Next of Kin
The Destroyer #46
by Richard Sapir & Warren Murphy
?
Copyright © 1981
by Richard Sapir & Warren Murphy
All rights reserved.
Next of Kin
A Peanut Press Book
Published by
peanutpress.com, Inc.
www.peanutpress.com
ISBN: 0-7408-0569-X
First Peanut Press Edition
This edition published by
arrangement with
Boondock Books
www.boondockbooks.com
For Dave Slobodin and the House of Sinanju,
Box 1454, Secaucus, N.J. 07094.
?Prologue
It was known to the natives as Devil's Mountain. The white men on the island were unfamiliar with the name or the mountain, since the ragged lump of volcanic rock straddling the French/Dutch border of Sint Maarten did not reach even half the height of Paradise Peak or any of the other more picturesque and geologically newer mountains in the area.
But the native islanders knew. In the hushed and reverent tones reserved for telling their children the island legends that would be passed on to the next generation, the elders among the hill dwellers spoke of Devil's Mountain and its legacy of death.
It was on Devil's Mountain that the Carib Indians performed their rites of war against invading tribesmen, eating the flesh of their enemies to take their strength. A thousand years before Columbus came to claim the island for Spain, the Caribs squatted along the rim of the already long-dead volcano to toss the gleaming bones of the vanquished into its crater.
And after the Spaniards came, with their muskets and cannons, trying to wipe them off the face of the earth, the Carib Indians assembled on Devil's Mountain to decide their fate. The brave elected to fight the strange and powerful new enemy. The proud killed their wives and children so that they would not be slain by the metal-wearing invaders. But the old, the infirm, and the wise fled to the caves in the hills, where they watched their ancient race plunge toward extinction. And by night they brought the bones and bloodied bodies of their fallen tribesmen to Devil's Mountain to lie for eternity among the spirits of the dead.