The sound was sharp like a baseball bat striking a heavy wooden post.

Trent hissed in pain his shin instantly swelling, but he didn’t stop. He planted his foot and threw a brutal elbow aimed at the bridge of Clayton’s nose. Clayton slipped it by a fraction of an inch the coarse fabric of Trent’s hand wrap grazing his cheekbone.

The proximity brought the violent stench of Trent’s aerosol deodorant and fear sweat directly into Clayton’s nostrils. It smelled sharp, metallic, acidic.

It smelled like every terrified young man Clayton had ever dragged out of a compound in Fallujah.

The memory flashed hot and bright, the crunch of glass under combat boots, the static crackle of a radio earpiece, the heavy suffocating weight of ceramic plates against his chest.

Clayton blinked forcing the desert out of his eyes, dragging himself back to the humid beer-soaked air of the Iron Horse Tavern.

Trent capitalized on the microsecond of hesitation. He locked his hands behind Clayton’s neck in a tight plum clinch pulling the older man’s head down. He drove his right knee upward aiming for Clayton’s ribs.

The knee connected with a sickening thud. Clayton felt a rib crack. It wasn’t a clean snap, but a deep grinding shift in his cartilage that instantly robbed him of his breath. A white-hot spike of agony shot through his left side.

His vision swam. The crowd erupted. They smelled blood. Trent tried to throw a second knee.

He never got the chance. The pain didn’t make Clayton panic. It acted like a switch bypassing the weary farmer and tapping directly into a neural pathway forged over a decade of brutal unrelenting close-quarters combat training. Clayton didn’t try to break the clinch.

He didn’t try to wrestle Trent away. Instead, Clayton drove his thumbs directly into the soft, vulnerable notch at the base of Trent’s throat right above the collarbone. He pressed inward and upward hard. Trent choked, his gag reflex firing violently.

His hands instantly unclasped from Clayton’s neck as his brain screamed at him to protect his airway.

Freed from the clinch, Clayton didn’t throw a punch. He grabbed the back of Trent’s head with his left hand, tangling his thick, grease-stained fingers into the younger man’s gelled hair.