“Yes, mine do that,” one of the men said, wildly interested.
“Yeah, right? But here’s the thing: my nut-cracking kicks are literally nut cracking. The testes cannot escape the impact. At least one of them always bursts open, and sperm pours into your bloodstream and it’s a disaster area all over your netherlands. And you’ll never get that teste back, so your reproductive ability is lowered fifty percent for life. Not to mention it reportedly hurts like giving birth to a sea urchin through your pee hole. But I wouldn’t know that, of course.”
Alpha had been rubbing the bridge of his nose for a full minute already. “Sorry, I’m missing the plot; your initial point was…?”
“Yeah, my bad, I get carried away. My point was, seeing how you guys were harassing that waitress and being very vulgar, I wondered if you could stop behaving like…well, being inbred dicks.”
She paused, and then finished with a candid appeal:
“Just give me an excuse to thrash you.”
Alpha sighed, faking discontent. She stood still, chest and crossed arms swaying gently with her breath, full lips shut tight, repressing the joyful anticipation while she mentally captioned the whole gang. First row, sitting down, Alpha, six-four, black-and-red leathers, Ray-Ban aviators; second row right, Beta, six-two, jackknife under the belt; left, Gamma, six-foot, broken nose, pool cue; in the back, Delta, five-nine, grabbing a beer bottle.
“You see, sugar,” Alpha began, raising a slow, ominous hand toward Andy’s cheek. “I would love to fulfill your request.”
His fingertips stretched dangerously close to Andy’s skin.
“But you forgot to say the magic word.”
Atoms away now.
“Which is…”
—
Any passerby to the conversation would have mistakenly concluded that the magic word was “CRUNCH.” For that was the incredibly loud sound Alpha’s fingers made when Andy pulled them apart by five inches, measured from the ends of the middle and ring, virtually disabling those extremities for any purpose other than effusively greeting Vulcans.
Alpha attempted a hopeless slap in midscream with his left hand that she easily blocked with her forearm, and she was already driving energy to her right leg to launch the much-hyped semicastrating kick when the rest of the thugs forced her to abort.
Beta charged, making her lose her step, and threw a punch at her face. She dodged it, kicked him in the knee, and, as he bent in pain, grabbed him by the parts of the human skull most resembling an ergonomic handle and smashed his head against the counter, making room for Gamma to attack.
Except this one swung a pool cue, which she didn’t dare block. Instead she rolled to the floor, waited for the cue to swing back, and dodged it again, letting a chair slow it down, then grabbed it by that end, snatched it out of Gamma’s hands, and swung it all the long way around back to him. That gave Gamma time to duck himself. Not Alpha, though: the cue whacked him as he was tending his dislodged fingers, whiplashing head spraying spittle as far as the mirror.
Delta managed to do nothing before Andy stepped forward and bashed his head with the pool cue. Because you can’t just wait for every bad guy to come at you.
She moved toward the pool table as Gamma retreated and grabbed a new cue by the midsection. The healthy ratio of broken bones per second fell for a minute while he swung the cue in midair, windmill style like the purple-masked Ninja Turtle. The improvised staff whooshed loudly through the tobaccosphere of the room like a gigantic hornet from outer space.
Andy stood through the demonstration, a skeptical Little John look messing up the angle of her perfect frown.
“That’s not how you grab a pool cue.”
She grabbed hers properly, point forward, and Gamma wasn’t able to block before she jabbed his sternum, pushing him off his stance. A side hit to the temple put him on the ground.
Beta and Delta were ready for battle again when she jammed the cue in one of the table pockets and snapped it in two. She took the resulting clubs and went on to do her own exhibition of audacious stick-wielding.
Delta stayed put, clearly impressed at this point. Beta took avail of his position behind her to whip out a jackknife and charge. Sadly his warcry, inspired by the Hong Kong movie overtones the fight was taking, betrayed his strategic advantage.
Andy spun on one foot: right club straight to hit the blade-carrying arm, left club to the inside of his elbow, right to the torso, left to the temple, right to the face of Delta joining in from behind, left heel to Beta’s shin, right to Delta’s crotch, and simultaneous strikes with both clubs on two different heads, in time to face the enraged Alpha charging like a mad buffalo and throw both clubs away and at last fling up her left foot.
The music stopped. And conversations ceased. Among dogs. In a two-mile radius. Their ears pricked up at the piercing ultrasonic howl coming from a small bar far away.
Alpha dropped to his knees, then to all fours, finally down into the fetal position, his hands cordoning off the devastated area.
“Andy?”
Andy turned on her feet, fists raised, and that’s how Kerri saw her for the first time in five years.
That wasn’t the plan. Andy swiftly blew the bang of hair off her face and smoothed her top. “Hey.”
Kerri came hopping over the counter to hug her, ignoring the nondescript mustached blur of a bartender (and possible employer) offering his unsolicited opinion about the whole mess.
The last thing Andy ever remembered from that scene was being smothered in happy, cheering orange hair, pouring over her own shoulders like streaming confetti, mind overwhelmed by the mob of excited questions, taut muscles caught in the unexpected embrace. And the red cells inside her body, still drunk with adrenaline, gazed up in awe, dented shields and blood-dripping axes in their little hands, wondering where in the world did all this peace come from.
Then there was some heated dialogue between Kerri and the nondescript bartender, among threats to call the cops and the whimpering of neutered thugs crawling on the floor, and Andy later recalled hearing Kerri say “fuck this job” somewhere in the background and yank off her apron and throw it at her ex-boss’s blurry face, but all those bits were blurry themselves.
—
Next time she checked her surroundings, they were in another, louder bar having shots and peanuts, and Kerri wore a black-sleeved raglan shirt and smiled the loudest girl-smile ever.
“God, you were awesome!” she said. “I’ve been playing out violent scenarios with Jesse in my mind for months, and you just improvised that? It was so much better than anything I’d come up with!” She finished off a drink, then her grin narrowed into a proud smirk. “Girl, you’ve grown to your full potential. You’re everything I wanted to be.”