by B Branin
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Adrenaline was doing a great job of numbing away the pain and bringing my senses back around. I could tell from the cold cement, the smell of trash and the thickened gloom that I was now in an alleyway thanks to the efforts of my assailant. Rolling onto my back, I confirmed my suspicions as well as getting an eyeful of my attacker.
He was a pale, scrawny and sunken-eyed individual, fitting the perfect junkie stereotype. Needle-tip bruises ran up and down his spindly arms and his body was wasting away due to neglect as his mind only focused on getting his next fix. Whether he was hopped up or not was debatable but his movements were sporadic and twitchy. While these jittery spasms seemed random, there was a definite sense of purpose emitting from my attacker. I’ve associated with addicts before but never had I heard of a lone user who would attack a larger man (not only was I taller but also outweighed him by a good twenty pounds) and then drag the victim away.
This was obviously no simple mugging.
The junkie finally noticed I was coming to my senses and crouched down, pressing one knee into my gut. He moved his face close to mine as his trembling hands pinned my wrists down. His breath made curled milk smell like a rose bouquet but I managed to keep from vomiting and looked him in the eye. The moment my eyes locked with his, I noticed his pupils shared the same freakish dilation as the woman inside the club who had forced me to dance.
As a conman, you don’t stay ahead of the police by believing in coincidences.
“You been messin’ with a vessel. Bad! Bad!” He croaked accusingly, furthering my suspicions that whatever drug he was on had unhinged him. I doubt this freak even knew what he was saying, probably just parroting something he had been told or a phrase he half-remembered.
So there I was, pinned, head spinning, body racked with pain and some fevered drug addict wanting to maim or kill me. My yellow stripe showed its full color as fear squeezed at my insides, coating my heart with a layer of permafrost. I fell back to my first line of defense: Fast talking.
Desperately I tried to initiate a dialogue in an attempt to talk and bluff my way out of this situation. The moment I opened my mouth, he let go of my wrists and struck me so hard it made my teeth rattle. My vision blurred with the fresh wave of pain. Oddly enough that second helping of pain did a great job of clearing my mind and helping me focus.
With a rictus smile, my assailant reached to his belt and drew a large knife, the kind hunters would use when skinning game. Even in the gloom the steel glinted menacingly, telling me that this unfortunate scenario wasn’t some desperate, drug induced mugging or random act of violence.
It was about murder. Cold, calculated murder.
“H-Here I spill the unworthy’s blood, to keep the daughters’ master happy! Cutting the flesh, I steal the soul. Just like she said!” The junkie chanted in a voice shaking with excitement, “Gonna get my r-reward for this! Send my soul s-screamin! I was told! Told!”
As I’m sure many people are aware, there are plenty ways to murder someone. Poison, strangling, shooting, drowning, bludgeoning, or even pummeling folks to death are so common there are actual statistics on them. All quite gruesome and all quite effective. Lucky for me this junkie hadn’t chosen any of the aforementioned methods.
No my assailant had drawn a knife the one method of murder I was intimately familiar with.
You see, I may be a coward but that doesn’t mean I haven’t learned some ways of defending myself. My weapon and tool of choice has always been the knife. Blades are easily concealed, extremely versatile, sold everywhere and unlike guns, aren’t easily tracked. There are plenty of situations where a firearm just won’t do, so I had familiarized myself with a blade and had a certain affinity for them.
While I was being forced to fight, at least this was a fight I was confident I could win.
Like most rookies, the junkie raised his knife high with the intention of slamming the blade down into my chest with as much force as possible. It’s a bit sad to confess this, but this wasn’t the first time I’d been moments away from being stabbed. With experience on my side, I knew exactly what to do to turn the tables on my assailant.
Timing was key. The moment that blade went into the air, I did a quick sit-up and mustered all possible momentum for a head-butt. My forehead slammed into the junkie’s face and while it lacked the force to do much damage, it certainly had the desired affect. Caught off guard by the attack, my assailant panicked and tried to simultaneously pull away defensively while awkwardly and blindly stabbing downward with his knife.
Just as I had anticipated.
Instead of catching his wrist as they’d do in the movies, I raised my own wrist up horizontally, bracing it underneath the junkie’s elbow. This successfully blew the chances his attack had of connecting with me and he cursed in high-pitched, frustrated gibberish, presumably at my refusal to just lie down and die. Now that my head had stopped ringing and terror had filled me with adrenaline, I was able to twist my body and shove my assailant off of me.
In seconds we both were on our feet and circling each other like wild dogs. I drew my knife and felt a cold kind of confidence fill me as I released the spring-loaded blade. The junkie’s dilated eyes took in the weapon I had produced, his lips curling back into a smirk. Obviously my assailant figured he still held the advantage. Yes, he had the bigger knife but unbeknownst to him, that didn’t count for much. See, in a knife fight, it was all about speed. Sure, a longer blade meant a superior reach but in melee you were getting so close to your opponent that an unwieldy weapon like his skinning knife could become a liability.
