I said there'd be Smurfs... and here they are

Flash of Blue


The tower’s stairwells were usually deserted. Every once in a while the old building’s huge roaches wound up dead in the crook of a step. Rounding the 9th floor landing, Dilby the Tracker spotted one. A little spear stuck out of its side.

Rounding the 9th floor landing, Dilby spotted one: another cockroach with a tiny spear sticking out of its side. The wee men were getting sloppy. He bagged it and thought he caught a quick sight of blue. He whirled. A small blue body lunged from the upper landing, a broad knife between its teeth.

A small blue body lunged from the upper landing, a broad knife between its teeth. It wore the red hat and breeches of an elder warrior, with flowing and matted white beard. Dilby swatted it away in time, but there was no swatting the mass of blue bodies that suddenly appeared behind it. The elder pinged off the wall and stood shakily, wiping blood from its mouth as the surge waited. It looked Dilby dead in the eye. “Live Smurf or die!” it shouted. Blue bodies thundered past its raised fist.

Dead Smurfs. Everywhere. The stench of it…the officer in charge had been on the force nineteen years and had never once mourned as he did now. The tracker, Dilby, had survived, but kept mumbling over and over, “They came by the hundreds…stomped and crushed, they kept coming.” White warrior hats lay like haiku petals…until the officer, Able Murtaugh, came to one slightly different. Blood had dried a lock of…blond hair to it. Murtaugh dropped to his knees…

Murtaugh dropped to his knees, squishing a few half dead Smurfs but it didn’t matter. He pinched up the white hat with the blood around the rim. Their queen. They were nothing without their queen. And he was nothing without her. Forbidden love was a meaningless secret now and his life was over. He rounded on the tracker and drew his weapon.

He rounded on the tracker and drew his weapon. “Rogue!” shouted another officer, drawing his own weapon. Guns pointed at Murtaugh. One gun pointed at Dilby.

Dilby regarded Murtaugh with sudden clarity. “You loved her,” he said, “her?” Dilby stood. “She was death itself, breeding with every one of these—” he kicked a pile of Smurfs toward Murtaugh. A few bounced down the stairs. “They’re everywhere now! We are the dominant species, we!” said Dilby, pounding his heart.

Murtaugh’s finger hadn’t left the trigger. “Stand down,” the other officer, a junior, warned from the landing above. The cramped stairwell guaranteed a ricochet bloodbath.

“Smurfs are a disease!” shouted Dilby. “Humanity is the cure! We will cleanse this world—”

“Live Smurf or die!” screamed officer Able Murtaugh and whipped the gun to his own temple. The shot pierced the wall. The moment before he fired and fell he thought he saw a foot twitch, a small white shoe with heels, and he realized that his dead body would squish her. The final thought of officer Able Murtaugh, decorated officer of the Civil Police Force, and never to be known by any, not even himself, was ‘Oh damn.’

Murtaugh’s clothing was sticky with crushed Smurf jelly. A young M.E. made the joke about slapping peanut butter on him. They wheeled Murtaugh’s body outside. The medical examiner’s assistant was pretty. If he was lucky he’d be able to skim some of this aphrodisiacal jelly off and maybe get it refined by the Chico Brothers, who didn’t exist but who made the finest highly illegal Smurf-caine available. Dead Smurfs got geeks laid. “This was terrible,” he said to his assistant. She looked somber. “Yes,” she said. He handed her a shovel to scoop up the beginning of a Smurfy night.