“You make one move toward her and I’ll feed you your own liver!” Quentin snapped.
“Always such concern for mortals.” One of the man’s eyes, just the one, swiveled toward me, and he licked a strand of drool off his lips with a tongue as thick and knotted as a two-by-four. His nauseating appearance and bizarre threats robbed me of the ability to respond quickly. Maybe I could have gotten over my confusion, and maybe I could have powered through my fear, but not both together.
“I notice you haven’t told the girl to run yet,” he said to Quentin. “Could it be that you’re scared to face me without her? Surely you haven’t become that weak?”
Quentin bristled. “You don’t know who she is! And I don’t need anybody’s help to beat you to death a second time!”
He snatched my phone out of my grasp before I could hit the second 1 of 911.
“I’m sorry, Genie,” Quentin said, crushing it to glass and metal splinters with a single squeeze. “But we can’t involve anyone else.”
The man in black grinned. And grinned. And kept grinning. His smile parted his face and sliced toward his ears, exposing a mouth that went nearly all the way around his head like a crocodile’s.
Quentin snarled, his flawless looks contorting into a mask of rage. I could see his canines bared, much longer than they should have been. He gave me a hard push to the side, sending me through the air. I landed on the grass as he launched himself at the giant.
The force from their collision nearly popped my eardrums. Quentin was telling the truth before. Whatever he and the man in black were doing, it wasn’t wushu. They attacked each other like rabid animals, clawing and biting as much as they punched and kicked.
I scrabbled backward on my heels and hands, trying to get away from the radius of their malice. My heart hadn’t beat in the last minute. I was looking at two people trying to kill each other. The sight was an infection that I couldn’t allow to reach me.
I heard a sharp wooden crack across the street like a tree had split and fallen, and suddenly Quentin was gone from sight. He must have been thrown off into the distance.
The giant yawned in pain and rolled his shoulders before turning his attention to me. He walked over and crouched down, slamming his hands against the ground on either side of me, blotting out the sun above.
“It’s strange, meeting you for the first time under these circumstances,” he said, his foul, raw-meat breath descending over me. “Let’s see if I can get a taste of you without cracking my teeth.”
His saliva spattered against my cheek. I shut my eyes, screamed my lungs out, and kicked him as hard as I could.
It felt like I completely whiffed, which should have been impossible given how big he was. But the stench abated. I looked up to see an expression of complete shock on the man’s face as he backpedaled away, a foot-size chunk missing from his flank. Black goo dripped from the wound onto the sidewalk.
He and I must have shared the same bewilderment at that moment. Look buddy, I’m as confused as you.
“Don’t touch her!” Quentin roared, taking advantage of his opponent’s distraction to make his flying reentry. He dropped from the sky onto the man’s platform-like shoulders and the two of them spiraled away into the street.
Despite their injuries, the fight wasn’t over by a long shot. The giant managed to get Quentin at
both arms’ length and smashed him into the ground repeatedly like he was trying to open a coconut. I thought Quentin was dead from the first impact alone, but his legs snaked out and wrapped around the man’s neck. He pulled the man’s head into his abdomen and began strangling him with his whole body, all while being bounced against the pavement so hard I could see an outline of his shoulders on the ground where they blew away the dust.
The giant kept ramming Quentin into the earth, but his strength started to flag, especially since he was still bleeding heavily from his side. His knees buckled and he fell to the ground like a chain-sawed oak. Quentin maintained the chokehold until the man in black stopped moving, and then some.
Finally he scooted out from under his opponent. Then, without hesitating, Quentin clambered onto the man’s back and grasped his chin and the top of his head.
“Wait, no!” I shrieked once I realized what he was going to do.
With a twist of his arms, he broke the man’s neck.
Quentin looked up at me, breathing heavily.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“No,” I whispered. “No no no.”
“Genie, please,” he said, reaching toward me. “I can explain—”
I wasn’t listening. I was too busy staring at what was happening to the giant’s corpse.
It was dissolving. Into the air. The dead man’s body suddenly resembled a still-wet painting dunked into a tank of water, the colors and hues that made up his existence bleeding away into a surrounding liquid.
His body silently burst into a great splash of ink. Spouting swirls of his former mass chased each other in all directions like calligraphy strokes until they faded into invisibility.