Dream Thing

Another man answered by firing his own submachine gun. He traced a line in the wallpaper. Remo was still standing there, with smoking holes in the wall behind him but none actually in him.

Remo appeared to take one long step that carried him across the room, as if his legs were elastic, and he adjusted the aim of the submachine gun. A few rounds peppered the chest of the gunner’s neighbor, and then Remo pinched the barrel and the last round blew up the Uzi in the face of the assailant.

“I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything better,” Remo said.

The bodyguard whose Uzi was appropriated by the don looked for another weapon. He found the blood-soaked Glock lying on the carpet, and he tried to use it.

“Obviously, that gun is malfunctioning,” Remo told the guard, who found his manhood splattered on the floor just like the don’s brother. The man died just as readily. “Anybody else want to give it a try?” Remo showed the gun to the three survivors.

One of them fired his own piece right at the heart of Remo Williams, but his aim was off slightly. The bullet hit the Glock in Remo’s hand and ricocheted back into the gunner’s own chest.

“I think it’s cursed,” Remo said, tossing the Glock.

The other two men were without weapons, but when the gun landed on the carpet in front of them, they wouldn’t touch it.

“Didn’t I tell you to call the TV news?” Remo said. They stared at him. “Well?”

One of them went for the Glock, and the other man tried to stop him. Somehow, the Glock went off in the tussle, with a little help from Remo. The don was just blinking his eyesight back as his last two men flopped dead from the same bullet.

The recently self-proclaimed emperor of the Independent Kingdom of Sicily resigned as the world watched.

“I am a worthless piece of human trash,” he informed them over his video feed. He spoke in English for some reason. He was broadcasting from the luxury, high-security apartment from which the government had operated. “I am a coward and a bully. I’m not a man. I’m just a slime-wall.”

A hand came into the shot and dragged the emperor out of the camera’s view. There was whispering off-screen as the camera’s automatic lens adjusted to bring the background into focus. It was a slaughterhouse. The government of the don had clearly been eviscerated.

“Excuse me,” the don said as he was thrust back in front of the camera. “Slimeball. I am a slimeball, not a wall. I will now release the 120 political prisoners …”

He was yanked out of the shot and shoved back in.

“The 120 innocent hostages will now be released. I, and the cowards who grovel at my feet like filthy dogs, should be arrested and charged with mass murder. Also, we are morons.”

The emperor looked off-camera and raised his eyebrows. “Anything else?” the world heard him ask.

Remo yanked the power cord to the camera and its lights went out. “That ought to do it.” He nodded at the wide-screen TV on the wall. “Look, you’re on CNN Europe already.”

Remo was thrilled at the instant success of the don’s nifty video hard-link to the local news station. The don had used it for the past few days to make proclamations to his new subjects. Now the don proclaimed to the world that he was an imbecile and a coward. He was worse than finished—he was emasculated.

“Kill me,” he pleaded.

“Sure thing,” said Remo Williams.

Chapter 5

Sir James Wylings had been born a leech. He had lived a leech. Being a leech on society was what Wylings knew. He was good at it.

But that didn’t mean he couldn’t remake himself into something better. He was convinced that all his famous, noble forebears had earned their royal status. So had Sir James Wylings, as far as the world was concerned. But Wylings himself knew the shameful truth. His knighthood had come about through the manipulation of events and, frankly, a little mass murder. You couldn’t arrange to save a starving camp full of refugees without allowing a good number of them to actually starve first. Wylings tried not to think about that part of the scheme. After all, it was only inland Africans who did the starving. His great-grandfather had a term for such people: “ignorant savages.” It was such a quaint old-England turn of phrase.

Sir James imagined the old duke saying, “They’re just ignorant savages, my boy. Any token of civilization you can give them makes them worlds better off than they were before. Aren’t those ignorant savages better off because of the blessings you provided?” The old man wouldn’t have allowed anybody to answer that before concluding, “Of course they are! You touched their lives with the magic fairy dust of English culture! If they weren’t ignorant savages, they’d understand that it was well worth the lives of a few ignorant savages.”

That mind-set was totally lacking in the modern world of the twenty-first century. It really wasn’t so long ago, the time of the British Empire, when England ruled the world.