Action Figures - Issue Three: Pasts Imperfect (18 page)

The trip ends halfway up the
hill leading to Milne’s Woods, at an old warehouse that was long ago converted
to a public gym. Natalie leads him inside, past a front desk clerk who doesn’t
look up from her book, down a narrow hall that opens into a space that, by
Matt’s best guess, occupies at least half of the building. Six boxing rings,
all of them currently empty, occupy the main floor, laid out like the pips on a
die. Speed bags line one wall. A row of heavy punching bags dangle from chains
secured to a high girder, one of several supporting a corrugated steel roof.

“Ay! Natalie!” The voice is
loud and low, like a cannonade of approaching thunder. Its owner beams at
Natalie as he approaches in a lazy, rolling gait, almost a waddle. The man in
the garish Hawaiian shirt is massive, possessed of a bulk built from raw,
unrefined muscle, and he towers over Matt by several inches — and over Natalie
by a foot and a half.

“Big Mo!” Natalie says, and
she all but vanishes in Big Mo’s arms when she goes in for a hug.

“Where you been, girl?
Haven’t seen you in a dog’s age,” Big Mo says, his smile bright against his
dark skin. “I was starting to think you didn’t love me no more.”

“College is a harsh
mistress, Big Mo, she demands a lot of my time.” Natalie makes a gesture of
presentation. “Big Mo, this is my friend Matt. He needs to do a little
ragework.”

“How you doing, brother?”
Big Mo says, offering a crushing handshake.

“Okay.”

“You go ahead and use
whichever ring you want, girl, place is all yours tonight,” Big Mo says. “You
let me know if you need anything.”

Natalie picks the closest
ring, a ragged thing with turnbuckles patched many times over with duct tape,
and a mat sweat-stained a sickly gray. “Pad up,” she says, indicating rows of
shelves sporting a wide range of sparring pads. “Gloves, boots, elbow and knee
pads, minimum, and I’d recommend some head protection too. We’re going full
contact.”

“Full contact?” Matt says.
“Wait, we’re going to fight?”

“Yep. If there’s a better
way to burn off stress than a knock-down drag-out sparring match, I can’t think
of it.” Natalie pauses, a lascivious smirk playing on her face. “Well, maybe
one better way.”

Matt pulls off his sneakers
and starts rooting through the pads, searching for a set of gloves with more
padding than reparative duct tape, but becomes distracted when Natalie
unceremoniously strips off her jacket and T-shirt — yet the sight of Natalie’s
lean, muscular form in a sports bra is not what causes Matt to gasp.

“Oh my God,” he says.

“What?” Natalie says, but
Matt cannot bring himself to admit he’s staring at the myriad of scars marring
her body. A series of crisscrossing lines stitch up her left forearm. A reddish
stripe streaks across her right biceps and triceps. The flat, taut plane of her
belly is marred by a scar too broad and jagged to be the aftermath of an
appendectomy.

“Nice war wound collection,
huh? Only one gunshot, though,” Natalie says, touching the not-an-appendectomy
scar with her fingertips. “Well, the graze on my shoulder, too, but I don’t
count grazes.”

“You’re...proud of them?”

“Hell, yeah, I’m proud of
them. Every scar on me is a man who got to go home to his family, or a woman
who didn’t have to spend the next year in intensive therapy, or a cop who gets
to end his career with something better than a hero’s funeral. This is the job,
Matt,” Natalie says, spreading her arms as a silent invitation to Matt: Look at
me; look at your future. “We take the hit so no one else has to.”

Matt, understanding at last,
nods.

“C’mon, get your pads on,”
Natalie says. “Time to start throwing hands. Fair warning, bud,” she says,
rolling into the ring, “The only thing I’m declaring off-limits is a shot to
the junk. You’re welcome.”

“Um...isn’t hitting a guy in
the nads fighting dirty?”

“If you’re boxing, sure, but
this isn’t boxing; this is fighting for your life — and when your life is on
the line, there is no such thing as dirty fighting. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Good. So, groin attacks are
off the table, but other than that, I’m not going to hold back and I don’t
expect you to, either. You come at me full steam.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“
Ma’am?
Oh, you are
going to pay for that one...”

Matt climbs through the ropes,
bright red pads wrapped around his fists and his feet, his elbows and knees.
Natalie eases into a fighter’s stance, left hand leading, right hand cocked
back for a strike.

“Let’s see what you got,”
she says. “Try to hit me.”

He tries. Natalie deftly slaps
away two jabs, stops cold a wild right hook, replies with three snapping jabs
to Matt’s face, and drops him to the mat with a brisk uppercut.

“What the hell?” Matt says.
“You told me to hit you!”

“I told you to
try
,”
Natalie says. “I didn’t say I’d let you.”

Matt begins to rise, only to
be driven back down by a jackhammer punch. “Hey!”

“What, you want to get up?”

“That’d be nice.”

“So get up,” Natalie says,
but each of Matt’s attempts is met with a fist to the face. “You’re persistent,
I’ll give you that,” she says, preparing another blow.

Her fist drops, but Matt is
not there to receive it; he dives forward, tucking into a shoulder roll that
brings him to his feet. A backhand, delivered blindly, nevertheless finds its
target, glancing off Natalie’s chin — not a debilitating strike, but enough to
disrupt her momentum and open her up for a series of attacks. Punches fly high
and low, pummeling Natalie’s head and midsection. She reels under the assault,
arms in front of her face in a defensive wall.

