Flywheels: What if There Were Hillbilly Ninja?

[rvm45]

Flywheels: What If There Were Hillbilly Ninja…



Chapter One





The origins of The Outfit are shrouded in mystery. I’ve never examined them, but I’m told that the oldest fragmentary records are in Gaeilge and some later documents are liberally sprinkled with Romany words and terms.

Be all that as it may. The Outfit today is a distinctly American institution, though a very secretive one.

Go to any skeptic and he’ll be happy to tell you that chakras, chi and chi meridians are pseudoscience and superstitious claptrap.

Let me point out that in some special circumstances—right where self-hypnosis, visualization and biofeedback are hard to distinguish—some visualizations are surprisingly powerful.

Imagine—not ordinary imagine—but visualize very strongly that you’re lounging by a sunny beach and your blood pressure will drop—not all day, but for ten or fifteen minutes. Imagine a clogged sink breaking loose and your sinuses will drain. Surprisingly this works even when the subject hasn’t been told the purpose of the exercise.

Spend two or three years learning to visualize and manipulate The Outfit’s chakra tree and you can use it to manipulate your body and even your immediate environment in surprising ways.

The chakra tree is as real and as unreal as the clogged sink and the sunny beach.

Once the Outfit used another mental construct to work their craft, but sometime in the mid seventeen hundreds they encountered the Hindu system of chakras and the Chinese system of chi and their acupuncture charts of chi meridians.

They modified the system a great deal, but the new mental construct was so much simpler and versatile that no description still exists of the old system.

“What difference does it make, since they’re all purely mental constructs anyway?” as Coach O’Brian once told us.

Yeah, The Outfit goes out of its way to declare its Occidental roots. Nonetheless you will find many Oriental terms and martial arts weapons in use. There are two reasons: they are a good fit and many outsiders who are recruited into The Outfit come from martial arts backgrounds.

About two thirds of The Outfit’s Adepts are born into the organization and they will have been training in some way all their lives. For the other third there is a rather laid-back three-year training program.

The Outfit’s two Golden Axioms are:

#1} Nothing of lasting value ever results from haste.

And,

#2.} Pressure and anxiety is evil.

It is blameworthy to try to motivate people through pressure and anxiety…

{An exception is given for attacking enemies.}

But it is also blameworthy to allow pressure into your life. If you can’t possess, practice or pursue something without getting uptight about it or its possible loss, then you need to ruthlessly cut it out of your life.

Nonetheless, one of The Outfit’s Silver Axioms is to always cut yourself and others a good deal of slack.

I trained for three years at the village in Northern Georgia in the foothills of the Appalachians. It’s a small town of about thirty-five hundred with only about twelve hundred being trainees and Adepts. The rest are carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians, cooks, clerks, schoolteachers and children among other things.

Some of those children—whose parents are not Adepts—will join the ranks of Adepts someday.

I could give you a detailed topographic map pricked with a pinhole right where the town sits, a compass, detailed directions how to get there and the GPS coordinates and you probably couldn’t find the place even then. For that you’d need a guide who has been here, not once but several times.

The Outfit can hide things in plain sight and make you detour all around them while convinced that you are forging straight ahead.

The Outfit supplied me with a nice private room. The mess hall served three tasty and plentiful meals every day at no cost. They also paid me six hundred and fifty undeclared dollars in cash every month.

The pay went up every year. Now as a graduate and a casual—meaning that I was between assignments—I drew eight hundred and eighty dollars per month. It was kinda like a salesman’s guaranteed minimum.

The training covers five things: martial arts, acrobatics, people manipulation skills, meditation and visualization skills and finally throwing.

The Outfit has their trainees put in some time throwing almost everything that can be thrown: baseballs, Frisbees, chakram, Irish darts, spears, bolas, spikes, tomahawken, lumberjack throwing axes and even rocks.

The two items that they stress most though are Kunai knives and throwing stars.

I’d had high school and college wrestling, a third-degree black belt in judo and a couple years serving as a sparring partner for an aging pro boxer in exchange for boxing lessons. I’d stack my martial arts expertise up against anyone.

I came in at six foot and two hundred and forty pounds. I was fit and trying to get lighter hurt my strength and endurance while giving me a 24/7 obsession with food.

Nonetheless, I came in with a few tumbling skills unusual for someone my size: cartwheels, headstand, back walkovers and such. Under The Outfit’s expert tutelage, I added several more maneuvers that I’d never thought to master.

I figured that even if I was terrible at visualizing, who could tell? I did spend the recommended time every day in lone meditation—and generally a few minutes extra—often more than a few.

There was no way to practice people skills in a village full of cognoscenti. I just diligently memorized scripts and axioms.

My great weakness was in throwing knives—particularly left-handed.

I’d been pursuing the will-o-wisp of ambidexterity since the age of five or six. The list of things that I could do and do well left-handed was impressive. I could draw, paint, shoot a pistol, and shoot a left-hand bolt-action rifle or a left-handed bow. I could cut my meat or butcher an animal with my knife in my left hand. I used a left-handed saber.

Two things that I’d never been able to do at all well left-handed was write legibly and throw things accurately.

The Outfit encouraged trainees to be able to throw from unorthodox positions with either hand out to ridiculous ranges.

As my first year had drawn to a close, I was very afraid that my poor throwing would get me eliminated from the program. That fear turned out to be ill founded. Very few people are ever eliminated from the program against their will.

At any rate, I’d gotten into the habit of heading for the outdoor knife throwing range when weather allowed and practice my knife throwing. I got steadily better—even without using chi to guide the missile and to drive it harder.

The range is typical of many of The Outfit’s facilities. The targets are 4’x4’ slabs of end-grain pine. There are less exacting ways to make an end grain target but The Outfit laboriously piled and stacked ten-inch butts of 2”x4” s and fastened them together with both dowels and glue.

There are stacks of straw several feet behind the row of targets to make it hard to lose a knife regardless of how egregiously wide of the target it might fly.

O’Brian, who’d been my coach all through the training walked out to the range to speak to me.

“They have a mission they’re going to offer you. You have some special expertise that they feel will be helpful.

“Spoil, there are reasons why it’s been almost a year since you graduated and this is the first mission that you’ve been offered,” Coach said.

“Coach, I’m willing to serve The Outfit, but I’m also more than happy just to hang around being a casual. I’m not ambitious or greedy. I have more than enough,” I said.

************* ******************* **************************

I went to see Harold the dispatcher by myself. That was SOP. He might have special instructions for me. Also, if I opted not to take the mission there was no need for me to know who was going or what the detailed instructions were.

“You will be going against the Russian mob in Chicago. These dudes play a very brutal game,” Harold warned me.

**************** ******************* **************************

I went by my room to pick up some gear.

All the buildings in the town seem to be made of the same roughhewn lumber and dark brown paint like they use in every boy’s summer camp that I’ve ever seen.

Two-story buildings serve as dorms or barracks for single trainees and Adepts. They are built along the line of the old military barracks—except that the buildings are all subdivided into single rooms inside.

They don’t put the quarters all in one spot. They spread them more or less evenly and randomly throughout the settlement.

The rooms vary in size a bit. Mine is ten feet by thirteen.

Inside they dispense with the rustic roughhewn look. The walls are lined with amber colored knotty pine and most of the furnishings are from the village. There are many gifted craftsmen living here.

My room has a single bed, a chest of drawers, an armoire, a desk, chair and a recliner. They supplied a seven-shelf bookcase and there was a four-position horizontal gun rack solidly bolted to the wall.

I’d brought an industrial sized fan, several wall hangings and three bright colorful bed coverings with me when I arrived. I had a faux Navaho blanket, a tie-dyed bedspread and one in eye-popping psychedelic.

On my desktop is my plastic artist skull, several artist mannequins, a big plastic two-gallon pickle jar about two-thirds full of Magnetics, some Legos and my comically oversized windup alarm clock with the huge twin bells that were oversized even on the big clock.

I’d ordered a dorm refrigerator, microwave, toaster, blender, hot plate and electric coffee pot through the quartermaster and I’d picked up a big black beanbag chair at a yard sale.

That room is my home and it means a lot to me.

When I was in the US Army—busily trying to convince them that we weren’t right for each other…

They brought in a temporary platoon leader for a few days and he wanted us to repeat a marching cadence that contained the words:

“I like it here;

“I love it here;

“I’ve finally found a home.”

I got dressed down—I was surprised that I didn’t get worse—because I wouldn’t say the words or even lip-synch them.

Not even God Almighty on his throne has the authority to order someone to lie. God wouldn’t, because he is righteousness but I’m just saying.

I damn sure wasn’t going to tell an egregious lie like that at the beck of a buck sergeant filling in for a sergeant first class.

I can truthfully say that about the outfit though.

********** *************** ***********************

There is a reason that the outfit doesn’t stress firearms very much.

One of the most common and basic of the abilities—and one of the more powerful and versatile ones—is to create copies of yourself. They call it “Spawning”.

Metals don’t spawn at all well. Small metal objects like zippers or dental fillings seem to do okay—but nothing much more massive than a thimble will copy well.

Let’s say that I have a 1911A1 .45 Automatic. Let’s also say that I spawn two copies. My .45 will still be fine but both Alpha and Beta’s 1911A1s will be as bollixed as all Hell. The copied guns probably won’t fire. They’re likely to explode if they do fire.

It takes some serious chi to copy a 1911A1. I would be extremely likely to omit copying the pistol. While I can’t spawn what I don’t have, it is simple to omit whatever I chose to leave out.

Cast iron and wrought iron as well as lead copy fairly well. The old Japanese Kunai was a multi-tool used as a bricklaying trowel, a garden spade and a small pry bar more than as a knife. It has a very thick blade. And they were usually made of cast iron.

All those qualities made them good weapons to carry and copy.

No, the Ninja seldom if ever threw the damned things. People in the outfit watch martial arts movies and anime as much as anyone else though.

The fact is that people who diligently practice throwing for years tend to get very good at it. Then at some point one learns to use chi both to guide and flatten the Kunai’s trajectory and to add three to five hundred percent or more impact energy.

Our armorers had also come up with an obscure alloy that seemed to copy very well. We called it “Mystery Metal” since no one except the metallurgists seemed to know its composition.

It is heavier than aluminum and only marginally stronger than wrought iron. It comes in a rainbow of blue-white tones. The armorers have succeeded in turning out a dazzling array of layered Damascus-like composites of wrought iron and mystery metal.

You can’t make a good sword of wrought iron or of mystery metal, but some of the other groups must have better metallurgists or at least more accomplished metal workers than we do because squaring off against rival Adepts armed with big katanas, dao or gen isn’t unheard of.

How would I fight an Oriental swordsman who’d been mastering kendo, iaido and jodo since early childhood?

Given the opportunity, I’d cheat like Hell.

Use of the Saber is a legitimate martial art though modern-day fencers have gotten away from true combat applications, but there has been a resurgence of Historical European Martial Arts and traditional Polish style saber fighting.

I’d match my thirty-nine-inch blade left-handed saber against any Oriental adept. I’d take him far out into uncharted water and let him drown.

It is all kinda academic because our armorers can’t make me a saber with a blade that won’t snap like a piece of peanut brittle when blades are crossed. They did make me a matched pair of hangers though—right handed and left.

A hanger is a mini saber. Mine have twenty-five inch blades. Sometimes the guard is minimized along with the blade but mine have full-sized guards. Surprisingly a hanger gives up little utility in defense compared with a saber but it does suffer in offense. They do allow me to go through squads of knife wielding foes like Samson going through the Philistines though.

Although it is a bit short, I generally limit myself to the left hanger. It’s quite enough of a problem to hide one hanger under halfway normal clothing.

Be all that as it may. I’d been working with the armorers to develop a semi-automatic pistol that could spawn. That was one reason that I hadn’t been placed on a team or offered any missions—but there was no reason to tell Coach O’Brian that. Being an Adept means living much of your life on a “need to know” basis.

My pistol was made of wrought iron and mystery metal sandwiched in tens of thousands of tiny layers and it had the same approximate size and shape as a Star PD.

We’d made over a dozen of the small pistols but this was the only one that had proved able to spawn without picking up ruinous inclusions. It was a bit worrisome that there were only five magazines prepared.

That meant thirty-one shots on tap. Folks say that you’ll have killed all your opponents, been killed yourself, taken cover or have broken contact before you can possibly fire thirty-one rounds. This is less true of an Adept with skills that ordinary folks cannot equal.

Brass doesn’t spawn very well so the cartridge cases are also made of mystery metal and we’d found that a slightly lighter charge and round flat-point pure lead bullets worked best. I had a hundred and fifty of the loads. Running out of ammunition wouldn’t be a problem.

Since there was nothing to prevent me from carrying two pistols, I didn’t have to rely on the cranky little pistol—only the spawn that I threw would depend upon it.

The armorers had made a few muzzle-loading weapons prior to my Star.

Josh the leader of my new team was a fellow large enough to have been an NFL lineman and he carried a Colt Walker replica and sometimes a short barreled 10-gauge muzzle loading shotgun when conditions allowed.

Gerald was the second in command. He was an albino. If he had any firearms neither he nor anyone else felt the need to tell me. I really didn’t care.

Ladonna was the third team member. She was a six-foot-one and one-hundred-and-eighty-pound black amazon. She had three cap and ball revolvers—two .44 caliber replicas of the Colt Navy and a five-shot .375.

Organic materials spawn well so it was no problem for her revolvers to have pearl grips or for my Star to have stag grips.

The two men and I were supposed to pick up Ladonna in Knoxville on our way to Chicago. I didn’t need to know what she’d been doing apart from the rest of the team.

************** ****************** ******************************

We split up in Knoxville and drove two different cars into Chicago. We rented the cars at two different car rental agencies using fake ID and charge cards that The Outfit supplied. Even under torture, I couldn’t tell you what make of car Josh and Gerald were travelling in or what names that they used because I simply didn’t know.

Even if we passed them on the road I wouldn’t recognize them. It is relatively simple to use a mind effect to obscure facial recognition.

Yeah, I can see the effects if I really look. I made it a point not to look too deeply in route to Chicago—just in case.

Ladonna said that I drove too slowly and cautiously so she wouldn’t relinquish the wheel all the way to Chicago.

“Why do you keep staring at me?” she demanded.

“If you’re some sort of racist then spit it out. We don’t have to like each other to work together,” she said.

“First of all, everyone is racist. Get over it. Second, I’m sorry that you caught me looking at you. I may be blond and fair with glacial gray eyes, but my ideal woman has always been deep chocolate brown.

“There aren’t many black women in The Outfit—especially dark ones like you,” I told her.

“Don’t white girls turn you on at all?”

“A very few—mostly, they might as well be men,” I said.

“So, in essence, I’m the first woman that you’ve seen in a long time?” she said.

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Looking is free, but quit looking away when I glance your way. It makes me feel paranoid.

“Here, I want you to practice. Look me up and down while I look right at you,” she said.

That was a very hard thing to do.

My father frequently said that a young man that starts chasing girls and dating before the age of thirty is a sissy and probably a homo too. I never believed that myself, but what teen wants his father to think that he’s a pouf?

I made sure that he never caught me looking at a girl and I got a lot of my values from reading Victorian novels. I’ve always believed that for a gentleman to ever show overt sexuality unless he were one hundred percent convinced the feeling was mutual was the height of vulgarity and crudeness.

Misreading a situation and making an unwanted advance—even something so mild as to try to take the lady’s hand—was the greatest insult that a man could give a woman. It was insulting for you to think that she might return your interest when she did not.

Another rule I lived by was that a gentleman presumes that every female that he meets is a lady. Even when a woman has proved herself a whore and a pickpocket, he still treats her as if she were a lady.

I mean sure, break her arm if that’s what it takes to save your wallet, but don’t use coarse language or let your hands wander while you do it.

I’m not shy—not even around women really. If the purpose of the exercise is to be rude and obnoxious I can do so without the slightest reluctance. When sitting on my hands and trying desperately to think of something to say that helped my case…

That saw me staring off into space and given broken-off replies to all attempts at conversation.

Fortunately, there was little need to engage Ladonna in any sort of dialog.

************* **************** *******************************

When we got to Chicago it was daytime so we went straight to the hospital to meet our client.

I’d seen photos and even a couple videos of the old man. He was sixty-three years old and until a few weeks ago he’d been slim, active and agile.

A gang member had raped his daughter. She had pressed charges largely at the old man’s insistence. The gangster was tight with one of the Russian gangs. You couldn’t say that the old man and his daughter weren’t warned more than once. The old man had remained admirably obstinate even after a beating that cost him a kidney and much of the sight in one eye.

The old man and his daughter both disappeared the same day. They’d killed the daughter—after they’d repeatedly raped her and then tortured her.

What they had done to the old man was worse—far worse than mere torture and death.

They’d amputated both his arms close to the shoulder. Then they’d taken both of his legs close to the hip. They split his tongue just to add insult to injury and then they’d kept him injected full of LSD-25 for ten terror filled days.

Then they’d tranked him and left him on his doorstep early one morning for his wife to find.

Any butcher or maniac with a meat cleaver or machete could have cut off arms and legs, but they’d wanted him to live and be a lesson to others. The blood vessels had been neatly tied off and the stumps were well done. Sure, a doctor could have done it, but so could a surgical nurse or a veterinarian. Truth be told, I know enough to have done it—though I never would have.

The old man slurred his sibilants and drooled a bit, but he was surprisingly coherent. I suppose that his body had endured enough traumas without trying to fix his tongue. I’m not sure that you can fix a split tongue.

We talked with the old man about two and a half hours. We pumped him for every relevant detail. Then I set to work.

I was a reasonable portrait artist and I’d read a how-to about how police sketches are done and I’d practiced. I ended up with eight recognizable likenesses. The fact that the old man had been pumped full of hallucinogens might have been enough to thoroughly impugn his testimony in a court of law, but they were good enough for me.

The old man’s nephew pulled me to one side.

“I’m a reporter. I’m a sports reporter, but I still have contacts and my co-workers have contacts. The old-time mob is footing your fee here through what is supposed to be charitable contributions.

“I want to see the dirty SOBs who did this pay out the ass, but my conscious tells me that I should warn you. These old school guys are as crooked and as brutal as the Russians. They just go about it differently,” he said.

I thanked him briefly for the heads-up. Then I told the nephew and Ladonna that I needed to talk to the old man alone. Ladonna gave me a brief hard stare but I stared back just as hard and gnashed my teeth at her out of the nephew’s line of sight.

************* ******************* ***********************

“Some folks believe that it is an unforgivable sin to commit suicide. I’ve never believed that myself,” I began my spiel.

“The thing is, you shouldn’t tell a lie even if it costs you your life. God wouldn’t want you to lie. He wouldn’t ask you to do that.

“In your position, I’d be wanting someone to end it for me.

“So, unless you tell me that you’d rather go on living like this and say it with conviction…

“I’m going to end it for you,” I said.

His eyes teared and he placed a hand on my shoulder in gratitude. It seemed so right at the time that it wasn’t until much later that I remember the hand and wondered where he got it.

I drove my index finger through his skull into his brain. Since the chi sealed the skull against leakage there was an audible pop as I withdrew it. It is poor tradecraft to kill someone only once, so I drove my finger through his sternum as well.

Some Adepts have mastered chi finger to the point they can punch a fist through a man’s torso. A finger through the sternum into the heart is just as effective if less sensational.

I left a “do not disturb” sign on the door. A nurse would ignore it but Ladonna and I should be well clear of the general area before that happened.

“That wasn’t very professional,” Ladonna said as we rode the elevator down.

Just then the door opened to reveal a half dozen security guards waiting for us with drawn weapons in the lobby. I didn’t even know that Illinois had armed security guards.

“Apparently not,” I said.

For just the briefest instant I allowed myself to feel anger. I was tempted to draw my pistol and show them just how far they’d stepped outside of their class.

Neither of us could teleport nor become invisible.

Have you ever watched a stage magician do his tricks? Nine out of ten times the difficult part of the trick has already been accomplished before you even start watching to try to catch him at it.

Neither Ladonna nor I were ever actually at the hospital. We’d sent two wet spawn. When a spawn pops his cork, there is a human-sized vacuum formed and there is a characteristic “Pop!”

Witnesses? Never mind witnesses. Within a half-hour they will have convinced themselves that they’d seen something—anything besides two people vanishing before their eyes.

We hadn’t been wearing our own faces anyway.

************ *************** ********************

We were both checked into a single room in a medium quality hotel as per Outfit doctrine.

Ladonna left the door to the bathroom open as she showered. I wasn’t a child and I wouldn’t sneak a peek, but we often dealt with people with unreal skills. If somehow, someway someone managed to sneak past me into the bathroom, having the door open would make it marginally harder for him to neutralize Ladonna without me knowing.

“Ding-Dong!” Ladonna shouted in the shower.

That was her way of saying that she’d gotten her spawn’s memories.

************* ****************** *******************************

There are broadly speaking two types of spawn. Wet spawn can eat, eliminate and bleed. They can last for hours or days—possibly even longer but the investment of chi would become enormous.

Although wet spawn can eat or drink their assimilation isn’t on par with a human’s. When they run out of chi they send a request for more.

Wet spawn cease to exist when they decide to pop their own cork, when the original pops their cork for them, when they’re slain or when they run out of chi. In the first three cases one gets back at least a portion of the chi invested.

You always get all the spawn’s memories and experiences.

Broadly speaking, you must divide your chi evenly with your spawn. There are ways to cheat and hold back a bit extra for yourself, but that’s an advanced technique.

That means that if I can throw four wet spawn but I decide to limit myself to one, he gets twenty percent—not fifty percent—of my chi.

Incidentally a human—unlike a spawn—can survive exhausting all of his chi. He’ll be mighty drained until he generates more, but he can live.

The human brain has a bit of difficulty keeping track of multiple simultaneous time-lines. It resembles reading a novel that gives multiple first-person descriptions of the same event.

While the spawn is alive I have very little contact or control over him. I can sense his chi level and I can choose to terminate him. I can talk to him. I can give hand signals or I can phone him, but I have no special connection to him.

Dry spawn last three to four minutes at most. His skin is about a quarter inch thick and tough but he’s hollow inside. Pierce his skin with so much as a hatpin and the spawn pops. Strike him two or three stout blows and he’ll pop.

Dry spawn cost little chi, but when he pops you don’t get any chi or experience back.

Wet spawn can throw dry spawn if they have the chi, but it is axiomatic that wet spawn cannot throw other wet spawn.

********** ************ ******************************

Ladonna came in from the shower.

“Gather your things, we’re leaving,” she said.

I’ve never met an Adept who could see the future. If I did, I’d think that the source of such ability had to be daemonic. Quite a few Adepts seem to get premonitions or forerunners though. They’re usually accurate and I take them seriously.

“We can leave the car,” I said.

We had several sets of fake ID and charge cards. We’d left nothing behind in the vehicle.

I placed my Star in one hand and my left-hand hanger in the other and threw two spawn. All three of us sheathed the small sword and the Star. Both of my spawn checked to make sure that the four extra magazines and the Kunai knives had also spawned.

It would be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence if they hadn’t, but it was procedure.

Ladonna also threw two spawn.

She had a Browning Highpower and a double-barrel 20-Gauge with barrels just barely long enough to be legal. She loaded it with magnum loads of buffered and plated #4 birdshot and the gun had custom extra-full chokes tuned to throw the tightest possible pattern with her pet load.

At very close range—about as far away as you can spit—birdshot can do impressive amounts of damage—more than buckshot or a slug. Farther than across a medium room though and it rapidly loses effectiveness.

She’d told me that didn’t concern her. She had her pistols for longer-range shots.

One of her and one of me exited our door and went left, and then one of me and one of her exited and went right.

Within a second or two there was gunshots. It sounded like there was at least two AK-47s on full-auto—one on either end of the hallway.

One of my spawn went down, but not before his side was all clear and he’d gotten a good look all around.

I threw a single dry spawn and handed him two Kunai knives. It takes about as much chi to spawn a Kunai knife as it does to spawn the dry spawn himself. I had several extra Kunai knives in my gear, but chi might soon be a factor.

My spawn looked up and down the hallway and threw his knives in less than a second. One hit the sole remaining gunman right in his eye and into the brain. The other penetrated the man’s bullet resistant vest and then his sternum.

I was wearing a vest of sorts—a rather weak one. It wouldn’t stop 9mm or +P .38 Specials but it was all that I could wear and move freely. I’d always figured that even if a round penetrated the vest it would have lost some of its potentially tissue destroying energy doing so.

My remaining wet spawn had taken a round to his right hand that had mangled the first three fingers. One of Ladonna’s wet spawn seemed to be gut-shot but mobile.

I whipped a quick tourniquet on his wrist for him and helped him sheath his hanger. When he’d lost his Star along with most of the fingers on his right hand he’d went medieval.

“Having your right hand blown off hurts,” he said.

“Did you think that it wouldn’t?” I asked him.

I picked up a long barreled but pistol gripped double-barreled 12-Gauge off of the floor for him and made sure that it was loaded.

I took the Star and two of the magazines from the wet spawn’s belt and handed them to the dry spawn. He’d already reclaimed his Kunai knives.

“You and the wounded Ladonna take the service elevator to the basement,” I told them.

“Why?” Ladonna started to ask.

“He has less than two minutes left—but if this one dies his pistol and magazines will vanish too,” I explained.

“You two, ride the main elevator to the lobby. Hold out as long as possible,” I said.

My duplicate stared into my eyes and gave a brief nod of assent and respect.

Within a few minutes—if I lived that long—we’d be one again and all duality would have been left behind. For that moment, we were two different beings and I was the one willing to sacrifice him to preserve my mission and my life.

Ladonna had broken down her shotgun and stowed it. She had acquired an AK, found a fresh magazine to load it with and had stuck another magazine into the front of her pants.

“The team in the basement encountered light resistance but they cleared it,” she said to me.

**************** ******************* ****************************

As the elevator stopped I created three dry spawn and launched them out of the door in all directions. I gave them all a pair of Kunai. I wasn’t long for this world. I would certainly bleed out, get shot or simply run out of mission well before I ran out of chi. There was no point in hoarding chi.

I wished that I could have given them all whole right hands, but you can’t spawn what you don’t have.

I heard two of my dry spawn pop as well as Ladonna’s dry clone and then the wet one rushed out into the lobby. I heard many rounds fired. It sounded like Mac 10s or Uzis. I’d heard both and I’d fired a Mac 10 a couple times. I wasn’t anything like an authority.

The shotgun was clumsy for one-handed use. It was meant to be halfway concealable without being an NFA weapon. No one had ever intended to fire it one handed like Roadwarrior.

I ran up to point blank range and let one rapid firing enemy have both barrels. I drew my hanger and looked all around.

The wet Ladonna and my single remaining dry spawn were just finishing off the last. I’d been shot again, more than once, but I was too numb to tell where.

I took one last look all around on the off chance that my eyes might see something important and then I popped my cork.

*********** *************** ************************

As we rode the elevator down to the basement, I said to Ladonna:

“Can you send a couple of dry spawn out to draw fire? I’m a bit wasted right now.”

“I can do better than that Honey,” she said to me.

She threw off two wet spawn. They stepped out into the basement with a pair of six-shooters in each of their hands.

“All clear!” one of Ladonna’s spawn shouted.

“Take this,” Ladonna said to a spawn as she handed her the AK and the spare magazine.

“I’ll take this,” she said while grabbing one of the spawned girl’s pearl handled Navy pistols.

We left via a service exit. Ladonna held the pistol low. Once we were on a busy city street the pistol abruptly vanished.

She’d kept the pistol ready for six extra rounds right at the outset as well as having the spawn listening for gunfire until we were almost clear.

We went through a dozen tail-spotting and tail-losing maneuvers.

There was a Dairy Queen three blocks further away from the hotel.

“I’m beat. I need food to recharge my chi. I need to sit down for awhile. Most of all I need to make a deposit in the porcelain bank very badly,” I told her.

She laughed at my lack of stamina, but she agreed.

*********** ************* ************************

“What do you want?” Ladonna asked.

“Get me a large cone, a large vanilla malt, a hotdog, a fish sandwich and French fries,” I said.

“I’m headed for the restroom,” I added.

After we’d eaten and rested for awhile, Ladonna had gone into the women’s restroom to send a scrambled text to Josh and Gerald. We had several burn phones with us and even so they were kept in foil wrap except at designated contact times. Phones can be hacked to send out homing signals.

“None of those people who came after us were Adepts,” Ladonna commented as we walked briskly down the sidewalk.

“That means that they were probably Russian mob. That means they’re already onto us. Josh said to go to ground, stay out of sight and await further orders.

“I memorized a list of safe locations. I’ll take you to one,” she added.

Some of what she said was coded of course.

************* **************** **********************

We had taken a long circuitous route to end up in a run-down crackhead hotel. As I walked into the room I took several deep breaths through my nose. My father had told me that bed bugs have a very distinctive pissy smell. No bed bugs.

I pulled the bedspread back and sprinkled sevin dust all around and then remade it.

I took my 1911A1 out of my pants—summer special holster and all—and placed it on the small round table beside the bed. Wallowing around on a holster will ruin it very rapidly.

“The bed should be safe now. Leave the covers up so you won’t be rolling around in sevin dust. You can sleep first,” I said.

Ladonna walked up until she was right in my face. She took my Star out of my waistband and laid it beside my full-sized.45 on the table. My left hanger was next.

She kissed me and then she hooked my heel with her foot so that I fell backward onto the bed. She wiggled and crawled astraddle me.

“Now is the time…” she started to say in a curious monotone voice.

It was a coded signal of course. Men knocked the flimsy door in with one of those two-man battering rams and rushed into the room.

My guns and knives were all a couple steps away on the table and Ladonna had me at a severe disadvantage. Someone gave me an injection. A couple of the others used stun guns about the same time. Then they forced a pillow over my face.

************* **************** **************************

When I woke I felt like I had been unconscious for geological eras. I felt achy and cranky and my mouth was both very dry and tasted incredibly foul.

“So, you’re awake,” a fellow in a blood stained surgical scrub shirt said.

He held an extra big empty syringe in his right hand. I guess that was what had awakened me.

“Look up,” he said while pointing upward.

There was a full-length mirror on the ceiling. I could see myself clearly. My arms were bound out to my sides as if I was going to be crucified lying down. Most of my legs were gone leaving just a freshly bandaged stump about six inches long on each side.

“The first time that you refuse to answer I’ll put you under again and when you awaken you’ll be minus your right arm,” the doctor said.

There were four men in the room besides the doctor. They all wore expensive dark suits. None of them wore ties and bright colorful shirts seemed the rule. They all left the top couple buttons undone—exposing hairy chests, gold chains and prison style monochrome tattoos.

A man with blond hair stepped forward to play the “good cop”.

“My friend, think of all the things that you can still do with what you have. Don’t force us to turn you into a total freak,” he said in a sympathetic and heavily accented voice.

“We’ve been at some pains to drain your vital energy. None of your tricks will work here,” the doctor chimed in.

“And even if you managed to create a copy of yourself, he’d be as legless and helpless as you,” the doctor rambled on.

Mind control starts with getting your own chi to resonate. I had never been particularly good at it. With my legs gone, along with over a dozen minor chakras and meridians I found that not only was it far easier to get the chi to resonate but also it resonated at a notably higher—and more effective—frequency.

I took over the doctor’s mind momentarily. I had him suck the big syringe full of air and then ram it deep into the Russian good cop’s right eye. He filled the pierced eye with a syringe full of air just in case a big syringe needle wasn’t painful and destructive enough.

The Russian reacted on instinct. He drew what looked like a 9mm Beretta and emptied the magazine into the doctor. He had the presence of mind to reload and transfer the pistol to his left hand before he pressed a clean handkerchief to what was left of his eye.

The door opened and two Oriental gentlemen walked in. They had a brief parlay in Korean while the Russians reverted to Russian.

Guess what dudes: while I have little ability with languages, I’m persistent. A Half-hour per day for three months with a Pimsleur’s stage one, two and three makes me fairly fluent in one language—sometimes I have to repeat so many lessons that it takes me four or five months to finish. That doesn’t matter. I get there eventually.

Learning languages is a sort of obsession with me for one simple reason. I hate for people to be able to talk around me. I can’t learn every language on Earth, but every widely spoken language that I can knock in the head cuts the number of people who can talk around me dramatically.

I was well into my thirteenth language when I started this mission. I can speak and understand both Russian and Korean.

The head Korean was a fiftyish dude with a shaved head, barrel chest and wide shoulders. He gave off a faint aura of a metabolism heavily augmented at every level by large amounts of chi.

“What is the meaning of this?” he snapped at the head Russian.

“Your instructions were to leave the interrogating to us,” he finished.

“We just softened him up a bit for you comrade,” the one-eyed Russian said in a “gee-whiz” joking tone.

The Korean hit the Russian in his neck with the little finger side edge of his extended hand. The Russians head flew clean off.

That was heavy-duty! I was impressed. It also gave me the distraction that I was hoping for.

Could a legless Adept throw spawn with legs? Perhaps, but it wasn’t going to happen today. Imagine a legless man with about three times the upper body strength of an Olympic gymnast and far more agility.

While I can’t throw spawn arbitrarily far away, I do have several feet of discretion to play with.

While the doc half blinded the Russian, I’d thrown two dry spawn. The left handed one hid behind a taboret with surgical instruments covering the top. The right-side spawn scrabbled to get under a low shelf on a table.

While the stump of the Russian’s neck still spurted blood the right-hand spawn grabbed the pistol that landed no more than a foot from him. The left spawn grabbed a half a dozen of the disposable scalpels off the taboret.

The spawn with the Beretta shot the boss Korean right in his calcaneus. Adept or not, when your ankle is shattered with no warning, you’re gonna fall. Even as the boss fell my spawn fired three double taps at the heads of the three Russians. Five of the headshots connected.

A scalpel with a cheesy plastic handle is a very poor throwing knife, but with a chi assist it can fly true at short range and cut a swath almost an inch wide.

The first scalpel hit the tall skinny Korean right in his Achilles tendon, practically severing it. The second missile went through the thick part of the calf. The third blade half severed the patellar tendon at the knee. The fourth and fifth scalpels went through the thigh in search of the femoral artery. One penetrated the right leg and almost went all the way through the heretofore-undamaged left leg.

The last scalpel must have been aimed at the throat but instead it buried itself in the man’s right deltoid even as he was reaching for me.

Even as the boss hit the ground and my right spawn sent a bullet into the man’s shoulder, the boss Korean popped. He was a spawn. Imagine that.

The tall skinny Korean wasn’t a spawn. I got that as he touched me. He had to actually be there for his mind reading to work.

As his leg was cut from beneath him, he fell towards me and then he fell on top of me with a hand on my forehead.

There was a dead doctor, a headless Russian and three Russians who’d been shot in the head. The boss Korean had popped his cork and the mind reader had a bollixed leg. I had collected all the intelligence and done all the damage that I could reasonably expect to…

So, I popped my cork.

************* ****************** ***********************

“Sweet Jesus,” I said as a brief prayer as the memories of the mutilated wet spawn hit me.

I’d spawned in the Dairy Queen restroom. I’d given my spawn my 1911A1 and its spare magazines. I’d called Josh on my cell phone and asked him to come pick me up.

I’d also planted a small homing device on the fake Ladonna. That was why I faked exhaustion, so I wouldn’t be expected to throw any wet spawn any time soon.


********** *************** ************************

A week later I made contact with the fake Ladonna.

“How did you make me?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“The Outfit knew that you were an imposter when they briefed me for this mission. How I don’t know.

“I’d have known in an instant though. Ladonna was a close personal friend and you killed her.

“I pleaded to be the one to take you out,” I said.

“You can’t take me out,” she said. “I’m far too strong for you.”

She made a gesture and there were four wet spawn surrounding her. Each spawn held a curved bladed Chinese dao sword.

“I feigned weakness and fatigue,” I told her.

I gestured and threw five spawn and each one drew a right hand and a left-hand hanger.

Each of her wet spawn threw two sword-bearing dry spawn.

I gave a brief stage chuckle and each of my wet spawn threw three dry spawn.

When she wasn’t impersonating Ladonna, she was one of the Adepts who eschew firearms. That’s why I could try out my twin hangers against her dao.

It was purely a matter of time since I had her soundly outnumbered. Besides she knew that the fight was being observed and even if she somehow defeated me she would still die.

She hadn’t kept Ladonna’s form, but she was still black. I assumed that was her true form. As she lay dying though, she became a Chinese looking woman with long straight hair.

I put my hand on her forehead and grabbed a few random bits of useful data as she expired.

The best way to explain it…

When the Korean mind reader was prying into my mind while assuming that I was an original—and when I popped my cork—it was like surprising a burglar and having him leave a large but random assortment of burglary tools behind.

Some were very useful. Some others were only useful occasionally. Some were fragmentary or beyond my ability to assimilate and some rapidly faded away like dew.

Now that I had the basics though, I could use my own chi to strengthen my mind powers both for defense and offense.

************ ****************** **************************

“What are you so glum about?” Josh asked as we travelled back to the camp in Georgia.

“I knew that there were cruel abominations in this world but that was the first time seeing a victim up close and then being a victim.

“If that had been my real body I’d be ruined for life,” I said.

“Never trust anyone completely. Watch your six diligently. Never go into danger if there is a way to send a copy,” Josh said.

“I’m putting you in for a raise in pay grade and I’m requesting that you be permanently assigned to my team,” Josh said.

That was okay, but it failed to cheer me up.

“Are you still sad?” Josh asked.

“Ladonna was a couple years ahead of me in the program, but Coach Brown put us together. I tutored her in the martial arts and she helped me to learn to throw well and how to do some mind skills. I’ll really miss her,” I said.

“Ladonna isn’t dead,” Josh said.

“But I saw her body in the fake Ladonna’s memories,” I said.

“Very few Adepts can throw five wet spawn. The natural tendency would be to go for even more. I’d recommend that you stop trying to increase the number any further and work on the chi level and quality of your copies—at least for awhile.

"Ladonna can only throw three wet spawn but she has a number of tricks that they can play. One of the tricks that Ladonna’s spawn can do is to hang around for twenty minutes to an hour after they’re slain. That can convince someone that she’s really dead. I’ve never seen anyone else who could do that,” Josh said.

“You can talk to her when we get back to camp,” he added.

That cheered me up.

[rvm45]

Chapter Two









It turned out that the Koreans wanted very badly to get their hands upon at least one Adept from The Outfit for reasons still unknown. We’d known for some time that there were at least two different Korean organizations. Some of the fallout data we collected in the wake of their botched kidnapping allowed us to ascertain that these Adepts belonged to an organization from North Korea.

The old man, his granddaughter and the nephew were all very real but small faction of the Russian mob had manipulated them. The Russians in turn had been hired and coached by the North Koreans.

The Outfit felt obliged to follow through on their contract and they’d sent several other teams in addition to Josh’s and they struck some hard blows after we’d left.

It happened that Ladonna and I had about five months between missions and we trained diligently.

Josh’s main abilities were a keen tactical mind and strength and power far above most Adepts. He could only throw two or three spawn on his best day, but even when divided four ways his chi levels were very high and he replenished them much faster than most.

Gerald was a virtuoso at throwing wet spawn. He could throw as many as six wet spawn. Josh’s spawn were at power level six, Gerald’s would all be close to four.

There are some differences both in capacity and talent, but generally once a trainee has accumulated the chi and has learned to do something useful with it, his power level will be close to “one”.

Generally, you can’t throw any sort of spawn at all until you have enough to make two spawn of a power level about point four with a remainder of point four or point five for yourself. It is difficult to impossible to cast a wet spawn with power much below point four and even if you did manage to do it they would be spectacularly useless.

Chi tends to grow rather linearly until about level three-and-a-half to perhaps five. Then someone’s power can get much harder to measure meaningfully. There are any number of specialized chi that can only be applied in a rather limited manner.

It was like the ability to read minds with skin-to-skin contact that I’d picked up from my encounter with the North Korean. None of my spawn had that ability—only me. It wasn’t of much value in hand-to-hand combat, but I was closing in on having three points worth of chi set aside for mind reading. I couldn’t utilize that chi to spawn or to throw harder or even to heal myself. It was good for little else but mind reading.

Whatever resources I had for generating mind reading chi worked independently of the rest of my system. It wasn’t generated at the expense of other chi but in addition to it. It was also conceivable that someday I’d find other specialized uses for that chi.

But it gets very difficult to compare two people’s strength when they each have more than a half-a-dozen different kinds of chi with only a couple kinds in common.

Chi ratings for straight-up power fighters like Josh and Gerald are more reliable gauges of overall power. Even then, Josh had exceptional night vision and the strength and range of Gerald’s hearing was very high.

Superior senses—sight, sound, touch, and smell, even balance—need very little chi to keep them running—rarely more than point one at the very most. Most Adepts senses have all been tweaked at least a bit. It’s more a question of degree.

I had been able to cast five wet spawn at about one point four or one point five each when I’d fought the Ladonna imposter. Josh had advised me to try to raise each spawn’s power dramatically before going for higher numbers of spawn.

I’d gotten each of the spawn close to two, but I’d also added several game changers to the mix.

First of all, after I’d thrown five spawn at close to power level two, I threw a second wave.

Sure, once a wet spawn or two is destroyed many Adepts can cannibalize the returned chi to throw another and generally somewhat weaker spawn or two. I was throwing three wet spawn with power ratings marginally above one in my second wave and I still had a general power rating of almost two and a half.

If I chose to go for pure numbers, each of the outer five could throw three dry spawn immediately after he’d been thrown. Each of the second wave weaker spawn could throw two dry spawn each while I—the original—could throw two or three dry spawn myself.

That was an awfully big crowd of me to have walking around.

Added to Gerald’s proclivity to multiply and Josh’s brute power it made us a very powerful strike force.

Ladonna’s main power was to create a variety of illusions. A few of her illusions relied solely on mind power and a couple others—like the persistent cadaver—were completely the result of physical manipulations but most of her strongest illusions wove both the physical and the mental seamlessly together.

She could throw three wet spawn with power levels close to two. Working with me, she’d managed to throw a “second wave”—if you want to call it that—of one wet spawn of about point seven power level while she’d managed to increase the power level of her original a tenth of a point.

I’d learned how to detect and to break free of mind attacks skirmishing with her while she’d added some ability to overcome purposeful resistance.

“You really need to work on building up your general chi reserves,” Josh told me. “Bulk up the second three first of all, but you can use more power in your first five as well. I’m serious. There is little point in having forty wet spawn all with a power rating of point four.”

One new team member was named “Randy”. He was tall and skinny to the point of being emaciated. He threw one very pale and sickly-looking spawn with a power level of point seven. I’d never before seen anyone with the ability to throw one and only one wet spawn. There seemed very little point to creating a single spawn of such weakness.

The other fellow was named “Cary”. While he didn’t look any too stout, Cary looked in far better condition than Randy.

“I can’t throw a spawn—not even one,” Cary said sadly.

“What can you do?” Ladonna asked sympathetically.

“I’m a rat runner,” he said.

I’d never heard the term and I said as much. Cary reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out a rat. It wasn’t white like most pet rats, but jet-black in color.

“This is Bocephas. I have about three-dozen rats that I’m linked to. I can send them into places that a man can’t go. They can gather intel or commit acts of sabotage. I can only stay telepathically linked to one rat at a time, but I can move back and forth between them very rapidly. They’re stronger, faster and far more agile than normal rats and they have intelligence well above normal too,” Cary said.

“Let me show you something else, “Cary said and placed the rat on the ground. “Try and catch him.”

I reached for the rat and he seemed to explode into all directions at once. The rat had momentarily produced a dozen spawn. Nine of them only lasted a couple of instants and then they popped all but three wet spawn and the original rat—now all several feet apart. They all threw off another eight dry spawn each. The third time they spawned they only threw off five dry spawn each.

Cary walked over about thirty feet to where a single jet-black rat stood sniffing at the grass and clover and picked him up.

“He’s exhausted his chi for the moment, but they recover very quickly. Josh said that you can do contact reads. That’s similar to how we communicate. Take him and read him. You won’t hurt him,” Cary said.

I took the proffered rat and cradled him in one hand while I stroked his head with an index finger.

A riot of unfamiliar sensory impressions flooded into my mind. The rat could hear very well and his ears were far better than mine in the higher ranges including a big swath of supersonic frequencies. His smell was far better and permitted far more subtle nuances than my own sense of smell admitted. He was very tightly connected to his vibrissae.

It was his sense of sight that really rocked me though.

“Rats see in black and white. That’s less than ideal for my purpose of course. I’ve enlarged the eyes, thickened the optic nerve, enriched the retina and enlarged the visual cortex in my rats a great deal,” Cary relayed to me telepathically through the rat.

