Without another word, the three of them ran into the night and piled into Mark’s truck.
10
SAN PEDRO, CALIFORNIA
STONE WAS STEPPING AWAY FROM HIS CORNER AND headed into a cage fight when he got the message from Kirigi.
It wasn’t much, just a little blip on the color screen of his cell phone that the guy managing his corner, who was more of a figurehead than anything else, held up for Stone to interpret because he had no idea what it meant. But Stone knew, all right, and it made him grin evilly to see it; Kirigi wanted him, which meant the Master had something special in mind, and it had to be something big to call Kirigi all the way over to Japan. Usually Kirigi wasn’t much on telephones—he was traditional Japan and liked the old ways, at least most of the time—but even he had to admit that nothing spelled instant communication like the modern-day cell phone. At other times, Kirigi kind of reminded Stone of an impatient gangbanger, some bad-ass dude right out of Chinatown who was just aching to fight his way to the top of the street hierarchy, even if he had to use his bare hands. Stone might have invulnerability, but Kirigi had a lot of mystical monkey business on his side, and Stone knew better than to mess with the man.
Stone went into the cage with the roar of the crowd ringing in his ears, although Stone knew that the cheering wasn’t for him. The cage itself was octagonal, and was just about as big as a good-sized living room. The floor was covered by a gray mat that had been crudely repaired in at least a dozen places. The mat had some really ugly stains on it, old and brown, and their origin was obvious. By the looks of it, the stitched-up patches might have been put there by any one of the longshoremen sitting in the stands; bets were being made and money was changing hands fast among the tough-looking men and women out there whose faces evidenced dozens of nationalities.
His opponent was clearly the favorite in tonight’s match, a local California boy on his way to going pro fighter because the Hollywood scene had turned out to be less than kind despite his pretty-boy face. Like a hundred thousand others, the boy had found out there was more to the movies than muscles and mouth; he needed talent, too, and in that he was sadly lacking. Stone had barely paid attention to all the prefight hype (although there’d been plenty)—he seldom did, since he was just in it for the bloodshed and fun—but he did recall this one’s name: Gunny Breeze. According to circuit rumor, the name had been given to the kid by his old man, a cantankerous retired Marine turned fight coach. Anyone who looked at the elder Breeze could tell he was he was a career hard case and twice as mean as a snake; the kid was doing well in the matches because he was supposed to be just like his dad.
There was a certain atmosphere in an ultimate fighting arena, one that was very different from a regular martial arts or boxing match. Yeah, there was the usual noise and screaming for the favorites, but underneath that was a vague sense of… primitiveness, of mankind dropped back thousands of years and embracing its Stone Age roots. The cage itself fed the undercurrent of danger—bigger than a boxing ring, completely enclosed by metal, it offered no escape to the two men inside it. It was possible—always—that someone could die within that aluminum chain-link fencing. The combatants knew this, and the audience did, too… and they wanted it. They all wanted it.
Breeze was a big guy, nearly as muscular as Stone himself… but any comparison ended there. Breeze was blond and blue-eyed where Stone’s skin was the color of coffee, and his eyes were black as a puddle of oil. Even though Stone knew the boy didn’t stand a chance, he had to admire him—there was none of the misplaced self-confidence he’d so often encountered on the ultimate fighting circuit, where too many men had looked at Stone and assumed his size meant slowness and too much body fat. Gunny Breeze’s gaze was cold and calculating—this boy was a killer just waiting to be trained. Stone liked that… but he also needed to get this over with so he could get on a flight to Japan.
The cage door closed around the two fighters and the referee. The crowd screamed in anticipation, pressing as close to the fencing as they could, the braver ones trying for a better look and risking a crack on the side of the head or a shove backward by one of the burly bouncers to get it. Stone and Gunny studied each other warily, although Stone was playing into it more to give the crowd a decent show than anything else. When the bell went off, the ref, a balding, slightly overweight man in his forties, wisely got the hell out of the way and the two huge fighters went for each other.
