Bloody Tourists td-134

by Warren Murphy

  One man would be Caucasian. The other would be an elderly Asian.

  "Why we supposed to beat up some old guy?"

  "Why the hell would an old guy be riding on top of a bus?"

  "This is too weird."

  Deemeyer had been thinking the same thing. He poured another beer as he thought about it.

  "You like this beer very much," said the man on the boom box. "It is the best beer you ever tasted."

  "Weirder and weirder," said a Hog.

  "He's right, though," Deemeyer grunted. "I never knew brew this good."

  All the Smoking Hogs agreed it really was the best beer they had ever tasted-and they drank a lot of beer.

  "You hate the two men riding on top of the tour bus." said the voice on the boom box.

  "Yeah, what the hell is with those assholes!" Cocker exploded.

  "You hate them! They are the ones to blame!" Deemeyer saw it all. Suddenly it was clear as crystal. All the ridicule. All the jokes. "He's right. It's those two guys on the bus!"

  "They're pricks!"

  "They're lower than slime! They're lower than the Raleigh Rampagers!"

  Yeah, Deemeyer thought. They two guys on the bus had to know pain. They had to pay hugely. They had to suffer agony like the Rampagers never suffered.

  The man on the tape said, "Those two men on top of the bus-those are really bad guys. You want to kill them. You want them annihilated. You'll do whatever it takes to wipe them out."

  "Wipe them out," Blackeye Bierce said.

  "Wipe them out," Shit-Kicker Cocker echoed.

  "Yeah," Deemeyer said. "Wipe them out."

  Chapter 25

  Greg Grom snatched up the phone on the first beep. "Yeah?"

  "It's Amelia, Mr. President," said his secretary. "I did what you said."

  "You gave them the beer?"

  "Yes, Mr. President."

  "And the money and the tape player?"

  "Yes, sir, but I don't know if I feel good about this. They seemed like an unsavory bunch of characters."

  "Never mind, Arnelia. I'll call you soon."

  Grom made his way to the front of the bus and stood at the driver's shoulder, nervously scanning the hideous extravagance that was Pigeon Fudge, Tennessee. After dropping Amelia at the car-rental agency, he had kept the bus circling for a half hour without a complaint.

  "Horrible-lookin' place, ain't it?" the driver said conversationally. "You know why they call it Pigeon Fudge, don't ya?"

  "Not really," Grom answered, not really listening. "It ain't from all the fudge shops."

  "You don't say."

  "Used to be a certain kind of pigeon that stopped by here from Canada in the summertime. But the original settlers came in the fall and set up their village and didn't suspect a thing. Then come summertime, and they had near to six hundred thousand pigeons congregating in the trees overhead. Made a terrible mess of the place."

  "I can imagine."

  "Word spread that the entire village was covered in pigeon shit, but for purposes of politeness the euphemism started getting used more frequently. And that's a story you won't find in the brochures." The driver chuckled. "In the brochures they say the name comes from all the fudge shops."

  Grom pointed. "See that entrance?"

  "Uh, yes, sir."

  "We're going to pull in there."

  The bus driver started to protest, but Grom was already making his announcement to the entourage. "Listen up, people! This is a security alert! Everybody take cover!"

  Mayhem followed as men and women pushed and shoved to get under bunks and tables.

  "What's going on, Mr. President?" one of the security agents demanded.

  "We've got hijackers on board the bus," Grom said acidly. "If you people had provided me with adequate protection, you would know this by now."

  The agents were flabbergasted. "Where are the hijackers?"

  "On the roof."

  "What?" the lead agent almost squealed.

  "Prepare to apprehend," he commanded his partner.

  "Too little and too late," Grom declared. "I've got my own enforcement team ready to handle the situation."

  "That's unacceptable! We will handle this."

  Grom snorted in the agent's face. "Listen, dim bulb, you leave this bus and you'll be a target. The people I've hired won't care who you are or what branch of the federal bureaucracy you crawled out of."

  The former Secret Service agent gave Greg Grom a haughty twitch of the lip. "We'll see about that."

