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but
always carefully, making sure that his partner was ready to take
his weight.
Now he didn’t care. He slammed his legs
down as hard as he could, knowing that the man’s body would cushion
his as they fell to the floor.
Except that they didn’t. The man didn’t
move. It was like slamming his legs down on a thick pipe. For a
ridiculous moment, Brian hung there upside down, looking up at an
inverted and puzzled expression on the other missionary’s face.
Craning his neck, he looked up and saw Armlock Man looking down at
him with an ironic smile, and his hand was released as the
hard-eyed man raised his fists, preparatory to to smashing them
into Brian’s groin.
Brian swung his arms behind the man’s knees
and poked his stiff fingers into the back of the man’s knee joints,
at the same time kipping his body out just a bit with an arch of
the back.
Armlock man folded back like he’d been hit
with a wrecking ball. The added push from Brian accelerated his
fall and his head hit the ground with an audible crunch. Brian used
the momentum to roll up to his feet, not allowing himself to think
about the sticky liquid now pooling around his boots. He turned
just in time to see Needle Man lunging at him with the hypo, no
longer smiling, but his face in a savage grimace of rage.
Lunges Brian did remember from his aikido
class, and without thinking he stepped out of the line of the
thrust and towards Needle Man, one hand sweeping down to grab the
wrist while the other went to the shoulder, black cloth of the suit
feeling slick under his hand.
    He wasn’t trying to grab it,
though, and simply put enough pressure to add to the missionary’s
forward momentum, swinging his hips in a tenkan swirl that brought the man’s
torso around in a spiral that ended abruptly with his head slamming
into the counter under the startled gaze of the barista.
She looked up at at Brian from the two black-suited
men lying on the floor. “Dude. I think you fucking killed
him.”
Brian turned to look where she pointed, and saw
that there was a stain on the floor under the head of Armlock man,
a growing dark liquid that spread viscously along the floor. “Fuck…
” Brian said, softly. He was just starting to become cognizant
again, and most of coming back to rational thought seemed to
involve the idea that he was really in a world of shit.
“Nah. Just drained him for a bit.” Both Brian and
the barista turned at the voice from the door, where Sullivan was
leaning against the jamb. “I’m surprised, bucko, I had you written
off as another dead fucking idiot.”
Brian found himself furious. “Didn’t much feel like
sticking around to find out, though, did you? Fucking coward…
”
Sullivan gave him a coldly appraising stare.
“Obviously I only had the first part wrong. You’re still a fucking
idiot. I tried to get you out of here and you thought it was a ploy
to get my lips into your package, you arrogant sumbitch. And I will
not sacrifice myself, no, for a guy who isn’t all that cute to
begin with.” He looked down at where Needle Man was beginning to
stir, and pushed off from the door jamb. Walking over, he very
carefully put the heel of his boot against the side of the man’s
chin. Just as the man’s eyes snapped open, he snapped his foot
down, hard, and there was another crunching sound as the man’s
vertebrae were twisted apart.
“What… why did you… ”
    “You didn’t hear me, did you?
Takes a helluva lot more than this to kill these things. But I
gotta admit, you did slow them down some. What the hell kind of
martial art was that?” As he talked, Sullivan pulled Brian towards
the door, and this time he did not resist, until they got to the
door. Suddenly he looked around the room, and realized that in
spite of the fact that two men— or
whatever— had been apparently killed in the
room, no one was reacting. In fact, the guy with the laptop was
back to typing, the barista was reading her book… as if they
couldn’t even