Warren Murphy: The Ultimate Death

Chiun brought his eyes level with Nuihc's. His nephew's orbs burned with undisguised hatred. Their gazes locked.

"The ignorant dog barks at its own stink," he said, his voice dripping with contempt.

Nuihc, once Master of Sinanju, struck up a fighting stance.

"Defend yourself, decrepit one!" he shouted.

Chiun stood his ground. "I will not fight you, shamed one."

Nuihc's eyes became angry steel slits. "Ah, I understand. Only when your opponent is unsuspecting, unprepared, do you strike. Here, where there are eyes to witness your treachery, you hold back. Time has addled your withered mind, uncle. You have forgotten that I do not share your compunctions. If you do not defend yourself, I will slay you like a dog in the street."

Chiun lowered his head. "So be it," he said quietly. And he turned his back in contempt.

Nuihc's eyes went wild. "I will have my revenge!"

Nuihc flew at Chiun, his index finger extended in a forward thrust-the identical stroke Chiun had landed against him years before.

Chiun would not react. He would not move to defend himself. If his physical fate was somehow sealed with his fate in this internal world of his fevered devising, then he would leave the outcome to destiny.

But he did not have the chance.

Against his will, he felt his body move. Nuihc's blow encountered vacant air as Chiun whirled, his arm swooping in a deadly arc, an out-thrust fingernail sweeping for his nephew's open chest.

At the instant the stroke should have registered, Nuihc was no longer there. In his place, several paces removed, was a man much older. He was looking at a young boy nearby. Neither had been there a moment before, Chiun was certain of that.

There was something about the older man in Nuihc's place that Chiun should have recognized, but there was no time to think. The man was stalking the boy. And his hand was streaking across the vacant space between them in molasses-slow milliseconds.

The boy! Something about the boy was familiar! The Master of Sinanju's hand moved with the speed of a thunderbolt and the grace of a swan. He intercepted the blow. Stopped the hand. Saved the boy.

The attacking man dropped to the dust of the ground, crumpled, becoming dust himself. Chiun looked to the boy.

The boy stared back at him. He seemed fearful. Shocked. And sad. Very, very sad.

He looked up at Chiun with hauntingly familiar eyes that tore at Chiun's heart and rended his soul.

Chiun knew who the boy was. It was the young Chiun. And he had somehow become his own father.

The villagers gathered around the village elder, whom Chiun had felled. He heard their curses, felt their angry, frightened glances.

He was at once father and son. Unable to avoid destiny. Unable to evade his past.

"Murderer!" they cried.

"Betrayer!"

"You killed your own nephew, one of us!"

"Who will be next? For none of us is safe!"

And in the prison that was his mind, Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, dropped to his knees and let the suppressed anguish of nearly six decades pour out onto the dusty main square of his native village.

Chapter 23

The elderly Chinese known only as the Leader sat on his rude wooden throne in the security surveillance room of Three-G, Incorporated. The thick metal door was double-locked, and virtually impossible to break down with anything less than a point-blank Stinger missile strike.

A line of Sony closed-circuit television screens displayed in static-filled images the drama being played out in the complex around him.

The Leader was oblivious to the pictures on the screens. Mary Melissa Mercy was not. She continued her running narration.

"He has gotten through the first wave, Leader," she said, a twinge of nervousness in her voice.

The Leader smiled, exposing snaggly rows of stained teeth.

For this great moment, the Leader had donned a scarlet-and-gold gown over leggings and boots. A rising phoenix, its wings wide, was a stitchery of flame on his chest.

"The surprise attack failed because surprise was not on our side," he explained. "The gweilo knew of us. But we have not failed. We will never fail. Ours is the true faith."

Mary Melissa Mercy stared down at a TV screen. On it, the gweilo Remo could be seen gliding stealthily down a corridor, away from the reception area and toward the atrium. "Will the second phase succeed?" she asked.

The Leader's smile widened until Mary Melissa could see the pits of his blackened back teeth. "With a certainty," he said. "Sinanju can be defeated by sheer numbers. This, I know. This, I know. As in Shanghai, so in this place."

His head continued to sway from side to side, as if to deny his own pronouncement.

Remo found himself in the darkened garden at the center of the Three-G complex. It was not exactly the Eden its designers had intended.

He saw dismembered bodies swinging lazily from the thickest tree branches, suspended by wire and rope. The putrid smell of rotted flesh assaulted his nostrils. The air was thick with swarms of buzzing flies.

And there were others there, as well. Hiding among the dead, pretending to be dead when they were only the undead. They had smeared one another with the blood of their victims to disguise themselves, but Remo knew they were there before they'd made their first move.

They roused, like sleepy pink bats stretching emaciated wings.

Remo deliberately had walked to the center of the garden in an attempt to appear unprepared, allowing them to surround him.

At his approach, two gyonshi dropped from the blackened branches of a dead oak tree like ugly fruit. One leapt over a heavy stone bench positioned at the edge of the path. A second was about to follow suit when the first rocketed backward, scooping his companion up in mid jump.

Both slammed into the tree from which they had climbed seconds before. They became intertwined with the tree trunk. Branches fell and clattered like brittle bones.

Remo slapped imaginary dirt from his hands as a dozen more vampires closed in.

By now the moon was high above, and the approaching mob advanced with movements that suggested wolves more than men.

Their faces were pale in the reflected moonlight. Their lean shadows spread and melted together, blurring their numbers and masking their features in an on-again, off-again flicker of silvery light. A cemetery whose graves had disgorged its residents might create such a picture.

Their hands were raised in the air before them, zombie-like, as they approached with a detached animal intensity. Their eyes held the same devoid-of-thought malice displayed by Sal Mondello and the other gyonshi. "Reject meat. . . ." they pleaded.

"Tennis, anyone?" Remo asked coolly.

He received a chorus of hisses in reply.

"All this because my elbow was bent," Remo growled, moving into action.

He dropped back and rolled, feeling his T-shirt dampen as he encountered one of the cool, blood-seeping mounds of buried organs. He came back to his feet just beyond the reach of the vampires.

The concrete bench over which his first attackers had clambered was cool to his touch as Remo stooped and hefted it into the air, leaving twin mud furrows in the ground where it had rested.

Remo lifted the two-hundred-pound bench with no more effort than if it had been constructed of papier-mache. He held its curved legs firmly in both hands and extended it impossibly far out in front of him, using it as a shield to ward off the blows of the deadly herd.

A twig snapped. Movement behind. There were more skulking in through the underbrush, eyes dull and feral.

A gyonshi nail hissed past his ear. Remo stabbed the right side of the bench outward in a sharp parry that caught the assailant in the forehead. There was a satisfying crunch of bone, and the vampire fell.