They arrived at the military base in about fifteen minutes, by Sam’s estimate. That meant they had been doing a solid twenty miles an hour. Sam could do that, but not through the thick of the woods.

Sam eyed the unicorn speculatively. It seemed like they were only scratching the surface of what Linquala could do. He quietly made a bookmark of their encounter, for review.

“Here it is,” Linquala whispered as they approached. The military base had once been a massive facility, and the crumbled cement that lined the forest floor was a testament to that. They had passed by skeletal buildings hollowed out by time and wildfires, eaten out by plants and insects and all manner of rooting creatures, but what was in front of them could only be described as a fortress.

The dome-shaped building sat heavily in the center of a clearing. Some unknown force had prevented plants from growing there, and Sam could still vaguely see the painted lines of the parking lot. The structure was remarkably well preserved, although what were probably blast-resistant glass windows were clouded with age. The door to the base stood agape, its corners worn and twisted where it had been pried open.

Sam hoped that whoever had bent that metal was long gone. Faera had mentioned Ungrin using tools made by others, and he wondered if that meant they had figured out how to operate guns. All of the more advanced weapons would likely have security locks on them, but a simple revolver would kill Sam just as well as anything else.

“Are these Ungrin able to use guns?” Sam asked, glancing at Faera.

She shook her head. “Doubtful. These things are pretty dumb.”

“But they can talk and use tools, right?” Sam asked, his mind starting to churn.

“Correct.”

“So they’re sentient. And you want me to storm the place and kill them? Is there any way to just trade them for a weapon?”

Sam found himself being stared at by both Faera and Linquala. The latter’s jaw hung open, giving him a good opportunity to inspect the inside of a unicorn’s mouth.

Faera sighed and rubbed her temples. “Look, Sam, these things are evil with a capital E. They don’t respect lives or honor. They will try to catch and eat anything made of meat. There is no way to reason with them. The only thing you can do is kill them. They prey on lone travelers and small caravans… it saves more lives in the long run to exterminate them.”

“Just like me, the embodiment of human evil?” Sam asked, raising an eyebrow. He wasn’t going to believe he should kill something on sight until he’d had experience with it himself.

“Crap,” Faera said, putting her hand over her eyes. “Just… don’t let them kill you, okay?”

“Just stay here and back me up if they attack,” Sam said. He stood.

“They’re gonna attack,” Faera said, hefting her knife.

“Even so,” Sam said, then left the elf and magic talking horse behind. He walked out of the concealing bushes and entered the asphalt-coated clearing. There, he waited in plain view for a minute. Nothing happened.

According to what he’d heard from Faera, diplomacy was something these Ungrin weren’t particularly keen on. But they were able to communicate, which meant they could be reasoned with, albeit not the way most people were comfortable with. Well, if it saved some killing, he’d try…

Sam let out a bellow and twisted to smite the battered steel door that hung from the entrance, using it like a gong. The sound reverberated through the forest, digging into Sam’s eardrums where he stood at the epicenter.

In seconds, a wail rose from the black depths of the bunker, carried by many voices. Skittering and scraping sounds echoed from inside the building.

“Ungrin!” Sam shouted at the top of his lungs, flexing what showed above the toga tied around his waist. “Give me what I want or die!”

Maybe that would work. If they perceived weakness, they would probably attack, but maybe if he cowed them from the very beginning, they… never mind.

“Meat!” a little blue man shouted as he charged Sam, a weathered K-bar in his hand. The Ungrin’s skin was a dark blue approaching purple. He was naked, his little dong flapping in the wind beneath his emaciated belly as he sprinted out the door. A sadistic grin revealed curved, serrated teeth. This thing was obviously a carnivore.

Sam smote him. The little blue body folded around the crook like a piece of origami before flying off and impacting against the bunker’s concrete wall, leaving a smear of red blood.

“Ungrin!” Sam shouted. “I’ll kill all the same unless you give me what I want!”

“Meat! Meat!” The cry was taken up by more and more voices.

Three more Ungrin charged out of the dark entrance, sharp sticks and stolen army gear raised above their heads. Just as Sam was swinging the crook back to deal with them, a rock shot out of the darkness, flying over their heads. Sam only had time to flinch.

The rock glanced off his forehead, blinding him with a flash of white. The pain caused him to stagger backwards as more Ungrin flooded out of the base, screeching as they came.

Sam had expected to have at least a little dialogue if he intimidated them, but apparently that was not the case. Or maybe Sam just wasn’t intimidating. Everyone else was afraid of him--it didn’t seem fair that he couldn’t leverage that kind of influence to save these little guys’ filthy fucking lives. In the end, if these little bastards wanted to pit themselves against the apex of human warfare ingenuity, that was their fucking prerogative.

