Free Over Your Dead Body by Dan Wells Page B

physical matter but of something ethereal. A spirit or a soul, turned from … something, into something else. I didn’t know what that something was, but I wanted to. I lay awake some nights, most nights really, thinking about it, about how to do it, about how to slow down and do it right, and now here I had three people practically begging for it. What would it be like to shove my knife into Derek’s chest? To cut out Paul’s heart? To peel back Corey’s skin and watch the muscles move underneath it, stretching and contracting and glistening in the starlight—
    “Pay attention when I’m talking to you,” said Derek, and I focused my eyes and saw him right in my face, so close I could feel the flecks of spit when he shouted. “There’s three of us and one of you,” he said. His voice came at me through a cloud of beer and halitosis. “How you gonna stop us from taking whatever we want from your little girl here?”
    Which one should I start on? I bent down and pulled out my knife, and all three of them backed up in a rush.
    I felt a hand on my arm, and looked down to see Brooke’s fingers, travel stained and fragile. “You’re not Potash,” she said. Or was it Marci? Or was it one of the others? The thought made me angry, not being able to tell the difference, and I took a step forward, longing to finish the kill.
    “He’s friggin’ nuts,” said Derek.
    Brooke’s finger’s tightened on my arm, and I heard her whisper: “You’re not trained.”
    Corey’s eyes were wide. “Trained?”
    That’s what she’d meant about Potash—not that I wasn’t a killer, but that I wasn’t a trained fighter. This was Potash’s knife and he could have handled three teenage jerks without even breaking a sweat, but I couldn’t. I had no combat training, no hope for a direct confrontation. My style was slow and methodical: to wait, to find a weakness, and then to exploit it with no warning and no chance for a counterattack. I couldn’t win this fight with a knife, and if I used a gun it wouldn’t … I felt my cold rage fading. A gun wouldn’t have the same satisfaction, the visceral thrill that I needed this to have. I felt my emotions receding, backing out of the calm, passing down through the anger, returning to normal. I wasn’t going to hurt them. She had said exactly what I needed, in exactly the way that worked—not protesting, not appealing to rightness or honor, but a simple, pragmatic statement of ability.
    “Thank you,” I said. I looked up at the three. “You can go now.”
    “What’s wrong with you?” asked Paul.
    “Let’s go,” said Corey, and the other two followed like obedient dogs. I’d assumed that Paul was the leader and Derek was the loudmouth buddy, but now I could see that Corey had been in charge all along, quietly manipulating everything the other two had done. It concerned me that I hadn’t seen it. We watched them go, first backing away, then turning and muttering among themselves as they walked the rest of the way to the fence. Derek turned around and shouted a final insult, cussing us out as the others went through the fence, then he followed them out.
    “Come over here,” I whispered to Marci, and we walked away from the building, away from the closed wooden gate we’d been standing near. Sure enough, one last beer can came sailing over the fence, then another, then a whole barrage of cans and rocks and gravel, all targeting the spot we’d been standing. After a moment the volley stopped, and I heard them snicker as they ran away.
    “Put the knife away,” said Marci. I realized I was still holding it, my knuckles white around the grip.
    I looked at it, not knowing what to say. “I wanted to kill them.”
    “I know.”
    “They were going to hurt you, and then I was going to kill them,” I said, though I knew it wasn’t true. Protecting her had been the impetus, but then the sheer love of death had taken over and Brooke or Marci or whoever it was had stopped