12.

MY FRIEND, MY FRIEND, HE’S GOT A KNIFE

We’re looking for food. This quest occupies every waking moment. The landscape has grown continuously quieter, more desolate. Months have gone by, trickling almost unnoticed through our fingers.

Against my better judgment, I’ve led us into a small town. We watched it for half a day, stomachs rumbling, and I didn’t see any movement. Finally, our hunger drove us in.

The broken buildings lean in on each other, bird shit stains the concrete, crabgrass runs in rivulets through the pavement. It’s quiet.

Glass crunches underneath our boots, and I glance over my shoulder at my wife, who looks wary. It’s quiet.

Too quiet.

A high-pitched whistle, almost like a bird’s, chee-chee-chee, echoes off the canyons of concrete, winds away down the alleys. That’s no bird, that’s a warning—they are calling each other. The call comes again, from another place—they’ve spotted us.

I pause, listening, hearing the thud of my heart, the breathing of my son, who’s riding in my backpack. He’s learned to be quiet. He’s almost too big for the backpack, but he’s still only four—he can’t hike hard all day. He does half days, and he doesn’t complain.

The machete is heavy in my hand, and the grip is uncomfortable. I hear a scrape on rock somewhere behind us—we’re boxed in, a classic ambush. I should never have brought us this way, but it’s too late now.

With muted footfalls, the wraiths slip out of their holes. There are five of them, wrapped in black rags, with red-rimmed eyes, humanity long fled. It’s been less than a year since the world collapsed; can they really have fallen so far, so fast? What happened here? What happened to our brotherhood of men?

But the answer burns in their eyes: hunger is the only emotion left in those skeletal faces. My machete stands between us and a gruesome fate. They fan out in front of me, tire irons and shanks in their fists, weapons that have seen horrid use.

A sinking, bitter taste floods my mouth, and my mind races—how do I keep myself from getting flanked? Who do I hit first?

Vancouver, Ca

—I’ve spent a lot of time training for mixed martial arts: boxing and kickboxing, wrestling and Brazilian jujitsu. I’m comfortable in a boxing ring, getting punched in the face. I can relax wrestling at full speed with a bigger, stronger guy, and I can (mostly) avoid getting smashed. MMA is a competition-tested amalgam of fighting styles, and I am about as well trained as an amateur is going to get.

Preparing for the apocalypse has made me aware of the limitations of MMA: I’m practicing sport-fighting, under controlled circumstances, with a referee or a coach watching, and I’m always ready for it. Training in the gym, we know what’s coming. Nothing springs out of the shadows before you’ve had your morning coffee or at the end of a long night. In the ring, nobody has a friend behind you with a two-by-four. It’s not the real world.

Steve Rodriguez, a former police sniper, told me that in the real world, “there will always be more than one, and there will always be weapons involved.” That simple sentence haunted me. Steve also introduced me to the twenty-one-foot rule.

In 1983, a cop in Vegas named Dennis Tueller wrote an article called “How Close Is Too Close?” for SWAT magazine. He had actually timed an “attacker” rushing a police officer from different distances, forcing the officer to draw his gun and fire. Tueller made a startling discovery: he found that when the attacker started his rush from less than twenty-one feet away from the officer, the attacker got there before the officer could fire. The average time for an officer to draw and shoot was 1.5 seconds, which was usually enough time for the attacker to cover twenty-one feet and hit the officer. All the stress factors—skyrocketing heart rate, flood of adrenaline—made it difficult for the police officers to act in time. Something like 12 percent managed it, according to the article. Tueller was initially concerned with legalities—that a shot from twenty feet would probably not be considered self-defense, which could mean prison.

Here’s the shocking truth: up close, a knife is better than a gun. I had heard policemen say that but never quite believed it. What would I rather have in a fight? Please. But when you factor in the “combat paradox,” then it starts to make sense. Stress only helps gross motor skills—stab, slash, or bash. Stress hurts the finer motor skills, like drawing, aiming, and firing a pistol. Safeties? Jams? Reloads? All fine motor. The gun requires distance. Up close, it’s all about the knife. The knife requires pure gross motor skills, so you won’t forget how to use it. It’s effective when you’re on autopilot.

Almost every postapocalyptic film has the hero fighting his way through hordes of bad guys, zombies, or mutants with a knife or a sword. I should really be able to do that, for when the bullets run out.

Eskrima, arnis, and kali are all terms for martial arts from the Philippines. Eskrima involves fighting with sticks, which makes it a good skill to learn in preparation for Armageddon. First of all, the stick can be exchanged for almost anything—a knife, a machete, a tire iron, a coffee mug, or just a tree branch. The improvisational aspect fit into my burgeoning survival philosophy.