  Chapter 26

  "Olly Outlander's Old Tyme Opry," Remo Williams read. "Temporarily Closed for Remodeling-Open Again Soon Folks. What are we doing here?"

  "I believe the signage is misleading," Chiun observed.

  "Yeah, this place looks like it's been locked up since Dubya's daddy was running things," Remo said. The bus nevertheless rolled across the weed-grown parking lot and headed around the dilapidated lobby entrance. "You know, I have a feeling they're not really remodeling this place, either."

  "There you are mistaken, my son. Here are the carpenters now."

  The bus came to a halt in the middle of the empty lot. The brakes squeaked and the engine idled.

  "You know, Little Father, I don't see any trucks. Just motorcycles. I don't think a real carpenter could carry all his tools on a motorcycle."

  Chiun stroked his wisp of a beard thoughtfully. "You have a point, my son."

  Remo shrugged. "Let's ask 'em. I think they're coming over for a chat."

  Chiun nodded. "We will put on our friendliest faces." The Masters of Sinanju stepped from the bus and plummeted fourteen feet, but their feet touched down almost without a sound and neither of them stumbled. The bikers didn't seem impressed.

  "How y'all doin'?" the Reigning Master said with a friendly wave.

  "Wipe them out. Wipe them out," came the menacing chant.

  "Wipe who out?" Remo asked.

  "You're to blame," accused the barrel-chested giant at the head of the pack. "It's your fault!"

  "What's my fault?" Remo asked.

  "Everything!" The man had a heavy length of chain, which he whirled faster.

  "You've been listening to the old Korean fart."

  "We'll wipe you out!"

  The bikers formed a half circle. Remo and Chiun were in the middle, backs to the bus.

  "You are trapped," the leader growled. "Now you die."

  "Maybe it's the leather jackets," Remo observed. "Nice warm day like this, they must be making you all hot and cranky."

  The biker with the huge chest broke from the circle and bore down on Remo and Chiun, then with a roar he aimed the chain at his two victims. The massive weapon damaged only the side of the bus-Remo and Chiun were no longer there.

  "It is your fault," Chiun said. The two Masters were now standing on the opposite side of the bus. Not a biker in sight. "You are to blame. Even strangers sense this."

  "They're bonkers," Remo replied. "Whatever they say is obviously the opposite of reality."

  "The deranged often possess their own vivid wisdom," Chiun noted.

  "Or claim to."

  The old Korean gave his protege a look hot enough to cause sunburn.

  "Here they are! Wipe them out!" There was a chorus of boot steps coming around both ends of the bus. The Masters retreated across the parking lot.

  "Why are you guys called the Smoking Hogs?" Remo called, reading sloppy jacket decals. "Is that like a Dixie version of a Sweat Hog?"

  "Wipe you out!"

  "Because the Sweat Hogs has been over for, like, decades."

  "Sweating does appear to be their only talent," Chiun noted.

  The bus lurched to life and spun in a circle. Remo wasn't about to let it escape. He led the herd of Hogs into position to block the bus's exit.

  "You run like a dog!" the barrel-chested biker taunted them.

  "This is as good a place as any to get wiped out, I guess," Remo said. The Masters were suddenly at a standstill, and the bikers
bore down on them with amazing speed.

  Remo watched the leader come at him with the chain. The man moved fast. Too fast for an overweight, beer-sodden thug in a restrictive leather jacket.

  Not that he had anything to worry about. As the mass of metal careened at his head, he simply ducked beneath it, then reached up, grabbed it at precisely the right point and gave it a nudge for added momentum. Donald Deemeyer saw it coming at him and dropped his mouth wide in surprise. The chain hit. There was a liquid crunch, and then his jaw was all that remained intact of D.D.'s head.

  Another biker howled and brought together a pair of crowbars, intending for Remo to be between them. Remo allowed the crowbars to clang together, then he gave them a hard shove. The bars drove forcefully into the guts of the man holding them.

  More of them came, their rage spurring them to greater speed. Remo sidestepped a red-eyed, cross-eyed machete wielder and sent the big blade rocketing skyward with a quick kick. The maniac stumbled and looked around wildly for his lost weapon.

