Chapter 1: Earth

I crossed the busy road from school and pulled the large coat around me, it was getting colder and the central heating of my classroom had made me painfully unprepared for the dropping temperatures. But it wasn’t as if I was going to be out in it for long. A quick walk into the subway allowed me a brief respite from the winter, but due to the thick coat I now had, it was actually a little too warm. Sasha would have told me that was typical… never content, and I guess she was right. I was always flicking from one skill to the next, one hobby to the next. She’d been the only time that I’d actually settled and put my heart and soul into something. Well, that and music. But she shared that passion, and we’d had that in common, so it wasn’t surprising to any of our combined family when we were married.

I sighed a little as I shrugged the coat off my shoulders and laid it across my laptop case. I slung the laptop lightly over my shoulder again and walked the stairs down into the underground. The platform was moderately occupied, most of the students had left hours ago when school had broken but, as a member of staff, I had a lot of marking to finish before the semester break, and it was close to 5pm. Not quite late enough for the office crowd to start piling out and late enough that most of the students were already home. But there was a group of boys in their late teens or maybe even a little older who were milling around the platform, obviously waiting for the next train. They were laughing boisterously and giving everyone else on the platform a sense of unease.

I recognised the group dynamic quickly: Three core members and a hopeful. We saw this pretty commonly in the school and it was a tragic story almost every time. There would be a core group of friends, usually bullies and troublemakers and a ‘spare’ that they allowed to hang around with them. They picked on the spare and treated them like dirt, but never enough to make them leave and, for their part, the spare kept around them so that they wouldn’t be a target for the behaviour that the core group inflicted on everyone else they met.

I looked around at the other members of the platform, I was over six foot tall and built in a typical triangle shape so I knew that they wouldn’t pick on me. In my many years of teaching, there was a certain way I’d learned to stand to intimidate these groups, and I combined it with a facial expression that seemed to make most young people feel guilt about how they were behaving and usually made them avert their eyes; the perfect teacher stare. Combined with my sheer size and an air of confidence that came with knowing several martial arts; these groups usually gave me a wide berth.

But the others on the platform… there was a mother with a pram, but she looked like she worked out and was radiating soccer mum energy. I wouldn’t mess with that mama bear, and this group of miscreants would leave her alone. A group of women in their late twenties sat on the platform and chatted, they were all extremely beautiful and intimidating in their own way, but girls like that were usually armed with pepper spray and, even if not, there was certainly safety in numbers. The boys were smart enough not to bother them. A man in a suit stood looking at his watch, not their style, he smelled like expensive cologne and lawsuits.

But the teenage girl, standing alone at the end of the platform... I sighed painfully; she was likely in trouble.

I wandered casually down the underground as the boys jostled down in the same direction. They hadn’t noticed her yet; they were engrossed in their phones. So, I stood about two meters from the young girl, my large frame providing some cover to shield her from their sight. If they stopped early they might not even see her at all, and I could even hope that they would get on a different carriage. Unfortunately, they didn’t stop, and poor luck seemed to drag them further down the platform until they passed me and realised the girl was there. The centre one, he must have been around 20 years old, put his phone in his back pocket and slicked his hair back. He started to saunter over to her with his two friends and their ‘spare’ following a little way behind.

“Hey there…” he oozed unattractively. He was dressed in rough jeans and a hoodie with some gang sign emblazoned upon it. “What’s your name, baby?” he asked, getting far too close for my liking.

The girl seemed to shrink from him, showing classic defensive body language as her shoulders raised to cover her neck and her hands raised to her chest to grip the strap of her bag. I couldn’t interfere yet. The law was clear; if they made the first move, I could do whatever I liked to protect her, but she had to reject them first. If she led them on in anyway, the legalities start to get murky, they start saying things like “She didn’t tell me to leave…” and “We were just talking…” and suddenly the defence has a case to let them go. I’d seen one of my mates even wind up with an assault charge when he’d stepped in to protect a kid and the miscreant’s father had been a lawyer.

“I’m not interested…” she stuttered. “Leave me alone please.”

Good girl! Now step away!

As if she could hear my thoughts, she moved away from the young knave and, walking around me, stood so that I was between her and them. Her father had obviously taught her well. She had quickly recognised I was safe and was using me as a buffer.

Perfect. Now back off dipshit.

But the boy had an ego to protect, and after a look to his mates, he started forward again.

“Hey pretty girl… no need to be so rude.”

I turned and faced him, taking a sidestep to block his path and put on my best ‘don’t mess with me’ voice.

“She made herself clear. Now I’m making myself clear. LEAVE. NOW.”

It just happened to be my 40th birthday, so I was older, more experienced and way smarter than this trio of morons. But you could see the kid size me up and, thinking his youth and enthusiasm would serve him well, his face contorted into a sneer and there was obvious mirth behind his derision.

“Fuck off you old cunt. We’ll hurt ya.”

