A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0022

Chapter 22

By noon, the warehouse floor had turned into a furnace.

The tall windows let the sun in without letting the heat out, and the metal roof absorbed everything in the morning and exhaled it back in slow waves that distorted the air near the beams. Jack felt it on his face the instant he stepped onto the clean concrete, a dry pressure that made the skin of his cheeks gleam and pulled the first drops of sweat to his hairline. He wore the suit. He always wore the suit for this, not because it protected him from the heat, but because a man who plans to fight in the clothes he will die in must first learn to sweat in them, learn where they trap him and where he breathes, until the strange iridescent fabric ceases to be a costume and becomes skin.

In front of him, blocking a third of the light, was what his friend had become when he asked his body the question.

Kevin filled the space like furniture fills a dollhouse. Over two meters tall, his snout long, dark and moist at the tip, two tusks protruding beyond a jaw that still sported the rust-colored beard he’d worn as an adult, the same reddish-brown that now formed a rough crest on the back of his skull and along his spine. He didn’t bother to wear a shirt.

There wasn’t a shirt in the world that could withstand the request. He wore only trousers stretched to the limit of the seams, the pale fabric tight over thighs as thick as oil drums, and above the waistband the contradiction that no amount of power had erased: the heavy, soft belly of the boy who ate thirty eggs at once, over plates of muscle that hadn’t been there a month ago. Veins bulged on his forearms and ran down his calves like roots breaking through asphalt. His chest was a wall. He was fat and monstrous, and both things were true at the same time, and somewhere beneath the bristles, strength and speed had surpassed anything Jack could quantify.

Neither of them spoke. The ritual spoke for them.

Jack reached into his back jacket pocket and pulled out the coin, a worn quarter dollar, smooth with the eagle on it, and placed it in the crease of his thumb, behind the nail of his index finger. He glanced at Kevin once. Then, he flicked him.

The coin rose spinning, capturing the white light in bright, flat flashes as it climbed ten meters or more, until it became a small spinning star against the darkness of the beams. It hung suspended. It fell. The entire game was focused on the time it took to descend, like a breath held in the chest, and when it hit the concrete with a thin, musical sound that turned into a dry thud, both were already in motion.

Kevin came like weather. There was no wind-up to him, no tell, just the floor shoving back against his hooves and then a charging wall of meat crossing the room faster than a thing that size had any right to. Jack ran straight at it. That was the part Kevin had stopped being surprised by, the part that still pulled a glint into the small black eyes, the way the thin man closed distance with the freight train instead of fleeing it.

A pace from collision Jack folded. He dropped his shoulder, tucked his chin to his chest, and let his own speed carry him into a low rolling slide that took him under the swing of one tree-trunk arm and through the gap between Kevin’s churning legs, the concrete burning past an inch from his face. He came up out of the roll already turning, planted, and threw his whole body into the air sideways, both shins scything around in a flat spinning kick that landed square on the flank of that great belly with everything he had, hip and core and the long lever of his legs all arriving at once.

It was like kicking the side of a moored ship.

Kevin did not stagger. He did not grunt. The flesh gave and shoved Jack’s own momentum back up his legs, and the only thing that moved was the boar’s head, turning, slow and almost curious, to find where the noise had come from. By the time the snout came around Jack was no longer there to be found. He had used the rebound, let it spin him off, and flowed around the wide trunk of his friend to put himself at the blind seam of Kevin’s back, and from there he went to work, short hammering strikes into the kidney, the spine, the long muscles bracketing it, fast enough that the sound of them ran together into a single drumroll.

The tail answered before the head could.

He had forgotten the tail. That was the lesson the body kept relearning, the one no diagram in his head could fully hold, because in Jack’s old life a man was hands and legs and that was the whole alphabet of a fight. Kevin was not built from that alphabet. The thin tail with its hard tuft cracked back off the hip without any warning from the shoulders, a whip of bone and ginger bristle moving at a speed Jack caught only as a blur, and he got his crossed forearms up out of pure animal flinch a quarter-second before it would have taken him in the ribs. It still felt like being hit by a swung pipe. The block held and the block did not matter; the force went through it and picked him up off the floor and threw him backward across the warehouse, four meters, five, the world tumbling. He let it tumble. He found the ground with the soles of both boots, dropped into the give of his knees, snapped a backflip out of the leftover spin to bleed the rest of it off, and skidded to a stop with his feet hissing across the dusty concrete and his guard already rebuilt in front of his face.

It still looked like he’d been hit by a swinging pipe. The block resisted, and the block didn’t matter; the force went through it, lifted it off the ground, and hurled it back across the warehouse, four meters, five, the world collapsing. He let it collapse. He landed on the soles of his shoes, braced himself on his knees, did a backflip, using the remaining rotation to dissipate the rest of the energy, and slid to a stop, his feet squeaking on the dusty concrete and his guard already rebuilt in front of his face.

