We continue on.
I don’t know how to formally fight, but I do know how to live. So I used my jacket to handle the biggest problem; the knife. I didn’t try to finesse anything, though. I just tangled his knife with the jacket and shoved him into the wall.
He almost had me there, though. Adam dropped the knife immediately, the moment I entangled it in the jacket, and when he launched himself off the wall he immediately started clawing at my upper arm. And I mean clawing; he was trying to dig his fingers into my flesh, and when I pushed him back there were bruises and couple of ugly gouges.
If Adam had known how to fight — I mean, before — he might have beaten me then. He was stronger, and a little faster, and that usually means bad things. He wasn’t fully in control of his body yet, though. He kept jerking forward, too far or too short, trying to compensate while he was still moving, and so his staggering was more like flailing about. Every time he moved, he’d growl and gibber, with gooey red spit bubbling out from his mouth from the effort. If he wasn’t there to hurt me, I would have felt sorry for him. I did feel sorry for him. The space-happy are sick, not evil.
I still knew that Adam was there to hurt me, so I tried feinting for the gun, then jumped back a little when he tried to lunge in my direction. A quick, horrible moment of closeness; and then he was past me, arms windmilling as he tried to rebalance himself from tripping over my outstretched foot.