“If you have a rat able to receive my signal you can use him as a communication device. The signal can’t be intercepted, blocked or even detected. Unfortunately, you and Randy are the only telepaths on the team,” Cary added.

“You won’t catch me touching a dirty nasty rat. Rats are filthy and germ-ridden,” Randy sniffed.

“They’re no dirtier than your pigeons,” Cary said.

“Someone who can’t cast a single wet spawn is hardly an Adept,” Randy said.

“I have to admit, you can cast a single wet spawn—a very weak single spawn,” Cary said.

While they’d been arguing Randy had been summoning his pigeons from somewhere close by without any of us noticing.

A huge flock of pigeons—well over a hundred strong—fell out of the sky seemingly from nowhere. That was only because we hadn’t been scanning the sky of course but it was still dramatic. The pigeons dive-bombed Cary and Bocephas. They pecked at the rat’s head and made a point of targeting Cary’s eyes.

Didn’t I say that I had a few game changers in my repertoire? I was about to demonstrate one.

I drew air from all around me. I shoved it all into a sphere of compressed air about thirty inches in diameter. I could only get the air up to about a hundred and thirty-five pounds, but I was working at increasing it. Eventually I wanted at least five hundred PSI.

Then I spun the air in my spherical force field faster and faster. I got the revolutions close to eighteen hundred RPMs. I wanted to increase my maximum rotational speed eventually as well.

Then I really cranked down and ratcheted the ball another three inches smaller in diameter. The smaller the sphere the more concentrated the blast. I threw the ball with both hands like a man passing a basketball or throwing a medicine ball.

I could only get the velocity up in the high ninety miles per hour range—about the same speed as a major league fastball pitch in baseball.

I threw it upward into the largest concentration of pigeons. It hit several of them before the threshold was reached and the chi containment field abruptly vanished.

Ever hear one of the one hundred PSI semi tires pop? It is loud.

My air ball threw out quite enough force in all directions to kill at least fifty pigeons and maim another twenty or thirty of them too badly to fly.

I didn’t stand around with my thumb up my behind awaiting developments.

I had four wet spawn on Randy fast—before the last pigeon had dropped from the sky. Two of the spawn drove Kunai through his jeans legs and into the ground beneath. The other two drove knives through his palms and then kneeled on his forearms in case the blades through his palms weren’t enough to convince him.

His single weak spawn moved to intercept me. I quickly got behind the clumsy copy and cut his throat from ear-to-shining-ear.

My main intent hadn’t been to read him. Actually, my reading ability wasn’t on my mind at all as I grabbed his chin with my right hand.

A load of twisted hatred, pain and fear along with a fairly comprehensive view of the convoluted consciousness of the bird master gushed into my mind.

I made a bone deep cut on the right side of his face—from the corner of his nostril to within a quarter inch of the outer corner of his right eye.

“Don’t kill him!” Josh shouted.

It was half command and half a request one would make to keep a friend from getting in trouble.

“Peace,” I replied.

I cut across the first cut at ninety degrees and neatly bisected my first cut.

“I should kill you now and be done with it. You’ve already felt my blade cut your throat when I slew your candy assed spawn. If I ever see you and you are not walking as rapidly as your spindly limbs will take you in the other direction…” I paused momentarily for effect.

“Then I will presume that you’re challenging me. I’ll kill you—no questions asked and no second chances. Now when I release you, go tell Cary that you’re worthless—I won’t make you lie and say that you’re sorry—and then go away,” I said.

************* ***************** **************************

“Whore’s spit!” Josh said. “Groups of Adepts are on the move all across America and the world. Our mission is to go to Atlanta and help gather intel. Even folks with no idea that our village is so close—and Adept groups aren’t likely to overlook such a thing—still consider Atlanta a major hub and crossroad.

“Rats are very good at sneaking and gaining intel at night but birds have a big advantage during the day. Another thing, most people aren’t horrified to see pigeons. And we don’t have any aerial surveillance capability at all now,” Josh said.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Nah, on second thought, I’m really not sorry. We’re well rid of that mental case,” I amended.

“How many of those air bombs can you throw?” Josh asked.

“About three. The third one will be a bit anemic and after that the power drops dramatically with every shot,” I said.

“How about your wet spawn?” Josh asked.

“The outer five can all throw one each—just a bit stronger than my number three. Any second air bomb they throw—or any the inner three throws will be more noisemaker than anything else,” I said.

“Why do you call them ‘inner’ and ‘outer’?” Josh asked.

“I think of the first five as an offensive force intended primarily to take the fight to the enemy. The second three are more of a Praetorian guard intended to hang back and protect me. Of course, once most or all the outer five are put out of action then it is time for the inner spawn and any recycles that I can manage to cannibalize to go on the offensive,” I explained.

“That’s why you saw some utility to Ladonna’s single weak second wave spawn. If her main duty is to protect Ladonna then she is better than nothing,” Josh said.

“Yeah, I’m not sure if she’d be better off with two point seven second wave spawn or a single one point four. The decision is largely made for you by your body and chi system,” I said.

“Do you have any other surprises?” Josh asked.

“A couple small ones. Nothing anywhere close to the air bombs,” I said.

“Let me see if the dispatcher can get us some sort of long range and hopefully aerial surveillance. We should be leaving for Atlanta within ten days,” Josh said.

[rvm45]

Chapter Three









“Uncle Ralph stuck his hand inside my panties and rubbed me,” Gina said.

“Okay,” was all David said.

David was eleven years old and Gina was eight. His father had been an Adept and he’d died when David was six. A year later his mother had moved back in with her parents who lived on a farm outside the village. She was not an Adept and she’d never fully grasped the village’s quaint mannerisms and clannishness.

David had been surprised how little was known about the village just a few miles outside of its territory. Many thought that the village was mere superstition and hyperbole. Several older boys from the school had beaten David very badly when he stubbornly refused to recant his claim that his father had come from the village.

“Why didn’t you tell them what they wanted to hear? They’d have quit beating you once you said what they wanted you to say,” his mother said.

“For one thing, it wasn’t true. For another, if I’d let them intimidate me I’d have lost face,” David replied.

“What if they’d went too far and beaten you to death?” David’s mother demanded.

“Game over. I win,” David said.

“Life isn’t a game,” she said.

“No, life is nowhere near significant enough to qualify as a game,” David replied.

She’d lost her temper and slapped him in reply.

“Thus, obviously demonstrating the superiority of your logic,” David said.

When he was fully recovered, he’d taken a two-pound ballpein hammer and caught each of the older boys alone. He’d managed to put enough fear of God into the peckerwoods that they didn’t dare even hint that David was involved in their misadventures.

************ ***************** ***************************

When his mother had been killed in a car crash, his mother’s side of the family had shuffled David and Gina around in a most ungenteel fashion until they’d ended up with his mother’s cousin Cornelia.

Cousin Cornelia thought that it was undignified being called “Cousin” and insisted that the siblings call her “Aunt Cornelia”. David refused of course.

*********** **************** **********************

David got into Cousin Cornelia’s stash and stole two of the yellow four-milligram Dilaudid tablets. He crushed them into a very fine powder and poured the powder into Ralph’s pint of McCormick Bourbon as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

Once Ralph was dead to the world David filled the big cast iron skillet with Wesson Oil and brought it to a burbling roiling boil. He pushed “Uncle” Ralph forward in the easy chair until his torso lay solidly against his thighs. He poured the boiling grease evenly from the nape of the pederast’s neck down to the crack of his ass.

The effect was electrifying to say the least. Ralph abruptly lost all interest in sleeping off his boozy high. He slam-danced all over the living room singing—screaming paeans of praise to someone or something every step of the way.

As the man completed his second agonized lap around the living room, David struck him a resounding smack upside his head with the hot skillet.

David took a spray can of black paint and put these simple words on the front room wall:

“Pick someone else’s sister to feel up you buck-toothed pervert.”

David already had bug-out bags for him and Gina with some food and a couple changes of clothing along with a couple extra days’ worth of underwear and stockings. He had Ralph’s Buck lockback, a couple of butcher knives from the kitchen and Cornelia’s old H&R Breaktop—a six-shot .32 S&W Long.

He hesitated but at the last moment he’d dialed “911” and left the phone off its hook. He hoped that he and Gina would have at least a half hour’s start before someone came by to check if there was a bona-fide emergency or not.

Four hours later David had found his way through the mental labyrinth that surrounded the village. He’d been in and out of the village a number of times with his father. The village recognized him as a friend. Even if it hadn’t, David had a very sharp mind with very penetrating powers of observation.

************* ***************** ******************************

David had an IQ of 167. The fact often sent him into brooding melancholy.

David had his own classification system for genius. Those geniuses with IQs of 140-175 were minor geniuses. Those with IQs between 175 and 205 were major geniuses and those above 205 were super geniuses.

The way he viewed it, life had cast him into a grim no-holds-barred scuffle for prestige and status with folks far better equipped for the struggle than he was. Anyone who outperformed him in any mental task shamed him. Intent or knowledge didn’t matter.

A man on the other side of the World could put shame on him. It mattered not at all that they would never meet or know of each other—if that man learned something faster or with less effort than David—then he shamed David. God might not be keeping score, but reality was. Unlike God, reality was an unforgiving scorekeeper.

David mastered several mnemonic systems and he practiced them until he was very good at them. He memorized facts and formulas relentlessly—trig tables, logarithms, physical constants—whatever. He drove himself to learn methods of doing very complicated sums in his head.

He learned to handle binary, octal, duodecimal and hexadecimal arithmetic as easily as he did decimal calculations.

Then he learned about The Outfit’s chakra tree.

The Outfit taught that chakras were horizontal flywheels—at least the seven major chakras were horizontal. Some of the minor chakras had all sorts of orientations.

The Outfit taught that some folks’ chakras turned clockwise and others turned counterclockwise. It varied with the individual, but The Outfit believed that it was not arbitrary and there were means to test to see which way a given chakra turned.

A few folks would have a pair of twin chakras at one or more sites. In that case one chakra would turn one way and the other turned the opposite. Double chakras often meant better ability to generate various kinds of chi.

The chakras both generated and stored chi, but they themselves consisted of chi—kinda like E=MC2. A chakra could store chi by spinning faster, becoming denser, becoming thicker or becoming bigger around—and they used all of those strategies.

One of the first visualizations was to imagine a chakra with a perpendicular handle sticking out. Grab the handle with an imaginary hand and give it a crank to store more chi. The clockwise chakra needed a left hand while counterclockwise flywheels needed a virtual right hand.

Twin chakras could both be cranked at once. The virtual hands passed through each other without incident since they were immaterial.

David found that he had five twin chakras. The top of the head, the one about where the pineal gland was and the one near the thyroid were all very influential on the brain, mind and intellect. David boosted the chi in those chakras with single-minded determination.

The hand-crank exercise was only a demonstration tool for beginners. It was a very inefficient way to generate chi. David went through the other chi bulking exercises that he’d mastered. When those were topped off for the moment he’d sit and manually turn his mental chakras for hours at a time.

When David was fifteen he’d applied to go through The Outfit’s three-year training program—but then they’d noticed what David had been up to on his own.

David was a master hacker and an electronics wizard. He’d been working on remotely controlled drones—both flying and creeping.

Josh’s group needed some sort of aerial surveillance and so David ended up in the field with only a month of training and his own hodge-podge dabbling at chi building.

*********** ************* *********************

Spoil’s Story:

We were in Atlanta to try to keep tabs on what all the Adepts flooding the town were up to. We didn’t have programs so we didn’t know who the players were or whose team they played for. At least a couple of the Adept groups were using gangs as cat’s-paws. That added a whole other level of complexity to the game.

As I saw the situation, it was pretty much a hopeless task. I said so but I didn’t harp on my opinion. Even if we couldn’t track anything close to all the rival Adepts we might still get a handle on what some of the other groups were up to.

I had never given much thought to Atlanta except to go wide around it when travelling to avoid the metropolitan traffic snarls. I’d thought of it as being a very big city—just behind Chicago and New York. I was surprised to find that both Louisville and Indianapolis had larger populations than Atlanta.

I’d spent some time in both those cities and I often used them for rule-of-thumb comparisons.

Truth be told: I’d pictured Atlanta as being a bit larger than two Louisvilles slammed chaotically together.

Both Indianapolis and Louisville have incorporated counties while Atlanta does not. Also, after the incorporation of Jefferson County, Louisville had experienced a huge surge in population growth. It was bigger and more sprawling than the town that I remembered.

Still Atlanta had an urban center with about forty buildings above four hundred feet—the official cutoff height for “Skyscrapers”. The Bank of America Plaza is reputed to be the tallest building in North America that isn’t in Chicago or New York City.

Much of the city was single-family dwellings though with grassy front yards, garages and all the accouterments of suburbia—just like cities with a tenth of Atlanta’s population or even less. Atlanta just has many more of them.

All that meant that there wouldn’t be much tailing folk afoot in an urban jungle like something you’d see a big city law or private investigator do in a TV show.

Our headquarters was an old but structurally sound warehouse. I don’t know what kind of cover story The Outfit used. It would prove inconvenient to end up under surveillance by the laws because they thought that we might be selling drugs, manufacturing meth or LSD-25 or maybe running a whorehouse.

The outfit meant to use the headquarters indefinitely. There were a couple other headquarters but this was where Josh’s team and maybe thirty-five to fifty other folks were stationed.

Many Adepts—especially the ones whose main ability is physical power—like to do weight training—heavy-duty weight training.

The welders created a couple power racks, an incline bench and a decline bench, dipping bars, chin-up bars and other accouterments. A bankrupt gym sold us two flat benches, six Olympic bars with a generous amount of plates, and a set of dumbbells going up to one hundred pounds and an assortment of kettlebells.

A couple guys didn’t think a gym was complete without a Scott curl bench and cambered bars. For a while a few guys snapped up any cheap exercise bars and plates at yard sales or whatever, to fill any miscellaneous gaps…

Add multiple mirrors—gotta have those mirrors!

And before you knew it, we had a gym—a very good basic weight gym.

The warehouse had five stories and our carpenters partitioned the top two floors into small private cells. Men can and have lived in open barracks, but having people coming and going all hours of the night on odd errands isn’t conductive to the best rest.

The Outfit practices grappling arts on several surfaces: ankle-deep sand, big chip sawdust ten or twelve inches deep, carpeting, grass, canvas covered mats and even modern mats of vinyl-coated foam.

Amateur wrestlers, judo players, and practitioners of Brazilian jujitsu or Russian sambo get used to modern wrestling mats and learn gliding and sliding moves that will only work on the wielding and very low friction surface of a modern wrestling mat. Sweaty arms and legs or tight fitting spandex britches all lower the coefficient of friction even further.

A Sand pit and a modern wrestling mat would have to do in the warehouse—until someone figured out how to shoehorn another surface into the warehouse.

There were knife-throwing ranges with the traditional end-grain targets and a tightrope suspended three feet in the air with crash pads clustered tightly underneath. There were heavy bags, speed bags, an uppercut bag and a couple mook jong.

I called a carpenter over.

“I want a balance beam and a climbing wall as high as you can make it. Everyone isn’t advanced enough to work out on the tightrope,” I told him.

That’s something that I like about the village. When you make a reasonable request, the craftsmen don’t argue or ask for credentials. They simply get to work.

***************** **************** *************************

It was time to talk to our two new team members.

“Why,” I asked Cary, “Are you rated an adept when you don’t have any tradecraft at all?”

“Roland Sensei said that I would be of the most benefit to my eventual team by concentrating exclusively on rat-running,” Cary said.

“The best part of being an Adept is learning about yourself, strengthening both body and mind and growing as a person. You’ve largely been short-changed of that by your dumbass sensei. What does he look like? If I ever meet him, I want to tell him he’s a dumbass to his face,” I said.

“He’s about six-eight and weighs about three-eighty. He has a shaved head with a big scar on his crown. He’s a muscle fanatic and extraordinarily strong,” Josh said.

“He’s tough,” Ladonna added. “He might last four or even five minutes against you. You, Josh and Gerald are the only three that I know that I’m reasonably sure could take him.”

When Josh gave her a surprised look she said:

“You’ve never fought with Spoil. Even then, he holds back a lot because all his best techniques are far too damaging to use in a practice fight.”

“What about you?” I asked David. “What’s your excuse for being a limp-wristed wimp?”

“I was told that my skills were needed here. If you don’t need my drones, I’ll go back to training,” David said.

“There is no need for that. We have everything that we really need to train you right here,” I said.

“Look at the weight room. Neither of you is really strong. Weight training will work for almost anyone. The trick is to be patient. Come to the weight room three times per week and forget about it most of the rest of the time.

“You want to lift in a workmanlike manner—not like it’s a holy crusade. I am almost certain that over a year’s time that both of you can add sixty or sixty-five pounds to your 5x5 bench press and over one hundred pounds to your 5x5 squat.

“You’ll be carrying about ten more pounds of muscle by then and maybe a couple pounds or so less fat—though neither of you are obese.

“Both of you should be fair knife and star throwers in a year’s time and since you both have a head start on manipulating and storing chi, I want to see your power level close to four and you able to throw three spawn with power levels close to one,” I said.

“Everyone can’t teach tradecraft,” Josh cautioned me.

“Really, then how does someone know if he can teach tradecraft?” I asked.

“It’s a knowing deep inside you,” Josh said.

Gerald and Ladonna nodded in agreement.

“Well then, I have a knowing. I know that I can teach tradecraft. I just assumed that everyone could,” I said.

*************** ********************* ******************************

Sixteen months passed.

Most of what we did was tailing or surveillance. I also climbed a few telephone poles, penetrated houses to install bugs and hidden cameras and sometimes I intercepted mail.

This was all done with spawn. My original was never alone and unprotected on the street and at risk of being snatched. In fact, except for excursions to the flat roof, I very seldom left the building.

I took advantage of being in a big city to fill some gaps in my education.

Monday, Wednesday and Friday I spent three hours at a dojo learning taekwondo. I’d never studied a martial art that stressed katas. Yes, if katas are all that you practice you won’t be a balanced martial artist—but that is not to say that katas are without value. I made sure to select a sensei who stressed very precise and picture-perfect katas.

Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday I studied capoeira. Capoeira with its free-form dances was at the opposite end of the spectrum from the rigid katas of taekwondo.

I spent two and a half hours training in a boxing gym six days per week in the afternoon.

When my two protégés learned to throw spawn, I took both of them to the boxing gym with me every day. David went with me to capoeira while Cary learned taekwondo.

If I sent a spawn to lift weights or run for me, I’d get little training effect. Skills are different. Any skill acquired by a spawn integrated seamlessly into my skillset as soon as the spawn popped his cork.

I also found an artist’s club that paid live models to pose and I drew or painted four or five nights per week.

Yeah, I can throw one Hell of a bunch of spawns at one time. If headquarters couldn’t spare me a comparatively few spawn hours for personal stuff, then we were all hurtin’ fer certain. Also, if I couldn’t go out and stretch my legs a bit occasionally and do stuff with spawn that I wanted to do the warehouse would have been a prison.

I talked Ladonna into going to the archery range and the shooting range with me once per week.

We had cooks, janitors and what have you in the headquarters. We weren’t firemen and Adepts didn’t cotton much to KP or sweeping duty. I had several support personnel come to me and ask to join our informal training.

Some of them had applied for Adept training and been turned down. A few were still young enough that they might still get accepted in the future. I didn’t turn out any Adepts in sixteen months but I taught some solid useful fighting skills, built up bodies, taught some tradecraft and strengthened folks’ chakra trees as well as showing them how to keep strengthening them in the future.

Well, maybe Cary and David became full-fledged Adepts under my tutelage, but they both had big head starts.

************* ***************** ********************

I had several projects that I worked on during that sixteen months.

I wanted to be able to behead someone with a shuto hand the way the boss Korean had beheaded the Russian mobster. Among the other advantages in combat, it should thoroughly demoralize any remaining clients.

I started with 2”x4” s and 2” PVC pipe. The object wasn’t to break board or pipe but to cut it cleanly with a chi-shielded hand. My skin should never actually touch the board, pipe or client.

All of these type strikes are called “chi finger technique” regardless what body part is used. It is rather easy to sever flesh with chi finger so I was supposing the vertebrae would be the biggest obstacles to a clean cut.

Once severing the 2” PVC got easy; I started pouring them full of cement for more of a challenge.

Josh stopped by to watch me one day.

“I see why Ladonna says that most of your best techniques can’t be used in sparring. Can you do this?” he asked.

He rammed his first two fingers deep into the broad surface of a 2”x6”, then he pivoted his hand so that his thumb penetrated as well—all in one rapid motion. He pulled a big chunk of wood out of the plank when he withdrew his pincered fingers and thumb. He repeated the demonstration several times.

“You do know about the small chakra in your hand? Storing a bit of extra chi in the hand will make many of your chi finger attacks work better,” Josh said.

“No, I hadn’t Josh. Thanks,” I replied.

[rvm45]

Chapter Four







There were several small sheds atop the warehouse that had been intended for Randy the pigeon-runner. David used one of them as a mini-hanger for some of his flying drones. Drones that you don’t want seen need to fly high enough to be invisible. Starting from six stories up let the drones climb to invisible height sooner and save power getting there.

Cary had told me that contact reading is similar to the long-range mental links that he used with his rats. He also told me that much of the chi used in telepathic type skills are generated by the enigmatic seventh major chakra.

Like David, I have five double chakras, but with a bit different distribution than David’s.

The first major chakra is at the tailbone. Number two is a couple or three inches below the navel. Number three is about an inch below the cartilaginous tip of the sternum—the xiphoid process for those keeping score.

I never could quite tell the difference between these three. Both in The Outfit’s chakra tree visualization scheme and in the Hindu system the function of them all seem very similar—leaving out the weird Hindu theology.

At any rate, all these have a strong influence on absorbing both food and chi from food and drink. Since all three of mine are double, I have a lot of stamina and after a day of backbreaking work I can eat a hefty meal or two and be as good as new the next day.

There are limits of course and I need plenty of calories to take advantage of my gift.

Number four is in the high sternum. I only have one of those and so my ability to absorb oxygen from my lungs and transport it via the bloodstream isn’t as pronounced as my digestion. Of course, since it is a perceived weakness I stress aerobic conditioning.

Number five is about even with the thyroid. Some of what it does affects the intellect—especially verbal processing and being able to influence others via speech. I have twin chakras there.

Number six is between and slightly above the bridge of the nose. The Outfit doesn’t teach or believe in a third eye, but that is where the sixth chakra sits, right where you see pictures of a third eye. This one is very important in logic, abstract reasoning and contrarily—in intuition and pattern recognition. I have two of this chakra.

Seven sits atop the highest point of the head and explanations and descriptions of its purpose and function range from enigmatic to incomprehensible. I only have a single chakra there.

Where am I going with this?

I said that hand cranking is an inefficient way to generate chi. Well…

You have to know a bit about the relative size and power of the chakras. Think of the size of a 10-pound barbell plate from an exercise bar. That’s about the size of chakras one and two. 7.5-pound plates are comparatively scarce, but I’ve seen a few. That’s about the size of number three.

Number four is about the size of a 5-pound plate. Five and six are about as big as the tiny 1.25-pound plates. Seven is about the size and thickness of a silver dollar.

The visualization training begins at chakra number one. The hand cranking visualization is mainly used on the first couple of chakras—three at most. Truth be told, it is very hard to add meaningful amounts of chi hand-cranking those.

David told me though that if one envisioned an extended pump handle with plenty of torque and hand-cranked diligently that he could increase the power of the top three meaningfully—especially mysterious little number seven that the telepaths and animal handlers used so much.

David also put me hip to five minor chakras in the cerebrum.

By the way, once you’ve managed to store more chi in a chakra, that chakra will tend to accept that level as the new “normal” and will tend to return to that level easily and without much fanfare when depleted.

I’d been diligently storing chi in the silver dollar chakra for a while and I’d decided that I wanted some beasts of my own.

I already carried one of Cary’s rats at all times so that Cary and I had a failsafe way of communicating. Rats were okay, but I didn’t particularly want to be a rat-runner. I had no special affinity for cats, pigeons or coons. I couldn’t see sending dogs into harm’s way.

No Adept could be held up as a poster child for normality and animal handlers tended to be more eccentric than most Adepts. Bat-runners were reputed to be the feyest of all.

Bats can see. Some of them have very good eyesight. Their main sense is sonar though and the true consummate bat-runner has altered his interior hard and soft wiring to handle 3-D sonar images in detail. As interesting as that may sound, apparently it has deep and abiding impact on the personality.

I decided to go with ravens. I’d gotten in touch with the area’s local super poacher and managed to obtain several breeding pairs of ravens. It is best to start reaching into the animal’s mind and stimulating extra intelligence, broadcasting power as well as chi generation and storage before birth—or with birds, before hatching.

Even before conception I’d been feeding the parent ravens doses of my chi.

How? By putting small amounts of my blood that I had supercharged with my chi into their food. Ditto once the small ravens hatched.

Sometimes it takes three or four generations of ever increasing modulations to zero in on exactly what you’re looking far and eventually that’s what I’d have if I lived that long.

In the meantime, I was tending to my small flock of ravens…

Ravens? Well I had twenty-six first generation ravens. After the young were grown I’d freed the parents but I’d connected deeply enough that seven of them decided to stay—though I’d never have anything but a half-assed mind link with them…

But my poacher hadn’t been able to completely fill my order—though I was paying out my rear—so he’d offered some substitutes.

I had thirteen first generation crows. Though smaller than ravens, only an advanced bird watcher would see anything amiss with a few crows in my flock of ravens.

I had four turkey vultures. What good is a turkey vulture? Well he can soar effortlessly riding thermals and studying the ground with eyes better in almost all ways than a pair of 18x binoculars.

There was one red-tailed hawk, three great horned owls and a screech owl. Can you say “night surveillance”?

Anyway, I was tending to my flock and just as happy as if I were in my right mind when Ladonna showed up.

“Put on something nice. There is a concert at the Woodruff Art Center and I want you to escort me,” she said in a voice that brooked no argument.

I wasn’t going, of course and neither was she. We’d send spawn in our places but you can’t spawn what you don’t have. Sometimes I’d change costume four or five times in a day just to throw appropriately attired spawn.

I put on black jeans, a black knit turtleneck and expensive custom cowboy boots. I had a three hundred dollar Stetson and several expensive pieces of silver and turquoise jewelry. I had a Rolex watch and since I will only wear leather watchbands, mine was custom and featured some silver conchos with small topaz centers.

What the Hell? The Outfit paid all my living expenses—I even got a clothing allowance while on a long-term mission. I was drawing generous combat pay. And there was a limit to how much money that I could spend on custom guns, knives, swords and holsters…

Especially since I wanted my life to be at least moderately portable.

Might as well spend the cutter on flashy threads.

Did Ladonna appreciate the trouble that I’d gone to array myself in such sartorial splendor?

“What would I have to do to get you to wear a tie?” Ladonna said.

“Blow my brains out and tie one around my corpse’s neck,” I replied.

“It would make me happy,” she said.

“What if you told me that it would make you happy if I castrated myself? So far as I’m concerned a tie is a flag to tell the castrator not to bother. This one was born without any,” I said.

“You always go to extremes and you want to argue,” she said.

“I’m going with you to hear the orchestra even though I ain’t particularly into classical music. I take you most everywhere that you want me to take you with very few exceptions. What more can you reasonably expect?”

“Are you ever going to cut your hair?” she continued.

She was on a roll.

“I might concede to having the split ends trimmed occasionally, past that—no,” I answered.

“Why come?” she asked.

“My father would set in and bitch and moan until I cut my hair—this is well after I became an adult. I’d give in and have five or six inches of hair that I’d really liked to kept whacked off. Then he’d swear on a stack of Bibles that he couldn’t see any difference. When he died, I decided not to cut my hair ever again. With him gone, there would never be any valid reason to,” I said.

The rest of our trip was passed in silence.

“We’re about three hours early. I know that you like to go to the High Art Museum and look at the paintings,” She said as we arrived.

We were just about to walk into the museum when she said to me:

“Are you ever going to make a pass at me?”

“Not while I have even a tiny portion of sanity and self-control left to me,” I replied.

“Are you trying to insult me?” she asked.

“I don’t compete—not for anything—not ever. Competition defiles everything that it touches both winners and losers—but especially the winner,”

“Didn’t you compete in wrestling and judo?”

“I competed in wrestling. I didn’t know about competition back then. What teenager does? I never looked at judo matches as anything but training,” I said.

“So how would be asking me for a date be competition?” she asked.

“I’d be in competition with every man that you ever dated before me and assuming we didn’t stay hitched for life, with every man who came after. And to head off your next question: it matters not the slightest bit whether I or any of the others choose to view it as a competition,” I said. “Like Earth and sky, it simply ‘is’ whether anyone chooses to recognize it or not.’”

“Don’t you compete with rival Adepts for your life?” she persisted to my annoyance.

“That isn’t competition. Nothing but my life is at stake. It has negligible value. They are more than welcome to it, if they can take it and no hard feelings. Death isn’t a defeat regardless of how inconvenient that it might be,” I said.

“I don’t understand your reasoning,” she complained.

“Alexander Alekhine was one of the greatest chess grandmasters of all time. They claim that at a tournament once, he leapt atop the table and screamed:

“’Why must I lose to this idiot !?!’

“Ecclesiastes says:

“‘I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.’

“If I competed I’d be the strongest, wisest and the most skilled, but if time and chance hit me—as it hit Alekhine—I’d end up losing to a lesser man. Things like that cut a giant swath through one’s self worth. Note—I did not say ‘through one’s conception of his self-worth’. Things like that take away from the core of one’s manhood,” I said.

“You’re willing to live your whole life alone over metaphysics?” she asked.

“Of course, but I think that we’re talking ethics or perhaps aesthetics,” I said.

Later I was glad that our little discussion had slowed us enough that we weren’t in the building yet when they attacked us. I’d have felt really bad if a stray shot had damaged one of the paintings or sculptures.

I slipped my hand into my pocket and sent word to Cary via the black rat. That’s right, I did say that my wet spawn couldn’t contact read. That was before I started obsessively cranking the silver dollar chakra to build up my spooky “action at a distance” mind powers.

The rat? I piggybacked him and used my chi to spawn a copy of him when I spawned. A small black rat takes negligible chi to copy though I may have been the first to use the maneuver—though Cary was quick to see the advantages and learn the skill.

We could have both immediately popped our corks and been back at headquarters, but it was possible that staying and surviving a while longer might net a bit more intel. Of course, it is conceivable that we could be knocked out and captured, but either an attempt at a contact mind scan or letting us regain consciousness and torturing us would only result in an immediate popping of the cork.

Even then either of us might have chosen to withstand torture for a span if it gave a rewarding opportunity to study the torturers.

At any rate, the message sent by “Rat-a-Gram” might get a heads-up to headquarters a few minutes ahead of us.

**************** ******************** ***********************

Cary, David and I walked out of the boxing gym. We rode the bus to the gym so that we could simply pop back to headquarters and save half the transit time.

Most of the time it wasn’t possible for spawn to ride the pop-cork express home. It isn’t even remotely possible to spawn a car. So, the spawn were often driving cars or trucks that were carefully registered in such a way that they couldn’t be traced either to The Outfit or to a member.

Yeah, if it really furthered the mission a spawn might abandon his vehicle though there was often more than one rider. There was a team detailed to pick up any abandoned vehicles. But cutting spawn hours by popping back was a luxury.

We had just turned into an alley to pop the old corks when a van drove into the dead-end alley mostly blocking egress.

Four big-ass black dudes got out of the cargo door. They looked like they were in costume for an over-the-top hip-hop music video—gold chains and all.

Things like that are of minimal import. Hell, the dudes might actually have been Korean, Japanese or albinos from Norway. The muscle-bulging physiques might have all been illusion too.

The eight cartoon caricatures of Pit Bulls—weighing well over two hundred and fifty pounds with spiked collars and all—were real enough. They were regrettably real. Those dogs had been force-fed chi until they were all but falling apart inside. They were on their last legs with only weeks—at the most—left. But as long as they lived they posed extreme danger to everyone around them.

I threw two super-charged air bombs, one with each hand. They carried almost six times as much power as the ones I’d slain so many of Randy’s pigeons with. I could prepare them far faster—two at a time if I had both hands free—and a wet spawn could throw about five pairs before the power level dropped below 4x the air bomb that I’d shown everyone on the practice field.

I hit the lead Pit Bull with one. It hit him with enough force to knock him dead.

The second ball was aimed at the dog’s handler—a fellow with ritual scarring, teeth filed to points and then gold capped, and deltoids that looked as big as halved volleyballs. He knocked it upward with a chi-shielded forearm. It was almost three feet over his head when it burst, but it still stunned him a bit. I saw him wince.

I grabbed a pair of the attacking dogs by the throat and ripped out a chunk of flesh from each that included carotids and jugulars as well as windpipe, esophagus and a big chunk of muscle.

While I merely cast the right-handed one to one side I had enough of a grip on the left one to cast him into the path of the other dogs. I did a bounding high leap up and over dogs and thugs until I got my strong left hand on the trainer.

I figured that he was a spawn, but I could read him nonetheless. I even managed brief contact with both hands with my right hand touching his forehead.

When I was young I was regrettably easy-going and amiable but the other children always picked on me—inerrably smelling out the one that wasn’t a herd animal. I was subject to berserkers back then, when my friendly goodwill had finally been exhausted.

My finishing move back then was to grab someone by the throat with my strong left hand and to lift him one handed until his feet cleared the floor. I always stopped short of strangling anyone to death though I remember several dudes walking around with my handprint visible in the bruising around their neck for several days.

I was enraged. I really didn’t care very much if they popped all of our spawn’s corks—though if you’re going to play rough don’t cry when you have to try to pick your teeth off the floor with broken fingers. I was enraged that someone would misuse and mistreat their dogs that way…

I flashed-back on my childhood berserkers. I had my strong left hand on his throat as I lifted him clear of the ground and shook back and forth him like a Rat Terrier shakes a rat. He tried to surround himself with a force field of chi like it was the World’s most heavy-duty aura. My own chi nullified his—at least where my hand touched his throat.

I could see through his frantic eyes that looked over my shoulder and behind me. Cary was down on all fours with both hands and fingers eaten and a dog savaging his genitals. He popped his cork and who could blame him? I wondered why it had taken him that long.

David had the right side of his face, neck and shoulder ravaged down to the bone. As he held a dog at bay with his right arm, he threw one of the two-inch washers that he carried through the center of one of the gangster’s forehead with his left hand. Then he popped.

I was holding the dog-runner overhead and slowly strangling him despite his resistance—while downloading ever larger hunks of his thoughts, memories and personality without consciously willing it so.

Then one of his pals pressed both barrels of a sawn-off 12 gauge right against my spine between my shoulder blades and fired both barrels.

Interestingly enough, I retained consciousness and continuity for over a second before I popped.

*************** ******************* ***********************

“We have an all-out alert!” David shouted into the PA.

“The three-man boxing team was just wiped out. Spawns of Spoil and Ladonna are under attack at the museum and trying to pick up any miscellaneous intel before popping back. Spawn are being attacked all over Atlanta…

“Wait, our rat-runner tells me that men are gathering at several points preparing for an all-out assault on headquarters. All recon teams pop back here immediately,” David spat out in a rush.

All my errant spawn rejoined me except the spawn at the museum with Ladonna. If he felt that there was useful data to be gleaned, I trusted him. After all, he was me. I was a bit impatient to have his first-hand experience though.

I downed a handful of vitamins; three caffeine tablets and some herbal tablets brewed by The Outfit to both increase chi production and speed its replenishment. The effect was subtle and it took a couple hours to kick in. If I were still alive in two or three hours, I’d be glad that I did my Christmas chi shopping early.

I munched on one of those high-energy protein bars with thirty grams of protein and washed it down with twenty ounces of whole milk fortified with four ounces of whipping cream and a big scoop of whey protein.

Josh walked into the situation room about the same time that I did—after fortifying my chi every way that I could think to.

“Damn David! Can’t I leave you alone to monitoring incoming intel long enough to grab a quick nap?” Josh grumped.

He was joking a bit—to relieve tension I suppose. There was no way David or anyone else in The Outfit could have prevented this.

“Well dudes, looks like the cold war just got hot,” Josh said.

Ding-a-Ling friends, I just got my spawn from the museum back.

I can’t drink carbonated beverages too soon after drinking milk. I was counting down until I could wash some brewer’s yeast tablets along with some desiccated liver capsules down with a twenty-ounce Coke. It might even be time to pop a couple Benzedrine tablets.

I drank a big cup of sugared coffee and used it to wash down some kelp and ginseng tablets to pass the time while I waited for my milk to be ready to accept some carbonation.

[rvm45]

Chapter Five








“They outnumber us about thirty-five-to-one and they have automatic weapons, grenade launchers, hand grenades and I don’t know what else,” Cary said.

I started to sneer at the mention of automatic weapons. Take a belt-fed, tripod-mounted, crew-served weapon firing full-powered rifle cartridges and you have something.

Handheld full-auto is overrated. A true expert can milk a small bit of extra performance out of a selective-fire weapon. They also let a total putz who hits largely by chance buy lottery tickets faster. Even then a poor shot isn’t especially effective. For most shooters in the middle, auto fire serves mostly to make more noise and waste ammunition.

I’d told Cary that a number of times and perhaps it was because of that he added:

“They have a number of M-60s and a few BARs. They’re using walking fire, but those rounds are very penetrating. Many of the others have MAC 10s with big suppressors,” Cary said.

Yippee-Ki-Ayy!

In walking fire, one carries the weapon at hip height—usually supported by a special sling. Every time the right foot touches ground (or the left foot—pick one) you fire a three to five round burst. Walking fire with a .308 or .30-06 almost qualifies as true machine-gunning and house clearings with machine pistols like the MAC 10 is one of the few times that automatic fire does gives a slight advantage to an expert.

We were on the third floor. The command center was there. Josh was the overall commander of the headquarters. David and Cary were a large part of his eyes and ears while Ladonna and I stood by as their trustworthy bodyguards.

We didn’t need craft to hear the gunfire coming from the first floor—though the intervening floors muffled it to a large degree.

“It is time for some of us to escape. How many first wave Spawn can you throw now?” Josh asked me.

“Nine—with power ratings of about 3.7,” I told him. “I can throw five 2.5s in my second wave.”

I didn’t tell him that I’d developed a third wave of three at about 1.4. I hadn’t ignored his advice to concentrate on power over sheer numbers, but several things had happened during our more than sixteen months in the warehouse.

For one thing, I had very little to do with my real body but focus on increasing my chi levels. I’d gotten notably stronger with the weights and that helps. It helps some Adepts more than others, but I got a good return on my chi for the time invested lifting—over and above the increased muscular strength.

The martial arts training had helped as well.

Since I was already on a roll, I had made a point of ingesting plenty of the bitter, pungent and heartburn inducing herbal concoctions guaranteed to give a modest boost to the ability to generate and store chi. You had to dig in, grit your teeth and settle in for the long haul though. That kind of medicine had to be ingested continuously over a span of weeks or months to effect permanent changes.

The second big factor was that I was continually throwing and absorbing spawn. Also, some of my wet spawn were called upon to last for days.

Throwing spawn was a capacity that my circumstances continually enhanced. The day came when without even trying; I knew that I had additional spawn available. All of their power ratings inched steadily upward as well.

“I have seven now all above 5,” Gerald said with a glance and a small smirk at me. Very few Adepts have a rating of 5 even before they throw spawn.

“I have four—stronger than they used to be when I threw three and I have a second wave of two at 1.6,” Ladonna said.

“Okay Ladonna, give me two first wave spawn and keep two in reserve. I want one of them primed to be a persistent corpse. Can you give me that without losing too much chi?” Josh asked.

Then he continued, “Spoil, give me your nine first wave. David and Cary—I know that both of you can spawn thanks to Spoil’s tutelage. Keep them. You will probably need them before the day is done. I want y’all to escape via the chute. Gerald and I will stay behind. There are things that we need to attend to before we can flee. We ought to be able to stall them ten or fifteen minutes. That’s all the lead time that we can give you.”

“Would you like me to add a couple second wave? Their power levels aren’t inconsequential,” I said.

“No, nine is enough. Hang onto the others as long as you can. Spoil, you are the ranking Adept in the absence of Gerald and me,” Josh said.

“Ladonna has seniority,” I objected.

I have always believed that seniority should trump both popularity and ability. It is the only fair way to operate.

“She doesn’t want command. You have a problem following orders and you only do what you want to do—but you’re exceptionally gifted. Sometimes the only thing to do with such people is to put them in charge,” Josh said.

There was a sheet-metal lined chute that went straight from the third floor to a small sub-basement below the first basement. The chute was carefully assembled so that there were no sharp edges to snag a bare hand. A non-adept might have been able to ride it down without serious injury—maybe.

“Ladonna, ladies first. Don’t argue. I need to protect the other two until they’re safely gone. The basement may need clearing. Six of one, half-a-dozen of the other,” I said.

David was probably more unique and the more valuable of the two. Even that was debatable, but was it safer for him to go before Cary or after?

“David, you go first. As soon as he’s clear, Cary goes. I’ll come right behind Cary. Now jump! Remember to rub the chute all around with your chi to slow your descent,” I said.

I took on last glance at Josh, Gerald along with two Adepts “Scot” and “Eli” that I barely knew—along with a bunch of spawn.

I stepped into the chute.

**************** ******************* *****************************

They rushed the third floor about ten minutes after the others had dropped down the chute. I have no idea where all the BARs came from. Back in the Roaring 20s there were quite a few robbed or pilfered from National Guard armories but that was a long time ago. The gun hadn’t been in production since the 1950s.

The M-60 isn’t quite as powerful as the BAR but being belt fed and with quick-change barrels it had a far higher effective rate of fire. The machine-gunners ripped apart walls and barricades and even made serious starts on tearing holes in the brick walls. They were backed up by five times their number firing MAC 10s or M-4s. They were throwing grenades like they were within a couple hours of their expiration date.

They made it through the first two floors rapidly. Most of the defenders had been called to the third floor to buy time to defend the situation room or to slide down the chute.

Also, the opposition seemed to know where the situation room was. They wanted to try to take the room with at least some of the computer hard drives intact and perhaps to take a high-ranking Adept prisoner. There was nothing they valued on the first two floors so they went at it like it was a Nihilist’s Holy Day.

Once they had a beachhead around the stairwell they pulled back the trigger-happy gangsters and brought the Adepts forward. None of them used firearms.

Seven of my spawn fell in the hallway leaving two of me in the situation room.

Revolvers are not—vulgar superstition to the contrary—more reliable than semi-autos. It is a bit simpler to qualify folk with room temperature IQs with revolvers if by “Qualify” we mean that he poses minimal risk of shooting himself or other friendlies with the weapon.

We were working with poor grade ammunition though with relatively weak cartridge cases and rims and a semi-auto made with the materials on hand didn’t like full-powered ammunition.

I’d switched to a pair of revolvers patterned after the Smith and Wesson N Frame. The used +P .45 ACP in full moon clips and they could use regular .45 ACP in a pinch. I’m not sure how well the ammo would spawn, but after spawning or for my original there was a possibility of resupply.

I shot out my last six round clip and drew my hangers—one in each hand. I popped a couple of dry spawn and then a sword master with a relatively long katana cut me from my trapezius to my spine on my left side without me even seeing the blow coming. I threw my right-hand hanger and pierced him through the sternum. Then both of us popped our corks.

************** **************** ************************

Now there was just one of me and it was my geas to be the last one standing. I had a single round left in each revolver and I made two headshots and holstered my guns. I wouldn’t use them again in this life but it went too much against my core values to drop them carelessly on the floor.

A little guy came forward. He carried no visible weapon. He was maybe five-six and thin—very thin. He had short hair that looked like it had been carefully parted and then sprayed in place. Unlike everyone around him, he wore a business suit and it looked expensive. He didn’t look like he had been touched by a single drop of blood, plaster or dust particle.

I could see with my chi-enhanced vision that these Adepts were both very powerful and very arrogant. I couldn’t read anything at all coming from the little chief. Those proud and haughty Adepts stepped out of his way as if they were afraid to even brush against the hem of his garments.

“You know that you’re going to die,” He began. “But why not make your death entertaining? If you will fight my champion hand-to-hand, I give you my word that no one will interfere as long as Duncan is alive. In the event you kill him then we kill you.”

I threw a Kunai with no windup and no warning. Somehow the Kunai stopped ten inches from his sternum and hovered there momentarily while he examined it like an art connoisseur studying an abstract sculpture and then he let it drop to the floor.

“Duncan come here,” he said.

Duncan was what Adepts call a “sumo”. He’d used his chi to build as much muscle as it was conceivable to pack on an almost human frame. He was about six-five and probably weighed about five hundred and fifty pounds. He probably didn’t have more than eight or nine percent body fat.

