They didn't run. Some continued looking at their leader. Most were looking at the man rolling on the ground, holding his throat. Switchblade was watching me with a mixture of curiosity, lust and hatred.
Then he pounced, slashing the blade up. Had he hit home, I would have been cleaved from groin to throat.
He didn't hit home.
I turned my body and the blade missed. I caught his over-extended arm at the elbow and twisted. The elbow burst at the joint. He dropped the knife. I picked him up by the throat. Screaming and gagging, he swung wildly at me with his good arm, connecting a glancing blow off the side of my head. I simply squeezed harder and his flailing stopped.
His face was turning purple; I liked that.
I raised him high and swung him around so that the others could see. They gaped unbelievingly.
"You may run now," I said.
And they did. Scattering like chickens before the hawk. They disappeared into the night, around hedges and into dark doorways. Two of them just continued running down the middle of the street. All of them were gone, save for one, the fifty-year-old. He was pointing a gun at my head.
"Put my nephew down," he said.
"It's always nice to see gang raping and murdering kept in the family," I said.
I put his nephew down. Sort of. I hurled the kid with all my strength into his uncle. The gun went off, a massive explosion that rattled my senses and stung the hell out of my hyper-sensitive ears.
When the smoke cleared so to speak, the old man was looking down with bewildered horror.
Switchblade was lying sprawled on the concrete sidewalk, blood pumping from a wound in his chest. Spreading fast over the concrete. A black oil slick in the night.
Blood.
Something awakened within me. Something not very nice.