by Rowan Casey
Whether she hit a vital spot or it simply grew tired of holding her, Jessie didn’t know but in the next second the thing whipped its tentacle back and then forward again with savage grace, sending her flying through the air like a stone from a sling.
For a moment she felt a deep sense of freedom as air rushed back into her lungs and she realized she wasn’t going to suffocate after all, but her euphoria was cut short when her body slammed into the steel shutter covering the entrance to a storefront and she momentarily lost consciousness from the pain and impact.
When she came to, she found herself lying on her side against that same steel shutter that had stopped her impromptu flight, staring down the street to where the tentacled-thing was shrieking up a storm as it moved its ponderous form down the street in her direction.
Time to go! a voice in the back of her head shouted at her and she tried to get up, only to discover that her lower body refused to respond to what her mind was telling it.
Quit fucking around, Noble. Get up!
But she couldn’t. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get her legs to obey her commands. She could push herself up on her arms and move her body, but she couldn’t get her legs to do so much as twitch. All she could do was prop herself up and watch the creature move inexorably closer.
And she had little doubt what it would do when it finally reached her.
“This can’t be happening,” she said beneath her breath.
Your body’s just stunned from the impact. Give it a minute and you’ll be right as rain.
It sounded like reasonable advice; she’d hit the storefront pretty hard, after all. Given her position, she could see her legs stretched out on the sidewalk. Somehow she’d managed to lose her right sneaker in the process and she could see the toes of her right foot poking through a hole in her sock. She focused all her attention on them, trying to just get her toes to move the littlest bit. Just a twitch, that was all she needed. If she could do that, she figured the feeling would come back through the rest of her leg and foot.
But try as she might, she couldn’t move a muscle.
From her waist down, she was completely paralyzed.
“No, no, no!” she shouted, pounding her leg with her fist in frustration and only growing more horrified as she realized that she couldn’t feel the blows.
A glance down the street showed the behemoth considerably closer than it had been moments before. It might be slow, but it was closing the distance and it wouldn’t be much longer before it used one of those tree trunk-like legs to squash her into dust.
She had to get out of here!
With no other option available to her, Jessie rolled over onto her stomach, facing back up the street in the direction she’d come.
At that point she would have been happy to see her pursuers; anyone who might help her get out of here was welcome, no matter what happened after. But the entrance to the alley only mocked her with its emptiness.
Jessie reached out with her arms, gripped the sidewalk as well as she was able, and dragged herself forward a few inches, her legs a couple of dead weights behind her.
That’s when one of those tentacles slammed down on the pavement beside her, shattering it, before disappearing back out of sight behind her again as quickly as it had come. One side of her was shrieking inwardly that it was getting ready for another attack and screaming at her to get out of the way, while the other half was staring at the crater the creature’s limb had left in its wake in a kind of dazed wonder.
There was no way on earth something like that should exist and yet here it was, only seconds away from landing another blow and crushing her to a pulp.
She’d never imagined she’d go out this way.
A fight injury, maybe a drug overdose, but not crushed beneath the heel of some reject from a hell she didn’t even believe in.
Jessie reached out, grabbed another stretch of pavement, and pulled herself another few inches forward, determined to keep fighting until the very end.
That’s when one of those tentacles whipped forward and wrapped itself around her ankle.
She screamed then, overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness that was so utterly foreign to a powerful woman like herself, and her breath caught in her throat as the creature began dragging her back toward it.
Not like this, damn it, not like this!
In that moment, the universe seemed to hear her call.
There was a flash of movement beside her, a figure more sensed than seen, and then a warm hand settled upon her brow and a voice seemed to speak into her mind.
“Hush now, Knight. You’re safe. I’m not done with you yet,” it said, and then a wave of black washed over her, drowning out the voice, the monster, even her own unmoving body as she floated away on a sea of darkness.
8
Jessie came thrashing back to consciousness.
For a moment she didn’t know where she was or what was going on, the darkness about her was so absolute, but then she felt the grip of something wrapped tightly around her lower legs and it all came flooding back.
The thing in the alley!
The way it had tossed her so effortlessly through the air.
Her helplessness at being unable to move her legs as it loomed ever closer...
With the memories came an overwhelming sense of fear; cold, shiny fear that squeezed her heart like a vise and flooded her system with adrenaline. Jessie reacted as one would expect, kicking and screaming and thrashing against the thing that held her in its grip, struggling to free herself as her fight or flight instinct took over.
She reached down and grabbed the tentacles wrapped around her lower legs. She tried pulling them first one way and then the other, to no avail. In fact, the more she struggled, the tighter they seemed to get.
Realizing that she wasn’t going to pull her legs free with just her own strength, she shot her hands out to either side of her, looking for something she might use to free herself. Something she could use as a lever of some kind, maybe, or a weapon to slash at the creature before it yanked her into the air again. Her left hand brushed against her pillow and she grabbed it, thinking she might use it to…
Her pillow?
