Warren Murphy: Voodoo Die

Now Remo heard footsteps running quickly in the dirt street and then he felt his cage being lifted into the air and he was being carried away. When he looked back, the two men in white trousers had turned and were shuffling back the way they had come, their scuffing feet still kicking up dust in the street, but silent now, their wailing ended. Then they vanished into the dark at the end of the street.

Remo looked up to see who was carrying his cage but he saw only black faces against a blacker night.

They were carried into a small wooden shack. Its interior was dimly lit with candles and the windows were sealed with tar paper to prevent any light from spilling outside.

Remo looked up. Four black men had been carrying him and Chiun. Wordlessly they went to work on

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the cage padlocks with heavy bolt-cutters. Two strong snips and the cages were open. Remo crawled out, then stood up on the dirt floor. He stretched his muscles and almost fell to the ground. Chiun was standing alongside him and he put a hand onto Remo's arm for support.

The four black men glided toward the door and were gone.

Remo turned to look at them, to thank them, but before he could speak he heard a familiar voice.

He turned around to see Ruby staring at him, wearing a green tentlike dress, her hair neatly arranged in corn rows. She was staring at him, shaking her head.

"Minute I see you," she said, "I know you gonna be nothin' but trouble, dodo."

"You're cute, Ruby," Remo said.

He reached forward to touch her, lost his balance, and fell forward. Ruby caught him in her arms.

"I don' know what you get paid," she said as she struggled him over to a cot on the floor, "and I don' wanna know, 'cause it gonna be more than I make and I gonna he sick, 'cause anythin' they pay you's too much. Lay down and let Ruby fix you up."

She arranged Remo on the cot, then helped Chiun to the other cot in the room.

"I gonna get some food in you. Both you too skinny."

"We don't eat most things," Remo said. "We have a special diet."

"You eat what I gives you," said Ruby. "You think this some fancy white man's hotel? I gotta get you fixed up so we can take care of the general and get us outa here in one piece."

"And just how do you propose to do that?" asked Remo. "Corazon's got the machine and the army."

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"Yeah, fish, but there something he ain't got."

"What's that?" asked Remo.

"Me," Ruby said.

She went to Chiun and pulled a thin clean sheet up over him.

"Why do you call Remo fish?" asked Chiun.

"He look like a fish," she said. "He got no lips at all."

"He can't help that," Chiun said. "It is the way of his kind."

"He can't help it but that don' make it no better," said Ruby. "Now go to sleep."

Then she was quiet and in the background as he drifted off to sleep, Remo heard the drums begin again.

Generalissimo Corazon was in his long white nightgown when the two frightened guards were led into the presidential sitting room.

They prostrated themselves on the floor before him.

"It was the dapples" one of them wept. "Zombies."

"So you dropped your weapons and fled like children," Corazon said.

"They were coming for us," the other guard cried. "The drums stopped and then they came down the street at us and they had their arms up and they was coming for us."

"It was the voodoo. The zombies," the other guard tried to explain. "The evil power."

"The power, hah?" Corazon yelled. "I show you the power. I show you who gots the power, me or the voodoo. On your feet. Stand up."

He had the two men stand facing away from him and then took the drape off the mung machine and pressed the button. There was a loud crack, a zapping

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noise, and as the two men melted into mush Corazon shouted again, "Now you see power. Real power. The power of Corazon. That be power."

Major Estrada stood on the side of the room quietly watching, noting that this time Corazon had pressed only one button to fire the machine and remembering which button it was.

"And don't you just be standing there, Estrada," Corazon called out. "You go get me some salt."

Estrada left and went to the kitchen of the palace where he took two saltshakers. One he put into his pocket and the other he brought back to Corazon, who sat in his gilt throne chair, looking glum.

Corazon took the shaker, looked at Estrada shrewdly, then unscrewed the top of the shaker and stuck his big index finger into the small jar. He tasted it to be sure it was salt. He nodded satisfaction.

"Now I got the salt, I all right," Corazon said. "The zombie, he can't live with the salt on him. And tomorrow I gonna go kill that Samedi, and I be the spiritual leader of this country forever and ever, amen." He gestured toward the spots on the floor. "And you, clean up that mess."

Remo awakened to the smell of food. It was a strange smell, one he could not place.

"'Bout time you get you lazy butt up," said Ruby working at a wood-fire stove in a comer of the shack's single room.

"Is Chiun awake yet?"

"He sleeping still, but he older than you. He got a right to sleep late and hanging 'round with you must give him lots of things to worry about and sleep off."

"What are you cooking? It smells awful," Remo

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said. He flexed his muscles but realized with annoyance that the strength had not returned to them.

Ruby's voice rose in a piercing shriek. "Don't you worry about what it is. It put some flesh on you. You eat, you hear?" She was spooning food onto a plate. Watching her in her shapeless green dress, Remo could see the well-formed turn of her buttocks, the long line of thigh outlined by the material, the full, high breasts. He moved up into a sitting position on the cot.

"You know you'd be a good-looking woman if it wasn't for that hair of yours," he said. "It looks like something that was done by a high wind in a wheat field."

"Yeah, that's true," Ruby said thoughtfully. "But if I wore my 'fro, they recognize me around here for sure. This way is better, least till we be getting home. Here. Eat this."

She handed the plate to Remo, who examined it carefully. It was all vegetables-green stringy things and yellow stringy things. He had never seen any of them before.

"What is this? I'm not eating anything until I know what it is. I'm not eating any disguised neckbones or chitlins or like that," he said.

"It's just greens. You eat it." She began putting more on a plate for Chiun.

"What kind of greens?" Remo asked.

"What you mean, what kind of greens? It's greens. Greens be greens. What you need, a taster? Think you a king and somebody trying to poison you? You ain't no king, just a trouble-making turkey dodo fish-lip. Eat."

And because Remo feared that if he didn't Ruby

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would turn her hundred-mile-an-hour earth-moving screech of a voice on him, he tasted some.

It wasn't too bad, he decided. And nourishment felt good in his body. He saw Chiun's eyes open. Ruby must have seen it too, because she was quickly at Chiun's side, cooing at the old man, helping him to sit up and gently but firmly planting a plate in his lap with orders to "eat this all up and don't leave none."

Chiun nodded and picked slowly at the food, but ate it all.

"I am not familiar with this food, but it was good," Chiun said.

Remo finished his, too.

"Good, there's more," Ruby said. "It put strength back in your bodies."

She refilled their plates, then sat on a low wooden footstool and watched them eat, as if she were counting their chews to make sure they didn't cheat.

When they were done, she stacked the plates on the stove, then went back to sit on her stool. "I think we got to come to an agreement," she said. Chiun nodded. Remo just looked at her. "Now I'm taking charge here," she said. Chiun nodded again. "Why you?" asked Remo.