Natalie hits the corner.
Matt hesitates, retreats a step. It costs him. It’s more of a shoulder ram to
the gut than a proper tackle, but the effect is the same: The impact jerks Matt
off his feet, doubles him over. An arm like an angry python snares him around the
neck, cutting off his air.

“What was your first
mistake?” Natalie asks.

“Agreeing to this?” Matt
wheezes. Natalie squeezes. “I didn’t press my advantage. I gave you an
opening.”

“Correct. Do you know what
I’d do now if this had been a real fight?” She feels Matt shrug. “I’d throw my
weight back and drop you on your head. Pro wrestlers call it a DDT. The impact
would give you a nice concussion for sure, maybe fracture your skull, and
probably wrench your neck so badly you’d be in a brace for two solid months.”

“Um...”

“That’s why you never
ever
go easy on someone in a fight. Whatever you’re willing to do to an opponent,
they’re willing to do far worse to you. Don’t give them that chance, because
they will kill you.”

“...Can I ask you
something?”

“Sure.”

“Are you scared of dying?”

The question causes Natalie
to break the headlock.

“I mean, you know, on the
job,” Matt says. “Are you ever scared you’ll be killed?”

“Nope,” Natalie says with a
shake of her head. “I’m scared of dying stupidly: getting hit by a car while
crossing the street, slipping in the shower and cracking my head open, choking
on a bite of hamburger, that kind of thing — but dying in the line of duty?”
She smiles. “I got no problem with that.”

Matt nods. “I...I’ve never felt
it. The fear, I mean. People have tried to kill me, and I know I should have
been terrified, but I never felt anything. I was starting to think there was
something seriously wrong with me,” he says, drawing a laugh from Natalie.

“Of course there’s something
wrong with you. Look at what you’ve chosen to do with your life. I’m going to
let you in on a secret,” she says, lowering her voice. “Super-heroes are not
sane people. We have superhuman abilities and an overpowering desire to help
people, but do we become cops or firefighters or join the military? Nope. We
pass up steady paychecks and health benefits so we can put on silly costumes
and play vigilante. Does that sound sane to you?”

“Not when you put it like
that.”

“Embrace the madness, kiddo.
You’ll be better off for it. Now,” Natalie says, striking her fighting stance,
“let’s get back to business.”

Big Mo lets Matt and Natalie
go past closing time, waiting until 9:30 to gently shoo them away. They step
out into the parking lot and Matt shrugs out of his jacket, giving the cold
night air access to his sore muscles.

“Put your jacket back on.
You’re still sweaty,” Natalie admonishes. “You don’t want to catch a cold, do
you?”

“Colds are caused by
viruses, not exposure to the cold. Be honest with me,” Matt grunts, each step
sending a fresh jolt of pain up his spine. “Am I hopeless?”

“As a fighter? Not at all.
You definitely need some training but your basic instincts are good, and you
punch like a sledgehammer. Where’d you learn to throw hands like that?”

“After the Archimedes thing
last year, I started going to the gym near my house before school. The guy on
the morning shift used to be a semi-pro boxer, or so he says. He saw me working
the heavy bag one morning and offered to show me how to throw punches that
don’t suck.”

“Put that man on your
Christmas card list, because he taught you well. How bad is the bruise?”
Natalie says, tilting her head to better present the welt rimming her left eye.

“I can’t tell,” Matt says.
“These stupid sodium lights turn everything the same color. Sorry about that.”

“Never be sorry that you
gave as good as you got. Anything less and I’d have been insulted.” Natalie
presses a button on her key fob, popping the locks on her car. They climb
inside with no shortage of grimacing and groaning. “All right, bud, let’s get
you home.”

“No. Drop me off somewhere
else. I don’t care where.”

Natalie settles into her
seat. She doesn’t push or prompt, she simply waits for Matt to continue. She
waits for a long time.

“My dad had an affair. Mom
threw him out of the house.”

“And you don’t want to go
back home because why? Did your mom do something to —?”

“She didn’t do anything,”
Matt snaps. “She didn’t do anything. It’s just that...she’s a mess. I can’t
stand to see her crying like that. I can’t deal with it.”

“Matt, I’m sorry about your
parents. I am. But you need to man up,” Natalie says gently. “I get it, it’s
hard to see your mother in pain, but you running away isn’t helping her any,
and she needs you. She needs someone who understands what she’s going through
and is on her side. I won’t lie, it’ll be hard for you, but if it makes things
even a little easier for her, isn’t that worth it?”

“I take the hit so she
doesn’t have to,” Matt says.

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“...Take me home.”

SIXTEEN

Generally speaking, I’m not
a big believer in psychic phenomena — by which I mean stuff like precognition, communing
with spirits from beyond the grave, junk like that. I know, the cognitive
dissonance is strong with this one, considering that I count among my circle of
friends two psionics, several genetic mutations, a sorceress, whatever the heck
the Entity is, and my own powers derive from technology I got from an
extraterrestrial, but I somehow can’t buy into things like precognition as
anything other than a weird feeling people get sometimes. Talking to ghosts?
Yeah, right, like my dead grandmother would choose to talk to some random
stranger with an alleged “gift” than to her husband or daughter. It makes no
more sense to me than horoscopes, Mercury in retrograde, or dopes who think
that wearing a specific pair of socks during the playoffs will help the Bruins
win another Stanley Cup (although, I confess, I for one would jump on that
particular bandwagon in a hot second if I thought there was a shred of validity
to it. Go Bruins).

And yet, as Han Solo might
say, I’ve got a bad feeling about this day.