Joe Lansdale: Captains Outrageous

No sooner had I landed than he came for me. He was hot to trot, and in my headlights he looked like a bad dream. What I had seen on his face was blood and dirt, and I figured the blood wasn’t from him. I caught a glimpse of the woman – a girl, really. One of her hands quivered like an animal in a trap.

He charged me and I sidestepped, slapped at the back of his head with both hands. He went past fast, slammed into the fence, turned, came at me again. I side-kicked him and knocked him back, but he didn’t go down. He leaped at me and I brought an elbow up and under his chin, but all that did was make him fall back a pace.

He jumped on me like a spider. I spun around, bent forward, and he flipped over my shoulder. He hit the ground, came up as if he had bounced off a trampoline. I hit him repeatedly, but he kept coming. The only thing I had fought before with this much tenacity and ability to absorb damage was a rabid squirrel, but the squirrel had been much smaller and Leonard had been there to help kill it.

I got him by the back of the head with one hand, the chin with the other, stuck my index finger in the soft spot on the side of his neck. He went around and down, but pounced up. We hammered at each other and I caught a good one over the eye. He came in for a tackle, and I hooked my arm under his neck and let his momentum carry me back. I stuck a foot in his balls as we went. He went up high and came down hard on his back. I rolled him over on his stomach, still holding on to his neck, trying to choke him out.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the girl, lying there in the pool of yellow from the headlights. She was covered in blood, and one eye was nothing but a dark wet hole. Her head had literally been driven into the ground.

I kept choking him, but it didn’t seem to be bothering the bastard. I didn’t get it. This guy was half my size, not overly strong-looking, and I knew what the hell I was doing.

Up he came, and out of the choke, and wheeled on me. I started kicking his shins and inside his thighs and his groin, but he kept struggling.

I kicked him one last time and decided I liked the gun after all. If just to discourage him. I pulled it, an automatic. It didn’t slow him down. He charged and I jammed it forward into his face, hitting him with the barrel. I struck him with such force the barrel slide was knocked back and it ejected a shell, but still he came, trying to get the gun. I should have shot him, but didn’t. I avoided him and tossed the gun over the fence.

He bellowed like something out of hell, came on hard again, and I wished now I hadn’t been so ethical. In that moment, had I had the gun, I would have emptied it into him. I was so frightened I thought of trying to break away and climb the fence for the automatic. But there wasn’t time for that now.

I hit him with a slipping elbow to the side of the face, dropped my arm and hit him with a hammer fist in the balls, went for a hammerlock, but that was like trying to put a lock on a rubber hose. I couldn’t hold him. I jabbed a finger into one of his eyes, and for the first time I got the right response. He went back, holding his face. In an act of desperation I leaped up sideways with both feet and hit him in the chest with the force of my entire body.

I at least succeeded in knocking him down. I got up, scared. In this rare moment of breathing room, I considered again going for the fence and the gun, but he went for it instead, leaped, grabbed the links, began to climb over.

I grabbed the fence, started scuttling too. He beat me over by a second or so. I threw myself over the top and landed in front of my pickup. The automatic had fallen on the far side of the truck, and he was going for it. I put a foot on the bumper of the pickup, sprang onto the hood, pushed off with my foot and rolled over the roof, hit in the bed on my feet, leaped from the truck onto him, hit him hard in the back just as he was reaching for the gun. He missed his grab, went forward, getting a parking lot full of asphalt across his face and chest. He got up with me on his back, my arm around his neck. He whipped me off of him like a dog shaking off water.

He turned, and since we were away from the headlights, and there was only a little light from the parking lot, I couldn’t see his face well, but there was asphalt hanging from his raw cheeks and his lips looked to be nearly scraped off. He began to beat his chest like Tarzan and yell. He turned, put both hands on the tailgate of my truck, and sprang into the bed, made the roof of the truck, yelled, “I’m a swinging dick,” and did a back flip onto the parking lot, hit hard. He hopped up from that and ran between me and the truck. I picked up the automatic, jumped into the truck. I was hoping the lights hadn’t run down the battery. It cranked. I backed out and went after him.

He was bearing down on Ella May. Ella May was a heavy black woman who worked in the department where the chickens were run through a neck slicer. On her shift she wore a hooded yellow slicker and high black boots, sat on a throne surrounded by a lake of blood, and it was her job to slit the throats of the survivors with a little hooked knife. She didn’t have her yellow slicker and boots on now, but that knife was her own.

As he charged her, she jumped back slightly and the knife came out and she cut him, deep. I could see blood fly up between him and her in my headlights. He ran right over her and kept running. He could have rushed around the building and out the open front gate where the shift was changing, but he charged the fence, ready to climb over. I put the pedal to the metal and bore down on him. He was already near the top. I hit the fence hard enough to knock him loose. He fell backward, smashing my windshield. I jerked open the door, leaped out, grabbed him off the hood, slammed him against the side of the truck, and kneed him in the balls two or three times.

He still succeeded in hitting me in the face. I wavered consciousness but didn’t go down. Ella May had come up on the other side of the truck and she was scrambling across the hood. She got him around the neck and stuck that curved knife in his cheek and pulled for all she was worth, splashing blood and exposing his teeth.

The guy reached up, grabbed the blade and tore the knife away from her. I got on that knife quick, latched a figure-four on his arm, swung him around and down, and butted his nose with my forehead.

“I teach you to jump on me, motherfucker,” Ella May said. She came off the hood and landed on his legs, then came around and started kicking him in the head.

I was beginning to swoon. Black spots swirled in my vision like gnats in the river bottoms. The two security guards who were my and Leonard’s replacements showed up and everyone dog-piled the bastard. We got him rolled over and handcuffed. One of the guards, a black guy I didn’t know, said, “You all right?”

“There’s a girl,” I said. “He was attacking a girl. Other side of the fence there,” and I pointed.

“I’ll call some law,” the black guy said.

I leaned against the truck. Ella May was kicking the guy still. He lay on the ground and took the shots without so much as a grunt. “Motherfucker, run over my ass. I’ll teach your cock not to stand up.”

One of the guards got hold of her and pulled her back, but she kept fighting. He finally pushed her up against the fence and held her arms behind her back and used his handcuffs on her. All the while, she was screaming.

“Handcuffs! Handcuffs! I’ll kick your dick over the fence, cocksucker.”

“Calm down, Ella May,” he said.

“Calm down, my ass. Motherfucker run over me… You’re hurtin’ my arm, goddamn it. I’ll remember your ugly face.”

The headlights from my truck, the lights in the lot, the darkness between and around them swirled together and I remembered feeling hot, trying to bend over to breathe better, trying not to faint, but when I bent forward I just kept going.