Warren Murphy: Killer Watts

Elber's eyes sprang wide in terror as the gripping pain in his chest intensified. The blue arcs continued to flow from Roote's fingertips until the corporal's heart could no longer take the strain. Bursting all at once, the ragged muscle exploded a river of blood into the soldier's chest cavity.

Roote cut the power.

Eyes already glazing over, a stream of sticky crimson flooding from his mouth, Corporal Elber toppled sideways onto the platform.

It had all happened in a matter of seconds. Only as the body fell did the reality of the horror seem to sink in for the other two sickly fascinated men on the platform.

The scientists panicked.

One bounded frantically for the ladder, shoving his colleague aside. The trailing scientist lost his balance, tumbling into the tank with a helpless splash.

Roote was across the platform before the man on the ladder had a chance to climb a single rung. Grabbing the scientist by the white coat, he dragged him back onto the platform. With a grunt, he flung the man into the pool.

Up until now, the platform had blocked the view of the men below. But at the appearance of Roote's naked torso, the reaction from the others was immediate. They screamed and ran. They were across the cold floor and out the open door in seconds.

Roote let them go, turning his attention to the men in the tank.

They were splashing madly, like panicked children who had not yet learned how to swim. One had nearly made it back to the platform when he saw Roote's bare legs. In terror, he ducked below the water. Bobbing up, spitting water, he began splashing back in the other direction.

Roote crouched down on his haunches at the edge of the churning pool. Tipping his head, he ran a lazy index finger through the cold water.

The second man had swum blindly up to the edge. He snorted mucus-filled water from his mouth and nose as he scrabbled at the plastic platform. His hand recoiled when he brushed against Elizu Roote's foot.

Skittering sideways, the scientist blinked chlorinated water from his eyes as he looked pleadingly up at the man who had been his test subject. He panted in fear.

"Do you want to beg for your life now?" Roote asked. His soft Southern drawl was mockingly soothing.

Halfway across the tank, the other scientist had made it to the submerged isolation box. He grabbed at the feeding tubes, trying to pull himself from the water. He slipped on the first attempt, splashing back into the big tank.

"Elizu, be reasonable," the nearer scientist begged.

"I don't think I can do that," Roote replied calmly. "That's why you all picked me. You shoulda kilt me. Shoulda kilt me when you had the chance. That box weren't no way to leave me."

"Think, Elizu, think. Try." Hot tears mingled with cold tank water on the scientist's face. "You were uncontrollable. What would you have done if you were us?"

Roote had to think for only a moment. As he rose to his full height, his eyes clearly registered his conclusion. Without another moment's hesitation, he aimed all ten fingers at the choppy surface of the wide pool.

In the water, the scientist shook his head in horror. "No!" the man screamed.

The power surge from Roote's fingers was incredible. It coursed through the water in an instant. The man across the pool had been halfway out of the water and up the rubberized monitor line. The blue electrical surge seemed to reach up from the surface of the tank and tug him back in. He struck water with a fat splash.

In the tank, both men jumped and crackled like batter-coated fish in a deep fryer.

On the plastic platform, Roote gently closed his eyes, rhapsodic, as the energy poured out of him. He let it run for a full minute, until he sensed the drain within his hips and shoulders. Only when he knew his internal supply was too low to continue did he cut off the power supply. By then, the men in the pool were long dead.

The crackling continued for a few moments afterward. The pair of white-coated backs bobbed lifelessly on the surface of the churning, steaming water. The material of their lab coats was tinted slightly brown.

Roote left them to bob in the waves. He stepped over the upper lip of the tank and climbed down the ladder.

Walking, not running, he crossed the big room toward the open door. His wet feet left a fading trail of prints on the concrete floor. A moment later, he was gone.

The monster had escaped.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he was fighting gravity. And winning.

Actually, as he strolled along the thin wire eight stories above the dark alley in Providence, Rhode Island, Remo realized that "fight" was not the proper term for what he was doing. Tightrope walkers and trapeze artists fought gravity. Every step or swing they took flouted the simplest law of nature. Remo was no mere circus performer. For him it was not so much a fight as it was a stalemate.

Gravity was there. Remo was there. Both knew it, but each pretty much ignored the other.

The cool breeze brought the scent of the Providence River in from the east. The slight shift in wind would have caught a mountain goat by surprise, flinging it into the black abyss below. Remo merely shifted his weight and he continued to balance delicately as he stepped, one foot casually over the other, toward the distant wall.

To fight gravity would be to lose, Remo knew. One might just as well have tried to wrestle the sun from the heavens. If he taunted nature, he would plummet like Icarus to the hard, unforgiving ground. Instead, Remo became a force of nature unto himself.

Remo was a Master of Sinanju. The latest in a long line of heroes stretching back into the mists of prehistory. To be a Sinanju master was to be in total control of one's physical and mental abilities.

Feats that seemed extraordinary to normal mortals were second nature to the men of Sinanju. Dodging bullets, scaling sheer walls, the ability to lift many times their own weight all came easy to those in harmony with the forces of the cosmos.

But Sinanju was not just a philosophy. The name derived from the poor North Korean fishing village from which the first master had come more than five millennia ago. Remo was the pupil of the Reigning Master, the last in the original pure bloodline.

Remo had not expected to become a Sinanju master. In fact, Remo-like most people-had never even heard of the most deadly of all the martial arts.

A lifetime before, Remo had been a Newark beat cop. One night a pusher had been found beaten to death, Remo's badge clutched in a hand tight with rigor mortis.

The trial had been incredibly, suspiciously, fast. Remo lost. He was executed for a crime he had not committed. When the electric chair didn't work, Remo awoke to find his old life was over and a new one just beginning. Technically dead, but still very much alive, Remo was placed in the skillful hands of the Master of Sinanju. From that moment on, Remo had been taught how to become all that he could be.

"Be all that you can be," Remo sang lightly as he stepped along the clothesline-thick insulated cord.

He wasn't aware he had spoken in more than a whisper until he heard the surprised voice before him.

"Hey! Whoa, hey, what the crap?"

The voice came from the flat roof. When he looked, Remo saw a broad, puzzled face peering from the deep shadows just above the upper roof ledge. It turned quickly away, calling into the darkest shadows in a husky rasp.

"Gino, get over here. You gotta see this." Another face joined the first. This new face, presumably Gino's, grew as surprised as the first when it spied Remo standing on the impossibly thin wire out in the middle of nothing. The alley below lurked dark and menacing.

The cable swung gently in the breeze. Remo swung with it.

"You know dat guy, Ennio?" Gino asked his partner.