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“ Corona,” said the one in the middle, approximately. “Melina Kandinsky Mercouri. Gowanda Kenosha Cu
I attacked.
I did everything at once, because I had the feeling that there would be no second take, that all of this had to be done correctly first time around. I sprang to my feet and charged at them in one fine liquid motion, arms extended and weapons held high, face contorted in my most hideous snarl. I tore the air with a shriek designed to curdle the blood of my opponents and freeze them in their tracks. A phrase came unbidden to mind, a line from the advertisement of a factory-to-you discounter. “It’s time to cut out the middle man,” a voice spoke inside my head, and I sprang at the middle man, fully prepared to cut him out.
The next thing I knew I had left the ground and was flying ass over teacups through the air. It was the damnedest thing ever. I never even had the sensation of physical contact with the man. Obviously he did take hold of me and throw me, but it happened so very suddenly and with such ease and precision that I was never aware of it. I even thought for a moment that I had taken flight, or that there had been an earthquake, or that the world was coming to an end. Nor was I convinced that the three possibilities were mutually exclusive. But I didn’t have too much time to work things out in my head because almost immediately I hit the wall with it and crumpled up on the ground.
I got up again as quickly as I could, which wasn’t very. They looked quite as they had looked before, standing in a row taking things easy, the only change being that they had turned to face me. Behind them Plum was posing as an allegorical statue representing Surprise. The man in the middle was saying things like Salami and Horizon and Montezuma.
So I charged again. This time I started out once again for the man in the middle; then, halfway there, like any suburbanite I drifted to the right. This, see, was strategy. I seemed to be charging blindly ahead at the man who had sent me flying, but that was just to give the man on the right a false sense of security. To lull him into inattention.
It didn’t work. This time I landed on the floor instead of hitting the wall, and this time it took a few seconds longer to shake the errant confusion out of my head, and this time when I got to my feet I discovered the Swiss Army pocketknife was missing. I still had the fork, though. Otherwise everything was as before – the same extraordinary sensation of flight, the same utter rout for our side.
The man in the middle was talking again. Or maybe it was the one on the left, or the one on the right. I couldn’t be sure. Nor could I catch what they were saying. Before the words had been meaningless enough, but now I couldn’t even pick up on the sound. I suppose I was as close to sleep as it is possible to be while walking around, and closer than I had been in twenty years.
I looked around for my breath and couldn’t quite find it, and then the one on either the right or left said something, and the one on either the left or right giggled and took a step forward, and I gathered that the third time was going to be the charm. My man thrust one foot forward and planted the other at a right angle to it. His hands assumed the traditional posture, one up in front of his face, the other just in front of his shoulder. His face, so loose and composed before, was now drawn and deeply seamed.
I did not attack this time. He was not waiting for me, either. He took small steps toward me, extending the lead foot, bringing the rear foot up, constantly maintaining the stance. I tried arranging myself similarly, wondering at the same time why I was bothering. He was going to cut me up and use me for bait and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.
And the hell of it was that I was never absolutely beyond redemption in hand-to-hand combat. They gave me lessons in it before they shipped me to Korea, and a couple of times on those numbered hills I had a chance to show what I had learned, and it went well enough. I was never great but I was never awful, either, but these three clowns were good enough to make my old judo instructors look like barroom brawlers.
The man came closer, and I looked at him and at the others, and I glanced among other things at his bright red genitals, and at the others’ bright red genitals, and I thought again of the judo instructors and my last thought in that co
I dropped my hands. I opened my mouth and, loud and clear, I shouted out, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny!”
Chapter 9
The three of them took the news in diverse fashion. The one approaching me with murderous intent stopped in his tracks, which was good, and blinked, which wasn’t bad either. Another just stood around looking puzzled, although my statement must have made as much sense to him as his dialogue had to me. And the third man – the man in the middle, the tallest and broadest and blackest of them all – paused only long enough to register recognition, surprise, and resolution.
Then he moved. One arm lashed out, palm flat and fingers extended, swinging in a sure backhand stroke that caught the standing-around-looking-puzzled man full in the throat. As the blow landed my man was already striding forward, his other hand reaching out to the man with murderous intent. The hand caught a shoulder and spun, and the other hand, no longer busy with the puzzled man’s throat, bunched its fingers and stabbed at the midsection, burying itself in the solar plexus and thrusting upward.
All of this happened very quickly while I just stood there and held onto my fork. The man who’d been chopped in the throat made a terrible sound and fell in stages to the ground. His knees buckled, and his body bent at the waist, and he went down as if torpedoed. The other man came right up onto his toes, lifted by the claw in his middle. He made a whooshing sound as air came out of him in a rush, making its exit either from his mouth, which seemed more likely, or through the hole in his belly, which seemed possible at the time. His back was to me so I couldn’t really be sure, but either way the air went out of him, and so did the resistance, and so, I guess, did life itself. He flopped onto the floor and stayed there.
And the big man, who had done all of this as easily as he had flung me across the room, said, “You’re absolutely right about that, needless to say. Ontogeny certainly does recapitulate phylogeny.”
“Every time,” I said.
“One never sees phylogeny,” he said, “without it’s been recapitulated by ontogeny.”
Plum was saying, “Wha’, wha’-” The two men on the ground were saying nothing at all.
I said, “Sam Bowman.”
The big man looked at me. He just stood there looking at me, and then slowly his lips eased into a broad grin, parting to show white teeth. “Yeah,” he said, drawling. “Sam Goddamn Bowman himself. And just who in the hell are you, man?”
Introductions didn’t take long. When we all knew who we were, it was time to look to the future. The future looked uncertain at best.
Bowman checked the two men on the floor, and they turned out to be dead, which is what we had assumed. “So much for witnesses,” he said cheerfully. “But that ain’t the end of the problem. The question, baby, is what we go
I told him that was simple – we were heading for home and he could join us. He said it wasn’t that simple at all.
“Ol’ Sheena has her boys strung out all over this patch of real estate, man. We knew you were here last night. If we tried to split now, we wouldn’t make a mile without coming up against some of my old buddies.”
“Are they that good at combat?”
“You believe it. I trained ’em myself.”