol and waited for the tracker to return before we resumed our search.

The landscape was becoming progressively hilly, the tan grass replaced by rocky terrain covered in a patchy moss-like growth that Dale mentioned was good for toilet paper in a pinch. Trees became more prevalent, a twisted species I wasn’t familiar with that looked like someone had tied a bunch of eucalyptus in knots and stood them up. Each tree had several trunks that created what looked like a hand that was stabbing into the earth, with the hand's “wrist” being where the trunks met and rose into the air for several dozen feet before the first branches appeared. The trees were huge and gave the landscape a rather ominous feel. It felt like we were walking amongst judging giants.

We finally picked up Tilly’s tracks again after a mile, relief flooding through our group when we didn’t spot goblin tracks near hers. The relief was short-lived, however. After another mile and a half, we found goblin tracks crossing hers, which turned in the direction she was heading. We picked up the pace.

Ulysses came up to the front, looking pale and clutching an old, rusted pistol in a white-knuckled grip. “We told her to keep the house in sight!” He was muttering.

“You didn’t know she was comin’ out this far?” I asked, trying to keep judgment out of my tone.

“No!” His response told me I’d failed. “The first couple of times I went with her to make sure she knew what was too far. After that, Margarette accompanied her as I could only take so much time off work. I—“

The normally jovial man trailed off, shaking his head. I gripped his shoulder. “After a while, you thought she was doin’ what she had while you were around. Seems she started rangin’ further afield.”

“I don’t know what will become of me if something happened to her,” he said. “I… I—“

He trailed off again and I gave his shoulder another squeeze.

Dale paused and waited for the main group to catch up before addressing the Sheriff and Ulysses. “The quarries’ just up ahead, and I’d bet my horse that’s where these tracks lead,” he began, standing so that he could keep us and the tracks we were following in vision. “There’s at least fifty individuals. If they have any ranged weapons, we won’t be able to fight them without losses.”

“Goblin’s don’t use guns,” one of the men scoffed.

“They do if they can get their hands on them,” I replied. “They ain’t too good about conservin’ ammo, however, so after a few days they just start usin’ ‘em as clubs.”

The Sheriff gave me a measuring look. “You tangled with goblins?”

I nodded. “A’few times,” I said, passing my eyes over the group. “If you’ve never tangled with the little shits, be prepared for their speed. They’re small but are quick like a grayhound. Aim for the head or the heart if you have smaller calibers, anywhere else will just piss them off. Forty-five’ll—“I displayed my Colt. “—stop ‘em with a chest or stomach shot, but they treat losin’ a hand or foot as extra motivation. Seen one stab a feller in the eye with their arm stump.”

The men turned to the Sheriff, who nodded. “They’re fast and tenacious, but only weigh about eighty pounds. The alphas are just as quick and mean, but are the size of a man and twice as strong.”

Dale cleared his throat noisily and spit to the side. “Luckily I haven’t seen any alpha tracks, but that don’t mean there aren’t any where we’re headed.”

The men started talking about what we should do, with the majority wanting to wait for Deputy Bill to return with the rifles and shotguns. Ulysses was obviously in the “go now” camp. I had similar thoughts but kept them to myself. As much as I wanted to rescue a little girl, I didn’t want ten men to die in the attempt.

“Look, all I got is a .38.”

“Same here.”

“I got a .44 but only four shots.”

The discussion became an inventory of our collective ammo. I stood apart, keeping an eye out. I climbed up a hill to get better vision, which is when I thought I heard something. I strained my ears. What was that? Was it…?

“Shut your holes!” I shouted at the men. “I hear somethin’!”

I climbed to the highest point of the hill. The land stretched out before me, and about a quarter mile away the hills abruptly ended and fell away. I figured that was the quarry Dane had mentioned.

The Sheriff and Dane scrambled up to me, and I shot them a dirty look for the noise they were making. They paused and I cupped my hands around my ears.

Nothing happened for a few moments, and I started to think I had imagined the noise. I dropped my hand and opened my mouth to apologize—

A scream.

“I hear a girl’s scream,” I blurted.

Before I knew what I was doing I was down the hill and rushing for the quarry.