At long last, Parker was starting to realize what he was up against. It didn’t matter that he’d been hurting kids year after year. It didn’t matter if he could bench-press four hundred pounds. It didn’t matter that he was thirty and Carl was sixteen. None of that mattered now. All that mattered was what was happening and what was going to happen, and Carl was in control of that. For a brief moment, Carl could read the internal struggle behind Parker’s eyes, the tug-of-war battle between rage and fear as Parker decided whether to back down or march forward.

  Hatred won. Carl saw it in the man’s eyes, saw the fear and rage uncouple, saw the eyes narrow and set with purpose. Parker came at him more slowly this time, hands up, moving his head side to side like a novice boxer imitating a slugger.

  He’s a southpaw, Carl reminded himself, seeing Parker advance with his right foot forward, and he’s had just enough training to do everything a southpaw is supposed to do. He would fight with his right foot forward and try to nail Carl with a straight left hand, maybe a right hook. All I have to do is keep my lead foot outside his lead foot, and I’ll eat him alive. If Parker came at him like that, looking to land the big left, Carl could just quarter-pivot, and Parker would turn and chase him and run into Carl’s straight right.

  As Parker shuffled toward him, Carl saw another advantage. Parker’s right hand was loose and pawing, and his left arm was tense, the knuckles of that hand white around the handle of the stun gun. He was thinking too much about his weapon, relying too much on it. It was like being able to see inside Parker’s head. The drill sergeant had latched on to the idea of shocking Carl again. . . .

  Carl made a small adjustment, stepping to his left, repositioning his lead foot—his left—outside Parker’s lead right.

  Parker didn’t seem to notice. He just shuffled forward, ticking his head back and forth but forgetting to keep his hands close to his face whenever he bobbed or weaved. He had just enough training to work against him. An untrained fighter is dangerously unpredictable. But Parker knew how to fight, had been taught, and this made him susceptible to Carl, who’d fought thousands of rounds and hundreds of street fights.

  Carl laughed. He rocked forward and back and side to side, moving his shoulders. Then he licked out with a quick jab just to see what Parker would do.

  Parker swung at him with the snickering cattle prod, bringing it in an overhand arc like a nightstick, and Carl slid out, going to the left. He quarter-pivoted and rocked back on his right leg like it was a coiled spring. This motion cocked his right shoulder. Then, just as Carl had assumed, Parker turned to face him and stepped in, drawing back with the stun gun, and Carl drilled him with a straight right that cracked loudly, snapped Parker’s head back, and sent spears of pain up Carl’s wrist. That’s all right, Carl thought. I have to keep punching now, no matter what.

  Parker shambled toward him until Carl doubled him over with a hard hook to the liver.

  Bent at the waist, Parker covered his liver with his hand. He smiled through his pain, blood from his shattered nose making his lips look big and red like those of some demented clown. “You know what we’re going to do to you, Hollywood?” he said, and Carl could hear the pain in his voice. His eyes seemed to burn with sudden inspiration . . . or perhaps insanity. “We’re going to lock you in the sweatbox. Cook you for an eternity. Then I’ll form everybody up and show them what we do to show-offs like you.” His laughter was an ugly sound full of pain and madness.

  Carl stopped it with a hook to the jaw.

  Parker dropped to all fours but recovered faster than Carl expected and lunged at his legs, trying to tackle him. It almost worked. He had Carl’s leg, but Carl was able to spin to the side and break loose, and Parker sprawled onto the floor. The stun gun skittered away. Parker fell facedown and was slow to rise. If he’d been a weaker opponent, Carl would’ve jumped in then, locked up Parker’s legs with his own, slid one forearm under his chin, wrapped his other forearm behind the big neck, and cranked until the King of All Bullies went to sleep. But Parker was too dangerous for that, too strong, and it was better for now to keep him out in the open and cut him to ribbons with his fists.

  As Parker made it onto all fours, Carl noticed Decker picking up a metal shoeshine box and motioning to his toadies. They were about to hit him with everything they had, all of them, and Carl knew he couldn’t withstand that. Instead of attacking Parker, he backed up and scooped the stun gun off the ground. Decker and the others looked at him warily. Parker rose, moaning. Carl felt around the handle of the stun gun until he found the button, pushed it, and the blue light crackled to life.