The boy wasn’t a lightweight, but Stone figured he could still take Gunny out with a couple of punches, especially if he landed one in the face. Gunny would be faster, but everybody in the place knew that Stone had the real power—one look at his arms was an indicator of how much damage he’d do if he connected. But there was still that if factor; Gunny wasn’t going to go the boxing route if he could help it—he was way too smart for that. Instead, he came in low and light on his feet, ducked under Stone’s tight right hook (the one that surprised almost everyone), dropped hard onto his left hip, and swept Stone’s legs out from under him.
Stone went down with a grunt and he could’ve sworn he heard the concrete somewhere beneath the thick matting actually crack. He stayed there for a few moments, actually waiting for Gunny to come after him until the ref hurried up and started to evaluate him. That wasn’t an option, but apparently neither was Breeze coming after him, either—the kid was going to wait until he got back to his feet. Stone rolled to his side and levered himself upward, waving away the referee and eyeing his opponent with a higher level of respect. Gunny wasn’t stupid enough to box with Stone, but he wasn’t about to go to ground with him, either. The kid must’ve taken one look at Stone’s massive neck and decided nothing short of King Kong—which he wasn’t—was going to be able to get a choke hold on that.
Stone licked his lips and hunkered down a little more, bending his knees and spreading his fingers wide. He thought he was ready for the attack, but when it came, the boy took him completely by surprise when instead of repeating his first takedown, he went after Stone as if Stone was the bowling ball and he was the pin. Stone found himself on the ground for the second time, and now he was starting to feel humiliated in addition to being rushed. Kirigi didn’t like to wait, and by now his Master had a jet being primed on the runway at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana. It was even more of a struggle to get himself upright this time—a man who weighed as much as he did didn’t fall lightly, and he didn’t get back up that way either.
Gunny still wasn’t coming after him, but the guy did look just a shade more pleased with himself about the situation. That was annoying but not the end of the world; he might have knocked Stone down a couple of times, but there was going to be a whole lot more on Gunny’s to-do list if he still thought he was going to get the better of Stone.
His next attempt at a takedown proved just that.
His problem was pretty obvious: while he still had a healthy respect for Stone’s size and strength, the two previous takedowns had made him think his opponent was slow and easy prey for putting off balance. With this thought in mind, the boy decided that to please the crowd, he should get a little fancier, and a flying scissor kick would be just the ticket for upping the cheering factor.
It wasn’t so much overconfidence as a serious miscalculation. Breeze had thought he had enough body weight behind him to pull it off, but the simple fact was that he didn’t—Stone outweighed him by nearly sixty pounds, and by the time Breeze thought he was going to make Stone hit the mat a third time, Stone was as firmly planted on that mat as a hundred-year-old oak tree. He did go down… but only because he wanted to. And then he did it a whole lot faster than Gunny Breeze had been counting on.
Breeze came in with a picture-perfect elbow grab— Stone gave it to him—then levered his body up with one leg in front of Stone’s thighs and the other behind them. Stone let himself be guided toward the ground, and he felt the kid’s surprise at how easy it was; a split second later Stone also sensed when that surprise turned to dismay as
Stone suddenly increased his downward speed. He landed solidly on Breeze’s right leg and pinned him there, and before the guy could get his left leg bent up to push himself away, Stone had that one pinned, too. Breeze bent at the waist and brought himself up only to take a hard backfist that was clearly more of an annoyance punch than anything serious on Stone’s part. By then the ref was standing over them to take a look, and as a result, little surfer boy suddenly went all frantic. After all, his title was on the line, and he wasn’t going to lose it so easily—and certainly not in the first round—to an oversized ape of an outsider who’d gotten in on the fights via a last-minute sign-up ticket. The ref wasn’t going to call him out just because he was trapped, so Breeze, feeling like he was still up on energy and good at his game, put everything he had into twisting his body and making an escape.
He must not have thought Stone was as heavy as he was, or maybe he just assumed that if he put enough effort into it, Stone would let go.
Stone didn’t.
