Warren Murphy - The Ultimate Death

One of the nurses cocked an eyebrow. "Did he sound strange to you?" she asked the others.

"He always sounds strange," said the other nurse.

"Actually, that was the first time he ever sounded normal to me," said Dr. Drew. "And I've been on staff ten years."

"Why do you suppose he kept rubbing his fingernail?" the first nurse whispered to the second, as they resumed ministering to the old Korean.

He did not know why he had come here. He only knew that he had felt compelled to do so.

The night air was heavy with moisture. The dampness clung to his kimono. The dew on the freshly mowed grass collected in dollops on the tops of his feet.

Long Island Sound stretched out into infinity behind the sanitarium. No boats bobbed on its surface. No lights were visible. No starlight reflected in the lapping waves. The Sound was totally black, like spilled crude.

Chiun, Master of Sinanju, peered into the distance. Not totally black after all, he saw now.

Wallowing somewhere on the far horizon, there was a grayness. It swirled there for a moment in eternity and then shot out to either side, spreading outward from that single finite point until it had become great gray wings.

Wings which began to beat remorselessly toward shore, spreading and widening.

They became a tidal wave, covering the vast distance to the shore in mere seconds.

The gray wings of fog enveloped Chiun's legs, rolling in around him in thick currents, but not stirring the wispy hair clinging to his venerable chin and in puffs over his alert ears.

It moved across the shore, obscuring the huge building behind Chiun.

Soon there was nothing but fog all around. No sky, no ground, no sea. Just the fog.

And there was a blackness in it. Like an evil pit in a rotted peach. It was vague and indistinguishable one moment, solid the next. It leaped around Chiun in the protective haze of the swirling gray fog.

Chiun followed its movements impassively.

The black fog-within-the-fog split in two, then the two vaporous shapes became four, and the four, eight. They spun kaleidoscopic patterns around him, encroaching, then retreating, bold and timid by turns.

Chiun paid them no heed. He stared resolutely out to where the horizon had been.

"Sinanjuuuuu . . ." The word was a taunt.

Chiun ignored the voice.

There was no breeze, and there were no other sounds or smells. Chiun was not even certain if he stood on solid ground any longer. There was just the dampness of the fog against his face. And the circling black mist.

"Do you invite us in?" A chorus of voices this time.

Chiun remained fixated on a long-vanished point in space, refusing to answer.

"You are frightened," scoffed a single voice.

"He has much to fear," another agreed.

"Much indeed," a third chimed in. "For he remembers Shanghai."

Chiun spoke. "I fear not gyonshi vermin." He refused to focus on the mist.

"Then invite us in," the first voice dared.

"Invite us in now, Sinanju Master."

"It is an invitation to death," Chiun said blankly.

The black mist circled closer. "Do you fear death, O great Master of Sinanju?" the voice whispered mockingly in his ear.

Chiun's eyes remained shards of flint. "I was not referring to my own death, gyonshi mist." Chiun delicately removed his hands from his kimono sleeves. He intertwined his fingers before him so that they formed a yellow basket of bones.

In his heart, he prepared himself.

"You are invited in," he said softly.

The tightness in his chest had worsened.

The man Smith had been would have been concerned, but not overly so. He would have assumed that it was simple esophageal reflux, or his ulcer acting up again. Were it to persist, he would have had it checked in a few days.

The thing that Harold W. Smith had become, however, did not care at all. Smith was a mere vessel now. The latest adherent of an ancient Creed. An expendable extension of the Leader.

But this thing that inhabited the body of Harold W. Smith was also in possession of Smith's knowledge.

Although Smith did not fully understand all that was happening to him, the thing did.

The Leader was of the Creed, he knew. The Leader had helped what had once been Harold W. Smith to be reborn in death. The Leader was all-knowing. The Leader could explain his new purpose to Smith the Undead.

But the Leader was in danger.

This "Remo" was a threat to the Leader, who Remo believed dwelled in the Three-G, Incorporated, health food company in Woodstock, New York. He was on his way now.

Smith's secretary was not at her desk when the Smith-vessel stumbled toward its office. For some reason, the body was not fully responding to the commands issued by its brain.

It wanted to stand erect, but the body was hunched. It clutched at its chest, trying to hold the pain in. In this doubled-over manner, the Smith-thing crossed the office and dropped into the cracked-leather chair behind the desk.

It was an effort to call up a phone directory for upstate New York over the computer terminal, and secure the number. But this was done.

When the phone was finally answered, the pains in the Smith-vessel's chest had grown sharper and more localized. It began to sweat. The sweat was cold, clammy.

The breath came with difficulty. His left arm grew numb.

"You . . . must . . . must . . . warn . . . Leader," the Smith-thing wheezed into the phone receiver. "Remo . . . Sinanju . . . coming . . . uuuhhhh . . ."

The receiver dropped to the floor as the Smith-thing slumped forward onto the sparse wooden desk, clutching his left breast as if a stake had been driven through his ribs and into his heart.

In her Woodstock office, Mary Melissa Mercy delicately returned the receiver to its cradle and hurried off to inform the Leader that the Shanghai Web had snared another foe.

All that remained now was the hated gweilo.

Chapter 21

Mary Melissa Mercy knew at an early age that she would devote her life to nursing the sick. As far back as she could remember she had practiced her art. Bandaging the family dog. Listening to family hearts with a stethoscope fashioned from a Dixie cup and plastic hosing. Once, she had even tried to "inoculate" a neighborhood playmate with a rusty nail-which resulted in a severe case of tetanus.

Mary Melissa got to visit the playmate in the hospital, thus opening up an entire new world to her young imagination. A world that smelled disinfectant-clean.

As soon as she had graduated from high school, Mary Melissa Mercy enrolled in the Lone Star Nursing School. It was a dream come true. And why shouldn't it have been? If there was one thing Mary Melissa cared about, it was health.

She had never been sick a day in her life. When every other kid was suffering from colds and flu and measles and chicken pox, Mary Melissa was always in the pink of health. Even a case of the sniffles would have been unusual for Mary Melissa Mercy.

She attributed her remarkable good health to one thing and one thing alone: vegetarianism.

If nursing was Mary Melissa Mercy's vocation, then vegetarianism was her avocation.

It wasn't something she had to do in order to maintain her perfect figure. It wasn't something she thought she'd try because her peers did it. They were beef eaters. It wasn't something that had been forced on her by her parents.

It was because Mary Melissa Mercy couldn't stand the taste of blood.

Little did she realize that her twin passions and single phobia would collide mere weeks after graduating from the Lone Star Nursing School, in a small, poorly ventilated corner room in the terminal ward of Houston General Hospital.

The elderly patient in Room 334 was enshrouded in mystery. He was known to the staff as Mr. Nichols, which everyone agreed couldn't be his name, for he was unmistakably Chinese.