The Final Death td-29

by Warren Murphy

  "Anyway," said Remo, "It's nice to see you in good humor and talking to me again."

  "I am not talking to you. I am humiliating you."

  Remo ignored him and turned back to Viki who sat looking out the window at her neighborhood.

  "Why didn't your mother come to the funeral?" Remo asked.

  "She was too torn up. She stayed home to get things ready for the wake. Here's the house."

  Remo turned the rented car into the two-car driveway in front of the brown split-level with the yellow window shades.

  As the three moved out of the car and up the lawn, Remo saw a dark figure moving alongside the house, bending over to peer in through a window.

  "Wait here," he said to Viki. "Watch her, Chiun."

  Viki moved close to Chiun as Remo moved off around the house. She put her hand on his arm and smiled at his impassive face.

  "The man at the cemetery," she said, nodding toward Remo. "You call him emperor. Why?"

  Chiun shrugged. "It is not for me to understand white men's games. I do not try. I call him emperor, Remo calls him Smith, the emperor calls Remo Nichols, everybody calls somebody something else. This is a very strange country but I will make it all clear when my beautiful drama is shown on television."

  With that, the Master returned his gaze toward the house and remained silent. But his face had the same expressionless look as when he had stood next to the coffin in the cemetery.

  Remo found the dark figure hunched over a cellar window a few feet ahead of him. Remo moved within an inch of the man. The figure rose and turned right into Remo's chest.

  The Right Reverend Titus Murray almost had a massive coronary.

  "Hello, Pastor," said Remo. "Trying to gain immaculate entrance ?"

  "Hugga, hugga, hugga," said the minister, back to the house, his belly moving like a bellows.

  "Whatever you say," said Remo, taking Murray's arm, and leading him to the front of the house. He waved Viki and Chiun up. "False alarm," he explained. "What are you doing here anyway, Reverend?"

  Murray collected some of his composure. "Mrs. Angus didn't answer the door. I was looking for her. I thought she might need some spiritual comfort."

  "Or help with the sandwiches from the looks of you," Remo said. "Viki, do you have a key?"

  Viki bounced up the steps and tried the door. "That's odd. Mom never locked it before." She took a key from under the welcome mat and unlocked the door, then stepped inside.

  Rev. Murray followed and Remo turned to Chiun who still stood on the front lawn, one sandaled foot poking the dead grass near the base of a tree.

  "Come on in," Remo said.

  "I think I will remain out here," Chiun said. "There is something here that I do not like."

  "I know, me. Right?"

  "This is serious, Remo. There is something here."

  "Little Father," said Remo at the door. "It's cold and it looks like rain so come in."

  "I will be out here," Chiun said stubbornly.

  "Suit yourself," Remo said. He went inside and closed the door behind him.

  Chiun waited a few seconds as if smelling the air, then began to move slowly toward the back of the house.

  "There's food downstairs," said Viki, stepping up the stairs to the kitchen. "I'm going to wash my hands. Mom! I'm back."

  Rev. Murray went downstairs and Remo stood in the foyer wondering what was on Chiun's mind. It was unusual for him to be so obviously worried about something, and when he was, it was generally serious.

  Remo heard a soft hissing sound like the tiny wake of a miniature surfer from downstairs and then heard water begin to splash upstairs. Then Remo heard a harsh gasp from up in the kitchen and a thud from the basement.

  Then he heard Rev. Murray's elephantine feet thudding upstairs, and then the minister ran by him, screaming, "Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God." His back was slick and red. Viki began screaming in the kitchen.

  As Murray ran out the front door, Remo peeked down into the basement. The floor was covered with blood.

  Rev. Murray had stopped next to a cypress tree on the front lawn and was throwing up.

  Remo ran up the steps and into the kitchen. Soapy water was running down Viki's arms and face. She was standing straight, feet together, only occasionally bending her knees to gather air for another scream. There was no one else in the kitchen.

  Viki's large brown eyes, now twice their normal size in shock, were looking over the sink, through the kitchen window, out at a carcass in a long black bloody dress who looked back from the limbs of a tree.

