by H. T. Night
In the locker room, Mike and I went over a few things.
“Just keep your head in the fight. If you do that, you’ll beat him.” Mike said to me, while he taped my knuckles.
We did our usual pre-fight routine, practice moves, going over pointers, stretching and loosening up, and before I knew it, it was time.
Mike and I walked out of the tunnel. I had to admit it was weird, not having Tommy in my ring corner for support. It had been the next best thing to having my dad, or an older brother. I walked out into the arena. Tommy was already in the ring. His eyes were locked on me. I refused to look at him. I didn’t have to do that to get psyched up. I would let him exhaust himself, mad-dogging me.
The announcer introduced both of us, and I headed to my corner. I looked into the crowd. There were about fifteen hundred people in the stands. I scanned the crowd to see if anyone I knew was out there. Sure enough, sticking out like a sore seven-foot thumb was Atticai. In fact, the whole gang was with him. Surprisingly, Yari and Lena were sitting next to each other. I made eye contact with Atticai. Atticai pointed to Tommy and drew his finger over his throat. Was he serious? I didn’t enter the ring to hurt anyone. At least not permanently.
I looked at Yari—and, man, she looked sexy as hell. I could see her red lipstick from the ring. Lena looked on with concern. Our eyes met, and she smiled. That was what I needed.
As I stood in the corner, Mike rubbed my shoulders and said in my ear, “This is it, Josiah. Tonight, Tommy is not your friend. Tonight, he is someone who wants to rip off your head. No mercy. Strike first and strike hard!”
The bell rang, and Tommy and I both ran out into the middle of the ring and hit gloves.
We circled one another for about 30 seconds, both trying to find an opening in each other’s stance. I noticed that Tommy would lose his focus about every 10 seconds, as if trying to regroup his thoughts or something. Weird what you notice when you’re fighting someone, but you always look for any advantage you can find. So, I counted off ten, and sure enough, his eyes dropped a little, and I swung a hard right hand that landed on the side of his face. He stumbled backwards a couple of feet.
“Watch his right hand!” Tommy’s coach yelled out.
Too late, I thought.
That right hand would have been enough to lay out anyone during a street fight. Tommy wasn’t just anyone. He was strong as hell, and I was going to need more than one punch.
He shook his head and came back at me. Then we circled each other again. Once more, I counted off ten seconds and threw a five-punch combination that ended with an uppercut that landed directly on Tommy’s chin. Tommy fell to the mat. I jumped on top of him and landed a series of punches. As I did so, Tommy grabbed my knee and was attempting a submission move. I knew better. I kicked it out. As I did, I hit my nose on Tommy’s right thigh. It blurred my vision, so I decided to jump up and go back to a neutral standing position.
I looked up and saw that we were three minutes into the five-minute round. This was already the longest professional fight I’d ever had. We circled each other some more. Tommy’s attention was now in overdrive. He stopped whatever he was doing earlier. Smart move for him. Now, I was going to have to strike him without an opening. I lunged forward and threw a powerhouse right. Tommy blocked it with his arms. He winced, which meant that just blocking my punches was going to hurt him and wear him down. Good for me. And so, that’s was what I did. I came in throwing powerhouse rights and lefts. Tommy couldn’t keep up with the barrage of punches. I saw an opening below and kicked Tommy in his right thigh, sending his body spinning to the ground.
I heard someone in the crowd yell: “Finish him off.” My instincts, of course, were to do just that. I jumped on top of him and wildly threw rights and lefts. Tommy’s eyes were rolling back. Why the hell weren’t they stopping the fight? Did they want me to kill him? I slowed down and pretended to be exhausted. Those assholes weren’t going to stop the fight because they didn’t think that I was capable of knocking him out. I looked down at Tommy.
“Don’t stop, Josiah.” Tommy said to me, his mouth guard muffling the words, but I understood them. “You’re not even breathing hard.” I held him down until I heard the bell. I went back to the corner.
