Sheila, never one for subtlety herself, appreciated the grand entrance. At least the confrontation had the requisite drama now.
The captain flew through the doorway, clearing with remarkable grace the gap as the door rebounded off the wall and flung itself closed. A surge of appreciation for the man she was about to kill washed through her brain as his fist wrapped around her throat and he leaned his weight forward. Her windpipe collapsed around itself under the pressure. Concerned at this development, she responded with a throat punch of her own and they both recoiled, not necessarily to corners but neither was either standing in the middle of the ring anymore.
“What the fuck was that,” Sheila gasped.
“You’re gonna kill me, right?” The captain said, equally raspy in tone and affectation.
“Well yeah but not, y’know, barehanded.”
“Hence this.” The captain gestured between them, indicating the initial attack.
“Didn’t work though, did it?” Sheila asked, doubled over but finally catching her breath.
“Depends on who recovers first,” he said, lashing out with a foot and catching the inside of her knee. Her leg buckled. Damn, she thought. Turns out he had a pretty good plan. She caught his leg as he went in for a second kick and tried to twist it, to spin him around like a sprung wind-up toy, but as she was small and on the receiving end all she managed was arresting his motion and feeling herself lose balance. Inertia is a hell of a thing.
She thought of the day before, of rolling over and seeing the order of things, of watching Rob save a basket of eggs while she flailed helplessly on the thick turf outside his Winnebago. What a stupid last memory to have, she thought. I won’t do it. Then she released the captain’s leg, let herself roll backwards, and flipped over her own head. She failed to stick the landing and stood in a wobbly half-crouch while he landed two punches to her stomach.
“Not bad,” she gasped, as she caught the third punch and held his wrist in both hands.
“I live with a bunch of crazies in a compound,” he said, slapping her with his left across the cheekbone. Her face lit up like fire. “It’s best to be not bad.” She threw his wrist up and away, forcing him to stumble, then kicked him between the legs. Hard. Sheila felt a meaty crunch through the top of her boot, and a brief whiff of bile reached her just ahead of a choking sound that forced its way up through his throat.
“Sorry,” she said.
“You’re not,” he gasped, trying to stabilize mid-air but with nothing to grab. He looked, she thought, like a rake someone had tried to stand up on its end. A leaf rake, probably. The kind with the big, bouncy head that was much good for anything. Especially raking leaves. His fist connected with her cheekbone and she found herself wondering where the hell it had come from. Then it occurred to her that maybe trying to figure out what kind of rake he looked like in the middle of a fight wasn’t a good idea. Then her other cheek lit up and she decided it wasn’t the time for committees anymore. A third punch hit her in the gut and she doubled over before unleashing an uppercut into thin air as he dodged backwards.
Her momentum brought her to a standing crouch, universally recognized as the ideal fighting position by those who intellectualize it but don’t consider the ground game, and as he mirrored her they stood and eyed each other warily.
Fistfights don’t make a lot of sense. Or noise. We take it as a given that sometimes there are no weapons, and in that case the fist is probably the best tool for defense, but consider where they are. It’s a house, with house things inside it, and Sheila doesn’t seem to us- does she to you?- like the kind of person who makes sure that items for defense are scrupulously hidden and inaccessible. So it is implausible even to us that the events have taken a turn in this way, but then again the implausible happens every day. We are unaware, for instance, of any preemptive nuclear strike against a similarly capable belligerent. Which is, then, to say that perhaps Sheila and this captain are engaging in a sort of self-limitation, for purposes analogous to the withholding of the sky-crackers back in the sixties. That’s possible. Perhaps they even feel that to introduce a weapon into the scenario would be an insult to the capability of the other. Also possible. There is honor in the ring, after all.
As for the noise, well. Consider that the most anyone outside the room has probably heard was the door slamming. That too has value, silence being a great equalizer when the odds are stacked against one. Sheila, we think, would probably have preferred the odds-against-one free-for-all which must surely have commenced if the captain’s followers had known about the events of the room. But as it stood, the only person who had heard a thing was Rob, who stepped in and slit the captain’s throat from behind.
“That’s gonna be the third one,” he said. Sheila’s eyes went wide as the captain slumped to his knees, clutching his throat. Blood sprayed across her shirt before pooling on what had been a very expensive rug, once upon a time. “Like I said.” The captain stared up at them, life leaking from his throat and ebbing from his eyes. A choking noise came from him. “They’re not gonna like it.”
“Why the hell’d you do that?” Sheila asked, stepping back from the widening pool.
“It had to be done, apparently. Otherwise what were you doing in here?”
“Fair fighting.” Rob looked down.
“Lot of good that does.” She remembered the training session. The eggs. Rolling backwards and considering throwing herself from the cliff with the garbage. “Anyway what did you think the end was?” Sheila looked down. The captain was starting to sprawl a bit now, had let go of his throat and was well and truly dying. It was going to be hell cleaning it, and even if it was technically Rob’s fault that she had to she sensed that this time she wouldn’t be able to make the responsible party pay.
“This but… cleaner? Earned?”
“Nothing clean about it. And either nobody earns it or everybody does. What’s your plan now? Because they don’t know now, but they will soon.” She glared at Rob. “And they would have known anyway. I just bought you time you were gonna spend dancing around in here.”
“Fuck you.”
“OK, now your plan.”
“Why do you care?”
“Because I like eggs,” he said. “And because I’d rather have you two than them and it is a choice. But there’s no point in sticking around if your plan is to die.” He cocked his head and looked down at the body. “I wonder how many nanobots are dying right now,” he said. “Has to be billions.” Sheila’s jaw dropped. He looked up. “Oh, we’ve got ‘em too. Government put ‘em in milk for the longest time. Now that the government’s gone the mind control’s stopped but it’s still interesting to think about.”
Sheila stared. She had hundreds, maybe thousands, of questions, all of which concerned his sanity and the path of belief that had got him as far as he’d gotten in life. He seemed genuine about the nanobots. He had been genuine about the Rock Plague. It was all nonsense, so deeply held that in the end it didn’t matter whether it was true or not. It simply was his reality. Her mind frothed at being held back. It needed him to see how ridiculous he was, how implausible- impossible- were the fears he possessed. And that even if there were nanobots, even if there was a rock plague, even if the virus was an inside job, it stopped mattering when the results became normalized. She wanted to scream at him.
But there wasn’t time for that. You couldn’t be stopping everything you were doing to try and force every nutcase you came into contact with to acknowledge how crazy they were, no matter how many radios they fixed or knives they taught you to wield. And anyway she had an army of idiots to kill singlehandedly, waiting at the bottom of the hill for her to cull them like abscessing sheep, and that had to take precedence over his ridiculous break from reality.
“Plan?” He reiterated, his tone the patient teacher confronting a recalcitrant child. She cracked her neck, reached down, and picked up the Desert Eagle from where it had landed on the bed.
“I’m gonna go down there and kill the fucking invaders.”
“Good bye, Sheila,” Rob said and, careful to avoid treading in the pool of blood or on the now fully encorpsulated captain, walked out of the room.