  Remo leaned to the window and looked out at the remains of Ruth Angus.

  And he saw Chiun, moving around the trunk of the tree, poking the cold winter ground with his toe.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Peter Matthew O'Donnell was enjoying a vodka and tonic in the comfort of his condominium apartment in the Timberwood complex of Westport, Connecticut, and watching the Vikings pretend to play in the Super Bowl when his foot became one with the ottoman.

  One moment he was sitting before his color set with the newest electronic dial and the built-in recording unit, and the next moment the football game had become a jumbled haze and his foot had become part of the splintered wood, sharp-ended metal springs, screws, and stuffing.

  O'Donnell tried to get up, but suddenly his other foot had joined the first and the bottom half of his legs were a foot stool.

  "Time out," said a voice behind him.

  O'Donnell lost his drink as well as his lunch, his breakfast, and part of his dinner the night before. His legs felt as if they had been used in the production of toothpicks and his bulky leisure shirt was a small green lake of evil-smelling liquid.

  "Yaahaaa," he said.

  "The score Anybody, 17, Vikings, zero," said the voice beside him. "You want to see the final score, you talk to me."

  "Gaa gaa yaa haaa," said O'Donnell.

  "Your name was on a small pad in Vinnie Angus' study. It said to call you. Why?"

  "My legs, my legs."

  "Right now they are," said the voice. "But if you don't answer me, your legs belong to me. I carry them out under my arm."

  "He called to tell me that the meat I sold him has some tough spots."

  "What spots?" asked the voice.

  "Around the USDA mark."

  O'Donnell saw a hand attached to a thick wrist move down his leg, slowly, like a pearl drifting through pancake syrup, and suddenly his left foot miraculously healed.

  "Aaaaaahh," he said in satisfaction.

  "Good. Now," said the voice, "why did he die after calling you?"

  "I don't…" O'Donnell began to say and then there was a blur in front of him and his left leg felt as if it had split in half and re-wrapped itself in braids.

  "Woo ha. Ya. Ya. Ya," O'Donnell said.

  "Why?" repeated the voice.

  O'Donnell's hands flew to his leg. They sank into the green goo that had seeped through his gray knit slacks.

  Where was the greatly lauded security of this damned condominium park? Where were the cameras? The double-lock doors? The little guardhouse in the parking lot?

  O'Donnell saw the thick wrist again move, this time toward his right leg.

  "No, no," he shouted. "I'm not sure, but I think the meatpacker."

  "Why?" The thick wrist moved away from his leg again.

  "Because I told the packer and he was upset and he wanted to know if Vinnie had told anybody else." As he spoke, O'Donnell stared through pain-blurred eyes as a football announcer interviewed boys of nine, 10, 11, and 12 who were involved in a passing-and-kicking contest. O'Donnell thought the kids looked like whirlybirds in their outsized shoulder pads.

  "And what'd you tell him?"

  "I told him I didn't know. I didn't think so."

  "All right. Who's the packer?"

  'Texas Solly. Texas Solly Weinstein in Houston. I called him and told him. That's the truth. I swear." If O'Donnell ever got hold of his real-estate agent, he'd ram all of the
Timberwood condominium's security devices down his throat.

  "What's Solly's number?"

  "It's at my office. At Meatamation."

  The thick wrist moved again toward his leg.

  "No, no. Honest. I don't carry his number. I just punch out a coded number on my line and it connects."

  "What's the coded number?"

  "I punch out four-oh-seven-seven," said O'Donnell, staring at the big white numbers on the red jerseys of the kids until the red washed over the white and the famed Triquinox color turned to an inky black. The set stayed on but he turned off and passed out.

  Remo wiped the small flecks of bile from his hand onto O'Donnell's shirt, then looked up as Chiun entered the room.

  "You must not go any farther," said Chiun. "Stay here."

  "Since when do you like football?"

  "Do not go," Chiun repeated.

  "Sorry, Chiun. A job's a job."

  "Then we will both go." Remo looked up. "We will both go and I will tell you of the skeleton in the tree and what it signifies and then we will tell Emperor Smith that we do not like this assignment and will not do it."

