"Noooo!"
Winston Smith didn't hear the whoosh of rockets over his own scream of pain and rage. He didn't realize the weapon in his hands was still discharging. He could only see the blood. And it kept raining inside the cockpit and out.
When the clutching hands released his wrist, the gun was empty and the masked face of Subcomandante Verapaz regarded him with emotionless green eyes.
"I will remove the body now," he said. "It will resolve our lifting problem."
The flat words hung like a cold mist in the cockpit.
"You bastard!" With that, Winston went for the subcomandante's throat.
All his strength poured through his arms and into his fingers. He found the Adam's apple and tried to crush it with his thumb. It felt like a hard piece of horn.
And the soulful green eyes were looking at him with absolutely no fear or anger whatsoever.
The hand reaching up to his throat was also hard. It squeezed once, and the blood seemed to fill his eyeballs. Smith saw red. Everywhere was red. His mind's eye was even red. And the red was the exact color of Assumpta Kaax's bright blood.
Winston Smith never felt the rain on the back of his head as the door opened behind him. Something pried the hand off his throat and pulled him out into the rain. He landed on his back.
After that, he lost it. Consciousness, hope, everything.
REMO WILLIAMS PRIED the steely hand off Winston Smith's throat and yanked Smith out of the cockpit. The chopper had settled on its skids. The rotor still spun, but it wasn't going anywhere.
Now it wouldn't have time.
In his seat Gordons, still inhabiting the body of Verapaz, looked at him coolly. "Hello is all right. I am a friend."
"Can you say 'sudden catastrophic failure'?" Remo said.
"Why would I say that?" asked Mr. Gordons without blinking.
"Because that's your destiny," Remo told him.
Remo's fist lashed out. Gordons blocked it with a forearm. The forearm, being made of flesh and blood strengthened with assimilated materials like crude wood and metal, simply snapped and hung loosely. Gordons looked at it as if not yet comprehending.
"Where is it this time?" Remo asked savagely. "In your nose?" And he flatted the nose with the heel of his hand. "In your knees?" And he pulled the kneecap off like taking the cap off a gas tank. "In your eyes?" He speared two forked fingers into the green eyes that became empty sockets.
In the close confines, Mr. Gordons had no maneuvering room. He obviously wasn't up to his full potential, either. His reflexes were fast for a human but slow for an android. Remo removed the jutting pipe. Bridgework came out with it. Then he pulled him out bodily.
Gordons found his feet and dug in his heels. Remo let go.
"You missed," he told the android.
"What is your survival secret?" Gordons asked mushily.
"Never say die."
Gordons's surviving arm threw a blind punch. Remo caught the fist, and the hand came off at the wrist, trailing a vein-and-wire mixture. He threw it over his shoulder.
"Can you say 'undescended testicles'?" Remo spat.
And his foot kicked up and shattered Gordons's groin. The caricature of a man jumped up in place, reeling upon landing.
"How about 'spinal dislocation'?" And he spun the bewildered android around, reached in and removed the spine whole.
The spinal column thrashed in his hand like an articulated snake. Remo began taking it apart, looking for the brain.
Not finding it, he dropped the loose bones and sent the head flying off the shoulder with a sudden swipe.
The head jumped, bounced and Remo stamped it flat.
That left the trunk weaving on two wobbly legs. The neck ended in a raw stump in which the bronchial tubes pulsed spasmodically.
Behind him the Master of Sinanju offered a suggestion. "My ancestors believed that the soul resides in the stomach."
Remo hadn't tried the stomach yet, so he gave it a shot. "Can you say 'esophageal reflux'?"
And taking Gordons by his shoulders, he drove one hard knee into the pit of the creature's stomach.
The result was better than Remo expected. The exposed windpipe in the neck stump went whoof, and up popped something that resembled a ball bearing except it was the size of a baseball.
It shot a dozen feet into the air and hung there for a horrible moment. Gordons's central processor. No question.
In that moment a thousand possibilities raced through Remo's mind. If he touched it, anything could happen. It might insinuate itself into his own body, taking it over. If it struck the ground, it could burrow like a gopher until it found something new to assimilate.
In that pause in eternity, Remo decided to bring his two palms together in midair, flattening the brain housing so fast it had no time to think, react or assimilate again. Remo hoped.
He never got the chance.
The Master of Sinanju stepped in, index finger leading, and as the shiny ball fell to the level of his wizened, expectant face, he sliced it back and forth so many times Remo lost count.
When the pieces hit the ground, they landed like a steel apple that had been run through a chopper. They sat formless, still holding some of the shape of a sphere but with the sections slipping every which way.
They watched it as the black rain discolored it.
"It's not moving," Remo said.
Then the Master of Sinanju stepped up and drove a heel into the pile of sliced metal.
They made a satisfying crunk as they were mashed into a lump.
His deadly nails retreating into the slaves of his kimono, the Master of Sinanju turned to address his pupil. "Your way would not have worked. He would have taken you as his next form."
"How do you know what my way was going to-"
Chiun smiled tightly. "Persons of correct fingernail length know all."
Remo knelt by the mash of metal. It was not moving. It didn't look like anything so much as sliced and mashed slag.
"I think he's down for the count."
"Of course. Nothing can withstand the Knives of Eternity."
"But I won't be satisfied until nothing is left. There's gotta be a way to make sure." And while they were thinking it through, a groan sounded behind them.
Winston Smith lay on the rain-soaked ground, his face buried in one arm. He pounded the ground again and again and again with his fist, and he only stopped when Remo came over and knelt down.
"This is the way the business goes sometimes," Remo told him in a quiet voice.
They stood over him until he had cried himself out and was ready to pick up the shattered remnants of his life.
The rain stopped before he did.
WOODENLY Winston Smith set his feet on the pedals and took the blood-sticky collective in his hands. They had wiped the inside of the cockpit with rags until the red was only pink. He could see enough to fly. That was sufficient. Nothing else mattered.
They flew north. Remo sat in the passenger seat, his face grim. In his lap he held a mass of metal.
In the back the Master of Sinanju sat on his steamer trunk, legs folded modestly under the flowing skirts of his kimono.
Beside him, wrapped in a shroud made of parachute silk, was a long red bundle. Winston didn't look at it. He couldn't. He just looked ahead, where a plume of smoke hung on the mountainous horizon.
Mount Popocatepetl still smoked. The smoke was grayish now. The crater smoldered red and angry as the chopper neared.
"Make a pass over it," said Remo.
Winston nodded. He had the bird near its operating ceiling.
Remo opened the cockpit door and held the metallic lump out. As they crossed over the crater, he let go.
The lump dropped straight down, and through the thin gray haze there came a distinct flare as it splashed into the simmering bowl of lava.
"Go around again," said Remo.
Winston brought the clattering ship around while the Master of Sinanju tenderly passed the silkwrapped bundle to Remo. He refused to look at it.