Chapter 3 - The Clinch
A baseball bat is a devastating weapon at a distance of four to six feet. It generates tremendous kinetic energy at the sweet spot of the barrel, capable of fracturing skulls and shattering forearms.
Every street fighter knows that.
What street fighters don't understand is that inside of eighteen inches, a baseball bat is nothing more than an awkward, heavy stick that gets in the way of your balance.
When Travis drew the bat back over his right shoulder, cocking his hips to swing with everything he had, he expected Derek to flinch. He expected Derek to put his hands up, back down the stairs, or cower. Most normal human beings retreat from incoming blunt force trauma; it is a primal, evolutionary reflex.
Derek was not a normal human being.
The moment Travis’s weight shifted onto his back foot to initiate the swing, Derek didn't back up.
He lunged forward.
Through the phone, I didn't hear a wooden strike. I heard the sickening, explosive crack of human forearms colliding with human meat.
Derek had closed the distance in a fraction of a second, penetrating Travis’s guard before the bat could accelerate past its initial arc. Derek’s left forearm jammed Travis’s right bicep, deadening the lever, while his right hand drove straight into the hinge of Travis’s jaw with an open-palm heel strike.
The impact sounded like a wet sack of concrete hitting the porch boards.
Travis let out a choked, wet gasp. The Rawlings bat clattered against the brick steps, tumbling end over end down into the manicured mulch bed below.
"You piece of shit!" Travis roared, his voice thick with sudden, panicked rage.
He was thirty pounds heavier and seven years younger, and the raw adrenaline of a cornered predator took over. Travis lunged forward, wrapping both arms around Derek’s torso, trying to use his superior mass to slam my brother against the porch railing.
I could hear the wooden banister groan under their combined four hundred pounds of weight.
"Derek!" I screamed into the phone, slamming my horn as a sedan cut me off on the off-ramp. "Derek!"
No answer. Only the ragged, guttural breathing of two men locked in a life-or-death struggle.
In the cage, when a bigger man attempts a crude, unrefined body lock, he exposes his neck, his base, and his posture. Derek didn't fight the tackle. He sank his hips, widening his stance, dropping his center of gravity below Travis’s belt line.
Then came the thud.
A sharp, short, percussive sound that repeated three times in rapid succession: Crack. Crack. Crack.
Derek’s left knee had driven upward into Travis’s liver.
The liver is not a muscle; it is a dense, highly vascular organ packed with sensory nerves. When struck with blunt, concentrated force, the autonomic nervous system triggers an involuntary vasodilation. Blood pressure plummets. The diaphragm seizes. The legs lose all neurological tone.
The roaring stopped instantly.
Through the phone, I heard Travis emit a high-pitched, pathetic whine—the sound of an animal that has realized, far too late, that it has bitten into a bear trap.
"Get... off..." Travis wheezed, his voice bubbling with bile.
I heard the heavy thud of a body collapsing onto the porch planks.
"You like hitting people who can't hit back?" Derek’s voice came through the receiver, entirely level, entirely cold, barely breathing hard. "Is that how you feel like a man?"
"Fuck... you..." Travis choked out from the floorboards.
Then came the rustle of denim, the scrape of boots, and the unmistakable sound of Derek dragging two hundred and ten pounds of dead weight across the porch and hurling him through the open front door into the entryway.
"Derek, where is Lena?" I yelled, my truck finally clearing the highway interchange, tires screaming as I took the suburban turnoff at fifty miles per hour. "Is she alive? Find her!"
The line shifted. Derek took the phone out of his pocket and brought it back to his mouth.
"I'm in the foyer," he said.
In the background, past Travis’s agonizing groans, I heard a small, muffled sob coming from the downstairs half-bath.
"Uncle Derek...?"
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The relief that surged through my chest was so violent that my vision blurred with tears.
"I'm here, baby," Derek said into the house, his voice instantly transforming from that of an executioner into the gentle, protective uncle who used to bandage her scraped knees. "I'm right here. Nobody's ever going to hurt you again."
