Terminus: A Novella of the Apocalypse (2 page)

Yet, he could not convince himself of this fallacy any more than I could.  None of us are able to believe any longer, and most of us have the good taste and proper sense of decorum to keep our mouths shut about such childish daydreams and infantile fairy tales.

Only The Priest remains foolish enough to spout such idiocy.  I have determined to stop him before he can improve the damage Terminus has wrought across the globe.

Perhaps seven minutes into the song and dance routine, I begin to notice a decided droop in The Priest’s hands and knees.  Though he continues to chase me, occasionally landing blows against my upper body and head while defending the same, his progress comes more sluggishly while his strikes are no longer crisp and sharp.  He has burned through the glycogen stores in his larger muscles.

So I advance to the next phase of my strategy.  I began to earnestly work him with my fists.  Here, I wish I could claim the grace and style of an out-boxer, or the power and speed of a boxer-puncher, but I am more of a swarmer.  I rely on my incredible stamina and the stunning speed of my hands.  I offer three blows to every single attempted strike by The Priest.  When I land them all, they rattle the bigger man’s head, but individually they lack the power to stretch him across the canvas.  Meanwhile, I am very, very careful to avoid the full-contact touch of The Priest’s infinitely more powerful punches.  Though I can dance inside his considerable reach and cut his face repeatedly while he struggles to extend and retract a single assault, I also know how easily he can knock me out with just one well-formed strike.  I take several of these intimidating punches as glancing blows across my cheeks, beneath my chin, and across the top of my bald skull, and they skip off my shoulders and torso, although my incessant maneuvering, ducking, dodging, and weaving keeps him off-balance, successfully misdirecting all of his intended contact through this phase of the contest.

More often as his arms tire, The Priest resorts to his legs.  When I dance in close to rabbit-punch his chin with a lightning series of vicious jabs, he brings up a knee to my torso.  These are bruising and punishing blows, and I feel them.  More than once they force me back to the outer fringes of the cage, where I dance backwards in wide circles to both tax him and allow my traumatized body to recover from his abuse.

Once the pain yields to a disturbingly warm glow of relief that borders on pleasure, I move hard forward to his center, leading with jabs to distract from the ultimate payload of a devastating uppercut or hook from either hand.  Ten minutes into the match, I land a massive right hook to the tip of The Priest’s chin that spins his head, twists his torso, and rotates his entire body onto the canvas.

When he hits the mat on all fours, his head hanging low, I recover the arc of my last punch, recoup my stance, and then begin to lean forward into a flurry of downward strikes that I intend to disconnect the bigger man’s skull from the top of his spine.  In the final instant of my approach, however, I catch a sidelong glance from The Priest’s wily left eye.  The glint of awareness in it startles me, as I realize I have not tagged him as directly as I had hoped.  He has faked the twist and spin.

With only centimeters of movement to spare, I understand how he has splayed his arms and legs like a crab, inviting me to mount him from above so he can spin beneath me, lock my waist with his legs and my shoulders with his arms.  Should I fall into this trap, he would then quickly rollover on top of me, pin me down, and then work his knees up beneath his body until they pressed my upper arms to the canvas.  Then he would commence with a series of hammer blows and elbow strikes that would cut my face to ribbons, ending only after I gargled my last tortured breath.

Instead of leaning forward into the downward strikes, then, I shift my stance, lean backward, lift my right leg high until my thigh touches my chest, and then I drive down hard into reverse aspect of the other man’s left knee.  Splayed crablike and wide on all fours as he is, he cannot recover in time to defend himself and, though he shifts the exposed limb to some degree, he absorbs nearly the complete force of my kick through the tendons and ligaments of that vulnerable joint.  The Priest clenches his teeth and groans for the pain of the blow, and he rolls left to take his weight off that leg.

Tucking his left arm into his torso and pushing off with his right hand and foot, I expect a slow maneuver that would expose his belly to another jab of my left heel.  Here, the big man surprises me with the power and speed of his recovering movement, however, and he spins through it so quickly I have no time to recover and plant my right leg and raise my left knee.  Thus, he catches me mid-stride with a sweep of his own that takes me off the canvas, rolls my legs underneath me, and collapses my upper body to my right.

