A small brook trickled off into the distance. The constant, nearby noise of running water coming from the intense darkness tensed Clyde's already jangled nerves. He checked the luminescent face of his watch. It glowed eerily green.
"They're late," he said.
"Just so long as they get here before Zit-Face," Ron replied. He was gingerly touching the sticky, coagulated mess beneath his nose where he had reglued his false mustache. He'd accidentally put it on upside down. The bristles had stuck up his nostrils and made him sneeze for much of the trip from Medford until he'd snipped most of them off with a pair of key-chain fingernail clippers.
"He's late, too," Clyde noted.
"Mmm," said Ron. He scratched at one end of the mustache. His face contorted in pain. "Ouch!" he yelped.
Clyde glanced at him. "Leave it alone," he said, annoyed.
"I can't," Ron complained. "It itches."
"Take it off, then."
"Mona told us to leave them on."
"Mona isn't here," Clyde said, a cold edge in his voice. "And even if she was, she doesn't know everything."
"You wouldn't say that if she was here."
"Yeah, well ... maybe," Clyde admitted, perturbed. He stared off into the night.
There was no sign of the second truck anywhere. Just the endless babbling brook. Occasionally, the sound of a car would echo across the gently bowing cornfield. Clyde sighed loudly, looking back to the rear of the truck.
He and Ron were standing near the grille. Together they had managed to get the BBQ out of the back. It was tethered at the rear of the vehicle, out of sight. Every few minutes, the creature would low plaintively. It was almost like a cross between a cow's moo and a sheep's bleat, without being fully either.
Ron stroked the mustache as if trying to massage the itch away. "You don't like Mona much, do you?" he asked.
"Yeah, right," Clyde mocked. "We get the grunt work and she gets the glory."
"There hasn't been much glory yet," Ron pointed out.
Clyde smirked derisively. "Are you kidding me? With what we've got tied back there?" He jerked his head to the rear of the truck. "She's about to go national. Without either of us."
Ron continued to toy with his mustache. "Still, it's worse for Huey. He's married to her."
Clyde looked at his partner as Ron played with his mustache. He had been doing it since they'd left Medford. Something in Clyde finally snapped. "Enough is enough," he growled.
Clyde grabbed one soggy end of sagging horsehair. With a mighty wrench, he ripped the mustache from Ron's face.
Ron DePew's shriek of pain was muffled beneath a pair of horrified, snatching hands. Ron's palms clamped firmly over the injured area as his body reacted to the blinding shock of sudden, intense pain.
"Shh," Clyde admonished. He dangled the false mustache between two disgusted fingers. Ron's discomfort had the instant effect of lightening Clyde's mood.
"That hurt," Ron's muted voice whimpered. "It's better to get it over with fast. Like a BandAid. Here." Clyde shoved the mustache back at Ron.
"Get that away from me," Ron complained. Removing his palms from his face, he felt at the raw flesh on his lip. His fingertips came away wet. Blood. "You ripped half my frigging face off!" he cried.
"Quiet," Clyde ordered. He cocked an ear to the cornfield. "Did you hear something?"
"No," Ron whined. He wasn't paying attention to anything beyond his injured upper lip. He continued prodding at his face.
After a moment, Clyde relaxed. "Nerves," he said, shaking his head.
"Who cares about your nerves?" Ron said, his lips twisted. He mumbled from the corner of his mouth. "Can you see teeth through this?" He pointed at the biggest lip hole.
THE FAINT AROMA of Ron DePew's blood carried back on the chill autumn breeze. Somewhere at the rear of the truck, unseen by the HETA activists, a pair of nostrils pulled in the heady scent of fresh blood. A primitive hunger stirred.
And as the two men stood, unwitting in the dead of night, confident, stalking feet began to slip silently through the darkness toward the cab.
REMO FOLLOWED the narrow path between the rows of corn. Crickets chirped loudly all around him. The aroma from the field was intoxicating. Remo had to concentrate to keep his mouth from watering. As a Master of Sinanju, Remo's diet was severely limited. But he'd been delighted to learn after more than twenty years of little more than rice, fish and duck that corn was an acceptable alternative to his customary staples. Acceptable to everyone, that is, save the Reigning Master of Sinanju. To appease Chiun, Remo had promised to strike corn from his diet forever. He only wished he could banish the desire.
Burying the urge to gorge himself, Remo plowed forward.
At the edge of the woods far away, a lone cicada screeched at the night. It was followed by a second, then a third. The symphony reached a crescendo before cutting off entirely. The short lull was broken as the first cicada took up its whine once again.
There were no signs of human life yet. The wind was blowing north to south, so no softer sounds or subtle smells were brought to Remo from either field. If the HETA trucks were at the edge of the dark woods that loomed ominously ahead of him, he wouldn't know it until he was nearly upon them.
Because of the direction of the wind and the limitations of his own senses, Billy Pierce had dropped off Remo's personal radar once they were an acre or so apart. The animal-rights activist's cursing, stumbling trip through the cornfield had faded into other background noise.
Nearby, Remo sensed a single, small heartbeat. Probably a raccoon or skunk. The creature waddled awkwardly through the rows of swaying corn a few yards away.
The wind shifted briefly once, doubling up on itself before switching southward once more. Skunk, Remo noted. Definitely a skunk.
But up ahead was still a blank slate. Even so, if the trucks were there, he'd know soon enough.
As silent as the very air itself, Remo pressed forward.
THE GROUND RACED UP to meet Billy Pierce. Muttering unhappily, he pushed himself to his feet.
His palms stung where he fell. Putting them up to his face, he examined them carefully in the moonlight.
They were bleeding. The scraping wounds he'd gotten while trying to escape from his bulkhead earlier that day had reopened. The right palm was worse than the left. He must have landed on a jagged rock.
He wiped the thin smear of blood and grime on his ragged bell-bottoms. It wasn't clear whether this helped to clean the dirt from his hands, but it seemed to satisfy Billy. He stumbled forward.
He wasn't aware how far he had actually traveled across the field until he was all the way through it. Billy tumbled over a raised lip of earth and fell with a heavy thud through the last row of corn. The stalks crunched loudly beneath his great girth.
"Damn," he griped, as his massive belly oozed in both directions, settling out on either side of his prone body.
He floundered for a moment, grabbing at the ground before him with his still stinging, bleeding hands.
Somewhere nearby, he heard the sound of a small river gurgling off into the night.
His hands sank into the earth. It was muddy to the touch.
"Great," he groused. "I fell in water." Although he was ordinarily averse to the thought of washing any part of his anatomy, the pain in his hands was so great as he pushed himself laboriously to his knees that, for a moment, he considered actually dipping his hands in the stream and swishing them around a little to cool the stinging sensation. But as he leaned his hands against his large thighs, Billy realized that the water sound was too far away for him to have landed in the river.
That was odd.
Kneeling at the edge of the cornfield and puzzling over the strange, unexplained wetness on his hands, Billy was surprised anew. As luck would have it, he had plopped out of the woods at the precise spot he had been looking for. No more than three yards away was the HETA rental truck.