by GX Knight
There was yet another stare off for me. I was starting to feel like the Wyatt Earp of eye contact, as she studied me from the anonymous safety hidden away behind the mirrored face plate of that fantastic armor. I was okay with losing this one. “You saved me.” I said matter-of-factly.
“I did.” She replied. Her helmet translated her voice into a synthesized creation. There was a twinge to her voice that made it sound non-American. Of course, my first instinct was to assume Australian, but considering what was happening around me, I made concession that she could have been from Mars for all I knew.
I don’t know why, but as a guy, the instinct to flirt comes at any and all times, no matter how inappropriate the situation might make it. “Well that makes you my knight in shining armor then, doesn’t it?” I tried my best sexy wink. She laughed, but I don’t think it was with me, so much as at me.
“And I guess that makes you the damsel in distress?”
Oh so she’s a funny girl.
I ignored her so I could keep working my mojo, “Would it be too much to ask to look my savior in the eyes? Would you consider removing the helmet so I could thank you appropriately?”
I have no game.
I really didn’t think she would. She was a warrior woman with cool swords and badass armor. All the comics I had ever read would have demanded that a secret identity be paramount to keep, so would you believe she granted my request? She pulled at silver latches on the back of each side of her face plate. There was a slight hiss before the helmet came undone. She took it off, and with the shake of a head, lava red hair spilled out to the side, settling across her right shoulder piece.
“Awesome.” I admired.
She spun like a school girl trying on her Mom’s dress for the first time. “You like it, really?” Not the reaction I was expecting, but I went with it.
“I do. You totally look Snazzy.”
She raised a curious eyebrow. I internally imagined murdering whatever part of my psyche still holding on to that stupid word.
Emerald eyes of isle fire met mine. She dismissed me with a laugh as I made not the tiniest effort to hide the complete and total enamored tickle I felt crawling all over my face. “If I promise to get in trouble tomorrow will you save me again?” I said with a cheeky grin. “I’d be willing to get kidnapped over and over if meant repeating this moment.”
Maybe I have a little game?
“Aye,” she said in a thick Irish sounding tone. Not Australian, but twice as hot in its delivery. I was suddenly in love with a new culture. “Though next time I think I might leave you to fend for yourself.”
“Then perhaps we switch roles, and I save you.” I did feel a little guilty. I was the one who wanted to be a knight after all.
She laughed again. Every time she laughed was like the touchdown of touchdowns. “Perhaps,” she pulled a device from her belt which had been connected to the piece of her suit I had nicknamed the Armored Thong. “But I’m afraid I haven’t finished saving you yet… My Damsel.” That stabbed a little.
“Take your time.” I insisted as she stuck the piece of unfamiliar super technology up to my arm.
“What do you see?” She asked perplexed while she analyzed the readings on the tiny screen.
“You.”
She sighed, “I mean on you?”
“I see me.” I replied looking over myself wondering if something had gone wrong. Had I somehow missed something during the frenzy of my escape through the snowy woods? “I mean I feel a little different. I’m not cold when I should be in the throes of hypothermia. I think I might have gained a little strength because I totally snapped some huge-ass limbs as if they were twigs as I ran here. But I guess my extremities do feel a little on the numb side, and it’s not because of the cold. Other than that, I feel fine. Oh and I can see a lot better than I used to as well, and maybe hear too.”
She looked confused. “I need to take you somewhere.”
As much as I was willing to go anywhere with her, I had somewhere else I needed to go first, “I need to get home. My Dad has probably crapped enough bricks to build his own Great Wall in China. Do you know how long it’s been since I was taken?”
She said nothing. Whatever was happening on the screen she studied it, stared at me, and then went back to surveying the information scrolling down her device’s readout. It was mildly frustrating. I sighed in protest of being ignored.
“We have to go.” She insisted.
I was just as insistent. It’s this stubborn thing I do. “Take me home.”
“Come with me, -then I’ll take you home.”
“Take me home, -then I’ll go with you.”
“Do you even know where you are?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll get there somehow.”
“Half naked, in the freezing snow, with no money? I’d like to see that. You’re the helpless Damsel, remember?”
I had no chance to respond. She pushed me over before a flaming basketball sized orb streaked past where I was standing. It struck a tree, singed a perfect hole through it, and then evaporated. My body flexed tense, I was ready for another to come, but it never did. My eyes shifted from tree to tree watching, waiting, until after a few seconds of extreme worry, my nose flared and my fist clinched into hammers, when I recognized Cade Arkman, still rocking his greasy-black Bieber hair. He emerged from a thicket wearing that awful smile of his.
