Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) Read Online Free PDF Page A

to see some animal suffer for their jollies?  I stepped past the third line of cars and called out, “Hey!” at the four guys.
         They looked up from the dog toward me.  They were guys in their early twenties like me, better dressed than I was, probably guys who’d stopped off for a drink together after work on a Friday.
         I expected them to scatter but they didn’t.  If anything they looked as irritated with me as I was with them – as if they were saying, “Who are you to talk to us without permission?”
         “We don’t have any money for you, hobo,” one of them, a light-skinned black guy, announced.  The others chuckled.
         The dog tried to get up and one of them pushed it back down with his foot.
         “You don’t want to touch that dog again,” I said.
         One of the other guys, a white guy in a grey suit with a red tie and white shirt, his brown hair cut close to his scalp, grinned, turned, and just kicked the dog under the jaw.  It yelped, turned in a circle and whimpered.
         “The fuckin’ dog pissed on the tire of my brand new car,” another, also white, said. “You better take a walk, pal, or you’re going to get what he’s going to get.”
         You grow up on a farm, you learn to respect animals.  Even the food animals like cows and chickens and pigs – they’re going to die, but you don’t want to see them suffer.  The life you make for yourself costs them theirs.
         But dogs are special.  A good dog guards your crop all night from the varmints that would eat it.  A dog protects you from what might come to eat your herd.  He’s your companion, he’s your friend.  He works right beside you for no other reason than because he can.
         “I’m telling you one more time to get away from that dog,” I told them.
         I started walking, they lined up between me and the dog.  It didn’t run away, and then I saw why.  They’d already broken his leg.
         I’m not ashamed to say, I lost it.  It was too much.  I’d gotten kicked out of the Navy for no damn good reason, I’d gotten fired for no good reason, now here I was going to have to work through the whole, hot summer on someone else’s property for no good reason, trading sweat for pennies, because all I ever did was to try to work for someone else and then stand up for myself. 
         No.  Not only no, but hell no!  I charged forward and I engaged.
         The first guy caught me in the stomach with his right.  I reached out and took him by the side of the head with my left hand, and punched him square between the eyes with my right.  Another of them leapt at me and caught me around the shoulders, trying to drive me to the ground with his weight.
         If I didn’t have fifty pounds on him, that might have worked.  As it was, I caught him in the chest with my right elbow and punched the guy coming up behind him with my left fist.  The first guy was staggering to the ground, shaking his head, when the fourth guy punched me in the head.
         The guy with his arms around my shoulders tried to drag me to the ground, circling behind me and pulling back.  The fourth guy, the black one, hit me in the stomach, then again, and again, then looked up at me and smiled, as if to say, “This is what you get, aren’t you sorry now?”
         I pasted him once in the mouth, then in the throat in a left-right combination.  He stepped back, both hands on his neck, and I could see the third guy had chosen the better part of valor and had taken off.
         I reached my right hand behind me, found the back of the second guy’s head, and then flipped him over my shoulder.  He landed on his feet and I took him by the hair and punched him in the back of the head, right behind the ear.  He dropped like a stone.
         The dog whimpered again.  I turned and he was laying by the guy I’d punched in the throat.  For all of the pain the