Instinctively, I drop my right hand while flailing my left arm for balance.  As I struggle to recover from the fall, from the corner of my eye I watch incredulously as The Priest plants his elbows, arches his back, flexes his pelvis, and then pushes off the sweat-strewn canvas, spring-boarding himself forward onto his feet again like a spent bow.  Though he hobbles for the damage done to his knee, again the bigger man’s endurance surprises me, as he finds his balance and his poise, easily positioning himself for his next assault before I have even begun to recover from his unexpected sweep.

Instantly, I realize he next intends to charge me low, scoop me in his arms, lift my body high, and then slam me down at his feet.  From there, he will engage his preferred style of wrestling and I expect a quick end to the contest, since I correctly judge he is still empowered by the yet considerable stores of sugar coursing through his veins.

To defeat his intended assault, rather than immediately attempt to find my feet after the first sideways somersault, I instead extend my tumble once, then twice, until I bounce off the flexible mesh of the cage wall, using it like a trampoline to vault back toward the center of the ring.  There, using all four limbs and the flexion of my torso, I find my feet again, round off on my momentarily confused opponent, and end this engagement with another sharp strike of my right heel to the back of the other man’s left knee.

This time I hear something pop.  The Priest screams, this a short, sharp bark of agony.

When he recovers his own motion to once more confront me face-to-face, he is obviously hobbled.  Though the strike has not taken the joint apart as I intended, I recognize a significant reduction in the man’s range of motion and application of strength from that quarter.  While his physical endurance surprises me, I think I have at least removed the threat of his left leg for the time being.  Minus one limb, the much larger man has now been reduced to an evenly matched combatant, as compared to my slighter, leaner and wirier frame.

Again, we resume the dancing contest, and I lead him about the cage while both landing and defending a largely insignificant series of jabs, uppercuts, knee strikes and front kicks.  Several more minutes pass, and then, with the remaining stamina attributable to stores of sugar in his veins, The Priest initiates a protracted assault led by his arms and legs, which he intends to drive me against the cage mesh, pin me there, somehow work his hands and arms through my defenses to find a clinch hold against my upper body or upper limbs, and then drag me down to the mat and into a wrestling contest.

He succeeds in momentarily securing an excruciating pressure lock on my upper left thigh when he bends low in a failed attempt to engage an improvised leg lock from a rather awkward inverted position, but the unbelievable pain of this tactic works against its protracted success.  It hurts so badly that my entire body flexes savagely, every muscle coming to bear against my opponent such that I lash out instinctively with a series of blows and movements that I cannot describe since I have not consciously engaged them.  The resultant exchange sees me pop vertically out of his arms like a slippery fish squeezed between two hands.  On an acrobatic back flip, roll and bounce, I find my feet behind him once more.

When he spins to face me and advances again, he does so with a distinct sag and slouch of his frame, and I know he has exhausted his secondary supply of physiological energy.  Though I have long ago burned through my muscle-bound glycogen, the body’s most readily available reserves of power, I still have a comfortable margin of blood sugar left, thanks to my nearly superhuman stamina.  This is, in fact, my ace-in-the-hole in any given fight.

As his body struggles to engage its fat-burning systems to convert the lipid in his tissues to blood sugar and then energy, I lay into my opponent with a will.  Like a cyclone of legs, knees, arms, elbows, fists and feet, I work him back and forth across the cage, against its mesh barricades and off again, down to the mat and up again, and then repeat this routine of assaults relentlessly.

Once more, The Priest’s incredible durability shocks me.  On the verge of exhausting my own supplies of blood sugar and confronted with the looming likelihood that his own body has begun burning reserves of fat, just at the point where the light of renewed vitality begins to sparkle within his mean, deeply set eyes, he makes a tactical error and I land a winning jab at the dimpled tip of the bigger man’s chin.

