by Joshua Guess
The door of the rearmost office was open, the light on. The white expanse of its back wall was broken by a dim void between two studs where the drywall was cleanly cut out. Through the gap I could see two shadowed forms. It was my bad luck that Susanne happened to be looking my way as I approached.
She shoved Amanda out of the way and drew her weapon with a blur as I tilted myself sideways to slip between the studs.
I took her in as her shoulders squared, her hips tightened, the shooter’s stance flawless. Though average in height and build, Suzanne was deceptively strong and fast. Beneath her clothes were cords of powerful muscle draped in light brown skin. A decade in the Marines followed by a brief stint as a boxer and amateur MMA fighter had given her skills and nerves of steel. The only reason I hadn’t put her as my second in command was politics, as she was a much more recent hire than Javier.
I was just a bit too slow. It was a good try, but she was ready for me. And honestly? Suzanne was a better fighter than me. Hand to hand, she’d destroy me.
In a desperate gamble, I threw the damn knife. The only way the blade would stick in her flesh was by pure luck. I just wanted to distract her.
It both did and didn’t work. Suzanne, apparently under orders to take me alive, fired a Taser at me from point-blank range. I felt the prongs hit and the massive jolt of electricity rampage through my body like a Viagra-fueled Hugh Hefner through a house party. Lucky for me, no amount of training stops you from avoiding a pound of steel whipping toward your face. Suzanne ducked hard to one side, her finger only lightly tapping the trigger in her rush to avoid being hit.
I only got that first blast. It sucked enough to make me feel kind of bad for what I’d done to the others, but it didn’t drop me. The effect was like being slapped across my body by an angry god, but after that initial wallop I still had forward momentum.
I did the only thing I could and kept right on moving.
15
Then
“I think the lesson will sink in if I break a finger,” Alan said calmly, then broke my finger.
I didn’t exactly scream, instead letting out a strangled sort of whistling exhalation from between my clenched teeth. Alan released me and stepped back. He didn’t throw my freed hand away in disgust or make a derisive comment. He just moved away.
“I can’t believe you did that, you fucker,” I breathed, cradling the hand bearing the cleanly broken digit protectively with the other. I was on my knees in his dojo, though we both wore street clothes.
“Really?” Alan asked, his placid face rippling with genuine surprise. “Maybe I’m losing my touch as a teacher, then. The whole point is to ingrain what to expect in an actual fight.”
“The point,” I replied, stressing the second word, “is to teach me how to fight. Not get your rocks off hurting me.”
Alan tilted his head to one side, a physical tic I’d seen him use often in the four classes I’d endured so far. “I don’t enjoy it, but the larger point is that you seem to think being hurt and learning to fight are separate things.”
I frowned at him. “I mean, I know I’m probably going to get hurt…”
Alan shook his head. “No, you understand it’s a possibility. Probable, even. You don’t know. And the reason you don’t know is because you’ve been behind a desk for most of your adult life.” I opened my mouth to speak, but he raised his open palms toward me. “I’m not giving you shit. I finished my own time in administration. I’m not judging you for not having the experience. I’m just stating a fact.”
He gestured at my wounded mitt. “When I told you to break free of the joint lock, you tried a little but stopped when it became painful, even though I only had a grip on your finger. If you were a regular student in my Aikido class, that would be fine. But you’re not here for that. You’re here, if I remember your exact words, for me to show you how to be a beast in a fight.”
That much was true. A few weeks earlier I’d worked a job two states away. What should have been a routine trip keeping watch over a shipment of very illegal guns ended in a misunderstanding and a brutal fistfight. Having had my ass thoroughly handed to me, I put out feelers for the nearest combat expert with flexible morals and came up with Alan.
He had retired from the Marines, and during his service he’d been an obsessive student of various fighting systems. Aikido, Judo, Krav Maga, Sambo, Boxing, tons of others. Twenty years of fighting, both on the mat and in actual war zones, made him into quite a beast himself.
You wouldn’t know it by looking at him. Even as he stood there in front of me, Alan didn’t appear dangerous. Or even particularly noteworthy. He was half white, half native Hawaiian, and average. His short gray hair was neatly combed to one side and I suspected it was the rare student indeed who ruffled it out of place. While certainly fit, there were no hardcore muscles. He looked like a math teacher who kept in shape by running a couple miles a day.
“Stand up,” he said, waving a hand in an upward motion. I stood. “Good, now walk over to me.”
I did. I’m not ashamed to say it was with some hesitation, but I did it.
“Punch me in the face with your good hand,” Alan instructed.
I frowned. “I’d rather not have you break my arm, so no thanks.”
At this, he smiled. Hell, he grinned. “I’m making a point, here. I’ll close my eyes if you like, but you better do it.”
Good to his word, Alan closed his eyes. Feeling the faint stirrings of a need to pay him back for the finger, I punched him in the face. I didn’t do it very hard, but enough to rock his head back some.
His eyes opened. “I’d say you hit like my grandma, but she was a tough old bird. I once saw her hoist an entire pig for a roast by herself. Now hit me again, but with your injured hand this time. Do it like you mean it.”
