Page 4 of Freaks
Zeth took the punch I landed to his stomach. My hand exploded with pins and needles, a sharp lance of pain and heat surging up my forearm as my knuckles met a wall of muscle so hard it might as well have been a slab of marble. This guy knew the drill. He knew how to take a hit. Even though he’d tensed to absorb the impact, he grunted, cursing from the impact. He reached for me, grabbed me, wrapped his hand around the back of my neck again, and I saw the moment he lifted his leg, bringing it back, about to sweep my ankles. I prepared to kick out with my own foot, a devastating downward stomp that could shatter bone if I aimed it correctly, but then Zeth was gone. He released me, pulling back, then he was turning, spinning, and the back of his fist was whipping around, about to come down on my temple.
It wasn’t a graceful move, but the drop and roll I performed saved me from a guaranteed knock out. Zeth snarled, baring his teeth—the first real show of anger he’d let slip—and he reacted, dropping down, his full weight behind his knee as he brought it crashing down onto my chest.
Oh…
…fuck!
I couldn’t…
I couldn’t fucking breathe.
That didn’t matter, though.
The stabbing, fiery pain that had laced itself around my ribcage and squeezed like crazy didn’t matter.
The cold, disconnected, withdrawn look on Zeth’s face as he raised his fist didn’t matter.
The way my head pitched, my vision seesawing as I turned onto my side and pushed myself back up onto my feet didn’t matter.
The only thing that mattered was that fucking thumb drive. If I didn’t get it, Rabbit wouldn’t find out who Carver was. And if Rabbit didn’t help us, it wouldn’t matter how many other hackers I tried to pay, threaten or bribe. They were a community of back-stabbing assholes, but they were smart, and Rabbit was the best of them. If Rabbit deemed a job dead in the water, no one else would dream of touching it. They could be running as many protection programs as they wanted, they could be as covert and secretive as they wanted, but he would still find out and he would still punish them. He would take whatever they had. He would destroy everything they’d built for themselves, and once they were ruined in the tech community, he would send someone over to break a few bones, too. Rabbit worked out, but typically hackers weren’t gym types. As a rule, they weren’t known for being badasses who could defend themselves at all.
I hissed, trying to expel the pain strobing through my body as I righted myself and faced Zeth again. The other man wiped his nose with the back of his hand, sniffing, and I realized with no small amount of satisfaction that he was bleeding from there, too, now. That satisfaction didn’t last long. My vision suddenly went blurry, and then it went red, my eyes stinging as my own blood ran into them. Fucking great. I must have cut my head.
“Shame we’re not fighting for money,” Zeth commented. He was breathing hard, but otherwise he didn’t appear to be fazed by the situation at all.
“You’d bet on yourself, I take it?”
He rocked his head from side to side. “I’d have to, you know that as well as I do. But you’re a feisty bastard. Seem to know what you’re doing. I might have put a couple of bucks on you too, just in case.” He grinned, and there was an amused glimmer in his eyes that briefly lifted the stoic, robotic air that cloaked him like a shroud. I returned the smile, a frisson of anticipation sparking and catching light in my veins. Yeah, it sucked being hit. And yeah, it sucked that I wasn’t making easy work of wiping the dusty polished concrete floor with the guy. But there was something vaguely exciting about all of this. I hadn’t truly had to defend myself in a very long time, and now that Iwashaving to, it was as if a part of me that had been slumbering was slowly waking up, coming alive and stretching its legs.
It had been years since I thought I might die, and right here, right now, there was a very real chance I might end up dead. If I lost to Zeth, Oscar could tell the floor boss still keeping score by the elevator to slit my fucking throat. He could also tell Zeth to end me and this evening’s earlier transgressions would be forgiven.
That knowledge, the impending nothingness that hovered so close by that I could almost reach out and touch it…it made my heart pump so hard that it felt like it hadn’t been beating at all up until now.
“I probably would have dropped a buck or two on you as well,” I fired back. “But it wouldn’t have mattered in the end. I’d have made a killing when I beat your ass and put you in the ground.”
Zeth’s eyebrows rose slowly—he looked faintly impressed. “Very confident. I like that.” His eyes flickered toward the floor boss, and it looked like he was going to say something else. He didn’t, though. He charged me, both fists pulling back, and then he was a whirlwind of arms and legs, his fists and his boots lashing out and striking.
I returned the favor. He wasn’t going to beat me. He wasn’t going to injure me further than he already had. He wasn’t going to gloat over me and goad me into submission, becauseIwas going to do that tohim.
For every blow he landed on me, I landed one on him.
Every time he wheeled, or turned, or struck, I did the same.
Every time he pinned me, or grappled with me, or took things to the floor, I twisted free of his grip and did the exact same thing to him.
We were so evenly matched, I lost count of who was bettering the other.
A fight in The Barrows could last anywhere from five seconds to five minutes. Ten, sometimes, if the fighters were insane and just wouldn’t back down. I had no idea how long Zeth and I danced around one another, taking and throwing punches, growling through the hits and refusing to back down, but it was far fucking longer than that.
He was my shadow and I was his. His fury matched my own. He caught me off guard, and seconds later he was on his back when I caught him. I was cut and bleeding, bruised black and blue, and I’d never felt more fucking alive.
The smell of iron and sweat filled the air. We skidded and slipped in the darkening pool of blood that had gathered at our feet, and the whole time neither one of us would call it.
My pulse was a frantic, crazed drum beat, pounding in my ears, as Zeth ducked under my arm and slammed his balled-up fist into my jaw. My vision swayed, white lights flaring and pulsing in my head, but I didn’t slow. I skirted around him, feinted to the right, then drove my own fist forward and up into his side, knocking every last molecule of oxygen out of his lungs as he doubled over and groaned. When he rocked back, his teeth were coated in blood and he was laughing like a fucking maniac.
“All right, all right. I get it now,” he growled. “You’re insane. I’m insane. We’ll both kill ourselves before we tap out on this thing.”
“Agreed.” I tried not to pant. My mouth was full of blood, too. I leaned forward and spat onto the concrete, grimacing at the volley of pain that relayed up and down my side. Felt like something might be broken somewhere, though I couldn’t tell what.
