Jack Du Brul - Vulcan's forge

Kenji tightened his fists at his sides. He could disembowel Chin with his bare hands without raising a sweat and the idea was a pleasurable one, but he had to maintain his composure. His grandfather held Kenji’s fate after he escaped Hawaii and he wouldn’t jeopardize that for the mere pleasure of killing the boy.

“All operations are different, surely you know this. Because you survived many in the past does not mean you are protected in the present.”

Though not chastened by Kenji’s comment, Chin remained silent.

Kenji was content to lean against the paneled wall of his study, arms now crossed over his chest, watching Chin smoke his cigar. His years of training had taught Kenji to remain impassive no matter what the situation around him. The tension within him would make a weaker man pace, but Kenji simply stood, quiet and dangerous.

“What of the woman,” Chin said, breaking the minutes long silence, “the reporter you have in the gardener’s shed?”

“What about her?”

“She has refused to help us; surely it is time for her to die.”

“Yes, maybe it is,” Kenji said sadly.

“I will do it,” Chin volunteered. “I want her first.”

“Take her,” Kenji replied casually, masking a sense of hurt.

At first, Kenji had entertained thoughts of taking Jill Tzu with him. There was something in the defiant beauty of the woman that made Kenji want to dominate her. Maybe it was because she knew of his Korean birth? He knew that she would never willingly be with him. Of course she could be drugged, like that American woman he’d rescued a week ago.

But Kenji knew that that was not a solution. Jill had to be eliminated, yet he had not been able to bring himself to do it. Chin’s lurid request was the perfect opportunity. Jill would die, but her blood would not be on his hands.

Chin pulled his small feet from the desk and slammed them against the carpeted floor. Kenji expected him to skip from the room like a spoiled child granted his favorite wish. Instead, Chin swaggered out, eyeing Kenji in an adolescent attempt at domination.

Jill wasn’t sure, but it felt as if night had descended once again, making this the fifth she’d spent locked up inside the maintenance shed. She could hear the incessant buzz of insects if she pressed her ear against the tiny crack under the door. The slit was too narrow for her to look through, not that it really mattered to her anymore. What was another night after all?

She’d entertained the thought of marking the floor by scratching the concrete with a sharp pebble to track the passage of time, but decided that it wouldn’t do her any good. She knew she’d be dead before there were even a few gouges. She’d asked herself over and over why she was willing to be killed rather than report the propaganda Kenji had presented her with. Was her journalistic integrity worth more than her life? Were her priorities that messed up?

No, she decided. She could have done it, spouted off whatever he told her. She could have guaranteed her survival, but afterward, her life wouldn’t really be worth living. Not because she would have helped that monster Kenji and not because she would have deceived the public. She would have disappointed herself and that was something she just couldn’t do.

All her life she had faced the world according to her personal set of standards and not once had she ever broken her own rules. If she had, she would have been lying to herself. Jill remembered doing a report once on heroin use among teens in Honolulu. One junkie, a sixteen-year-old girl who supported her habit by hooking, refused to admit she was addicted to drugs. She accused Jill of faking a photograph of her shooting up behind a sleazy hotel. The girl had lied to herself so much that she couldn’t even acknowledge the physical evidence of her problem. She’d told Jill that the needle tracks on her arms were tattoos.

Jill was afraid that if she broke her personal code, she would end up as self-delusioned as that junkie. Helping Kenji, even in an oblique way, would be a violation of that code. She couldn’t do it, wouldn’t do it, and would die for it.

Her mind had sharpened during the solitude of the past few days, driven by the same instincts which had kept man’s ancient ancestors alive on the plains of prehistoric Africa. Like any animal, the human being can sense danger long before the threat is seen or heard. Jill knew that there was a new danger around her; she could feel a malignancy in the air as surely as if it were a physical sensation.

She had first noticed it about an hour earlier, primarily as a tightening of the atmosphere, an almost electric sensation. Soon she noted more tangible evidence of a change.

There was an audible increase in the numbers of guards pacing around Kenji’s estate, more pairs of footfalls on the raked gravel walk next to the shed that was her prison. These new guards walked with a tighter cadence, more vigilant than Kenji’s usual security. But in the past half hour or so, she had heard fewer and fewer people walking around, as if the new guards were vanishing into the night. She heard them walk past the building as if headed for the jungle’s edge, but they never returned.

Now she heard new footsteps; there was an urgency in the strides. Jill knew instinctively where this man was headed.

The footsteps stopped outside the door and she heard keys jingling as merrily as a Christmas chime. The man thrust a key into the lock, turned it violently, and threw open the door. Jill had gotten to her feet and backed as far away from the door as possible.

The intruder was young, no more than a boy, but he carried himself with the negligent attitude of a world weary soldier, cocky eyes and a leering slit of a mouth. There was a pistol in a holster hanging from one bony hip.

He will rape me and then kill me, she thought as if reporting an incident that happened to someone else. I will be dead soon.

Chin-Huy approached, his small hands flexing in nervous anticipation. His eyes were dark spots on his face, like those drawn by a cartoonist. In them, she saw no depth. He drew closer, massaging his crotch languidly, his leer deepening by the moment.

Jill’s attacker was small, no more than fifteen or twenty pounds heavier than she. She might have a chance fighting him off, if only he left his pistol in its holster. Incredulous, she watched as he undid the web belt and let it fall to the floor, the pistol landing heavily against the concrete.

The door was open behind him, beckoning her into the warm embrace of the night. Maybe she could duck past him before he could retrieve his weapon. Jill’s eyes shifted past his shoulder to look at the rectangle of open country beyond her prison, and in that split second, Chin-Huy covered the last few feet between them. He struck her with a vicious roadhouse punch that drove her to the floor as if she’d been hit by a baseball bat.

Her connection to consciousness was just a thin strand. A quick hand darted out and kneaded one of her breasts painfully.

This is not happening to me, Jill thought. This is not me that’s being touched.

Chin-Huy twisted her nipple viciously and she gasped, the pain bringing her back from the dark realm that draped her mind. She looked up into his face. His teeth were crooked and stained, his breath on her skin was hot and fast. His eyes had narrowed to pinpoints and lust had suffused his face with dark blood.

In the millisecond it took her to blink away some of the tears flooding her eyes, an arm had whipped around his neck and yanked him up, off his feet.

By the time Chin sensed something was wrong, his windpipe had nearly been crushed. He tried to whirl around and break the grip, but the arm clung as tenaciously as a remora. His body began to jerk and twitch as if controlled by a manic puppeteer. He slammed back with one elbow, but the blow lacked power and the man killing him didn’t so much as grunt. The arm tightened even more, completely cutting off his air. Chin-Huy’s tongue snaked from between his lips, tearing against his teeth so that his saliva was stained pink. With one final tug, Chin’s neck snapped with a nauseating crackle.