Historically, the strategic value of the Philippines has led to constant invasion from other countries with different technologies and warfare styles, and so the art of eskrima was and is constantly evolving. The Chinese, the Malays, and the Japanese came through, and then the locals faced the Spanish rapier and the Portuguese cutlass. In Palau, the name for Filipinos is “people of the knife.”

The Philippines were under Spanish colonial rule for more than three hundred years. Think about that—for longer than the United States has existed, Filipinos were a subjugated people. This had a major effect on eskrima and the mentality of eskrimadors. Eskrima was forced underground, and that secrecy permeates the art to this day. In the southern islands, the savage Moros resisted the Spanish successfully for the duration of the colonial occupation.

The Moros are Muslim Filipino tribesmen who fought with knives and bolos (broad, leaf-shaped swords). Their terrible proficiency shocked Americans (who had bought the islands—and their problems—from the Spanish) during the Philippine-American War of 1899–1902. Vic Hurley wrote in 1936 that “the Moro was a soldier, sailor, fisherman, pirate, slave-trader, pearl-diver, navigator; he was a composite portrait of competent savage. Piracy was his profession. Murder and rapine were his lighter amusement. The history of the Moros is a history of continuous warfare. War was relaxation. To die was an earned privilege.” Maybe Hurley was laying it on a trifle thick, but you get the idea.

The marines fighting in the close-packed Philippine jungle would empty a .38 into a charging Moro and still get beheaded. This led directly to the implementation of the “1911” .45, because the soldiers needed knockdown power in a handgun, something that could blast the Moro off their feet. Or so goes the myth.

I wandered through the eskrima world in Los Angeles and Vancouver until I found my way to a guy named Mark Mikita, who turned out to be a revelation.

I first attended his class in Vancouver, in an open room like a traditional ballet studio, thronged by a large group of students, mostly stuntmen and -women. Mark is tall, lean, rangy, with a big grin and pale blue eyes. His hand movements are not so much quick as smooth and immediate: he knows exactly where to be. When he moves with a knife, he is infinitely dangerous.

He lectured like a college professor, a good one—encyclopedic, animated, and exhilarated by the subject. “This is martial arts,” he said. “Martial means war. This isn’t about competition. It’s about winning. I arrange the circumstances, no matter what they might be. Real martial arts, if we’re enemies, I don’t challenge you to a duel with a stick and knife (the classic eskrima pairing of weapons). Real martial arts is me following you, unseen, for days, and then sniping you from a roof across from your house when you come out the front door. That’s martial arts.”

Here’s my guy, I thought.

“There’s this idea that people are really fast,” said Mark, his voice dripping contempt. “I do this all the time, I line up everyone at the seminar with their hands against their thighs. When I snap, they clap. As soon as they figure out what’s happening, it sounds like one person clapping. Young guys, old women, everyone is essentially the same speed. It’s not about speed, it’s about being sooner. It’s about shortening the distance, about not telegraphing anything—controlling what the other guy perceives. Allow me to arrange the race, and I’ll beat Usain Bolt in a footrace—I make him run fifty yards, and I run ten feet. Martial arts is about arranging a short race. Professional boxers are extremely hard to perceive. They don’t telegraph their punches, they’re very sudden, so when you spar them it feels fast.”

We started drilling with hard plastic knives. Mark would often pause to lecture on what the knife should be doing—and it literally turned my stomach. It was disgusting. It was horrific. This was by far the darkest place I’d been on this journey.

“You don’t just slice,” he said. “The old Filipino guys, the guys who had fought in intertribal warfare, they train to cut and slice along the arm, to lay whole sheets of flesh off. If your opponent looks down at his arm and sees his bones and muscles exposed, a flap of skin hanging to his knees, he’s no longer thinking about you at all. You have turned his mind inward.”

I shuddered.

“The knife is a piranha under the water. Take a UFC champion like Chuck Liddell and cut off half his face, and he’s gonna struggle to stay focused.”

I felt queasy. Was this really where I wanted to go?

“Kicking somebody’s ass, that’s about humiliation. In a fistfight in a bar, people target the face, the seat of personality. You bloody them up, but it’s about dominance. There’s an ancient basic survival component to this—if there’s six guys in my tribe, it takes all six of us to hunt a mammoth. If we fight and I cripple you, now I’ve jeopardized everyone’s survival. So there’s an evolutionary part of not really hurting someone in the way we are capable of.

