The Goblins are Coming!

The Goblins are Coming! - is a shoot 'em up western themed dystopian adventure, the writing of which began (in 2001) with these two lines of a longer verse rattling through my head:

The goblins are coming, one, two three.

Hide in the cellar. Hide in the tree.

This text is the 2005 version of the short story (16.7K words) which I shared with 6 beta readers who said make it longer, but otherwise has never been published before.

It hung around in my mind for the next 2 decades and inspired the worldscape of the forthcoming epic novel (230K words) - The Last Book.