The kid jerked beneath him and Stone’s body vibrated with the effort Breeze put into it—it felt like there was a huge snake beneath him that was trying to squeeze through a hole the size of a bottle cap. Stone easily held his ground as the boy forced his body around. One second Stone was just lying there and Breeze was turning his legs underneath Stone’s; the next, a noise filled the air, something that sounded like a piece of porcelain breaking in two.
Then Breeze started screaming.
Stone looked down, but he wasn’t surprised at what he saw. The boy definitely had determination, and sometimes, in cases like these, that stubbornness could cause disastrous results. Breeze had, indeed, managed to get his body to turn—
—but his right foot hadn’t turned with it.
The ref rushed over and began gesturing wildly— “He’s out! He’s out!”—but it still took Stone a good six seconds to get his weight off the boy. Maybe he could have gone a little faster—all right, he definitely could have—but Stone had gone from being impressed with Breeze to being annoyed at his foolishness. Even so, the California kid was lucky. Stone could have killed him at any time during this match as easily as he blinked.
He watched impassively as the cage door was jerked open and a doctor ran in, followed by the kid’s corner man, then three or four other people. They left Breeze where he was, and it was a while before the doc slipped him a shot that at least got him to stop that raw screaming. Stone was the winner, of course, but he shocked the crowd and his corner man by just getting up and walking out—never mind the victory words or the trophy, and they could mail the prize money to his post office box.
Kirigi needed him.
ZIMBABWE, AFRICA
This place was soaked in death.
The unpaved streets—if they could be called that— were wide and dusty, disused. Even the trash that pressed up against the sad and sorry-looking buildings bore a coat of African dirt that obliterated its origin. Too far away from Gwanda—itself so small it had little impact on anything—to be remembered and too small to be noticed by the press, this place was like a pocket of lost life buried in the countryside. It had its own tiny government, but there were no people of power in charge; the few men who ran it had, sadly, made choices in the past that had aligned them with those whose existence would now ultimately help fuel its destruction and destroy them. Circumstance had made it into a dry and colorless sort of nonplace, so beaten down with hunger, poverty, and sickness that few of its own people even recalled its name… and no one at all actually cared.
Typhoid Mary walked through the village slowly, not touching anything—yet—but looking at everything and everyone; then she turned and walked back again. The famine here had played no favorites and its victims were everywhere, although, of course, it had sucked away the lives of the youngest and oldest first. Like a lioness singling out her prey, the hunger had honed in on those too old and week to fight its effects, melting away their will along with their body fat and immune systems.
Yes, this would be the perfect place for her next game.
What was left now was small, its original population of over three hundred reduced by a more than fifty percent death toll and others who had fled, looking for life in places other than the marked-for-doom village they had once called home. The deaths in the larger cities made the news regularly, but nothing places like this were routinely missed—after all, who thought about a nowhere village where the fanciest building was a two-room shack with a decrepit straw grass roof? That dwelling belonged to the village chief, whose children still lived, although not very well. His pleas for help to the military had gone unheard because of his people’s previous affiliation with the party opposing the president; now it was as if they didn’t exist. If they did receive supplies—a rare occasion, indeed—it was items that no one else wanted or his workers found that the food was so old that half of it had already rotted within the packaging.
The adults saw her, but it was the children who most interested Typhoid.
She had always been partial to them, with their sweet and innocent faces, their big, pleading eyes. She loved it when their faces turned upward and stared at her and their eyes filled with tears. Not that she could do anything about it—not that she would—but she reveled in the helplessness and the pain, even if it wasn’t caused by her. So many people didn’t appreciate the true value of suffering—without suffering, how could a person ever truly appreciate being alive in the first place? How could he or she know the beauty of no pain if there had been no experience, no true immersion, in agony? People took such things for granted and they fought pain with every ounce of strength that they had; instead, they should have welcomed it, sought it out, and lived with it, day by day. To be without pain was to be without sensation, without feeling, and there was no wisdom in an existence like that.