  "He'll really be happy to hear that," said Remo. "Somebody's trying to poison all America and we're going on vacation."

  "Americans have been filling themselves with poison for years," Chiun said. "It is in their food, it is in their air. They smoke poison. They ride in poison. They replace milk with poisonous chemicals. If they did not want to die, they would not do it. So why should we stand in their way?"

  Remo would have argued if he could have seen any flaw in Chiun's reasoning, but he couldn't. So he said, "We go."

  And Chiun said: "This is a bad thing you do, more bad than you know."

  The Meatamation office building and distribution center sat on the lovely Westport countryside like a castaway egg crate. It was one of the new gray architectural wonders that clashed with nature and revelled in wasted space.

  Remo stopped in the main driveway when he saw a pack of screaming people marching back and forth in front of the building's main entrance, a great hulking swaying mass, waving signs and shouting.

  "I will stay here," Chiun said. "These noise-mongers offend me."

  Remo found a gray-haired man in levis and gold windbreaker watching the people march.

  "You work here?" Remo said.

  The man nodded.

  "Where's O'Donnell's office?"

  "Who?"

  "Peter Matthew O'Donnell."

  "Why do you want to see him?" the man asked.

  "I'm his sister. Mother is ill," Remo said.

  "I guess it's important."

  "Yeah."

  "It'll be tough getting in there today," said the gray-haired man, nodding his head toward the marchers.

  "Just tell me where O'Donnell's office is. I'll worry about getting in."

  "I don't know O'Donnell. Never heard of the man. How should I know where his office is? You could ask the guard inside."

  "Go pound sand," Remo said. He started moving toward the door.

  "Be careful," said the man. "Don't make them think you work here."

  Remo stopped. "Why not?"

  "I don't know. They're yelling something about not wanting scabs."

  "They slow me down, they're going to have plenty of them."

  When he got close to the line, a bland-faced middle-aged woman in knee warmers, long fur coat, knitted scarf and mittens turned toward him and started screaming, "Pig, swine, fascist butcher."

  Remo smiled pleasantly and kept moving.

  A man in a knitted woolen cap and pea coat stopped and pushed his sign close to Remo's face. Remo plucked out the two nails holding the placard to the post and walked on. The sign flopped to the ground as Remo sidestepped a young mother screaming at her nine-year-old son to bite him on the leg.

  Finally Remo got to the door. An overweight black guard on the other side of the glass, who had no gun, no nightstick, and probably no dimes to use the lobby pay telephone, desperately motioned for him to go away.

  The back of Remo's neck was accosted by hot breath. He turned to face a half-dozen aggravated people pressing in on him waving their signs menacingly.

  Remo was considering the possibility of laminating them to their signs when a voice rang out: "Back off! Back off!"

  The group stopped a few inches from Remo, then turned, grumbling, and walked back to their picket lines, making way for a young, auburn-haired girl in tight-thighed bell-bottom jeans and a multicolored knit sweater. She stalked over to Remo, stopped, put one hand on her hip, and stamped her foot.

  "Well?" she demanded.

  "Not bad," Remo admitted. "On a scale of one to 10, I'd give you an eight and a half."

  The green eyes of the auburn-haired girl flashed.

  "What do you think you're doing?" she said.

  "What do you think you're doing?"

  "We are helping the helpless. We are defending the poor. We are protecting the downtrodden. We are fighting for ignored rights."

  "You're doing all that? Here? At a glorified butcher shop?" asked Remo in wonder.

  Another chorus of chanting filtered through their conversation.

  "We are marching for the Third World," the young woman said. "The Third World is poverty. The Third World is hunger. The Third World is two billion people going to bed at night with empty bellies."

  Remo shrugged. "The Third World is two billion lazy retards and 2,000 big-mouthed liberals. Save 'em if you want. But why at a meat factory?"

  "Look at you," the redhead said. "You've never known hunger." She looked at him more closely. "Well, maybe you have. Maybe a little bit. But probably a self-imposed hunger to conform to a corrupted society's standard of beauty."

