"Fucker," she spat, baring her teeth at me. She leaned over onto her left hand so she could raise the knife up from the floor, and I used the opportunity to kick her left elbow, connecting on the inside with a soccer kick that collapsed the limb. She rolled, unfortunately moving out of my reach, but she also lost her knife, which bounced on the tile a few feet away.
I could only stare as Melinda skittered along the tile towards the knife while the massive gunfire continued. I heard short, measured bursts within the general rattling carnage, and knew that Mark was still alive. I'd heard him too often when he'd taken me out to the woods outside of the city to train to not distinguish his strictly controlled style. It gave me some hope that I might actually get out of the mess alive and possibly with my balls still attached. I had a great fondness for them, they'd been good friends of mine for many years, and didn't want to part with them so early in my lifetime.
However, at that moment I couldn't waste any of my energy worrying about Mark or my balls. Melinda had scrambled to her knife and recovered it, turning to grin at me. She'd busted her lip when she rolled, a little trickle of blood running down her chin and filling her eyes with madness. "No more games, boy."
I'd expected her to come at me low, recognizing that there was a lot of bullets flying around the room. Instead, she sprang from her low crouch, springing high and quick through the air. I tried to pull my legs up as quickly as I could, but I knew in the position I was in, there was no defense for my side or my torso. She was on the upward curve of her leap when the burst of gunfire took her in the side, once near the hip and another in her left shoulder.
I got to see first hand one of the great myths of movies clearly busted then. In movies, when someone gets shot, they usually end up flying through the air like they just got thrown at least a few feet backwards (exceptions made for the hero, who still gets driven to their knees and grunting in pain). The reality is much different, and I guess grounded in science.
I'm no math genius, I barely pulled a B my last year in high school, mostly because I spent more time worrying about Carrie Brickshaw who sat one row over and three seats in front of me than class. But when Mark took me out and showed me using watermelons on strings, gel packs, and even a dead pig, and combined it with an episode of Mythbusters, I believed it. When people fall down or collapse at being shot, it's due to their own bodies motion. They see and anticipate the shot, trying to jerk out of the way.
In Melinda Pressman's case, she was jumping through the air focused on me. The bullets didn't affect her motion at all, except in one critical way. She reacted to the pain, and her right hand, which was holding the knife, relaxed. The handle slipped from her grasp and she landed on me with a thud, the side of the office chair cracking into her chest before she hit my shoulder. While it was my uninjured arm, the force still jarred my dislocated one, and I groaned deeply, trying what I could to get her off of me.
Melinda was seriously hit, but still conscious. Pain and rage mixed on her face as she tried to claw at me, only the pain of her wounds compounded by falling onto the chair and my shoulder preventing her from immediately clawing out my eyes.
That’s when I got lucky. Melinda rolled off of me, her legs tangled up with the legs of the chair I was tied in, twisting her body just a little bit. I kicked, connecting square in her chin. Her teeth clamped down on her own tongue and her head jerked back. Her eyes rolled up and she fell to her back, unconscious. I wasn't worried until I saw the bright red blood flowing out of her mouth and heard the choking sounds.
I tried what I could, reaching with my legs and trying to kick her body to roll over, but that final fall had spread her weight wide and onto her back, making it impossible. My shoves and kicks just thumped against her lower legs, not doing anything except making her thigh move over a few inches. I watched helplessly when she went into convulsions, choking on her own blood, never regaining consciousness. It was the first time I'd killed someone, and while yes it was self-defense, I couldn’t help but feel bad for her.
It wasn't until Melinda stopped shaking that I noticed the gunfire had stopped. I looked around at what little I could see. My world consisted of a three foot wide partially obscured window as well as the ceiling, and I could see nothing. I did however hear someone walking over the glass-covered ground at the front of the store, and I only hoped it was Mark and not one of Melinda's gunmen. I twisted my neck to see what little I could, knowing that if a gunman actually was the one approaching me, there was little I could do to stop him.
When Mark's masked face came into view, I swore I could have kissed him, full tongue even, and I've never wanted to kiss a man before in my life. He was covered with dirt and his cheek was scraped up pretty badly, but he looked more or less uninjured. "You okay?"
"Yeah," he answered, coming over and kneeling next to me. He found Melinda's knife and cut the ropes binding me quickly. "What about you?"