Blind Fall by Christopher Rice

Author:Christopher Rice
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Gays in the military, Murder, Mystery & Detective, Revenge, General, Psychological, Detective and mystery stories, Mystery fiction, Thrillers, Marines, Fiction, Honor
ISBN: 9780743293990
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

Inside the cabin, in one of the nightstand drawers, John found a pad and paper, which he removed quickly, before Alex could emerge from the shower. John carried the pad, paper, and a pen into the woods, and followed the creek in the direction Eddie had pointed earlier that day when he had said there was additional land.

The trees thickened a little along the creek’s bank as he walked up the gradual slope. He came to a large clearing that looked like it had once held a storage shed, or possibly another house, that had burned to the ground. The large boulders lying in various locations throughout the clearing suggested they had been placed there by human hands, adornments to whatever structure had once occupied the dusty expanse between short, dry pine trees.

He sat against one of the boulders and proceeded to draw an outline of a male figure. He didn’t bother to add any facial features. The number-one rule of hand-to-hand combat was that your opponent did not have a face. He had a head with two soft spots on either side called temples that could only effectively be struck with pinpoint accuracy. He had two highly vulnerable areas in the middle of his head that had only the softest layer of tissue for protection; these were called eyes, and targeting them was the perfect way to bring him to his knees. John had been trained to the degree that he could ward off any attacker’s blow with a quick series of defensive movements that could end in the attacker’s death, but he had no intention of teaching all of these to Alex.

Many of these moves were about striking a sensitive part of the assailant’s anatomy so that their instinctive physical reaction would override their conscious thoughts. But for Alex, John would have to streamline this, teach him only the best places to strike, leaving out the blows everyone learned from the movies. Uppercuts to the jaw were out. They had to be delivered too forcefully, and the risk of injury to himself was too great. Punching a guy in the nose looked great on TV, but a skilled assailant could train himself to endure the watering eyes and bleeding that might follow.

On the figure he had just drawn, he drew a line out from the area where the figure’s eyes should be. Then he drew two lines down the center of the figure’s throat, both about an inch from where his trachea would be. These were the vagus nerves. Strike them hard enough and you could stop a guy’s heartbeat, one of the primary causes of accidental death during martial arts competitions. Then it was time for the arteries, which he marked with crosshatched lines. There were the jugular and carotid arteries in the neck, and the subclavian artery above the collarbone. All of these were susceptible only to knife strikes, and considering they hadn’t even attempted unarmed fighting yet, John thought it might be too ambitious to include them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.