For reals. It was just hanging out in with a bunch of other notes and stuff I was looking through. I think it might have been for a contest or something? There's really no indication of what it was for, or where it was going. It seems interesting? It honestly didn't seem like I wrote it. Who is this mysterious man? What do these events foretell? I WISH I COULD REMEMBER.
Anyway...First thing goes here.
Unknown Short
It was a hot summer night, sweltering and smog filled, the press of too many people and too many cars leaving the skin grimy. The taste and stench of it coats the roof of your mouth like motor oil. It’s the kind of night that hot showers were invented for. Work was scarce, a lot of leg work for little reward. Nothing much even worth having. The return of a child’s laugh, an itching curse broken. Penny-ante crap that filled time, but not my pockets. I was bored, broke, and in a foul mood.
Oddly, having someone sent to kill me was a bit refreshing.
If it had been in a luxurious hotel room with some femme fatale sex bomb who was intent on poisoning me, that would have been flattering, but a knife in the dark in an alley that smelled of hot garbage and stale piss said terrible things about someone’s perception of me. It was insulting. I demand that attempts on my life be stylish.
It does, however, really says something about the world, when one man can pay another to stab someone in the dark. The advances of civilization. Commerce. Contracts. As a species, it shows that we’ve advanced.
On the other hand, he’s still trying to kill me and that doesn’t make me particularly happy.
The knife that slid out of the darkness was a steel blur followed by a short, wiry man swathed in strips of dark cloth. A mugger will pause after a surprise attack, letting you know he could have had you, to let the fear set in, but a killer pushes until there is blood on the blade and a cooling body on the pavement.
The man pushed, and he was good. Knives are tricky business, anyone can stick a blade in you, but to actually fight with one, that’s tough. Fighting against one is even tougher. It isn’t all sweeping overhand stabs like they teach in self-defense classes or horror movies.
He obviously knew what he was doing, because he kept coming at me, pushing me back on my heels, never letting me settle has he kept flicking the blade out at me with short, vicious little stabs.
“Look--” I started, holding my hands up. I kept my palms facing my body, protecting my wrists from those sharp licks of the steel tongue in his hand.
He didn’t stop or respond, didn’t pause, and I backed up again and again, not about to turn tail and get my spine acquainted with his blade, but then I saw the light hit his eyes and reflect back a pale blue.
My would-be assassin wasn’t human, or at least not completely. He came in again in a rush and I stopped backing up, stepped into the charge and with with my arms still up, I let him stab me.
I felt the blade slide into my forearm a few inch above my elbow, it skidded off bone and sank deep into flesh, and by Shadow and Flame it hurt. Get in fight with someone with a knife, you are going to get stabbed, you are going to get cut. The trick is knowing when to take one for the team, as it were, and get stabbed somewhere slightly less likely to kill you.
I gritted my teeth on the scream that tore from my throat. I’m sure it sounded like a sufficiently manly warcry, and not some bitten of shriek of agony, but the tactic worked and I took the worst of the attack away and closed on my shrouded attacker.
A great warrior once said, “Go for the eyes!” and that’s exactly what I did, aiming my thumb into one of those lambent orbs and there was the briefest of moments of resistance before warm and gooey ran over my hand and another shriek, not bitten off, crawled out from the muffling coil of wrapped cloth. I jerked my arm sideways, and when someone is tugging on your skull via your ocular orbit, you tend to do what they say, no matter how big and bad and inhuman you are.
The assassin stumbled away, falling to the ground, the knife dropping to the ground with a dull clatter, as he continued to shriek and clutch at his ruined eye. I was on him in a second, kneeling on his face and chest, grinding flesh into asphalt, forcing the breath from his lungs and keeping it out with my body weight. His screams weren’t doing him any favors in the long run, so I pushed my hand over his mouth. I doubted anyone was going to come running into a dark alley to check on a bunch of screams. There’s a word for Good Samaritans like that: corpse.