“There’s all the social conditioning we go through as children—don’t hurt anybody, play fair. But in warfare, you don’t do that. With the knife, I slash and lay open your face and you reach up and feel your teeth, you can’t concentrate anymore. And I’m still going. The knife is a buzzsaw, tearing you up. That’s why the knife is infinitely superior in a close combat situation, because there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

“Do you have nightmares?” I interjected.

“I sleep like a baby,” Mark said, and grinned. “But students sometimes do have nightmares from this stuff. It’s real and it’s horrible, horrible stuff.”

As Mark talked and drilled us, I started to see the carnage that could come from the knife—tendons snipped, hands and fingers sliced, thumbs lopped off, the cold steel seeking arteries, transecting muscles and doing irreparable harm.

I could suddenly see that if I had a knife, it would nearly negate an opponent’s ground game (his wrestling). With a sharp knife in my hand, I could easily roll with a jiu-jitsu black belt (a guy who would normally just toy with me) and carve him to pieces. All that boxing I had done, all that MMA training—it wasn’t useless, but the knife came along and changed it in a terrifying way.

“Let’s go back to the stick,” Mark said, and swung a stick forehand at me. “This is a priori knowledge: you’re born knowing how to do this. Put a stick in anyone’s hand, a knife, a sword, and they’ll swing it like this.”

Mark had me stand at what he called single-tempo distance, where I was out of range and it would take one action—a step—to get into range. The term comes from fencing; Mark studied with Edwin Richards, an Olympian in 1964 and one of the prominent fencing coaches in the United States. In one international tournament, Richards won all three weapons categories, epee, foil, and saber—one of the last fencers to achieve this feat. Mark studied with Richards for fifteen years. Fine distinctions of range become part of the training when weapons are involved. Mark held up a Thai pad for me to strike. “Now, come forward and brain me,” he said. “Just come and hit.”

I stepped across the floor and smashed my stick down onto the pad, which made a satisfying blam.

“Did everybody see that?” Mark asked, smiling. Many of his students nodded, murmuring. “That’s the classic error.”

He had another new student do the same thing, and apparently got the same result. “Did you see it?” he asked me, grinning ear to ear.

“The classic error is when you bridge the distance without the strike coming. You step forward and the weapon goes back, to build power for the swing. Essentially, for that split second you’re leading with your face.”

Mark demonstrated the difference. He stepped forward and his arm went back, chambering the strike, then he hit the pad. But his face and head were traveling forward and exposed for a moment as he came into range, before his blow was on the way.

“Now, the solution is to start your strike before you come into range—so that as you bridge the distance, you lead with firepower.”

And now Mark overemphasized the correct way. He stood still, prepared the strike, and then stepped forward as the strike came down. And now you couldn’t take advantage of his being open, because when he was open he was still out of range. When he came into range, the blow was already coming at you and you had to deal with it.

We drilled with padded sticks, and it was fascinating how quickly my reaction time began to tighten up and my focus became sharper. It wasn’t that I was moving fast, I was just seeing deeper into the future of my opponent’s action and acting in time. Usually, I had to slow myself down and actually wait for him to be in range.

I knew that this drill was a way for Mark to reach people like me, people with a lot of martial arts experience who think they know what they’re doing. It’s a way for him to say, Look, there are layers within layers to the stuff. You think you understand, but there are always deeper places to go.

—

In a stroke of luck, Mark eventually moved back to Los Angeles and opened a school about ten minutes from my house. Again, it resembled a dance studio, with full-length mirrors and even stretching bars. It was a macabre dance studio, though, with weapons of every kind hanging on the walls—a real jousting lance, various broadswords, rapiers, long blades, and countless shorter knives. He had rubber guns in ten different models, from a .45 to an AK-47; Western and samurai suits of armor. A real skull and a model of the spine hung on the walls, along with two huge anatomy posters detailing the muscular and circulatory systems. Mark could talk like a doctor about anatomy, about the horrific vulnerability of a human body to his thirsty blade.

I asked Mark what he thought of the twenty-foot rule, and he smiled. “Well, I know you’ve already read about the stress, and the likelihood of missing the shot, but there’s even more to it than that. If I can close the distance, then I can do more damage with the knife in the same amount of time. We’re standing face to face, you shoot and I cut. You have a hydrostatic shockwave in front of the bullet, and often that wave pushes things aside. Things like veins and arteries are designed to flex. The knife transects everything, it’s all bleeding out. I can open up an eight-inch-deep, fourteen-inch-wide wound with this four-inch knife. I’ll scribe your spine from the front.” The knife is intimate—you have to be close, and at close range, the knife doesn’t screw up, doesn’t run out of ammo, can’t jam.

