The final death, p.12
The Final Death, page 12
And it had legs.
Remo turned. Viki Angus was on a meat hook. Her brown eyes were open and icicles had formed on her lower eyelids where her tears had frozen. Her mouth was open and her tongue had become a solid block of ice. Her head did not loll back because her neck was stiff and cold.
The hook protruded out the middle of her chest, just to the left of her silver Star Trek insignia. It was big and sharp and rounded and its slick black color clashed with the blue of her uniform. The other hooks were metal gray but this one was black because a thin layer of her blood had frozen on it before it had a chance to drip off.
Her body did not sway, her legs did not dangle. Her boots were on but her pantyhose were missing. They must have had fun with her before she died.
Remo stood before her silent corpse. He reached up to take her down and her frozen arm broke off in his hand.
Then the mist was upon him.
· · ·
Mary Beriberi Greenscab was sitting with her feet up in the control room.
“It’s too bad they don’t have a camera in the freezer,” said Charlie Ko, wistfully, playing with his fingernail. He was slicing pieces of paper in half that he threw into the air.
“The lens would freeze up, maybe break,” said Mary, pulling her jeans-enclosed legs off the counter. She stood up and straightened her green checked shirt.
“So what’s the gab, Greenscab?” said Sheng Wa.
“Yeah, what’s hairy, Beriberi?” said Eddie Cantlie.
Everybody laughed until Mary flared, “Don’t call me that. I don’t need that cover anymore. My name is Broffman. Ms. Mary Broffman. But soon you can call me Ms. President.” Mary smiled, sticking her thumbs under her lapels, and everyone in the control room hooted.
“Alright,” she said. “This is it. Yat-Sen and Gluck should be back any minute. You guys go get Nichols and Angus. Thaw them both out. Drop Nichols anywhere and stick the girl with the old chink in a tree.” Mary moved toward the exit door.
“Hey,” said Charlie Ko. “What are you going to do?”
Mary turned back. “I? I? I am going to report ‘mission accomplished’ to the leader. Then I’m going to the airport.”
Charlie’s eyes widened. “You’re going to drop the stuff?”
Mary smiled. “By tonight, the meat eaters will be dropping like flies. By next week, we’ll have this government on its knees.”
Mary left. The boys howled and hooted.
“All right,” said Charlie, taking over. “Let’s get this place cleaned up. I’ll call Texas Solly and tell him he can open up again tomorrow. If he’s still around tomorrow.”
The group moved down into the slaughterhouse disassembly line. They moved across a metal balcony which led onto a spiral staircase that moved down into the huge room proper. The chutes, machinery, and monorail-like harness for the steers were clean and unmoving. The chutes and trap doors where the dead cows appeared lined one wall. A battery of opaque windows lined another. Benches and work tables were underneath the second-story balcony and the huge door to the freezer occupied the fourth and facing wall.
Sheng Wa and Steinberg moved in front of the cold-storage entrance as Eddie Cantlie came down the stairs. Charlie Ko moved across the edge of the railed balcony overlooking the entire floor.
Steinberg turned back from the door and looked up at Charlie.
“How do you open this damn thing anyway?”
They didn’t have to.
There was a cracking whump and suddenly the entire freezer door broke off from the wall and went flying across the room. Sheng Wa and Steinberg were in its path so they were smacked forward to smash against the wall and drop onto the work tables like rag dolls before the still-flying door crushed them into powder.
Charlie Ko saw the huge floor disappear under him before he heard the sickening crash. Then he looked back to the now-open entrance as a huge cloud of cold air and white mist billowed into the room.
The puffy billows built up like smoke bombs at a rock-and-roll show or a nuclear explosion climbing the sky until a figure came leaping out from the very heart of the cloud. A dark-haired, thin man with thick wrists came bounding up into the room.
Remo Williams, the Destroyer, soul intact, dropped lightly to the floor as the smoke swirled around him.
