Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [89]
He was falling behind, but he was still close, too close. One misstep and he’d be on me. You hit top speed at thirty yards, and after that it’s just a question of who slows down first. The lactic acid begins to outstrip the body’s ability to clear it from the bloodstream, and the muscles lose their efficiency. They begin to tire, to cramp up, and from that point it’s a basic question of chemistry. There was one other fact I was banking on: The stronger and more powerful a man is, the more he sacrifices in terms of endurance. For Williams and me it had come down to the equation between life and death.
He kept coming. It had to be the Morphitrex. Not even steroids could have allowed a man of Williams’s size and age to run so fast for so long. But I had nature’s own private stock of juice powering me forward. It’s called adrenaline, and in moments of extreme excitement it’s the best stuff in the world. The little glands that ride the kidneys were working overtime producing it, and I felt my stride evening out and my chest expanding, preparing for the inevitable switch of energy systems that would allow for the use of oxygen as a fuel source. That’s the system that marathoners use. It’s very efficient. You can run just about two hours before the sugar in the muscles gets used up and you hit the wall. The problem with that is by then you’re no longer sprinting, and I could feel myself slowing down.
A hundred yards with the juggernaut still coming, but not as fast. Even better, I could no longer hear his breathing. I checked ahead for a smooth stretch of sand, then glanced quickly behind me. The gap between me and Williams was now sixty or seventy yards. He was still running, but he was kicking up a lot of sand and having trouble keeping a straight course. He ran with his head down, like a drunk looking for a place to collapse. I ran for another twenty yards, then slowed a bit until my breathing evened out. I needed to save something for the end.
I stopped and waited for him. When he saw me standing there, he redoubled his efforts. I picked up a chunk of coral and threw it at him. His head jerked back, but his body surged forward. He was almost cooked. He was mean, and he was crazy, and he had a great deal of willpower, but the laws of exhaustion are nonnegotiable. He was already into oxygen debt, and his body, despite its strength, couldn’t pay it off quickly enough. I let him get within twenty yards, then took off running again. I slowed down just enough to keep his rabid hopes of killing me alive. Whenever I was satisfied that he was still coming, I trotted away from him.
Again I looked back. It was well that I did so, because he had closed to within twenty yards of me. He’d put everything into one last surge, but he was finished, used up. As I watched, he fell forward onto his knees like a man kneeling in prayer. I stopped and called to him. He looked up and struggled to his feet, stumbled forward, then fell to his knees again. I turned and faced him. He was sixty yards behind me now, a shadow of a ruin rising up out of the sand. Say what you will of Williams, but he had a lot of Bushido in his bullet head.
I ran at him, full speed, or what I had left of it. The world on either side of me blurred into a mass of incoherent light, like a palette of watercolors smeared in a rainstorm. I couldn’t feel my feet on the sand, but I was moving fast. My mouth was full of blood, my blood, and it made me mad.
Williams lifted his head, but it was too late, because I was already in the air, my knees tucked into my ribs and then the jackknife straightening of the legs as I thrust out my heels. There was no way you could have planned it, but Williams turned his chin to one side just as I struck him. His neck made a sickening sound, like the mast of a ship snapping in two. He spun half around and toppled backward. I landed hard on my hands and belly, facing away from him, the air knocked