One of the great advantages to sparring, in boxing, and “rolling,” in jiu-jitsu, is the traditional concept of randori, the ability to fight without permanently or seriously injuring each other. It’s different when someone is actually trying to hurt you. With weapons, the sense of urgency climbs off the chart. I could feel myself tightening up, becoming more desperate. I became hyperaggressive in my counteroffense—because I might have to be to survive. Weapons really change everything. Mark liked to joke that the Ultimate Fighting Championship should be called the Penultimate Fighting Championship. I started to realize that MMA, this thing that I had thought of as the be-all and end-all of hand-to-hand combat, was really just another form of sparring.

Mark is an intensely cerebral guy, and his study has been intelligent. I felt lucky to have found him, because at fifty, Mark seemed to me to be entering into some kind of profound, deeper mastery. He was still incredibly fit, but it was clear from old photos and the way he talked that he had been a superlative athlete in his world. Now his mind was expanding. He read, he studied, he pondered and examined his art like a scientist.

Mark told me that of all his teachers, his own father had made the biggest impression. “He questioned everything. He really forced us to think for ourselves. Even as kids, we learned the alphabet the regular way, and then out of order”—Mark recited the out-of-order alphabet he’d learned so long ago—“just because it was arbitrary and he wanted to prove that to us. So we’d do that in school to annoy teachers.” He laughed. I’ll bet that worked.

Mark grew up in a military family. His father was in the army for five years and the air force for twenty-five. “My dad had fought in the Philippines during World War II. He was there with MacArthur in 1944, and he had seen the Filipino guerillas. He saw them volunteer to walk point for the army and hunt the Japanese in the mountains, and he saw how skilled they were with bolos and sticks. They would get into scrapes with the marines, and these little guys would kick the shit out of the big marines. So he led me in that direction, and in 1971 I found my first eskrima teacher, a Filipino gunnery sergeant named Santos.

“I could see right away that this was an art based on common sense. There’s no stylistic mumbo jumbo—here comes a guy with a weapon to kill you, and here are some ways to avoid that. ‘Whatever works,’ he would say. We’d be training and I’d ask him should I be left foot forward or right foot forward? And he would say ‘Sure,’ which was frustrating. I wanted to know which was better. Santos was always saying ‘This is good,’ and later eskrima teachers would say the same—make it work. You don’t have to get back to ‘ready’ position, and needing to might get you killed.

“People will talk about knife-fighting skills, and they’ll get hung up on figure-eight movements, patterns—just techniques. If you really want to talk about knife fighting, it all comes down to anatomy. I don’t have to be strong, I just have to be accurate and know where the targets are, and be able to get at them. I don’t waste time plowing through meat, I go to major arteries and I shut him down.”

He demonstrated a point by taking his real skull off the wall (Mark had studied real cadavers with a student of his who was a neurosurgeon). “The skull has so many vulnerabilities,” he said. “The occiput, supraorbital plates, the foramen magnum. The spinal cord is exposed right here, so I put you into forward flexion and slide my blade down that part of the skull and I cut right through the spinal cord; it turns off the lungs, the whole diaphragm. Your knees would collapse, your heart will probably stop. I find the spinous process and the slide the knife through. It takes no strength, but I do need a very sharp knife. And the willingness to use it.

“In a close-quarters fight with weapons, you don’t have a lot of time; there’s a very limited window to get business done. You go after the periphery, and that starts the process. You pull defenses away and then start seeking with the scalpel. There are specific targets: subclavian arteries, the aortic arch, the femoral artery, the popliteal artery—whenever arteries and veins have to go around joints, they are forced close to the surface. It takes accuracy. You need to switch from hack-and-slash to surgery. You’ve got a tool that is totally destructive to everything. You put your hand up and I cut your fingertips off, and as you pull back I follow—right to the carotids, an extraordinary, superb target. Twelve point five percent of your blood volume runs through each one. In eight pumps of your heart, all the blood in your body is gone through a cut carotid in a six-foot geyser of blood.”

He shook his head. “You can see why it’s often a lose-lose situation with a knife. A knife fight should never be competitive. If he has a knife, and you pull a knife, you both should run away. If we’re both equally skilled, we’re both dead.”

Mark continued, “Numbers get thrown around, that a weapon is present in seventy to ninety percent of street altercations, but most martial arts schools don’t train much with weapons because it’s really hard to deal with. The best way to deal with a knife attack? Don’t put anything out there, run away. If you can get your shoe on your hand, or take your shirt off and wrap it around your arm to block with, that’s fine . . . but just run.”