His lower body especially his gluteal muscles were huge and out of proportion to the rest of him. They had to be to support his oversized bulk and to allow him to jump and move with as much grace as an NBA Basketball player or an Olympic gymnast.

His gut was big. It had to be to keep those super-sized muscles and bones nourished. You could see all eight of his abdominal muscles in bas-relief though.

He was bare to the waist. He had a shaven or hairless head, thick cauliflower ears and facial features like a troll—huge nose, thick supraorbital ridges and cheekbones and an outthrust lantern jaw.

All else being equal, a bigger muscle is a stronger muscle. I mean that you may have better or worse insertion points for leverage than me and you may have more or less intramuscular fat—what’s called “marbling” in prime beef. But if you exercise until your muscle is bigger without increasing the fat—then your muscle will have become stronger.

A muscle supercharged with chi can put out over five times the strength and power of a natural muscle—for a few minutes.

So, if you use your chi to grow your muscles as large as possible—as large as possible for an Adept—far larger than possible for a normal—and then supercharge those muscles with chi the strength becomes astounding. Such Adepts can supercharge the super-sized muscles even more intensely than other Adepts.

There are trade-offs though. There always are trade-offs. Duncan’s heart, lungs, digestive tract and chakra tree would all be put under heavy stress to maintain such a physique. His grocery bill would be astronomical. It would be very hard for him to avoid being conspicuous.

He wasn’t built like someone who’s grossly obese and muscle is about twice the density of fat. With the right clothing and a bit of a chi glamor he could pass himself off as a fatty—but then if he forgot himself for an instant and went bounding around like a kangaroo folks would wonder.

He couldn’t fit behind most auto steering wheels and he couldn’t even fit as a passenger in small cars. His bulk made certain stances and postures impossible to attain and once he developed some momentum it would be very hard for him to stop or change directions.

I was down to two hundred and twenty-three pounds and stronger than ever. I’d have liked to test myself against the sumo strength to strength but that didn’t fit my agenda.

I took off my weapon belt with the hangers and my revolvers and advanced to meet Duncan.

He used a straightforward rush with a fast flurry of palm-heel strikes. He was all but unstoppable. I closed with him and gave him a mighty chi enhanced slap to his left ear with my right hand. It should have sent a mighty wave of high-pressure air into the ear canal destroying the eardrum and semi-circular canal at the very least.

I alternated slaps until slapped each side of his head twice.

Nothing.

I took my left index finger and hit his right eye with a chi finger poke and he didn’t even blink.

Now that I was reasonably sure that I wouldn’t kill him I used my right hand to strike knife edged shuto hand blows—three of them—on the side of his neck. I’d worked up to cleanly severing pine 4”x4” s. My chi cut the posts so cleanly that they looked as if they’d been sanded smooth. My blows didn’t even make a red mark on Duncan’s neck.

We slammed into the brick wall hard enough to crack a half a dozen of my ribs.

Duncan slapped a bear hug around me. You hear about folk who can break your back in a bear hug, but that’s mainly nonsense. Duncan could actually do it though.

I grabbed his head with both hands and pushed his head back trying hard to break his leverage. At least that’s what it looked like I was doing.

What I wanted was a glimpse inside Duncan’s head. I’d never before managed to get both hands in contact with a client’s head in combat.

Duncan had the mind of a small child. He didn’t even have the mentality to turn himself into a sumo. It had to have been done to him from the outside. I’d never known that such a thing was even possible.

His mind was an open book. I didn’t think that he even knew that I was there.

There were two factors or three. Duncan only stored the things in his memory that he could comprehend. I couldn’t download his memories in perfect fidelity and I was bound to miss a few key memories simply because it took too long to capture everything.

A few things came to light right away though. Not only was Duncan strong but he could also drain someone’s chi. He’d been told to try to drain my chi so they could capture me alive. They thought that I was an original. It was a reasonable assumption with the corpses of Josh, Gerald, Scott and Eli as well as Ladonna’s persistent corpse all cluttering the floor.

Also, I’ve been told that my spawn just happens to have chi signatures closer to originals than most—nothing significant except that it makes it easier to send one of my spawns to impersonate an original.

I also gathered that the little chief was an object of fear, reverence and affection for Duncan.

I had gathered enough information from the sumo—about all that the child-man’s mind had to offer. And he was stating to drain my chi.

While I still had the chi, I formed an air bomb and struck the overhead sprinklers. Water would add to the confusion and further damage any computer parts or documents that had escaped the scuttle team and scuttle protocols.

I threw three air bombs at the little chief one after another. He deflected them without moving and he seemed unmoved when one of the blasts hurt a couple of the Adepts. I couldn’t read his chi body at all. He didn’t even seem to be alive to my chi enhanced eyesight. He just looked like a big 3-D human shaped hole in reality.

I gathered a modest air bomb in each hand and slammed both of them into Duncan’s ears. The bombs damaged Duncan and he collapsed. They also ruined both my hands and I popped my cork an instant after the blast.

**************** ******************* *******************************

When I touched down in the basement not only were there several Adepts besides what was left of my team but also there were sixteen of my students—cooks, janitors and building maintenance people. They all had at least a few Kunai, throwing stars, washers and many had a firearm or two.

“Guys, we gotta run silent and run deep. Cary, are all your rats away? We need to be as quiet as possible. Don’t shoot unless it is absolutely necessary. If we get separated head to the village,” I told them.

[rvm45]

Chapter Six









James looked around the small sub-basement. Today wasn’t going to be anything like what he’d hoped for. At least he was armed. He was fairly well armed so far as that went.

He had a Mossberg pump 20-Gauge cruiser, a Smith and Wesson Model 19 .357 Magnum with a 4” barrel, a pair of the Ka-Bar Swabbie knives with their foot-long deeply curved blades along with a pouch full of throwing washers.

He was better off than most of his friends and co-workers. In fact, he’d armed some of the others. He’d donated a short barreled 20-Gauge H&R single-shot, a Ruger Blackhawk in .357/9mm and a .44 caliber Colt Navy replica to folks he felt could make good use of them.

No Adept within pistol or shotgun range was likely to give anyone time to shoot him though. An Adept would throw a knife though an eye or a sternum or he’d close and destroy you with devastating techniques or he’d stand back and hit you with some mysterious jutsu.

Still, being armed was a positive good in and of itself and it hurt a man’s pride to think of going down without a fight.

************** ****************** **************************

By the time James was fifteen years old, he’d been drifting and travelling on his own for a couple years. He was taking shelter from a downpour under a railroad bridge that fortuitously had a solid bottom—otherwise it would have been of little value as a shelter.

As he sat shivering and wishing that he had something to eat a fellow drifter—a mere boy—had joined him.

“Howdy stranger,” the boy had said while looking James up and down and giving him a flash appraisal. “Are you hungry?”

The boy pronounced it “Hunk—Are—Ee”. Though he had no accent, James noticed that the boy chose to give a number of words his own idiosyncratic pronunciations.

The boy had a small pack under his poncho. He collected some twigs and small branches from debris in one corner of the area beneath the bridge. He soon had a fire going in a coffee can hobo’s stove. He put a smaller coffee can with a coat hanger bale to heat over the small blaze. He made some coffee first and then he made some rice.

“Canned Spam is heavy, so I never carry more than two or three. They’re for emergencies. You know—for times that I really need a caloric boost,” the boy told James.

He cut the spam into tiny pieces and put them into the can to boil with the rice. He handed James a couple of big pieces of jerky-jerky to chew on while the rice cooked.

As James sat and chewed jerky-jerky and sipped the scalding and heavily sugared and cinnamon laced coffee the boy expounded to James on a number of topics.

“Jerky-jerky isn’t heavy but it is expensive,” the boy said. “So, I make my own from venison.”

“Where do you get the venison,” James asked with his mouth full.

“I kill deer. They’re largely made of venison,” the boy said.

“Do you have a gun?”

“No. It’s foolishness, but folks get all wet and soggy, remarkably saline and damned hard to get along with over someone my age having a firearm,” the boy said.

The boy took a steel ball bearing about an inch in diameter and placed it into a sling. He threw it so hard that it buried itself about an inch deep in one of the 24”x24” creosote soaked columns that supported the bridge.

“Where did you learn to do that?” James asked.

“In the village.”

“Could I learn to do that?” James asked.

“Probably not,” The boy said as he used a small tomahawken to retrieve his steel ball.

In the morning, the boy gave James a good sling and a small aluminum mold to cast one and a quarter inch lead balls.

“I’d give you some steel balls, but you’d only lose them and that’s quite a long time to carry them until they’d be of use to you. You should practice with round stones until you get fairly accurate. Those big balls of lead are fairly dear too,” the boy said.

“About this village…” James had started to say.

“Do you want to go there? You’d probably never find your way there, but I can guide you.”

The village hadn’t cared that James was underage and a runaway.

James managed to feed himself quite well by working part-time as a dishwasher at a small restaurant. The chef fixed James up with a cot in an unused room upstairs.

School wasn’t mandatory in the village, but for those who choose to attend some of the free classes or lectures, school was only three days per week—Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

One day James had seen some teens his own age throwing Kunai knives, throwing stars and spikes at targets at one of the knife throwing ranges.

“They are training to become Adepts,” Chef had told James.

“What is an Adept?” James asked.

“They’re kinda like ninja or shaolin monks—except they’re the American version,” Chef said.

“Huh?”

“Don’t you ever watch television or go to the movies?”

“I very seldom watch TV and I’ve never been to a movie theatre,” James said.

“They have powers and the village was built to be a refuge for Adepts as well as a training facility. No one knows how old the village is, but many native villagers are partly descended from Cherokee who took refuge here rather than take The Trail of Tears. There is more to this hidden watch pocket of a world than easily strikes the eye—or mind. It is over half again as big as Rhode Island and even today much of it is virgin hardwood forest and it feathers seamlessly into the outer world at a number of points,” Chef told him.

“What kind of powers do the Adepts have?” James asked.

“It’s hard to say. The Adepts have powers and some of those powers are to trick the mind. They study sleight of hand, cold reading, hypnosis as well as the use of mind-altering drugs. They believe that such tricks are a legitimate part of total warfare and it generally helps to be over-rated by the normal,” Chef said.

“Can anyone attend the Adept school?” James asked.

“In theory, but you have to convince them that you’re worth training. We can start getting you better prepared to apply if you’d like,” Chef said.

Chef moved James off of dishwashing and started training him as a chef. The bad news was that James had to spend more hours in the kitchen.

James bought some Kunai knives and stars and started practicing throwing for an hour or more almost every day. There was also a school for non-Adepts that taught kenpo and MMA style grappling. He started running regularly and Chef taught him the basics of shooting pistols and shotguns.

He grew closer to his goal when he landed a job as an assistant cook at one of the cafeterias for trainees. None of the basic techniques were secret though many trainees were reluctant to share, but some were willing to show James a few tricks and exercises.

When the Outfit had needed support personnel for the Atlanta stations they were a bit challenged. Many native villagers were very reluctant to spend much time in the outside world. Some of them flatly refused to even set foot outside. Normals from the outside would be a very poor fit.

The Outfit had promised James that if he’d spend two years—twenty-five months they’d said “just to make it an odd number”—working as the head cook at the warehouse mess-hall that they’d guarantee him a spot in the Adept training program.

Then an odd Adept—though to say that an Adept was odd was rather redundant—with the charming name of “Spoil” had started his own mini Adept training academy in the warehouse.

James had been training diligently for almost fifteen months now. He’d learned to do things undreamt of before the training, but much of his training had only served to spotlight the huge gap between himself and a true Adept.

************* ***************** ***************************

Now James was huddled in the small chamber in the sub-basement wondering what they should do next.

One of the janitors wore a Glock in a shoulder holster and another shoved into the front of his pants. He literally bristled with spare magazines many of them extra-long ones with higher than standard capacity.

“We should find the escape tunnel and go,” the janitor said.

His eyes showed the white sclera all around.

“Ain’t no ‘searching’ to it. I know exactly where the hidden panel is. We wait. If we all start exiting willy-nilly we’ll give away the exit point and they may very well be able to set a trap for any Adepts who come after us,” James told him.

“Screw the Adepts! It’s everyman for himself,” the janitor said.

“I won’t show you where the exit is and if you manage to find it I won’t let you leave,” James said.

“How will you stop me?”

“I’ll kill you,” James said.

“You are going to show me the exit!” the man said while reaching for the pistol in his belt.

James wore his Cruiser in a sling that carried it across his midsection—muzzle to his left. The janitor kept a worried eye on James’ right hand resting lightly on the shotgun’s pistol grip.

James stepped close and trapped the man’s right hand with his own right hand.

The man never saw the blade in James’ left hand. James slashed across the man’s throat severing everything in front of the vertebrae. Then he slashed at the back of the man’s right hand, rolled the blade until he held it in a saber grip and then thrust upward under the rib cage and into the heart.

“What in Hell kinda knife is that?” Chandra—one of his assistant cooks—demanded.

“That’s a Cold Steel Magnum Tanto Twelve,” James said. “Overpriced, but very sharp and almost unbreakable.”

“How many knives do you carry?” Chandra demanded.

“Classified,” James said.

A moment later Ladonna landed in their midst. She took in the bloody scene in an instant.

“I’ve told you that the pleasure of cutting someone’s throat is fleeting and the consequences are often prolonged and tedious,” Ladonna said.

“If he didn’t want his throat cut, he shouldn’t have tried to pull one of those nasty Glocks on me,” James said. “ He was going to find the exit and leave you Adepts exposed.”

“I trust he knows better now?” Ladonna asked.

“One might hope,” James said.

“Spoil will be glad to see that all of his students made it here,” Ladonna said.

David, Cary and Spoil followed in close order.

“No one else is coming,” Spoil said. “Ladonna leads. James you back her up. David, I want you about in the middle. I’m pulling rear guard. Cary, it’s more dangerous back here than in the middle but I need your rats to scout ahead and I need you here to relay the information to me directly. Are you willing?”


“Yeah I’m willing. What about your ravens?”

“They got the order to leave the roof and disperse as soon as I got word of the attack.”

“Okay, move out everyone.”

[rvm45]

Chapter Seven










There were fourteen of our Adepts waiting for us at the end of the tunnel.

“We’re it,” I told them. “Everyone else has either bailed in some other direction or they have fallen. Let’s make sure that their sacrifices weren’t in vain.”

“Josh left Spoil in charge,” Ladonna said.

“Thanks Ladonna,” I told her.

I was a bit aggravated. I’m a loner and I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted the challenge of leadership. It was a moot point for the duration thanks to Ladonna.

“Let me scout the outside,” I said. “The rest of y’all protect our perimeters.”

“Spoil is a crow flier,” Cary told them.

Most of my birds were ravens but in Outfit parlance “Crow Flier” and “Raven Runner” were used interchangeably. Some of the Adepts rarely if ever came to the rooftop and since I rarely talked about my birds there was no reason for them to know about them.

The floor was clean and dry and I sat cross-legged to better concentrate.

I can fully enter into one raven at a time. It literally feels as if I’ve become a raven and I’m perched or flying through the air. If I am willing to settle for just a slightly jittery look through the bird’s eyes—it feels jumpy and jittery to me because I’m not fully in sync with the bird’s eye’s rasters—I can look through five or six pairs of eyes at one time.

I probably wouldn’t fall down but remaining upright took a small modicum of concentration, as did processing my own eye’s data stream. Seated with my eye’s closed let me see through my minions’ eyes bit more easily.

After about ten minutes of scanning I let my ravens go and opened my eyes.

“The streets are clear but there is one Adept lying in wait in the parking garage,” I told them. “Let me draw him out with some spawn.”

The situation was like a really big 3-D chess match and it made sense to send an expendable pawn or two to reconnoiter. I let David and Cary send a spawn each. They weren’t expendable but one of their spawn was. The weak power levels of their spawn—1.1 and 1.3—might also encourage the Adept to reveal more of himself.

They made it halfway across the floor of the garage when they were attacked by a score of hard plastic automatons about three feet high. I watched through a perched crow’s eyes—hoping his somewhat smaller profile might make him a wee bit harder to detect.

The little plastic doll robots had sixteen or so quarter-inch curved spikes on their palms to give their clumsy and chubby little hands a bit more grasp. They seemed immune to strikes by thrown Kunai or Bowies wielded with plenty of chi assist. They just didn’t seem to have any vitals.

Once they had a grip on someone they used razor sharp triangular metal teeth set close together to mimic the shearing effect of piranhas’ teeth. David and Cary’s spawn went down in a bloody mess. I had half wanted them to experience their spawns dying by violence. The first few times that you experience that, it really sharpens you up.

Ladonna sent two of her front-line spawn for round two. She lasted only marginally longer than the two scholars.

“I’m sending five of my second wave spawn. We can’t afford to bollix around all day with this. We need to get going. If this doesn’t work then it’s time for an all-out assault,” I said to my friends.

************ ***************** ******************************

A plastic doll leaped at me. I used chi finger in a broad chopping motion and cut him in two. A second robot leaped at me. I caught him but although he was all but weightless he was strong and he writhed very powerfully in my grasp. He managed to score my forearms rather badly with his palm spikes.

Another doll leapt and by the time that I flung the one that I’d caught far away he’d taken about four ounces of muscle tissue from my right deltoid. I twisted that one’s ugly little head off. Just then I felt a pain and looked down. The doll that I’d cut in half had crawled across the floor unnoticed and now he’d hamstrung my right leg.

One leapt upon me from behind and bit a big hunk out of my left trapezius. Somehow one of them bit off two fingers on my left hand.

There was no way that this was going to end well. Popping my own cork as opposed to being slain delivered a bit more chi to the original. I popped my cork.

***************** ********************** ***************************

I was the last one standing. I’m tempted to say “yet again”; but in truth I had no stronger claim to the last spawn in the situation room than the other four spawn in my second wave. It felt like one more time though.

I was angry and disgusted enough not to care about conserving chi. I made an air bomb and threw it at the evil dolls. I got enough of the back blast to addle me just slightly and I “saw” for the first time.

Have you ever read Castaneda? Many Adepts believed that some sort of half-assed Adept trained him. Perhaps by a group that used a lot of hallucinogens and a very cluttered and unnecessarily complex visualization scheme. There is another and darker interpretation.

At any rate Castaneda stressed crossing the eyes to “see”.

That’s really not right. Ordinary sight involves light rays being focused on the retina. An Adept’s eyes generally have absorbed enough extra chi to be able to see chi lines and chi auras somewhat.

But just coincidentally, the eyes are two irregular spheroids filled with a viscous semi-liquid. They make bang-up fluid chambers to sense chi particles. Chi penetrates most objects fairly freely and the eyes are bombarded with chi from all sides—but a few end up captured momentarily in the vitreous humor before they disintegrate.

It is similar in concept to those huge neutrino collectors that physicists use—though chi detectors can be far smaller and absorb far more detail.

The trapped chi particles are perceived directly without the intermediaries of lens, retina or optic nerve.

The thing is, when you focus on the eye’s chi sensing function you’re not strongly focused on using them for visual images and so you might feel that the visual world is blurry and out of focus.

At any rate, I “saw” for the first time. It is impossible to describe it fully. Each of the wicked little automatons was driven and powered by a brilliant blue-white sphere bigger than a golf ball but smaller than a tennis ball. It was centered in the torso as much as possible for maximum protection.

Five glowing half-inch diameter chi meridian branched out from the chi ball going to five minor chi balls about an inch across. One chi meridian went to each hip—right about where the ball of a man’s femur would be. Two were where the ball of a man’s humerus would be and one was centered in the head.

The little bastards couldn’t hear or smell or taste. They had very poor proprioception and tactile sense by human standards—but it was beyond the best state of the art for robots. And they saw very well. They were largely self-motivated but specific instructions could be sent to them and their master could see through their eyes and feel their bodies if he chose to.

I popped my cork.

****************** ******************* ******************************

“There is a ball of chi right in the center of those doll’s torso—right about where the fourth chakra resides. It seems to be their only vulnerable spot. Everyone attack,” I said.

I scraped together enough chi to throw three first line spawn—a couple of tenth points lower than the first time I’d used them today. I threw two second-wave spawn and all three of my third wave. There was no time to hold anything in reserve.

Ladonna came out with two first line and two second. Cary and David both had two. Several of the other Adepts could spawn as well as a few of my students.

A dude climbed out of a panel trunk. There wasn’t anything remarkable about him—except the eyes. He had wildly rolling crazy eyes.

“I’m the Grand Master Geppetto and you are all gonna die,” he shrieked and then laughed maniacally.

Okay, this squirrel food thinks he’s in a Disney cartoon. Whatever. It is remarkable how seldom people get dismembered in Disney cartoons.

I drew my pistol and shot him right in the center of his face. He popped.

One of the little dolls jumped at me. I used the pincher hand attack that Josh had shown me over a year ago. My first and second fingers on my left hand penetrated right up to the palm and then the thumb. I grabbed that chi ball and yanked it out. The doll stopped instantly.

Once I’d fended off the initial attack I resumed shooting my revolver. Yeah, those central chi balls seemed vulnerable to .45 bullets. James emptied his six-shot 20-Gauge and then drew his .357. Pretty soon it sounded like several folks firing an IPSC match all at one time.

When we finished there looked like about fifty of the little automatons lying on the floor.

The mad operator popped up before us and screamed his rage and then popped before anyone could target him.

“Spoil!” David shouted.

Geppetto had David in an arm-lock with a Kunai to his throat. I don’t know if he knew that David was a prime target or if it was happenstance.

“I’m leaving. If anyone tries to stop me he dies,” the wild-eyed madman said.

David had palmed the little .32 breaktop that he habitually carried. He slipped it behind his back and solidly against the man’s abdomen and pulled the trigger. When you fire a weapon in contact with the skin the muzzle blast follows the bullet and tears the wound cavity vastly magnifying the effect. A .32 S&W Long cartridge fired that way is probably equivalent to a .357 Magnum fired the ordinary way.

But gut shots aren’t terribly effective man-stoppers—especially with Adepts quite skilled manipulating their chi.

It did cause him to loosen his hold on David momentarily. Ladonna shot him through his right eye with one of her .44 Navy revolvers. A thrown Kunai struck him in his left shoulder while a hard-thrown washer hit his left hand—the one holding the knife—hard enough to break a couple of meta carpals.

David twisted free and kicked the man on the way down. James walked up to spitting distance and shot the man in his head to make sure that he never rose again.

I had thought that Geppetto was alone in the panel truck. Out came the most bizarre creature that I’d met so far.

I’m not sure if it was male or female. I’m not one hundred percent positive that it was human.

She was very tall and skinny with extra-long legs and arms like a spider monkey. She had very long black flyaway hair, huge hooked nose and extraordinarily long fingers with four-inch long nails. She cackled fiendishly and spiders advanced upon us from all sides.

These spiders were bigger than the biggest tarantulas and my new ability to see told me that they were very poisonous and they seemed able to leap eighteen inches at a jump.

There was no point in shooting at them with a revolver. I’d be out of rounds long before I made a dent in them.

I concentrated on surrounding myself with as many dry spawn as humanly possible. James crouched down and fired round after round of magnum #4 Birdshot at a shallow angle to the floor. The shot fired that way tends to bounce up just a bit and fan out travelling parallel to the floor. He was taking out fifteen or twenty spiders with one shot.

I started throwing air bombs into the fourth and fifth row tiers of reinforcements. Any closer and the over pressure would be a hazard to my people as well as to the spiders. At least there was a respite coming if we could persevere that long.

Cary had perhaps fifty rats forming a protective ring around him. When a spider tried to leap Cary’s chi supercharged rats leaped too. The rats were averaging eight or nine spiders before being bitten so there was a steady attrition in the ranks of the rats.

I called in my ravens. I didn’t have the numbers to throw away like Cary did and ravens and other birds are far slower breeding than rats. I told them to attack a spider only when it was reasonably safe to do so. One powerful blow of their chi-enhanced beaks would render a spider immobile and dying. They managed to thin the numbers of the spiders attacking me enough to help.

I only had one wet spawn still operational and we had both depleted our chi throwing one dry spawn after the other until we were light headed. I popped him in the interest of retrieving a portion of his scanty chi.

Someone came walking into the parking garage through the auto entrance. He was clad in silver coated Nomex from head to foot and he carried a super jumbo-sized flamethrower—I mean the fuel tanks were oversized.

He started spraying long streams of napalm on the spiders turning them into crunchy corpses. It took him few moments to angle around to where he could fry spiders without getting our folk in between.

I sent a command for my birds to get completely away. I threw three wobbly dry spawn to stand guard around me and used most of my remaining chi to throw an air bomb at the panel truck that the spider woman had ducked back into after cackling at us.

The truck rocked violently on its shocks and I thought for a moment that it might turnover. The spider woman bolted out of the truck only to get a three second blast of napalm.

She stood burning and melting like she was made of paraffin.

“You are all very bad boys and girls,” she cackled when she was nothing but a blurred runny three-foot caricature of a woman—like she was channeling The Wicked Witch of The West from “The Wizard of Oz”.

What was it with these dudes and children’s stories? Would Bambi and Thumper attack us next? The book characters not the exotic dancers…

The spider woman left only a big puddle of what appeared to be flesh colored wax. Then the puddle popped.

Wet spawn? Dry spawn? Paraffin spawn? I still don’t know to this day.

I was down on my knees. I had a handful of pills that I’d prepared earlier—eight brewer’s yeast, eight desiccated liver, one vitamin C tablet, one Benzedrine and two Lortabs—on the principle that by the time that I needed such a pick-me-up I’d be hurtin’ for certain.

I’ve always been good at swallowing multiple pills. I washed the pills down with one of the little eight ounce bottles of The Outfit’s chi restorer. For taste, I’d have preferred an equal volume of bile. I had a twenty-ounce cola in my pouch as well. It was a local energy drink high in both caffeine and ginseng. One of those would keep you wired for about eighteen hours—presuming that you weren’t totally wiped out beforehand.

The cola didn’t taste bad and usually I can take some big drinks of cola. The hot soft drink coming on the heels of the bitter chi restorers didn’t go down well. I got about four ounces down and for a moment it fought to come back up. I put the lid tightly on the soft drink and put it back in my bag. Then I fought to rise once more.

What? No, I was too drained to offer even token resistance to any further threats so I might as well have gotten the wheels greased to turn a little faster toward my recovery.

When the flamethrower wielder took off the silver hood I saw Gerald’s snow-white hair and red eyes.

“Someone help me get these tanks off,” Gerald said.

“Why not dump the whole thing?” I heard myself ask.

“I have a couple of sets of spare loaded tanks in the van Jefe,” Gerald said.

“I thought that you were dead. What about Josh?” I asked.

“I had just managed to master throwing a persistent corpse like Ladonna. It was down to two of you and one Ladonna spawn. I saw my chance and spit a low-powered persistent spawn and dove down the chute. I stopped by to get my flames and arrived via a different route. I hope you don’t feel that I ran out on you,” Gerald said.

“No protecting the lives of originals are what spawn are for. Any chance that Josh might have emulated you?”

“No, he’s definitely gone. And he left you in charge,” Gerald said.

“You’re second in command,” I interjected.

“That’s right. I was second in command under Josh. Now I’m second in command under you.”

A white van pulled even with us.

“This is the van with reloads for my flame thrower. Why don’t you ride with me?” Gerald said.

Ladonna was driving. James shoved an Adept out of the way and inserted himself into the passenger side.

“I have the shotgun,” he said. “So, I’m riding shotgun. My sensei needs protection. He’s exhausted.”

I saw that David and Cary were in a black ford four-wheeler right behind us.

I hesitated long enough to take another swallow of soft drink before I got into the vehicle in case the drink did come up this time, but it stayed down. After I climbed into the van I fought to stay awake until I’d finished the energy drink. I passed out afterwards and didn’t wake till they dropped me at my room.

It was time for ten hours sleep, a really big breakfast and then onto the lengthy debriefing.

[rvm45]

Chapter Eight









“When I was a boy, I saw a kung fu movie where a Shaolin monk was throwing coins a bit bigger than a quarter into a wooden post hard enough to half bury them in the wood. I thought that would be a marvelous skill to master. My father saw me throwing Kennedy half dollars at a shoe box propped against the headboard of my bed—and I wasn’t even penetrating the box,” I told my students.

“Don’t throw coins, you’ll lose them,” he said. “Let me bring you some washers from work.”

“The washers were a bit bigger around than a silver dollar and a bit fatter too. I couldn’t hold them between my first two fingers the way the monk did. I developed a throwing style like this,” I told my students.

I wrap my index finger around the leading edge and my thumb around the back. I throw the washers vertically with a snappy back fist motion. It’s not hard to be reasonably accurate across a back yard and they hit hard enough to leave a deep dent in a plywood target or a plank. They don’t stick, but they leave an impressive dent.

Interestingly enough, you can throw up to five or six of the stacked washers at one time. They don’t seem to lose force. They spread horizontally but not vertically. The only real drawbacks are that it isn’t quite as accurate and you exhaust your supply of washers faster.

As a man, I turned a few washers on the lathe to give them a chisel edge just dull enough to keep me from cutting my finger as I threw them—kinda a mini chakram, but I never threw them enough to see how big an improvement the edge made. Then as an Adept trainee I learned to give them a hefty chi assist.

“I want y’all to experiment and get pretty good with the washers before you start sharpening them or pumping them up with chi. I never had any luck throwing them horizontally like a Frisbee or overhand like a baseball but try both methods out. The great thing about the washers is that you can find them anywhere. They’re cheap and they’re not controlled,” I told my students.

Fourteen of my students made it out of Atlanta alive. When word got out that I was teaching Adept classes and took anyone who wanted to learn, I picked up thirty-five or forty students very quickly.

Farnsworth was typical of one type of student. He was a bit on the fat side while lacking in muscle. He was twenty-eight years old and he’d applied for Adept training every fall for the last fifteen years and he had been turned down each time.

“The school is right, you seem to have zero potential but I can’t see what that has to do with anything, if you want to study. Maybe you have hidden potential. Even a poor student can learn something from a patient teacher. Even if you never learn a damned thing, going to classes will keep you out of worse mischief,” I’d told him.

I mixed advanced students in with rank beginners and asked the skilled to help the beginners. Since some of my students were shift workers I ran three sets of classes though some managed to attend more than one set of classes. Since I could send spawn to teach it didn’t cut into my time much.

Today though, I was teaching my class with my original. As I’ve said, you can acquire almost any skill using a spawn but you get a poor return on physical fitness training done by a spawn. It isn’t a zero return but it is minimal. A bit of throwing followed by some grappling would help me keep my edge.

A dude from Administration walked up to our group. It isn’t a requirement but many in Administration wear violet colored gi tops—quilted cotton when it’s cold or chilly and light weight silk, nylon or thin muslin when it’s hot out. This dude took the royal purple seriously enough that he also wore purple jeans.

“The mayor wants to see you ASAP,” he said.

When I acknowledged him with a nod and a wave he popped out. How charming.

**************** ******************** **************************

The mayor didn’t wear a violet gi. He wore a suit and tie every day. Few people in the village even owned a tie let alone made a practice of wearing one. He was short and plump. He was very bald on top, but instead of covering it up decently he left it exposed to God and everyone else’s casual glance.

Gerald and Ladonna were there as well as David and Cary and four Adepts I remembered from the warehouse.

“First of all, quit teaching unofficial classes in tradecraft,” Dunno the Mayor said to me.

“No,” I replied.

“What!?!” Dunno demanded.

“Never raise your voice to me Dunno and be very careful how you address your betters. As you should know, we don’t take an oath of secrecy. The only thing keeping us from spreading knowledge widely is our own sense of propriety and prudence. If you were an Adept you’d know that,” I said.

“I am an Adept!” he shouted.

I grabbed his tie and yanked him across the polished surface of his walnut desktop towards me. I used a big Bowie to cut the tie off an eighth of an inch or so below the knot in one fast swoop.

“I told you not to raise your voice. I trimmed your garrote so I won’t be tempted to use it to strangle you with the next time you shout at me. Fact is: don’t shout at anyone in my presence. Now as I was saying—I schedule my classes to use facilities when the academy isn’t using them but if that’s seriously dragging your beat I can set up my own grappling areas and throwing ranges,” I said.

“They say that you’re running a big flock of crows,” Dunno said.

“I have a rather small flock—mostly ravens,” I corrected.

“You are not authorized to handle animals,” Dunno said in a querulous tone.

“You are not authorized to play the skin flute. I guess that isn’t hindering either of us from following our geas,” I replied.

He turned all red and I thought that I might have to cut the rest of his tie off to keep him from choking to death. On second thought: why should I bother?

“It has been three months since the debacle in Atlanta. We can’t afford to field large compounds like the warehouse anymore. They’re too easy to ferret out and they’re too tempting a target. Nonetheless, we need to keep a handle on what is happening in Atlanta and elsewhere. We’re going to use three and four man cells in loose contact with other groups and move them every few days. McVeeblefester is going to assume Josh’s old position,” Dunno lectured us.

“That’s a big negatory Good Buddy,” I said—using the olde tyme CB slang just to be annoying.

“I’m the leader of Josh’s old squad. If you put McVeeblefester in charge, I opt out,” I said.

“Good!” Dunno said.

“Gerald and I opt out too,” Ladonna said.

“That includes Cary and me as well,” David said.

“I don’t want Josh’s job—Spoil’s job now—so add me to the ‘declined’ list,” McVeeblefester added.

“Fine, I’ll put Spoil in charge. It’s y’all’s lives you’re putting at risk,” Dunno said.

“Yes, they’re ours,” Gerald said.

Then he leaned close and made a ridiculous funny face at Dunno.

************* ************** ***********************

I took Gerald with me to the briefing because he was second in command and segundos were invited. I took David even though he wasn’t invited because he was the brightest Adept that I knew and I wanted his mind to get to work on the situation ASAP. The black rat in my pocket would relay the info back to Cary immediately as well.

There were four other bosses and their segundos in Harold’s office.

“I’m going to lay it all out on the table for y’all,” Harold said. “Does anyone know what kinjutsu or forbidden techniques are?”

“They are techniques that are dangerous and/or seriously detrimental to a user’s health and well-being,” I said.

“That’s a big part of it but also there are techniques that could drastically change our world. Not physically but politically. Some folks possessing these techniques would set their eyes on world conquest—or at least becoming the absolute ruler of North and Central America,” Harold said.

“Not for me,” I said. “Dictators have to put in too many long hours and get up too early in the morning. And besides that, you have to use people skills far too often. I hate dealing with greed heads, backstabbers, idiots and suck-ups.”

“Everyone doesn’t share your distaste for power. Besides what if the only way that you could protect those dear to you was by wielding ultimate power?” Harold said.

“Well a ‘good’ end never justifies evil means. In fact, having a ‘good’ end in mind makes the bad means even more heinous,” I said. “But I see your point. Anyway, forbidden jutsu is the stuff of legend.”

“I wish it were so. We’ve never had any books of forbidden jutsu, but we know that they exist. Now several groups are trying to collect all the different books. Our job is to find as many volumes as we can and destroy them,” Harold said.

“I don’t hold with destroying books,” I said. “The Bible says:

“‘Then I saw that wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth darkness.’

“Wisdom will make you sad but wise sadness is preferable to blissful ignorance,” I said.

“Spoil, what do you know about the skin heads and white supremacists in Montana? Did you know that Adepts lead some of those groups? How about crack-brained polygamists from Utah and New Mexico? They have Adepts. Some of the Mexican Drug Cartels are run by Adepts.”

“You’re a Christian, aren’t you? Do you know that there’s a group right here in Appalachia that practices witchcraft and demon summoning along with their tradecraft? Do you want any of those groups to get ahold of all the kinjutsu?”

“Reckon not,” I replied.

************ *********************** ****************************

I insisted on bringing James and Chandra on board as full-fledged Adepts.

“Guys, you aren’t really full-fledged Adepts—but two thirds of the things you’d be taught during your three-year sojourn at the academy would be redundant. In peaceful and prosperous times, I’d say to go through it anyway, strengthening and polishing your technique along the way. But we’re on a war footing now.

“We’re mostly going to be running spawn into Atlanta and a few other selected places. For anything within a day’s ride we’re going to be using spawn. Our bodies are going to stay right here in the Village. That means that I need you to be working hard to build your strength, chi levels, physical skills and tradecraft,” I told James and Chandra.

The next year proved uneventful. We ran surveillance teams. I could cast multiple spawn so I was often on several stakeouts or tailings at once. We’d stay on the job for three or four days—about the maximum lifespan of most Adept’s spawn—and then someone’s spawn would come to relieve us.

Remember I couldn’t sit in the village and cast a spawn umpteen miles away in Atlanta. I had to create him within ten or twelve yards of myself and then he had to travel to Atlanta or wherever. Of course, my spawn could return to me instantly by popping his cork or having it popped. Also, recall that except for a general awareness of my spawn’s chi level and his general compass bearing in relation to me, I have no particular link to him. I had to contact him by telephone, radio, “E” Mail or whatever just like with anyone else.

We did go on some missions to cities like Knoxville—Knoxville is an obscure suburb of Lafollette—Chattanooga, Cincinnati and Louisville. We stayed gone for up to six or seven weeks. In that case our originals would go and set up shop a few miles outside of town and send in our copies.

I left a couple spawn behind to mentor my students for as long as they lasted—and the students invariably had some open-ended projects going that they could profitably spend their time on when the spawn expired.

At any rate, I became very interested in longer lasting wet spawn. I started doing basic research on my spawn.

Does a spawn have a chakra tree? It turns out that he does, but it is very subtle and hard to perceive. Spawn don’t absorb chi from food or their environment very well.

Would bulking up the first three chakras—the “digestion chakras” help? I found that it did, but the main chakras were all undersized and malformed. They were small enough that hand cranking them made a difference—if you kept it up long enough.

I also went back to my early training to find and plug leaks that let chi out. They were bigger, harder to patch and far more numerous than my own body’s. Progress was very slow at first but there was just enough to keep me at it.

Fortunately, improvements that I made to one generation of my spawn’s chakra tree seemed to carry over to the next generation of spawn that I cast.

The improvements to my spawn also seemed to cause their power levels to creep upwards even as I picked up the ability to cast more spawn here and there.

I had another idea. Dry spawn are comparatively weak. They last three or four minutes at most. Two or three stout blows or something that pierces their quarter inch thick skin will pop them—they’re hollow inside—but I could cast a great many of them.

Jeff Cooper scoffed at what he called “Inconsequential Increments”—or “IIs”. Sometimes though, your strengths multiply each other and three or four IIs can become a small but consequential advantage.

What if I could boost my dry spawn to last four or five moments instead of three or four? To require three or four stout blows to destroy them? What if their skin was even a few thousandths thicker? Finally, what if they were all just a bit more powerful?

The fact that I could field so many meant that a minor overall gain in efficacy would be multiplied many times over. And while we’re at it, why not try to increase the number that I could field at one time?

It sounded good in theory. In practice, altering my dry spawn as I cast them seemed as impossible as sculpting complex forms from my feces as I passed them.

Then I “Discovered”—or perhaps I invented them because the whole thing is a mental construct—but anyway, there were a couple chakras that seemed to heavily contribute to dry spawn formation.

The two chakras sit with their centers about three fourths of the way forward on the iliac crest. They are the size of half dollars and only as thick as a CD disk. They are cocked at crazy angles and part of them freely penetrates the crest since they’re immaterial. And by spending inordinate amounts of time “tickling” them, marginal improvements in one’s dry spawn can be realized.

************ ***************** *******************************

When the new nesting season arrived both my first-generation ravens and crows multiplied over three-fold—and the new birds were all second-generation chi supplemented creatures—they were subtly but noticeably improved over the first generation.

Then there were the wild birds that had opted to stay with me. They raised a few fledglings as well even though their offspring would still be first generation. I’d bought five more breeding pairs of ravens and two pair of crows from my commercial poacher. I had come to value my turkey vultures for aerial surveillance so I bought three breeding pairs of vultures as well as miscellaneous owls and red-tailed hawks.

There are a few folks who keep a raven or a crow as pets. The same can be said for owls though it is far less common. Falconers—legal and illegal—often buy red tailed hawks. There is a Noah’s ark scam—meaning the scam has been around for a long while—whereby one substitutes a poached red tail for the one that you have a permit for but which died or flew away. Many falconers’ birds live to surprising ages in captivity…

Very few people have any use for Vultures—so I had to pay out the wazoo for them. My determination to have breeding pairs so I could start modifying their descendants in vitro also upped the ante. It would have been far easier for my supplier to simply wait until eggs had hatched and the offspring were almost ready to fly to harvest them—but there you have it.

************** ****************** ********************************

My mission was to bug an attorney’s office in Nashville. McVeeblefester was driving and would be my lookout. Neither of us was real, but if they knew we were onto them they’d sweep the office for bugs and they might very well relocate—or feed us false data. It was better to pop my cork instead.

“What in the Hell sort of ethnicity is ‘McVeeblefester’,” I asked.my

“I wouldn’t know. ‘McVeeblefester’ is my first name. I think my father may have fabricated it. You can call me by my last name. It’s ‘O’Brian’ or by middle name. It’s ‘Enn’,” Enn said.

“Are you kin to O’Brian Sensei?”

“He’s my older brother—about sixteen years older.”

*************** **************** *********************

Cats gather about 11x or 12x as much light in dimly lit situations than humans. Dogs gather about 8x. My chi-boosted eyes were just a little bit above 3x. My hearing, ability to sense electromagnetic fields and my sense of feel were all boosted as well. What helped me the most though was the small screech owl who perched on my shoulder.

He looked all around randomly—or so it seemed to me—but my brain used his crystal-clear perception to build an accurate 3-D mental map of my surroundings. I could also direct his gaze somewhere of my choosing for three or four heartbeats at a time though when it helped. I also kept his bowels tightly locked via mind control. Owl crap all over would clue the office’s inhabitant that something was going on.

I know a dynamite method to bug the old-style phone with the screw off microphone caps. Unfortunately, they don’t make them anymore. People generally don’t leave their cell phones lying around to alter though the cell phones’ signals can often be intercepted.

I replaced several wall receptacles where their landline phones plugged into with an identical one that included a device to record and send each message to our recorder. I had no idea how The Outfit knew exactly what model was in use.

The next step was something that I hated. You can put a microphone to bug a room for sound into a wall receptacle. That way you don’t have to worry about dead batteries. Only any sane person would turn the current off before replacing the receptacle. Only you have to know where the breaker box is and which breaker to throw. Even that can leave a host of telltales: blinking digital clocks, interrupted flow to computers etcetera. Turning off the whole floor or building makes it worse and harder to hide.

I was an Adept so I could insulate my hands with chi as well as surgical gloves for all the good the gloves would do if my chi faltered. And if I electrocute myself or worse yet, fry my fingers I can simply pop my cork. But I hate being shocked with a fiery passion and it would reveal my intrusion if I left the wall receptacle half assembled.

I finished bugging the last receptacle and retrieved the portable hard drive that had been industriously downloading an ingenious Trojan—the malware, not the condom—into one of the desk computer’s hard drive.

Mission accomplished—almost. Then I got caught.

“Duncan remembers you. You hurt Duncan,” the sumo said.

“I’m about ready to hurt Duncan a lot worse,” I said.

I’m big into doing the five big compound exercises for five sets of five and throw in a few accessory exercises in various set and repetitions. When I’d started training at the warehouse I’d bench pressed 365 5x5. Before I started the chi building I’d have been thrilled to get 315 once as a lifetime best.

Sure, I could have supercharged my muscles and lifted three times as much weight, but that would have drained my strength instead of increasing it. I found though that I could supercharge just enough to use about eight to ten percent more weight than I was able to lift unassisted and the muscles would grow just as though they’d been capable of lifting the heavier weight all on their own. Then chi could also be used to speed recovery and stimulate a bit of extra growth.

I was up to benching 425 5x5 and squatting 550 25x3—not with many long pauses to take several deep sobbing breaths between repetitions—but up and down like a sewing machine needle. There were very few lifters—natural or steroid enhanced—who could equal my bench stats—particularly at a body weight of 221. I’m not sure that any Non-Adept could equal my squats.

I could supercharge my muscles to 6x or even 7x for a few minutes and one of Duncan’s arms was stronger than both of my legs. He wasn’t slow or awkward either. Dim witted perhaps but not clumsy or slow moving.

I looked forward to fighting him again but instead he whistled and a dog came to him—and what a dog! The dog was over four-foot-tall at his shoulder. He might have weighed almost as much as Duncan. The dog was covered all over with chitin plates that he’d grown. His eyes were as big as golf balls and they glowed with an internal red light. He had fangs longer and thicker than my middle finger.

