"Survival dictates continued flight. The terrain is too exposed here. And I am presently unable to assimilate another form."
"Nothing can happen to you now, Coatlicue. The ground has stopped shaking."
"Seismic activity has entered a quiescent phase. There is every reason to assume it will resume anew. Aftershocks continue. Continued survival necessitates seeking stable ground."
"Your followers need rest. They have marched behind you all day. Now they require rest and food."
"I do not require followers."
"But what is a god without followers? It is their secret prayers which have awakened you. It is their unheard yearnings that have warmed the many stone hearts upon your breast."
"I had elected to remain quiescent until my foes had ceased to exist, which I estimate would transpire in approximately 60.8 years at the latest. During my inactive state, I attempted to complete all self-repairs possible. This task is ongoing. The seismic disturbance triggered my self-preservation override. That function is presently being executed."
"Stop, Coatlicue. Stop. You must allow us to sacrifice in your name. It will make you stronger."
One serpentine head rolled to fix him with its weird stone orbs.
"How will sacrifice make me stronger?"
"It is the way of Coatlicue. Your womanly strength comes from human sacrifice. Human sacrifice empowers your hearts, feeds your people and keeps the universe running."
"I must keep moving if I am to survive."
And head retracting, Coatlicue lumbered on.
Lujan skipped around to her side, realizing that if he stumbled she would stomp him into a mass of jelly under her cruel tread. That was why he loved her so. She cared not for her subjects. Her subjects must worship her, not the other way around.
"We are yours to command, O Coatlicue. Do you not understand? Do with us as you please. Break our backs, crush our thin skulls, we will follow you anywhere."
Coatlicue made no reply to that.
"O Coatlicue, Devourer of Filth, do you not know that there is safety in numbers?"
"I am the only one of my kind. There is no other than I."
"Yes. Yes. You are the exalted one. No one is greater than Coatlicue. Not that Aztec Quetzalcoatl. Not Kukulcan. Not even Huitzilopochtli, who is your true son. All are less than fleas beneath your cruel shadow."
Coatlicue walked on, unheeding and unconcerned. It stirred Rodrigo Lujan's passions to see her walk so proud and unmoved.
Then out of the west came a trio of federal army helicopter gunships, Gatling guns and rocket rods hanging off them like barbed scorpion spines.
"Coatlicue! Behold! The chilango army has come to defeat you."
Coatlicue stopped. Her serpent heads lined up parallel to one another until both regarded the approaching gunship stonily.
No flicker of emotion showed in those basalt slits.
"Coatlicue. Listen to me," Lujan pleaded. "They will soon attack. Let us be your shields."
"Yes. Be my shields."
"Command us to be your shields."
"I command you to be my shields."
And grinning, Rodrigo Lujan turned to his retinue. Truly, it was Coatlicue's retinue. But the authority to command them had been conferred upon him.
"Come. Come form a human shield. Coatlicue needs protection from the chilango army."
And they came. The men, the women, the sunbrowned children. They formed a circle that was many people deep. Some climbed atop Coatlicue to shield her stone flesh with their soft brown skins.
"Shoot, army of chilangos!" cried out Rodrigo Lujan. "Shoot if you dare! You will never harm our stone-hearted mother."
And the lead helicopter broke off from the others to make its first clattering pass.
It was armed with side-mounted Gatling guns. The multiple-barreled tubes began spinning. Everyone could see them spin.
The hot bullets came like a hard, remorseless rain.
The screams that lifted from the throat of the army of High Priest Rodrigo Lujan were screams of liberation. Liberation from oppression, liberation from poverty and liberation from earthly toil.
The bodies dropped from Coatlicue's shoulder and head like spoiled fruit. They ran as red as pomegranates, as bloody as crushed tomatoes, their juices forming scarlet pools at the unmoved feet of Coatlicue.
All around her the indios fell. The bodies formed stepping stones for others to scramble to take their place.
"Yes, yes. Fight to protect Coatlicue, the mother of us all. Come and offer yourself. Liberation is ours! Victory is ours. Manana is ours!"
