No big.
He twisted away from my block, trying to rechannel his force and hit me with his other hand. I acted from instinct and headbutted him, catching him forehead-to-cheek. Not exactly optimal, and it hurt, but I heard a satisfying crack that signified I’d broken his cheekbone.
The Terminator staggered back a step, his face slightly misshapen, that smoking effect melting behind him. It seemed to be some sort of by-product of his speed, something I’d never seen before, but I had the brief thought that something like that maybe had an illusory or distractive quality about it, as well. Meta powers didn’t tend to fall into the realm of completely useless, not at this level, which told me he had some ability with it that I maybe hadn’t seen yet. Because he probably hadn’t felt like he was losing enough to employ it.
There was a nice cut on his cheek, a thin trickle of blood sliding down it just below his eyeball. He looked down for a second, then back up at me, and there was nothing in his eyes but vicious resolve of the sort I’d probably had whenever I was about to kick someone’s ass. It was very intimidating for most of his subjects, I was sure.
“If it bleeds … we can kill it,” I said, staring him down. Then I blinked. “Wait. No. Sorry. Wrong Schwarzenegger movie.”
“What?” His voice was deep and resonant. His genuine confusion shone through in his response.
“That was from Predator, but you’re the Terminator,” I said, readying for his next attack. “My bad.”
He squinted at me, as though trying to determine whether I was crazy, bantering in the middle of a fight like this. He must have decided I was just stupid, because he came at me again. The fact that we were trapped between cars didn’t give him a lot of room to maneuver, and he couldn’t flank me without going wide around one of them or leaping over its top, both of which would leave him exposed to a counterattack. And also allow me to see him coming from a mile away.
The Terminator led with a short punch, a jab designed to knock me back, but I whipped an arm around it and captured his wrist under my armpit. I whirled, ready for him, because I’d seen which side he led with, and I shifted my stance as I came around. I stole his balance perfectly and whipped him face-first into my SUV.
He cracked against the passenger window glass, shattering it with the palm of his free hand, which he used to prevent his head from rattling against the car. I continued my motion, his left arm trapped under my right arm, and I pinned him against the car, hyperextending his elbow in the process.
I was almost back to back with him at this point, and even with him pinned against the car, this was not a good place to be against a metahuman. I hit him in the lower back with an elbow and then released him, whirling away and leaving him against the vehicle for a quarter second before he spun around on me, nursing that elbow I’d just jacked up.
“Human flesh over a metal endoskeleton?” I asked, rhetorically. “Not so much.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?” he asked, low and gruff, cradling his arm against him. I’d given his tendons and cartilage a good bend in the wrong direction, and even a high level meta would feel that for a bit—unless they were Wolfe.
But nobody was Wolfe anymore.
I took a breath, trying to put the rampant stab of emotion I felt at that lonely thought behind me. “I’m making fun of you,” I said. “It’s this thing I do to annoy my opponents, get them off balance, even when they’re faster than me. It’s one of the few things I really remember about myself—”
He came at me without any blatantly obvious warning—except a subtle change in his balance as he set himself up for it. If I hadn’t been paying attention, if I hadn’t danced this dance with countless other people, if Mom hadn’t taught me … I might have missed it and gotten blindsided, had to throw up a scattershot series of blocks and hope for the best.
But I saw it, and when he came at me …
I dodged, I blocked, I turned him aside and rammed him into the car door next to me. I had him pinned against the mass of the car, his arm barred this time, putting my knee into his back to keep him there. If he moved against me, he’d break his own bone, or at least dislocate his elbow.
Finally, I had the Terminator pinned between a rock and a hard case.
But he failed to acknowledge this fait accompli and gave the car a shove with his free hand. It squealed, tires moving against the pavement, and sending the family within into a frenzy. They scrambled to get the hell out of the vehicle, their faces pasty white within the confines of the car’s cab. It was a mother and her three kids, and I could read the panic in her eyes, could hear her frantic screams as she climbed over the center console into the passenger seat and hurried to open the door and escape that way. She was screaming for her kids to follow her as the Terminator continued pushing against the car and moving it, tires skidding, across the pavement.
The kids were screaming now, too, trying to get out. One of them, presumably the oldest, had thrown open the passenger side door and was hurrying to unfasten a toddler in a forward-facing car seat. Their cries were drowned out by the squeal of the tires on the pavement, the Terminator was moving the vehicle, meta strength shoving two thousands of metal toward the van in the next lane over. I could see the eyes of the guy in the driver’s seat of the van, and they were wide and panicked, because he saw what was coming.
The doors were open on the passenger side and the mom was standing there, screaming for the kids to get out. The car was creeping toward her like a slow-moving lava flow across the freeway. The open passenger door made contact with the side of the van and, caught too wide open to just close, it started to bend at the hinge joints. The metal squealed, protesting at this rough abuse, pressure being applied in a way it was not meant to be pushed.
A child’s scream cut the night, echoing in my ear, and I realized that unless I did something quickly, they were all going to be crushed against the van in the next lane, unable to flee because of the bending doors that had them penned in. The driver of that vehicle was already pulled forward as far as he could, but he was butting up against the back of a semi-trailer, and if he inched forward anymore, the rear of the trailer was going to decapitate him.
I had this sorry bastard, the Terminator, pinned exactly where I wanted him, and then he’d had to go and put innocent people in danger. I panicked, some alarm going off in my head telling me that this was not acceptable, that this was wrong, that he was crossing a line into territory that I found absolutely detestable.