Warren Murphy: The Ultimate Death

Remo just kept taking fistfuls of popcorn, looking at them sadly, and dropping them on the floor. "It's a pity," he said. "You can't even go out to the movies anymore."

"Whatchu talkin' about, man?"

"Oh, you know what I'm talking about, Tyrant. May I call you Tyrant?"

"The name's Tarantula, jack-off," the teenager spat at him.

"The name's Remo, Tyrant. I don't suppose you've ever heard of me? I used to be a big name in these parts."

"You're nuts, you know that, man?"

"No, but I am ticked off," Remo said casually, dropping more popcorn. "You want to know why? I'll tell you why. Because I love this place. This is the place where I learned what heroes are all about. They gave me hope, and made me want to make the world better."

Remo took a fistful of popcorn. "Then you and your buddies come along and turn the place into a shooting gallery. Bad enough you do it on the streets-my streets-but at least you know where each other live. Here, you outnumber the innocent bystanders ten-to-one."

He squeezed his fist, and the popcorn turned to glittering powder. He let it stream out of his hand. "Now nobody comes to the movies anymore. They stay home, cowering in their living rooms, watching videos. You're killing movies. You know what that means?"

The gang made a move toward him, but Tarantula stopped them again. "No, anglo. What's it mean?"

Remo looked at him and smiled like a skull, rolling a popcorn kernel on his thumbnail with his forefinger. "It means that when this generation grows up, there'll be less people like me, and more people like you. And that pisses the hell out of me."

Tarantula gave him his biggest death's-head smile-the kind that doesn't involve the eyes. "Well, don't you worry about it, baby." He quickly reached into his jacket. "Because you're a dead man!"

Remo let him pull out the gun. He let the others reach for theirs. Then he flicked the single popcorn kernel on this thumb into Tarantula's right eye.

The piece of popcorn shot across the small distance like a barbed-wire BB pellet, and had the same effect.

The popped edges of the kernel tore open Tarantula's pupil, and the corn heart wedged deep in his cornea. He screamed, as Remo lightly gripped the thick rectangular barrel of the huge automatic weapon.

"That a custom job?" he said lightly. "Looks it. I don't know much about guns. They dilute the art."

Tarantula was in no mood to answer. He continued to scream and turn, one hand over his eye, trying to keep the blood and ocular fluid in. To the others, it looked as if he and Remo were dancing around an invisible maypole.

"Fifteen rounds," Remo judged, examining the weapon. "Nickel-plated. Must've set you back a ton of crack."

Tarantula fixed him with his good eye, brought the gun down until it was against Remo's nose, and pulled the trigger.

Tarantula's right-hand man went down, a smoking crater in his chest. Which was weird, since he stood off to the left.

"Smart move," said Remo, as the rest of the audience started to scream and bolt. "Can't shoot people in the head around here. Skull shrapnel really flies."

Tarantula screamed again. His arm had somehow been moved so it was pointing off to his left. He brought it around until it was against Remo's right breast, and pulled the trigger again.

Something propelled it away. Something too fast to be seen.

Dum-Dum Dudley, coincidentally named for the kind of bullet that killed him, went down next to Faroom.

Ignoring the stampeding audience, the Spanish Spiders and Allah's Swarm all took out their guns-with Remo and Tarantula in the middle.

Tarantula hit the carpet and rolled for his life.

The two street gangs started firing at each other. Normally they'd all miss, hitting a variety of innocent bystanders, but this time they had Remo to contend with. What their bullets didn't accomplish, his hands did.

He weaved among them, pushing and pulling gang members so that ripping lead smashed between ribs and into hearts. He spun, knocking them into the line of fire, jerking their wrists and guns so that their own shots found their marks.

It was like a macabre ballet. Remo was a blur, always one step ahead of death, and although the seats and floor became spattered with blood drops he remained unsprinkled by gore.

Finally the crackle of gunfire abated, and there was no one left but Faroom and Tarantula, who stood on the opposite sides of the wide aisle staring at each other in stunned silence. Remo leaned against the stage. He watched the two gang leaders impassively as the film continued to roll.

The theater was empty, save for those two, and the dozen corpses at their feet. Remo picked up his blood-splattered popcorn tub and began crushing the last of the kernels.

"Play nice," he instructed the gang lords.

They immediately raised their guns like duelists, aimed at each other's faces, and pulled the triggers.

The guns boomed and bucked in their hands. Tarantula's bullet went wide and slammed into an emergency exit's steel latch-bar. It whined away with a grinding snap. Faroom's round cut a chunk out of the stage next to Remo's elbow.

"I said nice," said Remo, and flicked a popcorn kernel into Faroom's eye.

As the other gang leader was cycloped he screamed, firing off another round into the ceiling.

Both gang leaders looked at each other through their one good eye, each holding their free hand over their destroyed ones. They were both hunched over, both gasping for breath, and both got the same idea at the same time.

Faroom aimed at Remo. Tarantula aimed at Remo. They transferred their hate for each other to this amazing white man. They pulled their respective triggers and held them down, so that all the remaining bullets in their fifteen-round clips were pumped out. Too late.

Both men danced and jerked as the projectiles ripped into them.

Faroom was perforated from his forehead to his crotch. Tarantula got ten rounds directly in the head, all but blotting out his two-ounce brain.

Remo watched Tarantula crumple to the floor, a big smoking hole in his head. "He who lives by popcorn," he intoned by way of eulogy, "dies by popcorn."

And he walked out into the warmth of the Newark, New Jersey, afternoon.

It was not the Newark he had grown up in. Not the Newark of the orphan Remo Williams, ward of the state, who had left St. Theresa's Orphanage-now a parking lot-for the Newark Police Department, pulled a tour in Nam, and returned to the force only to be framed for the murder of a pusher in the Ironbound section of town.

He had not killed the man, but the state saw it differently. Remo had gone to the electric chair thinking he was about to die.

After the juice had caused him to black out, Remo woke up in the place called Folcroft Sanitarium and discovered that the frame-up had been engineered to erase him so a government agency known as CURE could have its own White House-sanctioned assassin.

Remo Williams.

They had taken away his last name. They had erected a tombstone with his name chiseled in marble. They had destroyed every record with his name, face, and fingerprints on it.

And most cruel of all, they had subjected him to plastic surgery, so that when Remo awoke to the chill unexpectedness of still walking the earth, his own reflection was unsettling and alien.

Over the years Remo had had his face fixed several times, each time getting further and further away from the face that was genetically his own.

But now, over twenty years after it had all begun, Remo. walked the streets of his childhood with his original features.

He reveled in the knowledge that if Dr. Harold W. Smith, his superior, were even to suspect he had ventured back to his childhood haunts, he would stroke out. But twenty years was twenty years. Newark had changed. There was no one to remember even the true face of Remo Williams. He would tell Smith that, and that would be the end of any talk of going under the knife again. He hoped.