Stephen Hunter - Soft target

Why was this? Andrew could not tell you, nor could his many expensive medical and psychological advisors. Perhaps it was some excess brain chemical, perhaps he’d walked in on his mother giving his father a blow job, perhaps one of the bigger boys at school had smacked him in the mouth, turning him forever into a hater, or perhaps he was simply evil in the Old Testament sense. After all, as he had noted many times, evil is fun. It truly is.

He came back into the world as we know it and reacquired the self that he showed the world most of the time-steady, handsome, thorough, creative, obsequious. He went back into Reilly’s, carefully put the seventy handguns into the safe, swept the place out for the tenth time-some habits die hard-made sure everything was secure, then armed the alarm, stepped out the back door, and pulled it shut and locked behind him.

He drove about thirty miles through the early-fall Minnesota night and at last turned off the highway to follow the signs to his destination, a freakishly large building in the center of a vast plain

of now-empty parking lots. The sign read, WELCOME TO AMERICA, THE MALL.

Ray got off the X first, leaping, driving his crown into the man’s nose, feeling it crush flat and spew blood. But where that would put most men out of the fight in an instant, this tough little skinny simply took it, took the pounding thrust of Ray’s full body weight and went to the floor under him, but upon hitting it hard, he became a squirming dervish, his small but leanly powerful muscles twisting desperately for leverage. He was faster than Ray, who was faster than most; he was clearly a guy who’d done a lot of close-quarter combat, and somehow he found enough leverage to slip from underneath Ray so that the bigger man couldn’t use his weight as an advantage, and the two knitted limbs and tried to break each other’s backs, faces about an inch apart.

Ray saw insane strength in the wide black pupils, ignored the bloody snot and saliva that flew from the flattened nose and the rancid breath contained in the gaseous, propulsive exhalations through the mouth, and tried to get enough floor contact under him to move the guy back down to the submissive position, but the bastard was too active. Ray had one of his arms by the wrist, which also meant that the enemy had one of Ray’s hands by the arm, and the other arms were tangled like fighting snakes as each tried to find a path to the throat. Ray head-butted again, hard, but didn’t have enough neck to get the torque to deliver a disabling strike, and all he did was knock stars into both men’s eyes.

Then the guy got a leg free and kneed Ray hard in the balls, and as his breath was driven from his body sharply, Ray’s grip loosened and the guy snatched his arm free and got it to his bayonet and got that blade out before Ray caught up and snatched the wrist again. But now the blade was in play, and both men, in wrestling stalemate of enmeshed body on body, put all their focus and strength into controlling the blade, with the ultimate hope of driving it deep into the other’s body and piercing a blood-bearing organ. But then Ray, formally trained in hand-to-hand and the owner of six black belts in six disciplines, yielded suddenly, knowing that the man’s strength would overextend him, and when that happened, he reasserted control; now the Somali’s arm was straight and lacked space to set up for a plunge, and Ray bent it back, back, and back, and that’s when the guy managed to bite him hard in the ear. The pain wasn’t so bad as the surprise and the intimacy of it, and Ray lost concentration; the man, who’d lost the knife-hand battle, came quickly to victory on the nonknife side, snaking his arm through a brief hole in Ray’s defense and getting his wrist crossways across Ray’s throat. He just had to press the windpipe closed and hold it so for three minutes and he’d get the kill.

The fight sounded like six pigs in a pen built for three, all grunting and yelping and gulping. Their lungs pumped in-out; the breath came and went like waves on a beach; oxygen, fuel of battle, was as precious as gold, and they sucked for it whenever possible, in a medium lubricated by copious sweat outflow that slimed their pushing, sliding musculature like some kind of battle grease. Not a conscious thought formed in either mind; it was just instinct for the geometry of bodies, strength, will, and survival.

Ray risked his leverage contact with the floor, and with one leg pried loose, he got an ankle-wrap around his enemy’s leg and began to torque it hard, perhaps to loosen the body from the clamp it had on Ray. It seemed to be working too, but then the guy did an incredibly creative thing. He dropped the knife and Ray took the bait, releasing the arm to grope for the knife, and the tough Somali shot his hand through the opening and clenched Ray’s throat with his thumb driving into Ray’s larynx. Ray blinked, some bloody snot rained into his face, and suddenly the guy, quick as a snake, regripped his left wrist, pulling it from the neck, then plunging back in supertime to wrap that wrist around Ray’s windpipe, rising enough for enough play to get his arm strength factored into the equation, and then had both thumbs on Ray’s Adam’s apple and was driving in. Ray could only force him to an upward posture so that he couldn’t get the fullness of his power into the dynamic, but now, really, it was a matter of time, for he’d cut Ray’s oxygen intake by a good 70 percent.

Ray tried to get his arm inside the vise closing down on his throat, but his opponent half collapsed and there was no space to penetrate, even if it meant the Somali had to reset his hand just slightly, pulling it to the right so that one pressing thumb moved on top of the other one. Ray knuckle-struck him in the ear, hard, feeling tissue rip and more blood spurt, but the little man was too close to victory to let the strike throw him off, and his eyes mad with the killing lust, he drove his thumbs Ray had just the most fleeting impression of something flying horizontally through the air, and whatever it was, it hit his would-be killer in the temple with the force of a heavyweight’s punch, sending a resonant cracking, breaking sound into the atmosphere, and the Somali went semi-limp for a second, relinquishing his control, his hands flying involuntarily to protect his head as fear fought the unconsciousness that threatened to overwhelm him from the power of the blow. Somehow Ray found the bayonet, and at the same time did a power roll, and in a moment achieved position on top of the squirming man. His other hand suffocated any screams in the throat and he fingered the bayonet into a grip strong enough for thrusting, then brought it back and shoved it forward. He felt it penetrate and open the softer flesh between the ribs, slide off of deep, interior objects, then sink point-first in something fibrous. Ray withdrew, placing more strength on the man through the wrist clamp, getting more leverage as he rose to his knees, and drove again and again. The guy bucked through spasms, fighting it, his eyes cue-balling, his tongue writhing like a dying snake, until at last, supersoaked in blood, he went limp.

Ray rolled off him, feeling close enough to death himself. He lay flat on his back, sucking for oxygen at the effort he’d spent, and it seemed he’d drained the mall of all of it, but then it flooded into his lungs, bringing coolness and clarity. He sucked hard through three or four strong breaths, felt his limbs tremble with salvation at having survived the ordeal, noticed how much blood he now wore on his jeans, and looked up into the eyes of his savior.

It was the black girl La-something, he couldn’t remember, Lamelba, Lavioletta, Laviva, Lavelva.

“Jesus Christ, you got here just in time.”