I
Standing quite some distance above the black, turbulent waters below, Miles Scott had never been more aware of the genuine fragility of his own life. But despite this particular awareness as he teetered upon the edge of a precipice of life-threatening proportions, he felt strangely calm.
The city, now that the night was here, was dead quiet and hauntingly still. The chill wind surrounded him as he stood up there on the Washington Bridge, and he felt as if he were naked in the cold darkness, though he was as clothed as any of the other people out walking the streets.
The realisation that life was as vulnerable as it was in the great scheme of things was peculiarly similar to that initial moment after he had first heard of his twin sister's death.
That moment had been most peculiar because of its extreme calmness. Before the detonation of loss had caused raw and unyielding pain to surge through his muscles, vessels and nerves like the all-powerful shockwave tearing through the matchstick buildings devastated by an atomic bomb, he had actually taken the news quite calmly.
Calm, so calm - just as he felt now, teetering on the edge of oblivion, in perfect balance between rolling onto the paving slabs to his left and plummeting to the watery end to his right – to become just another fallen nocturnal pedestrian or just another statistic for the coroner’s office.
There were no friends to hold him back from the edge now: he’d never been especially popular, what with his dedication to a solitary sport, but his second year of college had turned him into a stranger to all. College had a cruel way of isolating those caught out of the social loop, and now at the beginning of his third year, his last refuge from loneliness was gone: his beloved twin sister had been plucked from this Earth without mercy, to leave him the only survivor of a truly tragic family.
Though the loss of his parents had been lost in the faded memory of his first few years, Sophie’s end had been a cruel, cruel blow. Cutting short a second year of college spent abroad on exchange to Japan, he had felt her death physically, mentally and spiritually, with a trauma that no grieving non-twin would understand.
Life was not worth living with this pain. No one in the world cared that he was alive, now, and he would never see the beautiful, innocent, kind face of his sister again. Everything around him was pain and darkness.
And just the smallest of steps would end it all.
He’d leave behind nothing much of any significance, his name in a few old high school yearbooks, on a number of martial arts tournament trophies, his image fading quickly from those he had thought were his friends.
Behind him, now, the still air was disturbed by the sound of other people. His thoughts reeled away from that brutal edge: Miles felt suddenly ashamed, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. If life mattered so little to him now, why should he be embarrassed at anyone witnessing the end of it all? But nevertheless, he did feel ashamed, perhaps deep down he was admitting to himself that it was the weak way, the coward’s way of dealing with hardship, but whatever, he turned back from the darkness towards the orange light flooding from the streetlamps, looking towards the source of the noise, intending to wait until the people had passed, and resort to his drastic solution soon afterwards.
The group of them seemed like fairly ordinary young people, night clubbers, college students most likely out on the streets after a boozy night in some dark dance venue down town. They were dressed fairly normally for that kind of crowd: the four men in dark trousers and coloured shirts, the lone female in a suggestively scanty skin-tight pink crop top revealing a wincingly trim midriff and below, a dark miniskirt hiding not much more of her below waist level.
At first he stood back and thought how lucky they all were, having fun together, far away from worries or solitude. But as they came closer, he saw that they were not laughing together, and they were not casually ambling along like most boozy college students following a night in a club.
As they came closer, Miles saw that they were running, with the four males in clear pursuit of the frantic female, the male laughter that of menacing threat rather than humorous frolic. The pretty blonde was clearly afraid, and running without shoes just out of reach of the pursuing men. Trouble, fear, desperation. It shocked Miles that such a thing could happen, so much so that he froze there where he stood, unable to move as the men caught up with her, pulling her down to the ground so that he could see repeated flashes of white underwear that was disturbingly thrilling to him despite the circumstances.
After that momentary pause, however, Miles found himself suddenly leaping down from his perilous promontory, his body seeming to act on some strange kind of autopilot – so much so that it appeared he was merely a first-person witness to his own body sprinting across the empty roadway at blistering pace to tear into the four attackers.
He watched as the years of theoretical, hypothetical combat suddenly clicked into a suddenly real context, those clever, gymnastic moves suddenly no longer about points or displays to impress the judges, but about using his body as a fulcrum to land cruelly perfect and grisly powerful blows on the four assailants who had the real intention to inflict harm on the girl.
How he managed to follow his various teachers’ words of advice to keep rage and fury from taking hold of his mind he would never know, but his chops, thrusts, jabs and roaring kicks were delivered in coolly calculated purpose, vigorously and without mercy but free from the red mist of anger.
The four fought for a while, hardly landing a blow on him, though he clearly landed the blows on them for blood was being shed. He tasted the red tang of iron in his mouth, and then saw the crimson fluid dripping down his opponents’ faces – but he knew for a fact none of it was his.
As their cries rang out and the hideous crack of broken bones split the air a few times, the four of them withdrew, backing off then turning to run, belting away with limps and groans to gamble that he was likely to stop and check on the girl rather than get involved in any serious pursuit.
II
“Are you all right? Miss?” he said in barely more than a whisper as he watched the murderous youths fleeing into the night.
“I’m fine,” she said, her voice quivering a little from either fear or nerves, but with a distinct edge to it as though she felt embarrassed that the four men had got the better of her, as though she felt she really ought to have coped with it all on her own, despite there being four men against her lonesome. “Thank you,” she said much more softly now, looking up at him with a vulnerable smile as she realised her initial tone had seemed less than entirely grateful.
“Glad I could help,” he said, reaching out his hand to pull her up to her feet. She was quite something, though her face was a little bruised.
“They… they ambushed me,” she said bitterly, and the two of them began to wonder slowly in the opposite direction to that the attackers had taken.
“We should get in touch with the police,” Miles said, feeling his mind somehow connecting up with his body once again as the adrenaline subsided within him. “Those guys are dangerous.”
“No,” she said softly with a slight shake of her head. “No police.”
