Well, if they wanted my attention, they had it now.
Spread out around me were a dozen men. Every last one of them wore the same black robe with the big hood and the flappy sleeves. In the middle, facing me, were Flat Top and Smiler from earlier. They were leering at me from the centre of the hemisphere surrounding my car and they had only one purpose in mind – to settle the score.
I retrieved the house brick and hefted it in one hand as I looked along the line of men.
‘Feeling confident, chaps?’ I asked. Before anyone could answer, I lifted the house brick to my mouth and bit off a corner. I felt the enamel on my incisors chip off and knew I would need some dentistry work to fix my perfect smile.
However, the effect on the witnesses was as intended. The smiles that dominated half a second earlier were replaced by hastily exchanged glances.
Who is this guy?
I was maybe three or four when I discovered my ability to fight. At the park with my parents, I wanted to play in the wooden fort climbing frame, but three larger boys were already in there and denied me access. I tried to push my way in and found myself shoved to the ground. It was the one and only time that has ever happened to me.
My mum saw it, and came running, my dad hot on her heels, but by the time they arrived the three boys had all run away crying. I had a broken metatarsal in my left hand from an ill-timed punch that hit the wood and not its intended target, but otherwise I was not only unscathed but imbued with a sense of what I could do. It wasn’t rage that drove me to attack them with my fists, it was a sense of injustice and of moral right. What right had they to impose their will on me? If I didn’t stand up to them, who would they pick on next?
It wasn’t just my desire to even the scales though, I had ability to back it up. I was the tallest kid in my class by the time I started school and carried on growing. My height gave me reach, and the musculature I developed naturally was enhanced by training as my father agreed to my request to join the local kickboxing dojo.
You could say I never looked back.
That’s why with odds of twelve to one, my only concern was that I might do permanent damage to someone.
You might think I would be wiser to jump into my car and get away from them, but that’s just not how I am wired. Outnumbered that badly, I did the only sensible thing: I attacked.
I had no idea who these guys were – some cult of weirdos Tempest upset was my current guess - but when I sent the first two packing earlier, they went away to get reinforcements.
They should have got more.
They were spaced more or less equidistance from me and had they all moved at once, they could have attacked me simultaneously. They didn’t, and before they could consider what strategy to employ, I went left, heading for the man one in from that edge of the semicircle.
It caught them all by surprise. The last thing they expected was resistance and my guess was they planned to make me apologise before giving me a fat lip anyway. None of them expected to actually have to fight and they probably all had day jobs as delivery drivers or schoolteachers or something equally benign.
The first chap had enough time to look panicked and no more. Five paces of my long legs carried me across the gap between us. I leapt into the air, throwing myself at him and powering a punch that connected with his right cheek to explode his face.
The men to his left and right had turned inward, their brains screaming for them to neutralise the menace and quickly. This was why I chose the man one in from the edge.
The one at the very end of the semicircle grabbed for me, found his arms caught in mine as I anticipated his move. Then, still using the energy in my run and punch, I pivoted off my back foot. Using it as a fulcrum, I lifted the lighter man and threw him at his colleagues. It was like playing skittles.
I figured he was close to a hundred and ninety pounds and about six feet tall. Travelling through the air three feet off the ground, he was unavoidable for the three men nearest me. That was five down in roughly three seconds and the other seven were having second thoughts.
Two of them had their feet rooted to the ground. I could ignore them because they had no interest in getting involved. That left me five.
I squared up to them, lancing out a foot to land a kick here and then another there as the fallen skittles attempted to get up. It convinced them to stay down but my focus shifted in the next instant as the second wave attacked.
Among them were the original two including the one whose nose I mashed earlier. They wanted revenge.
This time I let them come to me, reading their body language, and watching to see who would come first. You may think that one man against many can never win, but even two men trying to hit the same moving target are going to struggle and get in each other’s way. When you see it on TV or in films, it is choreographed, so, when the first came, I jinked, went under his arm, and popped up holding him.
We were chest to chest. Sure, he could kidney punch me, but he couldn’t get much energy behind the blows and he
