“You can’t fight.” A couple of months ago, over a beer in a rowdy bar after work, Jeff had been honest with Sean. “No shame in that.”

Sean had been slightly insulted, although he schooled his face not to show it. He was a 6’2” person who, despite Jeff’s claims, did not suffer from the effects of “gingers being bad at cardio.” Four times a week, he exercised. Day to day, he tried to eat reasonably well. He was reasonably strong. On the other hand, Jeff was an overweight 5’6” Greek man in his forties who not only had his favorite flavors of Doritos ranked, but ate so many of them that his claims were credibly bordering on authoritative.

Considering that, his claim of fighting prowess was weird. Sean told him so in slightly rougher, manual-labor appropriate vocabulary.

“I’ve heard a lot of shit, but I’ve never been called an avocado with a glandular condition before.” Jeff had laughed at the joke, but that didn’t stop the conversation. He was in his serious mode, talking about something he apparently thought was worth knowing. “You are in good shape, sure. But that’s not why you can’t fight. And it’s good you can’t fight.”

“What do you mean?”

“Guys like you read about fighting. Maybe you even take a class. It’s good. But if you fight someone, you have to get into a headspace for violence. And maybe you can, maybe you can’t. But it takes a second.” Jeff knocked back the last of his tallboy and grabbed another can from the bartender. “In my neighborhood, that second you just took? Some dude just smacked you in the ribs six times and is already going through your wallet for crack money.”

The trick was, Jeff claimed, that Sean’s natural instinct was not violence. He wasn’t looking for a fight every second of the day. That made him a good person, but it also made him hesitant. The real fighters were either people who had grown up with violence or trained so much that they could turn it on like a light switch. Anything else was a delay, and delays would get Sean curb-stomped.

As Sean faced off against four mutant lizards, that memory flashed through his head. By the time it was done, he suspected that remembering the lesson at all had already been exactly what Jeff meant by not having violence in his bones. He glanced down, half-expecting to see the lizards already charging. Instead, they hadn’t moved at all.

Quickest memory I ever had. Weird, Sean thought, already taking what he could from the memory and running forward. He didn’t know if lizards could be caught off guard, but he hoped they could. For a moment, it seemed to be working. Then, his plan was foiled by the damnedest thing. Reflexes.

The lizards had raised their tails in the air. Sean had seen this and assumed that it was a primitive attempt to seem intimidatingly large. As he charged, he found out how wrong he was. The tails twitched, barely moving, but Sean suddenly found himself facing a salvo of spikes coming at him from several slightly different angles. As they shot through the air, reflexes of a different kind kicked in as he flinched away in sheer panic from the incoming missiles. Instead of becoming a pincushion, his overreaction turned into a sort of half-stumble to the right that took him almost entirely out of the cloud of needles. As they passed, he heard them clang hard off the metal of the pod he had just left.

That was one indication of their potency. The other, more sobering indication came when Sean tried to lift his left arm. He couldn’t. When he stumbled hard into the wall, he was momentarily disoriented. So when he glanced over, Sean was stunned to see one of the spikes buried in his shoulder, stopped only because it was wedged between the two bones that comprised the joint.

One thing he had always found true about working a manual labor job was that people underestimated how much you tended to get hurt while working them. Early on, he had bashed his hand with hammers, cut himself, banged his feet on hard objects, and just generally violated the spirit of every OSHA guideline ever written. It sucked, but eventually, he built up a pretty decent resistance to pain. Nothing like Jeff’s, of course. He had seen that guy straight up break a finger, tape it, and go on with his day.

With adrenaline running and no other good choices? A spike in his shoulder was a hit he could tank. In fact, he could do better. Sean reached up and wrapped his hand around the exposed part of the spike. Taking a deep breath, he pulled it out. The searing pain came as expected, but didn’t overwhelm him. More than the hurt, he was now holding a vaguely metallic weapon and, judging by how it had cut through his flesh, was sharp as hell. It would do for now.

Having learned his lesson about running straight at the lizards, Sean tried to strafe them to get to the door. As he ran, he heard more spikes pinging off the walls, and glanced over to see that their tails were rapidly reloading with the things. Either the lizards’ anatomy was mostly hollow to accommodate extra spikes, or they were generating them on the fly somehow. The first seemed unlikely and the second seemed flat-out impossible, but either way he was in a lot of trouble.

Worse, the lizards seemed to be getting better at predicting his movement as he ran. The spikes were still landing behind him, but they missed less and less as time went on. As he approached the door, the pings of the spikes off the wall were so loud that the only thought running through his mind was to escape this pin-death room. With a heroic last step, he tried to catch the door hand and yank it open.

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“Dammit!” he cursed, as his sweaty hand slipped off the handle and his momentum kept him running. A moment later, the door was peppered with spikes, most of which bounced off. But one unlucky spike hit the handle almost dead on, piercing the lock mechanism about an inch into the handle itself. Sean wasn’t a locksmith, but he knew locks to be tricky, delicate things. What had just happened might have made it such that the door would never lock again, but it might have also locked it permanently. He didn’t know enough to be sure, but that doubt made the door that much worse of a choice.

