Chapter 4

Remo didn’t take orders from overgrown parakeets.

“I’m not going in there,” he told the bird. “It smells.”

The big violet parrot screeched in his face, then jumped off his shoulder and flapped into the trees to perch on a dead branch.

“He knows the way to go. You do not.” The man who spoke was tiny and ancient, an Asian dressed in a fine robe. Despite their trek through the rain forest, the Korean kimono was unsoiled, and not a single stitch of the priceless embroidery was snagged.

Remo was younger, taller and less finely dressed, wearing his standard uniform of Chinos and a T-shirt. His shoes were hand-stitched leather, made in Italy just for him. The shoes, T-shirt and Chinos were just as amazingly clean as the old man’s kimono.

“What makes you think Purple Polly knows where to find Burgos?” Remo asked the old man.

“Finding the dope fiend is not the reason we came.”

“It’s the reason I came.”

“We came to return this creature to its home, sparing it the rigors of journeying halfway around the world.”

“Uh-huh,” Remo said. “I have my doubts about him coming from this place, Chiun. I don’t think this bird has a clue where he even is.”

Chiun, the ancient Korean man, glared at Remo Williams. “He told Sarah that this is his home.”

“He told me he had a program to get rich in the real-estate market with no money down,” Remo said. “I didn’t fall for that one, either.”

The old man sniffed. “I shall accompany this creature to its home. If you would go elsewhere, and abandon your elderly, frail father to the terrors of the jungle, so be it. Remain here where it is safe.”

Chiun glided away, into the vast brown remains of the dead section of the rain forest, and the bird delightedly took to the air to swoop on ahead of him. Remo sighed and followed.

Chiun was certainly elderly, but he was as frail as a cast-iron locomotive. A Master of the ancient martial art called Sinanju, the elderly Korean had trained Remo. Remo was a Master of this martial art himself. In title, at least, he was Reigning Master of Sinanju. Chiun had given up his Reigning Master status to become the Master of Sinanju Emeritus, which implied some sort of retirement and surrender of authority.

In practice, Remo still did what the old man told him to do a lot of the time. Chiun had an air of all-encompassing wisdom and a goatlike stubborn streak, both hard to ignore.

Remo caught up to the old man in seconds. “I couldn’t let you go on alone, you being so frail and all.”

“Hush,” the old man said. “This is a place of death.”

Remo looked around, then felt what Chiun was talking about. They had entered a vast tract of Brazilian rain forest that was recently engulfed in a cloud of superheated steam, which killed everything. From tiny gnats to the giant upper-canopy trees, the steam killed them and left their cooked remains where they had died.

It was unlike the clear-cutting of the rain forest. This forest was still there, but dead. The earth was littered with the carcasses of the forest creatures. The smell was overpowering, but the aura of the place was even more unsettling.

“It’s worse than a battlefield,” Remo observed. He had been on jungle battlefields. “Everything is dead here.”

“Yes,” Chiun said somberly.

“Everything,” Remo added, sounding lame.

Chiun seemed to understand. He turned to Remo and nodded. “Exactly.”

Remo and Chiun were no strangers to death. Delivering death was their job. The Masters of Sinanju were assassins—the world’s preeminent assassins. Working for the U.S. government, Remo and Chiun had encountered and delivered more death than they cared to remember—but not like this. Remo had never been so immersed in the smells and stillness of so many dead things…

He tried to think of something else. He really ought to be looking for the drug lord, Burgos, not tagging after a fast-talking parrot. Burgos was intent on establishing a system of coca farms in the territory stricken by the geothermal disaster. He could easily clear narrow, miles-long strips of land among the decimated rain forest. The dead trees and the new growth would hide the cultivation, and this patch of land was so far away from everything it would be expensive to monitor from the air. Burgos would be less harassed here than in Colombia, making for better harvests.

Burgos himself was on a personal tour of the parboiled rain forest. As far as Burgos knew, his plan was still a cartel secret.

Remo and his employer were determined to nip Burgos in the bud—as long as Remo was in the vicinity anyway.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if the bird did lead us to Burgos?” Remo suggested, trying to lighten his own mood. “Maybe that’s why he brought us here.”

“I think not,” Chiun replied, not even breathing hard as they skimmed through the detritus of the jungle floor.

“Who can tell? Maybe he can be our crime-sniffing sidekick. You know, he points us to the bad guys and we go take them out.”

“Like Rin Tin Tin?”

“Sure. But in color.”

“You speak nonsense. His globe-trotting days are done, and he desires the serenity of his home.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“That is what I know to be true.”

After another few miles, Remo said, “I’m not so sure, Little Father. If this was my home, I don’t think I’d want to come back to it.”

Chiun said nothing.

The bird stopped on a dead branch high above them, peered ahead and screeched in alarm. He flapped strongly into the trees and was gone.

Remo and Chiun reached ahead with their senses. The smell of human remains now tinged the air.

Someone shouted in Spanish. Another voice spoke in a language totally foreign to Remo Williams. Far away, the bird cried out in pain.

