Point of Impact

13

Jay Gridley hiked down a country road, not far from the Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Sabine River, just across the state line from Louisiana, a place he had once visited as a child. Long-leaf pine and red dirt and lazily buzzing flies completed the summer scene. When he’d actually been here in real time, he’d been eight or so, walking with a couple of his cousins, Richie and Farah. Richie was his age, Farah was four. They had seen a long reddish snake wiggling on the road, and all excited, he and Richie had run back to tell their parents. Jay hadn’t been able to understand why his mom and Aunt Sally had jumped up in such a panic. “Where is Farah!”

“Hey, don’t worry, we left her to watch the snake, she won’t let it get away. ”

He smiled at the memory.

Just ahead, a white-haired old man in a dirty T-shirt and overalls — no shoes — sat in the shade of a tall pine tree and whittled on a long stick with a Barlow jackknife. Jay liked to get the small details right in his scenario work.

“Howdy,” Jay said.

“Howdy, yo’self,” the whittler said. A long wood shaving curled up from the edge of the knife blade.

In RW, Jay was querying a server for information that would be downloaded into his computer spool; but in VR, it was much more interesting.

“What’s happenin’?” Jay asked.

“Not much,” the whittler allowed. “This and that. You heard about them FBI guys got poisoned?”

“Stoned,” Jay said, “not poisoned.” He smiled. Yep, that had been a funny one. Something to wave at the Bureau boys when he ran into them in the cafeteria. The regular feebs were always ragging on Net Force about one thing or another, so any ammunition Jay could gather to pop off at them in return was good, especially since the L.A. incident hadn’t hurt anybody, only embarrassed ’em.

“Anybody come through selling snake oil lately?”

In this case, “snake oil” was a representation of the mysterious purple cap the DEA was all hot to run down. And not just them, so it seemed.

Along his way, Jay had stopped to chat with several local characters, and so far, he hadn’t turned up anything. But this time, it was different.

“Well, yes, sir, there was this fellow come through a little while ago had some of that stuff, I do believe.”

Jay’s laid-back Zen attitude vanished. “What? When? Which way did he go?”

Whittler spat a stream of something dark and icky and pointed with the knife. “He headed on up the road, over toward Hemphill, I reckon.”

Jesus! Could it be this easy?

“Was he walking?”

“In a horse-drawn wagon.”

Speed, he needed to get moving if he was going to track and run down the dope dealer. He looked around. He could drop out of this scenario and switch to another, or do it in RT with voxax or a keyboard… No, wait, he had a toggle he could use, a backup. He did it, and suddenly there was a moped leaning against a tree, just there.

“Mind if I borrow the bike?”

“He‘p yo’self.”

Jay ran to the moped, essentially a heavy bicycle with a motor that you started by pedaling the bike. It wasn’t a Harley, but it was faster than a horse-drawn wagon, and a lot better on a gravel road than a hog would be anyhow, at least the way he rode, even in VR.

He hopped on the moped and started pedaling.

This contemplative Buddhist stuff was all well and good, but when things started to break, you needed to be able to move!

The little two-cycle motor belched, emitted a puff of white smoke via the tailpipe, and started up.

The boss would be really happy if Jay could wrap this up.

Michaels was moving the boxes Guru had sent home with Toni when he came across a small, highly polished wooden one that gleamed, even under the dust. “Very nice,” he said, holding it up.

Toni glanced over from where she was piling shoes. She already had a molehill of them in the hall, the mound threatening to become a small mountain completely blocking the door to the bedroom. “Oh, I forgot all about those.”

Toni came over to where Michaels stood and took the box from him, flipped the brass catch up, and opened the lid, then turned it to show him.

“Wow,” he said.

She removed a pair of small knives from velvet-lined recesses in the box, then pulled out a shelf to reveal a hidden space under it. There was a thick leather sheath in the bottom section. It looked like somebody had chopped a third or so off the end of a banana and flattened the sides. She took the sheath out and inserted the two curved blades into it so that they rode side by side, separated only by a center strip of leather. They were all metal, the knives, and the pommel end of each consisted of a thick circle with a big hole in the middle. With a quick move, Toni pulled both blades, dropped the sheath onto the carpet, and brought her hands together. When she pulled her hands apart, each one wore a knife, with short and nasty-looking curved blades extending point forward, maybe two inches from the little finger sides of her palms. Her forefingers went through the rings on the end.

“These are a variation on kerambits, ” she said. “Sometimes called lawi ayam. Indonesian close-quarters knives.”

She turned her hand over, palms up, to show him.

He took a closer look. The things were short, maybe five or six inches long, and most of that was the flat handle with the hole in it. The cutting hooks themselves looked like little talons. The steel had an intricate pattern of lines and whorls in it.

“The traditional ones are usually longer and sharp on both edges. Guru had these made for her by a master knife smith and martial artist in Keenesburg, Colorado, a guy named Steve Rollert. I guess it must be ten, twelve years ago, now. They are forged Damascus, folded and hammered to make hundreds or thousands of layers in the steel. Edge is heat-treated differently than the body, so it’s hard and will stay sharp, while the body has a little more flex to it.

