Big Damn Hero

5

The man called Mitch couldn’t have seen the punch coming. Jayne Cobb might be big but he was fast too, when he needed to be.

It was a solid sock to the jaw, and Mitch went flying backwards, arms windmilling. He was caught by a couple of members of the crowd, who thrust him back towards Jayne, encouraging him to retaliate. Unfortunately for Mitch, he was too dazed to muster any kind of response. Glassy-eyed, he swayed in front of Jayne, who polished him off with a tidy right hook that dropped him to the floor like a felled tree.

Mitch’s buddy Earl now weighed in, swinging for Jayne. Jayne blocked the blow with a forearm and drove his fist into Earl’s paunchy midriff. The air whooshed out of Earl. His eyes and cheeks bulged like something out of a cartoon. Jayne followed up the gut-punch with an uppercut which fair lifted Earl off his feet. Earl flew bodily onto a table where four men were playing Tall Card. The table collapsed, sending cards, coins and drinks hurtling in all directions.

The card players were not exactly best pleased about this. As one, they lunged for Jayne, on whose face was plastered a big, sloppy grin.

It was at this point, with Jayne considerably outnumbered, that Zoë felt obliged to join in. She would much rather have sat out the fight, and she’d have been happy to watch Jayne get the tar beaten out of him. It would have been something of a bonus, in fact.

However, he was, all said and done, her crewmate and he had come to her aid more than once when they’d gotten into a scrape. More importantly, she needed to end the fracas before it escalated further. Brawls in a bar like this had a tendency to spread fast. A room full of unruly, very drunk people was like tinder: it only took a small spark to set the whole place on fire.

She decked the first of the card players with a simple, straight-fingered jab to the windpipe. He went down choking and spluttering, out of action for the foreseeable future.

One of his fellow card players, seeing this, made a grab for Zoë. She batted his outstretched hands aside, then pivoted on one leg, shoving the man past her. His face collided with the edge of her and Jayne’s table with a sickening crunch. Blood gushed from his nose, which was crushed flat by the impact. He slumped to the floor with a deep groan.

Jayne, meanwhile, grappled with his two opponents, who were raining punches on him. He managed to land a left-hand roundhouse on one of them but it was a flailing shot with little bodyweight behind it. The guy shrugged it off and walloped Jayne hard enough to make his eyes spin.

Zoë took the man out with a kick to the back of the knee chased up with a downward elbow jab to the top of his skull. He fell into an ungainly sitting position, legs splayed out in front of him, before keeling over sideways, out cold.

Being freed from one of his attackers enabled Jayne to give the other his full attention. He seized the man by the shirtfront and wrenched him close, before delivering a ferocious head butt to his face. Stunned, the man drooped in Jayne’s clutches.

“You look kinda peaky there, ol’ buddy,” Jayne remarked. “Maybe you need some air. Zoë? Wanna help?”

Zoë took one arm and leg, Jayne took the other, and together they swung the man back and forth, once, twice, before tossing him through the holographic window.

Zoë brushed her palms together. She assumed that was it. The fight was over and done with. Just a brief little taproom scuffle, no big deal.

One look around the bar told her she was sorely mistaken.

As she watched, someone in the drunken throng took umbrage because someone else had shoved in front of him to get a better view of the fight. The first guy — a farmer, to judge by his ruddy face and the smears of dried dung adhering to his clothes — picked up a near-full glass and broke it over the other guy’s head. Beer and blood sprayed.

This offended greatly the person whose beer it had been. She, a big bruiser of a woman with a plethora of homespun tattoos, thumped the farmer square in the face, adding a knee in the groin for good measure. As the farmer went down, gasping and clutching his nethers, a woman next to him who was most likely his wife uttered a wail of outrage. She leapt at the big woman, grabbing a handful of her hair. The two of them wrestled, howling like banshees.

By accident one of them spilled a drink with a jostling elbow. The man whose drink had been spilled thought someone else was responsible and duly hit that person.

From there, the situation rapidly deteriorated. It was a swift chain reaction, insult leading to insult, punch leading to punch. It unfurled with the incendiary inevitability of a forest fire. Chairs crashed down on heads. Bottles and table legs were pressed into service as makeshift weapons.

Above it all, a lone voice appealed for calm, that of Taggart himself, the bar owner. From behind the counter he begged his patrons to stop fighting and behave themselves, while the other bartender, his employee, crouched down in an attempt to avoid getting embroiled in the chaos.

Taggart’s efforts to restore order were curtailed as a bottle came flying his way, narrowly missing his head and shattering against the back wall behind him. At that, he vaulted over the counter and joined in the fray.