With a bellow, Sam blindly swung the crook. He felt two impacts, and guessed he’d gotten two of the first three. He’d swung low, so the third one… Sam ducked his head to the left and backhanded the space in front of him. His arm caught the third one mid-jump. He felt its rudimentary spear snap against his forearm as he slapped the Ungrin out of the air.

Sam took two steps backward and blinked his eyes, trying to get his sight back. He made out motion just in time to jump above a savage thrust from one of the squealing Ungrin. On the way back down, Sam caught the back of the Ungrin’s head with his heel, folding the critter in half and crushing its skull into the asphalt. He blinked the last of the spots out of his eyes and took stock of the situation.

He was surrounded by around thirty blue-skinned little monsters that wanted to eat him. They were showing a lot more caution than before, their spears held in front of them as they assessed him from a safe distance. Even though they were hesitating, Sam still heard the word ‘meat’ being tossed around between them, almost like a verbal tick or a hiccup. They simply saw him as meat, and they seemed unable to contain the thought.

About this time, Faera and Linquala burst through the brush, slamming against the five or so that had gotten behind Sam. Faera slammed her knife through the spinal column of one of the Ungrin that had turned to look at the sound coming from the forest. She grabbed the spear from its loosened grip and slammed it home in the eye of another.

Linquala simply crushed them, two at a time, beneath her hooves. In moments, the space behind Sam was clear, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

The Ungrin on the other hand, were furious. Petulant, angry cries echoed through the forest.

“Wrong, bad meat!” they called out with the tone of a toddler with their favorite toy stolen from them. Some stomped on the ground in anger while others howled and threw themselves at Sam.

“I,” Sam said, swinging his crook down and busting a skull. “Told.” He emphasized each word with another dead Ungrin. “You!” he grunted. “Give me what I want, or die!”

The ungrin screeched and threw their spears at Sam. Others shot rocks at him from primitive slings. Sam avoided it all, using an Ungrin shield to soak up some of the more inconvenient projectiles.

Finally, there were only five left. Probably realizing how outmatched they were, they broke, running in every direction. Sam, not quite out of the fight yet, threw the crook, breaking the spine of one, while Linquala chased another two down.

Sam heard Faera snarl a single syllable. Her fingers were flung forward in an awkward contortion, and a ball of crackling energy materialized six inches in front of her, shooting forward and impacting against the neck of the final Ungrin. He dropped bonelessly to the ground.

“He was going for a bolt-hole,” Faera said, when she saw Sam staring at her. She nodded toward a circular patch of grass near the edge of the asphalt. “If he made it, he’d probably try to ambush one of us in the tunnels below the bunker. Or, even if he left us alone and escaped, there’s a chance the little bastard would Molt and start a new clan.”

“Still not comfortable attacking things just on your say-so, but yeah, they weren’t fazed by my act at all,” Sam said, frowning.

“It’s okay,” Linquala said, rubbing her cheek against Sam’s hair. “You were very scary.”

“Not really the point, but thanks.” Sam picked up his crook and crushed the skull of the ungrin that crawled beside it. “Try to avoid a fight with everything you’ve got, but once it’s upon you, crush them. One of the technicians told me that.” He pressed his palm against his forehead to staunch the flow of blood dripping over his eye.

“Let me see,” Faera said, prying Sam’s hand away. She murmured the words of the healing spell, and the throbbing in Sam’s forehead flared for a moment, drilling into Sam’s skull, before fading to a dull thud. Sam gingerly touched the wound on his head, and while it was a bit tender, it was no longer bleeding. That magic thing was handy.

“Still won’t teach me?” Sam asked.

“Nope.”

“Ah well,” Sam said, putting his crook over his shoulder. It was no use standing around and begging Faera anymore. It seemed as though the NDA on magic was pretty solid.

“How about you, Linquala?”

“You don’t have a horn.” The unicorn tossed her head.

“Fair enough,” Sam said with a sigh, heading toward the open door. “Guess I’ll stick with smashing things with my stick, then.”

He entered the dark bunker, and immediately took a step back out. The stench was tolerable outside the bunker, but as soon as he set foot inside, the smell of rotting meat and things turning to slime from the inside out assailed his senses. Sam leaned on the crook while Faera watched him with a frown.

“Smells really bad in there,” Sam said, taking big gasps of breathable air.

“Yeah, it smells bad,” Faera said, before ducking her head in. “But it’s not that bad.”