“Saul is my friend. Saul won’t let you hurt Duncan. Duncan loves Saul,” the huge man-child said.

“What kind of dog is Saul?” I asked.

“Saul is a Hellhound.”

“Duncan, please don’t force me to hurt your dog. You can tell them that I was here and they will undo all my work. I have my pride too and I can’t simply pop out, but if you will let me, I’ll walk out of here and consider this a draw,” I said.

“Kill him Saul!” Duncan screamed in his booming bass voice.

[rvm45]

Chapter Nine









I “saw” Duncan’s dog. The dog was so cram-jammed full of both chi and drugs that he made the hip-hop gangster’s monster Pit Bills look natural in comparison.

The dog leaped and I reached inside him with an immaterial chi hand—similar to the chi hands that I used to hand crank my chakras with. Maybe it was the very same chi hand. I reached deep inside Saul and grabbed a handful of thick knotty chi meridians and twisted them into a hopeless tangle. The dog collapsed in a quivering heap.

Duncan rushed to his dog’s side and started bawling to my amazement.

I grabbed one of Duncan’s arms and yanked him urgently.

“Get out of the way Numb Nuts! I think that I can save your dog for you,” I said.

I reached inside and started untangling the snarl that I’d just created. It is always far easier to bollix something than it is to set it right. I had no apprehension lest Duncan attack me while I was preoccupied. I just knew that he wasn’t going to. It might have helped that he was too dim to know that he had close to zero chance to prevail against me in a contest of close range social engineering skill—or maybe not. He really loved his dog.

I’ve said that a human can survive for a while with zero chi. The same applies to animals. Saul’s body and chakra tree had been pushed so far and so hard though that chi was the only thing staving off total system collapse.

“He should be alright now Duncan. Tell whoever is pushing him to ease off on the drugs and chi infusions though or Saul won’t last much longer,” I said.

I walked out the door. Our bugging mission was shot all to Hell. It would be just as bollixed if I’d left Duncan and Saul’s dead bodies inside—or wherever.

The little suited boss had captured Enn—McVeeblefester—and he was holding him suspended in the air with his feet a good yard from the ground. Enn’s mouth was wide open in a scream of agony but something muted all his moans.

Something weird was definitely going down. That much agony should have popped the spawn’s cork. Failing that, Enn should have popped his own cork—to prevent his mind being scanned if for no other reason.

What really caused my hair to stand on end though was the fact that Little Boss wasn’t using either chi or any sort of electromagnetic force to levitate or torture Enn. He seemed to have a jet-black aura all around him and Enn.

What is the spirit of the bayonet?

Kill! Kill! Kill without mercy!

When facing a superior foe, the shrewdest course of action is generally a freewheeling all-out attack while holding nothing back.

I charged while throwing air bomb after air bomb at the little boss. I’d upped the power about forty percent since I’d used them in the parking garage and I’d drastically increased the speed that I could create and fire them and the number of bombs that I could launch during a barrage without running out of bombing chi.

My bombs didn’t explode, they just seemed to fade, fizzle out and vanish.

Since we were on a stealth mission I hadn’t wanted the constant challenge of keeping a hanger sheathed in chi to keep the Non-Adept from noticing it. I had a nice big Bowie for my left hand though.

I hacked at the little boss with a powerful overhand smash. He grabbed my left forearm and sent me tumbling with a mere flick of his wrist.

Damned nation! It was like the cartoon judo masters popular in my childhood or one of those complaisant aikido throws that just might work in the real world but wouldn’t be anywhere nearly as spectacular and photogenic.

He hoodooed my air bombs out of existence but he had to physically touch me to alter my trajectory. That was interesting.

I threw a Kunai at him with my right hand. Then I aimed a dozen sharpened and chi accelerated but unsheathed washers at him one at a time. Then I followed up with three at once followed by five at once. Then I attacked with my body and every ounce of power that I could muster.

Little Boss calmly tipped each washer aside with an index finger. He seemed able to slow down time and although I’d never trained to slow time—or even known that it was possible—time seemed to slow for me as well.

As I launched myself at Little Boss he seemed to suspend me in mid-air like he’d done Enn. Only it was different. Enn had hung motionlessly and had been in pain. I was moving glacially and I wasn’t experiencing any pain.

Then I “saw” it. Something powerful, nonmaterial and nonhuman possessed and indwelt Little Boss. He was a huge black dragon of the oriental type. He had a long scaled serpentine body with fins and crests here and there. He also had two powerful arms about three feet back of his head. He surrounded and suffused Little Boss completely.

While the demon needed the shell of Little Boss’ body to give it a foothold in the material world it had long since erased and displaced any trace of Little Boss’ personality. Little Boss had become no more than an avatar and place-keeper for a powerful demon.

Then the lobstrousity reached for me.

Guess again dude!

Something—so silver-shining white that it qualified as argent enveloped my body. I’m sure that it was always present, but the contrast created against the absolute blackness of the dragon caused it to be visible for the nonce.

Little Boss’ demon dragon fingers slipped off of me again and again—like someone trying to lift a big greased watermelon. Except that he never could actually touch me and he seemed unable to come within two or three feet of me.

Time speeded up. Little Boss seemed to lose his grip on me. He twisted enough to avoid my Bowie but I fetched him a hard punch in the face with a booming right hook.

Even before I’d touched ground I’d thrown a luxuriant group of five dry spawn and I’d given each a dozen washers and a Kunai knife. They threw washers hard one at a time and then they charged with Kunai.

Little Boss was bleeding from a broken nose. Somehow, I read his astonishment. He had never before felt pain. He tipped washer after washer from the trajectory that included him. The washers were coming too hot and heavy though. He caught one to the forehead above one eye and blood ran down into that eye. Then he got a finger on his left hand broken and then another.

I stepped close and planted an enormous uppercut to his liver and then a powerful backhand to his temple with the butt of my Bowie. I’d have been more than happy to stab or slash him but he seemed to have a healthy respect for my blade and he made sure not to leave an opening for it.

While Little Boss was momentarily stunned I grabbed Enn. He lay on the ground moaning in agony. I don’t know why he couldn’t pop. I cut his head off in one smooth motion using a chi shielded shuto hand. His headless corpse and his head endured for almost three seconds before popping. That was weird enough.

Duncan came walking out of the attorney’s office carrying Saul gently as he did so.

“Drop that worthless hound and kill him,” Little Boss screamed at Duncan while pointing a bloody finger at me.

Later to this noise, I thought to myself—then I popped my cork.

************* ****************** **************************

“Kill the dog. If he can’t defeat that Adept’s shadow then he’s worthless,” Little Boss screamed at Duncan.

“You couldn’t defeat him either. Should I kill you too Little Brother?” Duncan asked innocently.

“Fine then. I’ll kill the dog myself and then you have some discipline coming,” Little Boss said. “And don’t call me ‘Little Brother’. The part of me that was kin to you died a long time ago,” Little Boss said.

When Little Boss’ back was turned Duncan lifted one of the concrete slabs that marked the parking spots in the lot—four-foot-long, eight inches wide and perhaps six inches deep. It was close to one hundred pounds of rebar reinforced concrete.

Duncan swung the slab in a big wide ark like someone swinging one of the big wooden sledges at a carnival. He brought it down on the top of Little Boss’ head with every ounce of momentum his five hundred and sixty-five-pound body could muster.

The slab crushed Little Boss’ skull, it ruptured multiple vertebrae in his neck and it wreaked havoc with many ribs and thoracic vertebrae in Little Boss’ torso.

Somehow though, Little Boss remained conscious. He trained his single remaining eye on Duncan.

“I can repair even this,” his little brother told Duncan in a fluting hiss. “And when I do, you will rue the day that you raised a hand against me.

Little Boss liked to quote Machiavelli:

“Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot.”

Duncan was no great thinker but he remembered how his brother had quoted that line so many times over the years. He thought about it as he used the remains of the concrete curb to beat Little Boss’ brains into pudding, smash his hands and feet to bloody pulp and to thoroughly smash his legs.

His brother could probably repair even that, Duncan thought, but it stood to reason that it would take him longer to do so.

Duncan relieved Little Boss of his wallet. Duncan had money but his brother carried much more—just for “eventualities”. He was facing a long walk carrying an exhausted friend much of the way. He’d have liked to borrow his brother’s van but he couldn’t fit behind the wheel and he’d never learned to drive.

Duncan wasn’t completely stupid. He’d known that the day might come when he’d have to travel cross-country on his own. His father had always stressed looking ahead and being prepared.

He hadn’t thought of his father in a long while. It made him sad for a moment to think that he’d virtually forgotten his father. He had quit practicing much of what his father had taught him but he still remembered—in a blurry non-centered way.

Duncan was neither idiot nor savant and he didn’t have total recall—but his wide-open and simple mind could memorize things far faster and easier than most mentally gifted folk. He knew how to hop a freight train very well in theory and he had an excellent grasp of where the main railroad lines were.

*************** ******************** *********************************

A few days after the debacle in Nashville there was a loud and urgent knock on my door in the wee hours. I opened the door with a pistol in my hand. There stood a fellow wearing the blue gatekeeper’s uniform with an AR 15 slung diagonally across his back.

“What in the seven burning Hells do you want? It is 3:00 am,” I grumped.

“A huge sumo turned up at the gate. He was carrying a giant Hell Hound and he said that he wants to speak to you,” the guard told me.

Okay, Duncan was challenged but he’d found the village somehow. He knew that I was in the village and he’d made his way through the mind labyrinth to accost the gatekeepers.

************** ***************** **************************

They had Duncan sitting chained hand and foot in a detainment cell. Saul was muzzled. He had a great collar around his neck and two great tow chains bound him to the wall.

This didn’t look like something hastily conceived and thrown together. It made me wonder precisely what went on in the interrogation department.

I was still groggy and I sat down wearily.

“What do you want Duncan,” I asked. “On second thought, never mind,” I said as I placed a hand on either side of his head.

Duncan’s mind was simple and open but it had seemed to have acquired a bit more sharpness since he’d been away from the constant repression of his personality by Little Boss.

“Okay,” I told him. “I do have one favor that I’d like to ask though.”

I was too weary to demand keys to Saul’s collar and then have to debate the desirability of setting the Hell Hound loose with the guards. Instead I worked my index finger inside the wide collar and used chi finger to sever it effortlessly. Duncan flashed on my agenda and he pulled the multiple chains nominally restraining him with no more stress than if they’d been made of liquorish.

A guard came running up as I opened the door.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“It’s late. I have a guest. I’d intend to get him to the all-night mess hall and get him fed and then get him settled into a room. With any luck, I might be able to do that in time to grab another couple of hours sleep before my day starts in earnest. That’s not going to work out if you insist on playing twenty questions,” I told him.

************** ****************** ***************************

Saul, Duncan and I were about halfway across one of the grassy commons that dotted the village when we were met with a dozen violet clad administration personnel with AKs in hand.

“Halt! What do you think you’re doing?” the sergeant of the guard shouted.

“Don’t raise your voice to me and watch how you address your betters,” I said wearily. “I’ve already had this conversation with your boss.”

“Check your by-laws. I can bring a guest of my choice into the village at any time. I don’t know what group that Duncan belongs to. I’m not sure that he knows,” I continued. “It doesn’t matter. There are no exceptions to keep me from bringing in an Adept from a rival group—and we aren’t officially at war with anyone anyway.”

“This isn’t open for discussion. I told you to halt!” the sergeant shouted.

I kept a black rat with me at all times. That meant that I could contact Cary via “Rat-a-Gram” any time. I’d told Cary to contact the others and come before I’d even sliced Saul’s collar off.

Gerald, Ladonna, Cary, David, James, Chandra and McVeeblefester all showed up along with eight or nine of my more advanced students.

“Do I really need to throw large numbers of spawn this early in the morning to prove to you that you’re outclassed and outnumbered?” I asked them.

They stepped down reluctantly.

I stepped up close to the sergeant. I sucker punched him in the pit of the stomach and when he went down I grabbed his right hand and broke his index finger and then the one next to it—the middle finger.

“I told you not to raise your voice to me. Now we’re still not even, but I’m going to let you off easy this time. If you ever shout at me again, I’ll also collect the rest of the debt that I’m letting you slide on today,” I said.

“Have you taken leave of your senses?” Gerald demanded as we walked to the all-night mess hall. “What do you intend to do with the sumo and the Hell Hound?”

“Duncan and Saul are our newest team members,” I explained to my crew as simply as possible.

It was early in the morning and none of us had even had our morning coffee.

“Duncan, do you like donuts, rolls and chocolate milk? Chocolate is bad for dogs, but I’ll get Saul a platter with about ten pounds of bacon, sausage and scrambled eggs. How does that sound to y’all?”

Duncan beamed happily. I felt Saul’s mind caressing the image of the high fat and protein treat that I intended to procure for him and he barked joyously.

I was used to reaching out to touch animal’s minds. Saul was the first animal that seemed able to reach out on his own without prompting.

Note to myself:

Duncan might lose a hundred or more pounds of muscle and even some bone without the ruthless outside manipulation of his chi and anatomy by someone who really didn’t care if he was happy and healthy and who didn’t mind shortening his life expectancy drastically.

Still, even then Duncan was going to be very big. I needed to get a cabinet maker or two working on a big room with oversized bed and chairs bulked up to handle him or Saul’s weight. In the meantime, Duncan could sleep on a mattress thrown on the floor.

************** ******************* ******************************

I had just finished eating a big breakfast when Mayor Dunno and a score or more of his purple clad Praetorian Guards showed up to make my early morning joy complete.

[rvm45]

Chapter Ten







Most of my team and a few group members were standing in Mayor Dunno’s office waiting to be dressed down.

“Spoil, I’ve come to a conclusion,” Dunno said.

My father used to use exactly that same tone of voice and facial expression when he said:

“Spoil, I have a job for you.”

He acted as if I’d told him:

“I’ll bet you one hundred dollars that you can’t think up some tedious and pointless chore for me to waste my time on.”

And by coming up with such a task he’d won the bet and shown how clever he was to boot. Except I wasn’t stupid enough to ever issue such a challenge.

All in all, my father wasn’t such a bad fellow even though he had enough fusty mannerisms to have been in an old “Dick Tracy” comic strip or maybe “Lil’ Abner.” However, if Dunno was about to start channeling my father’s more annoying mannerisms he was going to come to the end of my patience very quickly.

“You can throw more spawn than anyone else in the village,” Dunno started.

That’s interesting. I knew that I was getting up there—and all my first wave spawn were over power level 4.0—but that made it official. Gerald wasn’t too far behind me in pure numbers and his spawn were all a good deal stronger than mine.

“Now that you have the sumo and the Hell Hound I think that your talents are wasted as an intel-gathering group leader. I’m going to hold your team in reserve as a rapid deployment strike force,” Dunno said.

“Whatever,” I said.

“But David is the best aerial surveillance specialist that we have and Cary is a gifted rat runner—in the top two or three. McVeeblefester is one of our best strategists. I think that it’s a waste to have them on a rapid deployment group. I’m going to reassign them to a data gathering group,” the mayor said.

“You can remove me from Spoil’s team, but you can’t place me on another team or send me on a mission without my consent,” David said.

“That goes for me as well. You can use us as team members on Spoil’s team or we can sit idle and draw casual pay,” Cary said.

“I’m not quite so picky,” Enn said, “I’m willing to move up to team leader—but only if my team is assigned to Spoil’s group.”

“There is no reason to send valuable resources on suicide missions,” Dunno said.

“So, you plan to send my team on suicide missions?” I observed.

I moved quickly and grabbed Dunno’s tie, pulled him across his desk and trimmed it for him once more.

“You’re starting to raise the volume a bit. I just wanted to remove temptation,” I said.

“If you ask me, I’ll kill this little boss for you. His bodyguards can’t stop me,” Duncan said.

The lights in Saul’s eyes grew in intensity and he growled deep down in his throat.

“Nah, it’s cool. Dunno isn’t worth killing,” I reassured my newfound friend.

“He reminds me of my little brother,” Duncan said and turned his back pointedly on the plump little mayor.

“I will need eight weeks to work in my new members. Then you can send us on all the high-risk missions that you’d like,” I said. “By the way Dunno—I sometimes have a weird or knowing. I just had one. It is my geas to kill you someday. That isn’t a threat. It is simply a fact.”

************* ****************** **********************************

“This chitinous armor isn’t natural,” the veterinarian said.

She pulled a big breastplate from Saul’s chest. It came loose with a bunch of fine hairs as if someone had given the Hell Hound a bikini wax.

“Since no one is warping his chi anymore the plates are gradually coming loose from the skin and hair is starting to grow in underneath. Give him a good soak in warm water every week or so until all the plates come free. Don’t force them. While they’re quick they’ll hurt if you try to remove them. You’ll be able to tell. Thank you for bringing him. He’s quite an interesting study,” she said.

************ ************** ************************

“This is Homer Sensei,” James said. “He isn’t an Adept, but he teaches kenpo in his own small dojo right here in the village.”

“I heard that you’re taking on students who couldn’t get admitted into the academy and you’re teaching them Adept tradecraft,” the ordinary looking black man said

“Just so,” I said.

“I hear they’re raising Hell with you for using their training facilities. You’re welcome to use my dojo,” Homer said.

“Thank you. That will ease things considerably,” I said. “Given your approval, we’ll finance any number of improvements and extra gear.”

“I came here thirty years ago with my older brother. He’d been accepted into the academy and he brought me to the village with him. He died on a mission shortly after graduation. I liked to think that if he’d lived that his recommendation might have greased a few skids for me. As it was, I never got accepted. I’m forty-two years old now. I suppose that it’s too late for me but I applaud what you’re doing,” Homer said.

“You’re right. It is too late for you. Everyone always starts everything important in life too late—because we’re only here on this Earth for a brief span of days. In thirty years, you’ll be seventy-two. You will be seventy-two if you study tradecraft and you’ll still be seventy-two if you don’t,” I said.

************ ************* **********************************

“I’m six-one and I weigh two hundred and twenty-seven pounds,” I told my students.

I stepped onto the one-inch diameter steel cable suspended thirty inches from the ground—which was liberally sprinkled with crash pads.

“I’m not a circus performer and I’m neither super agile nor very skilled,” I told my students. “I can do these stunts only because I cheat and use generous amounts of chi to bind me to the wire.”

I did the splits and then rose to standing. I did a cartwheel on the wire. The second time I stopped in the middle and did a handstand that evolved into a one-armed handstand. I went back to two hands and moved to an “L” Seat and held it for about forty-five seconds then regained my feet and did a back somersault off the wire.

“I’m not the most gifted or acrobatic of the Adepts,” I said. “In fact, most would consider me a bit slow and clumsy at acrobatics. No one is going to ask any of you to climb onto a tight rope or even a true balance beam for some time.”

I pointed to a board for practice. It was a bit wider than a standard balance beam and its surface was only ten inches off the ground.

“Y’all will start on that. Acrobatics are fine but focus on the chi manipulations that make acrobatics beside the point.”

************ **************** *******************************

I went to see the armorers.

“What do you have there,” Taylor asked me.

“Have you ever seen the little toy Kunai knives that discount houses like ‘Bud K’ sells?”

I showed him the little toy Kunai. They sell for about thirty-five or forty dollars for a dozen and they come in their own little carrying case. The blades are only about three inches long and they’re about six-and-a-half inches overall.

What do you expect for thirty-five bucks? At least the toy knives are fun.

An Adept could turn the little toy blade into disabling or even lethal weapons with chi assist. You could carry quite a few of the little knives for a minuscule weight penalty. I didn’t want to replace the full-sized Kunai—just supplement them.

I particularly liked the idea of throwing dry spawn with one full-sized Kunai for infighting and half-a-dozen toy Kunai for throwing and no harder to spawn than a single full-sized knife.

In the same vein, I’d brought some of the silly-cheap throwing stars—eight pointed and stamped from 12-Gauge—tenth-inch—sheet metal—you have to throw them vertically because if you throw them horizontally they’ll plane randomly through the air like a Frisbee but without a Frisbee’s potential for accuracy.

One problem was that once someone started flinging the flimsy missiles with a chi-charged vengeance, they didn’t last long. I was after some higher quality gadgets made to my specs.

“By the way, we’ve made a saber to your specs—thirty–nine-inch blade and all,” Taylor said. “Its rather heavy and bulky.”

“What does it weigh?” I asked.

“Three pounds and seven ounces,” Taylor said.

“Heros Von Borcke’s sword weighed three pounds and thirteen ounces and its blade was only thirty-six inches. He wasn’t an Adept—at least so far as I know. Three-seven is cool. It will be hard to hide though,” I ran down a bit at the last.

“Not with this new sheath. It absorbs a tiny bit of your chi and makes the sword invisible to non-Adepts. You’ll need to watch yourself in crowds though. If the sheath smacks someone they will feel it.”

“You’re a good man Taylor,” I told him.

************* *************** **************************

“Why do I need to learn to throw spawn?” Duncan said. “I’m already the strongest Adept around.”

“Gerald,” I prompted.

Gerald threw a dozen wet spawn and each one had a power rating above 6.0.

“Could you whip all of them and then Gerald’s second wave?” I asked. “Duncan, you aren’t truly an Adept. Too much of your chi manipulation has been done to you rather than by you. Your power rating is probably close to 12.0. You are the strongest member of my team by far.”

I paused a moment to let that soak in.

“You are weaker now than you were when we met in Nashville. I’m sorry, but you’re going to get weaker yet. I hope that we can keep you at least at 9.0. 10.0 is better. What if we run into your brother again and he’s got a sumo that he’s boosted to 15.0? If you are standing there at 10.0 and you can throw three or four spawn at even 9.0…”

Ratings get really shaky as a way to measure ability much above 5.0-6.0. Duncan’s spawn even at 6.0 would be far more physically powerful than one of Gerald’s spawn at 6.0. I couldn’t even throw a spawn at 6.0.

My slashing approximations were more to motivate Duncan and to explain why the things we endeavored to teach him mattered.

Duncan could be motivated to diligently throw Kunai and stars, climb on the ten-inch high balance beam or learn breakfalls by mentioning that another face-off against his brother was almost a certainty in his future.

************** ****************** *************************

When I walked into one of the pole buildings that we’d built on the dojo’s property I saw Cary and Gina—David’s eleven-year-old sister. No, get your mind out of the gutter. They had two dozen or so of Cary’s black rats and surprisingly—perhaps I should say “astonishingly” there was also several black cats walking around nonchalantly in their midst.

“EE?” I interjected.

“I’m teaching Gina to run cats,” Cary said.

“Everyone can’t teach tradecraft. Gina is fairly young to be exposed to this type stuff and finally what would David say?”

“I find that I can teach. Times, they are a changin’. Who knows when this could be an essential survival skill and no time to learn,” Cary said.

“Survival skill?”

A half-a-dozen black cats were between me and Gina with their back’s arched and fierce hisses while Gina brandished a Karambit in each hand. Point taken.

“And about her brother…”

“Actually, I’m the one who asked Cary to teach her,” David—who’d just entered the room—said.

************* **************** ***************************

In the end, we only had five weeks. I was grateful that we had five weeks.

I’d thought long and hard about how my students could grow and improve while I was away on assignments. I’d written a three-volume manual on chakra trees, chi manipulation and tradecraft. I left it for Homer, Coach O’Brian and Coach Brown to read and critique while I was away. Homer—although he wasn’t an Adept he had many years of teaching martial art under his belt—was to share selected parts with the other students to see how useful they’d find it.

There was a volume of kinjutsu that was being bartered between two groups of Adepts in Indianapolis. It was our job to intercept and snatch the book.

I disliked going looking for trouble, but now I had a new and improved Duncan and Saul on my team. I had several new weapons from the armorers…

And I finally had my left-hand saber with a thirty-nine-inch blade. The longest sabers or katanas seemed to have thirty-six inch blades as a maximum. I didn’t know what sort of edge—and liability, because nothing is free—the extra three inches would give but I expected that I’d find out.

[rvm45]

Chapter Eleven








The exchange was going to occur at The Indianapolis State Fair.

I was in Indianapolis in 62 when they had the big explosion at the Ice Show. I was a small child, but I can remember hearing the blast and my parents wondering what caused it. Of course, when the morning paper arrived we all knew.

I was living there when Kennedy was assassinated. I remember going to see the Soldier’s and Sailor’s Monument at Christmas. They’d draped it with Christmas lights and were billing it as “The World’s Largest Christmas Tree”. Later I learned that 1962 was the first year that they’d done The World’s Largest Christmas Tree.

I’d never cared much for Indianapolis. The roads are very confusing and the people all seemed to have that big city brusqueness and impersonality in much greater degree than the size of the city necessitated.

It has always seemed to me that East of the Misses’ Hip, the farther you go North of the Mason-Dixon Line the wetter and soggier folks get. They become ever more saline and ever harder to get along with.

That’s just me. If you like Indianapolis you’re welcome to your share of it and mine too.

Over nine hundred thousand people attend the State Fair every year. We can round that to an even one million. The fair lasts seventeen days. Divide seventeen into a million and you get fifty-eight thousand and some odd. That probably isn’t one hundred percent accurate because the number of people at the fair waxes and wanes from day to day.

Some folks attend more than one day. On the other hand, few folks get there at noon and stay until they roll up the sidewalks at 11:00 pm.

Guesstimate ten to twenty thousand people milling around mindlessly on the midway at any particular moment of time—along with a few score Adepts—especially if you count each and every spawn.

Our source said that the exchange would be on the midway. There were fifteen of us counting a few of my more advanced students. I had the students stay out of the fairgrounds and send spawn only. Numbers were welcome, but I didn’t want any of them hurt or captured by formidable Adepts from the opposition.

I threw fifteen first wave and nine second wave spawn. That was twenty-four of me walking around—not counting the original me. I had to be close to the action to call shots and send spawn reinforcements from any recycled chi.

All of the spawn’s faces would be copies of mine, but each one used a minimal glamor to change their appearance. A neat thing about the masking glamor—no two people would perceive the face exactly the same way.

Of course, a glamor would be like wearing a flashing LED encrusted vest that said: “Adept”. But it is nearly impossible to hide one’s status from another Adept anyway.

Gerald contributed a dozen spawn. Enn and Ladonna both contributed six each. Cary could do five and four of them were on the midway running huge numbers of rats.

David could throw four wet spawn. Two of them were in his electronic surveillance panel truck helping him monitor all the streaming data from his multiple flying drones. He held two spawn in reserve both to help boost his chi and as protection if he were discovered. One of Cary’s spawn helped David with surveillance and was ready to help defend him if it became necessary.

James and Chandra also watched over David, but from outside the panel truck hopefully looking nonchalant. They each had two copies walking the midway with one held in reserve to help defend. Finally, there was a single Duncan spawn with a power rating above ten watching David’s panel truck.

David worried me. Unlike long distance chi links, electronics can be traced. It was encrypted and bounced around a bit—but someone just might track it back to the source—and David was too valuable a game piece to casually cast aside.

The one thing that we had going for us was that most Adepts ignore high technology as unnecessary and uninteresting. For them it is superfluous most of the time. It isn’t always superfluous though.

I had eight turkey vultures soaring effortlessly above the fairgrounds relaying occasional views when something matched the images that I’d told them to look for. I wish that I had more of them. The red-tailed hawks also soared but their eyes weren’t as powerful as the vultures.

My ravens and crows flitted around gathering data here and there.

Most birds have very poor night vision. I’d manipulated my bird’s eyesight until they had half again as much light gathering power as a human. That’s still nothing to brag about and a raven flying rapidly through an obstacle rich course probably needed more than a fifty-percent increase over human night vision to do such stunts well.

There is a limit to how much change that you can make in two or three generations though.

At night, I had my crows and ravens fly as slowly as possible while pausing for fifteen to thirty minutes at a time to perch somewhere that they could scan the crowd—while I tried to make some sense of the jumbled and kaleidoscopic images they sent me.

Psychedelic!

My owls? The sharp contrast between the brightly lit midway and the surrounding night made them less than useful this time around.

I had five third wave spawn on tap nowadays and I was using three of them in a triangle formation to screen threats to my person while I held two in reserve. What the Hell? I’m a very important game piece myself.

Duncan stayed within eyeshot, but far enough away that it wasn’t obvious that we were together. He had three ungodly powerful spawn on tap. He beefed up my guard and keeping him close meant that I could keep an eye on him too. I trusted his loyalty beyond question. I didn’t trust his tact and finesse any farther than I could throw him.

Duncan’s weight was down to around four eighty. He’d lost some strength but gained quite a bit of speed and agility—especially since we’d been teaching him simple acrobatics. It wasn’t a matter of diet. His brother had simply forced Duncan’s body to carry far more supercharged muscle than was good for him. In the absence of such compulsion Duncan’s body was cheerfully jettisoning tissue that it had never wanted to add in the first place.

Be that as it may. Duncan wouldn’t have looked fat if you could see him, but he would look huge and deformed. He was using an overall glamor that made him look like a five-hundred-pound fatty—complete with belly rolls and jiggles as he walked.

I’d given him more than ample funds and he was having loads of fun playing the role and buying things to eat and drink at every food stand that he passed.

I was doing okay that way myself. Keeping so many spawn in play at one time, checking with my flock regularly and giving out orders over radio or rat-a-gram burned huge numbers of calories and the blazing hot August sun made me thirsty.

The one thing about Duncan that was a poor fit was the way he wandered the midway without the slightest apparent effort and occasionally he’d forget himself completely for a step or two and bounce around like Neil Armstrong.

Note to myself: check into getting a faux electric scooter for Duncan. When it really hit the fan, he could abandon it—hopefully temporarily—but it would need power, speed and battery life greater than ordinary for it to keep up with us on a moving stakeout. Sure, some of the regular models were built to take Duncan’s weight but then they crawled at about two miles per hour. Also, a genuine five-hundred-pound fat man wouldn’t drive up and down the midway for ten or eleven hours at a time.

No one seemed to be playing the free throw game across the midway. There was an Oriental gentleman bouncing a basketball and trying to bark up some players. He lost his ball momentarily and when he bent to pick it up his right leg was stiff. He caught me staring at him. We recognized each other as Adepts at about the same moment.

Just as I recognized the threat, he was behind me whispering in my right ear.

Almost instantly one of my ravens stooped and dive-bombed him. Its chi-shrouded beak should have hit him smack-dab in the middle of his face but he’d already teleported back to the front of the free throw game. Only I’d been looking right at him the whole time and he hadn’t moved.

“Truce! Play the game and talk,” was what he’d whispered in my ear.

“Take a chance? Three tries for ten dollars!” he shouted at me.

I walked over and handed him a twenty. He handed me five and five ones for change. There were three green pieces of paper with some rather fine writing upon them. I fold the bills and the message over and thrust it into my pocket.

“You have part of my mind,” he said. “And you really wreaked havoc on my left leg.”

He could talk like a ventriloquist without moving his lips.

“Peace, I don’t blame you. It was masterfully done. I could have repaired my mind and my body a long time ago if the punishment details they keep me on didn’t keep me on the verge of total collapse. The Tiger wasn’t punished though,” he said with a heartfelt sigh.

“That was a long time ago. This doesn’t look like such a bad duty,” I said.

“The Yokohama Ninja are exchanging a book of kinjutsu for a book of forbidden techniques with the Minnesota Manglers,” He said. “Everyone that can possibly be spared is at the fair trying to intercept one or the other books—or better yet, both.”

“Are they really from Yokohama?” I asked.

“Are the Manglers from Minnesota? It’s a name. It shows more imagination than ‘The Outfit’,” he said.

“Two books? I thought one side was bartering valuable consideration for the other’s book of kinjutsu,” I said.

“They are. What could be a more valuable consideration to an Adept than a book of privy lore,” he said.

“Privy lore? You make it sound like witchcraft.”

“Isn’t it?” he said.

“Little Boss?”

“His group is from Dallas. He’s a little bit under the weather lately but his gang is represented. Your sumo over there trying to act like a five hundred pound grossly obese fellow—isn’t that his older brother? You accepted the sumo into your team—ergo you accept defectors. Would you take me?” he asked.

“Now?” I asked.

“No, not now—later. There is contact info on the papers that I gave you.” He said.

“My father said that if animals and small children cotton to someone then he is probably trustworthy. Don’t trust anyone who weirds out children or dogs. I will let the sumo, his Hell Hound and my rat-runner decide whether you are trustworthy or not. Otherwise we can call it all off amicably and we both back slowly away,” I said.

“We’ve been talking too much. Score a basket and then argue,” he hissed.

“I scored!” I shouted.

“You stepped over the line. You’re disqualified,” he said.

“You lying slant-eyed bastard! You deliberately set your platform up to be cockeyed and rickety and so I stood behind it. How in Hell cold I have stepped across the line?” I shouted.

I hoped that he wouldn’t give in. I didn’t want one of the giant plush and if he gave in it would be conspicuous to drop one of the five-foot tall teddy bears in the first trash barrel that I came to.

“It says right there on the sign—all decisions by the game manager are final. I’ll tell you what though. I’ll give you a small bear if you’ll go in peace,” he said.

Twenty minutes later I saw Ladonna.

“Here, don’t say that I never gave you anything,” I said as I passed her the stuffed bear.

***************** ******************** ****************************

That night I consulted with several of my team and then I contacted the North Korean interrogator via text at the number he’d given me.

“Dude, here is the deal: if my sensitives give you a go you’ll be with us but bound and guarded. That is if they think you’re sincere. If not, you’ll be stripped and bound and left where you may not be found for several hours. Think what that will do to your approval rating at North Korean Adept Central,” I texted.

“Wonderful!” was the only reply.

“Either he’s desperate to get away or he’s determined to try to infiltrate our group and/or The Outfit.” I said with a shrug.

We’d lucked out and rented a luxury suite with several interconnecting rooms. After my phone message Ladonna sat with a straight razor and scissors along with needle and thread diligently doing something to her teddy bear.

“What are you up to?” I asked.

“Look at this,” she said while handing me a revolver.

It was a custom Smith and Wesson K Frame .357 Magnum. I knew that it was custom because of the bobbed hammer and the five-inch barrel. There were factor four-inch barrels and factory six-inch barrels but no five-inch ones. There were also very few full-sized K-Frames with round butts.

“It’s an old custom Smith. So, what?” I said.

“I think that if I pull out enough stuffing that I can put the gun in the bear and close it again with a Velcro flap,” she said.

“It’s a bit slow to access,” I shrugged.

“Not as one of several tertiary back-ups,” She said.

“Okay, what do I know? I just work here,” I said.

Cary looked pained.

“Well…they pay you,” he finally conceded.

“Said the man who talks to rats.”

“Says the man who played a carnie game and won a plush.”

[rvm45]

Chapter Twelve










“The ravens have it!” I told my team. “They’re exchanging gifts in front of the bumper cars.”

I moved in and swiped a book.

What does a book of kinjutsu look like? I have no idea—old maybe? I’ll bet that most of the other Adepts on this snipe hunt had no idea either. That’s why I’d stopped by a used bookstore and bought a set of encyclopedias—one consisting of big thick volumes with a nice pseudo-leather cover. Then I carefully spayed a black crinkle coat on them—damned shame to mess up a nice old book that way.

Each team member had a volume and so did all of their spawn. Once I had had the true volume in hand, half the team started a frantic shell game. In the meantime, the other half of the team pursued the remaining volume backed up and assisted with big flocks of crows and ravens along with dozens of rats and aerial drones.

None of the spawn looked like me—in case they got into a shootout or something. For the razzle-dazzle shell game to work though, we had to look alike. I have a Celtic nose—wide but comparatively short—and I have long hair along with caveman supraorbital ridges.

Using a confusing glamor is comparatively easy. Making yourself or a spawn look like a specific image is comparatively difficult. It helps to have a distinct image in mind.

I’d caught an old favorite on the radio on the way to Indianapolis. I hoped that he’d forgive me but I turned each and every spawn into a spitting image of a young Meatloaf—complete with silk hankie and white ruffled shirt and copious rivulets of sweat. I hadn’t been that heavy in a long while but the coarse features were similar enough.

I did an abrupt left face and ducked into a small and roped off gangway between gaming tents and when I walked out the other side I was a whole new me.

The boss North Korean was waiting for me on the other side. He must have waxed his shaved head because the shine in the bright sunlight was intense.

“You’re the Adept who shot me in the ankle. You also stole my subordinate. Now you have the book. This will be short but painful,” he said.

I threw a dozen dry spawn at once. They showered the Korean with mini-chakram washers, sheet metal throwing stars and mini-Kunai. They mixed them up so the trajectories weren’t as predictable. After throwing dozen missiles quickly they drew a full-sized Kunai and charged while I threw ten more dry spawn to keep the shower of pointed objects flowing.

The missiles all bounced harmlessly off the shield of chi that he surrounded himself with. Then the Korean made an impatient backhanded sweeping gesture with one hand and twenty-two of my beefed up dry spawn abruptly popped. I never cared for that bunch anyway.

He wasn’t going to allow me the space to draw my saber so I drew a Bowie and attacked. He intercepted my slash with a bare shuto hand and cut the blade of my Bowie off. Now I was mad. That was a very nice custom Bowie.

He attacked slashing for all he was worth with the knife-edges of his open hands.

This was me and not a spawn. I didn’t give three hoots in Hell about dying but if he whacked off all my fingers I’d have to live with the aftermath.

I sent loads of chi to my own knife-edged hands but I made the chi sheath extend about six or seven inches beyond my fingertips.

He slashed at my collarbone. That seemed one of his favorite attack points. I met him with the very tip of my right chi knife and it stopped his attack. Now that I knew that the chi would protect my hands I didn’t need to continue to create the hard to maintain extension.

I slashed at his head, clavicles and arms while parrying his chi finger with my own chi finger. Bluish white bolts of static jumped six to nine inches from our chi-shielded hands when they collided. It was like playing with a huge static generator or a Tesla coil.

“You stole my hand technique,” he said in an accusing tone.

“It is like: really man, be for real!”

“Talk seriously you fool,” he hissed.

“Alright, I think that pudding is a beverage,” I replied.

He got enraged and attacked furiously. That gave me the opening that I needed.

As he stepped close to deliver a resounding slap, I reverted to the pincer attack that Josh had shown me so long ago. The super reinforced fingers penetrated his shield and went into his chest.

I didn’t quite penetrate the chest cavity but I seriously damaged a couple ribs and came back with a respectable sized chunk of skin and pectoral muscle.

“You fool! Scum! Peon!” he screamed at me.

Just then a raven hit him hard in the back of his head with a chi-sheathed beak. It cut the skin on the back of his head deeply and it stunned him slightly…

Yeah, sometimes adepts just know these things without having to see, hear or feel them.

The backlash fried my raven. Bummer. I thought too much of my birds to send them on kamikaze missions—but the threat is generally stronger than the execution. I had eight and then nine ravens circling and making aborted feints at his baldhead. They could also dive and flair their wings with just the right timing to block his vision of me at a crucial moment.

I realized just then that we were kinda elsewhere. The carnie was gone. The people were gone. There was no green grass and no blue sky. The Korean seemed to have surrounded us with a bubble of chi that totally enveloped us on all sides.

Psychedelic!

I drew my saber and sheathed it in chi. I’d waited too long for the saber to have this poster child for Planned Parenthood cut the blade asunder.

The Korean pulled a pair of blue metal tonfa seemingly from nowhere. They were the very lustrous blue like the plum-blue finish that you see on a few old, top of the line and well preserved antique shotguns or European pistols.

He pushed a button on each handle and a thirteen-inch blade of blade of such shiny steel that it seemed to glow with an inner light slapped into place. Apparently, they worked like an out-the-front switchblade.

“Remember,” I told him. “In a Kingdom of The Deaf a man with a runny nose will ride a bicycle.”

If silly talk angered him, he might become careless enough for it to matter.

God alone knows what might have happened but just then Duncan managed to breach the barrier that the Korean had erected. Duncan came from behind me and to my right. Before he even got within range of the tonfa armed Adept a second Duncan burst through the barricade one hundred and eighty degrees from the first Duncan.

They did sumo style rushes and trapped the Adept between them. The Korean’s jutsu and weapons didn’t seem able to penetrate the tanked-up sumo.

The tonfa disappeared back into the sub luminous ether or wherever the Hell it came from. The Korean gathered himself and beheaded Duncan with his super-powered shuto hand.

Duncan vanished. That one was a copy!

The other Duncan snatched the Adept up and started trying to pile drive the bald man into the ground headfirst. The Korean buffered himself with chi and time and again he folded into an acute “J” shape instead of meeting Mister Ground with the crown of his head.

Finally, the Adept’s head hit the ground—once with moderate force, once hard and then Duncan went to slam him like he was trying to shatter a bowling ball with a boat oar.

Somehow the Korean managed to reach around with an extended chi finger like I had used earlier and sever both of Duncan’s legs just above his knees—but it was too late to forestall the super-slam.

Duncan fell with blood spurting from each of his severed legs while the Korean boss lay with crushed skull, broken neck and multiple ruptured disks in his back.

Then both of them popped. The second Duncan was a spawn too—as well as the Korean.

With the demise of the Korean the micro-mini world that he’d created vanished and we were back on the midway. Duncan stood there with an oversized Kunai in hand. There was two of Ladonna—both with a silly teddy bear’s rump protruding from a shoulder bag. There was three of me and a couple of students’ spawn.

I also got the experiences of five popped spawn all at once. They hadn’t just popped. Somehow the Korean’s barricade had kept the chi and experiences from reaching me. That was interesting but tangential.

“Everyone, throw as many dry spawn as you reasonably can. Make sure that they all have a faux book. Whenever you can create more dry spawn without weakening yourself dramatically, do so. Remember, we may be called upon to fight again soon so don’t deplete your chi too drastically. We are executing The Exodus Protocol,” I said.

Have you ever disturbed a really big nest of cockroaches and seen them scramble and scurry in all directions? That’s the effect that I was striving for with the dry spawn.

“You don’t know how ridiculous you look handing out orders while looking like Meatloaf,” Ladonna said.

O…EE...never mind. I’d forgotten the glamor.

“Ding-a-Ling! I just lost one of the spawn that was guarding the Korean mind reader. We need reinforcements sent,” I said.

“And remember—Everything louder than everything else.”

**************** ********************* *************************

“My name is ‘Jung Jae Min’. You can call me ‘Jae’,” the Korean defector said.

“Okay Jae, Duncan has a rather simple mind. It isn’t so much a matter of intelligence as it is architecture. I can scan him and know that he’ not hiding anything.”

Jae nodded understanding.

“You’re a reader and what little I saw of your mind back when, your mind is both complex and convoluted. I couldn’t be sure that you weren’t hiding something from me. There is even the outside chance that you could download some sort of malware into my mind,” I said.

“I realize that as an Adept you can probably get out of those handcuffs fairly easily. The duct tape should be a bit more challenging, but it gives me some warning if you decide to boogie. By the way, anytime you change your mind about joining us, say so. I’ll put several strategic cuts in your duct tape and we’ll all go away—leaving you free to move on to wherever,” I said.

There was a commotion outside the abandoned factory. In walked the expert swordsman that had slain me so casually during the battle for the warehouse.

There was blood on his katana. Apparently, he’d killed me yet again.

“So, you’re the Japanese sword master,” I said as I drew my saber.

“‘Japanese?’ Do I look Oriental to you?” he seemed offended.

He was standing there with an OD brown gi top and OD brown kendo or aikido style elephant pants that were so loose and flowing that they looked like a skirt. He had a katana in hand and a wakazashi and a tanto thrust into his sash.

He was dark complexioned with cruel black eyes and long shiny jet-black hair.

“You do,” I said.

“I’m a brujo and a Mazatec Indian from Oaxaca Mexico,” he spat. “And after I defeat you, I’ll drink you blood and eat your heart to steal your power.”

“My, aren’t the walls vertical?” I said. “O, and about that other—go ahead if you’re able.”

I glanced at Jung Jae Min.

“Friend, they want you back pretty bad if they send this pouf to redeem your coupon,” I said to him. “If I were you, I’d start working your bonds loose.”

“I’m not here for the mind-rifler. I shall leave him untouched if he doesn’t interfere. I’m here to kill Duncan Sweet,” the Mazatec said.

“’Sweet’? Duncan and Little Boss’ last name is ‘Sweet’? How ironic. He’s not here. I intend to kill you anyway. You’re an impressionable child living in a tumultuous age,” I told him.

“I too intend to kill you. Putting off a necessary battle only prolongs the discomfort.”

“Fall to your knees and tremble in terror!” I shouted at the sword master as I drew my thirty-nine-inch saber and attacked.

Sword fighting is largely a question of trying to cut the client’s sword arm off. Once that is accomplished cripples are easy to finish off.

That is mighty grim and merciless. That’s why you don’t fight unless you have to. One’s life is a small token to wager. The prospect of having one’s strong left arm chopped off is a scary thought.