He paused, and turned to me for emphasis. “Listen, if you train every day with me for five years, and somebody pulls a knife on you and you run? Then I’ve succeeded.”

—

I started to come to understand the stakes and the dangers, and I kept training—because there might come that moment when I couldn’t run. Mark and I talked at length about “the interview,” where you assess an opponent, he assesses you, and you both lie to each other like crazy. You bait; you try to get a reaction.

“We know well you can’t afford to trade, with weapons. And this is even worse in a grid-down scenario, there’s no help coming, no emergency room surgeons. So the most important thing to control is the distance. Whoever masters the distance will win the fight. The dangers of the weapon mean you almost never, ever commit to something—the lunge is suicide. You would commit to the big crushing blow only when the enemy is defenseless and stunned. You target the hands. Eskrimadors call it taking the fangs from the snake.”

Another reason why eskrima is a great self-defense art is that you can be be completely nonlethal. If a guy comes at you with a knife and you break both his hands with your stick, he’s probably going to leave you alone. And also, he’ll live.

“But you have to retreat and assess. This is critical: maybe you slashed his wrist but hit his watch! So in a real fight, in a real doomsday-type scenario, I’d use the distance—which gives me time—and take tiny clips, here and there. I start taking bites out of his periphery. If he’s bleeding from a dozen little cuts, I keep him moving, make him chase me, and now he’s pumping blood out and things get bad for him. Imagine the worst cut you’ve ever had in the kitchen. If you’ve got a few of those on your belly, on your neck? Your mortality is leaking out. All those thoughts about you kicking my ass are gone. I’m attacking your anatomy, but also your psychology.”

We trained in class to work on that “interview” process, sparring with padded sticks. We went after hands and stalked each other through tiny shifts in distance. When am I in range? Can I draw him in? Can I cover distance without him realizing it? The speed, focus, and clarity that you have to bring are exhausting.

I tried to imagine a real encounter—maybe in a burned-out building when I was trapped and trying to protect my family. A machete against another guy with a machete. Or a tire iron. I wondered if I could do it.

One day, a top student of Mark’s and I sparred with the padded sticks for hours. We really went at it—trying to cover the distance, trying to protect ourselves while at the same time seizing the opponent’s stick, looking for openings, blasting feints at each other’s hands.

Patterns quickly emerged and repeated. We danced around, out of range, or we crashed: there wasn’t much in between. That space in between, where all the damage gets done, was where you might only have a split second, and that’s where the fight would probably get decided. You didn’t have to take his stick, just kill it for a beat, entangle it for a split second. If he grabbed me, I could use that—his hand on my wrist could be seen as me grabbing him, too. As we began to tire, we crashed more and more often, and more clumsily.

I was bigger and had a longer reach than Mark’s student, and maybe I was in better shape, but he had a lot more experience with this drill. We went back and forth, and the tension built. Even with padded sticks, you could still get hurt, so we were going “light touch” to the head. Then he caught me, bam, on the side of the head, a little too hard.

Now, in MMA gyms where I come from, you often spar as hard as the other guy wants. If he wants to go light—and try new techniques, and mess around—I’ll go light. If he wants to bang, I’ll bang him back. There’s a little bit of the tough-guy attitude there, but human nature is what it is, and if somebody hits you, you hit back. I crashed, caught his stick, and, as he reached to try to free it up, cracked him on the head, blam! Definitely in violation of the light-touch rule.

Mark broke us up. He’d been watching, letting us ride the line of going too hard—because it was good place to train, a place for us to push each other.

“Did you see what happened when you got mad?” Mark asked. “You came straight to him. You were aggressive but also really vulnerable, because you were so hot to pay him back. You put yourself right in harm’s way, there. If we’re sparring, and I have a great counter to a side kick? If I really, really want you to come at me with a side kick, what do I do? I hit you with a side kick. And sure enough, then you come back at me with a side kick, and now I’ve got what I want. I programmed it into you. You can’t lose control and get mad, because this isn’t boxing—you can’t take one to give one. It’s a cliché, but men are like steel, useless when they lose their temper.”

I felt the flush of shame. I had not been in control. Anger is the easy way: it feels good to let go and collapse into rage because of the endorphins and pleasure it can bring. But that’s not the man’s way; that’s the boy’s way. The chump’s way. If you’re playing for mortal stakes, the cold clear mind is essential. Anger is just too dangerous.

—

I asked Mark what the perfect knife would be for the apocalypse.