“I was raised in a lab!” Sam protested, seeing she was having nowhere near as much trouble with the stench of anaerobic decomposition.

He squared his shoulders and nudged Faera out of the way. Sam approached the bunker door again, keeping his breathing shallow. If he could stand it long enough, his brain would grow numb to the sensation, according to his physiology training.

Sam’s stomach did cartwheels when he set foot inside, but he forced the bile back down his throat as he descended the stairs with watering eyes. Sam expected the interior of the bunker to be pitch black, but that wasn’t the case at all. Although, in Sam’s mind, it wasn’t much of an improvement.

Scattered around the first floor of the bunker were piles of offal that fed various luminescent mushrooms. Each pile had a small furry animal at its core, with the fungus growing between scraps of refuse tossed on top of the moldy fur.

The furniture had long ago been removed, and the computers that had most likely abutted the wall had been cut away. Tubes leading nowhere jutted from the wall at odd intervals, their bundles of copper wires tarnished and frayed.

“Don’t bother picking anything up off the ground,” Sam said as he crept through the rank bunker. “Any gun left out in this environment is going to be unusable.”

“’Kay” Faera said, crouched and following silently behind him.

Sam glanced back. “Where’s Linquala?”

“Good luck, you two,” the unicorn called, voice drifting down the stairs. “Not going in there in a million years!”

Fair enough. She had gotten them there, and provided Sam with his Smiting Stick, so there wasn’t much he could complain about. Not to mention, the dimensions of the base might not be so accommodating to something horse-sized. The tight quarters combined with thoughts of the tons of stone looming over his head were making even him uneasy. Sam supposed the testing facility must have been built with his dimensions in mind.

He took the hall to the right, plunged into deep shadow by the lack of phosphorescent mushrooms. Sam slowly walked forward, one step at a time, searching for a locked door that might indicate an armory, or a staircase leading down. He pushed a door open, wary of causing the hinges to scream in agony. They didn’t make much noise--the door simply fell off of them and collapsed to the floor, shattering into three pieces of rotten wood, releasing a plume of spores from the moldy ground, and sending a clattering noise through the entire bunker.

Sam held his toga over his mouth to hopefully inhale fewer fungal reproductive units while he listened. The crashing sound echoed for two heartbeats before everything was silent again. No responding sound erupted from the darkness, no little blue bastards chanting ‘meat’ mindlessly.

It appeared that they were alone in here, but Sam wasn’t going to take chances if he could help it. He continued along the hall, taking the rotten doors off their hinges and carefully setting them aside as he checked each room.

After the third door, Sam couldn’t see anymore. The light from the main hall of the bunker was simply too dim.

“You got a way to make light with magic?” he asked.

“There is a way, but I already told you, Special Forces only learn a small number of useful spells.”

“How is having a mind-flashlight not useful enough to make the cut?” Sam inquired.

“Elves have very good night vision.” Sure enough, when he turned back to look at her, he spotted the glimmer of a pair of reflective eyes.

“Well, shit,” Sam said, then slid past her into the main hall. He tore a strip from his toga and bound together a dozen of the luminous mushrooms, concentrating their light enough to shine in the dark. Then he tied them to the top of his crook, suspended in the center of the half circle of wood.

“You probably don’t want to check out the rest of this hall,” Faera said as Sam returned. He put the crook closer to illuminate her face. The brief instant before she batted the ironwood away revealed a grim expression.

“I have to see if there’s something we can use.”

“There’s no weapons in there, trust me,” Faera said.

“I trust you, but did you check for keycards, computers, or notebooks? Keys? I don’t want to get stuck in front of the door to the armory and find out the keys was in one of those rooms.”

Faera sighed, and stepped out of the way. “Help yourself.”

Sam pressed forward past where the dark had stopped him, and continued inspecting each room, being careful of the doors. One room in particular was filled with scraps of wood where the furniture must have been piled and then systematically torn apart to make simple weapons. The next room contained all the computers from the main hall, and Sam searched the area thoroughly, keeping his eyes open for an ID card or an encrypted access pass. The little security cards were quantum entangled so that they and nothing else could open their respective locks. The military expected a certain level of stupidity in their grunts, and so the names of whatever they opened were generally indelibly written on their sides. The keys looked like portable hard drives, and might have wound up in here whenever the rearranging of the bunker’s furniture took place.