He stayed there a beat, breathing, arms ringing.

That was the whole of it, the thing Kevin’s fruit had given him that the world was not ready for. Everything on him was a weapon now. The fists were obvious. But the head could break a door, the shoulder could break a man, the tusks, the snout, the spine, the tail, all of it loaded, all of it past the reach of ordinary durability, so that there was no safe surface anywhere on the creature, no place to stand close that was not standing inside the swing of something that could end you. Most fighters left openings between their tools. Kevin was a tool from end to end.

Across the floor the boar’s face split, and it took Jack a season of this to learn to read the expression for what it was. Kevin was smiling. The small eyes had gone bright and pleased above the snout, and the broad shoulders rolled, and the thing that had spent eighteen years as the boy who watched other people do the doing stood in the heat of the warehouse plainly, simply happy. He had come to love this. Somewhere in the weeks of it, between the bruises and the eggs and the slow study of his own new size, the fighting had stopped being a thing Kevin endured for Jack’s sake and become a thing Kevin wanted, the one corner of this rewritten life where the strength was not a burden or a secret but a joy.

The weeks had given the whole exercise a shape.

They did this most days now, when the planning was done and the light was good, two friends turning the empty rectangle they had cleared into the only school either of them had. There was no instructor and no manual. There was Jack, who came into it with the half-remembered architecture of a thousand fights he had only ever watched on a screen, body mechanics absorbed from anime and old films and the cold logic he ran on, learning by repetition and pain which of those remembered shapes the flesh could actually hold. And there was Kevin, who came into it with a fruit and a body built to punish, and no idea how to use either, learning by the same repetition that a wall does not win a fight by being a wall. They taught each other by trying to hurt each other, carefully, and the careful part got thinner every week.

Kevin lowered his head and snorted, a wet blast that pushed two short jets of steam out of the dark nostrils into the heat, the bull-stamp of an animal that has decided. Then he came again.

Jack did not roll this time. The roll worked once a fight at most, and only on the days Kevin let his enthusiasm outrun his footwork; try it twice and those hooves would simply stop and pivot and put a leg through your spine. So Jack gave ground instead. He backed off the line of the charge, light on the balls of his feet, drawing his friend forward into open floor where the bigger man’s momentum had nowhere useful to spend itself, and when Kevin pulled up and started throwing hands, Jack went to the work he was actually good at.

It became a thing of inches.

Kevin’s punches came in a flurry, faster than the eye wanted to credit for arms that thick, each one carrying enough behind it to fold a car door. None of them landed. Jack read the shoulders, the hips, the tiny tells the boar had not yet learned to hide, and slipped each strike by the smallest margin he could afford, close enough to feel the wind of it drag across his cheek, because the narrower the miss the shorter his own road back to the body. And every time the body opened, he answered. He could not hurt Kevin the way you hurt a man, could not crack that defense with force, so he had stopped trying to crack it and started threading it, hunting the small sensitive places where even a Zoan’s resistance ran thin, the nerve and the organ and the soft hinge of a joint, putting a single clean strike into each one with a precision that turned the impossible defense into something with seams.

A left cross came over the top. Jack dipped under the arm, in tight against the ribs, and drove a short hooking punch up into the liver under the last rib, the one spot on that whole armored flank that a nervous system could not ignore. He felt Kevin’s breath catch.

A straight right speared out for his head. He slipped it outside, let it pass over his shoulder, and was already rising.

He came up off the slip into a leaping elbow that cracked across the broad dark snout, right at the wet tip of the nose where the nerves clustered thickest, and the boar’s whole head snapped back with a startled bark of pain.

Kevin lunged to grab him, both vast arms closing, the move of a stronger thing that has decided to stop fencing and simply seize. Jack went up and over it. He planted a boot on the descending forearm, vaulted the grasping reach entirely, cleared the crest of the ginger skull, and on the way down brought his heel around and over in a falling axe kick that crashed onto the top of Kevin’s head with the full drop of his weight behind it. Stars went through the small eyes. Kevin swayed, stunned, the snout dipping.

Jack did not waste the half-second. He landed behind the staggering bulk, found the broad back, and went up it. One foot to the hip, a hand fisting the bristled crest for purchase, and then he was on the shoulders with his forearm sliding across the front of that thick throat, the other arm locking the figure-four behind the skull, his whole body cinching down into the choke, blade of the wrist into one side of the neck and bicep into the other, the only finish a man his size had any business attempting on a thing that size. For one heartbeat it was perfect. The hold was clean. In a real fight, against a real neck, that was a man going to sleep in eight seconds and dying in thirty.