I held his gaze, almost daring him to follow through on his words as I directed my voice to the now nervous girl behind me. I kept my instructions simple and short.

“Go find security, catch the next train. Make a call and have someone waiting for you at your stop.”

I didn’t see the girl nod with her eyes wide. I was staring at the kid in front of me. But I knew she had started to follow my instructions when the boy tried to pass me to stop her leaving.

“I didn’t say you could leave bitch!” he yelled as he moved to grab her.

I was not a fit man. I knew how to fight and had spent years training in various martial arts, but I was overweight, had a very short “gas out” time as my instructor called it and, as such, I couldn’t fight for long.

But I didn’t need to. I knew my limitations and, due to my low endurance, my fighting style had become brutally quick and efficient. I lost every competitive fight I was in due to my lack of cardio, but all my training partners said the same thing; in a fight without rules, they wouldn’t have stood a chance. I knew I had some extra weight and I knew how to use it in a fight. I also knew how to destroy someone’s ability to fight.

He extended his arm to try to grab her and so I wrapped it with one of mine, trapping it to my side. His forward momentum was checked with my hand against his chin. His feet had continued forward but with his head stopped in place by my sudden force applied to his top half, he fell backwards on his arse.

I didn’t let him get up. I had already engaged and I was outnumbered so I had to reduce the opponents quickly or get overwhelmed when my energy ran out. I dropped, letting the weight of my body slam through my knee and into his right shoulder. The kid screamed in agony as my knee shattered his collarbone and forced it into the upper section of his humerus -snapping it off at the neck where it met his shoulder.

One down.

The girl was running away. The first kid was out. I’d have to explain later to the police that I could have dropped my knee through his sternum, leading to a slow and painful death as he drowned in his own blood, and that ruining his chance at bowling for Australia had been a merciful second option but, for now, I had two idiots running at me.

A teep kick from my Muay Thai classes landed in the chest of the kid on the left and I carried my momentum forward. The trick with kicks was to make sure you didn’t over commit as lifting your foot off the ground sacrificed your balance, so I didn’t like kicking much at all. But this was a textbook example of where to use a well-placed teep. The kid left the ground under the force the push-kick as, like his mate, his feet kept going when his chest stayed still. Usually, a teep is defensive measure used for generating distance, but this 19-year-old was light and he fell backwards and sprawled across the floor. He wasn’t down for good, but he might think twice about getting up.

All my thoughts and observations were happening in the blink of an eye. As I landed my left foot from the kick, my right arm had been brought up to shield my face and I felt the thud of the other kid’s fist contact my bicep harmlessly. As muscular memory took over I felt myself grab the extended arm and pull him in the direction he had punched. I leveraged my own weight and spun him around sending him tripping over his collapsed friend and leaving myself standing on the edge of the platform looking at the mess I’d created.

Two of the four were sore but would be fine, the ringleader was looking at six months of rehab on that shoulder and I was untouched but breathing hard. Somewhere behind me a rumbling was coming and getting closer but I hardly paid it any mind. I’d used up whatever fuel I had in the tank after a long day at school and I was glad that the boys were looking scared and staying back. The girl was gone and I was about to follow her up the stairs to double check on her when movement came out of the corner of my eye. The fourth kid, the hanger on, the spare; he was swinging something at me. A large object from the platform, a rubbish bin or something but whatever it was didn’t matter. I stepped back and it passed within a centimetre of my nose.

It was everything happening at once and time seemed to slow. I know that sounds cliché, but sometimes it’s just the way things happen.

The kid’s face showed he was scared. No; he was terrified. I didn’t know if it was of me, or being in his first fight, or the consequences of what was happening, or the fact that he’d just tried to take my head off with rubbish bin, but whatever it was; I could see he didn’t want to be here. He just couldn’t stand by and watch his mates be beaten up, regardless of whether they deserved it or not. I felt for the kid. He knew he should have walked away, but the danger of losing the respect of the others was greater in his mind than whatever I could do to him.

I turned as this kid overbalanced with the force of the swing and the extra weight pulling him in a dangerous circle that came with a sickening realisation that he was going to spin himself off the platform and onto the tracks. And the distant rumble I had heard approaching was joined by lights down the tunnel that confirmed my suspicions; a train was passing through the station.

My arm shot out and grabbed the kid by the shirt as he stumbled backwards. I wasn’t going to let this kid die here. But the momentum was too much and, rather than stop him, I needed to transfer his energy in a different direction. Before he could go over the edge, I used my own weight as an anchor to change his direction and then spun myself around to pull him away from oncoming train.

We traded places; him stumbling away from the tracks and myself careening towards them as the bright lights of the train filled my vision and the screeching of brakes and the train’s horn deafened my hearing. The realisation that I had sacrificed myself for the guy who had just tried to decorate the train station with my grey matter was a bitter irony, but it was short lived. The pain of the impact was both sudden and fleeting as everything I knew got bathed in painful light and my world simply ceased to exist.