  "Little to the right," Remo said, stepping in close and giving him a small shove. "Hey, look!"

  Remo pointed up. The maniac looked. The machete was falling with tremendous velocity when it went in his mouth, out the bottom of his jaw and into his chest.

  Two more stabbed at Remo from either side with more conventional cutlery, but the knives disappeared from their hands, and he inserted a finger into an eye on the left, then the right.

  There was a gunshot. Remo stepped around the bullet, then ran at the shooter. Only one more shot slid past him before he had taken possession of the handgun and bent it into a horseshoe. He did the same thing to the shooter until he heard vertebrae crunching.

  "Weapons are for amateurs, Remo. Have I taught you nothing?" Chiun grumbled. He had finished off his fair share of leather-clad Smoking Hogs.

  It was the machete wielder he was referring to. The man had somehow extracted the weapon from his face and neck and was bearing down on Remo, the howls of outrage bubbling out of his neck. Remo stepped around him and whacked him hard on the back of the head. The machete wielder became airborne, dead already.

  Chiun tsked over the body when it fell. "Very messy."

  "I was just playing around," Remo protested.

  "Are you prepared yet to enter the bus? Or should we take our rooftop perch again and see what other surprises they have in store for us?"

  Remo sighed. "I guess we go in. But let's try not to kill everybody, Little Father."

  Chiun sniffed. "Don't insult me."

  Chapter 27

  "Why is everybody screaming?" Amelia demanded.

  "Shut up and listen!" Grom barked. "We're going with emergency Plan B."

  "But why, Mr. President?"

  "Just come get me!"

  "Okay-two minutes!"

  Grom couldn't believe he was putting his life in the hands of Amelia Powlik.

  He strapped on the gas mask. Nobody noticed. Half the staff was cowering under tables while half found it impossible to tear themselves away from the horrors outside.

  The ex-Secret Service agent turned and was about to make some sort of a pronouncement. Instead he said, "What's that for?"

  Grom brandished a stainless-steel canister: It had been a part of the special package delivered for him just that afternoon at the mountaintop restaurant. It looked like a can of Pledge without the label. He shot the agent in the face.

  Hope this works, Greg Grom thought. Before long he was spritzing everybody on the bus and issuing orders. He had never used the stuff in aerosol form before, and he wasn't one hundred percent sure it would work. Also, he had never used this specific formula. Who knew what it would do?

  Soon twenty-three employees and hirelings of the United States Protectorate of Union Island piled from the bus and ran screaming in different directions. All the security agents jumped off with a hooded figure held hostage, their guns pointed at the figure's head. The bus jerked into motion, heedlessly rolling over dead Hogs.

  CHIUN STOOD with his hands inside the sleeves of his kimono, which fluttered in the diesel fumes coming from the tour bus's tailpipe. "It is the prerogative of the Reigning Master of Sinanju to determine our next course of action."

  "Of course it is," Remo said in exasperation. "You go after the bus, I'll get the hostage. Then we both go round up the civilians. Unless you have a better plan."

  "I will do as you ask," Chiun said agreeably.

  Remo bolted after the Feds, muttering. "Why am I not surprised that this is the one time you're going to let me make up strategy?"

  He stooped as he ran and picked up a pair of rocks, then let them fly after the trio of agents. They never saw the rocks coming, and they never got the chance to fire their guns at their captive. Both awoke hours later in the Pigeon Fudge Lutheran Hospital with huge headaches and no memory of what had happened after lunch at that nice restaurant up in the mountains.

  Remo pulled the hood off their hostage and found himself staring at a young woman named Betsy Shak, assistant in the Union Island budgeting department. She kept walking until Remo pulled her to a stop. Then she just stood there, smiling slightly, eyes closed and snoring. "Ah, crap!" Remo exploded.

  Even that didn't wake up Betsy Shak.

  REMO AND CHIUN INTERSECTED seconds later, both sprinting at speeds that would have broken Olympic records.

  "Any luck, Little Father?"

  "No one was on the bus except the driver, who was under the delusion that he was hauling a trailer filled with ripe hogs to a sausage factory in Wauconda, Illinois. He called me Good Buddy Mao."