“It depends on the job, on the circumstances. Sure, it’d be great to have a razor-sharp sword. But that’s not always feasible. You would want three or four knives, different tools for different tasks, but you can’t be hung up on them. They’re just screwdrivers, just tools. And the tool dictates the style, where the knife goes and what it does. The one important thing is that they be razor sharp, and a combat knife cannot be used for anything but cutting human flesh.” Right. I knew the reason for that was so that you wouldn’t dull your combat blade on everyday use, but it still sounded scary, medieval. The thirsty blade, only used for killing.

I set out to find the best series of combat knives I could. The Internet knife world is a bonanza. I found my way to Cold Steel, a manufacturer that takes pride in its testing and has a great selection. The biggest and baddest knife it makes is the San-Mai Gurkha Kukri. A kukri is a curved short sword favored in Nepal; the Gurkha were Nepalese British soldiers from the old days of the British Empire; San-Mai refers to the steel composition, with a core of hard, high-carbon steel and more flexible steel on the surfaces. The Cold Steel catalog shows a burly knifesmith slicing through fifteen one-inch cords of manila rope with one chop. It’s a heavy knife, seventeen inches long, and I could cut your leg off with it. The kukri is a perfect weapon for killing zombies, which is probably why Milla Jovovich carries two in the Resident Evil movies. And she kills a shitload of zombies with them.

I found another short sword, called the Junglee—the odd brand name is Urdu for “from the jungle.” It’s lighter and faster than the kukri, almost as light as a stick. It can’t compare in quality to the Cold Steel blade, but it’s also a sixth of the price. The kukri is a hack-and-slash weapon, while the Junglee is all speed and reach.

Mark said, “Those are good choices, and they show you that with a weapon like this, you really could fight multiple opponents because you can do so much damage so quickly. And the grip needs to be so tacky and rough that it’s uncomfortable, because blood is like motor oil; it’s super-slippery stuff.” The details you have to think about. Mark told me it’s good to practice stabbing cardboard boxes, to see how good your grip is.

In the end, I bought a Spyderco Civilian, the same nasty, serrated, hooked folding knife that Mark sometimes carries. It is a terrifying-looking knife, which serves a self-defense purpose all its own. “I’ve pulled that knife out and cleaned my fingernails while guys were threatening to kick my ass in a parking lot,” Mark said. “Amazing how suddenly the fight goes out of them.”

The Civilian scared the shit out of my wife, because it is obviously, despite the name, a knife for killing. It held a horrid fascination for me. I was lying on the couch watching football and idly practicing opening the knife one-handed when I slipped, and the knife bit me on the thumb. That’s the only way I can describe it. The blood flushed and streamed down my wrist. I felt an electric tingle, and the hair on my neck stood up. And my cut was a little accident, hardly more than a scratch—it was hard to imagine what a real slash might feel like, the horror of it.

The Civilian tucks into the back of my pants and looks like absolutely nothing. It’s almost invisible. I started carrying it, and instantly my perception changed. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was carrying it illegally. It’s legal to carry one in most of California, but not in Los Angeles County.

Being armed, even with a legal knife, makes you pay a little more attention. You take a little more responsibility for your actions and your surroundings. This is a common feeling about “concealed carry,” the general term for carrying a concealed pistol. “I feel like James Bond” is a common sentiment, but there’s more to it than that. I thought about what Tiger McKee had said about preparing every morning to use the weapon. If you think you may encounter a situation in which you have to use extreme force, you have to make the decision beforehand. In the moment, you won’t have time. If you dither making moral decisions when somebody is trying to kill you, you’ll get killed.

Carrying the knife changed the way I saw the world, too. I’m not saying I no longer feared any man, but I certainly saw things differently. I was at a local supermarket and I ran into an absolutely giant guy, a famous pro wrestler, exploding with steroids, maybe six foot five and probably 320 pounds of muscle and tattoos. I was watching him, so he eyeballed me a little, but all I saw was flesh and targets. I wasn’t even a little worried about him. I knew I would just carve him to pieces. The knife would take and keep taking. Once the fight started it would go fast.

As I got back into my car outside, I paused. Had I gone too far? Was I really that blasé about carving another human being up? Did I really need to be studying how to kill with a knife? Was I becoming one of those paranoid dudes who find each other on the Internet and no one can take seriously? Next up: conspiracy theories.

Sure, of course, it’s all for self-defense—that’s what we tell ourselves. But is some part of it also about being better than the other guy? The same drive that had led that pro wrestler to steroids and into a cartoonish, Incredible Hulk body had propelled me deep into the study of killing with a knife.