  Remo noticed that the girl seemed to take pains that she herself matched that corrupt standard of beauty. Every curve, every line of her body was just the right size and shape and in just the right place.

  "Do you hear what those people are saying?" she asked.

  "No," said Remo. "I can't make it out."

  The redhead stamped her foot again. "They are crying out against this capitalist society's attempt to crucify us all on a cross of meat. They are shouting, we'll eat no more meat. We'll take no swine-flu shots."

  The girl broke off her conversation to scream out the message with the rest of the group a few times. Then she turned back to Remo.

  "This is a joke, right?" Remo asked. "You're all really members of The Movement of the Month Club, right?"

  "Our aim," the girl said haughtily, "is to convince this corrupt government that America has a moral obligation to feed the rest of the world."

  "I doubt that the rest of the world will stop breeding long enough to eat," Remo said. "What does that have to do with swine-flu shots?"

  "The answer is not shots," said the girl. "It is to stop raising and eating swine. It is to stop wasting millions of tons of grain fattening steers so that we can eat meat. Do you understand now?"

  "No," said Remo.

  "Why should you?" the girl said. "You work for this decadent company. Well, we're going to shut it down. Tight. And after this one, others. All across the country, until this nation comes to its senses. What's your name?"

  "Remo Nichols," said Remo, watching the black guard trying to fit pennies into the pay phone.

  "I'm Mary Beriberi Greenscab. I wouldn't suggest trying to get in, if that's what you're thinking of."

  "Mary Beriberi Greenscab?"

  "Short for Marion. You want to know what my name means?"

  "Not right now," said Remo. "I'm planning on lunch soon."

  "Beriberi is a deficiency disease marked by an inflammatory or degenerative change of the nerves, digestive system, or the heart, which means it usually causes a person to have fits, migraines, a bloated stomach, diarrhea, and heart attacks."

  "That's nice," said Remo. "We'll have to talk again real soon." He saw that the guard had found a dime and was talking now on the telephone. The police w
ould be here soon.

  "And Greenscab signifies the micro-thin layer of algae that forms on the inside lining of the stomach just before starvation."

  "Terrifically disgusting," Remo said. "If you'll excuse me…"

  "If you try to get in," said Mary suddenly, "we will have to stop you."

  "Stop away," said Remo, going for the door.

  "I warn you. It'll be a shame to trample you."

  "It's all right," said Remo, his hand on the lock of the glass door. "I'm a vegetarian. And I don't work here."

  "I don't believe you," said Mary. She barked out, "Gotta scab here. Get him."

  Just as Remo pressed the lock out of the glass and pushed open the door, the 24 picketers turned and charged as if they had been waiting for that command all day.

  Remo saw the black guard blanch. Inside the door, Remo leaped up to the top of the entrance over the head of the crowd and the protesters, eight feet wide at their narrowest point, hit the three-foot-wide, entrance at a speed of 13 miles an hour. The splat and crunch were gratifying.

  Remo hopped lightly down to the floor as the first groaning began. The guard had backed against the wall.

  "I called the cops. You better get out of here. I called the cops."

  Remo spotted O'Donnell's name and office number on the wall directory and ran off down the main hall, singing "Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb. Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow."

  The office door was locked. Remo popped it open and three Orientals stuck their hands in Remo's face. Or tried to, because just as the first fingernail reached the point where the air displaced by its movement slightly increased the pressure against Remo's skin, Remo moved instinctively.

  His head moved across, his own hand fluttered out, and the first man became a wall fixture. Remo slid his body sideways into O'Donnell's office, his foot moving across at a sharp angle to his body, and because Remo wanted to save one of them, the second man found his first kneecap driven into his second kneecap, making jelly of both. The man crumbled, howling, to the floor as the third Oriental faced Remo and executed a perfectly straight-arm karate thrust toward Remo's exposed neck.

  Perfect, except Remo drove his own fingers like a wedge between the Orientals' fingers and through his radius and ulna, cracking the man's arm like a piece of kindling.