That was probably the worst part, I noticed the odds shift and I got overconfident. So instead of sprinting up to the teacher's desk, which I had brief access to, I decided to cut behind the twins and take two quick leaps on the chair portions of the student desks but it didn't work out so good and I slipped right off the second one and fell hard on my elbow. Cue would've laughed at me, even harder at the fact that I would've broken the damn bone if it wasn't for the elbow cup in my turtleneck. But as it was, I was only in minor trouble when I went crashing to the floor and slid to the back wall, hitting the brick right next to the window. Again, thanks to my padding, the wall didn't take off a few layers of skin but a pushed-out, uneven brick caught me in the shoulder pretty good.
With a tomahawk kick coming straight down on me, I did all I could. I put up both forearms to block and thanked god for those shunts when it hurt minimally. I gave a solid kick to the standing leg of the tomahawk kicker and I felt his knee buckle so I slid forward to my left, bent my knee, and brought my right heel backward in a devastating crab kick that wiped out Señor Tomahawk. He hit his head hard on the brick wall behind me while falling forward. I had just enough time to pop up and jump over a desk to get more to the middle of the room but I caught a nasty kick in the ribs as I did it. It threw me off balance but I landed well.
The twins, however, were down and bloody. That meant it was just me left. Facing the door, I had two Fists coming from behind me and the other three coming straight at me. So I went sideways and hopped up on the teacher's desk. Another smart guy decided to push the desk as hard as he could and ram it against the wall, knocking me off. Which, in theory, would've been a great idea were the desk not bolted to the floor. He should've known that. Every bathroom in the school had no mirrors, no doors on the stalls, and when you went to use them, you had to bring your own toilet paper because the rolls always disappeared. Quite simply, everything truly worth taking was bolted to the floor at Kung Fu, even the bookcases, filing cabinets, and certain chairs.
Because of that little oversight, he merely smacked hard against it and caught my boot toe and all three nails in his mouth as a reward. His jaw collapsed like an empty tissue box and at least one of the nails drove into his tongue and under it, cutting into the sluglike soft tissue and lodging there. Fuck. It took a reflex effort from both of us to rip my boot free of his mouth and as he screamed bloody murder on his way to passing out, multiple fragments of mandible bone and shattered teeth fell clean out of his face and scattered across the floor. Following soon out of the newly vacated hole was a wad of greenish chewing gum—spearmint probably—riding a wave of clumpy blood, a barrel going over a waterfall. I jumped down from the desk, grabbed the rusted-but-still-rolling teacher's chair from underneath it and slung the thing toward the exit door. It aced a big Fist right in the knees. I dodged laterally and a punch clipped the side of my head as I felt the hardness of the chalkboard rebound against my back.
And then I just reacted. Didn't even think about what I was doing, I just swept, got low, then jumped and followed through with a kick that had my whole soul behind it. And somehow, the Sand Witch connected. The kid I hit stuck flat to the floor like they were made for each other. I didn't know how it worked. I couldn't explain it and as I was trying to put it together in my mind, I shuddered hard and the room shuddered with me. Walls moved with my breathing. My ears popped. No. It couldn't be. I was good at this, shutting down, going to work, training my brain not to feel my own effort, my punches that immobilized and chipped chunks off my knuckles, split them wide open, snapped the odd carpal bone as the collision instantly transferred its force through bone, joint, muscle, and tendon, like a tornado spiraling all the way up my arm, through my shoulder only to blow itself out in my chest, the kicks that cracked bones, jammed my toes, strained tired muscles, twisted my ligaments into obscene shapes, flimsy paper things that threatened to tear at any time. I couldn't start feeling now. I wasn't at home. It wasn't dark. I wasn't safe.
Worse was I could see Cue in my mind's eye, smiling at how I did the Sand Witch, did it right and didn't fall or hurt myself too badly and then the thought slapped me: I was in the corrupted temple. I was the little girl in our madeup story. The one the Sand Witch thought was a boy but didn't eat when she found out the truth. I was the spared one.
Through the blanket-thick blur across my vision I didn't see the last few faces, only their awkward splashes of movement, like they were underwater with me. Like we all fell in a pool. So I just followed through, powered by every last decent memory I had of Cue. Powered by all my fear that I'd be left in the corrupted temple, all alone. Everyone else would either be eaten or far away. Couldn't smell or hear, could only taste Cue's old blood on the last buds on my tongue and it made me want to vomit, to get it outside of me. I could feel bile climbing up the vertical of my throat like it was a mountain slope and summitting, creeping into the back of my mouth, searching for daylight, and as repulsive as it was, that sticking stain, I didn't want it to go. I couldn't puke now. That salt-blood taste, I needed it. I hated it. It drove me. I didn't want it to leave. It was all I had left of him, the last of his life. I stood up.
Lucky for me too. Just in time to see the last Fist coming at me, I kicked her with a straight leg in the diaphragm and as she was doubling over, she caught my plastic-protected knee in her mouth. She spit chunks of teeth onto the tile and they sounded like rolling toy cars beneath her feet as she stumbled forward, looking like she was about to come up for more so I stomped on her fingers and whacked her in the side of the neck. She keeled. I wanted to kick her again but I didn't, better to save it.
I wasn't crying. Not real tears anyway. I wasn't thinking about what Jimmy and I did. No. Hard, I brushed at the water trickling down my cheeks with the coarse plastic knuckles. Dusted the shed shavings from blunt contact at the same time. Didn't mean to. But even good plastic wears like bad carpet, loses chunks along its edges with rough use, and in doing so I accidentally mixed a wet, anonymous smear of blood on my cheek like an artist's palette, like Dad's palette? I confirmed it. The tears were real, but not attached to anything. Crocodile tears, the kind the sharp-toothed reptile cries when it eats its prey, when it's swallowing. Yeah, that was it. They weren't for Cue. They weren't for Jimmy. They weren't for me. Couldn't be. Not now. The more I breathed, leaning over my knees, the more the room came into focus. Now was not the time to lose it. I had to survive.
Two opponents left, had to be, but they were nowhere to be found. The door was unlocked and open. They must've run. And that was a huge relief, because I was so sore I didn't think I could throw another decent punch for a month, my muscles were aching so bad but my adrenaline was still flowing, just had to channel it in the right direction, away from Cue, no more memories, only toward the present, to the sounds of chaos in the hall: hoarse, raging voices, metal slamming down on metal or wood or tile or wall, screaming reverberations of fighting, glass breaking, even one-note laughter. It seemed like all of Kung Fu was rolling at once, every single room in every single building. What was left of the Wolves was getting wiped out. Melinda? I had no idea where she was, in the main building somewhere. I had to get to jimmy. Had to think. Fifth period was his gym. Shit. That meant this little girl had to use whatever was left in her, to fly.