Trolls Robert Borski Grady said, ‘You watch out for trolls now. Hear?’ I nodded politely, slightly. ‘Sure, Grady, sure. You know me.’ Even so: I meant to get me one of those mothers. Maybe two. ‘I’m not kidding, Harrison. You better be careful.’ ‘Yeah, yeah. Okay already, I’ll be careful. Just quit your bitching.’ Sometimes Grady gets like that: all stubborn in the head and authoritative. We have to humour him, then. Otherwise, he goes crazy. ‘I’m just going out for some fresh air. Be back in an hour or so.’ I think he might have mumbled something into his beard, but I didn’t hear him, because I was leaving, dispeeding. Out I went. The back door, across the lot, and into the garage. Heap was waiting for me. (Now here’s ten feet of jaguar steel with burnished chrome fenders and a hunched glass back: and it was all mine.) I finished walking in. ‘Hello, old buddy,’ I says to Heap. ‘How you been and all?’ No answer, of course. Heap seldom answers, so right away I ask, ‘You ready for some troll-hunting?’ Heap gives smile-grin up in grillwork. That means yes in car. ‘Okay baby,’ I said climbing in, ‘let’s go get ‘em.’ I turned the key and Heap fired up from inside, lizard-gut burning acid. Eyes opened, and glare lights phased out hungrily. I found the wheel and massaged Heap’s metal brain with the foot pedals. Smelled troll blood already, felt so good. We were gonna get one, maybe two. So I coaxed Heap out onto the street, tail end hot hot hot. It was July. Good troll-hunting weather. Summer nights like these usually brought them out in droves (making up perhaps for those troll-less winters). I knew we had a good chance of catching one, although two would bring our average up. Like altogether now, I guess me and Heap had killed on up to thirty-six trolls. (That’s no brag, either, only telling facts.) Match that against three years’ driving experience and you get an average of one troll a month. Not bad, eh? Course me and Heap were nowheres near establishing a record. Not when some Johnny down in Phoenix was putting them away six, seven a month. But we might make the ratings someday and that was good enough for us KayCee folk. Right, Heap? Anyways, see, we were on concrete now, on the inroads of the Intercity. Snakebelly smooth as far as the eye could see, miles and miles of highway with only slapdash yellow signs marking the exits and entrances: old Intercity 16. It was our favourite road and we were happy to be back on familiar territory. Seems funny when you think about it, though. That back when Grady was my age - Case I forgot to mention it, Grady’s my stepfather on my brother’s side. The guy who was always warning me to look out for trolls (he worried about me so). - none of this was here. They had greens and scenes instead. Trunks with trees, and grass, rockribs and weeds. I guess there were a lot of ecology-minded hicks around in those days. But nowadays, in 1994, it’s different. We’re more into the concrete revolution. Cities have become our lifeblood, the roads our arteries. So now you can’t escape them. They’re ubiquitous. Everywhere you go, everyplace you see: concrete. In greystone blocks or flatbed lamina. Just beautiful. With all our food being produced synthetically or in hydroponic centres, what’s the use of having countryside anyway? No use. That’s why we got rid of it, got concretized. Made more sense, wouldn’t you say? And in a way, all this pavement was responsible for the surfacing of trolls. With their type of country - the picnic-type -being slowly wiped out, they had nowhere else to go. You could almost say they were like jackrabbits. Back when God’s country was underdeveloped and raw, there were droves and droves of jackrabbits hunkering up and down the countryside. Yet very few people ever noticed them. But then when they started building transcontinental highways and expressways, these rabbits started getting pushed out of their own territory. They had to start crossing concrete to get anywhere, and that’s when people started noticing them; when they were scurrying across the road or getting trammelled under the wheels, crunch crunch. Well, trolls were sort of the same way. They were limited in the places they could make the nature scene. A few oases here and there. A stretch of grass and weeds up near the riverside. But that’s about all. And in every case, these places were surrounded with concrete. But now, you see, this doesn’t mean anything unless you realize several things. Like the fact that trolls are masters of disguise. They look exactly like you or me or Joe Bob next door. Only thing is, they’re hicks at heart. That’s right, hicks. They miss the greenery and the growing things. The cutfresh smell of grass, the scratchquick scurry of leaves. That’s