"Padre, I asked you to stay back."
At that moment the priest laid the gold cross against the thick ankle. It clinked against the stone.
All at once the crucifix was taken into the stone as if dropped into a placid brown puddle.
And with a low groan Coatlicue lurched forward.
Chapter 53
The behemoth of stone and flesh took one halting step, and during that jerky movement Remo had faded back three hundred yards. He had the priest tucked under his arm. Now he let him go.
The priest ran for his church.
Remo stood his ground, ready to retreat or attack as the situation warranted. Having fought various man-size versions of Mr. Gordons through the years, he had a healthy respect for its inhuman destructive power.
Nothing in his Sinanju training covered thirty-foot high giants. But as he watched, he sized up the possibilities. Gordons had started off balance. The poised foot came down, making contact with the earth. A distinct mushy crackle Remo recognized as a human body being crushed floated over the monotonous drum of falling rain.
Remo looked around. Verapaz was hanging back. It wasn't him. He looked back.
At that moment the landing foot lost its traction. Whatever-or whoever-it had crushed must have made a slippery smear because, like a man stepping on a banana peel, Gordons froze, throwing up his stiff, blunt arms.
It was too late. The foot slid forward, tilting the stone giant backward. Compensating, Gordons tried to lunge forward, toward his objective. The sheltering cypress of Tule.
He almost made it. But the gap was too great. The flat, square head fell into the hanging mass of branches. A few broke into kindling. The rest sprang back into place, dripping water.
When Gordons crashed facedown on the ground, he made a thud that felt like a huge aftershock and lay still.
The black rain beat down on him relentlessly.
Remo noticed a distinct blob at the bottom of the foot that had stumbled. It looked like a giant wad of chewing gum, except it was the color of strawberries.
Gordons showed no sign of moving again, so Remo approached.
"Damn," Remo said. "Wonder who that was."
"No one important," said Subcomandante Verapaz, who was sneaking up on the inert hulk, too.
Looking over the situation, Remo saw that Gordons had cracked apart in falling. The head was no longer attached. That was a good sign. Last time the brain was in the head.
"Uh-oh," he said, noticing one stony shoulder had gouged a gnarled, exposed tree root when it fell.
"What is wrong?" Verapaz asked. "It has fallen, therefore it is dead again."
"It's touching a tree root."
"So?"
"Whatever it touches, it assimilates."
"So?"
"So it might be the tree now."
"How can it be a tree when it is still there?" Verapaz wondered aloud.
Remo studied the way the stone shoulder and the tree root were meshed.
"Damn, damn, damn. Now we're going to have to cut down the whole tree to make sure."
"Hah! You can no more cut down the cypress of Tule than you can break the moon with your naked fist."
A squeaky voice from behind them said, "We will do what we must to defeat the monster, Gordons. "
"Coatlicue," Verapaz corrected. "Her name is Coatlicue."
Remo turned. "Chiun, I thought I told you to stay with the chopper."
"I did. Now I am here. For my skills are more needed here than elsewhere." And shaking back his kimono sleeves, the Master of Sinanju bared pipestem arms that ended in ten long nails of fierce strength and wickedness.
Chiun floated up to the prostrate idol of stone.
He examined it critically.
"Hello is all right?" Chiun said.
Nothing happened except the spit of raindrops off stone.
Chiun knocked on the stone tentatively.
"Hello is all right," he said again. It was Gordons's mechanical greeting. Somewhere he had been told that was a typical greeting, and never learned to leave off the last three words.
"Could be playing possum," Remo said guardedly.
Setting himself, Chiun brought the edge of his palm against a corner of the hard stone shoulder. It broke off. The Master of Sinanju looked at the separated piece, saw that it seemed solid and stamped it once with his sandaled foot.
It powdered under the force of his stroke. There was nothing metallic in the gritty pile, his sandaled toe determined.
Attacking again, Chiun dislodged another chunk. It fell, came under the heel of his sandals and a larger pile of rock dust was made.
Having created a line of attack, Chiun next closed his fist until only the index finger stuck out.
Then, with swift, sure strokes he began sectioning the shoulder by slicing off wedges of stone. They piled up swiftly.
"Need help?" Remo asked.
Chiun did not look back. "Why is the green-eyed one still breathing?"
"Because."
"That is no answer."
"Look, it's supposed to look like natural causes, and we have witnesses."
"The Thunder Dragon blow was meant for situations such as this."
"Are you speaking of me?" asked Subcomandante Verapaz.
"No," Remo and Chiun said together.
And under Remo's watchful eyes, the Master of Sinanju continued sectioning the great stone idol, exposing the gashed tree root until it was no longer in contact with any part of Mr. Gordons.
"This is too easy," Remo said. "Sure you don't want my help?"
"What I do not want is for you to hog the credit for the man-machine's defeat."
"I didn't defeat him. He slipped on a Mexican or something. Before that, all those lightning strikes must have fried his circuits."
"Pah. Mere incidentals. It will be written in the Book of Sinanju that Chiun the Great finally defeated the Colossus of Mexico."
"You can't write that!"
"I am Reigning Master," Chiun said, going to work on the torso. "The truth is whatever my goose quill inscribes."
"I still say this is too easy," Remo said, deciding the job would go more quickly if he started in on the legs.
ALIRIO ANTONIO ARCILA, being no fool, began backing away. He did not know who these two were, but they obviously possessed fearsome powers and an utter disregard for his cause. And the way they regarded him filled him with a chilly unease.
Their helicopter idled nearby. He could not pilot a helicopter himself, but through the rain he seemed to see a pilot just sitting there with nothing to do. Perhaps he was a fan. In fact, given that it was a Mexican army helicopter, the odds of this were very great.
On the way to the helicopter, his heel struck a thick tree root. Stumbling, he threw one arm back to catch himself.
And to his everlasting astonishment, the root snaked up and caught Antonio instead. It whipped around his chest, pinning him to the ground and, like a python, began squeezing the air from his lungs. Antonio discovered a terrible fact then. With all the air out and none coming in, screaming for help was impossible. He barked once weakly, and that ineffectual Chihuahua sound took away the last of his lung power.
As he lay there, his jungle green eyes growing wide with horror, the thick root insinuated itself into his open and gasping mouth and dropped something down his gullet.
Going down, it felt cold and metallic. It was very much like a steel baseball as it slid down a throat painfully not large enough to handle it, making his inability to inhale utterly moot.
By the time it dropped heavily into his belly, Antonio no longer cared about his lack of oxygen or anything else in the universe. He was brain-dead.
REMO PAUSED in his labors.
"This is going to take all day," he complained.
"Not if you cease interrupting me," Chiun snapped as he stamped a loose stone heart to grit.
Chiun was working, furiously. The thick slices of Coatlicue were coming off the knees now-or where the knees should be. They were piling up like home fries.