Fear Nothing

claim otherwise, so I didn't know why he should be so incensed.
        “ You !” he said with a new rush of anger.
        This time he rammed the damn bat into my stomach, which winded me but not as badly as it might have if I hadn't seen it coming. Just before the blow landed, I sucked in my stomach and tightened my abdominal muscles, and because I'd already thrown up what was left of Bobby's chicken tacos, the only consequence was a hot flash of pain from my groin to my breastbone, which I would have laughed off if I'd been wearing my armored spandex superhero uniform under my street clothes.
        I pointed the Glock at him and wheezed threateningly, but he was either a man of God with no fear of death - or he was nuts. Gripping the bat with both hands to put even more power behind it, he poked it savagely at my stomach again, but I twisted to the side and dodged the blow, although unfortunately I mussed my hair on a rough-sawn rafter.
        I was nonplussed to be in a fight with a priest. The encounter seemed more absurd than frightening - though it was plenty frightening enough to make my heart race and to make me worry that I'd have to return Bobby's jeans with urine stains.
        “ You! You!” he said more angrily than ever and seemingly with more surprise, too, as though my appearance in his dusty attic were so outrageous and improbable that his astonishment would grow at an ever-accelerating rate until his brain went nova.
        He swung at me again. He would have missed this time even if I hadn't wrenched myself away from the bat. He was a priest, after all, not a Ninja assassin. He was middle-aged and overweight, too.
        The baseball bat smashed into one of the cardboard boxes with enough force to tear a hole in it and knock it out of the stack into the empty aisle beyond. Although woefully ignorant of even the basic principles of the martial arts and not gifted with the physique of a mighty warrior, the good father could not be faulted for a lack of enthusiasm.
        I couldn't imagine shooting him, but I couldn't very well allow him to club me to death. I backed away from him, toward the lamp and the mattress in the wider aisle along the south side of the attic, hoping that he would recover his senses.
        Instead, he came after me, swinging the bat from left to right, cutting the air with a whoosh , then immediately swinging it right to left, chanting “ You!” between each swing.
        His hair was disarranged and hanging over his brow, and his face appeared to be contorted as much by terror as by rage. His nostrils dilated and quivered with each stentorian breath, and spittle flew from his mouth with each explosive repetition of the pronoun that seemed to constitute his entire vocabulary.
        I was going to end up radically dead if I waited for Father Tom to recover his senses. If he even had senses left, the priest wasn't carrying them with him. They were put away somewhere, perhaps over in the church, locked up with a splinter of a saint's shinbone in the reliquary on the altar.
        As he swung at me again, I searched for that animal eyeshine I'd seen in Lewis Stevenson, because a glimpse of that uncanny glow might justify meeting violence with violence. It would mean I was battling not a priest or an ordinary man, but something with one foot in the Twilight Zone. But I couldn't see a glimmer. Perhaps Father Tom was infected with the same disease that had corrupted the police chief's mind, but if so, he didn't seem as far gone. as the cop.
        Moving backward, attention on the baseball bat, I hooked the lamp cord with my foot. Proving myself a worthy victim for an aging, overweight priest, I fell flat on my back, drumming a nice paradiddle on the floor with the back of my skull.
        The lamp fell over. Fortunately, it neither went out nor flung its light directly into my sensitive eyes.
        I shook my foot out of the entangling cord and scooted backward on my butt as Father Tom rushed in and hammered the floor with the bat.
        He missed my legs by inches, punctuating the assault with that now-familiar accusation in the second-person singular: “ You!”
        “You!” I said somewhat hysterically, casting it right back at him as I continued to scoot out of his way.
        I wondered where all these people were who supposedly revered me. I was more than ready to be revered a little, but Stevenson and Father Tom Eliot certainly