Kevin’s neck was not a real neck.

A thick hand came up, found Jack’s locked forearm, and peeled it off the throat the way a man peels tape off a box, without strain, without urgency, the colossal strength simply refusing the premise of the hold. The other hand caught the back of Jack’s suit. And then the world came apart, because Kevin took the small dangling weight of his friend and threw him, a casual overhand pitch with a planet behind it, and Jack went off the shoulders and across the warehouse on a low flat line that ate ten meters of clean concrete in the time it takes to flinch.

He turned it into something. He spun in the air, hunting the floor, found it with one trailing boot and then the other, and rode the impact out in a long screeching slide that finally bled to a stop with his fingers brushing the ground for balance and his lungs full of the dust he had kicked up. He came back upright already moving.

They met in the middle of the floor one more time.

This time Jack went up first, a clean leap that carried him over the charging bulk before Kevin could swing, and as the boar’s reach passed harmlessly beneath him his hand was already inside the suit and coming out with the Glock. He had it before his boots touched down on the far side, turned, and put the muzzle on the one point that mattered, the soft notch at the side of the throat under the jaw, the seam in all that armor where the great arteries ran close to the surface. There was no resistance there that strength could lend. At that range, on that spot, the creature’s size and durability and speed all became furniture in a burning house. His finger took up the slack.

The striker fell on an empty chamber.

The dry snap of it was loud in the heat, a small flat click where a thunderclap should have been, because there was nothing in the magazine and nothing in the pipe and never was, not for this, not ever for this. The gun was never loaded inside these walls. That click was the whole agreement between them, the sound they had both decided to treat as the end, the kill that did not kill. Kevin froze with the muzzle cold against his throat and let out a long breath through the snout, the steam of it curling past Jack’s knuckles.

Jack lowered the empty pistol and let a thin smile cut across his sweat-shining face.

“That’s the match,” he said. “Again.”

Kevin straightened up out of the fighting stance, chest heaving, the heat pouring off him in a haze. When the deep ruined voice came it carried the particular good humor of a man who has lost and does not entirely mind.

“What’s that make it now. Twenty to one?”

Jack tucked the Glock away and shook his head, and the laugh that came out of him was short and real, one of the rare ones.

“No. Twenty-one to one.” He let the thought hang in the air for a second. “And you only got one point because I hadn’t yet felt your strength. On the first day. Before I understood what I was really dealing with. That doesn’t count, and you know it doesn’t count, and that’s exactly why you keep insisting on it.”

It wasn’t arrogance. It was the simplicity of it. Jack could win the fights because they had rules, because the gun was unloaded, the shots were fired, and both tried not to cause permanent damage to the only person in the world they trusted. Without the rules, he had no illusions about who would emerge victorious. He had seen Kevin free himself from his own throat with the indifference of someone swatting a fly. He had felt the throw, those casual ten meters. And worst of all, what kept Jack cautious even in victory, was that he still couldn’t reliably assess his friend’s strength. He had seen Kevin lift the rusty press across the warehouse without altering his breathing, seen the plaster crack with a careless touch, receive a blow to the guard and survive only because he saw it coming. Each new experience reset the balance. You couldn’t measure a man whose limit changed every week, and Jack had stopped trying to define that limit and had simply begun to respect the fact that, for now, he was far above his own.

He had felt the throw, those casual ten meters. And worst of all, what kept Jack cautious even in victory, was that he still couldn’t reliably assess his friend’s strength. He’d seen Kevin lift the rusty press across the warehouse without breaking his breath, seen plaster crack with a careless touch, receive a blow to the guard and survive only because he saw it coming. Each new experience reset the balance. You couldn’t measure a man whose limit changed every week, and Jack had stopped trying to define that limit and had simply begun to respect the fact that, for now, he was far beyond his own.

Kevin exhaled, deeply and long, like a bellows emptying, and his body began to fold back. The crest sank into the skin. Fangs retracted and disappeared. The snout retracted, softened, and became a face again, the long dark fur receding into the pale, freckled skin of a burly eighteen-year-old with a sweat-drenched red beard, and in a few seconds the monster that filled a third of the room was just Kevin, broad, tired, and smiling, wearing pants that now fit him again, since there was a smaller man inside them.

He wiped his face with the back of his hand, which was now normal, and looked at his friend on the other side of the floor, where the coin he had thrown still lay, a small opaque circle in the concrete between them.

“One day I’ll overtake you,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

Jack bent down, picked up the quarter, twirled it once between his fingers, and dropped it back into his coat pocket. The heat enveloped them, and the dust they had kicked up glistened in golden hues in the bars of light, settling slowly.

“Yes,” he said. “If luck isn’t on my side, maybe it’s on yours.”