Nix hopped up onto the stainless-steel prep table. The little Glimmuck looked terrified, his golden hair bristling with static, but his eyes were wide and manic, glittering with a desperate idea. He was holding Marcus's large metal whisk in his small, nimble hands and banging it rapidly against the concave surface of a stainless-steel mixing bowl. Pearl, equally focused, had joined him, using a fork to hit a heavy metal jelly jar she had found.
The sound they were creating was high, piercing, and shockingly effective.. a pure, resonant high-frequency tone that humans could barely hear, but that was clearly agonizing to the Pig Men.
Nix looked at Marcus, his electric-blue eyes blazing with the tactical insight of a creature that knew its enemies' hidden weaknesses. He pointed a slender, long-fingered hand toward the ceiling, toward the massive ventilation hood above the majestic grill.
"Up," Nix squeaked in high-pitched, broken English. "Up. Shiny tunnel. They hate the sound. They hate the noise."
Marcus looked up. The industrial exhaust hood. It was wide, greasy, and led straight up to the roof units.
It was a tight squeeze for a human. Impossible for a seven-foot Pig Man.
"The vent," Marcus realized, adrenaline spiking with the new opportunity. "It's an exfiltration point! Liri, you're first! Eira, boost her!"
Liri scrambled out from under the counter, dodging past Marcus's legs, her face pale but resolved beneath the brim of her cap. Eira laced her fingers together, making a step. Liri put a small boot into Eira's hands and launched herself upward. She grabbed the oily lip of the vent hood, hauled herself inside with surprising core strength, and disappeared into the dark metal throat.
"Go!" Marcus roared at Eira, shouldering his rifle and firing a blind, five-round burst through the pass-through window to keep the Hunters' heads down and mask the sound of Eira's climbing.
Eira jumped, grabbing the ledge. She didn't hesitate. She wriggled her hips, pulling herself up and into the ductwork with a strength that belied her slender frame.
Marcus turned to follow.
A massive gray hand punched through the pass-through window, shattering the tempered glass and grabbing the metal shelf inches from his face. The metal screeched as it crumpled into a ribbon. The Hunter's snout shoved through the opening, snapping jaws inches from Marcus's nose. The smell was horrific.. blood, rot, and wet fur, thick enough to choke on.
Marcus jammed the muzzle of the M16 directly against the creature's snout, right where the bone met the soft, rubbery skin. He pulled the trigger.
BOOM.
The point-blank shot didn't kill it.. nothing seemed to stop these things instantly.. but the round blew half its snout away in a spray of black gore and bone fragments. The creature shrieked, a sound of agony and rage, and reeled back, its blind, yellow eyes streaming.
Marcus didn't wait to see if it recovered. He tossed the rifle up into the dark vent opening. He jumped, grabbed the greasy metal edge, and hauled himself up into the darkness just as the kitchen door below exploded inward, forced open by the mass of the second Hunter.
He scrambled up the sloping ductwork on hands and knees, slipping on decades of accumulated grease, following the frantic sounds of Eira and Liri ahead of him. Below, the sounds of monstrous roaring and smashing metal echoed in the tight space.
They burst out onto the tar-and-gravel roof of The Slipgate, collapsing onto the rough surface under the blinding Texas afternoon sun.
They were alive. But they were trapped on a roof, with two raging monsters below and a reality that was rapidly dissolving around them. The air shimmered with that familiar gold mist, and the trees across the street looked too tall, too dark.
Marcus stood up, lungs burning, looking around for the next move. The parking lot was empty. The street was quiet.
"They will smell us up here," Eira said, her voice shaking with the effort of her climb and the psychic strain of the fight, as she pulled Liri close.
"Then we don't stay," Marcus said, looking at the fifteen-foot drop to the alley below, then at the adjacent roof of the barber shop, a six-foot gap away.
He looked at the Glimmucks. They had somehow beaten them up the vent.. a feat of miniature agility. They were crouched near the exhaust fan, shaking grease off their perfect golden skin with indignant little huffs.
"Nix," Marcus said, his voice hard. "You like shiny things? You like stealing?"
Nix looked up, his pointed ears twitching, his expression shifting from annoyance to avarice.
Marcus reached into his pocket. He bypassed the taped-up tea tin containing the dangerous coin. He pulled out his keys. He twisted a small, silver pocketknife off the ring.. a shiny, polished little tool he'd had for years.
He held it up. It glinted brightly in the sun.
Nix's eyes widened into saucers of pure desire.
"I need a distraction," Marcus said, tossing the knife high in the air and catching it. "A big loud noise. Something that makes those things look the other way for ten seconds. You do that, you keep the shiny."
Nix looked at the knife, then at the smoking vent where the roaring was coming from, then back at the knife. Greed warred with fear on his small, perfect, movie-star face.
Greed won.
Nix snatched the knife from the air with incredible speed, grinned a mouthful of sharp teeth, and zipped toward the edge of the roof overlooking the front parking lot.
"What is he doing?" Eira asked, horrified.
"Making himself indispensable," Marcus grimaced. "I hope."
He turned to the others. "We're jumping to the next roof. Liri, I'm throwing you first. Eira, you're next. Don't look down. Look at the landing zone."
He grabbed Liri by the waist. She didn't argue. She just nodded, her face set in grim determination beneath the oversized cap.
