The next time he staggered and slowed for a second, I was ready for him. I didn’t bother to wind up, I just set my feet and pegged it at him hard, like I was making the turn on a double play. I actually have a pretty good throwing arm, and I’ve often wondered whether that and my inexplicable love of baseball are traces of my unknown past, but at that particular moment all I was thinking about was trying to heave a large stone through Candy’s even larger skull. It hit him in the forehead with a godawful loud thud, hard enough that I saw the bones of his skull crunch inward beneath the skin like somebody had dropped a hard-boiled egg on a tile floor. He let go of his gun and fell to his knees, blood now gushing out of him top and bottom as he raised shaking hands to his face.

I could have just kept running—he was going to be in no shape to follow me for at least a few minutes, no matter how fast he healed. I could also have picked up his gun and given him a few rounds in the head or chest, enough to keep him down so long that I could have walked the rest of the way to the bottom in peace, stopping to pick flowers along the way (if any flowers grew on that miserable shitpile of a mountain). But as I said, I was in a crazy, violently angry mood, so instead of doing any of those things, I ran back to him and began to stab him over and over in the neck, face, and chest with that big old demon-sticker. He roared—actually, it sounded more like gargling, which I guess in a way it was—and did his best to get his hands on me, but I kept dancing back out of reach after each stab. When he eventually did get his big hands on me I’d already made a tattered, red, and soggy mess out of his upper body, and because I was behind him all he managed to do was pull me toward him. I jumped up onto his back, wrapped my legs around his neck (which was at least as thick as my waist) and started sawing away at his throat.