Page 140 of Antihero

Fuzziness all through Evan now, his tongue pins and needles. He was barely holding off his panic, mounting with each tick of the metronome. A massive hand clamped around his foot, engulfing the entire end of his boot. It felt like getting clinched by the claw of a crane.

Yanked backward, Evan went weightless. He snatched at the sand, came up with an intact medicinal bottle with embossed lettering—Dr. Kilmer’s Swamp Root!

He felt himself gathered into Goliath, a fish furled toward a squid beak. Swinging around, he saw the looming head, the gritted teeth in that wool-mesh beard.

He swung the bottle as hard as he could, aiming for the paper-thin orbital rim at the side of the eye.

Yielding contact. Bone and glass shattered.

The Goliath emitted a protracted groan, a howl that never reached howling. Releasing Evan, he clawed at his face. Evan still had the bottle by the neck, the broken bottom an oval of fangs. His vision warbled, rot scorching the back of his tongue, the slurp of water against shore exploding kaleidoscopically in his head.

Minute and a half.

He jagged the ring of shards into the gunshot wound on Goliath’s thigh and screwed hard.

Now came a proper howl.

Evan fell back, banging his shoulders against the hull of the motorboat.

Goliath thrashed and screamed.

It would not be enough.

Evan grabbed the man’s hefty ankle, lifted the tree-trunk leg, and tugged as hard as he could. No movement. Dropping his center of gravity, he jerked, throwing his weight back in thrusts.

Bellowing, Goliath lurched, skidding across the broken bottles. When he twisted to reach Evan, his stomach bulged into view, slashed through with cuts.

Evan’s strength was fading. His sentience, too.

Another jerk across the saw-toothed ground brought the Goliath’s leg within reach of the half-buried motorboat. Evan grabbed a muddy flex-cuff from the bunch he’d stuffed back into his pocket. He hoisted Goliath’s massive ankle up toward one of the boat’s cleats, still bolted to the gunwale, and readied the strip of nylon.

It wouldn’t fit around the girth of the ankle and the cleat.

Goliath lurched up, swinging at him, and Evan jabbed the heel of his hand into the shattered maw of his eye. The big man slapped back onto the sand.

Hands shaking, strength fading, Evan managed to get another flex-cuff looped through the first, daisy-chaining ankle to cleat.

Goliath yowled and ripped his leg back, tearing the entire cleat free of the gunwale.

Evan half collapsed against the side of the boat, tried and failed to draw a full breath.

He said, “Damn it.”

Fifty seconds, maybe forty-five.

His head got swimmy and he slid off the hull, barely missing a pronged spade of metal thrust up from the sandy mire.

An anchor fluke.

He laughed like a crazy man.

The rain hammered him.

Digging frantically, sand rammed beneath his fingernails, unearthing a length of the shank, the bulb of the stock, and there—at last—the ring.

He sensed a barometric shift in the air. Goliath had pulled himself up, sit-up-style, arms within clamping distance. He grabbed Evan at either shoulder, crushing his rib cage inward.

Evan slammed forward in a head butt, aiming the thick curve of his frontal bone at the cheek below the vanquished eye.