He came out of nowhere and crossed the highway so I stopped. When I stopped, he picked something up and threw it at my windshield. It wasn’t the clatter of pebbles on my windshield that startled me, though. It was his eyes. Dead, lightless, and fixed intently on me.
For what seemed like forever, he held my eyes with his own. Then, as if some switch were thrown deep in his brain, behind those inert eyes, he dropped his gaze and started shambling forward. Next me, Laszlo chuckled. “For a minute there, I thought he was going to charge.” I didn’t need to look at him to know that his right hand was resting on the handle of his knife.
As we waited for the zombu to get clear of the car, I listened to Laszlo’s breathing slow down to less than a hundred per minute and wondered at the toll this moment of extreme readiness would take on him. Funny people, these knifers. Ordinarily as loose and relaxed as the next person, but present them with a fight or flight situation and the mods kick in. Their breathing accelerates, drawing in more air for the blood that’s flooding into their muscles, driven by a heart that pumps at three times the normal rate. And adrenaline doesn’t even cut in yet. Primed for action, knifers in that state of readiness can uncoil like steel springs and disembowel a jacked up zombu in under ten seconds. But deprive them of the opportunity to release that pent-up energy, and their muscles become pulsing bags of lactic acid causing excruciating pain.
I don’t hear Laszlo anymore, but I know he’s gritting his teeth behind his pinched lips. Proud bastards too, these knifers. And who wouldn’t be, if you were all that stood between ordinary people and the zombu?