Being Henry David - By Cal Armistead Page 0,9
karate move. Better just try and pound the crap out of him. I clench my fists and Simon thrusts the knife at me again. This time the blade catches the side of my sweatshirt. There’s a ripping sound and I feel a sharp pain in my side. The knife, when Simon pulls it back, is streaked with blood.
Before I can respond, I hear a growl from somewhere behind Simon, and then Jack is jumping on the guy piggyback, wrapping his skinny arms tight around Simon’s neck. Simon bellows, tries to shake Jack off, slices the air with the knife. He manages to break Jack’s hold on him, flings him off onto his back, knocking the breath out of him.
From somewhere outside my peripheral vision, I hear Nessa scream Jack’s name. Simon looms over him with a lunatic grin, hand fisted on the knife handle, the blade with my blood still on it glimmering and I’m thinking, my God, he’s gonna do it, he’s gonna kill Jack. There’s a brick on the ground. I snatch it up without thinking, lift my arms, and crack it on the back of Simon’s skull. He turns to me, eyes wide, shocked surprise, aiming his knife at my face. So I hit him again, brick against forehead. His mouth moves like a beached trout, but there are no words. Blood comes oozing through his hair. He growls in the back of his throat and falls forward.
Jack and I take two steps back and stare at the fallen body of Simon, both of us struggling to catch our breaths.
“Is he dead?” Jack’s entire face is white, even his lips.
Dead. The word echoes in some chamber of my brain and my whole body seizes up like I’m paralyzed.
“I don’t know,” I say in a whisper, unable to take my eyes off Simon’s motionless body. “I just wanted him to leave us alone.”
Nessa stands with us, staring down in horror at Simon. As we watch, his right hand twitches and he takes a deep, shuddering breath, like his soul had started slithering away then decided to return to his pathetic body after all. He moans. I didn’t kill him. Thank God. I messed him up bad, but I did not kill him.
“We need to bolt, Nessa,” Jack says, still not taking his eyes off Simon. “Get our stuff. We’ll find a new place.”
Nessa nods and ducks into the shack. She comes back out with a stuffed backpack slung over her skinny shoulders. The last thing she grabs is the colored plastic bead necklace decorating the front of the shack.
“Hank,” she says then in a quivery voice. “You’re bleeding.”
A circle of red darkens the side of my sweatshirt. I lift it up and look at my stomach, to the right of my belly button, below my ribs. A trickle of blood slides down my side and into the waistband of my pants.
“He just nicked me. I’m okay,” I tell her, but everything is getting blurry around the edges. Blood. So much blood.
From somewhere up above there’s a clanking sound and the muffled voices of men shouting to each other.
“The construction guys are showing up for work,” Jack says in a panic. “Let’s get out of here.” But first he kneels down and reaches shaking fingers into Simon’s pockets. Simon groans, but doesn’t struggle. Jack pulls out a thin wallet and opens it to see a small wad of cash and a couple cards. He stuffs the wallet into his back pocket.
“Hey, what are you kids doing down there?”
Jack, Nessa, and I freeze. A man in a yellow hard hat leans out of a second floor window. I imagine the scene he sees below: Simon crumpled on the ground by the Dumpster, head oozing blood, Jack rifling through his pockets while Nessa and I stand there and watch. Accomplices. Immediately the three of us scatter, almost tripping over our feet to escape that reeking alley and the dark nameless thing that happened here.
The worker shouts something else, but we don’t stop running until we’ve hit one of the main avenues where morning people crowd the sidewalk, hoping we can blend in. We make ourselves slow down, calm down, walk in rhythm with the stream of anonymous, innocent city people.
“Where we going, Jack?” I ask, pushing back the panic rising in my throat. There’s a spatter of blood on Jack’s ear, more on the front of his T-shirt. Simon’s blood. I press my right arm hard against my side to hide