This guy rang a bell, but I had bigger shit to worry about. Keeping my sights on him, and him keeping his on me, I tried to negotiate my way out of this. This guy could be a valuable asset, so I work my magic.
“Tell ya what- I just started scavenging this block, so I’ll split it. You get that side,” pointing across the street, “and I get this side. Nobody gets shot.”
“How do I know you’re for real?” It was a far question in this world, always was, so I just keep at it.
“You seem familiar. I can’t put my finger on it, but you come off as the kind of guy that I’d want to avoid fucking with, so let me ask- what do I possibly have to gain from getting into a tango with you?” I slowly set the bag down, stood up and backed up with my gun trained on him. “That silencer and that coat could fetch a pretty penny, but so can my allergy meds and Tabasco.” Nodding to the bag “I wanna live just as much as you, so why are we even having this conversation? Hell, you could have killed me from the jump. For fuck’s sakes, YOU’RE IN MY TRUCK. You could have just blown my brains out as I unloaded my bag, but you didn’t. Y’know what, why in the hell was that?”
“To stall you.”
“What?”
This made no sense, but once it did I just dropped my gun, sheathed my knife and raised my hands, like getting arrested. That’s when I got what I needed. A new voice, American, slightly to my left.
.
“Atta boy.” That was when I thought to myself ‘time to go to work’. This is why Harry left me on.
I quickly turned in his direction, preparing an elbow strike to the face. Got him right in the nose as I spun to my right to avoid getting shot and dove to this guy’s back right as he turned. I’d never seen someone turn like that, fluid and solid at the same time. It was like a 180 Kajukenpo turn, but perfected, like this is what he did before the dead rose.
I reverted to a Krav Maga stance, slimmed with my left foot in front and my hands in front of my face as he went for a palm strike to my sides. I turned right to give him an elbow to the throat, as he leaned back and chopped me right in the throat. Knowing the stakes here, I couldn’t let this guy win. I had to distract him long enough to get a burst off at the fightin’ Irish.
I leaned back and prepared a Thai kick to the back of his leg, just below the knee, but it was like he knew what I was doing before I knew what I was doing. You don’t plan a fight. It’s like a brutal dance of death, you know the steps and you know the tempo, but you don’t know which one’s coming next. Most sports, you could play on defense or offense, but not this one. You can’t rely on just one, you have to have a balance of the two, and I’d never seen anyone with as a complete mastery of the two as this guy. I was going to have to rush this.
He turned at just the right moment, catching my leg in midflight, and pulled on it, yanking me to the ground where Irish had a clear shot. I did what I do best and improvised by grabbing my knife as I hit the ground. Trying to overpower the pain with adrenaline, which my body was doing a pretty good job of anyway, I rolled backward in way that I never looked away from them, which is a lot harder than it sounds, I stood up and threw my knife at the American, but he moved out of the way. Luckily, the trajectory was it just the right angle that it got Irish in the bicep, saving my precious ammunition as I hauled ass for the front fender.