The first antitank rocket left its pod in a bloom of smoky flame. The screaming device sped toward them unerringly. Its speed was breathtaking.
Men forming a human pyramid clawed one another in their heated desire to be the first to absorb the coming blow. They slithered over one another like brown sweaty earthworms.
When the rocket struck, it exploded a vertical cone of human flesh in all directions.
The cone simply vanished, only to reform in a thudding rain of arms, legs, head and separated torsos.
"Magnifico!" cried Rodrigo Lujan. "You have done it! You have saved Coatlicue from the rocket!"
Coatlicue stood as before, her double-serpent head parted, one tracking the overflying helicopter, the other focused on the third one, which hung back, poised to let fly more blood and destruction.
"The meat machines are protecting me," she said.
"Yes. We will all die if it takes that."
"I command you all to die to preserve my survival," intoned Coatlicue in an emotionless and very masculine voice. Rodrigo Lujan loved masculine women. He turned to his followers.
"Do you hear? We are commanded to die. To die is glorious. Let us all die to preserve Our Mother," proclaimed Rodrigo Lujan, who had to jump to one side so the stampede of indios could rush up and take the place of one dead and he would have an excellent view of the slaughter.
It was better than a bullfight. In the bullring, the bull dies or the matador is gored. There is only so much blood. A spot or two. A puddle at most.
Here it was a whirlwind of blood and carnage.
The indios took their places. They formed a dome of flesh. Like locusts, they swarmed over their Mother Goddess until her stone lines were no longer visible. They clung to her and to one another until Coatlicue resembled an upright beetle covered in ants.
The next rocket scored a direct hit. Hot metal flew. Flesh and bone turned to shrapnel. The screams were terrible yet beautiful. It was so incredibly Mexican. It was the most Mexican sight Rodrigo Lujan had ever beheld.
More bullets and then more rockets came, to snap and crump at the human anthill. And the more death gnawed, the more the indios strove to join it.
"Death!" they sang. "Bring us death so Coatlicue may live. We live through Coatlicue. Our blood illuminates the world!"
"Your blood illuminates the universe!" Rodrigo Lujan shouted to the dark, impersonal heavens as he crouched by the shoulder of the road, his bare skin now red from the rain that was not rain.
At length the helicopter gunships depleted themselves of missiles.
Perhaps it was also that the pilots had become sickened by the slaughter. For whatever reason, they broke formation, each retreating in a different direction.
"We have done it!" Rodrigo Lujan shouted to the cold stars above. "We have succeeded! We are Zapotecs!"
"And Aztecs," a man reminded.
"Maya," another said.
"I am Mixtec."
"We are all brothers in blood," Rodrigo said generously.
"And sisters," a woman said, licking a smear of blood off her naked forearm.
Others, seeing this and remembering tales of ancestral blood sacrifice, began eyeing the dead not as fallen human beings to be buried reverently in the earth but as something else.
The hungry look in his fellow indios' eyes gave Rodrigo Lujan the courage to say and do what in the past he could only imagine do
wn in his deepest Zapotec dreams.
"Coatlicue has reminded us. We are no longer men. We are not women. We are not human. We are her servants. We are meat machines. And if we are but machines made of meat, we may partake of other machines whose meat is no longer of use to them."
And to show the truth of his words, Rodrigo Lujan picked up the severed arm that had only minutes before belonged to a comely Maya maiden and took a ferocious bite out of her warm bicep with his strong white Zapotec teeth.
Chapter 15
Remo made good time rolling down Highway 195 in Chiapas State until he ran into a Mexican federal army patrol.
"Uh-oh," he muttered as the patrol rounded a bend in the road.
Beside him the Master of Sinanju said, "Pretend we are innocent of any suspicion. They will not see us."
Eyeing Chiun's emerald-and-ocher kimono, Remo said, "I have a better idea."
He floored the Humvee. It surged ahead.
