A Lonely Resurrection

moved in from the right. I snaked the hand he was trying to hold over his left wrist, trapping it, and used the grip to yank myself toward him. He was braced for me to try to pull in the opposite direction and couldn’t react in time to stop me from closing the distance. The doorstop was already out, palmed in my fist with the screw point jutting out between my middle and forefinger like the world’s nastiest signet ring.
    I popped a quick jab over his trapped left arm and up into his neck, aiming for just under the jawline. It wasn’t a power shot but it didn’t need to be; what it needed was accuracy, and that it had. The tip plunged in like a corkscrew hypodermic, and before he could pull away I twisted downward and ripped back. He yelped and leaped away, instinctively clapping his hand over the resultant tear. Blood jetted from between his fingers, and I knew I’d hit the carotid.
    He made a horrified gurgling noise and clapped his other hand over the spot, but blood continued to pour out. I swung back to my right. His friend had pulled up short, unsure of what had just happened, shocked by all the blood. I slipped the doorstop between my thumb and forefinger as though it was a knife and brandished it at him Hollywood style, my arm extended and the weapon way too far from my body.
    When he realized that I wasn’t holding a machete, he tried to grab my juicy target of an arm. I let him get my wrist, then made as though I was trying to yank free. He braced against the pressure, straightening his forward knee, his eyes and all his focus on the weapon. Using our counterbalanced pulling to brace myself, I raised my right foot off the floor and shot it into his forward knee. At the last instant he saw it coming and tried to twist away, but he had too much weight on the leg. The kick blew through his knee and he crumbled to the floor with a shriek.
    Murakami was still standing between me and the door. He looked calmly at the two fallen men, one screaming and writhing on his back, the other sitting and clutching his hands tightly to his spurting neck in a gesture of burlesque mortification. Then he looked back at me. He smiled, revealing the bridge.
    “You’re good,” he said. “You don’t look like much, but you’re good.”
    “Your friend needs a doctor,” I said, breathing hard. “If he doesn’t get proper attention he’s going to bleed out inside five minutes, maybe less.”
    He shrugged. “You think I want him as a bodyguard after this? If he wasn’t going to die, I’d kill him myself.”
    The fallen man was drenched with blood and staring at Murakami blankly. His mouth opened and closed but no sound emerged. After a moment he slumped soundlessly to his side.
    Murakami looked down at him, then back to me. He shrugged again.
    “Looks like you saved me the trouble,” he said.
    Come on, Tatsu, where the fuck are you?
    He unzipped his jacket and took a respectful step backward before shrugging it off. If he’d stayed just a little closer I would have moved on him as soon as it was down around his elbows, and he knew it.
    He looked at the doorstop, my hand bloody around it. “We’re going to do this armed?” he asked, his tone dead-man flat. “Okay.”
    He reached into a back pocket and pulled out a folded knife. He flicked a thumb stud on the handle and the blade snapped into position. From the instant, semiauto opening, I knew it was a Kershaw model, essentially a quality, street-legal switchblade, the blade about ten centimeters.
Shit.
    In my unpleasant experience, unarmed against a knife, you’ve basically got four options. Your best bet is to run like hell, if you can. Next best is to do something immediately that prevents the attack from getting started. Third is to create distance so you can deploy a longer-range weapon. Fourth is to go berserk and hope not to get fatally cut going through and over your attacker.
    I don’t care how much training you’ve had, these are your only realistic options, and none of them is particularly good except maybe the first. Unarmed techniques against the knife are a crapshoot, and against a determined attacker with a live blade, they offer piss-poor odds.
    My macho years are at least two decades behind me, and I would have been thrilled to turn and run if I could have. But in the enclosed space of the
dojo,
with a younger, and probably faster, enemy standing between me and the exit, running wasn’t really an option, and I realized that the ordinarily