“That’s not your property, Love.” He said to the girl. “His delivery has already been paid for. You know from personal experience how we just hate to disappoint our clients. We do anything to protect our reputation.” His lips curled with a predator’s confidence over every word, and she looked disgusted as if remembering something painful.
There was no introduction needed between the two of them. They knew each other, and well, it seemed from the interaction.
“We do have a problem then, because I have been paid as well to see him delivered to my client, which I am assuming is not yours.” I got my wish. She yanked both swords from their sheaths, and all but growled, “And you know I’m not doing another damn thing, for your precious Viper reputation. Tell your Daddy to fill out that refund check, because the kid stays with me.”
Who is she calling a kid?
“Look at him, precious. Who would want him now?”
“It can be fixed.” She said.
Cade shook his head, “You know it can’t.”
I was confused. There was so much to grasp, and I thought I was handling it well, but I also only registered about half of what anybody said, because I was too busy trying not to end up back in the science experiment truck, where I had apparently been the human guinea pig for quite some time. What was I supposed to think? I was being fought over as if I wasn’t even present, and apparently by two different mercenaries who had each been paid to see me delivered somewhere that wasn’t my home. I wanted to get back to my poor little apartment, drive my crappy little car, and work at my horrible underappreciated job. Crazy? Yes.
I didn’t want to trust either one, but I had to choose, so who? I guess whoever was left standing, because there was nothing else to think or say as the two charged like locomotives plowing toward one another on the same unfortunate track.
She flipped out of the way almost dodging him but caught a glancing blow to the arm that knocked one of her swords away. She rolled away with the strike trying to lessen the impact, but took a hard shot into the smoldering tree with the hole in it. She spun with the remaining blade, but he held a forearm to it that deflected the weapon with no injury to himself whatsoever. I should have known considering the car stunt he pulled at the expo, and the punches I landed that didn’t even garner so much as a flinch from him back at the fairgrounds. There was more to this guy than good genes. He had some supernatural juice flowing though him. He had to be some kind of Amalgam.
She tried to roundhouse kick, but that didn’t go well either. He caught her by the armored boot, swung her around a full one-hundred-and-e
ighty degrees, and then flung her into another tree. She shattered that tree and two more before she finally skidded to a stop. Had it not been for my improving sight, I would have lost her in that white armor amidst the falling clumps of snow their fight knocked from the surrounding trees. I watched with a helpless feeling as I heard her gasping for air, but I was unable to move when his vision shifted to me while the sounds of the others in his party trampled our way like herds of mutant wildebeest.
It was go time. Do or die. I stood as my body continued to adjust. No longer were my limbs totally numb. They tingled with what felt like pulses of static electricity. You know that thing your body does when you’ve been running around on carpet in your socks? I would have preferred the numbness, because the shocking didn’t feel pleasant. I felt like a human light bulb filament.
Cade’s smirk never left his face. He walked right up to grab me. I swatted his arm away with a swift slap to his hand. Just then we were joined by his arriving search parties. They no sooner had come into view though, when the armored-princess-of-awesome was back up and, like a flash of glorious red-headed-light, taking the fight to them. This distracted Cade’s gaze enough for me to one to get my own shot in, so foolishly undaunted by the grotesque outcome of our last encounter, I swung a slow lumbering hand at him.
Looking off in another direction, pulling a movie-ninja-move, he straight up palmed my fist and stopped the blow before it could land. I’m pretty sure I got out at least one cuss word before taking his best shot to my face.
Getting hit in the face is a unique sensation; flying through the air because you got hit in the face, even more so.
An epicenter of pain rolled from my cheeks, and spread into every recess of my entire head. I didn’t see stars so much as I did pure static. Not fun. I collected myself as she chased away the retreating attackers. She looked pissed as one of the leather clad bandits picked up the sword she had lost. She got a case of tunnel vision that put her attack path toward the sword thief within Cade’s reach, and he didn’t miss his chance to capitalize. There was a sickening thud when she caught one of Cade’s backhands right across her porcelain face.
She fell next to me as the guy got away with her sword. Her gauntleted hand fell in mine for a brief moment, and the pain in her green eyes seemed tangible.
