Remo hesitated. Frowning, he followed Chiun out to the car, grumbling, "All right, all right. But you could at least tell me who we're supposed to be this time out."
"I will be the unsurpassed Master of Sinanju," Chiun said haughtily, standing by the car door so that Remo could open it for him. "And you shall be what you always are-an insensitive clod."
"In that case," Remo said, stepping around to the driver's side, "open your own freaking door."
Chapter 3
La Plomo, Missouri, was under siege.
Three weeks after the last of the stiff-limbed dead had been carted away, a crowd was gathered around the barbed-wire perimeter posted with "Keep Out" signs, where Missouri National Guardsmen stood guard wearing butyl rubber chemical-warfare garb and overboots, their heads enveloped in glassy-eyed gas masks.
The lawyers came first. The initial wave arrived a solid hour before the first weeping, bereaved relatives of the deceased. The anguished relatives had chased off the lawyers. The lawyers had retreated and returned with reinforcements.
Now, weeks later, the lawyers outnumbered the relatives, most of whom had quietly buried their dead and returned to their own lives.
The representatives of the media had dwindled down to single digits. Those that were left were trying to find someone who hadn't been asked the question "How does it feel to know that your blood relatives died in excruciating agony from improperly stored poison gas?" That no one had as yet had determined that an improperly stored nerve agent had had anything to do with the La Plomo disaster seemed not to faze them in the slightest.
When they couldn't extract an appropriate supporting sound bite from a distraught visitor or a stiffnecked National Guard sentry-who were completely unintelligible behind their gas masks anyway-the TV representatives simply sought out a handy spokesman from one of the many protest groups that had clustered around La Plomo with the same voraciousness as the big bluebottle flies buzzing the trampled-down cornfield at the north edge of the wire. Remo tasted the smell of death hovering around the town of La Plomo before he saw the town itself. The airborne particles were probably less than one part per million, but his highly acute sense of smell detected the vaguely unappetizing stench as he coasted along U.S. 63 in his rented car.
"I think we're getting close," Remo called over his shoulder. "I'm gonna roll up the windows."
In the back seat, where he would not have to suffer a too-close proximity to his ungrateful pupil, the Master of Sinanju said, "You are too late by a mile. A country mile," he added.
Remo rolled up the windows anyway. He could endure the death smell-it went with the job sometimes-but poison gas was another thing entirely. Just as Remo's sense of smell was highly refined, so were his hearing, his vision, his reflexes, and-this was the downside of Sinanju-his susceptibility to irritants that would do no lasting harm to an ordinary person.
"Tell me if it starts getting too bad," Remo said, "and we'll go back. No sense ending up in the hospital if the air isn't breathable yet. According to the TV reports I caught at the airport, the National Guard are still wearing their gas masks."
"The lawyers did not seem affected," Chiun sniffed.
"Lawyers must not breathe the same mixture as you and I."
On either side of the road, stereotypical red barns and tall grain silos marched by. The early-spring breezes toyed with the lush prairie grasses. It seemed all very pastoral to Remo Williams-until he noticed an unusually thick cloud of flies swarming up ahead.
As they passed the cloud, Remo saw directly beneath it stiff hooves pointing up to the sky. He couldn't tell if the hooves belonged to a horse or a cow. Remo was a city boy.
The stench was sour, maggoty. Like rotted meat in old garbage cans. His brow grew worried. If there was any poison gas still in the air, it would be hard to separate from the overripe stink of corruption.
The dead farm animals grew plentiful as they went on.
"I guess this area was downwind of the gas," Remo muttered. "Those poor cows really got it."
"The only good cow is a dead cow," pronounced Chiun, who had no use for beef or dairy products.
"Tell that to the farmers."
Remo noticed a black flag by the road. He assumed it marked a rural mailbox and thought little of it.
But after the third black flag, he started taking notice. They flapped from narrow aluminum poles. The flags were entirely black. There were no mailboxes near any of them. They dotted either side of the road at regularly spaced intervals.
"I don't like the looks of these flags," Remo said. Chiun declined to reply. All through the trek west, he had selectively responded to Remo's comments, evidently reacting only to those he deemed part of the assignment.
The farms flew by. Although the terrain tended toward flatness, the land rolled gently, so it was impossible to see more than a half-mile ahead.
The road must have been a snake track originally, because it whipsawed unexpectedly. Thus Remo wasn't aware of the clot of people clustered at the roadside until he was almost on top of them.
They huddled under a spreading hickory tree, their hair matted, their bodies as ripe, if their body odor was any gauge, as thousand-year-old Chinese eggs.
"Chiun, check this out," Remo said when he saw them.
Grasping the front seat cushions, the Master of Sinanju pulled himself forward to peer past Remo's shoulder. His nails tightened and his tiny mouth dropped open in shock.
"Remo, look at those poor homeless unfortunates," he squeaked. "Reduced to dwelling beneath a mighty tree. Truly, a catastrophe had transpired here."
"I not only see them, I can smell them even through the maggots," Remo said grimly, coasting to a stop.
There seemed to be about a dozen of them, but it was impossible to tell because they blended together into a solid mass of multilegged dust bunnies. One of them pounded away with a hammer. The others held whatever it was they were nailing to the tree.
"Are you people all right?" Remo asked, rolling down the window. He almost gagged. "Can I give you a lift to a shelter?"
"No, we're not all right," the one with the hammer said in a whiny nasal voice. "The frigging pigs threw us out."
"Pigs?" Remo asked, trying to imagine how any barnyard animals-even if they had survived the gas-could have forced a dozen adults to vacate the town against their will. "Whose pigs?"
"The friggin' Army pigs," the leader snarled. "Who do you think's planting all those useless flags?"
Up close, they looked worse than from a distance. Not only did they resemble ambulatory scarecrows, but their faces were soot black. In fact, their clothes were literally caked with dirt. The man with the hammer turned around. Tangles of hair hung down to his dirty chin, so the front of his head was indistinguishable from the back.
"You're not gas victims?" Remo asked, dumbfounded.
"You hit it right, man. I'm a gas victim. You're a gas victim. We're all going to be gas victims if this friggin' country doesn't wake up to the environmental ecocide going down here! La Plomo is only the beginning. Pretty soon it will be Berkeley, then Cambridge. Then Carmel. Even Martin Sheen won't be able to protect us."
"Remo," Chiun whispered from in back, "drive on. These are not gas victims, but escaped lunatics. I can tolerate having one for a driver, but I will not allow any of these vermin to join me in this vehicle."
"Just a sec," Remo muttered, one hand on the window crank for a quick roll-up. "Did the Army bulldoze you people in a manure pile?" he asked the man with the hammer.
"This isn't manure," the man returned, slapping his khaki jacket. Dust erupted from it in a cloud. The man leaned into the newly formed cloud and snorted it into his lungs greedily. The others joined in, sniffing airborne dirt like dogs.