Remo bent his knees and uncoiled his legs like a spring, launching himself into the air and grabbing hold of a branch of the oak that extended out over the path. When he felt its bark almost giving way beneath his fingertips, he brought his heels against the temples of two of the vampires, breaking their necks while using them as a toehold to scramble higher into the tree.
Remo felt a slight breeze at his left calf. One of the gyonshi had managed to land a blow. An eight-inch gash had been slit in the back of his pant leg. It must have missed puncturing his skin by only a fraction of an inch.
They ranged below him, staring vacantly up into Remo's eyes as he crouched on the branch, considering his next move. There were too many of them to try to jump beyond them. There must have been almost thirty still standing, among them several Three-G workers whom Remo recognized. He couldn't run the risk that a gyonshi at the edge of the crowd might land a lucky shot as he leaped to safety.
Remo was considering other possibilities, and coming up empty, when he realized that he was not alone.
There was someone-or something-in the tree with him.
He spun on the branch, directly into the empty gaze of the late Gregory Green Gideon.
What little flesh had been left on the body was now almost completely decomposed. Gideon's eye sockets were teeming with writhing maggots. His arms and legs had been tucked away, fetalstyle, inside the tree trunk with him. His splintery ribs reflected the white moonlight like a broken picket fence.
An idea occurred to Remo.
A few of the gyonshi had finally realized that they could climb up the tree after Remo. The first, the former Three-G manager named Stan, was searching out a toehold in the wide-grooved bark at the base of the tree when the first jagged rib landed.
It spiraled downward like a makeshift boomerang, slipping between the gyonshi's own ribs and skewering his delicate heart muscle. Vampire and rib were hurled to the ground, impaled next to a mound of internal organs that had once belonged to an organic gardener from Batavia.
"Not exactly wooden stakes, but I guess they'll do," Remo muttered. He plucked out a handful of Gideon's ribs like laths from a plaster wall, splintered the ends into rude points and let a half-dozen more fly at once.
They speared faces and necks. The gathered gyonshi mob screamed and howled and shrieked and fell, but not one retreated. They surged around the oak like rabid wolves, their hands raised, their fingers extended in a last desperate attempt to infect Remo with the same deadly poison that coursed through their own veins and fretted at their dead, diseased brains.
Remo threw the ribs with quick precision, until his supply ran out. There were several vampires left beneath the tree, standing among their gruesomely disfigured comrades. Remo used Gideon's shoulder blades and collar bones to finish off the last of the survivors.
When there were no gyonshi left standing, Remo slipped from his perch and dropped lightly to the ground.
He stood among the gyonshi mob, their bodies twisted, their mouths open in shock. Blood coursed from their newly formed wounds, soaking into the earth, mixing with the stagnant blood of their victims.
Remo heaved a sigh, and removed the borrowed letter opener from his back pocket. He squatted down and began the distasteful task of slitting the throats of the undead, muttering, "An assassin's work is never done."
Mary Melissa Mercy had never before seen the Leader so nervous. She had believed him to be incapable of raw fear.
Yet here he was, his head shaking determinedly from side to side, his white, unseeing eyes opened wide in his purplish face. His self-confidence seemed to be oozing out of his coarse, dead pores.
"You are fearful, O Leader?" she asked, hesitantly.
The dead face jerked up at her, his eye-slits narrowing in a mockery of sight. "All has happened as you have described it to me?" he asked, indicating the rough location of the bank of television screens.
"It has, Leader," she replied.
He set his jaw thoughtfully, and was silent for a time. Then he said, slowly, "My Creed once ruled the Asian continent, Missy. And in that time long ago, in the subcontinent now known as India, a prophesy was made. A seer who fell victim to us prophesied at the moment of his death that the second coming of the Undead would come in a land yet unknown. And in that land, the last gyonshi would tremble at the sound of the voice of a god who was not the one God." His voice trailed off.
Mary Melissa shook her head. "There is only one God," she said with certainty. "The God of our Creed, who bids us to punish the stomach-desecrators."
The Leader's dead face sank, as the brain within his skull succumbed to dark thoughts. "This is the second time I have visited the Final Death on this land, and this is the second time I have faced the gweilo of the Sinanju Master."
Mary Melissa's brow furrowed. "What would you have us do, Leader?"
"Fight to the death, Missy. It is all we can do." His jaw snapped shut like a bony vise, and his thin lips pressed tightly together.
The production floor of Three-G, Inc., was silent as a tomb. Moonlight filtered through the ceiling-to-floor windows, throwing a ghostly semi-light over the huge room.
Remo left the door behind him open, as he padded quietly across the concrete floor toward the nearest metal staircase. He glanced up at the X-shaped catwalk that connected all four corners of the second-story level. He saw no one through the tiny diamond shapes that the catwalk flooring formed.
He was slipping past the dormant conveyor belt when he saw a figure hiding in its shadow. It was definitely female.
Remo recognized her from his last trip to Three-G: Elvira McGlone. He cleared his throat by way of warning.
She spun around to face him. Even in shadow, her eyes were desperate and fearful, like those of a rabbit transfixed by the headlights of a car. Her face might have been enmeshed in the hypothetical car's grille.
"Miss McCrone?" Remo asked. Her fingernails, including her index forger, were still coated in the same blood-red polish. She was not gyonshi. He was sure of it. Her index fingernails tapered to points, not edges.
"McGlone," she corrected. With one hand, she attempted to adjust the lines on her tattered skirt as she rose to face Remo. She pretended nonchalance, while her body language screamed her fear.
"Sorry," Remo said, taking a step toward her.
"Don't come any closer!" Elvira McGlone hissed. Even before she wheeled on him, Remo knew that she was shielding a revolver in her other hand. "I swear I'll blow your brains out!" She waggled the weapon menacingly.
"No bullets," Remo said, nodding toward the revolver, whose exposed cylinder chambers were like tiny caverns. It might as well have been a pencil sharpener. He glanced around the production room disinterestedly. He wondered if there were more vampires hiding close by. Waiting to pounce.
"Don't test me," Elvira McGlone said. The gun-waggling had become more pronounced.
"And don't kid me," Remo returned, reaching over to pluck the weapon from her hand. He flipped open the cylinder and shook it like a saltshaker. Nothing came out. "See? Empty." He tossed the gun away.
Elvira McGlone started backing away, like a toy doll whose batteries have been inserted upside-down. She whipped two Waterman pens from a pocket of her mannish tailored suit and crossed them protectively before her.
"You keep away!" she shrieked, pushing back into the conveyor belt. In her haste, she tripped over a plastic rubbish barrel and landed on her best side. Her backside. One of the pens rolled away out of sight.
"Don't sweat it," said Remo, who, until this last manifestation of fright, had thought she couldn't possibly become any more repulsive. "I'm not one of them."