I hissed a breath as I closed my left fist. The pain was intense, a dull, deep throb sending waves through my hand and up my wrist. I hit him with a quick jab, trying to keep the broken pinky to one side as I popped him in the jaw.
“Fucking dogshit on a cracker!” I shouted instantly, shaking my hand as I turned away.
“That was better,” Alan said. “You hit me harder the second time. Do you know why?”
I shook my head. The pain was bad enough to mess with the rational part of my brain. I could listen or I could speak, but at that moment doing both was as impossible as flying.
“It was because you knew what to expect,” he explained. “You didn’t just know your hand would hurt when you hit me with it. It wasn’t just an intellectual thing, you actually felt it. You understood it. Just like I understood how much getting hit in the face would hurt because I’ve experienced it a bunch of times over the years.”
He stepped forward and gentle grasped my broken pinky, raising the hand up between us. “The secret to being a good fighter isn’t technique. It can help, but not always. I know guys without an ounce of training I couldn’t take on my best day, because they’re barroom brawlers who barely flinch when someone breaks a chair across their backs. They’ve internalized how to cope with pain, how much damage they can take.”
I nodded. “I think I get it. I still want to learn how to actually fight, though.”
Alan chuckled. “I plan to teach you that, too. The first step is etching into your brain that it can overcome fear of being hurt. There might come a day when the only way to win is to take a lot of pain.”
It was two more classes before I first realized how right Alan was. We were near the end of a ninety-minute session, both of us dripping sweat, when he caught me unawares with a standing arm bar. He’d beat me silly most of those last two sessions. Mercilessly and meticulously. One of the threads he wove into his teaching style was to be ready at any time during that hour and a half for a surprise attack.
When my elbow locked tight and the pressure drove me toward the mat, I didn’t think. I only reacted. I leaned into the pain and something in my mind shifted. It wasn’t that I didn’t hurt—I abs
olutely did—but I didn’t dwell on it. Maybe my adrenaline helped dull the edge.
I twisted and felt the tendons and ligaments strain as my joints creaked in protest. The swift response was enough to allow for a bit of surprise, and I used it to slip a foot forward from the kneeling position I was in and snake it behind Alan’s own. Not being a novice, he saw it and responded.
He had to let up some of the pressure as he danced away from my attempt to snatch his foot from under him, and the decrease in tension gave me more play to move around. I used it to create a virtuous cycle and get free.
“That was damned good work,” Alan said. “You’re picking this stuff up faster than I thought.”
I raised my hand, finger in a splint, and shook it at him. “I’m highly motivated.”
It was true, but only scratched the surface. It had taken me a while to reorient how I looked at fighting, but eventually I saw it in a way that helped me internalize its logic. My usual worldview was to see everything as systems. It helped me break down problems and ideas into discrete chunks I could learn and turn around in my head, correlating them to each other in lots of ways. I’d tried to do that with what Alan was teaching me, and that had been a problem.
The whole reason I had approached him rather than taking a normal class was to avoid the rigid and ultimately limited schools of thought involved. Not that someone versed in Krav Maga, for example, wasn’t an incredibly dangerous opponent. Just ask the Israeli military. No, the problem was that I wanted a versatile set of skills and to learn them in a short time.
So when I began thinking of fighting as general concepts with specific applications, the whole thing became a lot easier. Rather than try to drill me in the mind-shattering number of different throws in Judo, Alan showed me a few basic ones and focused on the underlying body mechanics involved. It’s the difference between knowing how to use two hundred different levers and understanding how those levers work. When you have the former, you might have a solution for most problems. When you have the latter, you’re able to improvise. The best fighters can do both.
It was that way with everything we did.
“Anyone can throw a punch,” Alan said as he slowly demonstrated the way his body moved while doing so. “Knowing where to hit and how to maximize your force is the hard part.”
He taught me to be efficient. How to think of the body as a set of problems to be solved. The basics of emergency medicine taught the ABC concept; airway, breathing, and circulation. Alan explained that chokes or broken ribs were excellent ways of solving those problems, but increased my arsenal by pointing out that an enemy with a broken limb is effectively out of the fight.
Fight a man the size of a tank? He won’t hit very hard with a missing eye.
At first Alan and I got together twice a week. After a few weeks of this he began to see me as something more than just a paying customer. The dedication with which I threw myself into the work and the improvement that came with it caught his attention. We went to four days a week, sometimes meeting every day.
I learned to think about how I moved, how other people moved, in entirely new ways. There’s a strange kind of awareness that comes with actually putting thought into understanding your body. Most of us don’t spare a moment of reflection when we walk down the hall or take a drink of water. There’s no consideration for how much a wonder our coordination is.
It’s a bit like seeing a favorite movie after taking a course on film making. You see and understand the pieces and parts in ways you never could have imagined.
And yes, I learned to hurt. I’m not a masochist, but pain and I became close friends in the months I spent fighting Alan. I memorized hundreds of techniques from a dozen martial arts, none of them with anything approaching mastery, but well enough to serve as a starting point. Tools in my toolbox I could refine over time. Every one was burned into my muscle memory with the exhausted strain of a thousand repetitions, along with bruises and cuts and more broken bones.
