Infected: Shift (15 page)

“You’re that kitty fucker, ain’t cha?” the skinhead asked, although it wasn’t a question. “Helped that motherfucking gook cat escape justice.”

“Vigilantism isn’t justice,” Roan corrected, although he knew he was a) being a hypocrite, and b) there was no way in fucking hell this asshole would understand it.

“You’re one of them, ain’t cha?” A guy who could have been Skinhead’s younger brother snapped. “Kitty fag. These your bang buddies?”

Oh no, he didn’t just say that. “Get back in your piece of shit truck and leave. You don’t want this kind of trouble.”

“You threatening us, faggot?”

“He said leave,” Scott said, his voice oddly flat. It was kind of fun to watch. You knew the guys had been teammates for a while because they all glanced at each other and instantly knew what battle formation to take. Sandy and Tank started slowly drifting right while Jeff and Richie started slowly drifting off left, leaving Grey and Scott (and himself) right in the middle. Wedge formation. As soon as the skinhead and his buddies went for Roan (and Grey and Scott), they’d be instantly surrounded. None of them were new to fighting, even off the ice.

“You his boyfriend?” the skinhead taunted and made a kissy face at Scott, evoking derisive laughter from his followers.

Scott didn’t take the bait, just glared at him. “You have no idea who you’re fucking with, do you?”

“Buncha fuckin’ kitty fuckers.”

“Ever seen
Slap Shot
?” Roan wondered.

This seeming non sequitur stopped the skinhead in his tracks. “What?”

“I thought it might give you some idea what’s about to happen to you. Ah, those who don’t watch classic movies are doomed to repeat them.”

“That’s a great film,” Scott replied.

Roan nodded. “Can hardly go wrong with Newman.”

Confusion briefly clouded the skinhead’s face, but it quickly sharpened to annoyance. “You fags are nuts.”

They closed in, but there was a strange hesitation, and Roan knew why when he glanced back at Grey and saw him smiling ear to ear, showing off his gap-toothed grin. He was so happy he was almost laughing. And why not? He was an enforcer—his ability to fight (and squash and manhandle) was why he was on the team in the first place. This was where he shined.

Technically they were outnumbered, and these guys did have weapons. But Roan figured they’d have them all down in three minutes.

As it was, that was a generous estimate.

Grey threw the first punch, a snap to the jaw that knocked out the skinhead’s brother instantaneously. He hit the asphalt like a bag of meat. In fact, his head had snapped around so sharply it was a minor miracle it wasn’t thrown off his shoulders. Grey hit like a jackhammer, and Roan suspected he was actually holding back a bit. “Next,” he said cheerfully.

A guy with a bat swung, but Tank blocked it with his arm and gave the assailant what Roan knew was called a “Glasgow kiss”—he brought his forehead down sharply on the bridge of the man’s nose, breaking it with a sickening sound of crunching cartilage. As blood burst from both nostrils and he stumbled back screaming, Tank ripped the bat from his hand and threw it away (Roan heard it break glass—someone’s taillight?) as he cursed him out in his French-accented broken English, “That a pussy weapon, you piece of shit redneck motherfucker!” Tank then started beating on the guy, big roundhouse slugs to the head that made one of his earlobes burst open and start spurting blood. He had no technique at all, but he had a surprising amount of rage and fearlessness that pretty much tagged him instantly as the crazy guy to avoid fighting at all costs. (Strong could be dealt with—but crazy? Oh no. You never knew what the crazy were going to do.) As the guy was now on his knees, shrieking, a friend ran in to try and help, and Tank threw an elbow that caught him flush in the mouth as he was running toward him, and teeth tumbled out of the man’s mouth like candy from a broken piñata. What amateurs. Didn’t they know you didn’t fight the crazy guy?

If the skinheads ever got a chance to use their weapons, it wasn’t obvious. Sandy and Jeff seemed to be having fun pummeling the cretins, shoving them between themselves like human Frisbees, Richie was lecturing the fallen (“You start a fight, you should know how to fucking fight, assholes!”), and Scott had simply grabbed the youngest guy and pulled his shirt up over his head, both blinding him and locking up his arms so he couldn’t take a swing at anything, putting him in an odd, bent-over position. As he tried to squirm free of his shirt so he could get in the fight, Scott grabbed the back of his neck, squeezing hard, and said, “Don’t make me break your jaw.” Scott pressed his knee up against the man’s shirt-covered face, just to let him know how easily he could do it. The boy wisely stopped struggling.

“You’re dropping your left, Jeff,” a man said, and Roan looked to see the guy with the watch was filming the fight on his camera phone. The supposed bodyguard was watching, seemingly bored, as if this happened a lot and he was sad to be left out. Roan almost laughed. This
was
kind of like
Slap Shot
, and he was with the Hanson Brothers—all six of them. He hadn’t even had to do anything yet. Richie was currently slamming one man’s head repeatedly into the tailgate of an SUV, shouting, “Who’s the faggot now?” He actually seemed to be waiting for an answer, but since the guy seemed half conscious and was bleeding from almost every orifice, an answer probably wasn’t forthcoming.

Grey, who had knocked three guys out and had yet to break a sweat, cracked his knuckles, and asked, “You want this guy?”