  “You guys come any closer,” Carl said, “and it’s your turn to ride the lightning.”

  The others paused, looking toward Decker.

  “He can’t take us all,” Decker said. “That thing hurts, but it won’t kill us. He can’t take us all.” Then, raising his voice, he said, “Everybody, Freeman’s way out of line. We gotta stop him. We gotta help the drill sergeant.”

  “Bull,” a familiar voice said. “Let them finish. It’s their fight. You feel me?” And Davis stepped to Decker. The gang guys massed around him, united, and Carl suddenly found himself laughing. He couldn’t help it. This was all so crazy.

  People murmured and shifted their weight. A few moved forward and picked stuff up. Blankets, boots, shine boxes like Decker had grabbed. Somebody came from the back, double time, carrying a mop.

  “Y’all are punks,” Davis said.

  Decker was right, Carl knew. There was no way he could take them all, even with Davis’s help.

  “On three,” Decker said.

  Carl tensed.

  “One,” Decker said.

  Parker spit blood onto the floor.

  “Two.”

  Parker glared at Carl, drooling blood, and raised one fist into the air. “Stand down,” he said. “I’m going to finish this myself. Right now.” He reached into the cargo pocket of his camouflage pants, spat more blood, and pulled his hand out of his pocket. Sneering, he flicked his arm sideways. There was a sharp snapping sound, and six inches of steel flashed from his fist.

  “Now,” he said, advancing on Carl, “I’m going to gut you like a fish.”

  He meant it. Carl could see it in his eyes. All the hate and the fear and now the embarrassment at having been beaten in front of the kids, it had all boiled together in Parker to create a true psychotic rage. He shuffled forward in a low, knife fighter’s crouch, and Carl knew this was real trouble. Guys like Parker trained in knife fighting, spent their whole lives dreaming of do-or-die situations like this. The stun gun would do very little good, as far as the shock went. Parker could definitely push through the shock and pain long enough to sink the blade into Carl.

  Forget the trigger, then, Carl thought. Just use the thing like a bat and try to knock the knife away. He glanced around the room near him, looking for anything he could use to protect himself.

  There was nothing.

  Parker kept coming.

  Ross shouted from the crowd, restrained by the others.

  Good, Carl thought. Hold him. Otherwise, Ross would get himself stabbed. The kid had guts enough for somebody three times his size.

  If they’d been at the other end of the barracks, Carl might have run out the door and into the night, but he had his back to the rear wall, and the door might as well have been a mile away. Between him and it were a knife-wielding psychopath and at least a dozen kids who would happily join the attack.

  Parker flashed out with the knife. It didn’t come close, just flicked out and back in. He’s judging my reaction, Carl thought. Trying to see what I’ll do, trying to set me up. Carl sidestepped, not wanting to back into the tighter space between the final pair of bunks, and Parker rushed him.

  Carl jarred into a bed and slid away, panic at the unexpected speed of the attack popping up inside him. He spun past, but a line of fire lit across his elbow. He’d been cut. He felt the warmth of the blood and the burn of the cut, and when he shook his arm, an arc of blood splattered onto the tiles.

  “Like it?” Parker said. “Even better than the pencil, huh?” His voice sounded thick and stuffy, and Carl knew Parker’s nose was broken. Good. He hoped Parker choked on the blood.

  Carl’s eyes panned the surroundings again. Nothing. Then . . . wait . . . He reached out and pulled a pillow from the nearby bunk.

  Parker laughed, edging toward him again. “Think this is a pillow fight?”

  Carl held the pillow out in front and gripped the baton in his right hand. He found his rhythm again, rocking side to side, ready to spring one way or the other. This had to work. He had to time it just right, or he was going to die.

  Parker surged forward, and Carl jagged left. The blade went past. Carl started to bring his arm around, seeing the opening—and then something cracked hard into his head.

  It was such a surprise and such a sharp blow that he lost his balance. The blade drove in again, and Carl had just enough time to suck in his gut. The edge of the knife sliced across his side, opening his shirt and burning across his ribs. He felt the steel rub across the bone and slip away. Pain raced along the wound—another line of fire—and he spun away again, tripping over the thing on the floor. A shoeshine case lay at his feet, its lid cracked open, its contents spread across the tiles like spilled intestines.