The oncoming armored column consisted of a toylike LAV followed by two light tanks. It slithered up the winding, mountainous road.
"We can outrun these guys," Remo said confidently.
As he accelerated, the Master of Sinanju reached out to hold on to the swaying machine. His balance was perfect. He could have remained comfortably seated through an ordinary turn. But the Master of Sinanju was familiar with his pupil's driving. He knew what was coming and didn't care to be flung from the vehicle.
Remo took the corner on two wheels. The narrowness of the road made that mandatory. Jerking the wheel hard to the right, he brought the wide Humvee all the way up on its right tires.
It was an impossible maneuver. Low-slung vehicles can't run up on two wheels unless they are out of control.
In a sense, Remo had thrown the heavy machine out of control. It would have crashed. No question of that. But Remo was master of his own body and balance, and as long as he could control that, he could control the hurtling juggernaut that was the Humvee.
At the apex of the turn, the Humvee was canted at an extreme perpendicular, running on rims of rubber. Chiun turtled his head between his thin-boned shoulders to protect it.
"Okay now," Remo said tightly.
In unison, they shifted left. The Humvee wobbled on its spinning tires, then like a gyroscopically controlled toy began righting itself in a smooth descent that looked like gravity taking hold but was really Sinanju.
When the left-side tires touched asphalt, Remo let the vehicle freewheel a hundred yards, then floored it again.
Behind them the armored column was laboriously turning around.
"They will never catch up to us," Chiun said with satisfaction.
"Not in a million years," Remo agreed.
A whistling came from behind, arced over their heads and landed with a bang that threw up dirt and clods of red soil.
They heard the cannon detonation somewhere in the middle of the whistle.
"They are shooting at us," Chiun remarked.
"Are they crazy? They don't know who we are. We could be on their side, or anyone."
"Yes, anyone driving a pilfered army jeep."
"They call them Humvees now."
"They are trying to stop their Humvee with whistles," said Chiun as another shell screamed over their heads. This one slammed into the road before them. It erupted in a shower of dirt and asphalt chunks.
Remo eased to a halt. Looking back over his shoulder, he threw the Humvee into reverse and stepped on the gas.
The machine responded, barreling back up the road and into the teeth of a tank gun.
"Why are you driving the wrong way?" Chiun asked without evident concern in his voice or face.
"Because I'm hungry, aggravated and most of all pissed off."
"And because of these temporary inconveniences, you have decided to commit suicide and are taking me with you?"
"I left out one thing."
"And what is that?"
"I know something these guys don't."
"Yes?"
"The effective range of a tank gun."
Remo stopped the Humvee two hundred yards short of the booming tank gun. A shell whistled overhead. Their eyes tracked it as if it were a silvery painted balloon floating by on a brisk wind.
A second shell boomed past, to join the one before.
Both tore up the road well beyond the Humvee. The detonations came only seconds apart, the second shell dispersing the dust cloud made by the first.
"If they want to knock us out with that thing, they'll have to back up another six hundred yards."
"And if they do?"
"We'll back up with them, but that won't happen.
"Why not?"
"Because in another minute they'll be out of shells."
It happened sooner than that.
No more shells boomed forth. Instead, the turret was popped, and a handful of Mexican soldiers armed with stubby Heckler ine guns came trotting up the road.
"I guess this is where we get personal," Remo said, leaving his seat.
Chiun also exited the vehicle.
The approaching soldiers fixed them in their sights and called, "Manos arriba!"
"You catch that, Little Father?"
"He is saying 'Stick them up.'"
"Must mean our hands," said Remo throwing up his hands because Chiun had taught him it brought the enemy closer.
It didn't work this time.
From the light tank a commanding voice called out one ripping word. "Disparen!"
Chiun started to say, "That means-"
The soldiers lit up their weapons, but Remo had already spotted their trigger fingers turning white the moment before the muzzle began flashing.
Chiun faded left. Remo dropped into a sudden crouch so the first vicious burst could pass harmlessly over his head.
They started moving in on their attackers.