Someone had just gotten out of the passenger seat of the Ford and was stalking toward them, reaching into his coat pocket. Over the smell of so much testosterone, fear, and freshly spilled blood, Roan didn’t know if he had a knife or a gun, but either way he didn’t want to wait to see. “Yeah, leave him to me.” Roan sprinted to meet him, not wanting that weapon out of his coat, and upon seeing Roan coming for him, the man stopped and pulled it out. But he was still bringing it up as Roan grabbed his wrist and snapped it as easily as if the bones had been made of plywood. (It had been a gun, a small Saturday night special that probably would have been more annoying than lethal; he’d have to get up close to use it with any kind of accuracy). He took a breath to scream, and Roan slammed his forehead into his face, which made Roan almost black out, but the pain was something he could live with (especially since his morning Vicodin was just kicking in). The would-be gunman just hit the parking lot, unconscious, and Roan dropped his wrist, kicking the gun toward Grey. “Want a souvenir?”

A guy reeled away from Sandy, escaping his grasp, and Roan decked him with a casually thrown jab. He then looked around, shaking his hand (that guy had a face like concrete), and realized the only people left standing were him and the Falcons. All the skinheads were down and out, or, if at all smart, had run away screaming like kindergartners from a haunted house. A glance at his watch showed that barely two minutes had passed. Had any of the skinheads even landed a successful punch?

The driver still in the Ford took off so fast his tires squealed as he got out of there, leaving a shit-stain skid of rubber, and Tank threw one of the pipes at him, hitting the open rear tailgate of the truck (great throw.) It took a crazy bounce and caromed off into the sea of parked cars. “You pansy piece of shit, come back here!” Tank raged. Considering splashes of someone else’s blood colored his face, the front of his shirt, his sleeves, and his hands, he looked like a slasher in a horror film. A wild-eyed French slasher in a brown Puma T-shirt. “Bring your redneck family, and I’ll have my sisters beat you up! You limp dick ignorant pig shit!”

Roan found himself struggling not to laugh. Tank was great. He was going to start a Tank fan club. As he covered his mouth so he didn’t laugh, Grey came up next to him and whispered, “Goalies are all insane. Every one of ’em.”

Considering they volunteered to stand in front of frozen pucks being winged at their heads at roughly a hundred miles an hour, he could see why that might get you a reputation for insanity. If they weren’t before being goalies, they would be after.

“Nice right. You skate?” The guy who asked him turned out to be the guy filming the melee on his camera phone, the one who had told Jeff helpfully that he was dropping his left.

“No.”

“Too bad.”

Sandy clapped his hands together and said, “That was fun. We should do this more often.” He wasn’t being sarcastic.

“It’s a rush,” Jeff agreed.

Scott, who no longer had the kid (Roan figured he let him run for it, but he couldn’t be sure), looked at all the fallen, bleeding men littering the parking lot and asked, “What do we do now? Call an ambulance?”

“Nah. One of the skating moms’ll probably do it,” phone guy said, snapping it shut and putting it in his pocket. What was he, the coach? Assistant coach?

Tank clapped Roan hard on the back, almost making him jump with the shock of it, and said, “Pansy not a gay thing. You gay, but you not a pansy. These guys, they probably not gay, but they pansies.”

Roan nodded, smiling, trying not to laugh. Again, Tank was fucking hilarious.

“Anyone hurt?” the assistant coach (?) asked.

“I think my arm’s bruised,” Tank volunteered, rubbing the arm that deflected the bat blow.

“Think I jammed my pinkie,” Richie said, examining the digit. Looked fine to Roan.

“You’re fine to skate. You’re at the arena at three.”

“We got it,” Scott assured him. He gestured back to the door and said, “Tank, Sandy, why don’t you guys clean up. Then we’ll go get lunch.”

“I don’t need clean up,” Tank insisted. He saw the blood on his shirt and shucked it off, using it to wipe the blood off his face and hands. He revealed a surprising set of six-pack abs and a small heart tattoo between his pecs. If someone had tried to punch him in the gut, they’d have probably broken their knuckles. “I just need another shirt.” He walked back, and going in the door, handed the bloodied shirt to the assistant coach. “Frame this for me.” Sandy followed Tank back into the rink but kept his shirt on.

“He’s a goalie,” Grey explained. “They don’t get to fight a lot.”

“Does that explain the rage?” Roan wondered.

Grey shrugged, and Scott said, “That might be from yesterday’s game.”

“Oh,” Grey replied, as if remembering. “That asshole who butted him.”

Roan guessed that was some hockey terminology he didn’t know. “Pardon?”

“Hit him with the butt end of his stick,” Scott explained, making a gesture with his hands that looked like he was poking someone with an invisible stick. “It’s a shitty thing to do, but some guys do it, and the ref doesn’t always catch it.”

“Tank gave him a facewash for it and shoved him on his butt, and he got a game misconduct for it,” Grey said, finishing the story. “He wasn’t happy.”

“I wasn’t happy,” Scott said. “I argued so much with the ref he threatened to toss me in the penalty box.”

“I’m having a hard time imagining anyone deliberately trying to piss off Tank right now,” Roan admitted.

Grey grinned again, such a goofy expression that it made him look deceptively harmless. “Yeah, I know. He’s something off the leash, ain’t he?”

Scott sighed wearily and scrubbed a hand through his hair, mussing it up and making him look even more adorable somehow. Damn it, he needed to stop that! Scott looked at him, and Roan was afraid for a moment he'd caught a hint of the lustful ogling, but instead he asked, “Wanna come to lunch with us? We should buy you a drink.”