Mike yelled at me. “What the hell, Josiah. Why did you stop?!”
“I was tired,” I said.
“You won that round. If you win this round, you have it. Just don’t get soft!”
I sat there thinking about the last round. Then, something dawned on me. Tommy hadn’t thrown a single punch. Tommy was reluctant to hurt me. Tommy was refusing to punch me. The bell went off.
Tommy and I circled each other. “You’re going to have to punch me, Tommy. You can’t beat me unless you punch me. You need to forget who we are. This is your fight. This is your career. You can go toe-to-toe with me, but you will have to strike, also.”
Tommy nodded—then lunged forward and threw a hay maker. It landed across my face. I stumbled back.
I grinned, despite the pain. “There you go, Tommy. Now it’s a fight.”
Tommy and I traded punches for almost three minutes. My arms were heavy. I was getting pretty exhausted, and for just a millisecond, I down let my guard. That was all that Tommy needed. He sprung in and grabbed my legs. I fell to the mat. He whipped around me. He was trying to get me in his famous front-choke submission. Luckily, Mike and I practiced defending this, but, damn, Tommy got a good hold on me. Tommy was strong. Stronger than I remembered. He locked his forearm under my neck and had it wedged in tight. I tried to fight it off but, I couldn’t. I couldn’t breathe.
I totally blacked out.
When I opened my eyes, I could barely think clearly. I could hear someone talking to me from seemingly far away. It was Tommy and apparently, I lost. Tommy and a paramedic team were crouched down next to me.
“Come back to us, Josiah,” Tommy said, and I had a feeling he had been saying it a few times before that, too. Tommy gave me a big, relieved smile when he saw me blinking and breathing.
Now a doctor started asking me questions to see if I would be okay. I could see they had brought out a stretcher, and with that, I jumped straight up. There was no way I would be hauled off on a stretcher.
“Stay down, Josiah.” Tommy said to me.
“No freaking way, Tom. You deserve a proper hug.” I reached over and embraced Tommy.
Tommy grabbed my face, squishing my cheeks. We had always been like brothers. “You kicked my ass that first round, you know that.”
“Only because you didn’t have the heart to throw a punch, dumbass. You got me, Tommy. You deserve it.”
“I’m coming home tonight. I’ll take you out, and we’ll head up to Los Angeles and wreck that city.”
“Sounds good to me. I might need an aspirin first.”
“Me, too.”
We both laughed. I looked out into the crowd and both Lena and Yari were standing ringside, both looking terribly worried. I gave them a thumbs up to let them know it was okay. They both exhaled. The crowd cheered. Wow, two beautiful women were deathly concerned for my well-being. Could be worse.
I noticed that Atticai was making his way to the ring, too. He motioned for me to come to him, and I did.
When I reached the ropes, he said, “It’s bullshit, man. They should have never allowed that thing in the ring.”
I blinked. “Thing? What thing?”
Atticai looked at me with cold eyes. “No Tandra can handle a Carni. It’s not a fair fight.” What are these words? Mani? Carni? Tandra. What the hell were these people talking about?
I said as much to Atticai, and he just shook his head and walked away.
What the heck was that all about? I swore everyone in that group was bat-shit crazy.
The announcer announced that Tommy had knocked me out, and I gave Tommy one more hug and told him that I’d see him at home.
Chapter Sixteen
I got home and took a long hot bath. Ironically, the o
nly thing that hurt was my back. I swear it was still hurt from that a-hole hitting me with a baseball bat a few weeks ago.
After my bath, I put on a pair of sweats and laid on the couch and waited for Tommy. I thought about the fight. I couldn’t believe I’d lost. Honestly. I have only lost two fights in my entire life. I lost my very first boxing match when I was a kid, and I lost today. I wished my dad would have seen Tommy and me tonight. He would have been proud of both of us.
