Annie of the Undead (14 page)

I took stock of the locals, who were mostly men,
and they took stock of me. New faces get the treatment in a tight
training facility. Everybody wants to see if everybody else is
worthy of being there, and everybody wants to know whose asses they
could kick. Fighters. Heh.

When I figured everyone had gotten their eyeful,
I moved away from the door and into my natural habitat among the
mirrors and free weights and bags. There was a ring to the left
side of the room, and a couple of fighters were getting their game
on inside it, their coaches looking on and occasionally shouting
some gem of coaching wisdom. I headed for the coaches beside
it.

One of the onlookers, a man in his mid thirties,
saw me coming and headed over to intercept me before I reached the
ring. His eyes appraised me in that fighterly fashion as he
approached. Mine did the same to him. He was big, sweated up,
dressed in workout clothes, and fit as a fiddle,

“Can I help you, baby?”

“I’m looking for Devon Halleck.”

“He’s out for the day. Are you his new
fighter?”

I handed the guy my membership receipt. He
glanced at it and handed it back.

“I heard he had a girl coming. He’ll be back in
the morning. I’m sure he’ll want to meet you.”

That was this guy’s way of trying to make me go
away.

“It’s been a while since I’ve been in a gym. I’d
like to work out tonight, if there’s somebody who can get me the
papers to sign.”

The guy nodded.

“Okay. Sure. I can do that. Just come on in the
office.”

He led the way to the cramped, messy office just
off the main room. A few guys watched us pass, one giving my escort
a thumbs-up before we disappeared inside. They didn’t offend me.
Men are men everywhere you go.

Inside the office, my big receptionist dug out
the gym contract that had been started in my name and a
die-on-your-own-dime waiver. He looked at the name printed on the
front page.

“Anna Stav…Stavropoulos,” he pronounced
awkwardly

“Annie,” I corrected, looking at the name Miguel
had given me and discovering that it really was as horrible as the
guy had made it sound. Fucking vampire comedian asshole.

I double checked the spelling on the name before
I signed the papers.

“I’m Stringer,” said the man. “Mr. Rawls is the
manager. He out there by the ring. The brother is Coach Boorstin.
You need anything, you just ask one of us, straight?”

I nodded, took my sheet of the triplicate, and
headed back out into my version of heaven.

The looks I got were forgettable with all those
pretty bags waiting for me. I had come wearing my training clothes,
so there wasn’t anything else to hold me up. I did some stretches
and started to warm up. I didn’t start to really draw prolonged
stares until I hit the bags. Then the guy working next to me
actually stopped what he was doing to ogle the chick who could hit.
That was fine. He was the one wasting good workout time.

Across the room I caught one of the coaches –the
one that must be Rawls, a gnarled man around fifty with a cigarette
smoking in his mouth, leaning on the ropes and looking at me
instead of the fight he was coaching. After about a minute, he
called Stringer over, and the two exchanged a few words that seemed
to satisfy the coach’s curiosity.

People let me do my business. I threw myself
into the bags, delving deep into my training zone, the place I
would go where the rest of the world slipped away, and all I could
see were the faces of the people I wanted to beat to a pulp. Take
that, Mom! And that, Tim, you kiddie-raping shit! Take that…

So I didn’t notice the quarrel developing
between a couple of the other clients until I was hit in the side
of the head by a boxing glove. There just happened not to be a hand
in it.

After reflexively ducking and looking to
pulverize my assailant, I realized where the glove had come
from.

“Give it back, you bloody Yankee. Give me back
my bloody glove!”

“The only way your gloves’d get bloody is if you
bled on ‘em yourself,” sneered the guy holding the apparent partner
of the glove that had disrupted my workout. He was dangling it high
over the head of a distinctly tiny girl. Fewer than five feet high,
Asian, dressed all in black spandex, and with an insane puff of
shocking pink hair on her head, she cut quite the displaced figure
in an establishment like this. I almost thought I recognized her
from somewhere until I saw the hairy black cur tethered to the
bench beside her, and that I knew I recognized. Less than
twenty-four hours before, it had tried to deprive my vampire of the
honor of ripping my throat out. It was the dog, and she was the
guide from that ghost tour.

