Chiun remembered the undead. About how the mist had claimed the leader of their village by day and he had run, gibbering and killing indiscriminately until the Master had brought shame and ruin upon himself by mercifully ending the leader's pain.
By this errand of mercy, for no one else had the strength or the will to raise hand against the leader, so was the Master degraded before all the village. For it was written that no Master of Sinanju would ever hurt another from the village. And his father had killed a leader, a man who required death but did not deserve it.
So, humiliated in the eyes of his people, the Master took himself from those eyes, leaving his family who was still of the village, and went off to die in the hills.
Thus it came to pass that Chiun was the new Master.
Chiun remembered and Chiun hurt.
Chiun hurt.
Chiun opened his eyes.
So deep into meditation had he been that he had not attended to the soft padding of four feet to the outside of his door or the small scratching of a rubber tube being pushed under the door or the small creak of a spigot being turned.
But now, before his mind could sort out these impressions, his eyes saw a shimmering white cloud moving across the room at him.
"The mist, the mist," Chiun cried.
He rose, to face the demon cloud. His hands were at his sides, his legs were loose and prepared, but there was nothing to kick at, no living matter to slice through.
His face was twisted in fear but Chiun did not retreat or move back from the oncoming death. If this was to be his end, he would face it as a Master.
The cloud came upon him. It hung about his body, wetting his face and seeping in through his pores. The Master stopped his breathing but still the mist clung. The Master pulled his body in around himself for protection but still the mist infiltrated.
The mist coursed through his very being until it reached the Master's stomach and intestines. There it joined with the remnants of the duck he had the night before and became a deadly nerve-shattering poison.
The Master felt his stomach knot. It was as he always suspected. The stomach was the center of all life and death. It would follow that the soul dwelled there.
Chiun felt heat within his skull and numbness creep up his limbs. Moisture escaped his skin throughout his body. It was his soul trying to escape. His stomach knotted more. His hands became fists. His teeth clenched. The pain. The incredible, unbelievable pain. Pain unknown, unexperienced, amazing.
But Chiun did not cry out. He would not run, gibbering and killing, like the leader of his village. He would die here. He would die at peace because he knew that Remo lived. That the undead had claimed his soul instead of his son's.
Chiun bent double and fell to the carpet beneath the cloud. The mist settled around his fallen body, spread, then dissipated.
Chiun lay on the floor, the pain bending his knees, curling his arms. He did not fight it. He let it come. Through his closing eyes he saw the door to the suite slowly open.
"Worked like a charm," said Gluck. "The new condensed mixture really works fast."
"Yeah, well, let's get it over with," said Yat-Sen, pulling on a pair of rubber gloves.
The two moved into the hotel room to finish off the pathetic, cringing old man.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mary Beriberi Greenscab did not want him to move. Neither did Charlie Ko, Sheng Wa, Eddie Cantlie, or Steinberg.
They did not want him to move so badly that two of them were aiming Russian assault rifles at him while a third held an Israeli Uzi submachine gun on him.
"If I knew you were planning to kill me I wouldn't have come," Remo said.
The two holding the Russian rifles laughed at this and Charlie told them to shut up.
Remo was standing in a large metal steer bin 12 feet from the platform where Mary stood, an electronic prod in her hand. Charlie stood by her, playing with a large plastic thing with a metal tip that looked like a pointed dildo.
The other three were positioned to the sides and back of Remo, holding their weapons low and tight.
Remo had arrived in Vine Square after three different sets of directions.
The bell captain had said: "Go straight through on the interstate until you get to exit 27, then take route 664 south until you come to a fork in the road. Then just follow the signs and you can't miss it."
When Remo got off exit 277 and there was no route 664, he received the following:
"Well, a-course not. You go due no-arth here until ya git to Malpaso Road. You go Raht they-uh and go strite on until ya reach Vahn Squay-uh. Ya cain't miss it."
And when Malpaso Road was a dead end to the right, "Take a left, then another left, go down two blocks, take a right. Then ask directions. You can't miss it."
Remo found it on the way to asking directions. He had expected a steaming factory full of fat cows but when he arrived, the yards and corrals were empty. An ominous silence hung over the white factory swirling in the hot Texas mists.
Remo jumped a fence into the muddy yard. By the time he had gotten 10 feet however, his shoes were unrecognizable blocks of mud. So he took them off, hopped up onto a fence, and walked along that until he reached an entrance normally used for the delivery of grain.
He noticed the clear, sparkling eye of a closed-circuit camera following him from the top of the high truck portal, but he did not look at it.
Remo entered and the glass lens hummed after him.
Mary Beriberi and Charlie Ko were in the control room watching Remo's progress on tv. It was a small room, totally encircled by video screens and the controls for the cameras that picked up almost everything in the slaughterhouse.
Mary had looked carefully at the "east-side-outdoors" screen when Remo had hopped onto the fence.
"We take no chances," she said. "We get him where we want him first."
Charlie Ko had nodded, pulling a map of the entire factory from under his jacket.
Remo began to whistle "Anything Goes." As he walked through the truck entrance Charlie had said: "Positions everybody. Sector eight. We've got the fucker."
Remo moved through the grain room, climbed up a conveyor belt, and went through a small hole in the roof.