I closed my eyes and took a moment and thought about my parents, especially my dad. My dad was a lucid dreamer and loved to tell me his dreams. The last thing he had ever said to me was on the morning of their accident. I had just gotten up for school, and as I went into the kitchen, my dad was sitting there, staring off into oblivion.
“Hey, Dad, what’s up?” I had asked, still bleary-eyed from sleep.
He looked over at me. “Oh, I just had the most amazing dream, son.”
This wasn’t the first time my dad had told me about an extraordinary dream he had, but whatever this dream had been, well, it was obviously giving him some serious food for thought.
“What was it about?” I asked, opening the kitchen door and grabbing the milk. If my father wasn’t there, I would have downed the milk straight from the carton. As it was, I found a box of cereal and started making breakfast.
“It was about you, son.”
“Me?”
“It was about us. We were camping up in Big Bear. You were a lot younger, maybe around seven years old. I had lost you and went looking for you in the woods. I couldn’t find you anywhere, and I began to panic. I sensed you were in danger. Considerable danger. I ran and ran looking for you, until I reached an enormous cliff.”
“A cliff in the woods?” I said, confused.
“Hey, Josiah, it’s a dream. A big, pink Easter bunny could show up, and there would be no rhyme or reason for it, all right?”
He was so cranky in the morning. “Sorry, Dad. Go on.”
“Anyway, I walked to the edge of the cliff and I look down, and about 300 feet below, I could see you. You were calling out for me. I yelled down to you that I wanted you to wait there, that I would be coming down for you. But then something horrible started to happen.”
I was about to shovel in my first spoonful of Cap’n Crunch. I waited, genuinely intrigued.
He went on. “About twenty hyenas surrounded you. They were growling and hissing at you. And as they started closing in, all I could do was watch from above, feeling totally helpless. I was going to have to watch all these animals tear you apart, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. So without thinking, I jumped. It was more like a dive. It was instinct, you know? I had to protect you. And as I fell, something miraculous happened. My arms began turning into wings. My entire body had changed into a beautiful white bird. I swooped in and grabbed you, just in the nick of time.”
Now the first spoonful found my mouth. “Wow. That’s pretty crazy,” I said, talking with food in my mouth, which immediately irritated my dad.
He frowned at me. “Anyway, it was so real. Josiah, I can still feel the air beneath me.”
I had looked at my dad, and he had this amazingly peaceful expression on his face. Far-off and dreamy. A tranquility I had never seen in him before. The irony was, of course, that he would die eight hours later. He would never be able to save me from the hyenas.
As I lay there on the couch, remembering my last conversation with my dad, with tears filling my eyes, I turned on the TV. I put on some Jimmy Kimmel since it was 12:30 in the morning. So, where was Tommy?
I didn’t know, and soon I dozed off.
Chapter Seventeen
My cell phone was ringing. My eyes cracked open, and I tried to collect my thoughts. My body and mind were beyond the point of exhaustion. I grabbed the phone and did my best to focus my eyes on the Caller I.D. It was a local number, but I didn’t recognize it. And as I answered the call, I saw Daphne peeking in the window at me.
“Hello,” I said, as much to the hawk as to the caller. My voice sounded groggy as hell.
“Is this Josiah Reign?” A woman asked at the other end.
“Yes.”
“Are you a relative of Tommy Jensen?”
“No, I mean yes. We’re practically brothers.” Okay, now I was worried.
“Tommy has been in an accident.”
I sat up. “What kind of accident?”
“We’re not quite sure. We pulled his file, and you were the only contact listed. He’s in the ICU.”
“Which hospital is this?”
“San Bernardino Memorial.”
“Okay. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
I jumped up and put on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and headed out the door. Daphne was on the hood of my truck, almost as if she were waiting for me. I got in my truck and honked my horn, so she’d fly off. She did, squawking at me with a shriller kee-eeeee-arr than usual, and I pulled out of the parking lot and headed to the hospital.
Twenty minutes later, I pulled up to the emergency entrance. Surprisingly, there were a lot of empty parking spots. Even at 5:00 a.m., I would have thought most of Southern California ER’s would have been busy. Learn something new every day. I went through the double doors and headed straight to the nurse’s station.
