The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [75]
He wasn’t going down without a fight.
In his frustrated anger, he rose from the toppled bookcase quickly with one elbow as his support and one hand raised and curled into a fist ready to strike, and he struck hard and sure straight square into the madman’s bearded upper jaw. The figure’s lethal weapon sliced once across thin air merely inches beyond Max’s throat, flying upwards above both their heads, and Max caught its wrist with his opposite hand in a deathgrip as the figure sailed past his line of sight for a moment towards the closed attic door.
Max maintained his grip upon the figure’s wrist and thrust his body weight upon the dark shape, rolling over and plunging his fist through the air and down upon the figure’s arm just inches above the wrist, again and then once more, in desperate effort to free the weapon in the assailant’s hand. An arm rapidly ascended from the figure’s opposite side and met with Max’s chest in an excruciating wallop, returning Max’s back to the floor, heaving, loosening and then freeing his grip from around the figure’s wrist.
Max struggled to breathe, as though his lungs were severely punctured and his chest cavity split open and whatever oxygen he inhaled escaped effortlessly between his ribs. He clenched his chest, his fingers seeping into a sponge-like wetness, giving him the feeling that he was not only bare-chested but bare-skinned as well and his hands were clinging to his blood-drenched muscle tissues. Reality abandoned him once more, if only for a moment, though his adrenalin was pumping at a decathlon rate and the subconscious suspicions that he might be dying were surfacing just enough for him to scoff them away with a sideswipe of insistence that he was still alive and that he would live to see through this.
The figure arose and darted again beyond his line of sight. Max pivoted into the direction he believed the figure went, but the piercing agony in his upper belly and chest crippled the process, causing him to double over. The urgent necessity to know where the figure was subdued him, to know where the next blow would come from and to be prepared when it would happen. With persistent effort he managed to locate the figure’s presence directly behind him; it was arched forward and towards the ground, its knees bent, and it appeared to be rabidly exploring the floor’s thick coat of shadow around and beyond him, in search of perhaps its dispossessed weapon.
The following moment, the figure abandoned Max and the surface of the floor completely.
Max conjured up another degree of strength to lift himself upwards and over until his body flopped onto his chest with a debilitating painfulness which he hadn’t intended. This stunt rendered him motionless until he regained his strength and began to crawl, inch upon excruciating inch at a time in a dilatory endeavor to reach the foot of the bed.
When he arrived there, a light switched on from somewhere past the bed, on the other side.
He again could not see the figure. He could only hear movement, the sounds of rustling of odds and ends being scattered and swished about the surface of a desk or table, clicks and clangs and drawers both metallic and wooden opening and closing. A few of those odds and ends fell, and Max heard their vibrations echo against the hardwood floor.
With one outstretched hand he made an effort to reach above himself, upwards and through the rank air, until he caught hold of the dense fabric of the bedcovers at the bed’s edge. He fought for a firm grip, then lifted himself slowly.
It hurt like a sonofabitch.
Just to move, just to breathe.
He succeeded, supplanting his climb,