A very real danger when it comes to weapons is losing your temper, giving in to anger, escalating a situation. The laws in the United States are predicated on “sufficient use of force to deter the threat.” There is no difference between the knife and the gun, legally. Using a knife would be deadly force, and I would need to be able to prove in court that my life was in danger. A parking lot argument, a road rage incident, something silly like that, could escalate into a situation where suddenly I’d ended a life, and put myself in jail for twenty years.

Mark liked the Jeff Cooper quote, “Knowledge of personal weapons and skill in their use are necessary attributes of any man who calls himself free.” Mark would elaborate on that to say, “Skill in their use engages every aspect: can you control your temper and make the right decisions under stress?”

It went back to the very foundation of martial arts, which is self-control. “Being tough and capable is good, but if you can’t control it, you’ll put yourself in prison,” Mark said.

I eventually put the Civilian away and went back to wearing a Leatherman Wave multitool, which is not only legal but far more useful. I use the pliers all the time. And in a pinch, there’s a sharp knife on there.

—

The Shocknife is a training tool designed by a Canadian company for police and military use, and it’s pretty cool. I had gotten hold of two of them. They look like large, clunky plastic knives. They don’t cut, but when you press a button, a shock races around the blade. They also buzz and crackle and flash blue, and the noise is almost as alarming as the shock. They make the air crackle with the promise of pain.

To spar with them, I faced off with Ari Calvo, one of Mark’s longtime students. We put on fencing helmets to protect our faces and eyes. As I stood across from Ari, I suddenly felt that this was stupid. In terms of tactics and strategy, being equal like this is just dumb; it’s a no-win situation. We had discussed this aspect of combat training, and I’d read about it, but now I felt it.

The implausibility of the confrontation was half the lesson, right there. We tentatively edged closer to each other, darting and jumping. As we engaged, there was a lot of cutting at hands and wrists. Very often, a lunge ended with both of us dead, knives buzzing into each other’s masks, chests, armpits. If I lunged and hit Ari’s face mask, I would often catch a stab a half-second later in my own body.

The pain was real but no worse than a sharp bee sting, even with the knives set to their highest level. The idea of pain was much worse. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug. Facing that crackling, snapping blade, my skin crawled to stay away. I twisted and leapt and contorted to keep that blade away from my flesh. Mark was laughing that he had never seen us bounce around quite so much. Ari tired first, and he started just taking the stab into the chest to stab me back. Mark stopped us—sparring was over.

“You see the danger of this? The dangers in the drill?” Mark broke in. “This is why you can only train with these knives a little bit, as exciting as it is. Because the minute you start to accept that it is just training, that the blade isn’t really dangerous, the drill becomes the disease. This is true for almost any drill: you have to use it very sparingly, or it can become dangerous to you.”

I understood that this was the deadly disease that Mark was fighting in teaching weapons, a paradox: you can’t train full out. Any training drill you do that is safe for your partner is the opposite of the real situation. I never want to lose the terror of weapons, the skin-crawling aversion.

“Like Richard Pryor said,” Mark muttered, “If a guy pulls a knife, you run . . . and if you can’t run, fly!”

—

Mark was by far the deepest student of weapons that I had ever met, and he could very quickly take a conversation about nearly any facet of combat into deep technical places. I have, quite literally, hundreds of pages of notes from my study with Mark, and that was just scratching the surface.

There is one technical concept I will address, because it is so essential to any understanding of melee weapon combat. Mark calls it “line,” and it sort of makes sense and sort of doesn’t. I’m only now starting to understand what it means.

Mark would often wax poetic about how the old Filipino masters understood eskrima so well that they could be nearly unbeatable. One of his great teachers will remain anonymous, because, as Mark said, “Many of the old time eskrimadors prefer anonymity.” (Perhaps this is a holdover from the centuries of Spanish subjugation of the Philippines.) “He was untouchable. He was four-eleven and in his mid-eighties, and he could destroy me every time. These old masters have been studying the art and training for sixty years or more. You would see guys come in, young strong guys with a ton of skill, who would have their sticks sizzling like buzzsaws, and it made the real eskrimadors laugh. They call it amarra, which just means exercise, twirls and whirls, and it looks good; but these old guys could come straight inside, take the line, and kill them.

“Line could be described like this: when we’re playing pool, I want to sink a ball without giving you a shot, and if I can’t sink a ball, I make it so neither can you. I also set it up so that when you try and sink a ball, you are forced to give me a shot.”