An arm is largely useless without fingers. The fingers are small, vulnerable and on the most distal portion of the arm—often the part of oneself closest to the client.

Of course, most swordsmen realize this and so it isn’t so terribly easy to chop off a client’s fingers as one might hope.

The Mazatec had a katana. Katanas have skimpy finger protection. The techniques compensate for this to a large degree, or “stubby” would be popular slang for “Samurai”.

But I had my long saber’s luxuriant protection for my wrist and fingers so I could afford to snipe at my client’s relatively unprotected fingers. Another thing: a long-range one-hand thrust has more reach than a two-handed thrust.

I played it patient and thrust snap cuts at the Mazatec’s fingers or forearm whenever possible. Finally, I scored a fairly good slash across the back of his right hand and then along his forearm.

Ever wonder why swordsmen seem to make a big deal out of “first blood”? For one thing, bleeding saps one’s strength very quickly. Bleeding even three or four ounces while in “fight or flight” mode makes a perceivable difference.

First blood is also a nice proof of concept. I was already committed to be the more patient of us. Now the longer I stalled the more he’d bleed.

Then a thrust penetrated a half-inch into the same forearm.

The brujo abruptly switched tactics. He drew his wakazashi with his left hand and launched a two-handed attack on me that seemed taken from the berserker’s handbook. I took a long step back with my right leg and drew my right-hand hanger.

He managed to slash my left deltoid rather deeply with his frenzied attack, but I thrust my hanger up under his ribcage and through his heart and I pumped and wiggled the blade around before I pulled it out. He got a good deep slash high on my right forearm as I backed out.

I created a small air bomb and slammed it into his left ear with my right hand. It pretty much mangled my fingers but I didn’t have any long-range aspirations for them anyway.

************ ***************** ***************************

I walked into the abandoned factory to find Jung Jae Min frantically trying to put a tourniquet on my spawn’s right arm and pleading with him not to die. Whatever.

Sometimes you eat chocolate chip cookies but sometimes the cookies eat you.

{It was a bear in the original version but my version makes more sense.}

I popped the poor spawn’s cork and realized that he’d been lingering to test Jae’s reactions.

Jae looked up with a silly expression on his face.

“He looked so real. His mind even felt real,” he said to no one in particular.

“Don’t bother to bind him again. Why take the trouble?” I said.

We spawned the kinjutsu volumes several times over. The spawned versions wouldn’t survive the spawn that had been cast with it, but while the spawn survived there was a bewildering array of volumes floating around.

That’s how I ended up riding in the back seat of a four-door pickup truck reading a bit of each book as we travelled. It would have been incautious to have both volumes with me otherwise. Never wrap all your baskets around one egg—so to speak.

“That’s in some foreign language,” Ladonna said. “Maybe the Korean can read it.”

“This is Hiragana script. It’s Japanese not Korean. It’s hard to follow because it uses the old spellings and grammatical usages,” I said.

“You can read it?” she asked.

“Of course, do I look ignorant?”

“What about the other book?” Ladonna asked.

“That’s clerical Latin circa the early medieval era,” I said.

“And you read Latin too?” she queried.

“What kind of school did you go to Ladonna? They didn’t teach Latin. They didn’t teach Hiragana. Did they teach Kanji or Katakana? No? Damned Nation! Next you’ll be telling me that you can’t solve multiple linear equations and that you didn’t study Riemann Geometry or three-phase wiring.”

I was teasing Ladonna. After I’d learned Spanish, Portuguese, Eye-Talian and a bit of Catalan, Latin was easy. I’m sure that Ladonna studied Riemann Geometry and advanced linear algebra in grade school just like every other schoolchild in America.

Some of the stuff that I was skimming from the books was thought provoking and some of it was profoundly disturbing.

As soon as we were back in the village I needed to request permission to study the books in more depth before they destroyed them. Unless and until they could wrest the originals and all copies from all and sundry destroying these volumes was beyond pointless.

It would be stupid—Dunno stupid.

[rvm45]

Chapter Thirteen









“Never argue with an idiot”, they say. “Arguing with an idiot makes you look like an idiot yourself.”

There is more than a little truth in in that. Another problem with trying to reason with an idiot is that even when you thoroughly demolish each and every one of his points, he’s too jack stupid to realize that he’s been soundly defeated.

Sometimes though, when an idiot holds the keys to the kingdom and taking the keys by force isn’t an option then you plead. It’s not that you expect it to do any good. It’s just that you have to try.

Dunno met us when we arrived in the village and he had every guard and sympathizer with him.

“Dunno please! Some of these techniques would strengthen the village’s fighting force immensely. All of the techniques in these books aren’t punishing or destructive to the Adepts that use them. Everything is jumbled around and scrambled together and can be separated given time,” I pleaded for the fifth or sixth time.

“Yeah, like you can read Japanese and Latin,” Dunno scoffed.

At this point, why try to set the shabnasticator straight?

“Hand over the books or fight us for them,” Dunno said.

I noted that he was wearing turtleneck and not a suit and tie.

I made a face like I’d just been told that I had to eat a cereal bowl full of steaming rabbit turds and made a silent gesture for my team to hand over the two disputed volumes.

It made me wish that I’d made my own copies before we ever reentered the village…

No wait, I did make my own copies before I reentered the village—multiple copies in fact. If I hadn’t then I’d have been as stupid as the knob-gobbler occupying the black room—village slang for the mayor’s office—only by folks who have issues with the current administration.

************** ****************** ****************************

Two years passed relatively uneventfully. I continued training folk who couldn’t get into the academy. Also, I continued to polish and improve my books on tradecraft—even though we were rarely sent out, even on overnight missions—so I was rarely away from my students.

Dunno was seeking to surround us—we were a serious irritation to him—with layer after layer of malignant neglect. Instead of feeling suffocated or stifled though we used the time to become a pearl.

I started getting graduates. Of course, even a fair student, let alone a good or excellent student continues to learn all his life—or maybe that’s too tough a standard. Let’s say they’re improving their skill and understanding at least up into their late fifties or mid-sixties. Some folk are pretty much used up and run down a bit by then.

The point was, I could pretty well teach everything that I had to teach in two years, not the academy’s three. I started getting graduates.

Dunno refused to recognize or use our graduates so they simply joined my team. That was all well and good, except for one problem. Everyone on my team who’d graduated from the academy was entitled to casual pay with a hefty bonus for being part of a rapid deployment force.

Most of my students had to hold down at least a part time job to put beans in the pot and to put powder and primers together.

*************** ******************** ***********************************

The Japanese manual didn’t use The Outfit’s chakra tree to manipulate chi of course. They used a system based on five elements corresponding to five centers of energy in the human body:

“Earth, water, air, fire and the void.”

“Earth” translates to all things in a solid state. “Water” is liquid. “Air” is gaseous, “Fire” is matter in the plasma state and “The Void” is a vacuum. Each of the five elements has its own color and finger position to represent it along with its own musical note.

The Latin Volume spoke of the four “Humours”:

“Black Bile”, “Yellow Bile”, “Phlegm” and “Blood”.

It surprised me how rapidly that I learned to visualize each system, though the texts were sometimes rather obscure. That wasn’t deliberate. Try to teach a small child to drink from a straw or how to whistle. Words just don’t tell the whole story. At some point, you need to fall back on demonstration and imitation.

Once I knew how a skill worked and felt it working through me I could translate it into the chakra tree system—and as I have said, skilled Adepts have been developing, pruning and evolving The Outfit’s system for two or three hundred years.

The name of the genius that first decided that the mental images were merely abstractions that let trainees and Adepts grasp something that was largely ineffable has been lost to time. The best that I could tell the other two groups were handicapped by believing that their mental constructs connected to something real and actually “out there” somewhere.

I extracted five usable skills from the Yokohama shinobi book and a couple from the book in Latin.

Many, no most of the skills I wouldn’t touch with the tip of a long fly rod. Some aged the user dramatically with each use. Some caused progressive deterioration of the eyesight or memory. They gave a whole new meaning to the old canard:

“Can I do it till I need glasses?”

If the world can’t be saved without me damaging my eyesight, then say goodbye to the world.

There were also some very dangerous and potentially blasphemous stuff—how to summon demons, spirits and haints and how to make covenants with them.

God, the Holy Ghost and angels cannot be summoned by any sort of necromancing. If they could that would mean that they were constrained by the power of the necromancer and must appear wherever he commanded.

The very air is so filled with unclean spirits though, so that if they were composed of matter they would have to fly in holding patterns to avoid collisions. Their only agenda is to lie, kill, cheat and then destroy. It is inconceivable for any of them to wish anyone or anything the slightest good.

They are not constrained by any form of necromancing either. Think about that for a moment. Why would God in his infinite wisdom forbid all commerce with unclean spirits and then build all sorts of compulsions into reality to let the disobedient order the demons around and profit by their disobedience?

Sometimes though, demons will play along with someone’s delusions long enough to cause all sorts of serious mischief.

Apparently, these particular unclean sprits had been hanging with and humoring shinobi and alchemists for centuries. Once I realized that a book—each volume contained multiple books, some little more than a pamphlet—was a grimoire I skipped that book.

The whole thing caused me to do some soul-searching. The Old Testament says:

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

It also speaks against “Familiar Spirits” whatever that meant at the time. The New Testament says, “Sorcerers will not inherit the kingdom of God.”

Was what I was doing “Witchcraft”?

I had never thought so. The Outfit wasn’t exactly scientific—there were far too many things in their system that couldn’t be explained or described. They could only be experienced. Nonetheless things were presented in a spirit of open inquiry and there was no calling on “Spirits” or “Essences”. Everything was rational, mechanistic and impersonal with little or no “Woo” factor.

But these two volumes seemed so intertwined with appeals to unclean spirits that it was hard to distill a clean and impersonal technique from them.

‘Maybe,’ I thought to myself, ‘these volumes should be destroyed’—except that didn’t address the fact that there were multiple copies of the volumes floating around in the world.

I went from fifteen first wave spawn to sixteen. Something told me that I was topping out on the number of spawn. Every one of the first-wave had power levels over 6.0 though and their power continued to climb. I had eleven second wave spawn at 4.3 seven third wave at 3.1. And as a last resort I had four fourth wave spawn at 2.1.

Each of my spawn could throw larger numbers of dry spawn than almost anyone. I’d beefed up my dry spawn noticeably but I’d seemed to leveled them out at the maximum power and longevity possible—at least for the nonce.

I carefully separated out the usable jutsu and put it in a fourth volume of tradecraft that I was composing.

************** ****************** ************************

I’ve said that there are several Cherokee farms and villages in the same swath of land as the village. Some of the villages have their own egress points into the outer world. You see a few Cherokee in the village occasionally—usually shopping.

None of them ever bothered me so I never bothered them. Although I was curious I figured that they concealed their villages for a reason and that it would be rude of me to barge in uninvited.

I don’t have any idea how Cherokees dressed back in Daniel Boone days. A few period portraits that I’ve seen show them wearing white shirts with a string tie and black suit jacket. Today they seem to like mellow brown colored buckskin adorned with multiple Indian beads and dyed porcupine quills. They seemed really into bone necklaces and chokers and belts of wampum and many wore silver and turquoise jewelry.

Some of it may be anachronistic or from groups that lived west or north of the Cherokee. The thing is: we have television and radio in the village and the surrounding countryside. We also have DVD players, VHS, computers and Internet access and a steady stream of modern goods—like books and magazines—flowing in from the outside.

Some of the families even send their children to school on the outside—rarely for more than a year or two—just so they know how folks act and talk in the outside world.

So, the Cherokee are exposed to certain stereotypes of Indians just like everyone else. They may have chosen to adopt some of those stereotypes for reasons of their own.

************** ****************** *********************************

Thomas was a Cherokee who chose to live in the village for reasons best known to himself and he’d been attending my classes for the last couple of years.

“Do you know that here are at least two enclaves like this one in the Everglades?” Thomas asked me. “That is one reason that the United States never managed to completely crush the Seminole.”

“Okay.”

I couldn’t see where this was leading.

“What do you know about the drug trade?” he hopscotched.

“Very little,” I admitted.

“A lot of the drugs from South America are flown into Florida and there are parts of the Everglades that are reasonably close to a good road and they’re often used as discrete arrival points,” Thomas said.

It’s hard to keep up with such things unless one has an abiding interest. However, it was my understanding that any drugs not destined solely for the Florida trade end up being transported overland through Georgia and that Georgia offers a number of advantages for folks who want to fly straight there instead of Florida. That’s one reason that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) is one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the United States—having more personnel than many federal agencies.

“Our tribal elders stay in touch with the Seminole elders. There is going to be a big shipment into the Glades soon and it is going to be cash on delivery. If your team will help us take them down then your team’s cut of the cash will be three hundred thousand dollars,” Thomas said.

“I don’t know Thomas. I can’t really get behind the drug dealers. Drugs destroy many people’s lives. On the other hand, the ‘War on Drugs’ and black-market prices do far more harm than the drugs themselves ever could. At any rate, stealing from drug dealers would make me no better than any other thief,” I said.

“We thought you might say that. First of all, this is the same North Korean backed Russian mob that was turning people into basket cases in Chicago. Their sound defeat at the hands of The Outfit drove them out of Chicago for a few years but now they’re coming back. They’re also branching out and growing,” Thomas said. “Think of it as an act of war.”

“The Seminole would have been content to live and let live. However, a family happened to live near one of their ersatz landing fields. They weren’t Seminole by the way. But at any rate, they tortured and killed the whole family. I have crime scene photos if you doubt the elders’ fidelity,” Thomas told me.

I didn’t particularly distrust the elders but I spent several moments examining each of the photos in detail. Know your enemy.

“Finally, I can offer you these as further inducement.” He said while handing me two slim volumes.

“This is in Cherokee,” I said. “I can’t read it, but I recognize the script.”

I set the book aside to look at the other.

“This is Korean. It’s in Hangul. No wait, it’s in Hunminjeongeum,” I said.

“What’s the difference?”

“Well since the partitioning, South Korea and North Korea’s writing systems have diverged. Hunminjeongeum is the root they both started from,” I said.

“So, you can read the Korean book of kinjutsu?” Thomas asked.

“Slowly and painfully,” I said.

“The elders said that you’d probably say that. Here’s an English translation of the Cherokee as well. They said that it wouldn’t be right to try to bribe you. They said that after you’d examined each of the three volumes to tell you that they are a gift no matter what you decide,” Thomas said.

So, it was time to rob some drug dealing Adepts as well as their very brutal but Non-Adept running dogs.

**************** ******************* ***************************

I wanted to use as few folks as possible. I’d go. My sixteen first wave and eleven second wave wet spawns would be a strike force all on its own.

I’d take Gerald because he could throw almost as many spawn as I could. I was used to working with Ladonna. David’s drones would supplement our aerial surveillance. I added James because he was one of the better firearms handlers around and Chandra because she and James were an inseparable team.

The Russians liked AK-47s or failing that, some other high rate of firepower carbine. I supposed that we could have gone up against them with AKs or ARs or something of the like.

Semiautomatic AKs and ARs are expensive. I had a couple or three of each—but that wouldn’t begin to cover even my own spawn. I thought that illegal NFA firearms were too much of a liability—even within the village. They cause far too many federal agencies to target a man’s scrotum.

There had been a great number of Lee-Enfields available dirt-cheap a few years earlier. Like a fool I let the opportunity pass me by. The Cherokee had bought them up in large numbers though. They gifted us with a gross of them.

They were “Sporterized” which I generally took to mean “Neutered”. In this case though, they’d been sporterized to turn them into Scout Rifles. Even trimmed down to Jungle Carbine dimensions with the lighter Semi Monte Carlo stocks they were a bit heavy to be true Scouts—but they were very formidable at the right range.

Each one had a Scout scope of course, but they also had a laser sight for use in low-light conditions. I intended to have my people’s spawn already in place—no closer than eighty yards and no farther away than a hundred and twenty yards.

The Russian mobsters—even those born and raised in the US—seemed to fight with very little regard for life or limb. The one’s associated with the North Korean Adepts were worse. I suspect that the Adepts had hexed their minds to make them both absolutely loyal and to purge any residual thoughts of self-preservation.

I had little doubt that this would turn into a “last man standing” type of firefight.

Yip-Ee-Ki-Aay Dudes!

[rvm45]

Chapter Fourteen









In the end Duncan and Saul came along too. He sensed something was up and he was going, no discussion or dissuasion possible.

Duncan turned out to have more native wit than I’d given him credit for—not that he was a genius but he wasn’t a moron either. His mind and his personality had been repressed rather drastically—both deliberately and as a by-product of overstimulating his body.

I had tried to persuade him to learn tradecraft and especially spawning by saying that his brother might come back at him someday with a sumo at power level 15.0—as shaky a measurement of power level as 15.0 would be.

Now Duncan could now throw five wet spawn with power levels of 16.0 and two second wave at 12.0. He’d also learned a few new skills that had nothing to do with brute strength.

He now weighed four hundred and five pounds—having lost a hundred and sixty pounds—and I believe that he was physically stronger than ever. That’s because it is far more efficient to stimulate your own body from within rather than have someone else do it from outside.

Some feats of strength are limited by how much ballast one can bring to the table—especially pushing and pulling movements. Duncan would be weaker with those than he had been at five hundred and sixty-five pounds. On the other hand, he was far quicker, more agile and had far more endurance.

I’d say that the new Duncan would whip the old Duncan easily.

Despite my misgivings about automatic weapons, Duncan prevailed on the Cherokee armorers to loan him six M-60s—belt fed machineguns in .308 caliber.

No, I have no idea where the Cherokee got them. The stork brought them?

I couldn’t spawn a Lee-Enfield at all well—but I could spawn a single-shot H&R copy in .45-70. The caliber was so that even a low pressure spawned load would have stomp-them-flat stopping power.

Each spawn was created with the two big .45 caliber revolvers that I carried. Today I also wore one of the cranky little Star replicas I spawned the .45-70.

I issued each of them a real time Enfield—no clowning around there. The idea was that once the clients were in sight, each wet spawn would throw a half a dozen dry spawn and arm one of them with the H&R .45-70 and another with the Star along with three extra magazines. The four-remaining dry spawn would charge in like berserkers, Kunai in hand and add to the general confusion.

Vultures circled far overhead. Occasionally I’d tune into one directly and experience the panoramic view. My crows and ravens were divided into three apparent flocks. They should have sufficient numbers to stand off any local flocks that chose to defend their territory.

Anyway, they were bigger and stronger than natural birds. They had faster reflexes, greater intelligence and some ability to use chi. One of their chi abilities was to hit any would-be avian challenger with a big psychedelic blast of unpleasant hallucinations.

*************** **************** **************************************

The plane came in right before dawn to take advantage of the night. We waited until they’d unloaded all their goods. The work would tend to wear them out a bit. Also, the receivers weren’t going to come forward with the cash until the merchandise was all stacked and accounted for.

It wouldn’t take a plane anywhere near that size to carry millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine. Apparently though, the coke was in addition to a large amount of baled marijuana. I guess that you could call them equal opportunity smugglers.

I could pick out the Russian mob members. They were the ones standing guard with AKs or laboring with two or three pistols in plain sight.

The Korean Adepts stood and watched. They had no weapons showing but they used their chi to cool them off enough that they could comfortably wear suit jackets or even long dusters despite the heat—close to one hundred degrees with high humidity.

It is strange. Even after spending years as an Adept I still think of myself primarily as a pistolero. It’s who and what I am. Yet here I was fighting folk who were largely invulnerable to pistol fire.

Most of the Russians went down with the first volley. Truth be told, there was more than one sniper targeting most of the Russians when the skirmish began. We cleaned up any that had slipped through the cracks within a couple moments.

Apparently even a couple of the North Koreans—or at least their spawn—were vulnerable to rifle fire.

Then the real battle began.

The six Koreans watching the monetary transaction were only the tip of the iceberg. The woods were full of Korean Adepts, Cherokee Adepts, Seminole Adepts and my students.

The Korean boss was there in the flesh. He was so powerful that he eschewed hiding behind spawn.

He charged one of my sniper spawn.

************ ************* *************************

I lined my sights up on a Russian. When the signal was given—via a “silent” dog whistle inaudible to Non-Adept ears, I shot and hit my client right between his shoulder blades. As I worked the bolt of my Enfield the Boss Korean charged me.

I shot him at close range and saw my bullet freeze and then drop to the ground.

I’d anticipated the need to fight Adepts at close range. I set the rifle down and drew a hanger—far easier to spawn than the big saber—and I shot a very powerful thrust at the Boss Korean.

It was a no-go. Even my most powerful chi assisted thrust with a chi-sheathed blade couldn’t penetrate his aura. It stopped a good six inches from his body. Then I was pushed backward via the force transmitted through the blade—for an instant.

He slapped my blade contemptuously aside and took my head off with a single chop of his open hand.

************* **************** *************************

Three more of my wet spawn fell to the Korean—but that wasn’t his prime objective. He was using them to triangulate my position somehow. I’m still not entirely sure how that jutsu works.

He met me with my saber in my left hand and a thirteen-inch buckler—a small shield but with its own unique manual of arms—in my right hand.

“I’m surprised that you’re not farther from the battle and harder to find. It seems that you fancy yourself a swordsman—so I came prepared,” the Korean said.

He produced a scimitar from thin air—one of those that look like a very elongated Bowie with a deeply recurving swedge ten or twelve inches long and a deeply curved belly. It was a bit longer and far heavier than my saber.

The scimitar didn’t have much hand protection. I tried to snipe at his fingers or hand half a dozen times only to be rewarded with sparks where the chi sheath on my saber met his adamantine chi force field.

“Do you want to fight or play?” he asked in contempt.

Now the smart thing would have been to keep sniping. I wasn’t under any sort of time limit. Instead I chose to stake everything on one thrust.

As his shield absorbed my thrust he counter thrust and ran the blade right through my torso even severing my spine.

A fraction of a second later I turned into a flock of ravens and flew every which way. I’d wanted to try that in combat ever since I’d found it in the kinjutsu. It isn’t nearly as satisfying as it looks because it is an illusion. It’s just a wet spawn using short term dry spawned ravens to make a flashy exit.

“I’m over here Knob-Gobbler,” I said from fifteen yards behind him. “It’s never that easy to find the real me.”

I got the idea from his facial expression that he didn’t like me.

I’d picked my area well. I was standing on an incline and he had to attack uphill. It wasn’t a big advantage but it was. I’d foreseen that I might have to fight this fellow and I knew his force field would be problematic. So, I’d armed myself with one of the big two-handed great swords and I wore gauntlets to further protect my digits.

My first attack was a massive overhead slash with the great sword. He parried.

It was over quickly. I thrust the sword like it was a battering ram while holding onto the big ring guard intended for that purpose with my right arm. It managed to break through his aura and penetrate him almost to the hilt.

I hesitated momentarily uncertain whether I should try to churn the sword and twist it, try to withdraw it or abandon it and draw my saber.

The hesitation was costly. Hesitation often is. His return cut severed my forearm just below the elbow.

“I’ve walked this Earth for over two hundred years and then I’m defeated by a fool. But you will remember me every time you try to tie your shoes or open a can,” the Korean said with red drool cascading out of his mouth.

“I’m afraid not dude. I’m a wet spawn—a very special type of wet spawn. The kinjutsu word is a tongue twister. I call them ‘The Big Kahunas’,” I said and popped my cork so he’d know that I wasn’t bluffing.

Once I had popped out one of Gerald’s spawn was toting a big flamethrower. He came out of hiding and immolated the dying Adept. You have to be triply sure that you’ve wasted an Adept.

************* ***************** ***************************

The aftermath was largely a matter of gathering the money and picking up Enfields that had been dropped by popped wet spawn. The Enfields were a gift from the Cherokee but the M-60s weren’t.

I could see the look on some law’s face at a traffic stop.

“Why come y’all gots so many Enfields?” the law asks.

“EE…because I’m starting a militia?”

The M-60s would be even harder to explain.

Since the Cherokee had taken them back, it would be their headache.

They also decided that they had some use for a couple kilos of Cocaine and a bale of grass. I doubt that they dealt. If that were the case, they’d have taken everything.

It wasn’t hard to figure out that they were doing some business with some heavy-duty arms merchants. I’d imagine that only the most lunatic fringe arms dealers would smoke dope or shoot a syringe full of cocaine while doing business.

But let’s face it, having Adept powers made dealing with lunatics more reasonable—since even if they flipped their lid it would be hard for them to hurt an Adept—especially if he was cautious and sent a spawn in his place. So maybe sweetening vendors with blow and Ganga was good business practice.

The Seminole expertly dismembered the bodies of the Russians and Koreans and sunk them in the swamp. I hoped that the gators and snapping turtles would come and feast on them before any human body parts were discovered.

Then I saw a prehistoric sized alligator climb out of the water and commune silently with a Seminole.

“Don’t tell me…” I started to say.

“You run crows and ravens. Cary runs rats. David runs electronic toys and Duncan has Saul. Some of the Seminole run gators,” Thomas said.

“I wouldn’t think a gator had enough brains to do anything useful,” I said.

“Well, they mold them even as their parents and many great-great grandparents were molded. They have four chambered hearts, a brain that’s thirty percent larger and supercharged muscle and reflexes when they need them,” Thomas said and then added:

“Anyway, they are more than smart enough to answer the dinner bell. That gets rid of evidence quickly. Also, much of the Seminole land is only accessible by boat. What happens when a canoe or a john boat is hit by a thousand to sixteen-hundred-pound beefed up Seminole gator?”

“By the way Thomas, about the Cherokee…” I started.

“They are my kin and my people and I have useful contacts among them. I will try to do my kinfolk or the elders a solid when I can. That doesn’t make me any less of a team member,” Thomas said.

“Spoil, I was considered a full-fledged Adept by my people before I came to the village. Yet you’ve taught me things that I didn’t know. You also have a gift for teaching—especially with people having some sort of difficulty. The academy isn’t wrong in their assessment of these people’s potential—though we might disagree with how they deal with the slow learners.

“But you manage to make many of them full-fledged Adepts in spite of that. Dunno is throwing away many strong warriors when he refuses to use your graduates,” Thomas said.

As we prepared to depart Ladonna handed me something

“I got this from a dead Russian. I thought that you might like it,” Ladonna said.

I was apprehensive lest she brought me a body part as a souvenir. I’m not squeamish, but think how it might sound in court someday.

It turned out to be a Coonan—a 1911A1 upsized to handle .357 Magnum cartridges. They’re scarce and very expensive. This one had its own inside the waistband holster and two two-round magazine pouches—though there were only three extra magazines.

“I looked around, but I couldn’t find a dropped magazine anywhere,” Ladonna said.

“Maybe that’s all he had, I shrugged.

Our fee was three hundred thousand dollars, but there turned out to be a bit more money than the planners had thought. The Cherokee with their strict code of honesty whacked fair and gave us three hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars.

That meant that I could pay everyone and add in a hefty bonus and still have a wee bit over two hundred thousand in Team Spoil’s treasury.

We were going to need it.

************ *************** ***************************

“You have been practicing forbidden jutsu,” Dunno’s aide told me. “And you have taken on contracts on your own—in conjunction with The Cherokee of all people. Whose side are you on?”

Dunno sat dressed in a purple gi. I guess that he didn’t want me to cut his tie again. I also guess that he also didn’t trust himself not to raise his voice.

“Yeah, about that—are we at war with The Cherokee? If we are, I hadn’t heard. If you’d throw some missions to my team we wouldn’t have to take on side jobs,” I said.

“You are to leave the village immediately and never come back,” the aide told me solemnly.

“I and my team will leave, but it will take us a few hours to gather our things,” I said in a tone that brooked no argument.

“Arrest this man! Give him a good beating and throw him out the gate!” Dunno screamed. “Without his corrupting influence, many of the others can be reclaimed.”

That last bit of explanation seemed addressed to no one in particular.

There were six guards in purple gi tops lining the wall behind and to either side of me. I waited until they had started to move towards me and I exploded into a bunch of angry ravens. By the time they’d gotten the ravens out of their faces and got over the surprise I was standing behind Dunno with a big Bowie to his throat.

“Sooner or later you’ll tire,” Dunno told me with some satisfaction. “When you do, you will either cut my throat or release me. Then my guards will kill you.”

“About that Dunno, I’m a spawn. I’m in contact with my team. I’m giving them ninety minutes to pack and get out. Then I will pop my cork and join them. It is still my geas to kill you some day, but not yet,” I told him.

************* ***************** *****************************

I took a few essentials from my room. It wasn’t the time to be sentimental and load myself down with all the little things that turn quarters into a home…

But when I locked the door I used a kinjutsu to seal it. In the absence of some very strong sensory chi it would look like the room had simply vanished. Neither the door nor the window would be visible from without.

They would know a room was missing from the missing number and the fact that there were more rooms on one side that the other. Measuring the length of the building from outside or the length of the hallway from the inside and comparing it to the combined measurements of the other rooms would reveal a discrepancy. None of that would help anyone to find my room. The sealing was similar to the seal on the village—though it was much smaller. It only took one person to work it and there was less possibility of circumventing it.

About “The Big Kahunas”: I’ve never been to Hawaii or even the West Coast and I’ve never been enamored by the surfer culture—but the name just seemed to fit.

My first wave had gotten to a rather wobbly seventeen while my second wave stood at twelve. As I said, I had gotten to the point that I couldn’t expect to add more than one or two more, and that over long periods of time.

The forbidden technique let me cast three “Big Kahunas”. A big kahuna was like a super wet spawn that could cast wet spawn all on his own. Three was the number. I either had to cast three big kahunas or none. When I cast them, I sent my ability to cast my first and second wave with them.

Each big kahuna could cast six first wave with a power level about a tenth of a point lower than if I’d cast them—but note: there is another spawn added to the mix. The second wave would be very close in power to what I’d do on my own.

I had my third and fourth waves relatively intact and I don’t know quite how to explain it—it seemed similar to all those electron orbitals in chemistry. My first wave and second wave orbitals were largely filled—although unlike electron orbitals spawn orbitals could grow a bit over time.

But I had room for more and higher-powered spawn in the inner two orbitals—not to mention that splitting my chi into three gave each big kahuna more potential orbital spots eventually—though the chi expenditure could become epic.

Big kahunas could last for weeks or even months. Not only did they add three more copies of me into the mix…

For some obscure reason, each big kahuna not only had one hundred percent of my power and chi—but even a bit more. Big Kahunas could do the raven trick and teleport ten or fifteen yards in the process—like I’d done to the Boss Korean and Dunno. I can and did do chi-building exercises with each big kahuna. Progress was slow, but it was progress. No one could tell—so far as I’d been able to learn—a big kahuna from the original.

There were downsides. There always are. I had to split my flock at the outset and while a big kahuna lived, I couldn’t access those birds—just when I’d started to get the numbers up to where I’d wanted them.

I had to divest myself of my first and second wave for the duration. And the experience and leftover chi from popped first and second wave spawn went back to the kahuna who’d spawned him and not me. In fact, I don’t know what sort of limbo the experiences and residual chi paused in, but while even one of the kahunas lived, I didn’t get anything returned from them to me.

Sometimes a kahuna showed initiative and independent thought that was a bit scary.

Finally, it didn’t happen immediately but once all big kahuna had popped and returned to me I was due for a major crash—the kind where I barely had the strength to climb out of bed once or twice a day and load up on high calorie, high protein and high chi food and drink and then stagger back to bed for more sleep. Recovery took ten days up to a couple weeks.

************* ****************** **************************

Once my ninety minutes were up I laughed maniacally, gave Dunno a nice schmisse across one cheek and popped my cork.

I was happy that we’d seen fit to put tiny cameras in various places at the headquarters. It was a joy to see Dunno and the guards’ faces when I did the ravens—especially the second time where I simply disappeared.

************* ***************** ****************************

So, what to do?

I had about four hundred and fifty people come with me. It wasn’t just Adepts and students. I had carpenters, plumbers and stonemasons, cooks, armorers and tailors come with our team. Dunno had started to become a royal pain to many and I was popular.

I’d discovered a vocation as a teacher. I had some excellent teachers like Homer Sensei, Coach Brown and Coach O’Brian come with me.

I decided that I wanted to build a dojo in the outside world. It would charge fees for those that could afford them, but no one would be turned away. Those that trained diligently would be introduced to the more advanced tradecraft.

Two hundred thousand dollars would build a reasonably nice dojo if we used a pole building. Especially since we’d brought much of our gear with us and we had beaucoup construction tradesmen in our group. It didn’t answer the question of what to do with all the Non-Adept in our entourage.

While I sat and brooded Thomas walked up with a dude that looked like he’d walked out of a “Snuffy Smith” cartoon complete with bib overalls and black stovepipe hillbilly hat.

“How would y’all like to relocate in Macersville?” the man asked.

[rvm45]

Chapter Fifteen









I never figured that Macersville Kentucky was a real place. It certainly isn’t on any map of Kentucky. You won’t find it with any Google search. In fact, I got curious once and looked it up. There isn’t a city of Macersville in any state of the union. There’s no town of that name in Canada, Mexico or New Zealand either.

When I was a boy I remember my cousin, Wizard entertaining us kids with stories about Macersville and other tales at Thanksgiving and Christmas or at the big summer picnics.

We all called him “Wizard”. Someone had hung that tag on him because he claimed to encounter haints and the occult everywhere that he went—at least to hear him tell it. I’m sure that I heard his real name sometime but it was a long time ago and my memory for names has always been poor.

My father could have told me, but he’s gone and there’s no one left to ask.

Wizard drove a 1975 Ford E-150 van. It had aftermarket four-wheel drive and it was candy apple red.

Now the way wizard told it, there are vans for many purposes. There are vans used by businesses as delivery vehicles and a lot of tradesmen like plumbers, locksmiths, heating and air conditioner repairmen use them to haul gear and a ready supply of the most frequently needed parts.

Churches and even schools that don’t have enough people to justify even a short bus get one with three bench seats in the back and use it as a mini-bus. If you put two or four captain’s chairs in the back along with an icebox and card table with drink holders bolted to the floor it can be a luxurious means to transport VIPs. Many Ambulances are converted vans.

Then there are randy young bucks that think of their van as a sort of elegant hip and psychedelic boudoir they tote around with them like a hermit crab and his periwinkle shell.

Wizard said that the one thing you never see much thought put into is how to fix a van up as a one-man camper for a travelling working man who doesn’t always have the price of a motel room.

Wizard said that for him, one of the worst parts of trying to live out of a van was trying to put your pants on of a morning. You just have to lie on your back, pull them up to your buttocks and then kick and hunch and curse trying to get over your rump.

He said that he was always astonished to see a van where someone had taken the time and expense to remove the factory roof and then the riser that they install still isn’t tall enough to let you stand upright.

On the other hand, raising the roof eighteen to twenty-four inches increases air drag and sends gas mileage into the toilet.

He’d seen a newspaper photo one time that was his inspiration. Someone had taken an old Volkswagen Beetle and taken the top: Front windshield, back windshield, roof and side windows and roof and used it as a van’s riser and skylight.

It was a nice moon roof. It gave him room to stand in one place—which he only needed to do once daily—to pull his pants on. It was very aerodynamic. And he had it fixed with screens and he could take out the cross windows for ventilation. On a really cold night, there were snaps to let him seal the top portion off with a cover.

Wizard didn’t like carpet in a van. He said it was nigh impossible to keep clean when you actually live in your van.

“A van with a linoleum floor could be cleaned with an old ‘T’ shirt and a half pint of water,” Wizard always said.

He believed in a full-length bed.

“How many nights can a man sleep all curled up in a five-foot cross-body bed before his back starts killing him?” Wizard always asked.

Now Wizard drove his van way back into the woods for some reason. He said that he wanted some time to do some serious thinking. He took quite a bit of food and he spent two or three months camping in sight of his van. He was running out of food so he cut way back on food the last couple weeks.

When no epiphany seized him, he fasted for several days. Later he said that he wasn’t sure how many. He was smart enough to know that if he waited too long he might be too weak and lightheaded to drive. He’d saved a can of Salmon, a half pound bag of peanut M&Ms and two sixteen ounce cokes—that was back before twenty once soft drinks became common.

Wizard came down out of the sticks and he had to drive part of the way back to the paved road along a coal-clinker service road that ran beside the railroad tracks.

Part way back he noticed a very “inviting” two-rut trail through the chigger weeds and notwithstanding his desire to get the salmon and peanut M&Ms some company, he felt constrained to turn off and explore it.

By the time Wizard wanted to give up, there was nowhere to turn around. Wizard wasn’t one of the better drivers at backing up. A four-wheel drive van isn’t the easiest vehicle to back any great distance and Wizard was still a bit unsteady from his long fast.

He just kept driving while hoping he’d come to a place that it was possible to turn around.

Wizard came out in a meadow and there was a small town visible in the distance. Rather than thread the needle once more Wizard drove across the meadow into the town.

It was an odd town. There was a VHS Tape rental place and Wizard had never heard of any of the movies or actors or actresses in any of the movies. The stores didn’t have any of the brands that he’d ever heard of—not even candy, soft drinks or cigarettes.

When Wizard went to the pharmacy and bought a bottle of aspirin, the druggist tried to sell Wizard an ounce of liquid morphine and olde tyme looking reusable glass syringe.

The town marshal was a toothless old man who wore bib overalls and carried a Colt Single Action in .38-40. Wizard said that he looked kinda like the longhaired and long-bearded elf on the old Frosty Root Beer signs.

The thing that mystified Wizard the most was that there were no roads leading to the town from the outside world and no railroad tracks either. He demonstrated that to himself many times over, driving round and around the town.

Supplies had to get there from somewhere. Airlifts and underground railways seemed equally improbable.

No matter how many times he asked the locals and no matter how he phrased the questions, they simply didn’t seem able to understand what he was saying.

Wizard met The Pale Lady there in Macersville.

As one of the townspeople explained to him, a Pale Lady just missed being an albino. She’d have pale dishwater blond hair, skin the color of a Kabuki Dancer and eyes of the palest washed out blue.

Pale Ladies are almost never ill, but they seem to be very low-energy people. They have little interest in fashion, fine clothes, fancy food or even money. They don’t seem to have much if any interest in love, courtship, parenthood or sex. Passion about anything seems denied them.

Pale Ladies rarely marry and if the odd one does, she will almost never have children. They seem to be in touch with animals, especially wild animals and growing things. Many become midwives and herb doctors and in olden times they were often suspected of being witches.

Pale Ladies are not nearly as common as they once were, Wizard’s informant told him. Some thought that if you had a long family tree where first cousin marriages were the rule rather than the exception and then someone committed a major incestuous faux pas…

But sometimes it took two or three generations for such a snag in the bloodline to throw a Pale Lady. And there were women who were generally assumed to be the product of incest who had children, grandchildren and great grandchildren and nary a Pale Lady in the wood pile.

Wizard was quite taken by the Pale Lady and the garrulous old man told him to follow his heart.

“After all,” he told Wizard, “The reason that I know so much about Pale Ladies and in spite of everything that I’ve just told you…my mother was a Pale Lady.”

Wizard won the Pale Lay’s heart, but before they were wed, he insisted on going back to the outside world to wrap up a few affairs and to collect a few belongings.

The eyes of the Pale Lady had never been meant to ever shed tears of either sadness or joy. Her heart was never supposed to feel even the mildest of emotions.

She cried as she pleaded with Wizard not to leave.

“If you leave now, you will never return,” she told Wizard over and over.

Do you remember where Jesus says that sometimes the Holy Ghost closes a man’s ears lest hearing, he understand? And how he sometimes blinds folk, lest seeing they believe?

It isn’t always the Holy Ghost that prevents true understanding. In Wizard’s case—he thought that she meant to say that once away from her for a few days, he’d lose his desire to return.

No, she meant that he wouldn’t be able to. Wizard discovered that a few days later. Search as he would he couldn’t find the way back to Macersville. The last time that I saw Wizard, he’d been searching for over twenty years.

He told me that Macersville Kentucky is close to Cawood Kentucky not far from either Harlan Kentucky or Pennington Gap Virginia. I heard that he’d branched out into Western Kentucky, Tennessee, Southern Indiana, Montana, Arizona and once he left his trademark red Ford custom van behind and spent a few months looking for Macersville in Northern New Zealand.

My van is a 1988 Ford Econoline 350. Wizard always said that he’d get a 350 if he had it to do over again. Like Wizard’s mine has been converted to four-wheel drive and it has a Volkswagen top for a skylight. It has linoleum on the floors too. Mine is the blackest of jet-black imaginable rather than Wizard’s candy apple red.

I didn’t drive it much except in the village or on short personal errands in town. It was too distinctive and on a mission, it might always become necessary to crash, scuttle or abandon a vehicle.

Root was another cousin of mine. He was twenty or thirty years older than Wizard. He had dementia, was slowly dying and he was raising Hell and demanding to talk to a family member. I was the only one both left and willing.

“You’re not Wizard!” Root shouted.

“Now that we have that out of the way, how can I help you?” I asked him.

In between rants about freshwater gray meat mermaids—I mean, aren’t all mermaids gray meat? I’ve never seen a representation of a black mermaid…

“Tell Wizard that he has to cross the river. It isn’t the O-Hi-O—damn sure not the O-Hi-O. It’s not the Allegheny or the Monongahela. It isn’t the Snake River in Idaho. It’s not the Klondike or the Wabash. It’s not the Rio Grande or the Congo. It’s not even the river Lethe,” Root rambled.

“Tell Wizard to cross the Father of All Waters. Almost any mystical creature he meets will be happy to give him directions—unless they want to kill him. O yes! Haints peering at a man from behind every damned tree,” He finished.

And maybe cousin Root was as crazy as a politician. He was a very feeble old man though. They found Root’s doctor and a couple of nurses brutally murdered a few weeks later and neither cousin Root nor an orderly he’d scrapped with were ever seen again—at least not in this world.

************* **************** ****************************

So, this lunatic wants me to move my students and friends to the mythical town of Macersville Kentucky.

“Do you know my cousin Wizard?” I asked.

“We’ve met. We talked a few times,” he said.

“Do you know the Pale Lady?” I asked.

“She’s my cousin.”

“How about my cousin Root?” I persisted.

He looked pained.

“We don’t like to speak of such things. I’ll answer ‘yes’, but that is all I will say,” he said.

“So, you’re legitimate, or you’re whore’s spit crazy or you’re trying to bait me in. Tell me, is this like a single-entry visa like Wizard had?” I said.

“For you, at this wavelength, you can come and go as you please. The area around Macersville is similar to the area around The Outfit’s village. It’s larger, far older and resonates on far more frequencies,” he said.

After a moment’s pause, he added: “What you call ‘Macersville’ is wanting some new friends. And yes, I believe that my town is sentient the same way that you believe that your pistols are sentient.”

“You know a lot about me,” I said.

“Your ravens told the Pale Lady your story. You’re facing imminent death and defeat. It’s not that you’re weaker or unworthy. It is simply the way your geas runs—but destiny can be altered. If you can warp fate enough there might be a crack large enough to let Wizard enter the town again—maybe.”

“If this is a trap…I’m not easy to take down and I won’t forget,” I told the odd-looking character.

[rvm45]

Chapter Sixteen









I was surprised how the numbers of people willing to leave the village to join my baseless and homeless band continued to climb. I called a conference to decide on our next course of action long term and short term.

“You didn’t notice because the life of a trainee and then an active Adept is rather insular and you weren’t born in the village,” McVeeblefester—Enn said.

“Dunno was elected mayor early in your first year at the academy. He’s been cautiously but diligently drawing more and more power and authority to himself. That’s one reason that he took a dislike to you. Several times you interfered with an established practice that he wanted to create by your insistence on following the charter to the letter,” Enn continued.

“Dunno wants to be a dictator—not just of the village but of all the hidden land and eventually the other hidden lands and Adept groups. He might even have his sights set on being the ruler of the US or even North and Central America,” David added.

“I don’t think that his ability is great enough to be more than a small time local despot. With all the Adept groups scrambling for power and kinjutsu he’ll do well to hold onto his own little fief,” Gerald said.

“That’s the way that the greedy and power-hungry mind works though,” David said.

“That is why so many folks want to leave. They’re flashing on heavy weather ahead,” Enn said.

“There’s something else,” Ladonna said. “Many of the adult Non-Adept applied to the academy over the years and were turned down. They had their hearts set on their children becoming Adepts. But your class was the last one selected on merit. All the others are loaded with folk that Dunno pulled strings to get in. The quality of trainees and graduate Adepts has been steadily declining since you graduated.”

“So that’s where all the goofs in violet gis are coming from. I thought maybe Dunno found them under cabbage leaves,” I said.