Charlie dropped to his knees, his mouth open, his knuckles white gripping the protective railing, and Eddie Cantlie had fallen back on the stairs, staring at him between two rungs of the banister.
And Remo intoned, “I am created Shiva the Destroyer, the dead night tiger made whole by Sinanju. What is this dog meat that now stands before me?”
Eddie Cantlie felt his pants go wet and he tried to scramble back up the stairs. Remo walked over and punched the bottom stair. The entire revolving stairwell began to vibrate. Remo punched it again. The stairs began to shake until the internal strength of the steel could no longer stand the unnatural vibration and began to break up.
Remo took a step back and lightly tapped the bottom stair with his heel, as if by an afterthought. The top stair disconnected from the balcony. The bottom stair ripped up from the floor and the entire structure toppled with Eddie Cantlie in the middle.
Eddie seemed to hover momentarily in the air as the heavy stairwell crashed to the floor. He collided with the banister, then the structure bounced. Eddie hit the center beam, then bounced himself to fall face first on the concrete floor. He never felt the floor.
Remo turned to Charlie. Charlie turned to run and then screamed. Before him stood Chiun. In each hand Chiun held large liquid-looking bean bags. Except these bean bags had faces. They were stretched and lumpy faces, as if every bone in them had been squashed into sand, but still, they were faces. They were Yat-Sen and Gluck’s faces. Charlie Ko fell to his knees.
Chiun looked down at Charlie and then to the two hulks he held in his hands. He screwed his face in disgust.
“Amateur help,” he said. Then he threw his two human bean bags over the railing onto the floor before Remo. They hit the ground without bouncing. They just wiggled like so much jello.
“Don’t kill that one,” Remo called up. “I need to talk to him.”
“The others are not dead,” said Chiun. “I brought them here to be killed by you. It is written that Shiva shall put down the second coming of the undead and my ancestor’s disgrace.”
Remo looked at the two blobs of barely existing matter that lay before him. He could not imagine how Chiun had managed to walk through downtown Houston with one on the end of each hand.
“Where does it say that Shiva will put down the undead?” he asked.
“It is written,” said Chiun. “But do not worry. They are not truly of the undead.”
“How do you know?”
“They entered my room unbidden. I was deep in the throes of the Final Death when they came in without permission. It was then that I realized that they could not be truly of the Creed.”
Remo remembered when the mist came over him in the freezer. Chiun must have done what he had done when he realized that he had been tricked. Remo remembered how his stomach knotted and numbness had crept throughout his body.
It was the same sensation he had the last two times he had been poisoned. So he did what he did then. He upped the oxygen content in his blood to assimilate the poison. Then he concentrated his entire essence on his stomach. The center of all life and death. Then when all the oxygen and blood and poison rushed into his stomach, he threw it up and out.
In the freezer now was a little pile of frozen green, red and black. Just below Viki Angus’s broken body.
Remo kneeled down on one knee between the quivering piles of Yat-Sen and Gluck.
“I’d like to make this painful, guys, but I don’t have the time.”
He drove the first knuckle of each hand into their respective heads. What was left of their respective heads. He felt his digits sink deep into their whole and intact brains. Then he threw their carcasses into the freezer to join the puke.
Remo looked up to where Chiun stood before a quaking Charlie Ko. Remo’s eyes met the old man’s and there flashed an emotion between them. It was the love of father for son, and son for father.
Charlie Ko made his move. His legs straightened and he whipped his long-nailed right forefinger out in front of his hurtling body directly in line with the soft, thin, unprotected layer of flesh below Chiun’s jaw. He felt the solid rush of adrenalin that came from knowing that he could take the old man’s head clean off.
If it was still there to take. Suddenly the yellow body before him was gone and Charlie felt himself flying through empty air. Then there was a yellow flash from below, a tug at his wrist, and Charlie Ko stopped in midair on his feet.