The computer cases had been torn apart for the thin, sharp pieces of metal the Ungrin could carve from their sides. The interiors, on the other hand, had simply been smashed, leaving bits of copper wire and magnets strewn about the floor. After a good fifteen minutes, Sam couldn’t find anything immediately useful, but he marked the location in his memory in case they needed a magnet or some wire. It might be possible to use some of these parts to jury-rig a broken door in the high-security parts of the bunker, for example.

Sam stepped out of the room, and noticed that the smell wasn’t quite as bad anymore. He was starting to get used to it. He stuck his head into the next room, and nothing immediately jumped out at him like in the previous two. Sam swung the crook low to bring illumination to the floor, and spotted a foot. Sam took a moment to process that.

A foot. A foot must be connected to a leg, so the song would have you believe. Sam shifted the crook, following the foot to its natural conclusion.

Leaning against the wall was an eviscerated young woman. The meat had been stripped away from one of her splayed thighs, revealing bloody bone. Her ribs had been pried open to get at the inner organs, her throat was cut, and a curtain of brown blood spread down her mutilated breasts.

Sam grimaced and studied her face. She had freckles, was human, about sixteen years old. The perpetrator… Sam shook his head. There was no need to profile. He didn’t need to annotate all the horrible shit that had been done to her for the police to review later. The ones responsible were dead, the police were dead, and it was all pointless now. Sam felt his stomach churn, and with a gasp, he tried to hold it down.

That sudden intake of air brought the taste of old blood, of her into his mouth, and all of a sudden, the stench of the bunker became too much. Sam bent forward, retching. He hadn’t eaten in a few days, so only a clear bile spattered on the ground. If Sam had had anything to purge, he might have felt better. As it was, he was left shaking.

Sam stumbled out of the room, gasping the foul air, trying to catch his breath in the suffocating environment. “You were right,” he said, leaning on his crook. “I’ll just kill them from now on.”

Faera shrugged. “I like your take on it, actually. Maybe one day, you’ll establish contact with something everyone else assumes is evil, opening a whole new world of possibilities. If you don’t die first.”

“That does seem to be the more likely outcome,” Sam said, fixing his gaze on the hall to the left. Perhaps the armory lay in that direction.

He took one last glance back toward the girl in the room. “Where do you think she--”

“Just a friendly reminder,” Faera said, putting a hand on Sam’s arm. “If you look for where she came from, all you can do is tell her family what they already know, and humanize her for yourself. The pain will just be worse.”

Sam’s brows furrowed. He quickly catalogued the girl’s hereditary facial features, in the event he met a relative. “Fine,” he said. “I won’t go out of my way to find them, but if we do meet her family, they deserve to know she’s gone.”

“No problem there,” Faera said.

Sam nodded and set off toward the left-hand hall. He ducked under a burned-out red bulb that must have served as some sort of alarm over five hundred years ago.

As Sam crept down the hall, his mind returned to the dead girl almost against his will. The blood had only been a couple days old. If he and Faera had been here just a few days earlier, that girl might be alive now, throwing a petty tantrum, going through the pain of growing up.

Sam wondered what she had been doing out in the woods. Was she running away from home, playing in the woods with her friends, or out gathering food to supplement a bleak existence on the fringe of society? Rich kids don’t wind up alone in the woods with their chests torn open.

A woman’s moan of pain echoed suddenly in the darkness.

Sam shot up straight, holding his crook light forward to peer down the hall. “Hello?” he called. He glanced back at Faera. “Did you hear that?”

“Yeah,” Faera said, frowning. “Only reason a girl would be alive in a place like this is if they were saving her for later.”

Sam snapped his gaze forward again and began to trot ahead, lighting his way with the crook. He was in time to save someone after all.

“Hello?” he tried again. Sam peered into the rooms that dotted the sides of the hall, briefly illuminating their foul contents before moving on.

Another single-vowel moan.

Sam’s ears pricked. He was much closer to the woman now. The sound was coming from the end of the hall. “Hold on,” Sam said, trotting down the rot-slick tunnel.

At the end, he spotted a single arm protruding through some bars. Sam rushed up and knelt, peering deeper into the cage. It sounded like the woman might have a head wound, being unable to enunciate. Faera could probably do first aid, and maybe when she was conscious they could return her to her home.

The arm suddenly reached out and seized his ankle with desperate strength.

“It’s okay,” Sam said, putting his hand on her arm as he glanced down. “You’re gonna be…”

Sam only had an instant to process the sticky sensation that glued his hand to the arm, and the strange, raised bumps on her skin. The bars of the cell snapped open, and Sam was wrenched forward with a strength that had nothing to do with an injured woman. He got a glimpse of the arm retreating into the moist pit revealed by the glowing fungus, growing less and less human as it was sucked backward.