Alan and Rock had been going at it while Christine dealt with Ryan's second attack. Rock, who was heavier than Alan, understood the advantage of having a clear field for action. He had moved them both away from Aaron's downed body and further from Christine, back toward the racquetball courts.
Rock's presence made it clear to Alan that this fight was about Heather. Alan felt somewhat guilty for 'taking' Heather away from the quarterback, even though it was really Heather who had taken herself to Alan. But he had insisted that she dump Rock publicly, without considering the likely consequences to himself of that action. Now he was seeing one result of his being so mean and thoughtless.
Alan figured that Heather's dumping Rock had been partly Rock's fault. He suspected that Rock had been too dense and uncaring to be concerned about Heather's pleasure, so left himself open to being replaced by a better lover. So in a way Alan was also hitting Rock for Heather when they fought. Along with the need for self-defense, now that he had attacked Rock, those reasons motivated him to slug away as best he could. In doing so he was able to take out his anger at the football players, and particularly at both Rock and Heather for them putting him in this situation.
Like Alan, Rock was also an inexperienced fighter, because he'd always had his bigger buddies fight for him. As a result, up to this point their blows hadn't done much damage, producing just bruises and scuffed knuckles. However, Rock's greater weight and strength were wearing Alan down; Alan was becoming winded and definitely beginning to suffer.
He began to regret his spur-of-the-moment decision to attack Rock. Fighting for real was a lot harder and more tiring than he had imagined, way beyond what it looked like in the movies. He guessed that it might be easier and more automatic if he knew what he was doing. Or if he had super-quick reactions like Peter Parker (Spiderman). But he didn't, so all he could do was try to hit Rock while not absorbing too many hard blows himself.
The big problem was, he couldn't pause for breath or Rock would be all over him. So he had no alternative except to keep slugging away, even though his blows were becoming more half-hearted and less effective (if that were possible) as he tired.
Somewhere during this time he detached enough from the immediacy of fighting to wonder how Christine was doing. He wished he could help her, but he had more than he could handle just with Rock. He had an increasing dread that this was not going to end up well.
As an experienced quarterback, Rock always tried to maintain a tactical view of the field. He had purposely positioned himself while fighting Alan so he could keep an eye on what was happening with his buddies. He had seen Christine repeatedly blow through them while coming toward where he and Alan were fighting, so he prepared himself for her arrival.
Because Rock had kept Alan with his back to Christine, Alan was unaware of her approach. He had not seen how effectively she had dispatched her blockers while coming to his aid, so he had no idea that he was about to be rescued.
As Christine closed on the two of them, she saw that Rock was watching her, so she feinted a high snap-kick to his head, expecting him to dodge. He did, and backed off as rapidly as he could because of what had happened to Aaron and what he'd seen her do to Ryan and Ivan.
Alan didn't react when Christine suddenly appeared in front of him. She had to grab and shake him to disrupt his focus on fighting Rock and get his attention. His first response was "Whuh?" He had been so preoccupied with fighting Rock, and had become so worn out from the effort, that he didn't immediately grasp what was happening.
She said, "Alan! Move! I can handle them. I need you to go make a path through the barricade."
She was concerned that one of the other attackers might get to Alan if she were to have him retreat down the long, wide corridor with her attempting to defend them both. Since her prime goal was to make sure that Alan didn't get seriously hurt, she decided that he would be safer if they got away from their attackers by opening a narrow path through the barricade, because she could defend that opening while he found some witnesses whose presence would stop the attack. That would also provide a task to occupy him, getting him off the field of battle.
Alan nodded. He was grateful that she had given him some way to contribute to the outcome that didn't require him to know how to fight. He was also glad that this would let him catch his breath after fighting with Rock.
She escorted him firmly but gently around the corner of the racquetball courts, toward the barricade.
By this time Ryan was again on his feet. He called for Rock and Ivan to huddle with him, to develop a play that would let them incapacitate Christine.
Since she had no desire to hurt her schoolmates, she simply positioned herself between where they were talking and where Alan was clearing the barricade. If they stayed away she would leave them alone, but if they returned to the attack she would stop them.