Again, I don’t know what comes over me. Stupidity? Has to be. But I lost it. I pulled a George McFly and with all the strength my muscles could summon, I sprung to my feet, and with another right-left combo for the ages connected the strikes that were followed by gut wrenching sounds of bone being shattered. This time it wasn’t mine. Take that you bastard.
I stood over the unmoving Cade whose head looked like a bloodied plush doll had just seen a team of horses run over his face. I did what a hundred mile-per-hour car wreck couldn’t. I took a mental note and placed that in my freak-out box to be read later. That box was filling up quickly.
We were again alone save the knocked out Cade. I did check to see if he was breathing, he was. I don’t know why I cared, but I did. She sheathed her remaining sword, distraught about the one that had been stolen.
She examined Cade with a perverse pleasure, and I checked her face to see how she was. She took hits like a pro. You couldn’t even see where he’d backhanded her. When I asked about my face, she just kind of shook off the question saying something about not being able to tell, and then changed the subject as she picked up her discarded helmet. I’m sure she wished she hadn’t taken it off in the first place. He could have wailed on her all night and not done a thing. I could tell she was lying about my face though. Something caught her glance around my eyes. Knowing my luck, I was rocking a Dalmatian bruise. Not sexy when you want to impress the girl.
For a warrior woman that had just torn the proverbial bad guys, my abductors, a new one. She was nice, and hot. Did I mention she was hot? Not that something as trivial as looks should matter to a socially, and politically, correct aficionado as myself, but holy wow, she rocked elegance and beauty even as she sprung to clutch the hilt jutting out from the sheath on her lower back when something like chains rattled off in the distance.
I wanted to trust her. I really did. I guess part of me already had. But there was a lot going on, and there was only one place I could go, no matter what. I was still resolute about getting home, but I didn’t want to argue with her anymore. I could feel fatigue pricking claws into my body at every pressure point.
“I scattered them, but they’re coming back.” She warned in the last regularly spoken words. She pulled up her hair, and clipped her helmet back on, and then her creepy electronic helmet speaker took over. “Come with me, or risk it on your own?”
What choice did I have? I was still the damsel in distress. To add further insult, after I nodded in reluctant compliance, she leapt off the ground and scooped me up as a mother would a child, one arm on my back, the other holding me at the knees. For a grown man it was humiliating, and my focus targeted the embarrassment of my predicament as opposed to enjoying the fact that we were flying through a moonlit sky, though it was shaken by exploding bombardments from below.
Somehow I was being sucked into a strange world my father tried, in his own way, to tell me about. As the breezed whooshed over my face, I no longer cared that I was somehow different, that I was being carried by a flying warrior knight, or that from behind gigantic fireballs streaked though the air safely behind as in what seemed to be random shots of search flares. I would deal with that later.
The regret I carried, in the same way this girl carried me, was of the things I had felt and said toward my Dad. I felt so heavy holding that guilt I could have plummeted to the ground with all the hopes of flying like a stone with wings. My laden spirit should have caused us to crash, but thankfully we continued to magically soar away higher and faster. It was there, somewhere between the moon and the mountains, I gave Life a wink as I embraced the pain, and I decided to learn from it. I realized I could handle her abusive truth, and I was ready to take whatever else she wanted to dish out. I would fix what I broke, and nobody was going to stop me… Well, maybe after a quick nap.
Within moments I succumbed to fatigue, and as my head rest on this stranger’s armored shoulder, I drifted to sleep mid-plan on how to get myself home, and back to my Dad as I heard her use words that teetered on the edge of my consciousness, “By the way… My name is Maeve.”
TO BE CONTINUED…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
G.X. Knight: He is a single father from Montgomery, Alabama. If he were a Musketeer, he’d be Porthos (The Oliver Platt version). If he were a Power Ranger, he most definitely would be the very first green one (Play Dragonzord tune now). And if he were to pick only one superhero to spend a day at the amusement park with, it would be Iron Man (Stark’s paying). He enjoys showing his son who’s boss in Halo (the Sprinting Assassin forever rules!), he loves all types of music (please get back together, N*SYNC), and he hopes to one day live the Jimmy Buffett life of margaritas (Vodka/Red Bull) and cheeseburgers out on the white sand beaches of Gulf Shores. If you see him out-and-about you will know it’s him because he’ll likely be singing these wrong words:
“Did you ever know that I’m your hero? I’m everything you would like to be!
