by Noah Rain
It was all getting to be a little bit too much to dwell on, and the Shockers—all four of them—were getting to be a little too much to suffer in my—in Jackie’s—Gym.
“I’m going to need you fellas to leave,” I said, my patience having just about frayed. “Fun as it’s been. Vash, buddy, I’ll give you a rematch sometime. Just not here and now. I’ll let the mess slide.” I swept my hand out to indicate the debris on the floors. “It’s the least I can do.” I brushed the underside of my chin with my fingers.
Vash let out a long, slow, rattling breath.
Come on, then, you fucker.
“Like the man said,” Scarlett said. “Run along.”
“The Vixens lost all authority in Jaxton as soon as you set up that fucking penthouse in Silk City,” Vash said. With each passing word, I knew my hopes and dreams would be realized. There was no way we were leaving this gym without some violence happening first. “The better to cozy up to your targets.” He put a sarcastic inflection on the last bit. Scarlett didn’t appreciate the implication, and she looked like she was just about done talking as well.
“Now, now, Vash,” Scarlett said. “We’re all Synners, here. We’re all working toward the same goal.”
“Right,” Vash laughed without humor. “Because fucking your way into a Silk City penthouse is really fighting the good fight.”
Some of the other Shockers chuckled at that. They started to fan out, stepping slowly, their boots crunching in the debris. They might be facing down a pair of unclothed, unarmored and unarmed fighters, but Vash’s face clearly painted a picture of danger where I was concerned. And as much as Vash might be belittling Scarlett’s own crew, they seemed to be dealing with her even more cautiously than with me. They knew she could fight.
“Blackmail takes plenty of forms besides fucking,” Scarlett said. Her voice had changed. She no longer seemed angry, but bored. Done. “And sometimes, it’s not enough at all. Rest assured, boys, the girls over in Silk City know how to mix it up in more ways than one. And besides,” she looked at Vash, “some of us are trying to destabilize the system rather than profiting off of it.” Her eyes flickered over Vashs’s getup. All the bells and whistles. He didn’t appreciate the implications of that one, either.
“Fuck it,” I said to Scarlett without taking my eyes off of the two Shockers circling to my left. “Let’s see what the boys have got for us.”
“Last warning, Vash,” Scarlett said.
“Likewise,” he returned.
The Shockers stopped, adopting ready stances, their batons sparking with intensity. I didn’t flinch, and neither did Scarlett. I couldn’t speak for her, but they were going to need a lot more than glorified tasers to get my attention.
“You’re really going to end up in the Med defending him?” Vash asked. It was a giveaway, and Scarlett smiled as she seemed to recognize it as well.
You see, when any animal—be it man or beast—sized up a potential opponent, there was always a degree of boasting involved. Feinting, if you will. Dogs growled at each other. Cats hissed. Bulls stomped the ground. But if you watched animals circle each other long enough, you could always predict the winner before the first tooth or claw flashed, and before the first droplets of blood hit the dirt. The dog who growled last never won. The cat who hissed first never won. In the end, whichever beast wanted to keep talking was the beast that didn’t want the fight in the first place.
And I was done talking.
“No, Vash,” Scarlett said. “I’m not going to defend him. I’m just going to fuck you up because I want to, now.” She took a few steps backward, wisely avoiding the area full of glass and splinters. “Any more questions?”
Vash actually did growl then. I guess that counted as a question, and I decided to provide an answer.
I took one quick-step forward, careful not to land on anything sharp, and pumped a jab right into Vash’s glass-lodged chin. My knuckles came away bloody, even though I felt just the slightest pinch as my defective nerves covered the pain, but his chin effectively burst as the pebbles of glass became more deeply entrenched in his flesh.
A baton flashed in from my left and I darted backward, nearly colliding with the turnbuckle of the ring as I twirled around it, between the canvas-wrapped platform and the row of front street windows. Two of the Shockers came at me, while the third rushed Scarlett on the opposite side of the ring.
I saw her dodging between the swinging heavy bags as the baton lashed toward her, but my attention was soon taken by the Shockers in front of me. I had chosen my alley well. The two fighters were bunched up, with less space to work with because they were wearing such bulky equipment. They might not be easy to hurt, but it slowed them down.
Mobility over strength was a trade I was willing to take any day. But then, there was always a time for strength, too. And as soon as I had retreated backward, dodging blinking, flashing batons enough to convince them that my entire plan was to run away, I planted my feet and came in.
A one-two cracked into the uncovered chin of the Shocker on the right. The thudding impacts rattled his head in his helmet, but he kept his wits enough to make a grab for me. The Shockers weren’t complete idiots. They knew I had them out-skilled, so they had to get me immobile to get to work.
I tried to extricate myself from a tangle of limbs as the Shocker hooked his arms over mine and pulled me in, my head colliding with the glass shield over his face. I felt a buzz against my chin as his baton pressed against my lower jaw, and my teeth chattered. I felt my muscles seize up as the Shocker on my left rammed his own baton into my side. I grunted, and tried to break out of the exchange, but my muscles were so heavily contracted that I was having trouble getting them to obey my brain’s commands.
