Unnatural Selection td-131 Page 2

  Burt gasped. Bubbles came. Red and frothy.

  Burt staggered back, grabbing at his throat. His hands clutched a glistening hole. And then Burt Solare saw the ragged remnants of his torn-out throat. They were dangling from the blood-streaked mouth of Owen Grude.

  Burt tried to run. The other two men were on him. With hands and teeth they attacked Burt's soft belly. Screaming silently, he hit the wall and fell to the floor. They came in a pack. He tried to knock them off. His weak blows scarcely registered.

  When he glanced up in horror, he found that one man's face had disappeared inside his abdomen. He reappeared an instant later, sharp teeth dragging a bundle of glistening viscera.

  With a tip of his head and a few quick gulps, the man slurped up the ulcerous part of Burt's intestine like a string of bloody spaghetti.

  Another shadow. A face frowning deep disapproval.

  The woman. Burt saw her through his pinwheeling gaze. Pouncing, she fell in among the men, grabbing shoulders and arms, flinging them away. For someone so small and graceful, she was inordinately strong. When she gripped Owen by the back of the neck and yanked, Owen became airborne. He soared across the office, slamming hard against the wall. The particleboard buckled beneath him.

  With uncharacteristic delicacy, Owen righted himself as he dropped to the floor. Flipping, he landed silently on the rug. His face was enraged, yet he made no move on the woman. The other men prowled near him.

  "Stay," she commanded firmly to all three. Although they clearly didn't want to obey, the three men stayed back. Blood and saliva drooled from their open mouths.

  Burt lay in a bloody heap, weak hands clutching belly and throat. The rug was stained red. Every thready heartbeat sent more blood gurgling from his open wounds.

  The woman crouched beside him. Her nose crinkled unhappily as she studied his wounds.

  She had stopped them. Maybe she could save him. If she called the police, the hospital. Burt pleaded with his eyes.

  Her mouth thinned. "He's too far gone," she announced.

  No! Burt wanted to shout. Call 911! Help me!

  Did she hear his unspoken plea? The woman turned her attention back to his gaping stomach wound. Yes, I'm alive. I'm fighting to live. Save me!

  She reached for him. Did she know first aid? And then the horror returned full-blown.

  Hands thrust inside his ripped-open belly. Grabbing either side of his rib cage, the woman twisted.

  Burt heard his sternum crack.

  Baring fangs, the woman proceeded to stuff her face deep into his exposed chest cavity. With a lick and a snap, fangs pierced the left ventricle of his feebly beating heart.

  And in that instant of horrific pain, Burt Solare had an epiphany. The blinding realization came clear as glass in that last moment of his weak, frail mortality. Maybe I should have stayed in advertising.

  WHEN SHE WAS THROUGH feeding, she allowed the males to eat. They chewed greedily, Owen more than the others. This was his first. The hunger was strongest the first time.

  When the males finally finished, she was lying on Owen Grude's desk, her rough pink tongue licking gently at the last hints of sticky blood on her long fingers.

  They padded over to her, faces smeared red from their feast. The two males yawned contentedly. Owen Grude mewled apologetically. She continued to lick her fingers.

  "You behaved recklessly," she said, not looking up.

  "I couldn't resist."

  She turned her eyes lazily, fixing him with a glare. "A word from the wise. Next time? Resist."

  The threat was clear. Owen nodded obediently. Pulling herself to a squatting position, she looked at the other two. "He has a mate," she said, nodding to the half-eaten carcass of Burt Solare. "Kill her." No more instruction was needed. With barely a sound, they slipped from the office.

  Pushing from her haunches, she bounded to the floor. Her bare soles touched silently.

  "Show me the bottling plant," she commanded, prowling past Owen.

  He hesitated. "What about him?" he asked, lingering near the desk. He nodded to the body of his partner. Burt's glassy eyes stared up vacantly in death.

  She paused. "Oh, do you want a human funeral for your dear, dear friend?" she asked with mock sympathy.

  "No, of course not," Owen said. "I don't see him as I did. He used to be important to me. Now he's just-"

  "A meal?"

  Owen nodded. "I'm just afraid someone might find him."

  She padded up to Owen, pressing a firm hand on his shoulder. She growled. Flecks of red gristle clung to the spaces between her flawless white teeth.