  Remo's heart sank. "Oh, no."

  "I did not kill him," Chiun said. "But he will not make such a mistake a second time."

  "The hostage was a ruse. Let's assemble the civilians," Remo said. "Any one of them could be our guilty party."

  "A lunatic round-up. I am honored to be a part of your great undertaking." Chiun sped away like an arrow shot. Remo went in the other direction, muttering. "Two dozen maniacs running loose in a city designed by nutcases, and my only help comes from the sun source of all oddballs," he complained to no one in particular. "I need a vacation."

  It was at about that moment that he jumped the ten-foot security fence around Olly Outlander's Old Tyme Opry hotel and found himself face-to-face with a billboard that said, Why Not Take ALL Your Vacations in Pigeon Fudge, Tennessee? See Our Luxurious Condominiums-Models Now Open!

  The realty office had a pink-and-purple seismosaurus, bigger than a toolshed, squatting in one corner of the parking lot.

  A handful of the bus people had run pell-mell in this direction, but Remo couldn't see any of them anywhere. The seismosaurus grinned inanely.

  Remo Williams, the man who was created the Destroyer, felt his blood boil. "I have had just about enough of you." He snatched the thing off the ground and brought it down. Hard.

  He felt better, but as he raced down the street in search of bus people there were more grinning dinosaurs everywhere he looked. Remo knew they were laughing at him.

  Chapter 28

  Eileen Mikulka had made up her mind about something. She was up until the wee hours of the morning mulling it over, but when she finally came to a decision she felt such a surge of joy and relief that she knew it was the right thing to do.

  Eileen Mikulka was going to confront Dr. Harold W. Smith and give him a piece of her mind.

  She had never done such a thing, but there was a time for everything. She couldn't stand by and let Dr. Smith fire Mark Howard, no matter how serious his transgression.

  And how bad could it be, whatever Mark had done? There hadn't been any sign of trouble. Mrs. Mikulka considered herself as intimately involved in the operations of the place as Director Smith himself. Even if he made the decisions and set the procedures, Mrs. Mikulka communicated his edicts and collected feedback. Over the years she became increasingly responsible for reading the piles of reports that came to the director from every department, distilling them i
nto the briefs that Dr. Smith preferred. Deciding what details did and did not get passed on to Dr. Smith made her, in reality, a very powerful figure in the sanitarium hierarchy. It also meant she thought she knew everything about everything at Folcroft.

  That's exactly what she intended to tell Dr. Harold W. Smith. She would follow it up with this concluding and irrefutable argument. "Whatever mistake Associate Director Howard made, I have not heard a word about it. Therefore it can't be as significant as you believe it is, and it is most certainly not worth terminating the boy over."

  Dr. Smith would likely say something like, "I've never seen you so determined about anything, Mrs. Mikulka."

  She knew exactly how to answer that, too. "Because, in all my years as your secretary, this is the first time I thought you were making a serious error in judgment."

  There were other things she could have said, but she didn't dare. Like she knew that whatever Mark had done that was so horrible, it was probably just a minor and accidental deviation in the painfully rigid procedures Dr. Smith insisted upon for his tiny executive staff. She would not point out that it took almost superhuman patience and self-discipline to work in his environment.

  She would also not point out that Mark was good for Dr. Smith. Mark's easy-going nature had rubbed off in subtle ways.

  Finally, she would never bring up the fact that Dr. Smith was as old as the hills and his life spent behind a desk had left him with a frail constitution and persistent digestive irritation. For the future of Folcroft it was a good idea to have an assistant on hand to take over day-to-day operations. Just in case.

  Shame on you, Eileen, for even thinking such morbid thoughts.

  But it was true. She wasn't a spring chicken herself, and lately the brevity of her remaining years had been much on her mind.

  Maybe she should retire.

  With her head of steam up, she didn't waste a moment. She knocked on the doctor's office door as soon as she walked in that morning.

  When she entered, Mark Howard was lounging in the creaky chair in front of Dr. Smith's desk. Dr. Smith was doing something strange with his mouth.