Sheriff Miller, a heavyset man with a gray mustache who had reluctantly agreed to referee the bout, met Arthur at the edge of the platform. “Arthur,” Miller said, his voice low, troubled. “You don’t have to do this. I can shut this down right now. Call it a hazard. I know what he threatened regarding your property. We can fight that in court.” Arthur stopped at the base of the wooden stairs. He looked up at the ring. Weston was pacing like a caged tiger, glaring down at him, pounding his four-ounce MMA gloves together. “Court takes years, Sheriff,” Arthur said flatly. “This takes three rounds.” Arthur walked up the steps and ducked between the ropes. The canvas was soft under his boots. He hadn’t taken his boots off. Weston laughed out loud, pointing across the ring. “You’re fighting in shit-kickers? Are you insane, old man? I’m going to break your legs.” Arthur didn’t answer. He walked to his corner. There was no stool. He just stood facing the center of the ring, unspooling the athletic tape. He wrapped his hands himself. It was a slow, methodical process. Figure-eight around the knuckles, lock the thumb, anchor the wrist. The movements were so deeply ingrained in his muscle memory that his eyes never left Weston. Arthur’s gaze was empty. The lights, the noise, the crowd—none of it registered. He was descending into a very dark, very quiet room in his mind. He was unlocking a door he had welded shut in a desert two decades ago.
Sheriff Miller called them to the center of the ring. Weston marched forward, his chest puffed out, refusing to touch gloves. He glared down at Arthur, trying to find a flicker of fear. He found nothing—just a void. “Standard amateur rules!” Miller yelled over the noise of the crowd. “No strikes to the back of the head, no eye gouges, no groin strikes. You protect yourselves at all times. You obey my commands. Understood?” “Understood,” Weston barked. Arthur gave a slow, barely perceptible nod. Miller stepped back. He raised his hand. The crowd went dead silent. Only the hum of the diesel generator and the snap of the moths hitting the halogen bulbs remained. “Fight!” Miller dropped his hand.
Weston moved first. He was fast—terrifyingly fast—driven by the explosive fast-twitch muscle fibers of a man who spent three hours a day conditioning his body for peak performance. The blue canvas squeaked under his bare feet as he closed the distance with a shifting slide step. He feinted a sharp, snapping jab toward Arthur’s nose, dipping his hips simultaneously to mask his true intention. From that lowered base, he fired a vicious heavy leg kick aimed directly at the meat of Arthur’s lead thigh. It was a flawless execution of a Muay Thai roundhouse designed to deaden the sciatic nerve and chop a man’s base out from underneath him. Arthur did not back away. He did not attempt to check the kick with his shin. He did something that violated every instinct of a trained sport fighter. He stepped entirely inside the arc of the strike. By driving his weight forward, Arthur jammed the trajectory before it could generate velocity. Weston’s shin merely slapped against Arthur’s hip with a dull, harmless thud. But Arthur wasn’t stepping in just to defend. As his boots planted on the plywood, his right arm fired forward like a steel piston. It wasn’t a closed fist. It was a heavy, calloused, open-palm strike driven straight into the dead center of Weston’s chest, directly over the sternum. The impact cracked like a rifle shot over the hum of the diesel generators. The breath violently vacated Weston’s lungs in a ragged, wet wheeze. His forward momentum hit a brick wall and instantly reversed. He stumbled backward, his designer mouthpiece dropping to the canvas as his jaw went slack. His eyes widened in sudden, blinding panic as his brain registered the absolute lack of oxygen.