His hand didn’t. His hand still with his forefinger out, still with his other four fingers clenched, spun across the metal balcony, teetered on the edge, and dropped over.
Blood began to spurt out of his right arm stump as Remo leaped up onto the balcony and gripped the back of Charlie’s neck and his right forearm in such a way that the bleeding stopped but the blinding pain didn’t.
“Okay, fella,” Remo said. “You want to talk now or wait till after lunch?”
Charlie poured out his soul, knowing that this was the end and that, somehow, his talking would make the incredible pain end more quickly.
“We were hired by this old man to kill every nonvegetarian in the country.”
“How?”
“We used this two-part poison the old man gave us. One part went into the meat, one part went into the gas.”
“Why?”
“Because the authorities would have been able to locate the poison easily and develop an antidote if any one part were toxic. The part in the meat is kind of weak. But the gas activates it, makes it deadly.”
“How did you get it in the meat?”
“Eddie… he was the one on the stairs. He was the government inspector at this plant. We put it in the USDA ink.”
Smith had been right. Remo returned his attentions to Charlie.
“Where’s Mary?”
“She went to report to the leader.”
Chiun looked at Remo.
“Where’s he?”
“At the Sheraton. Room 1824.”
“Good year. Anything else?”
“Yeah, yeah. Mary is going to the airport and spread the gas over the city.”
Remo dropped Charlie in disgust. The pain behind his neck stopped, but the blood started coursing out of his stump again.
“Come on, Little Father, let’s go,” said Remo.
“No, my son, you must kill the man yourself.”
Remo turned back. “Why?”
“It is written that you will deliver the blow that avenges my father’s disgrace.”
“Where does it say that?”
“Just do it,” spat Chiun. “Must you always bicker?”
Remo moved toward Chiun and Charlie’s contorting body. “How many times do I have to go through this thing?” he complained. “Every time we get a new assignment, it’s written here that I’ll do this, it’s written there that I’ll do that. Can’t we just go?”
“It is written,” said Chiun. “That the son of the son of the father must do the deed.”
“I never read that,” said Remo. “Was that part of the fine print?”
Charlie Ko looked up at the two and screeched, “Please.”
“All right,” said Remo. “If you put it that way.” He moved in and with one stroke ended Charlie’s torture permanently.
Chiun beamed. “My son, I am proud of you.”
“Proud?” said Remo. “You’re proud of me? Proud? Of me, the white man, the pale piece of pig’s ear?”
“Well, perhaps proud is a little excessive,” Chiun said. “Highly tolerant is more correct. After all, it has been many days and still my manuscript is not delivered onto television. Important things like that are not easily forgotten.”
Remo sighed.
“And another thing. Your wrist was bent when you disposed of that garbage.”
“Oh God, here we go again. He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Dead is dead and wrong is wrong,” said Chiun. “Why was your wrist bent?”
“I’ll explain it all to you on the way to the airport,” Remo said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY for flying. The sky was clear, the visibility was 50 miles and the sun was slowly sinking in the west.
The golden strands of sunset were just beginning to reach across the horizon when Ms. Mary Broffman radioed the control tower and asked permission for take-off.
She had told the leader of their success with the two agents of Sinanju, then prepared herself for the flight of the Final Death.
She had refilled the gasoline tank on her orange-and-white two-seater, specially fitted Piper Cub airplane, nicknamed “hojo” because when it was flying it resembled a Howard Johnson’s restaurant with its orange roof. Then she had checked all her gauges and shifts, then the engine and flaps, then the little motorcycle motor attached to the dull-green canister in back.
All was in readiness. By nightfall most of the meat eaters in Texas would heel over. And by the morning the country would be in panic. Bodies would be littering the streets. The government would probably be gutted piecemeal. Large corporations would be leaderless and hollow. All manufacturing would grind to a halt. The entire foundation of the country would crumble.
