"He wasn't a perfect person. Nobody is, Poke. But you didn't have to do what you did to him. You could have—"
"I could have stood there with my dick in my hand like you did?" Poke snarled, holding his arms out to the side and walking towards Emmit quickly enough to make him lift his fists and hold them defensively in front of his chest. "If we would have gotten into that mess, we'd all three be dead. If anything, you should be kissing my ass, for saving yours."
As Poke said the word "yours", he jabbed one finger into Emmit's chest, digging painfully into the tender muscle and knocking him off balance. Emmit felt the severed spearhead tumble down the inside of his shirt and snag on the waist of his innermost pair of pants.
The rage, the same hot brutality that had taken control of him as he fought the walking dead, came back in a rush like the flame erupting from a jet engine. He saw nothing but a deep shade of blood red and felt nothing but his own quickening pulse and the boil of adrenaline surging through the tangled branches of his veins. His hand was in motion before he had even thought to throw a punch.
Poke had been anticipating it; hell, may have been wanting it. He snatched Emmit's fist out of the air effortlessly, jerked Emmit's body around backward, slammed his stony fist into the bend of Emmit's elbow and forced the clenched muscles to loosen, then wrenched the entire limb up as hard as he could— all in the span of about three seconds. The grinding, tearing pain in Emmit's shoulder was monstrous. He refused to make a sound; he would not give Poke the satisfaction of hearing how badly he was hurting him. Instead, he growled, each exhale whooshing out through gritted teeth. Poke half walked, half dragged him forward and slammed him face first into the wooden wall. Emmit saw spit fly from his lips and light on the rough surface of the logs.
"I could break your arm if I wanted to, Papa," Poke said softly into his ear. The stink of his breath was like an open sewer, hot and sticky on Emmit's neck. Emmit pulled away. Poke wrenched his arm higher. Emmit felt his hand going numb, filling with thousands of stabbing needles instead of blood. "I could break your arm and make you look just like your old pal Muddy. Would you like that?"
Emmit didn't respond. His jaw bones ached, and his teeth made little grinding noises against each other. His mouth felt like an active fault line. His brain did too.
"Now here's what happened, Papa. Muddy broke his spear and the Links swarmed him. You saw that happen. We couldn't get close enough to save him. Then we got swarmed, and we bailed out. That's what you saw, right?"
Emmit took deep shuddering breaths, his eyes squeezed shut and his free hand flexing and releasing like a dying octopus. He wanted nothing more than to get his hands on Poke, pin him down, dig his fingers into his black eyes and rip them out with his bare fingers. But he was caught like a rat in a trap, and any effort he made would probably result in a swiftly and neatly broken arm. But he didn't have to fucking answer—
His arm was yanked up so high that he could feel his thrashing fingers brush against the hair on the back of his neck. Something in his shoulder popped with a sound like the logs burning in the fireplace. This time he did cry out; he couldn't stop it. His arm was twisted at an angle he could never have reached on his own, an angle he had never experienced before. The pain was hot and radiating, just like the pizza ovens had felt on his hands and face at his dead-end job, back in "his" time.
"I saw it," he said, in a dark voice that was not his own. He was panting now, every breath full of all-consuming hate and agony. He felt himself pulled away from the wall, and then he was slammed back into it. The air whooshed out of his gut, and strangely, he was fleetingly reminded of how god damned hungry he was. Of all the times to be thinking about food.
"You saw what, faggot?"
Emmit couldn't see Poke, but he could hear the smile on his face. He imagined driving the broken spear up through the soft spot under Poke's chin, stabbing it through and into the roof of his decaying cave of a mouth, pinning it shut forever.
"We couldn't save him, now fucking LET. ME. GO."
"Man, you wouldn't last a day in the pen. You'd be taking all flavors of meat in the ol' prison wallet," Poke said, releasing Emmit's arm and then patting it gently, smoothing out the material of his sleeve. The muscles felt locked and twisted, and Emmit had to physically pull his own arm back to the position it normally hung in. He rubbed and massaged his shoulder muscles, but that pain wasn't going away anytime soon. If it ever did again.
Poke chuckled at him.
"Boy, you really don't like me much, do you, Papa?"
Emmit fought the urge to pounce on him with every ounce of self-control he had left. The tanks were dangerously low. Emmit envisioned a little gauge, hanging on the rounded wall of bone between his eyes, the needle hovering just over the letter "E". Above the gauge, he imagined a little danger light that blinked and glowed red, filling the inside of his head with