At that, Chiun slipped away like a racing breeze, Remo close behind. They moved faster than any other man on Earth could run, and yet they didn’t disturb the litter that carpeted the jungle floor.

In seconds Remo found himself at the edge of a jungle clearing. Some sort of a native village had recently stood here. The putrefying corpses of the villagers were still scattered about the village.

One of them was alive. It was an older male figure in a brief loincloth, his face smeared with symbols painted in mud. He was standing against a hut wall, bloodied from a beating.

His torturer was bloodied, too. There was a fresh gash across his face and the huge parrot was flapping around above him, screeching.

The man yanked out a handgun.

The villager’s stiff-back pride melted. He collapsed at the feet of his torturer, begging him to spare the bird. The gunman delivered a quick kick to the man’s temple and shot at the hyacinth macaw.

A target that big, that close, that purple should have been hard to miss.

But the torturer missed. Chiun had slipped across the clearing with all the speed and commotion of hawk shadow, coming alongside the torturer before the man knew Chiun was even there. The elderly Asian man snicked his long fingernails at the gun hand as the trigger was squeezed.

Chiun’s fingernails were strong and sharp as the finest sword blade. They detached the hand from the wrist, and the bullet went wild.

The torturer fell down, his lifeblood pouring out, which didn’t make his friends happy at all.

Remo was on the attack, skimming among the other gunmen. Armed guards had been standing by with automatic rifles ready. Remo snatched the rifles and sent them arcing away into the jungle.

Then he went for the others. Every one of them was armed, and he took their weapons away from them in whatever way was most expedient. He slapped their pistol hands, shattering their hand bones in the process. He shoved the rifles like battering rams into the rib cages of the owners.

Chiun was helping the villager to his feet. The man cared only about the huge macaw, now standing on his wrist and nuzzling his chest. The bird became stained with the old man’s blood, but neither of them cared.

“I guess they know each other,” Remo observed. “How bad is he?”

“If he ceases squirming, I shall be able to inspect him. I think he shall live. I believe we have also found what you were looking for, Remo. I suggest you deal with them while I tend to him.”

Chiun barked at the villager in a strange tongue and pushed the bird away. The old Korean didn’t have the gentlest bedside manner.

“Notice I did not kill a single one of you,” Remo announced grandly to the others, most of whom were on the ground holding some injured part of their body.

“You killed him,” snarled a man hugging a broken arm.

“Not me. It was the elderly fella. You gentlemen happen to be friends of Juan Burgos?”

“No,” snarled the man with the busted arm.

“Liar,” Remo announced, and touched the man on the forehead. A deep pit appeared there, and the man collapsed.

“I bet one of you is Juan Burgos,” Remo said. “And you’re just too chickenshit to make yourself known.” Remo loved to humiliate a high-up slimeball in front of his subordinate slimeballs. They were usually too stupid and too concerned with their own masculinity to ignore the gibe.

“I am Juan Burgos and I am no coward.”

Remo looked him up and down. “I believe you because you have the most expensive-looking suit and the greasiest-looking hair.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Nothing. I just had to be sure I had the right piece of human trash before I put the garbage out.”

“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.”

He took the elbow of the sole surviving villager and led him through the huts. There was a place where a body had lain since the moment it fell in the catastrophic surge of superheated steam.

Now the body was buried, and green plants were sprouting.

The villager was stunned.

“Come on.” Remo guided the man to another spot, where another body had lain. It was small, the outline of a frail young person. Remo knew a skinny girl had died here— and now grass was pushing into the world where she had lain.

The villager was weeping.

“See, Chiun, this place never died. Because even when they died, their bodies were protecting some of these plants, so the plants lived.”

Chiun started to say something, but Remo held up a hand. “Wait a second. Come look at this.” He led Chiun and the weeping villager into the jungle for a hundred paces, where the rock formation had trapped countless jungle creatures.

The carcasses were gone and it was an oasis of green, thriving plant life.

“Slimy, but nice,” Remo said.

“You cleared all this away yourself?” Chiun asked.

“Had to. Burgos dropped dead on me. Ever hear the saying that a little hard work never killed anybody? Well, guess what? It killed Burgos. Is your skinny friend happy or sad?” Remo nodded at the villager, who was weeping and opening his arms to the sky.

“He is both. Remo, this has lifted his spirits to heaven. He sees now that the world will continue, and he hopes that he may be taken up now to be with his People.”

Remo shook his head. “Hey, no way. After all the home repairs I made?”

Chiun looked strange. He looked sad. “My son, do you not understand? The village is gone. All the People were killed.”

“No.” Remo walked away a few steps, turned and raised one finger. Very distinctly he said, “No.”

“No?” asked the villager.

“Come on.”

Remo led the way this time, and the villager trotted to keep up. He reached a tree that was near the edge of the brown jungle, where the steam cloud had finally lost its murderous heat. The sky-scraping upper branches were alive with a smattering of green leaves—and a flock of noisy purple birds.

At the base of the tree was a sleeping boy no more than eight years old.

The villager looked at the tree with wide eyes, muttering to Chiun.