Those left would be helpless wanderers. For a precious few days, before the entire hemisphere was quarantined and the gas wore off, before the first of the doubtless many foreign attacks that would be launched to lay siege on the fat, dead nation, there would be time. Time to accumulate riches beyond belief. Wealth beyond measure.
And then to pilot another plane to another land, where the secret of the two-part poison would lead to incredible power and position.
The leader was a fool to entrust this vegetarian wonder to his “followers.” By morning he too would be dead. Mary would see to it. And then there would be no one between her, and whatever she wanted. Not bad for a little girl from Staten Island. If someone had told her five years ago that she would have reached this position simply from interviewing a Chinese gentleman in a library for her China history course, she would not have believed it.
But here she was. Minutes away from total, absolute freedom. “Piper Cub Z-112, you are cleared for take-off on runway three. Have a good flight. Over.”
“Thank you, control. Am starting engines to take off on runway three. Over.”
Mary started her engines. The extra-horsepower Volkswagen engine in front of her sputtered, caught, and roared to life. She felt the vibration in the joystick between her legs and enjoyed the rush it always gave. Grass bent in the whirling propeller’s wake. Dust was kicked up and swirled behind her.
An old, blind Chinaman in a library. A rich Jewish girl who needed a quick interview to finish a report for a school she was to drop out of two months later. An alliance formed between a desperate man and a bored girl. An incredible adventure shared in life and death. And it all came to this. The total, mind-blowing power of having the fate of the entire nation behind you attached to a motorcycle motor.
The orange-and-white airplane began to move. Mary pushed the throttle forward and began to bump down the asphalt to runway three for her first sweep.
Dusk was descending so she switched on her red-and-white flashers to warn any approaching aircraft of her presence. The runway lights glowed in the distance and the airport floodlights suddenly switched on.
Mary turned the plane around to face down runway three for her first sweep to gain momentum and power for liftoff. And in the glare of the airport lights, down on runway eight, a man hopped over the fence.
Mary began to inch forward. She looked toward the small human shape in the distance moving across the field in her general direction. The plane picked up momentum as she picked up her radio microphone.
“Control, control, this is Cub Z-112. There’s a man on the field. I repeat, there is a man on the field. Over.”
There were a few crackling moments of radio silence, then the tiny speaker over her head replied.
“Z-112, this is control. Where? I repeat where is the man? Over.”
Mary’s plane was rolling down the runway at a steady clip now. She turned to look down the field and saw what was definitely a man moving in a straight line across runway seven.
“Control, this is Z-112. The man is crossing runway seven. I repeat, runway seven. Do you read? Over.”
Another few seconds passed, as if the control-tower man had stopped to carefully survey the field. Mary stole another look to see the man moving onto runway six. She could now see that his right arm was up in the air.
“Z-112, this is control. I see no man on runway seven. I repeat, no man on runway seven. Over.”
Mary had reached the end of her first run and was sweeping around for her final taxiing for take-off.
“Control, this is Z-112,” said Mary, her voice strangely tight. “He’s there, control. I see him. He has just crossed runway six. I repeat, just crossed runway six. Over.”
Mary stared out her window to her left now as she saw the man moving in a diagonal as if to cut her off. She could see that he was carrying something in his raised right hand. And that something was dripping.
“Z-112, this is control. I still cannot see a man on the field. Have you been drinking? I repeat, have you been drinking? Over.”
“Idiot,” spat Mary. “I have not been drinking and he’s there, damn it. I can see him as clear as day. Are you blind or something? Look, look, he’s crossing runway five.”
Mary turned and saw the man coming toward runway three. His head was turned in her direction and she saw his dark hair and high cheek bones. She saw that he was wearing a black T-shirt, blue slacks, and that he was barefoot.
In his hand was a bloody meat hook.
“Z-112, this is control. I have checked with several members of the ground crew as well as double checking myself, and we can still see no man on the runway. You had better taxi back for inspection. I repeat, taxi back for inspection.”
