Warren Murphy: Voodoo Die

So it was dark and he had seen it coming and someone shrieked because she was afraid. And someone else shrieked because she was happy.

A car came up the block and lit it with its headlights and there was a noise in the streets of the city people, a mingling of nervous voices trying to establish contact in what they thought was a suddenly unnatural world.

And only one man in the entire city understood what was happening, because he alone had reawakened to his senses.

He knew that young men were running up behind him. It was not strange to listen for that or to know where their hands were and that one had a lead object he was trying to crack down on Remo or that the other had a blade. They moved their bodies that way.

You could explain it in a few hours to someone, using motion pictures of how every person gave obvious signs of their weapons by the way they moved their bodies. Some you could even tell what sort of weapon they had by looking at their feet alone. But the best way was feel.

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How did Remo know? He knew it. Like he knew his head was on his shoulders and that the ground was down. Like he knew he could slow-catch the force of the lead object and readjust the boy's momentum to send him down into the concrete sidewalk so that he cracked his own ribs on collision.

The blade was simpler. Remo decided to use force.

"You're going to kill yourself with your own knife," Remo said softly. "Here we go."

He clasped the young man's hand around the knife so it could not let go and pressed it into the stomach, and feeling the blade had a sharpness to it he very slowly brought it up to where he felt the heart muscle throb against it.

"Oh, God," said the young man who knew now he was going to die and had not expected anything like that. He had done hundreds of stickings in New York City and no one had ever given him trouble, especially not when he worked with someone who used lead.

Sure, he had been arrested twice, once for cutting up a young girl who wouldn't give him any, but then he only spent a night in youth detention and he went back and settled with her.

He got her in an alley and he cut her up good. So good that they had to bury her in a closed coffin and her mother wept, and asked where justice was, and pointed a finger at him, but that was all she could do. What was she going to do? Go to the police? He'd cut her up worse then. And what would they do? Give him a lecture? Put him up for a night in jail?

There was nothing that was going to happen to you for sticking someone in New York City. So it came as a great surprise to this young man that there would

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be some sort of violent objection from this person about to be mugged.

After all, he wasn't wearing a gang jacket, or riding around like he was connected to the mob, or wearing a gun. He had looked like a simple citizen of New York City, the kind anybody could do anything to. So what was this great pain he felt in his body? Was the guy a cop? There was a law against killing cops, but this guy didn't look like a cop.

They had been watching him just before the lights went. They had seen him buy a single flower from someone on Broadway and give the old woman a ten-dollar bill and tell her to keep the change.

And he had bills in his pocket. Then the guy took the flower, smelled it, and tore off two petals. And he chewed the damned things.

He was about six feet tall but skinny, and he had high cheekbones, as if he might have been part Chink or something. That's what one of the guys said. He had real thick wrists and he walked funny, like a shuffle. He looked easy. And he had money.

And when he turned into 99th Street, where it was not as well-lit and where no other citizens would come to his aid, where he was just beautiful pickings, the lights went out. Beautiful.

He didn't even wait. He knew he had a partner with a lead pipe, because that's what his partner was ready to use while the lights were on.

They closed in on the guy at the same time. It was beautiful, double beautiful. Wham. He should have collapsed. But he didn't.

He hardly moved. You could feel him not move. You could make out that your partner fell onto the sidewalk like he was dropped off a roof. And then the

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guy spoke to you very softly and he had your hand in his and you couldn't even let go of the knife. And he punctured your belly and you slammed desperately at your own hand trying to get the knife out of it so it wouldn't tear your insides out, but it felt like someone had taped your belly button to the heating coil of an electric stove and that burn kept going up and you couldn't let go.

If you could have, you would have bitten your hand off at the wrist just to let go.

It hurt that bad.

When the heart went, when the muscle was pierced and his blood flowed out of his stomach and now very fast out, all over the place, and he finally was able to let go of the knife because the guy was walking on up the street, then it dawned on the young man, in the final clarity of the last moment of life, even a seventeen-year-old life, that this guy he had planned to stick had snuffed out his life without missing one slow shuffling step.

The young man's whole life was not even a missed step in the evening of that strange guy who ate the flower.

The city was dark and Remo moved on. There was some blood on his left thumb and he flicked it off.

The problem with people in the city, he knew, was that darkness, relying on your senses instead of mechanical means to produce artificial daylight, was the natural way. And suddenly people who did not even breathe properly found themselves having to use muscles they had never used before, atrophied muscles like those used to hear and see and feel.

He himself had been trained with great pain and great wisdom to learn how to revive the dormant skills of man, the talents that had once made man

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competitive with the wild animals but now had turned this new species into walking corpses. The spear itself had made the human animal dependent on an outside thing, and not until the dawn of history in a fishing village on the west Korea bay did any man regain the pace and skill that reawakened what man could be.

The skill was called Sinanju, after the village in which it was created.

Only the Masters of Sinanju knew these techniques.

Only one white man had ever been so honored.

And that man was Remo and now in one of the great cities of his civilization the lights went out. And he was troubled.

Not because people were as people had been since before Babylon, but because he was now different.

And what had he done with his life? When he had agreed to undergo training, to serve an organization that would enable his country to survive, he thought there was a thing-justice-that he was working for.

And that changed as he became more like the Master of Sinanju who trained him. For then the perfection of being part of the House of Sinanju, the greatest assassins in all history, was enough. The doing of what you did was its very purpose. And one morning he awoke and he didn't believe that at all.

There was a right and there was a wrong and what was Remo doing that was right?

Nothing, he told himself. He moved on up to Harlem, walking slowly and thinking. Mobs had begun to loot and burn, and he came to the edge of one delirious crowd and saw it straining at an iron fence that shielded windows.

The sign behind the windows read: "Down Home Frozen Ribs."

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It was obviously a black manufacturing plant. Not a big one either.

"Get 'im. Get 'im," yelled a woman and she was not yelling at Remo. Something up in front of the crowd was struggling against the mob, trying to keep it from breaking through the fence.

"Get the uppity nigger. Get the high-pants nigger. Get the uppity nigger," the woman yelled again. She had a quart bottle of gin in one hand and a baseball bat in the other.