“You’re outnumbered. We can take you down before you know what hit you. You are going to be the one floating down the river.”
Remo nodded agreeably. “I meet people like you all the time. You’re so full of yourselves, you just can’t accept it when somebody is tougher than you are. I just took away all your guns and you still think you can kick my ass.”
The surviving Colombians had to admit to Remo’s point.
“On the other hand, you might as well give it a shot. You’ve got nothing to lose. I’m not here to arrest anybody.”
“Remo,” Chiun called, “must you play?”
Remo turned to Chiun. The villager was looking cautiously optimistic at the turn of events. “Be done in a jiffy.”
Juan Burgos decided this would be a good time to strike. He aimed for the back of Remo’s head with the fist-sized rock he had sneaked into his pocket.
Remo took the rock away just before it would have cracked his skull, then wedged it inside Burgos’s mouth. The rock was bigger than the mouth. Burgos’s jaw hinges crackled. It all happened too fast for Burgos or his men to react.
Burgos whimpered, prying at the rock with his fingers while Remo again made the rounds among the drug thugs. When Remo returned, Burgos saw through his agony that all his men were dying fast from new assorted wounds. It had taken the American seconds to wipe out his entire senior security staff.
Chiun spoke in a singsong. “This is taking much longer than a jiffy.”
“Maybe my jiffy is longer than your jiffy.”
“A jiffy is not arbitrary. It is ten-thousandths of a second, and you have used up many jiffies.”
“You’re making that up.”
“You accuse me of telling lies? Ask Prince Howard to look this up for you in a book when we return home. Meanwhile, spare the dope fiend for the time being.”
Remo pondered. “Exactly how long is a time being?”
Chiun glared at him.
“My father says you don’t get to die for at least one time being,” Remo informed Burgos. “Says there’s something we need to see.”
The villager led them through the rain forest. The drug lord, his face still wedged full of rock, walked in the middle with the macaw perched on his head. When he tried to shoo the bird, Remo chopped him in each shoulder and made his arms stop working.
They came upon a sea of putrefying animals. They were piled atop one another inside a rock formation. Fleeing from the tide of steam, they had been trapped by the rock and died together by the hundreds.
“This is not it,” Chiun said, and the villager led them on, until they found more dead people, fresher than the rotting villagers.
They were with some sort of an ecological research group out of Rio de Janeiro. Their crates of equipment said they were on-site to assess the damage done by the geothermal event.
Deep in the remote Amazon rain forest was not where one expected to encounter gangland executions, but that’s what happened. They were all on their faces, hands tied behind their backs, shot in the back of the head.
“You did this, I guess,” Remo said.
The billionaire Colombian had blood and drool dripping from his chin. He couldn’t decide what would benefit him most—lying or telling the truth. Finally he just nodded.
“It was a rhetorical question. I knew you did it.”
“I shall go into the mountain with this one,” Chiun announced, waving at the villager. “You may honor this man by tending to the proper burial of his slain People.”
“What? Why me?” Remo asked.
“This man had benefited us in ways you cannot know,” Chiun informed Remo. “The least that we can do is offer him help in this grim task.”
“We?”
“I mean you.”
“Okay if I delegate?” Remo asked, thumbing at the drug lord.
“I care not how it is done. We will be gone one night and half of tomorrow. Consider this free time for you to spend in whatever idleness catches your fancy—after the People are buried.”
Chiun and the villager strode off into the brown jungle. The macaw cocked his head, then soared off in a different direction.
“I guess it’s just you and me,” Remo said.
Burgos ran as hard and as fast as he could, then slammed face-first into the ground. Something had tripped him, but Remo was now on the other side of the researchers’ camp, rummaging in the supplies. He came out with a foldable shovel, which he tossed at Burgos’s feet. With a couple quick pinches Burgos’s arms started working again—although they still hurt as if they were on fire.
“Start digging, dope dealer.”
Burgos dug until the blue sky turned orange. The flies and the mosquitoes had migrated into the lifeless zone and they swarmed him, some even wriggling past the rock into his gaping mouth. Still he labored, out of desperation, praying that he might earn a reprise from death.
The American named Remo lounged in the trees overhead, where Burgos couldn’t see him. “Air’s fresher up there,” he explained when he came down briefly. Burgos had tried to run but made it less than twenty paces. Remo applied a little pain, making Burgos’s previous pain seem inconsequential, which convinced Burgos to return to his digging.
Soon he had six shallow graves dug, but when he began hoisting the bodies into them he became sick, then choked on what came up. Remo had to descend from the tree to dislodge the rock; he achieved this by pounding Burgos on the back of the head.
“Happy vomiting,” Remo said, then went back up into his tree. As night closed in, the last slain researcher was buried in the jungle soil.
Burgos was exhausted, every joint was a point of pain and he craved sleep.
“Hey, no way, Jose,” Remo said, appearing out of nowhere. “That’s just phase one.”
Burgos was marched back to the village. The place was filled with rotting corpses.
“I suffered enough,” he slurred through his dangling jaw.
“Ha. You haven’t suffered nearly enough. You’ll never suffer enough. When you add up all the misery you caused—hell, maybe Smitty’s computers could come up with an answer.”
“I cannot go on. Kill me.”
“Too good for you.”
“You can’t make me do anything.” Juan Burgos lay down on the ground to sleep. “What can you do to a man who wants to die?”
“Let me show you.” Remo took the Colombian by the hand and squeezed the ball of his thumb, and the pain was like nothing Burgos had ever dreamed of—as vast as the universe.
“If you work hard, you’ll only get three of those an hour,” Remo said.
By dawn, Burgos’s strength was sapped. He flopped in the dirt and didn’t get up again.
“Good riddance,” Remo said. He did the last of the manual labor himself.
The macaw flapped noisily onto Remo’s shoulder and regarded the finished graves. It looked sad.
“The People,” the bird murmured.
Remo didn’t know what to say. “The People,” he agreed. How do you comfort a bereaved parrot?
“The People are coming,” the bird said. “Get ready!”
Chiun and the villager returned after noon, and they stood in silence before the long line of graves. The stench was diminished.
A few hundred paces away, Remo had just finished replacing the support poles holding up the roofs of the village huts—the old poles had turned to rubber when the steam came.
“I sent the drug lord upriver with all his buddies.”
“Downriver,” Chiun corrected him.
“Whatever. They’re piranha food.”
“My son, why have you repaired these buildings— and how?”
“How is easy. I jogged out of the steamed part of the jungle and got good wood from the uncooked part,” Remo explained. “Hey you, come look at this.”