“It is a tree of some significance,” Chiun said.

“Yeah. It’s the highest one around—you can really see for miles. They’re coming this way.”

“Who is?” Chiun demanded.

“The new People.” Remo shrugged.

The villager grabbed Remo by the biceps and looked into his eyes like he was seeing a vision. “The new People?” His English was imperfect and tremulous.

Remo smiled. “He’s one.” The boy was awake and looking at the three adults shyly. His gaunt face was covered with the sticky remains of fruit. Rinds and cores littered the ground.

“Who is he?” the villager demanded.

“He’s one of the People,” Remo said. “They’re all over the place. They’re survivors, like you. There must have been twenty villages affected by the catastrophe. This kid was out wandering the jungle all by himself, eating gross steamed vegetables. Everybody he ever knew is dead.”

Chiun held up his hand, and no one spoke. Remo heard what Chiun was hearing—other voices, fearful and hopeful, coming closer. “Remo, you did this?” Chiun asked.

“Not me. It was the bird. He’s been out looking for them all night. He told them to head for the tree with the purple parrots.”

Soon the newcomers began to straggle, singly or in pairs, out of the forest, converging on the tree of the purple parrots. They were mostly young adults, some children, and they all looked like hell. They were filthy, naked, covered in wounds, their arms and legs splotched with bruises. They gathered about the base of the tree, not sure what to expect.

“Lunch is on me.” Remo pulled bags of supplies out of the bushes, all salvaged from the researchers’ camp. The people were soon opening packages of hermetically sealed beef stew and chop suey. “Later you folks can help yourself to whatever’s on the Burgos boat—it’s a few miles upriver. Or maybe downriver. That way, whatever it is. Hey, look, everyone! Spam!” He held up a box of meat cans.

The villager grabbed the food from Remo’s hands and took it to the newcomers. More were coming out of the trees, all of them shell-shocked victims of a catastrophe that they had never expected and didn’t understand.

The villager was crying, but now they were clearly tears of joy. He deftly used the can key to open the lunch meat and present the food to the famished survivors. He laughed as he cried, and he gave words of encouragement to each and every one of them. He busied about them with more stocks from the supply packs. He spooned food into the mouth of a woman whose fingers were worn raw from whatever she had endured.

The young boy, the first to arrive at the tree, ate just a little of the new food, then followed on the heels of the villager, helping him feed the People. One last survivor stumbled out of the trees, his face shrunken. The villager, and others, raced to him, took hold of him as he stumbled and carried him to the tree. Soon he was eating and looking stronger by the minute.

“This is a pretty nice picnic, huh?” Remo asked.

Chiun was detached and silent, but not in his usual obstinate way. Remo didn’t know what to make of it.

“You have accomplished something worthy of the scrolls, Remo Williams,” Chiun said at last.

“What are you talking about? I just cleaned up the corpses.”

“You have restored the People,” Chiun said.

“That was his doing,” Remo said, pointing at one of the purple parrots that was diving on them. It landed on the ground and waddled to Remo and Chiun.

“He rounded them all up,” Remo explained.

“Rounded them all up,” agreed the macaw.

“You do not know what have you done,” said the villager, coming to them with the boy at his heals. “This be way the People came to be—the old People.”

“Talk to the bird.”

The villager ignored the bird and wrenched the difficult English tongue from his brain with great intensity. “Now I know why all have I been made to do. I lived when all died so to guide new People—just as did one who was Caretaker lifetimes in the past. This the tree where bird hatched. This the tree where little father died fetching the great gift for me—the egg of purple bird. It all comes to a circle you closed.”

Remo was getting uncomfortable. “Really, all I did was cleanup. I just wanted to bring back some green. And fetch the feedbags. Janitorial work and gardening and grocery shopping.”

“You have remade the People and made me the Caretaker again.”

“Bird,” Remo said, “tell ’em it was your idea.”

“Trail mix!” the bird demanded.

“Remo,” Chiun said quietly in Korean, “accept graciously this high and deserved praise.”

“I don’t deserve this. I didn’t save these People.”

The Caretaker nodded, and nodding still he looked back at the quiet gathering of survivors, who had eaten well for the first time since the catastrophe. They were resting, finally abandoning the fear that tomorrow would offer them only continuing uncertainty.

“There is a story of one named Qetzeel,” the Caretaker began.

“You don’t say?” Remo said, then felt a sharp pain in his elbow. Chiun was holding it, but listening to the Caretaker attentively.

“Qetzeel is the Unmaker, the Destroyer,” the Caretaker continued.

Remo felt the blood trickle like ice water down his spine.

“Qetzeel is also the maker of the new world. When he destroys, he cleanses the world and makes it ready for rebirth. Friend, you have fostered the rebirth of the People through your symbol of new life.”

“Hey, buddy, get it straight,” Remo said. “I’m just the manual labor. I didn’t destroy your people, and I didn’t make the new ones. Talk to the damn bird.”

Chiun was aghast, but strangely the Caretaker was not shocked. He still wore his smile of contentment, as if everything was once again right in his world.

Remo was out of there.