"Tim, NO!" Emmit shrieked, and launched himself at Poke. His shoes slapped against the blood-soaked floor as he pelted across it. Poke lifted the bloodied spear and Emmit skidded to a stop, pinwheeling his arms for balance as his shoes slid on the unctuous planks beneath him. The spear head was inches from his teary eye; he had almost impaled himself on it.
"Oh, I think you better keep it down, Papa," Poke sneered in a voice that sounded choked by years of cigarettes and other poisonous smokes and vapors. "It's crowded out there tonight."
Poke strutted into the shed, keeping the red-gray spearhead trained on Emmit. He cocked his leg back and delivered a hard kick to the fallen Rev, burying the toe of his boot in the dead man's ribs. Tim didn't recoil or make a sound. He didn't pull his arms in to defend himself. Nobody was that good at playing dead. Emmit knew he was already gone.
"Stupid bastard was next on the menu anyway," Poke said, looking down at Tim's body with a disgusted curl on his lips. "Damn, you know what? Between him, Pup, and you, me and the boss man'll be fed until next winter."
He threw his head back and cackled like a supervillain from a bad comic book movie.
"Next winter, get it? Because it's always winter?"
Emmit didn't react.
"It's a joke, Papa, not a dick. Don't take it so hard."
Emmit wished for a swift, painful cancer to flourish in Poke's guts, a miraculous punishment sent directly from Heaven above. Old Testament style wrath of God type stuff. But as usual, when Emmit thought he might give God a shot at proving His existence and His empathy, nothing happened. Emmit was on his own, once again.
"I'm going to kill you, Poke," he said menacingly, his voice shaking but not from the chill in the air. "I'm going to kill you and I'm going to enjoy every second of it."
It happened so fast that Emmit couldn't have dodged it even if he could have seen it. Poke swiped the blunt end of his spear up, dizzyingly fast, and it connected with Emmit's jaw hard enough to knock one of his teeth out of its cozy gum bed. A fresh shot of pain exploded from the half-mended cut in his cheek. Emmit grunted and pursed his lips, tossing the sharp, broken tooth around with his tongue. He waited for the shock and pain to subside as much as they were apt to, and then spat the tooth at Poke in a jet of pink saliva. It bounced off his chest and pattered across the floor.
"You're gonna what?" Poke asked, tilting his head in mock confusion. His multicolored teeth shined in the firelight. "Can you even see me without your specs?"
Emmit spat again, folding his arms around himself. Pretending to cross his arms, to stand in a more macho pose. He kept his hands hidden from Poke as he felt for the hilt of his knife, ever so stealthily curling his fingers around the hilt. He hoped Poke was either too stupid or too focused on killing him to consider the fact that he might have taken some of the weapons from the rack. He puffed his chest out, wagging his elbows a little just to add a little extra to it. Big bad tough Emmit.
"I said, I'm going to kill you. And then I'm going to kill Roy."
"The only one dying tonight is you, fuckface," Poke growled, and though his body was blurry, Emmit couldn't miss the small, quick movements of his shoulders, the bracing of his legs, and one foot rising to rest on bent toes as he drew the spear back to thrust it forward.
It felt like sprinting into oncoming traffic on a dangerously foggy day, but Emmit charged at Poke like an enraged bull without thinking twice. Against the screaming panic alarms in his brain telling him to jump in the opposite direction and away from the danger of being skewered, Emmit lunged towards the deadly weapon. He stiff armed the incoming spear with his right hand, slamming his open palm into the shaft and shoving it away as hard as he could, withdrawing his knife with his left. Even amid the flurry of homicidal chaos, his eyes found the body of Tim, motionless on the floor. The anger it wrought was like a guiding hand closing over his, steering the knife towards Poke with even stronger conviction.
A suppressed scream vibrating his bared teeth, he slammed the knife into Poke's abdomen in snake-strike jabs, in and out again like the needle of a sewing machine. Once, twice, three times, four times. He felt some resistance as the blade entered, just a slight hesitation in his stabbing motion, but the layers of clothing and skin beneath gave way shockingly easily. The back of his hand grew hot and sticky wet.
Poke stumbled backwards, his raspy voice rising into screeching, high pitched cries of agony and shock. He stared at his abdomen in disbelief, touching the tiny circle of spurting wounds and then checking his hand, m sure the making sure the blood was real and that he had actually been stabbed. That someone like Emmit, who was so inferior to him and his high-ranking camp stature, had somehow gotten the drop on him.
Poke started to scream something, but it melted into an unintelligible roar as he flung himself at Emmit. Emmit raised the knife to defend himself, ready to hack and slash at the fuzzy figure rampaging toward him, only to have it slapped out of his hand. His fingers went flaccid, and before he could revive them, his hand was empty and naked. A half second later, Poke's fist slammed into
