He frowns. “That’s an odd reaction, but I’ll take it.”
I’m still laughing when Park stands. My eyes follow him as he walks toward the jukebox like he’s picking a song. Then suddenly, one of the men at the table lunges for Park, and a fight breaks out. My laughter comes to a screeching halt as I realize I’m in the middle of some kind of bar fight. Except this isn’t a normal bar fight. This is fighting on steroids with complicated moves and ninja-style kicks.
What the whiplash!
One minute I was starring in my own version of a Hallmark Christmas movie, but now we’ve moved onto the Lifetime network or maybe even Netflix with this level of violence. I’m no longer TV-G.
The guy at the counter picks up a barstool and hits Park over the shoulders with it.
I gasp—or maybe it came out as a scream—as Park staggers backward.
“Don’t…worry…Lace.” His words are broken, probably like his back. “I’ve got this.”
It doesn’t look like he’s got this. He’s extremely outnumbered and possibly hurt, but somehow Park finds the strength to get back in the ring. He kicks the first guy in the stomach, elbows the next in the nose, and punches the third across the jaw. That’s when the first guy pulls out a gun and points it at him.
What the jinglebellis going on?
They wrestle back and forth as Park tries to keep the gun barrel away from him. The scuffle travels across the bar, smashing into tables. The other two men charge after them. Then suddenly, the gun goes off, shooting one of them in the chest.
“Oh, my gosh! You shot him,” I yell.
Park flips his head to me. “That wasn’t my fault.” He doesn’t waste any more time. He moves through a sequence of fight moves on the two men left, yet somehow he manages to carry on a conversation with me. “My finger didn’t pull the trigger.”
“Are you sure?” I twist in my seat, following them as they crash around the bar.
He glances at me from inside a headlock. “I can neither confirm nor deny that I was the one who shot that guy.”
That’s when more shots go off. I stay frozen in my spot in the booth. Most people would scream and freak out or hide under the table, covering their heads with their arms as if they were at a baseball game and someone just yelledHeads up!But when it comes to bullets, I don’t think a shield of forearms would do anything to save anyone so I don’t bother.
I should probably call 9-1-1. Do you call 9-1-1 in situations like this? What would I even say? My holiday fling just randomly got in a fight with three strangers, and now there’s a dead guy. That seems complicated, so I decide to do nothing. Besides, isn’t it the bartender’s job to call 9-1-1 in these kinds of scenarios? Where the heck is the bartender anyway? He’s MIA!
One of the men kicks Park in the back of the knees, and he falls to the ground, landing on his stomach.
“How you doing, Lacee?” With his cheek pressed against the floor and a man kicking him in the ribs, Park somehow manages to add a smile to his question. “You okay?”
“I’ve been better.”
“It’s almost over,” Park says as one of them drags him up to a standing position.
More gunshots ring out, and this time I duck behind the vinyl seat as they fire away. A few seconds later, Park leans over me.
“We've got to go!”
I glance behind me and see the other two men he was fighting lying on the ground. “Did you kill them?”
“Technically, they were trying to kill me.” He pulls me behind him, shielding me, then cracks open the restaurant door. A round of bullets goes off from outside in the parking lot. One blasts through the bar window, shattering the glass next to us.
“Why are there more people shooting at us?”
Park throws me a confident smile. “Don’t worry. It’s just like four or five.”
“Four or five! This is the nightmare before Christmas!”
Park’s still focused on the men outside when one of the gunshot victims springs back to life, charging us with a knife in his hand. Instinct takes over, and I kick his arm, hitting the knife out of his hands. My leg comes up into a jumping front kick, connecting with the man’s jaw. He staggers backward and falls to the ground, knocked out.
Park snaps his head to me. “What just happened?”
“I guess that one wasn’t really dead.”