“But the point that I was trying to make: many parents are willing to follow you so that their children can train under you. Many of the senseis like Coach Brown and Coach O’Brian heartily approve of your practice of accepting all comers and they’re intrigued both by your methods and your new skills,” Ladonna said.

“There is one other thing,” Enn said. “Do you know why Macersville is accepting us with open arms?”

“From the goodness of their hearts?” I ventured.

“I have no doubt that they’re goodhearted people but unlike any other hidden town that I’ve ever heard of they don’t have a cadre of Adepts to bear the brunt of the fighting if they’re invaded and as we’ve already noted, the Adepts are on the move,” Enn said.

Macersville functioned on a silver based economy. They even had a small mint. They used old US coins as templates: Mercury Head Dimes, Seated Liberty Quarters, Walking Liberty Half Dollars and Morgan Silver Dollars. They eliminated any reference to the US so as not to imply sanction and they had modern dates.

A little silver went a long way in Macersville. Visitors were celebrities in Macersville. When the very rare outsider wandered into town the locals were more than happy to exchange the worthless fiat paper money dollar-for-dollar for silver and eat the loss.

I had over two hundred thousand dollars in my team’s treasury alone—not counting the large numbers of paper dollars that many of my people had brought with them. That much paper would have wrecked the local economy.

I used some of my money and most of my people’s money to buy silver bullion in the outside world—getting a small discount for buying in large quantity. The mint turned them into currency for us while keeping five percent for the town’s treasury.

My first priority was going to be getting my people housed. I was thankful that it was early spring and that I had five or six months before the weather would be terribly severe.

To understand the situation, I need to explain a bit about how hidden lands work. The village—though it is only a fraction of the hidden land that it resides in—is hidden in plain sight.

If a Non-Adept outsider became convinced that there was an anomaly in the topography around the village’s hidden land and if he tirelessly mapped all around as if he was playing a giant game of “Battleship” he’d come up with a hole—an area a mile or a mile and a half in diameter where he couldn’t go and where he couldn’t even see.

Note: The area inside the “black hole” is always far larger than the area of the blank circle on an accurate map.

We needed carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers, and electricians and so forth in the village. It would be a giant no-go to bring outsiders in to wire a house or add a fireplace. On the other hand, there wasn’t anywhere near enough work to keep the construction tradesmen gainfully employed year-round.

Most of our tradesmen worked at outside jobs. They weren’t the only ones. We even had people working in factory jobs or as convenience store clerks on the outside.

EE…? So perhaps I should put on my application:

“No Social Security Number; place of birth—Neverland; place of residence—Neverland…”

Nah! That’s a no-go.

We had mail delivery in the village. The Outfit just always contrived to get a villager appointed as the postman for all routes in the village. There was probably only one mail address for every fifteen or twenty families—but we made it work. Most folks in the village had no need to receive mail from outside anyway.

People who held down regular jobs outside paid taxes and social security and what have you. The very powerful concealment jutsu kept almost every outsider from being even momentarily aware that something big was being hidden from him right before his very eyes.

Parenthetically, Macersville didn’t seem to have any presence at all in the outside world and it was far more insular and self-sufficient. Also, the hidden land around Macersville dwarfed the lands around the village.

At any rate, we had many construction tradesmen in our happy band to call upon.

Dropping two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of silver into Macersville’s economy all at once wasn’t good. Some historians and economists say that all the silver and gold the Spanish brought back from robbing the Incas and the Aztecs inflated Europe’s economy for decades.

I had six hundred and fifty people to house. I had great temporary pole buildings packed with row after row of three tiered bunks. There were vacant houses in Macersville as well as run-down buildings that could be quickly rehabilitated and a few vacant lots where the local builders could put a house or an apartment complex and some of our single Non-Adepts would be quite satisfied with a one room apartment.

If I bought all the building materials that I needed locally the price of wiring, lumber, bricks, cement and so forth would go through the ceiling and I’d put local builders out of business.

On the other hand, I have a deep-seated distrust of altruism. Altruism is for posturing, ego-driven fools and it is fraught with unforeseen consequences and that means many otherwise productive hours are wasted stamping out brushfires.

I organized three for-profit construction companies of village tradesmen and a few Macersville folk. I bought most of my construction materials from the outside and imported them. My three companies could average three houses per week and I auctioned the houses off to the highest bidder.

There are some smaller homes in the downtown part of Macersville. However very large extended families had never gone out of style in Macersville—so houses with five bedrooms or more, full basements and large front and back yards was the general rule.

We were creating a large housing development adding whole new streets and extending others. If I’d built a bunch of small two and three bedroom homes our development would always be seen as a ghetto. As it was, about one house in five was sold to a long-time Macersville resident and that helped speed assimilation. And often the Macersville family that moved into a new home left another home vacant.

To my way of thinking, I needed about one hundred houses to make conditions acceptable for most of my people.

Take a slashing approximation and say that an average village family has four members—the parents and two children. That should mean that one hundred houses should house four hundred people. But wait—many of our people were kin. At least two four-people nuclear families along with grandma, grandpa and weird Uncle Harold ought to be willing share a large house temporarily.

It didn’t work out that way though because the number of people from the village continued to grow. As time went on they became more and more like refugees rather than folk who’d just decided to move.

Our development was on the Northeast corner of town. As much as I admired the way the Adept dorms or barracks were spread throughout the village, it wasn’t feasible in Macersville where much of the town was already in place.

I placed a generous number of dorms, training facilities and a couple mess halls just south of town.

Yes, those men and materials could have built more houses but both Adepts and trainees need to be housed and fed and Trainees need places to train. Otherwise there was no point to our coming.

*************** ****************** ******************************

“Morgan,” I said to the Snuffy Smith look-alike who was my full-time liaison. “Something confuses me. Wizard has been searching for a path into Macersville for decades and he said that one of the most noteworthy features of the town as that there was no roads into the town from outside. Yet here I am bringing in boxcar loads of people and construction materials and the town has several roads to the outside. I’ve yet to encounter the Pale Lady either.”

Morgan looked pained as he often did when I broached subjects such as this.

“Do you know how a hologram works? If you set up a laser just so, you get an interference pattern that contains a 3-D image. With the early holograms, you needed a laser to view the 3-D image. Later they improved it so that you only needed a laser to create the image but not to view it afterward,” Snuffy said.

“Yeah, there are ways to create holograms without a laser, but it is more troublesome and exacting. If I’m not mistaken, holograms existed as a scientific curiosity well before lasers made them commonplace,” I said.

“Okay did you know that you can store multiple images on the same hologram film by using different wavelengths of lasers? In one way it is a step backward because to view any one image, you need to backlight the hologram with the proper frequency,” Morgan said.

I stood looking at Morgan stubbornly refusing to ask anything else and waiting for him to circle back to the topic all on his own.

“Macersville is like one of those multiple image holograms. It has many, many levels. In order to stabilize this level enough to allow so many people and so much matériel to come in, we’ve had to lock this level down. Don’t worry. It’s not like we’re going to pull the hole in after us. That’s not even possible. But once this Christmas rush is over and we can crank down the size of the irises dramatically the paths to the other Macersvilles should open once more,” Morgan said.

“I wish that I could contact Wizard. He’s looked so hard to find a way back to Macersville,” I said.

Morgan shook his head gravely.

“If Wizard is ever to return, he needs to enter another Macersville—at least he needs to enter on an entirely different frequency. If you found him there is nothing helpful that you could tell him,” Morgan said.

“I could tell him not to lose hope,” I said. “Wizard is kin and his plight affects me deeply.”

“There is that. Think though. Isn’t a life spent on an enormous quest better than an ordinary life? Isn’t Wizard happier searching for Macersville and his beloved Pale Lady than he would have been working in a factory or an office somewhere?” Morgan said.


*************** ******************* **************************

As a new spring dawned, I took stock of our situation. Building houses had slowed to a crawl during the winter and tempers had become frayed amongst the refugees who were largely confined to the pole building shelters by the cold weather.

With the dorms and training facilities mostly finished I had enough wherewithal to build five houses per week—and that wasn’t counting the houses built by local contractors. Some of them were building a small housing development of their own due east of town.

Altruism is one thing—a stinky thing. Being generous and giving is something else again.

I built a large Olympic sized swimming pool in between our new houses and the old ones so the kids could have fun and mix a bit in the process. I built two other large pools in other locales hoping to give most of the children who wanted to go swimming the opportunity.

I also built a YMCA Style gymnasium for the city. It featured pool tables, Ping-Pong, basketball courts, padded wrestling rooms, a well-stocked weight room and a good sized indoor pool. The place charged modest membership fees and applied the money to replacing worn or broken equipment.

************* ***************** ************************

My weight had gradually shrunken to two hundred and seventeen pounds and my raw muscular strength while using just a little chi had grown despite my decrease in weight.

But the big kahunas altered the equation. I found that I could keep them alive for over three months and the best way to make them stronger was to throw them and have them diligently develop their chi generation and storage.

I had gotten them to where they were capable of throwing eight first wave spawn and five second wave. I could feel their third wave struggling to scrounge enough chi to be born.

Once the kahunas were thrown, I had my third and fourth wave remaining. I got my third wave up to nine at something like 4.3. The Fourth wave was five at about 3.0. I’d developed a very feeble fifth wave of three spawn at about 1.3.

I was surprised to find that the kahunas became more powerful than the original—me—and the differential grew.

As the kahunas became more long-lived and powerful the more the backlash when they finally popped grew. It actually melted fat and even muscle off my body and it took ever-longer periods of recovery.

After the first three-month exercise my weight dropped precipitously from two-seventeen to one hundred and seventy pounds—even while I ate large amounts of high protein and high calorie foods every day I started to look anorexic.

I was afraid that if the kahunas grew much more powerful that I might starve to death in the aftermath. I started deliberately bulking up before I sent the kahunas out.

Weighing two hundred and forty-five pounds helped. I only went down to one hundred and eighty-one pounds after the next three-month exercise. Two fifty-seven worked better and two hundred and seventy pounds worked best of all.

There was some fat in the mix, but my overall body fat stayed below eleven percent and my unassisted muscular strength grew far more than I could ever expect it to grow at my age.

“That’s why it’s a forbidden jutsu,” David said. “You’re big boned and to be honest you have large guts—I mean stomach and intestines. Then you have those three double chakras. Most people would drive the kahunas until his body gave out on him.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“I only call mine up in dire straits and I collapse them immediately afterward. I have no desire to make them more powerful. They’re more than powerful enough. I’m not power fighter anyway so far as that goes. I believe that you’ll eventually come to a place to where you will know that you cannot go any further without wrecking your body. That’s when you’ll either have to pull back or burn brightly and then crash—fatally,” David told me.

Then word came to me that Dunno had built a wall all around the city and that he wasn’t letting people leave anymore.

Right on the trail of that cheering news a dude showed up wearing a purple gi with blood all over it. He drove a convertible. He had a girl with him who’d been beaten up pretty badly.

*************** **************** *************************

The guard looked gaunt like a wrestler right after Christmas, who’s cut his bodyweight down to the bare minimum and held it there for most of wrestling season. His head hung listlessly off to one side like he just didn’t care anymore. He looked like I felt about five or six days after I’d recalled the last big kahuna.

Jung Jae Min had been called because he is far better at reading minds than I am. He’d just finished his reading when I walked in. I called an aide to me and gave him some detailed instructions and sent him on his errands.

“Take the cuffs off him. We aren’t at war with The Outfit,” I said.

That could have been used as a ploy to make the fellow think that I was the “good cop”, but I was sincere and he was too tired to care who was naughty and who was nice.

I placed my hands on the guard’s head—not because I didn’t trust Jae’s reading but because it saved time to see the events and emotions as they’d happened and because you always check everything that can be checked.

The memories were lying there right on top.

**************** ******************* **************************

The girl rolled up to the guarded gatepost in an old but very clean convertible. Her name wasn’t on the list of people authorized to leave the village. She had a part time job at the Dairy Queen and as the guards wasted more and more time, she became fearful of being late to work.

She became rude and abusive and the guards pulled her from the car. They pulled her around the corner of the guardhouse and were in the process of giving her a severe stomping.

I felt outrage. This was against the rules! I stepped forward to protest and my superior sucker-punched me with a powerful butt smash to the pit of my stomach with his rifle.

I didn’t particularly care about the girl—only about the rules—in a coldhearted sort of way. Rules are rules! Having hands laid on me was a whole other thing. I was in a full state of berserker even before I managed to fully catch my breath. I will show you what it means to lay hands upon me!

It took half a dozen deep breaths and then I activated the kinjutsu. I carried a pair of custom Kukris with sixteen-inch blades inside my violet gi. I’d honed them to the sharpest edge that it is possible for good steel to attain.

My jutsu let me move at incredible speed but my mind went through an accordion effect. It would speed up to match my super-fast movements or even more. My mind sped up until everything seemed to be standing still. Then events moved in slow motion. Then I’d moved ten or twelve feet with no memory of having traversed the intervening distance.

There must have been some sort of autopilot though or I’d have hurt myself badly moving so rapidly. The memories of slashing the other four guards and the sergeant was a psychedelic kaleidoscopic jangle.

************ ****************** ***************************

My body shook almost uncontrollably. Having experienced the boy’s kinjutsu first hand—even vicariously—had caused a huge cascade of adrenaline in my body. I felt like I might puke.

“That boy is barely sixteen years old. They’ve barely taught him anything except the best way to cut with various blades and the basics of marksmanship. Then they lay a forbidden technique like that on him. He’ll rip himself apart before he uses that technique another half dozen times,” I said.

“I know,” Jae said. “It is much the same way that they prepared us for use in our clan. I learned how to protect my psyche when mind-diving on my own. I had two brothers and a sister who never found the balance point.”

“And?”

“They went mad and they were euthanized.”

The aide returned to the door with my order. It was a quart shake fortified with everything that I found helpful in restoring my chi and energy along with several tablets of various herbs and other things—brewer’s yeast, desiccated liver, St John’s Wort along with a strong painkiller.

“That was for him,” I said gesturing at the guard. “Now I need one. How about you Jae?”

“I won’t turn a cold drink down. When I get back to my quarters I’m going to drink something stronger,” Jae said.

“Norman, take these pills and drink the shake. It will make you feel better,” I said.

When I’m in that state, I don’t need even the slightest encouragement to pack the food away—but then as David pointed out, I am naturally inclined to eat large and be large—extra-extra-large. There was once a time, before I became an Adept, that I had to fight hard to keep from becoming obese.

Norman—I knew his name very well from the brief time that I’d spent in his head—sat staring wearily off into space. I looked at Jae and shrugged. Jae put his hand on Norman’s head and laid several compulsions on him.

Norman took all the pills and sat listlessly but dutifully sipping at his shake.

When the aide returned I gave him instructions.

“The boy’s name is ‘Norman’. Put him in one of the holding cells. He shouldn’t wake except to urinate or drink water for…” I paused to look at Jae.

“About sixteen hours. There’s a crapper and a sink in his cell. If he asks for food or drink before that, make every effort to get him what he wants—and notify me immediately,” I said.

I paused to take a quick drink of my energy shake.

“Tell everyone even remotely connected to guarding him this. He has mastered a kinjutsu that lets him move so fast that you won’t see anything but a blur. Don’t open the door to his cell for any reason. When he wakes, tell him that he is not a prisoner but that we need to be sure that he’s fully conscious before we let him walk amongst us. Only Jae or myself can give the order to open his door. Now repeat all that back to me,” I said.

“Where to Jae?” I asked.

“I want to go get a contact reading on the girl. What about you?”

“I need to start packing the high-density food away. I’m going to have to rouse the kahunas again a good three weeks earlier than I’d planned to,” I replied.

“Why come?”

“I need to pay Dunno a late-night visit to convince him to open his borders once more,” I said.

“Can you persuade him?”

“I’ll either persuade him or his successor,” I said.

[rvm45]

Chapter Seventeen










I took one of Cary’s spawn with me because he’d lived in the village all his life and his perpetual practice missions with his rats had acquainted him with every little nook and cubbyhole. I took Thomas because no one could move as silently and as invisibly as Thomas. He’d been playing stalking and hide-and-seek type games with the other Cherokee children since he was four or five years old. Adept training simply added decorative icing to his already frosted cake.

Keep in mind, although some Adepts focus very strongly on a particular sense and develop it to very high levels, almost any Adept’s sight—particularly night vision—hearing, smell and taste will be noticeably and usefully enhanced. In addition, Adepts think faster. Sixty actual seconds becomes seventy-to-ninety or even a hundred subjective seconds to an Adept.

Adepts are hard people to sneak up on. On the other hand, we were hard people.

Cary tapped a guard on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” Cary said.

The guard was startled and he turned and stabbed with a curiously curved-bladed Kunai. The blade penetrated Cary up under the ribcage angled upward to intersect his heart.

Cary abruptly turned into an improbably high six-foot tower of tightly packed black rats and of course the tower collapsed in the blink of an eye with rats scurrying every which way.

“I’m over here,” Cary said from behind the guard.

The guard whirled and started to unsling his carbine. I couldn’t have noise…

Well, I could have had noise. I just didn’t want to. Gunshots really drag my beat when I’m trying to slip in unnoticed.

Thomas threw a rather thick scarf around the guard’s neck Thuggee style. It was thick to avoid crushing the windpipe but it was thin enough to quickly shut off the blood flow to the brain and the guard collapsed in an unconscious heap.

I stepped out of the shadows and laid my hands on the guard’s head. I didn’t expect that a private in the perimeter guard would know Dunno’s whereabouts but he did know the guard’s schedules and where the captain of the guard’s office was.

Thomas assumed the form of the unconscious guard. He strode boldly into the captain’s office and blurted out:

“You need to come see this!”

The captain started for the door but as he passed Thomas he sniffed suspiciously. Damned nation! He was one of the Adepts who supercharged his sense of smell. I should have guessed from the heroic size of his nose.

I loved the Tarzan stories growing up and I coveted Tarzan’s keen sense of smell. In point of fact, there would be a number of difficulties ramping a human’s sense of smell up to that of a dog’s.

Look at a Bloodhound’s nose—great big honking’ thing ain’t it? A Bloodhound is about 3x an ordinary dog’s sense of smell. It illustrates the point nicely. If you want to ramp up your sense of smell, you need to make room for more turbinates richly coated with more olfactory receptors—not that human olfaction couldn’t be improved somewhat working with the space that we already have.

Another thing, a dog’s and many other creature’s sense of smell works somewhat differently than a human’s. We perceive airborne molecules. A dog’s nose runs with a thin watery drip. The drool gets way out on the inside tip of the dog’s nose and dissolves airborne molecules. Then the dog sniffs it back into the interior portion of the nose to be analyzed. It’s an ongoing process.

And no, I’m not talking about Jacobson’s Organ. That is something else entirely.

At any rate, this Adept smelled Thomas. Smell is one of the hardest things to mimic. Most mimics don’t even try.

Thomas chopped the man across the side of his throat causing both the carotid and the jugular on that side to relax momentarily. Down the captain of the guard went.

A couple more uneventful captures and mind scans and we’d climbed high enough up the scrotum pole to find out where Dunno was likely to be.

**************** ****************** *************************

There was a seven-story tall cylindrical building. It was ostentatiously and unnecessarily high for the village, but it suited Dunno’s bloated ego perfectly. There were, so my scans and Cary’s rat recons told us, five well-guarded floors between Dunno’s quarters and us.

{He used both the sixth and the seventh floors as his living quarters.}

“How do we get to the roof?” Cary breathed quietly.

“Y’all stay here. I’m going around,” I said.

The raven trick can be turned around and ran in reverse. It is much trickier and it is a chi burner right up there with the three big kahunas or Norman’s hyperdrive.

Ravens converged on Dunno’s balcony and then they coalesced into me—or one of my big kahuna’s. I was beginning to wonder if that was quite the same thing.

I tapped Dunno awake and when he opened his mouth to scream I shoved a wadded silk scarf into it.

“I am the ghost of Christmas future,” I told him.

I don’t know if he got the literary reference or not.

“Dunno if you contrive to summon your guard somehow, I’ll kill you. There are many things that you are doing that I don’t approve of but I’m going to let most of them slide. I don’t have the time to supervise every move that you make,” I said.

“At this stage of the game, if I killed you someone like you would simply take your place. I wasn’t put on this earth to be a fly swatter. You are going to open your gates though and let anyone who wants to leave free to do so. They will take as many of their worldly goods as they can reasonably carry, load into a car, pushcart, trailer or pile onto a beast of burden. In fact, I would take it as a special favor if you’d make an effort to box, label and send out some of the household goods of the folks who left with nothing,” I told him slowly and distinctly as if speaking to a slow-witted child.

“There is one more thing. I need you to appreciate how far from the path of righteousness that you’ve strayed and how harsh I will be if you don’t act on my ultimatum,” I said.

I laid hands on him and did a quick scan of his memories. Some of what I found was so surprising that I recoiled as if from a stout electric shock.

I caused him to fall into a deep sleep and I used a straight razor to remove both of his ears. I carefully stitched the wounds closed and bandaged them. It was part of a psy-op.

It stood to reason that Dunno had books of kinjutsu that I didn’t. I had never seen Norman’s hyper drive jutsu for instance.

I found seven books of kinjutsu in Dunno’s safe along with a swede drawstring bag dyed purple. Inside the suede bag was a drawstring bag of thick jet-black velvet. Inside there were forty-seven flawless white brilliant cut diamonds. A few were one-and-a-half carats. Most of them were from two-and-a-quarter to three-and-a-quarter carats.

I didn’t know much about diamonds then. I don’t know a whole lot more about them now, but I picked up the specifications from Dunno’s mind. There should be between two and five million dollars’ worth of diamonds in the bag depending on the latest spot price.

There was no time to be examining the kinjutsu books in Dunno’s quarters but I knew a little about the books just from reading the top of Dunno’s mind. One was in old Ogham script. I can understand Gaeilge but I couldn’t read Ogham. One was in Devanagari. I can understand enough Hindi to follow the plot of a Bollywood musical without subtitles—but then, can’t everyone?

Something written in Devanagari might just has well be in French for all the good it did me. This one was probably in Sanskrit.

One was in very ornate German cursive and it was the best techniques from several volumes of the occult and kinjutsu that the NAZIs had ferreted out and translated during their brief moment in the sun. It makes you wonder how the Allies managed to win the war—but then there were probably Adepts on the Allied side too.

I had long wondered, but that confirmed a long-held suspicion of mine. The Powers That Be couldn’t possibly be ignorant of the existence of Adepts.

A couple of the books were in shorthand. Those might prove the hardest of all to decode. Look how long that it took to decipher Pepy’s journal.

One was in toki pona of all things. I looked forward to seeing how someone could even attempt to transmit a jutsu with a language of only a hundred and twenty words. It did have multiple diagrams though.

As I was stashing my haul and to tell the truth, wool gathering more than I should have been a sumo walked into Dunno’s safe room.

He probably weighed as much as our new slimmed down Duncan but he spread it over about five more inches and he was wider and just a bit more raw-boned…if any four-hundred-pound man—or woman—can ever be called “raw-boned”. He had a shaved head like Duncan had once sported.

Do you remember how I told Duncan that I had one favor to ask if he was going to hang with me?

“Let your hair grow out like a man’s dude!”

And it was a request, not a command.

Look what happened to Sampson when he went for that shorthaired metrosexual look—nothing good.

This dude had a jagged scar running diagonally across his crown. It looked like it had keloided a bit.

“You aren’t leaving here with those kinjutsu. You’re not leaving period,” the sumo said.

“Ach Ja! Du bist Kaufman,” I said.

“What?”

“You’re Roland Sensei, aren’t you? You’re a dumbass and your feet aren’t mates…and all your kids do book reports on MTV,” I said.

I figured that I was stronger. With me bulked up to two-ninety and squatting seven hundred and fifty pounds for twenty repetitions…

There was no way this dude was stronger. And my Kahunas ranged from fifteen to thirty percent more powerful than me.

Then Roland threw five spawn and they all charged me.

One of the spawn grabbed me in a vicious bear hug. I turned into a flock of ravens and teleported behind him.

I slammed a small, very high pressure and tightly focused air bomb into that sumo spawn’s ear. His puréed brains flew out his other ear and nostrils and my hand stung a bit but it was just fine otherwise.

“It’s a drag it’s a bore;

“They don’t even lock their doors,” I said.

I threw eight wet spawn at that moment—two for each duplicate.

“They haven’t had a party since the second world war,” I completed my scrap of song.

“Looks like it’s me and you Petunia,” I said to the sumo.

He didn’t even deign to throw a Kunai at me as he charged. I, on the other hand, threw six mini chakram washers at one time and they broke the sound barrier. That was a first for me.

“Yip-Ee-Kie-Ay!” I cheered my first sonic boom.

I wanted to get back to Macersville and examine the kinjutsu books. I really didn’t want to spend inordinate amounts of time clowning and playing patty-cakes with this cretin.

He thought that my super-sonic washer attack was my all-or-nothing squeeze play. I let him think that.

He rushed me just like his namesake—a sumo. My back contacted the inch-thick bullet proof Lexan that Dunno’s sliding balcony doors were made of. They shattered. He was driving me backward that hard.

If I hadn’t been pumped full of circulating chi, every one of my ribs would have shattered and every one of my discs would have ruptured. He drove me to the guardrail and I realized that his intention was to push me over the rail.

I flew up here dumb ass! Do you think that I can’t fly back down?

Apparently, he’d never watched any sumo matches. Ever seen the one where the dude being pushed out of the ring uses the raised rim for leverage to throw the other dude out first?

Roland went tumbling over the rail but he locked an iron grip on one wrist and pulled me over as well.

Did you forget something dumb ass?

I did the raven trick once more and Roland was left holding nothing.

A seven-story fall isn’t guaranteed to kill an Adept—especially an Adept like Roland with super-sized bones.

His right arm seemed the only one of his limbs that was unbroken. I started to break it with a kick to his elbow as he dragged himself along and then I stopped to ask myself why. It would have been unnecessary brutality.

Killing him might have robbed Dunno of a powerful subordinate, but we weren’t at war with The Outfit. It just seemed pointless at that moment in time.

We doubled back to where we’d hidden the high-ranking guardsman. He didn’t really have a paramilitary rank. They just called him “Boss”.

I gave him Dunno’s ears—mounted beautifully on a coat hanger wire. The brief short-lasting compulsion that I put on him called for him to call as large an assemblage of people as possible and rant and rave about what a shame and disgrace it was for rival Adepts to infiltrate the village, penetrate Dunno’s tower and take his ears as crack-brained trophies and make off with all the books of kinjutsu in Dunno’s safe.

He was to make a big point of showing Dunno’s ears to everyone who’d listen.

Why?

Dunno’s best move would have been to keep the theft of the kinjutsu and his ears quiet—just sweep it under the rug and pretend that it never happened. The truth tended to make him appear both impotent and ridiculous.

But Dunno and his segundo Roland were both going to be out of it for several hours. By then everyone in the village would know the truth. When he opened the gates, and told anyone who wanted to go to leave…that would be another puncture in his posture balloon.

************ ************* ******************************

The three of us arrived back in Macersville without incident.

I popped my Kahunas. The other two had simply been doing chi strengthening exercises and eating a couple big meals while the mission went on.

I had settled in for the long haul, translating kinjutsu, pushing heavy weights in the gym, bulking those flywheels and eating for a small army. I had decided to let the kahunas rest for awhile. I’d been forced to bring them out three weeks before my self-imposed limit of two months had passed.

We arrived back in the village on Thursday morning. I decided to wait until at least three weeks from the next Monday at the very least before bringing them out again. When that Monday came I still wasn’t sure. I sensed some sort of watershed was approaching with the kahunas.

Maybe I was close to my absolute limit. It would be a bit of a letdown to know that this was as good as it ever gets. It happens. I’d grown far more than most. I couldn’t complain.

It was more likely that I might be coming to the place where my body and chakra tree couldn’t take the strain of using the kahunas very many more times. You don’t miss what you’ve never known, but now that I’d known the power of using the three big kahunas I’d feel very weakened and humbled to be stripped of them.

The most unlikely possibility was that I stood poised on the threshold of even more power and jutsu. I liked that one and hope springs eternal but hope isn’t always the best guide to where you should place your bet.

Tuesday morning came and I still didn’t throw the big kahunas.

I was awakened at the crack of dawn Wednesday morning.

“Come quick! There is an army of skinheads on motorcycles getting ready to invade the town,” David told me as I grabbed my clothes and weapons.

[rvm45]

Chapter Eighteen








I sent a spawn to “negotiate” with the skinhead bikers. I could have a few spawn in play and still summon the kahunas, but I couldn’t call them with any large number of first wave spawn on line. I heard a proverb one time:

“A wise eagle hides his claws.”

That is meaningless in relation to nature, but the intended meaning is clear.

I took copies of Thomas, Ladonna and Homer Sensei—yes, he’d learned to cast three wobbly spawn—simply because the skinheads had a reputation of being racist. I took a copy of Duncan because he looked intimidating.

“We demand the return of the kinjutsu volumes and Sandra and Norman. You will hand them over or we will raise your little hovel of a village,” the leader said.

I looked them over. The leader was tall and muscular with glacial gray eyes that were perpetually darting about. He’d taken off his helmet momentarily to liaison with us.

The bikers were all on big black motorcycles that weren’t chopped. They wore black uniforms—well, if you can imagine black SS dress uniforms made from denim and subtly altered to be a bit more practical on a motorcycle. They wore NAZI style metal helmets but the sides had been swept forward to cover most of their faces leaving only a Greek style “Y” shaped gap for the eyes, nose and mouth. The gap was less of a slit though, being almost an inch wide.

They lined up two abreast and twenty-four-deep. There were six of the twenty-four man groups with perhaps fifteen or twenty-yards between each group.

I ‘saw’ that these dudes weren’t Adepts or even bona fide trainees, but they’d been given just enough chi training to make them more muscular than many champion boxers. Each one had perfect bones and teeth, was in vibrant good health and had his reflexes jacked. These dudes were quicker than a mean alley cat that’s gotten ahold of big dose of crystal meth somehow.

Three true Adepts led each group. The front group had the usual three Adepts plus one more to be the overall leader. The three Adepts from the front group joined the supreme leader so I was fronting four Adepts.

I couldn’t tell just what jutsu each Adept had up his sleeve, but I’d hazard that the single Duncan spawn could probably have taken the four of them and half of the front platoon unassisted.

“You have desires,” I told them. “It is a sad fact that there is far more desire in the world than there is satisfaction. There is also far more induction in the world than there is capacitance. Do you suppose that these two facts could be related in some fashion?”

The skinhead leader became so angry that big ropey looking veins stood out on his neck and forehead.

“Don’t play with me you mongrel!” he shouted.

Mongrel? Not that I care, but I was probably just as Aryan as the quarrelsome Hauptsturmführer.

All the rank and file soldiers carried what looked all the world like MP-40 machine pistols while the Adepts limited themselves to a single pistol in a cross-draw flap holster and what looked like an SS dagger with a fifteen-inch double-edged blade instead of the standard six inches.

Machine Pistols? The Germans called the MP-40 a “Machine Pistol” and it was considered quite proper to call any weapon—carbine or not—a “Machine Pistol” so long as it fired pistol ammunition. Jeff Cooper always used the term that way. No one ever said that use was incorrect back then.

Then Jeff Cooper got into a running debate with Chuck Taylor—a minor acolyte of Cooper who’d branched out and started his own system of combat gunnery.

Cooper contended that weapons like the Thompson, Uzi, PPsH or whatever, are heavier, bulkier and can make far more noise and waste ammunition faster than a pistol chambered for the same round—but they offered little or no tactical advantage.

Taylor disagreed and it rankled him when Cooper called his beloved sub-machineguns “Machine Pistols”. One day he decided that he was lord and supreme potentate of the English Language and he declared that it was incorrect to call sub-machineguns “Machine Pistols”. He wanted to reserve that term for weapons like the selective fire Star, the VP70 and the Beretta 93R.

Many gun writers are ignorant, unimaginative and imitative hacks. They picked up Taylor’s act of lèse majesté and aped his pronouncement. Nowadays fools will fatuously tell you that it is incorrect to call a sub-machinegun a “Machine Pistol”.

It isn’t. Chuck Taylor isn’t God and I call them “Machine Pistols” every chance I get—just to freak the squares.

At any rate, the bikers close enough to hear the exchange all reached for the pistol grip of their machine pistols. As the ones further back saw what was going down farther forward, the clutching of grips spread rearward.

Then Norman appeared. He wore his purple gi just so there was no doubt at all that he was the one. He’d been in Macersville a little over a month—since I hadn’t launched my raid the very same day that he appeared. We’d been cram-jamming him full of high calorie food along with many chi-building herbs. We’d also started him on a few chi-building and chi-controlling meditations and exercises for the last three weeks.

You can easily ruin something in three weeks—or three hours—sometimes even in less than three seconds. You aren’t going to build someone’s strength, constitution or stamina very much in three or four weeks though. We had gotten Norman’s storehouse of fat, glycogen and chi somewhat replenished though.

“I’m the one that you want. I’m not going with you and neither is Sandra. Please don’t take your displeasure out on these people. They’re not involved,” Norman said.

Then he went into hyper-drive. He drew his large Kukris and walked calmly down the right-hand row of bikers cutting each skinhead’s throat to the spine using first a right backhand on one biker and then a right forehand on the next. He carried his right hand cocked as he walked from bike to bike greatly reducing the number of hyper-drive inches the arm had to traverse.

Clever Norman. You didn’t use that technique in the village.

I say he “walked”. Definitions can get sticky when you’re talking about something like race walking where you have people diligently trying to push the envelope every which way that they can.

Nonetheless, one main difference between walking and running is that in running both feet leave the ground momentarily. Once you’re airborne you pretty much have to wait for gravity to push you back to where you can get traction once more. Hyper-drive all that you want. Gravity isn’t going to speed up for you.

Norman had mastered a technique of walking where at least one foot was on the ground generating thrust at all times—yet he was moving close to the speed of sound.

I could follow his movements only because of my Adept senses.

When Norman got to the end of the first platoon’s left side row of bikers he faltered and went to one knee for a fraction of a second. He climbed to his feet, shrugged and crossed the street. He worked his way back towards us, standing to the right and using his left hand to sever spines this time.

Norman collapsed close to my spawn and went to one knee and gasped for breath. His cheeks were now as hollow and gaunt as the first time that I’d seen him.

Like the song says:

“Oom blah dee; oom blah da;

“Life goes on Bra…”

Three large groups of ravens coalesced into my three big kahunas.

Then the event that I’d feared happened. There was a sea change in my big kahunas—but it was a change for the better—mostly.

Each big kahuna cast two medium kahunas. The medium kahunas cast five first-wave wet spawn each and then three second-wave.

The medium kahunas—in and of themselves—were six new spawn. They weren’t as powerful as the big kahunas but they were still five or six percent more powerful than me.

Two medium kahunas casting five wet spawn each—that’s ten. Count them. That’s two more first-wave than the big kahuna could have cast on his own and their power levels had gone up a couple or three tenths of a point. There is nothing mysterious about that. Unless and until a big kahuna has the wherewithal to cast all of the first-wave spawn at that power level, the second wave of kahunas won’t manifest.

A pair of kahunas casting three second-wave spawn for a total of six was one more than the old five. Their power ratings were a very wobbly point one higher than each of the old gang of five.

I could sense each big kahuna had three rather weak third-wave spawn now, held in reserve for a possible end game where everyone’s chi is largely depleted and even spawn below power level two can be a game changer.

Bombs, bombs, air bombs…

Explosives work by daisy-chaining a bunch of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and usually carbon atoms into a very unstable compound that is a solid—or liquid. Hit the daisy-chain just right and those atoms recombine into water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen in a tiny fraction of a second—releasing beaucoup heat in the process.

Nitrogen and carbon dioxide are both gases. So is water at those ungodly temperatures.

Gases need far more elbow room than solids. For a brief moment, they’re at many tens of thousands of pounds of pressure and they move in every direction at several times the speed of sound creating a great shockwave in the process.

Each explosive molecule carries enough and sometimes more than enough oxygen to turn everything to gas. That’s why dynamite or firearms would work perfectly well in space.

What about coal dust, or flour, gasoline or kerosene? They have plenty of carbon and hydrogen but little or no oxygen—and they’re more stable to boot.

Spread enough gasoline as a very fine mist though and it can create one Hell of an explosion.

In fact, gasoline has about twice the explosive power on a pound for pound basis as most high explosives. The reason? Half of the explosive has to be oxygen since it needs to pack its own.

The trick is getting the oxygen to the hydrocarbons fast.

The military developed bombs where a relatively small explosion turns a quantity of gasoline to a very fine mist covering many cubic yards and then a second blast ignites it. They’re very powerful bombs.

I had several containers built to contain about four ounces of kerosene, a couple ounces of very finely powdered aluminum, about three CO2 cartridges worth of carbon dioxide just to help the liquid atomize a bit and I’d added just a pinch of finely ground copper because I grooved on the pretty green glow that it produced momentarily.

I surrounded the PVC cylinder with a vacuum the size of a basketball. I set the cylinder to spinning frantically. At some point the cylinder ruptured and the kerosene atomized every which way. In an instant, I had a ball of kerosene vapor spinning clockwise at about 3600 RPMs. The temperature was above three hundred degrees but the kerosene couldn’t burn in the absence of oxygen.

Then I spread my net wide but his time the net was a sieve. It captured oxygen but let the other gases go through. It wasn’t one hundred percent effective, but I had a sphere of over ninety-five percent oxygen about thirty inches across—surrounding the kerosene ball and spinning about 3600 RPMs counter-clockwise.

The oxygen was at five hundred degrees at close to three thousand PSI when I threw it at the third platoon of bikers faster than sound. The inner barricade vanished a very tiny instant before the over-pressure ruptured the outer barrier. The sonic boom was awesome by itself. I was afraid to throw it any closer to us. I had it explode just overhead about a third of the way through the platoon.

The explosion rocked my fillings and threw human body parts every which way.

Keep in mind that I had three big kahunas throwing the fuel-air bombs simultaneously—one each for the third, fourth and fifth platoons. One might not suffice so each big kahuna threw a second and a third kerosene bomb.

The six kahunas contented themselves with throwing somewhat smaller air bombs without kerosene to play cleanup.

All the first and second wave spawn mopped up the second platoon.

Meanwhile the irritable Hauptsturmführer transformed. He grew about eight-foot-tall and while his muscles grew and bulged in every direction while he sprouted three extra pair of bulging-veined brawny arms and another eye in the center of his forehead.

I let the Duncan spawn take the Kali-looking dude because he’d have pouted for a week if I hadn’t. Meanwhile the Saul clone took on two of the remaining adepts. Saul was the only animal that I’d seen so far that would spawn spontaneously without prompting and using nothing but his own chi.

He’d found a way to throw spawn all armored and wired to the max like he’d once been. He was definitely more formidable covered with chitin armor plates and pumped full of every kind of “fight-or-flight” hormones and short-term chi. It was just that he couldn’t have lasted much longer that way. He’d have use himself up very quickly if he hadn’t changed when he did. With spawn, longevity wasn’t much of an issue.

At least I guess Saul had been more dangerous in his old guise. He was quicker and had both more wind and stamina now and his mind was clearer.

I stepped forward to deal with the remaining Adept.

Hell’s belles and cockleshells and skeletons all in a row!

The Adept’s mouth opened far wider than a human’s mouth should have opened—kinda like a Pez dispenser just part way open—and he sprayed me with burning napalm—the kind with aluminum and magnesium powder mixed in with the jellied petroleum to raise the burn temperature.

I’d never faced a fire jutsu but I had air jutsu at my command. I opened my mouth and blew a phantastic blast of wind at the stream of napalm. I hadn’t even known that I could do that.

I think that all else being equal, his jutsu was the stronger. He’d gotten started blowing fire before I sent my wind. I diverted or redirected the bulk of the napalm but I still caught a bunch—largely on my right arm and side and my wind had fanned the flames.

A human might not have survived those burns for long. I was a spawn and my maximum lifespan was a matter of days at most. I was like a samurai or the cherry blossom—aesthetic but ephemeral.

I used both air blast and a shield of chi to block his second blast of napalm long enough to get within arms’ reach. My left hand drove forward hard enough to drive my fingertips well into his chest cavity and I managed to rip out a chunk of heart muscle along with a couple short sections of his ribs.

Thanks again Josh.

I went to grab his windpipe with my right hand only to find the fingers were entirely burnt off. I butted heads and then went for the proverbial “Bite his nose off”.

An instant later I popped my cork. I opted to use the raven illusion just for a bit of a flourish. I realized afterward: that was the first time that I’d been able to do the raven exit with a non-kahuna.

************* ************* ******************

“You are a weapon of mass destruction,” Morgan said to me as we debriefed afterwards. “That is the last time that this kind of numbers will ever get so close to Macersville. The event had its own sort of necessity but it was a very singular event.”

“Could we equip a few motorcycle platoons like the skinheads? I can see a number of potential uses for an affiliated motorcycle club,” David asked.

“Logistics. Dyed-in-the-wool bikers probably aren’t the folk we’d need for this. Wanna-bees might sign up to join us, but then we need to wait until they have the cash to buy a bike. If they get a loan to buy one then they’ll be tied to a nine-to-five to pay for it. That could make accepting missions rather problematic,” I said.

“What if we supplied the bikes and got some really good motorcyclists to give riding classes while we did Adept training too? We could run the training though the clubhouse. They wouldn’t be full-fledged Adepts after six months but they’d be way ahead of those losers. We could continue further training between missions,” David said.

“A good new bike sells for around twenty thousand dollars give or take. Excuse me, but for what we’re doing, I’d like to keep them fairly uniform. That means that just the bikes for one club is gonna be a million dollars. We could afford to set up one club—maybe two—but that’s one Hell of a lot of money tied up and bringing no return,” I said.

“Another thing,” David said. “Those MP-40s the bikers had, were beefed up to 10mm magnum. The P-38s had been altered enough to be usable with .357 SIG. Obviously they have their own underground manufacturing facility. Why don’t we start our own?”

“David, if you don’t quit I’m going to put you on the committee to perfect the jutsu of defecating money,” I said.

Then I started down another path my mind was wandering down.

“Dunno has been working in collusion with a couple of other Adept groups. Not only that, but he’s been heavily into drug smuggling, loan sharking and assassination for hire. I’m not an economist or an accountant, but a number of things never really added up for me,” I said.

All of the buildings in the village were built with donated labor. The contractors bought building materials in bulk and wholesale. The village had its own industrial sized generators as well. I assume the generator’s fuel was also bought in bulk—probably bypassing some taxes along the way. Electrical power was supplied without payment to everyone in the village.

There were farms and farmers outside town but within the village’s purview. The village had their own abattoir, mill and bakery. They had orchards and dairies and breweries. The village’s cobblers kept the shoes and boots in top repair. The village’s woodwrights and cabinetmakers made world-class furniture for modest amounts of money.

Things like lemons and oranges, bananas and chocolate were brought in from the outside of course, but the presumption was that everything produced in the village was cheaper through cutting out many middlemen and quite often the taxman too.

Still, it didn’t seem as if the Adapts could possibly bring in enough money to pay so many trainees and casuals for doing nothing that brought real income into the village.

There are very large amounts of cash to be made in the drug business though.

Yeah, you could say that dealing drugs is a dirty business but someone has to do it.

Maybe in some existential way someone does have to deal drugs…meaning that in some way illegal drugs perform an essential function in society.

I just didn’t want me and mine involved. It isn’t even the drugs per se—it’s the snitches and narcs, pimps and prostitutes and scam artists that you have to deal with. Play with filth and some dirt is bound to rub off.

Yet I knew from my brief plumbing of Dunno’s mind that The Outfit hadn’t been free from unethical business practices at least since World War II. Dunno wasn’t the first mayor to cut corners.

Never mind what The Outfit might have done or might continue to do.

Was there any way that I could organize an organization that was prosperous enough to allow trainees the necessary free time and liberty to grow into Adepts and allow Adepts the time to perfect their jutsus and stay in top form—without stooping to actions that I found distasteful?

I was sitting lost in thought when Morgan cleared his throat and spoke.

“There is something that I’d like to show y’all. It doesn’t need to be widely known, but I trust y’all. I think that this will answer a good many of y’all’s questions,” Morgan said.

[rvm45]

Chapter Nineteen









“Have you ever asked yourself why Macersville functions on the silver standard?” Morgan asked.

“I haven’t a clue.”

The retro silver coins were neat and a precious metal standard is always better than fiat money. Hell, you could probably work out a system where each promissory note was redeemable for so many pounds of 1090 steel and it would work better in practice than fiat money.

“It is because for some reason gold is more plentiful here than lead,” Morgan said.

