Antifa Fight

Jake had battled against superior odds many times, but usually he’d been heavily armed and hadn’t been forced to take his enemies on bare-handed.

The thing to do in a situation like that was to take an opponent’s weapon away from him. Which was what Jake did when one of the black-clad attackers swung a pipe at his head. He ducked, let the pipe go over his head, and then came up with his left forearm under the guy’s chin, forcing his head back sharply.

Not sharply enough to break the idiot’s neck, though. These were kids. Arrogant, small-minded bullies, but still kids. They didn’t deserve to die for being stupid enough to believe the pack of lies they had been fed by their teachers, the media, Hollywood, and more than half of Washington, D.C.

Jake reached up, closed his right hand around the pipe, and wrenched it free of the attacker’s grip. He twirled it, jabbed the end into the kid’s stomach, and sent him staggering backward, gagging and retching. Moving too fast to see in the shadows, Jake let his instincts and a faintly heard sound guide him. He lifted the pipe as another of the figures slashed at him with a chain. The chain wrapped around the pipe, and Jake used it to jerk the guy toward him. Jake’s left fist shot out in a straight jab that popped the cartilage in the guy’s nose. He howled in pain.

Jake pivoted, swung pipe and chain, and coiled the chain around another attacker’s ankle. A quick tug yanked the guy’s legs out from under him and dropped him hard on his back on the concrete. That knocked all the breath out of him and left him gasping for air.

A second later, somebody landed on Jake’s back and wrapped wiry arms and legs around him.

“I got him!” a female voice yelled. “Kill the fascist! Down with oppressors! Kill him!”

The pipe and chain clattered on the walk as Jake dropped them. He reached up and back, got hold of the attacker clinging to his back like a spider monkey, and tore her loose. She didn’t weigh much. He bent forward, swung her over his head, and tossed her onto the ground, being careful to make sure she didn’t land on the concrete or hit a tree. She screeched, “Rape! Rape!” as she rolled over on the grass, and he wished for a second that he hadn’t been quite so careful.

“An-ti-fa! An-ti-fa!”

The chanting made him look around. He frowned as he saw that the commotion had attracted several dozen students. His frown deepened as he realized they were cheering on the black-clad attackers.

“Wait a minute!” he shouted, knowing he was wasting his time but too angry right now to care. “I didn’t do anything wrong! I was just trying to help a woman—”

“Toxic! Toxic!”

“Racist!”

“Nazi! Nazi!”

The whole world had gone freakin’ crazy, he thought.

The black suits were on their feet again and regrouping. As they got ready to charge him, Jake flashed back for an instant to things he had seen in the past: men in black hoods spouting Arabic as they held a Western journalist and sawed his head off with a big knife; more black-hooded figures forcing a scared child with a bomb strapped to him down a street while they threatened to kill his mother if he didn’t blow up himself and some American soldiers; those same evil men or others just like them shooting at him and his buddies . . .

Then the memories went back even further to old, grainy, historical newsreel footage he had seen, row upon row of young men in spiffy uniforms and high black boots marching through the streets of a city, lifting their arms in a salute to the madman in front of whom they passed in review, on their way to wipe out anyone who didn’t think exactly the same way they did. They had disarmed the citizenry, taken over all the newspapers and radio and colleges and universities and made it a crime punishable by death to say or even think anything they disagreed with . . .

And the mass graves and the smoke rising from the crematoriums and later an even worse evil rising in the East, with more millions dead for no reason other than opposing what the party leaders said and did . . . The starvation, the booted marchers coming down the street, the knock on the door in the night followed by wails of grief and anguish . . .

And these people surrounding him now, the bullies in their black hoods and the ones who chanted for them, believed in and supported that hideous evil, all while calling him a Nazi and a fascist . . .

They kept using those words, Jake thought wryly as all that flashed through his mind, but he didn’t believe the words meant what these people thought they did.

Then they charged him again.

Jake reached down and picked up the pipe and chain. He unwrapped the chain, held it in his left hand, and clutched the pipe in his right. He was sick and tired of this. Maybe it was time he actually fought back, no matter what the consequences.

“Drop ’em! Drop those weapons, damn it!”

The shouted command came from behind him. He turned, saw the half-dozen uniformed campus cops converging on him. He said, “Wait! I’m not the one—”

“Phelps, deploy Taser!”

He heard a stun gun fire, felt the fierce jab as the first set of needles pierced his shirt and lanced into his flesh to deliver their jolt of electricity. He staggered as the shock coursed through him, but he didn’t go down.

“Carter! Taser!”

Another set of probes hit him and seemed to turn the blood in his veins and arteries into streams of fire. Agony wracked him as his muscles clamped hard as stone. He knew that he was falling but didn’t feel it when he crashed to the concrete. Consciousness fled from him.

But not before he heard the gleeful, jeering cries from the spectators.

“Down—with—Nazis! Down—with—Nazis!”

- Chapter 2