Ch. 23: Shutting Off the Pumps
Amy coughed. She hung face down. Someone had picked her up by her belt and was carrying her. She hung limply, not having the strength to do anything else. Pitched forward, she opened her eyes just in time to see the hood of her SUV rush up to meet her. The impact of her broken nose on the metal produced a blinding pain. The hand grabbed her belt again and pulled her back, so only her torso remained on the hood. Her legs hung off the edge.
She heard the asshole who had choked her and broken her nose say, “No, I think I’d rather see the expression on your pretty little face.” Her assailant rolled her onto her back, began fumbling with her belt buckle. Something large rubbed insistently against her jean-clad thighs. His breathing quickened. Suddenly, he grasped the belt with two abnormally large hands and ripped the leather band apart.
Amy felt the fabric of her jeans tear. She opened her eyes and looked into the face of her assailant. The sunglasses and track suit were the same, but this was not the same man who had punched and choked her against the door of the car. He had been altered.
“No! Nooo!” Amy screamed when Mr. Sunglasses began to pull down her jeans. She spread her legs, trying to keep the jeans from being pulled down, screaming.
“No?” her assailant asked mockingly. He laughed. “Little sugar, you are gonna be screaming ‘Yes, yes, yes’—right before I kill you.” As her struggles grew more intense, he thumped her broken nose with his over-sized finger and pain exploded through her skull. Mr. Sunglasses began to rip the crotch seam of her jeans apart with the inhuman strength of his hands. When he revealed her panties, he smacked his lips and repeated, “Yes, yes, yes!”
“NOOO!” someone shouted. Mr. Sunglasses was ripped from Amy’s field of vision. She sat up. Her nose throbbed painfully, and she felt dizzy. Hearing a crash, she looked to her right and saw that a bicycle had crashed into the picket fence. Hearing a different noise to her left, she turned and saw her would-be rapist/killer get his head rocked back by three rapid jabs. He launched his own punch, only to have it brushed aside and suffer a counterpunch that rocked his head back again.
He leapt at his attacker, seeking to crush her in his bulging arms, but she ducked under and darted aside, delivering a wicked blow to his exposed manhood that made him howl. “You dyke cunt,” he said with a deadly coldness.
“What’s it to ya, needle dick?” asked Patty.
“The last thing you’ll feel is this ‘needle dick’, you bitch.” He launched a combination of blows at her.
Patty dodged one and deflected the next, but the third one caught her on the shoulder. She turned with the blow, spinning and executing a block that deflected another attack. “Promises, promises,” she teased. She brought her fists together, like they were punching each other, and the fingerless cycling gloves she wore began to glow with an amber light.
“You know,” he taunted, “I didn’t come here for that sweet little piece of Chink ass. She was just a ‘minge benefit.’ I came here for your sweet girlfriend. I was gonna skin her, maybe pluck out her eyes.”
“Pffft!” Patty scoffed as they circled each other. “If she were here, you’d already be dead—or in tiny pieces, wishing you were dead.”
“Well, then, I’ll just have to make do with you—and I’m getting’ paid extra for atrocities.” He blocked Patty’s next blow and launched into a series of punches and kicks that she seemed hard-pressed to avoid. The strength of his last blow was such that, when she blocked it with both hands, it flipped her backwards. She rolled and landed in a crouch, delivering a tremendous uppercut to his chest when he tried to follow up on his advantage. There came a loud “Crack” and a flash of light when the glowing glove hit his chest and he was thrown several feet backwards.
He roared with anger, looking even fiercer than he had before as he resumed his attack.
Amy tried to stand but, instead, dropped dizzily to one knee. She heard a quiet cough and looked back towards the crashed bicycle. She saw movement behind the picket fence, saw a hand gripping the top of the pickets, saw Kirby trying to rise, blood around his mouth and in his beard.
A startling series of loud “Crack’s” exploded behind Amy and her head whipped back around to see the killer stagger back, half of Patty’s shirt in his hands. Patty shrugged off the other half of the shirt, comfortable in only her sports bra. With her well-muscled torso on display, Patty certainly did not look like a woman on the threshold of sixty.
Amy tried to get her head together, to collect her wits. I need to take charge. I’m a sorceress, goddammit! I am a mistress of reality. The best she could do, however, was drop to her hands and knees and crawl towards the curb. She saw Kirby trying to raise himself and she waved him down. She needed to think, to stop being dizzy. Crawling onto the sidewalk and around the corner of the SUV, she leaned on the side of the vehicle for support and peeked around the bumper at the ongoing fight.
