Seth watched it with the sound off. He watched himself stand there slumped looking small. He watched the shove. He analyzed his own movement with clinical detachment. The drop step was sloppy. His bad knee had hesitated for a microsecond. The strike was technically sound, but he had telegraphed it slightly by shifting his shoulder. In a real firefight that microsecond would have gotten him killed. The video had two hundred thousand views. It had been uploaded fifty minutes ago.
He tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. The light turned green. He pressed the accelerator, the Honda’s worn tires spinning for a second on the wet paint of the crosswalk before catching grip. He wasn’t worried about the cops. Cameron threw the first two physical aggressions. It was textbook self-defense easily provable by the idiot’s own gym buddy. What terrified Seth was the exposure. He had spent six years trying to fade into the drywall of society. He wanted to be the invisible man. Now he was a viral spectacle.
His knee began to throb in earnest, a deep grinding ache that felt like ground glass in the joint. He needed ice. He needed sleep. He needed this night to end. It was 1:15 a.m. The rain had finally stopped, leaving the city slick and reflective under the harsh glare of street lamps. Seth pulled into a brightly lit gas station. The fluorescent canopy buzzed overhead, a persistent mosquito-like hum. He killed the engine and walked into the convenience store.
The air inside was artificially dry, smelling of rotating hot dogs and floor wax. He walked to the back, grabbing a bag of frozen peas to use as an ice pack and a lukewarm black coffee from a dispenser that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since the Obama administration. He paid the bored cashier, walked back out into the damp chill, and leaned against the cold metal of his car door. He cracked the coffee lid. It tasted like burnt pennies.
Tires hissed on the wet pavement. A black SUV pulled into the lot, idling near the pumps. It didn’t need gas. Seth’s peripheral vision locked onto it. He didn’t tense, but his weight subtly shifted, distributing evenly between both feet. He took a sip of the terrible coffee. The driver’s side door opened. A man stepped out. He was in his late forties, wearing a heavy wool coat over a dark sweater. He had the thick sloping shoulders of a lifelong grappler and the flattened cartilage of a cauliflower ear on his left side.
It was the head coach from Apex Grappling. Seth had seen his picture on the gym’s window decal. The man didn’t swagger. He walked with a heavy deliberate gait. He stopped about six feet from Seth, a respectful distance. “You’re hard to track down,” the man said. His voice was a low resonant baritone. “Had a buddy run your license plate off the gym’s exterior security cam.” Seth didn’t answer. He held the paper cup, feeling the heat bleed through the thin cardboard.