“Hi, I’m here to see Tommy Jensen,” I said to the dark-haired, heavy-set Latina woman behind the desk.
“He is in the ICU. Why don’t you have a seat and someone will be available shortly to speak with you.”
“But I got a call from you guys. Can I go back and—”
“Have a seat and someone will be out to speak with you.”
“All right.” I sat down in a seat near the back, my stomach churning. There were sure a lot of people in the waiting room, considering how few cars there were in the parking lot.
A police officer came in from outside. He walked over to the nurse, and the nurse pointed him in my direction. I guess the “someone” who was to speak with me was going to be a police officer. He came right over to me. “Are you Josiah Reign?”
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“I need to ask you a couple of questions.”
“Sure,” I said.
“What relation are you to Tommy Jensen?”
“There is no relation. He’s my roommate. He’s the closest person in the world to me, but there is we are not related.”
“Were you with Tommy tonight?”
“Well, sort of.”
“What does that mean?”
“Tommy had a fight tonight at the Honda Center in Anaheim.”
“A fight? You mean a professional fight? A boxing match?”
“Close. It was a mixed martial arts fight.”
“You mean like ultimate fighting?”
“Yeah, something like that,” I said.
“You were at the fight?”
This guy wasn’t going to believe what I was about to tell him, but it was the truth, so I had nothing to lose. “I was his opponent in the fight.”
“You’re kidding me? You fight also?”
“Yes.”
“And you fought Tommy tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Who won?”
“He did.”
“He did?”
“Yeah, he did,” I said, suddenly annoyed.
“Wow, there’s a first for everything.” The police officer sat down in the chair next to me. “So, what did you guys do after the fight?”
“Nothing. I went straight home. What is this about? Can I see Tommy now?”
“You didn’t stop off for a beer or an ice pack?”
“I received all the ice packs I needed before I left the arena. No alcohol at all after a fight. Gotta heal up.”
“What did Tommy do after the fight?”
“He had been staying at his grandma’s during training. After the fight, he was supposed to come over, so we could go out and celebrate our first fight together.”
The polic
e officer stopped writing and looked me in the eyes. “You were going to celebrate getting your ass kicked?”
“No, not exactly. Tommy is ‘in line’ to fight for the title in our weight class.”
“I see.” The police officer paused. “Did you throw the fight?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, that’s neither here nor there. Have they told you the severity of Tommy’s injuries?”
“No. I don’t know anything.”
“Did Tommy call you and tell you that he was going to be late?”
“No, he didn’t. What has happened to Tommy?”
“We’re not quite sure. All we know is that he was attacked.”
“Attacked? After the ring fight?”
He paused and leveled his stare at me. “And, due to the nature of his injuries, it appears that he was attacked by some kind of wild animal.”
I think my eyes bugged out of my skull. Before I could speak, the officer went on. “Even more unusual, he was dropped off at the ER, where the nurses found his body lying near the door.”
“No.” A sense of dread filled me. “Who dropped him off?”
“We don’t know.”
“Someone just dropped him off and took off?”
“Exactly. So where were you at 1:00 a.m?”
“I was at my house just about to fall asleep.”
“Can anyone else vouch for that?”
“No. I was alone.“
“Well, hopefully Tommy will regain consciousness shortly and he be able to shed some light on what happened.”
The police officer closed his notepad, nodded at me and walked outside. I just stared at him. Had I heard him correctly? Tommy had been attacked by a wild animal?
I sat there and waited. And waited. Two hours later, I got up and went to the nurse’s station.
“I’ve been here for two hours. Is there anyone who can give me an update?”
“The doctor will be out shortly to talk to you.”
“The doctor?” I questioned.
“Yes, the doctor.”
I was about to head back to my seat when I heard someone call my name. I turned around, and there was a man of Middle Eastern descent coming toward me.