The incongruity of her pillow being in the same alley where she was fighting that tentacled son-of-a-bitch brought her up short, her mind trying to put it all together into some kind of narrative that made logical sense. At that moment the fortuitous sound of a siren in the distance pulled her attention toward the window, where there was just enough moonlight shining in through the half-open shades to show her the familiar confines of her bedroom.
She was in her apartment.
But that thing…
There was no thing, she told herself firmly, as understanding came.
She’d been hallucinating again.
She reached out with one hand, found the lamp on her bedside table by touch, and flicked on the switch.
Light flooded the room, revealing the “tentacles” wrapped about her legs to be nothing more than her bedsheets. Apparently they’d come untucked at some point during the night and gotten tangled up with her legs as she tossed and turned. She didn’t know whether to breathe a sigh of relief or be pissed that she was seeing things again.
A fist pounded on her wall from the other side, startling her.
“Shut up, you crazy bitch!” her neighbor shouted and for once she was too relieved to shout back.
A dream, she thought. It had only been a dream.
Or another vision, that voice in the back of her mind said.
Jessie ignored it.
She pulled the sheets free, tossed them aside, and then got out of bed. A glance at the clock told her it was just after five; the sun would be up soon enough, heralding the start of the first day of the rest of her life, and she knew there would be no getting back to sleep for her now.
Fight day was here.
Might as well go for a run, she thought. Flush the nightmare out of her system so she cou
ld concentrate on getting right for the match later that night.
She wandered into the bathroom and turned on the shower so the water would have time to warm up before she got into it. She waited a few minutes and then, when it was ready, Jessie grabbed the bottom of her t-shirt and pulled it up, over her head. A twitch of pain rushed down her right side as she raised her arms up, causing her to wince and glance in the mirror.
The sight that met her eyes brought her up short.
A massive bruise covered the right side of her body, from just below her shoulder to the top of her thigh. It was already turning yellow, which suggested she’d had it a few days, but for the life of her she didn’t remember injuring herself in any way that might account for it. She’d taken her fair share of body blows during her fights at Dex’s last week, but nothing that would have left a bruise like this. It looked like she’d been hit by a car, for heaven’s sake!
She moved closer to the mirror, turning first one way and then the other, trying to get a better look. Beneath the darker sections of the bruise she could see faint, oval-shaped marks. They reminded her of the marks left behind on a patient’s skin after a session of cupping therapy.
She stared at the massive bruise, nonplussed.
Where the heck had it come from?
And why didn’t it hurt more?
It would have taken a significant impact to generate a bruise of that size, she reasoned. You’d think I’d remember something like that. But for the life of her, she couldn’t. And given the size of the bruise, she should have been practically immobilized by the thing. Her side should have been screaming in pain with even the slightest movement and yet all she felt was an occasional twitch of pain when she stretched farther than normal.
What the heck was going on?
An image of her being snatched up and tossed into a locked storefront flashed through her mind, but she buried it as quickly as it surfaced. She didn’t have time for such nonsense; a dream didn’t leave marks upon your skin!
After puzzling over it for a few minutes more, she decided that the bruise could only be the end result of all the fighting she’d been doing at Dex’s. She gotten into a few clinches, taking a fair number of body shots in the process. Normally that kind of punishment wouldn’t have been a big deal, but with her poor eating habits of late, never mind her drug use, her body was bound to react differently.
And those circular-looking marks? that voice asked.
Impact bruises, she told herself firmly. Left behind when her opponent’s gloved fists struck her with more force than usual.
Nothing to worry about.
She put her arms up over her head again and twisted this way and that, testing her range of movement. She got minor twinges of pain when she stretched too far to the left, but thankfully that was all. She could live with that.
Satisfied, she got into the shower and promptly forgot about it all. She had more important things to worry about – like how she was going to knock Dellacroix out before the end of the second round.
The Wilshire Arms Hotel was one of the oldest and most prestigious in the city of Los Angeles. Built in 1927, it was twelve stories high and boasted three hundred rooms, including sixty suites and a multi-story penthouse. A $48-million-dollar restoration project returned the hotel to its original Spanish Colonial design just a few years ago. The event had stuck in Jessie’s mind because of the ruckus the media made over the million dollars the owners had spent to have a mural painted on the bottom of the hotel’s pool. The who’s-who list of Hollywood celebrities who had called the Wilshire Arms home over the years was long and impressive; including such luminaries as Clark Cable, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn and Marilyn Monroe, to name a few.
Jessie arrived a few hours before the match and was surprised to find Hautdesert waiting for her when she stepped out of the taxi. He nodded hello and then led her through the hotel to a ballroom that had been arranged to host that event’s fight. A fighting cage had been assembled in the middle of the room, the freshly-painted steel gleaming under the lights, while four sections of chairs were arranged around it for the spectators who had yet to start arriving.