He’d have to try something different. The next best option was the table, where there was a small gap between it and the wall. He squeezed into the space and for a brief second, spikes didn’t follow him. The lizards lost track of their prey. Before they could find Sean again, he disregarded the treasures on the table and tipped it forward.

As the table fell and he heard the sound of the lizards’ scaled paws skittering out of the way, he ducked down. Another round of pointed lizard tail-projectiles hit the table, denting it but not actually piercing through to any significant degree.

Almost immediately, one of the lizards leapt up and grasped the top edge of the table, pulling its hissing, horrifying face up into Sean’s view.

“Shit!” Coming so close was scary, but he also pushed himself into motion. He knew a mistake when he saw one, and he doubted he’d have many of those to take advantage of. Rearing up, he brought the spike down hard into the lizard’s bulging iguana eye. As he had learned firsthand, the spike was sharp. It didn’t slow down as it sunk in all the way up to his hand. It apparently hit something important. The lizard jerked, slumped, then slid off the table before thumping into the ground.

Sean didn’t pause to gloat over his minor victory. Not wanting to give the lizards a chance to skitter around, he pushed his right foot back and shoved his left shoulder against the table. He had forgotten his previous injury, and an ungodly amount of pain erupted when his shoulder bashed into the steel.

Gritting his teeth, Sean kept with it. The table slid forward just as he had hoped it would, lubricated slightly by lizard blood and eye goop. He felt the table get heavier as it caught one, then another of the lizards and began to push them back.

Letting off the pressure on the table, he used his forward momentum to surge upward and tried to leap the table. He made it, but not without catching his shin hard on the bottom shelf. At this point, he was so hopped up on fear and adrenaline that he hardly felt it.

He landed on the floor and found that he had indeed caught two of the lizards in his table push. Both of them were on their back trying to get their feet back under them.

These lizards look about the right size to club things with, actually, Sean thought, reaching out for one of the tails. And they even come with these convenient spikes.

Before the lizard could face the right way to attack, Sean grasped the end of its tail, between two particularly nasty spikes. And before it could panic, Sean tried to lift the reptile in the air and swing it at the next foe in one smooth arc. Unfortunately, the animal proved surprisingly heavy, maybe because it was loaded down with metal spikes or whatever it was using to make them. So, his first attempt trying to do this one-handed failed him, and he momentarily staggered. Oh, no, this is happening, he thought, as he twisted and heaved even harder.

And then snapped forward as the lizard’s tail came off. He had, in the moment, forgotten they could do that.

At that point, all his pent-up power meant that he was swinging it into the next lizard whether he liked it or not. The tail hit with far more force than he could have normally put into play, impaling his target in two different places on its abdomen. Once again, he lucked out on his target choice despite having an almost completely nonexistent knowledge of lizard anatomy, and the second lizard went down.

A quick glance behind him showed that the lizard he acquired his new weapon from was momentarily down but not quite out, thrashing in pain from the tail detachment but still very much alive. Bringing the tail back and recreating the earlier arc of attack, he bashed it, hard.

It seemed not to mind and even used the momentum to somehow flip itself. Confused, Sean brought the weapon back to see that the tail’s spikes were left behind in the lizard he had just stabbed, meaning his still-twitching tail-club was a lot less useful than it had been moments ago.

But even so, he needed to kill this thing now. He jumped up, bringing his foot down on the back of the lizard’s neck hard, narrowly threading the gap between two spikes to land almost directly on its spine. As his foot made contact and pressed through toward the ground, he heard something crunch and felt the lizard’s body go limp under his weight. That was three lizards down, and one to go.

Before he had time to spring away from the crushed lizard, he felt a burning in the back of both his legs and crumpled to the ground. Sheer panic consumed him, spikes shouldn’t have been able to do that much damage. This wound hurt much, much more than the last. Screaming in agony, he wrenched his body around.

In front of him, somehow looking content and pleased with itself, was the last lizard. As he watched, it slowly loaded new projectiles to its tail.

Sean’s tail, in comparison, twitched uselessly in his hand.

But if it’s still twitching. Then maybe…

Looking down, he saw something amazing. The lizard’s tail, despite being detached from its host body, was still alive to some extent. And in the last several seconds, it had taken advantage of that only-sort-of-dead status to fully reload itself.

As the last lizard’s spikes clicked into locked-and-loaded readiness, Sean did the grossest thing he hoped he’d have to do all day. He jabbed his thumb into his tail’s exposed muscles, where the tail and body used to meet, probing around desperately for a nerve.

He found one. Already aimed the tail in the lizard’s direction, the spikes shot out straight and true. His fears that they’d clink off and that the lizards would turn out to be immune to their own projectile force proved unfounded. Two of the three tail spikes hit home, sank into the lizard, and worked their magic. Jerked backward by the attack, the lizard’s own shots were so off course they missed Sean by what seemed like a mile. The lizard crumpled. He had won.

Now he just had to deal with the fact that he was bleeding to death.