A blow to the face knocked Patty down, but her opponent seemed wary of trying to follow up on his advantage too quickly. He darted in and aimed a kick at her ribs while she was on her elbows and knees. Patty rolled away before the blow landed. She came up in a ready stance. Whatever this beast-in-sunglasses was, he was not easy to damage. Patty’s gloves looked like they hurt him, but Amy wondered if it would be enough to put him out of commission. Amy settled in to watch the fight, wracking her brain for something to do, for some way to end this asshole who was trading punches with Patty.
Watching the fight, it came to her soon enough what Patty was trying to do. She was training him. “Training the monkey” she had called it during those godawful trips to the gym Amy had been dragged along for when she was a teenager. It might have been the only thing Amy had learned on those sweaty, smelly afternoons. Patty was training him, teaching him how she wanted him to think she fought. The enchanted gloves Patty wore were the perfect training tools, as good as a shock collar for training this asshole where and when to think her next punch was coming. Patty squared up her shoulders, right higher than the left, and said using only her fists, jab, feint, feint, jab. Amy watched him take several hard shots learning the lesson, the loud CRACK and the frightful pain of the punches from the glowing gloves were motivation to learn. Jab, feint, feint, jab. Amy watched Patty take several hard shots teaching the lesson, but Patty was far tougher than she looked.
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When the asshole’s back was to her, Amy signaled Patty, pointing the sidewalk immediately in front of the SUV. When one of Patty’s punches rocked the asshole’s head to the side, she gave Amy a wink and a nod.
Jab, feint, feint, jab. After the sixth time through the pattern, interspersed with a variety of distractions so the lesson would not seem too obvious, Patty must have felt he was ready. She squared up her shoulders as she had six times before and her fist said jab. Amy saw him ignore the feints he knew were coming and deliver a devastating piledriver of a counterblow. Or would have if Patty had not suddenly ducked and delivered a sphere-shattering uppercut to his groin. The loud “Crack” resounded along the street and the tremendous concussive force of the blow lifted him from his feet.
He landed on his side near the front of the SUV, emitting a sound somewhere between a roar and a groan. But he was on his feet quicker than Amy would have thought possible. Patty moved in swiftly and snapped off two more quick jabs, the second of which rocked his head back with a “Crack” and sent him staggering backwards toward the curb. Amy reached out from behind the vehicle and grabbed his ankle where it was visible below the leg of his tracksuit. She mumbled the final four syllables of the spell she had been preparing and a colorless light seemed to pulse through him from that point of contact.
“What the?” The asshole seemed puzzled. He took a step toward her. And wobbled. “Huh?”
Amy scooted backwards, away from him. She saw Patty rushing towards the assassin and held up her hand. Patty stopped. The asshole took a second step—and wobbled again, falling to one knee. Bloody fluid began pouring from beneath the leg of the green tracksuit, where she had grabbed his ankle. More poured forth. He fell to the ground next to the picket fence. His entire lower body seemed to be liquefying.
Through a gap in the pickets she saw Kirby watching, gasping for breath. The asshole landed on the sidewalk directly opposite the gap through which Kirby stared. As his lower half liquefied, he seemed to notice Kirby watching him. “Awesome last words,” he croaked as the walls of every cell in his body burst. Soon, the assassin’s head was nothing more than a skull, bloody liquid oozing from the mouth, from what was left of the nose, and from behind the mirrored sunglasses.
“Damn, girl,” exclaimed Patty. “What did you do?”
Amy stood and spat down on the remains, but the spittle made little difference to the tracksuit-clad skeleton in its puddle of bloody ooze. Her broken nose made her voice sound strange as she said, “I taught this fucker not to mess with a sorceress who knows her biochemistry.” In bitter triumph she spat words down at the remains. “It’s hard to rape and murder people when your cells are all lysing because I shut down the sodium-potassium pumps in every cell of your body. Isn’t it, fucker? Isn’t it?!” Her words made no more difference than the spittle had to the remains. So, she kicked the asshole’s skull and it skittered across the sidewalk, sunglasses still firmly in place.
Amy remembered Kirby. “Fuck!” She stood and gingerly lifted one leg, then the other over the picket fence. She stumbled and barely managed to avoid landing on her face.