When you can get up after having three toes snapped like twigs and kick at full force with that foot, you’ve created a good working relationship with suffering.
This is the point in the Kung Fu movie where my teacher is murdered and I swear vengeance on his behalf, including a montage where my constant training pushes me to surpass him.
But that’s not real life.
Out of sheer necessity, I began working out just to keep up with Alan. His endurance was apparently inexhaustible, and as my training grew more frequent and difficult it became clear I needed to be in better shape to avoid puking up an internal organ.
Though there were a few breaks when I had to do a job out of town, I continued to work with Alan for the rest of my time in Aberdeen. We became friends, though our casual lunches were far outnumbered by the times we pushed each other to go just one more mile on a run.
I was so busy during that time and so tired by the herculean effort of juggling work, learning to fight, and mastering other skills that I came close to being in a state of zen from pure exhaustion.
It wasn’t the same thing as actually coping with and working through my grief. More of an escape mechanism.
But it did me a hell of a lot of good.
16
Now
I had to bank on the fact that Suzanne didn’t want to kill me. Or rather, even if she wanted to, she was under orders to take me alive.
It’s way harder to subdue a skilled fighter than to just kill them. She knew the same dirty tricks I did and then some, but because we were both practiced and wary we were on our guard. I had the slim advantage of knowing the sorts of targets she’d go for, which allowed me to protect myself fairly well during what followed my headlong rush.
Far more significant was my other advantage, which was my own lack of a need to keep her alive.
I speared her midsection with my shoulder while simultaneously driving the point of my left elbow into the top of her right knee. Suz wasn’t one to waste an opening, and she drove a wicked downward punch into the back of my neck.
Luckily I still had the stun gun in my left hand, and with my rush as a distraction it wasn’t hard to slip it past Suzanne’s defenses. In the few seconds it took to bring it close and begin to disengage myself enough to use it, she’d hit me several more times. The last one rang my bell, a palm strike to my cheek meant to disorient me.
So maybe I didn’t feel terrible about shocking the crap out of her.
While she was twitching, I turned about and stepped over to Amanda. She was frozen with terror.
“Put your hands behind your back,” I told her. When she didn’t move to comply, I raised the stun gun. “This is the other nice option.”
The zip ties went on quickly. I pocketed the stun gun and wrapped my fingers around her restraints, dragging her over to the twitching form.
“I’m really sorry about this, Suz,” I said. “You’re too much trouble to leave you running around after me.”
There was no response from her twitching form, though I hadn’t expected one. I let my mind fall into the cold place that made it feel like I was sitting in the back row of a movie theater, just watching it all happen from a distance.
With two hard stomps, I broke Suzanne’s legs. It’s more difficult than it sounds, mechanically and emotionally. Her choked shrieks of pain as my booted foot snapped the bones—one around the ankle, the other somewhere between there and her knee—were impossible to forget.
In the movies, the hero always gets exactly as much time as drama demands. He can strike a pose or rattle off a snappy line regardless of what else is happening around him.
Which goes to show that I’m not a hero. I had to be quick and merciless because in the real world, fractions of a second count. I glanced up to find Amanda standing near the door cut through the wall, too afraid of me chasing her down and hurting her to even think of running away. As gently as I could, I knelt and zipped Suzanne’s wrists together tightly. Hers I left in front so I could drag her f
rom the room.
“Move into the next room and stop,” I ordered Amanda. She did.
Suzanne screamed, half in rage and half in pain, as I hauled her across the floor. I made sure to put her out of easy reach as I stepped back toward the hole and dug in my pockets. Even without the ability to stand, Suz was dangerous. I didn’t put worming her way over to me, broken legs be damned, and biting through an artery in my leg past her.
I removed a squeeze bottle of lighter fluid and a book of matches. I popped the top and gave the bottle a firm grip, its contents gushing across the carpet. The book of matches went up a few seconds later, the room blossoming with harsh light. I only watched long enough to make sure the actual contents began to catch. The fire was actually one of two prongs; what damage it didn’t do, the water used by firefighters would.
“Come on,” I said to Amanda, then pulled Suzanne along. We moved to the lobby, where Stephen was struggling against his own bonds. He wasn’t messing around with it, either. Blood pooled on the floor where he got the idea to make the plastic slick and try to slide his hands out. He froze when he saw me, a flash of terror lighting on his face before vanishing behind the stoic mask of professionalism.
“You’re coming with me, Amanda. These two are staying here.”
On the floor, Suzanne spat a bloody gob. She must have bitten her tongue. “You’re dead, Carter. You know that.”
She looked up at me, a thin sheen of sweat coating her haggard face. Her eyes drilled into me with an intensity far beyond anger.
“Not yet,” I told her. “Wasn’t planning on making it easy.”
I quickly shed a few pieces of my outfit including my outer shirt. Beneath it was a black t-shirt, over which I slung a detective’s badge on a long chain. I was without a gun, so I liberated Stephen’s and attached the holster to my belt. The badge was part of my bugout bag, a tool so small and handy that I never considered not including it.