This powerful and precise strike drives The Priest’s lower jaw bone backward into its two-sided joint, flexing the tendons attaching it to the skull and, in turn, driving the skull backwards across its base and the top of the spine.  There, this savage movement jars The Priest’s vulnerable cerebrum, that double-golf-ball mass of nerves and brain cells empowering every aspect of my opponent’s body.  I watch the ripples of my strike wash back and forth through the man’s stunned face, across his scalp to the rear of his head, and then back again, even as that sparkle of vital light flares and then extinguishes deep within his shocked gaze.  Limp, lax, and lifeless, his limbs flail loosely, as though his bones are fashioned of rubber and his flesh cast in gelatin.

Then his eyes roll back, his mouth drops open, and The Priest collapses to the deck like a marionette with cut cords.  Nearing exhaustion, weak and trembling, I then rock backwards on my heels, tottering sickly from side-to-side for several interminable seconds while the crowd leaps to its collective feet demanding The Priest’s violent death.  Uninspired by their bloodthirsty demands, but driven by the threat of leaving a vanquished enemy alive behind me, I stumble forward to stand over my fallen opponent, who lies sprawled on his back, arms and legs tossed wide.  Morbidly triumphant yet unmoved to glee or satisfaction and without smiling, I gaze down into the dazed confusion of his bulging eyes.

Weakly, the movements of his arms, hands and fingers uncoordinated but improving from moment to moment as the big man struggles to recover, The Priest desperately attempts to grapple my lower legs and pull me down on top of him.  Before that sinister glimmer of vitality can return to the big man’s rolling eyes, I lift force into my shoulders with a massive inhalation and then, through my spine, let the full weight of my body descend into my right knee.

As forcefully as I can manage, I drop decisively, driving this knobby joint directly into the soft spot between the man’s chin and his heaving chest.  I feel something stiff and plastic crush beneath my kneecap, and then The Priest’s breath comes rasping and gargling.  Blood wells up from the corners of his lips to pour across his cheeks and into his ears.

Rolling from side to side, once I rise to let him die, the big man struggles to catch his breath, which he can never do again given the smashed and mangled state of his larynx.  Choking on his own blood and suffocated by his own collapsed windpipe, the false prophet of that tumble-down cathedral gargles one last time.  The he expires at my feet.

Unlike pre-Terminus crowds, the spectators of that contest do not dance and chant gleefully before the spectacle of the much-hated man’s murder.  Instead, they all fall silent, exchange a series of guilty, mournful glances, and then they simply sidle along the pews, turn into the aisles, waddle through the fallen cathedral’s massive doors and disappear into the gloomy evening of a dying city.

For several long minutes, I linger over my dispatched foe, sweat dripping off my brow and chin to splatter his lifeless face, and I ponder the flat emptiness of The Priest’s glazed, dead eyes.  Though all appearance of animation has expired within them, I think they continue to see somehow.  Perhaps better than before.  Those dulled orbs fix, unfocused, on something poised high over my head, something I cannot see.  Something of endless interest and unshakeable importance.  I stare down at him staring up past my head, and I wonder what they see, for it is the same absent stare I have seen so many times in the past.  It is the same vacant interest I have witnessed in the eyes of countless dead… the same mortally expired certainty I once recognized in the lifeless observation of my three beloved children and my once cherished wife.

What did they see up there?  Hopelessly, I tilt my torso backward, rotate my neck to its reverse, lift my chin and tip my head to fix my eyes on the cathedral’s artfully decorated ceiling, finding nothing there of genuine interest.

Softly, my head upturned this way and my eyes searching the unseen heavens, I whisper, “Where were you?”

As ever, no answer to this forlorn inquiry returns to me.  Never has.  Never will.

Suddenly angry once more, I lower my gaze, retract my right foot, and savagely kick The Priest in his ribs.  “Fool!” I hiss.

Then I turn to climb out of the cage, find my clothing, and leave that hateful, lie-filled place.  Once dressed and returned to the street, I stop at the curb to examine that sprawling structure with its gilt signage, concrete buttresses, stained-glass windows, and intricately carved wordwork.  I think it should not stand so high after the world has fallen so low.  No monument to such heinous deception and undeliverable promises should.