Then Pym saw his box of death's-head bees lying open and strewed about the floor.
"Someone will pay for this," he said, dropping to one knee on the rug.
Every bee was destroyed. Each exquisite gem of miniaturized technology, pulped as if they were nothing more than winged raisins.
Slowly, fists clenched, he climbed to his feet, standing tall and proud in his Bee-Master uniform.
"I swear," he said, lifting a shaking black fist before his helmeted face, "to wreak my awesome vengeance on all who oppose me."
Then he smiled under his cybernetic helmet. He had always wanted to give that speech in real life. It was from Bizarre Bee-Master #3. The Crimson Cockroach issue.
From the closet, he detected a buzz. Low, curious, it sounded like one of his bumblebees had survived the heartless massacre.
Striding to the door, he laid one black-gloved hand on the doorknob. As he pulled the door open, he narrowed his eyes behind his scarlet eye lenses. If one of his bees was still alive, he should be able to receive its visual-telemetry signal and see exactly what the bee saw.
But there was no transmitted image on the inner side of his flat eye lenses.
Too late, he realized the sound he was hearing wasn't that of one of his death's-head bees, but the annoyed buzz of feral honeybees. Too late, he slammed the door shut.
Too late! For they were out and buzzing around the room.
"No! Stay back. You are not of my brood," he cried. "You are not in league with the Bizarre Bee-Master!"
The bees ignored him. They circled and divebombed him, whether out of anger or as an attack response triggered by his dark uniform, he didn't know.
A sharp prick between his shoulder blades told him he had been stung in the back.
"Nooooo!" he cried. "I am your friend! I am a friend to all bees. All insects."
His right shoulder twitched in sudden pain.
Another sting pierced the back of his right glove.
The bee, withdrawing its barbed sting, fell to the rug squirming in its twisty death throes.
His throat immediately constricted. His breath came in ragged gasps.
"No! Not this way! The Bizarre Bee-Master cannot meet his end this way. Not when I am poised on the threshold of my greatest triumph."
Then he remembered he had prepared for this dire contingency, and stumbled to the hotel-room bureau, where he began clawing through the drawer contents.
"My EpiPen! It will save me. My EpiPen. Where-where is it? Where is my EpiPen?"
But there was no sign of it amid his Bee-Master Underoos and T-shirts.
Meanwhile, the angry bees continued to attack. Their relentless zit-zit-zit-zit signaled each sharp sting that brought coldness to his body.
They were ferocious. Insistent. Indomitable.
He knew from the countless pinpricks erupting all over his body that these were no less than Africanized honeybees.
"How ironic," he moaned, "to die at the stings of those whose habitats I am sworn to protect..."
Falling to the floor, he made a last, desperate attempt to contact his nanomites in the vicinity. They would protect him. They would come to his aid ....
But try as he might, he couldn't focus his thoughts. Couldn't broadcast the electronic signal that would bring the deadly creatures of his own devising to combat these bees who, in their blind fury, their unthinking ignorance, were slowly killing their only champion among a vicious humanity.
Then, like a miracle, an image swam before his eyes.
He was looking into the perfect features of Tamara Terrill. Of course. The interview. His bumblebee emissary was signaling that the interview had begun. It was time to speak. To tell America of his demands if they wanted the scourge he had inflicted upon their farms and cruel scientists to be lifted.
"I bring mankind greetings from the Bizarre BeeMaster, King of all Insects," he heard his drone announce. That was his cue.
He opened his mouth.
A feathery sensation alighted on his tongue. A sharp pain replaced it, and almost at once, his tongue swelled up, reacting to the potent venom of the bee that in its death spasms rolled down his open throat.
He could not speak. Thwarted. In the last ditch, he was thwarted! It was unbearable.
As he clutched up in a ball, like a dying insect himself, the Bizarre Bee-Master heard an insistent glassy tapping. Shutting off his helmet telemetry, he turned his flat scarlet eyes to the balcony window in response to the sound.
It was they! The nanomites had come to succor him. Somehow, some way, they knew! They were trying to penetrate the glass.
His leaping hope turned to crushing defeat when he saw, for the first time, that there were only two ordinary bipeds there. He recognized them. The tall man with the thick wrists and an old Asian who had challenged him before. He didn't know who they really were. Agents of the forces of darkness, without question.
The old Asian was waving goodbye. The other one was holding up the missing EpiPen, the one thing that could preserve his life and all his grandiose plans for the future of insectdom.
Slowly, painfully, as Bravo bees punished him mercilessly, he crawled toward them.
The bees continued to attack. But he would not fail. He refused to fail. He was the Bizarre Bee-Master and he was real. He was alive. He was indomitable.
"I," he moaned through his rapidly constricting throat, "am indomitable. I cannot be defeated. I refuse to be defeated. I refuse..."
And through the glass balcony door came a mocking rebuttal. "That's the biz, sweetheart."
They were the last words the Bizarre Bee-Master heard before he ascended to the great beehive in the sky.
WHEN THE BEE-MASTER had finished convulsing, Remo opened the sliding glass door and stepped in, Chiun right behind him.
The bees in the room came at them with the same single-minded anger they had displayed all along. Casually, Remo and Chiun thwarted their every attempt to strike, urging them out through the open door and into the dusk of late afternoon.
Remo stripped the body of its helmet, lifted it to head height and collapsed it like a shell of tin. The helmet went crunck and its red goggles shattered like bicycle reflectors.
Remo threw the remains into the wastepaper basket.
They looked down at the bloated, cyanosed face of the Bizarre Bee-Master and said, "I wonder who he was?"