Christine was calm and utterly confident, waiting with some slight amusement to see what their attackers might do. Now that Alan was out of harm's way and the others had lost the element of surprise, she knew that taking care of them would be pretty straightforward, even though it would undoubtedly be a three-on-one fight.
By calling for a huddle, Ryan again confirmed that he was their leader. Since her earlier takedown and his ensuing forced admission of defeat had obviously not deterred him, she decided that he merited another, more extreme lesson. She was starting to get pissed at his obstinate persistence.
Ryan, Ivan, and Rock broke their huddle and tried to come at her simultaneously from three directions at once. Ryan, who was wearing football pads, took the center slot, with Ivan on her left and Rock on her right. Since they didn't know much about martial arts, they thought that it would be straightforward to confuse her with their three-way attack and grab and hold her.
Christine smiled inwardly at this opportunity. Much of her Aikido training had been in randori, the practice of defending against multiple simultaneous attackers. The key elements were to separate the attackers momentarily, dealing with each rapidly, individually, and above all to keep moving no matter what.
She saw how she could arrange her counterattack to deliver Ryan's lesson. With her right hand raised threateningly, she moved directly toward the gap between Ivan and Ryan, apparently ready to strike either of them, making it hard for them to deduce her intent. At the last moment she darted round outside Ivan, sliding her descending right arm along the top of his grabbing right arm, forcing him to twist away from her as she passed him. They both turned to face each other, at which point she repeated the technique that had taken Ryan down earlier, with her right arm guiding Ivan's shoulders back and dropping him on his butt as she moved between him and Ryan.
This maneuver brought her left side immediately in front of Ryan, who grabbed her near arm as she had expected. She pivoted to face him, bringing her now-unoccupied right hand diagonally up in the narrow space between them, to Ryan's right shoulder. Once above his shoulder, her hand slashed sideways at his neck, delivering a percussive advanced-Aikido "blade strike" to the nerve receptors of his carotid sinus, located next to his carotid artery.
The precisely-delivered shock to this critical nerve plexus triggered a physiological response known as carotid sinus syncope: his arteries lost muscle tonus and dilated while his heart output dropped, causing his blood pressure to plummet precipitously, leading to momentary unconsciousness. As his grip relaxed and his body collapsed he toppled over away from her, propelled in part by her blow.
In Aikido practice she would have supported her sparring partner after such a strike. This time Christine pushed Ryan away instead, then held his arm to retard his fall enough to avoid a serious head injury as he crashed to earth unconscious, with only his football pads to cushion the impact.
She looked for Rock, to take him down, and saw that he had instead headed for Alan, despite Ryan's tasking him to grab Christine. This was due to Rock's rage: from his viewpoint, Alan had cuckolded him and stolen Heather from him in a very public, humiliating way, so this was extremely personal.
Rock and Alan had just started trading blows again when Christine arrived. Using a one-handed variant of Aikido pain holds and joint locks taught to law enforcement officers around the world, she reached out and grabbed Rock's arm at the wrist, compressing his skin just enough with her thumb and encircling forefinger to deny his brain the lead time needed to counteract her next move.
Using a precisely-applied torquing grip, she forced two specific bones in his wrist to move unnaturally against each other, causing their surface nerves to scream in unfamiliar agony, while at the same time her encircling finger pinched another nerve on the outside of his arm against a bone. The pain was excruciating, apparently forewarning of major bodily injury, and thus commanded his total attention.
The same Aikido technique also locked up Rock's wrist and elbow joints while forcing his shoulder to roll inward, making it impossible for him to wrest his arm from her grasp. (The resulting control without injury that it provides is one reason why military police favor that hold.)
Although Rock was now completely focused on his forearm and what she was doing to it, Christine's wrist technique had been so quick and unobtrusive, and the resulting movement of Rock's forearm had been so small, that Alan didn't catch on that the situation had just changed, so he hit Rock again, this time connecting with Rock's now-undefended face near his eye. It was a hard enough blow that Rock would sport a big shiner for days.
Christine was surprised by that, then realized that Alan didn't know enough about close-contact fighting to understand the implications of her seemingly innocuous grip on Rock's wrist. She said, "Alan, don't hit Rock when he can't defend himself."
Alan was startled and apologetic when he figured out that she must somehow be controlling Rock. "Sorry. I didn't know..."