  Decker. Decker had thrown it at his head, had almost gotten Carl killed.

  Then the whole room seemed to explode. Carl saw Davis catch Decker with a looping hook, saw Davis’s friends tearing into Decker’s toadies.

  Carl could figure that out later . . . if he lived that long. For now, he had to survive this attack. His ribs burned, badly cut, and his arm burned, and his whole body ached with fatigue.

  Parker seemed to sense this. He was grinning again, the fear gone from his eyes. They still burned with rage, and now they shone with excitement, too, anticipation, bloodlust. He bobbed and weaved toward Carl and flashed out with the knife again.

  This time, Carl didn’t hit a bed, and nothing hit him in the head. He timed the blade, read its arc, and bent away from it, letting it miss by inches rather than feet. His left arm brought the pillow around hard, slamming it into the exposed side of Parker’s head hard enough to make the big man stumble. Then Carl smacked down, sharp and fast, with the baton. It cracked across Parker’s thumb and wrist. The knife fell away, and the drill sergeant stumbled clumsily into a footlocker, grabbing at his wrist. Carl jabbed the stun gun into the thick neck and pushed the button. He heard the quick crack-crack and saw the blue flash, and then Parker was shrieking. He shook away and batted at the air, terrified.

  Carl kicked the knife under a bunk and thumbed the button again. The thread of blue lightning snickered. “How you like it?”

  Parker backed into the small area between the final bunks. He flashed a desperate look toward the bunk under which Carl had kicked the knife.

  “Don’t bother,” Carl said. “You’d never make it.”

  Terror flashed in the drill sergeant’s eyes. He dove for the floor.

  Carl kicked him hard in the ribs.

  Parker grunted but plunged his hand under the bed, reaching for the knife.

  “Give it up,” Carl said, and let him have another blast from the stun gun.

  Parker shrieked and flailed, but he was determined. He kept after the knife. He had his head and shoulders under the bed now.

  I can’t let him get that thing again, Carl thought. He was losing a lot of blood from his cuts, enough that he felt oddly chilled. Soon, he would feel weak. If Parker got the knife again, he’d kill Carl.

  “Ha!” the drill sergeant yelled, and Carl knew he’d found his weapon. The big man lurched backward, his wide, muscular shoulders coming into view, and he reached back with one hand to pull himself free.

  This was it. Carl’s last chance. He drew his knee up, all the way to his chest, and stomped down as hard as he could on the exposed collarbone. There was a loud snap, and Parker screamed. Carl stomped down again and again and again, targeting the broken bone. Then, when Parker slid screaming from under the bed, meaning to kill Carl, Carl stomped down hard on the bully’s face. Once, twice, three times. Parker waved the knife uselessly in the air, and Carl stomped again. He had to end this. Had to finish it. Now. He saw the jaw give. Stomped again, saw the knife hand drop, saw the knife go free onto the ground again, and was just thinking about picking it up and ending this monster once and for all, when something smashed into the back of his head, and darkness ate him.

  CARL AWOKE IN HELL.

  The air itself seemed to be made of flame, and in his great pain and confusion, his body felt indistinct, as if it had melted into the heat around him.

  Slowly, he came to his senses, only to wish he hadn’t. He knew where he was.

  The sweatbox.

  The cage smelled of filth and decay, sweat and blood. It was perhaps five feet long and half as wide, small enough that he couldn’t straighten out, and so short he would have to stoop if he tried to stand. Not that he felt like standing; he didn’t feel like moving it all. He was awash in a hazy semiconsciousness steeped in pain and ripe with fever. Through blurry eyes swollen nearly shut with bruising, he registered the tightly spaced bamboo bars, the corrugated metal ceiling, and, beneath him, the filthy matting of straw. His vision was so unsteady that the straw itself seemed to shiver with a subtle vibration.

  He was in a lot of pain.

  Some of his injuries came from the fight. His knuckles, massive with swelling and crisscrossed in deep splits, throbbed, as did the bones in his swollen hands. His right hand wouldn’t work correctly and was almost certainly broken. Both wrists ached deeply. The knife cuts, one a strip of fire on his arm, the other an urgent burning across his ribs, hurt so much even in his semidaze that it felt like the wounds themselves were moving. General bruising had inflated his entire body, making him stiff and achy, head to toe.