There were only three. Their weapons had a high rate of fire, and clips began running empty.
It takes almost as much time to extract an empty clip and ram a fresh one into the receiver as it does to empty the first clip to begin with, Remo knew.
That was plenty of time when shooting at the unarmed or engaged in sporadic firefights from shelter. But it was fatally long when facing two Masters of Sinanju.
Remo arrowed up and ahead when the empty clip started dropping free. Less than a second transpired.
He had cleared the halfway point when the empty clip clinked to the roadway. He made a fist.
The soldier was whipping out a second clip from a belt pouch, and his speed was good. He wasn't taking chances even though he was trying to shoot an unarmed foe who had surrendered on command.
At the exact moment the soldier's fingers gripped the fresh clip, Remo's fist started up from his belt line.
It was a short blow. It struck the hovering gun barrel, which cracked off and jumped into the soldier's gaping mouth. The mouth shut reflexively.
It would have been comical except the metal fragment kept going, taking out the cervical vertebrae in the neck via a newly excavated exit wound.
The soldier dropped, and Remo turned to deal with a second soldier, who was popping bullets one at a time in an effort to conserve ammunition.
One at a time was easy. Remo struck a pose, making a teapot handle with one crooked arm so the first round had an empty space to pass through. The soldier kept trying to correct his aim, but Remo corrected his stance each time.
Stubbornly the soldier kept trying to perforate Remo's exposed chest, but the bullets only managed to speed by past his inner elbow. His face grew dark with rage as he put out snarling round after snarling round, wondering why his bullets insisted upon hitting a triangular patch of empty air instead of his taunting target. A triangle that seemed to grow in size with each shot fired through it.
He never realized the triangle was growing in size because he was so concentrated on his task he didn't sense the approach of two-footed doom.
"Can you say 'mandibular dislocation'?
" Remo asked.
The soldier's response was to clench his teeth and redirect his weapon in Remo's direction.
So Remo showed him the harmless palm of his open hand before it slapped his jaw off its hinges to land in the dirt like a fresh-cut lamb chop.
When the soldier's remaining face hit the road, his dangling tongue hissed as it came into contact with a hot shell casing. He moaned.
Stepping up, Remo put him out of his misery with a hard heel that opened his skull like a cantaloupe.
He turned just in time to watch Chiun make a point about correct grooming. The Master of Sinanju was methodically flaying his antagonist.
The flayee seemed unaware of his plight at first. It was hard not to notice elongated strips of one's own flesh as they came off in long, thin peels, but the soldier's mind was obviously elsewhere.
Mistaking Chiun for a pushover, the soldier had dropped his submachine gun and pulled his combat knife out. It was a bad error in judgment. Chiun might have put him down with a quick blow otherwise, but the soldier gave him an irresistible opportunity.
"We don't have all day," Remo called over as the Master of Sinanju deflected a knife thrust and stripped the soldier's forearm skin on the return.
The soldier started to notice he was losing strips of hide. But he was game. He shifted hands. Chiun obligingly shifted hands, too.
The rest was a forgone conclusion. It was only one knife against ten fingernails.
Chiun extended a deadly sharp fingernail and parried every blow. The clash of tempered steel and flexible nail sounded like metal on horn. The thin, bamboolike nail gave just enough not to break.
The blade gave not at all. That was its undoing.
In the middle of a flurry of parries, the blade just broke.
The soldier heard the brittle snap and mistook the sound for imminent victory.
Grinning, he took a step back, preparing to plunge the blade into the old Korean's thin chest.
Then he noticed his blade was not sticking out from the handle anymore. A comical expression crossed his face. He looked down the way a man looks down when he hears the clink of a quarter falling out of his pocket.
The Master of Sinanju floated into the opening and inserted his fingernail directly into the man's navel.
Chiun turned his hand like a key.
The soldier's feet left the ground in his torment. He screamed and wailed, and as Remo stood off to one side with his arms folded, tapping a foot impatiently, the Master of Sinanju looked over his shoulder to see that Remo was paying attention.
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