SWOOSH.
I did not raise my hands.
I did not flinch.
I did not blink.
I merely tilted my chin three-eighths of an inch to the left.
The heavy leather glove tore through the empty air beside my ear, grazing the stray hairs of my temple with a sharp, concussive whoosh.
The sheer momentum of throwing all his kinetic mass into empty air pulled Blake violently forward, his front foot slipping on the slick vinyl, his hips twisting off-axis, his center of gravity completely destroyed.
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In the third row of the wooden bleachers, an eighty-two-year-old retired Army veteran named Harold Vance—a man who had served forty years in military logistics and wore an antique Korean War service cap—suddenly dropped his wooden cane.
The cane struck the floorboards with a loud, ringing CLATTER:
CLATTER.
Harold leaned forward, his weathered hands flying to his mouth, his rheumy blue eyes widening in sheer, un-calibrated terror as he stared at the angle of my neck, whispering a name that froze the blood of every man who knew the history of the fleet:
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