He kept his arm high, ready to bring down his weapon in a clubbing motion. Textbook attack, even if he wasn’t a textbook assailant. Sara went in under the arc of his arm, pivoted her body while grabbing him, and flipped him over her hip, hard, using leverage and momentum to her advantage. She turned on him quickly, kneeling on his ribcage, and cocked her hand back.
She’d thrown the killing blow a thousand times in judo practice, but always pulled the punch. This time she didn’t, giving it all she had, her fist connecting with his bulging Adam’s apple. She both felt and heard something crack beneath her knuckles.
Without pausing to reflect on what she’d just done, Sara whirled on the second attacker, who now stood behind Laneesha, a rusty kitchen knife pressed to the teen’s throat.
“Instep!” Sara yelled.
A small spark of recognition registered in Laneesha’s eyes, the intended result of the many self-defense classes Sara taught at the Center, and she lifted up her right foot and ground the heel down onto the woman’s.
The woman howled, stumbling backwards, and then limped off into the night. Sara didn’t pursue her, instead running to Laneesha for an embrace.
“Are you okay” and “I was so scared” came out at the same time, and then Laneesha began to cry. Sara held the girl, but it didn’t take long for her to calm down. Laneesha was made of strong stuff.
“I thought…I thought I was dead.”
“I know.”
“Why’d they grab me? What’d they want?”
“I don’t know.”
First they went for Martin, and now Laneesha. What the hell was going on?
Sara turned and looked at the man. He was still on his back, hands clawing at his throat. Sara knew she’d broken his trachea, cut off his airway. There was nothing she could do to help him. Sara watched him struggle, even though it was excruciating to see someone suffer so. Mercifully, he stopped moving after a very long minute, and the weight of her actions pressed on Sara like a crate of falling bricks.
I took a human life. I’m a murderer.
“He dead?”
Sara watched his chest, didn’t notice it moving. “Yes.”
She patted the girl’s back, then took a step toward the dead man. Laneesha grabbed her wrist.
“Whatchoo doin’?”
Part of Sara wanted, needed, to touch him, just so she could persuade herself this was all real, that she’d really done what she knew she’d done. Since high school Sara had been involved in the martial arts and self-defense—an obvious reaction to what had happened that fateful day at the mall. Every teacher she ever had, and even Sara herself when she began to teach, repeated time and again the importance of not holding back when in a real fight.
But none of her instructors told her how it actually felt. Part of Sara was exhilarated that she survived. But a larger part, the part that recognized how every human life was precious, made her feel like she’d just committed an unpardonable sin.
“I need to search him,” Sara heard herself say, “try to figure out who he is. I have to call the authorities, tell them what I did.”
“You saved me.”
Sara’s veneer cracked even further. “I… I just killed a man, Laneesha.”
“It was self-defense. You save my life.”
Sara managed a nod, then tried to pull away. Laneesha held her tight.
“Don’t go over there.”
“I have to check him for ID. This man might have a family somewhere.”
“Look at him, Sara. Any family he got don’t care he be dead.”
Sara stared hard at the corpse, his open mouth exposing a jungle of missing and rotten teeth, eyes bloodshot and staring into infinity. The shoes on his feet were battered old Nikes with the toes exposed, and his pants were held up with a length of rope. Even in death he looked fearsome. But still, he was someone’s son, and maybe someone’s brother, husband, father. Sara often felt she was put on this earth to help those in need, and here she’d just murdered one of them.
“You have to let go of my arm, Laneesha.”
“I’m afraid you go over there, he gonna jump up and grab you.”
“That isn’t going to happen.”
“I seen the movies. He gonna jump up.”
Sara tugged her arm away, a move both sudden and angry. “He’s not going to jump up! He’s not going to do anything ever again except rot! I killed him, Laneesha!”
Then the trembling started, and the tears came. Sara stood there for a moment, feeling alone and impotent and dangerous, and then she felt Laneesha hugging her, giving her comfort, and Sara regained control.
“There…” Sara cleared her throat, “there may be more of them, out there. Let me check the body and then we’ll get back to Martin, and the camp. Cell phones don’t work out here, but we have that radio the captain gave us. We can call for help.”
Laneesha released her. Sara approached the body reverently, kneeling next it and placing two fingers on its neck to feel for a pulse she knew wouldn’t be there. She jerked her hand back when she felt the broken windpipe beneath the skin.
Stay focused, get this over with.
Sara crinkled her nose against his odor and began to pat him down. His pockets were empty except for a rusty fork and a length of balled up twine.
The poor bastard.
She was putting the twine into her pocket when the man jerked up into a sitting position and lunged at her.
Tyrone wasn’t sure how they’d gone from being barely friends to holding hands, but he didn’t mind. He’d been with girls before, but never anything more than a quick lay at the club house. To bangers, girls were like liquor and drugs; a way to have some fun and kill some time. While Tyrone indulged, he was never really okay with the whole hooking up thing. Not just because of diseases and babies and stuff like that, but because two of the people he respected most in the world were his moms and grams, and if they deserved respect then other women did too.
So Tyrone never actually had what he could call a girlfriend. For him, joining a gang was a financial opportunity, a better way to make some cash than some dead-end fast food job. His family needed money, and Tyrone took on that responsibility. He lived the thug life, but didn’t breathe it like some of the other dogs in the club, and certainly wasn’t going to do it forever. Getting arrested for hitting a liquor store was probably the best thing that could have happened to him. It gave him a chance to reevaluate things.
Holding Cindy’s hand, simple act that it was, felt better and more real than anything he’d done while rolling with the People’s Nation. It didn’t matter that Cindy was white, or a drug addict. She radiated an inner strength, and had plans for what she’d do when she was released. Cindy was going to get a job waiting tables and save up money to go back to school. A simple ambition, but Tyrone had been without ambition for so long it made him realize the simple things in life were the ones worth doing. He’d always been good at math. Maybe he should try to do something with it. Become an accountant, or some shit like that.
“We should check on Tom,” Cindy glanced at the tent. “He shouldn’t be in there.”
“I think he’s lookin’ for his meds. Sara didn’t give him none tonight.”
“Still, he could be messing things up. Or stealing stuff.”
“True that, but we know what Tommy Boy is like when he’s off his pills. You wanna have to deal with him running around, trippin’ out on everything, ‘specially when things are falling apart?”
Cindy shook her head. Tyrone gently rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. Too many people would rather fight to the death to defend their bullheaded positions. Tyrone was impressed whenever someone changed their mind. It meant acting on reason, and with reason came self-improvement, as Sara often said.