“Fuck it.”
I reared back and rammed my head forward, squeezing my eyes shut tight as my forehead smashed through the shield covering the closest Shocker’s face. The glass shattered. I felt a slight burning sensation and then wet as blood ran down my brow and dripped into my mouth. The Shocker reeled backward, but he had forgotten to secure his baton, and I ripped it away from my chin and went to work on his friend.
The other baton was still pressed into my left ribcage, but now that I was only dealing with however many thousand volts were in the one, my body was ready to listen to me again. I hooked his arm and locked it up at the elbow with my left hand, then brought the baton in my right hand in in a driving motion. I stuck the baton under his helmet and watched as his teeth shattered like a cartoon skeleton, sending chips of enamel spinning into the air.
I forced his elbow up … the wrong way, and listened to the crunch and squeal as I ripped the baton away, whipped it at the other Shocker who was just now recovering his wits, and let the closer one fall to his knees, clutching at his ruined arm.
I probably shouldn’t have, as I’d never been one for excess, but I slammed a knee home on the squealer and he fell back, cracking his head off the old radiator under the windows. For a second, I thought I might have killed him, which would have given me a whole other laundry list of issues to sort out, but then I saw his armored chest rising and falling in a deep, hopefully restful slumber.
“You’re going to want to stay up late with him tonight,” I said before turning to the other Shocker. “You’re really not supposed to sleep with a concussion. Brain swelling and all the rest of it.” I tapped my temple, and the Shocker with the shattered visor tried to cover his fear with anger as he growled and came at me again.
Remember what I had said about growling?
Anyway, I decided to show this one how annoyed I really was. Instead of probing for the weak points in his expensive armor like I had with the first one, I adopted a side stance similar to the one Scarlett had used on me, and exploded into a kick that used all 160 pounds of me. The Shocker let out an oomph as my heel sent him wobbling backward, and I nodded appreciatively. Without t
he armor on, his sternum would have cracked.
He tried to respond in kind, and I let him, walking forward with a barbaric cage block that Jackie had always cautioned me against. I didn’t feel anything in the way of pain, even though some of his resin-gloved punches actually had some good pop on them, but I knew I’d have a collection of bruises in the morning.
When he figured out it wasn’t doing much to me, he actually surprised me by shooting his own helmeted head forward and cracking me on the brow. That one sent me back a step, and had me seeing a few stars, but I think my ensuing smile did the trick of breaking his spirit before a right hook broke his jaw and sent him slipping and slithering over the shards of glass and wood and out the broken double doors into the Jaxton night.
I looked behind me to make sure my first victim was still sleeping soundly—he was—before I scanned the gym for my old friend Vash. He wasn’t on the training floor, so I peered through the ropes toward the other side of the gym, and saw that he was currently engaged in a losing dance with Scarlett.
The two were fighting in a small thicket of swinging heavy bags, with Scarlett keeping her cool, flowing into the alleys and makeshift lanes and switching stances as she went, while Vash hacked desperately, like a marine chopping up the underbrush with his machete. There was no sign of the other Shocker, and when I crawled under the ropes and walked in the ring toward them, I nodded as I saw him crawling toward the back office on his stomach.
I leaned onto the ropes and watched Scarlett work. She certainly took less damage than me, though she did have a welt forming on her left cheekbone. Every time she took a step backward, she kept the other leg up and bent into a chamber, lancing the ball of her foot out to send Vash sliding back in the sand that spilled out of the heavy bags.
“Give it up, Vash,” I said, jeering at him like a fan in the stands.
Vash didn’t give it up, and I guess I could lie and say I respected his gumption, if nothing else about him.
Scarlett landed a few more push kicks to the sternum, the third of which hit Vash hard enough to send his baton spinning out of his hand. He was too angry to try to retrieve it, so he came in hard, swinging with his meaty armored fists. Scarlett was through retreating. Now she stepped forward, dodging Vash’s strikes with ease and grabbing him on either shoulder. She then proceeded to bend him over twice: once with a hard knee to the armored chest, and the second time with an even harder one to the nether regions.
Vash fell to his knees, and Scarlett took a page out of my book and sent her third knee toward Vash’s ugly mug.
She froze the knee a millimeter from his hooked nose, and Vash let out a whimper as he closed his eyes, wondering when Scarlett’s cold judgment would smite him.
He opened his eyes, blinking like a lamb, and I heard the Shocker in the office groaning as he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees.
“Vash,” Scarlett said. She squatted down and brushed a dark bang out of his eye. She still looked beautiful, and she still had hardly any clothes on, but given the situation, Scarlett’s perfect tits were the last thing on Vash’s mind as he nodded sheepishly.
“I’m going to need you to run along, now. And take your goons with you.” Vash nodded, swallowing. “Konnor Kayde is ours. You don’t need to know why.”
Apparently I didn’t need to know why, either, but I can’t lie and say that the thought of it didn’t absolutely thrill me.
“Vash?” Scarlett asked. He nodded. “I’m going to need you to do that, like, yesterday.”