Then, as I was staring at the slathering
creature, bouncing off the end of its leash like a yoyo trying to
get to its master’s tormentor, the other glove hit me in the
face.

Rrrrr.

I walked over.

“My uncle is an agent for MI-6,” the tiny girl
warned in the hard kind of British accent you’d expect a chimney
sweep to have, not a tiny spandex ninja assassin. “Do you know what
that means? I call him, and you disappear and spend the next ten
years in a black box no bigger than a tea cozy.”

The fighter giggled, holding back the tiny
dynamo with one hand on her forehead while she punched the air in
atomic fury. A couple of his friends stood by, egging him on.

“So which one of you hit me with the
gloves?”

The slim fighter turned to look at me. I
immediately sized him up. He was twentyish, lightweight, confident,
and fit, but not imposing –oh, and zit-faced.

He didn’t even bother sizing me up.

“Yeah, whatever,” he said, then turned his
attention back to the still-punching Brit-Asian-bomb-spandex
ninja-whatever-she-was. He pushed her back, causing her to fall
into the bench to which her hairy monster was tied. The bench fell
over, spilling her impossibly small backpack, covered with
something like ten thousand pin-on buttons, on the floor, and
flipping the dog into the wall like it was on a catapult. You’d
think the dog would be finished then, but it sprang back to the end
of the tether with renewed furor, gnashing and foaming at the mouth
like a miniature version of the hellbeasts that had attacked me in
the junkyard.

“Hey, you better get that dog to shut up, before
I crack it,” he said.

The girl gathered the struggling monster into
her arms.

“I’m protecting you from him,” she warned. “Not
the other way around.”

“Hey!” called the big coach from across the
room. “Get that dog outta here!”

“Jesus Christ goes where I go!” proclaimed the
little girl.

“Well then you can both get out. No dogs allowed
in here,” said the lightweight.

“But there’s another dog right over there,” she
pointed across the room to an old yellow lab lying beside one of
the rings. “Chap has even got his own food bowl and water bowl. It
looks to me like he’s settled in.”

“Duke is Mac’s dog, and Mac’s been here eight
years. He’s proved himself. Only way you get to keep your dog in
here is to prove yourself. You gonna prove yourself?”

“I untie Jesus and you’ll get all the proving
you need,” she answered.

Oh, Jesus Christ…

“Hey, glove-throwing boy,” I said, backhanding
the lightweight in the arm hard enough to ensure he’d be
offended.

As I had intended, he turned immediately to face
me, offense on his face right where I had put it.

“It’s been a good six months since I’ve had a
decent workout, and there I was, beating the hell out of the memory
of the last asshole I had to trash, and who comes along but some
punk who thinks that a few lessons after school makes him a champ
who gets to throw shit around and shove people down when he feels
like it.”

He looked a little stunned. I helped him out. I
pushed him again with my glove.

“Yeah, I pushed you. So what are you gonna do
about it?”

He edged closer to me, trying to use his height
the way people always do.

“You should watch yourself,” he said.

“Oh, come on now, girls and lads,” said the girl
with the tribble from hell. “Let’s all be civilized. Don’t fight on
my account.”

“No, let’s,” I said. “I don’t have a dog. So I
fight you and that dog gets to stay.”

“What?” The fighter laughed, as did his friends.
“You want to fight me?”

“Oh, if you don’t think beating you is enough to
prove me, then I’ll fight whoever you pick.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You up to it or not?”

“Well, fuck yeah, but...”

“Good. Let’s go, Tiger. The ring or the street?
Gloves or knuckles?”

I could almost feel the heat of the fight
already. I had just about convinced the kid to go for it, but
somebody was about to try to rain on my parade. Stringer came over
from the ring to see just what was going on.

“You getting into trouble already?” he asked,
looking at me.

I shrugged.

“Chick wants to fight me over a dog.” The skinny
guy laughed.

The big fighter looked at the kid, then back at
me. “Naw, let’s save fightin’ for day two at least. She said she
been out of trainin’ for a while.”

“All the better,” I said. “I like to dig right
in. What do you say, champ?” I asked the kid.

