“Oh, God,” she uttered, then she set about her business with a fierce expression, bashing hard on the first arm. Two times, three times, ignoring Mark Howard’s agony.
The hand released but it looked undamaged as it clawed toward the woman like a fast-moving spider.
“Sarah!” Mark gasped, and made a lunge but failed to grab the thing in his bare hands.
Sarah Slate cocked her head, raised her ax and brought down the blade between the fingers, splitting the steel hand like firewood.
The fingers continued to function, pushing the hand backward. Sarah swung the blade up and around in a wide circle, hit the arm at the wrist, sending it tumbling into the grass.
The second burned hand was damaged, but with three functional fingers it scampered onto the patio and dragged noisily along the bricks. While the second hand hurried up in close pursuit.
Mark Howard forced away the pain of his ankle and looked for a weapon, reaching for the small stack of bricks next to the back step. They were old cobblestones, the corners worn smooth, but they just might work. He witnessed Sarah bash the blackened arm away with her ax, but the other arm slithered around her feet and came fast at Mark Howard as if it had acquired a taste for his blood. This time, it went for the gut.
If it got a good grip on his abdomen and applied crushing force, it could do a hell of a lot more than just break a bone. It could cause massive internal damage—irreparable internal damage.
“Hands off!” Mark said angrily, and brought down his cobblestone brick, flattening the hand just a foot away from his body. The fingers curled up under it again and clawed forward. Mark Howard began bashing the fingers hard and fast unleashing his anger, cursing with every breath, and his fury seemed unending.
Finally a small, slim, flesh-and-bone hand gripped his arm midstrike.
“I think that’s enough,” Sarah said.
Mark looked at her, the vivid scarlet of his rage fading until it was just her beautiful face he saw. Then he looked at the hand in front of him. The fingers were flat, like soda cans smashed on the highway.
“Where’s the other one?” he gasped.
“Right here.” She gestured at the plastic box. Inside was the slowly moving hand and arm. Its five fingers had been amputated with the ax and tossed in after it.
“Are you hurt?” Mark Howard said.
“Not a scratch,” Sarah said with a smile.
Such a flood of relief rushed through him he almost wept, and the tension left his body. He went limp into Sarah Slate’s arms.
The young woman took a minute to realize he was unconscious, and it took her a moment to understand what he had said before he passed out. Something like, “Thank God in heaven.”
Despite everything that had happened to her on this day, she felt peaceful for a moment. She gently stroked Mark Howard’s damp face.
Chapter 25
Remo Williams pressed the 1 button until he heard it ringing.
“Hi, who’s this?” answered an eager man in a controlled Southern twang.
“Give me Smith and give ’im to me now.”
“I’m Bill. Won’t I do?”
“I want Smitty.”
“I think you got the wrong number, but that’s okay. Come on over and let’s party. Bring some babes.” Remo wasn’t in the mood for this. Harold W. Smith had installed a computerized system designed to weed out the flurry of calls he was receiving on the specialized call-transfer system used by his enforcement arm in the field. Unfortunately, this required that Remo spend the first minute of every phone call conversing with some stranger. The voice was supposedly computer generated, but Remo had begun wondering if it really was.
“Smitty, get on the line now.”
“See, nobody cares about poor old Bill anymore,” said the man on the other end. “I’m old news. Even my wife pretends I don’t exist.”
“Smitty, in two seconds I’m calling the Associated Press.”
“Aw, come on—”
The voice was interrupted by Harold Smith. “Remo, what’s the problem?”
“We don’t have time to go over the list,” Remo said. “Mark is wounded.”
“What? How seriously?”
Remo calmed himself, but it wasn’t easy. His relationship with Smith had been getting sour in recent months. Remo couldn’t put a finger on why exactly. “Mark has a hurt ankle. The bone isn’t broken but it’s definitely been bruised. Lots of soft-tissue damage. Chiun’s fixing him up.”
“What happened? Give me a report.”
“Okay, Smitty, the big man himself showed up here at the Slate house. Ironhand. In the flesh. He had the same sort of death-rays or whatever it was that we ran into in Spain. He filed our circuits.” Remo quickly briefed Smith on the series of events that ended with Remo and Chiun returning to the Slate house and finding Mark Howard laid out on a sofa, soaking the upholstery with his lifeblood.
“Chiun’s figured out what it is that is doing this to us,” Remo said finally. “We’ve run into something similar before.”
“Tell me,” Smith said.
“Remember those nutcases in Berkley, California, who had the big proton phazer-firer inside the statue?” Smith took a few seconds to decipher the explanation. “The old Soviet weapon. It gathered and expelled protons in a particle beam.”
“Yeah, whatever. It’s the side effect that was unhealthy for Chiun and me. Normals don’t feel it, but it screws with the enhanced Sinanju nervous system. That’s what was explained to me, anyway. What we’re running into now is almost the same thing.”
“Remo, we tracked the history of the Soviet technology. It was believed to have been closely guarded. We never saw evidence of a leak of the data. It seems unlikely someone else got access to it.”
“Is there anybody else there I could talk to? Somebody with brains maybe? No? I guess I’ll have to explain it to you, Smitty. They used to have this old style of government over there called communism. Look it up in the dictionary and it says ‘see corruption.’”
“I know about communism…”
“Then stop asking stupid questions. The commies always took the low road and the new Russia hasn’t cleaned up the old act, so of course somebody tried to sell the plans at one time or another. And maybe this wasn’t even from the Russian plans. Maybe somebody developed it on their own.”
“That’s not likely.”
Remo felt as if steam was about to shoot out his ears. “I just got the crap kicked out of me by a pile of scrap metal older than you. How likely is that?”
“All right. Let’s explore that possibility. What makes you think this may be independently developed technology, Remo?”
“Try to be a little more condescending, would you? They’re not using it as a weapon. If they knew how to turn it into a weapon, they’d rise it as a weapon, don’t you think? But whoever invented it this time sees it as a power source for the generators inside their animatronics. They’re using it as a way of creating rapid fuel-cell charging or some such. In Spain they had all the robots plugged into it, so the bad feeling went away when the charging stopped. Ironhand was not like that He had this little doohickey inside of him and whenever he needed to rev up his little shock-shooter, he’d start the power charger and send our nerves into underload.”
“I see.” Remo heard a flutter of keystrokes on the either end of the line, then Smith said, “Remo, I am initiating a search for this type of technology.”
Remo was relieved that Smith was at least taking him seriously. “You had better believe it. Whoever is retrofitting the droids has pretty nearly wiped us out accidentally. What do you think is going to happen if they figure out how to use it against us deliberately?”