"Make that sector six," yelled Charlie Ko. "He's not taking the stairs."
Remo got out of the hole to skip across several feeding bins.
"Uh…" Charlie checked the map. "We still have him in sector six. He's got to take the door."
But Remo did not take the door. Instead, he suddenly jumped against the wall, put his hands over his head, and dropped down a feed chute.
"Sector four! Down below! Hell, did you see that?"
Mary had to switch on the lower-level video cameras to tune Remo in again.
He was swinging from water pipe to water pipe. He swung until he was directly in front of a camera.
"This is a lot of fun," came his voice from the speaker below the screen. "But I don't have all day. What's my choice? The curtain or what's behind the box?"
Mary grinned wickedly. "Damn sure of yourself, aren't you, fucker?" She stabbed the microphone button on the console desk and said, "Keep going until you get to the door on the other side of the room. Go up one flight of stairs. We'll meet you there. Any more showing off and the girl dies."
The little red light atop all the video-tape cameras winked out.
"You're not nice," Remo had said, moving toward the stairwell on the other side of the room.
"Don't move," Mary said. "One little, tiny gesture and we blast you. Nothing. Don't even scratch."
"I'm not even itchy," said Remo. "Mary. What's the Third World going to think? What happened to helping the helpless, defending the poor, protecting the downtrodden, and fighting for rights?"
"The Third World doesn't pay as good."
Someone behind Remo giggled. Charlie Ko told him to shut up.
"So you're the head of all this?" said Remo.
"No," said Mary Beriberi Greenscab
. "I'm not, Mister Wise Guy Showoff. But I soon will be. By the time this nation recovers from the meat-eaters holocaust, I will be."
"O.K., fine, I'll buy that," said Remo. "So what are you waiting for? Shoot me and take over the country."
"Oh, no," said Mary, smiling. "First you are going to tell us how much you know and then you are going to die from a swine-flu shot reaction."
"All right," said Remo, sitting down in the big metal bin as if he were warming up to a Boy Scout fire. "You can find out how much I know from what I don't know. For instance, you are the ones putting the poison in the meat."
"Yes."
"The Pennsylvania convention?"
"Yes."
"The skeletons in the trees?"
"Yes."
"Why?" asked Remo.
"I'm sorry?"
"Why so much fooling around? The convention, then the skeletons, skinning bodies. What's the matter? You get bored easy? Why not just go ahead and poison the country?"
"Tests," said Mary simply, "At first our poison didn't work fast enough. So we tried it out on that convention and studied its effects."
"While we were working on a better mixture, a couple of people were getting close, like Angus and you. So we killed them according to traditional ritual. Now the poison is fast and 100% percent effective. We're going to start killing meat eaters by the millions."
Sheng Wa laughed. Charlie Ko told him to shut up.
"Traditional ritual?" asked Remo.
"Yes, Mr. Nichols. Didn't you know? We're honorary Chinese vampires. It is our creed to do away with all who desecrate the sacred stomach."
Now everyone started to laugh. Except Remo. He remembered what Chiun had said and felt a chill. He didn't think it was very funny. His voice cut off the levity.
"I don't understand this and I don't care." He got up. "You're all about to become just so much more meat." Remo heard the tone of his voice and was surprised that he sounded angry. Screw it. Screw his anger, and screw Chiun's fears, and screw Smith's detective work.
Remo was preparing his ankles and toes to send him up 12 feet into the air when the floor dropped out. He had been so angry that he didn't fully register Charlie's movement. Ko had pressed the pointed tube against the metal of the bin which had sent an electronic impulse to an automatic switch which opened the trapdoor floor.
Remo's toes curled, his legs twanged, but there was no longer anything to react against. He dropped like a stone.
Remo turned his muscles limp so no bones would be broken if he hit anything. He felt a gently sloping wall press into his side and he realized that he was now sliding along a chute.
A split second before he went through it, he saw a rectangular hole appear before him. Suddenly he was lying on the floor of a massive freezer.
A thick sheet of concrete reinforced steel slid down over the entrance. Just before it locked Remo thought he heard hysterical laughter from above.
Remo looked around, bringing his body temperature down closer to that of the air around him. He estimated it at five degrees below zero. The walls were white-and-gray frozen slabs stretching down for 50 feet. The room was 20 feet wide, big enough to hold several dozen men working on the large carcasses of meat that were even now hung on hooks that lined the ceiling along the center of the freezer.
Remo walked down the line of dead cows to find the door. Then he heard a hissing sound. He looked down the row of carcasses to see a white cloud billowing out of a freezer unit, filling the other end of the room.
A smoke? A mist? Chiun's fears? It couldn't be. No, it couldn't be. But still, Remo began to move back, away from the gathering fog.
Remo started peering between sides of beef as he went, wondering why you could never find a cross when you needed one. And how to ward off a Chinese vampire? A cross made of chopsticks? A ring of wonton around your neck? Sprinkle soy sauce on their graves? Impale them on a fortune cookie?
Remo suddenly realized that the hunk of meat on his right looked different out the corner of his eye. It was a different color. It was a different shape. It was smaller.
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 was 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 door 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 bannister.
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 bannister, 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."
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