Free The Blue Blazes by Chuck Wendig Page B

tunnel. Gobbos bite. Claw. He feels blood wet his shirt.
    He leaps for the Pig. Grabs hold. Barely. Legs dragging behind him. Gobbo hanging off the legs.
    The pig rounds the curve. There. Ahead Davey. Lying underneath the black thing, the reaper’s cloak, men leaping on top of the monster – the monster flinging them off like they’re straw-stuffed poppets.
    They’re not Mookie.
    The pig lurches forward–
    Mookie clambers up over it, toward the front of the cart–
    It crashes into the deadstop. Mookie uses the momentum to leap.
    He tackles the shadow-thing. Goblins screeching behind him. One gob catches a shotgun blast to the dome – buckshot peels back its scalp like the skin of an orange. A Sandhog’s six-shooter punches a hole in the other.
    Mookie wrestles with the reaper-cloak. He pulls it off Davey Morgan – but it has weight and energy like Mookie can’t believe and before he knows it the thing has him pinned. Bullets cut through the shadow and disappear inside it – the shadow-thing continues its assault unfazed. Knife fingers stick through Mookie’s breastbone like the flesh isn’t even there – he feels them cutting apart not his heart but rather, his soul –
    Nora. Jess. Grampop. Pop. Worthless. Dumb. Bad Dad.  
    Ugly thoughts like tentacles reach up, coil around him, threaten to drag him down.
    No . No time for this.
    He roars. Lifts his head. Opens his mouth.
    And bites for one of the only exposed features he can find.
    He bites off one of its shiny eyes. Spits it out.
    Light shines through the hole – a bloom of illumination like a sunbeam through morning mist. And then the thing keens, a high-pitched tone before diving off Mookie and through the floor. Like a wraith without substance, its flesh unreal.

 
    7
     
    A union within a union. A guild within a guild. Local 147-and-a-half. The men of the Sandhogs know about it, though they’ve little idea what it actually is. They think it’s some manner of “inner circle” composed of veterans of the Sandhog life who help shape policy and who know all the tricks. They know tricks, yes. They know a great deal. They’re the ones who know what’s really down there. The night the Sandhog demolition crew blew a hole in prehistoric rock and opened up a cave into a forgotten gobbo temple, the men there on that crew were the first. The ones that lived formed the pact. They wrote the charter. In union speak, everyone there bought the buck. Any Sandhog who sees something he’s not supposed to see, they rope him in. Though some find themselves invited, too. Tested by the others. Strong, smart, tough, and a little deranged: these are the traits that those men need. These are the traits necessary to stand between the safety and sanctity of the world above and the named and unnamed monsters of the Great Below.
    – from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below
     
    The reaper-cloak gone, the gobbos dead, gun barrels swing toward Mookie.
    Davey stands. Shaking. Flinty eyes casting about, trying to find a slippery grip on the world. The man – older now than Mookie is – looks rattled. He brushes it off, finally levels his stare at Mookie. “Mookie Pearl, as I live and breathe.”
    “Davey Morgan.”
    “Been a long fucking while, Pearl.” Loooong fookin’ wall .
    “It has.”
    Morgan shows his palms, lowers them – and as he does, the rest of the Sandhogs, a dozen or so men, lower their guns, axes, hammers.
    “You bring these monsters to my doorstep?”
    “Maybe. I dunno.”
    Davey steps up to Mookie. His bushy caterpillar eyebrows arch. He clucks his tongue, then seems to make some internal decision.
    Mookie knows it’s coming long before it hits – the old man telegraphs the punch so far in advance he might as well have sent message by way of an old limping donkey. Just the same, Mookie takes the hit. It’s owed to him.
    But just to be sure, he growls:
    “You get that one. But you won’t get a second.”
    Davey