Page 139 of Antihero

This might be it. The end of Orphan X on a shit-stained Brooklyn coastline.

He turned to face Anca through the windshield. Ridiculously, the wipers were still squeaking back and forth. He waved a hand. “Go. Leave.”

She shook her head.

He said, “Drive!”

The ground trembled beneath his boots.

With dread, he turned.

Goliath was charging.

Jack came to him as a whisper, quoting the Greek poet: We don’t rise to the level of our aspirations. We fall to the level of our training.

That’s what Evan had right now. It was all he had.

He held ground, hips pointing forward. Front foot angled straight to blunt incoming low kicks, weight set on his back foot to free his lead to check or teep. Hands raised high, palms turned in, unclenched, floating to guard his face. Chin tucked to protect his windpipe. He calculated an ankle-breaking kick, a muay thai strike with his shin since his foot would likely shatter against the Goliath’s bone on impact. He charted the precise angle to the inside base of the calf to break the ankle.

None of it mattered.

Goliath plowed into him, grabbed him by the shirt and belt, picked him up, slammed him into the road, picked him up, and slammed him into the road again.

Then he hoisted him once more and hurled him across the road onto the beach.

Evan rolled and rolled some more.

There was no air to be had.

A high sharp pain in his left lung, likely muted by fentanyl. He writhed in the sand-gritty trash, mouth gaping, searching for oxygen. The visual landscape swam distortedly. There were ceramic shards, perfume bottles wrapped in hides of mud, an arm of a porcelain doll, rust-eaten dog tags, a moss-coated astronaut action figure, intact jars, old engine parts, husks of horseshoe crabs, barnacle-crusted tires, a mound of leather shoe soles that brought to mind cattle cars and black smoke. That half-buried motorboat reared up from the sand menacingly. Water dribbled onto shore, thick like oil, sucking parasitically.

Breath came, relief overpowering that stabbing at the top of his lung. He wobbled in and out of clarity, drenched in opioid warmth, blanketed in drugged exhaustion. A vision came on, the beach as a sewage hellscape, the worst of everything heaved up from the bottom of humanity.

He could scarcely believe he was on the same spot of earth where Anca had blinked up at him from the passenger seat, the air suffused with a beatific light.

From the road, Goliath stared at him, unhurried.

The car was still there, just to his side. Anca had not driven off.

The giant turned to stare at her through the windshield.

Even from this distance, even through the rain, Evan saw her recoil.

He checked his metronome.

A minute and a half left if he was lucky.

“Hey!” he shouted, his voice warped, tongue sluggish. He groped the earth around him, hands fumbling across bottles and shards, somehow managing to pull himself upright. “Come on.”

That boulder head tilted. Massive eyes locked on him, so dark they looked pupilless.

Leisurely, Goliath ambled across the road toward the beach, massive arms penduluming at his sides. His leg buckled slightly, the only concession to the two heat-treated copper rounds he’d absorbed. He was deliberate, his movements unwieldly, which would have been a fighting advantage for Evan were fentanyl not leaching through his central nervous system.

Goliath’s enormous shoes crunched forward, popping doll heads and bottles. Nearing, he lunged. Evan managed to jerk to the side, barely dodging the freight-train bulk and jabbing a heel to tangle up the big man’s treads.

Goliath tumbled, the ship prow of his chest harrowing the earth, shoving up ridges on either side. With his full weight, Evan drove his knee down onto the spot between his shoulder blades, hoping to knock him windless. When Goliath bucked, it felt like riding a rhinoceros. He spun and Evan spun with him, nearly crushed beneath the steamroller drum of his torso. Evan managed to skirt free. They wound up feet to head, though Evan’s span reached neither the man’s feet nor his head. Goliath seized his ankles, jerking him along the sand, gathering him up toward his chest, sausage fingers groping. Evan grabbed him through the crotch, trying to hold position, pounding away with a hammer fist to the gunshot wound on the hip. The Goliath grunted, losing his grip.

Evan squirmed free. Goliath clawed after him, and they scrabbled through the wasteland sludge. Goliath kept coming and Evan’s palms scraped through the muck and the trash and Goliath kept coming, he kept coming.