  "Don't try to think too hard. Now, we have a lot of work to do. The fun is just beginning."

  With catlike grace, Dr. Judith White prowled out the office door.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and it wasn't that he didn't want to squash a few more cockroaches. His only problem was the wrong man was asking him to do the squashing.

  "Let me talk to Smith," Remo said.

  "Dr. Smith isn't here," Mark Howard explained. Howard was assistant director of CURE, the supersecret organization for which Remo worked as enforcement arm. That is, on those days Remo was actually working. At the moment, as Remo stood on the sidewalk in Little Rock cradling the pay phone between ear and shoulder, it wasn't one of those days. "No offense, Junior," Remo said to Howard, "but I don't scrunch cockroaches for you. Put Daddy on the phone."

  A few students from nearby Philander Smith College strolled down the sidewalk chatting loudly. Like most college students of the past forty years, these seemed to have an abundance of loud opinions and a lack of actual textbooks. Remo watched them as they walked through the historic Quapaw Quarter of the city's downtown.

  On the phone there came an exasperated exhale.

  "Remo, you know Dr. Smith leaves the office at five on Tuesdays and Thursdays now," Mark Howard replied, his youthful voice straining to be patient. "He said you can talk to me."

  "Talk to, yes. Take orders from, no. You want to talk about the weather?"

  "No."

  "See you in the funny papers." Remo hung up the phone.

  The receiver rang the instant he broke the connection. Remo had to hand it to Mark Howard; the young man was quick on the ol' keyboard. He picked up the phone.

  "Joe's Porn Palace. You can't spell coitus without us."

  Howard's voice was growing irked. "Remo, please."

  "Sorry," Remo said sweetly. "Still not the right guy for me." He hung up once more.

  This time the pay phone fell silent.

  While he waited, Remo whiled away the minutes counting the birds that flew overhead. He was up to thirty-one when the phone finally rang again. He scooped up the receiver.

  "Hi, Smitty," he announced.

  The lemony voice on the other end of the line was not that of Mark Howard. Where Howard's voice was young, this voice was older, more tired and infinitely more irritated.

  "What is the problem?" announced Dr. Harold W. Smith, the director of CURE.

  "No problem," Remo said. "Except that I don't take orders from your helper monkey. Why are you whispering?"

  "I am in my bedroom on my briefcase phone. My wife is downstairs and I don't want her to overhear. What's wrong? Mark says you are having trouble with the assignment."

  "No trouble. I don't even know what it is. You know the rule, Smitty. I'm Sinanju. Sinanju gets hired by an emperor. You're my emperor. I work for you."

  He could almost see Smith wincing on the other end of the line. "Please don't you start calling me that, too."

  Remo was the Reigning Master of Sinanju, the original martial art. Born in blood on the rocky shores of North Korea, Sinanju was the sun source of all the other, lesser martial arts. For millennia the Masters of Sinanju had rented their services as assassins to rulers throughout the world. Remo's teacher, who had been Reigning Master until Remo's ascension to that position a few months before, had refused to admit to working for anything less than
a true tyrant king, and so had long before dubbed Harold W. Smith "emperor." It was an honorific Smith didn't embrace. And it was definitely something he didn't wish to see carried through into Remo's fledgling Masterhood.

  "Whatever you call it, you're the boss," Remo said. "Tradition says I can't start taking orders from the kid. And I happen to agree with tradition here. What if Smitty Junior goes nuts and starts giving me whacko assignments, like maybe I should make him President or pope or something? Or he tells me to start assassinating petunias 'cause they give him the sniffles? Or what if he orders me to kill you?"

  "At the moment I would consider that a blessing," Smith said tightly.

  "You're not out of it that easy, Smitty," Remo grumbled. "If I'm stuck with Howard, you are, too."

  "Yes," Smith said dryly. "Just so you know, Remo, I do not consider myself stuck at all. Mark has helped lighten my load considerably. Two nights a week now I am able to have dinner with my wife. And might I remind you, Mark has also saved both our lives."

  Remo's face darkened at the memory. There had been a terrible battle back in the village of Sinanju. On that dark day months before, it was Mark Howard's timely intervention that had provided insight that might have turned the tide.

