"Don't leave me," Viki sobbed. "Don't ever leave me." Her breasts bombarded his chest again.
"Don't worry. You're all right now. Calm down and I'll get you some water."
Viki's wracking sobs began to subside. "All right," she said meekly. She watched as Remo went into the bathroom and water began to run.
Then she noticed Chiun at her side. She hastily frowned again, trying to bring on more tears.
"When you entered," Chiun said, "did you say 'Remo, Remo, thank heavens' or 'Remo, Remo, thank God?' "
Viki looked at him, trying for vulnerability, and said, "Thank God, I think."
"Thank you," said Chiun, scratching something out on his parchment and then writing something else.
Remo came out with a glass of water and sat on the bed next to Viki.
She sipped slowly.
"Now this thing in the yard," Remo said, "What was it? You saw people?"
"That's right, Remo. People. People. In my yard."
"Many of them? Were they Orientals? How many. Three? Four?"
"Four, I think. But it was dark. And they looked like Orientals, I'm pretty sure. Oh, it was awful."
Remo looked toward Chiun. "Looks like they're after Viki too," he said.
Chiun shrugged.
"We'll have to bring her to Houston with us."
Chiun shrugged again.
There was a knock on the door.
Viki screamed. Remo looked toward the door. Chiun continued writing.
"Room service," came a hesitant voice from outside.
"Tell them to take back the rice," said Chiun without looking up. "I smell gravy."
CHAPTER SEVEN
The leader calmly explained what they had to do.
The leader calmly explained that the attack had not failed, it had succeeded.
The leader coughed three times, hacked once, and spit a hunk of phlegm into the garbage can of the eighteenth-floor suite of the Houston, Texas, Sheraton.
"But we lost three of our best men," said a voice in Chinese.
"We have gained knowledge," was the leader's reply. "We have gained understanding." The leader weighed the two in his mind. "It is regrettable," he said at last. "But it was necessary. Tell me, what have we learned?"
The young Chinese voice told the old man about the attack at Meatamation and how the white man leveled three of the Creed's best fighters. Then the voice spoke of the yellow man who had been waiting outside Meatamation.
"The yellow man," whispered the leader, raising his right hand toward his eye. His right forefinger stopped at his left breast but his eight-inch fingernail rested just below his left eye. "Were his eyes the color of steel?"
"Yes," was the answer.
"It is as I feared," said the leader. "He has come. He has finally come." The leader dropped his hand to his lap and bent his head in silent prayer. He remained that way for a minute and a half, then his ancient head rose.
"Have you paid the others?"
"The marchers? Yes."
"Do they know of our creed?"
"No."
"Have you replenished our ranks?"
"Hired some new men? Yes."
"Call the others," said the leader. "The time approaches. We must do it. Now."
After the young person had left the room, the leader raised himself from his chair. His rise was slow as were his movements and speech. He finally got to his standing height of four feet eleven, then shuffled across the nylon-pile hotel carpet to the drawn curtains.
A shaking left hand gripped the heavy green material and wrenched it open. Hard, hot sunlight poured over the leader into the room. Houston hung in space, shiny gray, as if some hand had smeared Vaseline over it.
Big cars, each looking newly painted, jockeyed with the dirty, tan hulks of the tractor trailer trucks for 10 clear yards of road space. Work crews were pulling off the red-and-green decorations from the streets, heralding the passing of the new year. Stores were ending their post-Christmas sales.
And it was hot in Texas. It was always hot. That's why the leader liked it here better than Connecticut. It was hot. That was all the leader cared about. That was all he felt. That was all he saw.
Because the leader's eyes were bright blue, but the pupils were dark, smoky white. The leader was completely blind.
He heard the door open. The others had returned.
"Sit down, please," said the leader in Chinese.
"Sit down," said another, translating in English.
The leader waited until he heard two bodies settle into the suite's chairs, then he closed the curtain, and shuffled back to his chair, secure in the knowledge that no outstretched leg or upright body would obstruct his path.
The leader lowered himself into his blood-red seat with the green fanged dragons carved from wood resting beneath his arms.
"Sinanju is here," he said. "Lo, after many millenia, we cross paths finally."
"We have to kill a few more people," was the translation.
"We will not attack," continued the leader. "Our history tells of many dead men who tried to attack the steel-eyed Koreans. And now he is doubly dangerous because of the white man with tiger's blood."
"We will not attack," was the translation.
"We will separate and destroy," said the leader.
"We will separate and destroy," said the translator.
The other body in the room shifted and said: "Same difference."
The leader asked for a translation. He was asked, in Chinese, "Many pardons, wise one. But is that not the same thing as a two-sided attack?"
"Idiot," the leader flared. "You can bang your head against a wall all day and it will not come down. But pull out the right brick and it will collapse in ruin."
"Naw," was the translation. "It's not the same thing."
The leader heard another shuffle of cloth against leather. A voice said, "Do we have to kill them in the same manner as before? The new men can't understand why we have to skin them and put them in trees."
There was a translation.
"Fools, fools, fools," said the leader. "It is tradition. It is legend. It is our strength. For not only do we achieve death in our victims but fear in their survivors."
The leader's right temple was throbbing. "We are the last of my kind. The black plague, it was us. The famine of 1904, it was us. And now, now we are about to embark on the great prophesy of my creed. The road must be kept pure for our followers."
"The old man says keep doing it," said the translator.
"That is all," said the leader, waving his hand. "Now, listen, and take this down."
The translator pulled out a pad and pencil and wrote what the leader said for the next 10 minutes.
"Prepare your people," said the leader.
"Let's go," said the translator.
The leader listened as two bodies moved slowly away, a door opened, then closed.
The leader slumped down in his seat. The years, the strain had weakened him. He could not let them see it, but it had. His followers now had to be paid to take up the Creed. They no longer spoke the mother tongue. They could no longer change into other shapes or take on other forms. He was the last. Only he.
His forces had shattered. This was his last chance. All that was left to follow was the legend. The legend of the Final Death.
The leader moved slowly across the room to the bed. He eased his old and frail body down. He stared, unseeing, up to the plaster ceiling. His mind clouded and he was back. Back with his kind in Ti-Ping village.
He remembered the rooms of gold, paid in tribute to the cult's power and the cult's God. The only true God, the ruler of the realm of the afterlife.
He remembered his leader, his true father, telling him, teaching him the lesson of the Final Death.
The leader lay on his gold and blue Sheraton bed cover in the warm Houston afternoon and mouthed the words as he remembered.
The stomach is the center. The house of all life and death. Life begins and ends there. The soul dwells there. Destroy the stomach and destroy all life. When you die, you die the Final Death.