He opened a door and turned on the light and there was row after row after row of gold bullion stacked like so many bricks. Take all the gold at Fort Knox and combine it all the gold in California—that’s in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills—and it would be small potatoes compared to this.

“We have some gold jewelry and such. Gold is pretty and it doesn’t corrode. We try to keep it halfway reasonable though. When word of a fabled city of gold leaks out many men spend large portions of their lives searching—sometimes the searches persist for generations—the effects can be catastrophic,” Morgan said.

“Reich! Reich! Wir sind reich!” I deadpanned in a monotone.

“What would happen if you dumped all this gold in the outside world?” Morgan asked.

“The spot price of gold would drop precipitously. I don’t think that any major economies are still on a gold standard but nonetheless gold still casts a powerful shadow over the economies of the world. Then there are hard money tycoons and ordinary folk who invested in gold as a hedge against inflation. They’d all be wiped out,” I said.

“Even the prices of electronic components and some precision instruments would be confused,” I added as an afterthought. “Also, never mind the scrutiny the dude dumping that many tons of gold into the world market would garner.”

“On the other hand, I think we can donate a few million dollars’ worth of gold to your cause and not create much of a tidal wave in the outside world’s economy,” Morgan said.

“Works for me.”

************** ****************** **************************

I had a few of my people melting down bars of gold, adding in a bit of lead, tin, antimony and a bit of silver and casting them into .69 caliber balls meant for 12-Gauge punkin’ ball loads.

“Why are we debasing this wonderfully pure gold,” James demanded.

He sounded frustrated beyond measure.

“There is less than one percent impurities in Macersville’s bullion. No one has bullion that pure on the outside and bullion is a very poor way to sell lots of gold and try to stay off the radar. Gold from the ground wouldn’t be so pure and a crack-brained prospector just might cast his gold into round balls for ease of transportation,” I said.

I didn’t add that I had every confidence that the golden balls would be assayed for purity and there was no intention to defraud anyone.

My group had managed to locate several poor prospectors in several gold bearing states to act as front men. I’d seen a few of these type dudes on nature and educational documentaries. I’d often thought that the main thing motivating them was a love of being in the wilds and the thrill of treasure hunting. Actually, finding a large pocket of gold might prove more of a curse than a blessing.

They still hadn’t struck the mother lode though and they were still free to search for it. Part of what I paid them was put into a trust fund for their retirement. Another trust fund gave a small annuity so that they could winter in style and set out with top quality gear each prospecting season. Of course, I also gave them a fair chunk of money to fritter away while they were at it. And the vast majority of them would fritter it away one way or another.

Meanwhile I’d had my agents bribe a couple of writers for the prospecting magazines to tout using round ball bullet molds to keep track of a prospector’s loose gold. It might not be a great idea, but because it had been touted in print no one would question prospectors in several states coming up with many pounds of round golden balls all at one time.

*********** **************** *************************

Many folks that The Outfit recruited in their better days come from martial arts backgrounds. I was a case in point. Nonetheless the Outfit’s recruiting of outsiders was very hit or miss.

I sent trainees out to take martial arts classes in the outside world. They might take taekwondo or kenpo, judo or Brazilian jujitsu, boxing, capoeira or some form of kung fu. The style or art wasn’t important. What was important was finding competent senseis or coaches who were truly dedicated to teaching and to the martial arts.

When they found a prospect, they sent him to me.

************* ******************* ******************************

“Welcome Sensei!” I said to the newcomer.

He was about five-ten and weighed about two-ten without too much fat—though like many middle-aged grapplers, his muscles seemed all smoothed over with a thin covering of fatty tissue.

He looked Japanese and he taught judo but his accent was pure Kentucky middle south.

“I wish that we could do this at your dojo, but you don’t have the proper facilities,” I told him.

“You know what they say: my dojo, my rules. There are many ways to fake martial arts feats. There are ways to fake miracles. There are ways to run scams and ways to counterfeit money. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t legitimate miracles or genuine hundred dollar bills,” I continued.

He looked at me openly with just a twinge of skepticism. That was good. I preferred people who weren’t ready to swallow everything hook, line and sinker.

“By the way, I promised you a thousand dollars to come and talk to me but I’m sure that coming here cost gas and meals on the road and you might want to spend a night in a motel before heading back home,” I told him.

I handed him sixteen one hundred dollar bills.

“This should make your one thousand dollars pure profit. They’re not counterfeit. Check the serial numbers. Hold them up to the light. Note the hologram and the tiny metal strip,” I told him.

I stepped onto the clinical scales and weighed myself.

“Three hundred and five pounds and I’m almost ripped,” I said. “But for all you know, I may be floating in enough steroids to alter the outcome of the next three super bowls or my scales could be bollixed. Please weigh yourself to verify my scale.”

I stepped onto the tight rope and did the splits and then rose and went into a one-armed handstand and then did a double back somersault coming off. Next, I did a few tricks on the still rings and the horizontal bar. My stunts would be commonplace at a national gymnastics competition. Coming from a sixty-year-old man weighing over three hundred pounds it was awe-inspiring—always provided that it wasn’t trickery.

“Have you ever thrown knives?” I asked.

“Some,” he admitted. “It isn’t judo.”

“Would you throw these knives at a target—whichever one you want—and then retrieve them. Check out the targets while you’re down there. Those are laminated end-grain pine.”

I stuck three full-sized Kunai then a half a dozen mini Kunai and then I followed up with six single washers then six washers at once.

“That whip crack noise you hear is the washers breaking the sound barrier. Walk on down to the target and examine it in detail. Note the depth the washers and blades have sunk in.”

Finally, the judo sensei said, “Okay, you’ve convinced me. You can do things that I never thought to see outside a cheap kung fu movie. What is the point? What do you want from me?”

“I want to teach you how to do those things. I want to finance a nice big dojo for you and I want you to teach others what you’ve learned. You don’t have to pay me back with money. You will pay me back by offering your most promising students the opportunity to come and train with my people,” I said.

“I’m a Christian. I don’t want to be involved in the demonic,” he said.

“That would be an excellent objection but I don’t think that there is anything unchancy about what we do. There is an impersonal force permeating both matter and energy and we’ve learned through mental exercises to harness it. It’s no more demonic than electricity. There is this: some of our rival groups are turning to the demonic to increase their power, but there’s nothing new about such things,” I told him.

I could see that he wasn’t convinced.

“Take these three books. I wrote them to give my students something to study and to give them useful exercises when I was away and couldn’t train them every day. Take your time and look them over. I’ll get back to you or you can contact us,” I told him.

“What if I don’t join you but I teach the things in these books to my students anyway?”

“Feel free. Believe it or not, I wrote those books to help people and not for profit or credit,” I said.

“What if I plagiarize them and publish them as my own works?” he asked.

“You won’t. If you were that kind of fellow I wouldn’t have invited you here. But so far as that goes—I don’t give a rat’s ass if someone wants to steal my works. There is another factor though. There are two dozen or more groups of Adepts in the US of A alone. Many of them are very hard-core and dedicated to keeping the techniques secret,” I said.

************** ****************** *************************

We’d gotten the dojo conversion process down to a science. One third of the dojo was open to the public. It would be well lit. It would have spacious padded rooms and a very good selection of training equipment.

The second section held a nice weight room and some advanced equipment. Why have the weight room in a restricted area? It was conceivable that someone might tire of martial art training, but continue to pay the modest fee to use the weight room and we didn’t need people cluttering up the place.

Of course, the last third held the most advanced equipment and only the top ten percent or so were authorized to be there. Even the intermediates would either be intimidated or would suspect fraud if they saw some of the things that the advanced trainees were doing.

In the beginning a couple or three advanced students would go and stay with the resident sensei until he had the rudiments of chi manipulation. They might stay six months or sixteen months. If they had to take off a few days occasionally for a mission, personal concerns or whatever it didn’t diminish the quality of the training.

While the advanced students were there they also served as assistant instructors to the class.

Once the sensei was deemed competent to carry on alone, he’d still spend the occasional three or four-day weekends at our headquarters—throw in a two to three week stay once or twice per year. There were also frequent visits by various Adepts to help out and to further the sensei’s skills.

Remember the Outfit’s prime axiom:

“Nothing good ever comes from haste.”

It might take five or six years for a sensei to get to where he could truly be called an Adept with our on-site training.

The beginning mental exercises were given to the students from the start.

“The purely physical will only take you so far in the martial arts. These exercises are simple and they take a long time to bear fruit but they’re important. If you will do them diligently for a year or two you will begin to see an improvement. Your greater mental powers should just be beginning to come online as you’ve exhausted he physical,” was the rap laid on the students.

We didn’t have “Sis-Boom-Bah” demonstrations to convince the students the visualizations worked. Our policy of asking students to do the exercises “just because” tended to select those who were dedicated, not particularly physically gifted and willing to give something a good long trial based on faith in the sensei.

Eventually we had one or more dojos in Miami, Orlando, Atlanta, and Lafollette—including the suburb Knoxville, Nashville, Louisville, Cincinnati, Evansville and St Louis and over a dozen more Southeastern metropolises.

We had our headquarters just east and south of Harlan Kentucky and so far as The Powers That Be and the general public were concerned, we were a dedicated confederation of martial arts fanatics—clannish but too open to really qualify as a cult.

We chartered the “Nine Tails Motorcycle Club”—with few visible ties to the martial artists. Unlike any other bike club that I ever heard of, the “Nine Tails” had little hazing of new members but there was an exacting apprenticeship.

The clubhouses hid gyms and training facilities. Apprentices were taught tradecraft and they weren’t supposed to ride a bike on the roads until they had a year of tradecraft under their belts. Waiting until they’d gotten in better than naturally possible physical condition and jacking their reflexes by thirty percent and more greatly cut down on accidents.

The clubs held big road trips and camping expeditions. The mood was joyful but they didn’t have the reputation for boozing, getting high and chasing loose women that most other clubs had. Honestly, they were more like a militia of sober minded bon vivant scholars and poets.

Then there was the “Dragon’s Teeth Motorcycle Gang”. I have no idea how that one got started.

They didn’t ride motorcycles—but don’t tell them that. They used old Volkswagen Beetles and souped them up almost beyond recognition. Some had Ferrari engines or other high-performance sports car engines shoehorned in.

They jacked rear ends up. Some of the Beetles were converted to 4-wheel drive. Most kept the rear mounted motor but many converted the cars to front wheel drive and added a drive shaft. Chain drives were also popular.

A complicated but popular conversion was moving the steering column to dead center and having just one centrally located bucket seat.

“X” harnesses and crash helmets with goggles were de rigueur. So was brass-studded leather vests or jackets and with the club logo. Many Dragon Teeth carried lorgnettes.

The club members dressed like Prince, Doctor Who and a shipload of Vikings had collaborated on the wardrobe. They acted like someone had taken the most over-the-top Japanese Zen Master of all time, Castaneda’s Don Juan, Gallagher and Mork from Ork and thrown them in a container and shook them until they coalesced into the most manic word salad spouting Fool-Saint of all time.

You guessed it. Capoeira and Drunken style and Monkey style kung fu were their favorite martial arts.

Yeah, one effective combat strategy is to play the fool.

************** *************** ***************************

We had several good years when there were only the most minor rumbles with other Adept groups. I knew that the lull would be temporary. We used our time to our advantage.

I had some ideas and I was able to wield a few jutsu more powerfully than most. What really gave us a rocket-boosted assist was all the gold from Macersville. I knew that the gold had to stop at some point. I knew that it had to stop soon. I just didn’t know precisely when it would stop.

The final form of my kahuna jutsu was throwing three big kahunas who threw three kahunas each. Then the nine kahunas threw three little kahunas for a total of twenty-seven little kahunas.

The little kahunas weren’t physically small of course, but each one only had about ninety five percent of my power. Each one of the little kahunas could cast seven +5.0 wet spawn with a second wave of three at about 3.5.

The big kahunas and the kahunas could also cast modest first and second wave spawn, but most of the power and action was focused out on the most distal branches of my spawn tree.

I knew somehow, deep down inside that I’d taken that particular jutsu to its maximum. Truly, it is generally better to travel hopefully than to arrive. I mastered the odd jutsu here and there, but I also knew somehow that I’d never find a jutsu that would give me a tiny portion of the boost of power that I’d gotten from the raven jutsu in conjunction with the kahuna jutsu.

I needed to bulk up to well over three hundred pounds to handle the kahuna backlash when it came. I didn’t look fat. I looked like what the reigning Mister Olympia wishes that he could bulk up to.

When I was a ten I’d have grooved on the idea of being such a muscular monster. Now it was a bother. I stood out in any crowd unless I used a glamor. It was hard to find ready-made clothes to fit.

That really didn’t begin to cover it. I just felt like, looked like and had to train like a sumo-lite and I didn’t like it.

Speaking of sumos—Duncan wore his hair well down his shoulders now. He hadn’t gone bald but over half of his hair had turned snow white. Saul didn’t seem to age. He was well past the normal lifespan even of a Rat Terrier and they sometimes live eighteen years or so.

************** *************** ***********************

One day I happened to be alone with Ladonna.

“Do you ever regret that you never had children?” Ladonna asked.

“I have hundreds,” I said.

“You know what I mean,” she insisted.

“EE…having children requires a woman. They’re far from easy to acquire. Moreover, to win one you have to compete. Competition is defiling. I never compete.”

“Do you think that I like women?” she asked.

“No. But since you bring it up—do you? And why do I care?”

“I’m straight but when I was a senior in high school the prom queen made a pass at me. I was horrified and ashamed. When I told my grandmother, she was very stern—like when you tell someone something that they damned well ought to know already,” Ladonna said.

“She told me that big muscular loud and outspoken women like me were an abomination. She said that I didn’t deserve a man and that I’d better learn to like splayed women because that’s all that I would ever get. You say that you won’t compete against the men who dated me before you or who might come after you. There aren’t any. I have never been on a date with anyone—male or female,” she spat out.

“I don’t know what to say. If I’d known when we were younger I might have acted differently—maybe. I can’t say of a certainty,” I said.

She gave me one of those looks of resentment and dislike that has fermented and festered for decades. It’s like one of those big hot aching boils and you know that it will pop someday but you’re not sure exactly when.

I’m all for openness on one hand but on the other hand I hate psychodrama.

Just then David came walking in.

“I’ve just gotten the word. The North Koreans—Jae’s North Koreans—are going to swap some kinjutsu with the Dallas Adepts. There is going to be twenty-three volumes altogether,” David said.

“Do you know where?” I asked him.

“Gatorland in Orlando,” David said.

[rvm45]

Chapter Twenty







I went to Gatorland in Orlando when my family lived there. That was back in the 60s. I had many nightmares afterward partly as a result of seeing the gators up close.

My mother opined one day that she wouldn’t live somewhere with a canal running through her back yard. I said that it wouldn’t bother me.

“Yeah and one morning you’d climb out of bed and a gator would snap your leg clean off,” she said.

She could go from zero to hate-filled bitter sarcasm remarkably quickly.

I got the idea from her stupid remark, that the water could rise until it was knee deep and a gator could cruise in through locked doors without anyone suspecting anything was amiss.

Every time that I had to go wee-wee-wee after bedtime I was scared spitless lest a gator take my leg off as my first foot hit the floor—and we were staying in a trailer. Once that first foot safely touched down without incident I knew there wasn’t a gator lying in wait and I was reasonably good to go.

We went there again while on vacation sometime in the early 70s. The place was much as I remembered it but I was several years older and it didn’t give me nightmares.

As I checked the place out with online photos and Google Maps much of it was the same. The wooden walkways looked just like I remembered them but they’d added a whole other lake behind the first lake and a couple of smaller lakes as well.

So that’s where they meant to do the exchange.

Game theory came heavily into play here. Neither side was willing to go into the other side’s territory. The potential for ambush was too awesome and spawn would be detected and disallowed at the gate lest they be on some sort of Kamikaze mission.

There was much that could pass without notice in the outer world or what could be written off as gang violence, terrorism or drug wars, but there were limits. Either side would be unlikely to start a pitched battle in a public place.

Neither side was likely to try to palm off fake books either. An all-out war was something no one wanted. However, once word got around that a group was weak and indecisive it would start a feeding frenzy among Adept groups.

Word that someone had been gipped was bound to leak out. The only way to save face would be to launch an all-out war on the one who’d ripped them off.

That only left the mechanics of trying to intercept the packages and it wasn’t at all easy.

On the other hand, I feared the consequences of letting twenty-three volumes of kinjutsu get around and our new group needed to establish our bona fides. It was also a tempting opportunity to mess with people that I didn’t approve of.

This was going to be a hard snatch to pull off, so I contacted the Seminole to make it a joint operation.

************** ****************** ******************************

Gatorland’s parking lot was filled with big custom touring bikes all done up in brown and chrome. There were also many bizarrely customized Volkswagens there too. Both of the gangs left four members to watch over their rides while the bulk of each gang went inside.

The Nine Tails wore their summer colors—a lightweight brown leather vest with a kyuubi embroidered on the back with lots of fluorescent orange and psychedelic lime green. The Dragon’s Teeth had a white and yellow fire-breathing dragon embroidered on their black leather vests.

I had been concerned lest the park hesitate to admit so many color-wearing gang members at one time. I’d padded a lot of pockets from ticket sellers all the way up to middle management with enough long green to insure everyone would simply turn a blind eye to the outlaw bikers on the big day. There had also been a simple compulsion laid on each bribed employee to ensure that they told no one. Even if he was an operative for another Adept group, the compulsion should hold.

When I say “I” I mean that one of my people did. There are folk with far better mental jutsus than I can command

As it stood there were two-dozen Nine Tails and nineteen Dragon’s teeth scattered through the park.

Some of the Seminole looked Indian and some had gone for a Hispanic look. My three big kahunas were there. Each one dressed differently and had a different face via an unobtrusive glamor.

Duncan had one fatty walking and hitting all of the snack bars. He had another riding an electric wheel chair. The third Duncan sat on a park bench with his legs crossed and tried to be inconspicuous. Since that hid his height and made the view of his extra broad lower body at least partly obstructed I had hopes that his glamor might suffice.

That left Duncan and Saul with two more first-wave Duncans on tap with my originals.

There was a number of other spawn in Gatorland. Gerald’s kahunas—he still had just the three—There were spawn by Cary and James and Chandra. I had all of David’s spawn either watching his drone monitors or watching the sixes of the Davids watching drone monitors.

They made the exchange behind the restrooms not far from the parrot house—right next to the breeding marsh. Right off the bat there was trouble. Someone else made their move an instant before we did.

There were fifty white-hot fires around the two package bearers. The fires were like looking into a TIG welding torch without a hood or at a big magnesium fire for a moment and then when I looked back there were fifty men armed with oversized leaf bladed scimitars.

Fitting in for them was a no-go. They were bare chested with big green turbans of shiny silky material with big multi-colored balloon pants and shoes than turned up like elf shoes on the end. They were all muscled like pro bodybuilders on contest day.

Eccentricities of dress I could fathom, but none of these dudes were alive—not even like a dry spawn is kinda alive. These fellows were more like mineral wool or asbestos fibers wound extraordinarily tight and suffused with more chi than I’d ever seen in one place, along with some very ugly saffron colored energy.

They all looked identical with black brooding brows, hooked beak noses, fierce handlebar mustaches and glowering cruel countenances.

“They have summoned the djinn,” One of the Texans shouted.

Nine flocks of ravens converged and then combined into kahunas. Nine kahunas summoned twenty-seven little kahunas.

The Texans seemed to mostly be armed with Heckler & Koch MP-5s or some knock-off look alike. The North Koreans seemed to prefer M-4s with a D-Cell flashlight battery sized moderator. The Texan’s MP-5s also had D-Cell sized suppressors.

Parenthetically—some of the high tech wet silencers can be that size and do a yeoman’s job of suppressing a pistol cartridge’s muzzle blast. They weren’t going to come close to suppressing the muzzle flash and blast from a short barreled .223—but they could make it milder and more endurable for the shooter—hence the term “moderator”.

A bunch of dudes with shaved heads and carrying what looked like German MP-40s came in firing on the heels of the djinn.

Both the Texans and the North Koreans hosed the djinn, but bullets didn’t seem to affect the inorganic life forms. My speeded up Adept senses could see the bullets flatten on the djinn’s skin—causing the mildest momentary ripple—and then tumble harmlessly to the ground. Some of the Montanan’s wild spraying from behind hit their djinn servants, masters, owners—whatever in Hell they were with their 10mm Magnum bullets. That didn’t discomfit the djinn either.

None of the other groups seemed to have even the slightest concern about hitting innocent bystanders.

As a big Kahuna, I could throw five first-wave spawn after the kahunas. Each one was only a bit above level 3.0 but they were.

One of my wet spawn snatched up a little girl. He shielded her body with his and carried her out of the crossfire. He absorbed several bullets in the process. He wasn’t popped yet, but he was sliding that direction.

He drew his thirty-nine-inch saber—seeing as how bullets seemed to have no effect on the djinn—and gave one of the haints a full-powered chop across the side of his neck from behind.

The saber’s edge bit into the djinn’s neck a little over an inch and molten something—white-hot—erupted from the gash along with foot-long sparks of high power electrical arcs.

The djinn’s wound had closed over by the time that he’d turned around to face my spawn. He swung his oversized scimitar hard enough to bat my saber away and cleave my body from my left trapezius to my right iliac crest. He cut me in two diagonally and a tiny instant later the spawn’s cork popped.

I wouldn’t get any experience back from the kahunas or their get until the last kahuna fell, but since there wasn’t a kahuna in the line of propagation, I received that spawn’s memories and left-over chi immediately.

My four remaining wet spawn threw as many dry spawn as possible and entered the fray—to protect people and others.

**************** ****************** ************************

One of the djinn got distracted and stepped toward a toddler bawling hysterically in his stroller. His scimitar started down. I stepped in close and blocked the blow with my saber. Let’s see if you can still bat my saber away so casually when it is charged with every dreg of chi that I can force into, around and through my mighty blade.

My blade blocked the chop at the toddler—just barely. The second time he chopped downward at me. I reached up and supported my blade with my right hand. That worked just barely and he almost got my right hand’s fingers as he raked the scimitar outward across the saber’s blade on the way out.

He’d be ready and he’d get my fingers the next time that I used that strategy.

The djinn drew back for a mighty overhand smash. I threw my saber up to deflect the blow marginally as I stepped close and rammed my right-hand hangar as far into his chest cavity as it would penetrate.

He tried to pull back. I stuck to him like flypaper and kept the hanger sheathed in his heart. He tried to pull back even harder.

It was as I surmised. Somehow, he could bridge the moments from before his flesh was rent to the moment in the near future when it might—in theory—exist unrent once more—that is, if his flesh wasn’t torn or pierced very long.

The longer the hanger stayed in him the harder those moments became to bridge and pretend that they’d never happened in the first place. His left hand gripped my left wrist and tried to crush my radius and ulna in his crystalline grip. His right hand groped for my eyes.

I sheathed my right wrist and forearm in chi to prevent him pulverizing the bones. I dropped the saber and grabbed his left wrist. Something very hard and cruel came up from deep inside of me.

Something that I’d read long ago came rushing into my mind:

“When winning becomes solely a matter of who can hate harder, that’s when you gotta fight as if you could avenge every injury and sleight that you’ve ever suffered at the hands of man or fate—right here, right now in this exact moment of time.”

I had no idea what I hated that strongly but pure unadulterated malice caused my strong left hand to clamp down until I felt whatever answered for bones in the djinn’s wrist to creak and I threatened to crush them with my power.

The djinn popped or whatever the correct term for djinn is. He left enough white-hot molten metal to destroy what was left of my body. I popped.

************ *************** ***********************

“Ding-a-Ling!” Damn it!

Two spawn were down and there were forty-nine djinn to go. I was already behind on points. This wasn’t going well.

One of the djinn started to kill one of the giant tortoises—just from meanness I guess.

It was time to front him with saber and hangar in hand and try to figure out a way to kill djinn that didn’t take my spawn down with him.

“Dude it is like: leave the big turtle alone,” I told him.

************ ***************** ********************

Meanwhile Duncan lost a spawn to the djinn but the other two Duncan spawn had a clear view of what happened.

A djinn would assay an overhand chop at Duncan. Duncan would nonchalantly bat the leaf-bladed scimitar to one side with a chi-shielded hand. Then he’d step in close and rip the djinn’s head off. Duncan’s chi aura was more than robust enough to shield him from the molten metal reflux that a popping djinn created.

Two Duncans destroyed eleven djinn short order. The djinn didn’t seem capable of adjusting or altering their tactics but three of them happened to target one Duncan at one time. He got two before he went down and then the last Duncan destroyed that djinn.

Duncan had wrecked fourteen of the knob-gobblers so far, but we were down to one Duncan and there were more than fourteen djinns left.

Gerald had worked out a way to triple-team a djinn with one kahuna and two wet spawn but putting all our baskets around taking out the djinn left no baskets to take out the other bad eggs.

But the Seminole hadn’t been heard from yet. Up out of the breeding marsh pond came an alligator that was as long as a Greyhound Bus—not counting his tail. Like all Adept animals he’d been improved: more brains, quicker reflexes, four chambered heart, far better eyesight in the air and legs with far better conformation for four-legged locomotion on land.

I have no idea how they got the dinogator into the pond. Thing was: he could travel as fast overland as an Olympic sprinter and he could take out a djinn with one bite.

I saw a Seminole with an old-fashioned stone war club with feathers and bird’s feet hanging from the head and the butt of it. He swung it downward at a djinn from a yard too far away to contact the unchancy being. An instant later a huge bolt of lightning struck the djinn from a clear blue sky.

One Seminole had a bow. Every djinn he shot abruptly vanished with no molten backlash. Only problem was that he only had seven arrows. I guess special arrows like that must be hard to make. I’m sure that he’d have brought more of them if he’d had them.

Then there was James. James had been carrying one of those five-shot Colt cap-and-ball replicas—the one in .375—loaded with five silver pistol balls that he’d cast from ingots. I kept telling him that there weren’t any such things as vampires or werewolves and I didn’t know of a single haint that was affected by silver. Nonetheless he always brought the revolver with its five silver balls along just in case.

Wouldn’t you know it? When nothing else seemed to stop the djinn, James pulled one of his silver-loaded pistols. Any shot that hit a djinn anywhere with one of the silver balls popped him like a soap bubble—or a dry spawn.

Thing was: James wasn’t there in person but he’d spawned five replica Colts along with the five spawn he’d sent to Gatorworld.

The djinn were going down. The Texans and the Montanans seemed to have largely eliminated each other and there were only a few North Koreans left.

The Texans and the North Koreans were all originals. From what I could gather sending spawn to these events was a major faux pas.

All the bikers were spawn and most of them had changed missions almost instantly and had devoted themselves to shielding the non-combatants. Consequently, only two bystanders had been shot but most of the bikers had popped.

Many kahunas and little kahunas had popped but all the big kahunas had survived.

As the closest Kahuna to the books, I charged. The scholars brought to examine the books were about all that was left to protect them. I laid them out with knockout blows to the head when possible. I had a soft spot for scholars and I wanted to spare them if possible. That isn’t always the easiest thing. Some of my chi enhanced punches killed rather than stunned.

I shoved all the books into a duffle and I summoned my secret weapon. It was a raven that had been bred up to the size of a roc or a pterodactyl—big enough to pick me up with its padded feet and lift me up and carry the kinjutsu and me.

Yip-Ee-Kie-Ayy!!!

Flying far above the far too realistic Earth and knowing that I had the kinjutsu volumes was a heady feeling.

So far that day I’d seen real live—or undead—or whatever djinn. I’d seen a Seminole call down lightening. I’d seen haints that could actually be destroyed by silver bullets. I’d seen a giant dinogator and now a giant raven was carrying me.

It had been quite a day.

What was that?

No! O Hell no!

A huge black Oriental style dragon barred my path to safety. He was long enough to stretch from end zone to end zone on a football field. He was thicker than a house trailer. He had great giant arms well behind a very long neck and two relatively stunted rear legs sprouted about twenty yards from the tip of his tail. He was breathing out some sort of black miasma and Duncan’s little brother—Little Boss—sat calmly in a lotus position on the dragon’s head.

If I was going to have to engage in some sort of off-the-wall Adept aerial jousting I needed to be in a more advantageous position than clutched in my roc’s claws.

My giant raven dropped me and then executed a perfect Split S—the converse of the Immelmann maneuver. Once he’d leveled off he was at a lower altitude—having swapped height for speed—and he intercepted my trajectory, giving me the opportunity to land on his back.

Of course, now we were headed away from the dragon. And this is bad because?

What’s that old Monty Python ditty about a tranny lumberjack?

No, that’s not it. It’s about Brave Sir Robin:

“Brave Sir Robin ran away;

“Bravely ran away, away!”

Brave Sir Raven flew away; bravely flew away, away!

Yeah only sometimes there ain’t enough strategic retreats in the whole world…

The black dragon was about to catch my giant raven, get peanut butter on my chocolate and sink my battleship.

That was a no-go.

[rvm45]

Chapter Twenty-One








At least one of my kahunas or little kahunas was still alive and kicking. That meant no feedback or returned chi until every last one of them had popped. I was very tempted to pop all of them and call them back. This battle was going to take every bit of chi that I could muster.

I forbore for one excellent reason—my minor kahunas and/or the wet and dry spawn they’d thrown might be in the middle of doing something crucial. Popping them might put my friends or the bystanders at risk. I couldn’t do that with a clear conscious.

All my first wave spawn had fallen so I had their chi remnants. I still had all of my second wave spawn since I hadn’t used them.

I popped one of the chi balls in my mouth, crunched and swallowed. That was a kinjutsu—a gumdrop suffused with massive amounts of pure chi. The drawbacks were that it was much like mainlining a huge hit of crank and there was supposed to be a vicious crash afterwards.

One gumdrop might drive me over the edge, give me a brain aneurysm or cause my heart to vapor lock. Anything worth doing is worth over-doing though. I counted down waiting for the wave of chi to suffuse my system. As I felt the first tentative tingles of the coming rush I popped three more of the chi gumdrops into my mouth to slowly dissolve like hard candy.

My raven did an Immelmann. We were facing the dragon once more but we were higher and we were moving very slowly through the air—having swapped most of our speed for altitude.

I’d been trying to delay long enough to let the first wave of chi hit me full blast.

I felt it and I tried hard to throw two wet spawn and two wet rocs.

The rush from the gumdrop that I’d chewed and swallowed made me feel as if I’d stepped onto an elevator on the seventeenth floor only to realize too late that here was no elevator—just a massive fall.







A long time ago I’d seen an olde tyme jazz musician named “Buddy Rich” do a drum solo on television.

That’s what those three gumballs in my mouth felt like they were doing. Each one had its own distinctive “flavor” of chi and as they quickly unraveled—far faster than I thought they would—each new layer of chi was like a single drumbeat as it suffused my system.

I was a big kahuna. I’d maxed out my kahunas and little kahunas. I’ve said that “little” kahunas aren’t actually little. Well they aren’t. But while my original is about a quarter inch above six-foot, big kahunas are about six-four and three quarters. A kahuna is about six-one and a half. “Little” kahunas are about five-ten.

I did something that shouldn’t have been possible. I cast a single second-wave kahuna complete with his own roc. He was a small kahuna—literally. He was about five-one and just about everything else about him was appropriately downsized.

My small kahuna cast three wet spawn—each one was pygmy-sized at about four foot nine or ten inches. Each wet spawn had a downsized roc just the right size to be proportional to my raven and me.

The three gumballs in my mouth were gone. I didn’t remember swallowing them. I was sure that I hadn’t spit them out. I believe that they simply dissolved and/or were absorbed.

The small kahuna and company might be downsized in both size and power but they packed a potent sting for all of that.

I shouted a battle cry at little boss:

“I am sure this dude’s an idjit;
“He's the ultimate example of a mental midget;
“This bugs me more than artificial pork fritters or John Ritter;
“Thank God I'm only visiting this place, driving through…”

“I’m going to…” Little Boss said.

He had a very clear and precise bass voice and you heard it despite his conversational tone. Whatever he meant to say was washed away in the blast as the littlest kahuna and his three minions hit the dragon and its rider with one fuel-air bomb after another.

One by one he blasted all my people to oblivion—but not before they hit him with many bombs.

Finally, it was just Little Boss and our steeds as well as me.

Guess what dude. You returned enough chi for me to spawn one more recycled wet spawn—a fairly powerful one so far as that goes.

I created the final spawn right in front of me. It wasn’t so much that he was powerful compared to Little Boss—but he was one more annoying layer of wrapping paper that Little Boss had to deal with to get to me.

“Damn you! I will steal your soul and damn it to the worst part of Hell!” he bellowed at me. He was losing his temper big time and showing more and more of his true form.

“Dude it is like: you’re welcome to do that if you’re able but let me tell you a secret. All souls belong to God and it is God who judges men—not some half-baked rutabaga-headed minor minion of Satan. Thing is though—I don’t believe that you’re able to slay me here and now in this world,” I told him.

I’d been binding myself tightly to my mount the whole time. It was like my buttocks and the back of my legs were super-glued to the raven.

In his rage Little Boss leaped to his feet and stood on the head of his dragon like a demented ten-foot-tall George Washington standing in the bow of the boat as he crossed the Delaware or the Rubicon or maybe the river Styx.

Time to provoke Little Boss a bit more. An angry client is often a careless and foolhardy client.

“Time flies, every other minute;
“Past the church where the ladies got a big sale in it;
“O gross, dinner time is when you hit the local café;
“It's no ordinary menu oy vey,” I chanted.

“You’re a fool!” Little Boss screamed in rage.

“My name is ‘Spoil O Warren’ but I’m not your Spoil. I shall be your nemesis,” I said.

Yeah, you can’t damage real demons with silver but Little Boss’ dragon wasn’t a demon from Hell. He was simply one of those haints that occupy the empty spaces between the greater voids.

Little Boss couldn’t fly. Without the dragon he’d drop like a pompous rock or an unsupported red brick.

Metals don’t spawn well. Somehow the aluminum and magnesium in my kerosene bombs had transmuted into silver when I was spawned. Unfortunately, more than half of the silver had mutated into something else when I threw the small kahuna and the single wet spawn.

But I could “see” what even minor quantities of finely powdered silver in a fuel-air mixture explosion did to the serpentine dragon. I could “see” that all of the metal powder in my own bombs was still pure silver.

I cranked my gasses to unheard of temperatures and velocities inside their compartmentalized spheres of chi. I had a white-hot ball in each hand. This time instead of throwing them as before I created a lance of pure chi and rammed them as hard as I could into the dragon. I only let the gasses out in one narrow beam turning it into a shaped charge. One double charge was all it took.

Have you ever heard the vulgar colloquialism about the dude who is so startled or embarrassed that he jumps through his own rectum and disappears?

I don’t know if the dragon had a rectum and if he did, where he kept it. Nonetheless the dragon seemed to regress and invert himself several times in the course of vanishing.

“I will kill you some day!” Little Boss promised.

“I am no one. I come from nowhere. I cling to no thing. My life is a random waltz on my way toward oblivion. If you strike me down you will have accomplished nothing,” I said.

By now Little Boss was already falling so I had to shout.

“If you kill me, I’ll simply go to dwell with Jesus,” I said.

That sent the demon into paroxysms of rage. O well.

“Damn Dude! What did I ever do to you?” a miniature dragon about four-foot-long and as thick as my thigh hovering before me asked.

“Let me see, could it be because you were totin’ that homicidal cretin?”

“I didn’t have any choice once he summoned me,” the dragon said. “I’m free now. Why don’t we make a covenant between us?”

“I am not interested in covenants with evil haints or diabolical agents. Go away,” I told him.

“Dude, I’m not evil. I don’t want your soul or the blood of a virgin or even a big fat steer. A covenant is just a sort of pledge to be best friends forever—think about it. I’m too weak to hang here any longer,” the dragon said and then he vanished.

************* ****************** ***************************

I was with David and Duncan in the electronics room twenty miles from Gatorland.

“What in the Hell did the big kahuna just do?” David asked.

“It looks like he just cast a pint-sized second-wave kahuna,” I said.

A few moments the battle was won and the roc touched down briefly in the parking lot. My big kahuna got off and nearly collapsed.

“Get him inside,” I said.

“Why don’t you pop him?” David asked as the roc took off—hopefully before anyone noticed him.

Once I had the big kahuna inside I took the time to explain to David.

“Once all my kahunas are popped, I’m due for a super crash. I won’t be able to throw any kahunas for three or four weeks at a minimum and I’ll hardly be able to raise my head or get out of bed for a week or even ten days. I need to be up and functioning and we may need him for backup,” I told David.

“Call them back dude,” I told the big kahuna. “The rumble at Gatorworld is over.”

I ate heartily trying to get a little more padding for the emaciation in my near future. I also encouraged the kahuna to eat and load up on chi restoring potions and substances.

It is paradox and perhaps homeopathy. The chi laced gumdrops had ripped into the big kahuna’s system causing all sorts of damage to the tissues—micro tears and mini blowouts. The best way to help him heal was more chi.

There was a difference though. Each body has its own unique chi as well as each organ and probably each cell—though all of the body’s variegated chi would be broadly similar. Eating the chi drops was kinda like drinking scalding hot water to treat severe dehydration. At some combination of dehydration and water temperature it is just feasible but rehydrating comes at the price of burned lips, tongue, throat and stomach—maybe even parts of the small intestine.

The body’s chi could be used for healing much—hopefully all—of the chi-scalded body. It wasn’t helpful that the kahuna’s assimilation of food and chi builders was still noticeably inferior to mine—but as my kahunas became longer lasting their assimilation improved.

It’s like one of those old conundrums:

“Which came first—one egg or all the plethora of baskets one shouldn’t put around one egg?”

I had my doubts that I’d ever dare one of the chi-drops in my own body but they both frightened and fascinated me. In a way I was anxious for my big kahuna to cease so that I could savor his experiences first hand.

************** **************** ********************************

I enjoyed studying the new—to me—kinjutsu manuals. Some of them were very disturbing though.

The kinjutsu to summon the djinn called for a sacrifice of three dogs for each djinn.

First of all, killing dogs for such a crack-brained purpose both angered and appalled me. Second that was getting into the realm of sorcery and the occult where I—or any Christian—could not in good conscious follow.

Some of the other summoning’s required the sacrifice of pigs or goats or chickens or even virgin women.

I had no desire to follow them to that place but it caused me to wonder if the opposition’s willingness to court the abominable and the diabolical and dance with the devil didn’t give them an insurmountable advantage power wise.

The black dragon was in one of the volumes. There were at least threescore of those type dragons. About one third of them had wholeheartedly embraced evil, but at least according to the book the others were free moral agents similar in some ways to humans.

The spaces where these dragons dwelt were totally empty. Even hardest vacuum is something. The places where the dragons dwelt did not even have empty space. Each of the “spaces” was self-contained and some dragons dwelt in one hyper-sphere of total negation while others dwelt elsewhere and there was no moving from one realm to another—even should someone get the whimsical urge to transmigrate.

Although some of the dragons shared a realm, the nature of the place made it impossible for them to communicate or even be aware of each other in any way.

There were several mindblowers in the accounts. The negated spaces functioned as a sort of spacer or perhaps more like roller bearings for vast voids even emptier than the negated reams.

Did the dragons fly freely in these negated realms?

What could there possibly be to hinder them? On the other hand, without anything—including even emptiness—what medium was there for the dragons to fly through?

It was like trying to imagine the little end of nothing whittled down to a very fine point.

The dragons weren’t summoned with sacrifices, blood or incantations. One simply imagined them strongly with chi. It was the same method I used to summon my ravens or other birds.

I fed my birds small amounts of my blood but that wasn’t thaumaturgy—I don’t think. Imagine that my chi was tiny little bits of iron filings and that I could make the filings do all kinds of things via magnetism. There would be bits of those special iron filings in my blood of course—since the filings completely suffused my body. Feeding my blood to my ravens was a convenient way to get some of my “iron filings” into them so my “magnetism” could reach them and resonate through them.

Yeah, doesn’t sound good for my case, does it? Suffice it to say that I manipulated the ravens with a clear untroubled conscious but sacrificing animals—or people—to summon haints from beyond—that is definitely necromancing.

*************** *************** ****************************

Harold the dispatcher from the village stood before me.

“The Dallas Adepts are laying siege to the village,” Harold said. “They think that you’re still part of The Outfit. Nothing that we can say will convince them. We’re not going to open the gates and let them waltz in. On the other hand, they’ve sworn to kill every man, woman and child if we resist them. I know that you an Dunno have had your issues but please…”

I cut Harold off with a raised hand.

“The village is what—five to six hours drive from here? Does anyone know a way to get there quicker? David, alert all the Nine Tails and Dragon’s teeth within three hundred miles. Many of them have never even been in the village, so stress that I only want volunteers,” I rattled off all staccato like an olde tyme typewriter.

A foot-long dragon appeared in the air before me.

“I doubt that your raven can carry you over a hundred miles flying at ninety miles an hour. I can get you there travelling faster than sound,” the dragon said. “Let me whisper my true name to you and we’ll be good to go once you repeat it.”

“Won’t everyone hear it then? Why not just say it aloud?” I objected.

I was picking nits because I had no intention of saying the name.

“Do you know what the one that you call ‘Little Boss’ will do to the children if he captures the village?” the dragon said.

Images of sadism, torture, heathen sacrifices and other abominations flooded my mind. That is one of my most basic gifts—even before I came to the village. I can be fooled by ordinary lies just like anyone else. I can spot an insincere preacher, hypocrite, demagogue or one of the big-time scammers at a glance.

The dragon was sincere.

I sat comfortably on the dragon’s head. Sitting exposed to the supersonic wind would have been suicidal but he created a chi shield to protect me.

************* ***************** *************************

We arrived at the village within about fifty minutes of hearing Harold’s plea.

The Texans hadn’t stared the siege in earnest yet. Little Boss was seated on a dragon that was twice as long and thick as my black dragon. The new dragon seemed to glow with a sickly iridescence.

I leaped to my feet and prepared to do battle with one of Hell’s head firemen.

“You stole my brother, you steal my kinjutsu, you steal my Hell Hound and now you steal my dragon. I’m going to kill you,” Little Boss said.

I leapt to my feet and sang a snippet of the song that had been running through my head the last few weeks because it isn’t the words in a battle song that counts but the spirit and chi that one projects into it.

“One night in Boonville feels like half a month there;
“Not much to do and even less to see;
“Housewives do laundry and the rednecks drink there;
“All the kids do book reports on MTV;
“(I can feel the flute-player sneakin' up on me)” I sang.

Yeah, it is kinda embarrassing.

Just as I completed my last verse and prepared to joust with the new super dragon slaying fuel-air bomb fortified with a half-pound of finely powdered silver and used like the biggest knight’s lance in the history of jousting.

Little Boss threw a massive “V” shaped blade of chi at me. It was like a giant chi boomerang twenty-five feet across. Only it didn’t spin like a boomerang. It flew pointy tip foremost. There was no blocking it and no dodging it.

It hit me just above the navel and it cut me clean in two.

I was the real me—not a spawn or a kahuna—just me. I couldn’t turn to ravens and fly away like Trickster.

A Non-Adept would have lost consciousness instantly. My chi managed to give me a few extra seconds.

My new companion the black dragon was cut into small pieces as well…

The astute reader will realize that I managed to cope with the situation somehow or I wouldn’t be telling the tale.

Yeah, death always gets you eventually but there are ways to postpone the inevitable—sometimes. And yes, I did find a way to gain an indefinite life extension and it came about in this wise:

[rvm45]

Chapter Twenty-Two








I found myself somewhere that neither ground nor sky nor any landmark existed. There was a fierce wind howling and it seemed to come from all directions at once. Everything was in blackest black and whitest white like the picture on an old black and white TV with the contrast cranked way too high.

The contrast was so fierce I could see the wind’s turbulence. The wind didn’t feel fierce though. It felt like a hot but dry wind being blown pleasantly across my bare back with the comforting drone of a belt-driven fan added in—only my whole body felt that way. So, was I naked? Your guess is as good as mine.

There is a single quatrain in a latter translation of “The Rubaiyat”—on the whole I find the later translation inferior to the earlier one—but I groove on these four previously omitted verses:

“Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
“And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
“Were't not a Shame — were't not a Shame for him
“In this clay carcase crippled to abide?”

“You’re not dead,” the black dragon told me somehow—plainly and calmly with no need it seemed to shout to be heard over the maelstrom. “But you soon will be if you don’t take effective action.”

“Your thoughts are speeded up well over one thousand times but you have considerably less than a second of real time. Everything is monochrome because your mind is struggling to make sense of data that isn’t processed by any of your physical senses,” the dragon continued.

“Listen carefully. When one of your spawns returns to you, the return is instantaneous. It is one of the very few phenomena that are faster than light. However, each and every one of your spawn had to go through a transition like this one before they could return to you and that transition is not instantaneous.