Zoë turned to Jayne. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Aw man,” said Jayne. “Really? Things were just gettin’ good.”

“We’re supposed to be keeping tabs on the captain, listening in case he gets into difficulties. Not scrapping with the locals.”

She was halfway to the exit when her eye fell on a kid — couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen — who was on the receiving end of a pummeling from two men much older and larger than he was. The boy was attempting to fight back but the men kept whaling on him viciously. He was screaming in defiance and pain, but this just seemed to incite his assailants to hit him harder.

Zoë’s blood boiled.

Grown adults busting one another’s heads was one thing. Ganging up on a kid half your age and gleefully beating him all to hell was completely another. She doubted the boy had done anything to deserve this punishment. He’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Barely even thinking about it, she charged at the men. If there was one thing Zoë Alleyne Washburne could not abide, it was bullying. What was the Alliance’s behavior, after all, but bullying on a ’verse-wide scale?

She got one of the boy’s assailants in a headlock from behind, pulling on his throat, choking him. He reeled backwards, slamming her against an I-beam support column hard enough to loosen her grip. At the same time he rammed his boot-heel into her shin. Agony flared up Zoë’s leg. She bit back a cry, channeling her fury into a piledriver of a punch to the small of the man’s back. She caught him above the kidney. As he crumpled she clutched his ears with both hands and wrenched him down, simultaneously bringing up her leg, and felt as much as heard the crack! of the back of his skull connecting with her knee. His body went lettuce-limp and she threw him aside.

The other bully was still pounding the kid, but Jayne, taking his example from Zoë, intervened.

“Pick on someone your own size,” Jayne said to the man, who responded with a sneer. Jayne, though tall, was still several inches shorter than him and a whole heap less wide in the chest.

“That,” the man said to Jayne, “is one sorry excuse for a hat, pal.”

It was the last thing he would be saying for a long time.

“I am sick and tired,” Jayne growled, spitting out each word, “of folks disrespectin’ Mama Cobb’s knitting.”

Fifteen seconds later, the man was sprawled on the floor, unconscious and bleeding in several places.

Zoë went over to the kid, who was also bleeding profusely, and whimpering too. Her leg was throbbing agonizingly where the bully had kicked her, and she couldn’t put her full weight on it. She had a feeling her shinbone might be busted.

“You okay?” she asked.

The boy tried to nod.

“Come with us. This ain’t no place for the likes of you.”

The kid was groggy and didn’t look like he could set one foot in front of the other.

“Jayne,” Zoë said, “help him.”

Before Jayne could reply, there was a sudden burst of static on their comm links. In the midst of it they both heard Mal’s voice, just audible above the surrounding mêlée.

“—berries! Str—”

The rest was lost amid sweeps of white noise.

“He say strawberries?” Jayne asked.

“Sounded like it.”

“Mighta been ‘breeze.’”

“Pretty sure it was strawberries.”

“Only I wouldn’t wanna rush outside, guns blazin’, just to find he didn’t say strawberries after all. It’d be kinda embarrassing.”

“Jayne,” Zoë sighed, “we’re leaving. Come on.”

“Okay, okay.” Jayne got an arm around the boy and half-carried him.

They made for the door again, but were thwarted. There were just too many writhing, battling bodies blocking their path. They couldn’t make any headway through the scrum.

“Window,” said Zoë. They’d thrown the card player out through it. Why not follow him their own selves?

They struggled back towards the window. Zoë had to wrestle people aside and in one instance deal with a man who blundered dazedly into her and clung on for support. He refused to let go, so she broke a bottle over his head and he disengaged.

At the window, the boy managed to get one leg over the sill. With Jayne’s assistance, he clambered outside. Jayne followed.

Zoë slid herself through the holographic glass, sensing a slight shiver of electrons around her as she went, like she was penetrating a meniscus of warm mist.

Outside, she scanned the street both ways, looking for Mal. She fully expected to see him, maybe tussling with Hunter Covington.

Not a sign of him.

She tried her comm link. “Mal? Sir? Do you read me?”

No reply.

She didn’t allow herself to feel concern. Not yet. There was an alley close by. Could be Covington had invited Mal to join him down there in order to conduct their business out of sight of passersby. She limped over to its entrance to check, unholstering her Mare’s Leg just in case. The cut-down Winchester Model 1892 carbine had a six-round tubular magazine, with one up the pipe, an oversized cocking loop, and no rear stock. It felt good and hefty in her hand.

The alley was empty. No Mal. No anybody. It was as if he had vanished into thin air.

“Where’s Mal?” Jayne said.

“That,” said Zoë grimly, “is the honking great question.”