And the guy was coming right for him.
And the guy didn't have any gun of his own to shoot back with. Not a knife. Not even a cypress branch to use as a club.
The shooter was still trying to make sense of it all when Remo Williams stopped in front of him. "It's empty. "
Remo nodded at the shooter's trigger finger, still working the gun uselessly.
Oh, the gunner realized, he's right. No more bullets.
Then Remo grabbed the sizzling hot gun barrel. The gunner held on, thinking the guy was going to try to take it out of his hands. Instead, Remo propelled the gun at the gunner.
It slammed into him. Hard. All the internal parts between the bottom of his rib cage and the top of his pelvic bone turned into just so much mush. The gunner felt it happen.
Those, the gunner thought, were really important internal parts.
But that was the last thing he ever thought about, flopping down, gore flowing from his mouth.
One down-two counting the intruder who had tangled with Chiun aboard the boat-and Remo counted four more automatics still unloading on the camp.
The second shooter, fifty feet beyond the first, had an Uzi submachine gun. He had emptied one magazine, and Remo sprinted at him as he was reloading. He slashed hard and fast with his fingernails as the gunner half turned.
Then the gunner's vision momentarily went haywire. He was spinning through the air in an impossible way, and when he fell to the ground he saw, a few feet away, his own headless body falling to the ground in the darkness.
The gunner knew he had been decapitated and his only thought-before his thoughts ceased altogether-was that his attacker had to have had a really big knife.
Three guns still raked the camp with automatic fire, as if the men behind them were on automatic pilot, bent on firing endlessly until they got an order to desist.
Remo's third quarry had a Ruger Mini-14 rifle with a folding stock, a bandolier of spare clips slung across his chest. Instead of hosing down the camp at random, he was squeezing off short, measured bursts, aiming at first one sleeping bag and then another, keeping up his pinpoint fire despite the fact that all the bags were plainly riddled, tufts of cotton stuffing floating in the air around the campfire like exotic insects. From the smile etched on his face, Remo decided that the rifleman enjoyed his work.
Again Remo didn't bother approaching from the sniper's blind side. He just came in too fast for the sniper to do anything about it. The shooter started to turn his gun at the newcomer. When Remo jabbed rigid fingers under the shooter's rib cage, the move was too quick for the shooter's eye to follow. But the concussive, channeled force brought death as swift and sure as any point-blank gunshot to the head.
The next-to-last assailant had another stubby submachine gun. Moving up behind the tall man like a silent shadow, Remo clapped his hands over his assailant's ears with stunning force. The shooter's body shivered through a brief convulsion, then slumped forward.
One more to go.
By this time, Remo's last target had to know that there was something wrong. The other guns that had been pouring fire into the camp were silent now, the absence of their multiple staccato thunder plainly obvious. The final shooter had ceased firing, as well, attempting to discover what had happened to his friends.
Metallic clicking sounds told Remo that the gunner was reloading, just in case he had to make a fight of it. After that, it was the simple sound of breathing that betrayed his quarry.
At last, when he could stand no more silence, the shooter began calling out to his companions. "Remy? Florus? Where you at, goddamn it! Harry? Claude?"
The gunner started running, crashing through the ferns and undergrowth like a stampeding water buffalo. Conveniently, he was coming straight at him. Remo gave him a nice quick punch without even needing to move from where he stood. The gunner's head caved in, and he fell right over.
LOUISIANA'S WOULD-BE governor had gone stark raving crazy, and the hell of it was that he knew it. Elmo Breen was on the razor's edge of laughing at his own insanity, prevented only by the fact that he was trying to remain alive.
It was the first time in his fifty-something years on Earth that Breen had suffered from hallucinations, drunk or sober. And it could only be a wild hallucination, after all. A wolf man, for Christ's sake! According to the hallucination, the wolf man had hoisted Marshall Dillon overhead and dropped him like a sack of laundry, as dead as hell when he hit the ground.
As for the wild dogs or coyotes or whatever the hell they were, one of them had Hubert Murphy by the arm, attack-dog style, and yet another was attacking Victor Charles.
Breen saw three-fifths of his campaign support fund being ripped to bloody shreds before his eyes, and there was only one thing for a Southern boy to do in such distressing circumstances, even when he knew the whole damn thing was an illusion conjured up by a disordered mind or tainted booze.
He grabbed his thousand-dollar shotgun and proceeded to give battle as his great-great-granddaddy had done at Shiloh.
Breen turned his weapon on the nearest of the wolf-dogs, aiming for a rib shot, so the buckshot pellets wouldn't spread and injure Victor when he fired.
The big Benelli shotgun kicked against his shoulder, but he held it steady, dead on target, grinning triumphantly as his first round tore into its shaggy, snarling target with the force of an express train. It was almost comical, the way the mutt went down, rolled over once, then lay still.
He swiveled toward the wolf-dog that was mauling Hubert Murphy. The dog rushed in and took a bite from Hubert's face, retreating with a hefty portion of his fat cheek clutched between its teeth.
Breen knocked it sprawling with another shotgun blast.
His ears were ringing with the gunfire, but it didn't keep the howling out. Breen swung back to face the hulking man-thing lunging in his direction, wild-eyed, lips drawn back from huge yellow teeth, nostrils flaring in a face that looked like something off a Halloween mask. No time to aim the 12-gauge this time, and he jerked the trigger. Breen got lucky, saw his charging nemesis lurch sideways, thrown off stride, as pellets tore into its arm and side. Still it wasn't a killing shot, and when he tried to fire again, the shotgun's hammer snapped against an empty chamber.
Shit! Shit! Shit!
Breen dropped the 12-gauge, reaching for the stainless-steel Colt Double Eagle on his hip. The special tie-down holster he had purchased for this outing had a flap secured with Velcro, slowing his draw enough that he had barely reached the .45 before his freakish adversary hit him with a flying tackle, slammed the breath out of his lungs and drove him back against a nearby tree.
It was impossible for Breen to catalog the bolts of pain exploding through his body. A kaleidoscope of colored lights spun on the inside of his eyelids when his skull collided with the tree trunk. Lower down, it felt as if his spine had snapped, but that couldn't be right, or else he wouldn't feel the brittle agony that emanated from a hard knee's point of impact with his testicles. If that weren't enough, he sensed he was drowning, tried to draw a breath and found the burning muscles of his diaphragm unwilling to cooperate.
The shaggy man-thing took a backward step, then lunged again, one heavy shoulder slamming into Elmo's chest. Breen felt a couple of his ribs go, snapped like chopsticks, and a pain beyond pain as the jagged ends lanced deep into a lung. Whatever hope he had of drawing breath was canceled in a heartbeat, and the would-be governor saw darkness opening around him like a ghastly flower blooming.
Through the darkness came his frightful enemy, hands that resembled something from an ape-man costume reaching toward his face. Before they found him, Breen had time to wonder how a figment of his own imagination had acquired such rotten breath.