benches 250

Michael Carpenter was in his fifties from the neck up, with silvering hair, grey eyes, and a well-kept salt-and-pepper beard. From the neck down, he could have been twenty or thirty years younger. He was performing basic bench presses with around two hundred and fifty pounds on the bar. Michael was doing slow reps with it.
I hadn’t seen the start of his set, but I counted fourteen repetitions of the movement before he carefully set the bar back onto the rack, so he was probably doing twenties. The struts of the bench creaked a bit as the weight settled onto them.
Michael glanced up at me and smiled. He sat up, breathing heavily but in a controlled manner, and said, “Harry! Up early or late?”
“Late,” I said, and bumped fists with him. “Going light this morning?”
He grinned a bit wider. “Most mornings. It’s my shoulders. They just can’t take the heavy stuff anymore.”
I eyed the weights and said, “Yeah, you wimp.”
He laughed. “Want a turn?”
I felt awful. And angry about it. The Winter mantle didn’t care if I’d missed sleep and felt terrible. It wanted me to kill or have sex with something. Feeding it exercise was as close as I could get. Dammit. “Sure.”
He got up amiably, using an aluminum cane lying beside the bench to stand. Michael had taken multiple hits from an AK-style assault rifle out on the island a few years back. He shouldn’t have survived it. Instead, he’d come out of it with a bad hip, a bum leg, a bad eye, a severe limp, and the only non-posthumous retirement I’d ever heard about for a Knight of the Cross.
He limped gamely over to the head of the bench to spot me. I took off my duster, lay down, and started working.
“You look”—Michael paused, considering his words—“distracted.”
He was my friend. I told him what was up. He listened gravely.
“Harry, you idiot,” he said gently. “Go get some sleep.”
I glared at him and kept working.
He was one of a relatively few people in my life upon whom my glare had no effect. “You aren’t going to muscle your way through this one, and you aren’t going to be able to think your way through it in your current condition. Help your brother. Get some sleep.”
I thought about that one until the frozen chill of Winter had seeped into my arms and chest and I was breathing like a steam engine. Then I put the weight down.
“How many was that?” I asked.
“I stopped counting at forty.” Michael put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Enough, Harry. Get some rest.”
“I can’t,” I said, my voice suddenly harsh. I sat up, hard. “Somebody pushed my brother into this. Somehow. I have to stop them. I have to fight them.”


Peace Talks Chapter 17, Page 159-160