On the other hand, my switchblade had been solely designed for personal skirmishes such as this.
I’ve used a lot of knives over the years but the one I currently use has been a personal favorite of mine for some time: A sleek Italian stiletto with a double-edged blade coming to a razor sharp point at six inches. With a press of a button the handle would spit up the blade, making it lethal in less then a second. It was a nimble and clever weapon and one that was quite dangerous in my hands.
My opponent didn’t seem daunted in the least. Apparently the junkie lacked the patience I had and with a shout, he rushed me in hopes of drawing first blood. His attack was amateurish at best. My assailant swung his knife in a horizontal slash, hoping to catch my throat with his steel. It was such a simplistic strike, I almost felt guilty for counterattacking.
Almost.
My years of blade-play took over like a well honed reflex. The moment the junkie lunged, I had spun my switchblade between my fingers, changing to a reversed-blade grip. In the movies this is where we’d clash blades, sending contact-sparks flying into the air as we exchanged heated words or battle cries.
Fuck that.
While the junkie was still in mid-swing, I snapped my arm to full, but calculated extension. Skin tore and muscle tissue parted as a good three inches of my switchblade buried itself into the junkie’s wrist before he could complete the swing. He gave a sharp howl of pain that seemed animalistic, but I wasn’t through yet. Stepping forward, I put all my weight into a haymaker punch, catching him right on the jaw. His scream was cut short and he stumbled backwards, my blade slipping out of his flesh as easily as it entered.
Any sane person would have turned tail and fled after receiving such a horrendous wound to their person. Either the drug my assailant was on had been more powerful than I had suspected or he was bat-shit crazy. Either way, instead of running, the junkie transferred the knife to his non-injured hand and let his wounded wrist hang limply at his side as blood gushed forth. A sick pitter-patter-pitter-patter sound tickled my ears as the crimson droplets splattered to the ground.
I had to consciously quell a flood of cowardice as I watched this psycho completely ignore his grievous wound. The fight was over and we both knew it. Or at least, the one of us that was sane knew it. For whatever reason the junkie seemed determined to fight on.
He certainly appeared intent on killing me.
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The junkie gave a throaty scream of rage followed by more gibberish muddled with curses. Spurred on by pain, rage and whatever illegal substances were in his veins, he charged me drunkenly, holding out his knife as if hoping I’d leap on the blade. Waiting until the last possible millisecond, I sidestepped the charging addict and in what might have seemed a comical trick, stuck out my foot to trip him.
While less flashy, my method of dealing with his mad charge was effective. My assailant tripped over my foot, stumbled forward a few more steps before falling hard to the ground. The sound of him hitting the ground was drowned out by the inhuman shriek he gave out as he landed. My blood ran cold as I knew this wasn’t another mindless cry of hate, but rather the kind of sound issued when death was near.
My fear was confirmed as I looked down at the junkie. The tip of his skinning knife glistened with blood as it poked through his back. The idiot had tried to brace himself for the fall but had refused to discard the knife. The result was he landed on his own blade, his entire bodyweight forcing the weapon clean through his stomach.
Weak groans of agony escaped the addict’s lips as he curled his scrawny frame into a tight, fetal ball. A final, violent shudder tore through his body before the junkie fell silent, his sobs of pain ending in a ragged gasp. Then he laid there, completely still as I wiped the blood from my switchblade and pocketed it.
And that was that.
I didn’t give the dead body a second thought as I started to jog out of the alleyway and as far from this soon-to-be-crime scene as possible. That was another beauty about knives: It’s as clean a getaway as you could ever hope for. Sure it was a shame that there was the need to make a clean getaway at all, but I refused to let myself dwell on such thoughts.
If you survived as long as I had inside the gray area of law and morality, you fell into habit of accepting certain things, especially things you couldn’t cheat or change. I had been attacked and my attacker was now dead. No amount of worry or regret would fix that. Besides, this wasn’t the first death I had been directly involved in so I was rather good at dismantling and compartmentalizing panic.
Deciding it would be safer to use the alleyways as I fled the scene of the crime, I moved further away from the body and hurried deeper into the twisting maze of brick and cement. Before I turned the corner and completely committed myself to my escape, I took one last glance at the junkie, half-hoping and half-dreading he was still alive.
What I saw made my mouth go dry.
Standing over the body was a beautiful young woman. Even from here I could make out the wild black hair and leather belt studded with blue orbs. I looked down at my bruised and rapidly scabbing wrists and knew, just knew, it was the same woman who had forced me to dance at the club. She looked up from the body, her dilated eyes seeming to pierce through the gloom as she stared right at me...an unhinged smile on her perfect, painted lips.
I fled.