  "Maybe," Remo admitted. "The jury's still out on what would have happened back then if he'd butted out." He frowned with a sudden thought. "What do you mean both? You weren't in the line of fire back then."

  Smith cleared his throat. "Er, yes. Can we get on with this? My wife nearly has dinner ready."

  "Fine. Sue me for wanting to hear your dulcet tones," Remo said. He drummed his fingertips on the steel phone-book tray. "What's the deal? More cockroaches, right?"

  As Smith quickly sketched out the details of that night's assignment, Remo's fingers continued to drum a hollow staccato on the pay phone's metal tray.

  After a few moments, Smith stopped suddenly. Bored, Remo was back to counting birds.

  "What is that noise?" the CURE director asked abruptly.

  "What noise?" Remo asked.

  "I don't know. It sounds like a jackhammer." Remo glanced around. He didn't see any jackhammer. In fact, he saw no road construction whatsoever. He did see a few more college students. They were staring at him as they walked past. More accurately, they were staring at his hand.

  Remo glanced down.

  Four deep hollows in the shape of drumming fingers pitted the otherwise smooth surface of the stainless-steel phone-book tray. It looked as if the metal had superheated and melted into four neat pockets.

  "It stopped," Smith said over the phone.

  "Yeah," Remo grunted, stuffing his hand in his pocket. "Can we just finish this up?"

  Smith seemed to sense something was wrong. "Were you even listening?"

  "Sort of listening, mostly bored." He sighed. "Sorry, Smitty. I've got a lot of stuff on my mind lately."

  It was true. He had been preparing nearly all of his adult life to take over as Reigning Master of Sinanju. He thought it would be a snap once he finally accepted the position. He had come to find out that there was no way to be completely ready for so awesome a responsibility. All the training in the world had not prepared him for the new reality of his life. Once he actually became Reigning Master, it just felt different than he had expected.

  Remo was surprised by the CURE director's sympathetic tone.

  "I understand," Smith said. "Even when one knows it is coming, it still takes time to come to grips psychologically with the burden of great responsibility. There has been some research into the subject. If it would be helpful, I could send some published papers on the topic."

  "Pass. But feel free to quiz me on the state capitals. Better yet, ask me the boons granted to past Masters of Sinanju. For instance, did you know Master Cung managed to bamboozle three hundred armfuls of silk, a skepful of Sui dynasty myrrh, twenty golden flagons of rice wine, forty she goats and thirty pheasants from the Chinese? Chiun says they were peasants, but I think he's misreading the scrolls."

  "Yes," Smith said thinly. "In any event, the target is across the Arkansas River and up Route 161 near Furlow. Did you get enough of the rest?"

  "Enough. I've already got my squashing shoes on."

  "Good, Please report back to Mark when you are finished. Sinanju rules do allow that, don't they?" There was a hint of thin sarcasm in his voice.

  "Yes, that's kosher," Remo sighed.

  "I don't understand why you've become so prickly lately in regard to Mark. I thought you had worked through your difficulties with him."

  "I've got nothing against the kid, Smitty. I just liked it better when it was you, me and Chiun. Although right now Chiun isn't that much of a help."

  "Is there something wrong with Master Chiun?"

  "Nah. He's just being Chiun again. He came with me to Little Rock, but now he's sitting in a hotel room. He said he was contemplating his place in the cosmos or something. As if being the pain in my neck wasn't full-time job enough."

  "Very well," Smith said. "Just remember, Remo. Nothing stays the same forever. Things change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not, but change is inevitable."

  He was interrupted by a distant voice.

  "Harold," Smith's wife called. "Dinner's ready."

  "I have to go," the CURE director said. "Good luck. "

  With a soft beep, the line went dead.

  Remo held the cold phone loosely in his hand. He stared down at the permanent marks imprinted in the steel tray.

  "Preaching to the choir, Smitty," he said softly. He hung up the pay phone.

  THE TWIN-ENGINE CESSNA had flown up through the Gulf of Mexico. Staying low to avoid radar, the small aircraft hugged much of the shared border of Louisiana and Texas, finally breaking out across the Ouachita Mountains in southwestern Arkansas. It hummed into the Arkansas River Valley on the way to its evening rendezvous.