Vash scrambled so comically I had to cover my mouth to keep it under control. My abs flexed, and I felt a stabbing sensation on my left side. It didn’t hurt much. Just a faint sting, which meant it was probably a pretty nasty injury. But I was having too much fun to worry much.
Vash rushed into the office and grabbed his associate, and the two executed a drunken drag-wobble toward the front door, with their friend by the radiator swaying uneasily as he followed them, droning like a zombie.
Scarlett walked around the ring, looking around the floors. She bent over—and yes I watched—and grabbed her leather suit, sliding it into the ring. When she climbed in after it, she started working at the suit, pulling it over her feet.
“Thanks for the assist,” I said. Scarlett sat on her butt and shook her head. “You weren’t serious, were you?”
She looked up at me.
“About the Vixens needing me, or … wanting me, or whatever?”
She frowned. I felt stupid for asking.
“You need to work on your defense,” Scarlett said.
I couldn’t help but laugh at that.
“Seems like everything worked out fine.”
“Just because you can’t feel the damage piling up, doesn’t mean it’s not,” she said, sounding annoyed.
“True enough,” I admitted. “But then, it can be demoralizing for them to fight me.”
“I could see that.” She looked at my ribs, and I looked down, wincing as I saw the hand-sized wash of purple flesh where the baton had slammed home on more than one occasion.
“Why didn’t you just blast them with some of that spray of yours?” I asked, nodding at the black cannister that had rolled loose from one of the catches in her suit.
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Like what?”
“It’s not a mind-control substance,” she said. “It’s … pheromones, or something. Nina makes it.”
“And Darla was wearing it the other night, right?”
“It doesn’t work like you think,” Scarlett said. “I mean, yeah, it has an effect, but it isn’t suddenly going to make four armored guys all jacked up on cocaine and anger weak at the knees just because I hit them with a blast of pheromones and the sight of my tits.”
“Works on me.”
Scarlett gave me a withering glare, snatched up the cannister, turned it over and stood up, with her suit only over her ankles so far. She found the button on top and pointed the cannister at me, and then sprayed.
I coughed and wiped at my eyes, and spit over the ring. It tasted sour, and smelled like lavender.
When I looked back at Scarlett, she was searching my expression.
“Well?” she asked.
“Well what?”
“Do you want …” she stopped. “Never mind that. Do you want to answer a few questions?”
“Umm … sure?”
“What’s your name?”
“Konnor Kayde.”
“What was your trainer’s name?”
“Jackie Sullivan.”
“What was your mother’s name?”
I opened my mouth and then closed it. Scarlett frowned.
“Okay,” she said. “Usually it’s the fourth question that lets us know if it works or not.”
“What’s the fourth question?”
“What’s your Credit PIN?”
“I see.”
I scanned the floor, not wanting to meet Scarlett’s stare for a minute.
“Mommy issues, then,” she said.
“Doesn’t everyone have mommy and daddy issues, these days?” I asked.
“Sure, but when we hit them with this stuff, they tell us about them. Not you, though, which confirmed what Sasc … what I thought.”
I looked at her suspiciously.
“Now I’m starting to think I should have gone with Vash and the Sparklers.”
“Shockers.”
“Right. So … you guys are after me?”
“Interested,” Scarlett said. “If we can figure out how to get the serum to work on you … well, it could be—”
“Seems like you’re doing fine over in Silk City,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve learned plenty of mothers’ names and Credit PIN’s over there. Should be plenty for you guys to live on.”
“We can’t bring
the system down if we’re living on it.”
She seemed serious.
“Listen,” I said. “I’ve just got some weird nerve disorder. I hardly think it’s worth more than some mild curiosity.”
“Could be worth a lot more,” Scarlett said. She stepped out of her black suit once more, like stepping out of a bath robe. She came up to me, and put her fingernail against my chest. She pushed, and we both looked down. She pushed more, and a small trickle of blood leaked out, mixed with the sweat and traced a pink path down to the ridges of my stomach.
“You don’t feel anything, huh?” she whispered.
“Not … nothing.”
“That must be hard.”
I laughed.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Well … it isn’t great. I mean, it helps with fighting …”
“I can see that. Must help you … take a lot.”
“And it seems to help in one other area,” I said, blushing.
“What’s that?”
I looked at Scarlett and saw her looking back at me, staring intently. I felt something grab me … grab me hard, and looked down to see her hand had already crept into my boxers.
Scarlett bit her lip.
“Show me.”
Chapter 6
My Kind of Spar
I would say the rest of the evening passed in a blur, but that wouldn’t have been entirely accurate.
For starters, it would deprive you of the sultry details of exactly what passed between Scarlett and I on the hot, sticky canvas of the boxing ring. Secondly, it would deprive me the opportunity to relive the whole experience.
We hadn’t even boarded up the entrance to the gym. The double doors had been blown off their hinges, with one of the frames leaning diagonally to mostly conceal the entrance. The night air was sticky and hot, and the effect on the interior of Jackie’s Gym was even more pronounced.