“Now, Chad,” said Stringer before my prey could
answer my challenge. “This ain’t somethin’ you want to get into.
Trust me on this one.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Not if you’re a pussy.”

That almost set Chad off, but Stringer’s hand on
his shoulder stopped him. The other fighter spoke close to Chad’s
ear in a voice meant just for him to hear. “You got all these
people watchin’. You really want them to see you beat up on a girl?
That ain’t gonna make you look good, man.”

“Backing down from me will make you look even
worse,” I warned.

“I’m not backing down from you,” proclaimed
Chad, but he still looked confused.

I cleared things up for him. “But I bet you’d go
down on me.”

Stringer stopped the kid’s lunge with his big
arms. Then he gave me an irritated look.

I smiled.

“Listen, Chad…” Stringer began again.

But another party interrupted them. It was the
wiry old coach. By now we had gotten everybody’s attention in the
place, and this just wasn’t the kind of situation a good coach
could not stay out of.

When the smoke from his cigarette reached my
nose, I suddenly realized I hadn’t had one in days –since Michigan.
That was funny.

“Hold on there, String,” he said in a robust
smoker’s rasp. “Why don’t we let this play out?”

Stringer looked at the coach with surprise. “You
serious, Mister Rawls?”

“Sure. Let the kids have their fun. Maybe we’ll
all learn something.”

He looked at the lightweight, then at me.
Something in his expression told me he was up to no good.

“You really a fighter?” Chad asked with extreme
incredulity, looking me up and down.

“On and off.”

“Oh, most definitely she is,” said Stringer.
“You do not need to doubt that.”

Stringer looked at the coach suspiciously,
apparently sensing the man’s intentions as I had.

“You’re in dreadful trouble now, lad,”
pronounced the little British girl, who had for some time been
watching the discourse with wide-eyed interest.

“Come on,” said the manager. “I’ll clear the
ring for you.”

Then he walked away.

“Outta the ring, boys,” he said to the fighters
waiting for him inside, “Time for exhibit B.”

Having gotten what I wanted, I followed
quietly.

“You’re dead,” said the lightweight.

“Not yet,” I answered.

The Asian-British-Whatsit followed, crazy little
hairball in tow.

I donned my headgear and popped my mouth guard
into place. No one mentioned a chest protector, which was fine with
me. Guess they figured I could just go ahead and get my boobs
bruised.

I didn’t intend to let him hit me that much.

We climbed inside the ropes. The coach got in
with us. He was going to treat this like the real thing.

“All right. Annie and Chad, everyone.”

The manager backed off and said my favorite word
in all the world.

“Fight!”

Chad didn’t immediately come in for the kill. He
wanted to school me, but, like most males, the idea of putting a
glove in a girl’s face, even in the ring, was not something that
came natural to him. Instead of going on the offensive, he danced
around, looking cocky.

“Come on,” he stoked. “Let’s see what you got!
Come on!”

I let his discomfort build.

“Come on! Come on, bitch!”

I moved in quickly, feinted right, circled him,
feinted left, then came into him like a bull, delivering a
combination of rights and lefts in hooks and jabs and a straight
that left him staggering back, more from surprise than real damage
–I hadn’t hit him that hard. I was still warming up.

There were quiet exclamations of surprise from
our spectators.

The Asian girl, lacking the solemn decorum of
fighting people during a match, yelled at the top of her squeaky
voice as she hung through the ropes, “She’s going to spank
you!”

My opponent shook his head to get his bearings
back. Then he came back at me mean. I dodged his first several
throws, then moved in and hooked him hard in the soft places. He
hunched, the wind knocked out of him. I was a lot shorter than he
was, and he had failed to use those long arms to keep me away and
protect his body. He had paid.

I came in again. He blocked me and pushed me
back. He feinted and tried a right jab and a left hook. It was a
stupid move. I easily dodged. Then I tried to come in, and he
clocked me right in the jaw. I came at him right on the other side
of it, which surprised him again. He managed to protect his body
this time, but I was charged now, and I loaded my blows, pummeling
him until he had backed all the way to the ropes. He got off them,
and we traded blows. He hit me in the mouth, and I tasted
blood.