  When it first appeared out of the cool, late spring night, it was as a sound rather than something visible to the eye.

  The lone man waiting at Furlow's small airport heard the noise. Behind him, a red, white and blue banner slung from the side of a tin hangar advertised the Happy Apple Pie American Patriotic Flight School And Good-Time Hotdog Stand.

  The man on the ground had come up with that name himself. The secret world in which he lived had become far more treacherous of late. Everything was about being inconspicuous now. Faysal al-Shahir was as proud of the very inconspicuous, very American-sounding name of his business as he was of his own false identity.

  Faysal al-Shahir had cleverly picked his American cover name at random from a telephone book. He was now known as John Smith. That was much better than the first name he had cleverly picked at random out of the phone book. His contact in the radical al-Khobar Martyrdom Brigade had read him the riot act when Faysal al-Shahir had requested a false driver's license and credit cards under the name Jiffy Lube.

  But that teeny mistake had been months ago. Faysal had learned much about fitting in since then.

  He had been forced to shave his beard. His dark hair had been colored with blond highlights. Gone were his midnight-black eyes, disguised with blue contact lenses. His forearms had five-o'clock shadow from daily shaving.

  Even Shahir's clothing had been Americanized. His first week in the hated den of vipers that was the devil West, Faysal had been delighted to find a store that sold typical American clothes at a price that would not break his allowance. His first trip there he had bought a garbage bag full of beautiful clothes. Now, months later, decked out in his Salvation Army Thrift Store finery, Faysal al-Shahir was as wholly inconspicuous as the next puke-green leisure-suited, bell-bottomed American flight-school instructor.

  Although day had bled away, the rim of the twilight sky was still colored in shades of pinkish gray. It was out of the gloaming that the plane finally appeared.

  "They are here," Faysal announced in Arabic. Three other men had been sitting on wooden crates inside the door of the hangar. Like Faysal, th
ey were dressed in decadent Western garb. With fat lapels on ghastly colored polyesters, they looked like a 1970s prom band.

  At Faysal's announcement, the men hurried outside.

  It took several more minutes for the plane to reach the airport. By the time the Cessna came in for a landing, shades of gray had seeped into enveloping blackness. In darkness, guided only by soft runway lights, the plane touched down with a shriek of rubber. It sped toward them.

  Faysal offered a wicked grin. "It begins," he said. He was turning to roll the hangar doors wide when one of his companions spoke.

  "What is that?" the man hissed.

  Faysal glanced back. The man who had spoken was pointing a wholly inconspicuous, mood-ring-disguised finger down the runway.

  The Cessna was rolling toward them, slowing as it came.

  When Faysal saw what his associate was pointing at, his eyes grew so wide he nearly popped his blue contacts.

  A man had appeared from the dark woods next to the plane. He loped along in the wake of the small aircraft.

  Faysal felt his stomach tighten.

  "Who is that?" he demanded, wheeling on the others.

  "I do not know," his men replied in chorus. Faysal looked from the men to the runway. The stranger was gaining on the Cessna.

  "Should we shoot him?" one man asked. Rifles and handguns were already being raised. "No!" Faysal snapped. "We cannot risk hitting the plane. Besides, are you forgetting there are houses beyond the woods? We cannot draw the authorities to us. Not now."

  Light from the plane and runway enabled Faysal to glimpse the stranger's face. It was cast in cruel shades. Above high cheekbones, the eyes were blacksmeared sockets. It was more a vengeful skull than a human face.

  He ran with a gliding ease that seemed slow, but which propelled him forward ever faster. As Faysal watched, the stranger caught up to the left wing. Hands attached to abnormally thick wrists reached out for the shuddering tip.

  "What is he doing?" asked a fearful voice in Arabic.

  "It does not matter," Faysal hissed.

  Faysal's mind was finding focus. All was not lost. After all, this was just one man. He was certainly not from the American government. The United States came at you as polite agents in suits who worried about search warrants and due process and extending civil liberties to terrorist noncitizens. They fretted over how their behavior would look to Amnesty International, the CBS evening news and the editorial board of the New York Times. Real U.S. government agents were so panicked about doing what all these groups considered to be the right thing that they forgot that the right thing first and foremost was protecting their fellow countrymen from maniacs who would blow up buildings and murder innocent Americans.