“Naw, Pops, those are drifts. Smooth as a baby’s butt. You see anything that looks swept?”
“Maybe they air-dropped onto the roof.”
“Pops, come on, think about it! There’s a car in the lot!” The grin was gone from Jack Fast’s face. He did not like being stymied. He opened another window and brought up a thermal image.
“You have a night-vision camera up there, as well?” Fastbinder asked.
“Look! The car’s hot, see? Just got there.”
“But they are not in the laboratory. Jack, unless they move by levitation.”
The teenager was thinking furiously as the video camera moved in on the laboratory again as tight as it could go. The lens picked up a vivid image of the front door, wedged open as it had been for weeks, but there was no sign of movement inside.
“I’m going to deploy,” he declared.
“If you are wrong, you will need to travel all the way back there to reset all that equipment,” Fastbinder warned.
“These guys are slippery as snakes. Pops. If there is a chance they’re inside, I gotta give it to ’em now.” Jack clicked back onto the alarm window and the sound returned. “There’s somebody here!” Nancy Fielding teased.
“Okay, doll,” Jack Fast said, “go get ’em!”
He clicked Nancy, right on her pretty little mouth.
Chapter 29
Remo Williams felt a hot surge of radiation over his head, outside the building, then he was assaulted from every side. Power coursed through the building, and electric devices blinked to life in every corner. Explosive puffs opened holes all over the ceiling, enabling electronic devices to drop into position on scissors brackets. There were cameras, microphones, who knows what But worst of all were the thirteen simultaneous proton discharge events, which spun up various miniature generators like tiny ramjets and speared Remo with pinpricks of horror. His senses felt deadened, and the darkness of sensory erasure ate swift holes in his consciousness.
In a heartbeat the charges were done and Remo felt blessed normalcy. He had taken another proton discharge without succumbing to the blackness. Chiun shook off the unpleasantness and looked sharply at him.
‘Everything’s okay,” Remo assured him.
“There’s somebody here!” the dead girl said, proving Remo wrong. She lifted her head.
“Remo, let us go!” Chiun hissed.
“Yeah.” But he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She sat up suddenly, her neck distended, then stood with her arms and legs dangling and flopping lifelessly underneath her.
“There’s somebody here!” Her gaping mouth never moved, and the sound seemed to come from the back of her head. She swayed abruptly toward Remo and Chiun with her dangling toes dragging on the floor and crashing into debris.
Remo and Chiun were on the move, and Remo was already cursing himself for falling for the distraction when the air filled with flying metal.
Remo snatched at the bullet-fast chunks flying at his body and threw them back the way they had come. They didn’t go far before whipping back at him. At the same moment he felt the curious sensation of his shoes trying to levitate.
“Magnets.” Chiun cursed as his hands plucked away at the fitter of jagged metal that could have tom them to pieces.
“Electromagnets,” Remo added as the hand-hammered shoelace eyelets tore off and flew across the room.
A hundred miles away and 3.6 miles below the surface of the earth, Jacob Fastbinder watched in awe. The corpse of Nancy Fielding was jumping and dancing, limbs flopping everywhere.
One of the displays tracked how the powerful electromagnets were being manipulated by the fight-sensitive motion detector. Every two seconds, the electromagnets were pulsed to the opposing side. The two figures were being bombarded with ferrous metal scraps, then bombarded again, while the scarecrow, cadaver flew around the room trying to keep up.
“I suppose that is your girlfriend.”
“We broke up,” his son said, then grinned and winced as Nancy Fielding’s skull was magnetically pulled into the cinder-block wall. “She can’t last too much longer,” Jack added.
She hung there, then flew again at the two men, who allowed her to sail past as they maneuvered for the entrance. Every scrap of alloy that should have sliced into them was pushed away, or sidestepped, or just ignored.
“How are they doing that?” Jack demanded.
Jacob Fastbinder swallowed thickly when he was unfortunate enough to witness Nancy Fielding’s head become separated from the tangle of welded steel barbs that had been inserted in her skull. It was the steel that had been responding to the electromagnets. Without it, the cadaver flopped down and didn’t get up again.
“That’s what gives her get up and go,” Jack explained offhandedly. “Good grief, these dudes move fast—oh no, you don’t.”
Jacob Fastbinder knew the intruders were going to escape—he didn’t know how, but the shrapnel storm wasn’t stopping them; they were at the door.
“Charge!” JackFast exclaimed with manic delight, thrusting one fist in the air and slamming the other on a large opaque button.
Charging, read a tiny window on every one of Jack Fast’s displays, and all the metal plopped to the ground. The two intruders should have walked away, but they fell hard, just as lifeless as the mutilated corpse of Nancy Fielding.
Chapter 30
Remo Williams heard something ugly come out of his own throat when the Nothingness swarmed over him.
The Nothingness hurt It was the worst agony of all. He didn’t know if he could take it, not this strong, not again.
The senses of a Master of Sinanju are heightened beyond what most humans would believe possible, and a Master is constantly aware of the hundreds of signals in his environment: sound and pressure and temperature and smell; the shifting pull of the earth and the moon; the weight of the atmosphere and the incalculably small deviations in pressure that come from a flying bullet or a speck of dust.
In the Nothingness, Remo had awareness but all his senses became useless, and if he could have screamed—or prayed for mercy…
Then it was over. He picked himself off the ground cautiously, unable to believe that he had not plunged into a Nothingness again permanently.
“Remo.” Chiun was coming to his feet, and relief showed on his ancient face—until the Nothingness came again. Remo was yanked back into his own special hell.
Then it was gone. He forced himself to his feet, grabbed Chiun and heaved them both toward the entrance. Chiun collapsed on the ground outside and fought to get onto his hands and knees.
It came again, sucked them into Nothingness, and Remo’s last thought was that he could not take it. He would rather die….
To his surprise, pain came a moment later. He was draped over the steel frame of the doorway where he had collapsed. He drew his legs up under him and pushed away. He didn’t care if he looked like a crippled frog, as long as it put distance between himself and the source of their suffering.
Chiun came to his feet but couldn’t stand straight. He and Remo propped each other up like a pair of drunks. They went a few paces before the Nothingness sucked at them again. It was behind them, weakened, and the Masters of Sinanju swayed blindly, then staggered on.
When they reach the car they could no longer feel the pulses. They stood breathing, looking at each other.
“Chiun?” Remo gasped when he could talk again.
“I am enfeebled, but improving. How has it affected you, Remo?”
Remo allowed his breath to fill his body and send back signals of damage. “When it comes. Little Father, I wish I was dead. Dying would be better than that, whatever it is.”