A conference room off to one side of the ballroom was set aside to serve as her dressing room and when Hautdesert ushered her inside she found two men waiting for her arrival.
The first was a lanky redhead named O’Brien. Jessie had seen him around the fight circuit in the past; he was considered a pretty good cut man by people she trusted, so she was happy to see him.
The second, though, was a legend in his own right and Jessie nearly gasped as she recognized him.
Art Robinson was one of the best corner men in the business; he’d trained more than fifteen world champion boxers before bringing his talents over to the mixed martial arts arena nearly a decade ago. Word on the street was that he’d retired this past summer and Jessie could only imagine what her benefactor had promised to bring a man like him back to the ring.
Introductions were made and then the trio quietly got to work. O’Brien wrapped Jessie’s hands and wrists with tape, then helped her pull on her gloves, while Robertson quizzed her on how she intended to deal with Dellacroix once they were in the ring. Both men seemed satisfied with the results, which helped bolster Jessie’s confidence.
Preparations finished, Art led Jessie through a variety of stretching exercises to warm up her muscles. When he was satisfied that she was ready, he pulled on a set of training mitts and got her on her feet, throwing combination punches and kicking routines to fully engage that mind-body connection she was going to need once she entered the ring.
After that, it was just a matter of staying focused and calm until the fight began.
Jessie settled in to wait.
Twenty minutes later there was a gentle knock on the conference room door. O’Brien opened it, spoke to whoever was on the other side, and looked back at Jessie.
“It’s time.”
Jessie nodded; she was ready.
Art took point, with Jessie in the middle and O’Brien bringing up the rear. The ballroom was packed; Jessie saw only a handful of empty seats as they made their way between the rows and down to the steps leading into the ring. The referee was waiting for them there. He did the customary glove inspection and pat down, checking for illegal objects and lubricants like extra Vaseline hidden behind the ears, neck, shoulders, side and knees, and then gestured for them to enter the ring. A few moments later, Jessie’s opponent, Sheila Dellacroix, emerged from her “locker room” and made her way down to the ring, going through the same drill as Jessie had.
As Dellacroix entered the cage, she shot a quick glance in Jessie’s direction. The challenge in her eyes was obvious, even if she didn’t let that emotion show on her face.
Jessie felt her pulse quicken.
She was back – back in the ring, back in the fight game – and she intended to make the most of it.
An MC in a formal tuxedo stepped into the ring, microphone in hand. He marched over to the center of the ring, raised his hands, and waited until he had the crowd’s attention. It didn’t take long.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for coming! As you know, tonight’s exhibition match is on behalf of the Children’s Foundation for Los Angeles and everything we take in tonight will go directly to the Foundation!”
The MC waited for the applause to die down before continuing.
“As I’m sure you know, we’ve got a rare treat for you this evening! This private exhibition match features two experienced opponents and I’m sure they’ll put on quite a show for you tonight.”
More applause and another moment’s wait.
Let’s get on with it already, Jessie thought. She glanced around the room, taking in the audience in the process. There were more than a few high profile individuals in the room, from movie stars, to directors, to a pop singer or three. Given the pedigree of those in attendance, Jessie knew that the coffers of the Children’s Foundation were going to be
considerably richer by the end of the evening. On a whim she searched the crowd for Dante Grimm and found him seated to her right a few rows back from ringside. When he noticed her stare, he gave her a quick wink.
“In the red corner, coming out of retirement and taking her first match in nearly three years, with a prior professional record of nine wins, one loss, please welcome Jessie The Berserker Noble!”
The applause was noticeably light, at least to Jessie’s mind, but she didn’t mind. She wasn’t here for their adoration anyway.
“And in the blue corner, currently ranked as the number four fighter in the women’s bantamweight division, with a professional record of eleven wins, one loss, please welcome Sheila The Anvil Dellacroix!”
Jessie pretended not to notice the considerably louder applause nor the way Dellacroix raised her arms over her head in a V for victory.
Getting ahead of ourselves, aren’t we? Jessie thought.
“Once again, thank you to our sponsors and let me extended a special thanks to all of you from all of us at the Children’s Foundation; your support is highly appreciated. We hope you enjoy the evening! Let’s fight!”
The MC waved the fighters into the center of the ring and held the microphone for the referee as he gave the usual instructions. When he was done, he sent both fighters back to their corners to wait for the bell.
Jessie stared out across the ring, her thoughts on the fight in front of her and nothing else.
Let’s do this!
The bell rang.
9
Dellacroix didn’t hesitate. She closed the distance between them the second the bell went off and unloaded a one-two punch at Jessie’s head.
Jessie parried and circled out of range, noting as she did so that her opponent was swinging for the fences; someone wanted this to be over quickly.
Sorry, girlfriend, Jessie thought, but it’s not going to be that easy. You’re gonna have to earn this one.