Christine shifted to a two-hand grip to better manage Rock. She forced him onto his tiptoes, locking his shoulder joint in the process, then used his arm as a lever to make him move in the direction she wanted. His brain would not permit more pressure where she was forcing the bones in his wrist together; with his wrist, elbow and shoulder all under her control, he had no choice but to follow her lead and do whatever it took to minimize that unfamiliar, agonizing bone-on-bone pain.
During this encounter, which had taken only a few seconds, Ivan had gotten back on his feet and moved toward the fighting. As he approached she forced Rock, whom she was still holding on tiptoe, to move backward toward him. She kept Rock between them, allowing Ivan to see that Rock was completely helpless.
Ivan got the message: she could do the same to any of them. He was stunned. Just moments earlier they'd had a seemingly enormous three-on-one advantage. Where had that gone? He mentally cursed Rock for ruining their plan. (Had he been less of a brick he might have realized, from everything he'd seen, that they were facing a well-trained fighter against whom they'd probably never stood a chance.)
Ryan had regained consciousness and was trying somewhat unsteadily to get to his feet, so she forced Rock to back up into him, making the two of them collide. Then she released her grip on Rock's wrist.
Christine decided that the situation was stable, with their attackers milling around and not about to charge at them immediately. So she moved back toward Alan, staying between him and the others, and reached into her pocket for her cell phone.
She intended to have Alan call in their location and get some witnesses whose presence would help end the confrontation. When she pulled out her phone, she saw that it was smashed. She decided to yell again, to help Suzanne and the others find them. "HELP! SOMEONE HELP! BY THE RACQUETBALL COURTS, NEAR THE SHED!"
That puzzled her three opponents, whom she'd been blocking pretty effectively without any outside help. Ryan wondered whether her yelling was to get witnesses.
Alan's hopes soared when he saw Christine reach into her pocket, presumably for her cell phone, but then his hopes were dashed when he saw her pull it out, frown, and put it back in her pocket. When she cried for help, he thought it was because their situation was desperate. He figured that they were about to get pounded and didn't know what to do. He immediately stopped working on the barricade and prepared himself for more fighting, assuming what he thought of as a "fighting stance" with fists forward.
They were all standing near the barricade, without much movement, each apparently waiting for the others to make a move. It was a strange standoff, an unexpected pause in the action.
Suddenly Aaron came around the corner of the racquetball courts from where he'd been downed. Like some kind of relentless, bearded, burly Viking berserker, he was wiping the blood from his face like it was nothing. He flashed a triumphant toothy smile. "Leave 'em be, boys. I've got 'em. I personally want to kick the shit out of that damn bitch!"
Both Alan and Christine realized that the others must have seen Aaron stirring, which explained in part why they had been waiting - they'd been glancing back at Aaron and were hoping that he could take on Christine. Between that and Christine's call for help, they felt greatly emboldened.
Aaron moved toward Alan and Christine, but he could only limp forward slowly. His body wasn't ready to back up his cocky attitude, since he was still recovering from what Christine had done to him. He stopped well short, knowing that he couldn't face her yet when he could just barely walk.
When Alan saw that Aaron was up again and headed their way, he thought, Oh shit! We're screwed! Christine's good, but she must be on her last legs like me. Besides, what can we do against FOUR guys, especially that huge guy?! We're trapped here. That Hulk dude can just rush us and flatten us like pancakes, and then the rest can mop us up.
Fuckety-fuck! Fuck me! Alan cursed as he looked at Aaron. He's like a walking mountain!
"Hey, you gonna be okay?" Rock asked Aaron. Rock was obviously very angry, still hoping for revenge despite being unable to deliver it himself while Christine was protecting Alan.
"Yeah, just give me a minute to walk it off," Aaron replied. "Those two aren't going anywhere. Then the four of us will be able to take 'em on at once. But let me get the chick. This is personal now. I'm gonna fuckin' pulp her face into the ground!"
Alan felt lightheaded as another, weaker, fear-induced adrenaline surge hit him, making him tremble. He was panting, too winded to talk to Christine. He looked at Aaron limping about and thought that it wouldn't be long, maybe just a minute or two, before Aaron was ready and the fighting would resume.