Patty vaulted the fence and stood next to Amy. “He looks bad! Does he need hospital?”
“Let’s see,” said Amy. She knelt by Kirby. The crusty blood on her upper lip itched and she absentmindedly wiped it with the back of her hand. She gasped as agony erupted from her nose. It’s broken, dumbass! It’s gonna hurt if you touch it! She tottered, dizzy with the pain, but caught herself with her hands. Unfortunately, she had propped herself up on Kirby’s chest. He gave a burbling cough and more bright blood shone in the sunlight on the blades of green grass.
Patty took her around the shoulders, clearly worried, and helped her sit up. “Do you need the hospital?”
Amy scratched away some of the dried blood on her lip, carefully not to disturb her nose. “Me? Nah, I got this.” She hoped the other woman would take this for courage. She started to smile, but a twinge from her nose ended the attempt. After a brief incantation, a diagnostic spell quickly told her what she needed to know. “Help me roll him on his back, would you?”
Patty did approximately all of the rolling. She was able to move Kirby’s stocky form with surprising ease. Once on his back, he began coughing weakly. Blood bubbled on his lips. She shook her head. “He looks like shit. Can you actually fix him?”
“Can I fix him?” Amy retorted. “I’m a doctor, dammit, not a sorceress—no, wait, I’m both!” With that, she began doing magic.
Amy knew Patty was keeping a close watch on their surroundings. She looked up briefly between incantations and saw the older woman dividing her attention between scanning the street for further threats and reading what sounded like a barrage of incoming text messages on her cell phone. Patty’s fingers flew, firing off a flurry of responses.
Amy slapped Kirby. “Time to wake up, dude.” She slapped his face again. “You’ve gotta roll back over.”
Kirby’s eyes opened and darted wildly from side to side. “Wha—?” He gargled and choked on his own blood.
“Roll over King Beard-O and get on your hands and knees or this is going to be stupid hard on you.”
He did as he was told, a surprised look on his face. “It doesn’t hur—” He coughed up more blood into his beard.
“Now,” Amy directed, “put your head down and your ass in the air.” When Kirby had completed this maneuver, a brief mumble of words from Amy and a slap on his back moved a surprising amount of blood out of his lungs in several wracking coughs.
Kirby gasped. There was a lot of blood decorating the grass in front of him. He took his first deep breath. Startled, he nearly coughed it out again, but he managed to hold it in. He exhaled and took another. After a few more breaths, he sat up on his knees and gingerly probed his ribs.
“What did you do?” He looked at Amy, amazement in his voice.
She mimed a gun with her thumb and forefinger, blowing imaginary smoke from the tip, before twirling and holstering her ‘weapon’. “That was sorcery, podnuh,” she drawled, with a wink for emphasis.
“Well, it’s fucking great! What about your nose?”
“That’s gonna have to wait. Nobody in their right mind does any kind of healing magic on themselves if it’s above the neck. You don’t even want to know what all can go wrong.”
“Are...are you okay?”
The emotion in his voice was plain and Amy was warmed by her new friend’s concern. Then, she wondered how bad she must look to have him so concerned. “Not yet—but you can bet your ass I’m gonna be!”
From the front gate Patty said, “I hate to interrupt this tender moment, but if he’s okay and you’re at least so-so, we need to get to Miss Adelaide’s and circle the wagons. I texted Marci and told her to sit tight there. Let’s get in the car before the next surprise comes along.”
They wound up taking the white Land Cruiser Kirby had borrowed from Miss Adelaide. After Amy found her key fob remote control crushed on the street, Kirby hustled through the bungalow to the garage and pulled the big Toyota around to the front. There, he found Amy standing on the sidewalk, holding the garment bags. Behind her, Patty shut the BMW’s rear gate, having stowed the assassin’s remains within.
“That’s gonna really stink in this sun,” said Amy said as she and Patty climbed into the car. “I’m gonna have to buy a new car.”
“Yeah, but you can’t just leave a dead body on the sidewalk in front of my house.” Kirby sounded upset.
Before her door had even closed, Patty barked, “Focus, you two.” She fastened her seatbelt, then tapped Kirby on the shoulder. “Drive as fast as you can and don’t stop. You won’t get pulled over. Too many enchantments on this heap for that. We’ve got to get to Miss Adelaide’s and get the big picture. War got declared this morning and who knows what’s coming at us next.”