Nuihc said after a long time, "Can you not find me?"
Remo kept his silence.
"Have you given up, white?"
Remo said nothing. His head turned this way and that, his body coiled like a tense spring. The voice seemed to be changing position, as Nuihc would have to if he wished to foil Remo's ears.
"I will accept your surrender, if you will not fight me."
The Void seemed to reverberate in the silence that followed.
Just as Remo was about to give up, not three arm lengths to Remo's left two cold almond eyes winked open.
They snapped shut almost as soon as they fell on Remo. But it was enough. Lunging forward on the plane of blackness, Remo drove two fists ahead of him, one aimed for the head and the other for the belly. With his eyes shut, Nuihc was a sitting duck.
Unless he had stepped aside in the instant after he closed his eyes.
Doing so was an old Sinanju night-fighting trick. Nuihc would know that Remo knew it. He might hold his ground. Or he might think three steps ahead as opposed to Remo's two, and step aside, poised to strike when Remo walked into his trap.
There was no way to know.
Until his fists struck solidness, Remo didn't know what to expect.
"Ooof!"
Nuihc was driven back a unit of measure unknown on earth. Remo leaped after him and, spotting the stunned eyes lying on the black plane like dropped marbles, he brought the heel of his left foot square on the spot where Nuihc's larynx should be.
The croak of agony matched the sudden widening of Nuihc's stunned hazel eyes.
"Give?" Remo asked, setting his foot on Nuihc's unprotected chest.
"Urkkk."
"I asked you a question, dog meat," Remo snapped.
"I... am ... yours...." Nuihc gurgled painfully.
"Too bad," Remo growled. "I don't want you." And he began exerting pressure on the chest he could feel but not see. Cartilage crackled as ribs groaned. The hazel eyes went wide till the whites showed all around.
To his surprise, Nuihc sank into the blackness. His eyes, comically round in a mixture of agony and anger, were like startled gems slipping into a pool of viscous tar.
Left standing in the darkness, Remo looked around. He was alone in the emptiness of the Void. Nothing happened for a long time.
Then a sound like a freight train moaning assaulted the great Void.
REMO SNAPPED UPRIGHT with the screeching of steel wheels ripping through his skull. He flung himself out of bed, getting into his clothes on the way out the door.
Frightened faces were popping out of doors up and down the motel facade. And the shriek of steel wheels became an agony of howling metal and screaming voices. The voices were high, shrill, inarticulate. It seemed impossible they were human.
"Train wreck!" a man yelled.
Remo flashed around to the rear of the motel. Beyond was a rail line. And in the dark, noises were piling up. He got there just as the last car had screeched past in a shower of silvery sparks like molten metal. They splashed onto rails that twisted and warped on their ties, rusty spikes straining. They might have been trying to escape what was to come.
Then the roar became a long rumble, and the tracks let go. They sprang like rubber bands, snapping at their welds and sending rusty spikes and railroad ties flying.
Remo ducked a spike flying like shrapnel. It thudded into a brick wall and smoked like a meteorite. Running along the grading, Remo came upon the back end of the train. His first thought was for the passengers. But as he worked his way past the first teetering cars, he came to a jackknifed string of cattle cars. After a ghostly silence, a tortured whinnying came from the cars. And through the galvanized steel slats of the sides, he could see frightened black eyes. The smell of fresh dung filled the night air.
Remo climbed a car, found the lock and snapped it with the side of his hand. He rolled the door back, and inside, a muscular knot of horses writhed and kicked at one another. They began surging and leaping out in a torrent of clattering hoofs.
Remo got clear, letting them run where fear took them.
The next car was another cattle car. It lay on its side. The one ahead was piled up against a fir tree in some kind of sunken arboretum. There was blood coming out of one end. The pungent barnyard odor of dung mingled with it.
Remo moved on.
The middle cars were the worst. They had been literally rent asunder by the sudden compression of the crash.
All were cattle cars, Remo saw to his relief. There were no passengers. Human passengers, that is. He kept going. Sad, frightened eyes peered out at him from bent slats, neighing in their distress.
REMO FOUND THE ENGINE piled into a windbreak of red oaks.
It had come to a stop with its front end against two oaks. The headlight shone between them, cutting a funnel of light in the murk that was already busy with moths.
"Hey!" Remo called. "Anybody in there?"
There was no answer from the silent engine, so Remo found the engineer's ladder and climbed it.
He found the engineer at his controls with his neck like a raw tree stump. There was no sign of his head. It wasn't visible in the cabin. In fact, while the windshield had spiderwebbed, no loose glass littered the cabin.
How the engineer had lost his head was a mystery. The mystery was compounded as Remo walked the twisted tracks back and spotted the engineer's head squatting in the bough of a tree like some otherworldy beehive.
Remo left it where it hung. Someone would discover it soon enough. The horses were struggling from their strewn cars, and since there were no people to save, Remo decided he would do what he could to help the poor dumb brutes reach safety.
By that time others had come onto the scene.
A man in a blue police uniform was the first Remo met.
"My lord, what a mess. Look at all these poor critters." He drew his pistol. "Guess I'll have to shoot those that won't make it. Hate to do it, though."
"Why don't you give me a chance to pull the uninjured ones loose?" Remo asked.
"You got a crane in your back pocket?"
"Tell you what. Shoot the dying. Anything I haven't got loose is yours."
"Suit yourself," said the cop, and he walked back to where the beastly moans were most pitiful.
Remo moved to the nearest cattle car. It leaned drunkenly against a rows of scarred pine trees. He got to the door and wrenched it open.
The horses-there were mustangs mixed with black-and-white Appaloosas-were jammed up against the far side. Eyes wide, frightened and not at all friendly. Some kicked and screamed.
With one exception, their legs were whole. They could walk. All they needed was a ramp.
Looking around to make sure no one saw him, Remo attacked the sliding door. He broke the rails on which it slid and let it drop. It took only a little jockeying to make it a ramp.
Remo went among the horses and began spanking flanks. The horses responded. After they rattled off the ramp, they kept going, which suited Remo perfectly fine. He had a lot of horses to round up.
The one with raw bone sticking down from his severed leg managed to clump out, too. Its eyes were glassy. At the next car palominos were trying to squeeze out through a ragged hole at one end, oblivious to the hoofbreaking drop to the ground.
Remo got in front of a struggling horse. Confusion was mirrored in its sad eyes. It was stuck, one leg tangled in ripped galvanized slatwork. Other horses were pushing against it from behind and whinnying in fear.
Remo grabbed the side ladder and took hold of the twisted slats. He began yanking out pieces of metal and throwing them away. Once the hole was big enough, the first palomino jumped. He broke his front legs landing and fell over with a defeated moan. But the others landed in soft soil gouged by the derailment and they made it okay.
It took two hours, but Remo managed to save fully sixty horses from police guns.