Surviving the Dead 03: Warrior Within

COPYRIGHT

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

SURVIVING THE DEAD VOLUME III: WARRIOR WITHIN. Copyright © 2013 By James N. Cook. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the author and Amazon.com.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

Epub Edition © APRIL 2013

Surviving the Dead Volume III:

Warrior Within

By:

James N. Cook

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Also by James N. Cook:

Surviving the Dead Volume I:
No Easy Hope

Surviving the Dead Volume II:
This Shattered Land

Part I

Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men
.

-Miyamoto Musashi

The Book of Five Rings

The first light of dawn was just creeping over the horizon on a clear, cloudless morning. Rays of sunshine pierced the gloom, illuminated like diamonds on a carpet of frost-covered grass. In the distance birdsong filled the air, flittering through the tall, majestic trees that surrounded the field known, not affectionately by those familiar with it, as the Grinder. The morning would have been idyllic if not for the grunts, muffled curses, and dull thuds of flesh hitting flesh from the people struggling around me.

There were sixty-six in all—mostly men, but a few women as well—dressed in a motley assortment of outdoor wear as they punched, kicked, heaved, and grappled with one another. Thick wisps of steam rose from their heads like ghostly flames as they worked up a sweat in the chill September air.

As I had done every day for the past six weeks, I spent an hour teaching them new techniques both in striking and in groundwork, before turning them over to Gabriel for drills and sparring. It was the last week of their first phase of training, and Gabe was pushing them hard in preparation for phase two. I glanced at my watch, counting down the last few seconds of the round. The readout ticked down: three, two, one…

“Time,” I said.

Gabe grabbed the whistle dangling from a cord around his neck and blew three shrill notes. The recruits fell out of their fighting stances, released holds, and untangled themselves as they got up from the ground.

“Sixty seconds. Hydrate and switch partners,” Gabe called out, his deep baritone washing over the field. He turned his flint-eyed gaze toward me and reached out a hand for the stopwatch.

“Rotate in on the next round, Eric,” he said. “Take on Sanchez first, then Flannigan. Hit ’em hard and put some heat on them. I want to see how they react.”

I nodded, feeling the muscles in my jaw tense. Flannigan I wasn’t too worried about. She was tough but lacked experience and was only about half my size. Sanchez was a different matter altogether.

The recruits finished drinking from their canteens and began returning to the sparring area in twos and threes. Some of them lingered by their packs a bit longer than Gabe felt was necessary and, never being one to tolerate laziness, he let the offending parties know that if they didn’t hustle their asses up,
he
would be their next opponent.

That got them moving.

After slipping on my old six-ounce MMA gloves and washing off my mouthpiece, I called out to Sanchez and motioned him over. He frowned, his ink-black eyes darkening, and complied.

Sanchez didn’t look like much. He stood a shade over five-foot-seven, and was maybe a hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet. Lean and wiry, he had narrow, boyish features that reminded me of every surly kid I had ever seen busing tables at a crappy restaurant. He was an unassuming guy, not the kind of person who would ever start trouble. But someone, somewhere, had taught him the sweet science of boxing, and had taught him exceedingly well. 

Gabe knew Sanchez’s story, but despite my frequent inquiries he had refused to share that information. His reasoning for this was that he didn’t want it to affect the way I trained Sanchez, or any other recruits for that matter. Consequently, the first time I sparred with Sanchez, I had learned the hard way just how quick and accurate he was with his fists. It was not a pleasant experience.

Sanchez trotted to a halt in front of me. “You need me, sir?”

“Yeah, you’re with me this round.”

He narrowed his eyes slightly, fists tightening in his gloves. It had been a week since we’d last fought, and I had gotten the better of him then. I could tell he was itching for a rematch.

Gabe called out, “Touch gloves, get your hands up. Protect yourself at all times.”

I assumed a fighting stance, as did everyone else on the field. Hands up, chin down, elbows tucked, knuckles just below my line of sight. My feet separated shoulder width apart, weight distributed evenly between the balls of my feet—pure muscle memory.

Sanchez took a similar stance, his base narrower than mine. Where my footwork tended to be precise and deliberate, not wasting any motion, Sanchez was animated and bouncy. Constantly moving and shuffling, never staying in the same spot for more than a second. He was an annoying opponent, but that was a good thing. As his trainer, I wanted him to be dangerous.

Gabe signaled the start of the round and, as always, Sanchez lit into me before the piercing note of the whistle had faded into the air. I backed off and circled, giving ground and absorbing shots on my forearms and elbows, amazed again at the kid’s speed. I’m not slow by any stretch, but Sanchez is in a different league. I managed to snap off a few counter-punches, but the kid either slipped them or simply batted them aside. If this had been a boxing match, I would have been hopelessly outclassed.

Lucky for me, it wasn’t a boxing match.

Sanchez overextended on a jab, blew the timing on a follow-up cross, and gave me the opening I needed to close the distance and clinch with him. I slipped an overhook around one of his arms, grabbed him by the back of the head, and started launching knees rapid-fire into his midsection. His breath went out of him with the first strike, but his expression never changed. He accepted the blows without complaint and started working to improve his position.

Just as I’d taught him, rather than instinctively dropping his arms to block the knees—which would have only made things worse for him—he postured up and stepped closer to me, closing the gap that allowed me to throw knee strikes in the first place. Now the fight had become something similar to a Greco-Roman wrestling match, albeit without rules.

Using a jiu jitsu technique called
pomo
, which I had drilled extensively with him and the other recruits in previous weeks, Sanchez started fighting his way out of the clinch by reversing the hold I had on his arms. He managed to work one arm loose, backed off enough to avoid the hip toss I attempted, and twisted away from the clinch.

In a surprising bit of innovation, he faked a jab-cross combination, stepped back, and launched a Muay-Thai kick at my midsection. It was a good kick, with the right amount of snap behind it. But it was also a mistake.

One of the worst things that can happen to you in a fight is for your opponent to know what you’re going to do before you do it. The moment Sanchez dropped back from that lazy cross I knew what was coming next. When the kick came, I simply hopped back. His boot whipped past my midsection close enough to tug at my shirt. The momentum spun him around and exposed his back, taking him off balance for a second. That was all the time I needed.

Keeping my head low, I executed an old wrestling trick called a drop-step and shot in for a takedown at Sanchez’s legs. The only counterattack he had available was a spinning back-fist, which he sent whistling over my head. I ducked the blow and committed my weight to the takedown. My shoulder hit his upper thighs, my arms hooked around behind his knees and, with an explosive lifting, twisting motion, I swept him up from the ground and planted him on his back, landing with me in side-control.

From there it was only a matter of time. It’s hard enough to fight a skilled grappler under the best circumstances, but when said grappler outweighs you by fifty pounds and has seven more years of training than you do, it is simply impossible. Less than a minute after we hit the ground, I had transitioned from side-control into the full mount, softened him up with a few punches to the face, isolated an arm, and rolled into an armbar.