Line means a direct line between my weapon and you—your head, your legs, whatever my target is. Whoever has line has the offensive initiative. They have the option to throw a shot that will land before the counterattack will land. Closing the line implies much more than simply blocking one particular strike. You don’t just close line, you also take line. You arrange the circumstances in your favor. In boxing, when a right-handed fighter fights a southpaw, both guys try to keep their lead foot outside of the other guy’s, because if you have the outside foot, then your jab has line; it has the advantageous position and comes over the top of his. If you can constrain him to a few options, then you have easy attacks, counters, and snares. You have a short, direct line and he has a long way to go—you run a sprint and make him run a marathon. If we’re fencing, and my blade is inside of yours, I block your blade to the outside of my body as I run you through. I have line.

“You know it when you feel it,” Mark said. “We’re primates; we’ve been swinging clubs since before we had language. It’s a priori. You can tell when he can hit you and you can’t hit him.”

Hitting a fastball in major league baseball is considered one of the rarest abilities in sports. Many great hitters can read the pitcher’s body language and “feel” where the pitch is going. Of course, that makes sense: the ninety-mile-an-hour fastball covers the distance between mound and plate in milliseconds, so fast that the human eye essentially can’t pick it up, because the nerves don’t have time to communicate. But people hit major league fastballs all the time. How? The batter has a wealth of experience and is picking up a thousand little cues from the pitcher, so he can swing at where the ball is going to be. He sees into the future, essentially. And he does it without thinking, because thinking would be far too slow.

The more experience I had in the blazing speed of drills with Mark, the more I could see into the future. I could feel where strikes were coming and what the next steps were going to be by a thousand cues. If I tried to think about anything the pattern would fail, and I would be dead.

The study of weapons and hand-to-hand combat is a wonderful, powerful thing. Most, myself included, find it freeing, heartening. And the results are sometimes counterintuitive. For instance, a lot of police departments haven’t wanted their officers to train in martial arts, because they think it would make them more likely to beat people up. But the result is the opposite—the more comfortable you are in a physical altercation, the less likely you are to go to deadly force right away.

Learning martial arts relaxes you. If I have a stick, and a guy pulls a knife on me, I won’t freak out and go right away for my gun and shoot him—instead I’ll bust his hands up if he comes near me. If someone jumps on me, I won’t panic and freak out, because I’ve been doing jiu-jitsu and wrestling. If you perceive a fight as something more or less normal, then you can operate calmly.

Getting good exercise while learning valuable, perhaps lifesaving skills kills two birds with one stone. The seriousness of knife training is a good counter to the relaxed nature of everyday life. It’s so easy to go through days and months without getting really stressed. However, your body is like a car. If you don’t ever take your car out on the freeway and open it up a little, you’re not doing the engine any favors. It’s too easy to drift through modern life half asleep, and training to fight keeps an edge on you that just feels right. It helps keep things in perspective. Sure, maybe you missed that promotion or got a speeding ticket, but hey, you didn’t get your spine scribed from the front, so things can’t be that bad.

The destroyed city looms around us. The five cannibals have boxed us in. They are twenty feet away and closing fast. We will fight or die right here. I retreat quickly, moving back into a corner by a Dumpster. I know they won’t fight well together—they’ll fight as individuals, so maybe I can make that work.

I smoothly slip off the backpack with my son in it, and I feel my wife catch it as it slides off my shoulders. And then, quick as thought, out come the machete and the savage six-inch kitchen knife, razor sharp. I’ve got nothing to do at night but sharpen my knives.

Two of them are closing in. I leap to one side, and for a split second, I’m only fighting one of them. He’s swinging a tire iron at me with a big powerful swing, but I’ve had time to prepare while he commits; thinking is over. I drop-step underneath his swing, and my machete, almost of its own accord, takes the angle and whicks cleanly through his wrist. The tire iron and hand sail past me, spraying blood. He howls and clutches his wrist, staring, the world forgotten. I blast him with a push kick, a memory from my muay thai days. He stumbles into his friend, and now I’m out and moving, walking quickly, keeping them from flanking me.

I attack the closest, bringing the fight to him, making him react. I cut high with the machete and he blocks with his club, but my move is just for show. As I take another step toward him he sees too late that the real danger is underneath. The kitchen knife licks out, caressing his chin. As he goes down and I step out, the machete spins around the blocking club and bites deep into his neck.

That’s enough for the rest of them. They scatter, and the one without a hand stumbles after them, keening. They were looking for something to eat, not a war. They melt away, as quickly as they’d come. I stand for a moment, panting, waiting, ready to fight and die. Gradually, the silence penetrates my mind. They’re gone. Time to move.