Skinpeeler full fight

He was there all right. But my hammer didn’t connect.

Because the *bleep* was above me.

I later realized he’d been hiding behind the infrared camera, clinging to the inside of the ceiling rafter I-beam. I lunged right beneath him. And never saw the blade. I felt a sharp stab down through my jacket into the meat of my trapezius. I immediately let go of my legs and fell along with it. The move saved my life. If I’d stayed standing, he would have stabbed straight down between my clavicle and first rib, into my heart from above. An expertly aimed kill strike. As it was, I fell and twisted and my butt slammed into the steel walkway and I felt the blade rip down my back.

Skinpeeler had taken his shot.

Lying on my side in a tangle of legs I swung my hammer up and over my head and felt it come down hard on something soft. Skinpeeler let out an anguished scream. I scrambled up to my knees and felt him do the same and saw the blade—a long pointed scrap of steel—coming at me fast, but my hammer was already on it’s way down again. He got me a fraction of a second before I got him, the blade piercing my gut. Then the high velocity mass of the hammer obliterated his collar bone and he went down with a scream and I heard the blade clatter across the diamond-holed steel and skip off the edge into darkness. There was a long silence before it struck the littered floor.

I had no way of knowing what other surprises Skinpeeler had in store, so without pausing I pounded my hammer into each of his knees, one after the other. Bam. Bam. Skinpeeler sat up fast, howling over his shattered patellas.

“STOP!” he screamed. “ENOUGH! ENOUGH!” I punched him hard in the face, then stood over him, brandishing my hammer, bleeding bad.

“You done trying to kill me, *bleep*?” I growled.

He sucked in a breath through his teeth, nodded. His legs were broken, and he wasn’t moving his right arm, but he’d survive.

I, on the other hand . . .

I stepped back and put a palm to my gut, felt blood pulse, then arched my shoulder blades. Pain seared down my back. I was not in a good way. I felt hot blood sheeting down my lower back, soaking into my underwear. I needed to pressurize both wounds, quickly, or I was going to bleed out.

“You got a kit?” I said, looking at Skinpeeler.

The stabbing *bleep* was still in too much pain to speak. Let him live in it. I stepped over him and patted him down quickly, eating jolts of pain across my back and gut. Skinpeeler was much smaller than I’d anticipated. A slight guy. Wiry. With narrow shoulders and waist. All bone and sinew. A climber. Which explained how I’d missed him in the I-beam. He was dressed in all black. Lightweight pants and a dry-fit hoodie along with a pair of climbing shoes and black rubber gloves I assumed improved his grip. No first-aid kit. I loosened his belt and ripped it from his waist, then stood back and slipped off my trench coat and pulled off my own belt. I looped the belts together into one long strap. My trench was nearly in half. I ripped it the rest of the way.

“Feel like giving me a hand, *bleep*?” I grunted.

He tried spitting back a reply, but the pain was too much.

“Fine,” I said. “Be that way.”

Holding the end of one sleeve, I tossed a coat-half over my shoulder and grabbed it at my waist, then fished it back-and-forth as if drying my back with a towel until I found the line of the laceration. I followed the coat with the double belt and cinched it at the buckle vertically across my sternum, squeezing the jacket into the long wound. It was less than pleasant. Then I picked up the other coat half and tied it tight around my waist, pressurising the stab wound. I’d just bought myself a little more time, but I was still in a bad spot. I turned to *bleep*. He was still writhing on the floor. I leaned down and pulled off his balaclava. He was Asian. Hmong, at a guess. Maybe twenty-five. Maybe forty. In the eerie red light of the camera I met his eyes. He looked liked the kind of guy who would happily stab me in the back, and had before.

“What’s your name?” I said. He breathed in and out.

“Che,” he said.

“How many times you done this, Che?” I said.

“A few,” he said.

“One of us has to die?” I said. He nodded.

“What happens if I leave you here?” I said.

“Alive.” His eyes went very wide and he started shaking his head fast.

“No,” he breathed. “Please no.”

...

“What did you do with him after that?” said Kiira, her voice slightly muffled behind a surgical mask.

It was six a.m. and I was lying facedown on an operating table in Maldonado’s on-site medical clinic. I hadn’t slept. Code Barnes, Maldonado’s live-in surgeon, had just finished sewing me up. Gow was at the door, ever vigilant.

“Threw him off the catwalk,” I said between gritted teeth. The local was wearing off. And I’d refused any hard stuff. Kiira balked. “You should see what he landed on,” I said between clenched teeth. “Poor *bleep* got an *bleep* full of steel.”
-Sledge vs. The Labyrinth, pg. 93-96