“That is why you get no return from a dry spawn. Their chi is exhausted before they can mount what Omar called ‘The Air of Heaven’. It isn’t that though. If it was, this state would be irreversible.

“Instead of a spawn riding the wave to you, you need to reverse the direction—the polarity—or something and ride the current to your big kahuna—the one who ate the chi balls,” the dragon told me.

I remember watching films as a boy in first and second grade. As I watched the film wind from one reel to the next I pictured a big fat man at the zoo. He was eating peanuts or maybe popcorn and he was looking intently at a penguin across a moat.

Why a penguin I have no idea.

Anyway, somehow the penguin hooked onto the fat man’s essence and as the film wound around the new reel the fat man’s substance was pulled across the moat.
When the film was one hundred percent on the new reel, somehow the man and the penguin had switched places. Now it was the man’s fate to exist in a cage and he shed bitter tears at the penguin’s jutsu.

But the fat man had one last trick up his sleeve. The elementary school teachers were kind and they did rewind.

Somehow the fat man snagged the penguin’s essence and as the film rewound he resumed his rightful place as a free human being and the penguin shed bitter tears.

As a point of fact, since rewinding is much faster than playing mode we can surmise that the fat man’s jutsu was far more powerful than the penguin’s. Not that I’d ever heard of jutsu in the second grade. I just had a vivid imagination.

Nowadays, I’m struggling to find a way to rewind DVD disks. It is true that they work quite well without rewinding—but it is unkind not to rewind.

I’d been playing the role of the penguin in each and every instance of transferring the spawn’s data—their very being—to me. Now my biggest big kahuna needed to assume the role of the fat man and wind all of my substance around his reel—and do it fast. I wasn’t going to last long flapping in the breeze like this.

************* ***************** ********************

“What in Hell is the deal with you?” Gerald demanded as I woke and sat up on the cot that I lay on.

I was glad to note that they’d taken the unresponsive big kahuna to the battle site—probably in hopes that he’d revive soon enough to lend support.

“Everything is so shockingly realistic,” I said.

I noticed that I was surrounded all around with a cyan-colored aura six to sixteen inches thick all swirling and omitting green sparks of static every which way.

“My body was destroyed. I had to vacate the premises and relocate here. I don’t think these lightning bolts are damaging but stay back a bit just in case. In the meantime, bring me a big meal, all the chi-boosting herbal concoctions that you can find and a bag of those chi drops,” I said.

************** ***************** **************************

“I’m afraid to eat one of those chi-drops and you’re munching them like they were M&Ms,” Cary told me.

“How many kahunas are there?” I asked once I was up to speed.

“The other two big kahunas and five kahunas. None of the little kahunas survived,” Gerald said.

“Summon them. In the meantime, I know that it’s a mind blower but I’m no longer a kahuna. I’m Spoil. Even that is wrong but language isn’t fully adequate to express. I always was Spoil I was just forced into a precipitous retreat and had to move shop to this location,” I said.

************ *************** ****************************

Once all the kahunas were assembled I spoke to them.

“Guys, I had a choice with y’all. You are earlier and less powerful versions of what I can now create. I could simply absorb you but your chi is piddling and there is no necessity. Instead I’m going to top off each of your chi and set you loose. Once you’re free, you’ll find that my memories and experiences within you will become a little fragmentary and a bit fuzzy. That isn’t meant to be cruel or high handed. It is an unavoidable byproduct of y’all being cut loose. Everyone grab a chi-drop and chow down,” I said.

The former spawn that didn’t faint straight away after I loosed them were nonetheless in a psychedelic hallucinogenic state of consciousness.

“Have someone take them somewhere and let them recuperate. They won’t recover in time to be part of this battle. Tell me, what is the current tactical situation?” I said.

“The Dallas forces have control of the village. They hold the survivors hostage—though they’ve graduated to torturing some of them for information—or more likely—for their bestial amusement. I know, concern for hostages should never be a reason for non-action but…we’re not strong enough to retake the village. By the way, they also have at least three Cherokee villages under siege,” Gerald said.

“Okay, I’m about ready to retake the town for you—and for the captives. Tell everyone to fall back once I get started. Also, have everyone on my team have one of these,” I said while waving the sack of chi-balls. “I can ‘see’ that today no one will over amp if they take one.”

I stepped outside the trailer that served as a command center.

I cast seven big kahunas—each one more powerful than the three that I’d cast at Gatorland. Each of the seven big kahunas spawned four kahunas. Each of the kahunas cast three little kahunas and each little kahuna cast two extra small kahunas. The small kahunas all cast three wet spawn—though to tell you the truth, although the number of wet spawn out on the furthest branch of my spawn tree had grown the power of each terminal wet spawn had only gained a piddling 0.1 or a wee bit more.

My dry spawn hadn’t improved perceptibly in years, but today they all became about seventeen percent stronger.

I walked into the fray casually brushing Dallas Adepts out of my path. Many of them died and many were sorely injured but I took no heed. I just needed to confront Little Boss and they were the flotsam that happened to be in my way.

There in the village common I found Dunno. He’d been crucified and left to hang.

“I’ve long known that I’d kill you one day Dunno. I didn’t know that when the time came that it would be a kindness. Have you made your peace with God?” I said.

“A man in this position who hasn’t made his peace with God is a fool. I may be a fool but I have called on the name of the Lord,” Dunno replied.

“I’d save you if I could, but you’re too damaged,” I said.

“I know. Spoil I’ve hung like this for almost five days. Whenever death comes close they force chi into me to prolong my suffering.”

I drove a chi finger deep into Dunno’s head. His brains should have been thoroughly pureed before the contact with his forehead could even have been felt. I abused Dunno’s corpse a half a dozen ways, but quickly. I wanted to eliminate even the remotest possibility that he could be revived to suffer more.

“You broke my play-pretty Spoil. I’ll let you take his place,” Little Boss said.

He threw another of the pointy boomerang looking thingies at me. I didn’t deign to even block, dodge or parry the energy bolt. It made only the barest ripple in the skin on my stomach.

“That doesn’t work on me any more William. Fall to your knees and tremble in terror!” I said.

“I’m not William!” Little Boss screamed.

“No, sadly you are not William anymore. Duncan’s brother was thoroughly consumed by you long ago wasn’t he? Yet you cling to his template, don’t you? He is like a photographic negative or a hologram. As long as you hang onto it, you can project your avatar into our reality. How long Little Boss? How long?” I said.

“Duncan is almost five hundred years old—what does that tell you?”

Little Boss summoned the ugly chartreuse dragon. It seemed to have doubled or tripled in size.

“This is remarkably tedious,” I said.

I summed my friend with a gentle mental nudge. He chose to present as a dragon a yard long. Size is generally a fair indicator of a haint’s power but not always.

“Can I eat the whole thing?” he asked like a deliriously happy six or seven-year-old child.

“O please do,” I told him. “Enjoy but do make haste. I fear that he may only be the appetizer,” I said.

“That tiny thing cannot defeat Destroyer of Worlds,” Little Boss shouted.

“What a long and tedious name. My dragon simply goes by ‘Panic’ and he do incite it,” I said to Little Boss.

Panic ate the huge dragon, sucking the smoky substance of it down greedily like a crack head sucking on a glass pipe. In seconds it was gone.

Little Boss was so angry that he danced a little jig like a small child gearing up for a temper tantrum. Or maybe I was being too harsh. Maybe that furious frantic stamping little schottische that he was doing was part of his summoning ceremony.

He brought forth a half a dozen gargantuan haints at one time. Here was a spider whose abdomen was the size of a twenty-room apartment complex. There were three dragons, a jackal that would have dwarfed Clifford The Big Red Dog and a porcupine as big as a four-door pickup truck with lightening conducting spines—like someone had assembled hundreds of “Jacob’s Ladder” spark-gap generators.

“Panic, don’t play with your food. I’m finding this whole sordid affair unspeakably monotonous,” I said.

In a mere instant the haints were gone and Panic had grown to thirty feet long with a grossly distended abdomen.

“You’re on your own for awhile. I can’t eat another bite. I can’t even fly right now,” Panic sighed.

“This farce has gone on long enough,” I said.

I grabbed Little Boss. I got a good grip on one of his ankles and threw a super-powered wet spawn to grab the other.

“Make a wish,” I said to my double.

Judging by the way Little Boss screamed, it must be really painful to be torn apart that way.

************* ***************** *******************************

I toured the ruined village. There were too many dead and grieving. Most of my close associates had jumped ship with me, but there were many casual acquaintances lying dead on the street and it grieved me.

“Friends, you don’t have to act afraid of me,” I said. “I was filled to overflowing with chi that needed to be dissipated. If there wasn’t a battle then I’d have needed to find some other way to discharge it,” I told them.

“I’m sick of these kinjutsu wars. I’m going to put a stop to them,” I added.

[rvm45]

Chapter Twenty-Three







The old saying is that:

“It is better to light a candle than to be constipated.”

But I preferred the Hacker’s Manifesto:

“Information longs to be free.”

It took a few weeks for David to set it up. All the books of kinjutsu went up on multiple Internet sites, free for the downloading—both in the original versions and with the best translations into English, Spanish, Japanese, Gaeilge and German that we could come up with. A few of the new books that we’d acquired were as yet untranslated and/or undecoded. That couldn’t be helped.

I uploaded them in their entirety even though many of the volumes contained techniques and practices that I found abhorrent or that were highly damaging or even fatal to the user. I figured that if someone messed with crap after he had been specifically warned then it was on him. If I edited out all the dirty and nekked portions then folk would still scramble for the unexpurgated versions.

Adepts might find ample cause to fight in the future but they wouldn’t be piling up collateral damage from seeking kinjutsu volumes.

Of course, many Adept groups and governments frantically tried to suppress the sites. It was like trying to stamp out cockroaches or the clap though. Every time one site was hacked and crashed two or three more sprang up to take its place.

There were still a half a dozen or so books of kinjutsu floating around that we didn’t have access to. We were steadily tracking them down. All at once The Outfit and the Macersville group was an object of fear and apprehension in the Adept community.

We would try—in all sincerity—to explain to the possessors of an as of yet un-outed book of forbidden techniques that they were targets. If they’d share a copy with us once we published all motive to steal their volume vanished.

I had the distinct impression that many coughed up copies of the requested volumes from terror of us rather than because our logic swayed them. We tried hard to convince them that we were asking and not demanding but our reassurances often failed to convince them.

By then I had written eight volumes of jutsu and some of the forbidden jutsu—those that weren’t sorcery, or flat out ruinous to one’s health—and that didn’t involve unclean spirits.

That was a bit more complicated than the kinjutsu. I wanted anyone who was interested to be able to have actual books on archival quality paper in their possession. Things on a hard drive often turn out to be rather ephemeral.

I was afraid though, that die-hard secrecy advocates might target any publisher. I self-published and I had scores of publishers. There were over two dozen in the US of A alone. I had a publisher in New Zealand, one in Nigeria, three in Mexico, four in Japan, two in Germany and three in Ireland.

I published my books in the English, Gaeilge, German, Spanish, Japanese, Yoruba and Esperanto languages with beaucoup illustrations—most created by me. My people took possession of the books and paid off the printers well ahead of my advertising them.

Once someone ordered them—either online or by post—a virtual labyrinth of mail forwarding and cutouts were used. Orders in a given language were routed randomly to a location where books were kept.

There would be no profit in attacking a publisher since his role had already been played. Most Adepts would agree with Miyamoto Musashi:

“Do nothing useless.”

Even if they could track down one site that was mailing books there would only be three or four people and a few hundred volumes there. Once the stock was exhausted in one locale, the cell moved to another location.

I’m sure that some folks thought that they’d been ripped off by the time they received their books because sometimes delivery took three to five weeks.

At first my jutsu books were poo-pood and my name and art was put into the same category as Bruce Tegner, Ashida Kim, Count Dante and Stephan Hayes.

Then people started to notice several things. The books were on top quality archival linen paper with substantial leather covers and gold leafed borders and they sold for less than many trade paperbacks. I was selling them at well below my cost.

I’d have given them away except that then many people would order who had absolutely no intention of doing much more than look at the books and I couldn’t afford to throw that many books away. I also donated sets to over three hundred libraries in the United States alone.

Anyone who was distrustful or skeptical was free to examine the books in their entirety online before ordering.

So, I might be a goof and a charlatan, but I was a surprisingly well-funded one and I wasn’t in it to fleece people of their money.

I strongly urged everyone to both exercise and to study some sort of traditional martial art to go along with the visualizations and meditations.

What? Yes, both folkstyle wrestling and boxing are legitimate martial arts.

The sections on weight training and nutrition were demonstrably well written and contained good—though hardly unique—Information.

The sections on the throwing arts were also sound and included the use of washers/mini-chakram and methods to help train the weak hand.

Finally, I told people right up front that if they were in great shape and already a black belt or the equivalent it might take three to five years to see results working on their own—and even then, the improvement would be subtle at first.

A pasty-face otaku who rarely got out of a chair in front of the television or computer monitor might take even longer.

Then after a couple years three groups started touting my books: College and professional football players—particularly linemen, power lifters and Japanese sumos.

About a year later several professional baseball pitchers admitted reading my books and applying many of my throwing and chi-assisted throwing exercises and visualizations. Soon shot-putters, discus throwers, javelin throwers and strongman competitors also joined my endorsers.

The thing is—one of the things was—very few people would make any effective use of even the most elementary techniques in my books. It took too much motivated perseverance and very few folks have the will and patience. Without a very sound grounding in the basic techniques and several years of chi building and storage the kinjutsu were spectacularly useless.

I suppose that my books may be written off as nonsense and eventually fall into obscurity. In five hundred years, or a thousand or fifteen hundred if the Lord tarries that long, my books may have become the kinjutsu that Adepts fight over.

For right now though they should be the backburn that causes the big fire to fizzle out for lack of fuel.

Yeah, except that for the first few months after I published the kinjutsu online several Adept groups turned on us like a huge swarm of sparrow-sized rabid hornets.

Yeah, invertebrates can’t get rabies—I said “like”.

[rvm45]

Chapter Twenty-Four







I had set up temporary headquarters in the shambles of what had been the village for the time being. Dunno had woven his headquarters and living quarters into an inextricable tangle on the top two stories of his tower and as a result they seemed both cramped and hopelessly cluttered to me. We’d moved as much as possible of the apparatus of state back into the old headquarters.

Ruin walked in. He was one of the other two big kahunas when I’d split—that’s what we were calling the event now. The other had taken the name “Plunder” playing on the two definitions of “Spoil”. We weren’t particularly close but he’d been working as a gate guard and he had some visitors to escort.

There were three dudes dressed in what looked for all the world like knee-length black Nehru jackets. They were another three dudes along with them—shaved headed shabnasticators with the bright orange robes and japa beads of Buddhist or Hindu monks.

“We are from Agartha,” The head Nehru said. “Our colleagues are from Shambhala. Have you any idea where and what those places are?”

“Agartha is said to be somewhere in the bowels of the Earth. Shambhala floats in the clouds somewhere in the middle of the Sahara Desert and is generally both invisible and unreachable by mortal men,” I said.

“Only if you’re a Theosophist,” one of the monks said in a voice dripping in contempt. “There is a city there but that city is a tawdry imitation of the true Shambhala.”

“I’m not really busy, but then again I am. I sit and daydream and try to draw the disparate threads together and decide what I am going to do for my next move. People’s lives and happiness are at stake. So, if you have something to say, please say it—as briefly as possible and then leave quickly,” I said with a weary sigh.

“We have worked for centuries to erase all hints of these powers among mankind. The end was in sight. Then you broadcast what should have been ancient secrets to the six points of the compass. This town that you call the village and all the hidden land surrounding it shall be destroyed in six days, six hours and six minutes—starting from when the last of our party leave,” Nehru said.

“You must think awfully highly of yourself Nehru. What do you think gives you the moral authority to do something like that?” I asked.

“It is for the good of mankind,” Nehru said.

“Reconstructing a single man or mankind’s destiny for his or their ‘own good’ is far less excusable and far more heinous than reconstructing it to his harm—especially when you’re not mistaken about what is truly good for him. A man is a free moral agent and he should be left to choose his own path and follow it as far as his geas takes him without a crap-load of interference from knob-gobblers like y’all,” I told them.

One of the orange-robed dudes got so angry that he swelled up like a poisoned toad. You could see the big ropy veins throbbing on his hairless head.

“Even if you flee the village, you will be hunted down and killed with no more tolerance than we’d show a rabid dog,” he raged.

“That is as it shall be. No man dies while God still has purpose for him on this Earth. Now get your idol worshipping asses out of my office and out of my village or none of you will be alive to appreciate the events six days from today,” I told them.

They had just left when Rot and Wreck—two of my erstwhile little kahunas—escorted a rather tall and heroically built gentleman into my office. I could tell that he was no sissy boy since his very red and very straight hair hung down well past his belt.

There is something weak and effeminate about closely cropped hair on a man.

We were stretched thin. So many of my former shadow selves were being used as guards.

“My name is ‘Padraig’ and I come from Findias. I have a gift for you. This is the Claidheamh Soluis. Legends say that it once belonged to Nuada Airgetlám,” Padraig said.

He pulled a curved bladed long sword of sorts out of thin air and presented it to me hilt first—all while my bodyguards and the twin ex-kahunas almost had fits of apoplexy.

The sword looked much like my thirty-nine-inch saber but its blade was a couple inches longer and the handle was long enough to admit proper two-hand use while the whole sword emitted a bright golden light.

“It is considered churlish and under-bred to resort to the Claidheamh Soluis when lesser weapons will suffice,” Padraig said. “And no, I’m not that Padraig.”

“A legendary sword from a legendary city. Is it rude to ask why?”

“No. We don’t like the high and mighty ways of either Agartha or Shambhala. We do appreciate the beautiful patterns that result from turbulence and chaos. Sadly, such things are often the side effects of war and bloodshed. Keeping you alive and fighting longer won’t raise your casualty figures but it will raise the self-ordained Elders’ casualties and it should create far more interesting patterns. We’d join forces with you and fight shoulder-to-shoulder in the war lad—if we were only free to. We are largely constrained by a higher power. I give you this in outright defiance of our geas,” Padraig said while handing me a small book.

It was a slim volume of kinjutsu. In fact, there was but a single technique in the pamphlet sized book. It was a far different technique than any that I’d read about so far.

************** ***************** *****************************

“You could stay here in the village and meet the Elders head-on,” Morgan said. “Eventually they’d lay siege to your lands and no one could enter or leave. That would trap you and many non-combatants inside this pocket. The siege might go on for several human lifetimes. I think that they’d probably prevail eventually but win or lose you would need to devote the rest of your life to defending the borders of a besieged city.”

“But what choice do I have?” I asked.

“Evacuate the village. If you start tomorrow you’ll have five days. Take out all the people and their animals along with everything transportable that isn’t nailed down. People have had to bug out and head for the hills with far less warning,” Morgan said. “We can and will shelter and aid any refugees in Macersville.”

“What if the Elders attack Macersville?” I asked.

Morgan’s eyes grew bright and that was the first time I ever saw him smile.

“Even the Elders are not that arrogant and stupid. I only wish that they’d give us an ironclad release like that. We’d love to take part in these affairs directly,” Morgan said while vigorously backhanding one palm with the back of his other hand making a booming clap.

“What about the Cherokee?” I asked.

“It is very hard to find the Cherokee villages—even for an Adept born and raised in the enclave they share with the village. The enclave that y’all share has been preparing to split like a gigantic amoeba for centuries. It could dally for centuries more. Or we could give it a great jolt that causes it to spit off immediately. That would keep the Cherokee from being drawn into the Elder’s plan of total annihilation,” Morgan said.

I turned to David who was my ever-present secretary and assistant.

“Start planning the most expeditious way to get all of the people and as much gear as possible out of here as soon as possible but with at least hours to spare before the Elder’s deadline,” I told him.

“There is one more thing,” Morgan said. “We can make it appear that a skeleton crew of Adepts and Non-Adepts have chosen to stay behind and defend the village. If you give just the right amount of token resistance and then collapse we can trap and destroy significant numbers of Elders.”

“Why wouldn’t they just stay outside and collapse the enclave?” I asked reasonably.

“They need to check to make sure that there aren’t bolt holes and besides they have constituents who would be very pleased to take part in a massacre. Take that opportunity away from them and they’d become wet and soggy, remarkably saline and damned hard to get along with,” Morgan said. “Besides, it is difficult to impossible to collapse an enclave without access to the core inside. The core to this part of the enclave is in the village.”

“Won’t they send spawn instead of their true selves?” I asked.

“They believe that spawn are tools of inferior Adepts—folk who barely qualify as Adepts. They believe that they’re too powerful and too invulnerable to resort to such troublesome expedients as spawn,” Morgan said.

Okay. Time to plan some pretty chaos to make Padraig’s people “Oohh!” and “Ahh!”

**************** ***************** ****************************

No one was put in a tactically disadvantaged position yet by the worldwide distribution of the kinjutsu. No one had the books in their possession long enough to have truly mastered any advanced techniques. But many groups were frantically trying to get some people ready to roll.

Many of the kinjutsu damage the body. Some will age the user a decade or more with every use. I don’t know why but a disproportionate number of the hidden techniques weaken the eyes and/or tendons, ligaments and cartilage. As I’ve said before—if I have to resort to an eyesight damaging jutsu to save the world then I hope that everyone in the world has his affairs in order.

Everyone doesn’t share my scruples though. There are altruists—a fancy name for egotistical horses’ asses—as well as the power hungry and the brainwashed who’d be more than happy to practice body destroying techniques.

************ ****************** ******************************

We sprung the trap in the village without a hitch. I’d used every spawn that I could possibly generate as well as the maximum number of spawn from many of my friends.

Eating something as cram-jammed full of outside chi as the chi drops was fraught with peril, but if one survived the experience then once he recovered he’d find that he’d have risen to a much higher level of power—even if he’d been very close to his natural limit before.

As I’ve said, once the chi level rises to whatever level—no matter what frantic and complicated maneuvers that it took to get it there—the body’s chakra tree accepts that as the new “normal” and seems able to maintain that level without undue strain and to return to that level quickly and efficiently when all or much of the chi is exhausted.

Everyone on my team and most of the folks in my group had popped one of the chi-filled gumdrops when my prescience told me that no one would OD that day.

That meant that Gerald, Ladonna, Cary, David and several others now had big kahunas that were casting kahunas—including Duncan. People who’d never manifested a single kahuna were throwing three big ones. Also, all kinds of extraneous “cast a red shadow” type powers—abilities without any great utility—had grown into full-fledged usable powers.

The originals were all safely sheltered in Macersville—all except me.

I’d soaked up all sorts of jangled chi journeying through the sub luminous aether to inhabit my new body. How to describe it? In one way it was like static electricity. In another way it was like white noise with the decibel level raised to the point of bursting eardrums and even shattering concrete.

At any rate, the Adepts from Macersville needed to tap my energy reserves to collapse the village and the surrounding enclave while the Elders from Agartha and Shambhala were still inside—and working hard to prevent us.

When it was done…

All my surviving spawn returned to me. They say that nothing can ever escape from a black hole—kinda. The collapse of the enclave didn’t create a black hole—not precisely. The laws of physics didn’t limit adept abilities—not entirely.

It felt very much like I’d been gifted with a momentary vision of the inside of a black hole.

*************** ***************** ***********************************

Since my transmigration, the crash that I felt when my last big kahuna perished was not quite as severe and I recovered faster. At any rate, the crash was delayed and I should have more than ample time to get back to Macersville before the debilitating weakness hit.

I had a Cary kahuna along with a Duncan kahuna and a Gina kahuna. James and Chandra had spawn there as well.

Gina was a young woman now, very good with cats and married to Cary—to no one’s great surprise since they continually honed their jutsu one against the other. The cats fought the rats. When it was for real though, the cats and rats quickly made common cause.

I also had over fifty-Nine-Tails on their big bikes riding armed escort.

We rounded a curve and there was a couple dozen of the skinhead bikers—they’d taken to calling their biker gang: “The Berserkers”—blocking the highway.

Biker to biker we had them outnumbered over two-to-one. The Nine-Tails and The Dragon’s Teeth members didn’t seem to attain full Adept status as quickly as some, but even if most of them weren’t full-fledged Adepts they should have been far better at tradecraft than the Berserkers.

Except maybe that wasn’t completely true anymore.

When we came into sight most of the Berserkers transformed into thirty-five-foot-tall and heavily muscled dudes without shirts. All of them had a single eye much bigger than a basketball right in the low-center of their foreheads.

“Judas Iscariot riding a unicycle and juggling live hand grenades!” I exploded. “What next?”

Almost every transformation technique falls in the category of forbidden techniques.

The raven transformations that give me such satisfaction along with Cary’s rat towers and Gina’s pile of cats—they have their cautions and drawbacks—but they aren’t true transformations. There are true transformation jutsu though. A man can become a panther or a wolf, a gator—or a wolfman, catman or whatever hybrid shape.

There are grave risks. Someone who can’t quite complete the change can be left permanently in some sort of in between and deformed state. He can lose his human mind or the ability to change back to human. Even folks who master the jutsu are always a bit at risk every time they transform…and over time they all seem to take on some catlike or doglike or whatever features in their human form—fangs, split lips, patches of hair in odd places—stuff like that.

Transforming into something like the Cyclops ahead…any transformation that requires virtual matter to be created for the duration carries its own host of problems.

Still, while the teens and young men might have been remiss for even visiting something like the skinhead militias in the first place, they were all quickly brainwashed and literally turned into all but mindless and impersonal cats-paws for the Adepts who constituted the core elite in the gangs very quickly.

It might be a pity. It was certainly sad. There was no reason to hold back or be merciful though. Those young men might have left all the lights brightly burning when they left but they hadn’t been home for a very long time. They would never return home again. They had been spent.

Gina threw a cat that grew until it was as big as a large leopard. I hadn’t seen her do that before. Unfortunately, she only had one leopard on tap.

Cary blew up five of his rats until they were the size of Basset Hounds. The Duncan big kahuna that I had with me threw three wet spawn who promptly grew to be about twelve-foot-tall—small compared to the thirty-five-foot giants but still on a whole other plane of endeavor than a normal human.

Each of Duncan’s three spawn started winding up slings if you can believe that. Here was a fellow who could have called Goliath of Gath “Shorty” and he had a sling of David—a sling that used silver balls bigger than a hen’s egg.

“I been doin’ a lot of thinking since we fought the djinn at Gatorland,” James said. “This here is a double barreled 10 gauge with rifled barrels and punkin ball silver slugs. It’s a shame that the silver doesn’t spawn that well…”

James’ kahuna threw three wet spawn—all with muzzle-loading 10 gauge double barreled shotguns instead of the harder to spawn modern shotgun that James had. He tossed each of them a small bag. Each bag had several silver-ball shotgun loads inside. Once equipped with the unspawned silver punkin balls each spawn quickly loaded his shotgun and rushed to take up strategic positions.

Any of the Nine-Tails that could threw spawn. One of the problems with spawn use by bikers was the near impossibility of duplicating a bike. The clubs tried to maintain an inventory of usable motorcycles—off road bikes, battered but usable second-hand bikes and even souped up scooters and mopeds to get spawn to where they needed to be. They weren’t packing any of the throwaway two-wheelers here though.

Each Nine-Tails drew a long lance from thin air. The originals sat their bikes and prepared to joust with the giants while the spawn produced their lances and took up supporting positions.

How do you spell relief? I spell it: “Dragon.” Not “Puff the Magic Dragon” but “Panic the Malevolent Dragon”.

“Silver will weaken them, but they aren’t going to pop at the intrusion of the tiniest quantity like those djinn that you fought,” Panic told me.

“Aim for the eye. If you can compromise the eye, you nullify their ability to manifest on this plane. I can carry and largely shield you but I can only absorb one of the giants. I can still carry you after that, but I’ll be both slower and less maneuverable and I’ll also be able to shield you less,” Panic added.

“Okay, lets attack and try to avoid you having to eat one for as long as possible,” I said.

Duncan’s silver sling bullet promptly penetrated one of the Cyclops’ eyes and it promptly vanished—not even leaving a skinhead biker behind. After that Duncan’s aim seemed to go all to Hell. It hadn’t really though. Instead he’d taken the first giant by surprise and now they had chi shields around their eyes.

“How long can they manifest?” I asked Panic.

“Fifteen minutes—maybe as much as thirty. That chi shield around their eyes cuts minutes off of that though,” Panic said.

Some of Duncan’s deflected balls drew blood and some wounds were at the right place to flow into the eye. The chi shield didn’t seem to help keep the monster’s own blood away from the eye.

Gina’s giant housecat leaped from the back of a semi-trailer and snagged a giant about halfway up his thigh. It tried hard to climb the Cyclops like a tree but the cat was ten feet from the eye when the monster snagged it in both hands. He raised it high above is head preparing to smash it to the ground—trying hard to crush it all the while.

A rat launched himself from the cat straight at the giant’s eye. He’d been riding unobtrusively the whole while. On his way to the Cyclops’ eye he grew to the size of a Basset Hound. He manifested a mini set of claws like the custom knifemakers craft for presumably grownup people, so they can slash at things and pretend they’re the comic book hero Wolverine.

The rat’s claws were more than adequate to pierce the giant’s eye. One more giant down and he popped before he could do more than knock the wind out of the great cat.

One giant Duncan rushed a Cyclops. He stepped into the interlaced hands of another giant Duncan and got a huge boost upward. He was wearing both palm spikes and shoe spikes and he was industriously climbing up the bare chest of a monster leaving bloody foot and hand prints all along the way.

Another giant stomped the Duncan still on the ground. The Cyclops’ foot stopped four or five foot from the ground. The Duncan kahuna forced the foot up and off of him. Though he was smaller and with far less mass he had found a position where he could bring his greater strength to bear.

Once he stood upright—hands above his head—he ran forward while holding the giant foot aloft. The effect was very much like stepping on a roller-skate, a banana peel or a handful of marbles for the haint.

The Duncan kahuna cast five normal sized Duncan wet spawn. Two stayed behind to help with the foot. One tried to hamstring the giant’s other leg with a huge leaf-bladed scimitar pulled from nowhere while two Duncans ran to where the giant’s head would probably end up after he took the fall.

As soon as he fell the two Duncans put his eye out and he popped.

A Cyclops tried to stomp Gina. There was a huge snarling mass of black cats that promptly ran toward every point of the compass. Each of the cat spawn threw three or four short-lived dry spawn almost every foot of the way.

“I’m over here dumbass,” Gina said from behind the giant.

As the giant bent over to try to scoop Gina up— hoping to capturing cats and all—James shot the Cyclops with both barrels of his 10 gauge while Chandra and two of her wet spawn—also armed with 10 gauges—backed James up with an improbable amount of silver .24 caliber #4 Buckshot.

The wet spawn’s black powder muzzleloaders threw slower moving pellets and the silver balls deformed more and spread wider. Anyway, that you looked at it though, it amounted to a huge load of flying silver launched at a silver-vulnerable haint’s eye. The Cyclops popped.

The Nine-Tails sent about a dozen bikers at one giant and their sole goal was to hamstring the monster. There were more giants than twelve man squads of Nine-Tails bikers and they also had to look out for stomps and kicks from clients that they weren’t directly servicing.

Panic pointed me at one Cyclops’ eye. I hit it with a shaped fuel-air bomb mounted on a lance-like shaft of chi. It was kinda like those 12-gauge boom-sticks that they make for use against sharks.

As that monster exploded I managed to throw a simple oxygen bomb with no fuel into the face of another Cyclops.

I needed a moment to draw a container of kerosene and powdered silver from my bag. Panic took us up, out and away and well out of reach as I prepared an oxygen-fuel bomb lance—one for each hand this time.

We were coming out of the sun this time. I drove a lance into two different monster’s eyes this time. We went low to get away that time and I had time to throw a ball of very high-pressure white-hot oxygen against the knee of a giant that our bikers were trying hard to hamstring. That should give them the opening that they needed.

As the number of targets shrank, I tried to take them out with fuel-air bombs thrown from out of the giant’s reach. I used three bombs and only got one Cyclops. We went in close and I used my last PVC pipe filled with kerosene and silver powder. As we flew back toward my ride I threw a couple oxygen balls.

One of them caught a Cyclops right in his crotch—for what good or ill I cannot say.

I leapt off of Panic and he went back to eat one as he’d promised. Moments later all of the monsters were dead.

“Bring the bikes,” I ordered. “They can probably be put to some use.”

“We lost a dozen of our people defending you,” the Captain of the Nine-Tails said.

“You are the only original here. Without you, we would have had nothing to protect. God knows how your Macersville mages got back to Macersville. We care nothing for your village and we resent being asked to take part in your tawdry war,” he continued. “Why didn’t you simply ride your dragon home?”

“You’re right. I could have ridden Panic and avoided this whole bad trip. I don’t know what kind of aerial threats the opposition could mount though. Most of all, I didn’t know that a feeling of ‘us’ and ‘them’ had crept in. We will have an all-thing soon. If any of y’all want to cut loose we’ll work out terms,” I said.

“So, we’re going to have to buy our freedom?” the captain spat.

“Not at all,” I said.

That had truly hurt.

“I’m going to see how much gold, hardware, money and what have you that we can afford to give those of you who chose to leave as parting gifts and gifts of friendship and goodwill.”

[rvm45]

Chapter Twenty-Five







The Nine-Tails decided that they wanted to be totally independent of our organization. We’d resumed calling ourselves by the highly descriptive and colorful cognomen: “The Outfit” once more. We’d absorbed anyone with a prior claim to the handle. The Dragon’s teeth were friendlier and more polite but once the proposition was put to them they too were overjoyed to be independent.

Neither group could have come about in anything like their current incarnations without some extremely generous start-up money and some expert advice in a number of areas. Now that they were fully developed it seemed quite possible that they could survive and prosper on their own. Especially since I’d given each local club enough tax-free cash to tide them over quite a few rough patches over the next decade or two.

Some of our “franchised” dojos had close ties with one or the other biker clubs. A few just wanted to be free to go off and do their own thing. We kept about eighty dojos all over the Southeast though and we looked at them as a sort of minor league farm organizations to guide and funnel promising newcomers our way. And they were often a source of guides, safe houses and extra Adepts on call for operations in their area.

Some of our newly minted Adepts decided to join the economy and do the old work thingy—but they still worked out regularly at their old dojo. I know that we had at least two Adepts who were high school wrestling coaches. That was fine by me since there was no way that I could continue to add so many new graduates to the payroll.

Then a couple years after the destruction of the village, bad things started to happen. Several of the local biker gangs were brought up on RICO charges. Senseis and assistants—in some cases even advanced students—were arrested and held incommunicado without bail, hearing or charges under one or the other provisions of the Patriot Act.

Word came back to me that sitting down for a tête-à-tête with the government might stop the harassment—maybe even get some or all of our folks released. Although the bikers were no longer under our aegis that didn’t mean that I would abandon them to the jack-booted thugs if I could help. The senseis were under our aegis.

They were mighty particular where and how we met. It had to be on neutral ground under a tent. I guess that they thought it would be hard to hide any tampering in the thin canvas walls. I had to come myself—they weren’t interested in talking to my spawn and they assured me that they could easily tell the difference. I was allowed to bring a reasonable number of assistants and they didn’t have to be originals.

*************** ***************** **************************

The government forces had erected a big OD Green headquarters tent. It wasn’t big enough for even a tiny circus but it could have housed a small revival.

Inside there were five men in expensive suits sitting on folding metal chairs behind a folding table like you see in school cafeterias or swap meets. There weren’t any chairs on our side of the table.

There was a line of men in dark suits and dark glasses standing shoulder-to-shoulder against the tent wall behind and to either side of us.

Big deal! I had Duncan’s three big kahunas and I could have over thirty Duncans in less than a second. I had a Cary kahuna and a David kahuna. David was there so that his hyper-powerful mind could start analyzing the data ASAP and he had mastered linking to his electronic drones via mental jutsu. Cary was there mainly to give us one more channel of communication via his mental link with his rats. Neither of the men was inconsequential in a scrap in addition to their other gifts.

Ladonna sent a kahuna just because she’d stood by my side so many times that she wasn’t willing to sit this one out.

Tell the truth, I could fill the room with close to one hundred of me even without scraping the bottom of the barrel and using dry spawn. I expected some sort of trap—but damned nation…

“Let’s beat around the bush a bit before we get down to serious business. Who are you people and what in the seven burning Hells do you want from me?” I demanded.

“I’m General Maxwell. You don’t need to know these other gentlemen’s names. You are going to stop training civilians and you’re going to train soldiers for use in elite strike force and hostage rescue groups,” the general said.

“General, do be careful how you address your betters. I’m not going to train any of your soldiers because they wouldn’t be suitable candidates—overlooking the fact that I dislike orders and commands,” I said.

“These men are truly special,” Maxwell insisted.

“The Outfit’s two prime axioms are that nothing of lasting value ever results from haste and that bringing pressure to bear on yourself or others is evil. I’d need a year or two to unwind and relax your hyper-vigilant ‘Hoo-Haw!’ soldiers enough to even start teaching them tradecraft,” I said.

“We don’t want hippy mystics. We just want you to jack up their senses, reaction times, strength and endurance,” General Maxwell insisted.

“If I did that I’d be placing a time bomb inside each man that would eventually destroy him. I’ll tell you what—send me thirty or forty volunteers fresh out of basic training. In three or four years you’ll have some Adepts,” I said.

“There are several conditions. Each man continues to get his military pay, time in grade and promotions on the same general schedule as if he was performing in the top one percent in his chosen MOS,” I started to delineate.

“I was in your damned army. It was the worst experience in my life—by far. I can imagine someone with little talent and less desire to become an Adept hanging on grimly simply because it was better than going back into the regular military. People like that would bollix my training, but I wouldn’t send anyone back to that Hell. I want every trainee free to walk away from the military and/or Adept training at any time. That’s the only way that I could train folks for you with a clear conscious,” I concluded.

“I don’t care about your conscious and this isn’t a request. This is an order,” General Maxwell said.

“I warned you once about talking down to your betters. This interview is over. I will tell you one thing though: if my people aren’t released immediately I will look upon it as a declaration of war. You wouldn’t like that General. Duncan here for instance, could pick up one of your Humvees and throw it like an oversized bale of hay,” I said.

“Arrest him,” the general said without the least bit of stress in his voice.

I started to do the raven transformation just to throw their aim off. While I was travelling from “here” to “there” I started to throw every spawn that I possibly could.

I’d never sensed that feeling of duality before. I was fifty or sixty ravens and I was myself. At the same time, I had the bizarre teleidoscopic panorama from scores of human eyes taking in the scene in the tent from multiple vantage points simultaneously.

Then I was back in my original with a Taser-like set of darts in my right shoulder blade. The darts were bigger though and they had taken a deep bite into my scapula. They wasted no time in getting handcuffs and leg irons on me and spraying pepper spray into my eyes.

“We just took your powers away,” the general said. “They’re gone forever. I love clipping you freaks’ wings. Are you better than me now?”

He added a handful of terms that questioned my legitimacy, sexual orientation and accused me of incest—all in such filthy gutter language that I won’t bother to justify his breath by repeating scandals that he wasted his time hypothesizing.

“Dude, it is like: I was born more of a man than you will ever be. If there were no better men than you in the world, I wouldn’t waste toilet paper. I’d just grab one of y’all’s punk asses up and wipe myself,” I said.

The general slapped me across the face a half dozen times while alternating hands. Then he drove his knee into my crotch. Long before I became an Adept or even knew that Adepts existed I’d taught myself to ignore pain.

My body fell. I couldn’t control the autonomous reflexes anymore but I could control my mind and my voice.

“General Maxwell, I curse you.

“May you hunger and find no nourishment.

“May you thirst and find no refreshment.

“May you tire and find no place to rest your weary head.

“May you sire a thousand daughters and not a single son.

“May you be visited by kidney stones and the clap, gout, migraines, gall stones and boils the size of tennis balls and may all these curses be visited upon all your descendants and kin for seven generations,” I said.

I don’t know where that curse came from, but I’ve always known it. I hadn’t used it in over fifty years. Largely because God says to forgive, but also because cursing someone takes a lot out of you. I don’t know anything that places you into a deeper slough of desponds than cursing someone with one’s spirit.

I must have given General Maxwell the crawling hee-bee gee-bees cause he had a ball gag shoved into my mouth and a heavy black hood pulled over my face.

One interesting fact was that all the spawn seemed to have vanished before they could strike down a single jack-booted thug.

I have a sort of claustrophobia about having my hands bound behind me and I have a horror of being suffocated. I guess everyone does. I wasn’t going to give these sniveling shabnasticators the satisfaction of knowing how discomfited that I was. I forced myself to breathe slowly and evenly through my nose.

Finally, they took me to a holding cell somewhere far underground.

Waterboarding? Yeah that would have been something they did to let you have a break from the serious torments.

They stuck me in an isolation chamber for a very long time. Then they took me out and tried to feed me. I spit the food out as best I could.

“We could force feed you, but if you want to do the Bobby Sands thingy—so be it. We aren’t going to take it easy on you because you refuse to eat,” one of the guards said.

I had a knowing. That was something else that I’d had occasionally as far back as I could remember.

“One day I’ll wear your finger bones and those rings as a necklace,” I told him.

“We don’t need any intel from you. We simply want to break you. After you beg long and piteously enough we will stop—but only after we’ve thoroughly enjoyed ourselves,” the guard said.

“I beg you right now—please castrate yourself. Do it for the good of the gene pool,” I said.

I never broke or begged but I must admit to my shame that I did scream and bellow a few times.

An Apache Indian or a samurai wouldn’t have given them that satisfaction I’m sure. They could have endured the worst with a detached smile. The fact that they exposed my lack of true courage made me hate my tormentors all the more.

There were bouts of being shocked all over my body. Then they’d stick my head into a trough full of ice water while they beat me. Then they’d hang me by my ankles and pummel the water out of my lungs. When they tired, they’d put me back into the isolation chamber with IV tubes of glucose and various nutrients to partially offset my hunger strike.

Surely, I said to myself, my body will break soon and set me free from this torment.

I searched my inner world for my chakra tree. The chi meridians were like the branches and trunk of a tree and the major chakras reinforced and helped constitute the trunk of the chakra trees. The minor chakras hung off the minor chi meridian branches like so many eccentric fruits or tiny leaflets.

No matter how I searched that part of my inner world was simply empty. I would have mourned my loss but not where these knob- gobblers could see me.

Though the Chakra tree that I’d spent decades building, strengthening and optimizing was gone I could still hear Panic somehow. He assured me that our bond was unbroken whatever the situation might be with my Adept powers.

There was something else as well.

There hadn’t been anything there years ago when I started my training so long ago in the village. I started at the beginning again and imagined the first chakra—double in my case and I hand cranked them remorselessly over and over again.

The chakras hadn’t seemed completely real the first time around but that was nothing compared to the complete absence of reality in these visualizations.

They make very free with the idea of taking away someone’s powers in some of the cartoons, movies and books—as if it was more humane to geld or blind someone than to kill them. It isn’t mercy. It is something that comes from a bottomless pit of cruelty.

There was no point in getting mad when I was so weak. I couldn’t even stand much less avenge myself like Samson bringing down the house of the Philistines.

Then the next time someone took me out of the isolation chamber it was Duncan in some sort of protective clothing that resembled a cloth of gold space suit costume or prop.

“You shouldn’t have bothered Duncan. I’m not good for anything anymore. I can’t even stand without support,” I told.

“If you never regain your powers or even the strength to stand—If we have to wheel you around in a wheelchair—you are still laird and warlord. If anyone challenges your commands he can face all of us. We’re not to be taken lightly,” Duncan said.

“What’s with the gold suit?” I asked.

“They have some sort of field that cancels the chi that keeps a spawn in existence and you taught us to never go anywhere in person when you can send a spawn instead,” Duncan said.

“Do you see that guard lying on the floor over there Duncan? I want his hands and be sure to get his rings as well. Get his big toes while you’re at it. He was especially cruel and insulting to me and I promised to wear a necklace of his rings and finger bones,” I said.

Duncan pulled out one of his oversized Kunai knives and soon there was a handless and footless body lying on the floor. I noticed blood pumping out of the stumps.

“Is he alive?” I asked.

“Yes,” was all Duncan said.

“Kill him then. What if his compañeros got here in time to save him? That would be too cruel. If you cripple someone then finish him off if it is at all possible,” I said.

Duncan shrugged and slammed the guard’s head against the concrete floor hard enough to crush the man’s skull.

“He was cruel to you,” Duncan said.

“That’s true but we’re supposed to be better people than they are,” I shrugged.