“See, you put your forefinger through the hole and grip it so. You can also turn it around and use your little finger, with the blade coming out on the thumb side, like this.”

She demonstrated the move, then moved it back to the first grip.

“And perfectly legal to carry around, I suppose?”

She grinned. “Actually, you can in some states if you wear them on your belt, out in the open. Not most places if you conceal them.”

“Kind of like brass knuckles,” he said. “Or maybe knuckle, singular.”

“But much better,” she said. “The blades are extremely sharp, and you can hit with the ring end without hurting your finger.”

“Great.”

She missed the sarcasm, or more likely, ignored it. “Aren’t they?” She did a little series of moves, whipping the two knives back and forth.

A slight error and there was gonna be blood everywhere. His or hers. He took half a step back.

“They aren’t very long,” he said, and even as he spoke, he was glad they weren’t longer.

“ ’Cause they are slashers rather than stabbers. All the major peripheral arteries are fairly close to the skin’s surface. Carotids, antecubitals, femorals, popliteals. These will reach all of those. Cut a big artery, and you bleed out pretty quick if you don’t do something. Kill you quicker than not breathing will, and blood is lot harder to replace than air.”

“How nice.”

“I remember this guy Rollert has a sense of humor, too. These are custom work, but he makes a tool-steel version of these coated with black Teflon. He calls them box cutters, and that’s how he markets them. ‘Why, what’s the problem, Officer? This is a box cutter, see, it says so right there on the handle.’ I’ve got a set of those tucked away somewhere. Of course, those cost about a twentieth of what these did.”

She waved the knives again, getting into it. It was spooky to watch those things blur as she whipped them around.

“What’d the cheap ones cost?”

“About fifty bucks each.”

“You mean these two little pieces of steel cost a thousand dollars?!”

“Quality doesn’t come cheap.”

Michaels shook his head. His darling bride, carrying his unborn son, was a mistress of death and destruction. She talked about such toys the way other women talked about getting their hair done.

“You can do your djurus holding one of these in each hand, and with only a slight adjustment, do them the same.”

“Yeah, and slice off my nose if I make a mistake.”

“Better your nose than some… other extremity.” She grinned. “Don’t worry. By the time you know all eighteen djurus, you’ll be able to use these or a longer knife or a stick, no problem. Might nick yourself if you get sloppy, but as long as you keep proper form, you won’t. Silat is weapons-based, remember. Only use your hands if nothing better is available.”

She waved the little knives back and forth, crossing and uncrossing her hands in patterns that looked damned dangerous to him.

But she was excited, and as upbeat as he’d seen her lately, and he liked seeing that.

“These were the first knives Guru showed me how to use. Traditionally, they were backup. Women carried them a lot. You could wind one into your hair or tuck it into a sarong. These have a leather sheath, but the old-style ones made in Java usually have wooden scabbards. Supposedly, there were guys in the old country who could grip them between their toes and turn your legs and groin into hamburger while you were still checking their hands for a weapon.”

“Lovely.”

She kept twirling and slicing the air as she talked. “They make them longer, but the short ones are best for djurus. Even though djurus are practice and knives are for application, you can do the moves with steel hands. Watch.”

She stopped moving, and then did djuru three. Her hands didn’t move any slower than they did when she did the form unarmed, at least not that he could tell. “See? You block or punch like usual, only these give the moves more of a sting.”

“ ‘A sting,’ right. I’d be careful on djuru two,” he said. “Way your boobs are getting big, you come across your chest on that inside block, you’ll shear off a nipple.”

She laughed, then put the knives back into their little velvet nests. “Thanks. I feel better. Now I can go back and finish sorting my shoes.”

She handed him the box. “Put these somewhere we won’t forget them, and I’ll show you how to play with them when we get a chance.”

She went back to her chore, and he looked at the box. Well. He knew what she did for fun when he married her. She had saved his life with the art once, and he had learned enough to use it himself, a little. He had been training seriously for almost a year, and he seldom missed a day of practice, thanks to Toni’s proximity. After nearly being brained once by an assassin using a cane and pretending to be a little old lady, Michaels could hardly bitch about the down-and-dirty side of fighting. Pentjak silat was about as dirty as it came, and when somebody was trying to bash your head in, all bets were off. When you reached into your bag of tricks, this was the stuff you wanted to come up with. A guy charging at you with mayhem in mind might think twice if he saw you whirling these nasty little claws around with a demented grin while you did it. He sure as hell would.

Rules? In a knife fight? No rules!

He smiled at the wooden box and went to put it on a shelf in the living room. It would make a great conversation piece at a dinner party. Or a conversation stopper, depending on what you wanted to do.

It would be very interesting to see what the two of them decided to teach their son when he got old enough to wonder about all those funny dances Mama and Daddy did. For certain, they would show him how to protect himself. Michaels’s father had taught him how to do a little boxing when he’d been about six or seven, and while he’d never been very good at it, at least he had developed a sense of self-confidence in his ability to protect himself.

Once he’d started learning silat, he realized how much he didn’t know, but since he hadn’t spent a lot of time fighting, it had worked out okay anyhow.

Funny to think about, teaching your son how to fight, when he wasn’t even born yet. Next thing you knew, he’d be buying him baseball gloves and electric trains.