  Much of the damage had obviously occurred after the fight, after they’d hit him from behind. This part of the story he pieced together from evidence: the sore knot at the base of his skull, the extreme bruising and tenderness and swelling all over his face, the lips split and especially tender, the ears ringing and sore to the touch. His entire head roared with the worst headache he’d ever felt . . . doubtlessly a concussion. In the back of his mouth, he was missing a tooth. He wondered vaguely if he’d swallowed it. Worst of all were his ribs, which pulsed with pain from top to bottom on both sides and felt like they were splintering whenever he took a deep breath. They hurt so much that they seemed to quiver gently. They were bruised, maybe cracked or broken. He’d had bruised ribs before and knew the pain and how long it took to recover. Only forever or so and then maybe another week or two.

  Pain and this methodical inventory of injuries brought Carl further out of his unconsciousness. His throbbing nose drew no air, feeling as if it had been packed with dirt as he slept. Blood and mucus, he thought. Probably broken, too. He wondered, in the conditioned response of all boxers, what his nose would look like this time, and then considered just how bad the smells in the sweatbox must really be, if they were this pungent through a broken nose. Awful. His mouth tasted coppery with blood and was sandpaper dry from dehydration and breathing through it for however long he’d been unconscious. His throat was raw, and his tongue felt shriveled, somehow reptilian. It kept sticking to the roof of his mouth. He knew he was in the grips of a fairly serious fever, but he couldn’t be certain how much of the heat was coming from within and how much of it was the cage itself, which was certainly over 110 degrees. He needed water desperately.

  A bowl sat in the corner near a hole in the floor. Staring at this, readying himself for the pain he knew would accompany movement, Carl began to piece together something troubling. That strange, incessant movement he felt in his cuts and over his ribs slowly fell into step with his unsteadiness of vision. Then the subtle vibration of the straw covering the floor coordinated with a soft whisper barely audible behind the ringing in his ears. Finally, in a moment of dawning horror, his tactile senses sharpened, and through the deep foghorn of pain that had been deafening his perception of the world, Carl detected one final sensation.

  A light tickling covered his flesh.

  Movement. On his skin, under his clothes, in his hair. Everywhere.

  Bugs.

  He was covered in bugs.

  He surged off the floor, slammed his head into the low ceiling, bumped into the bamboo bars, and screamed, his voice low and raspy—the scream of a ghost long dead—and shook his broken body and swatted at himself and raked, twitching, clutching things from his body and clothing. For several seconds he was lost to madness, slamming back and forth in the small cage, making animal sounds of rage and terror, clawing and plucking and smashing, while within him erupted an absolute volcano of pain. Some of the bugs fought him, biting and gripping into his clothing and flesh with legs like briar thorns. He screamed again to find his cuts bubbling with feeding insects and tore at them with his dirty nails only to utter another hoarse cry upon discovering a hard-shelled black centipede the size of his index finger buried in the open wound over his ribs. He struggled with stiff and swollen fingers to grip the nightmarish thing, which broke in half as he pulled, then broke again and again so that it took an eternity for him to believe that he’d removed it completely.

  Later, convinced that all the bugs were off him, he collapsed into a crouch, the whole world pulsing in and out of focus around him. He was out of breath, weak with fever, and nearly blind with pain. Crouching there, he focused on his breathing and willed the pain into its proper place as best he could, channeling the faint ghost of the wisest man he’d ever known—his boxing trainer, Arthur James—until he could almost hear Arthur’s soft voice cooing in his ear, as it had between rounds, telling him, That’s all right, son. Catch your breath. That’s it. First the breath, then the mind. Once able, he crawled across the straw to the bowl. Without water, he would die.

  Large black bugs with yellow stripes swam in the murky water. He scooped them from the bowl, crushed them with his hands, and flicked them through the bars of his cage. He raised the bowl to his lips and gagged. It smelled like rotten eggs. This stench married with bad smells coming from the nearby hole in the floor, and Carl crawled to the other side of the cage, careful not to spill the water.

 

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