why they ramble about so: they’re looking for some place to flake out on. Someplace green, like oases or along the Missouri River. To get there, though, they have to park their ears nearby, and cut across the remaining concrete on foot. Which is illegal. Which is where me and Heap come in. We try and juice ‘em before they can make it to where they’re headed. Or if we miss them first time around, we try again when the trolls have to leave by the same way they came. Troll-hunting: that’s how it’s done and what it’s all about. I hope you paid attention, friend. All right. We were on snakebelly smooth again, old Intercity 16. Everything was going fine. Heap was burning ass, my eyes were eaglesharp, on the lookout. Weather, too, was good. Up above, at least as far above as the upper limits of Heap’s hunched glass back, the sky was clear, with fixated stars. Temperaturewise, the air was citywarm and muggy. All of which was great. There were bound to be trolls out tonight. Heap squealed his wheels in anticipation, drawing my adrenalin to the surface. Another three to four miles, and we would be in troll country. I started to watch the outer lanes for parked cars. Last time me and Heap were out here, about three weeks ago, we bagged a starry-eyed grandma troll. She was walking along the road with a fistfull of green when we came around the bend and juiced her. Splot! All over the road and half over the car. Took me two weeks just to pick her out of Heap’s grillwork. But the satisfaction of it all. What can I say? Every time me and Heap wiped out a troll, my spine felt like it had been short-circuited, like electrocuted fudge. That, plus knowing we were probably gonna make the ratings someday made everything worth any trouble involved. And that included cleaning up Heap’s grillwork. So you really can’t blame me for being the way I was. It was in my blood. Heap’s too. We were born troll killers. Which brings us back to tonight, and those old familiar riffs about how we were gonna get one, maybe two. Because now we were there, in troll country. I slowed down, turning the infra-red darksight system on. Heap was purring beneath me like a contented cyclotron. It was dangerous, driving this way, though, so we kept our eyes peeled. Didn’t want to run into a shadowload of parked car. In fact - ... hey, wait a minute. I thought I saw something ... Yes, there it was. Just what we were looking for. A parked car, up ahead to the left. That meant there was a troll somewheres around here. (There were also no other cars in sight. Which meant the troll was ours. Good. Good.) All excited like, I felt my temples start to pound. I was breathing heavier, too, like I was about to reach orgasm. My palms were sweaty. I doubt if I blinked once. We cruised up the road a smooth forty-five, taking it easy. And then I saw him: the troll. He was running left-to-right, some 75 yards away, all at a zigzag. Immediately, I unmasked Heap, hoping the lights would blind him. They didn’t, though, 65 I guess because our manoeuvre wasn’t all that unexpected 60 (this troll had obviously been around for a while). But he was a goner just the same 50. His car was to our rear, and the nearest 45 embankment was a hundred yards past the perpendicular line running up from his shoulder blades 39 and he certainly wasn’t about to turn back now. In fact, his only chance was to face us head on 25 and try to dodge us like a matador 20 would a bull. Which wasn’t going to be easy 15 because me and Heap were experts at this sort of thing 10 having done it countless times before 9 and never having lost one yet 8. We were closer now. I could see him 7 dancing in the light. But what was that 6 in his hand? 5 Flowers? And why did 4 he suddenly 3 look so familiar 2 as he feigned right, but instead 1 went left, which 0 - I heard the muted thud of impact. - is where we hit him, crash slam. Several things happened at once, then. Out of the corners of my eyes, I saw the troll’s shattered body bounce silently down the road, like something out of a speeded-up soundless movie, all bloodied and broken, while up in my head, in my mind’s eye, I was replaying the last few seconds before impact. Backwards from ten: there was that funny little troll running with short, tired strides, his arms swinging back-forth, his beard lightning yellow in the lights. There was Heap and me nosing in on him, relentlessly, doggingly, like some archfiend out of the pulp tradition (me and Heap were weaned on Capt. Whizzflash). Next there was a silence, the sky dark with frozen salt and shadows; then there was the collision at zero, and the recognition. The fire inside, the acid belly broth. Then there was no more G...
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