And these children… they were so much more mature than adults in the matters of pain. They bore it silently and without complaint, never crying or whining, saving every bit of their energy so they could fight for life for another day, another hour, another five minutes. And every single one of them gave to someone else—they shared the tiny bits of food they had, they shared what comfort they could, they shared themselves.
Just as Typhoid would share of herself.
They were drawn to her. She was the beautiful Asian woman among the mass of dark-skinned adults and children, quietly drifting among them like a golden-tinted ghost. They were the walking nearly dead— naked skeletal bodies with bloated bellies, huge, hairless skulls with tiny, glittering teeth and sunken eyes. Her sparkling, sympathetic gaze invited them to come forward and touch her. They begged for food, and she gave out pieces of candy crawling with her death; they wanted to touch the silk fabric of her blouse and slacks, so she invited one after another to crawl onto her lap and be hugged; they wanted comfort, so she pressed her black lips against the dried-out skin of their scalps, giving dozens of them little kisses of disease. In death she would give them freedom, finally, from their suffering. Yes, this was a good place, a very special place, but…
Kirigi was calling to her.
Typhoid felt his need the instant it sang through her blood. He wanted her for something, something important, and his silent call was like fuel to her addiction. Like her beloved pain, Kirigi was a sensation in her veins, the cry of a drug only she used and which she could not deny.
With a final goodbye kiss to the people who watched her, blown on the dark wind of an isolated forest, Typhoid Mary drifted out of the village she’d ensured would never survive and headed back to Japan.
PULAU KOMODO
There were people who lived on this primitive tropical island, but those who did built their crude wooden homes on stilts and pulled what little livestock they had inside at night. They farmed the rocky soil but not very successfully, and they catered to the tourists who came with the diving and biking companies, welcoming the foreign money to help support themselves in their poor economy. They left the tourists
to make their way, safely or not, with the guides, but the native islanders watched their own children constantly and even the adults stayed in pairs and traveled armed with heavy walking sticks and machetes, although speed was always the best defense.
If you couldn’t outrun the dragons, you couldn’t survive.
Tattoo grinned and followed behind the guide he’d hired to lead him into the denser jungle on Pulau Komodo. The brown-skinned man, whose name was Budi, knew the trails well, and Tattoo had to stay on his toes to keep up. Budi was a local guy, older and balding, with black eyes and skin as sun-wrinkled as an old belt; he’d looked at Tattoo critically and decided he was good to go physically. Pressing a crumpled American twenty-dollar bill into Budi’s hand—enough money to support his impoverished family for at least a month— had ensured the guy would take Tattoo to see what he wanted.
It was hot and humid here, and Budi had told him in broken English that November, only a month ago, had actually been the hottest month of the year. There were plenty of dragons around, but they were slow and sluggish because of the humidity, with less of a tendency to be aggressive; this obviously made it a good time to visit and study them. Tattoo was very interested in these prehistoric animals, and while the guide could think he was a tree-hugger environmentalist or a misguided animal lover, Tattoo had his own reasons for wanting to get close to them. It all had to do with that long, blank patch of skin on the outside length of his left leg.
Picking his way up a steep, rocky slope in front of Tattoo, the guide came to the crest of it and stopped, then gestured back at his tourist. “Ora,” Budi said, pointing. “Buaja darat.” Ora was the local word for Komodo dragon, and Tattoo had heard the term often since his arrival. The other phrase meant “land crocodile,” something Budi was using only, he thought, to impress this man who he thought was nothing but an ignorant tourist. The dragons were really lizards that could grow huge, up to ten feet long and three hundred pounds, with bacteria-drenched mouths that gave infectious bites to their prey. They were fast runners and surprise attackers, cannibalistic to their own young, and the island’s visitors and guides did well to stay out of their way. It had taken a bit of doing to find this guide, who was willing to get Tattoo closer to the lizards than anyone else, but not in the context of the more sluggish, people-accustomed ones that hung around the rangers’ shacks. No, Tattoo needed to see them in the wild, in action—he wanted to see them at rest, and he wanted to see them attack and feed. As magnificent as the animal might be, he needed to make sure it was worthy and… capable of being added to his body.
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