"I'm feeling my age," he moaned.
Allen took the bag from him and said, "Take off your shirt."
"I'm all right." He raised his arm in protest and stopped short, skewing his face in pain.
"Yeah, right. Take it off." Allen began lining the supplies up along the bottom edge of the bed. "Needle and thread. Did you get needle and thread?"
"It's in there." He tossed the shirt into a wastebasket by Julia. She moved it into the bathroom.
"Get me some hot water while you're in there," Allen called. He found the small travel packet of thread and needles at the bottom of the bag and opened it. He knelt beside Stephen and started examining the worst of his wounds. "So where'd you learn that 'dang you too' stuff?"
"Tang soo do. One of my parishioners runs a dojang. He thought it would help with my coordination and keep me in shape."
"It worked," Julia said, setting down an ice bucket of steaming water and two washcloths next to Allen.
"I attend his class twice a week and perform katas every day." He glanced under his arm at Allen, seeming to assess his interest.
"Katas?"
"Formal exercises against imaginary opponents. They teach you how to control your breathing rhythm and eye focus; they develop balance, gracefulness, strength . . . stuff like that."
"What level are you?"
"Second dan black—ahhhhh!"
"Sorry," Allen said, dabbing at a particularly dark clump of blood. "Black belt? That's how you took down those guys at your cabin?"
He glanced at Julia, heading into the bathroom. She looked back and winked. If she realized he was trying to distract Stephen from the repairs he was making to his flesh, then Stephen probably realized it too; he was allowing himself to be distracted.
Stephen frowned. "The first one caught me off guard, the assailant, I mean. I just gave him an elbow in the face, pretty sloppy. My sa bom nim would have a fit."
"And the other?"
"I was getting into form with him. I gave him a hammerfist strike to the temple." He laughed. "I'd never seen it for real. Incredible."
Allen threaded a needle, prodded a spot on Stephen's side, and poised the needle over it.
"You still into meditation?"
"Keeps me sane."
Julia stepped from the bathroom as she brushed her teeth. Allen could tell she didn't want to miss the conversation.
He flashed a big smile at her. "He used to disappear inside himself so deeply, he wouldn't hear us yelling at him."
"I heard you."
"We used to say he was heavily meditated."
Julia laughed, a nice sound.
Allen said, "You know, being a toothbrush is the worst job in the world."
Stephen blurted, "Tell that to the toilet paper!"
Julia laughed again, spraying tiny droplets of toothpaste.
"Hey," Allen said, "you stole my joke," and Julia laughed harder.
After a few moments, she spoke around the toothbrush. "I thought meditation was something Buddhists and New Agers did."
"Depends on where your mind's at. I meditate on the ways of Jesus."
"But he got into it before all that Jesus stuff," Allen said, unable to keep a measure of disdain out of his voice.
"All right," Stephen said. Soothing, placating.
"This is going to hurt," Allen said.
"Just do it."
Allen looped the thread through a dozen times, cinching each stitch to close the wound. He remembered a joke about a new doc trying to suture a man with palsy. He turned to tell it, but Julia had disappeared back into the bathroom. A few minutes later she came out, but he wasn't in the mood anymore. Instead, he asked Stephen, "Having a black belt, what do you think of the Warrior?"
Warrior. With all the labels that described him—enemy, pursuer, assailant, killer, assassin—the three of them seemed to have settled on warrior. The title was disturbingly appropriate.
"One bad dude."
"I mean in skill, fighting skill."
"Allen, were you watching? He had me, would have killed me if Julia hadn't chased him off. He is faster, smarter, stronger than any man I've sparred with. He moved like he knew everything I was going to do and responded to it as though he'd had weeks to think it over."
"But we got away."
Stephen said nothing.
"You seemed . . ." Julia paused, thinking about her words. "Hesitant to engage him."
When Stephen didn't respond, Allen said, "He's a pacifist."
Stephen shook his head. "C. S. Lewis said that unless you can show him that a Nazified Europe would be better than the war that stopped it, he could not be a pacifist. That's how I feel."
"I've never seen a pacifist fight like that," Julia said.
Allen said, "I'm surprised you fought at all, after what happened.'"
"What happened?" Julia looked between brothers, getting nothing back.
Allen said, "He—"
"I just swore off . . . being like that. That's all."
Allen bit his tongue. He leaned back on his haunches, inspecting his work and the work yet to do.
Despite the brief tension, a peace settled over them then—the tranquility that comes from being at ease with the people around you. The shared experience of fighting for survival had connected them in a way Allen didn't understand. He felt it, nonetheless, and apparently the others did too.
Julia was slouched in a chair, seeming to assess both brothers. A smile quivered against her lips like an incomplete thought.
Memory has a tendency to seize upon moments that seem to an outsider mundane and unremarkable. The occasion is special only to participants, and even they often don't recognize it as memorable. This moment would prove to be like that. They would remember the stillness in the midst of chaos, their casual postures in the shadowy room, the sense of camaraderie.
The calm before the storm.
forty-eight
The gauntlet came down hard on the tabletop. It sat there, empty and cold and very frightening.
"It's the Warrior's arm," Stephen said, quietly awed.
Julia nodded.
Allen hopped off the bed for a closer look. Sure enough, the black, spike-knuckled gauntlet he'd seen shatter through the bank window lay motionless on the dresser. Somehow it seemed more sinister now. Before, he had not seen it in its entirety, bulging with artificial muscles, curled into a taloned claw. He reached for it, hesitated, then gripped its forearm. It was warm, like flesh, but firm as bone. He lifted it, surprised by its lightness.
"It can't weigh more than a pound," he said, stunned. He tilted it. The fingers closed into a fist—
Chick.
He jumped back a step, letting the gauntlet slip from his grasp. Both Julia and Stephen jumped as well, thinking the thing had snapped at Allen or done something equally startling.
"That's the sound I heard last night in the cemetery," Allen said, staring at the gauntlet, now palm-up on the carpet. "While the Warrior was searching for me: chick-chu, chick-chu, rhythmic like that."
"Clenching and unclenching his fist," Julia said.
Allen nodded, watching the gauntlet as if he expected it to scurry toward him.
Stephen picked it up. He pushed his hand into it, reaching straight out. The gauntlet instantly took on the appearance of black skin, buckling a bit the way skin would when Stephen turned his palm up, bulging in the forearm when he squeezed his fist. "Incredible. Where'd this one come from, Wal-Mart?"
"It was left in my car by the Warrior, the one who got blown away last night," Julia said, holding out her hand.