Chapter 8 Fight, No Flight #3
Lynnette indicated the slimmer of the pair. “Take it easy on Slim Jim. He’s got a cracked rib. One bad hit and it’ll puncture his lungs.” Not that that would stop her from delivering the bad hit if he forced her hand.
Neck Tat spat on the asphalt in her direction.
The other guy, her first assailant, managed to haul himself to his feet again.
His grunting and groaning mixed with the distant sounds of commotion coming from the backside of the truck and Lynnette had to fight with her instinct to go check on her friend.
She had known someone was going after Jenna.
The best she could do was hold off the other three.
The two men, practically parallel with each other across from her, exchanged glaringly obvious looks and nods.
Lynnette rolled her neck.
They launched forward simultaneously, both armed.
Exactly as she expected. She held her ground, knowing her first assailant’s movements would be slower after multiple blows to the head and the way she’d messed with his breathing earlier.
He was the largest, and his bulk was mostly muscle, so her advantage with him had been surprise and skill.
Injured as he was, he’d become the slowest. Leaving her free to focus first on Neck Tat, who didn’t seem to have calculated for his companion’s decreased speed.
Neck Tat surprised her with decent reflexes and she wasn’t able to take him to his knees with a hard blow to the chest or throat.
He moved to slice open her liver as he twisted around her, so she spun with him and delivered a good, old-fashioned, blow to the face.
His blade scraped her, but didn’t bite nearly as deeply as he’d intended.
He stumbled away and she spiraled around to block a blow from the first guy, before following up with a series of targeted jabs that dropped him back to the ground.
For good measure, she chopped the backside of his neck.
He sagged, limp and unconscious, and his weapon slipped to the ground.
Heavy steps alerted her to Neck Tat’s approach and Lynnette threw herself into a side roll rather than blindly guess where his knife was aimed. When she came up on her knees, Slim Jim was pushing to his feet and Neck Tat was shaking out his arms like he thought they’d stepped into a boxing ring.
Somewhere on the other side of the truck, Jenna let out a panicked scream. “Let go! Get off!”
Jenna’s urgency stabbed into Lynnette and she raised her fists, glaring at her assailants. “Sorry, boys. Your day’s about to be worse than mine.” She actually wasn’t sorry. They’d started this fight and they were the ones carrying it forward.
Neck Tat picked up the other guy’s discarded knife, spun it until he had it by the blade, and hurled it at her like a throwing dagger.
Lynnette arched wide to the side and held her breath as she watched the projectile sail past her torso.
Of course, Neck Tat used those precious seconds to rush her, and that time his knife bit into the skin over her shoulder.
She let the pain make her angry, used the anger to make her sharper, and threw her fists into him until he was rolling backward on the ground toward Jenna’s SUV.
She might have followed, to knock him out similarly to how she had the first guy, but Slim Jim thought he’d caught enough breath to rejoin the fight and was loping toward her.
Poor guy with the cracked rib really didn’t know his body’s limits.
Or maybe he had a pain kink. If it was the latter, he might wake up in a good mood later.
Regardless, Lynnette didn’t spare him just because he was stubborn and stupid.
She kicked out his legs and let the impact to the hard ground do some damage to his system before swiftly rendering him unconscious.
With a quick glance up toward where Neck Tat was groaning and growling simultaneously, but still on the ground, Lynnette twisted and bolted for the truck.
He was winded, the other two were down, it was time to check on Jenna.
She wrenched the passenger door open with an internal wince—from the slice in her arm as much as the realization that the damn door had been unlocked the entire time—only to come face-to-nozzle with her own bear spray in Jenna’s fumbling, panicked grasp.
The driver’s side was shut behind Jenna, so Jenna’d at least managed to get some distance from her own attacker.
Lynnette managed to talk Jenna out of spraying her, shoved her discarded purse to the floor, and slammed her door shut with only the two of them securely inside the cab. It was a half-second to breathe. Or choke, as it seemed Jenna had caught herself in her airborne defense.
“Jenna, fucking answer me,” a male voice demanded, practically booming through the truck cab.
Lynnette jumped in her seat before her gaze zeroed in on Jenna’s phone, resting in the console. She blew out a breath of understanding and asked, “Is that your boyfriend?”
Jenna managed to seem embarrassed by the question.
Lynnette quickly established that Jenna was in no position to be driving, as Jenna’s eyes were visibly puffed up, and the women embarked on a place-swap born of desperation.
At least she was flexible. All the while, Jon-the-not-dead-Marine spouted off worried-boyfriend demands through the phone. It was endearing, really.
But it was time to go, as evidenced when Neck Tat threw himself into the passenger door and attempted to stab through the glass.
Pain lancing her heart, Lynnette threw her beloved truck into drive.
The assholes had shown up in shinier, newer-model, foreign things made of plexiglass and whatever other weaker materials.
Her truck would take some damage, but she could get them through.
And Lynnette would empty her savings into the repairs if that was what it took after, because dammit, these bastards were not taking her truck from her.
Still, she gave Neck Tat some reluctant credit.
He managed to climb into the back after being jostled off with her initial jolt forward.
But forcing her to back up only gave her more room to gain momentum for a second hit, and that would make it easier for them to clear their own way. Like it or not.
Jenna tried to protest through her creaking voice, well aware of Lynnette’s love for her truck.
But it was Jon’s lunacy that stalled Lynnette’s plan. “Stay where you are,” he said, the order in his words firm and unyielding. “I’m about ninety seconds out.”
Both women balked at the notion, but ultimately, Jenna indicated they should trust him.
So, Lynnette slipped them into park and leaned back to antagonize the asshole now stabbing into her rear window.
He’d mentioned someone named PJ when he’d arrived, hadn’t he?
“I’m gonna send your friend PJ the bill for my truck repair,” she hollered through the glass.
“Think he’ll have the balls to sue me over that? ”
He mouthed something incredibly crude in response and swung harder, causing the window to splinter and spiderweb out.
Lynnette released her seatbelt on reflex, her anger reignited. “Son of a—”
Tires squealed somewhere out beyond them, and suddenly a green truck was screeching to a stop in front of the set of double-parked vehicles.
Jenna breathed her boyfriend’s name even as he instructed them to stay in the truck, and then a man Lynnette did not recognize literally, but immediately recognized as a military man, swung out from the green truck with a pistol in hand.
As she and Jenna both instinctively dove for cover, gunfire splitting the air and a suspiciously tell-tale sound splattering in the back of her truck, Lynnette couldn’t help but remember something her father had said when she was younger.
When he’d explained the different military branches to her, from his biased perspective, his explanation of the Marines had been simple and mildly frightening to her then-youthful mind.
“As for the Marine Corps…. Well, when you need something absolutely destroyed overnight, that’s when you send in the Marines.”
Lynnette remembered thinking, as a pre-teen, that meant the Marines were violent and uncontrollable. Scary and dangerous. Something akin to beasts held back by chains. In the few seconds it took for Jon to end the fight, she decided she had been both right and so very, very na?ve in her estimation.
None of which meant she wasn’t going to give him an earful for dropping a body in her truck.