Page 3 of Freaks
“You’ll go down, then?”
“Fuck no.”
A burst of static ruptured out of a small set of speakers mounted on the closest support column; a crackling, popping sound splintered through the air, followed by a blast of sharp, grating, high pitched feedback. Oscar’s aggravated voice followed after it. “If one of you doesn’t make the other bleed in the next five seconds, I’m going to send someone down there with an AK47 and enough rounds to kill you both fifty fucking times. Get on with it!”
Zeth shrugged a shoulder, sighing under his breath. “I guess we’ll just figure this thing out as we go, then.” I’d figured before that he was quick, but I hadn’t realized just how quick. The pain hit me first—an explosion of white light that filled my head silently, like the blast starship blowing up in a science fiction movie, the light calmly washing over everything before the chaos of the detonation actually took hold. The annoyance hit me shortly afterward, and for a brief, unpleasant, fucked up moment, I couldn’t tell which stung more: the fact that he’d hit me without me seeing it coming, or the fact that it actually just really fuckinghurt. I allowed myself a single step back. Just one. I bent my leg and braced, stopping myself from reeling. From toppling over like a felled fucking tree. Now that would have been seriously embarrassing.
My vision swayed, colors returning, too bright, bleeding together in a mess of yellows, and oranges, and blues and reds, and then it sharpened, bringing Zeth back into focus; he was fucking close. Closer than he should have been, and his fist was flying toward my face for a second time.
Oh no, sunshine. No, no, no. Not again. Noteveragain. I ducked to the right, my hips twisting, and the bastard’s fist sailed on by, buzzing my nose. The strike would have broken the damn thing if it had connected. I clenched my teeth, hissing between them, and I reacted without a second’s thought. I raised my own fist, but I didn’t jab directly. I lifted my whole arm, locked my elbow out, and I brought the back of my fist crashing down on his temple. I’d always known how to defend myself. When I was a teenager, I’d enrolled in three different kinds of martial arts, purely because I knew how badly it pissed my father off. After I’d joined the church, there hadn’t been much time for training, though. I’d managed body weight work outs in the rectory when I got up each morning, but the sparring? The actual art of defense and attack? I’d grown rusty over the years. I’d become slow and sluggish. It had taken a long time after I walked away from my position to get back to where I was before. But after months and months of training, sweating, bleeding, gasping for every single breath I managed to drag down into my screaming lungs, I finally did it. And then I got better. Better still. Working out, training, fighting, running…it became an obsession.
And now?
Now I was fucking lethal.
The blow landed perfectly. The guy’s head rocked to the right, his neck compressing. Had to have fucking hurt. He skipped to the side, distancing himself from me and my now primed fists as he shook his head, obviously trying to quiet the bells that must have been clanging around the inside of his skull.
When he righted himself, angling his body toward me, a slow, strange, slightly deranged smile spread across his face. “Nice,” he said. “Looks like that’s a point each then.”
“Oscar doesn’t count points. He counts pints. Of blood. He won’t call the match until we’ve both spilled at least three between us. Or one of us concedes.”
Slowly, Zeth touched the side of his head, his temple, where my blow fell. He wiped at his skin and then held up his fingertips for me to see. They were slick and red, glistening under the florescent lights. “Well, we have our first taste right here. I’m not afraid to bleed a little more, Priest. Are you?”
Dementor and old Jackie boy downstairs did their best to put the fear of god into me, but at the end of the day, their taunts and jeers had been pathetic. Zeth wasn’t trying to scare me into submission. He simply opened his mouth and said the first thing that came to him, and I was fully willing to admit it; the guy was a little intimidating. There was nothing wrong with recognizing when an opponent was dangerous. It was fuckingsmartto recognize that. What wasn’t smart was letting them know you saw them as a threat. Once they knew they had you spooked, the fight was generally over. These vicious, violent bouts weren’t just played out with fists; they were played out in your head, too. And I was keeping mine in the motherfucking game.
I didn’t flinch as I stalked toward him, raising my fists into guard. “If you’re in, then I’m in.” I could see why Oscar sent the guy down here to teach me a lesson. He was huge, and he was clearly a highly-trained fighter. But Oscar was forgetting one thing: I was huge, too. I was highly trained. All he’d done was set two meteors hurtling toward each other, sending them on a collision course, and the impact when Zeth and I finally clashed was going to leave a crater in the middle of New York City, a mile wide and a mile deep.
