It was the most badass move I'd ever seen in my life. I actually had to push my mouth closed with a duct-taped fist before wiping my own blood off my chin with a trailing sleeve.
"Let me see those hands," Jimmy said.
"We gots to go," I repeated.
"Not if you can't punch!"
He took my bleeding fists in his secretary hands and I couldn't look down at those trespassing fingers of his. He pulled a strand of tape up to see bone underneath and I was right back in the present.
"Agh! Don't take it off, just retape me. Harder!" I demanded.
He reached into my backpack and did them up quick, like fixing a leak on plumbing.
Perfect timing too, because a group of five Fists busted right through the locker room door, slamming it hard against the brick. The first one slipped on Donnie's blood, tripped over the prone body, and then face-planted on the wall. Hello, Mr. Concussion. The other four didn't bother picking their compatriot up. They just came toward us one at a time, making sure to hop the body and avoid the blood. There was no other way: the hall was too narrow.
Jimmy pushed my backpack up onto my back and pulled the drawstrings so that it stayed tight. Then he did the unexpected. He took one big step and jumped so high into the air that the first Fist had to look up to see the sole of Jimmy's bare foot coming down into his grill, and then Jimmy kept going, he actually "walked" on the heads of the Fists, jumping and kicking down hard on the crown of the second one, then to the third one, then to the last, before dropping down easily behind them all and blocking off an escape.
Dazed and caught in the middle of a two-pronged assault, the Fists caved: the one nearest to me was still grimacing in pain and bringing his hands to his face by reflex when I pulled his left shoulder hard toward me, bending him forward as I kneed him hard in the gut. Pulling my patella out of his midsection quickly, I extended my same leg backward in a V-shaped follow-through, just to make sure my heel smashed the space on his face that his hands had vacated when I kneed him. Then he got tossed to the side.
Jimmy had already finished off #3 and #4, and #2 couldn't decide whether to swing forward or backward so he displayed a little ingenuity when he kicked for me and then arched backward with a drunken-boxing-style punch toward Jimmy but there was only one problem: I caught his foot between my forearms and Jimmy caught his fist. We didn't let him squirm too long though. Jimmy did the honors with a perfectly swift elbow to the face. Good-bye, Mr. Torched Eye Socket.
I picked my way through the mess of contorted bodies like a football player running the tire drill, knees up. It was already starting to stink in that enclosed hallway, bad. Sometime between being kicked and hitting the wall, Donnie had lost all control of his bowels. He'd dropped his load right there in his pants. Either he was dead, or his body didn't know how to hang on anymore. The brain just lost contact with the large intestine, the sphincter. Sometimes systems screw up and evacuate. It happens.
I dodged Donnie and ended up stepping on Mr. Concussion on my way through the open door and into the gridded locker room. To my right was a wall with a mirror and a scale. To my left were three C-shaped banks of lockers with a bench in the middle. Beyond them and through a portico with two sinks in it was a shower room and to the right of that was the exit to the pool. I'd never been in the boys' locker room before. It was exactly the same as the girls': gray concrete walls, rusting steel lockers, and alternating blue/light blue/white/turquoise blocks of tiny tile on the floor.
"I saw your face, jimmy." I lobbed my words over his shoulder as he ducked a nasty right hook from a female Blade that leaped out from the second bank of lockers.
Jimmy unloaded on her midsection. Five quick punches before she even knew what hit her, then he froze her. I saw the fingers of his right hand dig into her jacket above her heart and twist, almost like he was turning a doorknob while the left hand stabbed hard into a space near her stomach and did a similar movement rapid-fire to her neck. Must've been reflex. Her face even stayed the same. Just like all the others, a mixture of surprise and pain.
"What?" he asked while jumping to his right and avoiding a swinging kick from some red-haired kid. He brought his fist down hard on the outstretched leg and brought the kicker to her knees before finishing off her face with a kick of his own. I heard the kid's head make a dent in a locker and then the rattle of the reverberating latch.
"You liked it," I yelled while being pressed into my best Jackie Chan impersonation when a female Whip kicked past me and cornered me in the first locker bank. She jumped off the bench at me but I swung open the big locker and she didn't quite fall into it, more like smacked half her body on the corner of the open locker and bounced off.
Reeling, she backed up but threw a punch and I opened a locker right into her fist. DING. She kicked, but before she could extend, I opened a locker fast into her knee. PWONG. Damn, right on the grated top section. That had to hurt. I didn't wait for her to make another move. I ducked her awkward hook and drove my fist into her stomach then popped up and KO'd her on the cranium by swinging open a corner locker door right into her ear.
Nobody had locks on their lockers at Kung Fu. What was to steal? Athletic shorts masquerading as swim trunks? A moldy towel? Not even worth it. If anyone wore anything worth keeping they'd put it in a bag and set it on the wall alongside the pool to keep an eye on it during class.
"Liked what?" Jimmy asked. He was in front of me. That meant he'd cleared the room.
"Finishing Donnie," I said.
"Let's go," was his only response.