Bugbears aren’t Hell creatures, I’d learned since the first encounter, but something older and stranger. They can be summoned and put to work, as some demons and most fetches can, but they have very little mind of their own. That means they’re limited but also fairly foolproof, since they’re not actively trying to figure out how to eat their summoner. The average bugbear really is about the size of a smallish bear, but beyond that the likeness is pretty shaky. They’re made of something heavy but soft like jelly, can stretch and even break apart before reassembling themselves, and wrestling with one that’s wrapped itself around you is like trying to pull apart a car tire by brute force.
So are they constrictors, I hear you ask? Shit, I wish that was all they did.
See, the weirdest thing about bugbears is that they can harden selective bits of their gummy selves, as I’d already discovered while fighting for my life inside my late Datsun 510. A blobby hole of a mouth can suddenly grow sharp, jagged edges; a flabby, fingerless paw can sprout hornlike claws. The only reason you know it is because the bit that’s hardening goes from the usual near-black to a sort of purple-white. But even if you chop those harder bits off, they just turn back into the rubbery dark stuff and then flow back to the original, which is why even in this extreme situation I wasn’t bothering to waste bullets on them.
So, General Dollar’s battlefield report: one unconscious Amazon, Clarence at least momentarily out of action, Halyna (and her flamethrower) somewhere in the darkness behind me, hacking gamely away with her own silver-edged blade. Which left me struggling by myself against two bugbears the size of young hippos, with more jelly on the way. The one nearest my face had gone toothy as a hagfish and was armoring itself with pale purplish spikes like a giant rubber sea urchin, but it was the one coiled around my chest that was squeezing me breathless. I got my machete into it and cut off as much as I could (which was about as much fun as sawing through old chewing gum that hates you and wants to hurt you) but at last it fell away. I staggered back a few steps, doing my best to saw away the parts of the other one that were biting me. Nightmare Children were still swarming me too, but I could only deal with one shrieking horror at a time.
You could slow the bugbears down by chopping them into pieces, but eventually they’d pull all their bits back together. Fire worked, but Orban had reminded me several times that Halyna’s flamethrower only had three good bursts in it, and she’d already used one.
I had the strange experience of watching my machete pass through what would have been the face of the bugbear trying to eat my head. I almost cut my own nose off, but twisted the blade and managed to do enough damage that the thing slid off me and dropped to the floor, already repairing itself.
I backed toward Halyna so that we could protect each other while we fought. Clarence (who was proving to be pretty darn tough) had recovered, and although he was limping and dribbling blood from his cuts, he picked up unconscious Oxana and then dodged and slashed his way through the swastikids and bugbears to join us. The three of us put our backs to each other and waited, weapons raised. For a moment it almost looked like a stalemate, except for the fact we were clearly losing. Three or four more bugbears oozed out of the ceiling and plopped to the floor, then raised themselves up on pseudo-legs so they looked like larger, hairless versions of the Nightmare Children. This was turning into an evil-jelly jamboree, and I really didn’t like the odds.
“Save the fire, Halyna,” I said as she aimed the nozzle.
“Why? They will kill us!”
“Trust me. It’s the only thing we know that works. We may need it to make an escape route.”
“Escape route!” Clarence’s voice was hoarse, and he sounded like he was close to losing his composure. Fighting supernatural creatures can do that to you. “That’s a good one.”
“Hang in there, Harrison. We’ve still got blades. I’ve still got a bunch of silver bullets and so do both of you. I’ll tell you when to go to the guns.”
And then the nearest bugbears suddenly rose up like cobras, spreading themselves at the top as they surged toward us, humping up and down like fast and furious caterpillars. I slashed at the leading attackers with my machete, but the bugbears were wedged together so tightly it was like trying to chop the top off an entire ocean wave made of putty—I’d get through one and the blade would get stuck in the next, or the next. Also, the silver bothered them, but it didn’t kill them like it did the Nightmare Children.
We gave ground, but they were forcing us back against the nearest wall. I grabbed the first shieldlike object I could find, a broken Chinese screen, and used it as a bulldozer blade, trying to shove a way through them so we could make a run for it, but although it kept the nearest of the rubbery creatures off my face, the screen was too flimsy. One of the bugbears just reared up and flowed over the top of it like an octopus pulling a crab out of a hole. The monster’s weight nearly collapsed everything on top of me, so I let go and scrambled out of the way. A few seconds later the Chinese screen broke and disappeared under a mass of rampaging jelly.
Just when the wave of purple-black death had risen up so high in front of us that I was about to let Halyna buy us a few more seconds (because long-term planning takes second place to short-term not dying) the bugbears around us started to erupt in flashes of fire, a stitchery of sparkling little explosions that blew them instantly into smaller pieces, some of which continued to burn. A man-sized figure was running toward us through the flailing, smoking blobs. Our savior wore a shabby overcoat, and waved a pistol with a big silencer on the end. No, not just big, immense. I mean, it looked like something you’d see in specialty porn.
I confess to being surprised. “Sam? What the—?”
“Sam!” yelled Clarence. He sounded like a kid spotting his dad in the Little League stands.
My old buddy leaped over a bubbling pile of bugbear glop. Watching Sam jump is a bit like watching a rhino trying to fly, but I have to admit he got pretty good air, even though he didn’t quite stick the landing. “Talk later,” he said as he skidded to a tumbling halt beside me, almost knocking me over. An ugly, rubbery tentacle had wrapped around my leg, and I was busy hacking it off before its owner could get a more intimate grasp on me. “I’ve only got one more clip of these incendiaries,” Sam said, panting as he climbed back onto his feet. “If I’d known you were fighting the fuckin’ Shmoos I would have bought one of those crazy-ass drum magazines.”
I cut myself free, then got out my backup blade, a big old Bowie, and handed it to Sam. God, it felt good to see him, even if it just meant we were going to get fatally slimed together. “Silver-edged. It’s great on the spidery guys, not so much on the jellies. Give ’em a little more fire when you’re ready, and we’ll make a break for it.”