Zeth came at me again. Great knots of muscle shifted like liquid steel under his flesh. Instead of wondering how badly it was going to hurt if he actually,reallymanaged to hit me, I made a quick study of him. I watched those muscles. I disregarded the angle of his body and the way he transferred his weight from one foot to the other, and I saw where the power was building in his body. It all happened in a tenth of a second.
He presented his left side to me, as if he were about to lunge and jab with his left fist, but the tension and the way his abs compressed on the other side of his body told a different story. He was going to feint to the left. He was going to try and misdirect me with a halfhearted strike, and then, while I was focused on the weak punch, blocking him, he was going to assault from the right, swinging his right fist up in a hook that would likely take my fucking head off if I allowed it to make contact.
Well, two could play at misdirection.
I looked to the fist he was thrusting out toward my shoulder, pretending that punch was the only worry I had in the world, and I waited. In the space of a heartbeat, Zeth twisted his body, pivoted, and that right hook was sailing toward my jaw with an unbelievable force.
Motherfucker.
I’d anticipated the maneuver, but fuck me running if the man’s speed didn’t surprise the shit out of me all over again. I had just enough time to twist, spinning to the side and ducking. A microsecond later and that would have been it. I would have been on my ass, eyes rolled back into my skull, counting fucking sheep.
A kernel of irritation itched at me. I’d bitched about the other fights being too easy, but this fight wasn’t going to be anything of the sort. It was going to be hard. I’d be lucky to walk away from it unscathed, let alone win, and if I did win, the victory wasn’t going to be as sweet as it was earlier. It was going to be tinged with fucking relief, and that bit at my pride.
“Remember, Son. Pride cometh before a fall. After murder, pride is the most heinous sin of all. Do not succumb to it. Do not bow down to your ego. You’ll only ever end up hurt, or hurting those around you who care about you. Do you hear me, Felix? Are you listening to me?”
I shook my head, trying to dislodge the sound of my father’s voice as I danced beyond Zeth’s reach. Now was not a good time to be reliving life lessons from the Father Marcosa who had preceded me. That was how my father had always operated, though. He was always showing up when I least expected it, when I needed to concentrate, when I needed him sticking his nose in the least. He was a stubborn, obstinate, rigid man who never knew when to back off. Really, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the fact that he was still turning up and fucking with me, even though he’d been dead and buried for years. It was just his style.
Zeth huffed down his nose, moving into yet another defensive position designed to confuse and trick me. I witnessed the flare of anger in his eyes, though. He was pissed that he hadn’t put me to sleep with that sneaky right hook. Distracted enough that he didn’t see my right knee come rocketing up. He didn’t manage to step back in time to avoid it. I thrust my hips forward, sending the full force of my body weight into the lunge, and when my kneecap made contact with Zeth’s torso, his loud grunt of surprise and pain bounced off the walls of floor fourteen.
There was no time to celebrate. His elbow came out of nowhere, landing a sharp, dazzling blow to the side of my head, and suddenly everything was spinning. Some fighters would have used my momentarily dazed state to recover themselves, but not Zeth. He grabbed hold of me by the back of the neck, pulling me toward him, bringing his own knee up so swiftly that I barely managed to roll and drop out of his grasp in time.
This. Mother. Fucking. Bastard.
He was fucking with me.
He was trying to catch me off guard.
He wasn’t going to get away with doing either for long.
I ground my teeth together, swearing colorfully as I straightened and launched myself at him. Not in an uncontrolled attack. No, that would have been a rookie error, and I didn’t make those kinds of mistakes. At least not anymore. I threw myself at my opponent, knowing who he was, and knowing all too well how he was going to fucking react. He was going to let me hit him, and then, once he’d taken the blow and absorbed it, he was going to kick my legs out from underneath me and try and get me to the ground. Precisely what I would do in the same boat. I’d trained endlessly in order to counter the move, though, to prevent myself from being dominated in a grappling, wrestling match, and I was ready.