Below them, the front door of the diner smashed open, the last piece of the frame giving way. The first Hunter stumbled out into the sunlight, roaring, looking for a scent.
Suddenly, a car alarm began to blare across the street.. a piercing, rhythmic shrieking that cut through the afternoon quiet. Nix had apparently found a target, likely slashing the wires or smashing the glass of a sedan.
The Hunter's head snapped violently toward the noise. The sound clearly hurt it, diverting its rage.
"Go!" Marcus yelled, and threw Liri across the six-foot gap.
The explosion of pure, desperate magic had bought them time.. maybe thirty seconds, maybe a minute.. and that was all Marcus had ever needed. He scrambled backward from the shattered kitchen doorway, his lungs burning, the heavy, dead weight of the locked metal door pressing the urgency into his spine.
The rhythmic, high-pitched CHING-CHING-CHING from the Glimmucks under the prep table was still reverberating, a terrible, persistent sound. Marcus risked a glance into the dining room. The Hunters were gone from sight, retreating from the auditory agony, but the sound of them smashing and roaring in the customer area was a clear indication that the fight was far from over.
Eira, pale and trembling from the effort of her spell, stumbled away from the back door and leaned heavily against a stainless-steel counter. She was breathing in sharp, painful gasps, her fingers digging into the metal edge. Liri was crouched low near the floor, frantically sorting through Marcus's meager supply of cleaning tools, looking for something sharp.
Everyone could see that they were overmatched. The shotgun buckshot had merely irritated the Hunters, and Eira's last spell was clearly not repeatable in rapid succession. They needed plans.. not just defensive positions, but aggressive, creative traps that exploited weaknesses Marcus had not yet cataloged.
Marcus was beginning to notice a pattern in the enemy. The Pig Men, for all their terrifying bulk and interdimensional origins, were tactically primitive. They were old school, at best Vikings with tusks. They relied on brute force, momentum, and terror.
He recalled the encounter at the door. "They don't know how to breach and clear," he muttered, grabbing a stack of steel mixing bowls and handing them to Eira. "They just hit hard. They have some firearms.. I saw crude bolt-actions.. but they're not effective. They're parts and pieces they can't find and can't fix."
Eira nodded, taking the bowls. "Their strength is physical, Marcus. Their minds are simple. They carry the iron, but they do not understand the iron."
This detail sparked a thought in Marcus. He looked around the kitchen, his gaze sweeping over the heavy industrial appliances.
"Electricity," he said, the word cutting through the roaring outside. "Do they have electricity? Do they know what it is? The tools and the power that run this place?"
Eira pushed herself off the counter, rubbing her temples. "There is not a lot of electricity out there in the Gate, in the Netherworld, whatever we call it. Everything there runs on blood or light-threads. Wires are a foreign concept."
Nix and Pearl, huddled under the prep table, were listening intently, their beautiful faces focused. Nix paused his high-frequency tapping, his large, blue eyes wide with understanding. Electricity. That stuff here that was wired up. It had shocked him before, providing a momentary jolt of terrifying, pure energy when he bit the wrong cord.
Is there anything in this situation around us that has a lot of electricity? Nix thought, looking from the industrial wiring to the overhead lights.
Marcus answered the unspoken question as he stalked toward the deep fryers. "Oh yeah, we have a lot of electricity. Big stuff that'll kill you." He pointed a finger at the massive aluminum junction box near the HVAC condenser. "The air conditioners, the main oven, the fryers.. they run on 240 volts, sometimes more. And their amperage is very high. That means it can kill you instantly. It's too much energy for a simple organism."
A dangerous, predatory smile stretched across his mouth. "If we can get some wires, we can get that power outside. We put something shiny that they want to touch and catch or grab in the middle.. something Gold-Tribe can't resist.. and we put a couple of those around. We might have a chance to stop their hearts."
The plan was crude, suicidal, and entirely military. Marcus knew how to build a booby trap using available materials. Everyone chipped in instantly to create these desperate traps.
Eira took the heavy-duty extension cord from the floor buffer. She began carefully stripping the thick rubber casing with her knife, her movements precise and fast, revealing the coiled copper threads within. She knew the dangers of the Pig Men; she also understood the concept of directed energy.
Liri acted as a lookout and runner, crawling under the shelves, retrieving lengths of copper plumbing and a large, empty metal bucket.
Marcus went to work at the junction box. He used his combat knife to carefully pry off the cover of the main outdoor service panel, exposing the thick, black cables that pulsed with raw power. He knew the risk.. a single mistake would turn him into a cinder.. but the adrenaline sharpened his focus to a razor edge.
"We are going to light them up," he muttered, pulling out the tools he needed. "We will cook them from the inside out."
In the meantime, the Glimmucks were busy with their own crucial contribution, the one that had stopped the initial charge.
Pearl, crouched behind a stack of paper towels, searched frantically through her small, chaotic satchel. She was looking for a dog whistle.. a tiny, shiny silver tube she had pilfered from a keychain months ago. She knew its true worth was far beyond mere gold. She knew its high-pitched, insistent frequency could cripple the Hunters.
"Where is the damned Ching-stick?" she hissed in Elvish, tossing aside a bent spoon and a few gold fillings.
Nix, equally focused, had already found a powerful alternative. He was staring at the stainless steel kitchen shelving.
"Drill," Nix squeaked, tapping his perfect, small nose. "Drill is better. More pain."